Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture Raymond Malewitz

[ PMLA

Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture raymond malewitz

N 14 APRIL 2008 BARACK OBAMA, CAMPAIGNING FOR PRESI- Odent, addressed a crowd of union workers at the David L. Law- rence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Recall- ing his early years as a community organizer, he began his speech with an account of the irst time he saw an abandoned steel mill:

It was late in the aternoon and I took a drive with another organizer over to the old Wisconsin Steel plant on the southeast side of Chicago. Some of you may know it. And as we drove up, I saw a sight that’s prob- ably familiar to some of you. I saw a plant that was empty and rusty. And behind a chain-link fence, I saw weeds sprouting up through the concrete, and an old mangy cat running around. And I thought about all the good jobs it used to provide, and all the kids who used to work there in the summer to make some extra money for college. What I came to understand was that when a plant shuts down, it’s not just the workers who pay a price, it’s the whole community.

As Obama’s story suggests, the economic downturn of 2008 was old news for the manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt. In the early 1950s, approximately one- third of the United States labor force worked in factories, and industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Saint Louis were among the top ten population centers in the country. By the early twenty- irst century, fewer than one in ten Americans worked in factories, and an economically transformed and substantially depopulated Chicago was the only mid- western city let in the top ten. RAYMOND MALEWITZ is assistant profes- sor in the School of Writing, Literature, For better and for worse, this shift in the United States labor and Film at Oregon State University. He force has decreased the value of job skills associated with the creation is working on a book manuscript, “The and manipulation of material objects and has led to predictable calls Practice of Misuse.” to retrain the American worker. At the same time it has produced a

526 [ © 2012 by the modern language association of america ] 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 527 new demographic in the United States: a pop struggle for individual agency, which [is] at ulation of skilled manual laborers who can the very center of modern life” (7). not practice their trades. Cultural critics have In this essay, I return to the subject of addressed this demographic and its inluence the American skilled laborer and explore on the imaginative landscape of American the ways that the “struggle for individual culture during moments of economic transi agency” is reimagined in the present period. tion. For example, in his classic study of anti At stake are two larger questions implied in modernism in American history, No Place for Obama’s, Lears’s, and Crawford’s stories: how Grace, T. J. Jackson Lears departs from his do Americans generate real or ictional narra commentary on the arts and crats movement tives in which skilled laborers reassume posi of the early twentieth century to address the tions of authority; and what social, economic, work conditions of the early 1980s “postin ideological, or historical conditions would dustrial society” in which he writes. In such a necessitate a “return to the trades” program? society, knowledge workers look on their work I focus my attention on new archetypes and ind it “strangely insubstantial”: “he new in contemporary American culture—rugged bureaucratic world of work oten fragmented consumers—who are haunted by the dissolu their labor and reduced their sense of auton tion of manufacturing jobs during the late omy: more important, it isolated them from twentieth and early twenty irst centuries and the hard, substantial reality of things. Among the accompanying sense that their place in the middle and upper classes, the transforma American society holds no value. Although tion of work reinforced difficulties pervad they are alienated from sites of industrial pro ing the wider culture; the splintering sense of ductivity, rugged consumers ind alternative selhood, the vague feelings of unreality” (60). ways of practicing their skills by creatively In his wonderful (and wonderfully polemical) misusing, repairing, and repurposing the recent book, Shop Class as Soulcrat, Matthew objects in their environments. At the same Crawford confronts the contemporary version time, they ennoble such actions by viewing of this problem: them through the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individu A decline in tool use would seem to betoken alism. Whether in literature or in the broader a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: culture, American rugged consumers thus more passive and more dependent. And in mediate between the mythic models of self deed, there are few occasions for the kind of sufficiency required by the country’s older, spiritedness that is called forth when we take frontier culture and the empty and rusty things in hand for ourselves, whether to ix realities that characterize its transition to a them or to make them. What ordinary peo ple once made, they buy; and what they once postindustrial economy. ixed for themselves, they replace entirely or I trace four manifestations of rugged con hire an expert to repair, whose expert ix oten sumerism in the culture of late capitalism. involves replacing an entire system because First, I show how knowledge workers in Chuck some minute component has failed. (2) Pahlaniuk’s Fight Club overcome their “splin tering sense of selhood” through the hyper Crawford casts his “return to the trades” masculine, destructive transformation of program in terms that resonate with older, domestic objects into weapons. he weapon nostalgic notions of rugged individualism. ization of unlikely objects, I argue, repositions Meaningful work and self reliance, he ar these workers as agents of power rather than gues, “requir[e] focused engagement with our as its victims. Second, I introduce an alterna material things. . . . Both ideals are tied to a tive to this nihilistic rejection of knowledge 528 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

