II. JOUR MAL I: TRASH AESTHETICS.
For your curiosity, quote-fetish, and general interest, here is the transcript for JOUR MAL Season I, Episode I: “TRASH AESTHETICS”.
NOTE: An important point concerning the relationship between gleaning and poverty was accidentally omitted during the EPISODE's recording process. However, the point can be found as it was supposed to appear in the EPISODE's transcript below.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
In Association with PHASMID PRESS
THE EMPTY SET PRESENTS:
JOUR MAL: SERIES I-TRASH
Written, Produced, and Narrated: D.K. V-B
Additional vocals: Clementine Robertson
Graphic design: Scott McCLure
Outro music: “Keystone” (edit) by Black Shoes
Special thanks to Rob Scher
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PART I:
Jingle; (5th Element airport scene – apology for garbage).
PART II:
Oftentimes, whenever I mentioned the words 'sewer', 'slime', or 'trash' while speaking with a former associate of mine, they'd always offer me the same quote. “The clue lies there”, writes the great Phillip K. Dick, “symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” Cool, right? Yeah. Sure is. You know, I'd go as far as to say that in terms of cool quotes, well, that might be one of the most cucumber. But, and I hope after this diatribe you might see why, I find it to be too cool for me. Or, rather naively, its coolness makes me sad. The simple truth is that I'm not looking for the divine. To me, the divine, despite its hard lean for humility – what, with the bombastic booming baritones of burning bushes, lightning etching out Godfinger script on banquet hall walls, the performance of parting the sea – is neither quiet, surprising, nor quietly surprising. And you see, well, THAT is what I'm looking for, in the trash, in the slime, in the sewer. The quiet, the surprising, and the quietly surprising. Not an easy quiet, mind. Not, I think, unlike Monsieur Villfort, alone in the gent d'arm's hansom, with nothing but a pistol and single shot on the bench beside him. “A courtesy for a gentleman”.
Its wild, there is a whole materialist school concerned with trash. You'll see them next to the bin, under the sign that says 'garbage aesthetics', with name tags that read 'trash theory' or 'garbage theory' or 'the metaphysics of stuff'. I look their way and furrow a frown. They're so fuckin loud. And, ironically, In all that chatter, I scare hear anyone talking about how quiet trash is. I mean, that's not to say that there aren't really interesting things being discussed amongst them. Boscagli especially. In her 2014 text Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism, Maurizia writes about it in a really compelling way. She says “garbage, a full affront to ordered materiality, is stuff at its most uncertain, vulnerable, and wild” (Boscagli 227). In terms of the aesthetics of trash, there are, well, many aesthetic examples. Peter Menzel's photography, especially in his 1994 book Material World, Sam Mendes' 1999 American Beauty, Goddard's 1967 Deux ou trois choses, Agnes Varda's 2000 documentary about the marginality of trash and those in its margins in The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneuses et la Glaneause), Calvino's discourse on garbage in his 1972 Invisible Cities, and plenty others.
Now, from my tour of the gallery, its clear that there are allot of interesting ideas associated with trash or garbage theory. The curse of the miser and the constipated, as Calvino puts it: “the curse of the constipated (and the miser) who, fearing to lose something of themselves cannot separate from anything, accumulate what they do not expel, and end up by identifying themselves with their own excrements and lose themselves in them” (Calvino 8). Its interesting how this seems to also apply to being known for liking trash art, especially films and comics, books too, how one is subsumed and in certain ways lost in this appraisal. I don't like Besson, but I do like the 5th element, Underworld 1, Sweeney Todd, Moulin Rougue made me cry once, a mixture of that, Italian onions, and a first break up, sure, but Nicole and Ewen's singing was involved. Same with Bonham-Carter, since we're being confidants. I love Speed Racer, Amazing Spiderman 2, From Hell, Crystal Skull, Gone In 60 Seconds. Angel is unironically my favourite TV show of all time. So many others. Mission Impossible II, The 13th Warrior, Demolition Man, The Beach, The '98 Godzilla. I have an abiding, tearful love for Superman, and I used to read/peddle Mills & Boon romances in high school. How much more garbage can one man's taste be?
