Kimchi Quesadilla
an unexpected encounter with things
Prologue
As a child lying in bed during Southland’s long summer twilight, I used to contemplate the ceiling. This seemed so close, such a known commodity, and yet simultaneously so unreachable, and impossible to occupy. Imagine its complex forms as a space for living. Imagine encountering the light fixture standing upright, having to clamber up raking planes, and negotiate the lintels of doorways in order to move into another room. It literally turns what is familiar upside down, nothing can be taken for granted in this new spatial mode of existence.
Walking around the city in a receptive state, exploring “the poetic surface of the urban spectacle,”[1] it seems to me that the commercial urban roof-space operates in a similar way. Both are highly visible yet unable to be occupied. Built by humans, to serve humans, clusters of services paraphernalia accumulate on vast planes. The roof-realm is not for human habitation: here the human ‘subject’ is secondary to ‘objects’. It is their place. People make intermittent, precarious visits only as required to service the resident things.
I find this rooftop equipment interesting precisely because it has no truck with aesthetics. It has a job to do: its raison d'être, utility trumps beauty, form follows function. While appearing arbitrary to the casual observer, it follows its own underlying logic. Compelling forms get on with inconspicuous usefulness. Choreographer Trisha Brown has said, “We’re taught not to see how things function. You see water towers and yet you don’t see them, you ask what they are, you find out what they are, but you don’t really know what they do. That was my interest in working with them; they were secret, invisible, and I could have them, work with them.”[2]
Brown’s Roof Piece (1973) utilised the rooftops of New York’s SoHo to transmit gestures, some of which were almost semaphore like: “I had a big preoccupation with rooftops in the 1970’s, about getting up to this other plateau that is always visible, always right with us, but not often acknowledged – a plateau of possibilities, of horizontal communication that was available but that no one was using.”[3] No people were using it, but perhaps rooftop objects were – as an agora for a parliament of things.[4] Imagine them communicating amongst themselves, engaged in their own social lives, unbeknownst to passers-by.
Academic Caroline A. Jones has suggested that art has the ability to show us “how matter thinks,” and to help us become more “sensitive to the whole blooming, buzzing assemblage of intersecting worlds.”[5] For this research project I have been delving into the field of Object Oriented Ontology, and the writings of the philosopher Graham Harman, in order to address the secret life of objects. In Part Two, I consider the ramifications of redundancy and excessive consumption.
“Junk is not trash. We know what to do with trash. But Junk hangs around. It promises something fixed. It forces us to imagine another use, and drags us toward its future.”[6]
Part One
“The real, hidden, and essential do very much exist, but communicate only by way of the unreal, apparent, and inessential. It would be as if mushrooms communicated with their own qualities, not directly or through rhizomal networks, but via radio waves.”[7]
Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object
Nature and Culture
Until Bruno Latour, philosophers were preoccupied with human access to the world, with bridging the gap between culture and nature.[8] But since humankind evolved as an animal - albeit one existing on a continuum of sentience and reason - we are a part of nature. And everything we make and do is part of nature, just as a well-constructed bird’s nest is part of nature.[9] And herein lies Latour’s breakthrough. “Nature and Society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies-natures, of collectives….”[10]
Graham Harman writes that “Latour is the Galileo of metaphysics, ridiculing the split between the supralunar world of hard scientific fact and the sublunar world of human power games.”[11] The world has not been designed for us, it does not revolve around us. We are not apart from it, but merely a part of it.
So let us consider the sublime landscape of 19th century romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:
“Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around” [12]
This precariousness - emphasised by scale, risk and drama - could equally be found in the hybrid man-made landscape. Philosopher Frederic Gros writes that the city has reached such a scale that it may be traversed as if it were a landscape.[13] I would argue that there are many places in the un-domesticated city which have been made by people but not for people: places that are awe-inspiring due to their awkward ugliness, and their forbidding un-inhabitable nature.
