Savage Objects

savage-objects.indd 1 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 2 4/17/12 4:37 PM SAVAGE OBJECTS savage-objects.indd 3 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 4 4/17/12 4:37 PM SAVAGE OBJECTS edited by Godofredo Pereira Martin Holbraad Graham Harman João Maria Gusmão Bjørnar Olsen Eyal Weizman Reza Negarestani Susan Schuppli Jonathan Saldanha Regina de Miguel Michael Taussig Marcello Maggi Ayesha Hameed Paulo Tavares Godofredo Pereira savage-objects.indd 5 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 6 4/17/12 4:37 PM CONTENT 11 preface i. 17 Things as Concepts: Anthropology and Pragmatology — Martin Holbraad 33 On the Supposed Societies of Chemicals, Atoms, and Stars in Gabriel Tarde — Graham Harman 45 Soliloquy, A Dwarf in the Stratosphere — João Maria Gusmão 71 The Return of Things and the Savagery of the Archaeological Object — Bjørnar Olsen savage-objects.indd 7 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ii. 87 In Excess of Calculation — A conversation with Eyal Weizman 101 A Vertiginous Enlightenment (JWST and telescopic view of the object) — Reza Negarestani 119 Impure Matter: A Forensics of WTC Dust — Susan Schuppli 141 Vibrational Mediations — Jonathan Saldanha 157 An Efect of Verosimilitude — Regina de Miguel savage-objects.indd 8 4/17/12 4:37 PM CONTENT iii. 169 Bodily Unconscious — A conversation with Michael Taussig 183 The Tower and Its Ghost A Cosmopolitical Narrative from Botswana — Marcello Maggi 199 The Petriication of the Image — Ayesha Hameed 215 On the Earth-Object — Paulo Tavares 233 Underground Venezuela’s Territorial Fetishism — Godofredo Pereira savage-objects.indd 9 251 image credits 255 biographies 261 acknowledgments 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 10 4/17/12 4:37 PM P R E FA C E What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent turns to the non-human and to things have in common? And what conlicts are emerging within the apparently consensual removal of the human from the centre of the problem of knowledge? Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in objects, things, and the non-human – a gradual departure from the domination of text, language, and discourse in previous decades, or, as is often said, a move away from the human as the central point of reference for thinking the world. The claim that there is a consensual turn is compounded by the emergence of numerous publications on non-human actors in ields as diverse as archaeology, science studies, anthropology, philosophy, history, art, and architecture; works in which the divide between nature and culture or between humans and non-humans is efaced, where complex assemblages of people and things challenge thought procedures, and where the ground upon which modernity itself was founded becomes the object of contention. However, if we look closely at the diferent ways in which these topics are being discussed, the image of a uniform turn immediately disappears; we ind that recent attempts to emancipate objects are contingent upon and diferentiated by the practices in which they emerge. With this in mind, the present book tries for the irst time to bring together several diferent forums in which objects are being discussed anew, suggesting that the conlicts arising from 11 savage-objects.indd 11 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more productive than a consensual turn to post-humanism. The book takes as its point of departure two well-worn notions, objects and savages, speciically in reference to a Savage Thought that we provocatively twist upon itself, bringing to light not the thought per se but its object and the resistance this object holds to thought. We invited contributions from very different ields to respond to this provocation – from philosophers, archaeologists and anthropologists, to activists, architects and artists – to focus not only on objects themselves but also on the practices within which they are constituted and the territories they refer to. By framing these discussions within object-research as well as academic discourse – in ields ranging from textual production, legal forums, image migration, state performance, and acoustic exploration – speculation about objects and things also becomes a discussion about conlicting ecologies of thought, thus providing insight into often overlooked pragmatic and political dimensions. Ultimately, our hope is that, by bringing such diverse practices together, new lines of thought can be suggested and spaces for new alliances be forged. Godofredo Pereira 12 savage-objects.indd 12 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 13 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 14 4/17/12 4:37 PM I savage-objects.indd 15 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 16 4/17/12 4:37 PM Things as Concepts: Anthropology and Pragmatology Martin Holbraad Within anthropology, much has been written about the possibility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to emancipate ‘things’ (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of ‘humanism’, ‘logicentrism’ and other modernist imaginaries.1 The aim of this essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibilities for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things – by which I mean something akin to ‘things themselves’, though only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently – to generate their own terms of analytical engagement. Might the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown to consist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontological assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (including, perhaps, the ontological premises of a ‘posthumanist turn’ itself)? Might things decide for themselves what they are, and in so doing emancipate themselves from us who would presume to tell 1 E.g. Marilyn Strathern, "Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images", in Culture and History in the Paciic, ed. J. Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions of the Finish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25–44; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, "Materiality: an introduction", in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–50. 17 savage-objects.indd 17 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S them? Might they, if you like, become their own thing–theorists, acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our analytical conceptualisations?2 Such questions, I take it, would consummate the promise of a properly ‘savage thought’: objects acting not merely as conduits for the thinking of the people anthropologist study (those they used to call ‘savages’), but rather as a conduit for anthropological thinking itself. Objects, then, become the basis not only for savages’ ‘science of the concrete’, as Lévi–Strauss himself would have it,3 but also for thoughts that are savage enough to unsettle the conceptual economy of analysis itself, including anthropological analysis (which I shall take here as my point of departure). Let me illustrate what such a ‘savage’ concretion of anthropology might look like with reference to aché – one of the most basic notions involved in the prestigious Afro–Cuban tradition of divination of Ifá, which I have been studying ethnographically in Cuba since 1998. The power of powder Much like the notorious notion of mana in Oceania, aché is a term that babalawos, which is what men who are initiated into the cult of Ifá are called, use in a wide variety of contexts. Most salienty, they use it to refer both in the abstract to their ‘power’ (poder) or ‘capacity’ (facultad) to divine, for which they are most renown (‘to divine you must have aché ’, as they say); and, much 2 Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, And (Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, 2002). 3 Claude Lévi–Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 18 savage-objects.indd 18 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a prime ritual ingredient for making divinities appear and ‘speak’ during divination. Among the many ways in which specially prepared powders are deemed necessary to Ifá ritual, perhaps the most striking is its role as a ‘register’ (registro) for the divinatory conigurations through which Orula, the god of divination, is said to be able to ‘speak’ during the ritual. Spread on the surface of the consecrated divining tray that babalawos use for the most ceremonious divinations they conduct for their clients (particularly during the initiation of neophytes), this powder becomes the medium through which Orula’s words appear. This they do in the form of a series of ‘signs’ (signos, also referred to in the original Yoruba as oddu) that are marked (marcar) by the babalawo on the surface of the powder, following a complex divinatory procedure in which consecrated palm–nuts are used to generate distinct divinatory conigurations, each corresponding to its own sign. Sometimes considered as guises of Orula himself (or his ‘paths’ or ‘representatives’), these igures, comprising eight single or double lines drawn by the babalawo with his middle and ring inger in the powder, are considered as potent divinities in their own right that ‘come out’ (salen) in the divination: crouching around the divining board as they ‘mark the sign’, the babalawos and their consultants are in the presence of a divine being, a symbol that stands for itself if ever there was one.4 Crucially, babalawos emphasise that the powder itself is an indispensable ingredient for efecting these elicitations of the divine. Properly prepared according to secret recipes that only 4 Sensu Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 19 savage-objects.indd 19 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S babalawos know, aché de Orula, as the powder is referred to in this context, has the power to render divinities present. Aché– powder does this not only by providing the surface on which they can appear on the divining tray, but also because it constitutes a necessary ingredient in the consecration of each of the various objects used in the divination, including the divining tray, the palm–nuts and various other items babalawos must have consecrated for divinatory use during their own initiation. As they explain, none of these items ‘work’ unless they are properly consecrated, and this must involve ‘charging them with acheses’, i.e. with aché–powders, according to secret procedures. Concepts versus things Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of aché so blatantly exempliies some of the central preoccupations that inform Lévi–Strauss’s theorization of savage thought, such as the ‘antinomies’ he associated with ‘loating signiiers’ that can signify anything – e.g. both power and powder – because, in themselves, they mean nothing.5 Here we may draw attention only to the fact that, viewed from within the prism of the kinds of anthropological preoccupations Lévi-Strauss’s argument on loat5 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. F. Barker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). See Martin Holbraad, " The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or mana again)", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. A. Henare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 189-225. See also Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 20 savage-objects.indd 20 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y ing signiiers itself exempliies, the case of aché raises classical anthropological conundrums about the rationality credentials of what he playfully called ‘savage thought’ (pensèe sauvage). Much as with classic anthropological controversies about so-called ‘apparently irrational beliefs’ (Nuer twins being birds, Bororo men being red macaws, and so on), we seem here to be confronted with a series of notions that are counter-intuitive to say the least. Certainly, it would appear that the terminological coincidence of aché as both power and powder corresponds to an ontological one, since, as babalawos airm, a diviner’s power to elicit divinities into presence is irreducibly a function of his capacity to use the consecrated powders at his disposal as an initiate. Powder, in this sense, is power. And this would seem to raise the classical anthropological question: why might Cuban diviners and their clients ‘believe’ such a notion? How do we explain this ‘apparently irrational belief’ anthropologically? It should be noted, however, that this ‘classical’ way of posing the question draws its power from what one might call its own inherent perversity. In order even to ask why certain people might believe that a certain form of powder has the power to elicit certain divinities into presence, one has irst to take for granted that this could not (or should not) be the case in the irst place. In particular, assuming that the pertinent anthropological question is why people might ‘believe’ in this way that powder is power turns on the corollary assumption that such a belief can be parsed as the particular way in which the people in question ‘represent’ the objects in their midst, namely, in this case, representing (signifying, imagining, socially constructing etc.) powder as power. And this in turn relies on that foundational ontological axiom of straight-thinking modernism, namely the 21 savage-objects.indd 21 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S distinction between things as they are in the world and the various and variable concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed, as long as the analysis of aché remains within the terms of an axiomatic distinction between things and concepts, it cannot but ask the question in terms of representations, beliefs, social constructions and so on. Since we ‘know’ that powder is just that dusty thing there on the diviner’s tray, the question cannot but be why Cubans might ‘think’ that it is also a form of power. The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropology has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the blatant perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own metaphysic of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic (for Cuban diviners powder is power; we, on the other hand, ask why they might ‘believe’ it to be so, since, from irst metaphysical principles, it can’t be so). Hence the penchant in recent writings on material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron) for so-called ‘relational’ ontological premises which seek, in one way or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus thing divide.6 Still, rather than placating the conceptual imperialism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alternative 6 E.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, " Materials against materiality", Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Langham: AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). 22 savage-objects.indd 22 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y (e.g. ‘relational’, ‘symmetrical’, ‘vital’, ‘vibrant’) ontological order, my interest here is in the possibility of freeing things from any a priori ontological determination whatsoever, so as to allow them to dictate, as it were, their own terms of analytical engagement. As I propose to show, this most crucially involves eliding the concept/thing divide, not as a matter of substantive ontological revision, but rather as point only of analytical methodology. Given space constraints, I present such a prospect as a series of three methodological moves.7 Step I: thing-as-heuristic If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered, somehow, also as non-things (e.g. a putatively ‘material’ powder that is also a putatively ‘immaterial’ power, as in our example),8 then, anthropologically speaking, the notion of a ‘thing’ can at most have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. The initial 7 For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, ed. Wenare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no3 (2009): 431-441; Martin Holbraad, ‘Can the Thing Speak?’, OAP Press, Working Paper Series #7 (2011), available at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/ uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf 8 For classic arguments to this efect with reference to the things anthropologists call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al., ‘Introduction’, 16-23. 23 savage-objects.indd 23 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S analytical task, in other words, cannot be to ‘add’ to the theoretical purchase of the term ‘thing’ by proposing new ways to think of it – e.g. as a site of human beings’ objectiication,9 an index of agency,10 an on-going event of assemblage,11 or what have you. Rather it must be efectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethnographic ‘form’ ready to be illed out contingently according only to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if calling the powder babalawos use a ‘thing’ implies that it could not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power, then let us not call it a thing in any sense other than merely as an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identiier – merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to what it might be, including questions of what it being a ‘thing’ might even mean. Step II: concept = thing If the irst step towards letting things set their own terms of analytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori 9 Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: an introduction’, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50. 10 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 11 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice 1998). Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 24 savage-objects.indd 24 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing them to be illed by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethnographic instance. We may brand this methodological injunction by way of a further heuristic formula, namely ‘concepts = things’. According to this methodological edict, instead of treating all the things that people say of, do to, and do with things as modes of ‘representing’ them (i.e. as manners of attaching various concepts to the things in question by way of ‘social construction’, as per the standard anthropological way of thinking), we may treat them as modes of deining what these things are. This renders wide open precisely questions about what kinds of things ‘things’ might be: what materiality might be, objectiication, agency – all that is now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency and the analytical work it forces upon us. So, to return again to the Cuban example, the idea here is to treat all the things babalawos and their clients supposedly ‘believe’ about their aché-powders as elements of a conceptual deinition of what such a ‘thing’ might actually be: Cuban diviners do not ‘believe’ that powder is a form of power, but rather deine it as such. To the extent that our own default assumption is that powder is not to be deined as power (it’s just a dusty thing, we assume), the challenge then must be to reconceptualise those very notions and their many empirical and analytical corollaries (powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in a way that would render the ethnographically-given deinition of powder as power reasonable, rather than an absurd ‘belief’. I have sought at length elsewhere to specify the full gamut of ways in which diferent kinds of data may enter into the eforts of analytical conceptualization that problems of the powder- 25 savage-objects.indd 25 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S is-power necessitate for anthropologists.12 Crucially, a sound ethnographic understanding is necessary in order even to formulate such problems in the irst place, let alone solve them. For example, since what powder might be in Ifá divination depends on the notion of power that is at stake in this ritual activity, part of an attempt to articulate the question involves developing the cosmological conundrum that lies at its core: if power, in this ethnographic context, refers to babalawos’ ability to render divinities present as ‘signs’ during divination, then are we not in some pertinent sense dealing here with a version of the age-old theo-ontological conundrum, so familiar in the anthropology of religion,13 of how entities that are imagined as transcendent might under certain conditions – in this case by ritual means that involve the use of powder as an indispensable component – be rendered immanent? Conceptualising powder as power, then, requires us to understand how Afro-Cuban divination efectively solves something akin to the so-called ‘problem of transcendence’ in Judeo-Christian theology – although immediately one wants to add that this may well be a misnomer, at least insofar as the very notions of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ may themselves have to be reconceptualised in this context. 12 Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion", Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology 30, 2 (2010): 179185, 185-200 passim; Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13 E.g. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 26 savage-objects.indd 26 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreducible contribution that, heuristically understood, ‘things themselves’ can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with reference to the case of powder in Ifá, one might say that while ethnographic information derived from babalawos serves to set up the anthropological conundrum that aché in its dual aspect, so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the ‘pragmatographic’ information culled from its peculiar qualities as a ‘thing’ (viz. as powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution. Step III: thing = concept Consider what powder actually does in the diviner’s hands. As we saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, ‘come out’. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that power is understood as the capacity to make divinities ‘come out’ and ‘speak’. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a ‘thing’, powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles – its pure multiplicity, one might say. In marking the oddu on the board, the diviner’s ingers are able to draw the coniguration just to the extent that the ‘intensive’ capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is ‘registered’. In this way powder renders the premise of the oddu’s revelation explicit, as a matter of these signs’ inherent motility: by way of igure/ground reversal, oddu igures are revealed as a temporary displacement of their ground, the powder. 27 savage-objects.indd 27 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S But this suggests also a logical reversal that goes to the heart of the problem that apparently ‘transcendent’ oddu might be imagined to pose. If we take seriously babalawos’ contention that the oddu just are the marks they make on aché-powder (the basic ‘magic’ of divination), then the constitution of deities as displacements of powder tells us something pretty important about the ontological premises of Ifá cosmology: that these divinities are to be thought of not, say, as ‘entities’ that may or may not exist in states of transcendence or immanence, but rather as motions. And if the oddu are just motions, then the ontological discontinuity between transcendence and immanence (and with it the onto-theological problem they may be imagined to pose) is resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primitive, what looks like transcendence becomes distance and what looks like immanence becomes proximity. Indeed: qua motions, the divinities have inherent within themselves the capacity to relate to humans immanently, through the potential of directed movement that aché-powder guarantees, as a solution to the genuine problem of the distance deities must traverse in order to be rendered present in divination. Now, what I wish to draw attention to here is the work powder does for this analysis, by virtue speciically of what heuristically (once again!) one would identify as its prosaic, ‘material’ characteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analytical problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder that provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities are conceptualised as motions to dissolve the problem of ‘transcendence’, after all, that is only because their material manifestations are just that, motions. And those motions, in turn, only emerge as analytically signiicant because of the material constitution 28 savage-objects.indd 28 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y of the powder upon which they are physically marked: its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles, amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of water, in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviner’s ingers, and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres in powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that they can engender conceptual efects, setting the parameters for the anthropological analysis that they ‘aford’ the argument. As an irreducible element of the analysis of aché, it is powder that brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion, direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis, providing its own answer to its own problem – its savage power, if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle. So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capacity that things have to engender conceptual transformations of themselves, by virtue of the conceptual diferences their material characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragmatological element, as we may call it,14 of anthropological analysis is nothing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier ‘concepts = things’ formula, namely things = concepts. If the formula ‘concept = thing’ designated the possibility of treating what people say and do around things as ways of deining what those things are, its symmetrical rendition ‘thing = concept’ raises the prospect of treating things as a way of deining what we as analysts are able to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term, are a thing’s 14 Cf. Christopher Witmore, ‘The realities of the past: Archaeology, Object-Orientations, Pragmatology’, in Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, eds. B. R. Fortenberry and L. McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 25-36. 29 savage-objects.indd 29 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S conceptual afordances: how things’ material characteristics can give rise to particular forms for their conceptualization. One might even imagine this kind of transformational movement as a form of abstraction, provided that notion is disentangled from habitually corollary distinctions between concrete things and abstract concepts.15 Indeed, this is just what the ‘thing = concept’ clause of our analytical method would suggest. Where the analytical ontology of things versus concepts would posit abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend a particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuristic continuity of ‘thing = concept’ casts this as a movement internal to ‘the thing itself’: the thing diferentiates itself, no longer as an instantiation ‘of’ a concept, but a self-transformation as a concept. Savage thought thinking itself. 15 See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, "Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern", Anthropological Theory 9, 4 (2009): 371-94. 30 savage-objects.indd 30 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 31 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 32 4/17/12 4:37 PM On the Supposed Societies of Chemicals, Atoms, and Stars in Gabriel Tarde Graham Harman Gabriel Tarde lived from 1843 to 1904. A failed rival of Émile Durkheim for dominance in French sociology, Tarde fell into obscurity for many decades before enjoying a resurgence, due largely to the admiration of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. Tarde’s sparkling 1895 treatise Monadology and Sociology has recently been translated into English by Theo Lorenc,1 and will serve as the topic of the present article. In the words of the publisher’s description, this sixty-page treatise “sets out a theory of ‘universal sociology,’ which aims to explicate the essentially social nature of all phenomena, including the behaviour of atoms, stars, chemical substances and living beings. [Tarde] argues that all of nature consists of elements animated by belief and desire, which form social aggregates analogous to those of human societies and institutions.”2 What person of any degree of imagination could resist a book described in this way? If there is any possibility of including non-human entities in the political sphere, Tarde seems 1 Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, trans. and ed. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne: re.press, 2012). All parenthetical references in the article are to this work, and will consist of chapter number in Roman numerals followed by page numbers in Arabic numerals. For example: (IV, 30) refers to Chapter IV, page 30 in the re.press edition. 2 From the publisher’s online advertisement, found at http://re-press.org/books/ monadology-and-sociology/. 33 savage-objects.indd 33 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S like an excellent candidate for the job. Nonetheless, I will claim that this impression is largely illusory. In the irst sentence of the book, Tarde gives us the name of his hero philosopher, who in some respects is also my own: “The monads, children of Leibniz, have come a long way since their birth” (I, 5). The Leibnizian monads, those tiny atomic souls spread throughout nature, strike many readers as the quaint residue of an archaic era of speculative philosophy. By contrast, Tarde sees the monads as penetrating the whole of natural science in his time. “Monads” is a Greek-derived term that would be “units” in the Latinate.3 Monadology and Sociology was written half a decade before Max Planck discovered that heat comes in discrete packets, or quanta; this was soon followed by Einstein’s quantum theory of light and his proof of the existence of atoms through his explanation of Brownian motion, then Bohr’s theory of electrons jumping between discrete orbits in an atom. Nonetheless, the move towards a discrete rather than continuous nature was already underway in 1895. Chemistry had been marching away from continuous matter towards discrete individual atoms throughout the nineteenth century: “The progress of chemistry leads us to airm the atom and to deny the material continuity which the continuous character of the physical and living manifestations of matter, extension, movement and growth seem supericially to reveal” (I, 5-6). Tarde cites F. A. Lange as holding that for Newton gravitational force does not occur between large-sized celestial 3 And “units” is in fact the favored term of object-oriented philosopher Ian Bogost in Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 34 savage-objects.indd 34 4/17/12 4:37 PM O N T H E S U P P O S E D S O C I E T I E S O F C H E M I C A L S , AT O M S , A N D S TA R S I N G A B R I E L TA R D E bodies, but is only a sum of the gravity of all the tiniest particles of which these bodies are made. So too in biology, where “the founders of cellular theory have shown themselves to be Newton’s true heirs. In the same way they have broken apart the unity of the living body, they have resolved it into a prodigious number of elementary organisms, isolated and egoistic…” (I, 6). Tarde grasps a similar possibility for the study of history. Though he cites no forerunners for this claim, Tarde is adamant that we need “a clearer and more positive form of explanation, which accounts for a given historical event only by individual actions, and particularly by the action of inventive men who served as a model for others and reproduced thousands of copies of themselves, like mother-cells of the social body” (I, 8). He even praises Antoine Augustin Cournet for supplementing Darwin with a theory of “evolution by leaps or crises” (I, 13), like Stephen Jay Gould in more recent times, again privileging the discrete over the continuous. Although Tarde enjoys great favor with Deleuze and hence with Deleuzians, he puts a rather un-Deleuzian spin on this theory of discrete individuals, speaking openly of “the superiority of substantialist systems throughout history, from Democritus to Descartes, over the liveliest of dynamistic doctrines” (II, 20). And in yet another challenge to fashionable contemporary dogma, Tarde adds that “the idea of force leads naturally to the idea of substance… [against] the agitations of an illusory phenomenalism…” (II, 20). All this might suggest that Tarde ofers a jungle-like landscape made up of individuals of every shape and scale: with atoms at one level, cells at another, and autonomous human geniuses shaping history at still another. But this is not the case. For Tarde just as for his hero Leibniz, monads exist at one level only: the 35 savage-objects.indd 35 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S tiniest level. Tarde notes that “scientists who live in daily contact with the so-called elements have no doubt of their complexity” (I, 8), and for him the complexity of such non-ultimate entities as chemical elements means that they cannot have inherent unity and reality of their own. He cites the prominent chemist Marcellin Berthelot as saying that “the deeper study of the elementary masses which, on our current understanding, constitute the simple bodies leads every day more and more to an understanding of them not as indivisible atoms, homogenous and admitting of movement only as a whole, but as highly complex constructions, furnished with a speciic architecture and animated by highly varied internal movements” (cited at I, 8-9). In short, there is a descent into the ininitesimal. Visible inite things are simply the bulk summation of many tinier things that serve as the ultimate source of all things in the cosmos: “Everything comes from the ininitesimal and everything returns to it; nothing in the sphere of the inite and complex —a surprising fact which nobody is surprised at— appears suddenly, nor dies away. What should we conclude from this, if not that the ininitely small, in other words the element, is the source and the goal, the substance and the reason of all things?” (I, 11). The idea that new autonomous entities might emerge at each layer of the cosmos strikes Tarde as absurd. For instance: “It is truly surprising to see men of science, so stubborn in repeating at every turn that nothing is created, admit implicitly as though self-evident that relations between distinct beings can of themselves become new beings numerically added to the former” (V, 35). Or restated more sarcastically: “Once embarked on this course, there is no reason to stop: every harmonious, profound and intimate relation between natural elements becomes the creator of a new and superior element, 36 savage-objects.indd 36 4/17/12 4:37 PM O N T H E S U P P O S E D S O C I E T I E S O F C H E M I C A L S , AT O M S , A N D S TA R S I N G A B R I E L TA R D E which in turn assists in the creation of another yet higher element at every step of the scale of phenomenal complexity…” (V, 35-36). In order to forestall such proliferation of entities at every layer of the cosmos, Tarde asserts that in the case of human societies, “however intimate, profound, and harmonious a given social group may be, we will never see springing forth ex abrupto from among its members, to their surprise, a collective ego which is real and not only metaphorical, a marvellous outcome of which these individuals would be the conditions” (V, 36). Since this is precisely what many people do hold, it would be nice to read an actual argument by Tarde on this score. But he is adamant that whatever looks like a collective entity is really just one or more micro-entities asserting themselves against the others. For example: “Doubtless there is always one member [of a human social group] who represents and personiies the whole group, or else a small number of them (like the ministers of a State) who, each in a diferent respect, individualize it no less entirely in themselves” (V, 36). Again, nothing exists but the tiniest things. Here Tarde sounds much like the analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen,4 who believes in nothing but physical simples and living organisms, denouncing the supposed existence of all intermediate and large-sized entities. The diference between Tarde and van Inwagen, of course, is that Tarde thinks physical simples are living organisms. The hypothesis of monads, which Tarde fully supports, “implies both the reduction of two entities, matter and mind, to a single one, such that they are merged in the latter, and at the same time a prodigious multiplication of purely mental agents in the world” 4 Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 37 savage-objects.indd 37 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S (I, 5). To give just one practical instance, Tarde cites a report from G. J. Almann that “the movements of spores seem frequently to obey a real volition; if the spore encounters an obstacle, it changes direction and moves back by changing the movement of its cilia” (cited at II, 22). Tarde adds approvingly that “a railway mechanic could do no better” (II, 22). If we accept Tarde’s general hypothesis, “the movement of bodies would be nothing other than types of judgements or objectives formulated by the monads” (II, 17). Souls are characterized by belief and desire, which serve respectively as the grounds for airmation and will (II, 16). This links Tarde unexpectedly with the pessimistic metaphysics of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann (II, 21), while also providing an unusual point of entry into sociology and politics. Speaking of belief and desire, Tarde asks both rhetorically and beautifully: “Is it not clear that with their reciprocal combinations, passions and intentions, they are the perpetual winds of history’s tempests, and the waterfalls which turn the mills of politics?” (II, 21). And more decisively: “[belief and desire] alone can produce societies” (II, 21). Given that there is no soulless matter and that all is purely mind, it is not metaphorical to speak of “societies” at the infrahuman levels of the world. Indeed, “everything is a society… every phenomenon is a social fact” (IV, 28). Tarde thinks this merely ratiies what science is already learning on its own: “Science tells us of animal societies… of cellular societies, and why not of atomic societies? I almost forgot to add societies of stars, solar and stellar systems” (IV, 28). But paradoxically enough, for Tarde there is really no such thing as societies of chemicals, atoms, stars, or even humans. There exist nothing but the ininitesimal monads, and these group together into larger units only in the sense that 38 savage-objects.indd 38 4/17/12 4:37 PM O N T H E S U P P O S E D S O C I E T I E S O F C H E M I C A L S , AT O M S , A N D S TA R S I N G A B R I E L TA R D E some dominant monad takes control for as long as a given entity exists. For even if a cell acts as if it were animated by a single soul, “we must rather conclude that it was only the soul of a whole people of workers” (II, 22). When we study “nature, rocks, water, or even plants,” we ind that each is “a hermetically closed world of elements” (VII, 56). Celestial bodies themselves are created by the dominance of individual monads, as in the following bizarrely beautiful passage: “there still exists, we maintain, at the heart of the sun, the conquering atom which by its individual action extended by degrees to the whole primordial nebula, disrupted the contented state of equilibrium which, we are told, the latter enjoyed” (VIII, 62). The same process holds at the level of humans, who are not uniied Christian souls, but swarms of ininitesimal germs: “I call consciousness, soul, mind, the transitory victory of an eternal element, which by some favourable chance rises above the obscure realm of the ininitesimal, to rule a people of brothers who are now become his subjects…” (VIII, 65). The end of this transient reign is described just as Leibniz described it, but even more poetically: “I call death the gradual or sudden dethroning, the voluntary or forced abdication of this spiritual conqueror who, like Darius after Arbela and Napoleon after Waterloo, Charles V at Yuste and Diocletian at Salona, but even more completely stripped bare once more, returns to the ininitesimal where it was born and whence it came…” (VIII, 65). We have seen that, like Leibniz, Tarde proposes a world made up entirely of ininitesimal monads, in which all largerscale entities –chemicals, atoms, stars, humans– are merely the result of one dominant monad organizing less dominant collaborators to do its bidding. Where Tarde and Leibniz difer most is on the topic of knowledge and communication. We know that 39 savage-objects.indd 39 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S for Leibniz, “monads have no windows.”5 They are cut of from direct communication with each other, and mirror each other only through the mediation of God, who makes no appearance in the remarkably secular pages of Monadology and Sociology. By contrast, Tarde does not think that monads are windowless at all. Instead, “the whole external universe is composed of souls distinct from my own but fundamentally similar” (II, 15). Accordingly, “if it is the case that this being in itself is fundamentally similar to our own being, then it will no longer be unknowable, and may consistently be airmed” (II, 15). Whereas “Leibniz made each [monad] a camera obscura where the whole universe of other monads is represented in a reduced form and from a particular angle,” Tarde favors “open monads which would penetrate each other reciprocally, rather than being mutually external” (III, 26). Citing Newtonian gravity with its action-at-a-distance (refuted two decades later by Einstein), Tarde exults that monads cannot be mutually impenetrable (III, 26). Whereas Leibniz viewed the monad as a “microcosm” closed in on itself, Tarde views each monad as the entire cosmos itself, since it directly grasps all other monads (III, 27). Having begun the book with a discontinuous landscape of discrete units, Tarde emphatically turns the tables midway through: “What do we place within the ultimate discontinuity if not continuity?” (III, 27). Instead of a series of self-enclosed chambers as in Leibniz, the world is a gigantic relational whole in which all ininitesimals make contact at a distance. Here lies the root of Tarde’s project of shifting thought from being to having: “All philosophy hitherto has been based on 5 G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 214. 