Materiality Reader

Materiality

3 en

edited by Krzysztof Gutfrański Arne Hendriks, Inês Moreira Aneta Szyłak, Leire Vergara

Materiality

Alternativa. Anthology

Wyspa Institute of Art 2012 

This reader was published in conjunction with the Materiality exhibition, organised by the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk, as part of the Alternativa festival between 25th of May – 30th of September 2012. Exhibition curators Aneta Szyłak, Arne Hendriks, Inês Moreira, Leire Vergara ASSOCIATE CURATOR Maks Bochenek

www.alternativa.org.pl

contents

contents 13

Something in the Air Krzysztof Gutfrański

CURATORIAL STATEMENTS

6

25

A Living Materiality Leire Vergara

30

Materiality and the Practice of Everyday Life Aneta Szyłak

38

Material Performativity Inês Moreira

43 

Materiality, a Love Story Arne Hendriks

7

contents

contents

Part i –   The Voice of Things 51 

The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things Bruno Latour

71 

The Thing Itself Arjun Appadurai

85 

Materials Against Materiality Tim Ingold

 

Part ii –   Materiality 119 

Manifesto of Emotional Architecture Mathias Goeritz

125 

Wyspa from the Outside Elizabeth Grosz talks to Ewa Opałka

137 

Obiectum Sexuals Amy March

197 

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body Rolf Hellebust

233 

The Most Dangerous Film in the World Susan Schuppli

   

8

9

contents

Part iii –   IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI 269 

Consumption David Graeber

321 

Junkspace Reem Koolhaas

351 

Contributors –  

10 All photos on title pages by Grzegorz Klaman

krzysztof gutfrański

SOMETHING IN THE AIR 2012 

Translated from the Polish by Marcin Wawrzyńczak

13

krzysztof gutfrański

At the end of the 19th century, the Western world felt that it was time to start doing something about the side effects of the industrial revolution. The amount of destruction and waste generated during the construction of the new world – notably the vast quantities of all kinds of dust stirred up by various machines – had become a moral problem that needed to be addressed. The new varieties of smoke that had spewed out from the steam engine, the locomotive, and the volcanic steel factories as well as the swelling cities, became an enemy of civilization and thus a topic of scholarly interest and technological manipulation. In 1898, a young British engineer and inventor, Hubert Cecil Booth, went to the Empire Music Hall in London to watch the presentation of an American-made dust-removing machine. There he saw a bulky and highly inefficient contraption consisting of a box topped with a bag supplied with compressed air; while the device may have been able to blow up and dispel thick layers of dust, it did not dispense of them in a specified container. As Charles Panati writes in his Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Booth was unimpressed. A lot of dust missed the box and resettled on the carpet. Questioning the inventor about the possibility of sucking up dust instead, Booth was told that many people had tried but none had succeeded. Booth thought about suction for several days. Then, as he later wrote of his own invention, I tried the experiment of sucking with my mouth against the back of a plush seat in a restaurant in ­Victoria Street. He choked violently on dust but was inspired’. The secret, Booth realized, would be to find the right kind of filtering bag to pass air and trap dust. At home, he lay on the floor and, with various kinds of fabrics over his

14

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

lips, experimented. Dust seemed to be collected nicely by a tightly woven cloth handkerchief. He patented his suction cleaner in 1901. 1

Booth’s demiurgic quest for a new filter could be viewed here as a metaphor of another attack on the substance of reality. After all, that was roughly at the time that atoms and bacteria had been discovered, leading to the invention of a whole system of microscopic units and related concepts that would forever redefine the notion of reality and space-time, depriving dust of its status as a measure of smallness. From today’s perspective – more than a century after Booth’s attempt to remove dust – his invention has undergone a myriad of formal metamorphoses driven by various factors reflecting the fact that the relationship between people and materials is a process shaped by constant accumulation and surfeit, mutual exchange of labour, frequent tax changes, exploitation, wars, plunder, cultural rifts and the exhaustion of natural resources. The values that have come to be regarded as key are those tuned to the distinction between home and workplace, such as convenience, portability, ease of use, flexibility, practicality, hygiene and so on – all of this is called an object’s adaptability and its usefulness in the context of positioning and consolidation for the purposes of social praxis. Comfort has become law, leading to an everincreasing focus on the optimisation of form and function. Mass production of all kinds of devices and hardware and a growing distribution sector have meant that things (and the materials they are made of) have started to acquire a passive character, becoming ready-mades, as it were. Dust itself – visible, though made less distinct by atoms, germs, DNA, quarks and all other microscopic parts of an ever-smaller world – remains a kind of conjunction of space.

15

krzysztof gutfrański

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

It settles on skin, conveys aromas, serves as a habitat for microorganisms, causes diseases, and sometimes actually kills. Man’s inseparable companion, adapted to human dimensions, it defines the scale of material life, energy and physical work. And although it lacks a single body, unlike a tree, a table or more complex organisms, the materiality of its particles, or rather their material [from the Latin mater, mother] connects all substances, be them technical or natural, organic or synthetic, fauna, flora, fungi, bacteria, but also light, fog, fresh snow and volcanic dust, clean air and radioactive fallout from a nuclear reactor.2 Today, like a hundred years ago, huge amounts of dust and rust cover the site of the former Gdańsk Shipyard, waiting for that meaningful day of cleaning. The site’s complex history dating back to the mid-19th century Kingdom of Prussia, the changes of ownership, state affiliation and function, up to the dramatic climax in the ‘70 and ‘80 worker strikes that triggered the collapse of the Soviet empire, and along with it the gradual ruination, inertia and decline of the work ethos during the three decades of transformation – all that has turned the site into a (still) living monument. 3 Its monumental history and the various controversies over its interpretation mean that the Shipyard’s dilapidating remnants have become something like the stones Israelites take up from the middle of the Jordan as a memorial … forever after crossing the river. 4 But without proper care for the preservation of the site or any attribution of its pre-1945 history – as part of Prussia, the German Empire and finally the Free City of Danzig – and without understanding the need for preserving the integrity of the infrastructure, the memory of the Shipyard and its material structure will keep waning, as they have been for some time. Staged on the site in 2012, the Materiality exhibition was an attempt to apply a filter to the material aspect of the com-

plex organism that is the defunct post-industrial premises that have been parcelled out to various owners. It featured works primarily by artists and designers and explored various aspects of the materiality of objects, embodiment, and man’s relationships with things through numerous field research projects throughout the Shipyard. The exhibition site itself – the monumental 90B factory hall – and its spectral surroundings served as a self-referential commentary on the themes of the presentation. Far from suggesting any alternative or miraculous solutions, Materiality sought rather to make the viewer sensitive to the robe of things, as it were, proposing an active contemplation of materials, suggesting, on the one hand (in a somewhat Heideggerian spirit), that what is really new in the question about the thing and its materiality, is that it needs to be asked over and over again and, on the other hand, that industrial technology – developed from raw materials – is a fully legitimate component of the natural environment and one as worth protecting as monumental history. The Materiality anthology follows the exhibition and aims to widen and expand the educational and research-related aspect of both this particular project and the Alternativa Festival as a whole. This publication offers diverse perspectives on both the object unto itself, the material context, as well as the social role of things. The revaluations brought about by the Euro-Atlantic economic crisis, the growing interconnection between the material world and the Internet’s technological imagination, the ongoing privatization of the individual, as well as a broader reflection on capitalism mean that objects, and their objectuality, have been subject to incessant interest. Over the last three decades, anthropologists, archaeologists, philosophers, artists, art and literature historians, and also experts in na-

16

17

krzysztof gutfrański

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

notechnology and quantum physics, have been in debate, trying to explain a rapidly changing world. This collective theoretical effort, construed as a sum total of a wide range of discourses, actions and intentions and their underlying interests, seems headed towards a redefinition of the anthro­ po­­centric paradigm, that is, towards balancing out the subject’s domination over the object. The tension accompanying these struggles stems from the Western philosophical tradition, which has taught us to remove the world from our field of perception, and sometimes even to renounce it completely. Two key meanings of the word THING [Latin res] have defined man’s attitude towards objects since antiquity. The narrower meaning referred to the individual, vulgar, body of the object [res corporalis], while the wider one addressed things public [res publica, the Germanic þing / alþing], that is, issues important for the community. It is the latter, broader, definition that covers everything that affects people and has to do with them, thus becoming a discursive subject. It also includes the freedom of speech, in which a thing flows out from an uncontrollable stream of words. The narrower meaning of the term thing has thus always been inferior to its social, mobilizing dimension; the body of the thing itself, its material, keeps dissolving into thin air like dust.

for by the time they have congealed into objects they have already disappeared. 5 Ignoring the world of things, mundane has come to be regarded as a pre-condition of true thinking. This collection selectively presents the issues outlined briefly above and is far from being exhaustive. The anthology is preceded by an introductory section where the show’s curators, Leire Vergara, Aneta Szyłak, Inês Moreira and Arne Hendriks, present their view on materiality and the essence of curatorial practice. The main part has been divided into three sections, titled respectively, The Voice of Things, Materiality, and In girum imus nocte…, which through texts by authors of various provenance, offer theoretical commentary on the exhibition and highlight its key contexts. The first section, with essays by Bruno Latour, Arjun Appadurai, and Tim Ingold, addresses the irresolvable antagonism of words and things – the issue of whether things exist above words or whether it is the other way around, that only words are able to describe things, which raises the question of the possibility of transcending the anthropocentric perspective. The second section elaborates further on these issues by bringing together various perspectives of looking at, and viewing, the exhibition itself and the Shipyard, as put forth in the essays by Matthias Goeritz, Amy Marsh, Rolf Hellebust, Susan Schuppli or Elizabeth Grosz. Issues raised here include: the man-thing; emotions projected onto objects; the social character of objects; as well as of what Sartre meant when he wrote that we always find ourselves in everything and that we have already had, or rather have already been, the whole range of the deep-seated, dark emotions that we supposedly reveal. 6 This section also raises the question of how architecture frames human existence and how emotions are projected onto large-scale objects such as the Gdańsk Shipyard.

An approach that focuses exclusively on ready-made objects, ignoring the fact that they have emerged from a constant flux of materials and their transformations, leads us inevitably to the dead end of an irresolvable dispute – an antagonism of words and things. It is precisely in this conflict that materials start to vanish, devoured by the same objects that they have given birth to. As Tim Ingold writes, that is why we commonly describe materials as “raw” but never “cooked” –

18

19

krzysztof gutfrański

The third section, which takes as its title the Latin palindrome, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni [We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire], refers, through essays by David Graeber and Rem Koolhaas, to the broader context of objects and materiality, reflecting on the moving spirits of the Western world’s desire and imagination, that is, consumption and globalization. So what is the thing and its materiality? Hubert C. Booth’s sucking gesture prompts us to fundamentally reformulate the question. The world of materials stretches wherever language does not reach and it is the substance of materials that connects – before language – the habitat of living organisms, the biosphere. This is more or less what the Romanian artist Tristan Tzara meant when he said that thought is made in the mouth, that is, before words. Turning himself into a human polyp, Booth hearkened back to an experience that remains common to everyone in contact with things, regardless of the person’s material status or acquired knowledge. Evoking man’s first, primitive contact with materiality – which occurs through the stimulation of lips and the oral cavity and then through swallowing or spitting out – Booth demonstrated that a material’s character does not stem exclusively from its nature, just as it does not exist exclusively in the mind of its observer or user. Rather, it arises as a specific effect of the given object’s connection with its environment, which – just like dust – binds the world of people and materials into a greater whole.

20

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

notes

1 Charles Panati, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1989), 138. 2 See Joseph A. Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 3 From the extensive literature on Solidarity, Poland’s systemic transformation and the history of the former Gdańsk Shipyard, cf. for example Po zwycięstwie 1989 – 1995, dir. Marcel Łoziński, 1995, 62’; David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity. Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005); Alain Touraine, Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980 – 1981, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Tadeusz Kowalik, Polska transformacja (Warsaw: MUZA SA, 2009). 4 Book of Joshua 4:1 – 7 (New International Version). 5 Tim  Ingold, “Materiality Against Materials”, in Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 26. (Also in this volume). 6 Jean Paul Sartre, “Man and Things”, in Critical Essays (Situations I) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).

21

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

Leire Vergara

A Living Materiality 2012 

To think the Gdańsk Shipyard through the notion of materiality offers us the opportunity to reflect upon the properties of the material environment that constitutes it. In this respect, the Shipyard is the setting in which materials of different kinds continually refer back to the labour that shaped a particular form of life. To say it in other words, they are the objectual evidences that prove the existence of a collective endeavour that gave birth to such a material reality. In this respect, some of the abandoned furniture, the empty buildings, the derelict infrastructure, the scratched up pieces, the eclectic collection of plant species, the wild animals and other elements of different types are naturally bonded to a social life that has attained subjects as much as objects. Some recent approaches by contemporary thinkers are committed to expanding the notion of life to broader parameters, meaning this, to acknowledge life, not just within human existence, but also within other sorts of organisms. This perspective is introduced for example

in the essay entitled “Materials against Materiality” by Tim Ingold, which has been included in this publication. More concretely, the author proposes to bring things to life, so to say, to acknowledge that things are in life, as much as in human beings. He says: Bringing things to life, 1 then, is a matter not of adding to them a sprinkling of agency but of restoring them to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist. 2 [For him], far from being the inanimate stuff typically envisioned by modern thought, materials in this original sense are the active constituents of a world-in-formation. 3 With this claim, the author aims to defend that agency circulates as a generative flux between all the different entities being these: human and non-human, material and immaterial, natural and cultural, lived and non-lived. Following arguments such as the one posed by Ingold, help us think of the Shipyard as a complex reality constituted by entities which beyond being considered as fixed

25

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS elements, should be understood as dynamic practitioners engaged with its lifeworld. This means that these different living entities should all be equally taken as holders of singular histories. This particular idea brings us to an understanding of objects and materials away from their supposed stagnation and allows us to bring them to life, while attending to their properties in order to understand their agency in the environment. From the beginning, the exhibition of Materiality has tried to challenge the relationship between evidences and existence through the intention of acknowledging objects and materials within a particular milieu, so to say a given materiality that conforms to a complex system of arrangements. This has meant being attentive not just to the qualities of specific objects, but also to the processes and the contexts that have allowed specific material formations and transformations. As curators of this type of exhibition, we couldn’t avoid the tentative to become immersed in the given location thinking of our temporary inhabitancy of the place in terms of site-specificity and therefore pledge a production of new works that could establish a direct relationship with the Shipyard. Some of these long-term productions includes among others: The Reconstruction of Shipyard’s Broadcasting Center by Katarzyna Krakowiak, a work developed over a year around the dismantled radio broadcast system of the Shipyard; 2010 – 2012 by Michal Szlaga, a video documentary shot

on location that captures an entire set of demolitions; ­Input / Output by Sjef Henderickx, a temporary factory for the production of paper briquettes made from former Shipyard administrative papers; the discrete interventions spread out across the Shipyard entitled Rest Rust (Secret Gardens / Public Secrets) by Ernst Van Der Hoeven and Machines Return to Factories by Grzegorz Klaman, an installation realised from a genuine inscription found in the Workshop for Machine and Devide Repair R3 which was saved from destruction by the artist. However, we didn’t want to respond exclusively to the given environment, as we wanted to take advantage of thinking about the notion of materiality within other spheres. In this respect, the inclusion of works not directly dependent on the specific context offered the opportunity to introduce a polyphonic display of reflections on the subject, producing thus a self-generating materiality between the works within the exhibition. Therefore, a lively set of connections was activated through the different artistic approaches to objects, materials and their performativity. That is the case of cross-readings between works like Microbrigades, Variations of a Story by Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger and Florian Zeyfang, The Works of Machines by MML Studio, and Academy of Work (Gastev’s Workshop) by Partizan Publik, through which attention is paid to the performative relations between materials, technology and the collective body, or Formica Faux Real

26

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

Grzegorz Klaman, Machines Return to Factories (2012), photo 8485

Martí Guixé, Tied Tizio (2008-2012), photo 8485

27

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS by Maureen Connor and Kadambri Baxi, S.T. Orbea by Iñaki Garmendia, Nazhad by Hiwa K, Detour Project: The Past is also Invented by Paulo Mendes, In Free Fall by Hito Steyerl, Mihel Zabé on Mathias Goeritz (Circa 1960 s) by Erlea Maneros Zabala and This is a Lamp by Silvia Zayas that from different stances take into account the qualities of materials and the characteristics of specific objects in order to unravel the singular histories that are contained within, or 143.353 (The Eyes Do Not Want To Always Be Shut) by Marcelo Expósito, Organ Market by Sally Gutierrez and The Freedom of Speech Itself Lawrence Abu Hamdam where reflective approaches are proposed concerning the objectification of the body within the socio-political spheres of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

Iñaki Garmendia, S. T. Orbea (2007)

Following those projects mentioned above, the notion of materiality in this programme shouldn’t be limited to a rigid understanding of the qualities of the materials that can be found in such a particular context, instead they should be considered in their full capacity to address the social lives that occur in them, this is an organic life that continuously generates new formations. Or as Ingold has suggested The properties of materials are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced. In that sense, every property is a condensed story. To describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they low, mix and mutate. 4 

notes

1 For the author, stating that things are in life rather than life in things differs from the anthropological understanding of animism. 2 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality” in Being Alive Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Oxon: Routledge 2011), 29. 3 Ingold, Being Alive Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 28. 4 Ingold, Being Alive Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 30. 

Maureen Connor and Kadambri Baxi, Formica Faux Real (2007-2012), photo 8485

28

29

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

ANETA SZYŁAK

Materiality and the Practice of Everyday Life 2012

Once

a sought-after chief accountant, but he never surrendered his passion for She locked herself up in the unibuilding, inventing, constructing. versity lavatory just when a class He did not really know how to was about to begin. She quickly do it, he learned from DIY how-to removed a screwdriver from her bag books and the professionals he and expertly dismantled the lock. knew. That’s how he built a house The tool was a gift her father gave for the family. First one, and then her when she was leaving to study another. He would repair, salvage, in another city; she always carried remake. He constructed and it with her. But the story of the refurbished furniture. He had no liberal arts girl with a screwdriver machines, so he built his own, one begins a good decade earlier. She after another, one after another, would spend the afternoons and using elements found or received. evenings taking apart machines and In doing so, he would become the devices her father brought home Engineer. The Constructor. The from factory decommissioning sales Architect. But the constructions and the city’s numerous scrap yards. were no great works, no milestones, He had dreamt of being an engineer just poor cousins sweated out of but the Stalinist era was no time a constant flux of objects. for young men loudly voicing their Sometimes his friend, a turner, disparate views, so he ended up on would manufacture a part for him. the black list and all that was left But when he brought home a decomfor him was a bookkeeping course, missioned machine, it was time for after he had done his military the girl with a screwdriver to take a service, of course. For years he was turn. She became adept at disassem-

30

Hiwa K, no title (2012) bling precise machines and devices, where her small fingers proved most useful. She sorted the screws, washers and nuts by size without having to measure them. That was something nobody could beat her at then. She also dismantled electronic elements, and enjoyed working with the tiny resistors and condensers, sorting them by shape and characteristics. The cables, segregated by colour and thickness, she would put aside. Then she put them into drawers her father had prepared.

Well, exactly. The drawers. Her father collected everything for fear of wasting it; everything might come in handy one day. Market supplies were scarce, so every material, every object, was valued, stored and used. The smallest were the matchbox drawers, with the size of the contents stated in black pencil in the bookkeeper’s inimitable, neat and legible handwriting. And the handles? The handles were made of cardboard and toothpaste screw caps provided by family and friends.

31

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS The matchbox drawers would then expand into whole cabinets and bureaus. Plastic slide boxes proved best for the larger parts. The largest ones were kept in containers her father made with laminate scraps he would beg for at the carpenters’ cooperative. He would turn the wooden handles himself, painting them green, black, brown. Measure it! her mother would call, waiting for her wardrobe drawer. I remember the dimensions, he would call back and an hour later he would triumphantly march in carrying one that was too short and useless. The fight between utility and another functionality, one dependent on the pleasure derived from processing the material, went on forever. He loved wrestling with the material; the processing, transforming, he always had one goal, striving as he was to fulfil dreams and plans, sometimes utterly unfeasible, undoable, as in the case of the jewel box business. He started by buying fallen trees and cutting them using a handmade saw gate, seasoning the wood, cutting it into laths. Of course, her mother, constantly grumbling, eventually dissuaded him from continuing the process, as it had been frequently interrupted by an overstrained backbone. There was madness in this, an unfulfilled youthful dream, but today she does not think of him as someone who failed to become what he wanted to be, a victim of the system, an unhappy man alone in his own home. She thinks of him as someone whose small joys of being with her and training her technical skills

Hiwa K, no title (2012)

32

were also a process of introducing her to the world of objects and mechanisms, their secret life; the mysteries of the life of machines. It was a world of practicality, solvability; the mechanics of simple things; of excitement that you can activate something, set it in motion. Interacting with the tools and materials influenced how, equipped with the knowledge, she would learn about the world and act in it. Perhaps the screwdriver symbolized everything that was impossible, unexpressed, and which fulfilled itself in dismantling machines bit by bit, segregating the parts in the boxes and reusing them.

Far Away I want to leave here like nothing else, said a 20-year-old I met in the mountains near Duhok. I wanted to sell one kidney, but the people who were going to fix the deal disappeared suddenly. Maybe you could help me? There was no fear in his eyes of what he was planning to do. I saw only determination and a desperate desire to escape and regret that he was still there. The political geography of commodified human organs revealed itself to me fully at that point. Here is our life in the material world. We not only have to do with materials and substances but are becoming increasingly aware that our bodies are materials. Body parts can not only be transplanted, transformed or reconstructed but have also acquired commercial value as a result of the collection and commodification of stem cells and

33

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS organs, as well as the trade in them. Medicine, genetics and transplantology in particular, have radically changed our thinking about the human body, what it can become, and what values are attached to it. New materiality is a discipline in which we are all perceived as part of a complex system of material-world relationships, with all the possibilities therein, with its multidimensionality, tangibility and performativity. Modern labs, accelerating physicochemical processes which would take nature hundreds and thousands of years to complete, make it possible today to turn the strand of hair or the ashes of a deceased person into a noble stone similar to the one that nature would create in favourable circumstances. This radically alters our relationship to the body’s physicality and materiality and how it returns – or not – to the dynamic recycling circuit of matter.

Here Each one of us came to this place from somewhere else and each, naturally, was affected by it. We met in a space too rich in meaning. We focused on the material aspect of the Shipyard’s decline. And although new development has not started here yet, the original constructions and their infrastructure are already disappearing. For many years the Gdańsk Shipyard remained a huge monument of industrial heritage, slowly penetrated by nature which gradually took possession of the abandoned

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

workplaces. We are surrounded by production materials and equipment, but also by various remains, material scraps. Over the years, not only trees and other plants have inhabited the Shipyard, but also animals – hedgehogs, foxes, stray dogs and cats, martens and a whole range of birds. We live together in this one-of-a-kind environment. Dust is everywhere, huge amounts of dust. Something is leaking or rotting wherever you turn. Wood, bricks, concrete. Steel. Paint. Layers upon layers of paint. Thus, just like the animals and plants, the buildings and cranes, we are endangered. Are the historical, ideological, symbolic potentials already being exhausted as a result of the decomposition of the site’s material tissue? How much is the presence of the actual substance of the facilities, constructions, fences, sheds and lean-tos necessary for sustaining the credibility of the stories told? Will the rest go with the last person who tells the story of what happened and shows the places where it happened? Will the disappearance of a certain – tangible and perceptible – material completeness forever exhaust the potentials of possibility? Tim Edensor writes in his Industrial Ruins. Space, Aesthetics and Materiality: The sterile stages of the urban, commodified single-purpose, aesthetically managed urban environments that disguise the excess of meaning and curtail the range of possible activities are in marked contrast to

34

Hiwa K, no title (2012)

35

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS the ruin, barely framed as a functional space and replete with disorder. Whereas the factory was formerly stitched into an ordering network within which it assigned things, people and functions to specific realms and thus ensured the sustenance of spatial demarcations, the continual efforts required to uphold this order are now conspicuous in their absence. Accordingly, the regulation of the urban everyday becomes manifest by its absence and by the possibilities made available in the ruin. Because ruins are difficult to bring into a dominant system of representation, because they can’t be commodified without being entirely transformed, they contrast with the spectacles of the postmodern, themed city, and can stimulate imaginative, alternative practices which bring forth alternative and critical forms of consciousness. Fostering notions about how the world might be differently ordered in accordance, less managed spaces, bodies and things, and multi-interpreted signs, ruins can hint at potential futures in which individual creativities and desires are nurtured rather than being subsumed under individualistic consumption. 1 But how is real influence possible and how sensible is it to expect results? Although our functions and obligations are specified, it is still probable that the anticipated and

expected results of our actions will not materialize. Our work at the Gdańsk Shipyard is a matter not only of contextual action, but also of expanding a field of care and concern and of widening and deepening what we regard as curatorial praxis. A field of activity that began with a need for a place, as such, quickly became a need for working in a site of major historical and political significance, generating initially, and quite naturally, interests in memory and history, in how they are performed, singularized or generalized. However, we have always been interested in contextual complexity based on dissonances between the visible and the represented, between the voiced, the silenced and the ignored. We were fully aware of all the issues that were manifested in the early exhibitions, particularly Health and Safety or Dockwatchers2, that is, shows that asked questions about what it means to be starting an institution in a place buckling under the pressure of signification. A place constantly used and abused in the field of politics, which does not necessarily result in the protection of that which the representations of political credibility are borrowed from. Now the time has come for questions about the place’s materiality. About the tectonics of materials and objects, the temporal shifts and knowledge concentrations embedded in the substance around us. As we read in Atlas of Novel Tectonics:

36

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS Wood is at once an infinitely arrested but still smoldering fire that can be speed up and a set of organized strata in whose pattern of contours and lines the atmospheric, meteorological, and geological history of a region can be read. And those who work with wood at this level do nothing but this flow of information and time to the sensations by submitting it to diagrammatic modulation and control. 3  

Everyday It seems to me that the theme of everyday life, which entered the social sciences in the 1960 s, is not appreciated enough in how we understand curatorial practice. In the 1970s and 1980s, Michel de Certeau, a French scholar who transcends disciplines, played using the tools offered by psychoanalysis and the social sciences – the notion of everyday life4; to thinking about contemporary society and cities. For de Certeau, our unconscious and repetitive navigation among the various levels of reality is a subjective tactic of shortcutting and zigzagging the strategic solutions

produced by institutions, governments, corporations or other power structures. During the game, the strategists pursue exhaustive, organising solutions and generate interfaces of cohesion and continuity; individuals or groups evade those by using their own tactical solutions, shortcuts, modifications or simplifications. In doing so, they seem to create or discover pragmatic ruptures and detours that with time may soften the hard systemic grid. De Certeau proposes a mechanics of tangency, logistics, variability and performative influence through small practices and tactics rather than strategic plans or systemic solutions. As Hito Steyerl writes in Art as Occupation, there is no end to procedures and mediations today. The relationship between working5 effectively and being constantly busy has finally collapsed. We can decide, therefore, that through the practice of everyday life we move in a field of necessity and indispensability. We involve ourselves in the urgent, emergent and handy, practicing what Certeau calls everyday pursuits to particular circumstances.

notes

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press 2006), 14. 4 Hito Steyerl,“Art As Occupation, Claims for An Autonomy of Life”, e-flux Journal #30, 12/11. 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1988.

1 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins. Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 94 – 95. 2 Exhibitions that took place in 2004 and 2005. (ed.) 3 Stanford Kwinter,“The Judo of Cold Combustion”, in Jesse Reiser, Atlas of Novel Tectonics



37

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

Inês Moreira

Material Performativity 2012 

What if we understood exhibitionmaking not as the inevitable practical side of research, but as an extension of a conceptual and discursive project? To look at the curatorial through the making it urges is to expand on the questions of processuality and its relation to materiality. The first step is to unfold and analyze the PROCESSUAL and the MATERIAL. We believe that thinking of materiality and processual activity as part of material performativity at the installation site is a mode to expand the potentiality of the curatorial project. The concept of material per­ for­mativity is a processual and somewhat opaque notion of materiality, engaging with instability and becoming, and offering an entrance to think about production. The concept invites one to intensify the possibilities of reading and writing exhibition making so as to explore a conceptual mode of practicing beyond the immediate technical and practical goals (assembling parts to create a new show). Performativity emerges and cannot be designed as an attribute

of Cartesian technical objects, nor as chemical composition or other discrete matter. Rather it’s the set of pieces, operations and experiences which conjunct and cohere (object, installation, exhibition) and simultaneously disturb and depict its many layers. To consider material performativity is to consider a mode of thickening of the uninterruptable networks and conjunctions in production (art, exhibition, event), and yet to go beyond its ephemeral and contingent processuality (the making, the set up), finding / allocating other coats of thickness to the technical assemblage of the initial set-up. By focusing on the field of Organizational Knowledge, Wanda J. Orlikowski researches the intersection of the social and the technological and on how human agency is mediated through technological objects so as to understand the role of materials – material knowing – She states:

38

My preference is not to speak about material agency as

Silvia Zayas, This is a Lamp (2012) that seems too similar to actor-network accounts and may inadvertently lead us into the same difficulties of not adequately distinguishing differences between human activities and technological doings. Instead, I find the notions of human agency and material performativity more useful (…) In this view, material performances and human agencies are both implicated in the other (human agency is always materially performed just as material performances are always enacted by human agency),

and neither are given a priori but are temporally emergent in practice. 1  Material performativity entwines materiality with human agency, involving the entanglements which help to debunk craft creativity, ephemerality, and the experience of the making, which are important to the spatial and exhibition installation. We want to specifically explore production processes in which the witness is participating in the process of making, an actual doer in

39

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

André Cepeda and Eduardo Matos, Canal (2012), photo 8485

Paulo Mendes, Detour Project: The Past is Also Invented (2012), photo 8485

the field, a stepping forth to explore material knowing. Orlikowski’s concerns focus on knowing from practicing and making, and underlines its material and practical dimension – knowing is always material. Materiality not only mediates, it builds knowledge. Can material processes allow for reading, writing, thinking and intervening in space (exhibition, installation) from a performative engagement with materiality? Can the actual participation in the production process redefine some traditional terms in curating? Installation sites have been explored by collectives of artists, architects and curators in hybrid cultural projects, between exhibition, installation and DIY construction. To understand it, we must consider the exhibition as a performative stage or as a proces-

elements is combined with more subtle and emotional materials such as wool, felt, cloth or other natural and body related materials. The functional programs of these installation projects is mostly cultural, as exhibition scenography, design stores and other ephemeral sets: such as well as workshops and conferences exploring the construction process for small scale objects. Their work embodies traditional craft skills, small scale objects and a certain handiness, resulting in a comfortable language with the contention of the resources. The formal COMPOSITION of the spaces explores a certain dynamic of materials and of the process of construction, as spaces are sculpted out of ramps, benches, stools, tables, fragile partitions or bookshelves, lending a sense of transiency and ephemerality. At the level of rep-

sual entity (before, during and after the opening). To engage in a project through its production processes and materials demands to actively take part, to participate. This position differs from most idealized projects – in architecture, scenography or in curating – as this mode of work generates projects which, in some cases, do not precede the set-up of the exhibition – not as a represented idea, nor as a literal transcription of the materials. The Uglycute’s 2 installation assembles poor industrial materials used in the construction industry to create spaces (OSB, plywood, industrial carpets, Styrofoam, Wallmate, fences, and others), which in exhibition galleries are usually plastered and painted in white, or otherwise concealed in most, more conventional, exhibitions. The roughness of these standardized

40

resentation, most projects include images of the making of the space, as well as images of the UTILIZATION of the space, opening the space of production as one of the dimensions of the project. The presence of visitors, and artists, bodies in the space (and their everyday objects) undo the sterility of the contemporary art exhibition. The idea of material performativity and human agency are part of the unfolding of these installations. In most DESIGNED spatial installations or scenographies, there are professional technical teams involved (museums, galleries, theatres); the protocols are expected mostly to be followed and the plans applied and usually in the contract – the margins of contingency are kept tight. The curator, architect or artist, taking part in the set-up process is a common characteristic

41

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS of self-organized cultural projects, cultural and curatorial process as for example in artist-run-spaces. engaged in processual and material Spatial designers taking part in activities. the construction and production Processuality can be explored as of the project occur mostly in a mode of making and of thinking experimental participative projects about curatorial projects. Aside with communities, (in self-built set- from the objects, another layer of a tlements there is usually no design project is to structure the processes involved), and it is common practice to create it. Processual thinking in more sculptural objects, or in art allows one to engage with the installation. dimensions of making as part of the Underlining the complexity and concept of curating, and to depict multidimensional activities around material space and its technicalities curating and space (design, produc- as layers of a curatorial project. tion, materiality and the processes As a coordinator and a critical of assembling), we may approach observer, a curator’s gets closer to the PROCESSUAL nature of space that of a doer: intervening in the and spatial production; grasping material processes, creating space the described modalities of practice, for participation and to explore which we may designate curatorial experimentation / contingency as a practice in / on processual space. modality of research and practice. The making becomes an extended

notes



1 Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Material Works: Exploring the Situated Entanglement of Technological Performativity and Human Agency,” Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, vol. 17, no. 1 (2005): 185. 2 Uglycute is a Swedish collective of designers and architects that has been based in Stockholm, since 1999. Their website thoroughly documents the bulk of their body of work: [http://www.uglycute.com].

42

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

Arne Hendriks

Materiality, a love story 2012 

This is about love – not about which component goes where!1  When Robert Rauschenberg started to erase a Willem de Kooning drawing in 1953 he created for a short moment, a vacuum. Everything the drawing had been before it disappeared and everything the empty piece of paper was to become but hadn’t yet. It wasn’t even a work by Rauschenberg yet. I was authorless. In that moment, and only in that moment, this fragile piece of abused paper celebrated its materiality. It hovered in a sphere just after and just before meaning. In a single transformative moment the material and immaterial melted into an intimate substance of undefined production, a violent proclamation of love through symbolic digestion. This is not to say that Rauschenberg’s erasure created a better work of art. The Gdańsk Shipyard is a complicated drawing born of many authors. Although conceived as a functional landscape to build ships, over the past few decades it predominantly acted as a canvas for

the production of all sorts of realities, be they political, artistic, entrepreneurial, historical or touristic. All have appropriated the Shipyard for their own OBJECTIVES, which are not objective in any true sense of the word. More than a shipyard, Stocznia Gdańska is a projection of a petrified sum of collective desire. If you don’t want to get entangled in this web of drawings you need a Rauschbergian act of reinventive destruction to respond to its material presence. Interestingly, as any visitor can observe, the Shipyard makes a continuous effort to erase itself. The one material that defines Stocznia Gdańska is iron-oxide; rust. In the artistic and curatorial process of coming as close as you possibly can you are forced to become an accomplice to this self-sacrificial creativity. Not because you necessarily want to, but because the yard dictates it. At Stocznia Gdańska there is no intimacy without erasure. This observation is literally mirrored in Lex Pott’s Transience. The work consists of a horizon made up of fifteen large mirrors treated with

43

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS sulphur to accelerate the natural the soon-to-be married partners oxidation process. Pott’s space is to stand next to each other. Amy a double mirror of the Shipyard’s Marsh’s text on the very real objectself-destructive tendencies. The oriented desires felt by objectumwork reflects not only the buildsexuals investigates the strongly ings, the structures and the public, felt intimacy between man and but participates intimately in the matter from a clinical point of view. colourful destructive / productive It reminds us that we’re not just processes that animate the metal dealing with metaphors here. Our structures and ships around the connection to materiality is real. Shipyard. The need to dispose of And to some, it’s real to the point historical ballast, and fall in line of physical love. Who can deny that (love) with an altogether more indeed we are matter animated by crude material value system also the most wondrous of tremors? In manifests itself in a site-specific one of the Shipyard’s massive walls installation by Sjef Henderickx. sits a tiny speck of light. They are In Input-Output Henderiks shred the condensed remains of Ronald Shipyard archives to fuel the ovens van Tienhoven’s mother, pressed of iron smelters that have recently into a diamond. Ashes to ashes. set up shop in the Shipyard to feed Rust to rust. Perhaps the diamond is on its many dilapidated iron struca switch, a tiny wormhole through tures. It’s this wordless understand- which we can hear the angels of ing, a shared fate sought within matter singing to us. entropical processes, that mirror Rolf Hellebust investigates the Rauschenberg’s intimate act of desire to merge with matter from erasure, both in its material process the perspective of ideological and as well as in its space making. It aesthetic function in his book Flesh speed forces intimacy in search of to Metal: Soviet Literature and understanding and the chance for the Alchemy of Revolution. His the Shipyard to become a guiding interest in the forgotten proletarpartner in the creative process. ian poet and labour organizer Mateusz Herczka’s work Alexei Gastev is shared by Partizan Functional Programming for Space Publik. Their installation The to Marry Objects offers a platform Academy of Work re-enacts Gastev’s to embrace and celebrate such an studio / office where he wrote his understanding of the creative / depoetry to the sound of perfectly structive marriage between man executed hammer blows. His most and matter and the space we share. famous one was named We grow The installation is a proposal for a out of iron. We find an echo of chapel to perform the ritual union this instinctive desire for matter between a human being and buildto melt into flesh, and flesh into ing 90B of the Gdańsk Shipyard. matter in the work Tied Tizio by A cutaway in one of the walls allows Catalonian designer Martí Guixé. In one to view part of the building’s a thought-provoking magic trick he wall inside the chapel, and enables had Richard Sapper’s iconic Tizio

44

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

Partizan Publik (Christian Ernsten, Joost Janmaat), Academy of Work (Gastev’s Workshop) (2012), photo 8485

Partizan Publik (Christian Ernsten, Joost Janmaat), Academy of Work (Gastev’s Workshop) – detail (2012), photo 8485

45

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS

CURATO­RIAL STATEMENTS lamp roped up by a shibari bondage master. Curiously, or maybe not, the roped-up result animates the flexible desklamp by a total restriction of all movement. Suspended in mid-air Sapper’s lamp has never seemed more alive. If in fact the concept of life existed before life itself, then perhaps the self-erasing shipyard functions as a sort of platonic pre-creative space, where particle attracts particle in a fundamental autoerotic process, in which the yard manifests its desire in the activities it initiates. You constantly find yourself picking up pieces of scrap metal, collecting bottles, kicking piles of potential. Jolan van der Wiel’s Gravity Tool facilitates magnetic forces to grow functional objects like chandeliers and stools using metal particles collected around the Shipyard. The fruit of working with the Shipyard

left; Martí Guixé, Tied Tizio (2008-2012); right; Mateusz Herczka, Functional Programming for Space to Marry Objects (2012), photo 8485

nowhere shows itself with more lusciousness than in the rock garden created by Ernst van der Hoeven. Brightly collared flowers grow from what was until recently just a pile of rubble. Now it’s a place where you want to spend time and wait for the Shipyard to reveal yet another one of the interesting stories it has to tell. The Shipyard is a seducer. And to answer its material call we whip ourselves into a Bretonian state of mad love, a situation of desperate desire to merge spawned from desire itself. But it is the destructive act of curating an exhibition in an historical and political environment like the Gdańsk Shipyard that facilitates the drama necessary for such a (mad) love story to unfold. Herczka’s chapel stands both as a challenge and as a reminder of the commitment it takes to say, Yes I do.

NOTES

1 Taken from Amy Marsh, “Love among the objectum sexuals”, Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 13, March 1, 2010 (Also in this volume).

Sjef Henderickx, Input/Output (2012), photo 8485

46

47

part i  – The Voice of Things

The ­­Berlin Key

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key or How To Do words With Things 1993 

Translated from the French by Lydia Davis From: Bruno Latour, The Berlin Key or How To Do Words With Things, in: Materiality and Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 10 – 21. Illustrations redrawn by PMGB. Originally published as: La Clef de Berlin et Autres Leçons d’un Amateur de Sciences (Paris: La Découverte, 1993), 25 – 46. © The Author & The Publishers

51

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key

A social dimension to technology? That’s not saying much. Let us rather admit that no one has ever observed a human society that has not been built with things. A material aspect to societies? That is still not saying enough; things do not exist without being full of people, and the more modern and complicated they are, the more people swarm through them. A mixture of social determinations and material constraints? That is a euphemism, for it is no longer a matter of mixing pure forms chosen from two great reservoirs, one in which would lie the social aspects of meaning or subject, the other where one would stockpile material components belonging to physics, biology and the science of materials. A dialectic, then? If you like, but only on condition that we abandon the mad idea that the subject is posed in its opposition to the object, for there are neither subjects nor objects, neither in the beginning – mythical – nor in the end – equally mythical. Circulations, sequences, transfers, translations, displacements, crystallisations – there are many motions, certainly, but not a single one of them, perhaps, that resembles a contradiction. In Carelman’s Cataloque des objets introuvables1 one does not find the surrealistic key that appears below – and for good reason. 2 This key does exist, but only in Berlin and its suburbs. Here is the sort of object which, though in may gladden the hearts of technologists, causes nightmares for archaeologists. They are in effect the only ones in the world to study artefacts that somewhat resemble what modern philosophers believe to be an object. Ethnologists, anthropologists, folklorists, economists, engineers, consumers and users never see objects. They see only plans, actions, behaviours, arrangements, habits, heuristics, abilities, collections of practices of which certain portions seem a little more durable and others a little more transient, though one can never say which one, steel or memory, things or words, stones or laws, guarantees

the longer duration. Even in our grandmothers’ attics, in the flea market, in town dumps, in scrap heaps, in rusted factories, in the Smithsonian Institution, objects still appear quite full of use, of memories, of instructions. A few steps away there is always someone who can take possession of them to pad those whitened bones with new flesh. This resurrection of the flesh may be forbidden to archaeologists, since the society that made and was made by these artefacts has disappeared body and goods. Yet even if they must infer, through an operation of retro-engineering, the chains of associations of which the artefacts are only one link, as soon as they grasp in their hands these poor fossilised or dusty objects, these relies immediately cease to be objects and rejoin the world of people, circulating from hand to hand right at the site of the excavations, in the classroom, in the scientific literature. The slightly more resistant part of a chain of practices cannot be called an object, except at the time it is still under the ground, unknown, thrown away, subjected, covered, ignored and invisible, in itself. In other words, there are no visible objects and there never have been. The only objects are invisible and

52

53

Figure 1 Ceci est une clef.

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key

fossilised ones. Too bad for the modern philosophers who have talked to us so much about our relations with objects, about the dangers of objectification, of auto-positioning of the subject and other somersaults. As for us, who are not modern philosophers (and still less postmodern ones), we consider chains of associations and we say that they alone exist. Associations of what? Let us say, as a first approximation, of humans (H) and non-humans (NH). Of course, one could still make a distinction, on any given chain, between the old divisions and the modern. H-H-HH-H would resemble social relations; NH-NH-NH-NH-NH a achine;; H-NH a person-machine interface; NH-NH-NH-NHNH-H the impact of a technology on a person; H-H-H-H-NH the influence of society on technology; H-H-H-NH-H-H-H the tool shaped by the human, while NH-NH-NH-H-NH-NHNH would resemble those wretched humans crushed by the weight of automatisms. But why endeavour to recognise the old divisions if they are artificial and prevent us from following the only thing that matters to us and that exists: the transformation of these chains of associations? We no longer know just how to characterise the elements that make up these chains once one has isolated them. To speak of humans and non-humans allows only a rough approximation that still borrows from modern philosophy the stupefying idea that humans and non-humans exist, whereas there are only trajectories and dispatches, paths and trails. But we know that the elements, whatever they may be, are substituted and transformed association – AND – substitution – OR: this is what will give us the precision that could never be given to us by the distinction between the social and technological, between humans and things, between the symbolic dimension and material constraints. Let us allow the provisional form of humans and the provisional essence of matter to emerge

from this exploration through associations and substitutions, instead of corrupting our taste by deciding in advance what is social and what is technological. What is this thing? What’s it used for? Why a key with two bits? And two symmetrical bits? Who are they trying to kid? The archaeologist turns the Berlin key over and over in her hands. Because she has been told, she now knows that this key is not a joke, that it is indeed being used by Germans and that it is even used – the detail is important – on the outer doors of apartment buildings. She had certainly spotted the side-travel allowed by the fact that the two bits were identical, and the lack of asymmetry in the teeth had struck her. Of course she was aware, because she had been using keys for a long time, of their usual axis of rotation and felt clearly that one of the bits, either one, could serve as a head in order to exert enough leverage to disengage the bolt.

54

55

Figure 2 Berliner key symmetry.

Bruno Latour

It was only afterwards that she noticed the groove. The latter did not break the side-travel but re-established an asymmetry when she considered the key in profile. However, by turning the key 180° on its vertical axis, one found the same groove at the same place. Translation, 360° rotation on the horizontal axis, 180° on the vertical axis – all this probably meant something, but what? There had to be a lock for this key, she felt sure. It was the lock that would provide the key to this little mystery. However, when she looked at the hole into which it was to be engaged the mystery only increased. She had never before seen a keyhole shaped like this, but it was clear to her that the whole business, the whole affair, was based on the arrangement of the notch of the horizontal hole that would or would not allow the hole to receive the groove in the key. Our archaeologist’s surprise was still greater when she was unable to withdraw the key after having introduced it vertically and having turned it 270° counter-clockwise. The lock was certainly open, the bolt had certainly retracted into the black box as in the case of any honest lock, the outer

Figure 3 Berliner key reversibility.

56

The ­­Berlin Key

Street side

Courtyard side

Courtyard side looking through the keyhole

Figure 4 Berliner keyhole.

door was certainly opening, but try as she might, to pull, push, twist her key, our friend could not extract it again. The only way out, she found, was to lock the door again by a 270° clockwise rotation. And so she found herself locked out again, back where she started. What foolishness! she says to herself. In order to get my key back, I have to lock the door again. Yet I can’t stay behind the door, on the courtyard side, while I bolt it again on the street side. A door has to be either open or closed. And yet I cannot lose a key each time I use it, unless the door in question is an asymmetrical one that has to remain unbolted while one is inside. If it were a key to a mailbox, well, then I could understand it. But this is absurd, anyone could lock me in with a turn of the key, and anyway, we’re talking about the door an apartment house. And on the other hand, if I bolt the lock without the door being closed the bolt will stop it from closing. What protection can a door offer if it is carefully bolted but wide open? Good archaeologist that she is, now she sets about exploring the specifications of her miraculous key. What action would permit her to preserve all the elements of common

57

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key

sense at once? A key serves to open and close and / or to bolt and unbolt a lock; one cannot lose one’s key each time, nor leave it inside, nor bolt an open door, nor believe there would be a key to which a locksmith had, just for fun, added a bit. What gesture would allow one to do justice to the particularity of this key – two bits symmetrical through 180° rotation around the axis and identical through side-travel? There must be a solution. There is only one weak link in this little sociological network. Damn, of course! A reader avid for topology, an inhabitant of Berlin, the astute archaeologist, has probably already understood the gesture that must be made. If our archaeologist cannot withdraw her key after having bolted the door by a 270° rotation as is her habit with every key in the world, she must be able to make the key, now horizontal, slip from the other side through the lock. She tries this absurd move, and actually succeeds. Without underestimating our archaeologist’s mathematical aptitudes, we can bet that she might remain standing at the door of her

building the whole night through before learning how to get in. Without a human being, without a demonstration, without directions, she would certainly have an attack of hysterics. These keys that pass through walls are too reminiscent of ghosts not to frighten us. This gesture is so unhabitual that one can only learn it from someone else, a Berliner, who has in turn learned it from another Berliner, who in turn… and so on and so forth by degrees all the way back to the inspired inventor, whom I will call, since I don’t know him, the Prussian Locksmith. If our friend were fond of symbolic anthropology, she could have consoled herself for not being able to get in by endowing this key with a symbolic dimension: in West Berlin, before the Wall fell, the people supposedly felt so locked in that they double the number of bits on their keys. There, that’s it, a repetition compulsion, a mass psychosis of the besieged, a Berlin-Vienna axis; hm, hm. I can already see myself writing a nice article on the hidden meaning of German technological objects. That is certainly worth spending a cold night in Berlin. But our friend, thank God, is only a good archaeologist devoted to the harsh constrains and exigencies of objects. She finds herself on the other side of the door again, the key still horizontal, and feels that she will at last be able to recover it. That’s Germans all over, she says to herself. Why make something simple when you can make it complicated! However, just when she thought she was out of the woods, our archaeologist once again comes close to a fit of hysteria. Once she and her key – one in a human manner, the other in a ghostly manner – have passed to the other side, she still cannot recover her sesame. In vain she pulls, pushes, there is nothing to be done, the key is no more inclined to come out than it was when one engaged it on the other side. Our friend can find no other solution than to go back to where she started

1.Insert key

2.Turn Key 270° key cannot now be withdrawn because of notch on key and lip on door plate

Figure 5 Key operation – street side.