In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley compares humans with the wind harp: a passive device which experiences, or expresses, the wind by vibrating. Does the wind translate the strings, or do the strings translate the wind? Academic Timothy Morton, whose field includes ecology, philosophy and literature, writes:
“Sentience, on this view, is vibrating in tune with (or out of tune with) some other entity: sentience is attunement. From this platform, Shelley is able to imagine thinking as a derivative of a physical process: a vibration “about” a vibration, or an interference pattern between vibrations. Shelley sneaks in a still more radical claim: “perhaps all sentient beings” are like wind harps. Under the influence of the early Coleridge, Shelley is willing to transcend anthropocentrism and develop a philosophy that includes the nonhuman.” [14]
This idea of attunement is intriguing. The air between people and objects is loaded with data which is generally impenetrable to our limited sensory range. However, along with other sensory stimuli, I have always noticed electronic background noise, the weird hum of a transformer, the buzz of fluorescent lights. A former boss had a heart valve replaced with a mechanical one. When I sat across the desk from him I could hear it ticking, which I found quite disconcerting, yet simultaneously somewhat reassuring.
So do I notice these things because I am thinking about them? Or am I thinking about them because I notice them? Which comes first?[15] Being open to haptic sensory experience, and tuning into the energy of surrounding objects, gives power to things. Noticing ascribes life.
Actants
Latour and Graham Harman take Shelley’s non-human philosophy one step further, by extending ‘being’ to the inanimate: “Miniature trickster objects can turn the tide without warning: a pebble can destroy an empire if the emperor chokes at dinner.”[16] If things have the same status as humans, then we must pay attention to them and their actions. Latour coined the term actant, to describe a thing which can act and effect change. Harman favours the term object, and includes all entities under that umbrella. According to both philosophers all objects have power, which is beyond that bestowed by human use or perception. “Things themselves are actants – not signifieds, phenomena, or tools for human praxis.”[17]
Long lists feature significantly in the texts of both writers. These lists of unrelated things exist outside grammatical structure; lack of a ‘subject’ allows the focus to rest solely upon the object.[18] It seems me that this enables the reader to approach a thing obliquely, to sneak up on it from a different angle, and perhaps snatch a glimpse of its objecty-ness in action.
So what would be the sculptural equivalent of a list? Could groups of objects be arranged in such a way that no over-arching narrative presents itself, attention instead being directed to each individual thing’s agenda? Perhaps the obvious solution would be one of taxonomy: not classification exactly, but rather appropriating the vocabulary of museological presentation to denote respect, and demand attention.
Gathering humble things and representing them in a gallery setting enables a more nuanced appreciation of their subtle qualities. One example is Asterisms by the artist Gabriel Orozco. Made up of a democratic presentation of all objects found at a specific time in a specific place, the viewer is left to read the presented ‘data.’ Nothing is prioritised, every tiny object is given equal weighting, carefully laid out, documented, and presented for scrutiny. In works such as this the plinth seems to be staging a comeback as a device to elevate status, after having been left out in the cold for some years.
An alternative mode of allowing objects their own agenda would be to capture them in their natural habitat, using the camera as a device to focus viewer attention. Finding intrigue in random juxtaposition and chance adds another lens through which to view the contemporary built environment. Artist Richard Wentworth’s ongoing photographic series, Making Do and Getting By, records these chance vignettes of the urban environment. “I think that artists particularly are slightly magnetised, or maybe they’re not magnetised, they’re just paying attention to the iron filings, and they notice the patterning.”[19] He notices, and then drops a pin for the rest of us.
Latour’s granting of autonomous power to the inanimate bears a close affinity with both critical theorist Bill Brown’s Things, and political theorist Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism. Bennett argues that we must respect our non-human neighbours, as the notion of ‘dead’ or ‘dumb’ matter “feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”[20] This environmental aspect to vibrant materialism is shared with Timothy Morton, but it remains a human-centric way of thinking. Humanity’s main concern with environmental destruction appears to be the survival of our own comfortable lifestyle.
