The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture 9780804792998

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the practice of misuse

THE PRACTICE OF MISUSE Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

Raymond Malewitz

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malewitz, Raymond, author.   The practice of misuse : rugged consumerism in contemporary American culture / Raymond Malewitz.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8047-9196-0 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Consumption (Economics) in literature. 3. Material culture in literature. 4. Consumption (Economics)—United States. 5. Material culture—United States. I. Title. PS228.C65M35 2014 810.9'3553—dc23 2014008593 ISBN 978-0-8047-9299-8 (electronic)

For Emily

Contents

Acknowledgments ix 1 Misuse: From Aesthetics to Practice

1

2 Theaters of Rugged Consumerism

42

3 The Garden in the Machine: Biomimetic Hybrids and the Tragedy of Singular Use

76

4 The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman

112

5 Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism

147

6 The Commodity at the End of the World

180

Notes

191

Bibliography

209

Index

221

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the contributions of a number of generous and vibrant readers, colleagues, family members, and friends. In particular, I would like to thank my editors and anonymous readers at Stanford University Press for their careful attention to my arguments. I also thank Neil Davison, Amy Hungerford, Steve Railton, Janice Carlisle, Evan Gottlieb, Meghan Freeman, Dwight Codr, Zak Fisher, and Mike Kelly for reviewing elements of my chapters and for supporting my work. Earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 5 have appeared in PMLA and Contemporary Literature, respectively. My greatest thanks go to Emily, whose tireless support colors all aspects of this project.

the practice of misuse

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Misuse: From Aesthetics to Practice [T]he street finds its own use for things. —William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” (1981) The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended. —Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” (2007)

Of the many insights that sociology has brought to bear upon the study of literature and culture, no idea has received more attention than the notion that the human body is socially, rather than naturally, constructed. Arguments for the social construction of race, class, and gender are well known. To these categories Queer Theory has added sexuality, Disability Studies has added health, Fat Studies has added body shape, and Animal Studies has added species. Such perspectives maintain that our identities are determined not by our “natural” biological origins but rather by our contingent, nurtured interactions within and between cultures, which, as Roland Barthes observes, “establish Nature itself as historical” (101). It is therefore unsurprising that recent material culture scholars have used similar methods to understand the diverse objects that populate our world. That such objects are socially rather than naturally constructed

  Misuse is not, of course, a compelling new subject of critical inquiry. Nearly a century and a half has passed since Karl Marx introduced his theory of historical materialism in Capital (1867), and critics still look to it and to Georg Lukács’s nearly century-old History and Class Consciousness (1923) as powerful accounts of the ways in which commodities conceal their production histories beneath a reified sheen of ahistorical presence. But what is newly compelling about this sociological analogy is the notion that objects, like people, are subject to the contingencies of a continuing history rather than to the determinist logic of origin. In place of perspectives centered on the collective production of goods, the new “thing theorists” probe what Arjun Appadurai calls the “social histories” of modern commodities, drawing attention to objects’ individualized fates after they pass beyond the site of initial market exchange.1 Like the textual work of New Historicism, Appadurai’s and other scholars’ thing theories thus challenge the various discourses of power that inhere within the very notion of an object’s original, historical use-value, and which sanction or prohibit certain types of human-object interactions.2 In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), for example, Michel de Certeau argues that the “rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production” that constitutes late capitalism seems to leave the modern public in a position of collective passivity, but he insists that such a grim outlook overlooks the ways that consumption can operate as a productive and subversive act. This “tactical” form of consumption (what he calls “la perruque,” or “the wig”) is “characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its products (where would it place them?) but in an art for using those imposed upon it” (31). Likewise, Ken Alder insists that even if an object’s origins are known, its social value need not be yoked to the conditions dictated to it by its assembly: [A] history of things encompasses much more than an account of what “they” can do for “us,” if only because the purposes things serve are unanticipated by those who design, make, and market them. Hence stories about things involve more than stories of generic utility. To reduce an object to its function involves more than a failure of attention; it is a slur on the ability of human ingenuity to

Misuse   repurpose the material world and on the power of things to reshape the contours of human experience. Who hasn’t bent a paper clip to some untoward end? (“Introduction to Focus,” 80–81)3

To correct these problems, Alder presents a thesory of materialism devoted to what he calls “thick things.” As the phrase suggests, Alder bases his investigation of material artifacts upon the methods of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argued that only “thick descriptions” could “capture the diverse layers of meaning with which different human agents imbued their actions and those of their fellows” (“Making Things the Same,” 503–504). In Geertz’s well-known argument, closing one’s eye can signify either a wink or a twitch: “The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, ‘phenomenalistic’ observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows” (6). Along similar lines, within Alder’s “thick thing” system, the significance of a given object is not dependent upon its preassigned function or upon its resemblance to other, identical objects that have been put to human use. Instead, its tactical meaning emerges as a function of a particular social situation or context that cannot be easily anticipated or abstractly modeled. Put simply, if I needed to bind the leaves of this chapter together, I could use a paper clip. If my Internet router stopped working, I could unbend that same paper clip and push it into the router’s reset hole to correct the problem. Alder supplements this analogy by foregrounding the fungible nature of material substances: “The material world is lumpy, recalcitrant and inconsistent. Connections come apart; parts wear out; things break” (503). When an object breaks down, it cannot function in the way that its creators intended. As related scholars in the field of “rubbish theory” suggest, in the moment at which an object sheds its original use-value and is classified as waste, it effectively disappears from the socioeconomic landscape. Michael Thompson explains this phenomenon in his discussion of the difference between what he calls “transient” objects, which seem to lose their value over time, and “durable” objects, which preserve or even gain value as they age:

  Misuse In an ideal world, free of nature’s negative attitude, [a transient] object would reach zero value and zero expected life-span at the same instant, and then, like Mark Twain’s “one hoss shay,” disappear into dust. But in reality, it usually does not do this; it just continues to exist in a timeless and valueless limbo where at some later date (if it has not by that time turned, or been made, into dust) it has the chance of being discovered . . . and successfully transferred to durability. (9–10)4

Any conscientious recycler or tinkerer knows that an object’s lost functionality need not mean that that object has ceased to function; it can gain a new “durability” by simply changing functions. In this sense, Thompson argues, “rubbish is socially defined” and “responds to social pressures” (11). Any “thick” story of objects thus acknowledges that objects can (and often must) change over time, and that such changes come about at the intersection of creative human minds, unstable material substances, and chemical and physical laws. These playful events not only have the capacity to destabilize the social categories that allow for easy partitions between valuable materials and rubbish; they can also serve as emergent sites of resistance to economic policies that enforce such environmentally and socially damaging beliefs. To this end, a politics of creative consumption can be and has been hybridized with the older collective materialisms operative within Marxist traditions. Evan Watkins offers a good model for this collectivizing of tactical behaviors in his important book Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education (1993). Watkins argues that the “technoideological” societies of late capitalism express their power not only through the production of novel gadgets but also by the ways that they designate certain postproduction objects and social groups as obsolete rather than durable. “[I]n this master narrative of residual, obsolete survivals from the past,” he argues, “[technoideology] generates its own rationale for the stratification of the social field” (25). If this is the case, it stands to reason that an oppositional politics might concern itself not only with recognizing the ways that this ideology operates—how it justifies the marginalization of minorities, women, and other economically disenfranchised groups by linking them to “obsolete” commodities and modes of production—but also with putting into practice alternative strategies of human-object interactions that might call attention to the power dynamics governing these associations.

Misuse   As Watkins suggests, “the ‘stuff’ of both material and cultural junk can . . . be patched, repaired, reshaped, rapidly distributed, and deployed” to “break the links of survival narratives that equate the obsolete with the fading past, the residual, the nostalgic, the politically ineffective” (40). Activities that might seem reducible to individual whim—the specific repair or reshaping of a particular object by a particular person—might be redeployed in such a way as to reanimate a collective, oppositional politics that is so often also classified as nostalgic or obsolete.5 At the same time, as Fredric Jameson reminds us in The Political Unconscious (1981), we should be skeptical of any activity that is presented in and of itself as a Utopian demystification of the problems of false consciousness, particularly one that is predicated on individual rather than collective action (286). After all, within certain historical contexts, the supposedly liberating model outlined by Watkins could amount to little more than political displacement or a projection of social inequalities onto objects in need of rescue or repair: fix the object and you have fixed the social problem. Indeed, Watkins argues that such activities are frequently inscribed with pernicious race- and gender-based assumptions about the nature of production and consumption under the conditions of late capitalism. As he observes, creative acts of consumption often take on masculine characteristics in service-based economic systems that feminize labor practices. This “masculinization of consumer positionality” suggests that (as I shall also argue) the repair or repurposing of objects can reinforce or destabilize class, race, and gender privileges (55). Like most emergent social activities that constitute what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling,” creative repurposing can serve different ends based upon changes in social context. The incredible dexterity of late capitalism means that any attempt to collectivize the highly idiosyncratic refashionings of objects can result in those activities being “formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations” that serve market ends (132). For example, during the 2012 presidential election, Ann Romney shrewdly altered her husband’s public identity from a dispassionate plutocrat to a heroic everyman by describing him as a do-it-yourself creative repurposer. In her speech to the Republican National Convention, Romney informed the audience that during the early years of their marriage, the couple “ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses.