58

3.slide Key through keyhole

59

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key

on the street side, by pushing the wall-penetrating key back through in a horizontal position, then once again bolting the door, finding herself back outside, in the cold… with her key! She starts everything over again from the beginning, and finally sees (someone has shown her; she has read some sort of directions; she has groped around for a long enough time) that by bolting the door again behind her, on the courtyard side, she is at last authorized to recover her key. Oh joy, oh delight, she understands how it works! These shouts of joy were premature. When, in the morning at around ten o’clock, she wanted to show her friend what a good Berliner, as well as a good archaeologist, she had become, she covered herself with shame. Instead of demonstrating her brand new attainments, she could not turn the key more than five degrees. This time, the door remained open permanently without her being able to bolt it. It was only at ten o’clock at night, when she came back from the movies, that she could exercise her know-how, for the door, as it had been the night

before, was hermetically sealed. She was forced then, to participate voluntarily in this hermeticism by bolting it behind her in order to recover her precious key. It was only at eight o’clock in the morning the next day that she met the concierge; as he withdrew his key from the door he gave her the key to the mystery. The caretaker’s passkey had no groove, was thinner, and in quite the classical manner had only one bit. The concierge, and he alone, could bolt or unbolt the door as he pleased inserting his key in a horizontal position but then withdrawing his key as one does in Paris, remaining snug on the side where his lodge was. After that action, however, the inhabitants of the building found they either could not bolt the door (during the day), or were obliged to bolt it from eight o’clock at night until eight o’clock in the morning). In Berlin, this steel key performs mechanically the same function as is performed electronically in Paris by the door codes. Our archaeologist, somewhat versed in sociology, was quite delighted by the way in which the Prussian ­Locksmith obliged all the inhabitants of Berlin to conform to a strict collective discipline, and was already preparing to write an article rather in the style of Foucault on the subject, when her colleague from the Wissenshaft Zentrum took from his pocket a Berlin key from which he had carefully filed away the grooves! His key had become a passkey similar in every aspect to that of the concierge. Instead of being obliged to lock the door behind him, he could either leave the door open for his night-walking visitors, or bolt it during the day in the face of intruders, thus annulling the concierge’s unlocking. … Master of his destiny, he escaped the Prussian Locksmith once again. Berlin was decidedly the ambivalent city symbolised by the doubling of the bits and then their preclusion…

60

61

4.pull through from inside key cannot be withdrawn until…

5.Turn again 270°

6.Recover key by pulling from keyhole Figure 6 Key operation – courtyard side.

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key

If we call the script of a device its programme of action’3, what is the programme of action of such a key? ‘Please bolt the door behind you during the night and never during the day. Into what material is this programme translated into words, of course. All large cities, all groups of co-owners, all union newspapers, all concierge’s lodges, are full of complaints, notices, recriminations and groans about the doors, the fact that they are impossible to lock and impossible to open. But if it was a question of words, or notices, or howls of Lock the door! or placards, we would merely be in the world of signs. If we were still living in the blessed days in which concierges kept watch night and day so as to pull the door-cord only for those they had carefully examined we would be immersed in social relations – except for the door-pull, we forgot that,

which allowed the slave in the lodge not to reveal her undies by getting up. The denunciations, the palm-greasing permitted by these relations fed the plots of more than one novel. But now with this Berlin key we find we are neither altogether in the world of signs nor altogether in the realm of social relations. Are we in the world of technology? Of course we are, since here we are confronting keyholes and a handsome steel key with teeth, grooves and lips. And of course we are not, since we are encountering know-how, punctual concierges, and obstinate cheats, not to speak of our Prussian Locksmith. All devices that seek to annul, destroy, subvert, circumvent a programme of action are called anti-programmes. The thieves who wish to get through the door, representatives of the opposite sex, are pursuing their anti-programmes, from the point of view, of course, of our dedicated concierge. No one has acknowledged their competence to go through the front entrance, but they insist on going through. Delivery people, trades people, mail carriers, doctors, legitimate spouses, also wish to go through during the day and believe they have the necessary authorisation. The Berlin key, the door and the concierge are engaged in bitter struggle for control and access. Shall we say that the social relations between tenants and owners, or inhabitants and thieves, or inhabitants and delivery people, or co-owners and concierges, are mediated by the key, the lock and the Prussian Locksmith? The word mediation, quite useful, can also become an asylum for ignorance depending on the meaning one gives it. One person will take mediation to mean intermediary, another to mean mediator. If the key is an intermediary, it does nothing in itself except carry, transport, shift, incarnate, express, reify, objectify, reflect, the meaning of the phrase: Lock the door behind you during the night, and never during the day, or, more politi-

Figure 7 Berliner master key.

Figure 8 Lock mechanism.

62

63

Bruno Latour

The ­­Berlin Key

cally: Let us settle the class struggle between owners and tenants, rich people and thieves, right-wing Berliners and left-wing Berliners. Give me the society of Berlin, and I will tell you how the key is shaped. Technology is nothing more than discourse, totally expressible in other media. But then, why this key, these grooves, these surrealistic keyholes and this subtle inversion of the horizontal slot? If the transition to steel, to brass, to wood changes nothing, all technological mediators count for nothing. They are there for show; to give the idle something to chatter about. The material world confronts us only to serve as a mirror for social relations and a source of entertainment for sociologists. Of course, it carries meaning, it can receive it, but is does not fabricate it. The social is made elsewhere, always elsewhere. Everything changes if the word mediation fills out a little in order to designate the action of mediators. Then the meaning is no longer simply transported by the medium but in part constituted, moved, recreated, modified – in short expressed and betrayed. No, the asymmetrical slot of the keyhole and the key with two bits do not express, symbolise, reflect, reify, objectify, incarnate disciplinary relations, they make them, they form them. The very notion of discipline is impracticable without steel, without the wood of the door, without the bolt of the locks. The proof? Owners did not succeed in constructing a social relation solidly established on discipline, on verbal coercion, on printed notices, on warnings or the gentleness of customs. The doors remained wide open during the night or locked during the day. This is why they had to extend the network of their relations, forge other alliances, recruit the Prussian Locksmith, and mobilise mathematics and its principles of symmetry. It is because the social cannot be constructed with the social that it need keys and locks. And it is because classical locks still allow too much freedom that

keys with double bits are needed. Meaning does not antecede technological devices. The intermediary was not a means to an end, whereas the mediator becomes at once both means and end. From being a simple tool, the steel key assumes all the dignity of a mediator, a social actor, an agent, an active being. As for the symmetry and the little break in symmetry that one sees when looking through the keyhole, are they or are they not social relations? This would be endowing them with, at once, too much and not enough. Not enough, since all of Berlin must pass this way: it is impossible to withdraw the key because of the stagger of the horizontal slot. Are these, then, social relations, relations of power? No, because nothing allowed Berlin to foresee that a break in symmetry, a key with two bits, and an obsessed concierge had to unite to transform into an obligatory point of passage, a programme of action that, until now, had been composed only of words and customs. If I take my key with two bits that authorises me to re-enter my house and obliges me to bolt the door at night and forbids me to bolt it during the day, am I not dealing with social relations, with morality, with laws? Of course, but made of steel. To define them as social relations continued by other means would not be too bad, if we were capable, indeed of recognising in means, media, mediators, the eminent alterity, the eminent dignity that modern philosophy has for so long refused them. Along with their alterity, one must also recognise their fragility, that eminent weakness that the technologists, this time, refuse to grant them. A cunning little person equipped with a file is enough to rob the concierge of his role as alternative caretaker. And this concierge, in his turn, must also be disciplined. There is no point in holding the key in one’s hand, for the human concierge must be kept in hand also so that he will trigger the mechanism morning and night punctu-

64

65

Bruno Latour

ally. And the solidity of this chain consisting of: good-socialbehaviour-practical; know-how; concierge; key-lock-door is no less provisional, for a poser of an electronic code can now transform the vigilance of the concierge into an electric signal regulated by the clock and turn the steel key into a code I will have to memorise. Which is more fragile, 45 – 68E (my door code) or the handsome steel key? Which is more technological, the steel or the little counting-rhyme end of the war, May 68, Europe which I say over to myself at the end of the day in order to remember the thing that authorises me to re-enter my house? Which of the two, this solid key or that mnemotechnological counting-rhyme wired into my neurons, is more durable? Consider things, and you will have humans. Consider humans, and you are by that very act interested in things. Bring your attention to bear on hard things, and see them become gentle, soft or human. Turn your attention to humans, and see them become electric circuits, automatic gears or software. We cannot even define precisely what makes some human and others technical, whereas we are able to document precisely their modifications and replacements, their rearrangements and their alliances, their delegations and representations. Do technology, and you are now a sociologist. Do sociology, and now you are obliged to be a technologist. It is no more possible for you to avoid this obligation, this connection, this consequence, this pursuit, than it is permitted for you to enter your building at night in Berlin without taking out your key and locking the door again behind you. It is now (and has been for two or three million years) inscribed in the nature of things. Readers must have been wondering from the outset how people in Berlin contrive to hook this surrealistic key onto their key chains. Not to mention the fact that two bits instead

66

The ­­Berlin Key

Figure 9 Key Holder.

of one gives that much more chance of tearing one’s pockets. I do not wish to leave them in suspense. The Prussian Locksmith has applied himself to inventing a Berlin keychain, a little case endowed with claws that holds the bit, to which is attached a ring, which, in its turn, allows one to hook in onto a keychain, which can be attached to one’s belt. With mediators, in fact, there always begin chains of mediators, otherwise known as networks. One is never done with them. But sociologists, like technologists, enemy brothers, believe they can come to an end, the former with the social, the latter with objects. The only thing they do not manage to end is their fratricidal war, a war that prevents us from understanding the world in which we live.

67

Bruno Latour







NOTES

1 Jacques Carelman, Cataloques des Objets Introurables (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1995). 2 My warmest thanks to Bernard Joerges for having presented me with this key and to Wanfred Schweizer of the Kerfin Company for having sold me a sample of his lock, real enough to guarantee him his livelihood. It should be pointed out that this article was written before the Berlin Wall came down, in West Berlin, which was at the time besieged by real socialism. 3 Madelaine Akrich “The Description of technical objects” in Shaping Technology / Building Society, ed. by W.E. Bijker and J. Law (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 203 – 224.

68

Arjun Appadurai

The Thing Itself 2006 

From: Public Culture, vol. 18, No. 1 (2006): 15 – 21 [New York: Duke University Press] © The Author & The Publisher

71

Arjun Appadurai

The Thing Itself

The idea of objects having a social life is a conceit I coined in 1986 in a collection of essays titled The Social Life of Things.1 Since then, I have continued to be engaged with the idea that persons and things are not radically distinct categories, and that the transactions that surround things are invested with the properties of social relations. Thus, today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom. Furthermore, any and all things can make the journey from commodity to singularity and back. Slaves, once sold as chattel, can become gradually humanized, personified and reenchanted by the investiture of humanity. But they can also be recommoditized, turned once again into mere bodies or tools, put back in the marketplace, available for a price, dumped into the world of mere things. In some way, all things are congealed moments in a longer social trajectory. All things are brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of the motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite. Consider the objects of traditional plastic art, such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, buildings, or monuments. Despite their aspiration to the illusion of permanence, they are only momentary aggregations of material, such as paint, bricks, glass, acrylic, cloth, steel, or canvas. These underlying materials are ever volatile, which is why museums always insist that we do not touch. What is at risk is not just aura or authenticity but the fragility of objecthood itself. Furthermore, it is not just the materials from which art objects are composed that threaten to break through the illusion of permanence. It is the very action of the artists,

the craftsmen, the builders, and the framers that is always waiting to show its hand. The tear in the canvas, the crack in the glass, the chip in the wood, the flaw in the steel are not just signs of homo faber, but of the activity that art both conceals and celebrates. That activity is what allows for the subsequent activity of restoration or conservation to occur. In this sense, restoration and conservation are about more than preservation. They are a testimony to the fact that the very objecthood of art objects requires action in order to resist the historical processes that turn one kind of thing into another kind of thing unless one is committed to the project of maintaining the work of art as such – a permanent object and a repository of permanence. The corrosion of history only supports and intensifies the inherent tendency of things to move on to some new state in their social lives. And this is as true of art objects as it is of things in general. It may be objected that this approach to art objects is suited only to an older world of art – plastic, representational, material, and bounded (by frames, structures, occasions, and tactile reality). What about the many traditions of action art, performance art, installation art, body art, and so on in which the lines between the object and the event, the event and its technological representation, the representation and its context are all deliberately blurred to produce effects that are calculated to deny the illusion of permanence? In my view, these instances, which characterise the last three decades or so of artwork worldwide, constitute a rediscovery of the world of activity that much plastic art is at pains to conceal or transcend. These newer forms seek to exploit the vulnerability of objects to change, to take advantage of the corrosive effects of history and context, and to incorporate the mortality of the artist and the body into the fabric of the artwork itself. They are therefore fully consistent with

72

73

Profusion

Arjun Appadurai

The Thing Itself

the idea that all art is a momentary assemblage of mobile persons and things and that art objects, assemblages, events, and performances vary only in the intensity of their interest in denying or celebrating the social trajectory to which all things are subject. Let us return then to the theme of profusion and place it in the context of India. Much has been said about the teeming multitudes of India, especially of its cities, and the issue of population has become a scientific field in its own right under the name of demography. But the profusion of things in Indian social life has been less fully remarked. Of course, a short time spent in any one of India’s upscale bookstores will show that artists, journalists, and photographers (some great, some less so) have long discovered the promiscuous endlessness of India’s world of things, from pots and huts to dhurries and ivories, from textiles and palaces, to saris and jewelry, from floor paintings and tikkas, to advertisements and frescoes. Consider the work of a great photographer like Raghubir Singh: his brilliant compositions are as much about things as they are about people. And his photographed things are endlessly reflected and refracted until they form an endless chain of material effects that link the hand and cloth, steel and paint, mud and color. In Raghubir Singh’s photographs it is not possible to say that the extraordinary human faces are any more or less expressive than the profusion of things by which they are surrounded. In his work, and in the work of some other masters of the coffee-table book form, what is always evident is that art objects in India are part of a living continuum in which the objects of everyday life and the faces of everyday people are part of the sheer crowding of the Indian world of things. This sense of the luxuriance of objects and of their comfortable place in the order of things is everywhere in Indian

life. Indian society is a panorama of piles, stacks, bunches, bundles, baskets, bags among which people appear, as labourers, as shopkeepers, as vendors, as housewives, and as pedestrians, making their way through an endless landscape of things, ranging from the most precious to the most ugly and filthy. Things meld into bodies, especially in Indian society, where objects provide the material for people to sleep on, to live in, to rest on, to buy, to sell, to store, to repair, to trade, to scavenge, and to display. In this endless profusion of things, two important features may be pointed out. There is hardly any interest in minimalism, any more with things than with people. In regard to both things and people, what is sought and desired is the warmth of profusion and the enchantment of multiplicity. Thus even the most forceful contemporary Indian art has little to do with standard European minimalist traditions, and when it does, it takes its force from its shock value in a context where crowding is a source of delight. The second important feature of this profusion is that it recognizes no sharp line between people and things. And in this regard, India exemplifies the deepest insights of both Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx. In Mauss’s sense, things in India never lose some of the magic of their human makers, owners, or handlers; and following Marx, both things and humans share the mystery of the commodity and the underlying metric of labour. Finally, the sheer profusion of things in India makes it impossible to set art apart from its wider context and makes it difficult to distinguish art clearly from the objects of everyday life. This last feature has been seen as part of the dialogue between desa and marga2 impulses in Indian civilization, and between high and popular art traditions. There is some truth to these views. But more important is the fact that the very profusion of forms, materials, and styles in Indian social life makes the segregation of differ-

74

75

Arjun Appadurai

The Thing Itself

ent kinds of objects according to aesthetic criteria virtually impossible. The logic of profusion leads one to inquire about a closely related property of things, namely their relationship to abstraction.

My references to India and Indian society in the previous section could be taken to be quaintly anthropological, even Orientalist, in the sense that they appear to exceptionalise India as a kind of bazaar of thingness, as a civilization enamored of the Borgesian endlessness of its own object world. So let me suggest that I speak about India because I know a bit more about the luxuriance of objects in India. Of course, there are many societies, both contemporary and historical, which may be characterised in this manner, and the comparative question is an open one. In other words, when I say India I do not mean only India. But there is a trickier issue here: the issue of abstraction. The sort of profusion of objects that I have tried to describe as characterising societies like India (to stress my reference to a category of places rather than to an Indian essence of some sort) is often seen as relentlessly closed to abstraction. The relevant oppositions here have a venerable history in Western philosophy, from Plato to Martin Heidegger, in which the relationship of materiality to abstraction has been chewed to pieces. I do not wish to add a footnote to this venerable scholastic history. What I prefer to do is to ask how materiality and abstraction may inhabit one another in societies like India, in which the social life of things is both rich and undisciplined enough to allow a fuller analysis of their relationship. India, in spite of a growing and status-hungry middle class, is not yet a consumer society in the Western sense. Thus,

the materiality of objects in India is not yet completely penetrated by the logic of the market. That is to say, objects are not yet seen primarily as material repositories of monetary or exchange value. In the most advanced industrial economies, of which the United States is still in many ways the leader, objects have become fairly thoroughly colonised by the market. Everything has a price, including blood, fame, information, body parts, athletes, and gene codes. Of course, the ideology of the marketplace in the United States struggles mightily against this reality, seeking constantly to provide personal touches to objects, singular features to what are obviously commodities, and magical aspects to what are fully marketised experiences or commodities. Still, the tide has long ago turned and the pursuit of wealth as such has in every way outstripped the lust for the objects that it can buy. All Americans now understand that increasing one’s liquid assets is the first law of life (through the stock market, pension plans, gambling, theft, or real-estate speculation). What money can buy is, of course, important, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous are constantly on display. But nothing in the United States trumps the number of zeros that defines your personal wealth. The rest is keeping score and signaling in smaller fields of competition. Bill Gates is certainly respected for his geeky intelligence and extraordinary business vision, but his multi-billion-dollar personal bank balance is the key to his magical standing. In this sense, the fact that the United States is the ultimate consumer, market, affluent, or image society (depending on the adjective one prefers) should not distract us from the fact that a peculiar veil of abstraction governs over the material life of societies like the United States. Abstraction in this context has several dimensions. The first is that no object or thing in this type of society is fully enjoyed for its sheer materiality.

76

77

Abstraction

Arjun Appadurai

The Thing Itself

It is always a means to some other end, however obscure that end might be. A house could be your retirement. A car could be your insurance against isolation. A vacation home is a hedge against inflation. And all objects that are visible parts of American domestic life are, especially among the middle and upper classes, badges of lifestyle, not of life as such. Martha Stewart is a heroine because she brought high-end style to the middle classes, bringing gourmet cooking, gardening, house furnishings, and decorations within reach of the middlebrow consumer and allowing middle-class homeowners the fantasy of domestic good taste. The second aspect of abstraction is convertibility. No object is truly priceless, and indeed pricing the apparently priceless continues to be a deep American obsession. An old television show like The Price Is Right is an early example of the national preoccupation not just with things but with their precise prices. Today’s live shopping channels play on the same preoccupation, as do a variety of other popular magazines like Money. This is a familiar point about an intensely commoditized society, and it is closely tied to the drive in the United States and other advanced market societies to seek new instruments and contexts for speculation. The third dimension of abstraction is the deep tension between the singularity and the commodity, a tension my colleagues and I first addressed in 1986 in The Social Life of Things. Let me here describe a specific example of this tension, which is the paradoxical relationship between the gift economy and the commodity economy in the United States today. How does gift giving work in a capitalist, market-driven society? On the face of it, the gift is the exact opposite of a fundamental unit of the marketplace, the commodity. In abstract, general form, the commodity is standard. Each is inherently identical to the others. Available to anybody, it has nothing to do with who has given it to whom, and its value is

determined in no way by the context of who did the buying and who did the receiving. The thing has its price. In contrast, the gift is highly personal. The gift is very special. The gift is even magical. As the great anthropologist Marcel Mauss first showed the gift contains both the quality of the giver and of the receiver, and though it may have another life as a commodity, the givers don’t mind if it comes mass-produced. What is crucial is the identity between each gift and the particular relationship it solidifies. Even when a gift-giving society has rules about what types of gifts one must give – say, for example, the only allowable gifts are blankets and coins – those standard objects quickly become my gift, the thing you gave me, and so on. Again, we can recognize this in the contemporary United States. It is a little more complicated when the gift arrives in the receiver’s mail in a package mailed from Land’s End, to say, It’s my gift, but we manage to make the leap. The closer one looks, however, the harder it becomes to sort things out. Gifts and commodities don’t have an applesand-oranges relationship. Rather, a gift and a commodity are often one and the same thing: if I catch it here, it’s a gift. If I catch it one week later, when someone’s having a garage sale, it’s on the road to Commodity Land. It’s hard to think of any substance in the world that is singular – outside the commodity system – forever and ever. In the same way, a commodity can be many things, but it is not a singularity. One thing cannot be a commodity, for once it is a commodity, something is lost about its singularity. The minute you put a thing – be it a piece of clothing or food, a tool, a person, anything – on the market, you have to believe there could be others of its kind. Consider the great paintings that command incredible prices at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Of a single painting on the

78

79

Arjun Appadurai

The Thing Itself

auction block, you might be tempted to say that it commands such a huge price because it is unique. But if it is a real singularity, what makes it marketable? Are you, for example, buying a Picasso? A piece of Picasso? A piece of that set which is all of Picasso’s paintings, but a piece we can buy because it’s on the market? As these questions imply, something that appears totally singular – one-of-a-kind – is also totally a commodity – one of a set. Picasso himself is part of a set: the set of great painters who are very expensive to buy. The painting on the block is general in a hundred ways. Its singularity has been eroded. And so gift giving in highly commoditized societies, like the United States, exemplifies a fundamental problem: how to create human relations in a world where all things are potentially in the market or on the market.

especially in a global world where artists are more or less able to benefit from a global market that values some sites of abstraction more than others. As some parts of India’s art world enter, however tentatively, into the empire of the exhibit, the collection, and the commodity, there is a healthy countervailing tendency in the wider social world of things in India, which is the world of the thing itself. The idea of the thing itself is a way to capture the stubbornness of the materiality of things, which is also ­connected to their profusion, their resistance to strict measures of equivalence, and to strict distinctions between the maker and the made, the gift and the commodity, the work of art and the objects of everyday life. In India, and in societies where the rule of the market is as yet incomplete, there is a certain chaotic materiality in the world of things that resists the global tendency to make all things instruments of representation, and thus of abstraction and commodification. The challenge for India’s artists and critics is to find pathways through the global market without losing entirely the magic of materiality and the unruliness of the world of things. This unruliness thrives on the ephemerality of the artwork, the plenitude of material life, the multiple forms and futures that the social life of things can take, and the hazy borders between things and the persons whose social life they enrich and complicate. This tension between the rule of the commodity and the unruliness of the thing itself marks the space where Indian art and its makers can find a possible space of redemption, in which abstraction can remain the servant of materiality rather than its master.

Redemption Let us return to India, which is a society whose material life is in the throes of deep change. On the one hand, I have characterised a segment of Indian life in which the sheer materiality, the undisciplined profusion, and the promiscuous presence of things may be seen as a victory of materiality over abstraction, as a refusal to concede entirely to the empire of the commodity, and as a victory for the virtues of the social life of things, in which every thing can become any thing, since the market is not yet the strict controller of abstraction and equivalence. Yet no one can deny that art in India is increasingly separate from the rest of its material context, and furthermore that the world of art is increasingly tied to the related worlds of collection, criticism, auction, appraisal, and commodification. And nor is this necessarily a sign of degeneration,

80

81

Arjun Appadurai

Notes



1 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (ed.) 2 Marga [Sanskrit; Pali: magga, path] in Hinduism refers to a way of accomplishing something such as yoga or sadhana. Desa [dhesha] refers to region, space, country. (ed.)

82

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality 2007 

From: Id., Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 19 – 32. Originally published in: Archeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1 – 16 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] © The Author & The Publisher

85

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

Missing materials

Figure 1 Wet stone, photo: Krzysztof Gutfrański. Before you begin to read this chapter, please go outside and find a largish stone, though not so big that it cannot be easily lifted and carried indoors. Bring it in, and immerse it in a pail of water or under a running tap. Then place it before you on your desk – perhaps on a tray or plate so as not to spoil your desktop. Take a good look at it. If you like, you can look at it again from time to time as you read the chapter. At the end, I shall refer to what you may have observed

86

I begin with a puzzle. It is that the ever-growing literature in anthropology and archaeology that deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and material culture seems to have hardly anything to say about materials. 1 I mean by materials the stuff that things are made of, and a rough inventory might begin with something like the following, taken from the list of contents from Henry Hodges’ excellent little book, Artefacts: pottery; glazes; glass and enamels; copper and copper alloys; iron and steel; gold, silver, lead and mercury; stone; wood; fibres and threads; textiles and baskets; hides and leather; antler, bone, horn and ivory; dyes, pigments and paints; adhesives; some other materials. 2  This down-to-earth volume is packed with information about all sorts of materials that prehistoric people have used to make things. Yet I have never seen it referenced in the literature on materiality. Looking along my shelves I find titles like: The Mental and the Material, by Maurice Godelier (1986); Mind, Materiality and History, by Christina Toren (1999); Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, edited by Paul Graves-Brown (2000); Thinking Through Material Culture, by Karl Knappett (2005); Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller (2005); Material Cultures, Material Minds, by Nicole Boivin (2008), and Material Agency, edited by Lambros Malafouris and Karl Knappett (2008). In style and approach, these books are a million miles from Hodges’ work. Their engagements, for the most part, are not with the tangible stuff of craftsmen and manufacturers but with the abstract ruminations of philosophers and theorists. They expound, often in a language of grotesque impenetrability, on the relations between materiality and a host of other, similarly unfathomable qualities including agency, intentionality, functionality,

87

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

spatiality, semiosis, spirituality and embodiment. One looks in vain, however, for any comprehensible explanation of what materiality actually means, or for any account of materials and their properties. To understand materiality, it seems, we need to get as far away from materials as possible. Why should this be so? Anthropology has long, and rightly, insisted that the road to understanding lies in practical participation.You would think, then, that as anthropologists, we would want to learn about the material composition of the inhabited world by engaging directly with the stuff we want to understand: by sawing logs, building a wall, knapping a stone or rowing a boat. A woodworker is someone who works with wood, yet as Stephanie Bunn has observed most anthropologists would be content to look at the work in terms of the social identity of the worker, the tools he or she uses, the layout of the workshop, the techniques employed the objects produced and their meanings – everything but the wood itself. The materials, it seems, have gone missing. Coming to anthropology from her background as an artist and craftsperson, Bunn was directed to the literature on material culture. But nowhere in this literature could she find anything corresponding to the bit she did: the working with materials that lay at the heart of her own practice as a maker. 3 This making is for her, as it is for many artists, a procedure of discovery: in the words of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, an opening into the processes of life within and around. 4 Could not such engagement – working practically with materials – offer anthropology, too, a more powerful procedure of discovery than an approach bent on the abstract analysis of things already made? What academic perversion leads us to speak not of materials and their properties but of the materiality of objects? One clue to the answer lies in the title of a conference held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,

Cambridge, in March 2003: Rethinking materiality: the engagement of mind with the material world. 5 The pretext for this conference came, in large part, from a reaction against the excessive polarisation of mind and matter that has led generations of theorists to suppose that the material substance of the world presents itself to humanity as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for the inscription of ideational forms. An example is Godelier’s argument in The Mental and the Material, to which I referred in the last chapter, that there can be no deliberate action of human beings upon the material world that does not set to work mental realities, representations, judgements, principles of thought. 6 Where, then, do these mental realities come from? Do they have their source, as Godelier intimates, in a world of society that is ontologically distinct from the material realities of external nature. 7 At the Cambridge conference Colin Renfrew argued to the contrary, that the kinds of representations and judgements to which Godelier refers are not so much imported into arenas of practical activity as emergent within them, arising from the very ways in which human beings are interactively involved with material substance. 8 Yet in his formulation of what he now calls material engagement theory, the polarity of mind and matter remains. For the engagement of which he speaks does not bring the flesh and blood of human bodies into corporeal contact with materials of other kinds, whether organic or inorganic. Rather, it brings incorporeal minds into contact with a material world. What, then, is this material world? Of what does it consist? For heuristic purposes, Christopher Gosden suggests, we could divide it into two broad components: landscape and artefacts. 9 Thus it seems that we have human minds on the one hand, and a material world of landscape and artefacts on the other. That, you might think, should cover just about

88

89

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

everything. But does it? Consider, for a moment, what is left out. Starting with landscape, does this include the sky? Where do we put the sun, the moon and the stars? We can reach for the stars, but cannot touch them: are they, then, material realities with which humans can make contact, or do they exist for us only in the mind? Is the moon part of the material world for terrestrial travellers, or only for cosmonauts who touch down on the lunar landscape? How about sunlight? Life depends on it. But if sunlight were a constituent of the material world, then we would have to admit not only that the diurnal landscape differs materially from the nocturnal one, but also that the shadow of a landscape feature, such as a rock or tree, is as much a part of the material world as the feature itself. For creatures that live in the shade, it does indeed make a difference! What, then, of the air? When you breathe, or feel the wind on your face, are you engaging with the material world? When the fog descends, and everything around you looks dim and mysterious, has the material world changed or are you just seeing the same world differently?10 Does rain belong to the material world, or only the puddles that it leaves in ditches and pot-holes? Does falling snow join the material world only once it settles on the ground? As engineers and builders know all too well, rain and frost can break up roads and buildings. How then can we claim that roads and buildings are part of the material world, if rain and frost are not? And where would we place fire and smoke, molten lava and volcanic ash, not to mention liquids of all kinds from ink to running water? None of these things fall within the scope of Gosden’s second component of materiality, namely, artefacts. Moreover the category of the artificial raises its own anomalies. In an experiment, I asked a group of undergraduate students to sort a motley collection of objects that they had found lying

around outside into two piles, one of natural objects, the other of artefacts. It turned out that not a single thing could be unequivocally attributed to one pile or the other. If they seemed to vary on a scale of artificiality, it was only because for some more than others, and at different times in their histories, human beings had played a part in the processes that led to their being where they were, and taking the forms they did, at the moment when they were picked up. In this sense the bifacial stone hand-axe recently made for me by a professional flint-knapper is perhaps more artificial than the stone recovered from your garden that you have before you on your desk. But that does not make the former any more a part of the material world than the latter. More generally, why should the material world include only either things encountered in situ, within the landscape, or things already transformed by human activity, into artefacts? Why exclude things like the stone, which have been recovered and removed but not otherwise transformed. And where, in this division between landscape and artefacts, would we place all the diverse forms of animal, plant, fungal and bacterial life? Like artefacts, these things might be attributed with formal properties of design, yet they have not been made but have grown. If, moreover, they are part of the material world, then the same must be true of my own body. So where does this fit in? If I and my body are one and the same, and if my body indeed partakes of the material world, then how can the body-that-I-am engage with that world?

90

91

Medium, substance, surface An alternative way forward is offered by James Gibson, in his pioneering work on The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Here he distinguishes three components of the in-

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

habited environment: medium, substances and surfaces. 11 For human beings the medium is normally air. Of course we need air to breathe. But also, offering little resistance, it allows us to move about – to do things, make things and touch things. It also transmits radiant energy and mechanical vibration, so that we can see and hear. And it allows us to smell, since the molecules that excite our olfactory receptors are diffused in it. Thus the medium, according to Gibson, affords movement and perception. Substances, on the other hand, are relatively resistant to both. They include all kinds of more or less solid stuff like rock, gravel, sand, soil, mud, wood, concrete and so on. Such materials furnish necessary physical foundations for life – we need them to stand on – but it is not generally possible to see or move through them. At the interface between the medium and substances are surfaces. All surfaces, according to Gibson, have certain properties. These include a particular, relatively persistent layout, a degree of resistance to deformation and disintegration, a distinctive shape and a characteristically non-homogeneous texture. Surfaces are where radiant energy is reflected or absorbed where vibrations are passed to the medium, where vaporisation or diffusion into the medium occur, and what our bodies come up against in touch. So far as perception is concerned surfaces are therefore where most of the action is. 12  It is all too easy, however, to slip from the physical separation of gaseous medium from solid substance to the metaphysical separation of mind from matter. Thus the artefact is characteristically defined – as it is by Godelier – as an object formed through the imposition of mental realities upon material ones. 13 The artisan, it is argued begins work with an image or design already in mind of the object he plans to make, and ends when the image is realised in the material. For example, in the making of the stone biface mentioned above,

the knapper must have begun – as Jacques Pelegrin says of his prehistoric counterpart – with a pre-existing mental image … deserving of being termed a “concept”. 14 Here the surface of the artefact is not just of the particular material from which it is made, but of materiality itself as it confronts the creative human imagination. 15 Indeed the very notion of material culture, which has gained a new momentum following its long hibernation in the basements of museology, rests on the premise that as the embodiments of mental representations, or as stable elements in systems of signification, objects have already solidified or precipitated out from the generative fluxes of the medium that gave birth to them. Convinced that all that is material resides in things, or in what Bjørnar Olsen calls the hard physicality of the world, 16 students of material culture have contrived to dematerialise, or to sublimate into thought, the very medium in which the things in question once took shape and are now immersed. Ironically, Olsen does just this when he accuses social scientists who take leave of the material world for the realms of cognitive experience of being guided by a hermeneutics in which all that is solid melts into air. 17  Another example of this kind of slippage, from materials to materiality, can be found in an article by sociologist Kevin Hetherington, on the role of touch in everyday practices of placemaking. In the course of his argument, 18 Hetherington suggests that Gibson’s theory of perception offers only a weak acknowledgement of the materiality of the world. For whatever its virtues, the theory has so far failed to address what an encounter between the fingertip and the materiality of the world might have to tell us of a scopic we call place. 19 Perhaps you might like to try touching the stone on your desk. To be sure, your finger has come up against a hard material – stone. It is cold to the touch, and perhaps still damp. But has

92

93

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

touching this particular stone put you in touch with the materiality of the world? Is there nothing material that is not locked up in solid, tangible objects like stones? Are we really to believe that whatever lies on the hither side of such objects is immaterial, including the very air that affords the freedom of movement enabling you to reach out and touch them, not to mention the finger itself – and, by extension, the rest of the body, since fingers are not operated from the mind by remote control? Is the air you breathe an ether of the mind, and your finger but a phantom of the imagination? Gibson’s whole point, of course, was that the surface separates one kind of material (such as stone) from another (such as air), rather than materiality from immateriality. It is precisely because of this emphasis on materials that Gibson downplays any notion of the materiality of the world. Imagine you were a burrowing animal like a mole. Your world would consist of corridors and chambers rather than artefacts and monuments. It would be a world of enclosures whose surfaces surround the medium instead of detached 20 objects whose surfaces are surrounded by it.  I wonder whether, if moles were endowed with imaginations as creative as those of humans, they could have a material culture. Anthropologically trained moles, of a philosophical bent, would doubtless insist that the materiality of the world is not culturally constructed but culturally excavated – not, of course, in the archaeological sense of recovering erstwhile detached solid objects that have since become buried in the substance of the earth, but in the sense that the forms of things are hollowed out from within rather than impressed from without. In their eyes (if they could see) all that is material would reside beyond the objects of culture, on the far side of their inward-facing surfaces. Thus these objects could be phenomenally present in mole-culture only as material

absence – not as concrete entities but as externally bounded volumes of empty space. The very idea of material culture would then be a contradiction in terms. This example is not entirely fanciful, for in many parts of the world – including Mediterranean Europe, North and Central America, the Near and Middle East, China and Australia – humans have set up house in caves or other underground dwellings, often carving elaborate systems of interconnected rooms and passageways from the bare rock. Even today, an estimated five million cave dwellings are still in use, the vast majority of them in China. 21 The mundane activity of their inhabitants, however, plays havoc with our established categories of thought. We say houses are built, but can you build a cave? Whether constructing or excavating, much hard physical work may be involved. But whereas the house-builder erects an edifice, a monument to his labour, by the time the cave is finished all that seems to have been created is an unfurnished volume. In fact a great many cave dwellings incorporate constructed elements, such as a roofed frontage that may be built out from the rock face where the latter rises from level ground. The result is a well integrated structure, not a peculiar hybrid. There must be something wrong with a way of thinking that forces us to treat only one half of the house positively as a material object, and the other half negatively as a hole in the ground. We need an alternative approach. The source of the problem lies, once again, in the slippage from materials to materiality. It is this that leads us to suppose that human beings, as they go in and out of doors, live alternately on the inside and on the outside of a material world. It is as though this world were a Swiss cheese, full of holes yet nevertheless contained within the envelope of its outward surfaces. In the real world of materials, however, there

94

95

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

are neither interior holes nor exterior surfaces. Of course there are surfaces of all sorts, of varying degrees of stability and permeability. But these surfaces, as Gibson showed are interfaces between one kind of material and another – for example between rock and air – not between what is material and what is not. I can touch the rock, whether of a cave wall or of the ground underfoot, and can thereby gain a feel for what rock is like as a material. But I cannot touch the materiality of the rock. The surface of materiality, in short, is an illusion. We cannot touch it because it is not there. Like all other creatures, human beings do not exist on the other side of materiality, but swim in an ocean of materials. Once we acknowledge our immersion, what this ocean reveals to us is not the bland homogeneity of different shades of matter but a flux in which materials of the most diverse kinds, through processes of admixture and distillation,of coagulation and dispersal, and of evaporation and precipitation, undergo continual generation and transformation. The forms of things, far from having been imposed from without upon an inert substrate, arise and are borne along – as indeed we are too – within this current of materials. As with the Earth itself, the surface of every solid is but a crust, the more or less ephemeral congelate of a generative movement.

concoctions), as a means of waterproofing and as a hardener in leatherwork. Another example is the production of silk, which begins with the consumption of mulberry leaves by the grubs of the moth Bombyx mori. Liquid secretions exuded from the grub’s glands harden on contact with air to form filaments from which it winds its cocoon. To make silk, the filaments from several cocoons are unwound and reeled together, resulting in fibres of extraordinary strength. Then there is shellac, an essential ingredient of French polish. This material comes from the secretions of the lac insect (Coccus lacca), native to India. These secretions form a protective coating that covers entire twigs of the trees on which the insect larvae have settled. The twigs are collected and the lac removed and purified by boiling in water. The lac itself, which is insoluble, is then concentrated by evaporation, and stretched into sheets which set hard when they cool. 22  Although insects are among the most prolific producers in the animal kingdom of materials subsequently taken up for human use, a full inventory of such materials would be virtually inexhaustible. As a small sample, just consider this list of materials traditionally used by nomadic pastoral people in making tents:

The stuff of animals and plants As they swim in this ocean of materials, human beings do of course play a part in their transformations. So, too, do creatures of every other kind.Very often, humans take over from where non-humans have left off, as when they extract the wax secreted by bees to make the cell walls of the honey-comb for further use in the manufacture of candles, as an ingredient of paint (alongside linseed oil, egg-yolk and a host of other

96

Skins: these usually have to be softened by being scraped and beaten – a long and arduous task. Then they have to be cured by soaking in substances such as sour milk, camel dung or bark fermented in urine. Wool: in Central Asia wool is made into felt by pulling a long, waterlogged roll of five or more fleeces backwards and forwards for many hours. Hair: North African pastoralists make black tents from goat hair which is spun on a drop spindle and woven on a ground-loom. Hair is also used to fill mattresses and to

97

Tim Ingold

make rope, and is suitable for warp threads in weaving rugs and blankets. In addition, it is used for making paint brushes. Bone: used for tent frames, pegs and toggles, as well as for the needles used in sewing skins. Horns, hooves and claws: split into thin layers these can be used to make window panes. Sinews: used for sewing skins (with bone needles), or as warp-threads. Feathers: used for strengthening warp threads and for bedding (along with lambswool and camel hair). Dung: mixed with clay to form plaster (also acts as an effective insect repellent). Fish: the bones, skin and offal may be boiled to produce glue. Adhesives can also be made from dried blood, animal skins, bones and horns, muzzles and sinews, and cheese and quicklime. Eggs and dairy produce: in painting, milk is used as an emulsifier while egg-yolk is mixed with pigments to form a medium for distemper. 23 

Materials Against Materiality

animal origin: hog’s lard, bullock’s blood, cow dung, wort and eggs, wort and beer, milk, gluten, buttermilk, cheese, curdled milk [and] saponified beeswax. 24 The second example is of ink, an essential material for the medieval scribe. Two kinds of ink were used: one was made of lamp-black mixed with gum. For the other, which came into general use from the twelfth century, the principal ingredient was the oak-apple. This is the round, marble-sized tumour that often grows on the leaves and twigs of oak trees. It is formed around the larva of the gall wasp that has laid its egg in the tree-bud. The oak galls are collected, crushed and either boiled or infused in rainwater (or white wine vinegar). The other main ingredient is copperas, manufactured by the evaporation of water from ferrous earth, or by pouring sulphuric acid over old nails, filtering the liquid and mixing it with alcohol. The copperas is added to the oak-gall potion and thoroughly stirred with a stick from a fig tree. This has the effect of turning the solution from pale brown to black. Finally, gum arabic – made from the dried-up sap of the acacia tree – is added in order to thicken the concoction. 25 The scribe now has his ink, but of course to write he still need a pen, made from the feather of a goose, crow or raven, and parchment prepared by a lengthy procedure from the skins of calves or goats. 26 

Plants, too, provide an endless source of materials for further processing and transformation. One has only to enumerate, for example, all the different materials that can be derived from trees, including wood, bark, sap, gum, ash, paper, charcoal, tar, resin and turpentine. Other flowering plants and grasses give us cotton, flax, jute and papyrus. Nettles still grow widely in Britain because the fibres of their stalks were used in the Middle Ages for bowstrings. Many materials in common use are derived from the unlikely combination of ingredients from an astonishing variety of different sources. Here are two examples from medieval and early modern Europe. The first is of the material used for stucco work in sixteenth century England. The basic ingredient of lime was mixed with the following materials of mostly

Now so long as our focus is on the materiality of objects, it is quite impossible to follow the multiple trails of growth and transformation that converge, for instance, in the stuccoed façade of a building or the page of a manuscript. These trails are merely swept under the carpet of a generalised substrate upon which the forms of all things are said to be imposed or inscribed. In urging that we take a step back, from the

98

99

Bringing things to life

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

materiality of objects to the properties of materials, I propose that we lift the carpet, to reveal beneath its surface a tangled web of meandrine complexity, in which – among a myriad of other things – the secretions of gall wasps get caught up with old iron, acacia sap, goose feathers and calf-skins, and the residue from heated limestone mixes with emissions from pigs, cattle, hens and bees. For materials such as these do not present themselves as tokens of some common essence – materiality – that endows every worldly entity with its inherent objectness; rather, they partake in the very processes of the world’s ongoing generation and regeneration, of which things such as manuscripts or house-fronts are impermanent byproducts. Thus, to cull one further example at random, boiling fish-bones yields an adhesive material, a glue, not a fishy kind of materiality in the things glued together. In this regard, it is significant that studies of so-called material culture have focused overwhelmingly on processes of consumption rather than production. 27 For such studies take as their starting point a world of objects that has, as it were, already crystallised out from the fluxes of materials and their transformations. At this point materials appear to vanish, swallowed up by the very objects to which they have given birth. That is why we commonly describe materials as raw but never cooked – for by the time they have congealed into objects they have already disappeared. Thenceforth it is the objects themselves that capture our attention, no longer the materials of which they are made. It is as though our material involvement begins only when the stucco has already hardened on the house-front or the ink already dried on the page. We see the building and not the plaster of its walls; the words and not the ink with which they were written. In reality, of course, the materials are still there and continue to mingle and react as they had always done,

forever threatening the things they comprise with dissolution or even dematerialisation. Plaster can crumble and ink can fade. Experienced as degradation, corrosion or wear and tear, however, these changes – that objects undergo after they are finished – are typically attributed to the phase of use rather than manufacture. As the underbelly of things, materials may lie low but are never entirely subdued. Despite the best efforts of curators and conservationists, no object lasts forever. Materials always and inevitably win out over materiality in the long term. 28  This is a theme that has been taken up in the work of the sculptor David Nash. He makes things like boxes, ladders and chairs, but out of unseasoned timber, allowing the wood to live on beyond the life of the tree of which it was once a growing trunk or limb, without ever losing touch with its arboreal roots. Observing one of Nash’s ladders, for example, the wood appears to body forth from the thing made from it, rather than

100

101

Figure 2 Ladder (wood, four metres high, Lake Biwa, Japan) by David Nash (photo courtesy of the artist)

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

retreating back-stage as is the case with its factory-made equivalent in the showroom. We see wood that has been made into a ladder rather than a ladder that has been made out of wood. Moreover, with the passage of time the wood – as it seasons – splits, warps and cracks, eventually settling into a shape quite different from that given to it by the sculptor’s initial intervention. I keep my mind on the process, says Nash, and let the piece take care of itself. 29 For beneath the skin of the form the substance remains alive, reconfiguring the surface as it matures. But in treating the wood as life-giving material rather than dead matter, Nash is only drawing our attention to what our predecessors already knew when they first coined the term material by extension from the Latin mater [mother]. As Nicholas Allen reminds us, the term has a complex history involving feminine-gender Latin and Greek words for wood … which is or has been alive. 30 Far from being the inanimate stuff typically envisioned by modern thought, materials in this original sense are the active constituents of a world-in-formation. Wherever life is going on, they are relentlessly on the move – flowing, scraping, mixing and mutating. 31 The existence of all living organisms is caught up in this ceaseless respiratory and metabolic interchange between their bodily substances and the fluxes of the medium. Without it they could not survive. This of course applies to us human beings as much as to organisms of other kinds. Along with all terrestrial vertebrates, we need to be able to breathe. In the world of solid objects envisaged by material culture theorists, however, the flux of materials is stifled and stilled. In such a world, wherein all that is material is locked up in things, it would be impossible to breathe. Indeed neither life itself, nor any form of consciousness that depends on it, could persist. One cannot dream profoundly with objects, writes philosopher Gaston Bachelard. To dream profoundly, one

must dream with “substances”. 32 Suffocated by the dead hand of materiality, strewn with unrelated things, immobile and inert solids, objects foreign to our nature33 the material world can only be brought back to life in the dreams of theorists by conjuring a magical mind-dust that, sprinkled among its constituents, is supposed to set them physically in motion. It has come to be known in the literature as agency, and great expectations have been pinned upon it. Action, we are told, follows agency as effect follows cause. 34 Thus people are supposed to be capable of acting, and are not just acted upon, because they have acquired some of this agency. 35 Without it, they would be but things. By the same token, however, if agency is imaginatively bestowed on things, then they can start acting like people. They can act back; inducing persons in their vicinity to do what they otherwise might not. In one of the most original and provocative discussions of materiality to have appeared in recent years, Peter Pels characterises the logic of this argument as animist: a way of saying that things are alive because they are animated by something foreign to them, a “soul” or … spirit made to reside in matter. 36 Whatever its source might be, this animating principle is understood here as additional to the material object on which it has been bestowed. There is however, according to Pels, another way of understanding how things can act back. This is to say that the spirit that enlivens them is not in but of matter. We do not then look beyond the material constitution of objects in order to discover what makes them tick; rather the power of agency lies with their materiality itself. Pels characterises this alternative logic as fetishist. Thus the fetish is an object that, by virtue of its sheer material presence, affects the course of affairs. 37 This argument is an important step in the right direction, but it takes us only halfway. On the one hand it

102

103

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

acknowledges the active power of materials, their capacity to stand forth from the things made of them. Yet it remains trapped in a discourse that opposes the mental and the material, and that cannot therefore countenance the properties of materials, save as aspects of the inherent materiality of objects. Thus the hybrid quality that Pels attributes to the fetish – its capacity at once to set up and disrupt the sensuous border zone between ourselves and the things around us, between mind and matter 38 – is in fact a product of the misrecognition of the active properties of materials as a power of the materiality of objects. There is nothing hybrid about one of Nash’s ladders, however. Like the living tree in the ground from which it was made, it inhabits the border zone not between matter and mind but between substance and medium. The wood is alive, or breathes, precisely because of the flux of materials across its surface. Bringing things to life, then, is a matter not of adding to them a sprinkling of agency but of restoring them to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist. This view, that things are in life rather than life in things, is diametrically opposed to the conventional anthropological understanding of animism, invoked by and harking back to the classic work of Edward Tylor, 39 according to which it entails the attribution of life, spirit or agency to objects that are really inert. It is, however, entirely consistent with the actual ontological commitments of peoples often credited in the literature with an animistic cosmology. 40 In their world there are no objects as such. Things are alive and active not because they are possessed of spirit – whether in or of matter – but because the substances of which they are comprised continue to be swept up in circulations of the surrounding media that alternately portend their dissolution or – characteristically with animate

beings – ensure their regeneration. Spirit is the regenerative power of these circulatory flows which, in living organisms, are bound into tightly woven bundles or tissues of extraordinary complexity. All organisms are bundles of this kind. Stripped of the veneer of materiality they are revealed not as quiescent objects but as hives of activity, pulsing with the flows of materials that keep them alive. And in this respect human beings are no exception. They are, in the first place, organisms, not blobs of solid matter with an added whiff of mentality or agency to liven them up. As such, they are born and grow within the current of materials, and participate from within in their further transformation.

If, as I have suggested we are to redirect our attention from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials, then we are left with the question: what are these properties? How should we talk about them? One approach to answering this question has been proposed by the theorist of design, David Pye. 41 His concern is to examine the idea that every material has inherent properties that can be either expressed or suppressed in use. This idea is frequently enunciated by sculptors and craftspeople who assert that good workmanship should be true to the material, respecting its properties rather than riding roughshod over them. Suppose, then, that we take a metallic material like lead. Among a list of its properties we might include the following: ductility, heaviness, low melting point, resistance to electrical current, impenetrability to X-rays, and toxicity. Of these the first two might possibly be expressed artistically, but the others cannot. But if our aim is to be true to the material, then why, Pye asks, should we be content to select only certain aspects of the lead, ac-

104

105

Properties and qualities

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

cording to choices that have been dictated by considerations that have nothing to do with it? Then again, some materials exhibit properties while being worked that they lose once the job is done. Red-hot iron at the forge has the consistency of beeswax, but if the smith seeks to bring out its softness and elasticity, then the result, once the iron has cooled will express precisely those properties that the material, now hard and rigid, no longer possesses. Similarly, the rounded form of a clay pot, formed while the material was damp and pliable, can hardly be said to bring out the brittleness of clay that has been baked in a kiln. Nor can we deny the excellence of workmanship that allows a master sculptor to fashion the hardest of stone into surfaces that appear as soft and smooth as silken cloth, or an infant’s skin. On these grounds, Pye argues that it is not really the properties of materials that an artist or craftsperson seeks to express, but rather their qualities.

