Notes whilst reading Michael Shanks, David Platt and William L Rathje: The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological (Modernism/Modernity vol 11, no 1, 1984, pp61-83. (Platt's old home page now somewhat of a discard itself.)
AnneG posed a question on garbage some time ago, which we inadvertently ignored, or just placed in the garbage. But it has been retrieved, recycled, and these are merely some notes, in lieu of a proper response.
. . .
The mundane (junk) accidentally becomes valuable (artifact). This archaeological metamorphosis - things carrying history. Encrusted. Though conventional causality slips away... Art performs this consciously?: Picasso's bicycle seat, on a pedestal.
Conservation ethic goes unquestioned. Soviets destroyed Hitler's bunker in 1945, unthinkable now. In contrast: Hitler was an archaeologist of future, a predecessor of sorts of the Long Now: Ruinengesetz, Speer's theory of ruin value, the 1000-year Reich and the need for ruins that are heroic, awe-inspiring and lasting.
Hitler liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity. Ultimately, all that remained of remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture, he remarked. [Speer, Erinerungen, 68 in Scobie, Hitler's State Architecture, 1990, 94]
The Circus Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. [HS Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas]
Where are Las Vegas's rubbish tips? Also: the graveyard of signs:
In the yard behind the Boneyard, at the gates of the desert, old neon signs that have seen long service are piled up [...] and here there spend a golden retirement, like 70-years-olds in Florida, dazed by the sun, burned up with boredom. Under the combined effect of heat and damp-free air, they never rust, but age almost intact, safely out of sight, without losing any of their fresh-paint looks. Except for just one thing. Thousands of electric bulbs, deprived of their vital fluid, heat up in the sun and sometimes suddenly explode with a little pop like a bone snapping ... [Bruce Begout, Zeropolis, 31]
? etym for garbage (Middle English, offal from fowls), junk (Middle English jonk, an old cable or rope)], rubbish (Middle English robishe), trash (Probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to Norwegian dialectal trask), refuse?: words so very different.
A cultural apophenia/contamination/forgetting: where the codes/meaning have been corrupted, either because there has been a cultural/historical breach in time or because of chinese whispers across, say, an oral tradition. Cargo cults, ICBM worship in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Captain Walker in Mad Max 3, and so on. Wright's A Scientific Romance:
They talked about Macdonalds - and one day the laird showed me pieces of a familiar yellow plastic arch, which he said was the battle standard of the Lord of the Isles. [...] is it just that the past is telescoped in their minds, that ancient Macdonald marauders and the hamburger chain of that ilk and equally remote and thoroughly confused [p262] [...] So it went on, a corrupt text. Archaic language they no longer understood had been displaced by words they knew, even when the new words made no sense. [A Scientific Romance, 267]
And the "Executives" tribe in [JGB's Hello America, 1981]:
Heinz, his son GM, and their young friend Pepsodent - they were named after the products manufactured by the great corporations in Manhattan - all carried in their pockets a strange clutter of dried fountain pens and cracked pocket calculators, relics of the office workers they emulated [...] GM took out a clutch of calculators and tapped the dead buttons with a knowing smile at Xerox [...] All of them had been illiterate for generations, and the only words they could read were the brand names on neon signs [Hello America, 66]
Hello America posits "peak oil" as catalyst for collapse.
Staten Island landfill site: "Fresh Kills", where the WTC debris was taken, sifted and consigned. But this is entirely apt: the stuff of arch is garbage. "Structured deposition" - a euphemism.
Junk in space the natural study area of archaeologists: 10,000 resident space objects.
"garbage": subsumes themes of ruin, remains, discard, decay, hygiene, dirt and disease. Why ruins: landfill sites are dominated by building rubble. Landfill sites are modernity's ruins.
Desire to eradicate our discards. Edit it out. We do this visually too: people don't see the garbage that they generate every day. Surest correlate of a public rubbish container: trash nearby. [and of a covert system of managing it.]
The bigger cycle: discard, rot, ruin, curation, preservation.
No society has ever invested so much in getting rid of unwanted remains (out of sight, out of mind). Yet there is always litter near rubbish bins: we edit it out (out of mind, out of sight!). "Refusing".
Planned communities: Williamsburg, VA (and presumably also Disney's Celebration, the Truman Show etc) - a living museum, though sanitised unlike the original, despite having been "authentically reconstructed".
Role of men walking on the street-side of the pavement: protect against rubbish thrown from above, not from passing vehicles.
Flow:
commonly: to landfill tips, some categorisation, and recycling or burial? But some organic waste goes to tips, and on to vermifarmers, whose worms process organic waste into fertiliser and more worms. Consignment: What % of our paper rubbish is constantly in transit as junk mail?
Specialist garbage: nuclear waste (reprocessed, safe X-Longterm storage at eg WIPP), healthcare's move (away from disposability?) towards outsourced rental/mgmt of equipment. - ie garbage as part of the process: design, manufacture, distribution, consumption and discard.
Collapse and ruin
A journey to the ruins of our world to discover a truth - so common a motif that it's practically a genre. Goes back to Brit Romanticism, ivy-clad ruins, JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.
To look up:
- Mary Shelley (The Last Man), John Soane, Richard Jefferies (After London, 1880), Wells (The Time Machine, 1898)...
- Mike Davis, Dead Cities
- Clarke, I. F. The Tale of the Future, from the Beginning to the Present Day. An Annotated Bibliography of Those Satires, Ideal States, Imaginary Wars and Invasions, Political Warnings and Forecasts, Interplanetary Voyages and Scientific Romances - All Located in an Imaginary Future Period - That Have Been Published in the United Kingdom between 1644 and 1970. [2d]. - ed. London: Library Association, 1972.
- Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions
- Brian Stableford, The Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950
Emptied cities: NY (?) in 1953 War of the Worlds or 28 Days Later. Still with HG Wells, The Time Machine: accelerated time lapse shows different speeds of garbage: the waxing and waning of a whole culture, the subsequent return to nature.
(There's a sci-fi story about a planet with two time-flows rather than one, and they go in opposite directions. The "other" one is hypothesised only because the protagonist examines "current" photos of a building and finds it less worn/ruined than those from its "past". What's the story? ... And why didn't they hypothesise that some restoration had been done?!)
What of rubbish in PK Dick's Counter-Clock World? Did office workers render documents from torn paper retrieved from the bin, then "unwrite" them (past then cut) in a computer? - a reversal like the newsmen editing history in 1984, or the Firemen in F451.
In art: Gavin Turk's rubbish bag sculptures, and Noble and Webster's shadow pieces. Beuys: artifacts in vitrines. Duchamp, labelling the everyday object, rectifying them - art/archaeologist.
Eliot, The Wasteland, 1922, shored against my ruins:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
[...]
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home
[...]
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Joyce on Ulysses: "if the city disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book"
Alfred Jarry: "... demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings."
. . .
Previous fragments:
- Fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of words
- The worlds are dust: Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay
- All the way was ruin: after London, Chernobyl, New York, civilisation
- The ruined control tower; a concrete labyrinth
- Eliot: I will show you fear in a handful of dust
- Mottled, warped, streaked and pockmarked silent archival footage
- Alone in his never-finished, already decaying pleasure palace
Interesting entry.
Don't forget Calvino's chapter about waste in Invisible Cities...
Posted by: Rob | July 13, 2005 at 07:10 AM