  Misuse Our dining room table was a fold down ironing board in the kitchen. Those were very special days” (Fox News). The overwhelmingly appreciative response from Republican delegates and from various media outlets offers clear testimony of the unstable political value of any “tactic” of creative repurposing. But as Williams argues in Marxism and Literature (1977) and as Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, it would also be shortsighted to dismiss the oppositional value of these activities outright, for to do so would overlook the complex web of desires that motivates tactical behaviors and renders them appealing to groups from both the political right and political left. Jameson observes, “[I]f the ideological function of mass culture is understood as a process whereby otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses are ‘managed’ and defused, rechanneled and offered spurious objects, then some preliminary step must also be theorized in which these same impulses—the raw material upon which the process works—are initially awakened within the very text [or, in this case, object] that seeks to still them” (Political Unconscious, 287). Political examinations of the creative repurposing of objects thus must be “thickened” according to the same dictates as Alder’s phenomenological “thick thing” analyses. These examinations must be able to distinguish between actions that appear identical in their general form but that reflect the “dangerous” impulses of politically oppositional desire, or the “defused” satisfactions of a false Utopia, or some combination of the two.6 In an effort to understand the diverse phenomenological and political perspectives that frame contemporary acts of creative repurposing, this book takes up Alder’s and Watkins’s challenge to set human postproduction ingenuity alongside the “power of things to reshape . . . human experience.” In the next four chapters, I chart the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of new figures in late twentieth-century American material culture—“rugged consumers”—who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their social environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. Through their fluid encounters with the material world, rugged consumers behave in constructivist ways toward objects, turning the aforementioned theories of object life spans into practices of misuse. Rugged consumerism has the potential to temporarily suspend the various networks of power that dictate the proper use

Misuse   of a given artifact and to allow those networks of power to be understood as contingent strategies that must be perpetually renewed and reinforced rather than naturalized processes that persist untroubled through time and space. At the same time, as Ann Romney’s politically savvy story suggests, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than foreground the class-, race-, and gender-based problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the cultural dominance of late capitalism. By analyzing both the rare convergences and common divergences between subjective material practices and collectivist politics, this study shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects from the 1960s to the present. As should be clear from my opening framework, in themselves the abstracted behaviors that constitute rugged consumerism are not circumscribed by nation or time period. Indeed, the closest analog to the rugged consumer is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s much-celebrated bricoleur: “someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman” (16–17). In a passage from The Savage Mind (1962), LéviStrauss clarifies this “devious” work by distinguishing between the bricoleur and the engineer: The “bricoleur” is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purposes of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with “whatever is at hand,” that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. (17)

Through engagement with material objects, the bricoleur, like the rugged consumer, views the world outside the prescribed limits of sanctioned usevalues. Unlike the engineer, for whom each object is rigidly connected to a specialized task, the bricoleur’s object “is to be defined only by its potential use” and therefore comes to represent the bricoleur’s “poetry” (17–18, 21). As such, the bricoleur “‘speaks’ not only with things . . . but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and

  Misuse life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities” (21).7 Or as Michel de Certeau explains, instances of “tactical” consumption such as bricolage can be understood as speech acts, which, like Ferdinand de Saussure’s “parole,” are appropriated by users from some preestablished system, or “langue,” for a series of singular creative purposes (32–33). Though the rugged consumer and the bricoleur share the same language system and the same tactical view of human-object interactions, their material utterances reflect important cultural differences. To use Lévi-Strauss’s term, the “poetry” of both the rugged consumer and the bricoleur amounts to a fantastic space within which the rules of proper object use are at least temporarily suspended. But whereas Lévi-Strauss’s and de Certeau’s bricoleurs constitute nonspecific (and potentially transnational and, to an extent, genderless, transracial, and transhistorical) forms of these activities, this book presents rugged consumerism as a left- and right-libertarian response to economic and political developments within the United States during the contemporary period of its history. This libertarian inflection—skeptical of both traditional political institutions and (in its pre-neoliberal state) globalized corporate capitalism—is most visible in the way that rugged consumers position their “poetry” alongside the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Embedded within a culture in which the only readily available platform for collective action is a network of consumer behaviors—using objects in the ways that everyone else uses them—rugged consumers, either as individuals or as small communities, respond by reimagining consumption as an idiosyncratic, productive, and critical enterprise. Whether in literature or popular culture, American rugged consumers thus become mediating figures between mythic models of productive self-sufficiency conceived during the country’s older frontier history and the modern interdependent realities that characterize the country’s transition to a neoliberal globalized economy. Finally, in their desires to mythically (and, at times, practically) respond to the catastrophic economic, social, and environmental effects of American consumer culture, rugged consumers simultaneously embody and critique that culture. I also use the terms rugged consumer and rugged consumerism to signal some differences between my approach to American material culture and the important contributions of other critics who concentrate on a similar

Misuse   cultural landscape but whose work is situated at the purely phenomenological end of “thing theory” discourse. Though my aim in this study is less a new theory of things than a historical account of human-object practices by certain groups within the United States during the contemporary period, my account draws upon the useful terms and methods established by these earlier models. As such, I begin with a brief overview of this thing theory and a briefer account of its appropriateness to my work before I turn to my primary subject.

The Aesthetics of Misuse The recent resurgence of material culture in American Studies is due in part to the work that Bill Brown has undertaken in theorizing things. Through his editorial work for the award-winning 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled “Things” and his 2003 study of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century American literature, A Sense of Things, Brown provides a new framework for understanding the place of material objects during the modern era of American cultural history. In “Thing Theory” (2001), for example, Brown argues that the emergence of material culture studies in the late twentieth century signals an attempt by some critics to overcome the dizzying excess of theory-making. “Fat chance,” he replies. “For even the most coarse and commonsensical things, mere things, perpetually pose a problem because of the specific unspecificity that ‘things’ denotes. . . . Taking the side of things hardly puts a stop to that thing called theory” (3). Brown frames the problem of theorizing “things” through Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological studies of human-object relationships. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger distinguishes between two ways of perceiving objects: as purposeful “equipment” with an accompanying Zuhandenheit (“readiness-to-hand”) and as purposeless substances with an accompanying Vorhandenheit (“presence-at-hand”). To illustrate the difference between these two modes of human-object relationships, Heidegger proposes two different ways that a laborer might encounter a hammer. In the first case, a skilled laborer grasps the hammer and begins to put it to some purpose. While doing so, the laborer quickly becomes absorbed in the work and the phenomenological distinctions between the

  Misuse hammer and the hand that holds it begin to dissolve. Much like an athlete in a proverbial zone, the laborer thus experiences what Heidegger calls the “totality” of the object in its “in-order-to-do”-ness: the hammer is understood through its “serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability” with respect to some human will (Being and Time, 97). This mystical condition holds only for situations in which the laborer knows how to use the hammer and the hammer maintains its material integrity. When the hammer is wielded by a laborer unused to hammering or when it is broken, damaged, or rendered unusable within the context of a work-event, the tool ceases to be a prosthetic extension of human being and instead becomes, for Heidegger, “conspicuous” and “obtrusive.” At this time, its Vorhandenheit emerges from its Zuhandenheit as an abstracted thing of contemplation separate from the objecthood that once characterized it (102, 103). While Heidegger insists that objects experienced in their Vorhandenheit constitute an “inauthentic” experience of the world, the “conspicuous” event of an object breaking down offers compensation for this loss by enabling the laborer to decipher the essence of “in-order-to-do”-ness or “towards-this” that makes up the animating force of all human-object interactions: “[W]hen an assignment has been disturbed . . . we catch sight of the ‘towards-this’ itself, and along with it everything connected with the work—the whole ‘workshop’—as that wherein concern always dwells” (105).8 Brown reaches the same conclusion: We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. (“Thing Theory,” 4)

Heidegger’s and Brown’s theories of things thus operate through mathematical subtraction. If a physical substance is both a thing and an object, the thing appears out of the substance only when that substance’s original use-value has been removed or suspended. In other words, a thing appears when the object no longer can appear.

Misuse   When analyzing material artifacts, Brown, like Heidegger, is less interested in the economic division between an object’s exchange-value and its use-value than he is in phenomenological distinction between the experience of the “object” and the experience of the “thing.” Indeed, Brown’s argument conflates the two poles of a commodity, beginning with use-value (“when they stop working for us”) and transitioning seamlessly to exchange-value (“their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition”) without attending to the deep chasm between these two ways of perceiving material artifacts. Nevertheless, his phenomenological approach to theorizing things dovetails Marxist approaches in terms of both theories’ preoccupation with the social conditions that prevent “authentic” interactions with material entities and the possible contexts out of which those “authentic” interactions might return.9 For example, in History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács localizes the sensation of what Heidegger and Brown would classify as present-at-hand to a specific moment within world history corresponding to the development of rationalized capitalist economies. Within an economic context organized through the logic of reification, Lukács argues, all objects are viewed through a perspective that “conceals above all the immediate—qualitative and material—character of things as things.” In other words, through the process of reification, capitalism dissolves the relationship between an object and its “in-order-to-do”-ness. But whereas, within Heidegger’s system, the broken hammer provided the occasion for insight into the nature of an object; the laborer under capitalism receives no recompense in the form of a purified understanding of “towards-this”itself. Likewise, the consumer of an artifact can certainly make use of it, but the open, mystical authenticity of the object’s use-value is disturbed by its value as an object of exchange. Indeed, though he does not use these terms, Lukács’s arguments suggest that this very “towards-this”-itself is what withers under the logic of capitalist economies. The concealment of things, he maintains, is the necessary product of an economic system that translates material entities that cannot be equated into abstract, disembodied commodities subject to mathematical relations:10 “When use-values appear universally as commodities they acquire a new objectivity, a new substantiality which they did not possess in an age of episodic exchange and which destroys their original and authentic substantiality” (92).