The assertion, then, that a sculpture is good because it brings out the stoniness of stone cannot be justified on the basis of any properties of the stone itself that can be objectively known. It merely reveals our own personal preferences concerning the qualities we like to see in it. It is of course true that we may hold such preferences concerning the materials we use to make things. It is also true that these materials may be subjected to a battery of tests in order to measure

such properties as density, elasticity, tensile strength, thermal conductivity, and so on. For an engineer setting out to design a structure and deciding what materials to use, such measurements – which can be as accurate and objective as current science and instrumentation allow – may be of critical importance.Yet the knowledge they yield is a far cry from that of, say, the stonemason, smith, potter or carpenter, which comes from a lifetime’s experience of working with the material. This is a knowledge born of sensory perception and practical engagement, not of the mind with the material world – to recall43 material engagement theory – but of the skilled practitioner participating in a world of materials. It may seem pedantic to distinguish between the material world and the world of materials, but the distinction is critical to my argument. The trouble with Pye’s dichotomy between properties and qualities is that it takes us straight back to the polarisation of mind and matter from which our inquiry began. Materials, for Pye, are varieties of matter, that is, of the physical constitution of the world as it is given quite independently of the presence or activity of its inhabitants. Thus their properties are properties of matter, and are in that sense opposed to the qualities that the mind imaginatively projects onto them. Following Gibson, I have chosen to concentrate not on matter as such, but instead on substances and media, and the surfaces between them. 44 These are the basic components, for Gibson, not of the physical or material world but of the environment. Whereas the physical world exists in and for itself, the environment is a world that continually unfolds in relation to the beings that make a living there. Its reality is not of material objects but for its inhabitants. 45 It is, in short, a world of materials. And as the environment unfolds, so the materials of which it is comprised do not exist – like the objects of the material

106

107

The properties of materials are objective and measurable. They are out there. The qualities on the other hand are subjective: they are in here: in our heads. They are ideas of ours. They are part of that private view of the world which artists each have within them. We each have our own view of what stoniness is. 42 

Tim Ingold

Materials Against Materiality

world – but occur. 46 Thus the properties of materials, regarded as constituents of an environment, cannot be identified as fixed essential attributes of things, but are rather processual and relational. They are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced. In that sense, every property is a condensed story. To describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix and mutate.

This is exactly what Christopher Tilley does in his book, The Materiality of Stone (2004). Focusing on ancient monuments of massive stone or rock – the Mesolithic menhirs of Brittany, the temple architecture of Neolithic Malta and the Bronze Age rock carvings in southern Sweden – Tilley devotes a great deal of attention to the properties of stone as material. He shows how its stoniness, if you will, is not constant but endlessly variable in relation to light or shade, wetness or dryness, and the position, posture or movement of the observer. To describe the properties of stone he has to follow these variations as he walks around or over each monument, or crawls through it, at different times of day, in different seasons, and under different weather conditions. Yet in the very title of his book, these properties of stone, as material, are recast as the materiality of stone. And in that move the stone is instantly swallowed up by the landscape whose surface marks an interface not between earth and air but between nature and culture, the physical world and the world of ideas – two sides of a coin which cannot be separated but two sides nonetheless. 47 On the one side, as explains in a response to an earlier version of this chapter, there is a world of stones that is oblivious to the actions, thoughts and social and political relations of

humans. 48 Here, he says, we are dealing with brute materials. These are what geologists study. For the geologist, a stone is a formless lump of matter. He might find forms in the matter, for example in its molecular or crystalline structure, but it is these, and not the outward form of the stone itself, that concern him. On the other side is a world in which stones are caught up in the lives of human beings, and given form and significance through their incorporation into the social and historical contexts of these lives. This is the world that calls for the interpretative work of the archaeologist or student of material culture. 49  It is precisely in order to delineate this latter world, according to Tilley, that we require a concept of materiality – one that needfully addresses the “social lives” of stones in relation to the social lives of persons. 50 Likewise, archaeologist Joshua Pollard states that by materiality I mean how the material character of the world is comprehended appropriated and involved in human projects. 51 The paradox inherent in both definitions is that materiality lies in the measure to which the socially and historically constituted form bestowing agency of human beings transcends what Pollard calls the world’s material character, or what Tilley calls its brute materiality. This paradox reminds me of much older debates for and against the “human” nature of human nature, which likewise oscillated between a notion of brute animality common to all creatures and one of an essential humanity by which the social life of persons was thought to be raised onto a plane of being over and above the purely biophysical. 52 In speaking of the world of materials, rather than the material world, my purpose has been to escape from this oscillation, both by returning persons to where they belong, within the continuum of organic life, and by recognising that this life itself undergoes continual generation in currents of materials.

108

109

Living the stone

Tim Ingold

Considered as a constituent of the material world, a stone is indeed both a lump of matter that can be analysed for its physical properties and an object whose significance is drawn from its incorporation into the context of human affairs. The concept of materiality, as we have seen, reproduces this duality, rather than challenging it. But in the world of materials, humans figure as much within the context for stones as do stones within the context for humans. And these contexts, far from lying on disparate levels of being, respectively social and natural, are established as overlapping regions of the same world. It is not as though this world were one of brute physicality, of mere matter, until people appeared on the scene to give it form and meaning. Stones, too, have histories, forged in ongoing relations with surroundings that may or may not include human beings and much else besides. It is all very well to place stones within the context of human social life and history, but within what context do we place this social life and history if not the ever-unfolding world of materials in which the very being of humans, along with that of the non-humans they encounter, is bound up? My plea, in arguing for a return to this world, is simply that we should once more take materials seriously, since it is from them that everything is made.

110

Materials Against Materiality

Figure 3 Dry stone (photo: Krzysztof Gutfrański) Now return to the stone that has been quietly sitting on your desk as you have been reading. Without any intervention on your part, it has changed. The water that had once covered it has evaporated and the surface is now almost completely dry. There might still be a few damp patches, but these are immediately recognisable from the darker colouration of the surface. Though the shape of the stone remains the same, it otherwise looks quite different. Indeed it might look disappointingly dull. The same is true of pebbles washed by the tide on a shingle beach, which never look so interesting once they have dried out. Though we might be inclined to say that a stone bathed in moisture is more stony than one bathed in dry air, we should probably acknowledge that the appearances are just different. It is the same if we pick up the stone and feel it, or knock it against something else to make a noise. The dry stone feels and sounds differently from the wet one. What we can conclude, however, is that since the substance of the stone must be bathed in a medium of some kind, there is no way in which its stoniness can be understood apart from the ways it is caught up in the interchanges across its surface, between medium and substance. Like Nash’s sculptures of unseasoned wood, though much more quickly, the stone has actually changed as it dried out. Stoniness, then, is not in the stone’s nature, in its materiality. Nor is it merely in the mind of the observer or practitioner. Rather, it emerges through the stone’s involvement in its total surroundings – including you, the observer – and from the manifold ways in which it is engaged in the currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, in short, are not attributes but histories.

111

Tim Ingold

notes











1 I hasten to add that, of course, the greater part of archaeology is dedicated precisely to the study of materials and the ways they have been used in processes of production. Even in anthropology, there is some ethnographic work on the subject. My point is simply that this work does not seem to impinge significantly on the literature on materiality and material culture. For scholars who have devoted much of their energies to the study of materials, this literature reads more like an escape route into theory – one which, I confess, I have previously used myself. Thus, my argument is directed as much at myself as at anyone else, and is part of an attempt to overcome the division between theoretical and practical work. 2 Henry Hodges, Artefacts: An Introduction to Early Materials and Technology (London: Duckworth 1964), 9. 3 Stephanie Bunn,“The ­importance of materials,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 11 (1999): 15. 4 Terry Friedman and Andy Golds- worthy, Hand to Earth (Leeds: W.S. Maney, 1990), 160. 5 The proceedings of the con ference were subsequently published as DeMarrais, et al., Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004). 6 Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material, trans. by

M. Thom (London: Verso, 1986), 11. 7 Ibidem, 3. 8 Colin Renfrew, “Towards a theory of material engagement,” in Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World, ed. by E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden and C. Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004), 23. Idem, “Symbol before concept: material engagement and the early development of society,” Archaeological Theory Today, ed. by Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Polity, 2001): 127. 9 Christopher Gosden, Anthropology and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship (London: Routledge, 1999), 152. 10 I address many of these questions concerning landscape, sky and weather in my Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), Chapters 9 and 10: 115 – 125 and 126 – 135. 11 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 16. 12 Ibidem, 23. 13 Godelier, The Mental and the Material, 4. 14 Jacques Pelegrin, “A framework for analysing prehistoric stone tool manufacture and a tentative application to some early stone industries,” in The Use of Tools by Humans and Non-Human Primates, ed. by A. Berthelet and J. Chavaillon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 310.

112

Materials Against Materiality











15 Tim Ingold, “Making culture and weaving the world,” in: Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. by Paul M. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 53. 16 Bjørnar Olsen, “Material culture after text: re-membering things,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36 (2) (2003): 88. 17 This phrase was coined by Karl Marx, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. He was referring metaphorically to the evaporation, in bourgeois society, of the fixed fast-frozen relations of precapitalist modes of production, and not to any process of nature K. Marx, and F. Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The MarxEngels Reader (second edition), ed. by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 476. 18 I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive critique of Hetherington’s argument, which is mainly focused elsewhere. In any case I concur with much of it. I cite it here simply as an exemplary instance of the role that the concept of materiality plays in arguments of this kind. 19 Kevin Hetherington, “Spatial textures: place, touch, and praesentia,” Environment and Planning A 35 (2003): 1938 – 1939. 20 Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 34. 21 H. Mulligan, “Cave shelter,” in Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, Vol. 1, ed. by Paul Oliver. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 238 – 240.

22 Hodges, Artefacts: An Introduction to Early Materials and Technology, 125, 162 – 164. 23 Stephanie Bunn, “Animal products.” in Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, Vol. 1, ed. by Paul Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195 – 197. 24 Davey cited in Bunn, “Animal products,” 196. 25 Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, ed. by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 32 – 33. 26 Ibidem, 8 – 16, 27 – 29. 27 Acknowledging Consumption, ed. by Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995). “Why some things matter,” in Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (London: UCL Press, 1998), 11. Olsen, “Material culture after text: remembering things,” 91 – 94. 28 The fact that materials outlast the objects made from them establishes, in turn, the possibility of recycling. This possibility arises at the moment when our focus shifts from finished objects to the stuff of which they are made, seeing in it the potential for further transformation. In this sense, as Bunn remarks, recycled materials are a “grey area”, on the edge of material and object. Stephanie Bunn, “The importance of materials,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 11 (1999): 21. 29 Marina Warner, “Forms into time: the works of David Nash,” in David Nash: Forms into Time (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 15.

113

Tim Ingold

















30 N.J. Allen, “The category of substance: a Maussian theme revisited,” in Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, ed. by Wendy James and N. J. Allen (New York: Berghahn, 1998), 177. 31 In the words of philosopher Gilbert Simondon, Living matter is far from being pure indetermination or pure passivity. Neither is it a blind tendency; it is, rather, the vehicle of informed energy. G. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, ed. by J. Hart, trans. by N. Mellamphy (1980): 66. 32 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. by E. R. Farrell (Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 22. 33 Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 12. 34 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 16. 35 I return to the critique of the concept of agency in Chapter 17 of my Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 213 – 14. 36 Peter Pels, “The spirit of matter: on fetish, rarity, fact, and fancy,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. by Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998), 94. 37 Ibid., 94 – 95. 38 Ibid., 102. 39 Ibid., 94. 40 See Chapter 5 of my Being Alive, Essays on Movement…, 67 – 75.

41 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 45 – 47. 42 Ibidem, 47. 43 Colin Renfrew, “Symbol before concept: material engagement and the early development of society,” Archaeological Theory Today, ed. by Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 122 – 140. 44 I have found Gibson’s tripartite scheme a useful starting point for thinking about the inhabited environment. But it is by no means without its problems, see especially Chapters 9 and 10 of my Being Alive..., 115 – 125 and 126 – 135. 45 Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 8. Tim Ingold,“Culture and the perception of the environment,” in Bush Base: Forest Farm. Culture, Environment and Development, ed. by Elizabeth Croll and David Parkin (London: Routledge, 1992), 39 – 56. 46 I return to the distinction between existence and occurrence in Part IV of my Being Alive..., 141 – 175. 47 Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 220. Tim Ingold, “Landscape lives, but archaeology turns to stone,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 38(2) (2005). 48 Christopher Tilley, “Materiality in materials,” Archaeological Dialogues 14(1) (2007): 17. 49 Philosopher Arnold Berleant draws precisely the same distinction. Stone has two sides, he

114



Materials Against Materiality writes. There is the hard side: this 52 Leon Eisenberg, “The human is the stone, for example, of the nature of human nature,” Science geologist, armed with hammer 176 (1972): 123 – 128. Tim Ingold, and chisel. But stone also has a “Humanity and animality,” in soft side, consisting in the range Companion Encyclopedia of of meanings that stone holds Anthropology: Humanity, Culture for us, the values we find in it, and Social Life, ed. by Idem the metaphors by which stone (London: Routledge, 1994): 19 – 25. figures in our understanding, its influence on our imagination, and the powers we attribute to it. Berleant makes the distinction, however, only to dissolve it by folding the hard side of stone into the soft. Because the world we inhabit is necessarily a human world, he argues, everything about stone that we intuitively take to be hard is in fact already screened through the social and cultural layers that enfold us. Thus, Berleant concludes, stone has only one side, a soft side. A. Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), 110 – 111. For reasons that will become clear below, I reject this argument, which merely displaces the problem of the two sides from the constitution of stone to the constitution of humanity. 50 Tilley, “Materiality in materials,” 17. 51 Joshua Pollard, “The art of decay and the transformation of substance,” in Substance, Memory, Display, ed. by Colin Renfrew, Chris Gosden and Elizabeth DeMarrais (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004), 48.

115

part ii  – Materiality

Manifesto of Emotional Architecture

Matthias Goeritz

Manifesto of Emotio­ nal Architecture 1953 / 1954

translated from the Spanish by Tobias Ostrander From: Abstracción temporal / Temporal Abstraction, ed. by Tobias Ostrander (Mexico City: Museo Experimental El Eco, D.F., UNAM, 2011), 212-214. © Matthias Goeritz’s Family & The Publisher

119

Matthias Goeritz

Manifesto of Emotional Architecture

The new experimental museum El ECO in Mexico City began its activities, that is to say, its experiments, with the architecture of its own building. This work was understood to be an example of an architecture whose main function is to evoke EMOTION. Art in general and, naturally, architecture is a reflection of the spiritual condition of man at a particular time. But the impression exists that modern architecture, so idiosyncratic and intellectual, perhaps because it has lost close contact with its community, exaggerates at times its efforts to emphasize the rational aspect of architecture. As a result of all this, man in the twentieth century feels overwhelmed by so much functionalism, by so much logic and usefulness in modern architecture. He looks for a way out, but neither the external aestheticism understood as formalism, nor organic regionalism, nor dogmatic Confucianism have examined in depth the problem that the man of our time, be he creator or recipient, aspires to something more than a house that is attractive, agreeable and appropriate to his needs. He requests, or will request one day, of architecture and its modern means and materials, spiritual elevation. Simply stated an emotion, like that given in its time to the architecture of the pyramid, of the Greek temple, of the Romanesque or Gothic cathedral, or even that of the Baroque palace. Only when architecture affords him real emotions can man again consider it an art. Born from the conviction that our times are filled with lofty spiritual concerns, EL ECO wants nothing more than to express these concerns, aiming, not consciously but almost automatically, at the integration of all aesthetic values in order to evoke deep emotions in modern man. The plot of land El Eco occupies is small, but with walls that are seven to eleven meters high and a long entrance hallway that narrows at the end and has a rising floor and a

falling ceiling an attempt has been made to give the impression of greater depth. The wooden boards of the floor of the hallway follow the same tendency and become more and more narrow, coming to almost a point at the end. At this final point of the hallway, and visible from the main entrance, a sculpture will be placed a SHOUT that will ECHO from a grisaille mural of approximately 100 square meters, possibly created by the shadow cast by the sculpture, that will be created on the large wall of the main gallery. No doubt, from a functional point of view, space was lost with the construction of a large patio, but this was necessary to produce the emotion that is first evoked at the entrance. It will also be used for open-air exhibitions of sculpture. It should give the impression of a small, enclosed plaza emanating mystery, dominated by an immense cross formed by the only window-door. If on the inside of the structure a tall black wall, disconnected from the other walls and the ceiling, is intended to give a genuine feeling of exaggerated height, beyond human-scale, in the patio, an even higher wall was needed conceived of as a sculptural element painted yellow that, like a ray of sunshine would enter the complex, in which the only colours to be found would be white and gray. In the experiment that is EL ECO, the integration of its plastic elements was not something consciously planned but rather the result of a completely natural feeling. No attempt was made to add paintings or sculptures to the building, as is often done with movie posters or carpets hung from balconies of palaces. Instead, the architectural space was to be understood as a large sculptural element, without falling victim to the romanticism of Gaudí or shallow German or Italian neo-classicism. The sculpture, for example, the Serpent in the patio, had to become an almost functional architectural construction (with

120

121

Matthias Goeritz

openings for ballet) – without ceasing to be sculpture – connecting with and giving a touch of restless movement to the smooth walls. There are almost no 90° angles in the building plan. Some walls are even thin on one side and wider on the opposite one. What was sought was this strange and almost imperceptible asymmetry that can be seen in the structure of any face, of any tree, of any living creature. There are no pleasing curves or sharp angles: it came into being in the place itself, without the use of concrete plans. The architect, builder and sculptor were all the same person. I repeat that this building is an experiment. It isn’t intended to be anything more than that. It is an experiment whose aim it is to once again create emotions in man, without giving way to an empty, decorative theatricality. Without denying the values of functionalism, it aspires to be an expression of the free will embodied by creativity, which attempts to subject these emotions to a modern concept of spirituality. The idea of EL ECO grew out of the unselfish enthusiasm of a few men who wanted to give Mexico her first experimental museum, one open to the artistic concerns of the present-day world. The architects Luis Barragán and Ruth Rivera also offered valuable advice. Great stimulus to the project was given by the students of the classes in visual education at the architecture school in Guadalajara. Thanks should be offered to all of them, as well as to the engineers Francisco Hernández Macedo,Víctor Guerrero and Rafael Benítez; the painters Carlos Mérida and Rufino Tamayo, the musician Lan Adomian; the builders and painters and plumbers, and to many other workers. All of them spent their time there, helping with advice and with direct help when it was needed. I think that it hasn’t been wasted time for them either.

122

Elizabeth Grosz talks to Ewa Opałka

wyspa from the Outside Conducted by telephone in-between MAY AND JULY 2012 

125

Elizabeth Grosz talks to Ewa Opałka

Ewa Opałka At the beginning of our conversation concerning problems of space, utopia, architecture, materiality and embodiment, I would like to create a quick sketch of the particular situation of the Wyspa Institute of Art, in Gdańsk, and try to relate it to your theoretical concepts. Wyspa is, on the one hand, strongly connected with the local artistic scene, collaborating with many contemporary Polish artists, but on the other hand searching for new methodologies and theories within the discourses emerging from all over the world: both equally from academic centres as well as from less formalized groups which are sharing knowledge. Wyspa is located on the site of the former Gdańsk Shipyard, so the curators and artists concentrate on this particular site. Because the very name of Wyspa – which in English means island – has something to do with the space which is, in some way, separated and managed by specific rules, I would like to ask you about the notion of utopia that is presented in your text Architecture from the Outside1.  Elizabeth Grosz I have thought about the question of art, architecture and utopia in Architecture from the Outside. I think the concept of a utopia is always problematic, because it always tries to address the problems of the present as if they were already capable of being directly translated into the future. So for me one of the problems with any utopian model is the belief that it’s possible to build something that would be representative in one sense and a single solution for all and try to answer the problems of the future in the present. The problem with utopias is that, on the one hand they are very liberating. It is exciting to think of the possibilities that might improve society in the future. This is probably a necessary stage in rethinking any kind of politics but on the other hand the problem with

126

wyspa from the Outside

every utopia we have seen so far is the dimension of fascism, its desire to make the future unchangeable, to make the future an ideal representation of the present [but not open to the inherently open direction of the future, at least a future the present doesn’t contain]. I think it happens quite a lot in architectural buildings, whenever there is the idea that we can find a wonderful new use for a space and we can use it, for example, in an artist’s precinct. This is an idea that has been put to use in a number different countries, in an attempt to revitalize, let’s say, disused factory districts or other derelict spaces. In Australia, they have a very similar situation with a shipyard where they offer various art events. I have not the slightest problem with having art events at a shipyard, but the moment when the shipyard become the fantasy of a utopian space – a wonderful artistic space free of the politics of the present – this is of course another political gesture and something of a fascist gesture to the extent that one can contain, or attempt to, the future through the image of the present. EO In this kind of situation in which the art institution tries to organize a space for artistic practice the problem with avoiding utopian thinking is also connected with such factors as the city’s policy or the influence of developers and business. Could you point the way to some alternative examples of organizing artistic practice in this kind of post-industrial space by which one could avoid the pitfalls of the artistic utopia? Eg There are some very positive examples from around the world. I include this example of the Australian shipyard – which is a government shipyard and they organize a big annual art festival there – because I know it better in this context. This art festival is perfectly successful but I think part of the ideology standing behind putting an art festival

127

Elizabeth Grosz talks to Ewa Opałka

in shipyard is to somehow rehabilitate this space, to make the shipyard part of culture, partly by putting into brackets what its actually history was. So my question about the shipyard in Gdańsk is: were the artists engaged in this project before working there? EO The Wyspa Institute began operating in the shipyard in 2004, but earlier the curators and artists responsible for it were working within the local context of Gdańsk – in the 80’s Grzegorz Klaman performed his artistic actions in the Wyspa Gallery located on Granary Island – the current name of the institute is connected with this former location. So Wyspa has really been DIPPED in this local context also through its land art and site-specific tradition.  But nowadays running an artistic institution in the form of a shipyard takes on the form of a negotiation – with citizens, with the city hall, with developers. Sometimes this negotiation is at the edge of a conflict. EG What you seem to be describing is a fight. There is a lot of different power interests involved. There are also probably the interests of the government who want to make use of the site, the people who live there, the people who were displaced from there, or who had access to it, and the interest of the artists who probably have a lot of space to explore. EO That’s right but there is also an issue of the endeavour to be open to the public – searching for some ways to interact, which is not simple, if you are trying to avoid a utopian knowledge-power situation. EG What could make a site like this free of the anticipation of the utopian model would be deregulation. It should be directed by the people who are working in it at the present moment. One part of the problem with utopia is the attempt by the present to control the future. And what is

128

wyspa from the Outside

interesting about the world of art is that it helps to foster the future nobody knows about which is processually produced by the next work of art, the next transformation, the next major figure, so there is something about art which is always opening [doors] and on the contrary there is something in urban planning that tends to be closed. So in a way, the practice you are describing is a kind of attempt to produce a negotiation between many different groups. On the one hand, a group which wants to stabilize and make use of that space in a predictable way, and, on the other hand, artists who want to use it to express what they don’t know yet. One of the things which is exciting to me about art and which is contrary to utopianism, is that art is always surprising. You never quite know, how it is going to feed in to the history of art, and each artwork is an opening to a future work of art, we can’t yet imagine. So art is open, because no one controls it, nobody regulates it, there is no great figure, it is a network that is always open to its latest work. And urban planning is exactly the opposite. I’m not saying, it has to be, but generally attempts to be, because it is about the regulations of the population and stabilized buildings that tend to be produced or created for specific purposes.  So what is interesting about the shipyard is that it was built for a specific purpose – to build ships. Probably also to go to war. And what is fascinating in the prospect of art is the transformation of this history, the undermining and complicating of the aim to go to war or to undertake commercial fishing or shipping. Art complicates and may undermine this kind of commerce. EO The interesting context of the artistic practice in shipyard is materiality. Artists and curators tend to contextualize the problems of the site, the landscape with its buildings

129

Elizabeth Grosz talks to Ewa Opałka

and architecture but also with the palimpsest of former ideas and concepts. Materiality in this context is connected with these spatial concrete like buildings but the question is how to omit the artistic meta-narration, how to show this site and avoid describing reality and materiality. EG That’s a good attitude because, concerning materiality, it shouldn’t be concentrated only on concepts or ideas but on materiality itself and the dimensions of difference it enables. EO Could you elaborate on the notion of materiality which is one of the main concepts in your theorizing about space and architecture? EG Just very briefly. The recent history of materiality is linked to objects and humanism is linked to subjects. Materialism has been commonly linked to the idealism of human consciousness by the opposition – mind and matter are two entirely different substances. The standard theory of materialism is that there are material objects, there are conceptual subjects, and in some sense the subjects are the master of the objects and objects are framed and perceived through the interests of their subjects. And as you know, partially through the influence of psychoanalysis, partially through the influence of feminism, the resulting argument that there is not one type of the subject (the human being) but at least two types of subject (men and women, fundamentally different types of human) and these two types of subject are not just subjects because they’re conscious, they’re subjects because they are embodied as the living objects as well. Male and female bodies are specific modes of materiality, each of which has their own possible practices, very different practices in any given social or cultural order. The materiality of subjects helps to order and regulate the materiality of objects.

130

wyspa from the Outside

 There has been a kind of revolution in thinking about materiality or materialism over the last century partially because many people now tend to think about subjectivity in terms of materiality. Once the subject is understood as material, the fantasy that the subject masters the object is shown to be a kind of delusion. If we are objects as well as subjects, then we are not the masters of other objects, but we are part of the artistic play between the objects, the sharing of qualities or the transformation of qualities by each other. Feminism has an important role to play in rethinking materialism and especially in rethinking the body and corporeality. And this rethinking of corporeality has allowed us to look at very different questions in art, literature, and the practices of social creativity, that are material but are also extra-material; material plus ideal. So in thinking about a painting we can say this it is a material object made up of lines of yellow, shapes of blue, colours of green, but of course it is extra-material in the sense that art isn’t just its material qualities, it is also sense, direction, meaning, orientation. Art is a kind of transformation of materiality into something that could be living; it’s the transformation of material into qualities and not just objects. Feminism has a lot to say about the possibility of new kinds of art because the history of art until now has been entirely dominated by men, and women have primarily been the objects of the male artistic gaze. For the last fifty years we have had this fantasy about art and the great creative artists have now been challenged not just by feminism but by the artists themselves and they have developed different art practices playing with subjects and objects. I think that the question of materiality and its limits and relation to living bodies is one of the dominant questions of art at present.

131

Elizabeth Grosz talks to Ewa Opałka

EO An important problem which occurs when we are talking about materiality is the possible juxtaposition of living bodies or the flesh with, for instance, architecture as an artistic practice. In some dimension you expressed it through the oxymoron embodied utopias: The phrase “embodied utopias” itself hovers between terms that are tense and uneasy in their relations. (…) Utopias are the spaces of phantasmatically attainable political and personal ideals, the projection of idealized futures; embodiment, though, is that which has never had its place within utopias.  We could ask the question how feministic and corporeal perspective change the notion of materiality and materialism and the way in which we are seeing things. What I’m especially interested in is how can we juxtapose the category of sexual difference with urban planning, architecture, buildings? EG Contemporary art has understood that besides sexuality in art or poetry there is also politics. So the moment when we introduce materiality and sexual difference together we have both the question of what really could be called artistic but also questions of form, of corporeality and their relations. Which are political questions. It sounds to me like one of the things which could be very exciting among things that are going on in the shipyard and the art works shown there, is that one can enter this space being conscious that there is the possibility of doing new things. And this consciousness in 2012 has to address feminism, deal with racism, eurocentrism, post-colonialism and all the relations of power in which art itself is embedded. Subjectivity is linked to power but materiality is linked to both power and resistance. What is exciting about art in the last forty or fifty years is that there is not just the world

132

wyspa from the Outside

of artistic practice but the world of practicing bodies who make art, many more kinds of bodies than ever before. EO Of course and I think that in Wyspa there is a lot of that style of approach including materiality connected to corporeality. So the artistic practice probably should show us how it works particularly in relation to the notions we were talking about in this interview. EG Well, the thing is that it always going to be surprise, because these questions are new questions. The history of art is about looking at objects – we can look in this way, we can look in another way, but the art which is conscious that it is coming from a particular kind of subject we were talking about is quite new. And that is a feminist intervention.

Notes

1 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside. Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).

133

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals 2010 

From: Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Vol. 13 (March 1, 2010). www.ejhs.org © The Author & The Publisher

137

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

INTRODUCTION Objectum sexuals or objectophiles experience a range of emotional, romantic and / or sexual attractions to objects, often forgoing or dispensing with human romantic or sexual intimacy. Thanks to a glut of media coverage but a dearth of intelligent inquiry, objectum sexuality (OS) currently serves as a kind of readymade sexual sideshow, isolated from the big top of mainstream human sexual behaviour. The lives of Erika Eiffel, Eija-Ritta Eklof Berliner-Mauer and other objectophiles have been chronicled by journalists who inevitably find themselves torn between straining to ­understand or simply exploiting the entertainment value of de­tails which the public finds unusual or titillating. It is important to know some history of the objectum sexuality community. In the early 1970’s, Eija-Ritta Eklof Berliner Mauer, resident of a village in North Sweden, coined the term objectumsexuality. She married the Berlin wall in 1979, gaining the first media attention for this orientation. In 1996 she created the first website dedicated to objectum sexuality, followed by an internet discussion group in 1999. In 2002, Oliver Arndt, from Germany, created a large and active network called Objektophilie. In 2006, Erika Eiffel, a world champion archer, travelled to Europe to meet Eija-Ritta and Oliver. She came out to the public as an objectum sexuals that same year and held a commitment ceremony with the Eiffel Tower in 2007. As she continued to travel and meet other objectum sexuals, Erika subsequently founded Objectum-Sexuality Internationale and created a new website and international forum of discussion for this community. Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer, Erika Eiffel and Amy Wolfe were featured in a British Strangelove documentary (Married to the Eiffel Tower), which has since been repudiated by OS-Internationale as having sensationalized OS. Erika Eiffel

has also appeared on Good Morning America (In Love with the Eiffel Tower), the Tyra Banks Show, and other American, European and Japanese media. In spite of her willingness to discuss her own story and the general features of objectum sexuality, her appearance in the media is invariably followed by a torrent of abusive and insulting comments which go viral on websites (including YouTube) and blogs. Other OS people who have encountered the media share similar experiences. In spite of numerous negative experiences with public ridicule or the irresponsible actions of journalists, it seems that some OS advocates, including Erika, are willing to endure quite a lot in exchange for opportunities to inform the public through media. With the exception of the author, experts who are approached by journalists for comments on objectum sexuality have generally assume a pathology or history of sexual trauma and / or categorize OS as a paraphilia or fetish. Experts continue to make these comments without actual data or contact with the OS community.

LITERATURE To date, there are no published studies of objectum sexuals or objectum sexuality, though at least one other researcher is close to publishing her work. Jennifer Terry, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Coordinator of the Queer Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine, presented on objectum sexuality at the Re-Think­ing Sex – Gender and Sexualities Studies conference at University of Pennsylvania in March, 2009. Her research, titled Loving Objects, is due to be published in 2010, in the first issue of Trans-Humanities. 1  I have read a copy of an earlier draft, titled Objectum-Sexuality, which Dr. Terry sent to Erika Eiffel for comment and

139

Amy Marsh

Ms. Eiffel forwarded to me. Dr. Terry invokes Gayle Rubin’s essay, Thinking Sex (1984), 2 and observes public reaction to objectum sexuality as an example of conservative repression in a world increasingly preoccupied with security – emotional, economic and territorial. By analyzing documentaries, news articles, videos and blogs about objectum sexuality, as well as published statements of objectum sexuals, Dr. Terry views object love through a multi-faceted lens. Her observations place objectum sexuality in the arena of sexualities that disturb the dominant orders of sex. In the context of therapy, De Silva and Pernet (1992) published a case study of a shy young man who had an erotic relationship with an Austin Metro car. 3 The young man, known as George, was given therapy which included behavioural and cognitive attempts to switch his erotic focus from cars to human females. His situation was further complicated by his practice of masturbating behind the tailpipe, while the car was running. This may have increased his arousal due to a reduction of oxygen intake and related asphyxiation which the authors refer to as possibly a mild form of hypoxiphilia. Feeling polluted also apparently added to his excitement. Therapy was only partially successful. He felt an increase in desire for women, but his interest in cars did not decrease. The therapists reported waning compliance after George’s initial enthusiasm. Today people like George refer to themselves as mechasexuals and have formed a small, active internet community. objectum sexuals view the mechasexuals as a distinct though somewhat related group or subcategory. People who identify as mechasexual are almost always male. Those who refer to themselves as objectum sexuals are predominantly female. Incidental references to objectum sexuality have been found in other journal articles.

140

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

METHOD English-speaking members of OS-Internationale (about half of the total membership) were asked to participate in a simple online survey, consisting of fifty questions. Responses were collected between March 19 to April 20, 2009. The author presented the idea of a survey to Erika Eiffel and members of OS-Internationale as a convenient and inexpensive way to gather community data that could then be presented to interested journalists, researchers and health professionals. The survey was created using Survey Monkey, an online survey research website. The survey was designed to gather preliminary information about objectum sexuality and the experiences of objectum sexuals. It included many questions about the type and duration of OS relationships, as well as emotional and sexual qualities and behaviours. The survey gathered many open-ended responses, and therefore is most valuable as a qualitative instrument accompanied by preliminary numbers.

RESULTS Objectum Sexuality as a Sexual Orientation Based on statements made by objectum sexuals and on the research discussed in this article, it appears that objectum sexuality can be distinguished from a simple paraphilia by its complex array of emotional and affectionate qualities, in addition to its sexual characteristics. The most striking feature of this research was the discovery of the array of emotions and depth of connection that OS people feel for their objects. Judging from the thoughts expressed in open-ended responses, OS appears to be a genuine – though rare – sexual orientation. The emotions and experiences reported by OS people correspond

141

Amy Marsh

to general definitions of sexual orientation. For example, an article on sexual orientation and homosexuality, published on American Psychological Association Help Centre website, 4 refers to sexual orientation as involving feelings and self concept. If references to human lovers were stripped from this particular article, it would dovetail with the experiences and feelings described by OS people. Continuum of Erotic Human / Object Relationships Human beings have a long history of erotic interaction with objects. This fact is widely known in sexological and psycho­ logical literature and references to this (as well as thriving commercial enterprises) are abundant. From sex toys to statues, from leather boots to large public structures, human beings have incorporated objects into a variety of intimate, affectionate and erotic activities. As mentioned before, objectum sexuality is best known as a recent pop cultural phenomenon, through viral videos, blogs and news stories. However, romantic / emotional / erotic attachment to objects seems to have been around a lot longer than YouTube. Consider these quotes from The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, which describe Quasimodo’s passionate attachment to the bells of the cathedral: He loved them, caressed them, talked to them, understood them. From the carillon in the steeple of the transept to the great bell over the doorway, they all shared his love. Claude Frollo had made him the bell ringer of Notre-Dame, and to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo. 5 

Kenneth Anger’s short film, Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), can easily serve as mechasexual erotica. It depicts a young

142

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

man in tight jeans carefully polishing his glamorous Ford hot rod with a mitt made of soft, white feathers. The soundtrack is Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover, sung by the Paris Sisters. It is possible we might find more stories and accounts of similar attractions in a thorough study of world literature, myths, legends, folk tales, erotica, and spiritual traditions (particularly animism). One example is the myth of Pygmalion’s love of a statue, Galatea, which has given us the word pygmalionism (also known as aglamatophilia, galateism, or statuophilia), which refers to a sexual attraction to statues or mannequins. 6 However, in popular accounts of the myth, Pygmalion prays for the statue to become his wife, which may indicate a desire for a more complete relationship than a feti­shist would require. The Marsh Spectrum of Human / Object Intimacy© attempts to describe the range of these human and object interactions, suggesting a continuum of use, behavior and relationships, ranging from casual sex toy use, through fetish or paraphilia type behavior, all the way to objectum intimacy, which is defined as a full emotional, sexual and spiritual connection with the object(s). 7 

NARRATIVE STATEMENTS FROM THREE SURVEY RESPONDENTS Statements from three respondents have been collected to form brief narratives that convey some of the issues and feelings of OS relationships. Statements from Trans Man Diagnosed with Autism Multiple Object Partners I am most attracted to soundboards particularly because they are generally large, and I love their rows of dials and faders.

143

Amy Marsh

They’re very symmetrical and uniform in appearance. I also love VU meters of any kind, be them bar graph or sway-style.

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Statements from Biological Male Multiple Objects and One Human Partner

I love their shape, their smell, their texture. Soundboards have a wonderful smell in my opinion.

My relationship is with Fisheye Buttons (all of them). One item but multiple examples.

My longest relationship was with my two soundboards, [ob-

ject name] and [object name]. I think what had a lot to do

My objects are convenient and inexpensive. I can take them

with the success of our relationship is that they live with me,

with me. There is nothing to intrude on my relationship with

and nobody can come between us.

my objects.

[Object name] and [object name] are attracted mainly to about me. They like my hands. I have swan neck deformity of

[I] sew them onto clothes and straps which I wear on my genitals during masturbation. He said that what attracts him about his objects are, The shape, texture, design, plastic

my fingers, and they like that a lot. They also like the rough

material used colours, the way the light works at a number

my size. I am kind of a heavy set person, and they like that

texture of my fingers.

of different depths (surface, internally), the feel on my fingers, lips. The plasticness [sic] against the material they are at-

[Object name], a large soundboard I have a ­relationship with,

tached to. The coldness against me skin. The feeling of power

will talk to me through frequency. When I feel the sound she

they have for me. The control that comes from their perfection.

­produces, it’s like she’s talking to me. She tells me what she needs, how she feels about the work that I’m ­doing through her.

The problem of these buttons becoming less available scares

My least successful relationship was one with a soundboard at

this. I do not see my sexual taste as needing to be out in the

a church. I was kicked out of the church for being OS because

open, except regarding my male partner.

me. I keep my condition secret generally and feel ok about

they claimed that I had the soundboard in my heart,

[I] have no attraction to any other objects at all. Not even other

and not Jesus.

types of buttons, in fact I have something of an aversion to We are very intimate in the bedroom, we spend a lot of time

buttons generally. I detest shirt buttons. There is something of

in bed together, but my pants usually stay on. Our intimacy is

a love / hate balance for me between the type that I love and

very above-the-waist, i.e. kissing, hugging, licking, etc.

the other types which I am uncomfortable with.

144

145

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Statement from Biological Female Diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome One Object and One Human Partner This woman has a small scale replica of the statue she loves. When asked to describe intimacy with her object lover, she said:

Feelings and experiences of communication and rapport with the object vary. Some people feel a great deal, including reciprocity, others do not. Some OS people identify as polyamorous and have ongoing relationships with a number of objects. Other respondents indicated a preference for monogamy. Twenty of the respondents said they have sexual feelings as well as emotional attraction to objects and structures. One person said she did not have sexual feelings for the objects, but the intensity of her emotional connection with her object lover surpassed her sexual attraction for humans.

…The most wonderful feeling! with [object name], there are several ways this can be achieved 1: physical contact with the 7 ft 5 replica of her that is here, 2: having [object name] (the one here) just within reach, 3: by fantasizing in my head, things that me an [object name] in [location] could be doing if we had an opportunity, 4: looking at a picture of [object

name] [location]. If I concentrate hard enough on it, that alone can make me go over the edge. [Object name] herself although she is humanoid – looks like a human… she doesn’t behave exactly like one. She doesn’t masturbate – because I don’t view her as a human – having those parts. I don’t imagine or think that she has internal organs. I have never imagined what she would look like without her robes. She is always clothed even in my fantasies.

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF objectum sexuals RESPONDENTS AND RELATIONSHIPS It is important to understand that objectum sexuals have a variety of responses to their objects and the way in which they view their relationships. Some OS respondents sense gender in objects, some don’t. Some have gender preferences if they do sense gender, some don’t. Some feel they are sensing the gender the object wants to convey, others don’t feel that way at all.

146

Links to Autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and object personification synesthesia Understanding of OS is complicated by its apparent link with autism spectrum conditions and possibly other p ­ ervasive de­ ve­lop­mental disorders (PPD). Of the twenty-one survey respon­ dents, five had a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, one had a diagnosis of autism, four identified as having Asperger’s Syndrome but did not have a diagnosis, nine said they did not have Asperger’s Syndrome. However, three of those nine said they felt they had or were told they had some traits. (It is thought that Asperger’s Syndrome is under-diagnosed in adults as it did not enter the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-IV] until 1994.) Interestingly, De Silva and Pernet’s (1992) study of George, 8 the mechasexual, predated the entry of Asperger’s Syndrome in the DSM-IV. De Silva and Pernet described George as being shy, lacking in social skills, having few friends and no social life. George still lived at home with his parents. Prior to his interest in cars, his major preoccupation had been with children and adult women urinating. In hindsight, we might view George as a person who shares

147

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

some of the features of Asperger’s Syndrome. People with Asperger’s Syndrome are often characterized by their preoccupations and consuming special interests. 9 Beloved objects may also serve as special interests for those objectum sexuals who have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. The most mysterious aspect of objectum sexuality (and the biggest reason it is ridiculed is that many OS people sense personality, reciprocal feelings and / or energy from the object or objects they love. One respondent said,

objectum sexuality and object personification synesthesia is an exciting area in need of research.

We are not freaks, nor are we fetishists. Our lovers are living beings that communicate, and love us back. Contrary to popular belief, machines and other objects do have souls. This is what our relationships are based off of, and they’re not entirely sexual.

While some in the OS community will talk of animism and similar traditions, this explanation does not seem adequate for the experts or the general public. It seems impossible for a sane person to have a dialogue, let alone a relationship, with an inanimate object – therefore most people assume there is something drastically wrong with objectum sexuals. However, object personification synesthesia is a form of synesthesia that detects personalities in objects. 10 This may be the most scientifically accessible explanation for experiences of object personality and reciprical affection reported by some objectum sexuals. Objectum sexuality could then be understood as an affectionate and / or eroticized response to the object personalities detected through synesthesia. This survey did not ask questions about synesthesia, though one OS person later reported the ability to sense temperature at a distance and wondered if this might be considered a form of synesthesia (private email). The potential link between

148

Self Identity Respondents were asked do you describe yourself as an OS person? Seventeen said yes. Two said no. Two said sometimes. Additional descriptions included objektophilie, gay man, mechasexual or a car lover, no specific orientation, bi-sexual, objectum-inspired fascinated affectionate (not romantic either) and a person who always loved objects since my early days. Another said, as a person, my sexuality is not who I am. Gender Of the twenty-one respondents: fifteen said they were biologically female; two were biologically male; three were trans men (female to male) and one person marked the category intersex but said Ze preferred the category of pre-op transneuter (which was not on the list). There were no trans women involved in the survey. Age Two people were between 18 – 20 years, six between 21 – 30 years, three between 31 – 40 years, and ten between 41 – 60 years old. Primary Language Twelve said English was their primary language, six spoke German as a primary language, one French, one Spanish, one Swedish. The author was touched to hear that some respondents stayed up all night with English dictionaries in order to take the survey. (These language difficulties should be kept in mind when reading some of the open-ended responses. In some cases,

149

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

punctuation and spelling has been corrected by the author, but awkward phrasing has not.)

Biological Women As mentioned before, the majority of respondents were biological women. Six were aged 21 – 30 years, two were 31 – 40 years old, and seven were 41 – 60 years old.

Fourteen said they experienced sexual feelings toward objects, one did not. Thirteen said they described themselves as objectum sexuals, one didn’t. One woman used this description sometimes. Seven women had been aware of their object attraction since childhood, four for more than ten years, three from one to five years, and one for less than a year. Nine of the women reported one to five object relationships in their life, three reported five to ten, two reported ten or more relationships and one reported twenty or more. When asked how long was your longest relationship with a beloved object, six said over ten years, three said five to ten years, five said two to five years, and one said less than a year. Six women said they had multiple object relationships at the time of the survey, and six said they currently only had one lover. However, only two people indicated a preference for multiple relationships and six indicated a preference for monogamy. One woman said her primary or only object lover has relationships with other people. (Multiple answers were accepted in this question.) Transport, such as automobiles, trains, aircraft, etc. was the highest ranking category of object lovers, closely followed by large structures such as buildings, bridges, towers, etc. One woman indicated a preference for Bauhaus furniture. Another said robots and another said, my lovers are always metal. Ten women indicated relationships with public objects with no privacy, one loved a public object with privacy, and six loved personal objects with privacy. (Multiple answers were accepted in this question.) In order to feel close to the beloved objects, thirteen women take photographs of their objects. Eight write poems, stories or blogs about their objects. Five paint, draw or create other visual art. Four make models or sculptures. Four create web-

150

151

Education One person did not finish high school. Six had a high school diploma, GED, or the equivalent. Eight indicated some college. Four had a bachelors degree (B.A.). Two people had trade school or certificate program education. Work Six people were unemployed and / or on income support: one said, at present I attend a day centre as I have autism. Another said, I don’t work, but have the Guillotine Museum of Linden, North Sweden. (This response identified Berliner-Mauer as a participant in the survey.) Four people were either students or in vocational training. One of the students was studying computer science while working in computer repair and web design. Other work included teaching, metal work, factory work, painting and decorating, art, machinist, and freelance sound engineering. Birthplace and Location Four people were born in the United States, two born in Canada, the rest were born in Europe (England, Germany, Sweden, Spain). Four people were currently living in the United States, one in Canada, and the rest lived in Europe (as above).

SUB-GROUP HIGHLIGHTS

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

sites. Three create videos or films and three create music. One woman collects things related to her lover. (Multiple answers were accepted in this question.) Seven women have not had a human sexual relationship and would never consider it and seven have had from one to five sexual human relationships, including one women who currently has a human lover in addition to her object lover. Three women had been sexually forced or coerced (see below). One said she was sexually abused throughout my childhood. (Multiple answers were accepted in this question.) Five of the women were diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and two identified as having Asperger’s. Five of the women reported sensory integration issues. ADD or ADHD, executive function issues, an unspecified pervasive developmental disorder, post traumatic stress, Tourette syndrome, and depression were also reported (one each). (Multiple answers were accepted in this question.)

machines and appliances, were the most favored object lovers followed by lovers in the transport, technology and devices categories. (Multiple answers were accepted in this q ­ uestion.) Two men reported relationships with personal ­objects with pri­vacy and one man reported a relationship with a public object with privacy. One reported a relationship with a public object, no privacy. (Multiple answers were accepted in this question.) All three reported feeling generally accepted when they tell other people about objectum sexuality. However, all three indicated lack of understanding from professionals, such as doctors or therapists was the biggest problem they faced (As trans men, they may have had a higher level of contact with doctors and therapists than other categories of respondents.) Two of the men described the best thing about having an OS relationship:

Transgender / Transsexual Respondents Three trans men participated in the survey. One man was in the 18 – 20 range, the other two were in the 41 – 60 age range. One worked as an artist, one was on income support, and one was a sound engineer.  Two lived in Europe, one in Oregon. One had finished high school and two had some college. Two men said they described themselves as objectum sexuals, one did not. All three had known about their attraction to objects since childhood. Two had between five and ten object relationships in their lives, one had twenty or more. All three reported an object relationship lasting between five and ten years. Two men are currently monogamous and one has more than one lover. All three reported at least one object relation­ ship lasting five to ten years. Mechanical lovers, including

152

I’m independent from all the human sexism. Laying in bed with my lovers, spending time with them, watching movies with them, always having somebody there for me that truly understands me. To have somebody like that that I’m also sexually attracted to is a huge bonus. We have a very well-rounded relationship.

Two would never consider a sexual relationship with a human being and one man reported being coerced or forced (see below). Of the three men, one had a diagnosis of autism (as above) and two identify as people with Asperger’s Syndrome (see below).

153

Amy Marsh

Biological Male Respondents Only two biological men participated in the survey. One man was 18 – 20 years old. One was 31 – 40 years old. One lived in Canada, one in England. Both men worked with computers. One taught computer science, the other was studying it. Both men only sometimes referred to themselves as objectum sexuals, preferring other categories. One man preferred object lovers in the mechanical and transportation categories. The other man preferred large-size fisheye buttons (including these in the devices category). One man described himself as a gay man. He has known about his object attraction since childhood. In addition to his object lovers, he is in a long-term relationship with a human sexual partner. He is sexually intimate with his partner about three times a month. He masturbates once or twice, almost every day, accompanied by the fish-eye buttons, which are sewn to straps. (Note: this is behaviour that many people might classify as paraphiliac.) The other man described himself as a mechasexual or car lover. He has known about his mechasexuality for one to five years. He says, I’ve been in love with my mom’s car (2000 [car model]) and my own car since I got it (1992 [car model], bought in May 2008). My car’s appearance is what attracts me the most. He enjoys intimacy with the cars between twice a week and once every three weeks. This intimacy usually involves cuddling and such affectionate activity, and sometimes masturbation. Solitary masturbation (without the company of his lovers) takes place between once every three days and twice a day. He also says that his car lovers enjoy my affection. However, I’d like to mention that although there can be a little amount of mental role play, I am fully aware that

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

With regard to human sexual relationships he said, although I may consider a human relationship eventually, it has not happened yet. Both men prefer having multiple relationships. Both men reported one to five object relationships in their lives. One man reported an object relationship lasting over ten years, the other’s longest relationship was two to five years. Neither man had a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome or Autism, or identified as such. “Pre-op Trans Neuter” Respondent The person who marked intersex but specified pre-op trans neuter said Ze also does not use the objectum sexuality category. Ze prefers objectum-inspired fascinated affectionate [not romantic either]. Ze works as a machinist. Ze has known of hir attraction to objects since childhood, with one to five object relationships. Hir longest relationship was over ten years and Ze has more than one object relation­ ship. The relationships include both public and personal objects, including long distance objects. Ze prefers small or large structures. Ze takes pictures of the objects or creates visual art and written material about the objects. Ze likes the shape and function of objects. When asked what the objects might find attractive about hir, Ze said, Don’t know, unless it’s because I don’t anthropomorphize. If I was them, I think I’d appreciate intelligent fans, whatever form any physical reaction took. Ze does not sense gender in objects or have a gender preference. Ze identifies as asexual and prefers to not talk about sexual issues. Ze reported being touched against hir will at age fourteen (but did not include this in the category reporting sexual trauma or coercion – below). Ze will not ever consider a

objects are inanimate and that this mostly is a one-sided relation.