And as it so happened, in the minds of certain people I've found, jest, like the language used to deliver its affects, is never benign. In that accounting firm-gulag layout of the former communal PhD offices I was sometimes in, I found myself described, by those considered friendly and those who'd shush me, as the comic book guy. And there WAS acid in it, spat out with a smirk from the elevation afforded them by the backs of the high horses those characters sat upon. A look of repugnance, “a sneer of cold command” as Percy put it, one that said You! Yes, you down there. We deem you to be somewhere between gullible and gauche. But also something on the dark side of those blue eyes, something of the Count Mondego confession: “because you're the son a clerk. I'm not supposed to want to be you!”
Others would see me as a sort of fun garbage heap through which to rummage for a nugget about a piece of trash, Superman, a comic book film, a band, Supergrass to Sinatra, upon which to cut their teeth, or take back to a gallery, set it on a plinth, and wait for admiring eyes, pats on the back, toasts and whatever else it is they do in those clinical spaces these days. While it was tiresome, odious, uncomfortable, it allowed a sort of Ikari Shinji situation to emerge, blossomed in the fecund fuckery of youth, refined by the guile-mire of young manhood, and presto! – a dummy plug, a double made of trash to take my place among them, the shiny, the clean, the valid, while I was elsewhere, underground, in the bilge, in the grey water and the black, doing the smoothest breaststroke you never saw, down there in the sewer, where its absolutely silent. For me, well. That's ultimately a small price to pay for a putrid paradise.
Sometimes it honestly felt like it were just me down there. I've stopped asking why. That's the jurisdiction of 16 year old's journals, leastwise it were when I was 16. Maybe people don't fuck with trash like this because they feel that there is no time. That they should be pursuing, and be seen to be pursuing the valid, the beautiful, the adroit, the futuristic, the simple, and the neat because all of these things are, in some way or other, associated with ideations of progress, of the next stage, of stepping over the bloody mangle of the body of the boss of the present, rattling a purse of hard-fought coins to buy whatever future is beyond the dungeon door. Calvino knew. He knew about waste's totemic association with death. Calvino sees garbage as a chthonic thing: “As an offer to the underworld, to the gods of disappearance and loss [whereby] taking out the garbage is a way of exorcising death, of postponing, metaphorically, the moment when we ourselves will become waste. This daily representation of a descent to the underworld, this domestic and municipal funeral, even if just of a little, so that I know that for another day I have been the producer of waste and not waste myself” (Calvino 7). According to Holiday, “Calvino's philosophy of garbage teaches us not of the subject's power over the object, nor of his shrewd taking advantage of matter's plasticity through recycling. Instead, garbage teaches the subject about his (I maintain Calvino's use of the masculine when talking about trash. Its fitting) own limitations: that he is 'like garbage' himself, of that he is soon to become garbage, part of a process of circulation he does not control.” (Holiday)
Man, is etymology ever so very fuckin' interesting. It's funny that the French word “poubelle,” meaning rubbish or dustbin, taken from the last name of Eugene Poubelle, a prefect of the Seine who made an ordinance in 1884 that all homes have a dustbin, also contains the word 'belle' in it, meaning beautiful, and 'pou' which means 'louse', 'head louse.' A lovely metaphor for trash, as the lice of the beautiful.
So what makes my trashism or sewerism different? Is trashism/sewerism a materialist position, that you can in fact know what things are by the trash they produce and/or contain, or an idealist position, that you can know what things aren't by the trash they produce and/or contain? I'm not sure yet. But right now, I feel that both are true. Whilst the unknowability of things might be such that to “know” about things may be an idealist stance, here I'm arguing for the quietly surprising, that which emerges from the gap that is always-Also in things. While I have much respect and enjoyment for those who have built treasuries of social and critical capital precisely by elevating trash to the level of discourse, I roundly reject curatorial affectations of trash. This is why I refrain from providing definitive examples of what I consider to be trash. This is an intentional gesture. An attempt to leave the possibilities of trash open to themselves without prescribing, even in a single example, a taxonomy or hierarchy of trash. For anyone who knows me personally, the use of the clip from 5th element at the beginning and at the end of this is, I hope, at least a little bit amusing, or at the very least ironic in some pleasurable way. Not unlike an inside joke that everybody knows. So salute to all my heroes, who unlike JPEGMAFIAs cornballs, have always been something between jackals and rats. As for me, well, many verminine epithets are applicable and apt. But I take a certain liking to the suggestion of indexical nuance and acidic wit in concatenating the words “waste” and “man” in this con-text.