work in contemporary “maker communities,” ject only when that object’s use value has been which blend knowledge work with manual removed. In other words, the thing appears labor. Pairing Internet communities such as only when the object no longer functions: Instructables and IKEA Hacker with novels by Shelley Jackson and Margaret Atwood, I We begin to confront the thingness of objects explain how these maker communities repur- when they stop working for us: when the drill pose earlier forms of antimodernism, such as breaks, when the car stalls, when the win- the arts and crats movement, to turn passive dows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, con- encounters with mass-produced commodi- sumption and exhibition, has been arrested, ties into active ones. hird, through the same however momentarily. The story of objects communities and artifacts, I describe how asserting themselves as things, then, is the some forms of rugged consumerism advocate story of a changed relation to the human environmentalism and oppose models of con- subject and thus the story of how the thing sumption that push commodities toward real really names less an object than a particular and metaphysical junkyards. Finally, I exam- subject-object relation.2 (4) ine apocalyptic visions of objects in the works of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Mar- Brown revises this passive apprehension of garet Atwood. Such works, I argue, mythically objects in his later account of “misuse value.” resolve the problems of a dwindling skilled la- In A Sense of hings, he distinguishes between bor force by presenting American laborers in two types of human-object interactions: “ap- direct contrast to their current conditions: as perceptive” interactions, which “foreclos[e] survivors, not as casualties of late capitalism’s sensuous experience in order to render the “apocalyptic zero- point” (Žižek x). physical world phenomenal,” and “the experi- My analysis of object misuse draws on ence of the thing,” which “call[s] our attention an ontological distinction between open to brute physicality” through the “interrup- “things” and closed “objects” that appears (if tion of habit” (76). Brown illustrates this dis- only obliquely) in Lears’s discussion of “the tinction with a short passage from William hard, substantial reality of things” and in James’s he Principles of Psychology in which Crawford’s celebration of “spiritedness that James accesses the “thingness” of a painting is called forth when we take things in hand.” by turning it upside down. Brown interprets Both passages dovetail Bill Brown’s useful the passage as follows: “he diference between model of materiality outlined in his 2001 the apperceptive constitution of the thing, in essay “hing heory” and his 2003 study of what we might call its objecthood, and the ex- late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century perience of the thing, in what we might call American literature, A Sense of hings. Fol- its thinghood, emerges in the moment (and no lowing Martin Heidegger, Brown defines doubt only as a moment) of re- objectiication things as material bodies that resist integra- that results from a kind of misuse—turning tion into any human system of meaning.1 the picture bottom up, standing on one’s head” Objects, on the other hand, are the closed (76). Just as a broken drill becomes a mysteri- products of such human systems and take the ous thing through the suspension of habitual dematerialized form of standard use values. use, the link between a painting and its so- In “hing heory” the diference between ob- cially constructed value is severed through jects and things becomes the joint product of James’s actions. The painting, in short, be- mathematical subtraction and historical ac- comes a hard and substantial thing. cident: if a physical substance is both a thing Unlike Brown’s earlier model, this exam- and an object, the thing appears out of the ob- ple suggests that humans might intentionally 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 529 direct the process of thing making. By turning of failure (B), then multiply the result by the the painting upside down, James overturns average cost of an out-of- court settlement (C). the social relations that inhere in the paint- A times B times C equals X. his is what it ing, and in the brief transition between one will cost if we don’t initiate a recall. human- object relation and another, the thing If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we lickers forth. As his reading of James’s story recall the cars and no one gets hurt. suggests, Brown directs his theory of things If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall. (20) toward aesthetic rather than practical ends. In this sense, his work is grounded in the project Though the narrator’s algorithm demateri- of modernism, which “teaches us that inding alizes the objects of mechanical failure (and a new place for detritus, recycling it into some thus would seem to challenge Brown’s argu- new scene, confers new value on it” (78). As ments regarding accidental thing making), his examples make clear, the “recycl[ed]” object’s “new scene” is the scene of art, and the the concrete thingness of automobile parts is “new value” is aesthetic in origin. never far from his mind: In contrast to Brown’s modernist or pro- I know about the air-conditioning rheostat tomodernist model of intentional misuse, that gets so hot it sets ire to the maps in your which emerges from the conditions of indus- glove compartment. I know how many people trial capitalism, the kinds of misuse that will burn alive because of fuel-injector lashback. be explored in this study of postindustrial I’ve seen people’s legs cut of at the knee when capitalism yield objects that cannot be un- turbochargers start exploding and send their derstood as exclusively (or even partially) aes- vanes through the irewall and into the pas- thetic. Likewise, the rugged consumers who senger compartment. I’ve been out in the reassemble the world around them cannot ield and seen the burned- up cars and seen be understood as artists, at least in the high the reports where cause of failure is re- modernist sense of the word. To signal these corded as “unknown.” (90) diferences and some of their consequences, I begin with a story of object misuse that dra- hese ghoulish musings foreshadow the nov- matically recodes William James’s phenom- el’s surprising plot device: the narrator lives enology of the object. a second life as Tyler Durden, a part-time waiter and full- time anarcho- terrorist who occupies the narrator’s body as he sleeps. In- Weaponization as Misuse stead of reporting on the diverse mechanisms In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, the of death that sufuse the narrator’s daily ex- unnamed narrator’s career depends on the istence, however, Durden puts the narrator’s failures of American manufacturing. As a post hoc analysis into practice by intention- budget analyst for an American car company, ally misusing commodities. Near the novel’s he calculates the cost-beneit analysis of po- beginning, for example, Durden destroys tential recalls of defective automobiles: the narrator’s apartment with an explosive that would not look out of place in one of the If a new car built by my company leaves narrator’s car crash analyses. He arranges Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, for the pilot light on the narrator’s stove to and the rear diferential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped in- malfunction, causing the hermetically sealed side, does my company initiate a recall? apartment to slowly ill with gas. When the You take the population of vehicles in the compressor in the apartment’s refrigerator ield (A) and multiply it by the probable rate clicks on, the room explodes (34–35). 530 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

