Νεολουδισμός: Όταν οι μηχανές δεν είναι εκεί για να τις επιτεθείς

Παρατηρώντας το άγχος των φίλων μου και ειδικά της μητέρας μου που αναστενάζουν κάθε φορά που υποχρεώνονται να οικειοποιηθούν τα χαρακτηριστικά μιας νέας  εφαρμογής ή της αναβάθμισης μιας παλιότερης, αναλογίζομαι πόσο επιβλαβής είναι η αναγκαιότητα της ψηφιακής προσαρμογής στην καθημερινότητα τους. Οι πρώτες μέρες του τεχνοφιλικού ρομαντισμού φαίνεται ότι έχουν περάσει ανεπιστρεπτί, στον βαθμό που ολοένα και περισσότεροι εγκαταλείπουν τις κοινωνικές πλατφόρμες. Σε άλλες περιπτώσεις, διαπιστώνω ότι ορισμένοι,  μετά την έξοδο από τις διαδικτυακές περιπλανήσεις, αφοσιώνονται σε χειροτεχνικές δραστηριότητες οι οποίες επιτρέπουν μια απτή σχέση με τον υλικό κόσμο. Όμως αυτές οι αντιδράσεις στην αυγή της τέταρτης βιομηχανικής επανάστασης έχουν και ένα ιστορικό εκτόπισμα.

Ένα βράδυ, τον Μάρτιο του 1811 στο Nottingham, κάποιοι εργάτες κλωστοϋφαντουργίας κατέστρεψαν υφαντικές μηχανές σε ένδειξη διαμαρτυρίας για τις αλλαγές στις συνθήκες εργασίας τους. Αυτές  οι καταστροφές αποτελούσαν μέσο εξαναγκασμού των εργοδοτών τους για να κάνουν παραχωρήσεις όσον αφορά τα δικαιώματα τους. Η βιομηχανική επανάσταση είχε εξαπλωθεί παντού στη Βρετανία και τα πρώτα δείγματα της μείωσης του εργατικού προσωπικού είχαν πυροδοτήσει ταραχές κυρίως στην καρδιά της κλωστοϋφαντουργίας της χώρας, σε περιοχές που εκκινούσαν από το Nottinghamshire και εξαπλωνόντουσαν στο Derbyshire και το Lancashire.   Όσον  άφορα τον περίφημο Ludd οι  πληροφορίες που έχουμε είναι ότι αποτελεί επινόηση των ριζοσπαστών εργατών οι οποίοι τον εκπροσωπούσαν με το ψευδώνυμο “Βασιλιάς Ned Ludd” και  διεύθυνση αποστολέα “τη σπηλιά του Ρομπέν των Δασών”. Πράγματι κάποια χρόνια νωρίτερα, το 1779, ο κύριος Ludd είχε καταστρέψει δύο μηχανές πλεκτών άλλα δεν ήταν ο υποκινητής των ταραχών που ακολούθησαν, ούτε ζούσε σαν τον θρυλικό  Ρομπέν στο Δάσος Sherwood.1

Σήμερα ο Νεολουδισμός  στην πλειονότητα γίνεται αποδεκτός με περιφρόνηση. Μια ‘εκσυγχρονιστική’ στάση για αυτούς που συμμερίζονται κάθε τεχνολογικό νεωτερισμό, και η οποία είναι η κυρίαρχη, τον αντιλαμβάνεται ως οπισθοδρομισμό απέναντι στις εξελίξεις της τεχνολογίας και τους Λουδίτες ως άτομα τεχνοφοβικά με τη  φαντασίωση της επιστροφής σε μια πρωτόγονη εμπειρία.

Όμως είναι ξεκάθαρο ότι ο εφιάλτης που βιώνουμε άφορα την αντίθετη κατεύθυνση από εκείνη που πρότεινε ο Λουδισμός. Είναι η σχεδόν μη αναστρέψιμη καταστροφική πορεία του οίκο-περιβαλλοντολογικού συστήματος.  Αυτό που θα έπρεπε να μας απασχολήσει δεν είναι τόσο οι  εσχατολογικές προοπτικές ενός ριζοσπαστικού αντιτεχνολογικού διακυβεύματος άλλα ότι οι αποκλειστικά τεχνοκρατικές λύσεις έχουν αποδειχθεί ανεπαρκείς. Όσοι λοιπόν ειρωνικά επισημαίνουν μια προβιομηχανική Αρκαδία ως το πρότυπο του Λουδισμού, ας σκεφτούν  για τις συνέπειες εκείνου του μοντέλου ανάπτυξης που δεν έχει την ικανότητα να διαμορφώσει μια άλλη πορεία, και ας αποδεχθούν ότι ο καπιταλισμός οφείλει να διαθέτει τουλάχιστον προσαρμοστικότητα και ευελιξία.

