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/WALK9999

/liminal surplus

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(a boring introduction that you don’t really want to read and I don’t want to write, so here the interesting part of the conversation)

E: This summer something struck me. I noticed the ruins of surplus - our surplus. That made me think a lot about the way we live, produce and consume.
S: Oh, but that’s great news, how did that happen?

E: A couch on the street.
S: Oh, yes. A transient object.  

E: Did you also have a similar encounter?
S: (Tim Edensor)
Everyone does.
Spaces exist where rubbish lingers on, in attics, unofficial dumps, second-hand and charity shops, lock-ups, garages, sheds and ruins of all sorts. The material traces of people are everywhere, object-presences which conjure up the absence of those who wore, wielded, utilized and consumed  them. These objects and obscure signs, labels and traces are largely inarticulate in that they suggest multitudes of scenarios but only offer possibilities to surmise, to assemble conjectural memories, things we half  know or have heard about somewhere but are just beyond grasp. Yet in the ruins objects enter a different temporality.

E: Yes, it feels like they enter into a liminal or transitional state. It feels like these objects are waiting. Waiting to be collected, disposed of, or at best recycled. I'm asking myself, isn’t there another possibility?
S: (Tim Edensor)
Transient objects may further decline and become rubbish, but they can be reclaimed as useful or desirable once more, according to the vagaries of fashion and status. Moreover, social order is partly maintained by the predictable and regular distribution of objects in space. Disordering of a previously regulated space, like transient objects do, can interrogate normative processes of spatial and material ordering, and can generate a number of critical speculations about the character, aesthetics, affordances and histories of objects.

E: Why do you think it’s important to interrogate normative processes of spatial and material ordering?
S: (Tim Edensor)
Processes of decay and the obscure agencies of intrusive humans and
non-humans transform the familiar material world, changing the form and texture of objects, eroding their assigned functions and meanings, and blurring the boundaries between things. At first somewhat disturbing, this confrontation with the materiality of excess matter offers opportunities to engage with the material world in a more playful, sensual fashion than is usually afforded in the smoothed over space of much urban space.

E: I agree, indeed the ruins can somehow offer us more freedom and create local discontinuities in the city landscape, especially when in the public realm. But ruins can also generate a negative feeling. A feeling of injustice and inequality that’s not always easy to translate into a positive push.
S: (Anna Tsing)
The ruins glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscape - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations.

E: Should we then seek for untouched and undisturbed landscapes?
S: (Anna Tsing)
All landscape are disturbed, disturbance is ordinary. But this does not limit the term. Raising the question of disturbance does not cut off discussion but opens it, allowing us to explore landscape dynamics. Whether a disturbance is bearable
or unbearable is a question worked out through what follows it: the reformation
of assemblages.

E: What do you mean with assemblages? Do you mean collaboration?
S: (Anna Tsing)
Ever shifting, never static, assemblages are multi-species “world-making projects”. In constant flux, these assemblages fluctuate across time and space, producing divergent ways of being for humans and non-humans alike. Unpredictable and indeterminate encounters transform us within these entanglements; we are “contaminated” by such encounters, resulting in “tangled landscapes” of “contaminated diversity.
Survival always involves others. Without collaborations, we all die. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads once again to contamination.

E: As a designer how can I facilitate this encounter and collaboration?
S: (Ezio Manzini)
Everything design can do is to trigger, support, and orient social innovation. With the right tools, spaces and services design can lead to more sustainable ways of living and producing that anticipate possible futures.
Co-creating narratives of new prosperity with the community and adopting radically new ways of doing by locally reorganizing the system one can enable a systemic change. Co-ordinating and co-operating one can to push towards choices that are not hyper-individualistic, making alternatives accessible and improving the spaces of possibilities.

E: Do you have any examples?
S: (Ezio Manzini)
Collaborative associations are groups of people who work together to solve problems or open new possibilities (and who become co-producers of the results). Some examples of this category are groups of residents who transform an abandoned plot into a shared neighbourhood garden; groups of people who love cooking and who use their skills to cook for a larger group, dining together in one of the members’ houses.

E: Why do you think it’s important to work locally?
S: (Ezio Manzini)
Be local because that is where the richness is. But at the same time be global. You will ask me now, how to be local and at the same time open and global? You need to establish a dialogue between different groups, re-organizing the community in contrast with the main dangers of the present and propose a quality of life that is not based on having so much, but on the value of relationships.

E: How do we start valuing relationships more?
 S: (Anna Tsing)
We need to practice arts of listening: the recognition of differences as the beginning of work together.
But how, for example, shall we make common cause with other living beings? Listening is no longer enough; other forms of awareness will have to kick in. We need to practise the art of noticing. Ways of living together develop through coordination in disturbance.

/    we stop look at a bird on a piece of cardboard

E: It’s amazing to see how things come together - how that bird found a shelter in our ruins. This also makes me think about something else. Humans have always left traces behind, as do non-humans. The ruins are not a new concept.
S: (Jean Baudrillar)
Yes. All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of a surplus, of a superfluity that the individual - and society - feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive.