Through its anarchic weaponization of ing a set of atavistic skills that, ironically, object failure, Fight Club illuminates several he has already acquired in his second life as properties of this most violent and problem- Durden. he chaotic violence of mechanical atic strain of rugged consumerism. First, failure, for example, becomes the ritualistic violent forms of rugged consumerism clearly violence of the various “ight clubs” that Dur- divide people into two categories based on den establishes throughout the United States. their understanding of object function. On Likewise, the charred victims of car crashes the one hand are people such as the hapless become source texts for Durden’s later stories narrator, who cannot think beyond the dema- of mythic heroes sacriiced to ancient gods: terialized realm of commodity fetishism. On the other hand are rugged consumers such as “In ancient history,” Tyler says, “human Durden, who see through the socially encoded sacriices were made on a hill above a river. object to its material substance—to what housands of people. Listen to me. he sacri- Brown, following Heidegger, would call its es- ices were made and the bodies were burned sential thingness. As the blue- collar obverse of on a pyre. . . . Rain . . . fell on the burnt pyre year after year, and year after year, people James’s experiment with a painting, Durden were burned, and the rain seeped through exploits the design laws of consumer goods the wood ashes to become a solution of lye, and, in so doing, enters into predatory rather and the lye combined with the melted fat of than passive relations with his surroundings. the sacriices, and a thick white discharge of Second, like Brown’s rareied arguments soap crept out from the base of the altar and on thing making, the novel’s plot moves from crept downhill toward the river.” (67) the narrator’s apprehension of accidental misuse to Durden’s applied misuse. Unlike Durden’s fantastic conversion of acciden- Brown’s examples, however, Durden’s ac- tal misuse into ritual misuse culminates in tions echo the oten violent, self- sustaining his decision to render soap from human fat. behaviors of America’s mythic frontier popu- For supplies, Durden and the narrator raid lation. he explosion metaphorically propels medical- waste bins in search of liposuctioned the narrator out of his consumer nest—an fat—a literal embodiment of postconsumer IKEA wonderland where “the things you waste that they “sell back to the very people used to own, now they own you” (34)—and who paid to have it sucked of.” he narrator into a dilapidated rental where Durden lives, cannot resist casting this morbid enterprise a house that “is waiting for something, a zon- in terms that resonate with violent frontier ing change or a will to come out of probate, mythology. “We’re a hunting party, and we’re and then it will be torn down” (48). hunting for fat,” he reports (142). hough the house is in a Rust Belt city, While the narrator converts his urban the narrator’s description of his new dwelling life into a frontier existence of civilization situates it at physical and metaphoric bound- blended with wilderness, Durden’s plans are aries between civilization and wilderness. more extreme. As he renders soap, he skims Faulty fuses force the narrator to carry home- of the glycerin and begins to assemble bombs made candles for light. he lock on the front made out of cotton, cat litter, paraffin, diet door has been kicked in, leaving the house cola, and concentrated orange juice. These open to the harsh environment. heir “only improvised explosive devices, he hopes, will neighbors are a closed machine shop” and “a bring about the end of human civilization: block-long warehouse” (48). Most important, though the narrator continues to hold his of- “You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon ice job, he soon devotes more time to learn- forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Cen- 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 531

ter, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the rating homes with items scavenged from the Space Needle leaning at a forty- ive- degree trash of art schools and construction sites. angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge Print media follow the same general trend. totem faces and goblin tikis, and every eve- he popular arts and crats magazine Ready- ning what’s left of mankind will retreat to Made promises “instructions for everyday empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protec- life,” including a “MacGyver” section that tion against bears and big cats and wolves asks readers to submit their favorite example that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. . . . A cultural ice age. A pre- of creative repurposing. Likewise, popu- maturely induced dark age. [It] will force hu- lar Internet sites such as Instructables and manity to go dormant or into remission long IKEA Hacker teach cash-strapped casualties enough for the Earth to recover.” (116) of recession how to make rugs from plastic grocery bags, headboards out of hardcover Yet even in Durden’s fantasy the objects of hu- books, and serving bowls out of foreclosed- man civilization—the skyscrapers and empty home signs. As one Instructables member zoos—are not erased; they are transformed. writes, the recent economic downturn has By depicting trash picking as hunting, shop- been a blessing as well as a curse: ping for orange juice and cat litter as weapon making, and spray- painting skyscrapers as Say you need a wallet. Go to a store and wallets carving totem poles, the novel violently yokes might be made of leather, or vinyl, or canvas, consumer behaviors to older industrial and but they’ll roughly be of the same style, size, and agrarian relations with artiicial objects. In material. Go to Instructables, and you’ll find dozens made out of everything from playing the process, Fight Club celebrates a repur- cards to inner tubes, all constructed with more posed version of the hypermasculine violence design variance than seems possible. It’s this that Richard Slotkin critiques in his seminal endless variety, spurred on by ierce individual- study of the American frontier. ism, that makes the Instructables Crat commu- While this aggressive ethos operates in nity like no other. (Best 177; emphasis mine) many works of contemporary American literature,3 other forms of rugged consumerism he productive rugged consumerism that diverge from this sensibility and generate mod- informs these cultural and historical objects iied objects that serve productive rather than traces back to a network of industrial, eco- destructive ends. he politics of rugged con- nomic, political, and aesthetic practices and sumerism is a slippery subject, and to provide theories of the past two centuries. Consider a sense of the full range of rugged- consumer ReadyMade magazine. While its title refers to behaviors, I turn now to a few examples in Marcel Duchamp’s objets trouvés of the early American culture that offer a more complex twentieth century, the magazine’s philosophi- perspective on the regeneration of manual la- cal program is more in line with sustainable bor skills in the contemporary period. environmental practices than with modernist aesthetics. According to Shoshana Berger, a co- The New Arts and Crafts Movement founder of the magazine, the popularity of its green program was enhanced by the recession American television offers ample evidence of 2001, which gave readers a inancial incen- of rugged consumerism’s impact on popu- tive to pursue eco- friendly projects: “It helped lar material culture. At virtually any hour of that we started during a recession—the dot- the day, popular design shows such as Trad- com bust had hit the San Francisco bay area ing Spaces, Design on a Dime, and Hope for hard, and we published our first issue three Your Home broadcast instructions for deco- months after 9/11.” In the same interview, 532 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