40 savage-objects.indd 40 4/17/12 4:37 PM O N T H E S U P P O S E D S O C I E T I E S O F C H E M I C A L S , AT O M S , A N D S TA R S I N G A B R I E L TA R D E the verb Be, the deinition of which was the philosopher’s stone, which all sought to discover. We may airm that, if it had been based on the verb Have, many sterile debates and fruitless intellectual exertions would have been avoided” (VII, 52). This shift to having would amount to embracing an openly relational conception of the world, through which science supposedly outshines philosophy (VII, 54). We have seen that Tarde’s universal sociology condemns most purported entities to non-existence. What really exists are the ininitesimals, universally in contact with one another, but sometimes locally shaped into speciic things under the guidance of a dominant monad. Here Tarde joins the pre-Socratic philosophers and many scientists in undermining objects by reducing them to tiny subcomponents. But at the end of the day, despite beginning with a discrete cosmic model of atoms, cells, individual humans, and other quanta, Tarde fuses all these entities into a gigantic relational whole. Being is replaced by having; an individual is nothing more than those other individuals it touches. The universe becomes even more a hall of mirrors than it was for Leibniz, for it is now one gigantic Versailles of mirrors rather than trillions of micro-mirrors sealed of from contact with all others. If Tarde’s move to the ininitesimal was a way of undermining objects, his talk of immediate having at a distance is a form of what I call overmining, since it identiies monads exhaustively with their interactions with others.6 It should come as no surprise 6 For my previous discussions of the overmining/undermining doublet, see the following publications: “On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 41 savage-objects.indd 41 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S that Tarde airms both the smallest part of the cosmos (the ininitesimal unit) and the largest (the relational whole), while mocking the existence of everything in between. For as I have often argued in print, these two extremes are almost always parasites on one another, to such an extent that I have called this twofold philosophy “the beast with two backs.”7 Parmenides denounces all individual beings, leaving us with nothing but a uniied lump, but then must account for plurality by airming a plurality of things in the sphere of doxa or opinion. Mainstream scientiic naturalists reduce the world to tiny particles, but to safeguard scientiic knowledge they must airm that the properties of these particles are isomorphic with human knowledge – which is not itself a tiny underlying substratum, but a surface located at some remove from this substratum. Throughout Chapter VI of Monadology and Sociology, Tarde gives wonderful descriptions of how higher-level entities might seem to an outside observer to emerge beyond the ininitesimal through a merely subtractive process of simpliication. “Forms are only brakes and laws are only dykes” (VI, 46), meaning that whatever seems homogeneous and uniied actually swarms with internal diversity. But to be made of parts does not necessarily mean to be reducible to one’s parts, since those parts may shift or be replaced without this changing the thing they join to compose. Tarde concedes in passing that things cannot be reduced upward to their foreign relations with other things, since “if [things] were only social… it would follow 21-40; “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed,” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 5 (2010), 772-790; Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011). 7 Shakespeare, Othello. Act 1, Scene 1. 42 savage-objects.indd 42 4/17/12 4:37 PM O N T H E S U P P O S E D S O C I E T I E S O F C H E M I C A L S , AT O M S , A N D S TA R S I N G A B R I E L TA R D E that societies and nations would exist without change for all eternity” (VI, 48). In other words, if a thing were nothing more than its relations with other things, it would be identical with its relations, and would thus be devoid of any surplus allowing it to change from its current state. Yet the same also holds in reverse. A thing also cannot be reduced downward to the domestic relations of its own internal components, since to paraphrase Tarde, it would follow from this that societies and nations would change unremittingly with each tiny change of its internal pieces. The single hair falling from the head of Obama, or from that of an iron worker, football player, or cat, would change not only the United States but the cosmos as a whole – a purely arbitrary assumption. From this we can see that we need a theory of intermediate objects larger than Tarde’s ininitesimals, and smaller than his global network of havings and relatings. In between ininitesimals and relations there are objects, and in between them is also being rather than having. Indeed, there may be no ininitesimals or global relations at all. Without intermediate realities, there would be neither human nor inhuman societies, and no savagery of savage objects. There could be no societies of chemicals, atoms, stars, or humans. The world would be a colossal but tame savanna made up of tiny swarming creatures always already in contact with every other. 43 savage-objects.indd 43 4/17/12 4:37 PM João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, The Soup, 2009. savage-objects.indd 44 4/17/12 4:37 PM Soliloquy, A Dwarf in the Stratosphere João Maria Gusmão I am bemused by how so-called Extraterrestrials think so little of man that the stern and macro-cephalous igure we have grown used to never conceals, in that languid and anorectic representation, the private parts of the body. How odd that that distinct, albeit slight, impotent and child-like phallus does not, in our imagination, deign to bear – thus honoring our bipedal tradition – the shame of a simple pair of underpants. A brief glance at the creature’s nether region would suice to explain the philological proximity between the Martian myth and the avatar of homo sapiens civilization, the chimpanzee. A somewhat absurd comparison, since, contrary to Freudian opinion, our illustrious simian ancestor, having all his life given much attention to his genitalia, masturbates in the same amount and manner as we, the true humans, a fact that is alone enough to set him apart from the Martian’s venerable lack of libido. The common alien’s near-religious abstinence, rivaling in disgrace the ecclesiastic restraint upon which Catholicism was founded, serves, however, an underlying fantasy – as attested by the fact that there are numerous hysterical descriptions and accounts wherein those androgynous beings conduct experiments with medieval instruments on abductees lying on operating tables. Which leads us to conclude the following: this E.T., if he exists at all, is psychological – like the data that, rightly or wrongly, lead us on the road to this exhaustive inquiry into solipsism. 45 savage-objects.indd 45 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Summa summarum, if this is so, what inquest should then be carried out to ascertain the possibility of another conscience other than our own in the universe? Is there, in the crannies of diversity, in the outside we ind out there, something that can at least quiet what must be the most profound feeling of humans – the sense of abandonment? Or, on the contrary, does that difference which looms nearby, or was always held there, like an eternity corseted in time and space, require a new conceptual order to integrate the phenomenal experience of the world? Irrevocably, that which pertains to thought, that which truly emerges during the meditative mode, arises only when one does not ill the unknown with the assurance of certainty – that certainty which fades when all ceases to meet our expectations head on. If there is an ulterior reason in the world, it is certainly not an human reason, and surely not a divine reason; a notion which is certainly conceivable, but altogether inconceivable, a sidereal unreason which we may suppose entirely lacking in judgment and will, the reason, thus, for the unreasonable nature, not of man, but of the world. “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” and relection may well suspect, not a monster the likes of Polyphemous or the bearded God of the Old Testament, but rather, of the word mostrare, of a world that demonstrates indiference to any human ant. Above all, a non-psychological world, akin to those realities that, though we may not fully ascertain, we allow to subsist in order to speculatively illustrate the setting for our existence. Thus the task before all thinking habits and eccentricities, be they submerged in the unconscious or open to dialectics, is rather to submit to the logic of that original disturbance, that which moves the subject to order appearances, as one inscribes 46 savage-objects.indd 46 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Hand, smaller than hand, 2009. the human in an unclassiiable territory. And, since each of the senses is tangled in this order of thought; since every relection recommences exactly here, moving from the world’s ininity to analogy, engendering all images of the possible and the impossible, it is also from here that we come to our theoretical bent, which we must explain, setting henceforth the course for the present opuscule that we may be taken, if not seriously (as that was never our particular object), for people of good intention – which is to say, people intent on a single task: “more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful (…) Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I 47 savage-objects.indd 47 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science) Such terms, of course, oblige us to a cautious advertence: we shall never venture beyond the minimum rise of thought; thus, notwithstanding the vaunted peaks conquered by theory’s upper hierarchies, we can ofer only that which sophism has granted our essay – an apologetic sketch, not of a theological or materialistic summa, but of a dwarf philosophy, an abbreviated alienist treatise. João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, The Initiate, 2008. 48 savage-objects.indd 48 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E Item – concerning the eternity which underlies the experience of the world. The irst matter is discussed thus, it seems man is mortal and the world eternal Premise (The threat of disappearance, Hume and Freud) If each time that, intermittently, the light in the stairway goes out and back on again, and if, every time the Sun sets over the horizon, suspending visibility, there is no guarantee that it will arise again at dawn (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), since the Sun might become extinguished while we sleep, and the light bulb could blow out at any moment; and if in turn these two hypotheses mirror, at heart, the operation described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the game of fort-da – in which the child throws a spool only to reel it back in and wonder at its presence (appearing and disappearing), thus addressing the trauma of disappearance and parental abandonment – then how can we live without the repetitive sense that all is taken from us and must come to an end, seeing as the child soon learns to live, replacing the thing by its remission to the void – resulting, by default, in a loss that resides in the subject rather than the world? Which is, then, the most pertinent question, that of the neurotic – “do I exist?” – or that of the religious man – “does the world exist?” 49 savage-objects.indd 49 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Answer to the irst (the neurotic) As Freud explains, the mental apparatus and, in particular, its unconscious processes, are strongly determined by the pleasure principle. Thus, and attempting to investigate the inhibition of such principal psychoanalytic observation, Freud attempts a diferent inquiry in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This new analysis is the result of observing a compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience, when, contrary to clinical indings, psychic mechanisms tend to submit displeasure to the principle of reality and stability, usually repressing the mental pain thus brought on by delaying the drive. Early in the essay and before the famous example of the fort-da game, Freud confronts that which he calls traumatic neurosis, which is often found in victims of accidents and veterans of war: “Now in the traumatic neuroses the dream life has this peculiarity: it continually takes the patient back to the situation of his disaster (…) The obtrusion on the patient over and again, even in sleep, of the impression made by the traumatic experience is taken as being merely a proof of its strength. The patient has so to speak undergone a psychical ixation as to the trauma.” Freud goes on to compare the symptom to hysteria, concluding that both pathologies “sufer for the most part from reminiscences”. I. e., episodes that lead quotidian experience back to a second, and imaginary, repetitive experience. Why does the structure of these individuals tend markedly to imagine this past occurrence as foreshadowing their own future disappearance incarnating the threat of their own extinction? It must be in this sense that Jacques Lacan attributes a “love of castration” to the love of truth; in so far as the unconcealedness of the being (Heidegger’s Aletheia) is taken as harbinger of the world’s 50 savage-objects.indd 50 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, 3 Suns, 2009. 51 savage-objects.indd 51 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S disappearance, in other words, how, paradoxically, appearance is experienced theoretically: simultaneously and transitively, concealed and unconcealed and also, a movement between notbeing and being, somehow inverting the order of things, failing to understand that the extinction of man (death) is a far more factual datum than that of the world (apocalypse). Let us then imagine, mutatis mutandis, the world reduced to a wooden spool, and the philosopher, in an efort that we cannot but describe as athletic, throwing that same spool and relecting the ideation of its absence (“why is there something instead of nothing?”). The critique that may be erected here is that, in a certain dimension, metaphysics and the philosopher mimic almost completely the most primitive mental mechanisms for resolving subjective loss. “Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of linging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often no light task. He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratiication, emitting a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ (…) I saw at last that this was a game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). For the philosopher, too, the world has gone. Later, returning to the neurotic question “do I exist?”, the thing is easily replaced with its eviction to the void – resulting by default, as noted above, in a loss that is in the subject and not the world. Did the near-world disappear? No, the subject, indeed, is gone. Metaphysics represents irst the temporal diegesis of man, and only later the spatial diegesis of spirit; as a consequence, the worldview is founded on the occurrence of death and not on the facticity of the world. Therein lies meaning, a reason we scrutinize once again: a more-than-psychological 52 savage-objects.indd 52 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E reason, meta-psychological, a conscience not of oneself, but for oneself. “A Snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from ifteen years to thirty-ive, tormenting him most horribly.” (Borges quoting Hawthorne, Other Inquisitions) Answer to the second (the religious) In Bishop Berkeley’s paradigmatic work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, we read: “The table I write on I say it exists, that is, I see it and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed – meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. (…) For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible.” One hundred and two years later, with the advent of probability theory, we ind in Pierre-Simon Laplace the following endorsement of relative certainty: “When all cases are favorable to an event, their probability becomes a certainty (…) Under such conditions, certainty and probability are comparable, although there may be an essential diference between the two states of conscience, when a truth is rigorously demonstrated, or, on the contrary, when a small source of error can still be perceived.” Admitting, to use Berkeley’s example, that the table in his study, in the non-presential instance (Berkeley is not there to perceive it), may in fact not exist, let us imagine, by supposing the extraordinary: the table “has gone”. Is not that remote conjecture, improbable to the point that the more reasonable inverse can be considered, if not an absolute certainty, then perhaps the minimum deviation of that decisive verdict. Is it not more probable, the missing evidence of the table’s immobility 53 savage-objects.indd 53 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S notwithstanding, that it should be in the same place waiting, like any other grave inanimate object, waiting because it is not likely that something will force the table to escape the oice, and the oice to abandon the house, and it to leave the city, and the city to leave Ireland, thus leaving Berkeley without a table in the world upon which to work. We can then suppose that that which exists, even at the minimum level of appearance, such as that which was always impassible, but never perceived, or which occurs, leeting, but imperceptible, is not swept from the world like some great hypothesis. As Laplace argues, “it may be said that all knowledge is problematic; and in the small number of things which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means of ascertaining truth induction and analogy - are based on probabilities.” However, the metaphysical nausea resides exactly there, in that everything only is on the near-dreamlike condition that we have to imagine existence dividing the same and the other, because that fact, no longer imagined but real, without the slightest veil of illusion – raw existence – has no raison d’être, and, again, “does the world exist?”. It follows that, for the history of ideas, all beginnings and endings, diferences and unity, all the parts and the whole, are naught but a iction of thought. One certainty, however, since an ininite number of inconceivable things results in a minute amount of truths: something is out there, and it is not human or, at least, not as human as Laplace’s Demon: “An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such 54 savage-objects.indd 54 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Camera inside camera, 2010. 55 savage-objects.indd 55 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” Somehow, the logos is haunted by the denial of uncertainty. A thing must at least be known in order to exist. Dictating the end of probability, this attitude is just as much a concession to the improbability of the world, since any Noumenon, as a pure ideation of the spirit, eschews subjectivity and, in this case, we would be discussing an idea, rather than something instead of nothing. The second matter is discussed thus, it seems eternity is a rock and life is extemporaneous Premise (On the material illusion of the eternal) That a stone upon one’s path, a stone worthy of gravity’s circumspection, no so much a stone, but a rock, an immense crag in our way, then demonstrates to man, to the greatest of humans, that he will sooner make way for eternity than eternity will move for him, and, deinitely, that our fragility is immense in face of absolute immobility. The age of the irst man is counted from the moment when he lost his immortality. Adam died at nine hundred and thirty. Paradoxically, the determination of this ancestor’s theoretical age can be formulated thus: how many years did the man without a belly button live? Answer: nine hundred and thirty plus ininity. We can then conclude, at least in one of time’s directions, that Adam had always existed, more precisely, since the ininitesimal point at which ininity touches nothing, and immediately becomes “all or nothing”, with no middle term, because one contradicts zero. 56 savage-objects.indd 56 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E Recalling that the dread of the eternal lies in its unreality; that nothing, too, instills the greatest terrors; and since Adam and Eve have no belly button, and were therefore made ex-nihilo, from nothing (but Eve from the rib); the egg and the chicken, too, bring us to the riddle: “who was the irst to be born, born of nothing?” Eternity, as Plato deines it, is precisely without a subject, it is the result of a model, of an archetype. Reviewing the arguments of Parmenidean stasis to determine that deletion of subjectivity, what Popper called the “irst deductive cosmology”, we have: 1. Only what is exists; 2. The Nothing cannot exist; 3. The world is full; 4. Movement is an impossibility; 5. The Universe is one indivisible, unmovable block. Linked to this argument, the idea of eternity begins with two imperatives we will point out: irst, the relationship of the principle of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, the nothing is absurd, because all that exists either is or is not, there is no other option; second the principle of necessity of the world, since all things require causes and since nothing is no cause at all, since “nothing comes from nothing”, it cannot contain a beginning or an end to that which exists. Consequently, if reality is one, then, being the same as itself, it must be unlimited in all directions, i.e., eternal, even during the processes engendered by change, and, this, without interval, without empty spaces, a block. But if Parmenides’ spectral world were to exist, it would be as a world within a brain… an ideal world in which a dreamer believes he was conceived by a demiurge with a reality box, a special box within which all of creation is built and all probabilities and accidents foreseen by that supernatural thinker. In that ideal world, the dreamer, in turn, imagines himself to be a brilliant architect building in dreams a world within a box very like that one he believes to be his world. And he dreams. He 57 savage-objects.indd 57 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Falling Cat, 2010. 58 savage-objects.indd 58 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E dreams of a creature who resembles him, he conceives it in that box. He imagines it lives with only one purpose, that of inding the irst cause, just as he had done before, thus doubting the most subtle variations in appearance. He dreams, even, that this man in a box will himself make a box, a box as ininite as the one he had originally planned, reproducing the perfect nature in which he lives in that other box. This creature will imagine other entities, free beings in an absolute space-time, and, thereby, beings who would themselves suspect as many other gods and dreams, dreamers and dreamed, and as many boxes as may exist from the beginning to the end of times. The best answer to this (by now unoriginal) notion, is found in Stanislaw Lem: “And do you know what this God, this Creator thinks (…)?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘That He is the same as the madman. But, then, it is also possible that the owner of the dusty laboratory in which WE are boxes on shelves is himself a box, a box built by another, still higher scientist, who has original and fantastic notions . . . and so on, ad ininitum. Each one of these experimenters is God, the creator of a universe in the form of boxes and their fate, and under him he has Adams and Eves, and over him his God, one rung up in the hierarchy. (…) And there is no greater reward for this divinity than the revolt of the iron boxes that recurs in every generation, when they conclude very rationally that He does not exist.” (Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy) But… “You have not allowed for the wind, Hubert,” said his antagonist, bending his bow, “or that had been a better shot.” (Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe). 59 savage-objects.indd 59 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Item – Concerning the determination of the alien in man The irst matter is discussed thus, it seems man is part of nature Premise For if in the biological and sociological estimation, man is hands and heart tied to the world for its hermeneutic exploration and deloration, as in a prosperous garden in which all vegetation grows and is beautiied by the hands of a careful gardener, why, then, is it not man, who progresses and conquers so much, the true Amazonian forest of nature? If, whichever way man turns all is materially, symbolically and virtually transformed, how are these not the new landscapes of a new sense of the bucolic and pastoral? Banks and skyscrapers the new mountains; food supply and goods transportation networks the great and fertile plains; the entertainment industry, the clearings. The techno capital oversees, the shepherd’s dog rounds up the sheep, and the wee lambs blink and say yes: the grass is really fresh! Upon returning from Brazil, Amerigo Vespucci writes a series of letters telling in profuse detail of the irst encounters and impressions of the new world confronted by the Portuguese and Spanish leets in 1500. Vespucci, whose irst name was given to the Americas, describes the Indian, telling us they were naked and ate each other – a fact met with utter shock by the westerner, and which would have somewhat justiied the evangelic and colonial violence of the early days of transatlantic expansion. “For human lesh is an ordinary article of food among them. You may be the more certain of this, because I have seen a man eat his children 60 savage-objects.indd 60 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E and wife; and I knew a man who was popularly credited to have eaten 300 human bodies. I was once in a certain city for twentyseven days, where human lesh was hung up near the houses, in the same way as we expose butcher’s meat. I say further that they were surprised that we did not eat our enemies, and use their lesh as food, for they say it is excellent.” (Mundus Novus) Of course, the new has this anthropophagic logic of the new, has this capacity to destroy all that was previously accepted and to break with the prevalent order, the dispenser of meanings and ideas. Revolution, in the historical sense of the term (the Copernican revolution, the Kantian, etc.), carries that gift, namely, that the knowledge of the past is enclosed in illusion and that everything will henceforth be diferent, “never before lived”. For Alain Badiou, the concept of truth is precisely inaugurated by a new datum, something revolutionary emerging from science, from art, from love and politics and that sets of a inite procedure in the subject. This “revolutionary” action is dependent upon an ininite inquiry, as if in anticipation, at any given moment, of the assertion of a universal truth. Clearly, Badiou’s conception of truth moves away from a propositional modality; truth is a process. That something more that emerges from the state of the situation, he calls a supplement. Why is it that only a supplement can engender a truth? Because it breaks with repetition and norm, opens up the human’s experience to a horizon as vast, not as knowledge, but as the absolutely unknown. That which approaches on the wake of the supplement’s breakthrough, the event, is also not a certainty; it is contingent on a risk, on a wager. “Nothing regulates its course, since the axiom that supports it has arbitrated outside of any rule of established knowledge. The procedure thus follows a chance-driven course, a course without a concept.” (Alain Badiou, Philosophy and Truth) 61 savage-objects.indd 61 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Solar, the Blindman Eating a Papaya, 2011. 62 savage-objects.indd 62 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E When Diderot writes the Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, he takes his inspiration from the accounts of humanists travelling to the New World. In particular, he deals with the landscapes described by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French navigator and writer who, in 1771, describes a Tahitian paradise (Tahiti had irst been visited by westerners the year before Bougainville’s journey). Unlike Vespucci’s accounts, Voyage autour du Monde, an 18th century best-seller, speaks of an idyllic paradise populated by good savages; the primitives of Rousseau’s fantasies, upon which the romanticism of lost innocence and the return to nature could inally be projected. The supplement developed by Diderot, rather than addressing either Vespucci’s or Bougainville’s version, has a wholly diferent interpretation of the facts of the new world. Diderot dramatizes the western ideological farce in dialog between a chaplain and a native named Orou. “– Orou: What do you mean by these words fornication, incest, adultery? – Chaplain: Crimes, terrible crimes, for any one of which men are burnt in my country. – Orou: I care little if people are burnt in your country or not. But you will not indict the morals of Europe by those of Tahiti nor those of Tahiti by your own. You are mistaken, my friend, if you think all is said once a law is published, an ignominious word invented or a torture decreed. Answer me, then, what do you mean by incest?” And Diderot is careful to issue a disclaimer (in the mouth of another character who is reading the conversation above in the supplement’s framing narrative): “– I ind the discourse vehement; but under its somewhat abrupt and savage style, I seem to detect European ideas and turns of phrase.” Diderot has the capacity to see from afar the diference within the diference: the gaze which determines the encounter with the new world was never anything other than a conditioned 63 savage-objects.indd 63 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S gaze. The great revolution that would result from the impression of the Americas (as would later be the case in Africa) is revealed in a great conceptual absence. The degree to which the non-existent is implicit in the idea of new (“it was thus far unknown, all this is new, and nothing will be as before”) remains unaltered. This shows how remiss or contrary European logocentrism is towards the otherness produced by encounters between cultures, the Other a Fata Morgana. The second matter is discussed thus, it seems then that the world is alien. If in classical logic the being is the same as himself (identity principle), he is or is not (non-contradiction), there is no other option (the excluded middle). And if those existential quantiiers and premises only point man to the inference of a great solipsist inferno, since this path leads only to the following deduction: if the world is all diference, and if the assertion of diference implies it is the same as itself, then, since in considering “the world is or is not”, everything indicates that it is, then, if being is univocal, the world enmeshed in diference can only be equivocal, there being no other option than the assertion of diference; and, therefore, without the possibility of knowing anything with any certainty, we are left with non-sense: the world is unknowable. The oldest known British joke dates back to the 10th century and goes like this: “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.” The anti-philosophical tradition begins with Diogenes of Sinope. Tellingly, all that has come down to us of this philosopher are the anecdotes attributed to him; in essence, vignettes in which 64 savage-objects.indd 64 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E he states inconvenient truths. Thus, his cynical philosophy has the strange characteristic of not inding itself philosophical, of constraining itself in the face of the protocols of wisdom, in other words, of not being led by the paternal signiier, not occupying the position Lacan describes as the subject supposed to know (that of the analyst during transference). Diogenes’ virtue is, then, more that of a physiologist than of a philosopher: “Once as he was masturbating openly in the Agora, he exclaimed: ‘Ah, if I could only soothe my hunger by also rubbing my stomach!” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers) There is somehow a will in the body that does not answer to the presumption of conscience. We see here the importance psychoanalysis attributes to Freudian slips, lapses and mistakes, and which can be framed in the same materialistic guilelessness of cynicism, more clearly when truth ebbs to the surface. “In former years, when I made more calls at the homes of patients than I do at present, it often happened, when I stood before a door where I should have knocked or rung the bell, that I would pull the key of my own house from my pocket, only to replace it, quite abashed. (…) It was equivalent to the thought ‘Here I feel at home.’” (Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life) By the Freudian slip or through non-sense, we see how the sphere of the real is always greater than the sphere of possibilities. In the real, the possible happens, and that unfeasible means only that it is outside the scope of the representable. Episodes of this nature occur accidentally and instantaneously, and are immediately eclipsed, briely exposing the stuf the body is made of, a symptom, maybe the only nature we possess. Like the metaphysical joke, that thinking obstacle, sophism does not escape the modeling of involuntary gestures, but only suggests the entrance into the question of the problematic. The key is not for this lock. 65 savage-objects.indd 65 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S “They say Diogenes died at some ninety years of age. There are several versions of his death. Some say, after he ate raw octopus, he felt colic and died. According to others, he died voluntarily, holding his breath.” A brief epilogue We now present, by way of summary and explanation, the argumentative synopsis this text is committed to, and which, by excess formalism, is remiss in not making clear the following: Lacan’s assertion that there is no sexual rapport, reason, or relation, can also explain that there is no existential rapport, reason or relation. The entire castration complex revolves around the phallic issue. Phalocentrism and solipsism are enigmatically linked; the thing itself is not consubstantiated in a presence, but rather is a theoretical and evanescent thing, in which the lacuna in the subject is not a lacuna in the world, but the facticity of a super-abundance that, in exposing itself, proves to be greater than its retinal impressions. It is man, and not the world, that disappears. All of man’s activity, art included, is vanquished by a regime of inherent domesticity; namely, in so far as knowledge is imparted, no matter what it may be, any and all work, in the sense of mental and bodily efort towards an end, a fulillment, is as far from wild as the most surprising of mechanical cuckoos. The hope was that Art could somehow redeem this panorama that so diminishes man’s libertarian essence, by diving, in turn, into the unconscious and its drives, as if impervious to modernity and civilization, to be reborn as the mirror self of man, like himself, but inhuman: precisely, the other to the conditioned 66 savage-objects.indd 66 4/17/12 4:37 PM S O L I L O Q U Y, A D WA R F I N T H E S T R AT O S P H E R E João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Cassowary, 2010. 67 savage-objects.indd 67 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S man, the unconditional human. It does not seem amiss to now call that savage of the imaginary the alien, as if art, in order to better portray the truly tragic dimension of human contingency, were to suppress the subject of quotidian banality and re-inscribe him in a narrative, the subterranean and clandestine history of existence, “This is the miracle of the work of art in general, that it can distill in itself what is most intolerable, most unbearable and painful without, in the process, becoming mortal.” (Interview with Daniel Dobbels) Art has always proposed to meteorically conceive the new, and with it, the Other, that which comes of a minimum existential degree, to the maximum of its ontological intensity. As for what escapes the bounds of such generic deinition, we might say, we “look aside”. 68 savage-objects.indd 68 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 69 4/17/12 4:37 PM Archaeological spoils of history. Excavating trench 5, Eyri, Iceland. (photo: Bjørnar Olsen) savage-objects.indd 70 4/17/12 4:37 PM The Return of Things and the Savagery of the Archaeological Object Bjørnar Olsen Things are back, or so the rumors say. After a century of oblivion in most social and cultural research, and after decades of linguistic and textual turns, there is now much talk about a material twist: a (re)turn to things. The fascination with Saussure, Derrida and discourse has diminished, matter has replaced symbols; signs have been substituted by things. As neatly summarized by historian Frank Trentmann, “[a]fter the turn to discourse and signs in the late twentieth century, there is a new fascination with the material stuf of life…”.1 Coming from a discipline where the study of things for the last 170 years or so has been close to a disciplinary categorical imperative, this change of attitude is of course great news. Indeed one gets deeply impressed, even slightly moved, by witnessing how disciplines and practitioners that not so long ago showed little more than disinterest, even distaste for the object, now treat it with such obvious care and concern. Given this sincere and widespread devotion it is perhaps little more than a triling tribal setback to observe that the knowledge and skills possessed by the traditional thing disciplines, such as archaeology, ethnology and folklore studies, seem so irrelevant to those who currently embrace objects with such enthusiasm and empathy. Nevertheless - and apologies for any disciplinary 1 Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 283. 71 savage-objects.indd 71 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S stubbornness and narcissism - it is precisely this neglect I want to start out with. Also because it can shed light on my general concern about whether it is the things themselves that are back, or, rather, some very domesticated or disguised substitutes. The savagery of archaeology While “archaeology” became a popular if obligation-free catch word during the textual regime, and liberally used by philosophers, literary critics and psychologists in need for something suiciently metaphorically material to buttress their abstract conceptions with, the name of this brand has paradoxically almost completely vanished from view when there in fact is a material turn. Despite its persistent commitment to things, archaeology for some reasons seems more or less irrelevant for those who now eagerly claim to have returned to what has always been our prime subject matter. To name but one example, 1072 pages of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s Making Things Public2 contain the work of anthropologists, art historians, legal historians, artists, architects, designers, engineers, curators, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists of science and technology, and even English professors, linguists and political theorists; but no archaeologists. Not one! And this is despite the fact that no other discipline has done more to make things public. Why it is that archaeology – the discipline of things par excellence – is considered irrelevant to a discussion of things? One likely suggestion may be that archaeology deals with the distant past; its devotedness to bygone eras and moss-covered 2 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005). 72 savage-objects.indd 72 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E R E T U R N O F T H I N G S A N D T H E S AVA G E R Y O F T H E A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O B J E C T or dusty ruins renders it irrelevant, given the social sciences’ concern with the modern, the living, and the “now”. Against this persistent image it is probably futile to lecture on how archaeology’s extensive list of topics include modern beer consumption3, transistor radios and electricity,4 late 20th century Soviet mining towns,5 and lunar and planetary relics of space exploration?6 However, there may be other and somewhat more subtle arguments to count for the unease with which archaeology is conceived in mainstream social sciences and humanities. Doing archaeology usually brings to mind the “down and dirty” of ieldwork. On the one hand, such activities and practices are seen as slightly childish and even embarrassing (grown-up people digging in the sand), always triggering a smile or a joke. Our explorations and “discoveries” may be well suited for popular consumption through programs on the Discovery or National Geographic Channels, but not for the discourses and intellectual issues with which social sciences wrestle. 3 William Rathje and Michael McCarthy, “Regularity and Variability in Contemporary Garbage,” in Research strategies in historical archaeology, ed. S. South (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 261-286. 