  Misuse Quoting Marx, he concludes that like the landowner’s property, which “means nothing [to the landowner] but ground rent” and “los[es] any of its inherent qualities such as its fertility,” “even the individual object which man confronts directly, either as producer or consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its commodity character” (92–93). Under this system, the only way for the “thing as thing” to return in its “original and authentic substantiality” is for the object to exit the economic stage; in short, the object must be rendered economically worthless but substantively useful. While Brown seems less concerned with the political implications of this process than with the aesthetic consequences of thing-making, he reaches similar conclusions in his later account of “misuse value.” In A Sense of Things, he distinguishes between two types of human-object interactions: “apperceptive” interactions, which “foreclos[e] sensuous experience in order to render the physical world phenomenal,” and “the experience of the thing,” which “call[s] our attention to brute physicality” through the “interruption of habit” (76). Brown clarifies this distinction through a short passage from William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) in which James accesses the thingness of a painting by turning it upside down. Brown concludes: “The difference between the apperceptive constitution of the thing, in what we might call its objecthood, and the experience of the thing, in what we might call its thinghood, emerges in the moment (and no doubt only as a moment) of re-objectification that results from a kind of misuse—turning the picture bottom up, standing on one’s head” (A Sense of Things, 76). Just as a broken drill becomes a mysterious thing through the suspension of habitual use, James’s actions sever the link between a painting and its socially constructed value. The painting, in short, becomes a thing. In contrast to Brown’s and Lukács’s earlier models of an object’s habitual or ideological deformation, this latter example suggests that individuals might intentionally direct the process of thing-making. The earlier examples of objects breaking down suggest that the thing confronts its user through its refusal to be used or sold as a viable commodity. Within such frameworks, the only way to for an individual to obtain insight into the “thingness” of the thing is through historical accident: as long as the drill continues to function, it remains an object.11 In Brown’s description, however, James intentionally misuses a preexistent object to create a new

Misuse   human-object relationship and thus a new thing. By turning the painting upside down, Brown argues, James also overturns the social relationships that inhere within the painting, and in the brief transition between one human-object relationship and another, the thing comes into view. Consistent with his earlier work, in Brown’s analysis of William James’s story, the physical actions that constitute misuse seem incidental to the intellectual products of misuse, which, in turn, compose Brown’s genealogy of protomodernism. Through analyses of James and later Frank Norris, he argues that nineteenth-century American representations of object misuse forecast an “aesthetic that will come to energize the modernist capacity to call our attention to objects—be it the urinal that becomes Duchamp’s Fountain, or the bicycle seat that becomes Picasso’s Bull, or the refuse that attains formal brilliance in a Walker Evans photograph, or the ‘broken/pieces of a green/bottle’ that assume luminosity in William Carlos Williams’s ‘Between Walls’” (A Sense of Things, 78). In this sense, Brown’s theory accords with modernist techniques of defamiliarization outlined by early twentieth-century formalists such as Victor Shklovsky, who observes: “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception” (13). Like Shklovsky’s work, Brown’s focus remains firmly grounded in the formalist project of modernism, which “teaches us that finding a new place for detritus, recycling it into some new scene, confers new value on it” (A Sense of Things, 78). As his examples make clear, the “recycl[ed]” object’s “new scene” is the scene of art, and the “new value” is aesthetic in origin and in outcome. In contrast to this modernist or protomodernist model of intentional misuse, the practices of misuse that will be explored in this study of late twentieth-century American culture yield objects that cannot be understood as exclusively aesthetic. Likewise, the rugged consumers who reassemble the world around them cannot be understood as artists, at least in the high modernist sense of the word. Instead, the actions that I call rugged consumerism reapply the repurposed aesthetic examined by phenomenological thing theories to the realm of practical. My analysis will thus bend backward toward the sociological investigations of objects outlined at the beginning of this chapter and toward the political interpretation

  Misuse of human-object interactions outlined by Lukács at the same time as it draws upon the useful terms established by Brown’s and Heidegger’s thing theories. To signal this hybridized method and some of its consequences, I begin my account of rugged consumerism with a populist story of object misuse that is more in keeping with Alder’s “thick” description of historical things and Watkins’s obsolete “throwaways” than with the aesthetic projects of Picasso, Duchamp, and Williams.

What Is Rugged Consumerism? About halfway through the eighty-sixth hour of the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise began to assemble a strange box that would play a pivotal role in their survival. Thirty hours earlier, on April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank in the spaceship’s command module (CM) had exploded, damaging its power supply and forcing the crew to move to the ship’s attached lunar module (LM). Though not designed for this purpose, the LM served as a “lifeboat” for the crew, providing adequate oxygen, water, power, and shelter for the three astronauts as they traveled around the moon and back home. Unfortunately, it could not accommodate one final requirement for human life, which is why they had begun to cut up spacesuits and scavenge cardboard for this strange box: it could not remove the poisonous carbon dioxide that increased within the tiny lunar module with every breath the crew expelled. On earth, of course, the ecosystem corrects for this problem. Within the carbon cycle, carbon dioxide, the waste product of cellular respiration and artificial combustion, becomes a key nutrient for plant photosynthesis. Until recently, this cycle has kept carbon dioxide levels stable at far less than 1 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. In space, however, large metal canisters rather than plants emit breathable oxygen, and lithium hydroxide crystals rather than those same plants absorb carbon dioxide. The lunar module contained a small number of circular lithium hydroxide “scrubber” cartridges, but they were designed to filter air for only the two astronauts who were scheduled to land on the moon. The cartridges would not accommodate three crew members for several days in space. After thirty hours, these filters had approached their absorption limits and

Misuse   the ship was still three days from the earth. Without some other method of carbon dioxide filtration, the crew would soon sicken and die. Fortunately, the CM contained a large number of scrubbers that could filter the air within the LM. Unfortunately, the CM’s square cartridges were incompatible with the round receptacles of the LM. The aerospace companies that designed the CM and LM (North American Rockwell and Grumman Aerospace, respectively) saw no reason to make the filtration systems compatible because they served two different functions. The LM was not designed to be a command module, so why would it need the same life systems as a command module? The astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were therefore placed in a curious position of abundance and scarcity. They had all of the scrubbers they needed, just not the right ones. The engineers at NASA and the astronauts in space therefore had to design a procedure that would snugly connect a square plug with a round hole using the limited materials that could be scavenged from both modules. After a few hours, Ed Smylie, chief of the Crew Systems Division at NASA, worked out a potential design and radioed the Apollo 13 crew. Jim Lovell describes what came next as follows: For the next hour, the work aboard Apollo 13 had little more orderliness than a scavenger hunt, and little more technical elegance. With [capsule communicator Joe] Kerwin reading from the list of supplies Smylie had provided him, and . . . [the] controllers standing behind him and consulting similar lists, the crew were dispatched around the spaceship to gather materials that had never been intended for the uses to which they were about to be put. (Lovell and Kluger 256)

Smylie’s jury-rigged filtration unit required a square “scrubber” canister, a large plastic bag, duct tape, cardboard, and a hose. The crew used the plastic wrapping from their thermal underwear to seal the back half of the scrubber. They used the cardboard instruction sheet for the moon landing to hold the bag open so that air would flow freely through the crystals. They cut the hose from an emergency pressure suit and attached it to the plastic bag with duct tape. Finally, they connected the tube to the LM’s circular receptacle. A fan in the receptacle would draw air from the cabin through the scrubber cartridge into the cardboard-supported plastic bag down the pressure suit tube and through the LM’s filtration pipeline, where the filtered air would be redistributed to the cabin. After they had attached what they would later call the “mailbox” to the

  Misuse receptacle (Figure 1), they radioed NASA. “‘O.K.,’ Swigert announced to the ground, more proudly than he intended, ‘our do-it-yourself lithium hydroxide canister is complete’” (Lovell and Kluger 257). Within six hours, carbon dioxide levels within the LM had dropped to near zero. Though the full scope of American rugged consumerism cannot be understood through a brief description of this single historical event, we can already begin to chart its general properties. To survive, the astronauts and NASA engineers had to view the materials within each module as things rather than as objects, fulfilling Brown’s early conclusions that it is only when objects break down that “the worn-out usualness of the equipment then obtrudes itself as the sole mode of being, apparently peculiar to it exclusively” (A Sense of Things, 34). Unlike Brown’s examples, however, the context surrounding the astronauts’ actions reinforced the link between their activity and the economic behaviors of America’s mythic nineteenth-century white male heroes. John F. Kennedy had already described space as a kind of “new frontier” in his 1960 presidential inaugural speech, and the original Star Trek series, begun four years earlier, had proclaimed space to be “the final frontier.” Such metaphors were literalized in the Apollo 13 mission: within their spacecraft, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise confronted an artificial environment less hospitable than the mythic frontier of the American West. In the hostile terrain of outer space, they reengineered an environment that mimicked the natural cycles of the earth’s ecosystem through creative, unlikely acts of object repurposing. The American press viewed the mission through this lens and used the frontier analogy to critique the nation’s expanding consumer culture. On 16 April 1970, a New York Times article reported that the carbon dioxide problem had been “solved with a bit of Yankee ingenuity—‘shade tree engineering,’ Mission Control called it” (Wilford 30). Less than a week after the astronauts returned to earth, the same newspaper published an editorial entitled “Earth Day and Space Day” that urged Americans to adopt the same “shade-tree” ingenuity in their manipulation of the earth’s resources: Even now, hundreds of millions of men and women still naively think that earth has what Kenneth Boulding has called a “cowboy economy,” with resources as infinite and unending as the great plains must have seemed to those who herded cattle in the West a century ago. Every person understood last week that the scarce

Misuse  

figur e 1  Interior View of the Apollo 13 lunar module and the “mailbox,” outer space. Photo: 1970. Courtesy of NASA. JSC PAO Web Team. supplies on Apollo 13 had to be husbanded carefully, consumed economically, and recycled for reuse whenever possible. Earth Day . . . aims above all to convince the American people that similar prudence is required on Spaceship Earth. (New York Times, “Earth Day and Space Day,” 19 April 1970, 174)

Both passages provide indirect testimony to the emergence of an unlikely new figure in late twentieth-century American culture—the creative, improvisational, but restrained tinkerer—who replaces the older prodigal cowboy heroes of American mythology and provides the country a better, more frugal example of an appropriate “husband.” The Apollo 13 story also introduces implied villains against whom the rugged consumers struggle: rigid, uncreative engineers, who design objects for singular rather than plural uses. These design parameters placed the astronauts of Apollo 13 in a passive position with respect to the