Another reason I reject the curatorial affectations of trash is because I think the curatorial engenders a type of Zizekian passivity. You download the film and store it on your hard drive to relieve yourself of actually having to watch the film. Like canned laughter that laughs for you, he says, the device watches the film for you, in this way. In my naive sense, I find trash far less capable or fixed in this sense. Its non-demandingness is active and uncertain. Whether you've engaged with the trash doesn't matter in the same way whether you've engaged with curated stuff does. Trash's secondariness becomes primary in a similar way to canned laughter. Not because it laughs for you, but that it's in the background. It's so cliche and banal that you don't think about it, even as trash, let alone as worthy if curatorial attention. In this sense, trash is less than nothing and because of this, it feels to me to be easier to breathe around it, it is more open, more void, empty, and also possible.
I think to most, trash is that which people don't like in or after engaging with things. To me, trash is or speaks to or gestures to a type of surplus. It is that which persists in things, that which is not exhausted through various consumptive processes. In this sense, trash is the surplus of both purpose and design. Much like a ghosts relationship with a body, trash is the ghost of products, that which persists or haunts their decay. In this way, there are many similarities between what I'm calling trash aesthetics, trashism, sewerism and what have you with another notion I've written about called spectopoetics, an idea that borrows heavily from Derridean hauntology. If you're curious Google an essay I wrote for L'effacement called “Poetics of the Seance: Theorizing the Spectopoetics of Erasurist Poetry”.
Keeping with Derrida I could say that trash is a type of exorbitancy, marginalia, excess, surplus, excrescence, and abjection. One which is always-Also (a term I prefer to the traditional transcendental phrase always-already) there but surplus to design and purpose. This is why to me Holiday's analysis of Wall-E and Ratatouille is so brilliant because he recognizes how Pixar inverts the typical gesture of trying to flush trash away, to rid or obfuscate products of it, to background it as necessary but somehow inessential, secondary, passive, by bringing it forward, by making trash essential, central to not only the narrative of the product, but its entire aesthetic. These two texts make trash the active subject of the product, not a passive byproduct of a refined subject.
Obviously the main critique here has nothing to do with the idea that things are indexical of their always-Also trash, or that, in erasurist poetry for example, that there is always-Also a potential opening, difference, otherness, or newness at play in ostensibly destructive, repressive, obfuscative, or exclusive acts, the trace beneath the mark, the residue of the fire, the remnants of the letters beneath the strikethrough. The main critique is the danger of fetishizing trash. To elevate trash to the pseudo-devine status. To do so is to repackage and resell trash, to exclude trash from itself by re-inscribing it into the narratives of the pristine, desirable, and valuable. The disruptivity of trash resides in its dirtiness, its undesirability, and valuelessness.
To quote Black Knight starring Martin Lawrence, a film considered by many to be the very epitome of trash, another critique here could be: “we already have fire”, which is to so, this is all well and good, but Kristeva already talks about the allure of the abject. That the abject is, though ostensibly and typically described as a space of the undesirable, still a space haunted by desire. The very dirtiness, immorality, banality, brutality, horror, and Reality of the abject is what makes it paradoxically or obliquely desirable. Here, I confess it's a hard argument to refute. Because it says what is the value of any distinction between trash and not trash if both are ultimately undifferentiated by being desirable. Or put another way, what makes trash truly trash? I don't know. What I do know is that for me, the two other points are crucial here. That true trash is, for the most silent to desire, and that it is ever-giving. As long as there is surplus, there will be true trash and that trash will or can be many things, useful, interesting, disgusting, illuminating, boring, and others.
So then what is sewerism? What is “quisquiliae aesthetica”, “esthétique des poubelles”, trash aesthetics? Fuck. I've no real plan here in terms of defining it neat and clean-like. I guess in the last instance, though, trashism/sewerism is not a theory, barely a praxis, most certainly not a philosophy, and perhaps an ethic , maybe a way of (re)looking, (re)seeing. It is a weird, difficultly easy tao for me. It does, however, recognize as key Calvino's paradox, namely that he “refuses to aestheticize the contents of his poubelle [trashcan/wastebin], or to forget them once they are out of sight” (Calvino). That said, however, I guess I can try and orient whatever we'll call this afterwards in and around three rough coordinates. Lets call the first the quiet, the second the surprising, and the third the ever-giving.