Berger notes the resurgence of “cottage indus- For these makers, material objects become try crafters” who have combined the early- “open source” things, which are subject to the twentieth- century legacy of the American same kinds of modiications as personal Web cratsperson with the “hacker” communities sites and community blogs.4 of the late twentieth century. It would not be a Shortly after Instructables debuted, stretch to suggest that ReadyMade is as much it partnered with the popular blog IKEA a product of knowledge work (and its failures) Hacker, devoted to the creative reimagining as of cratwork, of environmental advocacy as of IKEA furniture kits. Part of the appeal of much as of economic reality, and of the imma- furniture hacking lies in its strange resistance terial Internet as much as of material culture. to, or subversion of, standard modes of object Or consider Instructables. Around 2001 use. Unlike the protagonist in Fight Club, for a group of mechanical engineering graduate whom IKEA is an emasculation and com- students at MIT became interested in the “fab modification of do-it- yourself desire (“We culture” of bicycling and kite surfing. Saul all have the same Johanneshov armchair in Griffith, a cofounder, describes the site as the Strinne green stripe pattern,” he tells the “kind of like a Wikipedia for making stuf”: reader. “We all have the same Rislampa/ Har “Everything I own is basically one of a kind. paper lamps made from wire and environ- . . . We got inspired when we looked at all mentally friendly unbleached paper” [33]), these guys who’d engineered these incredible, the members of this online community keep modded parts for their Harleys. hey’d have the materials but throw away the instruc- amazing photos of them, but they’d never tions; in Brown’s terms, they keep the disas- post the CAD image,” Griith says. “We were sembled thing but discard the object. like, Why not go open source?” (hompson). Whether such behaviors subvert or in Clearly, Griith’s story suggests that Instruc- fact support the conditions of late capitalism tables—like ReadyMade—makes a virtue is a question that I leave for others to deter- of economic necessity. But, in the process, mine. For the purposes of my argument, the Griith’s modiied bicycles (or their Harley idea of hacking mass-reproduced commodi- counterparts) update the older arts and crats ties reveals how the new arts and crats move- movement of the late nineteenth and early ment attempts to reform the older divisions twentieth centuries. Just as American crats- between production and consumption and people of this earlier period built objects between knowledge work and manual labor that departed (however provisionally) from that Fight Club could resolve only with vio- the homogenization of their mass-produced lence. In place of the gap between labor and counterparts, Griffith’s readers reassemble use that produces consumer alienation, IKEA mass- produced commodities into unalien- Hacker and other Web sites introduce a third, ated, “one of a kind” objects of devotion. critically underexplored term—modifica- In a rich testament to the influence of tion—which straddles the gap between the digital culture on material culture, the com- two sides of object exchange. While the alien- pany also adopts a recent trend in Web be- ation of initial labor remains, there emerges a havior toward open- source coding. Whereas community of new cratspeople who interact Web 2.0 sites, such as Wikipedia, encourage with commodities in ways that move beyond a community of like-minded participants to the socially encoded object to the thingness take ownership of the information that gov- dormant within it. erns their lives, Instructables encourages its Literary artists have been drawn to these followers to become more active in the way complex combinations of knowledge work that they encounter and manipulate objects. and material labor. For example, the novel- 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 533 ist Shelley Jackson incorporates a productive In each of the five sections, a reader ex- form of rugged consumerism in her hyper- tends the narrative by clicking on individual text novel Patchwork Girl. Repurposing Mary words in a given lexia or by selecting the Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel adopts Shel- links button above the lexia, creating a two- ley’s underdeveloped female monster (com- dimensional network of narrative possibili- missioned by Frankenstein’s irst creation) as ties that provides a structural metaphor for its subject and narrator. he patchwork mon- the creature’s stitched body. Fittingly, Jackson ster’s story composes only one element of the expresses this metaphor in her “map view” of work, however, which Jackson divides into the text, where the individual sections that ive networked sections: “graveyard,” “jour- compose the head, torso, arms, and legs of nal,” “quilt,” “story,” and “broken accents.” her creature appear as a kind of parodic in- In a manner akin to the “mod culture” struction manual for IKEA- like assembly of IKEA Hacker and Instructables, Jackson’s (ig. 1). As the female monster testiies: narrative is therefore subject to customiza- tion. he work presents itself as a disassem- he grave becomes the cradle; from amidst bled thing that is transformed by curious damp clods and wisps of luminous corpse-gas readers into coherent, idiosyncratic objects. comes squalling the “hideous progeny,” her

FIG. 1

“Storyspace map,” from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. Courtesy of Eastgate Systems. 534 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