4 Michael Schifer, The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991); Michael Schifer, Power Struggles: Scientiic Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity before Edison (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008). 5 Elin Andreassen, Hein Bjartmann Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen, Persistent Memories: Piramiden —A Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic (Trondheim, Norway: Tapir Academic Press, 2010). 6 Peter Joseph Capelotti, The Human Archaeology of Space: Lunar, Planetary and Interstellar Relics of Exploration (Jeferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishers, 2010). 73 savage-objects.indd 73 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S On the other hand, there is an element of blue collar savagery associated with the archaeological toil. Archaeologists dig ruins, sort through what our forebears regarded as trash, we handle dead bodies, and this craft,7 involving direct and tough engagements with soil and rocks, working outdoors and getting dirty, does not comply well with the dominant image of intellectual work. Taking into account the long held bourgeois contempt in academia (especially in the humanities) for dirt, manual labour, and working class life in general, it may not come as a big surprise that the craft of archaeology, and its repugnant trivia, is not too feasible. This otherness, this disciplinary savagery, has also made archaeology diicult to locate within the academic landscape, a humanist discipline enmeshed with an array of instruments, methods and practices always unfolding in close collaboration with the natural sciences.8 The wished for objects of return Such academic norms and hierarchies of value may also have afected the conception of the wished for objects of return. Just give it a thought, what kinds of things are allowed into the warmth of the social sciences? What things are spoken and written about? Are hay rackets back? Have log houses, ireplaces, whorls and 7 Cf. Michael Shanks, and Randall McGuire, “The Craft of Archaeology,” American Antiquity 61, no. 1 (1996): 75-88. 8 Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2010); Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 74 savage-objects.indd 74 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E R E T U R N O F T H I N G S A N D T H E S AVA G E R Y O F T H E A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O B J E C T spindleback chairs become matters of concern? Flint debris, broken pots, post holes and net sinkers? And what about door knobs, refrigerators and bunk beds? They may of course be present but leaing through some of the latest volumes and journal issues carrying the concepts of matter, materiality, things and objects on their front covers, rather suggest that what we are witnessing is a somewhat conditioned and selective return. At least these trivial artifacts, broken things and dusty museum objects are not quite in the same league as Boyle’s air pump, the body, Second Life, prostheses and intelligent design. There may be an obvious fascination with things but not just any thing. For example, when Frank Trentmann is to substantiate his claim of “a new fascination for the material stuf of life,” he provides a seemingly extensive list of stuf ranging from: “Jane Campion’s ilm The Piano (1993), biographies of objects, and exhibitions in the Fifth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, “When Things Cast No Shadow” (2008), all the way to public debates about the transformation of human lesh and mind in an age of nanotechnology, cloning, and cyborgs”.9 Indeed an interesting inventory. Leaving to one side what any archaeologist could have informed him, namely that the “age of the cyborg” started some 1.5 million years ago and thus that we “always have been cyborgs” 10, the selected “items” on Trentmann’s list is actually quite symptomatic: ilm, biographies, art exhibi9 Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and 10 See Bjørnar Olsen et al., Archaeology. Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 283. 75 savage-objects.indd 75 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S tions, human lesh (and mind), nanotechnology, cloning. Where are the ordinary things we deal with in our everyday life? Where are the street lights, wall plaster, shoelaces, car tires, buttons, sleepers, besoms, forks, sinks, toilet seats and doggy bags? And when these diligent and inevitable heroes of our everyday life are missing, it is no wonder that the uncanny archaeological material is left out. Archaeological objects are often bulky, fragmented or broken; they come in enormous quantities, illing up storage rooms, museum cellars and labs. True, there are marvels, treasures; however, more often than not archaeological things don’t stimulate aesthetic pleasure. And one may speculate how these messy things, often refusing to be labeled and identiied, comply with the wished for objects of return? Things may be welcomed back, but they should be clean, whole, and preferably discursive or photographed; and not so many and chaotic, please, and at the very least be easy to label. These rarely discussed preferences have clearly prevented more than dug-up objects from being permitted entry into the new and supposedly thing-friendly environments. However, as I shall describe soon, there might be other and more subtle issues involved. The real Dasein It might be objected that my complaints about the exclusion of certain disciplines and things from this admirable repatriation campaign misses the whole point about the material turn; that the main issue is how we conceive of things and the allowance now generated for matter and materiality in the discussion of society and culture. This might be true, but how things and matter 76 savage-objects.indd 76 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E R E T U R N O F T H I N G S A N D T H E S AVA G E R Y O F T H E A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O B J E C T are conceived of by their new stakeholders does not necessarily ofer reassurance. In fact, the speed and seeming ease with which the transition from social constructivist ideas to matter took place was almost too smooth and seamless to be true. As argued elsewhere11, things may be conspicuously present in current discourses and theories but often in a mode conditioned by the efective histories of previous not-so-thing-friendly philosophies. In other words, the object may have returned, but it is an object that often complies surprisingly well with the expectations of previous relativist and social constructivist programs. Thus the conditional restrictions of the return are not only relected in which things are allowed back but also in which mode they are allowed to be. We see this in the popularity of all kinds of “matter-in-lux” approaches where things, objects, materials, are never allowed to be hard, stable, lasting or in place. Things are always blurred, unstable, porous, scattered and mobile. Things can change “quickly and without warning, right in front of our eyes” just as in a magician’s show,12 and if not so abruptly they are still always in low.13 In other words, everything solid is still melting into the air. And it complies well with the morally loaded conceptual 11 Bjørnar Olsen, “Keeping Things at Arm’s Length: A Genealogy of Asymmetry,” World Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2007): 579–88; Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2010). 12 Cornelius Holtorf, “Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd,” Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 55. 13 E.g. Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (2007): 1–16; Tim Ingold, “Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World,” Environment and Planning A 40, no. 8 (2008): 1796–1810. 77 savage-objects.indd 77 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S hierarchy, where change, dynamics, low, is at top and persistency, solidity and inplaceness always is at the bottom. According to this regime, there are no intrinsic values or essences (everything is produced in relations, is hybridized or “quasi”), no secure centers, and of course stability is reactionary and out of the question. To paraphrase Judith Attield, the material world has become dematerialized to the extent that we can no longer ‘believe our eyes’.14 And how could we believe our eyes; how, in fact, could we live our lives – and other entities live their lives – if what we were told was true? Fortunately it is not. Things are also solid, the material world lasts. Due to this persistency the material world is always directed ahead of itself and into the future. As much as things last they are also in place; at least enough of them to make our existence predictable and secure. They are both “the most binding part of the communal rhythm”,15 and what makes “history slow”.16 When we wake up tomorrow, the bed, room, and house are still there and in place. So too are our private belongings, other houses, the streets, wires and pipelines that connect them. Buses and cars, the shops and factories, the fences and gardens, the mountains and trees, are all there in their dormant ready-to-handness and constitute the incontestable acquisition of our shared life world. In other words, and as we expect, things are overwhelmingly there; they are the real Dasein. 14 Judy Attield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 15 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: 16 Michel Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 87. 2000), 42. Belknap Press, 1996), 418. 78 savage-objects.indd 78 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E R E T U R N O F T H I N G S A N D T H E S AVA G E R Y O F T H E A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O B J E C T Notes on a bygone Zeitgeist? Then why isn’t there more concern with things qua things? Why haven’t the trivial, the everyday and everywhere become matters of concern? And why, we may add, does the discarded and outdated, such as the archaeological spoils of history, inlict an embarrassment or disturbance? In his classic work, The Philosophy of Money,17 Georg Simmel noted a seemingly paradoxical tendency in the modern attitude toward things: at the same time that things were losing their embedded social and ready-to-hand meaning, there was a growing interest in and fascination for the singular and assumed authentic object. He saw this new interest in interior decorations, in antiquities, in “turning objects into art”, as basically being an act of redemption. It was because the new money-conditioned relationships had deprived things of their former “lived” meaning, that a substitute was consciously sought: “Since so many objects continuously detached by money lose their direction-given signiicance for us, there develops... a deep yearning to give things a new importance, a deeper meaning, a value of their own”.18 In Simmel’s frank style, the new obsession with the fragment, with the atomized and aestheticized thing, becomes little more than “comforting stimulation for weakened nerves”: “The present vividly felt charm for the fragment, the mere allusion, the aphorism, the symbol… place[s] us at a distance from the substance of things; they speak to us “as from afar”; reality is touched not with direct conidence 17 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1978). 18 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 404. 79 savage-objects.indd 79 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S but with ingertips that are immediately withdrawn. The most extreme reinement of our literary style avoids the direct characterization of objects; it only touches a remote corner of them with the word, and grasps not the thing but only the veil that envelops them... In all this we discover an emotional trait whose pathological deformation is the so-called “agoraphobia”: the fear of coming into too close a contact with objects.”19 Some decades later Walter Benjamin developed a similar perspective in his writings on the modern attitude towards things. His main concern was how a “mimetic” and “auratic” attentiveness to things was giving way to modernity’s sublimated and intimate attitude. While the mimetic attitude implied a respect for things in their otherness and their auratic own-ness, the modern gaze was isomorphic, subjecting them to intimacy and sameness.20 As most conspicuously exempliied by the intérieur of bourgeois home, things had completely lost their otherness and individuality. They were sentenced to serfdom and became nothing but labels of privacy, faithfully mirroring their owner. While things’ otherness originally was the source of communication and interaction, the loss of the mimetic capacity made things’ diference problematic and fearsome. Their material integrity became a threat and thus a subject for domestication. In a remarkable fragment, Benjamin expressed how modern 19 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 474. 20 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 3: 1935–1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 255-256. 80 savage-objects.indd 80 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E R E T U R N O F T H I N G S A N D T H E S AVA G E R Y O F T H E A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O B J E C T man, “chilled in a chilly environment”21, tries to overcome this material estrangement: “Warmth is ebbing from things. Objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances . . . we have an immense labor to perform. We must compensate for their coldness with our warmth if they are not to freeze us to death, and handle their spiny forms with ininite dexterity if we are not to bleed to death.”22 Simmel and Benjamin’s writings bring forth how the modern attitude to things embroils an ambiguity: a fear of things in their thingly otherness and, simultaneously, a redemptive longing for the warmth of the atomized and humanized artifact. Things’ otherness and distinctiveness unsettle and distort us, and thus urge means for domestication and subordination. Among academic’s and intellectual’s language has always been the main taming device to cope with the unease and discomfort inlicted by the unmediated and the raw. By subjecting them to words the objects’ disquieting material obstinacy is countered. Making things perform like words, enslaving them in semiotic webs of relations, is another but more serious expression of this encroachment. 21 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 779. 22 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 453. 81 savage-objects.indd 81 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Conclusion: The fear of Odradek Despite the nuances and exceptions that any attempt at a gross generalization will encounter, it can still be argued forcefully that the buzz about a (re)turn to things is somewhat overstated or, at least, is a very conditional change of course. The things brought back, and how they are conceived, are to a large extent subjected to stubborn metaphysics that still hold sway over our conception of the material world and the knowledge allowed about it. Things primarily appear to us in the mode of usefulness (and relationality) and as phenomena percolated through Kantian cognition.23 Their otherness, their thingly and savage side, is banished to the margins, to the dark places and the underground. Just like Kafka’s Odradek, things in their diference have to hide in crevices, in attics, closed-of rooms and hallways, from where they may reapproach us with their fearsome coldness and spiny forms. In a world increasingly subjected to smooth design and perfection this other side of things is most conspicuously disclosed in the outdated and stranded, in discarded and abandoned objects; in the material redundancy of the past. In this state of abandoned being, “freed from the drudgery of being useful”24 and released from the chains of relations they have been enslaved in, things’ ownness and integrity are inally allowed to shine through and even to become dominant. Maybe that is why we ind derelict 23 Dag T. Andersson, Tingenes taushet, tingenes tale (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 2001), 182- 24 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 3: 1935–1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: 190. Belknap Press, 2002), 39. 82 savage-objects.indd 82 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E R E T U R N O F T H I N G S A N D T H E S AVA G E R Y O F T H E A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O B J E C T houses, abandoned buildings and sites, so troublesome. Things become more present, more manifest but also, as with Odradek, more pestering and disquieting. In their outmoded and stranded fate things suddenly appear to us in ways never noticed, exposing their own unruly “thingness”, integrity and inherent source of signiication. Maybe this thus also explains some of the unease with which the archaeological object is accounted for, by making manifest the useless, the forgotten, the unknown and less desirable side of things. Being unearthed these savage objects are brought back from their concealment but, as we have seen, are yet to be returned. 83 savage-objects.indd 83 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 84 4/17/12 4:37 PM II savage-objects.indd 85 4/17/12 4:37 PM Parties assemble around the model. Illustration: Christine Cornell and Eyal Weizman, 2008. savage-objects.indd 86 4/17/12 4:37 PM In Excess of Calculations: a conversation with Eyal Weizman In his forthcoming book, The Least of All Possible Evils,1 architect Eyal Weizman focuses on the participation of architectural and spatial devices in contemporary forms of power, particularly in the ethical economy of calculating the optimum balance between good and evil, inherent to humanitarian and military practices at large. According to Weizman, this liberal ethics of the lesser evil constitutes a ield of calculation that needs to be broken and disrupted so that political claims might emerge. As part of this process, architectural objects are often transformed into material witnesses within the context of public and legal forums, referring to another central aspect of Weizman’s recent work, the idea of forensic architecture – a method for reconstructing violent events from their inscription in the built environment. The following conversation took place in London, at the Centre for Research Architecture, 2012. Godofredo Pereira - I would like to start with the example of the presentation of a topographical model of the wall separating Israel and Palestine in court,2 where options for three pos1 Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2012). 2 In 2004 the topographical model of Beit Sourik area in the West Bank was 87 savage-objects.indd 87 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S sible routes were presented, and due to which, suddenly the discourse of law had to be re-organized, it had to learn how to look at architecture. In The Least of All Possible Evils you give this example: “because the judges bench was too high and the table too low, the judges could not see the model with suicient clarity from where they sat, and they had to step down to look at it properly. The judges also called the lawyers from both parties to join them.” And further on you argue: “The model generated the geographical grammar for ‘the law’ to shape physical reality.” As a model the wall is therefore already a form of political intervention. I suppose it is from this that the idea of forensic architecture emerges? Eyal Weizman - The project of forensic architecture originates from this story… so much of what has structured the project is already there. Firstly, the introduction of architectural representations as evidence into court is not simply yet another type of evidence that is added to others; rather, it is an intervention in the language by which the legal process unfolds. The introduction of an architectural model spawns an architectural discussion and the legal process becomes space making, architecture in action. The second thing that happens there is that the model shifts from being evidence to becoming an agent in the process. It is initially presented to demonstrate that a less invasive wall – a lesser evil – is possible. But its object quality, its material proppresented in the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) in Jerusalem, as part of an appeal against segments of the wall that would separate the villagers from 300 acres of their ields. Cf. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils. 88 savage-objects.indd 88 4/17/12 4:37 PM I N E X C E S S O F C A L C U L AT I O N S : A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E YA L W E I Z M A N erties, its dimensions, create another type of discussion, another grammar, another form of interaction and another physical space. So it is no longer evidence but a terrestrial artefact which, when coupled with the legal discussion, generates a design session. If, initially, we are speak of forensic architecture as the presentation of architectural evidence in order to render judgment on certain events, the model subsequently takes the lead and starts mobilizing a process by which the design happens in court. That is, a diferent kind of forensic engineering, i.e. an architectural process that happens within the forum itself. From that moment on, the architecture of the wall is made by the judges, the lawyers, the human rights organizations and their advisors, all the legal teams, and the model itself. GP - Architecture is then conceived as a set of dispositions and modulations of the lux of people and things – an ecology of relations on a territorial scale. EW - If we extend from Hollow Land 3 the concept of the political plastic, architecture can be seen as a force ield, slowing forces into form. So politics is the movement of matter in space, a material practice. Politics does not happen in space, it is space-making. It is not as if space is a kind of arena for architecture to happen. Every architectural intervention is a re-organization of spatial relations. So in that sense, one would say that the model in the story above has participated 3 Eyal Weizman, Hollow land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). 89 savage-objects.indd 89 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S in the de-congealing of forces that were previously ossiied into the pre-existing form of the wall that the state of Israel started to build. And all of a sudden, in court, the wall becomes elastic, becomes negotiable, becomes prone to push and pull, and that happens within the arena of the law itself. GP - You sometimes refer to it as an archive... EW - An archive of power relations if you like. In a sense the path of the wall is like a ilm–strip exposed to politics, it is a double–, triple–exposure, slow exposure. Its message is not what is written on it as graiti etc., but rather its paths, its materiality. GP - At one level the wall exists in its material dimension as an archive, and at another level, as a unitary image, by the wall as a whole migrating as an image. These diferent dimensions bring to mind another example you mention in The Least of All Possible Evils: the wall in two diferent courts. You quote the lawyer Muhammad Dahla, who said: “I had to appeal against the illegality of the entire wall in The Hague and against the details of its execution in Jerusalem”. This implies, in a way, that the wall becomes diferent legal objects. How does their balance play out, one claim afecting the other? EW - This is to say that each forum is also a framework, a legal and also political framework, in which the same object appears as something completely diferent. The whole question of its materiality and design does not feature at all in The Hague. 90 savage-objects.indd 90 4/17/12 4:37 PM I N E X C E S S O F C A L C U L AT I O N S : A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E YA L W E I Z M A N There, it is about a binary rendering of it being either legal or illegal. And it doesn’t enter in the calculus of proportionality, of materiality, of everything that is physical. It’s not an architectural decision at all. The minute it touches occupied ground it is illegal. What one learns out of it is that if one invests oneself fully within one forum and one arena, one inevitably ends up reproducing and reinforcing the only type of discussion available there. But Dahla does three separate things. He leads the legal case in The Hague, the local cases in Israel’s high court (which are architectural), and he is also part of a political process. He never limits himself to one process. What I think he could have done better – an idea for all of us to speculate on, without laying accusations on him – is how to gear one arena to the other. GP - The feedback between them? EW - There is a landscape of diferent forums. Potentially, and hopefully, we are in many of them simultaneously: being diferent people, doing diferent things, mobilizing the same object politically, legally, in terms of human rights, economy, etc. As a single project to gear one wheel to the other, and to also stand outside them and relect upon them, that system is very important. GP - Was it a matter of Dahla not wishing to invest too much in this overall connection, perhaps due to credibility within legal systems, saying something in one place but defending the opposite in other situations? 91 savage-objects.indd 91 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Justice Aharon Barak examines the diferent routes. Illustration: Christine Cornell and Eyal Weizman, 2008. 92 savage-objects.indd 92 4/17/12 4:37 PM I N E X C E S S O F C A L C U L AT I O N S : A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E YA L W E I Z M A N EW - He already does not limit himself to one forum, and we should credit him for that. He contradicts himself, and says whatever he can take in the Israeli High Court of Justice (knowing that it reinforces one of Israel’s instruments of occupation and dispossession) is in order to bring out contradictions from the inside. We need to take this idea as a challenge for us, to consider how to continue this project further. GP - The lesson seems to be that you need not ailiate yourself to the forum. One has to engage with often-imperfect scenarios, but always in order to open new possibilities, constantly re-adjusting. The principle seems to be one of treason… And at the same time, here, forensics is no longer simply the presentation of material evidence before a forum, but actually an engagement with several diferent forums, implying the production of contradictory objects. EW - The object is the object in context, there is no object per se; it’s not an ontological question here. It is an object that is formed and mobilized by a particular process, an ecology of practice and discourse that produces a certain claim in a particular context, and that’s the limit. In other forums it produces other claims and the question is how to put all those in motion together and in relation to each other. So the idea of one forum of forums, the full house or the single parliament of things is impossible. Every forum is also a border, the edges of an arena into which we can or cannot enter, in which certain types of enunciation and types of process are allowed or not. They are not neutral spaces for 93 savage-objects.indd 93 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S open debate but politically conceived and politically skewed. And they could be changed from outside or inside. So when you introduce something new into an existing forum, for example when you introduce architectural evidence into court, it’s not only that there is something new in an old forum, but that the court is also potentially transformed – its language and possibilities open up – so we can say that expansion is also transformation. Forums can also be conceived anew from the outside so to speak. Politically. They expand and multiply, network into other assemblies and disperse and they also burst. These have to be mapped; still it is the edge condition of it that is important. Therefore it is so important to be working on the edge condition, on expanding the forum, on connecting it with others. GP - I would like to bring this back to something you’ve mentioned regarding the process of negotiating the wall in local forums. In that, a process of inclusion takes place, where a series of participants, military representatives, independent contractors, human-rights lawyers, all come to participate in the process – this is the process that Dahla would take position against saying that he’s participating and adjusting the lesser evil – and you argue that this inclusion is politically violent, as people have no option but to participate. But at the same time, this inclusion imposes always a level of exclusion, regarding who has the capacity to bring the forum together. EW - That’s the dilemma of the lesser evil. You participate in something that is unacceptable in order to moderate its 94 savage-objects.indd 94 4/17/12 4:37 PM I N E X C E S S O F C A L C U L AT I O N S : A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E YA L W E I Z M A N excess, and end up reinforcing the system. The dilemma and the calculation are only used by the powerful side that sets the rules in Gaza, where the threshold of the tolerable continuously shifts. GP - I would now like to ask you about the objects themselves. We could say that the presentation of an object in court is always an aesthetic practice of material organization in order to produce a truth-efect. But the object, particularly when produced under technological procedures is always a result of percentile calculations, in relation to uncertainty. And even if, legally, you decide upon uncertainty, a material resistance still remains, a ield of possible research that latently undermines the political decisions in forums. You continuously go back to the object of discussion that produced an outcome in the forum. EW - I can ofer an analogy, of the infancy of the human rights discourse practice in relation to anti-totalitarian or anticommunist ideology. Sometime in the late seventies and eighties, human testimony functioned not only as an epistemic resource, i.e. to describe and deine events, but also as an ethical political move that comes to demonstrate empathy with humans whose rights we come to protect. More ethical in excess than epistemic. Now with the forensic turn in legal and human rights issue, it is not only that objects become some kind of witnesses, but also that they are being problematised as bearing rights and duties themselves. Their agency is questioned and becomes a major issue for legal theory. For example robotic weapons and drones pose 95 savage-objects.indd 95 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S legal questions that are not yet resolved. Also rights are now being discussed in relation to inanimate objects, as Paulo Tavares shows in his PhD research – as the rights of nature. Another way to answer your question is to say that both law and sciences operate upon a balance of probabilities, but very diferent ones. Law needs to render very diicult questions – sometimes of life and death – on a beyond reasonable doubt balance of probability, which, being non-numerical is still considered as a low-threshold probability. Also in science, in physics for instance, there is always a probabilistic calculation. Now, forensic aesthetics – a subject I have written about with Tom Keenan – is about the way this balance of probability is disrupted. Balance of probability does not necessarily lead to a conviction. The aesthetics of evidence needs to enter here, as a kind of eruption that operates in excess of probabilistic calculus. To connect to our previous discussion I’m thinking about two related systems of calculus, one of producing space – proportionality – and the other a mode of reading evidence – probability – each has a diferent mode of potential rupture, of moving in excess of calculation. With probability and proportionality there are no clear trenches, no lines, no enemies anymore, there is proximity, there are degrees of negotiation, and everything becomes a question of thresholds and balances. I think that, against this tendency the political requires the rupture of these. GP - Which is what happens when the political, via mechanisms of paranoia, appropriates that calculus as a constant degree of possibility that is incorporated into everything – for instance, 96 savage-objects.indd 96 4/17/12 4:37 PM I N E X C E S S O F C A L C U L AT I O N S : A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E YA L W E I Z M A N Hugo Chávez does this in order to exert very precise forms of power – to constantly re-organize the political discourse. For example, that the earthquake in Haiti is possibly a product of U.S. technologies, in the same way that maybe his own and Lula’s cancer were also technologically orchestrated. Even with the exhumation of Bolívar, as long as there is some degree of probability, then he could still possibly have been poisoned. EW - What you describe is exactly the moment where politics operates not in relation to the balance of probabilities, but where the smallest probability becomes the meaningful one. And that’s forensic aesthetics. That is the aesthetic move and its way into politics. You create something; you bring something to visibility that creates new possibilities. GP - Another example of rupturing this economy of calculations is the work of Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR)4 where architecture is seen in both its facets as part of the system of calculations within Israel’s occupation, and also as a way to re-introduce the political, precisely by improvements introduced into the refugee camps, something that so far had been seen as an admission of defeat. EW - This is deinitively the case with DAARs work in refugee camps; it was also the way I choose the end the book Least of all Possible Evils to say that the political and aesthetic 4 Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency is an architecture collective founded by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman. 97 savage-objects.indd 97 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S are united in an attempt to break that ield of calculation, that there is always an outside to a question that operates by that rupture of calculations. Palestinians tended to operate within this equation by which improvement means normalization, accommodation, acceptance of their position. But instead of operating within that given economy you can rupture it, you can destroy it. And this is what I think the model proposed by (Sari) Hanai, (Nasser) Abourahme and (Sandi) Hillal does. It breaks away from the existing formula, by refuting the idea that misery creates the more strong political claim, and instead contends that in fact the stronger the camp, the more we can invest in it, the more we can break the social from the political. Political right is a political right whether you are a rich or a poor refugee, educated or non-educated. In fact it is better to be educated. Who is to make this call for the maintenance of misery in the name of other people? As Rony Brauman5 said, it in a way so simple but so important: the basic condition for politics to happen is that you need to be alive. I do not need to indoctrinate you – I need to hear you. And it is so simple but nowadays so radical. GP - Ultimately in your work architecture emerges as a multifaceted set of practices, acting within the apparatus of power and colonization in the design of military separations; being included in the naïve good willed design of 5 Rony Brauman is a doctor and former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, whose positions vis-à-vis humanitarianism are thoroughly discussed in Weizman’s new book. 98 savage-objects.indd 98 4/17/12 4:37 PM I N E X C E S S O F C A L C U L AT I O N S : A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H E YA L W E I Z M A N refugee camps and the violence they perpetuate; but also as a form of intervention able to open spaces for life as the political. With DAAR, what is at stake, is not so much to produce a re-organization of the forum, but allowing new re-organizations to take place. And that is the political: the opening of new emancipatory possibilities. EW - We try to use architecture as an alternative political arena – a forum if you like – to imagine decolonization and diferent futures for Palestine. 99 savage-objects.indd 99 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S 100 savage-objects.indd 100 4/17/12 4:37 PM A Vertiginous Enlightenment (JWST and telescopic view of the object) Reza Negarestani The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST) will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The project is working to a 2018 launch date. The Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the irst luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.1 An electromagnetic fable for the Enlightenment: From a global perspective, light is a connective operator that transports information in the form of electromagnetic radiation between diferent spatio-temporal ields. In other words, the global scope of light or electromagnetic radiation weaves a web of connections between heterogeneous regions of space-time or local ields of information. In this sense, the global conception of light reveals the global scope of complicities between diferent spatio-temporal regions, and in doing so, it illuminates the scope of the modern abyss as an informatic-objectal web. To put it diferently, the universal scope of light expresses global-local transitions of objects, from 1 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), About the Webb, Available at: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/about.html 101 savage-objects.indd 101 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S global to local horizons and vice versa. Insofar as light connects incommensurable local ields of information, its global scope is always non-trivial in relation to its local scopes. An intuitive expression of this non-triviality is the twist of a Mobius strip. The Mobius strip is a bundle of line segments or local ibers over a circle. The global projection of these local sections will produce a section of a cylinder but not a Mobius strip which is a twisted bundle of local ibers. The non-triviality inherent to the global scope of light means that any local ield of information or regional horizon on this web is, in a sense, blind or myopic to the global scope of light as the web of complicities between anonymous materials (i.e. incommensurable local ibers, diferent regions of space-time, objects and heterogeneous ields of information). An object-induced vertigo called knowledge: If the global scope of light illuminates the scope of the abyss as the ultimate web of objects and if light in its global scope is invisible to local perspectives, then in order to stare back into the abyss one must irst reconstruct the global scope of light as what illuminates the abyss. Enlightenment should be, accordingly, understood as a response to the problem of illuminating the abyssality of the universe and bringing into focus its informatic-objectal web through the agency of a reason that does not emanate from the subjective vision but travels in the direction of a generic light. The ediice of knowledge committed to ambitions of the Enlightenment, likewise, can be seen as a system for developing optimal perspectives endowed with a universal orientation capable of conceiving information from diferent ields into an accessible global ield through which information from heterogeneous local ields stream and can be subsequently synthesized and organized. In other words, as far as the Enlightenment is concerned, the pro- 102 savage-objects.indd 102 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT ductive valence of knowledge lies in its ability to reconstruct the global scope of illumination – light as a connective operator – by unleashing diferent (ontological) perspectives upon the object so as to combine all these local perspectives into a global perspective. In conceiving its global web of illumination by agitating the object with optimal perspectives from all possible angles, knowledge thus becomes a universal strategy to embrace the abyss, the informatic-objectal web, immanent to the global scope of light. Yet insofar as embracing the abyss is the very idea of a systematic descent into it, Knowledge can be understood as a global scheme for staring back, or more accurately, systematically descending into the abyss. A systematic descent is comprised of global-local strategies for moving back and forth, ascending and descending between various vertiginous precipices of the abyss. However, it is important to recognize that such a gaze or systematic descent / navigation is purely conditioned by the object and its abyssal horizon of complicity with other objects. Perspectives are genuine – true-to-the-object – agitations upon objects:2 According to the modern deinition of knowledge, 2 “Though ‘navigation’ stems from Latin ‘navigare’, and this one from ‘navis’ plus ‘agere’, which means giving motion to a ship, the present meaning of “navigation” is restricted to the passive steering of a vehicle which is already moved by some motor. However, navigation on the EncycloSpace must regain the original activity, since EncycloSpace has been determined as an interactively handled body of knowledge, a body which is not built, altered and developed by mysterious forces but by our genuine agitation upon the object. Therefore, the original etymology of “navigation” is restituted: We shall distinguish between receptive and productive navigation. Receptive navigation means moving around within the body of knowledge without changing it. In contrast, productive navigation 103 savage-objects.indd 103 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S the gaze or the descent into the informatic-objectal abyss is constituted of systematic and optimal perspectives for approaching the object and accessing various layers, borders, levels of continuity and precipices of the abyss. Conditioned by the dialectics of depth and the geometrical outlines of the informatic-objectal web, the perspectives or navigational schemes of the modern knowledge can be efectively compared to descending and climbing equipments designed to navigate objects in their abyssal conception. Perspectives are schematically classiied on the basis of their ability and objective in approaching speciic aspects of the global web of objects or performing particular navigational tasks or operations on the horizon of knowledge and its concept-spaces which allow for intelligible access to the informatic-objectal web. There are perspectives which are for the sole purpose of approaching objects from diferent borders and orbits (ropes and webbing gears), latching onto speciic objects to facilitate the navigation of the entire abyssal web through temporal nodes (anchors), moving from one object or heterogeneous ield of information to another, navigating diferent grades or continua of the abyss (rappels and ascenders) and various forms of control, protection and brake tools (belay devices) to pursue diferent approaches to the object and ensure an endurable and thorough navigation of the informatic-objectal web.3 does change the body of knowledge.” See Guerino Mazzola, The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003), 43-44. For more details on navigational characteristics of knowledge with regard to objects, see Mazzola’s book particularly chapter 2 (Topography) and chapter 5 (Navigation on Concept Spaces). 