16.8.06
Throwaway notes on detritus...
1. Detritus and culture; detritus versus culture
By this is meant what is the difference between the extolled/fetishized object and the discarded object; the objects that define existence, the objects that we rid from our existence. Archaeologists fix on the detritus of dead civilizations, forensic anthropologists piece together the histories of crime from pieces of debris. The question that arises concerns not only what it means to read meaning into shards, but rather what that investigation says about those carrying on the investigation. At base, this investigation must be seen as "literary" rather than purely scientific, as in novels small details are made potent as metaphors. Large themes are extrapolated from thrown-away moments.
2. Detritus and spatial politics
Junkyards are formed on the brink of cities and civilizations, in no man's lands or wastelands or wetlands. How the perimeter becomes defined as such involves the evolving history of a particular place over time. Marginal terrains — places beyond the pale — are often defined by a set of prescripted parameters: they sit on the edge of metropoles (or civilizations); they mark the edges of city or empire; they are perceived as "lawless" places, or places ruled by private law. The way in which they are scripted tells much about the empire that abuts them (whether past or present). Do they reveal a failure of imagination or are they the terrains where the imagination is allowed to explore unfettered (a kind of backdrop for the psyche)?
In anthropology, there was a school of thought (which arose out of Latin America in the 1970s) that divided the world stage (and more importantly relations of power) into cores and peripheries. Studies were done that showed that violence tended to be greater on the periphery than in the core. One significnat study concerned the difference in labor treatment between a British-owned mines in Zimbabwe and in Great Britain. Subsequent studies have focused on relations of time, space and power. As a blunt example, the United States can claim a majority of patents because the U.S. Government controls their distribution, often rendering valid patent claims in far-flung corners next to impossible.
What can be said of lives lived on the periphery ... of the sorts of meanings inferred by a marginal existence? Are there prescriptions to be found by outsiders? Wisdom in a broken bottle? Foucault speaks of transgression as that edge where truth/morality is redefined as a constantly shifting limnal edge. I think it is possible to consider "transgression" both in moral and spatial terms, as in the idea of going beyond, the words "terra" and "terror" sharing affinity. In contemporary times, trailer parks are often the scenes of our most volatile and uncontained dramas (both in the literary world and in "real-life dramas" such as Cops). Have the trailer park residents (or inhabitants of the interior of Maine) come to stand in for the roles played by the Greek gods in Athenian society (among whom jealous rage, murder most foul, incest, etc. abounded)? On other frontiers ... the spaces that were the remote colonies former empires, for example ... the most horrific "crimes against humanity" have unfolded (e.g. the Balkans, Africa, Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc.).
3. Detritus, happenstance and permutation
This section speaks to random association as an underyling given of both creative exploration and scientific progress. The detritus of ruined civilizations speaks to a collapse of meaning, junkyards to an instance where strange bedfellows abound. Something like reading bones or tea leaves ... it is in the accidental association that truths are revealed. (Is it too no wonder that New York City is known for being a "dirty" city where filth and happenstance abound? In New York, however, the equasion is reversed as ).
Two concepts that arise out of postmodernism -- facsimile and nostalgia -- will be explored in conjunction with the idea of detritus. If all products in the "age of reproduction" are facsimiles, what does happens when the facsimile decays? Does the item in question undergo the same form of "sea change" as the original work did, once it was reproduced or in other ways translated?
By this is meant what is the difference between the extolled/fetishized object and the discarded object; the objects that define existence, the objects that we rid from our existence. Archaeologists fix on the detritus of dead civilizations, forensic anthropologists piece together the histories of crime from pieces of debris. The question that arises concerns not only what it means to read meaning into shards, but rather what that investigation says about those carrying on the investigation. At base, this investigation must be seen as "literary" rather than purely scientific, as in novels small details are made potent as metaphors. Large themes are extrapolated from thrown-away moments.
2. Detritus and spatial politics
Junkyards are formed on the brink of cities and civilizations, in no man's lands or wastelands or wetlands. How the perimeter becomes defined as such involves the evolving history of a particular place over time. Marginal terrains — places beyond the pale — are often defined by a set of prescripted parameters: they sit on the edge of metropoles (or civilizations); they mark the edges of city or empire; they are perceived as "lawless" places, or places ruled by private law. The way in which they are scripted tells much about the empire that abuts them (whether past or present). Do they reveal a failure of imagination or are they the terrains where the imagination is allowed to explore unfettered (a kind of backdrop for the psyche)?
In anthropology, there was a school of thought (which arose out of Latin America in the 1970s) that divided the world stage (and more importantly relations of power) into cores and peripheries. Studies were done that showed that violence tended to be greater on the periphery than in the core. One significnat study concerned the difference in labor treatment between a British-owned mines in Zimbabwe and in Great Britain. Subsequent studies have focused on relations of time, space and power. As a blunt example, the United States can claim a majority of patents because the U.S. Government controls their distribution, often rendering valid patent claims in far-flung corners next to impossible.
What can be said of lives lived on the periphery ... of the sorts of meanings inferred by a marginal existence? Are there prescriptions to be found by outsiders? Wisdom in a broken bottle? Foucault speaks of transgression as that edge where truth/morality is redefined as a constantly shifting limnal edge. I think it is possible to consider "transgression" both in moral and spatial terms, as in the idea of going beyond, the words "terra" and "terror" sharing affinity. In contemporary times, trailer parks are often the scenes of our most volatile and uncontained dramas (both in the literary world and in "real-life dramas" such as Cops). Have the trailer park residents (or inhabitants of the interior of Maine) come to stand in for the roles played by the Greek gods in Athenian society (among whom jealous rage, murder most foul, incest, etc. abounded)? On other frontiers ... the spaces that were the remote colonies former empires, for example ... the most horrific "crimes against humanity" have unfolded (e.g. the Balkans, Africa, Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc.).
3. Detritus, happenstance and permutation
This section speaks to random association as an underyling given of both creative exploration and scientific progress. The detritus of ruined civilizations speaks to a collapse of meaning, junkyards to an instance where strange bedfellows abound. Something like reading bones or tea leaves ... it is in the accidental association that truths are revealed. (Is it too no wonder that New York City is known for being a "dirty" city where filth and happenstance abound? In New York, however, the equasion is reversed as ).
Two concepts that arise out of postmodernism -- facsimile and nostalgia -- will be explored in conjunction with the idea of detritus. If all products in the "age of reproduction" are facsimiles, what does happens when the facsimile decays? Does the item in question undergo the same form of "sea change" as the original work did, once it was reproduced or in other ways translated?