Συνεπώς, το βίαιο σπάσιμο των μηχανών μπορεί να κλειδωθεί στις συμβολικές του διαστάσεις, όπου διαταράσσεται το υπάρχον κοινωνικό, οικονομικό και πολιτισμικό μοντέλο. Έξαλλου σήμερα δεν θα περιμέναμε εργάτες με τσεκούρια και βαριοπούλες άλλα χάκερς και ψηφιακούς πειρατές να σαμποτάρουν τις ψηφιακές μηχανές. Και στην περίπτωση μας, δεν πρόκειται για μια ιδεολογική σέχτα ή μια περιθωριακή ομάδα η οποία μάχεται για το σταμάτημα του παραγωγικού χρόνου, άλλα για μια αυθόρμητη στάση που συγκροτείται από διαφορετικές κοινότητες, οι οποίες θέτουν σε αμφισβήτηση τα όρια αυτού του μοντέλου ανάπτυξης. Ο Jathan Sadowski, κοινωνικός επιστήμονας που μελετά τις νέες τεχνολογίες, στο ερώτημα του για το πώς θα έμοιαζε ο Λουδισμός σήμερα απαντάει πως θα τον υπερασπιζόμασταν ως ένα κίνημα που θα αντιμετώπιζε την τεχνολογία ως ένα πολιτικό και οικονομικό φαινόμενο που οφείλει να εξετάζεται με κριτικό τρόπο και ο τρόπος του να κυβερνιέται να  είναι δημοκρατικός.2
Σε αυτό το σημείο θα συμφωνήσουμε με τον Μαρξ όταν επισημαίνει ότι η αμφισβήτηση και οι επιθέσεις στις τεχνολογικές δομές δεν έχουν νόημα να στρέφονται στα υλικά μέσα παραγωγής, αλλά μόνο ενάντια στην κοινωνική και ταξική μορφή της εκμετάλλευσής τους. Το πρόβλημα  σχετίζεται με τους οπτιμιστικούς προοδευτισμούς γύρω από την τεχνολογία και όχι με την ίδια την μηχανή.

Αν, όμως, στις αρχές του 19 αιώνα ο Λουδισμός ήταν μια σημαντική κατάκτηση στο πλαίσιο της αμφισβήτησης της κυριαρχίας της μηχανής πάνω στην ανθρώπινη εργασία, σήμερα ο Νεολουδισμόςέχει μεγαλύτερη σημασία.

Θεωρώ ότι δεν είναι μόνο τα εργασιακά δικαιώματα που απειλούνται άλλα και η ίδια η δυναμική της φαντασίας που ο τεχνοκρατικός πολιτισμός  επιβάλει. Στην υπάρχουσα σφαίρα του ψηφιακού καπιταλισμού, φαίνεται να  έχει διαφύγει από την υπάρχουσα κριτική ένας συλλογισμός για την αναγκαιότητα της πρωταρχικής φαντασίας. Το άλμα της φαντασίας, μέσα από το οποίο διεξάγονται βαθμιαία οι έννοιες και οι αφηγήσεις, περιορίζεται ολοένα και περισσότερο γιατί απλά η εκκίνηση μιας σκέψης διαμορφώνεται εξαρχής από τις μηχανές  αναζήτησης. Το αρχικό τόλμημα της σκέψης, άλλα και της έμπνευσης, εκπληρώνεται άμεσα με τους αλγορίθμους και την τεχνητή νοημοσύνη που γνωρίζουν καλύτερα από εμάς την διστακτικότητα των δικών μας συλλήψεων και μας προσφέρουν απαντήσεις σε δευτερόλεπτα. Ο Αντόρνο ίσως να μην είχε στο νου του την πραγματολογική διάσταση της αισθητικής πρόσληψης όταν ανέφερε ότι κανένα έργο τέχνης δεν πρέπει να εξηγηθεί υπό όρους επικοινωνίας, όμως ο λόγος του είναι ιδιαίτερα επίκαιρος όταν γνωρίζουμε ότι η προβολή του νοήματος είναι  κύριο συστατικό στο σύνολο της εικαστικής πρακτικής σήμερα.3

Σε ένα διορατικό κείμενο, ο Jean-François Lyotard αναρωτιέται για το ειδικό βάρος της επικοινωνίας στην τέχνη “σε μια εποχή που τα προϊόντα της  τεχνολογίας δεν μπορούν να προκύψουν χωρίς τη μαζική και ηγεμονική παρέμβαση της έννοιας”.4

Κάθε χειρονομία, όσο ελάχιστη και ασήμαντη με τις επικοινωνιακές υποσχέσεις της ψηφιακής τεχνολογίας αποζητά το μέγιστο της προσοχής. 