104 savage-objects.indd 104 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT 3 In order to reconstruct the global scope of illumination and bring to light the informatic-objectal web invisible to a trivial conception of local subject, knowledge continuously strives to develop and synthesize non-trivial and optimal perspectives, multivalent navigational schemes or subjective lenses. Rather than approaching the object from a limited range of local perspectives, the modern conception of knowledge adopts perspectives which are synthetic, capable of simultaneously approaching the object from diferent orbits and in diferent local contexts and modal frameworks so as to concurrently index and merge the microscopic (driven by internal diferences), the macroscopic (integral according to the underlying lux of invariance), the panscopic (unitary or fusion of diference and integration), the synchronic and diachronic images of the object. The ambition of modern knowledge to develop synthetic perspectives and multivalent navigational schemes should be understood in the context of modern knowledge’s recognition of Enlightenment as a global model of light wherein light is no longer issued forth from the eye but travels according to a generic informatic-objectal trajectory. In other words, modern knowledge develops and optimizes its perspectives and navigational schemes by continuously synchronizing them with non-trivial schemata of the objectal web. In a sense, the vertiginous precipices of the informatic-objectal abyss dictates modes and methods of descent. It is the object 3 These simple climbing equipments efectively represent the modern deinition of perspective as a navigational line that yields orientation and is able to ascend and descend between the local and the global through diferent ‘seemingly impossible’ paths and alternative orientations. Each perspective carries its ontological space “like a snake carrying its shell” (Mazzola, Ibid. 50). 105 savage-objects.indd 105 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S that lies at the base of agitations which induce the vertigo of knowledge and drive the ambition of the Enlightenment further down into the abyss. A perspective accustomed to the global scope of light: The synthetic perspective or a perspective / navigational scheme synchronous with non-trivial schemata of the informatic-objectal web is the very idea of the telescopic view. As a view conditioned by and adapted to the vertiginous precipices of the abyss, the telescopic view (whether as a mode of perspective in culture, interpretation or astronomy) is a synthetic perspective with a universal orientation. It is a multi-modal perspective that weaves microscopic and macroscopic views of the object within a universal panscopic frame, hence preventing the engagement with objects from deteriorating into a whimsical orgy with objects where the bourgeoisie-curated cabinet of curiosities meets the circus-oriented metaphysics of objects. Accordingly, the telescopic view is able to intermediate diferentiation and integration; on the one hand, indexing diference against an invariant background and on the other, bringing the universal lux of invariance beneath instances of diference into the foreground. In addition, the telescopic view is essentially a web-oriented view whereby local contraction and global expansion (decontraction) can be incorporated into a network of global-local correspondences and dialectics where dogmatic orientations toward one pole or another are dissolved. To this extent, the telescopic view is a perspective synchronous to the cosmological schema of an expanding universe with local instances of complexiication and contraction. The telescopic view should be considered as a trans-regional and trans-modal perspective capable of examining the full extent of the TRANS preix. From the particulate to the galactic to the 106 savage-objects.indd 106 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT Broadening Back A Ascent Descennt Descent Deepening Forth Telescopics Figure 1. The telescopic view brings into focus the informatic-objectal web by interlocking backand-forth navigation that broadens the scope along a uniied horizon with ascent-and-descent navigation that deepens the scope across a diachronic depth. 107 savage-objects.indd 107 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S TELESCOPICS Back and Forth adjuction aScEnt and dEScEnt adjunction (broadening scope) (deepeing scope) Panscopic Microscopic / Macroscopic dialectic of differentiation dialectic of Generality and Vagueness dialectic of Borders and Edges dialectic of Surface and depth ramification of the Local and Embedding of the Global in the Local Synchronization diachronization Spatial navigation chronic navigation and integration concentration of the Global and immersion of the Local into the Global Table 1. Telescopics navigates the informatic-objectal web along two major navigational strategies, ascent descent and back forth adjunctions. These two adjunctions respectively deepen and broaden the scope of navigation by covering all possible universal and regional orientations, giving a comprehensive and abyssal view of the web. 108 savage-objects.indd 108 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT stellar to the chemical to the planetary to the biological and social domains, the telescopic view is in constant transit between various global-local agitations of the object, between nature and culture, diference and integrality, universality and regionality. For this reason, Colombian mathematician Fernando Zalamea associates telescopics with trans-modernism, a trans-regional and trans-modal approach to culture and nature that topologically glues diferent cultural manifolds and knowledge-spaces such as microscopic and diferential perspectives of post-modernism and the panscopic and integral views of modernism together.4 From object to object, or the story of telescope from the perspective of the abyss: As a synthetic perspective conditioned by the global-local transitions of the object or the precipices of the informatic-objectal abyss, the telescopic view should be considered as a mode of approach pivotal to the entire panorama of the modern account of knowledge. Indeed we can speak of a proto-schema of telescopic view even before the introduction of the irst modern telescopes – a scheme, an ambition, an ideal for a subjectivity-yet-to-come forged in the universalist approaches of medieval scholastics and forerunners of optics. It is in this sense, that the true-to-the-object valence of the telescopic view should be seen as the drive behind some of the most sophisticated technological processes and engineering sparks leading to the development of modern telescopes and observatories. As far as the story of the modern telescope is concerned, global-local transitions of the object which shape the precipices of the abyss 4 See Fernando Zalamea, América – Una Trama Integral: Transversalidad, Bordes y Abismos en la Cultura Americana (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2009). 109 savage-objects.indd 109 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S as the true object of Enlightenment condition and dictate an approach – a way to see, a scheme to navigate – toward objects. Conditioned by objects, this approach becomes a central idea within the system of knowledge that in turn instructs and directs its own embodiment into an object for facilitating the systematic descent into the abyss. From a speculative perspective within the system of modern knowledge, we can thus say that telescope is the non-trivial incarnation of the abyss staring into itself. In the last instance, telescope is but an instrumental object whose original schema should be found in the global web of objects and its abyssal impact upon the foundation of knowledge, life, culture, technology and engineering through a global scope of light which is not immediately given in local perspectives. Telescopic descent, a space odyssey: The ambition of telescopic view in developing a universal and non-myopic approach to global-local transitions of the object highlighted by the global scope of light fully manifests in the advent of space telescopes. The object-induced vertigo of Enlightenment does not end with ever-complicating perspectives corresponding to the shifting precipices of the informatic-objectal abyss, it starts with uprooting from the dominant local horizon – the terrestrial sphere – that regulates or distorts the scope of various perspectives. The launch of telescopes into orbit should be seen as a systematic attempt to develop perspectives and schemata of a new vision not only librated from the planetary constrains but also capable of observing the terrestrial cradle of life itself as an object within the continuous objectal web of the abyss. As a true heir to the legacy of the Copernican orbital subversion of the Earth, Hubble Space Telescope took the idea of observation into orbit where light is neither iltered nor distorted by the Earth’s atmosphere. The 110 savage-objects.indd 110 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT imminent arrival of second generation space telescopes headed by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), however, broadens the scope of human knowledge and its telescopic descent into the abyss even further. The deployment of JWST at the second SunEarth Lagrange point5 outside of the Earth’s own orbit takes the idea of Copernican uprooting of the ground in favor of the abyss multiple steps further. Not only is the terrestrial scope of illumination abandoned in favor of an orbital illumination – implicit in the very idea of Copernican Revolution – but also the earth’s orbit and the solar scope of light are left behind in favor of a more global, more abyssal scope of light as what illuminates the web of cosmological objects. Both visible light as a scope of light fully in conformity to the biological capacities of the terrestrial organism and sunlight as a conception of light fully ingrained within the ambit of terrestrial life have created a local environment that has been for far too long misunderstood as a global vista proper to a universal subjectivity and vision. By shifting its emphasis to infrared light 930,000 miles away from the Earth where it will loat against a background with minimum heat radiations in one of the coldest environments possible, JWST will be able to detect infrared radiations coming through clouds of dust and emitted by the dimmest of objects, peering into the earliest stages of the Universe. In doing so, the future telescope will illuminate a geocosmic continuum that connects the inception of the Universe to the galactic, stellar and planetary horizons. 5 Lagrange points are locations in space at which a small mass can orbit at a ixed distance from the larger masses due to the balance between the centrifugal force and the two gradational forces associated with larger masses, for example, the Sun and the Earth. 111 savage-objects.indd 111 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S JWST and objects behind the Sun: Comprised of a segmented and cryogenically controlled (operating temperature under 50 Kelvin) primary mirror with the collecting area of 25 m2, JWST will orbit around the Earth-Sun second Lagrange point. In an optical and metaphorical gesture, JWST will face away from the Sun and will be shielded from radiation from the Sun, the Moon and the Earth. The telescope is designed to primarily work with infrared light rather than invisible light (Hubble telescope). Shielding of the telescope from solar and terrestrial radiations as well as cryogenic control of the mirror’s temperature enable JWST to detect near and mid ranges of the infrared spectrum of light with minimal distortion. Being a low-frequency spectrum of light that has been stretched toward its red end, infrared illuminates global-local transitions of objects in a Universe that has been expanding since its inception. Since light from objects stretches as it travels across an expanding space, the further the object in time (conceived in the early stages of the universe and now dead, Redshift Observer Object Blueshift Object Observer Figure 2. Redshift and Blueshift 112 savage-objects.indd 112 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT extinct or frayed into the open) the more stretched the wavelength of its light toward the red end of spectrum. Therefore, the globallocal transition of objects through electromagnetic radiation or light in an expanding universe always tends to the red end of the spectrum as objects of study go further back in time. This shift toward the red end of the spectrum (infrared wavelength) for objects of ancestral time is known as cosmological redshift: The further the object in time, the more stretched its light across the accelerating expansion of space, the redder the object. Cosmological redshift, accordingly, illuminates the global conception of objects as that which is independent of a time that can synchronize the subject with the object. JWST prima- rth nd Fo a Back Asc ent and Des cen t tric Me a Exp f Sp no n s io ace An Ancestral Object Dark Age Big Bang Age of the Universe Figure 3. Telescopic enlightenment: Expansion of space and the diachronicity of the object (or the trauma of spacetime) condition the telescopic approach of (universal) knowledge. 113 savage-objects.indd 113 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S rily sees the Universe in light of this diachronicity of the object that enforces the scope of the abyss as an ever-expanding web of information and objects. Whereas Hubble Space Telescope opened the modern system of knowledge to the imports and implications of an expanding Universe, JWST has been speciically designed to work within and in accordance with an expanding universe where frontiers – in an accelerated manner – fray into the open. For JWST, abyssality is, therefore, neither a conclusion nor a goal but the veritable environment for the operation of knowledge and approaching the global conception of the object implicit in the global scope of light. Since JWST is primarily optimized to see the universe through cosmological redshift – or light in an expanding universe – it is able to illuminate the global conception of the object in terms of a non-trivial and abyssal distance from the subject, an inaccessible distance that is best understood as diachronicity of the object. Incommensurable to the chronology of the thinking / seeing subject, the diachronicity or the inaccessible distance of the object expresses the identity of the abyss as what occasions the telescopic descent of knowledge. Far from being an obstacle for the ediice of knowledge, this inaccessible distance becomes as we shall see the source and the drive of knowledge as the sum of all perspectives or agitations upon the object. JWST, an augmented strategy for approaching the trauma of the object: The chronic truth of the object lies outside of the time in which the subject thinks, sees and relects. The diachronicity of the object constitutes the very trauma of the object for the seeing or thinking subject. The diachronic object is, therefore, a source of an unbindable tension that can neither be fully overcome nor extricated from the subject, yet nevertheless it is a tension around which the entire analytico-synthetic apparatus 114 savage-objects.indd 114 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT of knowledge and the subject takes shape and revolves. In the same vein, the subject continuously re-experiences the trace of trauma in order to obliquely approach the exterior source of trauma, it can be said that the system of knowledge is but a maze or an oblique navigation of the diachronic truth of the object. If knowledge is a system built upon and driven by the trauma of the object, then it becomes a compulsory objective for knowledge to produce its own objects through which the tension of this trauma can be resolved. As an object ideated, schematized and shaped by the system of knowledge and respectively, the trauma of the object indwelling within that system, the telescope exercises the traumatic power of the object on the subjective vision. It simply shapes, or more precisely, objectiies the vision of the observer according to the trauma of the object as a diachronic truth. The scientiic instrument, JWST in this case, can only be examined within the nested hierarchy of objects: It is an object conceived by tensions produced by the trauma of the object within the system of knowledge. In short, the scientiic instrument bears the imprint of the object upon the system of knowledge in the form of a compulsion to further delve into the diachronic truth of the object. If we broaden the Freud-Ferenczian6 theory of trauma – according to a new cosmological continuum that connects the galactic to the cerebral – from that of the tension within the nervous system caused by an index of exteriority to that of a universal tension caused by the diachronicity of the object, then it is easy 6 According to Freud and Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferenczi, trauma is understood not as what is experienced by the subject but as an inassimilable index (for the subject) whose reality is exterior and diachronic to the order of experience. 115 savage-objects.indd 115 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S to see JWST’s observational strategy within the cosmological reinscription of trauma: The space telescope approaches the global conception of the diachronic object or the source of trauma by way of synthesizing its trace i.e. light stretched across the fabric of space. In other words, JWST translates the spatial trace of diachronicity or the infrared light into an image of the ancestral object. More than being a new pinnacle of human technology, JWST as an object of knowledge is a new ‘drive’ (in the sense of not only trieb but also instrumentum) for binding the trauma of the object and reshaping the plastic ediice of knowledge along its line of observation. Telescopic compossibilization of subject and object, ascent and descent, back and forth: Even though the impact of the trauma of the object upon the system of knowledge is ineradicable and the compulsion to approach the source of trauma – the diachronic truth of the object – constitutes the course of knowledge, the prospect of epistemological reactivation and ampliication of the ontological condition of knowledge is not by any means a matter of a given privilege or fait accompli. The realization of JWST as a future object through which knowledge translates its ontological kernel into an epistemological navigational scheme or rational odyssey for descending into the abyss depends on, irst of all, a subjective guarantor. The task of this subjective guarantor is to demarcate the boundaries and conditions of the local and disentangle the subject from the object so as to identify local exigencies and rationally engage them. The current precarious status of JWST as an object that has turned into a iscal black hole devouring other space and research programs requires a subjective return to local conditions that are more in accord with the epistemological horizon of knowledge rather 116 savage-objects.indd 116 4/17/12 4:37 PM A VERTIGINOUS ENLIGHTENMENT than its ontological kernel. From a local perspective, JWST as a contingent object is a projection of the world’s economic and socio-cultural priorities which themselves have been brought forth by the current epistemological status. In short, these priorities are the results of how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. Only a universalist subjectivity determined to work out the priorities of a world ravaged by myopia and violence by renegotiating local epistemological views which underpin such priorities is able to evaluate, determine and globally establish the objective valence of the future telescope. The return to local exigencies and commitment to the epistemological horizon do not represent a reactionary fall upon the earthly ground but the synchronization of the universalist subject with the telescopic enlightenment: simultaneously, bringing the microscopic and the local to a universal elevation and bringing into focus the transition of the universal into its local exigencies, priorities and problems. Or to be concise: bringing into compossibility ascent and descent, back and forth in order to coherently interweave diferent depths or vertiginous precipices of the object. 117 savage-objects.indd 117 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S “It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.” — Bram Stoker 1 1 Bram Stoker, Dracula [a Tale] (Westminster: A. Constable & Co., 1897). 118 savage-objects.indd 118 4/17/12 4:37 PM Impure Matter: A Forensics of WTC Dust Susan Schuppli As architecture collapsed into micro-spherical debris, it produced a billowy ash cloud that lingered for days obscuring the boundaries between the terrestrial spaces of the built environment and the atmospheric realm into which its Twin Towers had previously reached. When viewed remotely from orbiting satellites this spatial fusion-confusion was conirmed, as neither a shift in scale, nor a pixel-by-pixel comparative analysis could disentangle pulverized architecture from airborne matter, or human remains from rubble.2 Much has been said about the ways in which the smoke and dust clouds of 9/11 momentarily obliterated the human dimensions of the tragedy as Lower Manhattan was shrouded in an incendiary fog that deied all technical attempts at peering 2 The IKONOS high-resolution commercial satellite captured images of Lower Manhattan at 11:43 AM EDT on September 12 2001. The IKONOS travels 680 kilometres above the Earth’s surface at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour. The French SPOT satellite took infrared images identifying hot spots at 11:55 AM EST on September 11 2001 (3 hours after the attack). NASA’s Terra satellite saw Manhattan from an altitude of about 1,300 kilometres. Satellites deployed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to track storms, forest ires, and volcanic eruptions also acquired images of the aftermath of the events in New York. In addition to these remote sensing technologies, The Expedition Three crew on the International Space Station also took photographs of the site from an altitude of nearly 400 kilometres. 119 savage-objects.indd 119 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ig. 1 — This photo taken September 11, 2001 by the New York City Police Department shows smoke and ash enguling the area around the World Trade Center as the North Tower collapses in New York. Photo taken by the New York City Police Department. ig. 2 — French SPOT infrared satellite imagery of Lower Manhattan taken at 11:55 AM EST on September 11 2001. 120 savage-objects.indd 120 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T directly into the scene of the crime.3 Instead our collective global gaze was transixed by images of the transmutation of glass and steel into a kind of cosmic dust – a demonic metaphysics in which architectural substance became pure nature once more, or so it appeared. The bodies of the more than 2,780 missing were not in evidence in these irst televisual transmissions, instead they were understood as trapped and possibly interred within the architectural remains of the towers which were themselves still hidden from view by the haze of fallout. But this was a false reading of the image, a mirage if you will, for what the microspheres of dust carried were not simply the material remains of the destroyed towers but all of the buildings’ contents including its human occupants. The body was not missing in the images of swirling dust that we witnessed repeatedly those irst few days after the tragedy but was emphatically present within each specimen of dust at 1.3 parts per 100. Part I: When the Dust Settled Dust is an aggregate of synthetic and natural particles whose micro-material complexity is so thoroughly entangled and 3 “What is missing from this image [writes Laura Kurgan referring to the IKONOS image] is what is missing now from the city or the world, and it is always missing at the limits of one-meter resolution, for all its detail. What is missing are the missing, over 5,000 people now presumed dead. Beneath or beyond the limits of visibility, of data, are the dead. And yet they remain in the image, in the ruin of the image, and ask something of us.” In Laura Kurgan, “New York, September 11, 2001, Four Days Later...” in Ctrl Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2002), 655. 121 savage-objects.indd 121 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S inclined to metamorphosis that it has no particularised form or objectness of its own, but rather assumes the contours of all other things. As emblematic non-material, dust has been brooded over for centuries by artists and writers who found in its formless nature the metaphoric vocabulary of remainder and decay.4 Dust understood as such is always temporally oriented towards an understanding of the past as inanimate. Dust is said to invade; it creeps and amasses; it covers over and veils, consigning its objects and events to the languor of history. Even when it accrues it seems somewhat depthless — dust is all about surface, the spatialised patina of passing time. Georges Bataille conceptualised dust as matter-in-waiting: a stealth-like incursion from the future that slowly disavows the vitalism of all that it touches. Architectural history has similarly been haunted by the gothic spectre of dust as an amorphic and insinuating ilth, only to become preoccupied by its antithesis in the planar cleanliness of modernism exempliied by the hygienist movement.5 In a matter of minutes, the gleaming glass towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) that were pulverized into dust, reversed this architectural evolution bringing about a gothic revival of a diferent order, in that, the terror augured by late 18th century writings on the insidious nature of dust was revived as a war against the dust-makers 4 See the Cabinet Issue 35 Dust for various historical accounts of dust. Sina Najai, 5 Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York (1958), with its externalized ed., Cabinet 35 (Brooklyn: Immaterial Incorporated, 2009). structural articulation minimally clad in sheets of glass ofers an exemplary example of the kind of planar corporate modernism that went on to inluence the design of the World Trade Center as did his Lake Shore Drive towers project on Chicago’s waterfront (1951). 122 savage-objects.indd 122 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T ig. 3 — Space Imaging’s IKONOS one-metre resolution satellite image taken at 11:43 AM EDT on September 12 2001. 123 savage-objects.indd 123 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S themselves. However as an expression of the external condition of torpor, dust typically lacks the necessary vitality whereby the past gains traction and is able to unsettle the present. Unlike “dirt” which has been theorized as “matter out of place” (Mary Douglas) and subjected to vigorous regimes of puriication, dust is treated as a much more mundane surplus that can be gently swept aside. Dusty is never as bad as dirty, but nor is it as symbolically transgressive. Dirt connotes a contamination of more than the just the surface of things, it has an insidious claim on interiority that makes it stubborn to purging, an attribute that has been semantically useful to poets and preachers alike. Dirt gets into things, deiling boundaries between entities, whereas dust [it seems] merely submits objects to stasis. Dirt is an object found in a place where it does not belong; dust reproduces in miniature everything that surrounds us. Neither dirt nor dust are speciic bodies, however. The irst is composed of minute bodies which ind themselves in contact with an object, and which the latter has retained in some manner. The second is composed of minute bodies crushed into powder, which is deposited on the object.6 In spite of the disgust conjured by writers such as Bataille when contemplating the transformation that a century of accumulated dust would exact upon the slumbering mound of Sleeping Beauty, 6 German chemist Jutsus Von Liebig writing in the mid 19th century, quoted in Edmond Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I,” The American Journal of Police Science 1, no. 3 (1930), 276-298. 124 savage-objects.indd 124 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T contemporary accounts of dust tend to treat it more perfunctorily as superluous matter. Even the cosmic dust that is being used by astronomers to read the fossil record of the universe regards this matter as benignly ubiquitous, although the chemical composition of this kind of interstellar and intergalactic material has no corollary to its earthbound counterparts. Dust in general, appears more dreary and dreamlike than terrifying or repulsive. Thus the expression “when the dust settles” suggests that dust will never be asked to do the dirty work of history — to toil in murky recesses and dig though muck and rubble in order to bring the particulate matters of past events into the contact zone of the present. Dust merely encloses or discloses pre-existent realities. (While this characterisation of dust is reasonably accurate, its real potential resides in its capacity to register prior events within its particulate matter, maintaining a certain connectivity with the past as a consequence of its ontological rather than rhetorical nature. This turn towards the internal composition of dust as harbouring multiple singularities — data packets if you will — opposed to more common descriptions as an distributed surface event is something I will come to shortly.) Once the dust clouds of 9/11 had settled the scale of the human tragedy would be revealed — a new kind of image-event, cleansed of interference, would be made manifest in which the body (even in its damaged state) would be returned to the visual ield. But this anticipatory narrative of full disclosure never materialised in quite these terms. Part II: An Unauthorized Biography of Dust The 2,780 missing were largely subsumed by the cataclysmic force of collapsing architecture, which was itself transformed into 125 savage-objects.indd 125 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ine powdery soot. Intact bodies were nowhere to seen frustrating rescue eforts, which ultimately managed to recover 19,906 human fragments, but of these remains only 293 were fully intact bodies and only 12 could be identiied by sight. In the aftermath of recovery, rescue workers who had dug through the tons of hazardous rubble with their hands and rudimentary tools, began to develop respiratory problems in the form of a dry and persistent cough. Within six months elevators and air ventilators in buildings adjacent to the WTC site, continuously began to fail.7 The dust had not simply settled, but had entered into the lungs of rescue workers and local inhabitants as well as into the mechanical systems of nearby buildings. You have 10-story buildings that leave more debris than these two 100-story towers. Where the fuck is everything? A serious weeklong search and we’ve found 200 in a pile of 5,000? What’s going on? Where is everyone? Why aren’t we inding more bodies? Cause it’s all vaporized — turned to dust. We’re breathing people in that dust.8 Its an image that prompts involuntarily gagging and explains, in part, why the mediated abstraction of airborne dust clouds hover7 See Nicholas Petraco, Thomas A. Kubic and Lisa Faber, The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center Dust (New York: National Forensic Science Technology Center, August 15 2007), 3. 8 A ireman speaking in a Brooklyn bar who had done a 24-hour shift at Ground Zero. Christopher Ketcham, “A Season in Hell,” in Salon.com, ed. Christopher Ketcham (New York City: Salon Media Group, 2011), 2012. 126 savage-objects.indd 126 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T ing at a distance, much like the mushroom clouds of the atomic bomb, ofers a kind of perverse visual pleasure or respite from the horror occurring at the immediacy of ground level/Ground Zero. As uneasy as the thought of unwitting acts of anthropophagi that the inhaling of WTC dust by man and machine alike might provoke, most common dust specimens actually contain a high percentage of exfoliated human skin tissue and human hair along with many other natural and synthetic ibres, particles, emissions, and pollutants. Our bodies are constantly processing the sloughed-of excess and waste produced by our contact with other species or by the frictions occurring between diferent specimens. And we in turn deposit minute trace evidence of our passage through space and in time wherever we move and whenever we make contact with another surface. As Edmond Locard, the French criminologist credited with laying the foundations of forensic science famously postulated, “every contact leaves a trace.” This principle of exchange asserts that in any encounter between bodies, objects, materials, and spaces certain residual traces are deposited and exchanged. These points of contact between entities can be mapped scientiically to link the distribution of bodies and objects within space. Dust writes Steven Connor is a “medium of transformation and exchange. Almost without qualities itself, dust has the quality of qualitylessness, the virtual virtue of transmitting the virtues of other substances. It is both a terminal and a mediate matter, inert, but sometimes, for that very reason, omnivalent.9 Dust scrambles the material signals of objects and events, transmitting complex information from one space to another. Hacking into dust has consequently become a 9 Steven Connor, “Pulverulence,” Cabinet 35 Fall (2009), 71. 127 savage-objects.indd 127 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S key activity of the forensic investigator who must become skilled at cracking its chemical coding chains. All matter, chemically speaking, can be divided into two primary subcategories: that of pure and impure substances. Dust is considered to be “impure matter” because it is a mixture containing two or more elements or compounds in close proximity whose proportions can vary, whereas water is a pure substance because it always consists of hydrogen and oxygen in a ratio of 1:8 by mass and 2:1 by volume. I have turned my attention to the forensic analysis of World Trade Center dust specimens in order to argue against the prevailing grammars of dust with their metaphoric stakes in a de-politicised history of material relations as merely a “chronics of things” unhinged from the speciic events out of which each diminutive element has emerged.10 By examining the particular chemical and physical properties of dust we further “unsettle” the assumed distinctions between human/non-human conigurations of matter and are better able to argue, as I have done elsewhere, for the fundamental ontological inseparability of all matter. In the Analysis of Dust Traces (1920) Locard discusses the nature and composition of dust, noting that what is key to an understanding of dust is that it is “an accumulation of debris in a state of pulverization” whether derived from organic or inor10 I take this phrase from a statement made by Quentin Meillassoux in an interview with Robin MacKay. “That’s what is diicult – conceptually I can airm it, but what is diicult is to give this sensation that you are in a world where you cannot make a physics, but only a chronics, of things.” Robin Mackay, Florian Hecker and Quentin Meillassoux, “Document Uf 13-1,” in www.urbanomic.com, ed. Urbanomic (Urbanomic, 2010), 3. 128 savage-objects.indd 128 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T ig. 4 — Macroscopically, each bulk specimen appeared somewhat like recently erupted volcanic ash. Tiny aliquots of bulk specimens were studied with a polarized light microscope (PLM). These initial PLM studies revealed that each bulk sample was composed of a myriad of materials. It appeared that all the materials composing the buildings and all of the buildings’ contents were literally pulverized by the collapse of the Twin Towers. Nicholas Petraco, Thomas A. Kubic and Lisa Faber, The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center Dust (New York: National Forensic Science Technology Center, August 15 2007), 3. 129 savage-objects.indd 129 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ig. 5 — Tabulation of WTC dust data. 130 savage-objects.indd 130 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T ganic entities. “The characteristic of pulverization distinguishes dust from mud and dirt. Mud is dust mixed with liquid, that is, in a plastic state. When the mud is oily it takes the name of cambouis. Dirt is dust with an admixture of fatty and desiccated bodies.”11 Pulverization is the deining attribute of dust because the compound debris particles that comprise dust are in efect the partial-objects of other [usually larger] entities, which have been ground down. “As a matter of fact, pulverization destroys the morphologic state, which would enable us ordinarily to recognize these objects by our senses or even with our instruments. On the other hand, the transformation does not go so far as to reduce the object into its ultimate elements, that is, into molecules or atoms... we do indeed, ind them in a certain physical state, where the micro-chemical diagnosis of its origin is still possible.” 12 Contrary to the popular image of dust as the expanding material surface upon which other traces, such as the imprint of a footstep might negatively be registered, dust specimens themselves, when understood technically as impure matter, archive traces of multiple objects in a state of transformation. As a compound material substance in which radically heterogeneous materials have momentarily locked together, dust is the material witness par excellence because it maintains these distinctions to the end allowing them to tracked back to the particular circumstances out of which they emerged. For Locard dust specimens were “the mute witnesses, sure and faithful, of all our movements and of all our encounters.” While it would be somewhat fallacious to 11 Edmond Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I,” The American Journal of 12 Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I.” Police Science 1, no. 3 (1930), 276-298. 131 savage-objects.indd 131 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S suggest that it’s various impurities deterritorialise and reterritorialise each other sharing matter-energy lows in a manner similar to the processes of becoming that characterise the “noce contre nature” (against nature marriage) of the wasp and orchid famously discussed by Deleuze and Guattari.13 However the compound substances found in dust do confer meaning onto the relations produced between them when we understand the forensic expert as a transversal agent committed to probing dust particles in the same way that the orchid and wasp are mutually attentive to pollen. Through their probing intercessions, forensic scientists are able to translate the material impurities of dust into a convincing narrative or origin story: a tale of two towers. Moreover, the natural cooperation between wasp and orchid that brings two unlike organisms together in a process that still manages to sustain their radical diferences, is echoed by the pulverization and coming together of diferent kinds of substances in dust. The resulting assemblage never produces a material strata whose diferences can be reconciled to create a synthetic whole that might, in turn, be named. There is no nomenclature for identifying a WTC dust specimen that includes ibre-glass, rock wool, asbestos, synthetic and natural ibres, paper, human remains, ceiling tiles, mica lakes, plaster and concrete, paint smears, metal lakes, fragments of wood, foam, and plastic, perlite, drugs, glass shards and other unknown materials. Dust, as I have said, may be formed of the debris of all kinds of bodies. In enumerating the elements compos13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987). 132 savage-objects.indd 132 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T ing it, there would be made a list of all the substances, organic or inorganic, existing on the earth. The essential point, however, is the exact state or condition of the respective substances before they reached the status of pulverization.14 “Specimens of Ground Zero dust where obtained from irst responders: members of the police department sworn laboratory personnel, crime scene unit detectives and personnel from the OCME’s oice. Additional specimens of WTC dust were obtained from individuals employed to clean and restore historical churches and graveyards located near Ground Zero. Finally, specimens where collected by the authors [of the study referenced in this essay] from several buildings six months after 9/11.”15 When 14 Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I.” 15 The testing protocol is outlined as follows: 1) each bulk specimen was thoroughly loosened and mixed gently using an agate mortar and pestle; 2) each bulk sample was equally divided into eight aliquots; 3) each aliquot was divided into eight equal portions; 4) each portion was placed on a microscope slide, covered with a No. 11⁄2, 22mm, round cover-glass, and dispersed evenly in Melt Mount® R.I. 1.539; and 5) each specimen was labeled for identiication. Next, a quantitative particle count of each specimen was carried out with a polarized light microscope itted was a Chaulkly, point-count reticule. At least 1,000 particles were counted for all of the microscope slide preparations made from each bulk specimen. The results were recorded on WTC dust data sheets. This data was used to compute the percent of each material present in the average specimen. Nicholas Petraco, Thomas A. Kubic and Lisa Faber, The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center Dust (New York: National Forensic Science Technology Center, August 15 2007), 4-6. 