E: Although I’ve read somewhere, I think in one of your writings, that: "only in the 40 years between 1960 and 2000 more services and goods have been consumed by the people alive than by all the previous generations in human history." Somehow I feel that nowadays we have lost the balance, this overproduction is not under our control anymore.
S: (Jean Baudrillar)
Indeed today, it is we who watch them as they are born, grow to maturity and die, whereas in all previous civilizations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlived the generations of human beings. There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity, the maternal, luxurious sense of being already in the Land of Cockaigne.
We are at the point where consumption is laying hold of the whole of life, where all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in advance, hour by hour, where the ‘environment’ is total - fully air-conditioned, organized, culturalized.

E: Yes, somehow we enter into this loop where we have to work more in order to be able to buy more. We are never satisfied. Maybe a way of resistance nowadays would be coming together and redefining wealth – perhaps access to leisure time is wealth, not material things and money.
S: (Jean Baudrillar)
Of leisure we may say that "When you have time, it is no longer free." And the contradiction here is not one of terms, but of substance. This is the tragic paradox of consumption.
Everyone wants to put - believes he has put - his desire into every object possessed, consumed, and into every minute of free time, but from every object appropriated, from every satisfaction achieved, and from every ‘available’ minute, the desire is already absent, necessarily absent. All that remains is consomme of desire. In primitive societies there is no time. The question of whether one ‘has’ time or not has no meaning there. Time there is nothing but the rhythm of repeated collective activities (the ritual of work and of feasting). It cannot be dissociated from these activities and projected into the future, or planned and manipulated. It is not individual; it is the very rhythm of exchange which culminates in the act of feasting. There is no name for it; it merges with the verbs of exchanging, with the cycle of men and nature.

E: Primitive people were somehow more connected to each other and to the surrounding environment. Do you think this has something to do with our consumer capitalist society?
S: (Jean Baudrillar)
The primitive people of those societies have no personal possessions; they are not obsessed by their objects, which they throw away as and when they need to in order to be able to move about more easily. They have no apparatus of production, or ‘work’: they hunt and gather ‘at their leisure’, as we might say, and share everything within the group. They are entirely prodigal: they consume everything immediately, make no economic calculations and amass no stores. The hunter-gatherer has nothing of that bourgeois invention, economic man, about him. He is ignorant of the basic principles of Political Economy. And, indeed, he never exploits human energies, natural resources or the effective economic possibilities to the full. He sleeps a lot. He has a trust - and this is what characterizes his economic system - in the wealth of natural resources, whereas our system is characterized (ever more so with technical advance) by despair at the insufficiency of human means, by a radical, catastrophic anxiety which is the deep effect of the market economy and generalized competition. There is among them no accumulation, which is always the source of power. In the economy of the gift and symbolic exchange, a small and always finite quantity of goods is sufficient to create general wealth since those goods pass constantly from one person to the other.

E: So do you think we should go back to the past?
S: (Gavin Wade)
Change the destiny of this country now.

E: What do you mean?
S: (Gavin Wade)
This extreme inequality is too much to bear.
Be equal or be nothing.

E: We have to start being more equal, not only between ourselves, but also between non-human species and the environment.
S: (David Wallace-Wells)
Every year we are discovering more and more ways in which our industrial activity is poisoning the planet.

E:  But why do you think people don’t act on it?
S: (David Wallace-Wells)
There are many factors, I won’t list them all but I will tell you about few of them.
There is the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty that they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it.
There is also the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than take action ourselves, and the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is.
Somehow it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

E:  What can we do on a daily basis to improve the situation? I believe that conscious consumption is not enough anymore.
S: (David Wallace-Wells)
Conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be substitute for a political action, advertising not  just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that in the meantime, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the world simply by buying well.

E: The ruins of surplus give me hope, but they also make me angry.
S: (Gavin Wade)
Be angry about current situations. Be angry about a lot in life. But be positive. Be positively angry. Politics need to be rejuvenated at grassroots level, people need to become more involved in making decisions, forming judgements and sharing opinions. This does not mean bringing official politics to a wider audience. It means producing spaces and events for collective opinion formation.

E: Spaces and events for collective opinion formation? Can I borrow that?
S: (Gavin Wade)
Steal and take and copy and change these words. Often the words I write are a script to be performed.

E: The issue I am trying to address is very relevant in the present moment, but the fact of it being so relevant and often spoken of makes me question what I’m doing sometimes.  
S:(Gavin Wade)
We don’t need to “push at the door of issues no one else is talking about” because frankly in the internet age there are no issues that no one else is talking about. What we need is an art that provides people with the space to devise new strategies for engaging with and renegotiating those issues; a newkind of social space that offers hope for how we might live better.

E: Where do you think one can find this new kind of social space where we could collectively dance in the ruins? Sometimes I get overwhelmed, there are so many variables involved. It’s sometimes impossible to plan and the outcome can be confusing.
S: (Anna Tsing)
In the limit spaces of capitalism, neither properly inside nor outside, where the inability of capitalist form of discipline to fully capture the world is especially obvious. Living with precarity means not being able to plan. But it also stimulates noticing, as one works with what is available. Moreover, stories should never end but rather lead to further stories. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time?

E: :)
S: (Anna Tsing)
At the very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways forward - not just one.

E: That’s what I’m hoping to find - another way forward.  
S:(Anna Tsing)
And remember not all of us enact such a literal figuration of living in ruins, precarity is a state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others.

(I've never been good at goodbyes so I won't even bother to try)

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