words. Death is the very seat, the prop of life, the eponymous heroine in the deserts of the its raw material, and those once impregnable American West, living of the land as a para- ramparts that barred the living from the dead gon of the rugged individual. are breached. Impregnable ramparts, preg- In their paeans to productive modifica- nant death; barriers breached by a breech tion, Jackson and the spokespeople for the new birth. Yeah, I came out topsy- turvy, heels over maker communities thus ofer important alter- head, and the whole world wobbled with me. natives to the nihilistic modiication of fron- Life once did flow toward death, parents engendered ofspring, time moved from the tier culture outlined in Fight Club. In doing so, beginning to the end. I am a disturbance in they testify to what Jonathan Lethem, Jackson’s the low. (“Born”)5 former husband, in his patchwork text “The Ecstasy of Inluence,” calls “the beauty of sec- his disturbance is, in a sense, a fusion of old ond use”: “he demarcation between various and new do-it- yourself arts and crafts pro- possible uses is beautifully graded and hard grams, which converts a series of deadened to deine, the more so as artifacts distill into objects into creative new patchwork pattern- and repercuss through the realm of culture ings. “You can resurrect me, but only piece- into which they’ve been entered, the more so meal,” the creature tells us. “If you want to see as they engage the receptive minds for whom the whole, you will have to sew me together they were presumably intended.” yourself” (“Graveyard”). Jackson aligns her hypertextual experi- Environmental Activism and Misuse ment with a nineteenth- century tradition of manual assembly similar to the rugged Margaret Atwood’s recent novel he Year of consumerism of maker communities: patch- the Flood also displays the influence of the work quilting. In a lexia entitled “Research,” new arts and crats aesthetic popularized by Jackson explains that the idea for her novel ReadyMade and Instructables.6 Set in a future emerged when she “came across a fabric world that teeters on the brink of an ecologi- of relations, an old patchwork quilt, which cal disaster, the novel follows the lives of two my grandmother once made when she was members of an eco- cult called the Gardeners, young.” This passage is a quotation from who live by scavenging and repurposing the the preface to L. Frank Baum’s The Patch- dystopian world’s waste products. hey cre- work Girl of Oz and in a sense performs what ate objects that are simultaneously practical it describes. Like the rest of the narrative, and philosophically demonstrative. For ex- the repurposed quotation echoes the self- ample, one of the Gardeners’ leaders, Stuart sustaining nature of the rugged women of the the Screw, teaches his disciples how to make frontier, who, as Jackson writes, built crazy “furniture out of recycled junk” (83). Such quilts out of “any shape, color or material: a do-it- yourself handiwork is on full display in new dimity bought for the color, an old serge another character’s humorous description of saved for a memory, scraps of old dresses or her living quarters: neckties or coats . . .” (“Crazy”). Although Our space was a big room, with some cu- many historians would dispute the accuracy bicles curtained of—one for me, one for Lu- of this depiction of the frugal frontier quilter, cerne and Zeb, one for the violet biolet, one Jackson’s patchwork narrative operates un- for the shower. he cubicle curtains were wo- der the same assumptions of diversity amid ven of plastic-bag strips and duct tape, and scarcity that characterize the frontier quilt- they weren’t in any way soundproof. . . . er’s mythic counterpart. Fittingly, the novel We ate our meals in the main room, on a concludes (if it can be said to conclude) with table made out of a door. All of our dishes 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 535

and pots and pans were salvaged—gleaned, does not depart from the conditions of late as the Gardeners said—except for some of capitalism so much as it emerges from them. the thicker plates and mugs. hose had been he Gardeners do not wholeheartedly reject made by the Gardeners back in their Ceram- the “pleebland” that exists beyond their small ics period, before they’d decided that kilns community. After all, the things that they used up too much energy. use were once marketable commodities that I slept on a futon with husks and straw. It had a quilt sewed out of blue jeans and used were discarded by the larger society. Instead, bathmats. . . . (63) they reject the specific premise held by the pleeblanders that each object has a singular Clearly, the novel also situates its rugged use value and that once that use has been ful- consumerism in the context of the American illed, it is perfectly acceptable to discard the environmental movement. The Year of the commodity’s husk. In place of this model, the Flood describes an environmental apocalypse Gardeners suggest that through “God-given brought on by an engineered virus (“the Wa- powers of creativity, . . . even the useless and terless Flood”) that, like Durden’s fantasies discarded may be redeemed from meaning- in Fight Club, returns contemporary society lessness” (160). In other words, the Gardeners to its preindustrial state. As the leader of the ind a solution to the problems of utilitarian- Gardeners writes in one of his millennial ism through a kind of hyperutilitarianism— pamphlets, “[T] he Waterless Flood is coming, a mania for uncovering new “proper use[s] ” in which all buying and selling will cease, and for things that perpetually reobjectiies the we will ind ourselves thrown back upon our world. Though this regenerative solution is own resources, in the midst of God’s boun- not without its critics,7 in the novel this ap- teous Garden. Which was your Garden also” proach allows the Gardeners to reclaim the (126). Despite their obvious diferences (in- pleebland’s lost sites of creative productivity. cluding, chiely, the fact that the Gardeners he Gardeners’ platform of continuous re- are not responsible for the genocidal depopu- purposing echoes the tenets of the new arts and lation of the land), the Gardeners and their crats movement and a new American environ- frontier antecedents display the same belief in mental industrial design movement based on the redemptive energy found at the intersec- biomimesis, regenerative industrial practices, tion of civilization and wilderness. and cradle- to- cradle engineering. Each of these Indeed, the Gardeners of Atwood’s novel terms describes creative eforts to rethink the convert environmental advocacy into a kind negative telos of consumer behaviors by con- of Christianity complete with environmental structing objects that mimic the life cycles of saints such as Rachel Carson (372). Echoing natural things. The major arguments of this a frequent refrain of environmental crit- movement are outlined in the 2002 environ- ics, the Gardeners insist that in their world mental manifesto Cradle to Cradle, jointly “[t] here [i] s no such thing as garbage, trash, composed by the environmental architect or dirt, only matter that [has not] been put to William McDonough and the environmental a proper use.” Accordingly, they collect dis- chemist Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle carded wine and convert it into vinegar for argues for a novel program of ethical design in cooking and cleaning, scavenge soap ends which commodities would be designed to be from hotels and restaurants to be remade into recycled at the same level at which they enter detergents, and raid trash bins for toys, furni- “the matter life cycle,” traveling from one birth ture, and cooking supplies (68–70). to another or, as the authors’ title suggests, As the Gardeners’ misuse of preexistent from “cradle to cradle.” he primary example commodities suggests, this eco- advocacy of this program is the book itself. Printed on 536 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