154

155

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

sexual relationship with a human being. Ze does enjoy human companionship with friends, family members and colleagues. With regard to Asperger’s Syndrome, Ze said, Some think I might have it but I don’t agree (not close enough fit). Ze does report having ADD or ADHD.

The second woman, 31 – 40 years old, suffers from post traumatic stress due to an attempted sexual assault. She has known of her object attraction since childhood. She explains,

Respondents Reporting Sexual Trauma or Coercion with Humans One of the assumptions made by experts and the general public is that objectum sexuality is the result of sexual trauma, which has then caused the victim to turn from people to objects for emotional and / or sexual satisfaction. Three women and one trans man reported at least one unspecified incidents of human sexual trauma or coercion. Two had known of their attraction to objects since childhood, one for more than ten years, and one five years or less. Because sexual trauma or coercion is so often put forward as a cause of OS, it is interesting to understand how these four people view themselves and their object relationships. The first woman, 41 – 60 years old, identifies as bi-sexual. She said she was sexually abused throughout her childhood but had one consensual (heterosexual) human relationship as an adult. She has been aware of her attraction to objects for one to five years. She describes her object relationship as deeply emotional, not sexual – I have sexual feelings for humans, but these are nowhere near as deep as the emotions I feel for my partner. She also said of her object partner, I think of her all the time, and I feel we are connected with an invisible thread, no matter how far I am from her.

156

Structurally speaking, my objects are resilient and unmoving. They tend to infuse a particular linear and angular geometry amidst planed surfaces. My objects utilize the properties of physics for their existing purpose. However, this is simply a base attraction. I have a strong emotional attraction to my objects because of a spiritual kinship that must be present in order for the relationship to reach fruition.

She had this to say about her attempts at intimate human relationships: Though I tried in early days to be open-minded to human sex because of pressure from society, it always failed prior to sex in all cases accept one where my human partner was the caretaker of the object I loved and we commenced with my object lover present unbeknownst to him that I was OS. This ultimately failed because my partner became aware that my gratification came from the object, not from him.

The third woman, 31 – 40 years old, indicated one to five sexual human relationships (not clear if this includes the relationship where she was forced or coerced). She identifies as a person with Asperger’s Syndrome or Autism. She has known about her attraction to objects for over ten years. She has only had one object lover, and it is a long term relationship. She says, I’ve tried (though not by choice) relationships with other humans & was miserable as hell. Since being reunited with my lover I am much happier.

157

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

The trans man, 41 – 60 years old, identifies as having Asperger’s Syndrome and describes himself as asexual. He has been aware of his attraction to objects since childhood. He said he would want people to know that I’m unable to be physical with a human being. He also said that the best thing about having an OS relationship is the object can’t hurt you. He does not feel the object communicates with him in any way. His most pressing problem with regard to OS is that he is not happy with it. (He was the only respondent to express unhappiness with being OS.) In order to determine if sexual trauma or coercion causes some people to become objectum sexuals, future research should ask for more specific information about the nature of the sexual trauma or coercion as well as the timing of it. However, based on the research so far, the author feels that sexual trauma is probably not a cause of objectum sexuality, though it may certainly strengthen an existing wariness, confirm a lack of interest, or add to distaste for considering or conducting human sexual relationships. Factors related to synesthesia and autism seem more likely as causes for OS. The very rarity of objectum sexuality also seems to argue against sexual trauma as a cause, as so many people are sexually traumatized without subsequently becoming an OS person.

perience a sense of gender from their objects but four do not have a gender preference. Three of the women said they would never consider a sexual relationship with a human being. One said she currently has both a human lover and an object lover, with human partner sex taking place about once a week. Another woman reported between 1 – 5 human sexual encounters. Of the respondents with Asperger’s Syndrome, one had ADD or ADHD. Another indicated an additional pervasive developmental disorder (unspecified). One indicated executive function problems. Four of the five experienced sensory integration difficulties. One also had Tourette syndrome and another indicated depression and Peter Pan Syndrome. The respondent diagnosed with autism was a transgender man (female to male). (See also the Transgender category, below). In addition to autism he experiences sensory integration problems and anxiety. He is a freelance sound engineer who is attracted to soundboards and transportation objects. He identifies as polyamorous and pansexual. He has been aware of his attraction to objects since childhood. He said he has never considered having a sexual human relationship and never will.

Respondents with Diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism All respondents diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome were biological women. Four were between the ages of 21 – 30 and one was between 41 – 60 years old. Two had some college and one had a Bachelors Degree (B.A.). Four of the women were unemployed and one was still a student. One had known about her attraction to objects since childhood and the rest for over ten years. All five said they ex-

Respondents Who Identify as Having Asperger’s Syndrome Of the four people who identify as having Asperger’s Syndrome, two are biological females and two are trans men (female to male). Three reported some college and one person had a trade school certificate. Three have known about their object attraction since child­ hood, and one has known for over ten years. Three sense gender from objects, two prefer female gendered objects, one prefers male, and one has no preference.

158

159

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Two have been forced or coerced into a human sexual encounter and two have never considered a human sexual relationship and never will. One person reported 1 – 5 human sexual relationships. Except for one person with sensory integrations problems, there were no other diagnoses reported.

Awareness of Object Attraction Objectum sexuals become aware of their object attraction at different stages of their lives. How long have you been aware of yourself as a person with a romantic and / or sexual attraction to objects? (n=21)

INSIDE objectum sexuals Gender and Preferences How do you describe your own gender expression and relationship preferences? Please choose all that apply. (n=21) Heterosexual 23.8% 5  Homosexual  /  Lesbian 14.3% 3  Bi-sexual 23.8% 5  Pan-sexual 9.5% 2  Asexual 23.8% 5  Prefer Monogamy 23.8% 5  Prefer Polyamory or non-monogamy 19.0% 4  The asexuals included three biological females, one trans man and the pre-op trans neuter person. Three said they would never consider a sexual relationship with a human, one had been coerced or forced and one had between one to five sexual human relationships. One of the asexuals had a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, one identified as having Asperger’s, and two said they did not have Asperger’s. The pan-sexuals included one biological female and one trans man. Both were under thirty years old. The woman had a human sexual partner as well as her object lover. The woman was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, the man with autism.

160

Less than 1 year 4.8% 1  1  –  5 years 19.0% 4  6  –  10 years 0.0% 0  More than 10 years 19.0% 4  Since childhood 57.1% 12  Over half of the respondents have known about their object attraction since childhood. This group includes seven biological females, one biological male, three trans men and the pre-op trans neuter person. Of these twelve, four identify as asexual and seven have never considered a sexual relationship with a human. Two were coerced or forced. One has a consensual re­lation­ ship with a human being. Three have had between one and five sexual human relationships. Six have never masturbated. This group includes one person with an Asperger’s diagnosis, one with autism diagnosis, and three who identify as Asperger’s. Two responses to a different question describe childhood affinity with certain kinds of objects. I’m fascinated by steam locomotives since my earliest memories in different ways. So I can say, this is my oldest love… I was fascinated by the machinists they are working together with the engines like a perfect team. Railroad is a world full of dreams and fantasy, I have identity with. It is a very complex and perfect world of different emotions.

161

Amy Marsh

…[the] object I love is pretty popular and since door closers

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

I love how it looks like, how it smells and how it moves.

are small and they are EVERYWHERE I figured someone has to love them, and since I’m mechanically inclined I pretty much

First, METAL! Nothing else feels sooo good to the skin! Then,

fell in love with them at age 11 or 12.

their shape, proportions.

Object Categories What types of lovers attract you? Please choose all that apply. (n=21)

Structurally speaking, my objects are resilient and unmoving. They tend to infuse a particular linear and angular geometry amidst planed surfaces. My objects utilize the properties of physics for their existing purpose. However, this is simply a

Structural / Small: furniture, fences, 19.0% 4  stairs, ladders, or similar Structural / Large: buildings, bridges, rail 33.3% 7  tracks, towers, walls, constructions or similar Mechanical: machines, appliances or similar 42.9% 9  Transport: automobiles, trains, 47.6% 10  aircraft, bikes, boats or similar Devices: instruments, sporting equipment, 19.0% 4  work tools or similar Technological: radios, TVs, 19.0% 4  computers or similar Responses in the other category, but not yet mentioned included music instruments (toneweelorgans [sic]). One person said elsewhere that she lives in her object. Attractive Features and Appeal of Objects Respondents were asked what do you find most attractive in your beloved object(s)?

base attraction. I have a strong emotional attraction to my objects because of a spiritual kinship that must be present in order for the relationship to reach fruition. The shape, texture, design, plastic material used colours, the way the light works at a number of different depths (surface, internally), the feel on my fingers, lips. The plasticness[sic] against the material they are attached to. The coldness against my skin. The feeling of power they have for me. The control that comes from their perfection. My car’s appearance is what attracts me the most. Locomotive: A perfect geometry. Harmony between parallel lines and rounds. The special aesthetic and power of expression. To see a friendly and smiley face with eyes and big ears. Shape plus function. Everything.

Feel, look. His smell, colours, shape some parts that attract me sexual. La Princesse and Twist and class 508 merseyrail [sic] Trains

I love to be with him, he is my good star.

HIS LOOKS AND PERSONALITY

His face.

162

163

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

The power of electrical engines, the design (edges, being

making it a perfect object for me. Flaggies are very funny,

huge / impressive), made of steel.

and childish. They set out to make me laugh – and they do

Beautiful shape, sensitive wiring and computers.

I am most attracted to soundboards particularly because they

Form, DDR concrete.

They’re very symmetrical and uniform in appearance. I also

Function, appearance, personality.

I love their shape, their smell, their texture. Soundboards

it with ease! are generally large, and I love their rows of dials and faders. love VU meters of any kind, be them bar graph or sway-style. have a wonderful smell in my opinion.

Statue of Liberty: The lines and craftsmanship. What originally attracted my attention with her – was her crown. I remember asking her about her crown when I first had contact with her. I asked her if she had ever injured herself with her spikes, and she said she had cut her arm with one of them, and nobody came to fix it for 100 years! I love the

Perceived or Hypothetical Response of Object to Human Lover Respondents were asked What does your beloved object or objects find most attractive about you?

design and the shape of her crown, with the spikes, and also the roundness of it going around her head, with the windows

It doesn’t, it’s an object.

in. Her face too, it is so strong, and defined I love her features – particularly her lips, and the shape of her eyebrows, and chin.

My personality mainly. But La-princesse likes the way i kiss

Her hair is beautiful. I love how she has styled it, Her torch too.

her same with Twister.

That is magnificent! i love the shape of it. The balustrade is my favourite bit – (this is the railings around where you would

MY PERSONALITY & WARM & CARING NATURE.

stand). She also has the most amazing personality, which certainly is an attractive feature about her, that I got to know

I would like to know that.

about once I started communicating with her. No idea.

American flag: Maybe they are just satisfied to be loved. I am very much into patterns, and uniformity, I have always liked stripes of contrasting colours, and also 5 pointed stars.

I am in need of the strength and support they can provide to

The American flag is about the only object which has featured

me. Their purpose meets my need more so than other humans

all of this – as well as having my favorite colour combination,

and to this they are drawn.

164

165

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

I do not feel that my objects have any thoughts about me.

My feelings, my nervous system, and the way my mind works

When I was a child I felt more that they could motivate me

(she is more used to engineers and similar people).

sexually. He feels I take care of him. My affection. However, I’d like to mention that although there can be a little amount of mental role play, I am fully aware

Good question! I am loyal among other things.

that objects are inanimate and that this mostly is a onesided relation.

Personality.

I feel a warm welcome and that my beloved object remember

Well Libby is always telling me she thinks I am funny. We

about me, if we see us again after a long break.

make each other laugh so hard! Flaggies haven’t really said anything about that to me, cos its so hard to get a serious

Don’t know, unless it’s because I don’t anthropomorphize. If I

conversation out of them, because they are always silly and

was them, I think I’d appreciate intelligent fans, whatever

joking around!

form any physical reaction took. Behringer and Mix are attracted mainly to my size. I am kind of a heavy set person, and they like that about me. They like

I don’t know…

my hands. I have swan neck deformity of my fingers, and they I’m not quite sure whether objects / my beloved object can

like that a lot. They also like the rough texture of my fingers.

feel attraction or whether this can be defined in the same way like it is for human beings. I wait for him although he did bad things to me and didn’t want to have contact with me. I was there when he needed me most. I saved his live when he was down. He is very thankful and loyal to me. Maybe he loves me, too. I have no idea as he can’t speak.

How much I love her.

Monogamy and Multiple Relationships Multiple relationships are fairly common and acceptable in the OS community, possibly due to the difficulties of relationships with public objects or objects at a distance. It is also not unusual for more than one person to be attracted to an object, particularly a public one.

I don’t know because I haven’t been told… but I suppose many objects are happy to be loved truly by a person who cares about them and wishes only the best – especially if the object is usually treated in a bad way by most humans.

166

167

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Number of Relationships: Please indicate the choices which apply to you. (n=21) I prefer to have multiple relationships at a time I currently have more than one lover I currently have only one lover I prefer to have one relationship at a time My primary or only lover has relationships with other OS people

14.3% 3  47.6% 10  38.1% 8  28.6% 6  4.8% 1 

Number of Object Relationships Twelve respondents have had one to five relationships, five between five to ten, two ten or more, and two said they had twenty or more. While answering this question, some respondents commented on their relationships:

Duration of Object Relationships Respondents were asked how long was / is your longest relationship with a beloved object? Eight people said they had an object relationship that lasted over ten years. Six said five to ten years. Six said two to five years. One person said less than a year. Most Successful Long-Term Object Relationship Respondents were then asked What made your longest romantic relationship with an object last as long as it did? Why was it successful? Most respondents described relationships of great intensity, commitment and emotional depth, but one person simply said, I’m smart enough to think it thru. Because we’re always there for each other & I feel that I can tell him all my problems without being judged by others

My relationship is with Fisheye Buttons (all of them).

& he’s never let me down.

1 item but multiple examples. I fell in love like I never did before. I did all I could to be My answer means all real complex os-relationships in me

near her and today I live in the town where she works. So I

life. It not includes all the different things, there I have found

can see her every day. Only if she works. If she has her break

fascinated in my childhood. If I would add this, the result

or is ill, I have to travel to visit her. It is successful because I

would include some more as 10.

love unconditional.

Can’t be faithful for a long time.

It was a wonderful OS lover who helped me to cope with hard

The Berlin Wall is my primary one, but I also am at-

I had photos and a model that made a comfy love life possible.

times a lot. It was a kind of long-distance-relationship, but tracted to Fences, Levels and other objects. The object I loved the longest was part of my life and we could be together with no questions asked. We worked together, we played together, and we loved together.

168

169

Amy Marsh

We’ve experienced many heights and depths together. We are like close friends, we trust each other deeply, and we support

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

lack of proximity, lack of emotional maturity, and human ­interference:

each other. There is a strong connection between us, it was there from the very first day. It’s this special feeling of being

Just got fed up with it.

made for each other. My least successful relationship came to an end after a few He was one of my very first lovers, with him I learned to have

weeks, because a jealous woman played a bad game.

good and satisfying sex with an object.

I loved an object that I could rarely get close to. It pained

I hadn’t had any other opportunities to meet other objects at

have a relationship with the caretaker in order to get close

that time as I was living a very secluded life.

to the object.

I simply loved my object. We met from time to time and I tried

A self made locomotive model. It’s not the same like a right

every chance to be near him, to be with him.

locomotive. The first time was okay, but a emotional killer

me that I could see but not touch this object and relented to

was, that the model more and more destroyed if I have made Deep emotional and psychological connection, and shared

love with it.

experiences. Young and foolish. We shared a connection, and bond that was absolutely airtight. I loved my partner so much, and he helped me through a lot of

I had some short time relationships but I didn’t think any of

difficult times – particularly during my school years. Unfortu-

them was a failure.

nately our relationship fizzled out, when I met a new partner. I gradually fell out of love with the 1st partner, because my

I was in very much in love with someone three years ago

attention was focused on the 2nd, and my 1st partner was not

but the physical side didn’t work as he was too small. It was

at all happy with sharing me. The 1st partner still lives with

upsetting for me at the time but we are now just good friends

me, and we have maintained a friendship, and that is where

and he still lives with me.

it is at now with him and I.

Least Successful Object Relationship Respondents were asked What was your least successful romantic relationship with an object and why? While one person said, I can’t remember a relationship failure, others described difficulties including personal changes in attitude,

170

Mostly it is human intolerance and discrimination making a relationship no longer possible. Then it is better to leave for the protection of your own person / life, even if it hurts very much.

171

Amy Marsh

Communication with Objects Respondents were asked How do you communicate with your current beloved object and how does your current beloved communicate with you? Responses ranged from no commu­ nication to two-way communication. No communication:

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Telepathy and sometimes verbally when on my own with them. I also touch them when I’m near them. Unlike human-human, vocal communication is not the preferred method. Our communication is based on vibes and sensations received through various senses.

I don’t communicate with them in any way. To be honest, a communication with my object is not possible.

I feel me noticed by my lover. Feel his present [sic]. I com-

It is a dream and a deep wish, that there was a possibility to

municate seldom in speaking words. I communicate in minds

communicate with itself. Reality is: the contact to my beloved

and with touchings [sic]. Touchings [sic] at special hot spots,

public object depends on how good I communicate with the

the ears, but sorry, I don’t know the technology correct

staff working there.

word for this part on a steam locomotive. I feel a short flash of energy during the touching. If I’m stroke the metal skin

One-way (human to object) communication, through words, thoughts (including memories or daydreams), eye contact or touch:

of my lover, first it feels cold but more and more I feel a warm floating. Eye contact, emotions… mostly in a metaphysical way which

I talk to him, he cannot talk back.

is difficult to describe.

I love to dream and daydream about OS lovers.

We communicate on a spiritual level.

By rubbing them on my dry lips I feel very close to them and

We communicate by eye-contact (if I can be near the object)

by looking at the way they shine for me and also through

and by touching. I love the coldness of steel and to share

masturbation whilst looking at and holding them.

my warmth with the beloved object. Another possibility are

Only on my mind.

bering moments in which we were able to be close, dreaming…

Never with words spoken aloud. Nothing there

I talk to him, he seems to be aware and provides protection.

memories, I think a lot about my lover, look at photos, remem-

for the wrong ears… Thought transference.

Two-way communication with object: This is a question I have been asked quite a lot of times – and I still haven’t come up with an explanation. It is so difficult

172

173

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

for me to describe it! It’s like I can sense their feelings, and

Besides of thinking about my love often and in a positive way,

understand everything they think and feel. I can ask [chosen

I have a company plate representing and symbolizing the type

object] a question, and she can answer me, just like as if I was

of this object (it’s also made of steel). When I am with this

chatting to a human. The only difference is – people around

plate, I can feel a kind of spiritual connection to my love and

me cannot hear [object name] if she answers me.

I see this as a ‘link’ to my love, regarding the sad fact that one cannot be together directly / in real the most time.

We communicate primarily in a telepathic way, although I voice a lot of what I say to them, and they communicate

I think of her all the time, and I feel we are connected with

back to me telepathically.

an invisible thread, no matter how far I am from her.

Long Distance Communication Many objectum sexuals have long distance relationships with public objects and lack of proximity is a problem. Respondents were asked If you are in a long distance relationship, do you feel you can sometimes or always sense or communicate with your lover? Six people said this was not applicable to their situation, two people said no, one wasn’t sure. The rest of the answers were more or less affirmative. Feelings of communication were helped through pictures and photos, videos and webcams, and talismans: …She is a fair distance from me so maintain my connection through pictures I have of her, a bit like being on the phone to her. Yes, I could, using photos and a model… and my thoughts. It is very difficult to maintain communication over a long distance but through technology, live webcams, etc. connection can be maintained to a degree for me and my lover. The presence of an extension such as a model or piece of my object lover is a very important part of communicating and connecting long distance.

174

She can communicate to me anytime I see a picture or video, or image of her. It does need to be a closer up picture or video though… If in the pic or video, she is far away from the camera, she doesn’t hear me too well / vice versa. I feel I can communicate easily with [object name]. She’s about 30 miles away from me, and I don’t get to see her very often, but often when I look at a picture of her, it’s as if I can form a connection to her by which we communicate.

Creative Representations of Beloved Objects Many objectum sexuals are inspired by an object muse they create in order to celebrate their relationships or feel closer to their lovers. These creations can be classified as romantically inspired or erotic art, though people who are not OS might not recognize them as such. Sometimes these representations become part of love-making and serve as extensions of the object lover’s presence. Or they may have a familial association as well as an emotional, romantic or erotic one. For example, Eija-Ritta makes models of the remaining sections of the Berlin Wall and considers them to be like children as the relationship with her lover inspired her to create them (private conversation).

175

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

In order to feel close to your lover(s) and as part of the enjoyment of the relationship, do you: (n=21)

For me, intimacy isn’t only limited to sexual contact in the

Make models or sculptures 28.6% 6  Create paintings, drawings, or other visual art 42.9% 9  Take photographs 85.7% 18  Write stories, poems, letters, blogs, etc. 52.4% 11  Create websites 23.8% 5  Create films or videos 23.8% 5  Create music 19.0% 4  One respondent referred to a collection of things related to the beloved object. Note: Tattoos should be a category added to future studies. Erika Eiffel has tattoos of the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge (private conversation).

Electric, exciting, sometimes perverse, highly stimulating and

sense of activities. It also includes the moments in which I can simply be with my object, staying together.

Descriptions of Human / Object Intimacy Respondents were asked How do you describe intimacy with your lover? Two people were not happy, responding with problematic and no privacy – not much intimacy. Others made comments such as GREAT when it can happen, VERY PLEASURABLE, and very satisfying and making happy. Another person said, Very good but sex drive is poor. Intimacy could include sensual or spiritual feelings or behaviour, instead of, or in addition to, sexual feelings or behaviour.

very aesthetic. Usually involves cuddling and such affectionate activity, and sometimes masturbation. Deeply emotional, not sexual – I have sexual feelings for humans, but these are nowhere near as deep as the emotions I feel for my partner. I am more object sensual, not sexual. Just limited to (dry) kissing, hugging, holding, sleeping with them. We are very intimate in the bedroom, we spend a lot of time in bed together, but my pants usually stay on. Our intimacy is very above-the-waist, i.e. kissing, hugging, licking, etc.

Frequency of Intimacy Respondents were asked How often are you intimate with your beloved object(s)? For those with public or distant objects, the answers included:

Intimacy for me and my lover consists of a corporeal connection alongside a strong spiritual union. Physically sensing my

I am in a long distant relationship. However, during the pe-

lover with the whole of my body enables our climax but is

riods of time that I am close to my lover, we are intimate

only attained when the spiritual energy between us reaches

upwards to 4 times per week.

a point of equilibrium and blissful harmony. Too seldom. Regular I must wait months or weeks.

176

177

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Ranges between twice a week and once every three weeks. Far too seldom (weeks extend to months / a year). I sadly cannot even be near, in the sense of only being present!

3 – 4 × a month, sometimes more, sometimes less.

About once a year.

Not often enough, about once every few weeks.

For some, intimacy has changed over time, or conditions have changed: It used to be often. The first OS lover: less than I want. The second OS lover: enough.

Limitations to Intimacy Respondents were asked to please explain if there are limitations such as distance, privacy, or other. (See also Problems, Proximity, Privacy below.) While three out of sixteen said there were no limitations, others described lack of privacy or proximity: PRIVACY as [object name] is a fairground ride so i don’t get any privacy at all with him really.

In my younger days once or a several times a day. My lover lives in a museum, which is rather public and there

For those who live with or near their objects, frequency of intimacy included:

are always lots of other people around, which makes things rather difficult. I don’t have enough of privacy with OS lover no. 1. Too many

ALL THE TIME.

people around, no more alone time. Almost every night. Distance is the major limitation in my relationship. Privacy is MOST NIGHTS WHEN, CUDDLED UP IN BED.

also an issue but more so for one object lover than the others. In some rare occasions I have access to the house’s garage (I

Sleep with my closers every night since

live with my parents); in other occasions, there are privacy

I have had my first closer.

limitations, and I find a lost spot where I think I can be relatively safe with my car.

Every day once or twice. Occasional gap of a couple of days. Distance, public object, it’s not my own. Well there is no set amount – but at a guess I would go for 5 times a week.

178

179

Amy Marsh

Masturbation and Self Pleasure Respondents were asked How often do you pleasure yourself (masturbate)? However the way in which this question was worded was not accurate or adequate for the OS community and revealed human to human sex bias on the part of the author / researcher, who did not understand that what a non-OS person might consider masturbation may often (but possibly not always) be considered partner sex by an OS person.

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

5 times a week at a guess. It will always include

[object name]… Masturbation with a Representation of the Object Lover The following question again reflected human to human sex bias and a lack of understanding of OS intimacy, When you self-pleasure, do you enjoy being close with a representation of your lover, such as a model or a picture?

I have never masturbated as I see it. All sexual pleasure achieved without the presence of my actual lover has al-

I don’t consider it self-pleasure, because I always feel close

ways been with a part or model extension of my lover.

to my lover / s. Lover no. 2 is always with me when having sex.

Never. No sex without lover.

Yes, but I don’t feel it is self pleasure because I don’t consider the gratification to be one way.

Five other people responded never, including the person who responded below. However, it is difficult to tell whether the never means no sexual self-stimulation at all, with or without an object partner, or just no stimulation without an object partner or the image or feeling of an object partner present. Never. I don’t feel any sexual attraction to humans, this (and

I enjoy being with my plate, but I don’t need self-pleasure. I love my object, NOT my body!!!

Two people talked about their enjoyment or use of pictures. I enjoy pictures as well as the real thing.

human bodies in this context) disgust me! I always have pictures of my loved ones close.

People who said they self-pleasured may or may not have included their object lovers in the process. Frequency varied widely, from daily once or twice to a few times a year. When I feel turned on by [object name] as I said before I don’t see her much as she lives in [place name].

180

I have sexual feelings about humans, not my partner.

Two people responded in the negative: Not relevant, don’t masturbate and [I] Don’t do that! And in the OS equivalent of internet porn use, one person said, Sometimes I masturbate to YouTube videos of very large, and very attractive [object category].

181

Amy Marsh

Problems, Proximity, Privacy Objectum sexuals face a number of hurdles in their pursuit of satisfying personal lives. Lack of acceptance by society is the biggest problem, followed closely by human abuse of beloved objects and the inability to be publicly affectionate with beloved objects. As mentioned before, physical proximity is a large problem for those who love public monuments, landmarks, fairground rides, public transportation, or other structures and buildings. Fifteen people loved public objects, twelve of them without privacy. Twelve people loved private objects, but only one of them reported a lack of privacy. It may be that those people who achieve intimacy through energetic exchanges or telepathy are best able to feel happy in their relationships with public objects. Respondents were asked What is your most pressing issue or problem regarding your OS relationships and preferences? Two people were happy and said they did not have any problems. Other responses concerned Being closeted:

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Nothing really accept [sic] I wish people would be more open minded and not view OS as a MENTAL problem. Not enough people in society understand or accept us. Would be nice if we had the right to be able to have some sort of civil ceremony so we can be free to express our love for our partners in the same way as anybody else would. No privacy / disrespectful people all around and about my beloved object. No social life outside with my partner. Hardly any contact possible, intolerant humans trying to destroy my personality.

Distance: Dealing with the physical distance between me and my lovers is a large issue for us. I also struggle with an old flame

I won’t tell my siblings as long as my father is alive.

rising up from the ashes of a current relationship that I want

I don’t want him to know.

to save. I wish to be monogamous but have to accept that at

Having to keep it for myself.

this time I am not.

Lack of social acceptance for OS relationships and other social difficulties:

Personal pressures and problems: There are a connection between transgender, Asperger?

I want people to accept me. I want to be able to take my lovers to the movies like anybody else. I want the public to accept

That worries about other things keep me from enjoying them

us like majority have homosexuals.

as much as I’d like.

That most people don’t understand it. I don’t understand how

Not to have the time I want to have for my relationship.

they can’t understand it… because. it feels so natural to me.

182

183

Amy Marsh

I have not learned to communicate with people and to understand people. My knowledge of human nature is not good. Not happy with it. Not being able to create a family with my loved one.

HUMAN INTERACTIONS Unless the OS person feels accepted many human interactions will feel problematic or troubling. In response to another question, two people were bothered by human responses, such as: Idiots taking the piss on the internet after OS appears in the media. Intolerance by humans, even if not yet outed as an OS-person!

Sexual Relationships with Humans Eleven people said they have never considered a sexual relationship with a human being. However, this survey question was flawed in that it did not include the choice of might consider a sexual human relationship. In the other column, two people did consider the possibility of a future sexual human relationship:

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

Only two of the survey respondents had a current sexual relationship with a human being, in addition to their object lovers. Frequency of human intimacy was once a week for one person, around three times a month for the other. Seven have had one to five sexual human relationships and one has had more than ten sexual human relationships. I have had sex with a number of men but I have only had 1 relationship which I am in at the moment (6 years). It was one mistake in the past – now I know that I cannot (and don’t want to!) be in a human sexual relationship.

As discussed previously, four people reported having been sexually forced or coerced by a human being. Other Kinds of Human Relationships One man said, I have a balanced sociable life and a male partner.

Other respondents mentioned very good non-OS friends who are understanding and the rare species of nice-being-people who enable at least a visit with a beloved object / machine.

One person added Although I may consider a human relationship eventually, it has not happened yet.

I am still questioning myself whether I may or may not have sex with a human partner I feel comfortable enough with.

I cannot say I never will…you never know.

184

185

Amy Marsh

Disclosure Objectum sexuals seem to be either very careful and cautious about disclosing their preferences for objects, or else they are appearing in public media and making YouTube videos about their object loves. A future study should include questions about personal privacy vs. public disclosure, and the rewards or difficulties that have resulted from these choices, and include some probing of how and why such choices have been made. OS people on the autism spectrum may need additional help sorting out personal, social and professional boundaries that affect disclosure decisions. Acceptance Objectum sexuals unsure of acceptance upon disclosure might be uncertain either due to conventional politeness of the person hearing the news or, in the case of those with Asperger’s Syndrome and autism, because they are unable to read body language and other social cues. One person was unhappy about lacking a social life that included her OS lover, I can’t do normal things with my lover, see a movie, go in a restaurant, have a drink… For OS people, social isolation and continual misunderstanding is a reluctant price paid for object love: For me it is very important to clear up, that an OS-person also like other humans, just not in sexual ways. Also OS people need friends and a social net. Love is not the same like sex. Love, a OS person also can feel for other humans, in different ways. Love is not defined by sex. But if I as an OS person fall in love with a object, sex must be a part of it. OS is not the same like fetishism. The object I love is independent. It [has its] own

186

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

identity and it is never a part or symbol of another human. To love an object is never a substitute for missing a human partner.

Encounters with Helping Professionals When asked Have you ever consulted with a medical, psychological or other therapeutic or healing professional about matters pertaining to your OS orientation? seventeen people said no and four said yes. Responses from the professional community were equally divided between respectful and understanding and not helpful. Though objectum sexuals experience the same problems as other people, such as grief at the loss of a loved one, stress, and so on, it seems unlikely that they will divulge their orientation to helping professionals unless they are certain of a measure of understanding or acceptance.

CONCLUSION: WHAT DO objectum sexuals WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW? People who identify as objectum sexuals are part of a sexual minority which also contends with additional challenges such as a high incidence of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome within its ranks. Though it is rare, objectum sexuality has attracted a great deal of notoriety, controversy and ridicule. Individual members are not always well equipped to deal with public scorn and exploitation. However, Erika Eiffel and other OS activists have done much to develop community and validate the experiences of other OS individuals through the creation of websites and internet forums. Almost all of the objectum sexuals surveyed expressed satisfaction with their orientation to objects.

187

Amy Marsh

Only one person expressed unhappiness. For most OS people, unhappiness and stress comes from lack of understanding and human interference with their object relationships. Many OS people are unhappy about their lack of proximity and access to object lovers, particularly those which are public structures. And for an OS person, destruction of a beloved object, such as the Berlin Wall, is devastating. Most of the OS people surveyed expressed a great depth of emotion and a great deal of commitment to their relationships and many feel that their feelings are somehow acknowledged and even reciprocated by the object lovers. Sexologists, therapists, counselors, medical personnel, social workers and other helping professionals lack information and understanding that will allow them to treat the OS person with the same respect and understanding they are expected to extend to members of other sexual minority groups. The apparent link of OS to autism spectrum conditions and object personification synesthesia should be investigated and researched. Such research would be an important addition to the study of human sexual behaviour and would benefit the autism / Asperger’s community as well as the OS community. It seems appropriate to give the last word to the OS respondents, who were asked What is the most important thing you would tell someone about OS relationships? Their answers touched on a number of important points. OS relationships feel natural and appropriate to those who have attraction to objects: They are real. They are complex. They are no less and no more of value than other romantic relationships.

188

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

OS relationships are often the preferred or only option for those who are attracted to objects: …I’m unable to be physical with a human being. To love an object is never a substitute for missing a human partner. OS lovers are never a replacement for human lovers, or a way to get out of the way of human lovers. It’s an independent kind of love, not a way out of the difficulties that come along with a human relationship. OS love has its own difficulties!

Happiness is possible It does not prevent me from having a happy life, and it is not something that can be changed anyway. That it may well be to do with an aspergers tendency or a coping mechanism from childhood into sexual adulthood (my father died when I was 12, I think this OS has been a great help for me to cope and have an almost religious attachment to something solid and safe which I have sexualized from puberty onwards). I would not drop it for the world, it makes me very happy!

Objectum sexuals reject the categorization of their relationships as a fetish. OS is not the same like fetishism. They are NOT AN OBSESSION. IT IS TRUE LOVE NOT FAKE.

Objectum sexuals want respect for their lives, lovers, and relationships:

189

Amy Marsh

Love Among the Objectum Sexuals

notes

I would tell them about my lover & be honest with them from

the start, but make it clear that an OS person’s relationship is no different from anyone else’s.



All feelings should be accepted and respected no matter whom or what they are for.

Most objectum sexuals feel that their objects are unique and not truly inanimate.

The object I love is independent. It [has its] own identity and it is never a part or symbol of another human.

Most objectum sexuals want and need other kinds of human relationships and a place in human society, even if they don’t want to have sexual relationships with humans.





For me it is very important to clear up, that an OS-person also like other humans, just not in sexual ways. Also OS people



need friends and a social net. Love is not the same like sex. Love, a OS person also can feel for other humans, in different ways. Love is not defined by sex. But if I as an OS person fall



in love with a object, sex must be a part of it.

Perhaps the most definitive statement was: This is about love – not about which component goes where!



190

1 J. Terry, “Loving Objects”, Trans- Humanities 1 (2010) (Seoul, Korea: Ewha Women’s University, Inpress, 2010). 2 Gayle Rubin,“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”, in Pleasure and Danger, ed. by Carol S. Vance (New York: Routledge, 1984). 3 P. De Silva, & A. Pernet, “Pollution in Metroland: An unusual paraphilia in a shy young man,” Sexual and Marital Therapy, 7(3) (1992), 301 – 306. 4 Sexual Orientation, Homosexuality and…, American Psychological Association Help Centre: http://www.apa.org / helpcenter / sexual-orientation.aspx [acessed 2012.07.17]. 5 Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. by Walter J. Cobb (Puffin Classics, 1965). 6 Brenda Love, Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices (New Jersey: Barricade Books, 1992). 7 Amy Marsh, “People Who Love Objects, Love’s Outer Limits,” Carnal Nation (October 2009). http://sf.carnalnation.com / content / 35197 / 999 / people-wholove-objects-part-i, http://sf.carnalnation.com / content / 35921 / 999 / people-wholove-objects-part-ii, http://sf.carnalnation.com / content / 36653 / 999 / people-wholove-objects-part-iii [acessed 2012.07.18.] 8 P. De Silva,“Pollution in Metroland: An unusual paraphilia in a shy young man ,” Sexual and

Marital Therapy, 7(3) 1992, 301306. 9 Patricia Romanowski, Barbara L. Kirby, et. al., The OASIS guide to asperger syndrome (New York: Crown, 2005). Tony Attwood, Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. (London & Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2004. 10 Daniel Smilek, et. al. “When ‘3’ is a Jerk and ‘E’ is a King: Personifying Inanimate Objects in Synesthesia,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (6) (2007), 981 – 992.

191

Amy Marsh

Spectrum of Human / Object Intimacy

Behavior with Objects > Interest in Objects > Orientation Toward Objects Sex Toy Use

Increased Object Interest

Fetish /  Paraphilia

Increased Object Orientation

Objectum Sexuality Sexual or Romantic Orientation

Objectum Intimacy Full Object Relationship

Utilitarian Physical Involvement

Utilitarian Physical Involvement

Utilitarian Physical Involvement

Utilitarian Physical Involvement

Utilitarian Physical Involvement

Utilitarian Physical Involvement

Physical Desire for Object

Physical Desire

Physical Desire

Physical Desire

Physical Desire

Object Fantasies

Object Fantasies

Object Fantasies

Object Fantasies

Some Sense of Object Personality and/or Gender

Fuller Sense or Object Personality and/or Gender

Fuller Sense or Object Personality and/or Gender

Emotional Attachment No Need for Reciprocity

Emotional and Romantic Attachment – Wish for Reciprocity

Emotional and Romantic Attachment – Wish for Reciprocity

Potential or Actual Sense of Object Consciousness

Actual Sense of Object Consciousness Spiritual Connection

Occasional Object Use – Primary Focus is on Sex with Self or Other Humans

Objects Frequently Used as Accessories in Sex with Humans

Objects Required for Sex with Self or Other Humans

Less Interest in Sex Little or No Interest Huwith Humans man Sex Partners

No Interest in Human Sex Partners

With thanks and grateful acknowledgment to Erika La Tour Eiffel and members of Objectum-Sexuality Internationale. [email protected]! ©Aug. 2009 http://dramymarshsexologist.tripod.com

192

193

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body 1997 

From: Slavic Review, vol. 56, No. 3 (Autumn 1997): 500 – 518 [Pittsburgh: Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies] © The Author & The Publisher

197

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

Since Marx was strong on criticizing capitalism, not so strong on the practical mechanics of revolution, and rather wobbly on the communist future itself, we cannot blame his Soviet followers if their ultimate goal always remained a religious mystery, veiled by the pseudoscience of political dogma. The veil enhances the mystery; it obscures the fact that there is a mystery – that the real transformation of society into utopia and the individual into unfettered homo labourans cannot be described in scientific language at all but can only be symbolized. This becomes clear when we move from politics to art, to the sphe­re of culture dominated by symbolic language. Des­ pite its debt to the explicit utopian tradition of Chernyshev­sky and the nineteenth-century radicals, Soviet literature limits itself to an exclusively symbolic depiction of the flowering of communism1. In Christianity, a transformation of analogous importance is symbolized by the bread and wine of the Eucharist. In Soviet literature, the physical transformation most commonly used to denote the entry into communism is that of flesh to metal, and, as is the case with the bread to flesh of the Bible, no literal paraphrase of the metaphor can get us any closer to grasping the mystical communion with the Godhead that is represented here. Anyone who has had to read a work of socialist realism is familiar with the obligatory comparisons to metal – above all iron and steel – in physical and psychological descriptions of the positive hero. This is nothing new; iron sinews are already a cliché in the Bible, to recall that text once again. What is new, and what testifies to the mythical significance of metal symbolism in Soviet culture as a whole, is the sheer extent to which it has been elaborated – despite the inevitable dehumanizing implications of metal and mechanical comparisons. Iron discipline, iron will, iron nerves, iron muscles,

iron jaws, iron cheekbones, iron faces, eyes like gimlets – at some point, as the list of attributes grows and moves from the abstract to the concrete, we begin to feel uneasy. Our uneasiness, the uneasiness of the bourgeois humanist, is precisely what the earliest, most radical Soviet writers play on in their extreme use of metal imagery. Yet their motives for using it go beyond its mere shock value – just as the overall role of such imagery in Soviet culture is only superficially explained by the historical focus on steelmaking and heavy industry in the post-revolutionary economy (if the economic reality did not in fact proceed from the cultural myth). Iron and steel symbolism was, as Hans Günther points out, associated with Bolshevism from the very beginning. 2 Leon Trotsky writes that as early as 1903 the future Bolsheviks were depicted as hard, not so much for their character as for their political stance. When the Menshevik Georgi Plekhanov ironically called his opponents tverdokamennye (rock-hard, steadfast) Lenin took it as a compliment. 3 Trotsky’s brotherin-law Lev Rozenfeld adopted the revolutionary pseudonym Kamenev, from kamen’ [stone]; Stalin’s henchmanVyacheslav Molotov took his name from molot (hammer); and Stalin himself went from the Georgian Dzhugashvili to a surname based on the Russian word for steel. Apparently, the dzhuga of his original name meant iron in the ancient language of Georgia. 4 In this case, Stalin is not so great a departure; still, it is significant that iron becomes steel in the translation. There is no better metaphor for revolution than that of the blast furnace, where the destructive energy of fire effects a creative transformation of raw metal into something different and radically improved. With this added connotation of revolutionary change, iron and steel epithets eventually dominate in descriptions of the Bolshevik mentality over comparisons that merely evoke hardness of character.

198

199

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

The symbolism of iron and steel actually involves three types of metaphorical transformation. The ­fundamental chan­ ge is that of flesh to metal: the acquisition of the ­physical or psychological qualities of iron that must precede any development of revolutionary consciousness. Then there is the change from iron into steel, to which Anatoly Lunacharsky compares the process of the organization of the proletariat. 5 Finally, steel is itself subject to a limitless series of transformations: smelting, alloying, rolling, drawing, annealing, tempering. Thus the great classic of socialist realism, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s Kak zakalialas’stal’ [How the steel was tempered, 1934], applies the metaphor of its title to the training of the Bolshevik cadres. This potential for limitless transformation also has significance in the historical context of the 1917 revolution, which, as its instigators only gradually realized was to be but the first step on an endless path. Each new step, each succeeding year of the revolution, would be marked by exhortations from above for a recapitulation of the initial revolutionary impulse on some level of Soviet society, for a retempering of the steel; and the louder the calls for endless dynamism, the more the people dug in their heels. Steel is less valuable in itself than as a tool for creating new steel; it is malleable; it can be made to flow like water; but it can also be hard, even brittle; and it can rust. In symbolizing spiritual change by a material transformation, the Bolsheviks recall the traditions of medieval alchemy. They would never have acknowledged the link, much less the alchemists’ focus on gold as the highest of the elements. Still, it is worth remembering that the conversion of base metals was not, at least in theory, motivated by any proto-capitalist hunger after wealth. It was rather meant to prefigure the transformation of the human psyche, represented by the al-

chemists as a process of hardening or crystallization, thus anticipating the spiritual tempering of the Bolsheviks. 6  More generally, as Mircea Eliade asserts, the ­alchemical quest to replace the work of nature and speed up the course of human history anticipates the essential ideology of the modern world, of which Marxism is a prime example. 7 This quest for individual transcendence, imbued with the iconoclastic spirit of Gnosticism and acquiring overtones of social revolution in the doctrines of the Freemasons and other Enlightenment-era secret societies, has been posited as an ancestor of Russian Social Democratic utopianism, especially in its more technological aspects. 8 A closer link to Soviet metal imagery can be found in the more recent past: in the romantics’ revival of the medieval – for example, the influence of Gnostic alchemist Jacob Böhme on the German poet Novalis. With Novalis we see the first serious modern literary use of images of metal and crystal to denote spiritual transformation. 9  By Marx’s time, the irony of writers such as E.T. A. Hoffmann had already begun to deflate this revived mysticism; but alchemical imagery as a symbol of the romantic longing for world religion had become firmly established. In the operas of Richard Wagner this longing serves as an inspiration for Nazi ideology: Hitler’s ideal of soldiers, hard as steel recalls the cult of the metallic body in Stalin’s Russia. 10 One difference is that Soviet metal imagery is always associated with the economic fact of industrialization, whereas the ideology of the already heavily industrialized Germany harks back to a pastoral pagan utopia. High Stalinist culture has its own superficial neoclassicism; but although references to the metal bronze, for example, may evoke for the Nazis the majesty of imperial Rome, they are more likely to remind Soviets of Stalin’s poet laureate Vladimir Mayakovski and his futurist assault on the dead statuary of his own country’s hateful former empire. 11 

200

201

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

For leftist writers in both Russia and Germany, compa­ risons of the human body to metal and, in particular, to metal machinery, not only hint at the ideal transformations of a communist future, but also at the reality of the industrial world. 12 When Bertolt Brecht disassembles his characters like an automobile, he is reacting against what he sees as an ideologically motivated denial of the reality of the man-machine relationship in the fashionable pastoralism of pre-World War II German literature. Still, although Brecht and his counterparts among the Russian futurists can claim that their disassembled and mechanized heroes are in an important way more real than those of classical nineteenth-century realism, this new reality has a negative, dehumanizing side to it. Of the metal-encrusted corpses and demonic clockwork figures that people Hoffmann’s attacks on romantic alchemy, we are most familiar today with the mechanical doll from the ballet Coppelia. In Hoffmann’s original story Der Sandmann [The Sandman, 1816], the doll’s name is Olimpia-which became a popular woman’s name in Russia after the revolution. [The diminutive Lipa means fake in Russian slang.] Mayakowsky knows all of this: What heavenly Hoffmann / Thought you up, accursed one?! he writes to his lover. 13 Many early Soviet writers show a curiously ambiguous attitude toward metal and mechanical symbolism, in which the apotheosis of the revolutionary body is at the same time its inexorable demonization. 14  Though largely forgotten today, Aleksei Gastev was among the most influential advocates of the metallization and mechanization of the proletariat in the first decades of the Soviet Union. A poet and labour activist, Gastev was born in 1882, a decade before Mayakovsky, and died in 1941, a victim of the purges. 15 He was the most important of the proletarian poets, and a seminal figure for such groups as Proletkult and the Smithy, whose cosmic eloquence on the dissolution of

the individual psyche in the utopian collective became the chief target of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s anti-utopian satire My [We, 1920], with its ironhanded Benefactor. 16  Esteemed by his contemporaries as an articulate and enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary cause, Gastev possessed a rare combination of the skills of a poet, journalist, and labour organizer, together with extensive firsthand experience of the factory floor. Born in Suzdal, the son of a teacher, Gastev moved as a youth to Moscow, where he soon became politically active. He worked at various technical occupations in both Russian and foreign factories. Gastev gained particular prominence among the metalworkers, the traditional elite of the working class, and a group known for its radicalism. In 1917 he was elected general secretary of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union. By then, he was already at the height of his literary fame. Although Gastev’s major poetry collection Poeziia rabochego udara [Poetry of the worker’s blow] appeared in 1918 as the first publication in the Proletkult’s book series, he was always seen as a precursor and model for the main group of proletarian writers, rather than as a member of their circle. In the 1920 s he quit literature altogether and devoted his full energies to the task of educating the new Soviet proletariat in the Taylorist method of organizing industrial labour. Gastev’s best-known work, acclaimed by the Proletkultists as embodying the essence of the philosophy of the industrial proletariat, 17 is the prose-poem My rastem iz zheleza [We grow out of iron, 1914]:

202

203

Смотрите! я стою среди них: станков, мoлoткoв, вагранoк и гoрн и среди сoтни тoвaрищей. Ввepхy жeлeзный кoвaный пpocтop. Пo cтopoнaм идyт бaлки и yгoльники.

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

Oни пoднимaюcтя нa дecять сaжeн.

They demand even greater strength.

Зaгибaютcя cпpaвa и cлeвa.

I look at them and stand up straight.

Coeдиняютcя cтpoпилaми в купoлaх и, кaк плeчи

Into my veins flows new iron blood.

вeликaнa, дepжaт вcю жeлeзнyю пocpoтйкy./

I have grown still higher.

Oни cтpeмитeльны, oни paзмaшиcты, oни cильны.

I myself grow steel shoulders and arms immeasurably

Oни тpeбyют eщё бoльшeй cилы.

strong. I have merged with the building’s iron.

Гляжy нa них и выpпpямляюcь.

I have risen.

В жилы льётcя нoвaя, жeлeзнaя кpoвь.

My shoulders force out trusses, upper girders, roof.

Я выpoc eщё.

My feet are still on the earth, but my

У мeня caмoгo выpacтaют cтaльныe плeчи и бeзмepнo

head is above the building.

cильныe pyки. Я cлилcя c жeлeзoм пocтpoйки./

I still gasp for breath from these inhuman / superhuman

Пoднялcя.

[nechelovecheskie] efforts, but already shout:

Выпиpaю плeчaми cтpoпилa, вepxниe бaлки, кpышy.

Let me speak, comrades, let me speak!

Нoги мoи eщё нa зeмлe, нo гoлoвa вышe здaния.

The iron echo covers my words; the entire building

Я eщё зaдыxaюcь oт этиx нeчeлoвeчecкиx

vibrates with impatience. And I have still risen

ycилий, a yжe кpичy:

higher; I am already level with the chimneys.

 – Cлoвa пpoшy, тoвapищи, cлoвa!