Όμως ο  καλύτερος τρόπος για να διαπιστώσουμε το zeitgeist  της  επικοινωνιακής υστερίας θεωρώ ότι βρίσκεται στις καλλιτεχνικές πρακτικές. Μια κατηγορία  εγκαταστάσεων  που βασίζεται στην έρευνα  συμπεριλαμβάνει  τις στρατηγικές  της συσσώρευσης και χωροθέτησης των πληροφοριών, με την παράθεση βιβλίων και ενημερωτικών φυλλαδίων σε συνδυασμό με οπτικοακουστικό υλικό που συνοδεύεται με laptops, ταμπλέτες και monitors. Οι αρχειοθετημένες καταγραφές που κατανέμονται χωρικά συνήθως στον οριζόντιο άξονα μιας βιτρίνας απασχολούν τη σκέψη της ιστορικού τέχνης Claire Bishop, η οποία υποστηρίζει ότι δεν μπορούν να κατανοηθούν απομονωμένα από τις σύγχρονες εξελίξεις στην ψηφιακή τεχνολογία.5

Η συγκέντρωση ενημερωτικού υλικού στις εικαστικές εγκαταστάσεις έχει μια αντιστοιχία με τον τρόπο με τον οποίο αναζητούμε και αποθηκεύουμε πληροφορίες στο διαδίκτυο και αυτή η αλλαγή μοντέλου σκέψης και παραγωγής γνώσης δεν είναι έκδηλη, όπως ήδη περιγράψαμε μόνο στα ψηφιακά εργαλεία, άλλα επικεντρώνεται  και στη σχέση μας με την απτή ύλη. Και είναι κατανοητό.

Όταν όμως η προβολή του νοήματος σχετίζεται αποκλειστικά με την επιλογή έτοιμων δεδομένων, η “αυθεντικότητα”, μια λέξη τόσο κυνηγημένη και εν μέρει εξιδανικευμένη για τους λάθος λόγους, δεν έχει υπόσταση και αποκτάει γραφικό χαρακτήρα. Πράγματι, απέναντι στην επέλαση της πληροφορίας, χειροτεχνικές μαρτυρίες της τέχνης στη ζωγραφική και τη γλυπτική μπορεί να φανούν παρωχημένες.

Σε αυτό το καθεστώς, “μέσα στον πραγματικά ανεστραμμένο κόσμο, το αληθινό είναι μια στιγμή του ψεύτικου”  υποστήριζε ο Guy Debord στην “κοινωνία του θεάματος” πριν την κυριαρχία της ψηφιακης πληροφορίας.6 Σήμερα το “χάσιμο” των χρηστών του ίντερνετ  λειτουργεί κυριολεκτικά ως  μια αντιστροφή της ζωής. Και αν το ατομικό στοιχείο ενθαρρύνεται με τη ναρκισσιστική ρουτίνα των selfies και την ανάδειξη ενός αγοραίου κοσμοπολιτισμού, αυτό εντάσσεται στη σφαίρα του “επιχειρείν”, στην καταγραφή ενός  “φαίνεσθαι” της ιδιοτυπίας της συμπεριφοράς, η οποία στοχεύει στη μέγιστη δυνατή επικοινωνία, με την προσδοκία να φτάσουν τα posts σε όσους τον δυνατόν περισσότερους αποδέκτες.

Θεωρώ ότι το να αρνηθούμε λοιπόν τη σύνταξη ενός νεολουδητικού ρεύματος είναι σαν να θεωρούμε ότι όλα είναι υπέροχα τακτοποιημένα στην καθολική παντοδυναμία ενός τεχνητού κόσμου, ο οποίος μέσα στους αυτοματοποιημένους μηχανισμούς του είναι σε θέση να διαχειριστεί και να καθυποτάξει τη σωματικότητα μας. 

Το ερώτημα λοιπόν πλανάται σε ένα κόσμο όπου κάθε πτυχή της ύπαρξής μας οριοθετείται και υπαγορεύεται με οθόνες και πληκτρολόγια. Αν προσγειώσουμε τον Λουδισμό στη σημερινή εποχή, ξέρουμε ότι δεν υπάρχει καμιά προοπτική να συντριβεί η μηχανή. Εξάλλου η τεχνολογική υπεροχή δεν ταυτίζεται στο αντικαπιταλιστικό φαντασιακό με τη χρήση τεράστιων μεταλλικών τερατόμορφων κατασκευών και οι άπειρες διαδυκτιακές προσβάσεις δεν μπορούν να αντιμετωπιστούν με ένα σπάσιμο του κινητού η του λάπτοπ άλλα με μια αποφασιστική μαζική περιφρόνηση των ψηφιακών εφαρμογών.