The Quiet:
I won't get into I guess what I could call the architecture of sewerism here, how trash, the sewer, and slime all fit together, co-mingle, ooze, and squelch in their rancid play. But for the time being, just assume that all three terms, which even in this piece I use interchangeably, refer to the same ethic, aesthetic, vibe, and/or praxes. Now trash, for me, is quiet. The quiet is perhaps its most important and, for me, attractive feature. I'm thinking of the unpopular French Lex Luthor's description of the abjection of the dungeon, its purpose and function, to hide all therein and deprive it of light. The quiet of trash is engendered by the fact that with it, unlike it was with what it used to be, there is a quiet lack of attention, accolades, desirability. The quiet of abjection is the quiet of the sewer, the trash in it, that constitutes it, and the slime it (re)produces, together, form a well nigh purely abject space, one where there ain't even any fascination with the shit before it's flushed. With real trash, the only desire lingering in and around it like a baleful odour is the desire to relegate it, full true, to the realm of 'Nobodycares', to the realm of the unseen and the unheard.
In what way is trash quiet, though? While necessary, the sprawl of often entitled critique and the oftentimes blind vitriol of contrarian defences of any and everything, especially film, are so fuckin loud and clamorous, like cymbals being banged together without rhythm, style, or humour, as little more than comical attempts at engendering serious attention. Trash, in my view, somehow avoids this attention. Trash is disinterested in being uninteresting. Nobody, or few, pick at it. Even fewer for its silence. Often, the elevation of trash to discourse is meant to make trash make noise in the already deafening onsteady onrush of critique and consumption, to make a splash, to shock them in those circuits to attention by reintroducing something that was relegated or jettisoned as abject back into the spaces of critical and consumptive validity and value. Doing so divests trash of its silent indifference...I guess, then, the only way trash is like God for me is in its silent indifference to our narratives of purpose, design, and value.
The Surprising:
Real trash is surprising. Not in a cheap way, wherein which a good rummage through it reveals or brings back something of ostensible value whose determination as such survives or is unaffected, un-effaced, by its placement in the trash receptacle; something precious, valuable, nice, and/or good that doesn't properly belong to trash and to find it therein, mixed, mired, and co-mingled with the maggot-made is surprising. That kind of shock has nothing to do with trash itself, but rather trash as a space wherein which non-trash is not supposed to be, from which non-trash is supposed to be removed and decontaminated from this exposure and interactions in this space, and subsequently, being firmly reset into the appropriate or proper circuits of value to which it belongs. This shock is finding a diamond in a turd. The shock of the valueless holding the value-full for ransom. No, I'm thinking more along the lines gouged out by the other Frenchman who leapt from an open window to his death, and the other one, still living, who sports a fantastic goatee. The first spoke about the groovy unseen door-prizes of reterritorialized anything with his psychotherapist homie. The latter speaks about usurping. But I suppose I could describe the surprising as something akin to what I like to think of as the paradoxical doctrines of 'should' and 'are', how what a thing is is never what it should be for us, how what it should be is never what it is. How, trapped in this basic oscillation, this banal pong, things are seldom allowed to be or become beyond or beneath or beside the mandate for which they were created or intended. For me, in the sewer? (re)possibility supersedes purpose every time.
The Ever Giving:
In his essay Holiday states, “in looking garbage and decay in the face, [one] identifies a positive plasticity in the encounter between waste and the human subject, a plasticity that is destructive and productive at the same time” (Holiday). In this plasticity is a type or types of excess; where Excess is the conservation of reality, that is, the surplus in things is what things conserve in themselves. In other words, a black hole, for example, is an excessive void. It contains it's own opposite such that what it is is both everywhere and nowhere, but never discretely in its presence or non-presence, its objective and subjective realities. This is true of all things, but what's true in all things is that things change. A product becomes trash, life becomes death, starfire ossifies to iron, in each case everything is subject to a process. So is trash. All theories of trash are theories of becoming. Trash is secondary, tertiary manufacture. Trash is not produced complete. A thing must become trash. Trash is to become. After the debauchery of want and use.
