Want Not: A
Dialogue on Sustainability with Images
[pdf]
Karen
Pinkus and Cameron Tonkinwise
CT:
Song Dong's Waste Not is
the artist's mother's house with everything that was in it during
a period of the Chinese government's edict to “waste not.”1 It
captures a sense of the volume of materials over time passing through
homes, what is not normally visible because we have surprisingly effective
waste concealing systems. It makes apparent the absurdity of using long-life
materials for short-life uses. It foregrounds capitalism (via negative
socialism), but also the emerging global consumer class in China. It
also points to the constipated error of a steady-state version of
sustainability. Living involves flows, whereas hoarding leads to
death—the piece is a work of mourning by Song Dong and his mother for his
father/her husband.
KP:
I didn’t see the exhibit but it makes me think of two things. First, the
Western analogue has to be the estate sale, when the children lay out all of
the goods (tchotchkes) that they
don’t want after their parents die. Usually they hire professionals to handle
the sales. If you go to an estate sale you see a whole person’s life laid out
before you (minus the really valuable objects, if any). Sometimes you find, in
addition to books, utensils and costume jewelry, prosthetic limbs, walkers,
unopened boxes of adult diapers or elder potties. The estate sale is a symbol
of anti-sustainability, not due to lack of resources as we might normally
think, but excess that—precisely—can’t be handed down to the next generation. In
this sense, the estate sale thwarts the temporality of sustainability and it
reminds us that the term “sustainable future” (even as we will inevitably use
it) is both an oxymoron and a horrific monster.
Song
Dong’s piece also reminds me of the various hoarding reality television shows
that are popular now. On Clean House the crew forces pathological clutterers to sort through their goods and then
sell them at garage sales. In Song Dong’s piece as well as in these shows, it
strikes me that labor is completely effaced. The home is the place where you
keep consumer items that act almost as a hedge against flows of any
sort—energy, labor power, money, desire. In Clean
House the actual work of transforming the home is edited out. While it is
going on the property owners are holed up in a hotel to contemplate the error
of their ways or engage in soul-searching. On their return they are invited to
take off their blindfolds and open their eyes. The reactions—conditioned by
previous viewing of reality shows—are always the same.
CT: If you were
to try to categorize all the possessions from an estate sale, or the death
premonition that is a reality TV show, as a proxy for the average global
consumer household’s possessions according to their purchase reasons, what
would you find? I mean, let’s say it were possible to map purchases on the
following axis:
Potential/Futural
Use |
||
Instrumental |
Expressive
|
|
Actual/Current
or Past Use |
Each use of a
durable amortizes its ecological impact, which would suggest that everything
above the middle horizontal line has a greater ecological impact. But every use
of energy, or an energy-consuming device, creates significant ecological
impacts, counter-balancing the top.
What is perhaps
most significant about this thought experiment—though
it is something that could be done more or less accurately,2 if only we could agree on quantitative measures of ecological impact, which are
value decisions rather than establishable facts—is
the recognition that everyday existence, at least materially, is not merely in
the here and now. In terms of household ecological impact, a significant
portion suggests “potentiality before actuality.”
This points to
the extent to which the household’s organizing principle is autarky:
stockpiling, just in case, the very opposite of just-in-time. Yet this desire
for self-sufficiency, which leads to houses packed with aspirational stuff—that dress for which a formal party
occasion might finally arise, those cross country skis that might become
necessary next time a snow storm halts motorized transport, this slab of tins
of beans that will keep us alive when there are fresh water wars—is also the organizing principle for
most approaches to the ‘sustainable house:’ the zero impact house, that
generates its own power, collects its own water, composts its own waste.
Brenda and
Robert Vale are famous for creating and then promoting a peri-urban house that
is energy and water self-sufficient. They have more recently become famous
again for publishing Time to Eat the Dog:
The Real Guide to Sustainable Living (Thames & Hudson, 2009), a book
that pieces together life cycle assessment data that result in claims like:
it’s more sustainable to be a vegetarian driving an SUV than a hamburger eating
bicyclist; and it’s more sustainable to play golf than to own a dog. The title
of the book refers to their claim that the most sustainable pets are vegetarian
ones that you can eat when they die—like hamsters. It was this claim that
confirmed the paranoias of neoconservative bloggers in the US (though the book
is not released in the US)—greenees want to dictate whether or not you have the
liberty to own a dog.
And the net
ecological impact is often the same as the hoarder’s house. The embodied energy
and pollution involved in all the small scale technologies needed to reinforce
this vision of the autonomous “suburban” house will often not be overcome by
the cleanness provided by such technologies over their lifetime.
Sustainability
urgently needs to be recast as interdependence rather than independence,
resilient networks of social support, whether commercial services or communal
resource pools, rather than walls of stuff preventing my need to engage with
others for my future.