a special type of synthetic polymer resistant The Commodity at the End of the World to degradation but easily stripped of its ink, Since the beginning of this essay, I have the book can be fully recycled by its readers moved away from aesthetic theories of things back into the newly luid print medium. Like and toward descriptions of various practices Jackson in her patchwork novel, McDonough of misuse. In its conclusion, I want to return and Braungart create an ininitely reusable pa- to the relation between the imagination and limpsest, a transformable mount upon which manual labor. Both the new arts and crafts “books become books become books over and movement and new groups in the ongoing over again, each incarnation a sparkling new environmental movement misuse objects vehicle for fresh images and ideas.” As Mc- in ways that cannot be understood through Donough and Braungart hyperbolically sug- strictly practical or political frameworks. gest, “Form follows not just function but the he pleasure of making a chair out of a rub- evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly ber hose or a briefcase out of old loppy disks propagating spirit of the printed word,” and (to name two “instructables”) stems not only creates “a story within the very molecules of its from the creative act of re- production or the pages. Not the old tale of damage and despair, satisfaction of ecological advocacy but also but one of abundance and renewal, human cre- from the cognitive surprise of seeing an ob- ativity and possibility” (71). Civilized objects, ject in a new light. At such moments, the net- in other words, are regenerated through their work of associations that surrounds an object repositioning as natural things. drops away, yielding what Heidegger would McDonough and Braungart’s appropria- call the “lit up” being of the thing (Being 102). tion of literary vocabulary—“story,” “tale,” he resulting product of misuse fuses Brown’s and so on—relects a curious conlation be- aesthetic theory of early- twentieth- century tween material and metaphysical concerns misuse with its later practices. that runs through the work. As do the cre- The most extreme examples of theory ators of the monster in Patchwork Girl and overlapping with practice emerge in the apoca- of the Gardeners in Year of the Flood, Mc- lyptic literature written shortly ater 9/11. A few Donough and Braungart yoke material months ater the attacks, Don DeLillo wrote: form to political action and claim that the permanent or impermanent forms in which Now a small group of men have literally al- commodities reside can stunt or encourage tered our skyline. We have fallen back in time human development and creativity. and space. It is their technology that marks our his quasi-utopian stance alters the way moments, the small, lethal devices, the remote- that objects might be encountered at the control detonators they fashion out of radios, dawn of the twenty-first century. By fore- or the larger technology they borrow from us, passenger jets that become manned missiles. grounding the parallels among natural, Maybe this is a grim subtext of their enter- industrial, and knowledge production, Mc- prise. hey see something innately destruc- Donough and Braungart transform each ob- tive in the nature of technology. It brings ject from a product into a process, or, to use death to their customs and beliefs. Use it as Brown’s terms, they create things from which what it is, a thing that kills. many objects can be produced. Like the new hacker and Instructable communities, Cradle In this reading, DeLillo recounts his horri- to Cradle becomes, in a sense, open- source ied fascination as he watches objects return and calls on future readers to complete its to their deadly thingness: radios become sig- work at the metaphysical frontier between naling devices, planes become manned mis- natural production and social consumption. siles, towers—“technology’s irresistible will 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 537 to realise in solid form whatever becomes Through flashbacks, the story reveals how theoretically allowable”—become rubble. In Snowman’s friend Crake creates a cata- the same essay, DeLillo speculates that these strophic “bio-form” as a permanent solution shocking instances of object misuse might to the environmental and social problems of forever alter the way that Americans view the the early twenty-irst century. In place of hu- commodities that populate their world: “We mans, Crake engineers a set of childlike hu- may ind that the ruin of the towers is implicit manoids that are designed to wander naked in other things. he new Palm Pilot at a in- through the harsh terrain, munching leaves, gertip’s reach, the stretch limousine parked singing songs, and copulating during their outside the hotel, the midtown skyscraper limited mating season. Snowman watches under construction, carrying the name of a over these simple “Crakers” after their cre- major investment bank—all haunted in a way ator dies, leading them out of their laboratory by what has happened, less assured in their conines and into a world populated by use- authority, in the prerogatives they ofer.” In less things. Early in the novel, Atwood shows other words, DeLillo anticipates a Durden- how this garbage experiences a strange kind esque future world where the seamless rela- of regeneration through violence: tion between object and commodity is broken apart.8 His examples all embody aspects of he children scan the terrain, stoop, pick up the transition to a global economy. he Palm flotsam; then they deliberate among themselves, keeping some items, discarding others; Pilot no longer merely represents a friendly their treasures go into a torn sack. Sooner or airman taking knowledge workers from place later—he can count on it—they’ll seek him out to place in the networked world of telecom- where he sits wrapped in his decaying sheet. . . . munications; it also becomes a suicide pilot Here they come now. . . . delivering messages to hidden explosives. he Opening up their sack, the children cho- stretch limo parked outside a hotel signiies rus, “Oh Snowman, what have we found?” opulent aspects of the transportation indus- hey lit out the objects, hold them up as if try; we also see it (if only in our imagination) ofering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, as a fertilizer bomb. he new skyscraper no a chunk of pale- green pop bottle smoothed longer provokes a singular vision of post- by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, industrial success; it is also haunted in its as- ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted re- sembly by the near- instantaneous destruction mains of one, with a long wiry tail. of the Twin Towers. Snowman feels like weeping. What can he The breakdown in a late capitalist com- tell them? There’s no way of explaining to modity’s “authority”—its failure to regulate its them what these curious items are, or were. own use value—reaches an apex in two novels But surely they’ve guessed what he’ll say, be- written in the wake of 9/11: Margaret Atwood’s cause it’s always the same. Oryx and Crake and Cormac McCarthy’s “hese are things from before.” He keeps The Road. Scenes from each novel illustrate his voice kindly but remote. A cross between De Lillo’s strange interpretation of rugged pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent un- consumerism in the apocalyptic literary imag- cle—that should be his tone. “Will they hurt us?” Sometimes they ind ination: the end of late capitalism signals the tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic return of authentic human- object interactions. bottles of bleach. Booby traps from the past. Set in the same postapocalyptic future He’s considered to be an expert on potential as her later novel Year of the Flood, Oryx and accidents: scalding liquids, sickening fumes, Crake follows Snowman, one of the few survi- poison dust. Pain of odd kinds. vors of a bioengineered plague (the “lood”).9 “hese, no,” he says. “hese are safe.” (6–7) 538 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