Bennett ascribes creative agency to the non-human as well as the human. It relates to the idea of matter ‘wanting’ to follow a certain path, or desiring a certain form. Brown uses the example of constructivist materialism, which “sought to recognize objects as participants in the reshaping of the world: “Our things in our hands,” Aleksandr Rodchenko claimed, “must be equals, comrades.””[21]
In general Brown seems to position his discourse as speaking up for the underdog, for the oppressed minority who need championing within cultural studies. Somehow we must overcome the lowly status of the passive object in the face of the controlling subject. In this sense the object is merely the latest entity to be granted some kind of ‘franchise,’ following on from women, people of colour, LGBT, animal welfare, corporations, environmental concerns etc. Latour asks, “Will a different democracy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?”[22] This can be problematic if hard won human rights are seen as somehow diluted, shared with the inanimate all and sundry, to the extent that humans feel de-valued.
Harman, Latour, Bennett, et al, argue that we are raising the object to equal the status of subject, not squashing humanity back down into the mud. But you would have to say it is rather a grey area. Some people may feel they need a scapegoat who is further down the pecking order than they are. Academic Andrew Cole’s position is that vibrant materialism decentres the human, and “questions about capitalism or class are reduced to flat ontologies positing the equality of everything, while the experience of workers under capitalism is eschewed.”[23] For Cole, Object Oriented Philosophy is a perfect fit with the Marxian notion of the commodity fetish:
“For Marx, at least, this way of thinking about objects is what keeps capitalism ticking. To adopt such a philosophy, no questions asked, is fantasy-commodity fetishism in academic form.”[24]
Cole’s ideas give me pause for thought. My name is Robyn, and I have an object-fetish. Am I perpetuating capitalism? I would argue that object and commodity are not exact synonyms.
However, I am ascribing ‘value’ to physical objects. Bill Brown suggests that the current resurgence in the ‘value’ of things may instead be due to the growing digital nature of our world.[25] Confronted with ubiquitous screens and interfaces, humanity has a growing need for the tactile, the concrete, for the digital as in fingers.[26] Hence the rise in a material culture.
But I digress, and must return to my main thread.
Alliances and Encounters
As humans we are faced with a legion of potentially mutinous vibrant autonomous actants/objects/things/matter. Individually each one may have a miniscule amount of power, but once massed together they can prove to be a formidable force. Who needs James Cameron’s Skynet when we have the Great Pacific Garbage Patch contaminating the food-chain?
According to Bruno Latour, an actant increases its ability to effect change with each alliance it forms and maintains. An actant with no network has no power. Latour’s networks are dependent on continuous political connection and negotiation between actants. Harman describes it thus: “The world is not made of stable, rock-solid forms, but only of front lines in a battle or love-story between actants.”[27] All of these objects “are constituted by their involvements from the start.”[28] Harman uses the example of a knife, which could be variously a murder weapon, kitchen utensil, or stage prop. Place, and associations, colour our view of all objects, including art objects. Things need a context. Each individual entity interacts with others within a larger system.
In the network of Bruno Latour, the actors are unable to directly touch each other. He resolves the issue of cause and effect with the concept of indirect causation. Latour’s mediator, or middle man, translates the directive from one entity and relays it to the next. Without this intermediary conductor, transference of energy or content is impossible. Harman rightly points out that since this mediator is another actant, in theory it is also unable to ‘touch’ either of the two parties. Further mediators would be required to transfer the communication, then they would need more mediators, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. Harman seems to be trying to shoehorn Latour’s thinking into some kind of universal metaphysical ontology. Rather unsurprisingly, he has found Latour wanting in a few details. “While the gaps between entities are rightly multiplied to infinity, he leaves no gap at all between a thing’s inherent reality and its effects on other things.”[29]
Graham Harman’s solution to this issue of indirect causation is “a split between real objects and sensual ones.”[30] He posits that every object has a hidden inner core which is unable to be accessed or exhausted, while certain outer aspects or qualities can be ‘touched.’ Therefore, we encounter objects as mere simulacra, or caricatures of themselves. “The thing “as” thing is not the same as the thing itself, which can never be openly encountered.”[31]