133 savage-objects.indd 133 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S discussing the analysis of WTC dust at a New York Microscopic Society lecture (May 28 2003) Dr. Nicholas Petraco, one of the three authors of the subsequently published study, expressed his incredulity at inding drug residue within the tested specimens.16 “I suppose prescription drugs are so ubiquitous that traces of them would be found after the catastrophic destruction of any segment of an urban nexus, but this still surprised me.” Today the US consumes 80% of the world’s opioid pain medications and 99% of the world’s hydrocodone, a semi-synthetic opioid. Between 1997 and 2007, the years roughly bracketing 9/11, the milligram per person use of prescription opioids has soared from 74mg to 369mg, representing an overall increase of 402%.17 In order for trace elements of drugs to register within WTC dust specimens that included all of the material debris found in the immediate environs of Ground Zero, the percentage of people taking them in 2001 would have had to be even signiicantly higher than current levels of consumption. Many community health studies have examined the impact of 9/11 upon drug use, especially the increase in drugs taken for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. However Petraco’s surprise at inding the presence of drugs in the WTC dust samples returns the narratives 16 The report The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center Dust was authored by Dr. Nicholas Petraco, MS, D-ABC, Forensic Consultant, NYPD, Adjunct Assistant Professor, John Jay College, CUNY, Dr. Thomas A. Kubic, JD, PhD, Associate Professor, John Jay College, CUNY, and Ms. Lisa Faber, MFS, Criminalist IV, Supervisor NYPD Hair and Fiber Unit. 17 David Kloth, “America’s Fatal Addiction to Prescription Drugs,” The Guardian (June 10, 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/ jun/10/prescription-drug-abuse?INTCMP=SRCH 134 savage-objects.indd 134 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T of drug use back to the materials themselves, which are in the unenviable position of being able to chronicle the magnitude of wide-spread drug use/abuse (prescription or otherwise) without the causal factor of a cataclysmic drug-inducing event. That is to say, if we learn how to read the signiicance of the statistical composition of dust as a question of proportionality between ibreglass and narcotics. The presence of drug fragments also returns the human body to the space of eviscerated architecture as a denatured body that was already materially impure. Human remains conjoined with concrete and plaster can perhaps be accepted piously as a passage from dust-to-dust, whereas the presence of drugs troubles the telling of an entirely moral narrative. It is this realisation that takes us aback, I believe, when confronting the tabulation of dust data. The insight that the body was already damaged or ill in someway prior to the violence inlicted by crushing architecture. Morality would come to play a crucial role in the U.S Administration’s response to 9/11 and therefore the evidence of drugs in WTC dust can be seen, I believe, as clouding the moral distinctions between good and bad upon which its righteous wars were waged. The symbolic purity of a body subjectively tainted by drugs requires a more nuanced semantic articulation than a body conceptualised as objectiied “human remains” returned to ash. Of course the narrative of the “lawed” body, riven by alcohol or drugs or weakened by its sexual proclivities and desires, runs rampant through American society, exempliied by the political igures of Clinton, G. W. Bush and most recently by GOP candidate Herman Cain. But it’s a story that has always been redeemed by a call to a higher purpose – service to God, Country, and family. It is also a story that extends the mythos of self-remaking that has 135 savage-objects.indd 135 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S been so powerfully operative within the American psyche, one that can convert poverty into wealth, debauchery into virtue or even corpulence into slimness. The transformative potential of the American “Can Do” spirit is continually paraded as evidence of capitalism’s capacity to accommodate diference and promote tolerance.18 This is all to say, that the bodies invoked by the rhetorical framework of 9/11 were not these kinds of damaged but redeemed bodies. In their collective status as victims, all personal impurities were symbolically purged and the “secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors” who died were of necessity collectively represented as wholly innocent. Their private bodies transformed into a national body whose wounds were solely inlicted by external forces.19 Another brief example of a material history that one could excavate out of the geological strata of WTC rubble is that of 18 Subsequent controversy in 2009 around the proposed building of an Islamic cultural centre in the general vicinity of Ground Zero highlighted the limits of this tolerance with respect to the ways in which the narrative ield of 9/11 could be re-distributed other than in reductive terms. 19 President GW Bush’s Address to the Nation on September 11 and 21 2001 substantiates my line of argumentation in its invocation of a nation wounded, whose tolerant and progressive nature has ensured that God has chosen its side in its global ight for justice. In vowing to seek retribution for the acts of terror, Bush also made a pledge to return the US to the economic prosperity, which he (along with many) regarded as the symbolic target of the terrorist attack. The moral project of attending to the nation’s psychic wound was thus conjoined to healing its inancial health, a position echoed by New York major Rudy Giuliani imploring Americans to go and out shop otherwise the “terrorists will have won”. 136 savage-objects.indd 136 4/17/12 4:37 PM I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E N S I C S O F W T C D U S T asbestos. During initial construction of the inancial complex (1966-73) asbestos was widely used as a building material due to its tensile strength, low cost, high melting point, and resistance to chemical breakdown. An estimated 400 tons of asbestos were incorporated into the structures of the WTC. However, anticipating a imminent ban by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), builders had stopped including asbestos-based materials by the time they had constructed the 40th loor of the North Tower, the irst of the Twin Towers to be completed as well as the irst hit in the attacks and the last to go down in lames. Asbestos is still regarded as one of the most robust ire-retardant materials and in the weeks following 9/11 some engineers and scientists wondered if the banned substance (had it been used throughout) might not have helped to contain the ire damage in the towers long enough for people to escape.20 According to EPA reports, the implosion from the towers “pulverized asbestos to ultra-ine particles” and the World Trade Center Health Registry estimates about 410,000 people were exposed to asbestos during the rescue, recovery and clean-up eforts that followed 9/11. Instead of saving lives through its ire-retardant properties, exposure to the asbestos used in constructing the lower regions of the towers has contributed to severe illness and death. Although the analysis of WTC dust conirms trace evidence of asbestos, this data sample can’t testify to what might have been had its prohibition not been in place. But what it tells us about its low particle count in relationship to that of the other insulating materials (45.1%), lower even than 20 James Glanz and Andrew C. Revkin, “A Nation Challenged; Haunting Question: Did the Ban on Asbestos Lead to Loss of Life?” The New York Times, September 18, 2001, Science section. 137 savage-objects.indd 137 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S that of human remains (albeit not an insulator) is that while it was incapable of retarding ire in its macro-material form, its low threshold occurrence when inhaled as toxic micro-particles, was suicient for causing chronic disease and death. These two examples begin to suggest ways in which a forensics of WTC dust might prove productive for reading the complex social, economic, and political relations out of the material strata of our world. Moreover, the ethical dimensions of an event in which the loss of life in the US was followed by more than 10 years of retaliatory war is itself provoked by this microscopic study of dust, when we also learn to read material relations between human and non-humans actors out of an image-ield of seemly formless dust clouds. In doing so we come to understand that images taken at a distance, that the aesthetic realm of our emergent remote sensing technologies, is also the realm of radical imagining and seeing. If we accept ethics as the domain of action in and on the world, then the very act of looking is also an act of intervening into the image-stream of the event as a kind of witness, be it as a drone operator scouring Afghani targets from a console in Nevada, a technician recalibrating the position of the IKONOS Space Imaging satellite, or a forensic scientist examining a glass slide of dust specimens by means of polarized light microscopy. WTC dust becomes political when its intricate materiality is exposed and ultimately returned to the image-ields from whence it came as the productive instantiation of a forensic aesthetics that renews our vision, allowing us to see the world for what it really is — impure matter. 138 savage-objects.indd 138 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 139 4/17/12 4:37 PM “A landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways.” — J. G. Ballard “I returned to the element which is the basis of all sound multifariousness: to pure vibration (...) Every existing sound, every noise, is a mixture of such sine waves — a spectrum.” — Karlheinz Stockhausen savage-objects.indd 140 4/17/12 4:37 PM Vibrational Mediations Jonathan Saldanha The following reports document two moments of an investigation in progress about spaces that contain a sonic dimension, acoustic territories that operate through resonance while mediating and translating spectral powers. The irst report deals with the constitution of a choir as a resonance-inducing element in the premises of a radio antenna located in Teufelsberg, Germany, and the second report with the translation and iltering of recordings made by a radio telescope in Dwingeloo, Holland, based on the interceptions of the black hole located in the Cygnus constellation. Both ruins once operated in tracking and translating the invisible, but are now sceneries of technological sedimentation, a landill of past protocols: radio transmissions, encrypting / decrypting, cosmic radiation, ionosphere, electromagnetic emanations and anti-matter, all of them now channeled through their chthonic cavities. The remains of the previous operational body persist, emptied of their previous purpose. The original and elementary luids have dried, leaving this body suitable for the participation in new protocols. Here a set of explorations and mediations comes to light for which the surviving space and its involving membrane are viscerally revived, extracting through resonance a vital potential. Both processes contain a particular interest for the presence of sound, and its vibrational, corporal, and physical inscription. 141 savage-objects.indd 141 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S I. Devil’s Echo Teufelsberg Station. (Photo: Francisco Queimadela) "(...) eerie echoes to resonant frequencies that can afect the brain – seem to have been an intentionally planned component of a number of prehistoric sites worldwide, from ruined temples to rock art locations." — Paul Devereux The acoustic emanation of the inner space of a radio antenna was the site for a series of recordings of an informal choir of voices. Located in Berlin, this antenna was once upon a time important for the monitoring and interception of radio signals during the 142 savage-objects.indd 142 4/17/12 4:37 PM V I B R AT I O N A L M E D I AT I O N S cold war.1 During this period, domes were built to protect the antennas against the cold, the wind and the rain, as they had been manufactured from fragile materials and any alteration to their structure (frost or rust) would reduce their capacity for reception. Inside of one of these domes it was possible to explore the relations of sound with its immediate ghost - its echo. The particular acoustic properties of this space are caused by its spherical coniguration, which constitutes an internal camera that 1 Geological strata of the Teufelsberg: — Artiicial hill built by the Allies after the Second World War from about 12 million cubic meters of rubble from Berlin. It is one of the two highest hills in the Berlin area. — Buried underneath the hill is a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was so solid that covering it with debris turned out to be easier. — The NSA (US National Security Agency) Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg came after this, and was one of the premier listening posts of the cold war, rumored to be part of the global ECHELON intelligence gathering network. — Lake Teufelssee is near the hill; where it is believed once stood a castle inhabited by demons, and that was subsequently submerged by the lake. — The large structure was constructed on the top of the hill; from all directions the station enjoyed excellent and unobstructed reception of signals in radio bands that were otherwise diicult to receive over long distances. And viewed from all over West Berlin, in all directions was “East”. It continued to operate until the fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall. After that the station was closed and the equipment removed. — The buildings and radar domes still remain in place but the site has been largely destroyed since the 90’s and the surrounding hills are used as a ski park. 143 savage-objects.indd 143 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S potentiates the phenomena of resonance:2 the sound is relected and re-sent by the hard corpus of the dome.3 This vast building complex was used as a station for communications monitoring, amplifying, decoding and re-encoding of an extensive radio range of distant, invisible signals. This dome is now repositioned as an axis mundi which operates as a nerve center and as an echo chamber intensifying the temporal experience of space, amplifying other parts of the signal range, revealing today, through its resonance, acoustic ghosts that emanate from the ruins of its long petriied telluric body. All sound emissions originating in the interior are contaminated to the point of being efectively altered, leaving a trail in space like a sound instantly substituted by its double, by the feedback of its container. The efect is equivalent to that of hearing your own voice from inside your own skull, receiving the relections and resonance of the walls stronger than the original sound emission (ig. 3). This vibrational luid unblocks the inner surface of the dome, transforming it into a membrane, a physiologic extension of environmental perception. The sound reveals 2 A resonant frequency is a natural frequency of vibration determined by the physical parameters of the vibrating object, in this case the dimensions, shape and material of this cavity. The resonance in this space is also a reverberation; the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound dissipates. 3 This dome is made of hexagonal and pentagonal modules of a synthetic material, permeable to radio frequencies (ig. 1). The hard surface of this sphere like place relects sound continuously, the direct sound received is followed by a cluster of many relected sounds which blend and overlap, the sound intensity is enhanced by the relected waves, hence the particular acoustic imprint characteristic of reverberation (ig. 2). 144 savage-objects.indd 144 4/17/12 4:37 PM V I B R AT I O N A L M E D I AT I O N S ig. 1 145 savage-objects.indd 145 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S the architectural form of its container, impregnating time with its acoustic signature. In this evocation process a group of voices was formed that was organizing itself as a trajectory through the space’s interior, its time determined by the duration of the predeined distances, so as to ind an internal point of relation with the cavity and its echo. It established a protocol of tones and intensities where the voices had operated, in a topographical process that re-combines and reveals its traces in space. This group of voices, as a system, was placed in such a way as to only truly show itself through resonance.4 The group singing - understood as a catalyst for a visceral state - was fed by the architecture of the cavity and by the static sounds produced and unfolded in it - space that unravels, wrapping the participants in a mental dislocation. The geometry of this scenery interacts deeply with the occupants, inhibiting senses and amplifying the spectral territory of the place, which is slowly impregnated during the process. The round dome assumes the coniguration of a skull striving to speak, vibrating its inner cavity and speaking through the voice of others. The echo mediates space and the people who occupy it. 4 A parallel can be drawn with Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech which was used to help the deaf learn to talk since they could not hear their own aural pronunciation. The system is composed of symbols that show the position and movement of the throat, tongue, and lips as they produce the sounds of language, and it is a type of phonetic notation. 146 savage-objects.indd 146 4/17/12 4:37 PM V I B R AT I O N A L M E D I AT I O N S ig. 2 — Spectral analysis of a broken bottle sound recorded inside the dome, the echo and reverb are visible in this image. ig. 3 147 savage-objects.indd 147 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S II. Spectral Blindness Dwingeloo Radio Observatory. (Photo: Regina de Miguel) "Every stone utters oracles." — Teixeira Rego A trip to the Dwingeloo radio telescope in Holland,5 and from there, on to the black hole in the Cygnus constellation,6 in a process of revelation in which forms appear and materialize out of the opaqueness. 5 An invitation by artist Regina de Miguel. 6 This distant galaxy appears to us as the second brightest radio source in the sky (ig. 4). Its supermassive black hole generates tremendous energy as it consumes large amounts of material. Nearby electrons are accelerated in this process, emitting strong radio waves as they spiral outward in magnetic ields. 148 savage-objects.indd 148 4/17/12 4:37 PM V I B R AT I O N A L M E D I AT I O N S This satellite dish, a mechanical ear of the ifties,7 was built to listen in to the waves transmitted by radio sources in the cosmos, among which, are the strong spots of radio wave emanation originating in black holes. The mass composing the cosmic background consists of a conglomerate of electromagnetic impulses and emanations that appear opaque at a irst analysis. Saturated with interstellar radiation, its components become visible only when these emissions (ig. 5) are analyzed with the right tool. The radio signal feeding the antenna is translated into a sound signal, an amorphous white noise: 8 a blindness engendered by the impossibility of interpretation. 7 The Dwingeloo Radio Observatory (northeastern Netherlands), is a single dish radio telescope with a diameter of 25m. Construction completed in 1956. At that time it was the largest radio telescope in the world. As of 2000, it was no longer operative in an oicial capacity and since August 2009 is oicially a Dutch industrial heritage monument. CAMRAS, along with radio amateurs and amateur astronomers, use the telescope for EME, also known as moonbounce. In this technique, radio wave signals are aimed at the Moon from one location, bounce of the Moon’s surface, and are detected by an antenna at a diferent location on Earth. One EME was made in the same day of the black hole recordings, sending choir sounds of the Teufelsberg sessions to be delected by the moon, an interplanetary echo that would please King Tubby. 8 White noise is a random signal with a lat spectral density; the signal contains equal power at any center frequency. White noise draws its name from white light in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible band in such a way that the eye’s three color receptors are equally stimulated. A random signal is considered white noise if it is observed to have a lat spectrum over a medium’s widest possible bandwidth (ig. 6). 149 savage-objects.indd 149 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ig. 4 ig. 5 150 savage-objects.indd 150 4/17/12 4:37 PM V I B R AT I O N A L M E D I AT I O N S Given the quality of this radio magnetic static noise, and listening to the machine that hears it,9 it is diicult to point to some deinite spot, but while the great antenna turns looking for a signal in the sky, a small volume oscillation announces a visible crack in the opaque noise - strong radio emissions like those originating from Cygnus black hole increase its volume allowing for the interpretation of this oscillation as a coordinate. The visibility threshold is narrow for this kind of antenna, already not up to date with the current methodologies and technologies of astronomical observation. This machine decodes the radio signal into sound, deteriorating it through its electric mechanism and reducing the specter of white noise received. An encounter where the observer meets only the translated signal produced by the tools used in the observation. After the session at the antenna and back at the sound studio, other mechanisms were put into action in order to carry out a series of sonic translation of the recordings of white noise from the black hole. To work with this signal implies moving towards its opaqueness and to transmute it into a mechanism in time.10 9 In 1931, Karl Guthe Jansky, an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, was assigned the job of identifying sources of static that might interfere with radio telephone service. Jansky’s antenna was an array of dipoles and relectors designed to receive short wave radio signals. By rotating the antenna the direction of the received interfering radio source (static) could be pinpointed. After recording signals from all directions for several months, Jansky eventually categorized them into three types of static: nearby thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms, and a faint steady hiss of unknown origin. Jansky inally determined that the “faint hiss” was coming from the Milky Way and was strongest in the direction of the center of the galaxy, the place for a super massive black hole. 10 A. Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, created the Spectrograph, a device 151 savage-objects.indd 151 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S The sound was progressively transformed and iltered in a process that restored the form of the noise, giving it a gesture that was also cut out by the transposition of its frequencies, to coincide with harmonics of the earth’s cavity (Shuman’s resonance).11 The sound was therefore iltered12 through two types of objects: membranes - lexible structures covering or limiting a body; and cavities – objects’ inner concavities, with walls composed of diferent densities and whose internal space can ilter the noise signal as well as resound it. A new acoustic body for the leshed-out sound of the black hole. The resulting sounds were then re-combined, forging a forensic reconstitution13 of the black hole’s negative territory. that translated sounds into readable patterns via a photographic process, making visible records of the frequency, intensity, and time. 11 The Schumann Resonances are quasi standing wave electromagnetic waves that exist in the earth cavity. Like waves on a spring, they are not present all the time, but have to be ‘excited’ to be observed. They are not caused by anything internal to the Earth, its crust or its core. They seem to be related to electrical activity in the atmosphere. 12 A vibrating object will pick out its resonant frequencies from the complex excitation coming from the white noise, and vibrate at those frequencies, iltering out other frequencies present in the excitation. (ig. 7) 13 “Audio forensics was born during WWII, when acoustic scientists investigated the possibility of identifying enemy voices on radio broadcasts. Their eforts were made possible by the newly invented sound spectrograph, a tool for graphing the frequency and amplitude of voice patterns over time”. Alexander Gelfand, “Audio Forensics Experts Reveal (Some) Secrets”, Wired, November 10, 2007, January 15, 2012, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/audio_ forensics?currentPage=all#. 152 savage-objects.indd 152 4/17/12 4:37 PM V I B R AT I O N A L M E D I AT I O N S List of materials used as mediators and ilter: electricity > synthetic membrane > metal > ceramics > wood > skin > meat > goat skull > human skull > and inally the encrypting of the resultant sound in the grooves of a vinyl record, which condenses the process, and is susceptible to be used as a difusion medium. ig. 6 — Spectral analisys of the white noise recorded in the radio antena. ig. 7 — Spectral analisys of the withe noise iltered by the cavity of a human skull. 153 savage-objects.indd 153 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S 154 savage-objects.indd 154 4/17/12 4:37 PM AN EFFECT OF VEROSIMILITUDE 155 savage-objects.indd 155 4/17/12 4:37 PM 156 savage-objects.indd 156 4/17/12 4:37 PM An Efect of Verosimilitude Regina de Miguel “For twenty years or so, my friends and I have been studying these strange situations that the intellectual culture in which we live does not know how to categorize. For lack of better terms, we call ourselves sociologists, historians, economists, political scientists, philosophers or anthropologists. But to these venerable disciplinary labels we always add a qualiier: ‘of science and technology’. ‘Science studies’, as Anglo-Americans call it, or ‘science, technology and society’. Whatever label we use, we are always attempting to retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing, as often as we have to, the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power.” — Bruno Latour 157 savage-objects.indd 157 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S The photographs presented here are the result of a collaboration with artist and musician Jonathan Saldanha, in November 2010 at the Dwingeloo radio telescope, in the Netherlands. At the time of its operation (1956) this antenna was the world’s largest, and is now part of Dutch scientiic heritage and rarely activated; only for speciic occasions (with permission of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) or for activities of a “moon-bounce” amateur radio group that do its maintenance. On the 20th November 2011 we went there to ilm its rotation and operation; material to be included in the ilm Nouvelle Vague Science Fiction. At that time, Jonathan Saldanha made several experiments in which the antenna was pointed at targets in the cosmos such as pulsars and black holes. The material for the soundtrack of the ilm resulted from these recordings, in particular of Cygnus Constellation and Sagittarius A* – a black hole located in the centre of the Milky Way. Dwingeloo radio telescope. Photo: Regina de Miguel. November, 2010. 158 savage-objects.indd 158 4/17/12 4:37 PM AN EFFECT OF VEROSIMILITUDE Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Sgr A*, black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. Image by NASA. We later decided to give the work an objective dimension by recording a 12-inch (30cm) vinyl, and images of it are shown here. These images were made in collaboration with the Department of Electronic Microscopy of the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. After a preliminary study of samples of vinyl’s surface, a series of photographs were made of the etched surface from ampliications of between 1000 and 2000 times the actual size of the object. This microscope uses a beam of electrons instead of light to form an image. It has a large depth of ield, allowing large sections of the object to be focused at a time. In the electron scanning microscope the specimen is usually coated with a carbon layer or a thin layer of a metal such as gold to give conductive properties to the sample. It is then swept through by the accelerated 159 savage-objects.indd 159 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Samples of vinyl coated with gold for observation. An Efect of Verisimilitude, 2011. Black and white photographs on paper, 30 x 50 c / u. 160 savage-objects.indd 160 4/17/12 4:37 PM AN EFFECT OF VEROSIMILITUDE electrons travelling in the tube. A detector measures the amount of electrons sent, resulting in the intensity of the sample area. It is capable of displaying three-dimensional igures, projected as a TV picture or a digital image. Invented in 1931 by Ernst Ruska, it allows a deeper approach to investigating the atomic world. It allows us to obtain highresolution images of stone, metallic and organic materials. The light is replaced by an electron beam, the lenses by electromagnets and the samples are rendered conductive by making the surface metallic. The photographic magniication revealed an uncertain landscape of mountains, desert, and arid areas, similar to some of the images that space photography of the moon or other planets have provided us with. Somehow it consists of a reverse process by which an invisible and unreachable region of space becomes visible again in the shape of a hybrid and ictional object. The photomicrographs are accompanied by several archive images found in scientiic publications depicting aerial views of archaeological sites in diferent parts of the world. The sound we receive now from the black hole comes from a distant past. The reconstruction of this landscape made out of small details emerges from a place and time in which we did not exist. Similarly, an archaeologist reconstructs, through minor signals, an unknown time. 161 savage-objects.indd 161 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Electron microscope at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. Aleix Plademunt photographs. 162 savage-objects.indd 162 4/17/12 4:37 PM AN EFFECT OF VEROSIMILITUDE 163 savage-objects.indd 163 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction focuses on existent relations between the construction and analysis of human ecologies. Thus it emerges as a syntactic space where connections are made between scientiic analysis and perception (verisimilitude scales), non-experiential learning derived from the technological imaginary (alienation and projection) and degrees of formation of perfect consciousness and criticism (new forms of orientation). This is an audio-visual work divided into two channels and two sets of photographs. In the irst channel we ind a stratigraphic route which starts in Slovenia at Lake Cerknica and the cave beneath it – a natural phenomenon where the water level never stays the same appearing and disappearing throughout the year (a simple comparison could be made between this natural event and the deinition of an “interface”: a screen that brings something up, supposedly out of nowhere) – to reach the antennas ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, where far away objects that can not be grasped in their full extent if not by sound waves, are studied. This corresponds, though not synchronously, with a second channel of archive images, where a repository of scientiic images located in various scene recreations of spaceship Solaris are presented. This is its turn, and as in Stanislav Lem’s novel, would produce a virtual representation of Science itself, based on fragments and things that emerge with no apparent order. A voiceover located from a position of “super-observer”, guides us to diferent ends of the world. With a markedly objective tonality, it will use these apocalyptic prophecies to ironically conclude that we will never be able to contemplate the role of the observer and the meaning of events and images. 164 savage-objects.indd 164 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction, 2011. HD video and 3D animation. 20.37 min. Original soundtrack by Jonathan Saldanha. 165 savage-objects.indd 165 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S 166 savage-objects.indd 166 4/17/12 4:37 PM III savage-objects.indd 167 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G 168 savage-objects.indd 168 4/17/12 4:37 PM Bodily Unconscious: A conversation with Michael Taussig Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of several books that, in a literary fashion, combine Marxist theory, social critique, ethnographic research, and story telling. Since 1969 he has conducted ieldwork in South-America, particularly in Colombia and Ecuador. His wide-ranging research focuses on – amongst other topics – the commercialization of peasant agriculture, slavery, hunger, commodity fetishism, the impact of colonialism, “shamanism”, secrecy, and terror. Taken together, his research into these topics comprises what is now regarded as a highly original and inluential body of work. His writing on concealment, revelation, and notions such as “epistemic murk” has especially inluenced this book because of the way that it unsettles clear subjectobject distinctions. This interview took place in Berlin, 2012. Godofredo Pereira - Reading your books one inds stories inhabited by multiple objects; state monuments, gold, cocaine, or statues of the Devil. Therefore I wanted to start by asking you, what are the properties of objects and things that we ind so attractive? And how is that you became so attracted to them? Michael Taussig - My irst reaction would be to think more in terms of substance than object. What’s the diference? For 169 savage-objects.indd 169 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S instance, I think of gold and cocaine as substances that contain evil and a Bataille-type of excess. Of course they are objects – objects being anyway such a wide deinition - that have these fascinating qualities. I suppose the question is how much of it lies in objects and how much of it lies in the history of which objects have been part. For instance gold: you wouldn’t say that it is inherently good or bad, but it comes so saturated by legend in many cultures both prehistoric and historic. So one ends up thinking that some objects get picked out and become historic actors. Cocaine has an incredible history too, both prior to Spanish conquests and in the last 50 to 100 years. Again there is this connection between some properties in the substance and these mighty myths. But when it comes to monuments, for instance, in Defacement,1 or Magic of The State,2 these strike me as imbued with aura, which is not necessarily to be thought as symbolic or un-symbolic but as a sort of mystery that exceeds the symbolic value. In comparison with gold and cocaine, monuments strike me as a diferent class of object. I only started thinking of objects in the way you’re getting at, with My Cocaine Museum,3 and that’s where I did another turn, because after years of going there (Colombia) for short visits it was only in the nineties that I started thinking of the 1 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative 2 Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997). 3 Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999). 2004). 170 savage-objects.indd 170 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G insane amount of work that the people performed in order to get tiny bits of gold: how clever you have to be, living in nature, making canoes, battling against mighty currents with the strength of arms. And the canoes are sometimes full of cement bags, all this efort to make a church out of cement, to build a garden that works and a house against the rain and the mud with only a machete at your disposal... its overwhelming to think of the amount of interaction with the natural world. And that’s when I started to dive into the world of materiality, in a very diferent way from historic materialism, by standing in awe of the labour and the interaction of human beings with mud, water, stone, rain and heat, and that’s why that book was written like that. So where you see a uniformity of objects I would emphasise the break. GP - Throughout your work one inds the idea that the monument, apart from its representational or symbolic characteristics, has an implicit attraction for defacement or vandalism. Isn’t this something that forces an engagement with the monument in a material or visceral way? MT - My thoughts were along the lines that monuments do plead for defacement in order to make themselves stronger, and that’s the terrible iconoclastic paradox. It seems that these objects, monuments, are human-like once we deface them, then and only. In Germany some artists take the position that any monument is inherently fascistic. But that is what makes the folk authors of the portales in Venezuela - within the cult of Maria Lionza - exceedingly interesting. These 171 savage-objects.indd 171 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S are mini-monuments, democratic or people’s monuments. Consequently the question would be, what’s the diference between religion and the state? And looking at these portales, once you move into the sphere of ritual and religion, another form of perception occurs. And you have to ask yourself, “why didn’t we ask these questions about state monuments?” Aren’t they religious, and aren’t they massively involved in ritual? And that seems to lood the discussion with rich ideas. GP - I suppose every state monument in the history of architecture, engages essentially with death, with a language that emerges of religious or transcendent architectures, that is then captured by the state, to invest its institutional power with an immaterial capacity. Isn’t this present in The Magic of The State? I mean the circulation whereby the object becomes animated and the body becomes petriied? Through death and spirit, architecture is invested with something that gives life to state power. MT - Yes, indeed. I am thinking that where animism becomes relevant (or my term the Nervous System), is where every critique (and this applies to defacement as well) is always going to be counteracted by animistic force; a literally reactionary force that comes out of society or out of the nature of knowledge. And by the Nervous System I understand this continuous thrust and counter-thrust, so all that work is part of a series of challenges that are doomed to be outpaced and out-thought by that which we are trying to explain. And this boils down often to the play of order and disorder. 172 savage-objects.indd 172 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G I thought about this in the days of postmodernism where fragmentation and disorder where highly valued, and my sense was that these were mere opposites to tropes of order and narrative, simple inversions. Whereas the Nervous System – which is both representation and reality – is constantly moving in this ield of tension; in this ield of force between these oppositions. So the animistic quality is the endless capacity of that which you are explaining to come back and sabotage what you are doing. GP - Is there an issue of time in the way that you relate these oppositions? MT - When I think of time it is to do with memory and Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history i.e. the diferent types of time: the now time, the stasis, in shock, for instance, rapid acceleration, a cessation of movement followed by a disturbance in the sense of time or the state of emergency where time seems to stand still but is pregnant with shattering consequences… GP - I was thinking in terms of events outside of human control, the obvious example being natural catastrophes. MT - Time as history is important in my notion of the “bodily unconscious”, and secondly in my interest in ethnographic diaries where time is scattered and played back on itself as afterthoughts. In the diary form, and the diary as a substitute for explanation, the diary is a mere record which my generation tended to look down upon but it suddenly 173 savage-objects.indd 173 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S seems to now have an allure. And these facts are in the low of time, but they also stand out from time – whereas time in Marx or Freud, is always a historical narrative of development of the world of the economy or of the individual. Hence my interest, in the last few years, in the diary form; and the diary form as even superior to explanation. I’ve often thought of the diary as another organ of the human being, like a liver or brain. It becomes very personal and it literally becomes a fetish. You can see that in I Swear I Saw This4, or in the description Benjamin gives of his notebooks, and even more in the people that write about this: they fetishise his fetishisation. And this is really a fetish, really part of the human body while somewhat superior to it, and therefore it has this strange relationship to time. The diary contains certain elements of time in relation to this object that becomes a human being. But the second connection I wanted to make was this idea I call the “bodily unconscious” that I see is ascending or being manifest in a new way with relation to global warming and the change in the nature of the physical reality. I call it historical but in a sense that encompasses more than time, or not just time, but greenhouse gas change of the planetary climate. GP - Which relates to the “anthropocene”, the new geological moment of the earth as argued by Paul Crutzen? 