16 February 2022. Objects | Activism
The histories of obsolete objects. ‘Our true home is the present moment’.
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1: The history of obsolete objects
There is a terrific review essay at The Baffler that I have been meaning to mention for some time on objects that are now obsolete. Indeed the book being reviewed is called Extinct. It is edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner, and Miranda Critchley, and includes 85 essays on objects that are no longer with us, arranged alphabetically.
These objects include, for example:
all-plastic houses, cab fare maps, chatelaines, flying boats, moon towers, paper dresses, slide rules, UV-radiated artificial beaches, zeppelins.
The reviewer, Sophie Haigney, also notes an essay about domestic ashtrays, including one that came with its own stand.
The editors, it seems, want to understand the conditions under which objects disappear:
“When things disappear, they do so, it is implied, because of their own inadequacy or their unsuitedness to their conditions. Part of the purpose of this book is to probe and question this seeming inevitability.”
The essays focus on both what has disappeared; and why; and the significance of this.
The editors identify six general reasons why things become extinct and categorize each object in this way. Certain objects are deemed “failed”; they simply didn’t work. Many more, though, are “superseded” by more advanced models of similar things. Some dead objects, especially commercial products, are “defunct”—these have failed to gain widespread adoption, or couldn’t be mass-produced, or have simply gone out of style. Others are “aestivated,” meaning that they disappear but are revived in a new form. Still others are classified as “visionary,” in that they never quite came into being at all. The rest are “enforced,” basically regulated into disappearance.
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(Cartoon by Guy Head, 1862. From The Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0)
It’s easy to be nostalgic about such things, but some of the objects in the book should have disappeared sooner. I hadn’t realised that arsenic wallpaper was a thing in the 19th century, but it was. (It was good for dying things green; it was also used in clothes). William Morris produced it, for example, and even when campaigners identified it as a source of both illness and death designers and manufacturers continued to produce it. It wasn’t legislated against, but eventually the weight of public opinion became overwhelming, and companies had to announce that their wallpaper no longer contained arsenic.
The story of arsenic wallpaper demonstrates the power of consumer desire even in the face of known risks, the failure of legislative bodies to care for the public welfare, and the hidden dangers that can lurk inside beautiful things. There are many other fables in Extinct, often pointing toward the way the market fails to advance revolutionary inventions... Phase-change chemical heat-storage barrels, a radical form of solar heating invented in the 1940s, might have made for environmentally friendly home design, had they been pursued for longer. A planned monorail city in the UK that was never built looks like the utopian dream of living car-free.
Or, maybe, in the last example, like a famous episode of The Simpsons.
As Haigney writes, there’s an implicit idea of the counter-factual in here. What world might these objects have survived in? This connects to an idea I’ve discussed here before: that entrepreneurs make a bet on a certain kind of future—even if the bet fails, they have seen something in a possible future(s) that other people haven’t seen.
This is true in a sense; people interested in internet reform can study the template the Minitel provided for early network-based computing, one which was more centralized, more widely accessible, and more attuned to privacy than the world wide web that replaced it. At the very least, Extinct is evidence that nothing is inevitable; things didn’t have to turn out this way.
But there’s another story in here too, in which these ideas come up hard against structural change that simply rolls over them, sometimes, but not always, for the better.
Certain ones crop up repeatedly: the oil crisis in the 1970s; growing concerns about sanitation in the late nineteenth century and public safety in consumer goods in the twentieth. These are fundamentally political pheneomena, with implications that go far beyond the fate of single objects. But they appear individually and sequentially, as interludes in the life cycles of particular things; the book’s structure occludes a more coherent political analysis of change.
Although there’s an implicit material history of objects embedded here, the alphabetical structure means that it is hard to discern. Extinct takes the form of a coffee table book—400 pages, beautifully produced—so maybe it’s designed to be dipped into, as Haigney suggests. And maybe there’s a melding of form and content here. Surely coffee-table books, and the “coffee-tables” they once sat on, are also headed for extinction.
2: ‘Our true home is the present moment’
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There’s an obituary of the Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh, who died at the end of January at the age of 95, on the CUSP blog. It’s by Tim Jackson, who’d written about Thich Nhat Hanh in his book Post Growth—Life After Capitalism.
Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled by the South Vietnamese government in 1966, after presenting a peace proposal to end the war at a conference in Washington. He spent the next half a century in exile, returning to Hue, where he was born, only after having a severe stroke at the age of 88.
He was part of a movement for a more activist form of Buddhism, one that was engaged with the hardships of the people they lived among. In Vietnam, as the war with the United States developed, there was no shortage of opportunity.
The premise was clear. If the peace sought in monastic retreat was not simply to be a gratuitous pleasure, it must be brought back into the world somehow. It must translate into action. It must stand firm against the suffering of others. The young activists who gathered around Thich Nhat Hanh came to believe that nonviolent protest—and what he called ‘compassionate action’—was a necessary response to the injustice of war. ‘When bombs begin to fall on people,’ he said, ‘you cannot stay in the meditation hall.’
Some monks took this to extremes; famously several set themselves on fire in public to draw attention to the war. But the nonviolent movement also took on other forms:
he established the School of Youth for Social Service, which trained thousands of young volunteers, both monastic and lay, to relocate refugees and help them rebuild their lives. Its services were very soon called into action. In 1964, at the height of the conflict, the country was hit by one of the worst floods in living memory... More than six thousand people lost their lives. The entire country was mobilized in the relief effort.
But some of the worst-hit areas were in areas that were also riven by armed conflict. Thich Nhat Hanh and volunteers took seven rowing boats with food and medical supplies into the area:
Sometimes trapped in crossfire, sometimes succumbing to sickness themselves, the volunteers made their way high into the mountains, bringing aid to anyone who needed it, whichever side of the conflict they were on.
As a result of his work in the Vietnam peace process, some of it with Martin Luther King, led King to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Price. Thich Nhat Hanh led the Buddhist delegation at the Paris Peace Talks.
(Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King at a enws conference in Chicago in 1966. Source: Plum Village)
During his long exile, he published 100 books, popularising ideas such as mindfulness to a Western audience. Having been made homeless and stateless by the South Vietnam government, he eventually settled in France, where he built up an ecological retreat, Plum Village.
His perspective on the West remained critical:
In The Art of Power (2008) Thich Nhat Hanh argues that what we think of as power in western society is really a form of craving: for wealth, property, possessions, status, comfort, sex. And for dominance over others in pursuit of these things. To be ruled by our cravings is to intensify our suffering. Not only for those excluded from power but even for those who use economic or military power to satisfy them. Suffering can only be alleviated, he insisted, by freeing ourselves from craving.
His long exile meant, eventually, that he longed to return home. But it also opened up a deep understanding of activism:
‘Our true home is the present moment,’ he said. ‘Whatever is happening right here, right now,’ that is our home. This isn’t just an abstract idea, he insisted, but ‘a solid reality’ that we can learn to experience for ourselves. To set ourselves on the path of reaching this experience is the greatest power that we have. At the end of the day, he said, there is no way home. ‘Home is the way’.
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(Inviting the bell to sound, Plum Village, 2006. Source: Plum Village)
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