  Misuse objects that surrounded them and that kept them alive through liftoff, space flight, and the eventual return to earth. Reprising the roles of earlier astronauts, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise at the start of the mission were what test pilot Chuck Yeager called “Spam in a can”: passengers rather than pilots, whose lives were sustained by the onboard computers and the engineers at mission control. They were, in other words, instruments of use-value rather than authors of use-value. The breakdown of the Apollo 13 spacecraft introduced scarcity in the midst of technological abundance, thrusting the pilots into an active role of survival through improvisation. Mission Control’s reference to “shade-tree engineering” bears this out. A shade-tree mechanic, like LéviStrauss’s bricoleur and Watkins’s survivalist, is a person who repairs his or her own car rather than relying upon auto mechanics to perform the task.12 Unwilling to leave the mission in the hands of Rockwell’s or Grumman’s technicians, the astronauts worked on the ship in the shade of the moon just as automotive hobbyists used to work on their cars beneath a shady tree. Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13 plays upon these divisions, and, in the process, translates historical records into a cinematic myth of rugged consumerism. In one scene, two sleep-deprived engineers notify the lead flight director, Gene Krantz, played by Ed Harris, of the dangerous carbon dioxide levels in the lunar module cabin. When Krantz asks about the lithium hydroxide scrubbers and is told of the cartridge compatibility problem, he rubs his eyes and exclaims, “Tell me this isn’t a government operation!” Embodying the characteristics of the uncreative engineer, one protests, “This just isn’t a contingency we’ve remotely looked at.” “Well, I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole . . . rapidly,” Krantz replies to end the scene. The “mailbox” contraption proved so thematically engaging that Howard framed its heroic production through a five-minute montage. Fittingly, the first instruction that mission control provides for the assembly of the “mailbox” is to “rip the cover off the flight plan.” “With pleasure,” Jack Swigert replies, symbolically breaking the astronauts free from the stifling procedures of the uncreative engineers and transforming the pilots from “Spam in a can” to rugged consumers.13 When the astronauts assemble the contraption, Howard introduces his own touch to the montage, stepping

Misuse   outside of the historical record by having Lovell (Tom Hanks) stuff one of his socks into the contraption to serve some undefined purpose. Within the context of American popular culture, the “mailbox” might be classified as a Rube Goldberg machine. An early pioneer of cartoon humor, Goldberg created the popular comic series “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts,” which presented improvised, overengineered machines assembled from unlikely sets of parts. For example, “Professor Butts’ Moth Exterminator” uses (among other things) a block of ice, a bow and arrow, a tire, a sailboat, a spoon, a lamb, and a machine gun to rid a house of the pesky insects. Trained at the University of California’s Mining School, Goldberg used his engineering background to both celebrate and parody an increasingly passive, bureaucratized American consumer culture. Though Goldberg insisted that “[w]ith few exceptions, no single person can stand out as the inventor of any great mechanical appliance,” the legacy of his cartoons in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries testify to the mythic power of the lone creator, who endlessly endeavors to invent new desires alongside new, surprising uses for everyday objects (quoted in Marzio 183).14 As Goldberg knew, his audience’s laughter also provides an indirect measure of the dramatic transformations that have taken place within the late twentieth-century American economy, which have cleared space for the emergence of rugged consumerism in the cultural superstructure. According to Peter Marzio, “The Goldberg inventions countered the corporate impersonality” of companies such as Bell Telephone, General Electric, and Westinghouse, which replaced individual creativity with invention by committee” (182). Depicted in Thomas Pynchon’s midcentury novella The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), these new modes of collective production stripped engineers of a sense of individual self-worth. In the novel, the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, meets an engineer at “Yoyodyne”— a fictional company modeled after defense industry standards such as Rockwell and Grumman—and is surprised to hear that he still harbors creative desires: “I didn’t think people invented anymore,” she tells the man. “I mean, who’s there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn’t it all teamwork now?” “Teamwork?,” he replies, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society” (67–68). In their libertarian appeals to Edisonian

  Misuse inventiveness and accountability as palliatives to the alienating conditions of modern labor practices, Apollo 13 narratives, Goldberg’s cartoons, and Pynchon’s engineers thus yearn for earlier, mythic Americas—places that celebrate rather than denigrate the “independent gadgeteer bent on asserting his right to dream” (Marzio 183). Howard reiterates this theme of creative, low-tech misuse and uncreative high-tech use throughout Apollo 13. After the oxygen tank explosion, Krantz orders the astronauts into the lunar module, which, as the film reminds us again and again, is designed for only two astronauts. Later, he gathers his team of engineers together at Houston and tells them to “forget the flight plan. From this moment on we are improvising a new mission.” As he begins to outline the new course of action on an overhead projector, its bulb breaks. Undeterred, Krantz “improvises” by picking up a piece of chalk and creating a do-it-yourself diagram of the earth and the moon on the wall behind him. Part of Krantz’s strategy is to use the LM’s engine to perform an “extended burn” to adjust the spaceship’s flight path back to earth. Without the assistance of the onboard computers, the astronauts planned to manually fire the engine and thus reclaim the piloting roles that had been denied them. A Grumman engineer at the meeting protests: “We can’t make any guarantees [that it will work]. We designed the LM to land on the moon, not fire the engine out there for course direction.” Ever the rugged consumer, Krantz replies, “I don’t care what anything was designed to do. I care about what it can do.” Later, as the crew prepares for the burn, the same Grumman engineer pulls Krantz aside and reminds him that “the engine’s never been tried like this.” In a rejoinder that Pynchon’s disgruntled Yoyodyne engineer would have appreciated, Krantz replies, “Look, I know what you’re trying to do. I guarantee you, I won’t hold you personally responsible.” During the subsequent burn, the camera returns to the engineer, who is chain-smoking and sweating. After its successful completion, the engineer leaps to his feet, puts his hand on Krantz’s shoulder, and shouts, “I knew it! I knew it! How about that LM, huh?” “I guess you can keep your job” is Krantz’s terse reply. Howard’s message is clear: the real heroes are not the engineers who built the lunar module; they are the creative astronauts and NASA engineers who, under the conditions of scarcity at

Misuse   the new frontier, see beyond an object’s intended use and exploit its unintended capabilities.15 The mythic narrative of the Apollo 13 space mission—men reclaiming their authority as makers at the site of failed engineering—was no doubt shaped by gendered (and to a certain extent, racial) anxieties regarding the changing roles of skilled laborers and objects during the second half of the twentieth century. The gradual shift away from industrial production within the U.S. economy has, for better and for worse, decreased the value of stereotypically masculine job skills associated with the creation and manipulation of material objects. In the early 1950s, approximately one-third of the (largely male) workforce of the United States labored in factories. By the early twenty-first century, that number had dropped below one in ten. This trend continues as manufacturing industries become increasingly globalized, automated, and deregulated, and as businesses invent ever more efficient cost-cutting measures in response to the economic recessions of the 1980s and early twenty-first century. The consequences of such diminution have not gone unnoticed. In his classic study of antimodernism in American history from 1880–1920, No Place for Grace (1981), T. J. Jackson Lears departs from his commentary on the arts and crafts movement of the early twentieth century to address the present conditions of work in a “postindustrial society” in terms that would have been familiar to earlier labor critics. Within such a society, knowledge workers look upon their work and find it “strangely insubstantial.” “The new bureaucratic world of work often fragmented their labor and reduced their sense of autonomy: more important, it isolated them from the hard, substantial reality of things. Among the middle and upper classes, the transformation of work reinforced difficulties pervading the wider culture; the splintering sense of selfhood, the vague feeling of unreality” (60).16 In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi offers many examples of this kind of alienation: “The massive bureaucracies of postwar ‘white collar’ employment, especially the defense contractors fat on government largesse, were replete with makework jobs with inflated titles. Their vast middle managements were filled with functionaries who often didn’t even know what they were managing, who suspected they weren’t really needed at all. What these corporations were offering was a secure job, not a vital role” (29). For Faludi, American

  Misuse astronauts provide fitting symbols of the transformation from a performative culture of masculinity to an ornamental culture during the decades following World War II. Within such a culture, traditional definitions of masculine identity based upon usefulness, control, and individual productivity shifted toward decorativeness, submission, and collective consumption, making male workers appear to themselves as objects rather than subjects. For example, in her account of NASA’s decision to put a window on an early Mercury capsule (one that would ostensibly allow American astronauts to navigate space), she writes: “[The astronauts’] triumph was illusory, because their trouble wasn’t the lack of a view. They were the view. In a sense, the whole capsule, the whole space program was a window. If the astronauts couldn’t see out, the entire world was looking in. The astronauts had a mission after all, and it was to be watched” (458). The Apollo 13 astronauts could not perform even this role. Less than a year after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon walk, the American media had grown exhausted with NASA coverage. As Lovell laments, A little after the two-day mark in the mission, the crew was scheduled for its first TV show, but none of the networks intended to carry it. The broadcast was set to begin at 8:24 p.m. on Monday, April 13, in the time slot belonging to NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and CBS’s Here’s Lucy. ABC had programmed the 1966 movie Where Bullets Fly, followed by The Dick Cavett Show. Viewers across the nation had shown little interest in having any of these programs preempted by the show from space, and even in Mission Control, NASA technicians themselves were only half interested. (Lovell and Kluger 88).