Με βάση τα όσα έχουμε αναπτύξει, ίσως να μην μας κάνει έκπληξη η προτροπή του Richard Seymour, ο οποίος, στο σύγγραμμα που φέρει τον τίτλο twittering machine και που τον δανείζεται από το προφητικό έργο του Paul Klee (Zwitscher-Maschine, 1922), μας επισημαίνει ότι  “..έχουμε ανάγκη  από μια αποφυγιολογία (escapology), σίγουρα, μια θεωρία για το πώς να βγούμε έξω πριν να είναι πολύ αργά.”.7

Θα έλεγα ότι χρειαζόμαστε περισσότερο θάρρος, ώστε ν’ αδιαφορήσουμε για την εθιστική κουλτούρα της παιχνιδοποίησης των κοινωνικών μέσων, με τις εικονικές “καρδιές’ και τις προσδοκίες απο αφοσιωμένους και ταυτόχρονα  άβουλους  ακόλουθους . Μπορεί το like να μην το “σπάσουμε” άλλα είναι εφικτό  να  υποβαθμίσουμε  μια πτυχή του, εκείνη της ανώδυνης επικοινωνίας. Το να προστατεύσουμε  τα προσωπικά μας δεδομένα  αποφεύγοντας τις εφαρμογές και τα γκάτζετς είναι μια επιλογή, το να τα στρέψουμε ενάντια τους με μαζικές αντιδράσεις είναι η επόμενη.

---

1 E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers”, Past and Present 1 (1952): σ. 57-70

2 athan Sadowski. “I’m a Luddite. You should be one too.” The Conversation, 9 August 2021

3 Adorno, Theodor W, Αισθητική Θεωρία, μτφρ. Λευτέρης Αναγνώστου, Αθήνα, Αλεξάνδρεια, 1989

4 Jean-François Lyotard  “Κάτι όπως επικοινωνία .. χωρις επικοινωνία” στο Απάνθρωπο, Κουβέντες για τον χρόνο, μτφρ. Βασίλης Πατσογιάννης. Αθήνα, Πλέθρον, 2019. σ.170

5 Claire Bishop “On the superabundance of research-based art”, Artforum.com, April 5, 2023

6 Guy Debord, Η Κοινωνία του Θεάματος, μτφρ. Π. Τσαχαγέας – Ν.Β. Αλεξίου. Αθήνα, Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1986, σελ. 26

7  The Twittering Machine: How Capitalism Stole Our Social Life, London, The Indigo Press, 2019, σ. 15

Κωστής Βελώνης

https://popaganda.gr/postscripts/neoloydismos-otan-oi-michanes-den-einai-ekei-gia-na-tis-epitetheis/

And If I Fall

There’s this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same
thing as making, and as if making might
bring it back, somehow, the real
cathedral. In anger, as in desire, it was
everything, that cathedral. As if my body
itself cathedral. I conduct my body
with a cathedral’s steadiness, I
try to. I cathedral. In desire. In anger.
Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.
Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.

Carl Phillips 

Pattern

Garous Abdolmalekian

#GarousAbdolmalekian #pattern #poetry #wind #textiles #crafts

Vanishing Portrait

 

Vanishing Portrait, 2022

wood, mirror, acrylic 

I See a Baguette in a Handbag

I See a Baguette in a Handbag 

It sizzles, fizzles and bubbles,

in a stainless steel coffee maker.

The coffee grounds are getting colder, are getting stiff, on the white wall of the ceramic cup. 

I see an elephant.
In case of a raised trunk, and the trunk is raised in your case, 

wisdom comes your way. And it will come all of a sudden. I see an eye. 

I see that the eye is squinting at a cloud of dots. The more dots, the more money you get.
I see a lizard.
I see a crab. 

I see the lizard and the crab in company with a parrot.
The lizard warns you: Beware of false friends.
The crab says: Embrace your sorrow and you won’t lose your strength.
The parrot presages a scandal you will hear about, or gossip in which you will be involved. I see a net. A net of oranges.
I see an arm with a hand reaching downwards. It reaches to a V. 

You will get in touch with a person for whom V is the first letter of their name, or a Virgo. I see an A in front of a portal.
A is you and portal means potential. You are going to encounter new opportunities.
I see a baby tooth. 

I see a bikini top. I see a horizon. 

One side of the cup is completely dark. The other side is only covered halfway. Above this there are only some fine brownish lines.
Like the moment when a wave splashes on the beach, the water runs back into the ocean, and the foam produced by the wave still exists before it sinks slowly into the sand. 