Neither story, nor speech, but only one iron word I’ll shout:

Жeлeзнoe эxo пoкpылo мoи cлoвa, вcя

We shall be victorious! ]18 

пocтpoйкa дpoжит нeтepпeниeм. A я пoднялcя eщё вышe, я yжe нapaвнe c тpубaми. И нe paccкaз, нe peчь, a тoлькo oднo мoё жeeлзнoe я пpoкpичy: Пoбeдим мы! [Look!-I stand among them: machines, hammers, furnaces, and forges and among hundred of comrades. Above is iron-forged space. Along the sides run girders and angle bars. They rise twenty meters. They bend right and left. They are joined together by trusses in the cupolas and, like the shoulders of a giant, support the entire iron building. They are impetuous; they are bold; they are strong.

204

It is difficult for us to recapture the impact this poem must have had on its original audience. But we can at least recognize it as an effective positive depiction of a symbolic metamorphosis from flesh to metal, and we may find it less easy than we think to separate the artistic from the purely rhetorical elements. Gastev’s strategy puts the vocabulary and style (inventories, terse physical descriptions, simple commands) of a technical manual at the service of unbridled Promethean lyricism. This distinguishes him from the majority of prerevolutionary worker poets, who express their own lyrical flights in strictly conventional verse. The basis of We Grow out of Iron is a realized metaphor. Gastev’s narrator compares the arching girders of a factory ceiling to a giant’s shoulders and proceed to describe his own

205

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

transformation into the imagined titan. In this dual metamorphosis, the change from flesh to metal symbolizes the labourer’s identification with his tools and task (the ultimate form of worker’s control over the means of production), and the fabulous increase in stature represents his loss of individuality in the collective. Both are crucial features of Soviet metal symbolism. More often than not, the metallization of the body also involves a transformation from the flesh and blood of the individual to the mass, considered as a single metal organism. As might be expected the concrete act of labour most closely associated with this transformation is that of metallurgy, hinted at in the molten infusion of new iron blood. The thaumaturgic power of the orator, who (in the words of a fellow proletarian poet) pours the iron of fiery words into his listeners, is also apparent here. 19 We Grow out of Iron begins with I stand among them, and ends with the shouted incantation We shall be victorious. As the speaker ascends Christ-like toward a heaven of hammered metal, his consciousness is lost in that of his fellow workers (the iron echo), and he becomes the mass-man. Gastev’s poetry is significant because it provides us with an example of revolutionary metal symbolism in its most fully developed explicit form. In the pre-1917 verses of the worker poets, such symbolism appears often but remains formulaic, most often involving Aesopian parallels between the political struggle and the blacksmith’s creative work. 20 In the poems of F. S. Shkulev, for example, one frequently encounters such abstract sentiments as Labour is our father, / The smith of our happiness and We are forging a new, better world.21 Both the capacity of the titansmith to create a variety of intangible values and Russian socialism’s age-old desire for the construction of a revolutionary New Man are reflected in Shkulev’s work.Yet his smiths lack the skill to forge human beings.

Although the inherent symbolic complexity of such a daring creation proved unattractive to the early proletarians, their contemporaries in the highbrow literature of the period had fewer qualms. Most of the symbolists tend toward an apolitical, traditional alchemical interpretation of the fleshto-metal transformation; but one cannot forget Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, with its explicit image of a terrorist’s acquisition of revolutionary zeal through an infusion of molten copper. 22 Unlike some of his colleagues in the Proletkult, Gastev shies away from the conventional abstract vocabulary of symbolism, as well as its overt religious imagery. 23 He thus appears sensitive to the possibility that his own cosmic lyricism might be linked to that of the ruling tendency of the previous generation. 24  Gastev is also aware of the condemnation by his futurist contemporaries in the pages of LEF of Mayakowsky and ­post-1917 proletarian literature for its romanticism. From this charge only he himself was exempted in consideration of his poetic inventiveness. 25 For Gastev the overthrow of convention was never the end in itself that it was for the futurists. Still, his goal of fashioning radically new art forms for the ascendant working class won him the respect of poets such as Mayakowsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Nikolai Aseev. 26  As for his evaluation of the undeniable romantic element in his own work, Gastev is ambiguous. On the one hand, in Poetry of the Worker’s Blow he groups his earlier efforts under the explicit title romanticism. On the other, in his retrospective 1925 preface to the sixth edition of this popular volume, Gastev justifies his withdrawal from the field of letters by downgrading the creative writing of revolutionaries in general as a substitute for real deeds in times of forced idleness, and thus marked by a terrifying hypertrophy of enthusiasm. Similarly, in the preface to the previous edition of his book,

206

207

Rolf Hellebust

Gastev promises that, should he ever take up the pen again, it will only be to solve a problem of naked reportage, and not to engage either in romanticism or its opposite, the topic of the pure machine. Still, it is important to note that neither Gastev’s ambivalence toward his early lyricism, nor his ultimate sacrifice (as he puts it) of his writing career as a whole, mean he has in any way given up on the most romantic of his dreams – that of the biological reformation of the contemporary human being, as he puts it bluntly in his description of his post-literary aspirations. 27  In his reference to the pure machine, as in his attempts to distance himself in these prefaces from the whole hothouse quandary of proletarian literature, Gastev shows his sensitivity to the mounting critical attacks of the 1920 s – not from the left front this time, but from those forces that would eventually coalesce into the monolith of socialist realism. Critics such as Nikolai Yezhov were less concerned with romanticism than they were with the proletarians’ concentration on the abstract mass-man at the expense of the realistically portrayed individual. A typical derogatory article offers a parodic recipe for a proletarian hero, with an ingredient list including a spike for the hero’s iron sinews, iron heart, and iron nerves.28 Gastev himself is careful to reproach those poets who simply continue with variations in all possible keys on such words as machine, iron, steel.29 Such sensitivity to the changing critical climate (along with details of his extra-literary biography) may help to explain why Gastev ultimately fares better in Soviet esteem than do the early proletarian writers in general. One scholar, writing in 1959, goes so far as to claim that Gastev’s worker is not mechanized not soulless – in contrast to many heroes of the poems of those years, where human beings were pushed

208

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

into the background and stifled by machines, furnaces, and forges. If there the human being was made into iron [ozhelezen], here, on the contrary, iron is made human, given a soul.30

This is despite the fact that it is Gastev who, more than any other single author, bears the responsibility for influencing the mass of factory-floor poets to write in ways for which they would later be condemned. In comparison with the poems of Gastev and his colleagues, the prose works that come to dominate socialist realism in the 1930 s insist on a more subdued strictly realistic approach; but in such novels as Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and Aleksandr Serafimovich’s Zheleznyi potok [The iron flood, 1924], the tempering of human steel in the individual is still linked figuratively to a growth in feeling of oneness with the masses. Both of these canonical works chronicle the forging of the nation in the crucible of the Russian civil war. Although the symbolism of Ostrovsky’s soberly didactic and politically cautious 1934 novel does not venture much farther than its title, The Iron Flood still tends toward a more figurative idiom. It tells of how a ragged group of peasants and soldiers of various political persuasions is gradually moulded into an efficient fighting force. Their leader, Kozhuk, a man whose face, jaws, eyes, and voice are repeatedly described as being made of iron and steel, succeed in constraining and redirecting the elemental flood of unrefined human metal. By the end, this surge is held by iron shores and the faces of the newly committed Bolsheviks have all become like Kozhuk’s own, forged out of blackened iron. 31 The critical moment in the unification of these zealots comes when, in the course of a gruelling march to escape their Cossack pursuers, they come upon the hanged and mutilated

209

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

bodies of a couple of revolutionaries with whom their enemies have already caught up. Suddenly the exhausted, demoralized soldiers are transformed. They feel new energy pouring into them; they pick up their pace, and in the tramping of their feet, marching faster and faster, is heard the beating of a gargantuan heart:

The metal in their veins is the same as that which flows in Gastev’s giant hero. The image of a mammoth heart beating in a body that swells to become the size of the universe is also typical of Mayakowsky’s revolutionary fantasies. Here, it signals the transformation of a mob of undisciplined soldiers into a pliant instrument, into the unified iron ranks of the newborn Red Army. 33 In Mayakowsky’s case, this image of a huge collective figure could be just as easily interpreted as the reflection of the poet’s own giant ego, another example of the futurist exhibitionism that represents the zenith of a long and inexorable process in western literature: the rise of the writer’s own personality as a central artistic theme. But Gastev himself is no less an individualist. Although he boasts of his own experience as a metalworker, we should not forget that he was also a teacher’s son and would likely have followed in his father’s footsteps had he not been expelled from teacher’s college in 1902 for his subversive activities. 34 Like Nikolai Gogol’ and Leo Tolstoy, Gastev eventually became so caught up in the didactic side of his artistic mission that he abandoned literature, in his case to organize

and direct the Central Institute of Labour, where he spent decades trying to reach definitive solutions for problems of factory-floor ergonomics. (The results of his ambitious research, though laced with flashes of genuine poetic insight, are of little use today, when it has been accepted that the best way to increase efficiency is to adapt the machine to the human, and not the other way around.) Gastev is not content merely to program each and every movement of an army of human robots. He writes ecstatically about how the millions will give birth to a man who in suffering, in death and destruction, through the mass effort of the great collective [will] subdue the old, blood-spattered grief-soaked world. 35 His own implicit role, however, is not as a member of these expendable millions but rather as one of the true popular heroes of the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s: the individualist engineer-inventor, the modern alchemist, the Faustian (or rather Nietzschean) rebel who can be as great a misanthrope in practice as he is a lover of humanity in theory. 36 Gastev is like Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, who uses his marvellous submarine to teach a violent lesson to what he perceives as a misguided human race. Nemo identifies himself with his steel weapon, but it is his steel, his creation; it is only his sailors (of whom he demands machinelike loyalty) who are effectively assimilated into the metal mass. 37 There is a difference between possessing steel – whether armour, weapon, nerves, or muscles – and being made out of steel. Superman, the Man of Steel (born in 1938, at the very heyday of metal superheroes in Russia and Nazi Germany), is an example of the first kind, as are Iron Man or Robocop – no more than techno-knights in armour. It is the comic book villains who have the metal on the inside. We all know the clichéd moment of truth when the robot disguised as a human has his face ripped off, exposing the infernal machinery within.

210

211

At once a rumble of heavy steps broke the silence, evenly and rhythmically filling the blistering heat, as if there walked one man of unspeakable height, of unspeakable weight, and as if there beat one huge, superhumanly / inhumanly [nechelovecheski] huge heart. 32

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

The problem of the individual versus the collective remained unresolved not just in Gastev’s thinking, but in the practical work of the proletarian culture movement as a whole. 38 Gastev’s individualism is but one element in a complex of contradictions engendered by his symbolic view of the communist New Man. It is necessary to dwell on some of these problems in order to understand the essential contradiction, not just for Gastev, but for Soviet metal symbolism as a whole: the question of how such dehumanizing imagery could be adapted to such ostensibly humanistic revolutionary ends. If Gastev can remain such an individualist while extolling the virtues of collectivism, either he (like Moses) implicitly counts himself out of the fortunate masses whose lives are to be transfigured or a subtler shift has occurred. In Slavoj Žižek’s application of the medieval topos of the king’s two bodies to the leaders of modern revolutionary movements, the communist body is seen to undergo a form of Lacanian redoubling, dividing it into a sublime essence and its material projection. 39 The sublime body, as the incarnation of historical necessity, is that special stuff reterred to by Stalin in his famous funeral oration. 40 If Gastev’s proletarian body is likewise to be subject to such an ontological split, then it can be made of special stuff – that is, metallised – without losing the flesh-and-blood humanity of its material envelope. One reaches a similar result by observing that the New Man of Russian socialism has always been depicted in two mutually irreconcilable ways-either as the creator of utopia (Chernyshevsky’s Rakhmetov), or its product (the inhabitants of the aluminum paradise of V   era Pavlovna’s last dream). One depiction stresses the individual, the other the collective. The question is: which is the sublime incarnation? And who is sacrificed for the cause? Because being made of special stuff always entails suffering-whether it be the suffering of

Rakhmetov, who tempers his body for the struggle by sleeping on a bed of nails, 41 or that of Gastev’s mass-man, remaking the world in suffering, in death and destruction. Still, if the real mechanism for revolutionary transformation is to be the labour process – which Marxism views as basically a good thing – then where is the need for suffering?42 Of course, the conditions under which the labour is performed cannot be neglected Gastev, a child of the modern age, was fascinated by the factory, by technology, and by speed. Still, his view of the relationship between worker and machine was not always so sanguine. Around 1909, he was working as a streetcar driver in St. Petersburg:

212

213

I switch the motors on maximum almost from the beginning. They lift the 12-ton cars with a kind of fateful stubbornness; before we reach the top I reduce the current a few octaves. It is as if someone very large is struggling in a sealed vacuum, burying his mighty, heavy, methodical groaning deeper and deeper within him.

But the initial power rush soon fades and is replaced by the unbearable tedium of the work: Is this life really going to drag on for years and decades? After an excruciating day of work you sleep like a log. The next day you get up again to break your back for Mr. Capital. And again, and again, and again… There is only the hum of the motor, which also seems to be saying. And again, and again, and again... 43

Yet ten years later, Gastev boasts: In the machine-tool everything is calculated and adjusted. We shall perform the same calculations with the living machine – the human being. 44

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

Surely this radical change in attitude cannot be explained only by the fact that the living machine now works in a Soviet factory, whereas before he was a slave to Mr. Capital? 45 Or perhaps there was no change in attitude? If we look carefully at the views of labour espoused by proletarian thinkers, we find that as noble and uplifting as work may be, it is never really enjoyable. In fact, the more dehumanizing the work, the more it reduces the worker to the level of the animal or machine (burying his mighty, heavy, methodical groaning deeper and deeper within him), the more uplifting it is. Gastev stresses the need to become inspired by the difficulty of work. 46 Similarly, while criticValerian Polansky repeats the Proletkult boast that factory life has become a daily festival, he also makes it clear that

Mr. Capital from a representative of the liberated proletariat performing the same odious task. For Gastev, as for so many of his comrades, the w ­ orkers’ suffering does not disappear after 1917 but is merely reva­ lu­ated. This recalls the semiotic view of Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, according to which Russia evolves, not by developing new cultural paradigms, but by subjecting the old ones to a simple axiological inversion. 49 Worker-writers take an initially negative view of the factory as axiomatic. 50 The inversion of signs is to be the result of the flesh-to-metal transformation: Our writers did not achieve the proletarian spirit all at once. There was a time when everything that now seems orderly appeared to them as chaos; in it thousands like them were

the proletarian knows that for his achievements he will have

lost. At the basis of their new feelings lies a prolonged period

to make many great sacrifices. But this does not trouble him

of tempering. 51 

and does not fill his soul with pessimism and fear in the

Thus Gastev’s aim is not merely to calculate and adjust his living machine, but also-with a shockworker’s disdain for human and mechanical limits – to switch the motors on maximum almost from the beginning. Here we sense an echo of the Orthodox ideal of disinterested suffering and abnegation, as espoused by such writers as Feodor Dostoevsky, or in this century by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, who is truly fulfilled only when he has lost himself in collective suffering and collective labour – but on his own terms, not those imposed by the totalitarian regime. 48 The element of free choice is crucial here, for it is also, at least in principle, the only thing that separates the streetcar driver working for

Of course, Gastev’s unblinking references to the need for bloody sacrifice in the birth of the mass-man must be considered in the real context of the post-revolutionary situation. The cult of the machine notwithstanding, the state of the economy was such that it was impossible to rely merely on engineering advances to catch up with the west. Gastev’s fantastic scenarios of mass suffering seem merely a projection into the future of the contemporary state of the working class, devastated by hunger, disease, and military mobilization. 52 Furthermore, the bulk of labour in industry would long remain manual work of the crudest type. This at least partially explains why Gastev’s Institute of Labour spent what would appear to us as an obsessive amount of time analyzing the basic mechanics of the hammer stroke. 53 Together with the perceived need for monumental sacrifice, it also makes for an interesting parallel

214

215

face of these sacrifices. He remains proud, calm, strong, and serious.47   

Rolf Hellebust

with attitudes toward industrial progress prevalent among the generation of Gastev’s parents. During the crucial decade of Count Witte’s tenure as minister of finance, much of the public was convinced of the need for massive industrialization and realized that this goal would require patience and sacrifice, as well as a collective effort led by the state. After Witte’s defeat in 1903, Russia had less of a firm industrial policy; but his legacy clearly survives in the attitudes of Gastev’s time – especially in the assumption that economic progress is not inevitable, but requires radical and decisive action. 54  Still, the focus on suffering in Soviet metal symbolism has to do with more than political arguments for the need to substitute human labour for the labour of as yet nonexistent machines. Recall the flesh-to-metal, individual-to-mass transformation in The Iron Flood, which is described as being directly catalyzed by the sacrifice of the murdered revolutionaries. Here the symbol begins to assume the qualities of myth. To understand this mythopoetic potential, we have to go back farther than the medieval alchemists (although Böhme directly equates the transmutation of metal with the death of the human body55) – back to their ancestors, the magician-smiths of primitive culture, and back to the cultural universals of the suffering god, of ritual transformation through fire, of metal as a living, even divine substance. In the prism of antiquity the machine-age mass-man resembles the primordial god from whose immolated body, buried deep in the earth, grow the ores sought by the ancient smith, 56 and whose idol oversees his fire rituals and serves as the object of his worship. Here is an excerpt from Gastev’s Most [The bridge, 1918]:

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

В пeчи. Двe тыcячи гpaдycoв… Oтбoрным бaтaльoнoм в зeв. Двecти кипящиx бoлвaнoк. Лeжaт кaк дeвицы. Шaгaeм. Гoрим. Пoбeдим и вoccтaнeм кaк призрaки. Pычaт и лeтaют бoлвaнки. Бeлo-oгнeнныe рыбы. Пoгибaют в cтoнax… Bocкрecaют…  – Плавильныe вaнны. B нac бoги. Запeртый хаос oгня. Cтeны лoмит… Гopящий вoдoпaд. Opyдийный xoxoт. Cмepть. Cмepть. [Flywheels in motion. A hundred thousand workers to the task. We go fearlessly into the iron. We give it our hearts. In the furnace. Two thousand degrees … Into the maw as a crack battalion. Two hundred seething lumps of pig iron. Lie like virgins. We stride. We burn. We triumph and rebel like phantoms.

Maxoвики в xoд.

Lumps of iron snarl and fly.

Cтo тыcяч paбoтникoв в дeлo.

White-fiery fish.

Идёмтe бeccтpaшнo в жeлeзo. Дaдим eмy cepдцe.

Perish groaning … Are resurrected …

216

217

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

The smelting baths. In us are gods.

By the forges we temper our passions

The pent-up chaos of fire.

We, dying, rise again from the dead. 61

It breaks down the walls …

Then there is M. P. Gerasimov’s shocking vision of a factory accident, in which a fall onto red-hot sheet metal becomes a crucifixion, with the hint of a gory, yet angelic resurrection:

A burning waterfall. The loud laugh of tools. Death. Death.] 57 

Bнeзaпный кpик. Oдин pacпятый

In comparison with We Grow out of Iron, this later poem shows Gastev’s evolution toward an ever-greater verbal economy and an emphasis on individual words through isolation and repetition that lends them an incantatory quality reminiscent of the work of futurists such as Khlebnikov. Gastev also exhibits a modernist penchant for juxtaposing the world of technology with the primitive world of myth. 58 Here he re-enacts the legend, common to many civilizations, of human sacrifice to the furnace to make the metal flow. 59 Gastev’s mass sacrifice is equated with the flesh-to-metal ­transformation (We go fearlessly into the iron), an equation strengthened by the fact that the metal ingots themselves lie like virgins before a pagan ritual. Ingots and workers perish, are resurrected and become transformed (although the last two lines appear to undercut such an optimistic reading of this sketchy narrative). Here the link between metal imagery and the immortalization project of early Soviet utopian thinkers becomes apparent. 60 It is not difficult to find other examples of this link among the proletarian poets. V. D. Aleksandrovsky writes: Mы пьeм винo из дoмeнныx пeчeй У гopнoв cтpacти нaши зaкaляeм Mы, yмиpaя, cнoвa вocкpecaeм We drink wine from blast furnaces

218

Лeжaл нa зoлoтoм лиcте, Змeиcтым плaмeнeм oбъятый, Гopeл нa oгнeннoм кpecтe. Oн yмep пpи мaшиннoм звoнe; Kипeл чyгyн, cвepкaлa cтaль. Лишь, cкoвaнный нa дымнoм тpoнe, Kpoвaвый aнгeл pвалcя вдaль. A sudden cry. One crucified Lay on the golden sheet, With sinuous flames embraced He burned on the fiery cross. He died amidst the sound of machines; The pig iron seethed the steel glared But shackled on a smoking throne, A bloody angel lunged into the distance. 62 

These excerpts from Gastev and others highlight the symbolic role of fire in the flesh-to-metal transformation. In mythical terms, the forging of human beings is a variant of the motif of initiation through ritual death and rebirth – and, in particular, that of purification by fire. The universal revolutionary symbols of fire / light / sun / heart have been associated with metal imagery from primordial times. 63 

219

Rolf Hellebust

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

Another feature commonly associated with primitive symbolic culture is that of the ritualisation of labour – especially labour involving mysterious natural transformations, including the making of wine and bread, the creation of pottery, agriculture, and also metalworking. Medieval alchemy clearly retains the ritual aspect of ancient metallurgy. However, the ideologies of progress and mastery over nature that it engenders have a desacralising effect on labour, as it gradually comes under the sway of modern science, the revealer of nature’s secrets. For Eliade it is precisely this loss of the element of communion with the divine that makes modern labour unbearable, that leaves it the cold, naked routine deplored by Gastev in his prerevolutionary phase. Eliade asserts that the desacralisation of labour constitutes a living wound in the body of modern societies. However, nothing tells us that a resacralisation cannot occur in the future.64 Despite Gastev’s superficially ultrarational approach to the study of workplace mechanics, his codification of repeated physical movements amounts in reality to a ritualisation of labour. His efforts contribute less to the rationalization of factory work than to its aestheticisation and fetishisation. (This is precisely the argument of Gastev’s major opponent in the debate over the nature of proletarian culture, Aleksander Bogdanov, who also rejected Gastev’s apparent antipathy toward individualism by asserting that in the labour collective the individual as such would still be highly valued. 65) In general, the process of modern mythmaking described in the work of Gastev and other early Soviet writers, in which physical work becomes a ritual of sacrifice, transformation, and communion with the mass god, seems nothing less than an attempt at the sort of resacralisation of labour that Eliade has hinted at. 66  To understand how modern factory work could actually be perceived in this mystical fashion, one should consider the

composition of the industrial proletariat in post-revolutionary Russia. A large percentage of urban workers in skilled positions were peasants by origin, and they lacked formal schooling, except as far as their immediate profession was concerned. The eccentric worker-heroes of Platonov’s stories best of all reflect the animistic attitude of the urbanized Soviet peasant toward machinery. The very absence of advanced technology also clearly overstimulated the imaginations of educated people such as Gastev (compare Lenin’s utopian ideas about electricity). Thus Trotsky excoriates the futurists by scoffing that only a nation as economically backward as Russia could be so thrilled by the claims of technology. 67 As Soviet culture evolves away from the early unbridled enthusiasm of futurism, the messianic communism of godbuilders such as Maxim Gorky and Lunacharsky, and the violent world-revolutionary dreams of politicians such as Trotsky, its original quasi-religious dimensions become less visible. With the coming of Stalin’s totalitarian regime, the production of symbols of any kind becomes a monopoly of the state. The most powerful of these symbols are muted and their meanings may even be contradicted by explicit rhetoric, according to the dictates of political expediency. At the same time, their hold on the popular imagination reaches its apogee. One of the most famous Soviet songs of the 1930 s, known to every schoolchild, celebrates the feats of the aviation heroes. Vse vyshe [Ever higher] was actually written in 1920, the same year that Gastev began to organize his Central Institute of Labour. In 1933 it was adopted as the official march of the aviators:68

220

221

Mы poждeны, чтoб cкaзкy cдeлaть былью, Пpeoдoлeть пpocтpaнcтвo и пpocтop, Нaм рaзyм дaл cтaльныe pyки – кpылья,

Rolf Hellebust

A вмecтo cepдцa – плaмeнный мoтop. We were born to make fairy tale fact, To conquer space and expanse, Reason gave us steel arms – our wings, And instead of a heart, a flaming motor. 69 

As Katerina Clark notes in her discussion of this song, the flyers and their steel birds were depicted in popular accounts as so close that they were as one.70  Thus, by the end of the 1930 s the imagery of iron and steel had penetrated every aspect of Soviet society. While its deeper symbolic aspect became progressively less explicit, it nevertheless retained its function, which went far beyond that of the biblical iron sinews and brow of traditional metal imagery. The prominence of the flesh-to-metal transformation in Soviet culture has various explanations, from the real industrial significance of iron (Engels’ last and most important of all those raw materials that have played a revolutionary role in history71), to the activism of the metalworkers, to the influence on Marxism of the cynical revaluation of the classical Gold and Iron Ages by Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire. 72 Yet the primary function of r­ evolutionary metal imagery remains its concealment of the essential gap in Marx’s historical narrative: that of the creation of a communist culture and a communist New Man. While Lenin focused on the political struggle, it was the theoreticians of proletarian culture, led by Bogdanov, who directly addressed the problem of this gap. 73 Gastev (despite his quarrels with Bogdanov) contributed to this effort, and his writings represent the clearest example of revolutionary metal imagery in its original symbolic function. Richard Stites claims that the utopian visions of Gastev and his supporters did not survive in any recognizable form the

222

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

great Stalinist revolution. All that remained were the crudest elements of his doctrine of workplace efficiency, stripped of all dreamlike qualities and aspirations. 74Yet ­despite harsh Stalin-era criticism of Gastev’s images and ideals, it is precisely the dreamlike element that outlives his quixotic Taylorism, to become a flywheel in the machinery of the national myth. Only after the unimaginable feats of collectivization, industrialization, and World War II have been left behind and the USSR truly enters the modern industrial era do the old symbols really begin to lose their meaning. (Hence the characteristic mocking tone of a late Soviet cartoon with its hesitant surgeon exclaiming at the operating table: Call a metalworker. He has a flaming motor instead of a heart. 75) The new society has outgrown the ideal of raw physical sacrifice on a massive scale; for better or for worse, it need the same rational, secularized approach to labour that has been developed in the west. And once the metal gods are no longer venerated the very identity of the shallow-rooted political state with which they have been so closely linked is already in question.

223

Rolf Hellebust

notes















1 In particular, this is true of Soviet science fiction, which, if it does portray future utopias, carefully avoids any account of their development from present historical conditions. Patrick L. McGuire, Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, 1985), 27. The shock value of Platonov’s realization of the myth – his description in Chevengur (1929) of a naive attempt to construct a communist society – derives from the official taboo on such a realization. 2 Hans Gunther, “Zheleznaia garmoniia (Gosudarstvo kak total’noe proizvedenie iskusstva),” Voprosy literatury, 1992, no. 1:40. 3 Leon Trotsky, “Iosif Stalin: Opyt kharakteristiki,” in Osmyslit’ kul’t Stalina, ed. by Lev Anninskii et al. (Moscow, 1989), 628 – 629. 4 Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York, 1967), 272. 5 Anatolii Lunacharskii, Geroizm i individualizm (Moscow, 1925), 42. 6 Ulrich Johannes Beil, Die Wiederkehr des Absoluten: Studien zür Symbolik des Kristallinen und Metallischen in der deutschen Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 32, 43. 7 Mircea Eliade, Forgerons et alchi­­ mistes, 2d ed. by (Paris, 1977), 154. 8 Aleksander Świętochowski, Utopie w rozwoju historycznym (Warsaw, 1910), 336 – 237.

9 Beil, Die Wiederkehr des Absoluten, 60. For the influence of German romanticism on utopian tendencies among the Bolsheviks, see Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (London, 1974), 43. 10 Gunther, “Zheleznaia garmoniia...,” 41. 11 To hell with bronze’s polypoundage. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Vo ves’ golos,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1955 – 60), 10:284. A precedent for Mayakovsky attitude is that of those iconoclasts during the French Revolution who called for bronze statues to be recast into cannons. Richard Stites, “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution: Destroying and Preserving the Past,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. by Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington, 1985), 2. 12 Some embrace this reality with less enthusiasm than others. Yet even the village poet Sergei Esenin makes himself assert, But all the same I want to see / Poor destitute Russia made of steel. Sergei Esenin, “Neuiutnaia zhidkaia lunnost”, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1961), 3:69. 13 Mayakovsky, “Fleita-Pozvonochnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1:200. 14 For an overview of the “metal theme” in early Soviet literature, see L. M. Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury (1880 – 1923 gg.) (Leningrad, 1924), 252 – 285. 15 For a biography of Gastev, see Kurt Johansson, Aleksej Gastev:

224

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body













Proletarian Bard of the Machine Age (Stockholm, 1983). 16 On Zamiatin and the proletar ian writers, see Patricia Carden, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Aleksei Gastev and Evgeny Zamyatin,” Russian Review 46 (1987): 1 – 18, as well as K. Lewis and H. Weber, “Zamiatin’s We, the Proletarian Poets, and Bogdanov’s Red Star,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (1975): 253 – 278. 17 Fedor Kalinin, “Put’ proletarskoi kritiki i Poeziia rabochego udara A. Gasteva,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 4 (September 1918): 16. 18 Aleksei Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 19. 19 Aleksandr  Pomorskii, “Pokhorony,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 2 (July 1918): 28. Pomorskii’s audience is described as welded together by indivisible steel (27). 20 Besides his literary role, the smith remained the chief visual icon for the worker until the 1930 s. Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art,” in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity, ed. by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny (Ithaca, 1994), 341 – 360. 21 E. E. Nechaev, F. S. Shkulev, and A. M.  Gmyrev, U istokov russkoi proletarskoi poezii (Moscow, 1965), 209, 228. 22 Andrei Belyi, Peterburg (Moscow, 1981), 307. References to the Bronze Horseman as a metallic revolutionary figure can be found among the proletarian poets. Proletarskie poety pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi, ed.

by A. A. Surkov (Leningrad, 1959), 196, 314. 23 Johansson, Aleksej Gastev, 82. For examples of the use of religious imagery among proletarian writers, a number of which incorporate striking images of metallization, see Mark D. Steinberg, “Workers on the Cross: Religious Imagination in the Writings of Russian Workers, 1910 – 1924,” Russian Review 53 (April 1994): 221 –2 37. 24 Still, Gastev seems to share (at least unconsciously) the goal of such symbolists as Viacheslav Ivanov, who called for the creation of new myths to unite intelligentsia and people. A precedent for Gastev’s syndicalism can also be found in Ivanov’s sobornost’. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Introduction,” Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge, 1994) 3 – 6. On Gastev and symbolism, see Johansson, Aleksej Gastev, 43. On the relationship between the symbolists and proletarian writing in general, see Nikolai Os’makov, Russkaia proletarskaia poeziia 1890 – 1917 (Moscow, 1968), 135, 214 – 215. 25 S. Tret’iakov, “Perspektivy futurizma,” in Literaturnye manifesty: Ot simvolizma k Oktiabriu, ed. by N. L. Brodskii et al., comp. (Moscow, 1929; reprint, The Hague, 1969), 242. 26 Aseev dubs Gastev the “Ovid of miners and metalworkers” – perhaps in recognition of the prominence of the theme of metamorphosis in his work. N. N.  Aseev, “Gastev,” Sobranie

225

Rolf Hellebust















sochinenii (Moscow, 1963), 1:202. On Gastev’s attitude toward the futurists, see “O tendentsiakh proletarskoi kul’tury,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, 9 – 10 (June-July 1919): 45. 27 Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara, 15, 14, 17. 28 Ibid., 18; “Vse, chto nuzhno znat’ khalturshchiku dlia pokaza geroev,” Na literaturnom postu 30 (October 1931): 32 – 33. 29 Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara, 18. 30 Z. S.  Papernyi, “Proletarskaia poeziia pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi,” in Surkov, ed., Proletarskie poety, 12. Similarly, Os’makov praises Gastev as “one of the most talented of the proletarian poets.” Russkaia proletarskaia poeziia, 154. 31 Aleksandr Serafimovich, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1959), 6:461 – 628, quotations found on 621 and 620. 32 Ibid., 584. Compare Gastev: “The crowd steps in a new march; its feet have caught the iron tempo.” Poeziia rabochego udara, 120. 33 Ibid., 592, 621. 34 Later the same year, Gastev was exiled to Vologda province, where he satisfied his pedagogical urge by seeking work as a private tutor. Johansson, Aleksej Gastev, 12. 35 Aleksei Gastev, “V poiskakh,” Zhizn’ dlia vsekh, 1913, no. 1. 36 The contradiction between what Johansson calls Gastev’s clear-cut individuality (Aleksej Gastev, 68) and his collectivist posture is complicated by the fact that the labour management

theory promoted in his work itself leaves no place for the engineerhero, just as it leaves no place for Gastev’s preoccupation with manual labour over labour-saving mechanization. See Harro Segeberg, Literarische Technik-Bilder: Studien zum Verhdltnis von Technik und Literaturgeschichte im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1987), 198 – 199. As for the author of this theory, Taylor himself appears as somewhat of a misanthropic engineer-hero, especially in this description of his ideal of the metalworker: One of the first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type. Quoted in Pethybridge, Social Prelude to Stalinism, 38. 37 Jules Verne, The Complete Twelve Thousand Leagues under the Sea (Bloomington, 1991), 186 – 187. 38 Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley, 1990), 93 – 95. 39 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London, 1991), 156 – 160. See also Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, 1983), 7. 40 I. V. Stalin, “O Lenine,” Sochineniia (Moscow, 1947), 6:46. One can imagine what sort of stuff in particular could be in the mind of this advocate of metallization of the whole country. “Kitogam

226

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body











rabot XIV konferentsii RKP(b),” Sochineniia, 7:130. 41 N. G.  Chernyshevskii, Chto delat’? Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1939), 11:207. 42 In comparison, the metal imagery of the Nazis largely omits the element of suffering, while their Soviet opponents in World War II tend to portray themselves as aggrieved defenders, even when on the offensive. 43 Aleksei Gastev, “Iz dnevnika tramvaishchika,” Zhizn’ dlia vsekh, 1910, no. 10. 44 Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara, 245. 45 That enslavement to capital was in fact much less a worry to Gastev than the question of industrial reorganization per se is suggested by Bolshevik reaction to his ideas on the financing of Russia’s economic restructuring. Johansson, Aleksej Gastev, 60. 46 Aleksei Gastev, Kak nado rabotat’: Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 138. 47 “Dve poezii,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, 13 – 14 (June-July 1919): 49, 52. 48 On the depiction of suffering in sacred redemptive terms in workers’ literature, see Steinberg, “Workers on the Cross,” 220 – 227. 49 I. M. Lotman, and B. A. Uspenskii, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. by Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, 1985), 30 – 66.

50 O.B. Alekseeva, Ustnaia poeziia russkikh rabochikh (Leningrad, 1971), 102. 51 N. N. Liashko, “O zadachakh rabochego-pisatelia,” Kuznitsa, 1920, no. 3. 52 While the reality of what Lenin called the “declassing” of the proletariat has been debated (see Diane Koenker,“Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War,” Journal of Modern History 57 [1985]: 424 – 450), what is important here is the broadly shared perception of disintegration, and the impetus it gave to artists and writers to reinvent the mythological revolutionary proletarian, as Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Suny put it. Siegelbaum and Suny, “Class Backwards? In Search of the Soviet Working Class,” in Siegelbaum and Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet, 14 – 16. 53 On contemporary criticism of Gastev’s Taylorization project, see Kendall Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism,” Soviet Studies 24, no. 3 (1977): 386 – 391. 54 Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881 – 1917 (London, 1983), 102 – 103, 119. 55 Beil, Die Wiederkehr des Absoluten, 54. 56 Mass burial is a common motif in Gastev’s tales of collective martyrdom. Poeziia rabochego udara, 121 – 123, 139. 57 Ibid., 195. 58 Other proletarians occasionally used mythological themes: for example, K. Odintsov, who tells

227

Rolf Hellebust







in his Iazychnitsa of how fiery Dazh’-bog I Laughed and blazed with the glitter of metal. Sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei, ed. by M. Gor’kii et al. (Petrograd, 1917), 78. Still, they avoid any mythologizing of the worker. 59 Joseph Needham, “Iron and Steel Technology in East and Southeast Asia,” in The Coming of the Age of Iron, ed. by Theodore A. Wertime and James D. Muhly (New Haven, 1980), 516. 60 On this topic, see Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, 1992). On myths of death and transfiguration in socialist realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 2nd ed. by (Chicago, 1985), 181 – 182. 61 V. D.  Aleksandrovskii, “My,” in Surkov, ed., Proletarskie poety, 95. 62 M. P. Gerasimov, “Kresta,” in Gor’kii et al., Sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei, 3. 63 In her study of medieval culture, Marcia A. Morris notes that fire is the destructive force which Russian apocalyptic thinkers dwell on in greatest depth, and the idea that present suffering will win the believer recognition as one of the chosen is also central to apocalyptic thought. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature (Albany, 1993), 95. On fire / light / sun / heart symbolism in proletarian writing, see Os’makov, Russkaia proletarskaia poeziia, 167.

64 Eliade, Forgerons et alchimistes, 157. 65 Aleksandr Bogdanov, “O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kul’tury (otvet Gastevu),” Proletarskaia kul’tura, 9 – 10 (June-July 1919): 51 – 52. Also see Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, 1988), 137 – 138. 66 Carden also sees the longunresolved problem of how to make labour meaningful as a major concern of Gastev’s, for which his vision of the immaculate factory with its perfect precision and cooperation offers a solution. Carden, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia,” 10. 67 Quoted in Pethybridge, Social Prelude to Stalinism, 147. 68 Svetlana Boym,“Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin’s Fairy Tale to Molotov’s Lacquer Box,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 824. Boym points out that this song, with a few textual modifications, was also adopted by the Nazis, who had heard it sung in translation by German communists (825). 69 P. German, “Vse vyshe (Aviatsionnyi marsh),” in V. Endrzhievskii, comp., Kryl’ia sovetov: Literaturno-estradnyi sbornik (Moscow, 1939), 6. 70 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 139. 71 Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1962), 21:158. 72 Henry Kamen, “Golden Age, Iron Age: A Conflict of Concepts in the Renaissance,” Journal of Me-

228

Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body





dieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1974): 155. 73 Sochor, Revolution and Culture, 30 – 31. 74 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 164. 75 Komsomol’skaia Pravda (29 December 1989). An analogous literary example of post-Stalinist subversion of 1930 s aviation symbolism is Vasilii Aksenov’s surrealistic parable Stal’naia ptitsa [The steel bird, 1965].

229

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World 2011 

From: Tickle Your Catastrophe: Imagining Catastrophe in Art, Architecture and Philosophy, eds. Dominiek Hoens, Frederik Le Roy Robrecht, Vanderbeeken, Nele Wynants (Ghent: Academia Press, 2011): 129 – 141. © The Author & The Publisher

Our nuclear plants do not represent any risk. We could have built them at the Red Square. They are safer than our ­samovars.

Excerpt from a Soviet newspaper1 

233

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

CHRONICLE OF DIFFICULT WEEKS Three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on 26 April 1986, filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over the 30-square km site known as the Red Zone in order to document the extraordinary cleanup efforts of Ukrainian workers and volunteers. 2 When Shevchenko’s 35 mm footage was later developed he noticed that a portion of the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise. Thinking initially that the film stock used had been defective, Shevchenko finally realised that what he had captured on film was the image and sound of radioactivity itself. This is how radiation looks. Radiation is a fatal invisible foe. One that even penetrates steel plating. It has no odor, no color. But it has a voice. Here it is. We thought this film was defective. But we were mistaken. This is how radiation looks. This shot was taken when we were allowed a 30 second glimpse from the armoured troop carrier. On that April night the first man passed here – without protection or stop watches, aware of the danger, as soldiers performing a great feat. Our camera was loaded with black – and – white film. This is why the events of the first weeks will be black and white, the colors of disaster. 3 

Figure 1: Film stills from Vladimir Shevchenko’s Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, 1986, 54 mins. Source: Russian Press Service.

234

Upon projection, small flares of light momentarily ignite the surface of the film, sparking and crackling; they conjure a pyrotechnics of syncopated spectrality. It is an act of radiological recording, whereby the radical imprint of the disaster was inscribed directly into the emulsion of the film as decaying particles moved through the exterior casing of the movie camera. It was not a representation of catastrophe

235

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

but an actual toxic event in which a lethal dose of radiation was ingrained within the molecules of each and every silver halide particle. Shevchenko’s film Chronicle of difficult weeks literally transformed into the most dangerous reel of footage in the world. Although the documentary provides us with an intimate view into the space of disaster, its pictorial mediation as filmic matter allows us to remain at a safe and ­objective distance from it. The sudden distortion of its sound and image-flows by the Geigerlike interference of the radiation, however, displaces our initial confidence in its representational status as a fixed historical index or media artefact and installs in its place a sense of dread that what we are witnessing on film is in fact the unholy representation of the real: an amorphous and evil contagion that continues to release its lethal discharges into the present and future yet-to-come. As a radiological interface capable of conjoining bodily matter with pictorial content the contaminated film footage hurls us, unwittingly, back into the contact zone of the event. Conceptualising this unexpected filmic rupture as a capturing of the real, rather than an act of cinematic inscription, forces us to rethink the ontological nature of media matter itself. Contrary to film theorist André Bazin’s well-known conceptualisations of film as time-embalmed or change mummified and Laura Mulvey’s invocation of film as death (stillness) in the flickering guise of life, this particular sequence

of irradiated film reminds us that the ontological moment cannot be fixed at 24 fps. 4 There is no ontological ground that we can return to in perpetuity, no film-substance to rewind and playback without loss or change, but only the movement, rhythm and vibration of a topology of difference. The nature of being – mediatic matter’s ontological core as a record and index of past events – is thus converted into a dynamic ontology of becoming, as radiation exerts its modulating influences over time. Shevchenko’s film itself becomes a kind of time machine or, as Gilles Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2: The time-image, an artefact for machining time in which the paralysed, frozen, petrified instance of the 35 mm film-frame becomes embryonic, teeming with the hallucinogenic elixir of alchemical life. 5

Figure 2: Film stills from Thor Heyerdal’s Kon Tiki, 1947, 77 mins.

236

It is as if the past surfaces in itself but in the shape of personalities which are independent, alienated off-balance, in some sense embryonic, strangely active fossils, radioactive, inexplicable in the present where they surface, and all the more harmful and autonomous. 6 

Arguably, Shevchenko’s documentation of the objective material reality of Chernobyl through the apparatus of cinema (lens, camera, film stock) sets up a variant of the discussion around the ontology of the image if read entirely within the instrumental register of film’s technical capacities for recording the images and sounds that stream naturally into the camera’s receptors. However, to read his film radiologically, I argue, is to collapse the gap between representation and the real, form and content, signification and affect, so that the ontological dimensions of the film extend beyond their accepted role as indexical trace and enter into a feedback loop with the actual material residue of the world. 7 

237

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

The radical nature of the recoding of the film by way of the nuclear accident requires that an analysis of Shevchenko’s film entirely within the field of representation must be set aside in favour of an engagement with the film as an actual event. According to Deleuze, the (filmic) event does not race something that came before rather it actively creates the terrain it maps. 8 Likewise for Jacques Derrida, it is the trace of writing itself that comes before language (speech), so that what is being traced is not a discursive supplement to the materiality of the world but the movement of the world as it performs its own choreography. The map [says Deleuze] expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement. 9 As such, Shevchenko’s film exceed its objective status at an example of documentary realism because it merges the subjective trajectory of the filmmaker’s camera movements over the disaster site with the subjectivity of the terrain itself, given that radiation was imprinted directly upon all those who travelled through it; indeed Shevchenko himself succumbed to its lethal force in 1999. Chronicle of difficult weeks thus becomes a de facto material witness to the industrial accident, one that is ontologically inseparable from the fatal landscape that it simultaneously pictures and maps.

films while not being a film at all insofar as cinematic documentation was an activity secondary to the scientific purposes of the journey. What it managed to capture, however, were momentary glimpses of the real. 10 While most of the footage was shot as the sailors were floating in calm waters, when something of significance did occur, the camera was quickly abandoned Bazin focuses his discussion upon a short sequence of frames in which the camera unwittingly captured the image of a whale shark in the water as it lunged towards the raft – an almost imperceptible rupture in an otherwise extended tedium of benign footage. This disruption in the image-flow can be conceptualised as a kind of cut that transforms representation into sensation, but without the repatriating operations that have theorised the cut as a form of filmic suture. What came before is ontologically different in kind and not merely degree from that which follows. What we witness is no longer a picture of the expedition, but the pro-filmic presence of danger.11 Shevchenko’s damaged film footage performs a similar ontological feat, as the sudden appearance of radioactive fallout converts documentary images into energetic matter – an unleashing of spectral forces that augurs immanent peril. Instead of continuing to operate as an indexical sign, the image is mutated becoming itself an immanent part of the unfolding action or movement; in essence, it becomes an event.

KILLER FOOTAGE

Does the killer whale, that we can barely see refracted in the water, interest us because of the rarity of the beast and the

Bazin intuits a similar shift in representation from an onto­logy of depiction to an ontology of the event when he discusses Thor Heyerdal’s documentary chronicle of the Kon Tiki expedition from 1947, in which Norwegians drifted from Peru to Polynesia on a crude wooden raft guided only by the ocean’s currents. Kon Tiki, writes Bazin, manages to be the most beautiful of

238

glimpse we get of it, slight as it is? Or rather because the shot was taken at the very moment when a capricious movement of the monster might well have annihilated the raft and sent camera and cameraman seven or eight thousand meter into the deep? The answer is clear. It is not so much the photograph of the whale that interests us as the photograph of danger. 12 

239

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

Bazin’s remarks here bring together several strands of this paper in ways that are useful for our purposes. Not only does the unexpected intercession of the shark’s emergence within the filmic regime activate its latent virtualities affecting the body of the viewer that short-circuit the conventional channels of spectatorship organised around signification and representation, but it also foregrounds the role that chance will play in merging image with event. It is the incidental capturing of a few frames, whether the perceived menace of the shark or the five seconds of irradiated footage, which alters the equilibrium of each documentary film. Without warning, the angerous supplement of affect plucks the image from its data-stream and plugs it into the connective tissue of the filmic assemblage. The sailors forget the camera in order to attend to the hazard of the shark; Shevchenko forgoes the examination of his rushes in order to scrutinize the alien markings that mysteriously appear. These disruptions in the normative workings of the cinematic apparatus shatter the distinctions between the picturemaking capacities of the machine and the pure image-making capacities of the event. Yet somehow the “Kon Tiki” is an admirable and overwhelming film. Why? Because the making of it is so totally identified with the action that it so imperfectly unfolds; because it is itself an aspect of the adventure.13  As a device for crystallizing time, the camera becomes itself a part of the temporal unfolding of the action that it initially set out to document. 14 It is an amalgam between two different kinds of movement, each of which harbours its own technicity: that of the media apparatus, with its image-sound recorders calibrated at precisely 24 fps, and that of the topological terrain, with its rhythmic flows, whether as waves of seawater or pulsating radioactive emissions. Consequently, time, and not just space, must also be figured differently when

the identification between the making of the film and its subject matter fuse, when the object becomes implicated in its own adventure and movement. Radiological time in particular ceases to move according to the disciplined march of the clock, as discrete units of measurement extruded through geometrical space, and instead folds back onto itself, creating anarchic feedback loops between radically non-con­tiguous temporalities in which the future-yet-to come is overlaid onto the past in a process of continuous modulation. The bursts of radiant energy fixed by Shevchenko’s film are thus not the residual traces of a past that has come to haunt future recordings in the telegraphic manner that sound and image ghosts typically appear within the analogue regime (a phenomenon in which previous recordings still cling to their magnetic substrates when errant particles escape their full erasure) but the spectral forces of the futurepast archived by the continuous present. 15 As a radioactive fossil whose toxicity can endure

240

241

Figure 3: Suess, Sarcophagus, documented March 27, 2009. Source: http://timmsuess.com / decay

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

THE MUMMY RETURNS

Figure 4: Timm Suess, Sarcophagus deterioration, documented March 27, 2009 Source: http://timmsuess.com / decay

millennia, the film’s indexicality is a bipolar registering of both the his was of the past (the initial accident) as well as the this still comes from the future (the ongoing contamination). Film is typically considered to be an intensive, archival storage medium that compresses history within each of its frames. Its content as such is understood to be fixed in time, even though the stability of its material substrate may be subject to deterioration over time. ­Radioactivity, however, with its extended lifespan of millennia, ultimately recasts Bazin’s ontological conceptualization of film as change mummified and posits in its place an ontology of zombification, in which the original danger of contamination is not so much mummified or preserved as it is brought back to life, tainting future handlings of the film and its screenings – a radiological insurrection into the archive, resulting in the resurrection of the dead object itself.