In a scene that dovetails Slotkin’s arguments a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand on the American frontier culture, the ef- slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola” (19). fete commodities of human civilization are Like the Crakers, the son asks the father what transformed from what they “were”—the this thing is, and, like Snowman, the father empty containers of lust (BlyssPluss), glut- allows it to speak for itself: tony (ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins), and so on—into what they “are”: primitive “things” What is it, Papa? that are either safe or dangerous. Just as It’s a treat. For you. Slotkin argues that American frontier my- What is it? thology internalized the “savage” energy of Here. Sit down. (19–20) American nature in its attempt to regenerate an overcivilized European culture, Crake’s McCarthy’s subsequent description trans- genocidal project clears away the preexistent ports the object out of its everyday context framework of social relationships that make and into the realm of ritual. an object into a commodity. In an inadvertent He slipped the boy’s knapsack straps loose parody of consumer relationships, the Crak- and set the pack on the loor behind him and he ers “hold [objects] up as if ofering them for put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on sale,” but perform these actions innocently; the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his they cannot abstract an object into a quanti- nose to the slight izz coming from the can and tative exchange value or a singular use value. then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said. Snowman recognizes the vestigial market he boy took the can. It’s bubbly, he said. behaviors, but his recognition provokes the Go ahead. thingness of each object to licker forth: the He looked at his father and then tilted the computer mouse becomes a mouselike thing can and drank. He sat there thinking about with a “wiry tail.” He thus sees the world from it. It’s really good, he said. (20) the perspective of the Crakers, for whom the objects were never objects in the irst place; McCarthy’s prose depicts the common phe- rather, they have always been “curious items” nomenon of seeing the world anew through or “things” that are either useful or useless. the eyes of a child. hough readers are surely he same regeneration holds whether the aware of the mechanics of opening a soda can, puriied thing becomes a new object with a McCarthy narrates the action in detail and in new use or returns to its older use value. In so doing calls attention to the new singular- Oryx and Crake, the only bit of “flotsam” ity of this habitual action. In other words, the that garners later mention is the hubcap, father and son misuse the can of Coke, turn- which the Crakers turn into a cymbal (360). ing a disposable object into a ritualistic thing. In McCarthy’s The Road, however, a can of Like the ritual soapmaking in Fight Club, Coca-Cola remains (in some senses but not McCarthy’s eucharistic conversion of Coke in others) a can of Coca- Cola. As an un- suggests that the material thing has begun named father and son travel west through to break free from its commodity status. As McCarthy’s bleak vision of the future Ameri- the thing gathers the father and son within can countryside, they reach the outskirts of a the shared space of ritual, it also emanates a desolate city and enter a supermarket. Near greater authenticity or aura: this can of Coke the entrance, the father discovers the remains appears to be the last of its kind. While Hei- of two vending machines: “He sat and ran his degger and Brown suggest that the thing hand around in the works of the gutted ma- emerges at the moment when an object breaks chines and in the second one it closed over down—when the thing refuses to adhere to its 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 539 socially constructed function—in this case the dividualism, working for good and for evil, same efect is achieved through the opposite and withal that buoyancy and exuberance circumstances. In the context of McCarthy’s which comes with freedom—these are traits imaginative work, the can of Coke has not of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere broken down, but the larger social order that because of the existence of the frontier. (37) surrounds it has; the object has been removed from the networks of production, distribu- Ironically, though Turner’s study celebrates tion, and advertisement that inform behav- American capitalist expansion during the iors in an age of mass commodiication. hus, nineteenth century, similar mythic charac- even if the boy’s delight in the beverage—“It’s terizations of the frontier inform the social bubbly” and “It’s really good”—duplicates or critiques of late capitalism that I have called even parodies preexistent consumer behav- rugged consumerism. Like the extreme cases iors, his behavior, like the Crakers’ inadver- of McCarthy’s protagonist before broken tent parody of consumer relations in Oryx vending machines and Snowman before the and Crake, can be understood as an original, Crakers’ scavenged possessions, American authentic encounter with the thing. Both ac- skilled laborers confront a world that requires tions seem to suggest that the only way that a a “masterful grasp of material things.” Un- commodity can become the celebrated prod- fortunately, commodities and postconsumer uct promised in company advertisements is waste resist or anesthetize such impulses. he for its company to disappear. literary imagination ofers partial solutions to These circumstances resonate with the the cognitive, industrial, and ecological end- apocalyptic vision of DeLillo’s “Ruins of the games of late capitalism not simply by relect- Future” and constitute the most extreme vi- ing the current repurposing culture but also sion of rugged consumerism in American lit- by asking us to reimagine the creative relations erature. As we have seen, in earlier examples between humans and all objects that populate of rugged consumerism social conditions still our worlds. Perhaps, just as the mythic disap- allow readers to distinguish between the stan- pearance of the American frontier in the nine- dard use and idiosyncratic misuse of objects. teenth century brought renewed attention to In Atwood’s and McCarthy’s stories, readers the characteristics of rugged individualism, can no longer do so: every object is a thing and the loss of American manufacturing might every use a creative misuse. Fittingly, such situ- now create a desire to reimagine or to remy- ations return each novel’s maker communities thologize human- object relations at a moment to the primal scene of American mythology. when such skills are disappearing. In his famous (and famously problem- atic) essay “he Signiicance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner describes the inluence of the frontier on the NOTES American character as follows: I am grateful to Nancy Bentley, Amy Hungerford, Janice [T]o the frontier the American intellect owes Carlisle, Stephen Railton, Emily Davis, Zachary Fisher, its striking characteristics. hat coarseness and Michael Kelly for their comments on earlier drats and strength combined with acuteness and of this essay. 1. In his early essay “he Origin of the Work of Art,” inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn Heidegger argues that humans are forever turning things of mind, quick to ind expedients; that mas- into objects, or what he calls “equipment.” As proof, Hei- terful grasp of material things, lacking in the degger describes a pair of peasant shoes, which are more artistic but powerful to efect great ends; that genuinely present “the less the peasant woman thinks restless, nervous energy; that dominant in- about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at 540 Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture [ PMLA