In the ocean, in the dark part of the cup, I see a jellyfish with a dot in its belly. A person close to you will bring you the message that they will have a baby.
I see a spiral. A vortex.
Trap / energy booster. 

Yacht means you will go bankrupt. I see a ferry.
I see some lemons.
Envy gnaws at you. 

I see a lightbulb.
Your intuition is strengthened. Believe in it.
I see a hammer.
The smashed lightbulb will bring you a great portion of luck.
I see a mermaid.
I see scissors.
I see an e-scooter.
Tomato means love is around the corner.
I see a keyhole.
I see a very long nail.
I see a dragon.
I see a baguette. I see a baguette in a handbag.
Baguette is bread, and bread is an important experience you’ve had, now coming to an end. I see a bus. Bus 69.
I see you riding this bus to a place starting with P.
P like Panorama. 

Lucia Graf , 2022

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

Lisel Mueller, 1996

You say you want a revolution…

Edward Ludlam’s name didn’t do the decent thing and die with its owner in the summer of 1776. Instead it emerged rudely triumphant more than 30 years after Edward – or Ned – was laid to rest at St Mary’s Church in Anstey.

If the name rings a bell, it’s because Ned Ludd was once used as a signatory by smash-happy men and women across Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Men and women who were out of work because new knitting and stocking machines had taken their jobs.

During five years of hardship and strife, many a wooden frame was chopped to bits. Who dunnit? Ned Ludd dunnit officer. Duh.

Dead Ned’s name was to plague those technology-savvy industrialists who had brought poverty to thousands of families across the East Midlands. Threatening letters were sent to factory owners signed Ned Ludd, General Ludd and King Ludd.

The Luddites, as they now called themselves, destroyed 200 new stocking frames in one three-week period in early 1811. In the East Midlands, the heart of the country’s textile industry, the fighting spread from Nottinghamshire and then to Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

Parliament, as it is wont to do, cruelly rounded on the starving and desperate, passing legislation which made damaging machines punishable by death. At this time, almost 90 per cent of the 20,000 stocking frames in use in the country were located in the region, with records showing almost 12,000 were in Leicestershire.

Lord Byron, quite possibly the sexiest person who ever lived, was one of the few MPs to speak in defence of the starving people in his native Midlands. Byron, FYI, was a Nottinghamshire lad.

And factory owners, we know, had good cause to worry about their safety.

In 2006, underground passages and a chamber were found beneath a house in Loughborough that once belonged to lace magnate John Heathcote.

Heathcote had good reason to fear the Luddites – they had already destroyed a lace mill of his in Loughborough in 1816. But with all this, the mystery still remains – why did the Luddites take Ned Ludlam’s name?

“It was a cover name, the same as Robin Hood,” local history enthusiast Brian Kibble told the Mercury in 2006.

“They used it to protect their real names. The Luddites supposedly got their name by the actions of Ned Lud, or Edward Ludlam, from Anstey.

“Ned, well, he wasn’t quite all there, and that is one of the stories that has come down.

“There’s a story that he’d been teased by local children, and he chased them and he lost them. And, apparently, in his frustration, in one of the cottages, he smashed up this knitter’s frame.

“The other legend was that he was the son of a knitting frame worker and his father had chastised him one day and, in revenge, he smashed up the frame.

“Whatever the truth,” says Brian, “somewhere along the line he seems to have been responsible for smashing up machinery.”

Ned’s name lived on in the village down the years.

“Apparently,” chortles Brian, “it used to be a saying in the village that if something was broken or damaged it had been Ned Ludded.”

Ever since, “Luddite” has been a Leicestershire-inspired entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. One, as a word for the English workers who fought for their jobs between 1811 and 1816, and now, more commonly, a disparaging word used for those opposed to or uneasy with new technology.

https://leicestershirelalala.com/you-say-you-want-a-revolution-the-luddites-were-chissits-too/

 

glimpse

outside
It was a long time ago –
An enclosure, on heath land, an outcrop in the heather and gorse;
A circle of rusted railings, decrepit, close to collapse, ominous –
We ran wildly round this broken construction,
revelling in its anonymity and ambiguity,
but aware of the notice boards fixed to the railings, eroded into blank facades, but emanating warnings, and threats of danger,

It was our discovery, and it would be our place;