For Lovell, the trouble with aeronautic technologies seemed to have been that they worked too well, transforming space exploration into a mundane and predictable narrative that could easily be exchanged for other televisual narratives. In an increasing number of terrestrial and extraterrestrial spaces, technologies designed by anonymous engineers shelter, entertain, and pilot citizens through their social landscapes. But that comfort and safety is purchased at the expense of perceived agency, making the predisaster space flight about as compelling as watching a computer solve a set of prearranged mathematical equations. In his wonderful (and wonderfully polemical) book, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), Matthew Crawford confronts this masculine crisis directly:

Misuse   A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed. (2)

Crawford goes on to cast his “return to the trades” program in terms that resonate with older notions of rugged individualism. Meaningful work and self-reliance, he argues, “requir[e] focused engagement with our material things. . . . Both ideals are tied to a struggle for individual agency, which [is] at the very center of modern life” (7, Crawford’s italics).17 While Crawford describes the creation and repair of material objects (his primary example is motorcycle repair), similar terms and conclusions apply to my argument. For the rugged consumer, the desired outcome of creative misuse is a renaturalized world in which artificial objects become raw materials for postproduction reproduction. Such a startling transformation is the hallmark of rugged consumerism and promises an alternative to the passive, collective consumer behaviors at the center of contemporary American society. Instead of simply using the objects at hand, the Apollo 13 astronauts and their cultural counterparts produce new objects out of “raw” materials: socks, duct tape, plastic wrapping, and so on. In so doing, they regain access to what has been lost (or, more accurately, displaced) in the recent dissolution of American industry: the sites of individual productivity and agency.18 Ron Howard’s interpretation of the Apollo 13 story casts its rugged consumerism as a strongly conservative (to use the terms of American political discourse), neoliberal (in terms of European and Marxist discourse) enterprise.19 This encoding is found in the politically enervating nostalgia for industrial and artisanal modes of production that pervades the coverage of the Apollo 13 mission. It is also visible in the ways that rugged consumers, especially in their filmic portrayals, privilege individual or local action through their appeals to a rugged individual’s frontierlike existence.20 If the real Krantz was a bureaucratic engineer from the 1970s, the filmic Krantz is a post-Reagan rugged consumer who cries out, “Tell me this isn’t a government operation!” Finally and perhaps most obviously,

  Misuse it is suggested by the fact that the chief exemplars of this kind of creative repurposing are typically white, heterosexual, middle-class, and male: the disgruntled engineers of Yoyodyne, the tinkerers of Rube Goldberg, and the astronauts at NASA. This “masculinization of consumer positionality,” as Evan Watkins calls it, weakens the oppositional coding of these activities and raises the possibility that far from serving as an alternative to late capitalism, rugged consumerism—like the larger libertarian philosophy upon which it often draws—embodies its dominant ideology and is, in a sense, its quintessential activity. In their ability to not only adapt to crises within modes of production but also to thrive within them, mythic rugged consumers thus might be thought of as necessary symptoms of late capitalism rather than emergent challenges to its dictates. While this strain of rugged consumerism certainly colors many depictions of “frontier”-like repurposing, other rugged consumers frame their activities within the left-leaning libertarian philosophies that once characterized the American counterculture. The politics of rugged consumerism and its cultural representations are slippery subjects, and to provide a larger sense of the diversity of rugged consumer behaviors, I turn now to a few other recent examples that offer a more complex interpretation of its politics than may be apparent in the earlier example.

The New Arts and Crafts Movement A survey of popular media forms suggests that the myth of rugged individualism still exerts a powerful hold upon American audiences. American mass culture is overloaded with examples of small communities whose creative acts of object repurposing respond to real or imagined conditions of scarcity. At virtually any hour of the day, popular television design shows such as Trading Spaces, American Restoration, American Pickers, and Hope for Your Home broadcast instructions for decorating domestic spaces with items scavenged from the garbage bins of art schools and construction sites. On the other end of the entertainment (and, to a certain extent, gendered) spectrum, television shows such as MythBusters, Doomsday Preppers, The Walking Dead, Revolution, and The Colony include within their casts creative engineers, tinkerers, and mechanics who must assemble jury-rigged machines out of discarded auto or machine parts for

Misuse   a series of practical or paranoid exercises. The adventure film Cast Away (2000) depicts a modern-day Robinson Crusoe named Chuck Noland (played, appropriately, by Tom Hanks), who must make tools from a set of unlikely materials to survive on a deserted island. As a systems analyst for Federal Express, Noland begins the film as another passive knowledge worker with a tenuous grasp of both the social world and the object world. When his plane crashes on the way to Malaysia, he finds himself trapped on a desert island with a large number of FedEx packages. Over the next hour of the film, Noland sets about converting the items within these packages into useful things: an ice skate becomes an axe; a portable toilet, his raft; and, most memorably, a Wilson volleyball becomes his friend and companion. Comparable circumstances confront the characters of the popular television series Lost. As survivors of a plane crash, their continued existence depends upon the items that they scavenge from the downed plane. In the opening episode, one character closes a gaping wound with a passenger’s sewing kit and sterilizes the wound with a mini-bottle of vodka. In another, a resourceful survivor constructs a shovel out of airplane wreckage and wire (season 1, episode 14). Such behaviors are, of course, not limited to mass entertainment.21 The New York Times recently devoted an article and an online multimedia slide show to Phoenix Commotion, a construction company that builds low-income housing out of unlikely building materials. The company’s founder, Dan Phillips, makes roofs out of license plates, windows out of crystal platters, and flooring out of wine corks (“One Man’s Trash . . . ”). Updating Stewart Brand’s celebrated Whole Earth Catalog from the environmental movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular Internet sites such asAltUse, Instructables, Alternative Consumer, and IKEA Hacker teach cash-strapped victims of the 2007 recession how to make rugs from plastic grocery bags, headboards from hardcover books, serving bowls from foreclosed home signs, and book bags from floppy disks (see Figure 2). As one Instructables member writes, the recent economic downturn has been a blessing as well as a curse: Say you need a wallet. Go to a store and wallets might be made of leather, or vinyl, or canvas, but they’ll roughly be of the same style, size, and material. Go to Instructables, and you’ll find dozens made out of everything from playing cards to inner tubes, all constructed with more design variance than seems

  Misuse

figur e 2  A for-sale sign fashioned into a serving bowl. Photo by Will Holman. possible. It’s this endless variety, spurred on by fierce individualism, that makes the Instructables Craft community like no other. (Best of Instructables 177, emphasis my own)

Popular arts and crafts magazines such as the now-defunct ReadyMade promise “Instructions for everyday life.” ReadyMade included a “MacGyver” section that asked readers to submit their favorite example of creative repurposing, and comparable sections were devoted to fashion, food, crafts, and interior design. The notion of rugged consumerism that informs each of these small communities can be traced back to a network of industrial, economic, political, and aesthetic ideas of the past two centuries. These include a mixed bag of libertarian ideas derived from (to name a few) hacker culture, the new arts and crafts movement, back-to-the-earth environmental movements, globalized neoliberalism, anarchism, antiglobalization

Misuse   groups, the punk movement, economic and environmental survivalism, and the American myth of rugged individualism.22 The promiscuous and contradictory plurality of this network suggests that any political theory of rugged consumerism would have to acknowledge the activity as an unstable tactic on the order of de Certeau’s “wig” that can serve to either reinforce or, at rare times, undermine the mandates of late capitalism. The activity can change to suit a particular political disposition just as much as an object changes within the hands of the creative repurposer. Consider ReadyMade magazine. While its title refers to Marcel Duchamp’s objets trouvés of the early twentieth century, the magazine’s hipster-philosophical program is more in line with sustainable environmental practices than with modernist aesthetics, providing instructions for converting the transient accouterments of that dubious lifestyle into durable goods: disposable coffee cups into windowsill herb gardens, shoe laces into desk accessories, and travel trunks into portable bars. According to magazine cofounder Shoshana Berger, the popularity of its green program was enhanced by the recession of 2001, which gave readers a financial incentive to pursue eco-friendly projects: “It helped that we started during a recession—the dotcom bust had hit the San Francisco bay area hard, and we published our first issue three months after 9/11” (Berger). Finally, in the same interview, Berger references the resurgence of “cottage industry crafters” who have combined the early twentieth-century legacy of the American craftsman with the “hacker” communities of the late twentieth century. It thus would not be a stretch to suggest that ReadyMade is a product of (real or imagined) environmental advocacy as much as of economic reality, and of the immaterial Internet as much as of this material culture. Or consider Instructables.com. Around 2001, a group of mechanical engineering graduate students at MIT became interested in the “fab culture” of bicycling and kitesurfing, and created the website to document this culture. Cofounder Saul Griffith describes the site as “kind of like a Wikipedia for making stuff”: “‘Everything I own is basically one of a kind. . . . We got inspired when we looked at all these guys who’d engineered these incredible, modded parts for their Harleys. They’d have amazing photos of them, but they’d never post the CAD image,’ Griffith says. ‘We were like, Why not go open source?’” (Thompson). Clearly,

  Misuse Griffith’s history suggests that Instructables—like ReadyMade—makes a virtue of economic necessity. But in the process, Griffith’s modified bicycles, like their Harley counterparts, update the older arts and crafts movement of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Just as English and American craftspeople of this earlier period built objects that escaped (however provisionally) the homogenized status of their mass-produced counterparts, Griffith’s maker community reassembles mass-produced commodities into unalienated, bespoke objects of devotion. In a rich testament to the influence of libertarian digital culture upon material culture, the company’s vision also takes advantage of recent trends in Web behavior, including the move toward open source programs and websites. Whereas Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia encourage a community of like-minded participants to take ownership over the information that governs their lives, Instructables encourages similar modifications in the way that we encounter and manipulate objects. Griffith imagines a world in which the same DIY principles that governed early websites translate from the digital world into the real world. In the process, material objects become “open source” things, which are subject to the same kinds of modifications that give rise to personal websites and community blogs.23 The same argument holds for licensed modifications of open source objects and for unlicensed modifications of proprietary codes and material objects. Shortly after Instructables debuted, it partnered with the popular blog IKEA Hacker, a website devoted to the creative reimagining of IKEA furniture kits. Though the website is edited by a freelance writer in Kuala Lumpur, it has attracted many (it should be noted, typically white, middle-class, and liberal) Americans who are intrigued by the idea of applying the principles of computer hacking to interior design. As its provocative title suggests, part of the appeal of furniture “hacking” lies in its putative subversion of standard modes of object use. Instructables has even received “nasty letters saying basically that we’re infringing [a company’s] trademark and they don’t want their products being used in a lamp or something like that” (“In recession, frugal DIYers hack Ikea furniture ”). As should be clear from the examples above, the oppositional impulse of these new maker communities does not mean that their activities cannot be redirected to serve market desires and should therefore be treated