all, or is even aware of them” (32). When the shoe breaks iction: “Real life was getting creepily too close to my in- down, “the worn-out usualness of the equipment then ventions—not so much the Twin Towers as the anthrax obtrudes itself as the sole mode of being, apparently pe- scare. That turned out to be limited in extent, but only culiar to it exclusively” (34). because of the limitations of the agent used” (Interview). 2. Tim Edenson makes a similar aesthetic argument in his survey of the decaying industrial landscape of Great Britain: “Ruination produces a defamiliarised landscape in which the formerly hidden emerges; the WORKS CITED tricks that make a building a coherent ensemble are re- Atwood, Margaret. Interview. Bookreporter .com. Book vealed, exposing the magic of construction” (109). Report, May 2003. Web. 5 Jan. 2010. 3. he weaponization of unlikely objects is a common ——— . Oryx and Crake. New York: Random, 2003. Print. feature of crime iction, serving as a material counterpart ——— . Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Print. to legal transgression. I discuss at greater length the relation between social laws prescribing use and legal codes Berger, Shoshana. “Interview with Charles and Hudson.” prescribing social behavior in an earlier essay, “Anything Charles and Hudson. Charles and Hudson, 3 Mar. Can Be an Instrument.” 2008. Web. 11 Aug. 2009. 4. David Owen reaches the same conclusions in “he he Best of Instructables. Vol. 1. Sebastopol: Make, 2009. Inventor’s Dilemma.” According to Owen, Griffith is a Print. “prime exemplar of ‘maker culture’—a community of so- Brown, Bill. A Sense of hings. Chicago: U of Chicago P, phisticated do- it- yourselfers who view hardware in the 2003. Print. same provisional way that computer hackers view sotware, ———. “hing heory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–16. and who believe that making, modifying, and repairing Print. things can be an antidote to throwaway consumerism” (44). Crawford, Matthew. Shop Class as Soulcrat: An Inquiry 5. In keeping with earlier studies of Patchwork Girl, into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. I cite the titles of each hypertextual lexia in lieu of page DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” Guardian. numbers. Guardian News and Media, 22 Dec. 2001. Web. 5 Jan. 6. hough Atwood is Canadian, the setting (a post- 2010. apocalyptic United States) and thematic content of Year Edenson, Tim. Industrial Ruins. New York: Berg, 2005. of the Flood place the novel in the American tradition of Print. rugged consumerism. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Mac- 7. I am thinking here of Žižek’s critique of recycling as a false, utopian means by which “a legal order can quarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, make recompense for its founding crimes, thereby ret- 1962. Print. roactively cleansing itself of its guilt and regaining its in- ———. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Lan- nocence.” “[T] he properly aesthetic attitude of a radical guage, hought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: ecologist,” he argues, “is . . . that of accepting waste as Perennial- Harper, 2001. 15–86. Print. such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown: Eastgate, decay, of the inertia of rotten material which serves no 1995. CD-ROM. purpose” (35). His argument thus dovetails earlier argu- Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place for Grace: Antimodernism ments for an aesthetic, rather than a practice, of misuse. and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 8. his proposition is old news in the larger context 1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Print. of racialized global conlict. As Kristin Ross argues, “In Lethem, Jonathan. “he Ecstasy of Inluence: A Plagia- narratives from the wars of decolonization, familiar ob- rism.” Harper’s Magazine. Harper’s Magazine Foun- jects [such as telephones, kitchen sinks, and mattresses] dation, Feb. 2007. Web. 5 Jan. 2010. appearing in a routine inventory can become metonymi- Malewitz, Raymond. “Anything Can Be an Instrument: cally ominous through their proximity to torture imple- Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac ments” (112–13). Ross’s most chilling example is the case McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.” Contemporary of Djamila Boupacha, who was raped with a toothbrush Literature 50.4 (2009): 721–41. Print. and a bottle by French soldiers. Her story and the larger history of modern torture—from the Algerian conlict McCarthy, Cormac. he Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib—suggest that DeLillo’s Print. words describe the past and present as much as the future. McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle 9. In an interview with Random House, Atwood reveals to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make hings. New that she was halfway through the novel when the towers York: North Point, 2002. Print. fell. hough she insists that the central plot did not change, Obama, Barack. “Alliance for American Manufactur- she notes the overlap between history and her speculative ing Address.” David L. Lawrence Convention Center, 127.3 ] Raymond Malewitz 541

Pittsburgh. 14 Apr. 2008. Council on Foreign Rela- Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Middle- tions. CFR. Web. 23 Mar. 2012. town: Wesleyan UP, 1973. Print. Owen, David. “The Inventor’s Dilemma.” New Yorker hompson, Clive. “he Dream Factory.” Wired. Condé 17 May 2010: 42–50. Print. Nast Digital, Sept. 2005. Web. 5 Jan. 2010. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, Turner, Frederick Jackson. “he Signiicance of the Fron- 1996. Print. tier in American History.” he Frontier in American Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization History. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. 1–38. Print. and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, MIT P, 1995. Print. 2010. Print.