We squeezed into the empty space, enclosed by these disintegrated posts;
we hurled ourselves around the inside perimeter –
stumbling on the coarse grass tussocks,
landowners of somewhere unknown to the rest of the world,
blissful, ecstatic and full of excited fear of what this place might be,
this dissolving steel ring syncopating earth and sky…

inside
the staircase splits into two, left and the right –
on the left, a door into the long, narrow attic,
a small window, a horizontal half moon, at the far end;
this dark space seems detached from the rest of the house;
the water tanks gurgle, the pipes groan and grumble;
on a grey blanket, shells, stones, dried plants are laid out in rows;
a secret museum has found its place…
it’s high up, remote,
an adventure where the tops of trees are framed by the half moon window,
and the life below is miniature.

upstairs
one staircase looks at another –
above, air;
so much empty, gaping, intangible space;
out of reach,
but that is where the adventure is,
to climb into the empty space, to look up, hoping for the sky;
to sense the weight and light and time of empty space
intruded upon by the reach and stretch of unnameable things –
plaster, cement, colour, clumsy, elegant, surprise, hang, lean, stretch…
the excitement of perilous moments, the sentient fear of vertigo…

and here, these big shapes, anthropomorphic, stare and wait,
dumb, curvaceous, still, biding time…

 Phyllida Barlow, 2020

Bruderschaft

Alles ist Wundenschlagen,

und keiner hat keinem verziehn.

Verletzt wie du und verletzend,

lebte ich auf dich hin.

Die reine, die Geistesberührung,

um jede Berührung vermehrt,

wir erfahren sie alternd,

ins kälteste Schweigen gekehrt.

Ingeborg Bachmann

Brotherhood

Brotherhood

Each and every thing cuts wounds,

and neither of us has forgiven the other.

Hurting like you and hurtful,

I lived towards you.

Every touch augments

the pure, the spiritual touch;

we experience it as we age,

turned into coldest silence.

Ingeborg Bachmann

Map Piece

Yoko Ono, Map Piece, 1964 
#YokoOno #mapping #walking #wandering#lost 

How to analyze plastics forensically

https://publiclab.org/notes/maxliboiron/07-19-2018/how-to-analyze-plastics-forensically

The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things

Ι often watch the television show “Hoarders.” One of my favorite episodes features the pack rats Patty and Debra. Patty is a typical trash-and-filth hoarder: her bathroom contains horrors I’d rather not describe, and her story follows the show’s typical arc of reform and redemption. But Debra, who hoards clothes, home decorations, and tchotchkes, is more unusual. She doesn’t believe that she has a problem; in fact, she’s completely unimpressed by the producers’ efforts to fix her house. “It’s just not my color, white,” she says, walking through her newly de-hoarded rooms. “Everything that I really loved in my house is gone.” She is unrepentant, concluding, “This is horrible—I hate it!” Debra just loves to hoard, and people who want her to stop don’t get it.

I was never sure why Debra’s stubbornness fascinated me until I came across the work of Jane Bennett, a philosopher and political theorist at Johns Hopkins. A few years ago, while delivering a lecture, Bennett played clips from “Hoarders,” commenting on them in detail. She is sympathetic to people like Debra, partly because, like the hoarders themselves, she is focussed on the hoard. She has philosophical questions about it. Why are these objects so alluring? What are they “trying” to do? We tend to think of the show’s hoards as inert, attributing blame, influence, and the possibility of redemption to the human beings who create them. But what if the hoard, as Bennett asked in her lecture, has more agency than that? What if these piles of junk exert some power of their own?

This past fall, I met Bennett at a coffee shop near the Johns Hopkins campus. Sixty-five, with coiffed silver hair and cat’s-eye glasses, she sat at a table near the window reading the Zhuangzi, one of the two most important texts of Taoism, the Chinese school of thought that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. “The coffee isn’t very good here, but the people are nice,” she told me, conspiratorially. She took out her phone. “I have to show you a picture.” She turned the screen toward me, revealing a photo of two dead rats lying on the pavement—an image at odds with her kindly-neighbor looks. “I was walking by the university, and this is what I found,” she said. I leaned closer. The rats, who had drowned in a rainstorm, lay in artful counterpoint, as though posing for a still-life.

Dead rats are almost a theme in Bennett’s work. In her best-known book, “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,” from 2010, she lists some of the objects that she found on a June morning in front of Sam’s Bagels, on Cold Spring Lane, in Baltimore:

One large men’s black plastic work glove
One dense mat of oak pollen
One unblemished dead rat
One white plastic bottle cap
One smooth stick of wood

These objects affected her. “I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould called the ‘excruciating complexity and intractability’ of nonhuman bodies,” Bennett writes. “But, in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive ‘intractability’ but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects.” Bennett likes to reference Walt Whitman, who once described people who are highly affected by the world around them as having “sensitive cuticles.” Bennett hopes to cultivate a sensitivity in her cuticles. That means paying a lot of attention to everything—especially to experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed, uninterrogated.