242

Today, Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 is itself entombed within a metal-clad concrete structure that is ominously named the Sarcophagus, both a burial chamber to the many volunteers who died trying to quell the fire and seal-off escaping contaminants, as well as a form of architectural embalmment aimed at mummifying its radioactive contents. It is literally a death-trap, but a decaying one whose breach will not be the result of tomb-raiders but an act of vandalism perpetrated by the very radioactive materials that it houses. When the core melted its uranium seeped into the sand bed below the reactor, temporarily petrifying its radioactive impulses into a silica bond. Now these solid forms have largely disintegrated creating a subterranean terror of radioactive dust clouds that lie in wait for their next atmospheric release. Given the failing state of the Sarcophagus, the opening of the tomb and unleashing of its evil spirits may happen sooner rather than later. What it guards through containment is ironically also that which it guards against – the virulent reanimation of its airborne radioactive particles. Nuclear materials writes Peter C. Van Wyck in “Danger signs” stand in relation to their containment only very imperfectly – there is always leakage. 16 

MICROFICHE VS. DIGITAL DATABASE Shevchenko’s archival recording of the Chernobyl disaster only exists today, that is to say posthumously, because it was captured by analogue means. The extremely high levels of radiation within the zone would have immediately erased any digital video-data, which is stored magnetically. It is not possible to archive the nuclear with digital technology if the

243

Susan Schuppli

hard disks or tapes used for data storage come into contact with radiation. Not only does Shevchenko’s film record the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and the containment efforts of workers and volunteers or biobots, but in carrying actual traces of the toxicological within its emulsive layers, it also produces an archival double, as the epistemological dimensions of the event are folded into its ontological metamatter. Only analogue storage mediums are amenable to such ongoing acts of topological deformation. Only film’s material substrates can archive multiple superimpositions while still retaining the expressive singularity of each successive layering. The digital, while not immune to interference and noise, must by definition recalculate and absorb this intruder – data into its coding chains, whereas the deviance of (radiological) interference within analogue domains sits side-by-side with its proper subjects of i­ nscription, since there is no mechanism for reintegrating extraneous information. Today, any search engine will return the nuclear accident at Chernobyl when the date – 26 April, 1986 – is input into its search parameters, whereas a microfiche review of Soviet (Pravda, Izvestia) and international newspapers from the period shows a time-lag of 19 days before the event registered publicly in print that a major nuclear accident had taken place. Although an orbiting American satellite took nighttime images of the reactor explosion and meteorologists and scientists recorded extraordinarily high levels of radioactivity within days of the meltdown in Sweden and Germany, this information was not linked to Chernobyl for almost three weeks, since Mikhail Gorbachev and the Central Committee largely withheld news of the disaster. Only on 29 April, in response to rapidly growing rumours circulating outside of the Soviet Union that something had h ­ appened at Chernobyl,

244

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

Figure 4: Pravda newspaper front pages from April 26 and May 15 1986 respectively. Photographed from Micro-fiche: Susan Schuppli

245

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

did Gorbachev deign to place a series of discrete notifications with five Soviet news agencies indicating that a minor incident had taken place. An accident occurred at the nuclear plant in Chernobyl. One of the reactors had been damaged. Measures have been taken. A governmental commission is inquiring. 17 In reality, the accident at Chernobyl was massive, releasing higher levels of radioactive contaminants into the environment than any preceding radiological event: higher than the detonation of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the years 1952 – 63, the blast at the Mayak plutonium production and reprocessing facility in Siberia in 1957 (which had held the previous record for greatest ecological damage by radiation) or the partial reactor core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. 18 By severely under­ playing the gravity of the situation, tragically delaying reports that a substantial nuclear explosion had taken place and downplaying the potential for contamination, a tragedy of far greater consequences ensued. For those working at the Chernobyl nuclear plant site or living in the adjacent city of Pripyat, this time lag would prove fatal, as malignant cells metastasized seeding their defects throughout the zone and eventually airlifting their malevolence across the borders of the Ukraine into Belarus and Europe. Only by scouring each small spool of film in the Univer­ sity of Western Ontario’s Weldon Library periodical and newspaper collection from 26 April, 1986 onwards to see what newsworthy items made the front page each day did I finally come to realize that Chernobyl never happened – at least, not by any publicly reported accounts on that particular day. I might add that the library’s microfiche collection is extensive and includes Soviet as well as other non-Western newspapers. Mine was not a mediatic discovery, akin to

Baudrillard’s infamous declaration that the first Gulf War never happened due to the hyper-reality of the image-world that overcodes the real to such an extent that it eventually surpasses it and in doing so annuls it. No, my microfiche findings pointed quite literally to the fact that there seemed to be no public record of the nuclear accident having ever taken place on that day. This realization spurred me into examining each spool of film after 26 April, until I finally came across a substantial printed reference to the horrific events at Chernobyl 19 days later. On 14 May, President Gorbachev first appeared on state television with the belated words we have been struck by disaster and then again as the lead story on the front pages of newspapers the following day. While the obviously tragic consequences of this delay are obvious it was the process of carefully scrutinizing each reel of microfiche that offered the conceptual breakthrough that I was looking for, when I fully grasped the implications of this time-lag and how it could assist me in thinking through the notion of the event. This is a revelation that would have been far more difficult had I relied solely upon digital search engines, which had retroactively corrected the time-line and erased the gap. This temporal disjunction raises the crucial question as to when Chernobyl actually took place: on the day the reactor core failed or on 14 May when the event came into public consciousness? The digital would answer unequivocally 26 April, but the analogue is somewhat less certain and prone to vacillation, since it comprehends that the facticity of the date was a retroactive production. Arguably,  something took place on 26 April, 1986, but the question is whether Chernobyl as an event occurred on that date.

246

247

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

EVENTS AND ACCIDENTS In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze posits a distinction between bodies concerned with their states of affairs located in actual geometric space and present in time, and incorporeal beings, which he regards as pure events constrained neither by space nor time. The kinds of bodies that manifest tensions, physical qualities, actions and passions, that exist in space and are available in time, are also the kinds of bodies for whom other bodies are a matter of concern. 19 A tree being a cause for another tree in disseminating its seed for the purposes of growing a forest, or a cause for the bird that builds its nest within its sheltering branches, or for the human that seeks its shade on a sunny day. Although each body is a causal agent for, or recipient of, the other’s actions, the results of their encounter can also create effects of a different kind that are intrinsic without being substantive.

Figure 5: Film stills from Vladimir Shevchenko’s Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, 1986, 54 mins. Source: Russian Press Service.

temperature, and the situation of its planting. 21 Rather than designating a quality in the thing by saying that the tree becomes green or is now green, which only refers to its physical state of affairs as a qualitative predicate, if we say instead the tree greens, we invoke an attribute that performs itself as a verb. To green is the event expressed by the verb. 22 It is the becoming green of the tree that constitutes the event, rather than the quality green, which is a mere actualization of the various conditions of growth that gather to express themselves as surface features.

These effects are not bodies, but properly speaking, incorporeal entities. They are not physical qualities and properties,

With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its

but rather logical or dialectical attributes. They are not things

actualization, the moment in which the event is embodied in

or facts, but events. We cannot say that they subsist or inhere. 20 

a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying here, the moment has come. The future

One of the many examples that Deleuze offers to help us conceptualise the event is the seasonal changes in the pigmentation in a tree. Although we might logically be tempted to designate the status of the event to the tree’s change in colour from brown to green, this is in fact contrary to Deleuze’s conception, which is preoccupied with verbs (becoming) and not nouns (being). In spring, we witness the tree ­becoming green but this, according to Deleuze, is only a transitory surface effect, an expression of the event’s actualisation induced by the conjunctive relations between climate, soil conditions,

248

and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect of this definitive present and from the point of view of that which embodies it. But on the other hand, there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum… It has no other present than that of the mobile instant which represents it always devided into future – past. 23 

249

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

Unlike other philosophers for whom the event represents a radical break in historical continuities, a fresh-start or the commencement of something altogether different, the event for Deleuze is not a new occurrence or beginning that cuts its ties with the past but rather an alteration in a set of ongoing processes. Events only revel themselves when a change takes place within such processes, whether these are naturally occurring or artificially induced. For example, within an organic system, the abnormal growth in cellular tissue that mutates into a malignant tumour becomes an event, while variations in the organization of nonorganic entities that produce new rock formations out of shifting tectonic matter or that modulate weather patterns into tornadoes may also be termed events. It is neither possible to determine the absolute cause of an event, nor pinpoint its moment of inception, but we can discern its effects. The event moves through time (Chronos) but is also in contact with the time of actual occurrences (Aiôn). 24 Although certain events must perish in order to provoke different events into actualisation, each event is still suffused by the chromaticism and rhythms of the past, and even derives its momentum from these lingering resources. The meltdown of the core at Chernobyl was not the start of a unheralded series of nuclear reactions but rather a dramatic change in the energetic output between subatomic particles that had previously been controlled and contained the impact of the accident rechanneling the nuclear pathways that the radiation took from self-contained micro-explosions

or fission to its externalized macro-extensions as radioactive dust clouds. Deleuze actually makes a specific distinction between the event and the accident. He regards the former – the event – as ideal having an eternal truth whose time, unlike that of the accident, is never simply the present that provokes it (the accident) and brings it into existence. There are no accidental events, insists Deleuze, but merely events that bear upon accidents and define their conditions. In short, the event is the problematic that problematises the accident. But just how does the event come to trouble and ultimately induce the accident? For Deleuze, an ideal event is a singularity that recomposes itself with other singularities to produce a series. When two series come into contact with each other, they resonate, redistributing their collective singularities between them. In doing so, they evolve into a different event whose intertwined nature produces what could also be characterised as a kind of assemblage; an entity that is discernable only after the fact by virtue of its effects. For example, the transition between winter and spring communicates with the pressure building up inside trees that eventually impels the flow of sap into creating a new assemblage called a sugar bush (a Canadian expression that refers to the cold-weather phenomena of running sap and tapping trees). As Deleuze notes, however, singularities are not states of expression that can be attached to speakers in discourse, to their psychological or physical states of affairs or to designate the properties of a concept such as the centre of a curve within mathematics. They are indifferent to signifying distinctions that order the world and govern its percepts. 25 The accident (nuclear or otherwise) can never correspond directly to the event because that would take the event into the denotative domain, the domain of its actuality, of its general circumstances as an industrial

250

251

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

accident and its particular malfeasance as Chernobyl. If the singularities are veritable events, they communicate in one and the same Event which endlessly redistributes them, while their transformations form a history. 26 Although the event acts upon a series of mobile virtualities, transformations arise when two or more of these series communicate with each other, creating a change in their wave-like resonances that can mutate and discharge their singularities into creating a new series, a different event. It is within this surfeit expression of movement that we can discern a history that might properly be called an actual event or an historical incident. Events (like radiation) are extensive and obscure; accidents (like Chernobyl) are intensive and distinct. However, even ideal events are subject to critical thresholds that can provoke their virtualities into recipitating an actualization that might eventually crystallise into an accident. Such transformations (histories) are generated by the incoming events of the future (by the intercession of another series) that can determine a different distribution of their effects. This redistribution manifests itself in the form of transactions that are operative in the world and visible as attributes of its material reality. Because of the invisible and migratory nature of the fallout from the nuclear accident, the movement of its airborne contaminants travels at a much faster pace than that of most public safety dispatches or even awareness that something dangerous has happened. It is as if the accident only appears retrospectively, after the fact. The nuclear accident unsettles the telling of its history because its transmissional flows can never be entirely administered by the media apparatuses used to communicate its event-information, in that, its telematic streams are also to be found within the radiological dimensions of its technogenic matter: in irradiated environments, warped biological systems, deteriorating structures and so on.

Of course, any event or disaster is never simply relegated to its delimited space-time within the archives of history but is always capable of being extracted and relinked to other signifying channels in order to produce new meanings and new narrative distributions. The nuclear event, however, produces artefacts that are of a fundamentally different nature given the very long half-life of this kind of radioactivity. Unlike other historical relics, the radiological fossil does not require the mediating gestures of the living historian, asking the right or relevant questions about the past, to exhort the testimonial from the trace. Radioactivity does its work prospectively and, though it leaves evidentiary traces of its clandestine passing, it only does so in times to come, when it is often too late to mitigate against its damaging effects. The meltdown of the reactor is not limited to the event space-time of the Ukraine in 1986, given that the radioactivity, in transgressing the boundaries of nuclear containment, has the transmissional and chemical capacity to reactualise the catastrophic event over and over again for years to come. There is no event-horizon or point of no return for a nuclear accident. There is only the return. In this regard, each nuclear accident is always already preemptively inscribed within those event-making transmissions yet-to-come as well as those that have already perished. The future is bound to the past by way of a radiological present, which brings the future – past into actualisation as an ongoing effect: a nuclear accident lying in wait.

252

253

SOVIET DEFECTORS In an uncanny premonition of things to come, Stalker (released in 1980), the final film shot by Andrei Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union, stakes out the apocalyptic terrain that would become the Red Zone of Chernobyl a full six years prior to the

Susan Schuppli

actual meltdown of the reactor core. A mysterious breakdown in the fourth bunker is advanced as the cause for the bleak landscape of Stalker’s Zone. Tarkovsky’s cinematic treatment of the Zone is drawn from the rumour of an explosion at the Mayak nuclear waste facility near Chelyabinsk in 1957, which was said to have created a vast ecological nightmare. As was the case with Chernobyl, the Soviet leadership concealed evidence of the accident and denied reports of human casualties, but unlike the 19 day time-lag that attended Chernobyl’s public confirmation by the Kremlin, official corroboration of the chemical fallout at Chelyabinsk was only revealed in 1989: thirty-two years after the damaged landscape first testified to the presence of radionuclides in its water table and agricultural produce. Stalker is thus a visual interface between two virtualities, a psychic cinematic medium channelling two historical realities: that of Chelyabinsk, as an unsubstantiated rumour, and that of Chernobyl, as an accident yet to-come. In a rather strange alchemical détournement, the illusory domain of film was once again transformed into the realm of the actual, in that it brought the virtual into presence as a felt-effect, whereas the two nuclear accidents that bracketed Stalker remained in a suspended state of latency, only to be actualised after the fact – after a time-lag of a certain duration. Although the industrial accident at Mayak had already taken place prior to the production of Stalker in 1979, the Soviet government’s denial of its having ever happened temporarily erased it from history as an actual event. Of course, thousands could intuit that something dangerous had happened in the vicinity, not by way of any direct or established knowledge of the incident but by means of its corporeal effects: chemical changes in bodily matter. What is of parallel interest in playing Shevchenko’s documentary back through the reels of  Tarkovsky’s science-fiction

254

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

epic is not merely the prophetic account of nuclear disaster that arcs between the two (which certainly merits further investigation) but also the tale of defective film stock that afflicted them both. As the story goes, Tarkovsky’s German producer supplied him with a new kind of Kodak stock but then disaster struck when the artesian well-water required for the film’s processing ran dry due to a malfunction at Mosfilm. Not only is his film stock prospectively entangled with the heavy-water chronicles of Shevchenko’s documen­tary yet-to-come, but the technical breakdown at the pre-eminent Russian film studio gestures towards the future failings of technology that would result in the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Apparently, Stalker’s exposed materials languished in an unprocessed state for 17 days (unbeknownst to Tarkovsky) as the film stock rapidly deteriorated. In a word, the whole material for the first part ended up on the scrap heap.27  The review of the ruined footage ended in a scandal. Tarkovsky, Rerberg, the Strugatsky and Tarkovsky’s wife Larissa were all sitting in the projection room. Suddenly one of the Strugatskys turned towards Rerberg and asked naively: Gosha, and how come I can’t see anything here?. Rerberg, always considering himself beyond reproach in everything he did, turned to Strugatsky and said: And you just be quiet, you are no Dostoievsky either! Tarkovsky was beside himself with anger. But one can understand Rerberg. Imagine what it means for a cameraman to see the entire material turning up defective!28 

Threading both of these films through the narrative of defect exemplifies Paul Virilio’s contention that there is no accidental catastrophe of a technical nature, which subsequently reveals an unattended error, programming glitch or series of mishaps

255

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

leading up to the improbable event. Failure is pre-emptively encoded into any machinic assemblage as its virtual double – its evil twin – the accident invented simultaneously with the invention. The possibility that Shevchenko’s film stock might also become defective was already incriminated within the virtual archives of those of Stalker, prior to him having ever loaded his film canisters and flown into the Red Zone. The very existence of a cinematic assemblage (camera, film, developing solution) is a prehension that a technical malfunction of a greater or lesser degree may occur at some point, which might in turn attach itself to a localised event transmission (e.g. Stalker and / or Chronicle of Difficult Weeks). The accident as a possible event is always – already preprogrammed into any technical object as one of its latent capacities, even though chance still has an important role to play in creating the necessary conditions for its emergence. When circumstances conspire accidents can happen, but they do not, however, happen accidentally. Standard maintenance protocols are processes, not for preventing, but for minimising the magnitude of the error dimension built into the technical machine. Data backups and software recovery programmes are sold not because of the unlikelihood of a fatal incident occurring but because the accident exists as a statistical reality. The virtual is always real. Nuclear disasters don’t happen by mistake; they are inadvertently manufactured as one of the many consequences of harnessing of nuclear power. This is why the powerful myth of a fail-safe system still requires a series of back-up operations and contingency plans just in case that unthinkable future-event does arrive. Although inventions are tacitly understood as coming about through processes of experimentation, or in some cases serendipity, an invention may also come about through an act of recognition that brings some previously hidden or unob-

served reality into public perception. This conceptual mode of inventing is in essence a form of paying-close-attention-to, a kind of perceptual framing device that organises diffuse or latent elements into recognisable patterns and brings them to our immediate attention. Inventions can lie in a state of prolonged dormancy (that is, indiscernible to the human ecologies for whom they are a matter of concern) until conditions arise that provoke them into retroactive presence. As Virilio suggests, it is in the very act of uncovering or covering something that the invention is constituted and thus by extension also the accident. When English archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the only intact burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings in 1922 and unearthed Tutankhamun’s tomb he literally invented it writes Virilio. 29 In the case of Chernobyl, it was in the act of entombing the colossal nuclear power plant in concrete and steel, creating a latter-day Sarcophagus, that the major nuclear accident was invented. Focusing awareness upon something for the first time is akin to inventing it anew. While the nuclear accident as a possible outcome was already implicated within the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction set off by Enrico Fermiin 1942 and subsequently imprinted into the technical assemblage of the nuclear power plant, its recognition as a catastrophic nuclear accident required an act of signification (the construction of the Sarcophagus) equal in magnitude to the cataclysmic scale of the tragedy. Gorbachev understood this implicitly when he issued his first press release reporting minor damage at the Chernobyl plant site. Acknowledging the immensity of the disaster would also be to reinvent it as such, as calamitous and momentous. This, in turn, would require a reciprocal response of similarly dramatic proportions on the part of the Soviet state, which would no doubt also trigger accusations of culpability in

256

257

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

corresponding measure – something the Central Committee was reluctant to undertake or admit to. The voodoo-like force that enmeshes Tarkovsky and Shev­ chenko’s films through the cinematic space-time of the accident is activated by a series of coincidences that bind the aesthetic malfeasance of chemistry with the politics of the nuclear. To suggest that the accident is always prefigured in the technical organization of the system tends to conjure up a world of determinism where the disquieting strangeness of coincidence is diminished and rendered a de facto byproduct of the machinic assemblage. Film is a particularly unique form of pre-emptive technology because its functional capacity for machining narratives is one of its defining elements. Although Stalker reactivates events that have already passed and anticipates the coming of future events, it does more than simply orient itself by pointing towards; it actually pre-narrates the plot and develops the visual lexicon that will map itself onto future representations of the nuclear accident. As Laura U. Marks has suggested film is a fossillike medium (a recollection-object) that condenses cryptic histories within each of its frames. Because it is spatially organised in terms of an encounter between a spectator and the screen, it is able to translate these encoded experiences over time. It is this space in-between that bestows onto film the power to represent and charges it with meaning. 30 Stalker becomes, in effect, the encrypted virtual archive from which Chronicle of difficult weeks will derive many of its signifying resources. Machines for sonic and visual inscription are thus also technologies of the archive, machines for recording and retrieval, for travelling in time. While the archive narrowly conceived is likewise a pre-emptive technology, in that it organizes its categories in advance of the selective entry of its artefacts and thus pre-narrates what stories can be told

in the future, its archival documents can be resequenced to tell a different versions of events. Analogue film’s insistent linearity, the fixed sequence of its frames, would seem to disavow or at the very least severely limit such conceptual peregrinations. Yet, even a tenaciously programmatic narrative can be creatively reengineered to author other historical accounts and testify against its intended origins.

Arguably what is fascinating about Shevchenko’s film is its transformation from a conventional documentary or benign media artefact into a radioactive fossil through the mysterious intercession of an invisible agent. Even when we are utterly aware of its horrific implications, we (as viewers) are transfixed by the strange markings and itinerant noise that suddenly emerge out of the depths of the image. The retroactive appearance of fallout on the film conjured by these radioactive ghosts still has the capacity to make us feel uneasy and anxious in their presence. If we are ultimately to re-read Shevchenko’s film against the grain of representation, which is to say, to read it radiologically, it must be understood as an early warning system for monitoring the incoming signals from the future-past. 31 Marshall McLuhan viewed the creativity of the arts not in terms of self-expression, as is often the case, but as a kind of radar installation capable of intuiting the approaching transformations signaled by developments in new media and new technology. 32 According to McLuhan, the perceptual dynamics of art in concert with the sense-perception of the artist, who is specifically trained and attuned to the experiential and the sensate, allows art to register the incoming effects of the future without necessarily staking out a delimited terrain or identifying its operative

258

259

READING RADIOLOGICAL FILM

Susan Schuppli

The Most Dangerous Film in the World

modalities in advance of its arrival. Rather, it enables us to discern its potential targets and the generalised parameters of its probable engagements. 33  Shevchenko’s irradiated footage operates as just such an early warning system, with the notable exception that its filmic antennae are oriented not exclusively towards the eruptions coming from the future, but are also tuned into the tremors that still reverberate from the past. Radar, as the original acronym implies, is a form of radio detection and ranging. As an ersatz radar system, Shevchenko’s film transmits its radiological emissions out into the world; if some of these are perchance detected they are returned to us in the present where, following Deleuze, we experience them indirectly as interference effects or as pure events. 34 (This is like the kind of shiver that skims almost imperceptibly over our skin each time we view Shevchenko’s film.) Unlike conventional radar systems, that try and eliminate interference and noise by focusing their transmissions and range of detection upon specific targets of interest, this project on the radiological event (which I continue to develop through writing and art installations around nuclear history), is predicated upon welcoming unwanted signals, in order to activate entanglements between unlikely and non-aligned events. Its signal-to-noise ratio is thus skewed more towards generating more interference rather than isolating and tracking particular historical signals. 35 Consequently, each time Shevchenko’s film is screened its toxic temporalities are transmitted into the multiple space-times of history, and although some are reflected back to us, others perish in their atmospheric transmission. As radiological emissions and nuclear emissaries, they warn us of the potential hazards and risks that come with speculative research, reminding us that the breach of the Sarcophagus is always-already bound to the filmic space-time of radioactive

becoming through the seepages of the virtual. Chronicle of difficult weeks is ultimately a long-range media machine and tracking device used for jamming linear accounts of history, modulating its frequencies and rerouting its signals in order to actualize new radiological events.

260

AN ACCIDENTAL POSTSCRIPT When delivering an earlier, abbreviated version of this text at the Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations conference in Japan on 17 July, 2007, the lecture-room at the University of Tokyo suddenly began to shake. Focusing intently upon my paper, I continued to read even though the other conference participants were becoming increasingly agitated. An earthquake of magnitude 6.8 was taking place near Niigata, which resulted in a series of malfunctions – leaks, burst pipes, and fires – at the Kashiwazaki nuclear power plant. Subsequent technical studies discovered that the nuclear plant had accidentally been constructed directly on top of an active seismic fault. Experiencing the tremors of this radiological activity directly as it was unfolding, standing as I was amidst the quake, signaled the uncanny entanglement between the conceptual content of my research and the literal ontological ground upon which these ideas momentarily trembled. It was as if the actions of the future, my research yet-to-come, had colluded with the past, Chernobyl, to make the present shaky and thus a source of renewable creative energy for the future. As William Gibson has frequently remarked The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.

261

Susan Schuppli

notes



1 Igor Kostin, Chernobyl: Confessions of a reporter (New York: Umbrage Editions, 2006), 10. 2 Vladimir Schevchenko, Chernobyl: Chronicle of difficult weeks. 35 mm. Ukrainian News and Documentary Film, 1986. 3 Vladimir Schevchenko. Chernobyl: Chronicle of difficult weeks. 35 mm. Ukrainian News and Documentary Film, 1986. [This comment was made by the editors of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2008 when considering an early draft of this text for potential publication.] 4 André Bazin. “The ontology of the photographic image,” Film quarterly 13 4 (1960): 4 – 9. Laura Mulvey. Death 24 × a second: Stillness and the moving image (London: Reaktion Books 2006), 8. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The time image, tans. by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Continuum, 1989), 166. 6 Ibidem, 113. 7 See Philip Rosen’s discussion of the misreading of Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image as one of technological finality in his Change mummified Cinema, historicity, theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 9 – 10. 8 Simon O’Sullivan, Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 35.

9 Gilles Deleuze, Essays critical and clinical, trans. by D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 61. 10 André Bazin, “Cinema and exploration”. In What is cinema? Vol. 1, ed. by and trans. by H. Gray, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 160. 11 This observation was made by the editors of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2008. 12 Bazin, “Cinema and exploration”, 161.  13 Ibidem. 14 Maurizio Lazzarato. “Machines to crystallize time: Bergson,” Theory, culture & society 24 6 (2007): 111. 15 Sound-ghosts are a memory effect of magnetic recording in which the imprint of a previous recording mysteriously reappears. This effect was first reported in 1947 when new kinds of tape were introduced with varying degrees of coercivity or resistance to demagnetization that in turn permitted stray microns to gather along the outer edges of the tape and haunt through subsequent recordings. [Janne Vanhanen, “Loving the ghost in the machine: Aesthetics of interruption.” Paper originally presented at the Refrains conference at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, 29 September, 2001, Paragraph 5. http://www.ctheory.net / articles. aspx?id=312 (accessed October 2005)]. 16 Peter C. Van Wyck. Signs of danger: Waste, trauma, and nuclear

262

The Most Dangerous Film in the World















threat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 19. 17 Media announcements were given to the Pravda newspaper, state television, the Novosti press agency (APN) and the Tass Agency and their correspondent in the Ukraine. Reporter Igor Kostin, who worked for Tass, took the first photographic image of the destroyed reactor at Chernobyl. Like Vladimir Shevchenko, his film was also riven by radioactive contaminants, most of the roll incinerated and unreadable, Kostin, Chernobyl: Confessions of a reporter, 10. 18 Jim T. Smith and Nicholas A. Beresford, Chernobyl: Catastrophe and consequences (London: Springer, 2005), 25. 19 Gilles Deleuze, The logic of sense, trans. by M. Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 4. 20 Ibidem, 4 – 5. 21 See the entry on the event by Cliff Stagoll in Adrian Parr’s The Deleuze dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2005), 87 – 88. 22 Deleuze, The logic of sense, 20. 23 Ibidem, 21. 24 Gilles Deleuze, The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by T. Conley, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 76 – 82. 25 Gilles Deleuze, The logic of sense, trans. by M. Lester. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 52. 26 Ibidem, 20. 27 Stas Tyrkin, “Tarkovsky’s Stalker Foretold Chernobyl,” (Komsomol-

skaya Pravda 23 March, 2001), paragraph 2. 28 Ibid. 29 Paul Virilio, The original accident (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 9. 30 See the discussion of fetishes and fossils in Laura Marks’s The skin of film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses (London: Duke University Press, 2000), 89. 31 Radiological film reading is a technical term and form of diagnostic cryptography that refers to the practice of optically decoding the incandescent semiotics registered by processes of X-ray technology – a mode of radiographic literacy that is used to examine welds in reactor rods and search for signs of malignancy in flesh. 32 If art is an “early warning system” to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls … Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: The extensions of man (Toronto: Signet Press, 1964), xi. 33 Ibidem, 33. 34 The signal-to-noise ratio is a metric used in signal processing to quantify interference effects in radar systems and better allocate their range of attention to specific targets of interest. 35 For example, one of the related incidents I have examined is the

263

Susan Schuppli recent death of Alexander Sasha Litvinenko, Russian intelligence agent-turned-dissident who succumbed to a lethal dose of a radioactive material (specifically, Polonium 210) in London in November of 2006.

264

part iiI  – IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

Consumption

David Graeber

Consumption 2011 

From:Current Anthropology vol. 52, No. 4 (2011), 489 – 511 [The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research] © The Author & The Publisher

269

David Graeber

I do not want to offer yet another critique of consumption or of consumer practices. I want to ask instead why it is that we assume such things exist. Why is it that when we see someone buying refrigerator magnets and someone else putting on eyeliner or cooking dinner or singing at a karaoke bar or just sitting around watching television, we assume that they are on some level doing the same thing, that it can be described as consumption or consumer behaviour, and that these are all in some way analogous to eating food?1 I want to ask where this term came from, why we ever started using it, and what it says about our assumptions about property, desire, and social relations that we continue to use it. Finally, I want to suggest that maybe this is not the best way to think about such phenomena and that we might do well to come up with better ones. To do so necessarily means taking on a whole intellectual industry that has developed over the past few decades around the study of consumption. For most scholars, not only is the category of consumption self-evident in its importance but also one of the greatest sins of past social theorists was their failure to acknowledge it. 2 Since the mid-1980 s, theoretical discussions of the topic in anthropology, sociology, history, or cultural studies almost invariably begin by denouncing past scholars for having refused to give consumption sufficient due. The most frequent villains are the Frankfurt School. One widely used cultural studies textbook begins by explaining that theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the expansion of mass production in the twentieth century had led to the commodification of culture, with the rise of culture industries. Consumption served the interests of manufacturers seeking greater profits, and citizens became the passive victims of advertisers. Processes of standardiza-

270

Consumption

tion, they argued were accompanied by the development of a materialistic culture, in which commodities came to lack authenticity and instead merely met false needs. These need were generated by marketing and advertising strategies and, it is argued increased the capacity for ideological control or domination. 3

The author goes on to observe that this view was first shaken when ethnographers such as Dick Hebdige (1979)4 began examining the actual behaviour of those involved in youth subcultures and discovered that rather than being passive and easily manipulated... young consumers were active, creative and critical in their appropriation and transformation of material artifacts. In a process of bricolage, they appropriated reaccented rearticulated or transcoded the material of mass culture to their own ends, through a range of everyday creative and symbolic practices. Through such processes of appropriation, identities are constructed. 5 

Of course, Hebdige was dealing not just with subcultures but mainly with self-conscious countercultures. Still, this became the model. Before long, what was taken to be true of rebellious youth came to be seen as true, if perhaps in a less flamboyant fashion, of all consumers. Rather than being passive victims of media manipulation, they were active agents. In anthropology, a number of scholars soon began making similar arguments and telling similar stories from the mid-1980 s to the early 1990s:6 in The Social Life of Things, 7 in Consumption and Identity, and above all, 8 in a series of books beginning with Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Each of these authors had his own version of the story, and each developed his own idiosyncratic theories of what consumption was all about,

271

David Graeber

Consumption

but what was ultimately more important than any particular author’s version was what might be described as the standard narrative that began to take shape in classes, seminars, and informal graduate school conversations at the time. This was a surprisingly uniform little morality tale that runs something like this. Once upon a time, it begins, we all used to subscribe to a Marxist view of political economy that saw production as the driving force of history and the only truly legitimate field of social struggle. Insofar as we even thought about consumer demand, it was largely written off as an artificial creation, the results of manipulative techniques by advertisers and marketers meant to unload products that nobody really needed. But eventually we began to realize that this view was not only mistaken but also profoundly elitist and puritanical. Real working people find most of their life’s pleasures in consumption.What is more, they do not simply swallow whatever marketers throw at them like so many mindless automatons; they create their own meanings out of the products with which they chose to surround themselves. In fact, insofar as they fashion identities for themselves, those identities are largely based on the cars they drive, clothes they wear, music they listen to, and videos they watch. In denouncing consumption, we are denouncing what gives meaning to the lives of the very people we claim we wish to liberate. 9 The obvious question is, Who is this we? After all, it is not as if cultural anthropology had ever produced any Frankfurt School style analysis of consumption to begin with. This seems all the more significant because the story was not simply told at one historical juncture. By now it has effectively become a regular instrument of academic socialization whereby graduate students many themselves coming from counter-cultural backgrounds or at least still struggling with their own adolescent revulsion against consumer culture

adjust themselves to more settled consumer-oriented lives. Still, the real (and rather perverse) effect of this narrative has been to import the categories of political economy the picture of a world divided into two broad spheres, one of industrial production, another of consumption into a field that had never seen the world that way before. It is no coincidence that this is a view of the world equally dear to Marxist theorists who once wished to challenge the world capitalist system and to the neoliberal economists currently managing it. Perhaps this is not entirely surprising. I have argued elsewhere that as an ideology, 10 at least, neoliberalism consists largely of such systematic inversions: taking concepts and ideas that originated in subversive, even revolutionary rhetoric and transforming it into ways of presenting capitalism itself as subversive and revolutionary. And the story looks rather different if one looks at the broader social context, particularly what was happening within capitalism itself. Until the mid-1970 s, economists and marketers, when they sought outside expertise to help understand consumer behaviour, tended to consult psychologists. Starting in the late 1970s, essays in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour and other marketing journals began to argue for the importance of social context the foundational essay here is often considered to be by Russel W. Belk and look to anthropology, in particular, for models and assistance. 11 At first there was a great deal of resistance to this line of approach within marketing studies itself, but as advertisers themselves began to speak of accelerated market segmentation and increasingly move to defining consumers as, essentially, a diverse collection of subcultures, it became more and more obviously relevant. The first major attempt at an alliance between anthropologists and economists in the study of consumption was soon to follow Mary Douglas’s work with Baron Isherwood, The

272

273

David Graeber

World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. 12 Their work, however, had little real traction in the discipline largely because it came from a fairly explicitly conservative political position it was framed in part as a rejoinder to 1960 s countercultural types who criticized materialist values. In fact, with the exception of a few mavericks such as Steve Barnett, who (also in 1979) left academia to set up his own marketing consultancy firm, anthropology as a discipline remained largely reluctant to answer the business world’s call. 13 The real breakthrough occurred in the late 1980s with the populist turn described above, that is, when anthropologists began to take the opposite approach to Douglas, and rather than condemn countercultures, they effectively began treating all cultures as subcultures and all subcultures as countercultures. The following quote is from a recently published encyclopaedia of anthropology, in the section,“Anthropology and Business” The British anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that this turn represented a metamorphosis of anthropology, from a less mature state in which mass consumption goods were viewed as threatening (i.e., signifying both the loss of culture and a threat to the survival of anthropology) to a more enlightened outlook that frankly acknowledges consumption as the local idiom through which cultural forms express their creativity and diversity. This rather amazing about face has permitted a confluence of interest between anthropology and the field of marketing. 14 

The author goes on to observe that the literature in consumer behaviour and marketing produced by anthropologists has been well received by marketing

274

Consumption

departments and corporations, with the result that anthropologists now hold positions in the marketing departments of several major business schools (e.g., University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of Nebraska, University of Utah). It would appear that anthropology is now a permanent addition to the disciplines that comprise the academic marketing field. 15 

A synthetic discipline, called consumer culture theory16 has emerged as increasing numbers of anthropologists follow the path blazed by Barnett and work directly with advertising firms on specific campaigns. I certainly do not mean to suggest that pressures from the corporate world created this discourse; as I say, all this was part of a much broader infiltration of neoliberal categories into anthropology that was happening at the time. Neither do I mean to suggest that the resultant field of consumption studies has been driven by business interests or for that matter that it has not produced any number of interesting and worthwhile analyses. What I do want to argue is that this choice of initial terms has made a difference. This is what I really want to investigate. How did consumption become a field of anthropology, and what does it mean that we now call certain kinds of behaviour consumption rather than something else? It is a curious fact, for example, that those who write about consumption almost never define the term. 17 I suspect this is in part because the tacit definition they are using is so extraordinarily broad. In common academic usage (and to an only slightly less degree popular usage), consumption has come to mean any activity that involves the purchase, use or enjoyment of any manufactured or agricultural product for any purpose other than the production or exchange of new commodities. For most

275

David Graeber

Consumption

wage labourers, this means nearly anything one does when not working for wages. Imagine, for example, four teenagers who decide to form a band. They scare up some instruments, teach themselves to play, write songs, come up with an act, and practice long hours in the garage. Now it seems reasonable to see such behaviour as production of some sort or another, but if one takes the common de facto definition to its logical conclusion, it would be much more likely to be placed in the sphere of consumption simply because they did not themselves manufacture the guitars. 18 Granted this is something of a reductio ad absurdum. But it is precisely by defining consumption so broadly that anthropologists can then turn around and claim that consumption has been falsely portrayed as passive acquiescence when in fact it is more often an important form of creative self-expression. Perhaps the real question should be, Why does the fact that manufactured goods are involved in an activity automatically come to define its very nature? It seems to me that this theoretical choice the assumption that the main thing people do when they are not working is consuming things carries within it a tacit cosmology, a theory of human desire and fulfilment whose implications we would do well to think about. 19 This is what I want to investigate in the rest of this paper. Let me begin by looking at the history of the word consumption itself.

The English to consume derives from the Latin verb consumere, meaning to seize or take over completely and, hence, by extension, to eat up, devour, waste, destroy, or spend. To be consumed by fire, or for that matter consumed with rage, still holds the same implications: it implies something not

just being thoroughly taken over but being overwhelmed in a way that dissolves away the autonomy of the object or even that destroys the object itself. Consumption first appears in English in the fourteenth century. In early French and English usages, the connotations were almost always negative. To consume something meant to destroy it, to make it burn up, evaporate, or waste away. Hence, wasting diseases consumed their victims, a usage that according to the Oxford English Dictionary is already documented by 1395. This is why tuberculosis came to be known as consumption. At first the now-familiar sense of consumption as eating or drinking was very much a secon­dary meaning. Rather, when applied to material goods, consumption was almost always synonymous with waste: it meant destroying something that did not have to be (at least quite so thoroughly) destroyed. 20  The contemporary usage, then, is relatively recent. If we were still talking the language of the fourteenth or even seventeenth centuries, a consumer society would have meant a society of wastrels and destroyers. Consumption in the contemporary sense really appears in the political economy literature only in the late eighteenth century, when authors such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo began to use it as the opposite of production.21 One of the crucial features of the industrial capitalism emerging at the time was a growing separation between the places in which people or men, at least worked and the places where they lived. This in turn made it possible to imagine that the economy (itself a very new concept) was divided into two completely separate spheres: the workplace, in which goods were produced, and the household, in which they were consumed. That which was created in one sphere is used ultimately, used up, destroyed in the other. Vintners produce

276

277

Etymologies and Antecedents

David Graeber

Consumption

wine, and consumers take it home and drink it; chemical plants produce ink, and consumers take it home, put it in pens, and write with it, and so on. Of course, even from the start, it was more difficult to see in what sense consumers were consuming silverware or books because these are not destroyed by use; however, because just about anything does eventually wear out or have to be replaced the usage was not entirely implausible. All this did, certainly, bring home one of the defining features of capitalism: that it is a motor of endless production, one that can maintain its equilibrium, in fact, only by continual growth. Endless cycles of destruction do seem to be, necessarily, the other side of this. To make way for new products, all that old stuff must somehow be cleared away, destroyed or at least cast aside as outmoded or irrelevant. And this is indeed the defining feature of consumer society as usually described (especially by its critics): one that casts aside any lasting values in the name of an endless cycling of ephemera. It is a society of sacrifice and destruction. And often what seems to most fascinate Western scholars and the Western public about people living in radically different economic circumstances are phenomena that seem to mirror this in one way or another. George Bataille [1937]22 saw here a clue to the nature of culture itself, whose essence he saw as lying in apparently irrational acts of wild sacrificial destruction, for which he drew on examples such as Aztec human sacrifice or the Kwakiutl potlatch. 23 Or consider the fascination with the potlatch itself. It is hard not to think about Northwest Coast potlatch without immediately evoking images of chiefs setting fire to vast piles of wealth such images play a central role not only in Bataille’s but in just about every popular essay on gift economies since. If one examines the sources, though, it turns out most Kwakiutl potlatches were stately redistri­

butive affairs, and our image is really based on a handful of extremely unusual ones held around 1900 at a time when the Kwakiutl population was simultaneously devastated by disease and was undergoing an enormous economic boom. 24 Clearly, the spectacle of chiefs vying for titles by setting fire to piles of blankets or other valuables strikes our imagination not so much because it reveals some fundamental truth about human nature largely suppressed in our own society as because it reflects a barely hidden truth about the nature of our own consumer society: that it is largely organized around the ceremonial destruction of commodities. Consumption, then, refers to an image of human existence that first appears in the North Atlantic world around the time of the industrial revolution, one that sees what humans do outside the workplace largely as a matter of destroying things or using them up. It is especially easy to perceive the impoverishment this introduces into accustomed ways of talking about the basic sources of human desire and gratification by comparing it to the ways earlier Western thinkers had talked about such matters. St. Augustine and Hobbes, 25 for example, both saw human beings as creatures of unlimited desire, and they therefore concluded that if left to their own devices, they would always end up locked in competition. As Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, 26 in this they almost exactly anticipated the assumptions of later economic theory. But when they listed what humans desired neither emphasized anything like the modern notion of consumption. In fact, both came up with more or less the same list: humans, they said, desire (1) sensual pleasures, (2) the accumulation of riches (a pursuit assumed to be largely aimed at winning the praise and esteem of others), and (3) power. 27  None were primarily about using anything up. 28 Even Adam Smith, 29 who first introduced the term consumption

278

279

David Graeber

Consumption

in its modern sense in The Wealth of Nations, turned to an entirely different framework when he developed a theory of desire in his Theory of Moral Sentiments30 one that assumed that what most humans want above all is to be the object of others’ sympathetic attention. 31  It was only with the growth of economic theory and its gradual colonization of other disciplines that desire itself began to be imagined as the desire to consume. The notion of consumption, then, that assumes that human fulfilment is largely about acts of (more or less ceremonial) material destruction represents something of a break in the ­Western tradition. It is hard to find anything written before the eighteenth century that precisely anticipates it. It seems to appears abruptly, mainly in countries such as England and France, at exactly the moment when historians of those places begin to talk about the rise of something they call consumer society or simply consumerism,32 that is, the moment when a significant portion of the population could be said to be organizing their lives around the pursuit of something called consumer goods, defined as goods they did not see as necessities but as in some sense objects of desire, chosen from a range of products, subject to the whims of fashion (ephemera again), and so on.

All this makes it sound as if the story should really begin around 1750 or even 1776. But could such basic assumptions about what people thought life is about really have changed that abruptly? It seems to me there are other ways to tell the story that suggest much greater continuities. One would be to examine the concept of desire itself as it emerged in the Western philosophical tradition, to understand how it is that consumption could become our key idiom for talking about

material desire. Here I think there is a great deal of continuity, and investigating it should make it much easier to understand why in fact European thought provided fertile ground for the emergence of such a concept one that, I suspect, would have seemed quite odd almost anywhere else. This approach might seem surprising because it is not as if one can immediately identify a single Western theory of desire. In fact, thinking on the matter in what we have come to think of as the Western philosophical tradition contains a number of apparently contradictory strands. Since Plato, the most common approach has been to see desire as rooted in a feeling of absence or lack. This does make a certain obvious intuitive sense. One desires what one does not have. One feels an absence and imagines how one might like to fill it; this very action of the mind is what we think of as desire. But there is also an alternative tradition that goes back at least to Spinoza that starts off not from the yearning for some absent object but from something even more fundamental: self-preservation, the desire to continue to exist (Nietzsche’s life which desires itself). 33 Here desire becomes the fundamental energetic glue that makes individuals what they are over time. Both strands continue to do battle in contemporary social theory as well. Desire as lack is especially developed in the work of Jacques Lacan. 34 The key notion here is of the mirror stage, where an infant, who is at first really a bundle of drives and sensations unaware of its own existence as a discrete bounded entity, manages to construct a sense of self around some external image, for example, an encounter with his or her own reflection in the mirror. One can generalize from here a much broader theory of desire (or perhaps merely desire in its more tawdry narcissistic forms) where the object of desire is always some image of perfection, an imaginary completion for one’s own ruptured

280

281

Theories of Desire

David Graeber

Consumption

sense of self. 35 But then there is also the approach adopted by authors such as Deleuze and Guattari, 36 who wrote AntiOedipus, their famous critique of psychoanalysis, largely as an attack on this kind of thinking. Appealing to the Spinozist / Nietzschean tradition, they deny that desire should be found in any sense of lack at all. Rather, it is something that flows between everyone and everything; much like Foucault’s power, it becomes the energy knitting everything together. As such, desire is everything and nothing; there is very little one can actually say about it. One might be tempted to conclude at this point that desire is not a very useful theoretical concept that is, 37 one that can be meaningfully distinguished from needs, or urges, or intentions because even authors working within the same philosophical tradition cannot make up their minds what it is supposed to mean. But if one goes back to the origins of the alternative tradition of Spinoza, 38 one soon discovers that the two strands are not nearly as different as they appear. When Spinoza refers to the universal driving force of all beings to persist in their being and expand their powers of action, he is referring not to desire [cupiditas] but to what he calls conatus, usually translated will. On a bodily level, conatus takes the form of a host of appetites: attractions, dispositions, and so forth. Desire is the idea of an appetite, the imaginative construction one puts on some such attraction or disposition. 39 In other words, the one constant element in all these definitions is that desire (unlike needs, urges, or intentions) necessarily involves the imagination. Objects of desire are always imaginary objects and usually imaginary totalities of some sort because, as I have argued before, most totalities are themselves imaginary objects. 40  The other way one might say desire differs from needs, urges, or intentions is that as Tzvetan Todorov puts it, it al-

ways implies the desire for some kind of social relation. 41 There must necessarily be some kind of quest for recognition involved. The problem is that owing to the extreme individualism typical of the Western philosophical tradition, this tends to be occluded even where it is not, the desire for recognition is assumed to be the basis for some kind of profound existential conflict. The classic text here is Hegel’s On Lordship and Bondage, the famous master / slave dialectic in Phenomenology of Spirit that has made it difficult for future theorists to think of this kind of desire without also thinking of violence and domination. 42  If I may be allowed a very abbreviated summary of Hegel’s argument, 43 human beings are not animals because they have the capacity for self-consciousness. To be self-conscious means to be able to look at ourselves from an outside perspective that must necessarily be that of another human being. All these were familiar arguments at the time; Hegel’s great innovation was to bring in desire, to point out that to look at ourselves this way, one has to have some reason to want to do it. This sort of desire is also inherent in the nature of humanity, according to Hegel, because unlike animals, humans desire recognition. Animals experience desire simply as the absence of something: they are hungry; therefore, they wish to negate that negation by obtaining food; they have sexual urges; therefore, they seek a mate. 44 Humans go further. They not only wish to have sex at least, if they are being truly human about the matter but also wish to be recognized by their partner as someone worthy of having sex with. That is, they wish to be loved. We desire to be the object of another’s desire. So far this seems straightforward enough: human desire implies mutual recognition. The problem is that for Hegel, the quest for mutual recognition inevitably leads to violent conflict, to life-and-death struggles for supremacy.

282

283

David Graeber

Consumption

He provides a little parable: two men confront each other at the beginning of history (as in all such stories, they appear to be 40-year-old males who simply rose out of the earth fully formed). Each wishes to be recognized by the other as a free, autonomous, fully human being. But in order for the other’s recognition to be meaningful, he must prove to himself that the other is fully human and worthy of recognizing him; the only way to do this is to see whether he values his freedom and autonomy so much that he is willing to risk his life for it. A battle ensures. But a battle for recognition is inherently unwinnable, because if you kill your opponent, there is no one to recognise you; on the other hand, if your opponent surrenders, he proves by that very act that he was not willing to sacrifice his life for recognition after all and therefore that his recognition is meaningless. One can of course reduce a defeated opponent to slavery, but even that is self-defeating, because once one reduces the Other to slavery, one becomes dependent on one’s slave for one’s very material survival while the slave at least produces his own life and is in fact able to realize himself to some degree through his work. This is a myth, a parable. Clearly, there is something profoundly true in it. Still, it is one thing to say that quest for mutual recognition is necessarily going to be tricky, full of pitfalls, with a constant danger of descending into attempts to dominate or even obliterate the Other. It is another thing to assume from the start that mutual recognition is impossible. As Majeed Yar has pointed out, this assumption has come to dominate almost all subsequent Western thinking on the subject, 45 especially since Sartre refigured recognition as the gaze that, he argued necessarily pins down, squashes, and objectifies the Other. 46 As in so much Western theory, when social relations are not simply ignored they are assumed to be inherently competitive. Todorov notes that much of this

is the result of starting one’s examples with a collection of adult males: psychologically, he argues, it is quite possible to argue that the first moment in which we act as fully human beings is when we seek recognition from others, but that is because the first thing a human baby does that an animal baby does not do is try to catch her mother’s eye, an act with rather different implications. 47 At this point, I think we have the elements for a preliminary synthesis. Insofar as it is useful to distinguish something called desire from needs, urges, or intentions, then, it is because desire (a) is always rooted in imagination and (b) tends to direct itself toward some kind of social relation, real or imaginary, and that social relation generally entails a desire for some kind of recognition and hence an imaginative reconstruction of the self, a process fraught with dangers of destroying that social relation or turning it into some kind of terrible conflict. Now, all this is more arranging the elements of a possible theory than proposing one; it leaves open the actual mechanics of how these elements interact. But if nothing else, it helps explain why the word desire has become so popular with authors who write about modern consumerism, which is, we are told, all about imaginary pleasures and the construction of identities. Even here, though, the historical connections between ideas are not what one might imagine. In the next section, I will look at theories of consumerism as desire and see how they tie into this broader philosophical tradition one rooted I believe, in some very fundamental underlying assumptions about the nature of human beings.