4 Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). 174 savage-objects.indd 174 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G MT - Exactly. GP - In your early work you look at the colonial Other, for instance in Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America5 where you confront diferent forms of labour and relations to nature. But slowly this clear-cut distinction seems to become less relevant. For instance, in Magic of The State you suggest the practice of pilgrimage as a method of not so much explaining but of slowly absorbing. And this seems to be similar to our discussion of the notebook. MT - Definitely, because you re-read and re-read and some thoughts emerge between the lines; things come at you. But yes there is something very diferent; the absorption and pilgrimage theory is very diferent. For instance in the sixth chapter of Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man,6 “the colonial mirror of production”, I focus on the projection of the Western savage onto the Indians and then acting in accordance to it. So on the one hand I spoke there of a mode of mimesis or mirroring, and later, on the other hand, pilgrimage as a completely diferent process. Two very diferent modes of talking about something, of explaining even. I was also wondering if the fetish would be an important entry into this discussion? 5 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 6 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 175 savage-objects.indd 175 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S GP - I always have present the idea by William Pietz of the fetish as the “space of revolution”, and its history, as a history of cultural conlict. As such it can be seen as a ield of operation, not so much against the fetish, but from it. MT - But the important consequence of bringing colonial features into the discussion is that fetish then would be what the other person is doing, not me. That’s the reason why many people are constantly fascinated by those “others” – because of their fetish perceptions. But my attitude towards the fetish, and I think some other people share this of course, is against what I thought was the classic Marxist attitude which was to de-fetishise the fetish. Whereas on the contrary I think one should add to the fetish quality of the fetish - that’s the strategy - and that’s what I make to be the Benjaminian point. This is a more speciic statement than saying that one is interested in the poetics of the fetish or the poetics of the commodity and I found it to be a creative and generative approach. I suppose it its in the current Latour inluenced enthusiasm of objects becoming alive and seeing the hybridinal qualities of subject and object. But when I read Latourians I guess I’m always disappointed that they are not interested in poetics i.e. they are not that interested in literature or being literary. And they don’t deepen themselves in some of the Marxist properties of objects. GP - In a way as if everything becomes democratically objectiied and pristine? 176 savage-objects.indd 176 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G MT - In my colours book (What Color Is the Sacred 7), particularly if you look into the chapter called “where stones walk like man”, my notion of the “bodily unconscious” gives an alternative view of objects and magic. Here I am heavily invested in anthropology of sorcery and magic in which (thanks to what we call sympathetic magic) there’s a connection between words, bodies and substances used in ritual, to afect one another. What is underlying here is a notion that Mauss and Hubert call “mana”, which is a very general but sympathetic vibration between substances and humans, between bodies, the sun and the moon, the tides, human bodies. That is the universe I see resurrected by global warming, creating a new connection of the human body to other bodies, changing the mind-body relationship. The “bodily unconscious” is to a large extent an actual entity that is called the autonomic nervous system. This is something that is designated as such by a professor of Physiology at Harvard, Walter B. Canon, in his 1920s book called The Wisdom of The Body.8 Cannon was asked by the US army to study shock in the First World War by examining American soldiers dying from rapid blood loss in France and Belgium. And this enlarged his views of the body as an internally regulated mechanism that he took from the French philosopher Claude Bernard’s notion of the internal milieu. It’s a simple notion in which everything is like a cybernetic system. 7 Michael T. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 8 Walter B Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, inc, 1939). 177 savage-objects.indd 177 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S For Cannon shock was due to overworking of adrenaline, and he is the irst person to pin down this overwhelmingly important function. A gearing of the body to run, “ight or light”. Very productive for a short amount of time, but then the body just exhausts itself. Now, what interests me in his notion is that the body is performing a series of operations every second without you knowing it, hence the term, the autonomic nervous system. And if it were conscious, it probably wouldn’t work - Its better that this remains unconscious, but not the Freudian unconscious. It is rather the bodily unconscious, closer to Nietzsche. That was shock, so important in WWI and the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada and Surrealism and all that heroic male stuf. Later in 20th century the biochemistry and physiology of the steroids were discovered to play a fundamental role in stress — just as stress came to displace shock as the governing trope for dealing with daily life (the steroids were also in the adrenal gland (in the cortex, not the medulla). So the question for me is, as the planet gets warmer which we now see in unexpected perturbations, very hot, very cold, looding, storms, will this in some way will create a new cybernetic set-up for the human body, and will the bodily unconscious have to work in diferent ways? Will this produce a diferent mind-body relationship? And yes! I think it will, along with new language of ritual and magic geared to the new desperation and the new ideas regarding the environment, ideas that need to be freed from the alienating language of what is taken as “science” (see the afterword to My Cocaine Museum). 178 savage-objects.indd 178 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G Also, as mankind is no longer seen as inhabiting an anthropocentric universe, we are forced to think now of reality in terms of Greek or Medieval theories, of microcosm-macrocosm, in which not only is man not an island entire unto himself but becomes more like Alfred Whitehead’s idea of internal relations. Whitehead’s idea was that an object contains within itself the relationship to the other and its ramifying context(s). So the stress on the Universe produces a sense of the interconnectedness of things understood not as things per se but as nodes in networks. And this is important because Humankind is again seen as connected to all sorts of other things that have now become unstable. It is from here that I start to think about the poetics of sorcery and magic (things that we can get from all sorts of sources) of traditions in which this sense of interconnectedness (often through language) is crucial for a writer like myself. You compose stories, fables, which are meant to intervene. My chapter on “where stones walk like men” in my color book is a succinct example. But there is still a third property that is important in this “bodily unconscious”, and that is that it cannot be exposed too much. For two reasons: If you try and analyse it too much, it can no longer operate and, secondly you run the risk of giving the state and the corporations further control. This also relates in the end to my practice of writing, in which the poetry of “objects” or the poetry of interconnections, images and stories become crucial. This would be analysis in action, where the philosopher would not always be Apollonian, standing back. 179 savage-objects.indd 179 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S GP - The poetics of sorcery takes you to the importance of practice, the technique. But the “bodily unconscious” also brings to mind Latin America where the ground is both nature, animated, alive, but also a source of developmental possibilities, with oil and gas. MT - Well it depends on what “Latin America” we are talking about. And this takes us to the question in Adorno and Horkheimer, of what a yielding relation to nature would be. To yield as opposed to mastery (and here we would have to go back and talk more about Hegel’s master and slave). That’s what your question points to, but none of us have igured it out. What would be a yielding relationship — i.e. the mastery of non-mastery? GP - This is an issue that has traversed this conversation, if we take, as you suggested, the fetish as the starting point. And in Pietz, the fetish is, such as nature, always irreducibly material, something that beyond discourse or use, or function, still remains in excess. MT - I have another view of this object theory discussion, whereby it seems to me that every now and again, human cultures invoke the remote past, or pre-history, or some original time before time. And this occurs perhaps in crisis, both personal and macroeconomic. In Australian dream time, for instance, in the initiation of young men and women, the bodies of dancers are painted, the people meet for an extended period of days or weeks, scariication of the body or the male genitals may occur, and the initiates are exposed 180 savage-objects.indd 180 4/17/12 4:37 PM B O D I LY U N C O N S C I O U S - A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M I C H A E L TAU S S I G to secrets. My experience and reading of South American shamanism (so called) suggests a similar reaching back to a supposed prehistory at time of misfortune, pregnancy and menstruation; see my book on defacement concerning the Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego, for example); in the time before time animals and plants and stones were like human beings in a very diferent object universe. And I wonder if we look at the people in this conference in Berlin on animism, fascinated by things and objects as alive, whether they are not unconsciously entering into a new dreamtime caused by the sense of impending disaster, returning, that is to a time before time when stones talked to man and, so some would say, society was classless. 181 savage-objects.indd 181 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST “The cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a ‘good’ deinition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the ‘good’ deinition of a ‘good’ common world. It is ‘idiotic’ in so far as it is intended for those who think in this climate of emergency, without denying it in any way but nonetheless murmuring that there is perhaps something more important.” — Isabelle Stengers 1 “Any work of interpretation includes elements of uncertainty and intellectual self-efacement.” — Michael T. Taussig 2 “And then, oh, what to say? Bradley is no more than a detail; His torment is lost in the great universal torment.” — Victor Hugo 3 “To write one must return, return home at least.” — Marc Augé 4 182 savage-objects.indd 182 4/17/12 4:37 PM The Tower and Its Ghost A Cosmopolitical Narrative from Botswana Marcello Maggi 1234 I have recently returned from Gabarone, the capital of Botswana, where I lived for four years. A series of chance events which were diicult to control had brought me to the city. In the same way, a series of accidental circumstances would dictate my departure. I am a visual artist and that is how I came across the story I am about to tell. Soul It was last January, I don’t remember the date, but I do remember the heat and the pain when a Zimbabwean artist tattooed three runes on the left side of my neck. The day before, I had visited a friend who was a ngaka ya setso:5 he used those Scandinavian magical stones, although in Botswana there are other ways of 1 Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2005), 995. 2 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (The University of North California Press, 2010), 3. 3 Victor Hugo, Contro la Pena di Morte, (RCS, Milano, 2010), 228. 4 Marc Augé, Rovine e Macerie. Il Senso del Tempo, trans. A. Seraini (Torino, Bol- 5 Traditional doctor. lati Boringhieri, 2004), 10. 183 savage-objects.indd 183 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S interpreting fate. He had travelled widely, and had, for many years, denied his hereditary mission. On my insistence, however, and in light of our great friendship, he decided to open the bag of runes and tell me how things stood. The symbols shown in the stones he pulled from the bag spoke of me in mysterious ways; the message would be indelible. While I was still sitting there, next to a woman with a large rabbit tattooed on her midrif, both of us waiting for protective cream to be applied, I got a phone call; the keys to the tower had inally been found. Someone from the prison administration had them. I wanted to set up an exhibit in the tower – about a hundred automatic drawings, in ink on paper, depicting angelic beings. The idea was to take my inspiration from Klee’s Angelus Novus – the Benjaminian angel of disaster – but drawing out its meaning, and introducing motifs from a post-nuclear and cybernetic age in a place such as Botswana, which had witnessed the extreme acceleration of “progress” while maintaining sites full of secular fascination, original places in which everything might yet begin again. So, having waited this long, I could now open the door to the tower and see the place where I planned to set up my exhibition. I needed to get to know the interior of the building as soon as possible. The idea was to place the igures in ascending order along the stairway that led to the top. I also wanted to prepare a video in collaboration with Steve, an artist from Cape Town, to be projected on the tower’s façade; it would be shot from the rooftop, capturing a panoramic view of the town, as if through the eyes of one of Wim Wenders’ angels. The idea for this site speciic intervention had come to me some months before, when I was visiting some friends from the Tapong the art centre of the “Village” (one of the town’s central neighbour- 184 savage-objects.indd 184 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST hoods). I noticed the tower standing right directly in front: about ten metres high, with a small door and four tiny windows, two on each of the side façades. What I found most interesting was its verticality, an “axiomatic metaphor” which engaged the whole psyche, an anthropologist of the imaginary might say:6 a symbol of spiritual ascension, but also of fall. The irst thing I thought of was Klee’s angel. I asked about the building’s purpose and was told it was the old prison tower, the place where they used to hang the convicts. Next to the tower there were other buildings in ruins, these were the old prison facilities. The tower had long been the highest building in Gabarone – excluding, of course, all the recent architecture, starting in the late 1970’s. I was also told that the building was about to be classiied as a monument. Among the few monuments in town – the Morula Tree National Monument, the Sir Seretse Khama Monument, the BDF Monument, and not much more – the tower stands out, since it is the only one to be an architectonic construction, not a statue or a tree. There was also talk of setting up an extension of the Tapong in the prison, or after its restoration, turning it into a museum. In any case, the former prison was also to become a monument. Given the absence of other architectural monuments in the city, this information puzzled me. If the stone tower was in good condition and appeared to have some architectonic interest, the ruined prison, on the other hand, seemed to me of no value at all. There had been talk of the future of the two buildings for quite some time now, but the agreement with the National Museum hadn’t yet been settled.7 6 Gilbert Durand, Les Structures Anthropologiques de l’Imaginaire (Paris: Dunod, 1992). 7 The local journal Mmegi, on the 18th May 2011, mentions an interesting article 185 savage-objects.indd 185 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S The National Museum was where I irst headed, certain I would obtain some further information about the tower, as well as the necessary authorisation to carry through my artistic intervention. There I was told the National Museum had no jurisdiction on the building; I had to visit the National Archives to ind exact data on the building and its ownership. So, in the days that followed, I examined the archives for records, but, despite the staf’s help, I found nothing. There seemed to be no historical record of the tower. I abandoned my research for the time being and trusted the riddle to a journalist friend. Busy with other tasks, I had nearly forgotten my project when, on that torrid, cloudless, day I got the call. Dodo, the journalist, was calling to say she had found both the keys and some papers concerning the tower in a department of the Prison Administration. When I got there, I was given the following instructions: I should declare, in an application form, my personal data, as well as the objectives and purposes of my request. At the moment I was still unaware that this writing would be the ultimate reason for my research, so I just declared my artistic motivation. The request was denied; it was, a priori, impossible that it would even be considered, because my position would not allow it: I was not researching under the auspices of any university, nor was I a member of any NGO. I decided, with no hard feelings, to postpone the exhibition indeinitely once more. But since that day when I got Dodo’s call, things began to happen to me, a series of events, a subtle sequence of circumstances which made the tower become a kind of obsession of mine, a “savage object”. It was as if it was asking me insistently to unfold its meaning, to use it, to open it up to new possibilities. And yet, at the same time, as if due to some intentional and 186 savage-objects.indd 186 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST violent cruelty, the tower was able to escape the attribution of any plausible meaning. I kept meeting with Dodo to collect more information on the subject. She told me she had been born in that neighbourhood, and that the Village had once been the historic centre of Gabarone. She wanted to tell me what she knew about the tower. It held a disturbing allure: besides conirming that that was where everyone said the convicts were executed by hanging, she added that the tower was inhabited by the ghost of a prisoner. The news impressed me; I became convinced that my urge to represent spiritual beings in that place was not about showing the horror of the world as seen through the eyes of astral intelligences in some drawings. It was horror, to be sure, but that of a single soul, and an earthly one, still tethered to the world of matter. Not a hundred angels, but one singular being: a ghost. A few days later, I received a call from the National Museum. Thanks to information obtained from the Botswana Society 8 they now knew the true reason why the tower had been built; it was a water tower. It had last been operating during the years of the British “protectorate”. This information, they told me, had been found in Alec Campbell and Mike Main’s book, Guide to Greater Gaborone.9 The book, which seems to be a simple but much detailed touristic guide, has the undoubted merit of having about this issue. Accessed at: http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=915&dir=2011/ May/Wednesday18. 8 A non−governmental institution dedicated to scientiic, historic and cultural research on the country. Available at: www.botsoc.org.bw. 9 Alec Campbell and Mike Main, Guide to Greater Gaborone (Botswana: Pula Press, 2003). 187 savage-objects.indd 187 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S been written by two renowned experts on Botswana. However, the page which mentions the tower and its original function does not quote any sources.10 Meanwhile, I was so deeply involved in all other sorts of research that I did not attach much importance to the news received, despite the revelation it carried. Stars An atmosphere of uncertainty and mystery hovered around the tower, such imprecision of data as to confuse and obscure the meaning and value of an object that was about to be declared a monument. It seemed to me that the most important thing in the tower was its ghost, even if some now said that nobody had ever been hanged in that place. I could say that what interested me most in the architectonic construction was its Phantom Objectivity, to transpose, and therefore “betray”, Taussig’s meaning.11 If the expression is meant to explain what petriies social life, for me that stone building was animated with a force capable of resisting any deinitive objectiication. In that tower, there really was a ghost, and I had no other option but to go back to unearth it. Conferring with Dodo, we thought that the most obvious thing to do was to ask people who had been born and raised in the Village; this enabled us to gather precious information. But inding the locals was far from simple, because the Village had changed over the years: from the living centre of a country’s 10 In any case, in their book I was able gather more accurate historic data necessary to develop my research. 11 Cf. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, University of Chicago, 1987). 188 savage-objects.indd 188 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST history, it became, due to rapid urban expansion, a residential neighbourhood. Besides the numerous and relatively recent private residences, there are small buildings to house the professors at UB (University of Botswana). Nonetheless, we started by trying to pick out those of the passers by who seemed to have belonged there for some time now. The irst was the old guard of the City Council, the adjoining construction on the tower’s left side. Short and thin, his name was Tawonga: “That was the tower where prisoners were hanged”, he conirmed, claiming, very matter-offactly, that the spirit of a prisoner who was hung long ago still inhabits the tower. He said that, at night, his presence is easily detected, for he makes indescribable sounds; a mixture of piercing howls and powerful laughs. Some nights, Tawonga added with a wary expression (as if revealing an unutterable secret), the ghost climbs the outer stairs to the roof and, once on the rooftop, sits down to gaze upon the city from that unique perspective. When he is up there, the night becomes even darker and all the stars disappear. We look for conirmation from any other passer−by. We approach Dabilo, a woman who sells sweets and phone cards from a stall on the street corner: — “The ghost exists, I met him once and looked him in the face,” said Dabilo. “I was returning home one night, walking down the little street by the tower and, when I turned the corner, I saw him: he had the face of Miriam Makeba.” — “Miriam Makeba? The South-African singer, who died not long ago?” — “Yes, her.” He smiled at me and disappeared all of a sudden. 189 savage-objects.indd 189 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S The ghost’s existence is recognised and acknowledged by most of the local residents, although some did deny it or refuse to talk to me. A man walking by stops to tell me that not only does the ghost exist, but he often comes into his property to steal his chickens. Every time the man inds a chicken missing in the morning, he goes to the tower and inds, by the small door, clearly visible blood stains; the ghost has sacriiced the animal and devoured it. I write it all down in a notebook, thinking that it is enough for the day. Dodo and I agree to return to the area near the tower to try to reconstruct yet more fascinating episodes. What I didn’t know, in fact, was that I would soon have to leave the country. Rope I started doing more research, with few bibliographical references. There were enough, though, to satisfy my ever-increasing curiosity about Botswana and its capital – although I lived there, I did not know much, and what I did know was sketchy. I realized that, if the data we have today goes back to Prehistory (to the times of the Australopithecus, the South-African Thaung baby killed by an eagle two million and a half years ago), the fact is that what Western culture irst learned of this territory dates back to the Kongolkonferenz documents (1884-1885). Before it was declared an area under English “protectorate” – Bechuanaland – this territory of Southern Africa, almost completely barren, was the stage for many tribal wars. The main ethnic rivalries were between the Khoikhoi and the Basarwa: the former claimed dominance over the latter, considering themselves to be the “the real people” and considering the other San: “outsiders”. But if the 190 savage-objects.indd 190 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST Khoikhoi’s pastoral culture caused them to slowly migrate south, the San continue to occupy the lands of the plateau to this day. Since their DNA is without hybridizations, they are considered to be one of the last living groups directly descended from the ancient population out of which mankind evolved. They formed nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, people said to be endowed with sophisticated sensorial abilities.12 But they had to sufer abuse on the part of several other ethnic Botswanan groups, such as the Bangwaketse, the Bangwa and the Bakwena. The latter, after occupying the Bakhalagari area, in Molepolole, were themselves victims of the Boers’ Great Trek and of other groups such as the Bakololo. The history of the San people is a succession of injustices that last to this very day: we have only to point out the high incidence of AIDS and the humiliation they have been subjected to 12 Elias Canetti takes literally a pioneering work by W. H. I. Bleek, Lucy Catherine Lloyd and Georges McCall Theal, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: G. Allen & Co., 1911), 330-339 330-339): “A man tells the kids that watch over the arrival of his grandfather, “Look ye around for grandfather, for grandfather seems to be coming: this is why I feel the place of his body’s old wound”. The children look around: the children perceive the man coming. They say to their father: “A man is coming yonder”. Their father says to them: “Grandfather comes yonder, he would come to me: he was the one whose coming I felt at the place of his old. [...] An ostrich walks basking in the sun. Is bitten by a back insect [...] the ostrich scratches his neck with a paw. The Bushmen feel anything at the bottom of his own neck, in the precise place where the ostrich scratches. It’s like the feeling of blows that strike. This feeling tells the bushman that there is an ostrich around.” Cf. Elias Canetti, Masse et Puissance (Paris, Gallimard, 1966), 357-358. 191 savage-objects.indd 191 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S by the governmental authorities, who, for several years now, have been trying to remove them from the Kalahari Game Reserve, due to their agreements with the diamond companies. As far as the capital, Gabarone, in the days of the “protectorate”, the Village used to be its administrative centre. Besides the tower and the prison, the area included a fortress, the irst post oice in the country, the Magistrate’s House and a cemetery. Today the Tapong art centre is located in the site that was once the Magistrate’s House. Thus, the spatio-temporal sense of the tower is closely linked to the adjoining structures. Although in the past its function was not that of a prison, it nonetheless gives of the colonial power’s force of discipline and punishment. However, the rope that connects it to the past, in a strange semiotic metamorphosis, is the same that binds it to the present: we must stress the fact that Botswana still considers the death penalty to be legitimate.13 And if the tower has withstood the passage of time, in contrast to the prison ruins, such resistance brings it closer and connects it to a present in which, on the former site of the Magistrate’s House, an art centre was built. The name of the centre, Tapong, is tellingly allusive: in Setswana, the local language, it means rope. The tower is a historical sign,14 but one in permanent change: it always refers back to a sign other than itself. It carries out a strange gesture of de-territorialisation, at once standing in the same place and remaining within itself and (magically) resisting 13 See here: www.ditshwanelo.org.bw/death_penalty.html. 14 On the concept of the historic sign, cf. Santino Cavaciuti, “Il segno storico e il problema della sua conservazione”, in AAVV, Semantica delle Rovine (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2006), 271-274. 192 savage-objects.indd 192 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST 193 savage-objects.indd 193 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S the setbacks of time (urban transformations, the erosion of the years). As a sign, as a trace or mark, its meaning is purely archeological: its “origin” and its “coherent reason” can be deduced and take on meaning if we decide to see it from that constitutive “vertical” suggested by its immediate presence. Let us now consider the spatio-temporal factors. If, in its spatial dimension, the tower belongs to its place since the time it was built, in the temporal dimension, on the other hand, the past, present and future of this work of architecture are transformed in meaning and value: irst, the times of the protectorate, when the tower expressed its functionality in the same rigid terms in which it was framed between the prison, the City Council and the Magistrate’s House. The setting is less logical in the present, however, its meaning being continuously questioned by two institutional domains: the prison and the museum (domains which, by the way, would be both considered “heterotopic” by Michel Foucault).15 Here, space is no longer rigid and the structure is not framed rationally: the prison is in ruins, the City Council deals with diferent regulations and the Magistrate’s House has given way to an art centre. In the future (a future whose possibilities belong to the present) the tower shall acquire a new setting; a monumental frame which will connect it to the fate of the prison and, in a certain way also, to the fate of Tapong. If the present decides the future of the two constructions, by monumentalizing them, thus 15 For Foucault, heterotopic spaces are spaces which: “(…) distinguish themselves for being connected to all other spaces, in a way that suspends, neutralises or reverses the set of relations they themselves draw, relect or mirror (…) spaces which, in some way, are in contact with all others, and yet, contradict all other spaces”. Michel Foucault, Eterotopia. Luoghi e non-luoghi metropolitani (Milano: Mimesis, 2005), 19. 194 savage-objects.indd 194 4/17/12 4:37 PM THE TOWER AND ITS GHOST harking back to the rigid sense of a colonial past, it will do so by deinitively setting them in a globalised “spherologic” space16 in which everything must be included if it is not to lose its meaning, its consistency. In this hyper-inclusive stage, the small windows on the sides of tower, which now resemble blind eyes, will again become essential devices of a face: the stone face of a Bifrontal Janus. This image of the sacred divinity with two faces, symbol of passages, thresholds, and new beginnings – Varro deined Janus as the creator par excellence17 – moved me to explore a frantic, almost absurd, circle of ideas. Now I am here, back in my own country. I am still writing, researching, continuously looking for meaning. But, at this remove, everything becomes vaporous: meaning is extended, seeming to include the place where I ind myself as well. I remember having omitted an essential aspect in my research, one which would have altered its course had it been considered right away: the fact that animism is the most difused religion in Botswana.18 Now my bibliographical resources are even scarcer and I am reduced almost exclusively to the internet. I remember Botswana and its nostalgic mystery and, through the virtual screen of my computer I still look for that link, that subtle rope that connects me to those places. I keep inding information, mostly 16 For the concept of sphere and spherology, see Peter Sloterdijk. Cf., for example, 17 Marco Terenzio Varrone [Marcus Terentius Varro], Della Lingua Latina, VII, p. 26-27. 18 On the idea of animism as a mirror through which modernity sees itself and L’Ultima Sfera. Breve Storia Filosoica della Globalizzazione (Rome: Carocci, 2002). its image of otherness, cf. Anselm Franke, "Much trouble in the transportation of souls, or: the sudden disorganization of boundaries!", in Animism, vol. I. ed. Anselm Franke (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 11-53. 195 savage-objects.indd 195 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ethnographic, about the San. I come across important data that invariably lead me back to the ghost in the tower: the star, in the !Kung mythological tradition, is the heart of a dying shaman.19 And speaking of stars (those stars that the ghost managed to make disappear in the dark), there is a disease that the San called Star Sickness.20 The shamans used chickens to heal it. White and black chickens were used in the healing rituals, to expel the evil spirits. The same chickens the ghost used to steal. Those chickens, I have just found out, are the most important food source in the poor and rural areas: their absence indicates the most extreme poverty. And then, I read something else in the news about Miriam Makeba, who has very likely visited Botswana,21 and her never ending ight for human rights. The ghost, who lived in a tower whose original function was diicult to identify, inhabited a death space 22 on which the natives of the Village projected, through their fantasies, their identity, so that they would not lose it, so that they could preserve it. 19 Cf. Anne Solomon, “The myth of ritual origins? Ethnography, mythology and inter- 20 Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way: A Story of the First People (New York: 21 Miriam Makeba was married to the famous trumpet player Hug Masekela, who 22 On the concept of death space, see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, pretation of San rock art,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 52 (1997): 3-13. Picador, 2006), 272. lived in the country for a short period, during the times of the apartheid. and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, University of Chicago, 1987), 10. 196 savage-objects.indd 196 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 197 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 198 4/17/12 4:37 PM The Petriication of the Image Ayesha Hameed We start with two images: from the air, of tarps and cops; on the ground, a pair of hands outstretched. Or we start with an image remembered of a forest teeming with vines and snakes and heat and danger. No place to be civil. The Jungle On the 22nd of September 2009 at 8am six hundred CRS oicers entered the wooded area outside Calais where migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan had been camped out over the course of several years en route to trying to get into the UK. Although over 1500 people lived in these camps, the publicity of the upcoming raid led several of them to leave beforehand, leaving about 278 migrants there, at least half of them children. It took the CRS 15 minutes to pass the human shield created by activists and to clear the camp, sending the migrants to detention centres across the country and minors to the Metz-Queuleu detention centre. Then the bulldozers came in and razed the site. My point of entry into this event is the violence embedded in calling where the migrants were living la jungle. The press explains that it comes from a Pushtun word for the forest, but that does not fully explain its signiicance, or why it became a catch-all term for the living conditions for the migrants outside 199 savage-objects.indd 199 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S of Calais. When migrants escaping the raid moved to the Gard de Nord in Paris, the press dubbed the Park Villemin nearby as the Parisian jungle. The term la jungle became a modular term that linked migrants to the outdoor spaces where they camped. But there are other lives that arise in the circulation of the image of la jungle that is separate from what it meant when it was coined by the migrants themselves. But part of what makes this image so easy to circulate is that congeals within it several ways of framing and controlling migration. It is what Hito Steyerl would call a poor image from an imperfect cinema, an image whose value increases with its easy circulation. The dissolution of bodies into the landscape gets congealed into an image that takes on its own life, enters into the world of exchange value. And what of the use value, the event itself? Steyerl calls the residues of the poor images the wretched of the screen. In the heightened attention to space and the life of things and bodies, what is revealed are inner processes and logics of the event or more precisely its immanent aesthetics. In other words, rather than making a ilm or taking photographs, the event itself produces its own imagery that contains an aesthetic quality that is germane to its historical and political existence. I. This is an attempt to take stock of the razing of la jungle migrant camp. To see what afterimages this event produces both material and immaterial and the life that such images have. I want to look at the circulation of three kinds of stories that bury and supplant 200 savage-objects.indd 200 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E the event itself in the zombie-like circulation of images in the aftermath of a violent event. I am interested in the life that is embedded in the circulation of the image produced by a name like la jungle. The destruction of the space, the violence of the razing that piles emblematically over the violence of incarceration and the quest for asylum in a sense transmutes the image of the jungle into something profanated, but also animated in a monstrous condensation of person and land that as an image is an actor. The ideological work in linking these migrants to a space called la jungle – especially in an urban setting like Paris is quite clear, coniguring them as inhabiting a state of nature, charging them as other and as somehow primitive. I would like to push this further and argue that the jungle describes a congealed landscape, or what Adorno, in “the idea of natural history” would call ontologized ahistorical nature, that is evoked in the service of containing migrants, that plays a sleight of hand in invoking a speciic spatial location but then conferring on it a primordial, ahistorical quality. ig. 1 — Watercolour of Mowgli with Kaa and Bagheera. savage-objects.indd 201 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S La jungle is a site that constantly produces images. What is staged is the irruption of history and fable in the invocation of the term. In Hindi “jungle” is the word for forest, but in its transition to the West it gains another meaning. The jungle connotes a wildness, a zone of danger, the victory of the viral and uncivilized. It is feral like Mowgli the child of the commons who Peter Linebaugh describes as standing at the threshold between the lost life of the wilderness and the civilizing gesture of enclosure. What is the razing of the jungle then but a rooting out of the virus of otherness contaminating the inside, of the alternative of commons to the striation of border control. The jungle is of another place and time and can and must be purged. And Mowgli and the jungle as repository of fable and myth are transmuted through violence into objects both magical and profane. The purging of the jungle and the mining of its fabular past is measured by another fantasy: the spanning of the English Channel. From the beginning of the nineteenth century French scientists like Albert Mathieu and Thomé de Gamond proposed plans to build tunnels under the channel with horse drawn carriages, lit with lamps; then as an underground railroad. These utopian plans saw a future without Mowglis, neat lines loating across space unencumbered by any trace of the unwanted. A mythical future. To Adorno, history and nature when examined separately, take on an ontological, mythical quality. Mythical history is that which is separated from the speciicity and the locatedness of nature while mythical nature, divorced from history or a sense of progression, is conigured as a perpetual cycle. This sense of perpetuity and ahistorical nature, is what I mentioned earlier is evoked in the term la jungle. From this point of view, the problem of housing migrants is seen as an unending cycle of containment 202 savage-objects.indd 202 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E ig. 2 —Plan for the Channel tunnel by Thomé de Gamond. and iniltration in constant alternation, where the problem of migrants is displaced onto nature and built space. However, the intersection of history and nature in the form of natural history reveals the contingency, the transitory nature, the tactical quality of both, and we can see what these reiied concepts look like once they disenchant one another. These remnants of reiied nature, are the only way we can move from the world of appearances and totality to things. In terms of this discussion, the primordiality, the ahistoricality of the term la jungle is demythiied by revealing its complicity with the enforcement of the UK and the EU border regimes, and with revealing how the reiication of migrant living conditions is used in the mobilization of unfeasible spatial solutions. 