How much shit is there that nobody wants? Brutally empiricist answers to this speculation would point me to entire oceans, continents, trash-masses on land and at sea clogging up, poisoning, anathema to the bare life of small things, and larger, and larger still, all the way to the forks, gullets, guts, and trash of those last ones, largely stupid, skewering the poisoned smaller ones with their forks, tongues, tongues, time, eyes, looking, averting as they wait for the cistern to fill, impatiently yanking on the handle with the same furious enthusiasm the avoidant hit elevator buttons with. Sure. This is bad trash, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be wanted, to be desired for remaking, refashioning, re-moving and in so doing removing the poison of its presence from places too sensitive for it to be, lancing the sea with a recycling needle. It is, for me, equally true that trash takes on many forms in the sociopolitically, economically, and culturally determined provinces of so-called good aesthetics. I've come to be shown, through a modicum of experience, a fair amount of observation, and a tremendous amount of bad luck that certain things are most likely true: hate is more reliable than love, and disinterest, beyond the operations of serviceability and the usefulness of utility, is inevitable. There will always-Also be more discarded things than those kept and so there will always-Also be a need for a sewer as long as humanity continues to both create and consume. Limiting myself to meditations of trash in relation to sewerist aesthetics, as long as humanity keeps creating and consuming art, for whatever purpose, in whatever form, style, degenerate or avant garde, there will always-Also be aspects, parts, and pieces of that process that will be discarded.
Part III:
Well, my man Freddy was at least honest and brave enough to criticise himself openly. So, I guess, I'll try it in terms of these ramblings about trash aesthetics here, and my (mis)understandings thereof. I think a salient criticism that could be levelled against me here is that trashism/sewerism is ultimately a transcendental position. That trash is somehow always-already and that things are always-already tending toward trash, as if trash were the supra-subjective use, value, purpose, and design of things, and that those things without such are trash in as much as those with these designations will become trash, and are therefore in some sense always-already trash. I'd counter by saying that such a view of trash undermines, in the way Graham Harman uses the term, the emergence of trash, that is, its ability to change from what it was designed, used, valued, purposed to be, into all that it can or could be. This is why I prefer the term always-Also because the suffix “also” is more sensitive to emergence, play, movement, and dynamicism in this way, this surplus as emerging as opposed to the fixity and ossification of a static “always.” Sure, “Also” could lead to a type of infinite chain of always-Also this and/or that and therefore a type of already, an absolute elsewhere. But I just feel also is more dynamic, more attuned to permutation as opposed to permanence. Maybe a weak defence, but I fuck with it.
Okay. If, as you can no doubt tell, I am trying to avoid something solid in terms of a definition of sewerism/trashism, which on the one hand is terribly unhelpful, and on the other is the Hemming-way: “to truly know something is to kill it”, perhaps it would do well to sketch out the ways in which sewerism/trashism compares to other similar ethics and praxes. Like gleaning, the glaneuse and the sewerist, for instance. I like to think of gleaming as a type of 'offalality', it is concerned with offal in a broad sense, off cuts, the semi-sprouted, the half-ripe, the edible abject. Gleaning is a “practice with a very long history of picking up what's left on the ground after the harvest”.
Now, using this concept, Varda's documentary mentioned earlier “critiques contemporary Western culture's vast over-consumption and waste, [and in so doing] reveals a submerged network of gleaners who daily improvise a more honest and intimate relation to the material”, an improvised materiality of making-do as their livelihood. In view of this, something like a definition might begin to peek out the mud, surface the slime in intimating a declaration: Sewerism (noun): an improvised materialism, one of recontre and trouvaille through a play of bricolage whereby the sewerist is part glaneur, part bricoleur. Perhaps. I mean, sounds neat enough. But it is incomplete. It is incomplete because there are important aspects of gleaning that need to be acknowledged first. There are, for example, obvious linkages here between gleaning and poverty, precarity, and paucity. Interestingly, there are, in Varda's work and its depiction of gleaning more broadly, two ways in the mien that I see, of interpreting gleaning: 1) “that gleaning grants a person a dignity that neither begging nor stealing [in essence, commission or plagiarism, maybe as artistic analogues, for me]. 'To bend is not to beg', a maxim of one man in Varda's documentary. Or 2) that foraging through trash is a lamentable index of abject poverty and incisive deprivation (of goods and products, sure, but also a poverty of art for me) where the reality of material conditions/lack thereof, can not be euphamized by folksy wisdom or academic doxa. Taking this into account, and thinking about art, for me, a poverty of art cannot be completely, and an argument could be made for even meaningfully, annulled, (re)filled, or (re)dressed by the (re)mix, or the (re)release. In this sense, the Surrealist ethic of clash and meeting, of the lucky find become the creative labour of survival in the fields, including those artistic, of civilization.