Let me begin with Colin Campbell’s Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 48 certainly one of the

284

285

On Lovers and Consumers

David Graeber

Consumption

more creative essays on the subject. Campbell’s book aims to provide a corrective to the usual critique of consumer culture, which is that it throws up all sorts of wonderful fantasies about what you will get when you purchase some product and inevitably disappoints you once you get the product. It is this constant lack of satisfaction, the argument goes, that then drives consumption and thus allows the endless expansion of production. If the system delivered on its promises, the whole thing would not work. Campbell is not denying this happens so much as he is questioning whether the process itself is really so frustrating or unpleasant as most accounts imply. Really, he says, is not all this a form of pleasure in itself? In fact, he argues that it is the unique accomplishment of modern consumerism that it has assisted in the creation of a genuinely new form of hedonism. Traditional hedonism, Campbell argues, was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women, and song; sex, drugs, and rock and roll; whatever the local equivalent. The problem from a capitalist perspective is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated and bored. There are logistical problems. Modern self-illusory hedonism, as he calls it, solves this dilemma because here what one is really consuming are fantasies and daydreams about what having a certain product would be like. The rise of this new kind of hedonism, he argues, can be traced back to certain sensational forms of Puritan religious life but primarily to the new interest in pleasure through the vicarious experience of extreme emotions and states that one sees emerge in the popularity of Gothic novels and the like in the eighteenth century and that peaks with romanticism itself. The result is a social order that has become, in large measure, a vast apparatus for the fashioning of daydreams. These reveries attach themselves to the promise of pleasure afforded by

some particular consumer good or set of them; they produce the endless desires that drive consumption, but in the end, the real enjoyment is not in the consumption of the physical objects but in the reveries themselves. 49  The problem with this argument or one of them (one could find all sorts) is the claim that all of this was something new. It is not just the obvious point that pleasure through vicarious participation in extreme experience did not become a significant social phenomenon only in the seventeenth century. It was accepted wisdom as early the eleventh century that desire was largely about taking pleasure in fantasies. Here I turn to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the Romanian historian of religions Ioan Couliano on medieval and Renaissance theories of love. 50 These theories all turned on the notion of what was called the pneumatic system. One of the greatest problems in medieval metaphysics was to explain how it was possible for the rational soul to perceive objects in the material world because the two were assumed to be of absolutely alien natures. The solution was to posit an intermediate astral substance called pneuma, or spirit, that translated sense impressions into phantasmic images. These images then circulated through the body’s pneumatic system (which centred on the heart) before they could be comprehended by the intellectual faculties of the soul. Because this was essentially the zone of imagination, all sensations, or even abstract ideas, had to proceed through the imagination becoming emotionally charged in the process before they could reach the mind. Hence, erotic theory held that when a man fell in love with a woman, he was really in love not with the woman herself but with her image, one that, once lodged in his pneumatic system, gradually came to hijack it, vampirising his imagination and ultimately drawing off all his physical and spiritual energies. Medical

286

287

David Graeber

Consumption

writers tended to represent this as a disease that needed to be cured poets and lovers represented it as a heroic state that combined pleasures (in fantasy but also, somewhat perversely, in the very experience of frustration and denial) with an intrinsic spiritual or mystical value in itself. The one thing all agreed on, though, is that anyone who got the idea that one could resolve the matter by embracing the object of his or her fantasy was missing the point. The very idea was considered a symptom of a profound mental disorder, a species of melancholia. Here Agamben discusses Ficino:

Agamben goes on to quote the French scholastic Henry of Ghent to the effect that melancholics cannot conceive the incorporeal as such because they do not know how to extend their intelligence beyond space and size. For such depressive characters, lonely brooding is punctuated by frustrated urges to seize what cannot really be seized. 52  Now, one might quibble over whether anyone was ever quite so consistently pure in his or her affections as all this might imply. A fair amount of embracing certainly did go on in medieval Europe, as elsewhere. Still, this was the ideal,

and critically it became the model not just for sexual desire but for desire in general that is, at least among the literate elites. This leads to the interesting suggestion that from the perspective of this particular form of medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization as Campbell describes it is really a form of clinical depression, 53 which in some ways does actually make a lot of sense. 54  Couliano is more interested in how erotic theory was appropriated by Renaissance magicians such as Giordano Bruno, for whom the mechanics of sexual attraction became the paradigm for all forms of attraction or desire and, hence, the key to social power. 55 If human beings tend to become dominated by powerful, emotionally charged images, then anyone who developed a comprehensive scientific understanding of the mechanics by which such images work could become a master manipulator. It should be possible to develop techniques for binding and influencing others’ minds, for instance, by fixing certain emotionally charged images in their heads or even little bits of music (jingles, basically) that could be designed in such a way as to keep coming back into people’s minds despite themselves and pull them in one direction or another. 56 In all of this, Couliano sees, not unreasonably, the first self-conscious form of the modern arts of propaganda and advertising. Bruno felt his services should be of great interest to princes and politicians. It apparently never occurred to Bruno or anyone else in this early period to apply such protoadvertising techniques to economic rather than political purposes. Politics, after all, is about relations between people. Manipulating others was, by definition, a political business, which I think brings out the most fundamental difference between the medieval conception of desire and the sort of thing Campbell describes. 57 If one starts with a model of desire where the object of desire

288

289

In the same passage, the specific character of melancholic Eros was identified by Ficino as disjunction and excess. This tends to occur, he wrote, to those who, misusing love, transform what rightly belongs to contemplation into the desire of the embrace. The erotic intention that unleashes the melancholic disorder presents itself as that which would possess and touch what ought merely to be the object of contemplation, and the tragic insanity of the saturnine temperament thus finds its root in the intimate contradiction of a gesture that would embrace the unobtainable. 51 

David Graeber

Consumption

is assumed to be a human being, then it only makes sense that one cannot completely possess the object. (Embrace is a nice metaphor, actually, because it is so inherently fleeting.) And one is presumably not intentionally in the business of destroying it, either. One might say, then, as a starting point, that the shift from the kind of model of desire that predominated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the kind of consumerist model described by Campbell is a shift from one whose paradigm is erotic to one in which the primary metaphor is eating food.

Still, even if one examines the original medieval version, the basic conception is already surprisingly individualistic. This is because it is so passive. Desire is the result of an individual receiving sense impressions from outside. Now it is certainly true that this is one very common experience of desire, as something that seems to seize us from outside our conscious control, let alone better judgment, and often causes us to do things for which we would really rather not hold ourselves entirely responsible. But it also allows us to overlook the fact that desire emerges in relations between people. Granted the relationship between lover and beloved even an imaginary one, is a relationship of a sort. Still, it is easier to see how much this opens the way to a purely individualistic conception if one compares this particular model of desire as developed explicitly in medieval and Renaissance theory and tacitly through the sort of consumer practice Campbell describes with, 58 say, the kind of value-based approach I have tried to develop elsewhere. 59 Money, for example, can be considered in Marxian terms as a representation of the value (importance) of productive labour (human creative ac-

tion) as well as the means by which it is socially measured and coordinated but it is also a representation that brings into being the very thing it represents, because after all, in a market economy, people work in order to get money. Arguably, something analogous happens everywhere.Value then could be said to be the way the importance of one’s own actions register in the imagination always by translation into some larger social language or system of meaning, by being integrated into some greater social whole. It also always happens through some kind of concrete medium which can be almost anything (wampum, oratorical performances, sumptuous tableware, kula artefacts, Egyptian pyramids) and these objects in turn (unless they are utterly generic substances, such as money, that represent sheer potentiality) tend to incorporate in their own structure a kind of schematic model of the forms of creative action that bring them into being but that also become objects of desire that end up motivating actors to carry out those very actions. Just as the desire for money inspires one to labour, the desire for tokens of honour inspires forms of honourable behaviour, the desire for tokens of love inspires romantic behaviour, and so on. 60 By contrast, pneumatic theory begins not from actions but from what might once have been called passions. Godfrey Lienhardt long ago pointed out that while actions and passions form a logical set either you act on the world or the world acts on you we have become so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing ourselves as passive recipients that the latter term has almost completely disappeared from the way we talk about experience. 61 Medieval and Renaissance authors did not yet have such qualms. In pneumatic theory, passions are not what one does but what is done to one (where one is not agent but patient); at the same time, they referred as they do now, to strong emotions that seem to seize us against

290

291

Complications 1: Individualism

David Graeber

Consumption

our will. The two were linked emotions such as love were in fact seen as being caused by just such impressions on the pneumatic system. Far from being models of action, in fact, passivity came to be seen as a virtue in itself: it was those who tried to act on their passions, to seize the object rather than contemplate it, who really missed the point. Framing things in such passive terms then opened the way for that extreme individualism that appears to be the other side of the peculiarly Western theory of desire. A schema of action is almost of necessity a collective product; the impression of a beautiful image is something that one can imagine involves a relation between only two people or even (in so far as love became a mystical phenomenon) between the desirer and God. Even with romantic love, the ideal was that it should not really be translated into an ongoing social relation but remain a matter of contemplation and fantasy.

All this makes it easier to understand how it might be possible to shift from erotic fantasies to something more like the modern idea of consumption. Still, the transition, I would argue, also required a number of other conceptual shifts and displacements in terms of both class and gender. Compare, for example, how images of paradise in m ­ edieval and early modern Europe varied by social milieu. When peasants, craftspeople, and the urban poor tried to imagine a land in which all desires would be fulfilled they tended to focus on the abundance of food. Hence, the Land of Cockaigne, where bloated people loll about as geese fly fully cooked into their mouths, rivers run with beer, and so forth. Carnival, as Mikhail Bakhtin so richly illustrated, 62 expands on all the

same themes, jumbling together every sort of bodily indulgence and enormity, pleasures sexual as well as gastronomic and every other kind. Still, the predominant imagery always centres on sausages, hogsheads, legs of mutton, lard and tripe, and tubs of wine. The emphasis on food is in striking contrast with visions of earthly paradise in other parts of the world at that time (such as those prevalent in the Islamic world), which were mostly about sex. Erotic fantasies are usually strikingly absent from the literature on the Land of Cockaigne; if they are present, they seem thrown in rather by way of an afterthought. As Herman Pleij has pointed out, 63 the medieval high culture version of paradise was in many ways conceived in direct opposition to the popular one not that it emphasized erotic pleasures, either. Instead, it tended to fix on what we would now call elite consumables, the exotic ­commodities of the day that were primarily essences: spices above all but also incense perfumes, and similar delicate scents and flavours. Instead of the Land of Cockaigne, one finds a hankering after the lost Garden of Eden, thought to exist somewhere in the East, near the fabled kingdom of Prester John anyway, 64 from somewhere near those fragrant lands whence cardamom, mace, peppers, and cumin (not to mention frankincense and myrrh) were harvested. Rather than a land of complete fatty indulgence in every sort of food, these were often conceived as lands whose ethereal inhabitants did not have to eat at all but simply subsisted on beautiful smells. 65 This emphasis on refined flavours and fragrances in turn opens onto a whole different realm of experience: of taste, ephemerality, fleeting essences, and, ultimately, the familiar elite ­consumption worlds of fashion, style, and the pursuit of ungraspable novelty. Once again, then, the elite who in reality, of course, tended to grasp and embrace all sorts of things

292

293

Complications 2: Shifting Lines of Class and Gender

David Graeber

Consumption

constructed their ideal of desire around that which somehow seemed to escape their hold. One might argue that the modern consumer ethos is built on a kind of fusion between these two class ideals. The shift from a conception of desire modelled on erotic love to one based on the desire for food (consumption) was clearly a shift in the direction of popular discourse; at the same time, though, one might say the innovative aspect of modern consumeristic theories of desire is to combine the popular materialist emphasis on consumption with the notion of the ephemeral ungraspable image as the driving force of maximization of production. This might at least suggest a solution to what has always struck me as a profound paradox in Western social theory. As I have already noted the idea of human beings as creatures tainted by original sin and therefore cursed with infinite wants, as beings living in a finite universe who were inevitably in a state of generalized competition, was already fully developed by authors such as St. Augustine and therefore formed an accepted part of Christian doctrine throughout the Middle Ages. At the same time, very few people actually seemed to behave like this. Economically, the Middle Ages were still the time of target incomes, in which the typical reaction to economic good times, even among urban craftspeople and most of the protobourgeoisie, was to take more days off. It is as if the notion of the maximizing individual existed in theory long before it emerged in practice. One explanation might be that until the early modern period, at least, high culture (whether in its most Christian or most courtly versions) tended to devalue any open display of greed appetite, or acquisitiveness, while popular culture which could sometimes heartily embrace such impulses did so in forms that were inherently collective. When the Land of Cockaigne was translated into reality, it was in the form of popular festivals

such as Carnival; almost any increase in popular wealth was immediately diverted into communal feasts, parades, and collective indulgences. One of the processes that made capitalism possible, then, was what might be termed the privatization of desire. The highly individualistic perspectives of the elite had to be combined with the materialistic indulgences of what Bakhtin liked to call the material lower stratum. Getting from there to anything like the capitalist notion of consumption required I think, one further shift, this time along lines not of class but of gender. The courtly love literature and related theories of desire represent a purely male perspective, 66 and this no doubt was true of fantasies about the Land of Cockaigne and similar idealized worlds of gastronomic fulfilment, too. Although here it was complicated the fact is that in the folk psychology of the day, women were widely considered more lustful, greedy, and generally desirous than men. Insofar as anyone was represented as insatiable, then, it was women: the image of woman as a ravenous belly, demanding ever more sex and food, and men as haplessly labouring in an endless but ultimately impossible effort to satisfy them is a standard misogynist topos going back at least to Hesiod. Christian doctrine only reinforced it by saddling women with the primary blame for original sin and thus insisting that they bore the brunt of the punishment. It was only around the time of the industrial revolution and the full split between workplace and household that this sort of rhetoric was largely set aside and women proper bourgeois women, anyway were redefined as innocent, largely sexless creatures, guardians of homes that were no longer seen as places of production but as havens in a heartless world. Significantly, it was at just the moment that consumption came to be defined as an essentially feminine business. 67

294

295

David Graeber

Consumption

The legacy of this shift is still with us. As feminist theorists emphasize, 68 women in contemporary consumer culture remain caught in a perpetual suspension between embodying the extremes of both spirit and matter, transcendent image and material reality, that seems to play itself out in impossible dilemmas about food.

really has not. It was at this point, once we were expected to try to satisfy one’s desires in what we have come to think of as the real world, that the ephemeral nature of experience, and therefore of any embrace, becomes an impossible dilemma. 70 One is already seeing such dilemmas worked out in De Sade, he argues, again around the same time as the dawn of consumer culture. This is pretty much the argument one would have to make if one were to confine oneself, as Agamben does, entirely too literary and philosophical texts. In the past couple sections I have been trying to develop a more socially nuanced approach that argues, among other things, that the modern concept of consumption, which carries with it the tacit assumption that there is no end to what anyone might want, could really only take form once certain elite concepts of desire as the pursuit of ephemera and phantasms fused effectively, with the popular emphasis on food. Still, I do not think this is quite a complete or adequate explanation. There is, I believe, another element that made all this possible, perhaps inevitable. This was the expansion of the market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the redefinition of the world according to an essentially market logic that came to accompany it. MacPherson first referred to it as an ideology of possessive individualism but in this case, 71 an ideology that extended far beyond the disputations of the learned and effected the perceptions of artisans and rabble-rousing politicians one by which people increasingly came to see themselves as isolated beings who defined their relation with the world not in terms of social relations but in terms of property rights. It was only then that the problem of how one could have things, or for that matter experiences (we’ll always have Paris), could really become a crisis. 72 

On Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too, and Certain Problems Incumbent Therein What I am suggesting, then, is that while medieval moralists accepted in the abstract that humans were cursed with limitless desires that, as Augustine put it, their natures rebelled against them just as they had rebelled against God they did not think this was an existential dilemma that affected them; rather, people tended to attribute such sinful predilections mainly to people they saw as social and therefore moral inferiors. Men saw women as insatiable; the prosperous saw the poor as grasping and materialistic. It was really in the early modern period that all this began to change. Agamben has a theory as to why this happened. 69 He suggests that the idea that all humans are driven by infinite unquenchable desires is possible only when one severs imagination from experience. In the world posited by medieval psychology, desires could be satisfied for the very reason that they were really directed at phantasms: imagination was the zone in which subject and object, lover and beloved could genuinely meet and partake of one another. With Descartes, he argues, this began to change. Imagination was redefined as something inherently separate from experience as, in fact, a compendium of all those things (dreams, flights of fancy, pictures in the mind) that one feels one has experienced but

296

297

David Graeber

Consumption

There is a great deal of debate about when the ideal of private property in the modern sense first developed and how early it could be said to have become common sense even among the popular classes. Some insist that it was well under way in the High Middle Ages, at least in England. 73 It was certainly so by the time of Cromwell. 74 The notion of consumption, I would suggest, eventually came to resolve a certain contradiction inherent within this ideal. From an analytical perspective, of course, property is simply a social relation: an arrangement between persons and collectivities concerning the disposition of valuable goods. Private property is one particular that entails one individual’s right to exclude all others all the world from access to a certain house or shirt or piece of land, and so on. A relation so broad is difficult to imagine, however, so people tend to over their subjects. These were the ultimate stakes of sovereignty; certainly, it was the one power kings were least willing to delegate or share. 75 The ultimate proof that one has sovereign power over another human being is one’s ability to have the other executed. In a similar fashion, one might argue, the ultimate proof of possession, of one’s personal dominium over a thing, is one’s ability to destroy it and indeed this remains one of the key legal ways of defining dominium, as a property right, to this day. But there is an obvious problem here. If one does destroy the object, one may have definitively proved that one owned it, but, as a result, one does not have it any more. In English law, such relations are still described according to the logic of sovereignty that is, in terms of dominium. The power a citizen has over his or her own possessions is exactly the same power once held by kings and princes and that is still retained by states in the form of eminent domain. This is why private property rights took so long to enshrine in law: even in England, which led the way in such matters, it was almost

the eighteenth century before jurists were willing to recognize a dominium belonging to anyone other than the king. 76  What would it mean, then, to establish sovereignty over an object? In legal terms, a king’s dominium extended to his land, his subjects, and their possessions; the subjects were included in the person of the king, who represented them in dealing with other kingdoms, in a similar fashion to that by which the father of a family represented his wife, children, and servants before the law. The wife, children, and servants of a head of household were likewise included in his legal personality in much the same way as his possessions. And in fact the power of kings was always being likened to that of fathers; the only real difference (aside from the fact that in any conflict, the king was seen to have a higher claim) was that unlike fathers, kings wielded the power of life and death the destruction of property, but it does lead to a choice of either destroying the Other or reducing the Other to property. Relations that are not based on property or, more precisely, on that very ambiguous synthesis between the two types of sovereignty suddenly become impossible to imagine, and I think this is true because Hegel is starting from a model of possessive individualism. We end up, then, with what might seem a particularly perverse variation on Hegel’s master / slave dialectic in which the actor, seeking some sort of impossible recognition of absolute mastery of an inanimate object, can achieve this recognition only by destroying it. Still, I do not really think this is a variation on the master / slave dilemma. I think a better case could probably be made that the dilemma described by Hegel actually derives from this. After all, the one thing least explained in Hegel’s account is where the necessity of conflict comes from (after all, there are ways to risk one’s life to impress another person that do not involve trying to murder that person). 77 He-

298

299

David Graeber

Consumption

gel’s quest for recognition does not lead to treat it as if it were a relation between a person and an object. But what could a relation between a person and an object actually consist of? At any rate, the paradox exists, and it is precisely here where the metaphor of consumption gains its appeal because it is the perfect resolution of this paradox or, 78 at least, about as perfect a resolution as one is ever going to get. When you eat something, you do indeed destroy it (as an autonomous entity), but at the same time, it remains included in you in the most material of senses. 79 Eating food, then, became the perfect idiom for talking about desire and gratification in a world in which everything, all human relations, were being reimagined as questions of property. Hence we return to Hegel. But I want to emphasize here that Hegel is not the starting point of this journey. He’s the end. An account that focused on the actual emergence of the term consumption in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century would, no doubt, have to contend with the broader socio-political context of Hegel’s day. As Susan Buck-Morss has recently made clear, 80 Hegel composed his master / slave dialectic with questions of real colonial slavery particularly, the revolution in Haiti very much at the forefront of his mind. The reappearance of actual chattel slavery in Europe and its colonies was of course another direct result of the emergence of possessive individualism and caused endless dilemmas for its ideologists. The connections here are infinitely complicated: I have argued that capitalism is really a transformation of slavery and cannot be understood outside it. 81 But in this essay, in this argument, by taking things back to the eleventh century, before Western Europeans had a colonial empire and when chattel slavery was at its low ebb, I am trying to cast the net even broader to ask, What, in fact, are the origins of that attitude toward the material world that

allowed people in certain corners of Atlantic Europe to create these colonial empires to begin with? If we do not ask such questions, we are left with the tacit assumption that there is nothing to be explained here, that anyone in a position to massacre and enslave millions of people in the name of personal profit would naturally wish to do so. I would hardly suggest I have offered a full explanation for this, but I think the material assembled here is quite suggestive in this regard.

What does all this imply about the current use of the term consumption? For one thing, I think it suggests we should think about how far we want to extend the metaphor as Wilk has justly emphasized, 82 a metaphor is all this really is. It makes perfect sense to talk about the consumption of fossil fuels. It is quite another thing to talk about the consumption of television programming much though this has been the topic of endless books and essays. Why, exactly, are we calling this consumption? About the only reason I can see is that television programming is created by people paid wages and salaries somewhere other than where viewers are watching it. Otherwise, there appears to be no reason at all. Programming is not even a commodity, because viewers often do not pay for it (and in the past they almost never did); it is not in any direct sense consumed by its viewers. 83 It is hardly something one fantasizes about acquiring, and one cannot, in fact, acquire it. It is in no sense destroyed by use. Rather, we are dealing with a continual stream of potential fantasy material, some intended to market particular commodities, some not. Cultural studies scholars and anthropologists writing in the same vein will of course insist that

300

301

Conclusions: What about ­­Consumerism?

David Graeber

Consumption

these images are not simply passively absorbed by consumers but actively interpreted and appropriated in ways the producers would probably never have suspected and employed as ways of fashioning identities the creative consumption model again. It is the undoubted truth that there are people who design their identities around certain TV shows. In fact, there are people who organize much of their imaginative life around one particular show Trekkies, for instance, who participate in a subculture of fans who write stories or comic zines around their favourite characters, attend conventions, design costumes, and the like. But when a 16 – year-old girl writes a short story about forbidden love between Kirk and Spock, this is hardly consumption anymore; we are talking about people engaging in a complex community organized around forms of (relatively unalienated) production. One can imagine here a kind of continuum with this representing one extreme. At the other, we have a considerable slice of television viewing by people who work 40 or 50 hours a week at jobs they find mind-numbingly boring, extremely stressful, or both; who commute; who come home far too exhausted and emotionally drained to be able to engage in any of the activities they would consider truly rewarding, pleasurable, or meaningful; and who just plop down in front of the tube because it is the easiest thing to do. 84 In other words, when creative consumption is at its most creative, it is not really consumption at all; when it most resembles something we would call consumption, it is at its least creative. And there is no particular reason to define television watching as consumption at all. 85  Does it really matter that we use the word ­consumption when speaking of television programming as opposed to some other term? Actually, I think it matters a great deal. Because, ultimately, doing so represents a political choice: it means

that we align ourselves with one body of writing and research in this case, the one most closely aligned with the language and interests of the corporate world and not with other in this instance, that activist literature explicitly critical of the role of television in contemporary life. Around the same time as Steve Barnett was dropping out of academia to become an advertising consultant, an advertising executive named Jerry Mander abandoned the business world to publish a book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television using his own technical knowledge of the industry to make a case that the common popular discourse that sees television as a mind-numbing drug and advertisers as cynical manipulators is entirely accurate. 86 Unlike the works of exponents of the creative consumption paradigm, which remain largely confined to the desks of graduate students and marketing executives, this volume found a ready popular audience and continues to sell well to the present day. The same can be said of more recent additions to the literature, such as Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam, 87 and of the flagship journal of the anti-marketing activists, Adbusters, largely composed by current or former employees in the industry, which (unlike, say, the Journal of Consumer Research) can occasionally even be found for sale in supermarket checkout lines (even if, admittedly, mostly cooperative supermarkets). Some of this literature which incidentally tends to take a neo-Situationist rather than a Frankfurt School approach may be anthropologically naive, 88 but this is largely because anthropologists have played almost no role in helping shape it. This literature in turn overlaps with the truly voluminous critical literature on TV journalism, corporate public relations, and the mediatisation of political life, from which again anthropologists have largely excluded themselves even if they may often be personally sympathetic. Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television, 89 for

302

303

David Graeber

Consumption

instance, which emerges from this tradition and which was a surprise best seller in France, has gone largely unnoticed as a result. What I am really trying to draw attention to here is the profound irony of the situation. While academics that espouse such opinions risk being instantly denounced as elitists with contempt for ordinary people, these opinions seem to resonate with many ordinary people in a way that the creative consumption literature never has. Oddly, those writing in venues such as the Journal of Consumer Research itself often seem more open to this critical literature than most anthropologists, 90 perhaps because they are aware that one cannot very well represent consumers as subversive unless there is something out there, some dominant ideology, for them to subvert. After all, if all that existed was a collection of subcultures, there could not also be countercultures, as there would be no hegemony for them to resist. The shadow of the Frankfurt School’s mass society must therefore be preserved if only to be eternally transcended. This is perhaps also why the story with which I began, that we used to be naive Marxists, has effectively become a permanent element in academic socialization. We all come to graduate school already aware of the anti-consumerist discourse precisely because it is a popular discourse (if obviously not the only one). Part of our initiation into that peculiar elite that is academia is our learning to denounce that discourse as elitist. What methodological conclusions am I suggesting, then? Above all, I think we should be suspicious about importing the political economy habit of seeing society as divided into two spheres, one of production and one of consumption, 91 into cultural analysis in the first place. Doing so almost inevitably forces us to push almost all forms of non-alienated production into the category of consumption or even consumer behaviour.

Consider the following passage, found (in fact) in a critique of the culture of consumption:

According to the logic of the quote above, if I bought some vegetables and prepared a gazpacho to share with some friends, that is actually consumerism. In fact, it would be even if I grew the vegetables myself (presumably because I bought the seeds). We are back to my earlier parable of the garage band. Any production not for the market is treated as a form of consumption, which has the incredibly reactionary political effect of treating almost every form of unalienated experience we do engage in as somehow a gift granted us by the captains of industry. How to think our way out of this box? No doubt there are many ways. This paper is meant more to explain why it is important to do so than to propose an actual solution. Still, one or two suggestions might be in order. The first and most obvious is that we might begin treating consumption not as an analytical term but as an ideology to be investigated. Clearly, there are people in the world who do base key aspects of their identity around what they see as the destructive encompassment of manufactured products. Let us find out who these people really are, when they think of themselves this way and when they do not, and how they relate to others who conceive their relations to the material world differently. If we wish to continue applying terms borrowed from political

304

305

Cooking, playing sports, gardening, DIY (Do-It-Yourself), home decoration, dancing and music-making are all examples of consumer activities which involve some participation, but they cannot of themselves transform the major invasion by commercial interest groups into consumption which has occurred since the 1950 s. 92

David Graeber

Consumption

economy as I have myself certainly done elsewhere it might be more enlightening to start looking at what we have been calling the consumption sphere rather as the sphere of the production of human beings, not just as labour power but as persons, internalized nexes of meaningful social relations, 93 because after all, this is what social life is actually about, the production of people (of which the production of things is simply a subordinate moment), and it is only the very unusual organization of capitalism that makes it even possible for us to imagine otherwise. 94  This is not to say that everything has to be considered a form of either production or consumption (consider a softball game it is clearly neither), but it at least allows us to open up some neglected questions, such as that of alienated and nonalienated forms of labour, terms that have somewhat fallen into abeyance and therefore remain radically undertheorized. What exactly does engaging in non-alienated production actually mean? Such questions become all the more important when we start thinking about capitalist globalization and resistance. Rather than looking at people in Zambia or Brazil and saying Look! They are using consumption to construct identities! and thus implying they are willingly or perhaps unknowingly submitting to the logic of neoliberal capitalism, perhaps we should consider that in many of the societies we study, the production of material products has always been subordinate to the mutual construction of human beings and what they are doing, at least in part, is simply insisting on continuing to act as if this were the case even when using objects manufactured elsewhere. In some cases, this can turn into self-conscious resistance to or, for that matter, an equally self-conscious enthusiastic embrace of consumer capitalism. But in many cases, at least, I suspect that our issues and categories are simply irrelevant.

One thing I think we can certainly assert. Insofar as social life is and always has been mainly about the mutual creation of human beings, the ideology of consumption has been endlessly effective in helping us forget this. Most of all it does so by suggesting that (a) human desire is essentially a matter not of relations between people but of relations between individuals and phantasms; (b) our primary relation with other individuals is an endless struggle to establish our sovereignty, or autonomy, by incorporating and destroying aspects of the world around them; (c) for the reason in c, any genuine relation with other people is problematic (the problem of the Other); and (d) society can thus be seen as a gigantic engine of production and destruction in which the only significant human activity is either manufacturing things or engaging in acts of ceremonial destruction so as to make way for more, a vision that in fact sidelines most things that real people actually do and insofar as it is translated into actual economic behaviour is obviously unsustainable. Even as anthropologists and other social theorists directly challenge this view of the world, the unreflective use and indeed self-righteous propagation of terms such as consumption end up undercutting our efforts and reproducing the very tacit ideological logic we are trying to call into question.

306

307

David Graeber

notes

cultural perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1 As Richard Wilk (2004) has Press.  1986), 3 – 63. shown in endless and elegant 7 Jonathan Friedman, “Introducdetail, the term consumption is tion,” in Consumption and basically a metaphor of eating identity, ed. by J. Friedman [“Morals and metaphors: the (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, meaning of consumption,” in 1994). Elusive consumption. ed. by 8 Daniel Miller, Material culture K. Ekstrom and H. Brembeck, and mass consumption (London: (London: Berg, 2004), 11 – 26.] Blackwell, 1987); Acknowledging 2 To take one example, a while consumption: a review of new ago a book came out called The studies, ed. by Idem (London: Consumer Society Reader, ed. Blackwell, 1995); Id., Capitalby Juliet B Schor, and Douglas ism: an ethnographic approach B. Holt (New York: New Press, (London: Routledge, 1997); Id., 2000), which contains essays by A theory of shopping (Oxford: 28 authors, ranging from ThorBerg, 1998); Id., “Introduction,” in stein Veblen to Tom Frank, about Consumption: critical concepts consumption and consumerism. in the social sciences (Cambridge: Not a single essay offers a definiPolity / Cornell University, 2001); tion of either term or asks why World’s Apart, ed. by Idem these terms are being used rather (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). than others. 9 I note that such demotic wisdom 3 Hugh MacKay, Consumption is rarely precisely reflected in the and everyday life (London: Sage, works of any particular author, 1997). though Miller often comes very As Conrad Lodziak who close to saying this. Yet they also cites this passage, makes have tremendous power. Another clear, this standard version does example of the phenomenon is not really reflect the actual the phrase How can I know The arguments of anyone involved Other? and the debate surroundin the Frankfurt School. It is all ing the question, which raged something of a myth. [The myth around the same time, in the late of consumerism (London: Pluto, 1980 s and early 1990s. As far as I 2002)]. know, the phrase never actually 4 Dick Hebdige. Subculture: appeared in print at all, even in the meaning of style (London: the works of those authors (e.g., Routledge, 1979). Marcus and Clifford) with whom 5 MacKay, Consumption and it was broadly identified. everyday life, 3. 10 David Graeber “Neoliberalism; 6 Arjun Appadurai, ed., “Introor, the bureaucratization of the duction: commodities and the world,” in The insecure American, politics of value,” in The social ed. by Hugh Gusterson and life of things: commodities in Catherine Besteman (Berkeley:

308

Consumption University of California Press, [Miller, Material culture…, 190], a 2010). rather idiosyncratic and arcane 11 Russell W. Belk, “Situational definition related to his own variables and consumer behavior,” Hegelian notion of self-creation Journal of Consumer Research 2 that, however, I do not believe is (3) (1975): 157 – 164. shared by any other consump 12 Mary Douglas and Baron Ishtion theorist, and later as the erwood, The world of goods: consequences of objects for the towards an anthropology of people that use them, a definition consumption (New York: Basic, that is so broad it is presumably 1979). not really meant as a definition 13 In fact there was equal resistance at all [Miller, Consumption: critiin the early 1980 s on either side. cal concepts in the social sciences, Richard Wilk (personal commu1]. The other is Joyce Appleby he desiring, acquiring and enjoying nication) informs me that he and of goods and services which one Eric Arnould, a professor of marhas purchased, though elsewhere keting, wrote a paper called “Why in the same piece she also defines Do the Indians Want Adidas?” in consumption as the active 1981; no anthropological journal seeking of personal gratification would accept it, and American through material goods. (Joyce Anthropologist returned it unreAppleby. “Consumption in early viewed with the comment This is modern social thought,” in The not an anthropological topic. consumer society in American 14 Marietta Baba, “Anthropology history: a reader. ed. by Lawrence and business,” in The encycloB. Glickman, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell pedia of anthropology, ed. by University Press, 1999), 130 and H. James Birx (Thousand Oaks, 164]. CA: Sage, 2006), 43. 18 Especially if the band had not 15 Ibidem, 47. yet received a record contract or 16 See Eric J. Arnould, and Craig many professional gigs; if they J. Thompson. “Consumer culture were able to market some kind of theory (CCT): twenty years of product, it might be considered research,” Journal of Consumer production again. Research 31 (2005): 868 – 882. 17 Of the few exceptions of which I 19 Here I also want to answer some of the questions rather left am aware, one is Miller [Material dangling at the end of my book culture and mass consumption, on value theory [Towards an 1987], who first defined consumpanthropological theory of value: tion as an action that translates the false coin of our own dreams the object from an alienable to (New York: Palgrave, 2001)]. an inalienable condition; that is from being a symbol of estrange- 20 In French the word consummation, which is from a different ment and price value to being an root, eventually displaced artefact invested with particular consumption. But the idea of inseparable connotations

309

David Graeber taking possession of an object prestige interestingly skipping seems to remain, and any number pleasure. of authors have remarked on the 28 The sensual pleasures they had implied parallel between sexual in mind seem to have centred appropriation and eating food. as much on having sex as on 21 Produce is derived from a Latin eating food, on lounging on silk word meaning to bring out (a pillows, and on burning incense usage still preserved in phrases or hashish, and by wealth, both such as the defense produced seemed to have in mind, first a witness or he produced a and foremost, permanent things flashlight from under his cloak) such as mansions, landed estates, or to put out (as from a factory). and magnificent jewellery rather 22 Georges Bataille, “The notion of than consumables. expenditure,” in Visions of excess, 29 Adam Smith, An inquiry into the selected writings, 1927 – 1939, ed. nature and causes of the wealth by and trans. by Allan Stoekl of nations (Oxford: Clarendon. (Minneapolis: University of Min1976 [1776]). nesota Press, 1985), 116 – 129. 30 Idem, Theory of moral senti 23 Bataille’s argument was that ments (Cambridge: Cambridge production, which Marx saw as University Press, 2002 [1761]). quintessentially human, is also 31 One could even argue that the domain of activity most conSmith’s approach to questions strained by practical consideraof desire and fulfilment is so one tions consumption the least so. To sided centring almost entirely discover what is really important on social recognition and imto a culture, therefore, one should material rewards (wealth, in his look not at how things are made system, was only really desirable but at how they are destroyed. insofar as wealthy people were 24 Joseph Masco, “’It is a strict law more likely to be the object of that bids us dance’: cosmologies, others’ attention and spontanecolonialism, death, and ritual auous sympathetic concern), that thority in the Kwakwaka’wakw it is meant to head off the very potlatch, 1849 to 1922,” Compossibility of the consumption parative Studies in Society and model that was to develop from History 37 (1995): 41 – 75. his economic work. 25 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 32 Maxine Berg, and Helen Clifford, (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, Consumers and luxury: consumer 1968). culture in Europe, 1650 – 1850, 26 Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and (Manchester, UK: Manchester practical reason (Chicago: UniUniversity Press, 1999). Neil versity of Chicago Press, 1976). McKendrick, John Brewer, and 27 Similar lists appear throughout J. H.  Plumb, Birth of a consumer the Western tradition. Kant also society: the commercialization had three: wealth, power, and of eighteenth-century England (London: Europa, 1982). Woodruff

310

Consumption D. Smith. Consumption and anomaly: the power of Spinoza’s the making of respectability: metaphysics and politics, trans. 1600 – 1800 (London: Routledge, by M. Hardt (Minneapolis: 2002). Peter Stearns, ConsumerUniversity of Minnesota Press, ism in world history: the global 1991). transformation of desire (London: 40 Graeber, Towards an anthropoRoutledge, 2001). logical theory of value: the false 33 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, ed. by coin of our own dreams, 2001. and trans. by G. H. R. Parkinson 41 Tzvetan Todorov, Life in common: (Oxford:Oxford University Press, an essay in general anthropology, 2000). trans. by K. Golsan and L. Golsan 34 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A selec(Lincoln: University of Nebraska tion, trans. by Alan Sheridan Press, 2001). (New York: Norton, 1977). 42 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 35 Graeber, Towards an anthropoPhenomenology of spirit, trans. logical theory of value: the false by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, coin of our own dreams, 2001, 1998). 257 – 258. 43 I am especially drawing on the 36 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatfamous strong reading of this tari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism passage by Alexandre Kojève, and schizophrenia (Minneapolis: Introduction to the reading of HeUniversity of Minnesota Press, gel (New York: Basic, 1969), that 1983). had such an influence on Bataille, 37 Working here on the assumption Lacan, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon, that if one examines any intellecand so on. tual tradition carefully enough, Emanuel Levinas has recently one could find the materials for challenged this reading, but it a genuinely insightful analysis of has certainly dominated social such big questions (i.e., sufficient theory, and particularly French perusal of the Buddhist would social theory, for at least half a also have yielded useful results century [Otherwise than being; had I been competent to do it, or, beyond essence (Pittsburgh, which I am not). PA: Duquesne University Press, 38 Spinoza, Ethics, 2000. 1998)]. 39 For the best collection of essays 44 In Hegel’s language, they on Spinoza’s theory of desire, see construct themselves as a Yirmiyahu Yovel’s, Desire and negation; therefore, they seek to affect: Spinoza as psychologist negate that negation by negating (New York: Little Room, 1999). something else, that is, by eating On his theory of imagination, it. see Moira Gates and Genevieve 45 Majeed Yar, “Recognition and Lloyd, Collective imaginings: the politics of human(e) desire,” Spinoza, past and present Theory, Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1999) and 18(2 – 3) (2001): 57 – 76. Antonio Negri, The savage

311

David Graeber 46 Lacan’s mirror phase itself 51 Agamben, Stanzas: word and actually draws directly on Hegel phantasm in Western culture, [Edward S. Casey, and J. Melvin 17 – 18. Woody, “Hegel and Lacan: the 52 “That is the incapacity of dialectic of desire,” in Interconceiving the incorporeal and preting Lacan, ed. by Joseph the desire to make of it the object H. Smith and Walter Kerrigan of an embrace are two faces of (New Haven, CT: Yale University the same coin, of the process Press, 1983), 77 – 88; Hugh Silverin whose course the traditional man, “Twentieth-century desire contemplative vocation of the and the histories of philosophy,” melancholic reveals itself vulnerin Philosophy and desire (New able to the violent disturbance of York: Routledge, 2000), 1 – 13]. I desire menacing it from within”. might note, too, that it is the Agamben, Stanzas: word and Hegel-Kojève-Sartre connection phantasm in Western culture, 18. that is responsible for the habit 53 Campbell, The romantic of writing about “the Other” with ethic and the spirit of modern a capital O, as an inherently ­consumerism, 1987. unknowable creature. 54 There is a lot of evidence that 47 Tzvetan Todorov, Life in common: suggests that levels of clinical an essay in general anthropology, depression do in fact rise sharply 2001, 66 – 67. in consumer-oriented societies; 48 Colin Campbell, The romantic they have certainly been rising ethic and the spirit of modern steadily in the United States consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, for most of the century. I should 1987). emphasize, by the way, that while 49 Roy Wagner, “If you have the Agamben, Stanzas: word and advertisement you don’t need phantasm in Western culture the product,” in Rhetorics of (1993) and Couliano, Eros and self-making, ed. by Debbora magic in the Renaissance (1987) Battaglia (Berkeley: University of draw exclusively on European California Press, 1995), 60 – 77. sources, these ideas were very 50 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and likely developed earlier and more history: essays on the destruction extensively in the Islamic world. of experience, trans. by Liz Heron Certainly, it is well established (London: Verso, 1993). Idem, that the courtly love tradition in Stanzas: word and phantasm in medieval France harkened back Western culture, trans. by Ronald to Sufi poetic traditions of love as L. Martinez (Minneapolis: Unithe chaste and spiritually fulfillversity of Minnesota Press. 1993). ing contemplation of an idealized Iouan Couliano. Eros and object. [Roger Boase, The origin magic in the Renaissance, and meaning of courtly love trans. by Margaret Cook (Manchester, UK: Manchester, (Chicago: University of Chicago University Press,1977); Louis Press, 1987). Massignon, The life of al-Hallaj,

312

Consumption vol. 1 of The passion of alsense of wholeness in a society Hallaj: mystic and martyr of fragmented by capitalism itself. Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton See Guy Debord, Society of the University Press, 1982), 348 – 349.] spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994); Unfortunately, I lack the language Graeber, Towards an anthroposkills to pursue the question logical theory of value: the false of medieval Islamic theories of coin of our own dreams, 2001. the imagination, but I would 61 Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity underline that this is yet another and experience (Oxford: Oxford way in which when one refers University Press, 1961). to the “Western tradition,” one 62 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and should think of oneself, especially his world (Bloomington: Indiana in this period, referring equally or University Press, 1984). even primarily to Islam. 63 Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cock 55 Couliano, Eros and magic in the aigne: medieval fantasies of the Renaissance, 1987. perfect life, trans. by Diane Webb 56 Along lines already developed by (New York: Columbia University the Art of Memory [see Frances Press, 2001), 421. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the 64 Jean Delumeau, History of parahermetic tradition (Chicago: Unidise: the Garden of Eden in myth versity of Chicago Press, 1964) and tradition, trans. by Matthew and eadem, The art of memory O’Connell (Chicago: University of (Chicago: University of Chicago Illinois Press, 2000). Press, 1966).] 65 John Block Friedman, The 57 Campbell, The romantic ethic monstrous races in medieval art and the spirit of modern consumand thought (Cambridge, MA: erism, 1987. Harvard University Press, 1981). 58 Ibidem. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes 59 Graeber, Towards an anthropoof paradise: a social history of logical theory of value: the false spices, stimulants and intoxicoin of our own dreams, 2001. cants (New York: Vintage, 1992). 60 Almost always this also ends 66 Even women, when they wrote up involving a certain degree of love poems, tended to adopt a fetishisation, where the objects male point of view. end up appearing, from the ac- 67 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society tor’s perspective, to be the source and culture in early modern of the very powers by which France (Stanford, CA: Stanford they are in fact created because University Press, 1975), 125 – 151. from the actor’s position, this David Graeber, “Manners, might as well be true. Often, too, deference and private property: these objects become imaginary the generalization of avoidmicrototalities that play a similar ance in early modern Europe,” role to Lacan’s mirror objects or Comparative Studies in Society similar critiques of the comand History 39(4) (1997):694 – 728. modity as capturing an illusory Keith Thomas, Religion and

313

David Graeber well as his slaves; both rights, if the decline of magic (New York: they really did exist in practice, Scribner, 1971), 568 – 569. Silvia were stripped away quite quickly. Federici, Caliban and the witch: 76 G.E. Aylmer, “The meaning of women, the body, and primiproperty in seventeenth-century tive accumulation (New York: England,” Past and Present 86 Autonomedia, 2004). (1980): 87 – 97. 68 Susan Bordo, Unbearable weight: feminism, Western culture, and 77 Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the body (Berkeley: University of the other’s death, for it values California Press, 1993). the other no more than itself; its 69 Agamben, Stanzas: word and essential being is present. Hegel, phantasm in Western culture, Phenomenology of spirit, 114. 1993. 78 Or, more technically, I suppose, 70 Agamben, Stanzas: word and synecdoche. phantasm in Western culture, 79 And it has the additional 25 – 28. attraction of being almost the 71 Crawford Brough MacPherson. only power that kings do not The political theory of possessive have over their subjects: as one individualism: Hobbes to Locke. sixteenth-century Spanish jurist Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. wrote, in arguing that American 72 In other words, rather than cannibalism violated natural law, asking how is it possible to truly no man may possess another so have or possess some object or absolutely that he may make use experience, perhaps we should of him as a foodstuff. Anthony be asking why anyone should Pagden, The fall of natural man: develop a desire to do so to begin the American Indian and the with. origins of comparative ethnog 73 Alan MacFarlane, “The mystery raphy (Cambridge: Cambridge of property: inheritance and University Press, 1987), 86. industrialization in England and 80 Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Japan,” in Property relations: Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26(4) renewing the anthropological (2000): 821 – 865. Sibylle Fischer, tradition, ed. by C. M. Hann Modernity disavowed Haiti and (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerthe cultures of slavery in the age sity Press, 1998), 104 – 123. of revolution (Durham, NC: Duke 74 To the extent that, as MacPherUniversity Press, 2004). son shows, populist politicians such as the Levellers framed 81 David Graeber, “Turning modes their arguments in such terms of production inside out; or, why [The political theory of possescapitalism is a transformation of sive individualism: Hobbes to slavery (short version),” Critique Locke, 1962]. of Anthropology 26 (1) (2005): 75 Supposedly, in early Roman law, 61 – 81. the paterfamilias did have the 82 Richard Wilk, “Morals and metapower to execute his children as phors: the meaning of consump-

314

Consumption tion,” in Elusive consumption, ed. School, allow me to provide some by Karin M. Ekstrom and Helene personal qualifications. I grew Brembeck (London: Berg, 2004), up in a Nielsen family and know 11 – 26. all about collective working class 83 Obviously, with cable, PPV, TiVo, family viewing but also have and so on, it is more a commodity myself had many horrific jobs than it once was. But still it is from which I often returned to so in a very minor sense: most stare blankly at the television. I television is still a medium for also have a certain experience of advertising. fandom, being, in fact, the first 84 The passage above is partly academic ever to publish an essay inspired by Conrad Lodziak’s on the topic of Buffy the Vampire discussion of television viewing Slayer David Graeber, “Rebel in his book The Myth of Consumwithout a god: a review of Buffy erism [106 – 107]. Such thoughts the vampire slayer,” in These are, of course, anathema to the Times 23(2)(1998):28 – 30., surely mainstream of media studies one of the greatest shows of all and will no doubt provoke the time. I think my personal attitude withering ire of many readers, is typical of most Americans: but as Lodziak cogently remarks, television is a wasteland, except empirical studies and questionfor those shows I like. naires tend to ask what viewers 86 Jerry Mander, Four arguments find meaningful or important for the elimination of television about television programming, (New York: Harper Perennial, not how meaningful or important 1978). they take the experience to 87 Kalle Lasn, Culture jam: how be. Those few studies that do to reverse America’s suicidal ask consumers how important consumer binge and why we television viewing is to them find must (New York: Harper Collins, it “the most expendable or least 1999). important of daily activities”. See 88 The ritual vilification of the also H. Sahlin, and J. P. Robinson. Frankfurt School is so relent“Beyond the realm of necessity: less that I cannot resist one television and the colonization small word in their defense. It is of leisure,” Media, Culture and certainly true that Adorno and Society 3 (1980): 85 – 95. It is hard Horkheimer could be remarkto square such stated preferably puritanical and elitist. But ences with the statistical facts it is also important to bear in for instance, that in the average mind these were German Jews American household, the televiwho witnessed the rise of the sion is on roughly 4.5 hours per Nazis to power in Germany and day in any other way. were keenly aware that fascism 85 Lest I be instantly accused of was one of the first political affiliation or at least affinmovements to make full use of ity with the dreaded Frankfurt modern marketing techniques.

315

David Graeber Starting from that fact makes consumers are conceptualized as it much harder to deny that interpretive agents rather than sometimes people really are as passive dupes. Thus, various intentionally manipulated with forms of consumer resistance political ends in mind. Would inevitably greet the dominant anyone seriously suggest that normative ideological influence most of those who consumed, for of commercial media and marexample, Goebbels’s anti-Semitic keting. Consumers seek to form effusions, were really creatively lifestyles that defy dominant conand subversively reappropriating sumerist norms or that directly his messages or that if they did, challenge corporate power (875). this made the slightest bit of Lest this sound surprisingly difference? No doubt Adorno and radical for a marketing journal, Horkheimer overstated their case I note that the authors immein making fascism the model for diately go on to argue that this all subsequent political-economby no means should be meant to ic forms, but one could equally suggest that there is any natural argue that others have overstated alliance between such subversive its uniqueness. consumers and anti-corporate 89 Pierre Bourdieu, On television consumer activists. The latter, in (New York: New Press, 1999). their evangelical zeal to reform 90 For example, Eric J. Arnould, and society as a whole, really see Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer consumers themselves as part of culture theory (CCT): twenty the problem. Corporate power is years of research,” Journal of appar ently to be challenged but Consumer Research, in their sumnot unreservedly. mary of 20 years of “Consumer 91 Or, at best, three: production, Culture Theory” in the Journal consumption, and exchange. of Consumer Research, 31(2005): 92 Robert Bocock, Consumption 868 – 882, are careful to acknowl(London: Routledge, 1993), 51. edge the importance of this 93 Graeber, Towards an anthrocritical literature and sometimes pological theory of value: the sound very much like ideology false coin of our own dreams, critics themselves. Consumer 2001; Idem, “Turning modes of culture theorists read popular production inside out; or, why texts (advertisements, television capitalism is a transformation of programs, films) as lifestyle and slavery (short version),” Critique identity instructions that convey of Anthropology 26 (1) (2005): unadulterated marketplace 61 – 81. ideologies; thus, they aim to 94 Another approach that treatsreveal the ways in which capitalconsumption largely as a form ist cultural production systems of production in this case, value invite consumers to covet certain production is the immaterial laidentity and lifestyle ideals (875). bour argument that has emerged However, they add, in such theory, from Italian post Workerism,

316

Consumption particularly in the works of Maurizio Lazzarato [“Immaterial labour,” in Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics. ed. by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133 – 147.] I have critiqued this position elsewhere [David Graeber, “The sadness of post-Workerism”, in Commoner, (http://www.commoner.org.uk/?pp33), 2008]. See also first volume of Alternativa. Anthology: Labour & Leisure, ed. by Krzysztof Gutfrański (Gdańsk: Wyspa Institute of Art/ Alternativa.Editions, 2012).