KP: Your
discussion above touches on a lot of fascinating points. The convergence of
your four-fold system of measuring ecological impact and your critique of a
consumer-based and instrumental sustainability brings me to Heidegger. There’s
a wonderful little book, Heidegger’s Hut,
by the architect Adam Sharr (MIT Press, 2006) that provides a counterfoil to
the sustainable house. Built into a hillside in the 20s, for many years this
Black Forest retreat lacked electricity or telephone. It was, by nature and not
by calculation, low impact. Sharr doesn’t try to conflate artificially the
Heideggerian four-fold (earth, sky, divinities and mortals) with the four rooms
of the very basic retreat where the philosopher wrote many of his great texts.
Nor does he
suggest any sort of easy assimilation of thought (or more specifically of
Heideggerean “dwelling”) with a retreat from the city into the country.3 Withdrawal from academic and social life in the city into the hut is not about
passivity any more than it is about a self-satisfied existence off the grid.
Heideggerean thought reveals the ultimate inauthenticity of the Brundtland or
dictionary definition of sustainability, which depends on a fixed, calculated
notion of “the present” as static. “To enjoy resources in the present” one
would have to know what “the present” is; and to believe that consumption in
that “present” is calculable, measurable and acceptable. The pretence that we
do know and can fix our “present” as the exterior (not tied to Being) measure
for “future generations” is undone by Heidegger and a number of key thinkers in
his wake.
For me, Heidegger
helps us think beyond any aestheticization of the landscape or Nature that
would be associated with a kind of unthought green consumerism. Nor is it a
romanticization of country life. Rather, the hut was, as Sharr describes, a
place where Heidegger could think and write, and experience the changes in
season in a direct manner. In contrast,
today’s sustainable building is a building, Heidegger might say, but is it a
dwelling? “The old word bauen which
says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen however also means
at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specially to
till the soil, to cultivate the vine.”4 In “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger asks us to imagine a two-hundred year
old farmhouse in the Black Forest. The house is ordered by letting the
four-fold be in “simple one-ness.” However, he does not advocate a return in
the modern age to the building of such houses. Rather, this old farmhouse
“illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build.” Building
belongs to dwelling, but the suburban sustainable house seems to be a building
without dwelling, building that does not grow out of dwelling or for the sake
of dwelling. It is a low-emissions shell that anyone (with a green conscious)
is invited to purchase and fill with prefabricated “sustainable” furniture.
Now, Heidegger
may seem to fail to fulfil your call for a more communal or interdependent
sustainability and he has certainly been the (perhaps too easy) target of
critiques by communist thinkers in the broadest sense (see Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, for instance). It’s easy
to see how a notion of “dwelling” fails to account for either “spontaneous”
modes of conservation or the excesses of the “the new frugality,” identified by
trendspotters in the city.5 But Heidegger’s hut is communitarian—much more so than the low-impact
home—because it is built (and thought) from dwelling, from Being, rather than
from a calculation about the housing market by individual
investor/builders/developers, no matter how green their consciences.
CT: The
following images refer to one aspect of the substantial energy efficiency
retrofit undertaken on The Empire State Building recently; this was the
refurbishment of the windows. Overnight, workers would remove the windows from
an office in the building, take them to a temporary factory in the basement of
the building where special reflective/insulating films were applied to the
windows that were also cleaned and resealed, and then re-insert the windows
before the office workers commenced the next day.)
Certainly the
example of Heidegger, and in particular the difference between dwelling and the
buildings within which dwelling more or less takes place, makes clear that
sustainability is a how not a what; it is matter of how I live, with what or in
what I live. Apart from the fact that the adjective “sustainable” should only
ever be used comparatively, rather than as an absolute (i.e., there is only
ever “more or less sustainable than”) “sustainable” should always be followed
by the word “use”; there are no sustainable products or buildings, only (more
or less) sustainable uses of products and buildings.
However,
Heidegger, and particularly this Heidegger who was philosophically explicit
about “staying in the provinces,” foregrounds what is no longer an option for
any of us. The pressures are becoming such that fertile land that is not being
used for food production, watersheds or species conservation is no longer
tolerable, especially not for the soon-to-be privileged few with ongoing access
to fossil fuel-based transportation infrastructures to get to and from their
holiday, or writing, retreats.
The task for
today, the challenge that is the “how” of more sustainable living, is to find
“dwelling” within dense cities. So 3 related points.
1) Heidegger
was never alone in the hut, in the solitude that affords the discernible
presencing of being and time. The footprint of the hut is able to be as small
as it is because living (cooking and cleaning for example) is to a large extent
outsourced. Someone, most likely a woman and/or local poor peasant, brings
Martin meals, clean sheets, towels and clothes, etc, while he prepares lectures
on the essence of human freedom. From a more calculative perspective,
purchasing services when needed, rather than just-in-case ownership of goods,
can lead to significant gains in environmental performance, mainly because the
goods used to deliver services remain in domains (businesses rather than
households) that have incentives to invest in efficient, well-maintained and
then end-of-life-component-and-material-recovered goods. But that ecological
sustainability is rarely coupled with the social sustainability of appropriate
levels of recompense for such all the service workers sustaining the creative
class.