Misuse   with a healthy degree of skepticism. After all, IKEA Hacker, Instructables, and the aforementioned television programs convert the conditions of economic uncertainty and inequality into sources of entertainment, and thus to no small extent weaken any oppositional political thinking that might stretch beyond the center-left. In what may be the most egregious example of countercultural marketing, the August 2010 cover of the men’s magazine Details advertises a story of “Artisanal America” that addresses the question “How Handmade and Homegrown Became the New Consumer Religion.” Likewise, websites such as Etsy.com and its parody site, Regretsy.com, operate as eBay-equivalents for repurposed and handmade arts and crafts. Nonetheless, for the purposes of the present argument, the idea of “hacking” mass-reproduced commodities reveals how new arts and crafts movements reflect what Jameson calls a “protopolitical” desire in their attempts to reform the relationships between production and consumption in ways that at least present the possibility of rehumanizing both processes. In place of the gap between labor and use that produces alienation, IKEA Hacker and other websites introduce a third, critically underexplored term—modification—that straddles the space between the two sides of object exchange. By severing an object not only from its production history but also from its rigid postproduction use-value, rugged consumerism produces new communities of craftspeople who look at objects in ways that see beyond their status as Heideggerian “equipment” to the material “thingness” (for lack of a better word) that socially encoded values conceal. Perhaps because of their status as provisional tactics caught up in complex webs of signification, these activities can be difficult to understand or even to isolate as decipherable signals within the louder cultural noise of late capitalism. Happily, this enterprise has been aided by the sudden and dramatic appearance of rugged consumers in North American literatures of the contemporary period. For example, Shelley Jackson bases her important hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (1995) on the principles of creative repurposing, but she frames these activities in ways that align with my hypothesis of rugged consumerism. Patchwork Girl retells the story of the underdeveloped female monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), who was commissioned by Frankenstein’s

  Misuse first creation as a life-mate but who was destroyed by the doctor before she was given life. The patchwork girl’s story is only one element of the larger work, which Jackson divides into five networked sections: “graveyard,” “journal,” “quilt,” “story,” and “broken accents.” The “graveyard” section recounts the lives of women whose body parts are scavenged by Frankenstein to form the female monster. The “journal” section contains Mary Shelley’s fictionalized diary, in which “Shelley” blends an account of her struggles to write the novel with a description of her (fictional) decision to construct, reanimate, and befriend an actual female monster. The “quilt” section is a hypermedia collage that blends quotations from sources ranging from L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) to “Getting Started with Storyspace,” a handbook written by the founders of the hypertext writing program. Finally, “broken accents” is a phrenological diagram of a female brain subdivided by subject. Clicking on any of the subjects allows the reader to enter the text from a variety of different locations within or between each of the subsequent sections. Patchwork Girl thus asserts itself immediately as a literary “mod,” or “hack,” of preexistent cultural artifacts; it is at once a memoir, a parasitic narrative, a commentary, and a history. In a manner akin to digital “mod” cultures, Jackson’s work thus presents itself as a disassembled thing that is transformed by curious readers into individual objects. In each of the five sections, readers extend the narrative either by clicking on individual words within a given lexia or by selecting the “links” button above the hypertext window. This mechanism creates a two-dimensional network of narrative possibilities that provides a material metaphor for the creature’s stitched body. Jackson expresses this metaphor in her “map view” of the text, in which the individual sections that compose the head, torso, arms, and legs of her creature appear as a kind of instruction manual for assembly that would not look out of place in an IKEA box (Figure 3). As the female monster testifies: The grave becomes the cradle; from amidst damp clods and wisps of luminous corpse-gas comes squalling the “hideous progeny,” her words. Death is the very seat, the prop of life, its raw material, and those once impregnable ramparts that barred the living from the dead are breached. Impregnable ramparts, pregnant death; barriers breached by a breech birth. Yeah, I came out topsy-turvy, heels over head, and the whole world wobbled with me.

Misuse  

figur e 3  The “Map View” Storyspace page for Patchwork Girl (1995). Image courtesy of Eastgate Systems. Life once did flow towards death, parents engendered offspring, time moved from beginning to end. I am a disturbance in the flow. (born)24

This disturbance is, in a sense, a fusion of old and new DIY arts and crafts programs that convert a series of deadened objects into creative new patchwork patternings. “You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal,” the creature tells us. “If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself” (graveyard). In keeping with the working definition of rugged consumerism, Jackson aligns her hypertextual experiment with the nineteenth-century frontier tradition of patchwork quilting. In a lexia entitled “Research,” Jackson explains that the idea for her novel emerged when she “came across a fabric of relations, an old patchwork quilt, which my grandmother once made when she was young.” But this is only partially accurate. The passage is a quotation from the preface to L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz, which, through its linguistic recycling, performs what it

  Misuse describes. Jackson’s repurposed narrative echoes the self-sustaining myths of the rugged women of the frontier, who, as Jackson writes, made crazy quilts out of “any shape, color or material: a new dimity bought for the color, an old serge saved for a memory, scraps of old dresses or neckties or coats” (crazy). Although many historians would dispute the accuracy of this characterization of the frugal frontier quilter, Jackson’s patchwork narrative operates under the same mythic assumption of diversity amid scarcity.25 Appropriately, the novel concludes (if it can be said to conclude) with the eponymous heroine in the deserts of the American West, living off the land as a paragon of rugged individualism at the same time as the reader, presumably, has individuated the narrative. In terms of its narrative arc, Patchwork Girl thus seems to adopt the same neoliberal, do-it-yourself policies as the earlier examples of rugged consumerism, but these policies are counterbalanced by the novel’s celebration of local communities and collectivities. As the female monster reports, her body is “made up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles, and . . . no absolute boundaries” (self-swarm) that work in concert to hold her together. These “particles” include not only the various women whose lives make up the “graveyard” section of the novel. They also include the hypertext novel’s diverse set of readers, who reconstruct and reconstruct their own narratives from the same set of textual materials. Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood (2009) also displays the influence of the new collective arts and crafts aesthetic popularized by ReadyMade and Instructables.26 Set in the not-so-distant future, the novel follows the lives of two members of an eco-cult called God’s Gardeners. As the world teeters on the brink of an ecological disaster, the Gardeners live by scavenging and repurposing the dystopian world’s waste products. In the process, they create objects that are simultaneously practical and philosophically demonstrative. One of the Gardeners’ teachers, Stuart the Screw, teaches his disciples how to make “furniture out of recycled junk” (83). Such DIY handiwork is on full display in another character’s description of her living quarters: Our space was a big room, with some cubicles curtained off—one for me, one for Lucerne and Zeb, one for the violet biolet, one for the shower. The cubicle curtains were woven of plastic-bag strips and duct tape, and they weren’t in any way soundproof. This wasn’t great, especially when it came to the violet

Misuse   biolet. . . . We ate our meals in the main room, on a table made out of a door. All of our dishes and pots and pans were salvaged—gleaned, as the Gardeners said—except for some of the thicker plates and mugs. Those had been made by the Gardeners back in their Ceramics period, before they’d decided that kilns used up too much energy. I slept on a futon stuffed with husks and straw. It had a quilt sewed out of blue jeans and used bathmats, and every morning I had to make the bed first thing, because the Gardeners liked neatly made beds, though they weren’t squeamish about what they were made of. (63)

Yet the novel uses this environmental disaster plot to explore ideas that, in Atwood’s playfully ironic manner, are simultaneously neoliberal and left-libertarian. The novel describes an environmental apocalypse brought on by an engineered virus (“The Waterless Flood”) that returns American society to its preindustrial state. As the leader of the Gardeners writes: “[T]he Waterless Flood is coming, in which all buying and selling will cease, and we will find ourselves thrown back upon our own resources, in the midst of God’s bounteous Garden. Which was your Garden also” (126). Within this setting, the few remaining humans who survive display the same characteristics as their frontier antecedents. Their rugged consumerism is not simply an aesthetic or political symbol of craftsperson resistance; it is also the only means of survival in a future world of ecological and geopolitical collapse.

Environmental Activism and Misuse The novel’s theme of environmental devastation illustrates another central ideological component of leftist rugged consumerism: the American environmental movement of the last few decades. The Gardeners of Atwood’s story convert environmental advocacy into a kind of Christianity complete with environmental saints such as Rachel Carson (372). Echoing a frequent refrain of actual DIY environmental groups such as the Garbage Liberation Front, the Gardeners insist that “[t]here [is] no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that ha[s]n’t been put to a proper use” (69).27 Accordingly, they collect discarded wine and convert it into vinegar for cooking and cleaning (69), scavenge soap ends from hotels and restaurants to be remade into detergents (68), and raid dumpsters for