The idea that objects have agency might be familiar from childhood. When we’re small, we feel connected to a blanket that can’t be thrown away, or to a stuffed animal that’s become a friend. As adults, we may own a precious item of threadbare clothing that we refuse to replace—yet we wouldn’t think of that shirt as having agency in the world. It seems pretty obvious to us that objects aren’t actors with their own agendas. When Alvin, another Hoarder, says that “things speak out” to him, we know that he has a problem.

Bennett takes Alvin’s side. “The experience of being hailed by ‘inanimate’ matter—by objects beautiful or odd, by a refrain, by a piece of cake, or a buzz from your phone—is widespread,” she writes. “Everyone is in a complicated relationship with things.” In her view, we are often pushed around, one way or another, by the stuff we come into contact with on any given day. A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you.

The idea that a piece of plastic has genuine agency places Bennett in an intellectual tradition that originated with the late French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour. “When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,” Latour wrote, in “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime.” Latour thought that we needed to stop arbitrarily restricting agency to the human sphere; by extending our sense of who and what may act, he argued, we might more easily acknowledge obvious facts about our world. “A force of nature is obviously just the opposite of an inert actor,” Latour wrote. “Every novelist and poet knows this as well as every expert in hydraulics or geomorphology. If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency–such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers.”

Stuff has agency. Inanimate matter is not inert. Everything is always doing something. According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore. Non-hoarders can disregard the inherent vibrancy of matter because we live in a modern world in which the categories of matter and life are kept separate. “The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds as we speak,” she writes. Hoarders suffer at the hands of their hoards. But the rest of us do, too: that’s why a modern guru like Marie Kondo can become famous by helping us gain control over our material possessions. Bennett describes herself as something of a minimalist—but her minimalism is driven by a sense of the agency of things. “I don’t want to have such a clamor around,” she told me.

In a park called Druid Hill, we walked along a path through the woods. Bennett paused, then led us off the path, down a hill so steep that we had to grab at small branches and tree trunks to slow our descent. We stopped to consider an especially notable dead tree. I thought it looked a little wistful.

“It’s stretching its hands out to the sky!” Bennett said, lifting her own arms up and laughing.

In Bennett’s most recent book, “Influx & Efflux,” she describes an encounter with an Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven—a fast-growing tree with oval leaves—on one of her walks around Baltimore. “I saw a tree whose every little branch expanded and swelled with sympathy for the sun,” she writes. “I was made distinctly aware of the presence of something kindred to me.” Ailanthus altissima is often considered an invasive species. Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves. Most environmentally minded people are comfortable with this kind of thinking when it’s applied to the pretty part of nature. It’s strange to apply the concept of kinship to plastic gloves and bottle caps. Bennett aims to treat pretty much everything as potential kin.

Wearing bright-silver sneakers, she dropped her arms and headed off into the woods. I hastened to keep up with her. Soon, we stumbled upon something we found hard to precisely describe.

“What is that?” Bennett asked, her voice rising.

It seemed to be a shock of almost luminescent bright-orange stuff growing right out of the ground. She bent down to touch it.

“It’s plastic,” she said, at first disappointed but then intrigued. The individual orange bristles were sticking straight up, like vertical pine needles.

“How’s it in?” Bennett asked. She turned to me. “Try to pull it out!” I leaned down, grabbed an orange handful, and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.

“This is amazing,” she said. “This is almost like a trick someone’s playing on us.” She took out her phone to snap a photo, then nodded. “That’s an excellent find,” she said.

In “Vibrant Matter,” Bennett uses the phrase “thing power” to capture the lively and active qualities of objects. She describes the things that she came across near Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Road as “vibratory—at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire.” She argues that there’s a sense in which even metal is alive—it can crack in interesting ways, and “the line of travel of these cracks is not deterministic but expressive of an emergent causality, whereby grains respond on the spot and in real time to the idiosyncratic movements of their neighbors, and then to their neighbors’ response to their response, and so on, in feedback spirals.” Borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Mario Perniola, she concludes that there’s a “sex appeal of the inorganic”—“a shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter.”

Did I find the orange thing in the ground enticing? Not really—but it had done something to me. In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Ever since, we’ve tended to think of ourselves as living in a disenchanted world, from which all magic has been stripped. Bennett asks us to entertain the possibility that “the world is not disenchanted”—“that is, not populated by dead matter.” Her response to the disenchantment of the world is to deny that it ever happened in the first place.

Bennett is a philosopher and political theorist. But her intellectual work is not primarily about creating new theories. In her writing, she expertly distills and juxtaposes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and others, but her goal is often to create a mood. She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities.”