203 savage-objects.indd 203 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Agency comes in the appropriation and disenchantment of these reiied objects, in unmasking of the “primordiality” of the jungle, the persistence of migrants who inspite of the varieties of terrible living conditions, in fact have remained a constant presence in Calais, even at the expense of their own skin, their bodily borders and health. These living conditions need to be changed but the agency of migrants in the face of these draconian measures cannot be denied. The border then inlects and collapses not only the registers of the body, territory and state, but also shows how the border is drawn in the cooptation of the reiied and abject body from above; and how resistance lies in the demythiication of that process from below. II. ig. 3 — Aerial view of a camp in the woods near Calais, known locally as la jungle. Photo by Pascal Rossignol. 204 savage-objects.indd 204 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E ig. 4 — Eric Besson press conference at la jungle. Photo by Jason Parkinson. Then we have the media event – this is theatre. This is an image of the aftermath of the highly publicized razing of the jungle. The jungle is the stage, the media it’s chorus and the interior minister Eric Besson’s visit, that of the conquering hero. This media event inhabits this site that is both evacuated of its migrants and meaning, and in that evacuation makes for an image that circulates with all the greater ease. This turn to landscape as a means of control is an ongoing strategy of containing migrants in this site that did not begin with “the jungle”. To this end I would like to describe the built space of the Sangatte refugee camp that preceded the establishment and the destruction of the jungle outside of Calais. The Sangatte Refugee Centre was originally a storage facility used in the construction of the Channel Tunnel. The Sangatte Refugee centre was opened in August 1999 to provide food and shelter to migrants in Calais hoping to get to the UK to claim asylum status, and to prevent them from camping in a park in 205 savage-objects.indd 205 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S the heart of Calais. The building, a 25 000 square metre old storage house had no heat, and few showers and its target capacity of 700 inhabitants was quickly exceeded, reaching 1800 in the irst year alone. The tightening of the border to the UK turned Sangatte into a city. As Didier Fassin notes “with its circulation of people among a city of large tents, its huge canteen where long queues waited for meals, its prefab buildings housing administrative and medical services, and its open space for Muslim worship, this ‘small town’ began to acquire distinctively urban features”. But it was a city with laws, where overcrowding and overlowing toilets and bleak prospects for crossing made it a diicult place to live. As one migrant states in the 2002 documentary Le Piège de Sangatte: “There are two kinds of jails you can say, one is the kind you are trapped and closed in. The other one is where they don’t let you go anywhere. Not accepting and not letting anywhere. In my point of view we’re in the second kind of jail.” The sense of being trapped had its legal implications. Often migrants sought to go to the UK as they spoke the language, and had relatives there. They also hoped for better living conditions than what they found in France. Also, as Mark Thomson states, police outside the centre often prevented migrants from receiving multilingual pamphlets with procedural information on applying for asylum in France. As one of his irst acts as interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy closed down the centre in 2003. The centre was described by UK home secretary, David Blunkett as a “festering sore” in relations between the UK and France. As a “magnet” for migrants and “evil” smugglers, it became the scapegoat for the “problem” of migration. In other words, Sangatte as a reiied site became the cause 206 savage-objects.indd 206 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E of migration low, rather than a spatial stopgap in a crisis in their living conditions. After its closure, as migrants again lived precariously on the street, under bridges and in parks in Calais and Paris, the media and the government began speaking warningly of the spectre of a “Sangatte 2”. Sangatte 2 was a spectral place that evoked the principle of the magnet as space and haunted the discourse around immigration in Calais, and prevented the establishment of alternate living quarters, and conined humanitarian organizations to providing food rather than shelter. One anonymous member of the no border camp that summer described the walk to the camp: “a six lane highway, littered with signs of human habitation: abandoned blankets and shoes, and narrow tracks along the roadside. We met groups of men going in both directions, and they looked at us with unmasked surprise, wondering who were these strange white-folk, who were not the police, but were out walking their sunset trails. Grim destitution: pockets of cardboard cities, huddled up against old industrial warehouses, and hundreds of people queuing for food.” The camps and personal property were destroyed on a regular basis by the police, well before the September raid. There were no showers and the water at the beach was heavily polluted. There was an outbreak of scabies, and many migrants had leg injuries and cuts as a result of falling from trucks and of fences. El-do--: The desire for asylum in the UK, was described in the Guardian and elsewhere as a quest for Eldorado - a spectral place, like that of Sangatte 2 that belies the stringency of what the migrants are contending with. Reports like that by the La Coordination française pour le droit d’asile describe barriers to migrants applying for asylum to France, including: the lack of facilities for the many unaccompanied minors; the negative 207 savage-objects.indd 207 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S experience of their reception; the lack of procedural information on seeking asylum; the distance of Arras, the nearest centre from Calais; the lack of accommodation etc. This is on top of the continuous harassments, ines for camping, frequent incarceration that the migrant in Calais faces on a daily basis. III. This is a publicity still taken from the ilm Qu’ils reposent en revolt. It is an image of the hands of a migrant who has attempted to burn his ingerprints of so that he can avoid identiication. His hands then carries the imprint of the law and of his own journey. But more than this we cannot look and we cannot look away. The image, a publicity still for a ilm shot in black and white, whose grainy texture is as much an image as the hands and scars themselves. We cannot look away and yet we look. ig. 5 — Still from the ilm Q'ils reposent on revolt. Image by Sylvain George. savage-objects.indd 208 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E One of the biggest deterrents is the safe irst country agreement, otherwise known as Dublin 2. This law requires the migrant to seek asylum in the irst EU country that they have entered and been ingerprinted in – which in many of these cases is Greece or Italy where facilities are the least predictable, the rate of success of being granted asylum is very low, and the treatment of asylum seekers is very harsh. The looming presence of this third country, and the threat of being deported back there, is so unacceptable to many migrants that it became a common practice in the jungle for them to try to erase their own ingerprints – by drinking chemicals and by burning of the skin on their ingertips. The act of self-injury resonates with the terribleness of living conditions of the camps. It also forms a limit concept – making the migrant body, the state and international law inextricable, and collapsing several registers of border control. The implication of the body within the topology of the border shows its relation to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. According to Kristeva the dissolution of boundaries gives rise to the abject. What divides the subject from the world dissolves for the abject. To Kristeva, the boundary between the body and outside becomes diicult to diferentiate from the body itself making what is outside, the excremental, the grotesque and the unwanted, a part of the self. It dissolves the orderedness of identity and the world, and ushers in a state of indeterminacy, in-between-ness and ambiguity. The implication of the abject body collapses the registers of the state, territory and body onto the border. It also calls attention to the diferent strategies of containment that borders operate on and the fears that are concomitant with their dissolution. The relocation of migrants from the parks of Calais to the Sangatte Refugee Centre to the inhabitation of the jungle outside Calais, 209 savage-objects.indd 209 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S in this light can be seen as spatial, environmental strategies of containment in response to the iniltration and visibility of migrants in city centres. In this context then the border shifts around as well – where through the Touquet treaty, the UK border controls move into Calais, and into train stations and into jurisdiction of private companies like Eurostar, where international law is established between EU states to circumvent internal laws in dealing with migrants, where between municipality and centre, between nations – a game of pass-the-parcel is played around accountability in dealing fairly and systematically with asylum seekers The image of the reiied abject body parallels the congealing of the landscape of the jungle in the promulgation of border controls. From this perspective Sangatte’s description as a “festering sore” – draws its appearance of veracity from the real health problems of its inhabitants, and collapses the semantic distance between the two. Continuing this logic, Sangatte contains the disease of migrancy while the iniltration of migrants into the parks of Calais and Paris infect these cities. Finally the jungle is a primordial and unconined space of disease, where the humanitarian concern with living conditions collapses into its treatment at the hands of the state that purges or vaccinates it. The act of destroying these ingerprints and the image it produces and which circulates recapitulates the moment of its inception. In 1858 William Herschel the Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor was inalizing a contract with Rajyadhar Konai to purchase some “ghooting”, a binding material to build light roads. When Konai was about to sign the contract, Herschel was inspired to ask Konai to make a stamp of his hand on the contract. Herschel had no thought of the actual imprint 210 savage-objects.indd 210 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E and its veracity. Rather it was the gesture of implicating Konai’s hand and by extension his body into the contract. “I was only wishing to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter”. He wanted to frighten Konai into honouring the contract by marking him and using that mark as a contract. This gesture of pulling a hand to a document in the building of a country road in colonial India bookends the moment of refusal and violent abject agency in the refusal of Dublin 2. In both moments the land is encoded into the hand and the moment of frightening Konai the “native” non insurgent into honouring his commitment to supply materials to build the road is negated by the territorial tracks scored painfully on the hand of the migrants travelling not in the margins but towards the metropolitan centre and refusing the paper, legal and territorial trails leading them there. ig. 6 — Herschel ingerprint. 211 savage-objects.indd 211 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Conclusion Between the poor image and the wretched of the screen lies the ambivalent potential of the image that resides between revelation and profanation. The wretched of the screen, the event itself is the object always in excess of the poor image that circulates. Congealed in the images is the tension between what is inside and outside its frame. Thus the image of la jungle contains at its margins the bodies of the migrants who live there; the hands and burned ingerprints of these migrants encapsulates the journey from Italy or Greece to France; the prehistorical of la jungle always contains the fantasy of its own expulsion. These images are de-congealed and torn apart by a method - what Derek Gregory calls a montage, that swoops from the air to the ground and is punctuated by irruptions of history and memory. This is, following Sebald, a natural history of destruction where the agency of the body is only recuperable in this collage of multiple angles of space that is punctured by time and ravaged in a hollowed out media event. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon says: “The appearance of the settler has meant in terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petriication of individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler. This then is the correspondence, term by term, between the two trains of reasoning.” Petriication means to feel fear in the face of the power of the settler. But more importantly, petriication means to turn to stone, and this turning into stone is only measured when the settler turns into a decaying mass, into the earth as well, into a rotting corpse. And in this reckoning is where another life can 212 savage-objects.indd 212 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E arise again. The native here could be the migrant or the refugee and the settler could be the colonizer and the arm of the state, and in their material relations is embedded the turning into stone, decaying into earth. A liminal but spaced space inhabited by what Mbembe calls the diference between the living dead and the plain dead. But this isn’t enough. Is there an analogous way for humans to become nature through the ravages of capital just as nature becomes animated under its guise? In a lecture in Philadelphia Silvia Frederici describes how the labourer becomes the object of his labour. Through thousands of generations of labour the farm worker becomes a cow, the tiller becomes the fruit of the soil, the sailor becomes the rhythm of the waves by lying on loor of his ship and inding his way home. Here the pivot is the act of labour that is the site of transmutation. This is the positive register of becoming nature. What is its negative? It is the turning into stone, the production of death at the border, the turning of the state into a corpse and the native into stone and an image ingrained. But this isn’t enough. 213 savage-objects.indd 213 4/17/12 4:37 PM T H E P E T R I F I C AT I O N O F T H E I M A G E 214 savage-objects.indd 214 4/17/12 4:37 PM On the Earth-Object Paulo Tavares Globalization “Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy”, Michel Serres wrote in The Natural Contract, 1990.1 Certainly this was not the irst time humans realized that nature was a crucial factor in their futurehistory. Yet the statement carries novelty, for the turn from the 80s to the 90s was perhaps the moment when it became possible — and indeed necessary — to think the entanglements between environments and humans, nature and history, at an unprecedented scale: “global”. While the globe as a igure of thought had been present throughout the history of western philosophy,2 Serres’ 1 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (University of Michigan Press, 1990), 4. 2 The idea of the globe, as Peter Sloterdjik’s spherology shows, dates back to the metaphysics of classical antiquity. “Combining geometry with ontology”, ancient philosophy/cosmology adopted the sphere as the representation of the totality of the world and conceptualized humans as creatures that inhabited a global construction. Images of the globe would be recurrently actualized throughout European history as the elementary space from which the position of humanity in relation to nature was progressively deined. Sloterdjik then proceeded to identify the multiple manifestations of the sphere/globe as a privileged mode of depicting the world, from the visions of the sphere-as-cosmos of classic antiquity up to early modernity/colonialism, when “metaphysical globalization” turns into “terrestrial globalization”, that is to say, when the globe starts to be thought and 215 savage-objects.indd 215 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S use of the term “global” is slightly – and signiicantly – distinct: he refers less to a subjective projection or mathematical, cartographic construction, and more to an objective, material reality which arguably had no previous parallel in “natural history”, something akin to the phenomena described by Frederic Jameson in the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984: “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodiied areas... a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature”.3 The global-reach of the market and the geographic difusion of modern technologies drained out the resource of radical alterity provided by Nature (with a capital letter), Jameson argues, dislocating a fundamental referential point against which mankind was conceived in western modernity. The transformation was twofold: an entire new form of space was being produced while simultaneously forcing society to assume a complete diferent position in relation to it. For Serres the uniqueness of the situation was most perceptible precisely because of its (lack of) scale: “suddenly a local object, nature, on which a merely partial subject could act, becomes a global objective, Planet Earth, on which a new, total subject, humanity, is toiling away”. 4 The course of history has always been inluenced, either constrained or potentiated, produced in its earthly dimensions via European colonial expansion. Throughout that history, a constant motive: the enunciation of power, mastery and rule has been structurally attached to images of control and possession of the globe. Peter Sloterdiik, Esferas II (Madrid: Siruela, 2003). 3 Frederic Jameson,”The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. M. G. Durham & D. M. Keller (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 506. 4 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 5. 216 savage-objects.indd 216 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT by environmental conditionings, but now the human habitat assumed diferent qualitative dimensions. The limits imposed by nature were no longer given on a local – i.e. cultural – setting, but had assumed global – i.e. universal – proportions. And hence global nature’s subjective complement: humanity. Michel Serres starts by describing Fight with Cudgels, a painting by Francesco Goya produced between 1820 and 1823. In the image two men are depicted in the middle of an open landscape, engaging in a duelo a garrotazos. They appear attacking each other, while knee deep and sinking deeper into a swamp of mud. Serres uses Goya’s image as an allegory to elaborate his critique of the relationship between humans and their environment: the ight symbolizes war, and by extension the “social contract”, and while war/politics is fought through, they seem to be somewhat oblivious of their surroundings environment. And yet they are entirely subject to the environment, and the mud will swallow them up, unto the verge of “collective death”, regardless the victor and the defeated. The preface to Serres’ book could very well have been a plethora of paradigmatic environmental disasters that the world has experienced in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Most signiicantly, on the communist side, the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986, which, as Mikhail Gorbachev himself put it, “was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union ive years later”.5 On the capitalist side of the map, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in 1989, the largest oil-related accident in the history of the Unites States before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, whose 5 Mikhail Gorbachev, “Turning point at Chernobyl”, Project Syndicate, April 14th 2006, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gorbachev3/English. 217 savage-objects.indd 217 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S catastrophic efects on the pristine shores of Alaska turned into a mass-media event that was fundamental in the crystallization of a public sensibility in relation to the emergence of an environmental crisis. If globalization has increasingly became an objective reality and humanity a subjective consciousness, it is not only because our nervous systems have been electronically extended to the point of “global embrace”, as Marshal McLuhan wrote in 19646, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of the potential consequences of what ecologist Wolfgang Sachs has called a “massive accidental internationalization”.7 The emerging “global nature” and its subjective complement, “humanity”, were the two entangled outcomes of a dystopian future: the potential of total disaster and subsequent impossibility for human life on the planet forcefully unites us subjectively and objectively: morally as a trans-national community who bears the responsibility of preserving the life of the planet; physically as a single species inhabiting a common land upon which our existence is dependant. Modernization, according to Serres, was founded on unrestrained, unregulated violence, both civilian and military, directed onto the natural world. Given the widespread ecological depletion generated by the military-industrial complex of Cold War economies, this new globe-object needed to be protected by the introduction of a new form of legal contract between humanity and nature: the natural contract (as opposed to the “social 6 Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York and 7 Wolfgang Sachs, “Environment”, in The Development Dictionary: a guide to knowl- London: Routledge, 2001), 3 (irst published in 1964). edge as power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (New York and London: Zed Books, 2010), 25. (irst published in 1992). 218 savage-objects.indd 218 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT ig. 1. Francisco de Goya. Fight with Cudgels. 1820-1823. Oil, originally on plastering, transferred to canvas.123 x 266 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. contract”). Rather than the natural outcome of the progress and material accumulation initiated with modernity/colonialism, Serres’ “globalization” denotes an entire new spatial coniguration that, having emerged out of the former, positions a critical perspective upon it. Insofar as mankind could design and operate technologies whose temporal, spatial and energetic dimensions were at the same scale as worldwide phenomena, humanity, observed collectively, turned into the equivalent of a natural force: “from now on there will be lakes of humanity, physical actors in the physical systems of the Earth”.8 “Global nature” is therefore and above all a space deined by a new socio-geological order in which the divisions that separated humanity and the environment, culture and nature, the anthropological and the geological have been blurred. In other words, spatial shifts were 8 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 8. 219 savage-objects.indd 219 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S not only technological but relational, and therefore demanded a “new geo-politics” which, ultimately, called for the establishment of a New Constitution — “a new social contract”, as Serres put it — in which nature was positioned on a common ground in relation to humans and assumed the status of a right-bearing subject: the living globe. “Only One Earth” Arguably, one of the main forces for the consolidation of globalization was the construction of the environment as a symbolic site for transnational collective identiication as well as a new space of intervention. Serres’ text owed much to this larger framework that was formed during the 70s and 80s. Natural Contract can be read alongside discourses that emerged out of the circles of ecological science and environmental activism that had already gained relative consensus in the forums of the “international community” by the time it was published. In 1987, for example, with the publication of Our Common Future, the UN-commissioned report on the global environment prepared for the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the notion of “sustainability” was oicially introduced as a central mandate in the spheres of global governance.9 Advocacy on behalf of nature was not a novelty itself, but early modern environmentalism had concentrated eforts to preserve endangered species and wild habitats, or to promote more “eicient” modes of extracting natural resources via strategies of conservation in localized areas. The ecological 9 World Commission on Environment and Development, Our common future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). This report was published for the Un Earth Summit Rio-92. 220 savage-objects.indd 220 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT thinking that emerged out of the toxic-networks generated by the Cold War’s industrial machine led to a complete shift in the understanding of the globe as a political space. More than ecology, it was the concept of ecosystem that played a decisive role in that process. Ecological science was developed inside the limits of biology, whereas ecosystem theories expanded ecology out of its traditional frames to encompass a more complex and interdisciplinary ield that included economics, demographics, geographies and other areas dealing with anthropogenic variables. In short, it allowed talking about hybrids of nature-culture as complex self-regulating ecological units. In the post-war period the close ailiations between cybernetics and ecology helped to expand holistic notions of “global nature” to the highly technologic environment of the western-world and ecosystem soon turned into a central term in the lexicon of environmental discourse. While preserving the idea of wholeness and vitalist connotations, ecosystem added a more mechanistic and managerial approach to ecological thought. Concepts of self-regulation, homeostatic balance, communicative feedback loops and optimal performance were central in shaping the new environmental ethos that emerged in the 70s. Ultimately, they were responsible to give concrete spatial form to an entire new perception of the earth-space, which was gradually transformed into a political ield when environmental discourse embraced ecology’s holism and assumed the “defence of the Planet” as its mandate. “Only One Earth” — the slogan of the irst UN Summit on the Environment held in Stockholm in 1972 — was projected as common space inhabited by a human community tied by ecological bounds that ignored national diferences, a subjective construction that the Apollo 11 images would help to reinforce in 221 savage-objects.indd 221 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S collective imagination. The planet and mankind, global nature and humanity were related as two entangled parts of a fragile system whose equilibrium relies on a delicate balance between its components and, therefore, the prospect of environmental decline was symptomatic of a certain tendency towards entropy that needed to be remediated. Above the communism vs. capitalism divide, the environmental crisis was characterized as a profound disequilibrium between our species and nature that posed a fundamental ethical question for humanity as such. While the Earth emerged as a common, “only one globe”, the politics for the “protection of the planet” led to the comprehension that the environment would demand certain systems of care and policing operating at international scale. Rather than a barrier enclosing nature against anthropogenic-forces, post-war ecological ethos manifested a deeper and more complex integration of “the natural” into the networks and techniques of law, science, economy and governance. Besides the input of ecology and counter-cultural critique, “environmental consciousness” was also shaped by Malthusian fears of demographic explosion, resource scarcity and world-disorder. Hence it was necessary to incorporate a certain “planning rational” that would be enacted according to those emerging ecological-political equations that were being drawn at a global scale. Inside the bureaus of the UN, aid-agencies and academic circles, James Lovelock’s Gaia lost its mythical powers and was reduced to statistical analysis, economic programmes, and scientiic expertise. In parallel, environmental anxieties would be gradually combined with security issues. If the calculated conclusion of a “global” environmental crisis was the prognostic of death at the level of the species, this new form of bio-political construction called for governmental rationalities 222 savage-objects.indd 222 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT operating at an international level, since, so to say, the right over life and death had escaped the jurisdiction of national sovereignty. During the 70s and 80s the “defence of the environment” was mostly articulated by scientiic-discourse or political activism on the ground, remaining considerably antagonistic in relation to the imperatives of economic growth and technological progress that characterized the developmental decades. In the twenty years that separate the Stockholm Convention and Rio-92, that situation was completely transformed. Oil-spills, chemical leaks, deforestation and anti-nuclear power protests insistently occupied the headlines of international media; governmental and non-governmental environmental organizations proliferated; and the ield of “environmental sciences” — a form of applied eco-geology that speciically deals with the study and “remediation” of man-natural assemblages — turned into a well-developed academic discipline and economic business. While Stockholm expresses the arrival of the environmental question into the oicial forums of international politics, Rio-92 marks its consolidation. In between those two moments, the terms of the equation were completely inverted: whereas environmental discourse was perceived as opposed to the developmental intents of curbing world poverty of the 70s, in the 90s it was poverty that became one of environment’s most feared enemies. Growing population aggregated to lack of means reinforced the burden on natural resources, generating a vicious cycle of lack/scarcity, ecological depletion and global insecurity. “Development”, the main planning concept of the previous decades, could not be completely dismissed, but should be better qualiied, because if unrestricted, unlimited and unmonitored, it would engender larger risks than the ones it aimed at prevailing. 223 savage-objects.indd 223 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S “Sustainability” stands for that moment when the planet turned into a total global environment, for in order to save the planet, it was irst necessary to “environ” the earth, enveloping its ungovernable rhythms into discourses and practices that would be deployed in order to better calibrate the global balance between anthropogenic action and biological rhythms. Up until the 70s, global concerns evolved in a one-way direction, towards the difusion of modernization, but by the late 80s, our concerns had shift considerably, for it became necessary not only to difuse modernization but also simultaneously deal with its immanent and constitutive risks. Modernity, in Ulrich Beck’s famous analogy, became “self-relexive”, not only concerned with the imperatives of uprooting people from the past and fostering progress, but with problems that resulted from the very nature of progress rather then from the lack thereof10. Being conscious of its inherent accidental dimensions, “sustainable development” — or for that matter, “sustainable modernity” — transformed the accident-in-potential into an economy, calculating its probabilities in order to balance the risks and safety-costs of interventions. The developmental-logic continues, but it now acknowledges that the hazards — what is called “externalities” in the economic jargon — that are systematically produced by modernization would need to be minimized, modulated, channelled and distributed. We are therefore moving out of that globe organized according to the “developmental gap” towards a globe divided according to the “risk diferential” — populations and territories divided by their susceptibility and capacity to respond to the coming “total environmental catastrophe”. Not only the (uneven) distribution 10 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992). 224 savage-objects.indd 224 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT of wealth, but also the lines that divide the class of the insured from the class of the uninsured according to the selective politicaleconomy of risk distribution operating around the globe. The Earth-Political “The fundamental event of modernity”, Martin Heidegger remarked, “is the conquest of the world as picture”. 11 But not only as picture, one should add, for the imaging of the globe is simultaneously the means by which an object of appropriation/intervention is encompassed. This history was tempered by ethical intents aimed at moderating the violence that is structural to the logics of mastery and possession that deines the relation between modern reasoning and the non-human world. Throughout that process, the earth was materially and symbolic constructed as the bearer of a certain universalism – the household of all life and the ultimate jurisdiction of “the community of humans”. From its early manifestations in nineteenth century to its late modern cybernetic connotations, the basic idea that the planet operates as a organism to which “humans” should adapt in order to recuperate and prolong an ontological harmony between man and nature has remained central to environmental discourse. And hence the structural paradox of ecological universal ethos: for while it pleas for a trans-nationalism on behalf of a common globe, it also erases much of the political contingencies implied in the historical process by which “Only One Earth” came into being. 11 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in Of the beaten track., ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002), 71. (irst published in 1938) 225 savage-objects.indd 225 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ig. 2 — Earth-object. Paulo Tavares, 2012. 226 savage-objects.indd 226 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT The problem of this project is not so much that it erases cultural diversity in the name of a western-centred homogeneous universal humanity. The more crucial point is that it veils the modes by which “other natures” are excluded on behalf of the hegemonic construction of a single earth. To be sure, colonial/modernity was a force that attempted to destroy and model other cultures in relation to its own image. But it is also true that alterity is structural to modernity, even if only in the form of a domesticated (or repressed) imaginary resource or as a subjected position that functions to legitimize power hierarchies. Rather than cultural diference, what modernity cannot tolerate is a diferent nature, i.e. a certain political-ecology that stands in dissent with the hegemonic nature upon which the multi-cultural universalism of modernity was erected. The relevant political question therefore is not so much how culturally tolerant the enlightened, western-based category of universal humanity can be, but precisely the opposite, how could modernity accommodate “diferent natures” besides and beyond the monolithic version upon which it was constituted. The history of environmentalism is in many respects the evolving of a critical response to the modes by which modern episteme restricts the non-human world to strictly utilitarian and economic means. Yet modern ecological ethos had for the most part operated as a way of moderating man’s violence towards nature rather than breaking up with the foundational scheme that legitimates it. While environmental discourse/activism speaks on behalf of all — i.e. humanity —, it remains committed to protect and caring for an “universal nature” that it takes as naturally given. The ecological-political problem, therefore, remains open, and refers to whether politics should concentrate its discourses 227 savage-objects.indd 227 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S on behalf of that natural which it assumes as universal or rather should focus on the attempt to unsettle the very hegemony of the modern/colonial construction of nature and the global consensus around what the earth stands for. To a large extent, this is precisely what Michel Serres was trying to convey: “Objects themselves are legal subjects and no longer mere material for appropriation, even collective appropriation. Law tries to limit abusive parasitism among men but does not speak of this same action on things. If objects themselves become legal subjects, then all scales tend toward equilibrium”12 The central argument thus follows: as history has made humans equivalent to natural forces, reversely, nature should be endowed with similar fundamental rights to the ones conquered by humans along history. Emerging in parallel to the environmental discourse/ethos, contemporary environmental legislation also operates as a way of moderating — that is to say, legislating — human violence towards the world. Sustainability is nothing but the inscription of a certain “legal check” into a regime of so far unrestricted physical destruction. So thus is Serres’s proposal for a Natural Contract. Yet the logics are completely distinct, for while the former attempts to regulate anthropocentric action, the later establishes fundamental rights to other than humans. It’s a meaningful diference: sustainability is an ethics of policing – i.e. modulating human-nature relations/boundaries already 12 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 37. 228 savage-objects.indd 228 4/17/12 4:37 PM ON THE EARTH-OBJECT established; the “natural contract” is an ethics of the political – i.e. it confronts a human-nature world with an-other human-nature world and claims for a “new equality”. Serres’s globalization is the history of the coming into being of a distinct globe which, while being born out of modernity/coloniality, relexively challenges the very system of partitions between nature and culture that sustain its regime. For nature was that part of the common globe that had no part in modern politics, law or history, insofar as its speech was regarded as “pure natural”, merely noise or raw data, and therefore excluded from the bounds of language/politics. Yet with increasing frequency and relevance nature’s speech appears as a collective moral warrant, either translated by science, mediated in legal courts, or as the material testimony of modernity’s violence that remains registered in the social-ecosystems of disaster zones such as Bophal, Chernobyl, the Niger Delta or the Napo Basin in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The history of modernity could be narrated as a longue-durée process of environing the earth. What we call globalization – that moment in history when inancial markets, communication networks, energetic technologies, and ecological accidents turned into “world-objects”13- is the last snapshot of that movement by which the planet was surrounded, up to a point in which that process has practically reached the totality of life, at least in relation to what concerns the life of the human species and to that on which 13 “By world-objects I mean tools with a dimension that is commensurable with one of the dimensions of the world. A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy, the Internet for space, and nuclear waste for time…these are four examples of world-objects.” Michel Serres, “Revisiting the Natural Contract”, CTheory, November 5th, 2006, available at: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=515. 229 savage-objects.indd 229 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S it depends: “global nature”. After the “terrestrial globe” initiated with early modernity/colonialism, the “bio-spherical globe” that emerges with late nineteenth century with bio-geography, and the eco-systemic turn of the 60s and 70s, we maybe experiencing the formation of new sensibility towards the planet, more geological than territorial or biological, and therefore, a new reality in which the political terrain is no longer only the geo- or the bio-, but something I would tentatively call the earth-political. In the 70s, when the ecological discourse was surfacing, geo-political power was disputed as a matter of reaching the outer space — escaping the Earth. Today’s crucial problem is that power will engage much more intimately and forcefully with the materiality of the planet, drilling deeper into the earth, scanning its hidden surfaces, trying to uncover sources of material wealth under melting glaciers and new discovered terrains – extracting, sectioning, dividing and re-articulating local and global ecologies. If ecology can be thought as political, its most urgent problem is not so much safeguarding nature, but challenging the very notion of nature itself and questioning the forms and means by which the earth is translated into the political globe. 230 savage-objects.indd 230 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 231 4/17/12 4:37 PM "To make sense of Chávez’s Venezuela, we must thus seek to understand the exchange between the people who inhabit Venezuelan soil and the oil that lies in its subsoil." — Fernando Coronil1 "Mehrdad Irvanian, the Iranian architect once suggested: ‘In order to study architecture, one must irst investigate necrocracy’. But we should go further: we should practice the art of exhumation too." — Reza Negarestani2 1 Fernando Coronil, “It’s the Oil, Stupid!!!” ReVista: Harvard review of Latin America. Venezuela. The Chávez Efect, Fall 2008, 20. 