Harman makes use of astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s theoretical two tables to help illustrate his concept. The first table is reduced to its base matter; it is merely an assemblage of tiny particles. The second table is all about human use and experience, it is reduced to its effects. Harman adds to these a third: the object itself, with an autonomous core which lies beyond perception. Harman uses the term ‘Tool-Being’[32] to refer to this hidden core. We will never truly know the hidden nature of the tool-being since, like giant squid, they are “encountered only once they have washed up dead on the shore.”[33]
“Where ever we look, tool-being always lies elsewhere.”[34] Subterranean reality inconspicuously goes about its business, while we are distracted by the sensual qualities encrusting its surface. Harvard professor Giuliana Bruno has written that such surface qualities are key to relations between subject and object. “The life of objects haptically conveys energies that are also layers of experience and residual existence… materiality, in this sense, is an archive of relations and transformations.”[35] Found objects emit traces of their former life, they are available to be encountered as a palimpsest. She quotes De rerum natura by Lucretius:
“There exist what we call images of things,
Which as it were peeled off from the surfaces
Of objects, fly this way and that through the air…
I say therefore that likenesses or thin shapes
Are sent out from the surfaces of things
Which we must call as it were their films or bark.”[36]
So as real objects we are able to perceive the sensual qualities of things. But does the thing perceive us? Harman’s view is that while any single interaction has just one real object, the reciprocal relationship could occur as a separate encounter.[37] Harman is proposing that the ‘as’ structure is not dependent on sentient awareness – any real object encounters any other object in this same way.
“Even the most stupefied physical mass reduces to sheer caricatures each of the obstacles and barriers it runs up against. Thus, some sort of objectification occurs even at the level of sheer matter; the realm of presence-at-hand is not the product of human sensation, but of the perspectival stance of any entity whatever.”[38]
The curious thing then, is to imagine what the experience of this perceptive object might be. What is it like to be a thing? In Alien Phenomenology, cultural theorist Ian Bogost utilises the example of bat sonar to grapple with the inner life of the ‘alien’ object. Experience is subjective, and since there is no equivalent human sense how could we begin to imagine how a bat operates? Bogost proposes the analogy of the submarine as a possible solution. However, “we never understand the alien experience, we only ever reach for it metaphorically.”[39] He ends up back with Harman’s caricatures: things make sense of the other using their own properties.[40] Of course, inevitably, with a caricature some aspects are distorted. It is never a true version of reality. The metaphor merely enables our partial experience of the other, by translating an otherwise indecipherable language.
Oxford bioethics lecturer Charles Foster has documented his attempts to go beyond the limitations of his species. He tried to experience the world differently, the way an animal does, over a period of years. Foster is fascinated with understanding how the same sensory inputs are processed by different beings in different ways, and also by what the world sees when it looks back at us. By thinking his way into another’s mind, putting himself into the shoes of another organism, Foster hopes to gain an empathetic understanding. He argues that this is a transferrable skill: “Perhaps, for a human, being an animal is just an extreme mode of empathy – no different in kind from what you need to be a decent lover or father or colleague.”[41]
Perhaps respect and consideration toward objects could also engage human empathy in a similar way. There is a danger perhaps of animism, of ascribing human-like existential qualities to the inanimate. And so we arrive at one potential issue raised by considering things as autonomous objects – that of anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism
Academic Christopher Wood has argued that a thing may not exist as a thing until encountered by some other. Humans ‘create’ an object’s autonomy by discerning it as an individual ‘thing’ against a ground of formless matter, therefore ‘thing’ is anthropomorphism by definition. “The thing is always already anthropomorphic, in the sense that it customizes for human apprehension something that is outside the human.”[42]
Similarly, Timothy Morton stresses that the origin of the word anthropomorphism lies in the way that a form is being perceived by humans. Morton, however, then sides with Harman and Bogost in allowing that the perception or encounter may be undertaken by a non-human entity. Whatever is doing the looking will colour the way something is seen: “…if everything is itselfpomorphising everything else, anthropomorphism is not as big a deal as some ecological criticism thinks.”[43]
Jane Bennett has no problem with anthropomorphism, as long as it enables us to get beyond anthropocentricism. This is the danger that must be avoided: we must allow that creative agency exists beyond humanity, if we are to achieve any kind of sustainable balance with the planet’s systems.
“Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentricism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman “environment.”[44]
American artist Amie Siegel made objects the protagonists in her film Provenance. People are not central to the work, which instead follows the life of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh chairs. By using various filmic devices normally used with human actors, she allows the viewer to sympathise with these non-human characters. “In order to present the objects as of their own ontology, they had to be treated like people.”[45] An intriguing idea, however I suspect that purposely engaging the anthropomorphic qualities of objects is still frowned upon by the art institution.
Art critic Michael Fried discussed the anthropomorphic effect of minimalist sculpture in his 1967 essay “Art & Objecthood.” He favoured the term ‘literal art,’ as the actual physical qualities of the medium took precedence over representation. Fried wrote that the “meaning and, equally, the hiddenness of (literal art’s) anthropomorphism are incurably theatrical.”[46] But is this necessarily a bad thing? A viewer experiences their own body as subject in relation to the ‘impassive’ art object, “not … entirely unlike being distanced or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming across literalist objects unexpectedly – for example, in somewhat darkened rooms – can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way.”[47]
I suspect Graham Harman’s view would be that the object itself is not theatrical, but the viewer imposes the theatricality upon it along with their anthropocentric perception. “The things I encounter are projected in terms of my own possibilities….”[48]
Part Two
“Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing – between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity… and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects.”[49]
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
Obsolescence
Bruno Latour brought the term black box into general use within the field of metaphysics, meaning “any actant so firmly established that we are able to take its interior for granted.”[50] Such a black box does its job so effectively we forget it is an alliance of many actants, forming an assemblage working together towards a common goal. We do not consider the inner workings, only the inputs and outputs.
In Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please? Latour discusses Damian Ortega’s art installation Cosmic Thing. Ortega disassembled a VW beetle, and re-presented the components, literally in suspended animation. The work is a 3-dimensional exploded axonometric. The car ceases to function as car, instead becoming a diagram. Although demonstrating technical function, that same function is simultaneously rendered impossible.[51]
This, for me, is the most interesting aspect of the black box concept. It only ever becomes truly visible once it ceases to function efficiently. The dysfunctional or dislocated object comes under the spotlight of our gaze. Stripped of common purpose, the individual autonomous components become apparent. They exist as a gathering of parts with an ambiguous former purpose, and the possibility of technical facility.
In my opinion the dysfunctional black box has certain parallels to Harman’s reading of Heidegger’s Tool Analysis. With both concepts, utility and visibility are somehow mutually exclusive, only in a slightly different way. When a black box stops functioning it is seen, whereas when a tool is seen it stops functioning. Harman states that “the visibility of the tool immediately marks its cessation as equipment.” [52] In this way utility is able to function as a kind of invisibility cloak. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”[53]
In brief, according to Heidegger, a tool oscillates between two modes of being: ready-to-hand, or present-at-hand. We use the hammer without giving it a second thought, but the broken hammer forces its presence upon our consciousness. Harman extrapolates Heidegger’s tool analysis to apply to all entities as an ontology of objects. He argues that both modes of existence – concealed and revealed – instead operate simultaneously as his split between hidden core and exposed qualities. Our gaze is diverted by an aesthetic outer surface, while we disregard the subterranean essence operating in the shadow-lands of our vision.