Dense urban
environments are made for sustainable services, freeing tight living space of
products, and providing the efficient markets that make services more
affordable. Being serviced is not the objecthood problem of buildings that
Heidegger worried about. But is it too (inter)subjective to be a source of
dwelling?
2) Heidegger’s
philosophy is one of finitude, that what is present before us as everyday
objects, is not all that there is, that things are merely temporary holders for
being, durations of presencing. Everywhere, for everything, there are still
also always absences, withdrawals, concealing. At a more ontic level, this
suggests that all things move through time. A chair might appear to be
self-sufficiently a thing there before me (an ob-ject), but it is such only in
the more or less now. It has not always been there in that way, nor will it
always be there in that way. Its wood and steel only seem to be temporarily
unchanging. As a result, enduring in its “being there in this chairly way” is
something that must be actively pursued; it is the task of ongoing maintenance
(or preservation as Heidegger calls it in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and
elsewhere). The axe persists as an axe only by having its metal head sharpened
and then changed two or three times, and the handle being oiled and then
changed two or three times.
Being “in the
provinces” is a mode of being that usually incorporates habitual rituals of
repair and maintenance into the practice of everyday life. This is certainly
not the case in cities. The nature of their construction, the materials used (steel,
concrete, glass), the density of the design, and the very time-impoverishing
nature of city living, make active preservation both difficult and seemingly unnecessary.
This is what the innovative “factory-in-the-basement-for-overnight-retrofits”
service of the Empire State Building foregrounds. If we are to have more
sustainable cities, we need cities that more explicitly take heed of their need
for being sustained. Urban buildings need to be designed, or redesigned, with
better access to envelope and services, to facilitate maintenance, repair and
upgrade. Such more sustainably usable buildings would manifest their openness
to changeability, and to the fact that their unchangingness is the effect of
sustained work, by those who dwell amongst them.
3) Cities
throughout modernity have been cast as machines. This characterization alludes
to the more sustainable efficiencies that can come from urban densities. But
throughout modernity cities have also been symbols for excess, for aneconomic
pleasure and affective spectacle. Compared to the cosmopolitanism of urbane
life today, Heidegger’s mountain-top Hutte looks exactly like the sort of back-to-the-land austerity that
neo-conservatives decry about environmentalists.
Sustainability
needs to articulate a relation to transgression and affect, not just as a
rebranding exercise, but in order avoid being yet another mode of the
biopolitics of bare life. Allan Stoekl (in Bataille’s
Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability [Minnesota: Minneapolis
University Press, 2007]) has recently attempted a productive provocation: What
must sustainability learn from Bataille, the philosopher of excess? Stoekl’s
answer is that only a sustainability that can articulate with the human need to
engage in the gratuitous can escape the very the cause of societal
unsustainability: the drive for efficient productivity. Or to put it the other
way around, being frugal is just another calculative strategy for turning the
entire world into a resource for the future. By contrast, being slow, even
slack, can be much more socially as well as ecologically sustainable. Cities
are full of these redundancies and wastages, not all leisurely, many requiring
strenuous effort (like burning the muscles in your leg cycling amongst filthy
traffic).
A sustainable
future cannot be just a peacefully, resource efficient, clean and shiny
once-and-for-all world. To sustain humans, it must contain its own challenges,
its own diversities, its own changing dynamic.
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and
Comparative Literature at Cornell University where she is also a member of the
graduate field in studio art and a co-leader of the Society for the Humanities Sustainability
Initiative. She is working on a book, tentatively titled Poetic Dwelling: The Humanities Confront
Climate Change. She is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of
Ambivalence (Stanford, 2009).
Cameron Tonkinwise is currently the Associate
Dean for Sustainability at Parsons The New School for Design. His teaching and
research integrate the philosophy of design with a concern for sustainability. His
work focuses on the design of commercial and nonmarket systems for shared
product use, exploring how the emerging discipline of service design might
facilitate the development of less-materials-intense economies while
negotiating issues of perceived convenience and autonomy.
Notes
1 The policy, “wu jin qi
yong,” translates as “waste not.” The piece was exhibited at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 2009.
2 See for example Eva
Heiskanen & Mika Pantzar “Toward Sustainable Consumption: Two New
Perspectives” Journal of Consumer Policy Vol.20, No.4 (Dec 1997) who draw on research that calculates the “slave days”
(a unit of energy equal to the healthy daily calorific intake of a person) of
leisure activities like reading the newspaper and playing golf.
3 And certainly Sharr
understands the complexity in the very notion of withdrawal in relation to
Heidegger’s politics. “Why do I stay in the Provinces?” in Thomas Sheehan ed, Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Transaction Publishers, 1981).
4 Martin Heidegger, “Building
Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry Language
Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 147.
5 See
“Frugality Is The New Chic,’
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99654933