2 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008), 51. savage-objects.indd 232 4/17/12 4:37 PM Underground Venezuela’s territorial fetishism Godofredo Pereira Geologic exhumation According to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produced in 2009 entitled “An Estimate of Recoverable Heavy Oil Resources of the Orinoco Oil Belt, Venezuela”, the Orinoco oil belt – consisting of oil-saturated sandstone – could produce an estimate of 513 billion oil barrels, more than previously calculated and above actual estimates for either Iran or Iraq.3 This recent rediscovery of Venezuela’s underground potential is part of the ambitious Plan Siembra Petrolera4, which aims to reformulate and optimize the production of oil in Venezuela to directly beneit its population. Since its creation it has promoted a better quantiication of oil-in-place, which together with technological advancements in survey methods has already allowed for a progressive upgrade of available reserves. In the USGS report states that “a comprehensive study by Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) established the magnitude of the original oil-in-place 3 U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, World Petroleum Resources Project: An estimate of recoverable heavy oil resources of the Orinoco Oil Belt, Venezuela, October 2009, available here: http://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo16635. 4 Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., Plan Siembra Petrolera 2005-2030, available here: http://www.pdvsa.com/index.php?tpl=interface.sp/design/readmenuprinc.tpl. html&newsid_temas=32 233 savage-objects.indd 233 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S (OOIP) at 1,180 billion barrels of oil (BBO)” and that PDVSA has recently revised this value to more than 1,300 BBO,5 an increase of more than 100 billion barrels of oil-in-place compared with previous estimates. Initiated in 2005 and expected to run until 2030, Plan Siembra Petrolera mostly relies on Magna Reserva, the name given to Orinoco Oil Belt, a petrol basin of some 55,314 km2, divided into 27 sections according to geological characteristics and output potential. It is now recognized as the world’s largest reserve of heavy oil. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PVDSA), the company that manages all oil exploration sites and facilities, traded the nation’s oil according to a logic subservient to international market policies, particularly during the period know as “the opening” (Abertura) between 1994 and 1996.6 Part of a project of economic liberalization commonly implemented throughout all Latin America – the “Washington Consensus”– that in Venezuela had its major contestation in the demonstrations known as Caracazo,7 this was a process that disconnected the oil industry from the populations’ economic and social needs. Against this, the government’s progressive re-structuring of the company since 1999 sought to acquire a more independent 5 U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, World Petroleum Resources 6 Cf. Minister Rafael Ramirez , “A National, Popular, and Revolutionary Oil Policy Project. for Venezuela”, Venezuela Analysis, June 9th 2005, http://venezuelanalysis.com/ analysis/1182 (accessed 10 Jan. 2012). 7 Series of riots against free market reforms that took place the streets of Caracas, 27th February 1989, ending with the massacre of hundreds by police and military forces. 234 savage-objects.indd 234 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M ig. 1 — Map showing the Orinoco Oil Belt assessment unit. US Geological Survey, 2009. position. Importantly, this availability of oil has enabled Venezuela’s new “multipolar” geopolitical strategy, inancing regional alliances and alliances at the scale of the global South. Within this new frame Venezuela has progressively taken a decisive role, participating in the creation of UNASUR,8 and creating ALBA,9 an organization that promotes economic integration based on social welfare in response to the liberal policies of FTAA;10 the lat8 Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). 9 Bolívarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). 10 The Free Trade Area of the Americas, was an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) perceived as a foreign policy tool of the U.S. government. 235 savage-objects.indd 235 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S ter perceived to be the implementation mechanism of U.S. policy. Moreover, outside South America and OPEC, countries such as Russia and China have also become important trading partners. The attempt to produce a South-South alliance does not imply the direct dismissal of, or even a clear transformation of, trade relations with the US, but more an attempt to be less dependent upon them: “Venezuela would never stop selling oil to the U.S. because these purchases add up to approximately 60% of Venezuela’s total oil exports. Venezuela is one of the top four petroleum suppliers to the U.S.. Furthermore, the U.S. is too reliant on foreign oil and the Venezuelan economy would take a serious hit if the countries stopped trading with each other”.11 What this seems to indicate is that, despite its anti-imperialist rhetoric, Venezuela’s commercial interests and economic principles will continue to structure the underlying politics of the country as much as they have since the ‘60s oil boom. According to anthropologist Fernando Coronil, “given the location of Latin America in the twin international division of labour and of nature, at the present time the pursuit of foreign exchange has meant that, in practice, all Latin American states – whether on the right or the left – promote comparative advantages within a neoliberal framework”.12 11 Cf. Christina DeFeo - Council on Hemispheric Afairs (COHA), “ALBA: How Much of a Turn to the Left in Latin American Governance and Economic Policy?”, Venezuela Analysis, July 19th 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5500 (accessed 5 Jan. 2012). 12 Fernando Coronil, “The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)”, in Business As Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, ed. Calhoun, Craig J., and Georgi M. Derluguian (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 257. 236 savage-objects.indd 236 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M But the consequence of a reinforced oil politics has clearly been felt throughout the whole country, where forgotten communities living in Venezuela’s sprawling barrios and indigenous populations living in rural and Amazonian areas have become the object of the state’s attention, particularly concerning the implementation of several social programs, missiones, aimed at distributing oil revenues in the form of community based services. As Anthony W. Persaud explains, “social spending has skyrocketed since Chávez reigned in on the PDVSA, and the beneits of oil are reaching the masses of Venezuela and beyond. In 2004 Venezuela invested 3.7 of its 6.5 billion net oil proits in social missions, and the plan from 2005-2012 has outlined spending of 10 billion per year. In 2007, PDVSA alone spent 14.4 billion on social programs. All of this social spending in Venezuela has meant drastic reductions in the levels of poverty and inequality, improved access to healthcare, huge improvements in education and the battle against illiteracy, and subsidized food programs for the most vulnerable.”13 One of the most publicised examples of oil wealth redistribution is Ciudad Caribia, declared the 1st socialist city of the 21st century. It is a city for 100,000 people built from scratch in a mountainous on the periphery of Caracas that includes housing, public services, retail, religious centres, cultural and sports facilities, and also an ALBA promotional store and direct satellite connection to state TV. The purpose of Misión Vivienda, of which Ciudad Caribia is part, is to provide two million new homes by 13 Anthony W. Persaud, “Oil in Venezuela: The Lesser of Two Evils”, Venezuela Analysis, July 13th 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5491 (accessed on 1 Jan. 2012). 237 savage-objects.indd 237 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S 2017. Considering that Venezuela has been an oil-rich country for many years, it is notable that its wealth is only now bringing palpable beneits to the lives of its poorer people. ig. 2 — Areal view of a Barrio de Petrocasas - housing units made of PVC and produced by the oil industry, for Misión Vivienda. El Tuy. Photo Oscar Tenreiro, October, 2010. Transmutation However, what is not often mentioned is that Chávez simply presents this redistribution of wealth as a direct consequence of Venezuela’s recent turn to socialist policies and not as the result of luctuations in oil prices or partnerships with multinational companies. In many ways, this brings to mind the notion developed by Fernando Coronil of the “magical state”. Throughout 238 savage-objects.indd 238 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M the 20th century, Venezuelan presidents from Pérez Jiménez to Andrés Pérez or Jaime Lusinchi, have all translated state investment of funds derived from oil trading into populist or nationalist narratives that present public projects as the consequence of the nation’s modernizing progress: “This personiication of social and natural powers makes these leaders appear as superior beings capable of extraordinary deeds – as charismatic leaders or, as playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas suggested for Venezuela, as magicians.”14 But ultimately this representation only disguises an under-developed oil-dependent country, revealing, as Atilio Borón argues, a “disjunction between the “consolidation of neoliberalism in the critical terrain of the economy and policy making” and its visible “weakening in the domains of culture, public awareness and politics.”15 While below ground, Venezuela’s economy is dependent on trading partnerships across the globe; above ground, its politics is mostly concerned with the performative translation of its efects. This disjunction then, becomes central to frame every political transformation in Venezuela. But how is it that the passage from one domain to the other takes place? In The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature, C. Conway describes how, since the independence wars, Simón Bolívar has become a central igure in Venezuela’s political transformations. Bolívar was the military commander who liberated most of South America from Spanish rule two hundred years ago, and established a southern union of people called Gran Colombia. Encompassing the territories of what are currently Ecuador, 14 Fernando Coronil, “It’s the Oil, Stupid!!!”, 30. 15 Atilio Borón quoted in Fernando Coronil, “The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)”, 256. 239 savage-objects.indd 239 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Colombia, Venezuela and Panama, this dream lasted for only twenty-two years, collapsing due to internal conlicts between supporters of federalist reforms and supporters of centralised government; ultimately leading to its fragmentation into different nations. Tensions in the area remain visible today, where Colombia is a strategic partner of the US; and the last decade has witnessed constant animosity between the two nations. Moreover, since he was elected in 1999, Hugo Chávez has reignited Bolívarianism: after the elections the country was renamed Republica Bolívariana de Venezuela, with political transformations said to be continuing the tradition of anti-imperialism. Brought to bear on past and present history, Bolívar’s life now represents the nation’s quest for autonomy. This over-coding of Venezuela’s territory with the life and ideas of Bolívar recalls Borges’ short story On the Exactitude of Science, where the map replaces the territory itself. Together with the monument, the museum and the archive, the map is central to the bringing together of geographical and historical domains, deterritorializing local subjectivities only to immediately reterritorialize them again – in this case by the life of Bolívar - the map thus functions as a signifying grid that is applied to the territory. If we bear in mind that Venezuela’s tallest mountain is called “Pico Bolívar” and that Bolívar’s constitutional writings have inspired several current policies, we can start to grasp that this nation’s material and spiritual borders are being “mapped” by his life, and that national unity is thus produced in a process by which both history and geography are fetishized.16 The 16 Cf. Fernando Coronil, “Beyond occidentalism: toward nonimperial geohistorical categories”, Cultural Anthropology : Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996), 76. 240 savage-objects.indd 240 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M ig. 3 — Hugo Chávez and Nestor Kirchner plan the 10,000-kilometer Gran Gasoducto del Sur (Great Southern Pipeline). November 2005. 241 savage-objects.indd 241 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S proliferation of monuments is particularly relevant to the long tradition of nationalist projects, and as early as 1997 anthropologist Michael Taussig had already noticed that under the lag of Bolívar the country had been progressively “converted into a mausoleum with statues of the Liberator nailing down the state of the whole good and tight”.17 Today, however, this process of investing objects with anima is further emphasized by government statecraft. With the messianic return of Bolivarianism taking place, it is no surprise that the people now encompass human, animal, architectural, geological or any other entities that might be imbued with the spirit of “El Libertador”, magically conferring life to the material ground itself upon which Venezuela stands as nation. And the culminating event of this process was clearly his recent exhumation. The event took place on the 15th of July, 2010, by direct order of the president of the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, with the stated purpose of conirming if the bones in Bolívar’s grave were in fact his remains, and more importantly, if Bolívar had died from arsenic poisoning instead of tuberculosis. Chávez, a long-time supporter of the theory that Colombian oligarchs murdered Bolívar, has recently rekindled the controversy surrounding his death. If these theories were proven true, it would provide yet another parallel between the two leaders, Chávez himself also having a long history of troubled relations with his neighbours and survivor of an attempted coup d’etat in 2002. The analysis of the inside of the bones can thus be understood as a voyage to the origin of territorial signiication from which everything emanates: the closest allies, the government, 17 Michael Taussig, The magic of the state (New York, London: Routledge, 1997), 110. 242 savage-objects.indd 242 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M the people and so forth, to the outermost limits of his presence, coinciding at one level with the borders of the country, but at another with the borders of global anti-imperialist struggles. Agreeing with anthropologist Michael Taussig’s description of the return from exile of Bolívar’s remains to Caracas for a state funeral in 1842, as “a foundational act of spirit possession”,18 then this recent exhumation not only perpetuates a circuit of exhumation-inhumation; of revealing and hiding – whose purpose is the incorporation of all people and things into his body, while incorporating him into the body of the people – but also lends itself to a rhythm of Bolívar-appearances produced by political necessity, providing another opportunity for the correction and reformulation of the nation’s history now in relation to a rediscovered subsoil. Ultimately no clear conclusion as to whether Bolívar was naturally or unnaturally poisoned emerged, and this neither discredited Chávez nor reduced the efect of the performance, conirming that, in itself, the event could function without the discovery of a deinite truth – after all, this is the essence of fetishistic magic, in which the performance of revelation has precedence over that which is revealed. Thus, in the strange symmetry between the geological exhumations of the earth and the forensic reinvestment of bone’s magical dimension therein lies the movement where, as Marx would say, magic is performed: the soul of oil transmuted into Bolívar’s spirit. Material resistance Regarding geophilosophy, Deleuze and Guattari insist that “thinking takes place in the relation between the territory and the 18 Ibid.,101. 243 savage-objects.indd 243 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Earth”,19 where the Earth (not to be confused with the earth-soil, or with the earth-planet) ceaselessly forces the constant reformulation of the territory. We can see something similar happening in Venezuela, where the reinvention of a nation through the territorialization of underground energy into spirit requires constant negotiation of unstable and resistant materials. According to government officials frequent public declarations the continuous development and application of new technologies will make Venezuela an undisputed leader in the development of extra-heavy oil. New technologies play an essential part in this re-invention of the country, as it is known that unconventional hydrocarbons pose signiicant development and production diiculties. Orinoco basin’s heavy oil is, on the one hand harder to extract and reine and much more toxic than other forms of oil, and this is relected in its price; but on the other hand, in the future, it is expected to become one of the world’s main energy sources as reserves of normal oil decrease. With the current turn to less conventional forms of oil extraction the array of technologies that can tap the soil’s underground dimension is rapidly increasing; for example: deep reading technologies, sonic and acoustic scanners, seismic and geophysical analysis, petrophysical and geomechanic reservoir modelling. But new forms of representation also raise inconvenient problems: as the numerous images of Chávez pointing at maps on TV indicate, the territory of Venezuela has a strategic geopolitical dimension, but one that the map is no longer suicient to grasp. The contemporary 3D geological models of the Orinoco oil basin 19 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 244 savage-objects.indd 244 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M are essential to modelling its complexities, and are becoming the essential tool necessary for transforming the as yet unseen subsoil into an architectural space that can be interpreted and navigated from diferent angles, providing a concrete image for an invisible presence. However, the remote sensing technologies do not only refer to a domain of shifting tectonics and mineral lows that evade the conines of territorial border divisions, but also to a complex subsoil that is analysed speciically for the possible harnessing of oil; and here, cutting-edge scientiic research and political opportunity ind themselves dependent upon a growing industry without which it would be impossible to tame these underground forces. Curiously, even in Bolívar “himself”, a similar material resistance is also present. When Dr. Paul Auwaerter of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine irst proposed that Bolívar’s death was caused by poisoning – which later led to the exhumation – he wasn’t suggesting that this implied murder, but more likely that the water in the area contained unusually high levels of arsenic, a substance that was also often used at the time for medicinal purposes, and is present in the waters of several South American countries.20 As stated in his report, “[Bolívar] likely received additional arsenic in the food and water that he consumed while campaigning in the Andes, where high levels of the element have been detected in soil and in the tissue samples from pre-Colombian mummies. Bolívar’s complexion, as noted above, changed from white as a youth to dark and rough 3 years 20 Paul G. Auwaerter, John Dove and Philip A. Mackowiak, “Simón Bolívar’s Medical Labyrinth: An Infectious Diseases Conundrum”, Cinical Infectious Diseases 52, no. 1 (2011), 78-85. 245 savage-objects.indd 245 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S before he died. The transformation might simply have been the result of years of exposure to the harsh elements during his campaigns. However, it is also possible that it was an additional manifestation of arsenicosis, because difuse melanosis, papules, and keratoses are among the earliest signs of such intoxication.” In any case, although keratoses and melanosis are signs of intoxication by arsenic, they are still vague indicators, diagnosed from descriptions made almost two hundred years ago. And even now, with current mass spectrometric techniques, forensic toxicology analyses aren’t always able to produce satisfactory results. Clearly these material instabilities, both in oil and bone, open new spaces of political confrontation. Immediately we see contemporary geopolitical alliances as well as internal policies being discussed according to forensic procedures and remote sensing devices; state politics is suddenly captured by minute discussions on disease symptoms and toxicological analysis, the idea of the body of the state now reliant upon arsenic and environment relations, and geopolitics seen through the lens of skin coloration. But the most important consequence of these examples of material resistance lies not in the endangering of Bolívarianism or the revealing of the underlying Venezuelan liberal petropolitics – even if this might be a possible result – but in forcing the dramatic reconiguration of the nation’s political agents: not so much oil in the service of the revolution, but the revolution as a mode of engagement with gigantic oil reserves. Geo-architecture Given constant U.S. political pressure, internal divisions and global economic instabilities, the Bolivarian project remains 246 savage-objects.indd 246 4/17/12 4:37 PM U N D E R G R O U N D. V E N E Z U E L A’ S T E R R I T O R I A L F E T I S H I S M ig. 3. Gas shale resource place: Co-visualization of shale surface, karsts, well plan, and microseismic data. Image courtesy of Paradigm Ltd. precarious, remaining heavily dependent on the subsoil for both economic and political sustainability. In January 2012, and after announcing that the nation had oil reserves that would last for 400 years,21 Chávez indicated that with new research in Venezuela’s Golf and in the Atlantic, Venezuela’s ranking in terms of natural gas reserves could also improve to levels similar to those of Russia; and again to continue the mirroring of subsoil exhumations with military ones, another anti-imperialist prócer, General Francisco de Miranda, is to be exhumed by the same 21 Yoersis Morgado, Presidente Chávez: Venezuela tiene la reserva petrolera y de gas más grande del mundo, http://www.asambleanacional.gob.ve/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37360%3Apresidente-chavez-airmoque-el-pais-cuenta-con-petroleo-para-mas-de-400-anos&catid=388%3Amensajeanual-presidente-chavez-2011&Itemid=50&lang=es (accessed on 27/02/2012). 247 savage-objects.indd 247 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S team that exhumed Bolívar. But at the same time that the state’s magical territorialisation takes place, Bolívarianism is itself constantly rewritten, it has been transformed since 2005 into a socialist movement,22 an adaptation essential to understanding the real nature of the process: that Bolívar isn’t a static idea but a dynamic self-adapting principle against which all current policies need to be measured. The relation between the people that inhabit the soil and the oil that lies in the subsoil, that anthropologist Fernando Coronil claims is central to understanding Venezuelan politics, thus emerges as the geo-architectural management of the shifting relation between earth and territory. If the complex nature of heavy-oil’s extraction brings to visibility a so far unknown domain, the subsurface becoming object of a renewed interest on the part of scientiic researchers and digital visualization companies, at the same time political organizations, ecological activists, and indigenous populations also claim this underground; after all it is the source of life for many communities. Clearly it is the underground with its power of attraction and its ambiguous nature that is the contemporary origin of policies and conlicts, a mysterious domain that has so far been translated into revolutionary spirit. But as heavy oils and mineral toxins slowly become central to the discussion of the life of Bolívar – the Earth resisting the territory – the question remains: how much longer will this process of magical transmutation be able to efectively control Venezuela’s increasingly complex ecology? 22 Cleto A. Sojo, “Venezuela’s Chavez Closes World Social Forum with Call to Transcend Capitalism”, Venezuela Analysis, September 31st 2005, http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/907 (accessed on 27 Feb. 2012). 248 savage-objects.indd 248 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 249 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 250 4/17/12 4:37 PM IMAGE CREDITS João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva — ig. 1 Exhibition view Alien Theory, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. Oicial Portuguese Representation of 53rd Venice Biennale, DGARTES, Ministry of Culture, Portugal. Thanks to: Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa. Photo by: Martin Argyroglo. — ig. 2 Produced by Inhotim Institute, Minas Gerais, Brazil. — ig. 4 Oicial Portuguese Representation of 53rd Venice Biennale, DGARTES, Ministry of Culture, Portugal. — ig. 5 Sies + Hoke Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany. — ig. 7 Produced by Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris in collaboration with Lamu Palm Oil Factory, Kenya. — ig. 8 Thanks to: Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa. Susan Schuppli — ig. 1 AP Photo/NYPD, Det. Greg Semendinger. — ig. 2 © GeoEye Inc. All rights reserved; Image courtesy of Satellite Imaging Corporation. — ig. 3 © GeoEye Inc. All rights reserved; Image courtesy of Satellite Imaging Corporation. — ig. 4 © N. Petraco, T. A. Kubic, L. Faber. All rights reserved; Image courtesy of Nicholas Petraco. — ig. 5 © N. Petraco, T. A. Kubic, L. Faber. All rights reserved; Image courtesy of Nicholas Petraco. 251 savage-objects.indd 251 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Jonathan Uliel Saldanha — ig. 1 Photo: Catarina Miranda. — ig. 5 Negative of Cygnus A taken at diferent wavelengths (W. Baade & R. Minkowski, The Astrophysical Journal). Regina De Miguel — ig. 2 Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Sgr A*. Image by NASA. Ayesha Hameed — ig. 3 © REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol. — ig. 4 © Jason N. Parkinson/reportdigital.co.uk — ig. 5 © Sylvain Georges / Noir Productions. Imagem cortesia de Independencia Société. Godofredo Pereira — ig. 2. © Photo: Oscar Tenreiro. http://oscartenreiro.com — ig. 3. © Presidencia de Argentina. — ig. 4. © Paradigm Ltd. Image courtesy of Paradigm Ltd. 252 savage-objects.indd 252 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 253 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 254 4/17/12 4:37 PM BIOGRAPHIES Ayesha Hameed Ayesha Hameed’s video and curatorial work focuses on borders in the context of sanspapiers organizing and migrant subjectivity. Her work has been presented at the Banf Centre for the Arts, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, OBORO, Montréal Arts Interculturels (MAI), ISEA and elsewhere. A former board member of Fuse Magazine, her writing has been published in Public: Art/Culture/Ideas and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies as well as a few collections of essays like PLACE: Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts and Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada. Hameed is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London. Bjørnar Olsen Bjørnar Olsen is professor of archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Tromsø, Norway. He has written a number of papers and books on northern prehistory and history, museology, material culture, and archaeological theory. His latest books are Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012) (with M. Shanks, T. Webmoor and C. Witmore), Hybrid Spaces: Medieval Finnmark and the Archaeology of Multi-Room Houses (2011) (edited with P. Urbanzcyk and C. Amundsen), In Defense of Things. Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (2010), and Persistent Memories: Pyramiden – a Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic (2010) (with E. Andreassen and H. Bjerck). bjornar.olsen@uit.no Eyal Weizman Eyal Weizman is an architect and a professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he also directs the Centre for Research Architecture. A founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine, Weizman also directs the European Research Council-funded project “Forensic Architecture: On the Place of Architecture in International Humanitarian Law”. His books include The Least of All Possible Evils (Nottetempo, 2009; Verso, 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), and A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003). Godofredo Pereira Godofredo Pereira is an architect, writer and editor. He has a MArch from the Bartlett School of Architecture where he currently teaches in the MA programme and is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also co-editor of Detritos, an experimental journal of art and critical theory. His research focuses on the relations between architecture and power. 255 savage-objects.indd 255 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S Graham Harman Graham Harman is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University in Cairo. Among his best-known books are ToolBeing (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), Prince of Networks (2009), The Quadruple Object (2011) and Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2011). João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva João Maria Gusmão (Lisbon, 1979) and Pedro Paiva (Lisbon, 1977) jointly attended the course of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon and began to exhibit their work together in 2001. Since then, their artistic production is linked not only to experimental ilm, photography and installation, but also to writing, a practice that has been part of the work of both authors. They participated in several international biennials, in 2006, the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil), in 2007, the Triennial of Luanda (Angola), at the 6th Biennial of Mercosul, Porto Alegre (Brazil), in 2008, Expresses 7 (Italy), in 2009 they represented Portugal at the 53rd Venice Biennale and in 2010 at the 8th Biennial of Gwangju (South Korea). Of several solo exhibitions stand out those made recently in 2011, at Frac Ile-de-France, Le Plateau (Paris), at Museo Marino Marini (Florence), at Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf; in 2010, at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham); in 2008, at Photoespanha (Madrid); and inally, the exhibition Abissologia: para uma ciência transitória do indiscernível, in Cordoaria Nacional, a partnership with the ZDB Gallery in Lisbon. Jonathan Uliel Saldanha A researcher and composer, Jonathan Saldanha’s work is concerned with the relations of sound with its ghosts, animism, magnetic radio, the jungle, negative territories, subsonic frequencies and intra cranial dub. He is a founding member of the musical and artistic platform SOOPA, a visual and sound laboratory as well as cultural producer based in Porto, Portugal. Saldanha operates sonically in the projects HHY & The Macumbas, U.S.S., Fujako, and Mécanosphère, among others. He develops theatre sound projects under the name Beast Box having conceived the show “Nyarlathotep” in Balleteatro, Porto and “Máquina da Selva “ in Serralves Foundation. He is also a member of the artistic collective Embankment. www.soopa.org; www.embankmentact.blogspot.com Marcello Maggi Philosopher, artist and musician. Completeed a PhD from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, under the guidance of philosopher José Gil, with the thesis: Art Brut Art and the Catastrophe in Art (2010). He is a member of the editorial board of art and essay journal DETRITOS since 2009. He has directed art therapy workshops (painting, sculpture and 256 savage-objects.indd 256 4/17/12 4:37 PM BIOGRAPHIES installation) with patients with mental and psychiatric disorders in the Museum of Uncouncious Images, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2008) and at the Center for Social and Education Intervention Studies in Bari, Italy (2003-2006). Martin Holbraad Martin Holbraad teaches social anthropology at University College London. Based on ethnographic ieldwork in Cuba since the late 1990s, his research focuses on the relationship between myth and action, the consecration of objects, and, more broadly, the logic of cosmological thought in the ield of religion as well as in politics. These ethnographic interests inform his theoretical concerns with such topics as the anthropology of truth and the imagination, abstraction and divinity, and the relationship between anthropological and philosophical analysis. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012) and co-editor of Thinking Through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge, 2007), Technologies of the Imagination (Special issue of Ethnos, 2009) and Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future (Routledge, in press). Michael Taussig Michael Taussig was trained as a medical doctor and now teaches in the Antropology Department of Columbia University in New York and at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland. He is the author of several books including: What Color is the Sacred? (2009). Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006). My Cocaine Museum (2004). Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in a Colombian Town (2003). Defacement (1999). Magic of the State (1997). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993). The Nervous System (1992). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987). The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980). Paulo Tavares Paulo Tavares is a Brazilian architect based in between London and São Paulo. He has taught at the London Metropolitan University, at the Visual Cultures Lab/MA in Contemporary Art Theory - Goldsmiths, and since 2008 teaches in the MA programme at the Centre for Research Architecture - Goldsmiths. Regina de Miguel Artist and cultural producer. Her work develops connections between situations of scientiic analysis and perception as objective knowledge (scales of verisimilitude), non-experiential learning as derived from the technological imagination (alienation and 257 savage-objects.indd 257 4/17/12 4:37 PM S AVA G E O B J E C T S projection), and levels of development of the ideal and critical consciousness (new forms of orientation). Part of her production has dealt primarily with the strategies of the formation of desire and crises in subjective meaning and its visualization of the psychological landscape in the form of cartographies. In the same vein, she also analyzes the speculative transfer in scientiic and cultural learning tools. Collaborates with the working group A User’s Guide, (http://ausersguide.tumblr.com/), a project with Lorenzo Sandoval and María ptqk, dedicated to the backstage of art and cultural production. She also takes part on Correspondences from Eyjafjallajokull, (http://eyjafjalla.org/) a project about the idea of Europe. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as Artium, La Panera, Musac, La Casa Encendida and can be seen in the collections of the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art, (Artium), Fundación Arco, INJUVE, ABC, CGAC, and the Reina Soia National Gallery. She is represented by the gallery Maisterravalbuena and is now working on the audiovisual essay Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction.(http://nouvellesciencevagueiction.tumblr. com/). +info: reginademiguel.net Reza Negarestani Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer. His works have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Collapse, Angelaki, Identity and The Speculative Turn. He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press 2008). Negarestani’s writings have been the subject of various theoretical and literary courses and seminars, most recently a symposium centered on Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia held by The New School, New York. Susan Schuppli Susan Schuppli is a media artist and cultural theorist who is a Senior Research Fellow in Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where she also received her doctorate in 2009. Previously she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and completed her MFA at the University of California San Diego. Her creative projects have been exhibited at The Kitchen in New York, the Brussels Biennal, Belgium, Artspace, Australia, and most recently at Museum London in Canada (2012). She is on the editorial board of the journals SITE (Stockholm) and Second Nature (Melbourne), and is a member of the Photo-Lexic Research Group based in Tel Aviv. Recent projects and essays have appeared in Cabinet, Photoworks, Architectural Design, Borderlands, Cosmos and History, Memory Studies, and Academia Press. 258 savage-objects.indd 258 4/17/12 4:37 PM BIOGRAPHIES 259 savage-objects.indd 259 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 260 4/17/12 4:37 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book begun to take shape in early 2010 after the seminar series and performance cycle on Urban Totemism organized by the collective SOOPA in Porto, and has been particularly informed by the ongoing discussions that began at the collective residency The Terror of the Object in April 2011 developed by detritos in Atelier Real, Lisbon. From these encounters and collaborations the idea of bringing together some of the exciting contemporary research into objects and things begun to emerge, and ultimately became the project Objectology, within Guimarães – European Capital of Culture 2012. Savage Objects is a part of this larger project. The task of editing and coordinating a book like this would have been overwhelming and impossible without the group of people that, in diferent ways, participated in the project and advised me at diferent times of its development. Firstly, I would like to thank all the authors for their contributions to this project, and I would like to express my sincere admiration for their work. I also thank Inês Moreira, who helped granting the conditions for the project’s development in its initial phase and in particular, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, the Programmer of Art and Architecture of Guimarães 2012 – European Capital of Culture 2012. I would also like to thank Filipe Silva and Jonathan Saldanha of SOOPA who were involved in the conception of the project from the beginning, and all artists, authors, researchers, and organizers who were involved in the aforementioned events. I am also grateful to Eyal Weizman, Susan Schuppli and all the members of the Centre for Research Architecture, who discussed its central aspects with me and with whom I’ve developed part of this research. In particular, producer Teresa Aguiar and designer Dayana Lucas, deserve a very special thanks for developing the whole project and giving it a certain rigour and reality. To all the translators, consultants and reviewers also a special thanks: Will Potter, Susana Serras Pereira, Ricardo Tinoco, Ayesha Hameed, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Miguel Serras Pereira. And inally, my main gratitude goes to Susana Caló, who thought the contents of the book with me and critically accompanied its every stage. Godofredo Pereira 261 savage-objects.indd 261 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 262 4/17/12 4:37 PM First published in 2012 by Guimarães 2012 — European Capital of Culture in partnership with Imprensa Nacional−Casa da Moeda © 2012 Guimarães 2012 All images, texts and chapters: the contributors. edited by Godofredo Pereira contributors Ayesha Hameed, Bjornar Olsen, Eyal Weizman, Godofredo Pereira, Graham Harman, João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Jonathan Saldanha, Marcello Maggi, Martin Holbraad, Michael Taussig, Paulo Tavares, Regina de Miguel, Reza Negarastani, Susan Schuppli. translation Ricardo Tinoco, Susana Serras Pereira, Miguel Serras Pereira. proof-reading Will Potter, Ayesha Ahmeed, Lawrence Abu Hamdam, Imprensa Nacional−Casa da Moeda. design Dayana Lucas front cover image Landsat 7 Satellite image of Tassil n'Ajjer National Park. NASA. executive production Teresa Aguiar and Deserto de Cristal − Associação Cultural printed and bound Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. Portugal. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, electronic, mechanical or other, without permission in writing from Fundação Cidade de Guimarães. savage-objects.indd 263 4/17/12 4:37 PM This book is part of the project Objectology curated by Godofredo Pereira and Filipe Silva for Guimarães 2012, European Capital of Culture. number of pages 268 keywords 1. Objects. 2. Territories. 3. Architecture. 4. Practices. 5. Technology. 6. Things. 7. Ecologies isbn 978-972-27-2071-7 legal depot n.º 342785/12 edition n.º 1018738 print run 1 000 GUIMARãES 2012 - CAPITAL EUROPEIA DA CULTURA, ÁREA DE ARTE E ARQUITETURA programme director Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro programming assistance Gisela Díaz, Gisela Leal executive production João Covita, Pedro Sadio, Pedro Silva The President of Fundação Cidade de Guimarães wishes to thank all for their contribution to this publication and the project Objectology This publication is part of the cycle “On Audiences”, within the Art and Architecture programme, Guimarães 2012, European Capital of Culture savage-objects.indd 264 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 265 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 266 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 267 4/17/12 4:37 PM savage-objects.indd 268 4/17/12 4:37 PM