317

Junkspace

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace 2002 

From: October, Vol. 100, (Spring, 2002: Obsolescence): 175 – 190 . [Cambridge, ma: The MIT Press Journals] © The Author & The Publisher

Logan Airport: A World-Class Upgrade for the Twenty-first Century

Late-Twentieth Century Billboard

321

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

Rabbit is the new beef … Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a lifelong immersion in the arbitrary … LAX: welcoming – possibly flesh-eating – orchids at the check-in counter … Identity is the new junk food for the dispossessed globalization’s fodder for the disenfranchised … If spacejunk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown … Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a lowgrade purgatory … Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-first century than has survived from the twentieth … It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century. Architecture disappe­ ared in the twentieth century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People’s Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing. The product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that

enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hotair curtain … It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo) … Junkspace is sealed held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant, resisted by the same arsenal since the beginning of time; but air-conditioning – an invisible medium, therefore unnoticed – has truly revolutionized archi­tecture. Air-conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them. Air-conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of orga­nization and coexistence that leave architecture behind.  A single shopping centre is now the work of generations of space planners, repairmen, and fixers, like in the Middle Ages; air-conditioning sustains our cathedrals. (All architects may unwittingly be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will eventually make it cohere.) Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into Junkspace … When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e. architecture. Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. O.K., let’s talk about space then. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The lustre of renovations. The subtlety of the shopping centre. Let’s explore public space, discover casinos, spend time in theme parks … Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, ­limited expectation, and reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda Triangle of concepts, an abandoned Petri dish: it

322

323

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, and confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction … Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends. A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever … Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole. Junkspace is additive, layered and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided quartered the way a carcass is torn apart – individual chunks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has become ornamental; small, shiny, space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams deliver cydopic burdens to unsuspecting destinations … The arch, once the workhorse of structures, has become the depleted emblem of community, welcoming an infinity of virtual populations to nonexistent theres. Where it is absent, it is simply applied – mostly in stucco – as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erec­ted superblocks. Junkspace’s iconography is 13 percent Roman, 8 percent Bauhaus and 7 percent Disney (neck and neck), 3 percent Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan … Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, Junkspace is a domain of feigned simulated order, a kingdom of morphing. Its specific con-

figuration is as fortuitous as the geometry of a snowflake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code … Because it cannot be grasped. Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver; its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makeable. Although strictly non-­architectural, it tends to the vaulted to the Dome. Some sections seem to be devoted to utter inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: the deadest resides next to the most hysterical. Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner. The aesthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous, and dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasipanoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder. Murals used to show idols; Junkspace’s modules are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups. Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: they are essences through which meaning disappears … The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind reflect humanity at its most casual.  The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to dress down. A stringent dress code – a last spasm of etiquette? – governs access to Junkspace: shorts, sneakers, sandals, shell suit, fleece, jeans, parka, backpack. As if the People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, Junkspace is best enjoyed in a state of post-revolutionary gawking. Polarities have merged – there is nothing left between desolation and frenzy. Neon signifies both the old and the new; interiors refer to the Stone and Space Age at the same time. Like the deactivated virus in an inoculation,

324

325

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

­ odern architecture remains essential, but only in its most M sterile manifestation, High Tech (it seemed so dead only a decade ago!). It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress; exit stairs dangle in a didactic trapeze; probes thrust into space to deliver labouriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air; acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose flaccid non-events. Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the stroke of midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic; in three years it may segue into Nigerian Sixties, Norwegian Chalet, or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque … Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace. There is no form, only proliferation. Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honour, cherish, and embrace manipulation … Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise and sparkling infrastructures of light, LEDs, and video describe an authorless world beyond anyone’s claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar. Junkspace is hot (or suddenly arctic); fluorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass, generate additional heat to raise the temperature of Junkspace to levels at which you could cultivate orchids. Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stagnant, recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs looking for a vacant shell. Junkspace shed architectures like a reptile shed skins; is reborn every Monday morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a final state that could only be modified at the expense of partial destruction. At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary, and standardized substance now comes pre-digitized.. As

the module becomes smaller and smaller, its status become that of a crypto-pixed. With enormous difficulty – budget, argument, negotiation, deformation – irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from endemical elements. Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque is now wrested from the homogenized the singular liberated from the standardized … Architects thought of Junkspace first and named it Megastructure, the final solution to transcend their huge impasse. Like multiple Babels, huge superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with impermanent subsystems that would mutate over time, beyond their control. In Junkspace, the tables are turned it is subsystem only, without superstructure, orphaned particles in search of a framework or pattern. All materialization is provisional: cutting, bending, tearing, coating: construction has acquired a new softness, like tailoring … The joint is no longer a problem, an intellectual issue: transitional moments are defined by stapling and taping, wrinkly brown bands barely maintain the illusion of an unbroken surface; verbs unknown and unthinkable in architectural history damp, stick, fold, dump, glue, shoot, double, fuse – have become indispensable. Each element performs its task in negotiated isolation. Whereas detailing once suggested the coming together, possibly forever, of disparate materials, it is now a transient coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation; no longer the orchestrated encounter of difference, but the abrupt end of a system, a stalemate. Only the blind, reading its fault lines with their fingertips, will ever understand Junkspace’s histories … While whole millennia worked in favour of permanence, axialities, relationships, and proportion, the program of Junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offers entropy. Because it is endless, it always leaks somewhere in Junkspace; in the

326

327

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

worst case, monumental ashtrays catch intermittent drops in a gray broth … When did time stop moving forward, begin to spool in every direction, like a tape spi­nning out of control? Since the introduction of Real Time™? Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways … The average contemporary lunch box is a microcosm of Junkspace: a fervent semantics of health – slabs of eggplant, topped by thick layers of goat cheese – cancelled by a colossal cookie at the bottom. Junkspace is draining and is drained in return. Everywhere in Junkspace there are seating arrangements, ranges of modular chairs, even couches, as if the experience Junkspace offers its consumers is significantly more exhausting than any previous spatial sensation; in its most abandoned stretches, you find buffets: utilitarian tables dra­ ped in white or black sheets, perfunctory assemblies of caffeine and calories – cottage cheese, muffins, unripe grapes – notional representations of plenty, without horn and without plenty. Each Junkspace is connected sooner or later, to bodily functions: wedged between stainless-steel partitions sit rows of groaning Romans, denim togas bunched around their huge sneakers … Because it is so intensely consumed. Junkspace is fanatically maintained the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift in an endless Sisyphean replay. As you recover from Junkspace, Junkspace recovers from you: between 2 and 5 A.M., yet another population, this one heartlessly casual and appreciably darker, is mopping, hovering, sweeping, towelling, resupplying … Junkspace does not inspire loyalty in its cleaners … Dedicated to instant gratification, Junkspace accommodates seed of future perfection; a language of apology is woven through its texture of canned euphoria; pardon our appearance signs or miniature yellow sorry billboards mark ongoing patches of wetness, announce

momentary discomfort in return for imminent shine, the allure of improvement. Somewhere, workers sink on their knees to repair faded sections, as if in a prayer, or half-disappear in ceiling voids to negotiate elusive malfunctions, as if in confession. All surfaces are archaeological, superpositions of different periods (what do you call the moment a particular type of wall-to-wall carpet was current?) – as you note when they’re torn. Traditionally, typology implies demarcation, the definition of a singular model that excludes other arrangements. Junkspace represents a reverse typology of cumulative, approximate identity, less about kind than about quantity. But formlessness is still form, the formless also a typology … Take the dump, where successive trucks discharge their loads to form a heap, whole in spite of the randomness of its contents and its fundamental shapelessness, or that of the tentenvelope that assumes different shapes to accommodate variable interior volumes. Or the vague crotches of the new generation. Junkspace can either be absolutely chaotic or frighteningly aseptic – like a best-seller – overdetermined and indeterminate at the same time. There is something strange about ballrooms, for instance: huge wastelands kept column-free for ultimate flexibility. Because you’ve never been invited to that kind of event, you have never seen them in use; you’ve only seen them being prepared with chilling precision: a relentless grid of circular tables, extending toward a distant horizon, their diameters pre-empting commu­ nication; a dais big enough for the politburo of a ­totalitarian state, wings announcing as yet unimagined surprises – acres of organization to support future drunkenness, disarray, and disorder. Or car shows … Junkspace is often described as a space of flows, but that is a misnomer; flows depend on disciplined movement, bodies that cohere. Junkspace is a web without a spider; although it is an architecture of the mass-

328

329

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

es, each trajectory is strictly unique. Its anarchy is one of the last tangible ways in which we experience freedom. It is a space of collision, a container of atoms; busy, not dense … There is a special way of moving in Junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful. lt is an acquired culture. Junkspace features the tyranny of the oblivious: sometimes an entire Junkspace comes unstuck through the nonconformity of one of its members; a single citizen of an another culture – a refugee, a mother – can destabilize an entire Junkspace, hold it to a rustic’s ransom, leaving an invisible swath of obstruction in his / her wake, a deregulation eventually communicated to its furthest extremities. Where movement becomes synchronized it curdles: on escalators, near exits, parking machines, automated tellers. Sometimes, under duress, individuals are channelled in a flow, pushed through a single door or forced to negotiate the gap between two temporary obstacles (an invalid’s bleeping chariot and a Christmas tree): the manifest ill will such narrowing provokes mocks the notion of flows. Flows in Junkspace lead to disaster: department stores at the beginning of sales; the stampedes triggered by warring compartments of soccer fans; dead bodies piling up in front of the locked emergency doors of a disco – evidence of the awkward fit between the portals of Junkspace and the narrow calibrations of the old world. The young instinctively avoid the Dantesque manipulations / containers to which Junkspace has condem­ned their elders in perpetuity. Within the meta-playground of Junkspace exist smaller playgrounds, Junkspace for children (usually in the least desirable square footage): sections of sudden miniaturization – often underneath staircases, always near dead ends – and assemblies of underdimensioned plastic structures – slides, seesaws, swings – shunned by their intended audience are turned into a Junkniche for the old, the lost, the forgotten,

the insane … the last hiccup of humanism … Traffic is Junkspace, from airspace to the subway; the entire highway system is Junkspace, a vast potential utopia clogged by its users, as you notice when they’ve finally disappeared on vacation … Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an insidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic; sometimes an entire Junkspace – a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad – turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air-conditioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable, but remain joined to the flesh of the main body via gangrenous passages. Judging the built presumed a static condition; now each architecture embodies opposite conditions simultaneously: old and new, permanent and tempora­ ry, flourishing and at risk … Sections undergo an Alzheimer’slike deterioration as others are upgraded. Because Junkspace is endless, it is never closed … Renovation and restoration were procedures that took place in your absence; now you’re a witness, a reluctant participant … Seeing Junkspace in conversion is like inspecting an unmade bed someone else’s. Say an airport needs more space. ln the past, new terminals were added each more or less characteristic of its own age, leaving the old ones as a readable record, evidence of progress. Since passengers have definitively demonstrated their infinite malleability, the idea of rebuilding on the spot has gained currency. Travelators are thrown into reverse, signs taped potted palms (or very large corpses) covered in body bags. Screens of taped Sheetrock segregate two populations: one wet, one dry, one hard, one flabby, one cold, one overheated. Half the population produces new space; the more affluent half consumes old space. To accommodate a nether world of manual labour, the concourse suddenly turns into Casbah:

330

331

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

improvised locker rooms, coffee breaks, smoking, even real campfires … The ceiling is a crumpled plate like the Alps; grids of unstable tiles alternate with monogrammed sheets of black plastic, improbably punctured by grids of crystal chandeliers. Metal ducts are replaced by breathing textiles. Gaping joints reveal vast ceiling voids (former canyons of asbestos?), beams, ducting, rope, cable, insulation, fireproofing, string; tangled arrangements suddenly exposed to daylight. Impure, tortured and complex, they exist only because they were never consciously plotted. The floor is a patchwork: different textures – concrete, hairy, heavy, shiny, plastic, metallic, muddy – alternate randomly, as if dedicated to different species … The ground is no more. There are too many raw need to be realized on only one plane. The absolute horizontal has been abandoned. Transparency has disappeared to be replaced by a dense crust of provisional occupation: kiosks, carts, strollers, palms, fountains, bars, sofas, trolleys … Corridors no longer simply link A to B, but have become destinations. Their tenant life tends to be short: the most stagnant windows, the most perfunctory dresses, the most implausible flowers. All perspective is gone, as in a rainforest (itself disappearing, they keep saying …). The formerly straight is coiled into evermore complex configurations. Only a perverse modernist choreography can explain the twists and turns, the ascents and descents, the sudden reversals that comprise the typical path from check-in (misleading name) to the apron of the average contemporary airport. Because we never reconstruct or question the absurdity of these enforced dirives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum-seekers, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone – incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles … There was once a polemic about the right angle and the straight line; now

the ninetieth degree has become one among many. In fact, remnants of former geometries create ever new havoc, offering forlorn nodes of resistance that create unstable eddies in newly opportunistic flows … Who would dare claim responsibility for this sequence? The idea that a profession once dictated or at least presumed to predict, people’s movements now seem laughable, or worse: unthinkable. Instead of design, there is calculation: the more erratic the path, eccentric the loops, hidden the blueprint, efficient the exposure, the more inevitable the transaction. In this war, graphic designers are the great turncoats: Where once signage promised to deliver you to where you wanted to be, it now obfuscates and entangles you in a thicket of cuteness that forces you past unwanted detours, turns you back when you’re lost. Postmodernism adds a crumple-zone of viral poché that fractures and multiplies the endless frontline of display, a peristaltic shrink-wrap crucial to all commercial exchange. Trajectories are launched as ramp, turn horizontal without any warning, intersect, fold down, suddenly emerge on a vertiginous balcony above a large void. Fascism minus dictator. From the sudden dead end where you were dropped by a monumental, granite staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible destination, facing a provisional vista made of plaster, inspired by forgettable sources. (There is no datum level; you always inhabit a sandwich. Space is scooped out of Junkspace as from a soggy block of ice cream that has languished too long in the freezer: cylindrical, cone-shaped more or less spherical, whatever …) Toilet groups mutate into Disney Stores then morph to become meditation centres: Successive transformations mock the word plan. The plan is a radar screen where individual pulses survive for unpredictable periods of time in a Bacchanalian free-for-all … In this standoff between the redundant and the inevitable, a plan would actually make

332

333

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

matters worse, would drive you to instant despair. Only the diagram gives a bearable version. There is zero loyalty – and zero tolerance – toward configuration, no original condition; architecture has turned into a time-lapse sequence to reveal a permanent evolution. … The only certainty is conversion – continuous – followed in rare cases, by restoration, the process that claims ever new sections of history as extensions of Junkspace. History corrupts, absolute history corrupts absolutely. Colour and matter are eliminated from these bloodless grafts: the bland has become the only meeting ground for the old and the new … Can the bland be amplified. The featureless be exaggerated. Through height? Depth? Length? Variation? Repetition? Sometimes not overload but its opposite, an absolute absence of detail, generates Junkspace. A voided condition of frightening sparseness, shocking proof that so much can be organized by so little. Laughable emptiness infuses the respectful distance or tentative embrace that starchitects maintain in the presence of the past, authentic or not. Invariably, the primordial decision is to leave the original intact; the formerly residual is declared the new essence, the focus of the intervention. As a first step, the substance to be preserved is wrapped in a thick pack of commerce and catering – like a reluctant skier pushed downhill by responsible minders. To show respect, symmetries are maintained and helplessly exaggerated ancient building techniques are resurrected and honed to irrelevant shine, quarries reopened to excavate the same stone, indiscreet donor names chiselled prominently in the meekest of typefaces; the courtyard covered by a masterful, structural filigree – emphatically uncompetitive – so that continuity may be established with the rest of Junkspace (abandoned galleries, display slums, Jurassic concepts …). Conditioning is applied filtered daylight reveals vast, antiseptic expanses of

monumental reticence and makes them come alive, vibrant as a computer rendering … The curse of public space: latent fascism safely smothered in signage, stools, sympathy… Junkspace is post-existential; it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were. Who do you think you are?  Who do you want to be? (Note to architects: You thought that you could ignore Junkspace, visit it surreptitiously, treat it with condescending contempt or enjoy it vicariously … because you could not understand it, you’ve thrown away the keys … But now your own architecture is infected has become equally smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped busy, atrium-ridden …) JunkSignature™ is the new architec tune: the former megalomania of a profession contracted to manageable size, Junkspace minus its saving vulgarity. Anything stretched – limousines, body parts, planes – turns into Junkspace, its original concept abused. Restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return-the Parthenon marbles – redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re-produce Junkspace. Junkspace will be our tomb. Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume. The combined pollution of all Third World cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses, sweatshops pales into insignificance compared to the heat generated by Junkspace. Junkspace is political: It depends on the central removal of the critical faculty in the name of comfort and pleasure. Politics has become manifesto by Photoshop, seamless blueprints of the mutually exclusive, arbitrated by opaque NGOs. Comfort is the new Justice. Entire miniature states now adopt Junkspace as political program, establish regimes of engineered disorientation, and instigate a politics of systematic disarray. Not exactly anything goes; in fact, the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all

334

335

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

rules, regulations, recourse … Babel has been misunderstood. Language is not the problem, just the new frontier of Junkspace. Mankind, torn by eternal dilemmas, the impasse of seemingly endless debates, has launched a new language that straddles unbridgeable divides like a fragile designer’s footbridge … coined a proactive wave of new oxymorons to suspend former incompatibility: life / style, reality / TV, world / music, museum / store, food / court, health / care, waiting / lounge. Naming has replaced class struggle, sonorous amalgamations of stams, high-concept, and history. Through acronym, unusual importation, suppressing letters, or fabrication of nonexistent plurals, they aim to shed meaning in return for a spacious new roominess … Junkspace knows all your emotions, all your desires. It is the interior of Big Brother’s belly. It pre-empts people’s sensations. It comes with a sound track, smell, captions; it blatantly proclaims how it wants to be read: rich, stunning, cool, huge, abstract, minimal, historical. It sponsors a collective of brooding consumers in surly anticipation of their next spend, a mass of refractory periods caught in a ThousandYear Reign of Razzmatazz, a paroxysm of prosperity. The subject is stripped of privacy in return for access to a credit nirvana.You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are. Emissaries of Junkspace pursue you in the formerly impervious privacy of the bedroom: the mini bar, private fax machines, pay-TV offering compromised pornography, fresh plastic veils wrapping toilets seats, courtesy condoms: miniature profit centres coexist with your bedside bible. Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests. Each man, woman, and child is individu-

ally targeted tracked split off from the rest … Fragments come together at security only, where a grid of video screens disappointingly reassembles individual frames into a banalized utilitarian cubism that reveals Junkspace’s overall coherence to the dispassionate glare of barely trained guards: video-ethnography in its brute form. Just as Junkspace is unstable, its actual ownership is forever being passed on in parallel disloyalty. Junkspace happens spontaneously through natural corporate exuberance – the unfettered play of the market – or is generated through the combined actions of temporary Czars with long records of three-­dimensional philanthropy, bureaucrats (often former leftists) that optimistically sell off vast tracts of waterfront, former hippodromes, military bases and abandoned air­fields to de­velopers or real-estate moguls who can accommodate any deficit in futuristic balances, or through Default Preservation™ (the maintenance of historical complexes that nobody wants but that the Zeitgeist has declared sacrosanct). As its scale mushrooms – rivals and even exceed that of the Public – its economy becomes more inscrutable. Its financing is a deliberate haze, clouding opaque deals, dubious tax breaks, unusual incentives, exemptions, tenuous legalities, transferred air rights, joined properties, special zoning districts, publicprivate complicities. Funded by bonds, lottery, subsidy, charity, grant: An erratic flow of yen, Euros, and dollars creates financial envelopes that are as fragile as their contents. Because of a structural shortfall, a fundamental deficit, a contingent bankruptcy, each square inch becomes a grasping, need surface dependent on covert or overt support, discount, compensation and fund-raising. For culture, engraved donor bricks; for everything else: cash, rentals, leases, franchises, the underpinning of brands. Junkspace expands with the economy but its footprint cannot contract – when it is no

336

337

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

longer needed it thins. Because of its tenuous viability, Junkspace has to swallow more and more program to survive; soon, we will be able to do anything anywhere. We will have conquered place. At the end of Junkspace, the Universal? Through Junkspace, old aura is transfused with new lustre to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with the Guggenheim, Forty-second Street with Disney. God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing … an insulting evolutionary joke … A shortage of masters has not stopped a proliferation of masterpieces. Masterpiece has become a definitive sanction, a semantic space that saves the object from criticism, leaves its qualities unproven, its performance untested its motives unquestioned. Masterpiece is no longer an inexplicable fluke, a roll of the dice, but a consistent typology: its mission to intimidate, most of its exterior surfaces bent, huge percentages of its square footage dysfunctional, its centrifugal components barely held together by the pull of the atrium, dreading the imminent arrival of forensic accounting … The more indeterminate the city, the more specific its Junkspace; all of Junkspace’s prototypes are urban – the Roman Forum, the Metropolis; it is only their reverse synergy that makes them suburban, simultaneously swollen and shrunk. Junkspace reduces what is urban to urbanity. Instead of public life, Public Space™: what remains of the city once the unpredictable has been removed.. Space for honouring, sharing, caring, grieving, and healing … civility imposed by an overdose of serif … In the third Millennium, Junkspace will assume responsibility for pleasure and religion, exposure and intimacy, public life and privacy. Inevitably, the death of God (and the author) has spawned orphaned space; Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian … At the moment of its greatest emancipation,

humankind is subjected to the most dictatorial scripts: from the pushy oration of the waiter to the answering gulags on the other end of the telephone, the safety instructions on the airplane, more and more insistent perfumes, mankind is brow­beaten into submitting to the most harshly engineered plotline. The chosen theatre of megalomania – the dictatorial – is no longer politics, but entertainment. Through Junkspace, entertainment organizes hermetic regimes of ultimate exclusion and concentration: concentration gambling, concentration golf, concentration convention, concentration movie, concentration culture, concentration holiday. Entertainment is like watching a once-hot planet cool off; its major inventions are ancient: the moving image, the roller coaster, recorded sound, cartoons, clowns, dinosaurs, news, war. Except for celebrities – of which there is a dramatic shortage – we have added nothing, just reconfigured. Corpotainment is a galaxy in contraction, forced to go through the motions by ruthless Copernican laws. The secret of corporate aesthetics was the power of elimination, the celebration of the efficient, the eradication of excess: abstraction as camouflage, the search for a Corporate Sublime. On popular demand, organized beauty has become warm, humanist, inclusi­ vist, arbitrary, poetic, and unthreatening: water is pres­surized through very small holes, then forced into rigorous hoops; straight palms are bent into grotesque poses, air is burdened with added oxygen – as if only forcing malleable substances into the most drastic contortions maintains control, satisfies the drive to get rid of surprise. Not canned laughter, but canned euphoria. Colour has disappeared to dampen the resulting caco­vphony, and is used only as cue: relax, enjoy, be well, we’re united in sedation … Why can’t we tolerate stronger sensations? Dissonance? Awkwardness? Genius? Anarchy? … Junkspace heals, or at least that is the assump-

338

339

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

tion of many hospitals. We thought the hospital was unique – a universe that identified by its smell – but now that we are used to universal conditioning we recognize it was merely a prototype; all Junkspace is defined by its smell. Often heroic in size, planned with the last adrenaline of modernism’s grand inspiration, we have made them (too) human; life or death decisions are taken in spaces that are relentlessly friendly, littered with fading bouquets, empty coffee cups, and yesterday’s papers.You used to face death in appropriate cells; now your nearest are huddled together in atriums. A bold datum line is established on every vertical surface, dividing the infirmary in two: above an endless humanist scroll of colour, loved ones, children’s sunsets, signage, and art.. below a utilitarian zone for defacement and disinfectant, anticipated collision, scratch, spill, and smudge … Junkspace is space as vacation; there once was a relationship between leisure and work, a biblical dictate that divided our weeks, organized public life. Now we work harder, marooned in a never-ending casual Friday … The office is the next frontier of Junkspace. Since you can work at home, the office aspires to the domestic; because you still need a life, it simulates the city. Junkspace features the office as the urban home, a meeting-boudoir: desks become sculptures, the work-floor is lit by intimate downlights. Monumental partitions, kiosks, mini-Starbucks on interior plazas: a Post-it universe: team memory, information persistence; futile hedges against the universal forgetting of the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement. Witness corporate agitprop: the CEO’s suite becomes leadership collective, wired to all the world’s other Junkspace, real or imagined Espace becomes E-space. The twenty-first century will bring intelligent Junkspace: on a big digital dashboard: sales, CNNNYSENASDAQC-SPAN, anything that goes up or down, from good to bad, presented in

real time like the a ­ utomotive-theory course that complements driving lessons … Globalization turns language into Junkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrrhic: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism, outsourcing, and multitasking … we can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy … Through the retrofitting of language, there are too few plausible words left; our most creative hypotheses will never be formulated discoveries will remain unmade, concepts unlaunched philosophies muffled ­nuances miscarried … We inhabit sumptuous Potemkin suburbs of weasel terminologies. Aberrant linguistic ecologies sustain virtual subjects in their claim to legitimacy, help them survive … Language is no longer used to explore, define, express, or to confront but to fudge, blur, obfuscate, apologize, and comfort … it stakes claims, assigns victimhood, pre-empts debate, admits guilt, fosters consensus. Entire organizations and / or professions impose a descent into the linguistic equivalent of hell: condemned to a word-limbo, inmates wrestle with words in ever-descending spirals of pleading, lying, bargaining, flattening.. a Satanic orchestration of the meaningless … Intended for the interior, Junkspace can easily engulf a whole city. First, it escapes from its containers – semantic orchids that needed hothouse protection emerging with surprising robustness – then the outdoors itself is converted the street is paved more luxuriously, shelters proliferate carrying increasingly dictatorial messages, traffic is calmed crime eliminated. Then Junkspace spreads like a forest fire in L.A … The global progress of Junkspace represents a final Manifest Destiny: the World as public space … All of the resurrected emblems and recycled ambers of the formerly public

340

341

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

need new pastures. A new vegetal is corralled for its thematic efficiency. The outing of Junkspace has triggered the professionalization of denaturing, a benign eco-fascism that positions a rare surviving Siberian tiger in a forest of slot machines, near Armani, amid a twisted arboreal Baroque … Outside, between the casinos, fountains project entire Stalinist buildings of liquid, ejaculated in a split second, hovering momentarily, then withdrawing with an amnesiac competency … Air, water, wood: All are enhanced to produce Hyperecology™, a parallel  Walden, a new rainforest. Landscape has become Junkspace, foliage as spoilage: Trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts, or even toupees, sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables … Seemingly at the opposite end of Junkspace, the golf course is, in fact, its conceptual double: empty, serene, free of commercial debris. The relative evacuation of the golf course is achieved by the further charging of Junkspace. The methods of their design and realization are similar: erasure, tabula rasa, reconfiguration. Junkspace turns into biojunk; ecology turns into ecospace. Ecology and economy have bonded in Junkspace as ecolomy. The economy has become Faustian; hyperdevelopment depends on artificial underdevelopment; a huge global bureaucracy is in the making to settle, in a colossal yin / yang, the balance between Junkspace and golf, between the scraped and the ‘scaped trading the right to despoil for the obligation to create steroid rainforests in Costa Rica. Oxygen banks, Fort Knoxes of chlorophyll, eco-reserves as a blank check for further pollution. Junkspace is rewriting the apocalypse; we may die of oxygen poisoning … In the past, the complexities of Junkspace were compensated for by the stark rawness of its adjunct infrastructures: parking garages, filling stations, distribution centres routinely displaying a monumental purity that was the original

aim of modernism. Now, massive injections of lyricism have enabled an infrastructure – the one domain previously immune to design, taste, or the marketplace – to join the world of Junkspace, and for Junkspace to extend its manifestations under the sky. Railway stations unfold like iron butterflies, airports glisten like cyclopic dewdrops, bridges span often negligible banks like grotesquely enlarged versions of the harp. To each rivulet its own Calatrava. (Sometimes when there is a strong wind, this new generation of instruments shakes as if being played by a giant, or maybe a God, and mankind shudders...) Junkspace can be airborne, bring malaria to Sussex; 300 anopheline mosquitoes arrive each day at CDG and gtw with ability, theoretically, to infect eight to twenty locals in a three-mile radius, a hazard exacerbated by the average passenger’s reluctance, in a misplaced gasp of quasi-autonomy, to be disinfected once he or she has buckled up for the return journey from the dead end of the tourist destination. Airports, provisional accommodation for those going elsewhere, inhabited by assemblies united only by the imminence of their dissolution, have turned into consumption gulags, democratically distributed across the globe to give every citizen an equal chance of admission … MXP looks as if all of the leftovers of East Germany’s reconstruction – whatever was needed to undo the deprivations of Communism – have been hurriedly bulldozed together according to a vaguely rectangular blueprint to form a botched sequence of deformed inadequate spaces (apparently willed into being by the current rulers of Europe, who extort limitless Euros from the community’s regional funds, causing endless delays for its duped taxpayers too busy on cell phones to notice). DFW is composed of three elements only, repeated ad infinitum, nothing else: one kind of beam, one kind of brick, one kind of tile, all coated in the same colour – is it teal? Rust?

342

343

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

Tobacco? With symmetries scaled beyond any possibility of recognition, the endless curve of its terminals forces its users to enact relativity theory in their quest for the gate. Its dropoff is the seemingly harmless beginning of a journey to the heart of unmitigated nothingness, beyond the animation provided by Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen … Valley cultures were thought to be the most resistant to Junkspace: at GVZ you can still see a universe of rules, order, hierarchy, neatness, coordination, poised moments before its implosion, but at ZHR huge timepieces hover in front of interior waterfalls as an essay in Regional junk. Duty-free is Junkspace; Junkspace is duty-free space. Where culture was thinnest, will it be the first to run out? Is emptiness local? Do wide open spaces demand wide open Junkspace? Sun belt: huge populations where there was nothing; PHX: war paint on every terminal, dead Indian oulines on every surface – carpet, wallpaper, napkins – like frogs flattened by car tires. Public Art distributed across LAX: the fish that have disappeared from our rivers return as public art in the concourse; only what is dead can be resurrected. Memory itself may have turned into Junkspace; only those murdered will be remembered. Deprivation can be caused by overdose or shortage; both conditions happen in Junkspace (often at the same time). Minimum is the ultimate ornament, a self-righteous crime, the contemporary Baroque. It does not signify beauty, but guilt. Its demonstrative earnestness drives whole civilizations into the welcoming arms of camp and kitsch. Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seductions. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower what is higher. The minimum now exists in a state of parasitic co-dependency with the overdose: to have and

not to have, craving and owning, finally collapsed in a single signifier … Museums are sanctimonious Junkspace; there is no sturdier aura than holiness. To accommodate the converts they have attracted by default, museums massively turn bad space into good space; the more untreated the oak, the larger the profit centre. Monasteries inflated to the scale of department stores: expansion is the Third Millennium’s entro­ py, dilute or die. Dedicated to mostly respecting the dead, no cemetery would dare to reshuffle corpses as casually in the name of current expediency; curators plot hangings and unexpected encounters in a donor-plate labyrinth with the finesse of the retailer: lingerie becomes Nude, Action, Body, cosmetics History, Memory, Society. All paintings based on black grids are herded together in a single white room. Large spiders in the humongous conversion offer delirium for the masses … Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing – no sequence is too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting… Through our ancient evolutionary equipment, our irrepressible attention span, we helplessly register, provide insight, squeeze meaning, read intention; we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless … On its triumphal march as content p ­ rovider, art extends far beyond the museum’s ever-increasing boundaries. Outside, in the real world, the art planner spreads Junkspace’s fundamental incoherence by assigning defunct mythologies to residual surfaces and plotting three-dimensional works in leftover emptiness. Scouting for authenticity, his or her touch seals the fate of what was real, taps it for incorporation in Junkspace. Art galleries move en masse to edgy locations, then convert raw space into white cubes … The only legitimate discourse is loss; art replenishes Junkspace in direct proportion to its own morbidity. We used to

344

345

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

renew what was depleted now we try to resurrect what is gone … Outside, the architect’s footbridge is rocked to the breaking point by a stamped of enthusiastic pedestrians; the designer’s initial audacity now awaits the engineer’s application of dampers. Junkspace is a look-no-hands world … The constant threat of virtuality in Junkspace is no longer exorcized by petrochemical products, plastic, vinyl or rubber; the synthetic cheapens. Junkspace has to exaggerate its claims to the authentic. Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real – stone, trees, goods, daylight, people – into the unreal Entire mountains are dismembered to provide ever-greater quantities of authenticity, suspended on precarious brackets, polished to a blinding state of flash that renders the intended earnestness instantly elusive. Stone only comes in light yellow, flesh, a vio­lent beige, a soap like green, the colours of Communist plastics in the 1950 s. Forests are felled their wood all pale: maybe the origins of Junkspace go back to the kindergarten … (Origins is a mint shampoo that stings the anal region.) Colour in the real world looks increasingly unreal, drained. Colour in virtual space is luminous, therefore irresistible. A surfeit of reality-TV has made us into amateur guards monitoring a Junkuniverse … From the lively breasts of the classical violinist to the designer stubble of the Big Brother outcast, the contextual paedophilia of the former revolutionary, the routine addictions of the stars, the runny makeup of the evangelist, the robotic body language of the conductor, the dubious benefits of the fund-raising marathon, the futile explanations of the politician: the swooping movement of the TV camera suspended from its boom – an eagle without beak or claws, just an optical stomach – swallows images and confessions indiscriminately, like a trash bag, to propel them as cyber-vomit in space. TV-studio sets – garishly monumen-

tal – are both the culmination and the end of perspectival space as we’ve known it: angular geometric remnants invading starry infinities; real space edited for smooth transmission in virtual space, crucial hinge in an infernal feedback loop … the vastness of Junkspace extended to the edges of the Big Bang. Because we spend our life indoors – like animals in a zoo – we are obsessed with the weather: 40 percent of all TV consists of presenters of lesser attractiveness gesturing helplessly in front of windswept formations, through which you recognize, sometimes, your own destination / current position. Conceptually, each monitor, each TV screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, while cyberspace has become the great outdoors … Mankind is always going on about architecture. What if space started looking at mankind? Will Junkspace invade the body? Through the vibes of the cell phone? Has it already? Through Botox injections? Collagen? Silicone implants? Liposuction? Penis enlargements? Does gene therapy announce a total reengineering according to Junkspace? Is each of us a mini-construction site? Is mankind the sum of three to five billion individual upgrades? Is it a repertoire of reconfiguration that facilitates the intromission of a new species into its self-made Junksphere? The cosmetic is the new cosmic.

346

347

Contri­ butors –  

351

Contributors Arjun Appadurai (born in 1949) – Things. Commodities in Cultural is a contemporary social-cultural Perspective (1986), Disjuncture anthropologist focusing on and Difference in the Global Culmodernity and globalization, tural Economy (1990), Modernity based in New York. Appadurai at Large (1996) and Fear of Small was born in Mumbai (Bombay), Numbers (2006). India and educated there before coming to the United States. He Mathias Goeritz (born in 1915, received his B.A. from Brandeis died in 1990) – was a German University in 1970. During his painter, sculptor and teacher – academic career, he has held proactive in Mexico. He studied fessorial chairs at Yale University, philosophy and art history in the University of Chicago, the Berlin at Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Pennsylvania and Universität. In 1940 he emigrated The New School, NYC. Currently to Spanish Morocco, where he he is the Goddard Professor in worked as a teacher until 1944. the Steinhardt School at New He returned to Europe at the end York University’s Media Culture of World War II in 1945, settling and Communication department. in Spain. There he devoted Appadurai has articulated a view himself to painting, and met of cultural activity known as the avant-garde artists. In 1948 he social imaginary. For Appadurai, helped to found the Escuela de the imaginary is composed of Altamira, which was a call to five dimensions of global cultural artistic rebellion and propounded flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, absolute creative freedom. In technoscapes, financescapes, and 1949 Goeritz settled in Mexico ideoscapes. Arjun Appadurai has and became professor of visual held numerous fellowships and education and drawing at the scholarships and has received Escuela de Arquitectura of the several scholarly honors, includUniversidad de Guadalajara. Of ing residential fellowships at the singular importance was his Center for Advanced Study in the creation of a museum in Mexico Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto City, the Museo Experimental El (California) and the Institute for Eco, which operated from 1952 Advanced Study at Princeton, to 1953 and had both a national and an Individual Research and an international impact Fellowship from the Open Soci[The museum was reopened in ety Institute (New York). He is a 2005 as a part of The National fellow of the American Academy University of Mexico]. Starting of Arts and Sciences. Appadurai with his move to Mexico City in is also co-founder of the journal, 1952, Goeritz continued to teach Public Culture. Some of his most and entered a richly productive important works include: Worperiod, particularly in terms ship and Conflict under Colonial of his sculpture. He also made Rule (1981), The Social Life of regular contributions to the

352

Contributors monthly “Sección de arte” in the periodical Arquitectura / México from 1959 to 1978.

Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as her readings of the works of French feminists, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Michèle Le Dœuff. She has mainly written on questions of corporeality and their relations to the sciences and the arts. She has held tenured positions at The University of Sydney, Monash University, The State University of New York at Buffalo, Rutgers University and Duke University. She is the author of publications such as: Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989), Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (1995), Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (2001), The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (2004), Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005), Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008), Becoming Undone. Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art (2011).

David Rolfe Graeber (born in 1961) – is an American anthropologist and anarchist who currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007. Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002), membership in the labour union, Industrial Workers of the World, and more recently the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is the author of publications such as: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2004), a book based on his doctoral dissertation, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007), a book of collected essays, and Debt: the First Five Thousand Years (2011), a major historical Krzysztof Gutfrański (born 1982) monograph. In 2012 he edited – is an art historian, curator and (w/ Janet Byrne) The Occupy researcher. He is engaged in art Handbook. criticism, visual anthropology and the relationship between art Elizabeth Grosz is an ­Australian and science. He is the editor-in academic and feminist living chief of the Alternativa festival and working in the USA. She at the Wyspa Institute of Art in is known for philosophical the Gdańsk Shipyard (which interpretations of the work of has issued, amongst others, French philosophers: Jacques Grzegorz Klaman’s catalogue, a

353

Contributors series of Alternatva anthologies, Russian Literature, 2007), Flesh etc.) He also co-edits Format P to Metal: Soviet Literature & the magazine and is the editor of an Alchemy of Revolution (2003), art & science book series entitled “The Real St. Petersburg” (in The Ekspektatywa (both Bęc Zmiana Russian Review, 2003). Foundation, Warsaw, 2009), as well as the editor (w/ Joanna Arne Hendriks – is an ­Amsterdam Zielinska) of ABECE Azorro – a based artist, exhibition maker, supergroup reader. From 2010 researcher and historian (Master to mid-2011 he ran a public of Arts – University of Amsterprogram of interdisciplinary dam). In his speculative design open space Studio+Kitchen at research, the strange and the Centre of Contemporary Art familiar continuously swap Znaki Czasu in Toruń, Poland. places and create perspectives on Since mid-2011 he has worked the radicality of everyday experias a freelance curator and editor. ence and the familiarity of the He has published in various print radical. He is a strong believer and internet publications. in the transparency of information and an active participant Rolf Hellebust – is an associate in the Open Design movement. Professor in Russian and SlaHe teaches in the Next Nature vonic Studies, part of the Faculty department of the Technical of Arts at Notthingam University. University at Eindhoven which He wrote and defended his PhD is concerned with investigaton The Pushkinian Tradition as ing the social implications of Narrative and Intertext (U. of nanotechnology. His projects Toronto, supervisor Lubomír include Hacking Ikea, the Repair Doležel) in 1993. Since then he Manifesto, The Academy of Work, has continued to develop reThe Incredible Shrinking Man, search interests in both the 19th and 8Billion City. and 20th centuries – and beyond, mainly on the construction of Tim Ingold (born in 1948) – is the 19th-century Russian literary a British social anthropolocanon as a cultural narrative, the gist, currently Chair of Social symbolic language of revolution Anthropology at the University in Russia, as well as focusing on of Aberdeen. He was educated the theory and practice of Rusat Leighton Park School and sian modernism and postmodernCambridge University. He is a ism in its international contexts, fellow of the British Academy building on the previous work on and of the Royal Society of Edsuch figures as Belyi and Joyce, inburgh. His theoretical interests Nabokov, Bitov, and Aksenov. are: ecological approaches in His recent publications, are: anthropology and psychol“The Journey to the Underworld ogy; human-animal relations; in Turgenev’s Bežin Lug” (in relations between biological, psy-

354

Contributors chological and anthropological of Manhattan (1978), Content approaches to culture and social (2004), Serpentine Gallery: 24 life; environmental perception; Hour Interview Marathon (2007), language, technology and skilled Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2006 practice; the anthropology of (2008), Project Japan. Metabolism lines and line-making. PublicaTalks… (w/ Hand Ulrich Obrist, tions: The Skolt Lapps today 2011). (1976), Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers: reindeer economies Bruno Latour (born in 1947) and their transformations (1980), – is a French anthropologist, sociThe appropriation of nature: ologist of science and an influenessays on human ecology and tial theorist in the field of Science social relations (1986), Evoluand Technology Studies (STS). tion and social life (1986), The Having taught at the École des perception of the environment: Mines de Paris from 1982 to 2006, essays on livelihood, dwelling he is now a professor at Sciences and skill (2000), Lines: a brief Po Paris (the Paris Institute of history (2007), Being alive: essays Political Studies) where he served on movement, knowledge and as vice-president of research description (2011). between 2007 – 2012. Although his studies of scientific practice Rem Koolhaas (born in 1944) were at one time associated with – is a Dutch architect, archisocial constructionist approaches tectural theorist, urbanist to the philosophy of science, and Professor in Practice of Latour has diverged significantly Architecture and Urban Design from such approaches. He is best in the Graduate School of Design known for withdrawing from the at Harvard University, USA. Koolsubjective / objective division and haas studied at the Netherlands re-developing a work-in-progress Film and Television Academy in approach. Along with Michel Amsterdam, at the Architectural Callon and John Law, Latour is Association School of Architecone of the primary developers of ture in London and at Cornell actor-network theory (ANT). His University in Ithaca, New York. most recent works of importance Koolhaas is a founding partner of include: Pandora’s hope: essays OMA, and of its research-oriented on the reality of science studies counterpart AMO, currently based (1999), Politics of Nature: How to in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In Bring the Sciences into Democ2005 he co-founded Volume racy [Politiques de la nature: Magazine together with Mark Comment faire entrer les sciences Wigley and Ole Bouman. In 2000 en démocratie] (2004), ReassemRem Koolhaas won the Pritzker bling the social: an introduction Prize. He is the author of publito Actor-network theory (2005) cations such as: Delirious New [written in English], On the York: A Retroactive Manifesto Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

355

Contributors [Sur le culte moderne des dieux Inês Moreira (born 1977) – is an faitiches, 2009] (2009), Cogitamus. architect, researcher and curator Six lettres sur les humanités based in Portugal. In her work scientifiques (2010), Enquête she has experimented with sur les modes d’existence. Une collaborations between archianthropologie des Modernes tecture, contemporary art and (2012). speculative / oblique research on contemporary culture. In recent Amy Marsh – EdD, DHS, ACS, CH years she has been developing is a board certified clinical curatorial research on space, sexologist, certified sex educator, under the title Performing Buildcertified consulting hypnotist, ing Sites: curatorial research sex writer, and sex educator in / on space, which proposes a located in the San Francisco Bay critical epistemology in the field Area. She is an Associate Profesof curatorial studies (Goldsmiths sor at the Institute for Advanced College, London). She was Study of Human Sexuality in Cultural Programmer of ArchiSan Francisco. She also teaches tecture for the European Capital online adult sexuality classes of Culture 2012, in Guimarães, through Creative Sexuality Portugal, and Deputy ProgramEducation Corp. and Sex Coach mer for Art+Architecture (from U and has presented at numerous February 2010 to March 2011). conferences. She has a private She is now curating a number practice in the SF Bay Area. She of projects interfacing architecis the author of “Love Among the ture and cultural studies. She Objectum Sexuals” and “Le’ale’a coordinated the Laboratrio de O Na Poe Kahiko – Joy of the Arte Experimental of Instituto People of Old,” both published das Artes / Ministério da Cultura, in the Electronic Journal of Lisbon (2003 – 05); was co-foundHuman Sexuality. Her essay, er of the independent art group “Kid Chrysalis” was recently Plano 21 Associação Cultural, included in Transitions of the and part of the Terminal Project Heart – Stories of Love, Struggle team (since 2005); she is also and Acceptance by Mothers of the founder of the experimental Transgender and Gender Variant curatorial project petit CABANON Children, edited by Rachel Pepper. (since 2007); and resident curator Dr. Marsh also wrote a weekly at Museo Extremeño Iberoamericolumn,“Love’s Outer Limits,” for cano de Arte Contemporneo in the now defunct Carnal Nation Badajoz, Spain (since 2007). website, and currently hosts “Ask Dr. Amy” on the Romance Ewa Opałka (born 1982) Broadcasting Network, Live 365. – is a PhD student at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at Jagiellonian University in Cracow; a graduate of film

356

Contributors studies, curatorial studies and Aneta Szyłak – is a curator and gender studies she currently art theorist, a co-founder and works as a curator and art critic. the current Artistic Director She has published in Ha!art, of the Wyspa Institute of Art Format, Opcje. She is interested and Alternativa Festival – an in issues of representation of intellectual environment for women in art and film studies of contemporary visual culture in lesbian identity, psychoanalysis, the former Gdańsk Shipyard, and corporeal feminism, artistic and Vice-President of the activities in public spaces. Wyspa Progress Foundation. Her projects are characterized by Susan Schuppli – is a media artist powerful responses to cultural, and cultural theorist curpolitical, social, architectural rently working on the European and institutional peculiarities Research Council, a funded and include Labour & Leisure project of Forensic Architecture, (Wyspa / Alternativa – Gdańsk, at Goldsmiths University of 2011); Estrangement (with Hiwa London where she also received K: Wyspa / Alternativa – Gdańsk, her doctorate in 2009. Previously 2011 and The Showroom-London, Schuppli participated in the 2009); Over and over again Whitney Independent Study Pro1989 – 2009 (Wrocław Centennial gram and completed her MFA at Hall, 2008); Chosen (in collaborathe University of California, San tion with Galit Eilat: Digital Art Diego. Her creative projects have Lab-Holon, Israel) and many been exhibited at The Kitchen others. She has lectured at many (New York), the Brussels Biennale, art institutions including CopenArtspace (Australia), and most hagen University, Bard College, recently at Museum London New School University, Queens (Canada). She is on the editoCollege and NYU, both in NYC, rial board of the journals SITE and worked as a guest professor (Stockholm) and Second Nature at the Akademie der Bildende (Melbourne) and is a member of Kunste in Mainz, Germany. She the Photo-Lexic research group is a PhD student in the Curatobased in Tel Aviv. Parallel to rial / Knowledge at Goldsmiths, these theoretical and practical London and the University of inquiries is an ongoing examinaCopenhagen. tion of the relationship between architecture and media events. Leire Vergara – is an independent Articles related to this work curator who lives and works include: “Forensic Architecture” in Bilbao. She is an editor and in Post-Traumatic Urbanism member of Bulegoa z / b, an (Architectural Design, 2010) and independent office for art and “Improvised Explosive Designs” knowledge, recently opened in in Ambivalent Architectures Bilbao. From 2006 until 2009, she (Borderlands, 2010). worked as chief curator at Sala

357

Contributors Rekalde (Bilbao). During this period of her curatorial practice, she paid special attention to the production of commissioned projects that encouraged new ways of transcending the limits of the white cube. She has also developed a strong commitment to art education through various conferences, workshops and meetings that were pivotal to the exhibitions programme. From 2002 to 2005, together with Peio Aguirre, she co-directed the independent art production structure D.A.E (Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak) with its base in Donostia-San Sebastián. She has contributed as a writer to a number of art and cultural magazines and catalogues. She is a PhD student in the Curatorial / Knowledge programme, part of the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, London.


358

Alternativa. Anthology

3 en

MATERIALność © Wyspa Progress Foundation Gdańsk 2012 

print

isbn 978-83-935174-1-1 First edition Printed in Poland

 akład Poligraficzny Z Moś & Łuczak Sp. j. ul. Piwna 1, 61 – 065 Poznań, www.mos.pl

editors

print run

Krzysztof Gutfrański and the 500 copies Curatorial Team (Aneta Szyłak, acknowledgements Arne Hendriks, Inês Moreira, The editors want to thank the Leire Vergara) authors for contributing to the editorial team book and allowing their texts to be reproduced. Aleksandra Grzonkowska, Judson Hamilton The publisher has made every design and typesetting effort to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgeTomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak ment has not been made, we ask / berszmisiak.com copyright holders to contact the publisher publisher. Wyspa Institute of Art ul. Doki 1 / 145 B 80 – 958 Gdańsk www.wyspa.art.pl www.alternativa.org.pl Artistic  Director  of  the  Wyspa Institute of Art and The Alternativa Festival Aneta Szyłak

president  of  the  Wyspa Progress Foundation Grzegorz Klaman

Editor-in-chief of Alternativa Editions Krzysztof Gutfrański

Honorary Patronage

This publication has been funded with support from the European Commission. It reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Partners

Materiality is a two-year European project that is being developed in collaboration between Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk, Vessel in Bari, Polytechnico in Tomar and Kibla in Maribor.