So once utility is removed from its context, or denied its equipment function, what does it become? Redundant utility could be seen as a kind of existential crisis of the object: services that do not serve, but instead are present to be encountered in a different way. Human interaction with the tool-being is no longer one of inconspicuousness usefulness, but ambiguous confrontation with some other aspect of its nature.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan has suggested that redundant technology becomes highly visible. Instead of receding into a shadowy operational background (behind the distracting figure of surface content), the defunct medium becomes a clichéd symbol of itself. Graham Harman has written about McLuhan’s philosophy in Bells and Whistles:
“On the one hand it is empty cliché, an obsolete medium discarded into the rag-and-bone shop of the spirit and cluttering our awareness while the real action unfolds in a hidden ground. On the other it is aesthetic figure retrieved from the junk heap either as a result of some new medium, or by the outright generation of that medium thanks to the work of the artist.”[54]
Perhaps all this is why I first became intrigued with the forms of TV aerials. Antennas are already in a precarious position due to the cessation of transmission in the VHF band. Now all broadcast television is vulnerable with the rise in web based on-demand options. Any kind of dictatorial central linear broadcast is on the out. Young people don’t watch TV, they consume broadband. They no longer merely receive content, they determine content. Everyone has become a content producer: in 2015 some 400 hours of video were being added to YouTube every minute.[55] So who is the audience now? Art critic Boris Groys contends the spectator has been usurped by the algorithm:
“The subject not only does something on the internet, but also reveals him- or herself as a human being with certain interests, desires and needs. The monetization of classical hermeneutics is one of the most interesting processes that has emerged in recent decades. The artist is interesting not as producer but as consumer.”[56]
In her essay Digital Divide, art historian Claire Bishop maintains that the digital is the subterranean presence, or backdrop, for contemporary art production, just as TV was in the 1960’s. Even when disavowed, it is still shaping the underlying conditions. Artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn filter, skim, and select; presenting archival samplings of material and data. Art critic Hal Foster writes, “With its throwaway structures, kitschy materials, jumbled references, and fan testimonials, [Hirschhorn’s work] often suggests a grotesquerie of our immersive commodity-media-entertainment environment: such are the elements and the energies that exist to be rechannelled.”[57]
As Bishop says, surfing the net has become the dérive for the 21st century.[58] I wonder what Baudelaire’s urban flâneur would make of that.
Junkspace
“Junkspace (is)… the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock.”[59]
For me this quote brings to mind the Isidore Ducasse quote beloved by the surrealists,[60] and this may have been architect Rem Koolhaas’ intention in his 2002 essay. In brief, Koolhaas’ Junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet, which acts as a kind of corollary to the widely used term space-junk. As Koolhaas states, “We do not leave pyramids,”[61] but instead produce acres of expedient, provisional, and arbitrary built space determined mainly by the limits of infrastructure. Think seamless internal environments supported by services. Outside, banished to the corners of the rooftop carpark, equipment goes about the business of supporting this fish-tank of an artificial environment.
Koolhaas’ premise is that air-conditioning, unnoticed and invisible, has revolutionized architecture and allowed for the creation of Junkspace.[62] Koolhaas uses the analogy of the bubble to express the internal space contained by the shallowest of shiny skins. There is no underlying structure, it is all smoke and mirrors. Junkspace has no proscribed function: it is deliberately anonymous, constantly subject to updates, rearrangement, refurbishment, the cult of the new. “At the stroke of midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic.”[63] Work in progress, sorry for any inconvenience caused. Please excuse our appearance we are remodelling.
One of Koolhaas’ concepts that resonated with me is that “conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space.”[64] Public space has been privatised with the support of both bureaucratic deals and market forces. “Each square inch becomes a grasping, needy surface dependent on covert or overt support.”[65] I have watched over the last 30 years as our promenades and circulation spaces have been eroded by both planning concessions and concession stands. From naming rights on stadiums and foyers, convenience booths in stations, to selling off QE2 Square, and advertising everywhere. Everything is treated as nothing more than a potential source of revenue. Public good is seemingly a luxury society can no longer afford. This saddens me.
Junkspace is analogous to junk food: rich & calorific, yet depleted of nutrients, designed expressly to tempt you to consume more & more. As with J.G. Ballard’s Metro-Centre,[66] every human whim and entertainment can be found within the bounds of Junkspace, yet the whole system teeters on the brink of mob rule and dysfunctional collapse. Koolhaas raises the point that while half of society madly consumes, the other half toils to support their consumption: maintaining the Junkspace machine, stocking the shelves, transporting or transforming raw material into consumer goods. Jane Bennett has suggested that this so-called ‘materialist’ lifestyle is in fact anti-materiality.[67] Things are de-valued by contemporary society’s excessive consumption and endless cycle of upgrades. Neo-liberalism has embraced built-in obsolescence.