  Misuse toys, furniture, and cooking supplies (70). Each action is informed by a sense that the world teeters on the edge of environmental apocalypse that cannot be forestalled by any larger collective action. As one character laments, “We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with” (239, Atwood’s emphasis). But when the waterless flood finally does its worst, these “doomsday preppers” are uniquely suited to survive the apocalypse. As the Gardeners’ misuse of preexistent commodities reveals, this eco-advocacy does not depart from the conditions of late capitalism so much as it emerges from them. The Gardeners do not wholeheartedly reject the “pleebland” that exists beyond their small community. After all, the materials that they use were once marketable commodities that have been discarded by the larger society. Instead, they reject the specific premise held by the pleeblanders that each object has a singular use-value and, once that use has been fulfilled, it is perfectly acceptable to discard the commodity’s husk. In place of this model, the Gardeners suggest that through “God-given powers of creativity, . . . even the useless and discarded may be redeemed from meaninglessness” (160).28 The Gardeners activity again enables us to frame rugged consumerism as a political strategy that both critiques and reinforces the systems of late capitalism. This idea of the creative power of recycling or repurposing echoes a new American environmental industrial design movement based upon biomimesis and regenerative industrial practices, which fuse environmental advocacy with capitalist speculation. Each of these terms describes creative efforts to rethink the negative telos that pushes contemporary commodities toward real or metaphysical junkyards by constructing objects that mimic the life cycles of natural things. The major arguments of this movement are outlined in the 2002 environmental manifesto Cradle-to-Cradle, jointly composed by the environmental architect William McDonough and the environmental chemist Michael Braungart. Cradle-to-Cradle argues for a novel program of ethical design that would program material objects for their own organized transformation. This program opposes linear systems of commodity decay by designing objects to be recycled at the same level at which they enter the

Misuse   matter life cycle, traveling from one birth to another, or, as the authors’ title suggests, from “cradle to cradle.”29 Serving as the primary example of this program is the book itself. Printed on a special type of synthetic polymer resistant to degradation but easily stripped of its ink, the book can be fully recycled back into a more fluid print medium. McDonough and Braungart thereby create an argument and an infinitely reusable palimpsest, a transformable mount upon which “books become books become books over and over again, each incarnation a sparkling new vehicle for fresh images and ideas” (71). As the authors hyperbolically suggest, this creates “a story within the very molecules of its pages. Not the old tale of damage and despair, but one of abundance and renewal, human creativity and possibility. . . . Form follows not just function but the evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly propagating spirit of the printed word” (71). McDonough and Braungart’s appropriation of the vocabulary of narratives—“story,” “tale,” “word”—reflects a curious elision between material and metaphysical concerns that runs through the work. As in Jackson’s Patchwork Girl or like the Gardeners’ environmental musings in Atwood’s novel, McDonough and Braungart yoke material design to political action and make a comparable claim: that the permanent or impermanent forms within which commodities reside can either stunt or encourage human development and creativity. Printed words, they maintain, want to be freed from stagnation, to become disembodied spirits that “endlessly propagate themselves” through the malleable medium. Or, to repurpose a William Gibson maxim: “Information media want to be free.” This quasi-utopian practice clearly changes the way we encounter objects at the dawn of the twenty-first century. By foregrounding the parallels between natural, industrial, and literary production, McDonough and Braungart transform each object from a product into a process— one thing from which many objects can be created. Like Patchwork Girl, Cradle-to-Cradle thus attempts to become wholly participatory, asking the reader to complete the work through an active form of consumption. But as their argument suggests, in framing consumption as a Utopian solution to consumption, they run the risk of liquefying any oppositional message in that activity. Indeed, the authors treat any mention of the link between environmentalism and collective politics in sardonic, dismissive ways:

  Misuse The environmental message that “consumers” take from [the supposed opposition of environmental politics and industrial advocacy] can be strident and depressing: Stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. . . . If you are going to save the planet, you will have to make some sacrifices, share some resources, perhaps even go without. And fairly soon you must face a world of limits. There is only so much the Earth can take. Sound like fun? (6–7)

Clearly, we have come a long way from the quasi-puritanical rugged consumerism that the New York Times celebrated in the Apollo 13 space mission during the 1970s. McDonough and Braungart’s “manifesto” posits a future realm in which solutions to the major political problems of our era are resolved by the very institutions that created them. As the ideological obverse of Atwood’s God’s Gardeners, the environmental rugged consumers implied by their program operate as heroes of late capitalism and clear manifestations of its dominant politics. Far from critiquing the systems that generated the environmental crisis, this ecological vision of rugged consumerism instead supports Timothy W. Luke’s suspicions regarding the value of “green consumerism,” in which the “marginal benefits” of consumer-driven environmentalism “are counterbalanced by the substantial costs of remaining structurally invested in thoroughly consumeristic forms of economy and culture” (135).

The Literature of Misuse In this chapter, I have argued that many forms of contemporary American culture—television, film, the web, journalism, and literature— constitute tactics that respond in ways that sometimes oppose but more often support the ecological, intellectual, and economic endgames of current consumer behaviors. On both sides of the (admittedly limited) libertarian political spectrum within the United States, these responses are embodied in the actions of rugged consumers, who ask us to imagine how the creative relationships between humans and the objects might recode that society. In the chapters that follow, I construct a historical narrative that charts the development of these figures from their Utopian, countercultural beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s to their neoliberal containment during the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Misuse   The primary subjects of this study are literary sources, and I have chosen this smaller scope in full awareness of its clear limitations. The elastic nature of literary language makes it both an unlikely and a likely medium for exploring the nature of rugged consumerism. Any author who attempts to describe the release of a thing from an object must overcome the innate tendency of language to fail in its representation of such actions. After all, to name an object is to ascribe to it a putative function and to embed it within a social context of advertisement, rational production, and rational consumption. Within the material sphere, the products of rugged consumerism—the serving bowls made out of foreclosure signs and crazy quilts made out of blue jeans—are not fully subject to what Brown calls the “the tyranny of use, from the instrumental, utilitarian reason that has come to seem modernity’s greatest threat to mankind” (A Sense of Things, 8), because their materiality—the shape and color of a foreclosure sign, the denim pattern of blue jeans, and so on—are clearly and always empirically available to the men and women who work with them. In the immaterial world of language, authors must employ alternative strategies to achieve the same effect. Rethinking the relationship between humans and commodities in literature thus involves rethinking the language that literary artists use to describe material bodies and their relationships with human subjects. The process, not the product, matters in the case of rugged consumerism, which means that any study of alternative consumers must linger upon the instances after an object sheds its former value and before it stabilizes in its new objecthood. In contrast, literature requires the narratization of rugged consumerism: a fusion of immaterial literary poetics and what Lévi-Strauss would call bricoleur poetics. But literary language can present material bodies in ways that strip them of standard modes of referentiality. For example, the ambiguous, underdetermined ways that characters such as Jackson’s patchwork girl and the astronauts of Apollo 13 name things (“a fabric of relations” for a quilt or a “mailbox” for a carbon dioxide filter) mark each character’s changed relationship with objects. At these moments, language peels away the accumulated meanings that surround a given commodity and returns that object to a primal site of creativity. Literary narratives are also helpful in marking the limitations of any putative political coding that such activities might convey. Because

  Misuse literary objects are embedded within politically progressive or politically conservative plots, they are subject to Alder’s “thick descriptions” in ways that actual instances of object repurposing, which often take place in unrecorded spaces and times, are not. The way that American authors represent such behaviors within their narratives and the difficulties they face in aligning stories of individuals with larger political programs thus provide the clearest indication of the significance of rugged consumerism as a cultural and (proto)political enterprise. Finally and most intriguingly, the analysis of literary artifacts constitutes a process akin to the practices of object repurposing that these artifacts depict. In many respects, practices of misuse generate interpretations of nonliterary objects in the same sense that critical practices generate different interpretations of literary objects. As Annette Kolodny argues, “[W]e appropriate different meanings, or report different gleanings, at different times—even from the same text—according to our changed assumptions, circumstances, and requirements” (11). In this sense, rugged consumerism might be understood in part as a materialization of a certain set of literary practices that come into being during the same post-1960s environment. This literary turn does not imply that real objects play no role in the study. Indeed, in the second chapter I show how quasi-Utopian versions of American rugged consumerism emerged from the material limitations of the nation’s countercultural theaters during the late sixties. Low on cash and short on licit resources, many fringe theaters of the time operated in unlicensed venues cobbled together from garbage found on the street. Like their counterparts in the visual arts, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenberg, who presented work in the same repurposed buildings, playwrights such as Sam Shepard drew inspiration from their financial limitations and wrote plays to accommodate the discarded objects that they reappropriated on walks around New York City. But unlike these visual artists, who convert detritus into art, Shepard’s rugged consumers imbue worn-out objects with practical as well as aesthetic values. Drawing upon a number of autobiographical accounts from off-off-Broadway playwrights collected in the New York Public Library’s theater archives as well as important historical studies by Stephen Bottoms and David Crespy, I show how both within and beyond

Misuse   the magic circle of the stage, off-off-Broadway’s rugged consumers transformed commodities and their waste products (including the commercial spaces of American theater) into renewed sites of creative production. The next three chapters shift attention from embodied humanobject relationships in theater to disembodied representations of rugged consumerism in literary texts. In the third chapter, I explore the ways that objects are deformed and re-formed in Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). By examining his descriptions of two historically intertwined objects—the V-2 rocket and celluloid plastic— I show how Pynchon’s bricoleur poetics frame an object’s social life as either linear or circular. In the case of the former, objects are designed to maintain their structural integrity over time. This model rigidly divides producer from consumer and, for Pynchon, catalyzes the environmental crisis of the late twentieth century. In the case of the latter, commodities, like natural materials, operate in a constant state of flux and thus have no singular use-value. This “natural” model of an object’s social life destabilizes the producer-consumer divide, reclaims the commodity as a site of creative reproduction, and partially ameliorates the devastation unleashed by Fordist and post-Fordist modes of commodity assembly. Through a close reading of the movie-house fire at the novel’s conclusion, I show how the history of the decaying polymeric film that generates the fire reproduces the V-2’s passage from life to death and testifies to the hidden defect (or, to adopt another Pynchon phrase, “inherent vice”) within modern industrial production. In opposition to this linear, destructive model of production and destruction, Pynchon’s preterite characters enter into a set of unstable communities that creatively recycle the objects and language of death into instruments of entertainment or spiritual transcendence. Setting instances of language recycling (such as puns) and instances of object recycling (such as the fashioning of alcoholic cocktails and jewelry from the V-2’s component parts) against environmental manifestos of the late 1960s such as Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971), I conclude that Pynchon’s countercultural rugged consumers reconceive decaying or death-driven objects as what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter” with highly idiosyncratic modes of agency, just as natural systems convert the end of one life cycle into the beginning of another.