What is the glaneur that the sewerist might also be and/or sometimes do, or appear to do? The glaneur is a survivor, an artist of la recoup, an alchemist, (re)surveyor, a slimy visionary for whom “a cluster of junk is as a cluster of possibilities. A collector whose collections of trash paradoxically move him towards lessness”, a servant of the disappeared, an armarius of the abject for whom gleaning, chance, and art-making are natural allies, whom must always-Also be vigilant against the “potential of gleaning for art to be transformed into recycling with a price-tag, the screaming cost of a fan-base and critics, the pollution of attention, the corrosiveness of cool-because-its-not-supposed to be, the high prices of junk in these strange and saturnine days. What Varda discovered in her own art, a documentary, not dissimilar in technique to gleaning, that gleaners glean for survival, for choice, for pleasure, and only occasionally for money. The gleaners I see often also do it for clout, the cool contrarians, preening in coats restitched from the tatters and sodden patches of dead Berlinale brigadiers, still thirsty for the power intimated in their play of generalship. Me? Well. I glean for the joyous silence of it.
The swerist, like the gleaneur, refuses to acquiesce to the demands of infinite productivity at a ratio of dream-grind-meme that late capitalism demands, even of its dead and dying, even of its waste, its potentially profitable trash. The sewerist cares not for what the ghost can tell him about where its body might've left hidden away a tidy sum, a nugget of something that could fetch a price, scale a sale. The sewerist is also not bamboozled as to how this economic outlook, this monetary materialism tries to hide itself under the laudable aegis of ecological efficiency, or in art, the Red Letter Media schema of the aestheticized Best-of-the-Worst which elevates trash to the status of discourse, subsumes it in all that racket while simultaneously recirculating it in the flows of the paradox of contrarian consensus. Back-lensers with no dream to sacrifice under the spotlight sizzle. With these ones, I see a risk of destroying trash by re-inscribing into discourse. Sure, maybe this sideswipe is the result of my still being vexed by how during their critique of Black Panther, they referred to the gleanings of various African civilizations and cultures as “primitive,” without loosing an eyelash, as if to suggest that in their minds, the concepts of African civilization and culture and the white myths of the primitive are inextricable. But that's neither here not there.
Well, then, what does the sewerist (re)do, (re)make, say/quote, paraphrase? I can't say for sure. But one thing he does is pay attention, rummages, searches, reads, sewerline libraries, the great scrolls of chicken-scratch marginalia, the bruised-skin beatitudes, and all types of other shit. It's not a dead end. It's not a resurrection. It's not a seance. It's a comfort. It's a fascinating silence. It's the lullaby of slurring songs of slimy voices, of everyone, for no-one. Another thing the sewerist does is try to have no fear of trash. The sewerist is untroubled by the tautologies of trash that see trash simultaneously elevated and demoted, abolished and made, by comparisons to the aesthetic standard that produced trash as such in the first place. The sewerist does not fear the leavings of the harvest, the painful vapidity of the award ceremony, the violent exclusivity of the eminance grise of the Kermodian top insert-number-and-year-list. The sewerist doesn't even pick at the silver-medal-lined scraps on the floor of the booth of the honourable mention. Alone, he sits, turns it on, watches, laughs, sighs, spies out patterns that were there all along but too ugly, too simple, too stupid to seek out, care about, or comment upon, turns it off, and goes to sleep, trying to lull that lump in his throat, that knot in his heart, the same one Dr. Miles Bennell had after kissing what once was Becky Driscoll.
D. K. Vida-Bekwot.