Could noticing an old Snickers wrapper in the park really help us save the world? There might, or might not, be an element of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Philosophy in the idea. Bennett conceded that her point of view could be criticized as being “bullshitty,” or “airy-fairy.” But she likes to “take perspectives that seem implausible and find the good intuitions embodied in them, and then go with it,” she said. “I don’t believe crystals have the power to do this or that, in any New Age way,” she continued. “But what’s the intuition that prompted it?” The intuition behind New Agey crystal enthusiasm involves a sense of the fascination crystals create in us. They have inserted themselves into human civilization in any number of ways—as dishware, ornamentation, and aids to worship, as writing instruments (graphite is a crystal), and as a primary material in microchips. The study of their unique structure has been important to various branches of scientific research. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a crystallographer who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1964, described herself as “captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.” Even in Hodgkin’s telling, the crystals did the capturing. Perhaps the New Age crystal enthusiast and the experimental scientist have something in common.

On a meta level, Bennett’s work suggests an attitude that we might take toward others’ attitudes. When I mentioned to her that her excitement about thing power might be thought of as stoner philosophy, she more or less agreed—but then went with it. “If you encounter somebody that is different from you, maybe, if you’re good at lingering for a moment or two in wonder at that person, you can postpone the moment of fear or rejection,” she told me. The subtitle to “Vibrant Matter”—“a political ecology of things”—hints at an interpersonal politics: in her view, politics should always include a sense of wonder, not just at marmosets, viruses, rivers, pieces of plastic, concrete, and dead rats but at other people.

Bennett and I left the park and found ourselves in a spooky area beneath an expressway. We decided to walk up a nearby hill, toward a hip neighborhood called Hampden. In front of an extraordinarily ugly apartment building, we ambled to a stop. Bennett was trying to show me something with great enthusiasm.

“This is a famous Baltimore thing called formstone,” she said. “It’s like stone wallpaper.” This seemed right: the formstone, out of which the building’s façade was constructed, looked like a kitschy stucco version of a medieval stone wall. Bennett pointed to an otherwise unnoticeable flaw in the formstone.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a crack with caulk in it,” Bennett answered, triumphant.

I wasn’t getting it right away. Later, she explained to me that the caulky crack was interesting to her because it showed that there are tendencies in the formstone itself to “guide and shape and nudge and call upon people even as they’re designing things.” A person put a bunch of caulk into the wall of a building, she said, but this person was “guided” by the specific, independently established shapes and contours of the formstone. Often, she went on, “you basically have to follow the form of the material.” Agency goes both ways.

It was hot, and I was tired. An hour before, I’d been entranced by a dead tree; now the houses and lawns and trash and lampposts and caulk cracks were starting to lose their vibrancy. I felt a strange sense of guilt. Was I letting Bennett down—letting the formstone down, too? “Even if, as I believe, the vitality of matter is real, it will be hard to discern it, and, once discerned, hard to keep focussed on,” Bennett writes. “I have come to see how radical a project it is to think vital materiality.” It’s not just that concentration can be wearisome. Bennett had shown me that picture of the dead rats for a reason: being genuinely open to and affected by everything around us means that there is no picking and choosing. It is everything or nothing—the good, the bad, and the ugly. This can be inspiring; it can also be overwhelming. Perhaps this explains why so many hoarders feel bewilderment and distress: they’re burdened and sometimes beaten down by their hoards. Human beings have a lot of difficult work to do if we’re to learn to recognize the inherent worth of all vibrant matter.

Bennett hopes for a positive outcome. During my time with her, I thought frequently about an old house in Detroit which my spouse and I have been rehabbing for many years now. It was built in 1917. It has its ways. We started our rehab project with many grand ideas about completely transforming the layout of the house. But because we’ve been doing the work ourselves and going slowly, the house has had the opportunity to get its two cents in. It doesn’t speak like a person, of course, but it communicates, day after day, season after season. The house has revealed to us how light travels around its surfaces and interiors in winter, spring, summer, and fall; some of the changes we were planning to make have come to seem wrongheaded with that further information. Other changes we hadn’t even considered suddenly became possible and exciting: its intermittently crumbling ceilings opened the possibility of increasing the height in some rooms.

Working on the house has started to feel like an ongoing dialogue. Rather than imposing our preconceived ideas onto a bunch of inert matter, we often find ourselves asking, What does the house want? People who visit sometimes remark on the special feel of the place. They’ll ask, How did you make this house so cozy? The answer, as Bennett has shown me, is not clear and definitive. We listened to the house, and the house listened to us. Enchantment happened. ♦

By Morgan Meis

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-philosopher-who-believes-in-living-things