Dutch architect Bjarne Mastenbroek recently stated that working in today’s internalised retail precincts is analogous to going down historic coal mines. The workers are still denied a connection with daylight for eight hours a day, only now they are “digging up money.”[68] We work to consume, in order to maintain the illusion of everlasting economic growth required by the ‘masters of mankind.’[69] The citizen has been superseded by the consumer.
Junkspace is designed to capture and hold the public within a continuous circuit of offerings that will separate them from their money. Data analytics determines maximum retail encounters – no architect required. Airport experiences become an “enforced derive,”[70] with signage that counter-intuitively directs travellers on the longest possible route winding through duty-free displays. (I recently read a tip in a travel supplement – follow the men in suits, as the regular business traveller always knows the fastest shortcut. It has come to this.)
Junkspace disorientates and obfuscates. At both St Lukes and Sylvia Park I have at times experienced confusion over direction. It doesn’t help when the same stores have multiple outlets or are being constantly shuffled around.[71] Perhaps anonymity is all we can hope for now: every Mitre 10 Mega and Countdown is designed to lull you into a sense of comfortable familiarity. They are completely the same yet different. You think you know where things are, and then realise you are stuck in a mirror image of your reality. A new supermarket has emerged from a hole and its sign glows like a beacon down my street. It's the Final Countdown. Which makes three within a one kilometre radius. The other day while shopping in the new store I came out of one aisle, and on autopilot doubled back on myself, mistakenly thinking I was in my ‘old’ one.
I could view the city as shopping mall writ large: an urban jungle which evolves & deteriorates over time, with no over-arching vision. There is no impetus to produce permanence and quality. Looking at central Auckland recently from Ian McKinnon Drive, it struck me that perhaps we’ve got the nondescript built environment we have, because Auckland has such an amazing natural landscape. Would we try harder if we didn’t have a glorious harbour, numerous volcanic cones, and lush vegetation? Or is this just a local manifestation of Koolhaas’ global Junkspace world? Maybe it was ever thus – we only remember the masterpieces, yesteryear’s survivors, while the transient crap that surrounds them is constantly ‘updated.’
Junkspace is a space of constant change and excessive production, and as such produces a surplus of potential material with which to feed an art practice – diverted en route to landfill. Thomas Hirschhorn, while discussing his own artistic practice, refers to this sensorium of Junkspace as “the capitalist garbage bucket.”[72] Just like Hirschhorn, we have to make use of what Junkspace throws our way. The precarious, the hybrid, and the expedient, become an “aesthetics of resistance,”[73] a rallying cry to subvert capitalism.
Of course the aesthetics of resistance is weirdly reliant upon the machinery of capitalism to supply the fuel for its fires. Without the production of surplus-value, and the constant societal pressure to aspire through acquisition, there would be no waste, junk or by-product to be recycled or re-presented. The two exist in a co-dependent relationship, and that’s the way Junkspace likes it.
Postscript
A few weeks ago, while walking in the city, I came across a post-it note on the footpath. It was yellow, and in careful handwriting were the words:
kimchi
quesadilla
I clocked it and walked a few steps before pausing. I badly wanted to pick it up, but at the same time it felt kind of stupid. In the end I carried on, without so much as a cell phone snap. The trouble was I kept thinking about it. It seemed like such an unlikely pairing.[74]
I ended up retracing my steps several times over the course of the week, searching high and low for the elusive Post-it, but it was lost forever.
I had my chance and I’d missed it.
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Footnotes
[1] Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 180.
[2] Neri, Looking Up, 180.
[3] Trisha Brown, quoted by Neri, Looking Up, 171.
[4] The Parliament of Things is the title of the final chapter in Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern
[5]“A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” 63.
[6] Roman Mitch, “Junktime,” no pagination.
[7] Harman, The Quadruple Object, 107.
[8] Harman, Prince of Networks, 16.
[9] Although the 17th century philosopher Spinoza thought that humans were part of the physical world, he still believed in a god, and thought humans were more equal than others.
[10] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 139.
[11] Harman, Prince of Networks, 59.
[12] Shelley, Mont Blanc: Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni, Verse II, 1816.
[13] Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 176.
[14] Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” 205.
[15] This heightened sensitivity to everyday sounds could also be due to a form of mild hyperacusis.
[16] Harman, Prince of Networks, 21.
[17] Harman, Prince of Networks, 24.
[18] Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 45. “Lists of objects without explication can do the philosophical work of drawing our attention toward them with greater attentiveness.”
[19] Wentworth, Making Do and Getting By, 14.
[20] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix.
[21] Brown, Thing Theory, 10.
[22] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 12.
[23] “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” 24.
[24] Cole, “Those obscure objects of desire,” 323.
[25] Brown, Thing Theory, 16.
[26] “It has always been the role of the artist to contrarily swim upstream, now – seemingly as some kind of push back against the ubiquitous screens of the virtual – tactile materials are on the rise in our art schools…. It seems to me that a new wave of artists who have grown up on Photoshop, and with Instagram filters, feel the need to get down and dirty with raw materials, return to the source, spin fibres, carve wood, dig their own clay, and so on.” Walton, “The Popular Recreator,” 2.
[27] Harman, Prince of Networks, 23.
[28] Harman, “Technology, objects and things in Heidegger,” 19.
[29] Harman, Prince of Networks, 112.
[30] Harman, Prince of Networks, 190.
[31] Harman, Tool-Being, 69.
[32] This term originates from Harman’s reading of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis which will be discussed in Part Two.
[33] Harman, Tool-Being, 4.
[34] Harman, Tool-Being, 24.
[35] “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” 15.
[36] ibid 14, quoting from Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of the Universe: A New Verse Translation by Sir Ronald Melville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 102-103.
[37] Harman, The Quadruple Object, 75: “the only possible kind of direct contact is asymmetrical, with real objects touching the sensual objects they experience.”
[38] Harman, Tool-Being, 224.
[39] Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 66.
[40] Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 66.
[41] Foster, Being a Beast, 93.
[42] Wood, in “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” 107.
[43] Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” 207.
[44] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 120.
[45] Siegel, in “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” 94.
[46] Fried, “Art & Objecthood,” 5.
[47] Fried, “Art & Objecthood,” 4.
[48] Harman, The Quadruple Object, 56.
[49] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4.
[50] Harman, Prince of Networks, 33.
[51] Latour, “Can we get our materialism back, please?” 140.
[52] Harman, Tool-being, 45.
[53] The Wizard of Oz, MGM, 1939.
[54] Harman, Bells & Whistles, 189.
[55] http://www.reelseo.com/vidcon-2015-strategic-insights-tactical-advice/
[56] Groys, “The Truth of Art,” 8.
[57] Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 10-11.
[58] Bishop, “Digital Divide,” no pagination.
[59] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 175.
[60] “…as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” French poet Isidore-Lucien Ducasse (1846-1870) published Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) under the name Comte de Lautréamont.
[61] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 175.
[62] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 176.
[63] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 177.
[64] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 176.
[65] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 184.
[66] The Metro-Centre is the setting of Ballard’s 2006 dystopian novel, Kingdom Come.
[67] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 5.
[68] Bjarne Mastenbroek, “DIG IT!”
[69] The 18th Century political economist Adam Smith coined the term ‘masters of mankind’ for those who abuse their position of power to increase their own profit at the expense of others. Their vile maxim was: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.”
[70] Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 181.
[71] In the interests of full disclosure this has also happened to me in Oxford Circus. After coming out of the London Underground the four symmetrical buildings once led to me catching a bus the wrong way down Oxford street. I sheepishly got off at the next stop.
[72] Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 11.
[73] Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 10.
[74] Obsessive googling has lead me to the eventual realisation that kimchi quesadilla is a real thing, and in all likelihood the note was nothing more than someone’s lunch order. However, it still exists in my imagination as a fanciful mash-up, with the added allure of loss.