  Misuse Pynchon’s and Shepard’s work exemplifies the ways that early forms of rugged consumerism are presented as Utopian alternatives to the institutions and modes of use available to consumers under the conditions of late capitalism. In Chapter 4, I examine characters in two novels—Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997)— who illustrate the shift from left-leaning libertarian countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s to the neoliberal libertarianism of the 1980s and 1990s. Like Heidegger’s early essays on “das Ding,” both novels proceed with the understanding that things emerge from objects when those objects break down. In Fight Club, the unnamed narrator’s life depends upon mechanical failure: his job is to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of recalls for defective automobiles. The main character in Underworld, Nick Shay, works in the related field of waste management. As the breakdown of commodities brings each character closer to the hard substantiality of the material world, they begin to exhibit behaviors associated with rugged consumerism. The narrator of Fight Club escapes from his passive experiences with car crashes by inventing an alter ego, Tyler Durden, who converts the chaotic violence of mechanical failure into the ritualistic violence of “Project Mayhem,” an anarchist program that he hopes will produce a renewed and fully articulated rugged individualism. Likewise, Nick copes with his troubled past by learning to disassemble and reassemble everyday objects—first by naming their esoteric component parts as a young man and then by manipulating their material afterlives in his subsequent career in waste management. But instead of breaking from the larger culture of late capitalism, these instances of creative repurposing reinforce the structural conditions that they purport to combat. Each character’s bildungsroman plot thus testifies to the ways in which the earlier countercultural possibilities of rugged consumerism become integrated into the dominant institutions and formations of late-century America. Chapter 5 investigates the complete neoliberal reconciliation of the rugged consumer and late capitalism through its representation in the work of Cormac McCarthy. In the first half of the chapter, I compare instances of material manipulation in his historical novels such as Blood Meridian (1985) with similar activities in novels and plays set in the contemporary period such as No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Stonemason (1995). Within his historical novels, McCarthy’s cowboy heroes and

Misuse   villains bypass the problems of consumer culture by interacting only with natural materials. For example, the satanic judge in Blood Meridian establishes his status as the “suzerain” of nature through his promethean interactions with objects—the chief example being his creation of gunpowder from urine and volcanic sulfur (198). While the characters in McCarthy’s later novels are estranged from these creative modes of production, they adopt similar behaviors by treating artificial commodities as if they were natural resources—turning tent poles into prosthetic arms, or stun guns into keys. In the second half of the chapter, I show how McCarthy represents such acts of rugged consumerism through divisions between his narrator’s “thick” descriptions of work and his characters’ “thin” conversations. In No Country for Old Men McCarthy carefully describes how Llewellyn Moss and Anton Chigurh readily manipulate the mass-produced objects of their surroundings in order to survive in the harsh environment of the American West. At the same time, neither character can (or will) articulate the significance of such actions to himself or to others. This absence does not compromise either character’s agency; indeed, in the sometimes humorous and often violent disjunctions between a character’s laconic utterances and complex performances, McCarthy’s novels undermine the social structures by which one could distinguish between the proper use and the unsanctioned misuse of commodities. But in their unwillingness to articulate their actions, Moss and Chigurh suggest that rugged consumerism has become, in a sense, a renaturalized (and therefore remystified) manifestation of the dominant ideology of the time period. I conclude both the chapter and the book by raising the possibility of renewed countercultural activities that might reemerge out of a playful reappropriation of the neoliberal rugged consumer.

 2

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog. —Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (1968) A great war is about to begin. . . . The war will be a spiritual conflict between material things. Material matters will be destroyed by spiritual beings who will remain to create one world and one nation under one power, that of the Creator. The time is not far off. . . . You must see it through to its rightful end. —Sam Shepard, “Spider Lady,” Operation Sidewinder (1970)

If the central phenomenological and political problem of an oppositional rugged consumerism is how to disrupt systems of rational use in order to free material “things” from their “objecthood,” then the origins of such a platform are a visible heterogeneous set of ideas, activities, and communities associated with American counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But just as it is easier to understand a material substance in its closed objecthood than in its open thingness, it is far easier to understand the myriad manifestations of the counterculture through what it opposed than what it advocated. One of the early adopters of the

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   term “counter culture,” Theodore Roszak, conceived the phenomenon as a response to what he considered the increasingly technocratic ways in which human activity was rationalized during the 1960s. In his seminal work, The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), Roszak characterized the technocratic society of the time period in ways that anticipate the laments of more recent rugged consumers: In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the non-technical man. Instead, the scale and intricacy of all human activities—political, economic, cultural—transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts. . . . Within such a society, the citizen, confronted by a bewildering bigness and complexity, finds it necessary to defer on all matters to those who know better. (6–7)

In his subsequent analysis, Roszak elides technological materials with technocratic cultures, suggesting that the nature of modern technologies produces a rigidly hierarchical system that forces consumers to defer to experts’ advice when interacting with their environments and when engaging with the political structures in which they live. He concludes: “[S]cience and technology, with their relentless insistence on specialization and expertise, were themselves to come full circle and be transformed into as close a priesthood as any in history” (263). Roszak’s personification of technology implies that no good can come from any engagement with modern technologies, and to a large extent, this characterization of the counterculture movement still operates today. Historian Howard Brick, for example, contends that “[d]espite the modern individualism and pharmacology of this milieu, [the counterculture’s] overriding tone was critical of advanced technology and professedly hostile to ‘Western’ metaphysics” (115–116). A shortcoming of this perspective is that it obscures the larger source of countercultural critique implied in Roszak’s observation that “nothing is any longer small” in a technocratic culture: not the technologies in themselves but the rational systems of use-values that limit human engagement with these technologies. After all, while many elements of the American counterculture rejected the “priesthood” of science by refusing to engage with certain objects, in other areas of the same movement, a Protestant-like reformation was taking place that promised to democratize all engagements with material artifacts.

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism In 1968, Stewart Brand published the first of many editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, which would quickly become one of the most important works of the burgeoning American counterculture and an early inspiration for digital maker communities of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.1 The oversized, low-budget catalog was divided into nine sections—Whole Systems, Land Use, Shelter, Industry, Craft, Community, Nomadics, Communications, and Learning—with each section offering information on a variety of mail-order tools and books. Complimenting these advertisements were a set of interwoven creative essays, stories, and anecdotes from public intellectuals such as Buckminster Fuller and Wendell Berry, who championed the ethical and social gains to be achieved from an off-the-grid lifestyle. Whole Earth Catalog thereby functioned as what Brand called “an evaluation and access device” that enabled users to navigate the increasingly complex technological landscape without the aid of technocratic experts. “With it,” he stated simply, “the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting” (1). The Land Use section, for example, contained basic instructions for assembling wind generators and solar devices, while the Craft section, according to one of the catalog’s contributors, serviced “the desire of our market to back the hell out of 20th Century confusion” (150). Embodied in these two examples, the eclectic composition of the Whole Earth Catalog ensured that the book would appeal simultaneously to the techno-Utopian and neo-Luddite strains of the American counterculture. As Andrew Kirk argues, “By reclaiming an amateur tradition of invention and technological development and celebrating an ecological focus to technological research, Whole Earth provided moral support for young optimists working to map a brighter future free from technocratic thinking but not free from technology” (9). Kirk’s distinction between technocratic thinking and technological activity highlights the central left-libertarian premise of the Whole Earth Catalog and the larger countercultural movement of which it stands representative: midcentury American youths desired a means by which they might bypass traditional knowledge structures—corporate and governmental—and reclaim a sense of personal agency in their interactions with the elements of the material world. Put within the context of thing theory, the American counterculture wanted to regain access to the thingness

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   of the material world—to the site of creative productivity—rather than resigning themselves to roles of passive consumer behavior that merely repeated the standard use-values attributed to such objects. As architectural critics Charles Jencks writes in a thematically related manifesto: Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (1973), “By realizing his immediate needs, by combining ad hoc parts, the individual creates, sustains and transcends himself. Shaping the local environment towards desired ends is a key to mental health; the present environment, blank and unresponsive, is a key to idiocy and brainwashing” (15). If this sensibility is valid, interactions with advanced technologies were only the most extreme occasions for confronting the challenges of a technocratic society. Indeed, if Roszak’s representation of the “technocratic state” holds true, these interactions imply that all human-object interactions from the incredibly complex to the “small or simple or readily apparent” change under this technocratic culture, in much the same way that Georg Lukács argues that humanobject interactions change under capitalism. If it is far easier to see how technologies such as computers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and television transmitters place the “amateurish citizen” in a disempowered position than it is to see how more pedestrian technologies (coffeepots or bookshelves or beds) perform the same function, it is only because the newer technologies are different in scale but not in kind. In the pages that follow, I argue that the same countercultural tensions between individual agency and passive consumption outlined in The Whole Earth Catalog emerged in many off-off-Broadway plays during its period of origin in the early 1960s. But while off-off-Broadway responded to the same problems as The Whole Earth Catalog, it did so in ways that departed from the latter group’s preoccupation with making advanced technologies and focused on remaking the discarded commodities of everyday existence. Hiding in plain sight, these banal objects play a crucial role in illuminating the historical conditions and ideological tenets of this lowbudget, do-it-yourself movement, and more particularly, the early work of its most celebrated playwright: the California transplant and rock-and-roll cowboy Sam Shepard. In exploring how Shepard and his off-off-Broadway contemporaries reused and repurposed the objects of New York City living in their plays, we can begin to trace the ways that low-tech practices of misuse emerged alongside their maker counterparts during 1960s and 1970s.

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism Like so many major artists of the mid-twentieth century, Sam Shepard constructs an American culture that simultaneously recoils from and revels in the spiritual and material waste products that are generated by the country’s transition from a producer to a consumer economy. A typical Shepard play either begins or concludes on a stage choked with the useless carcasses of consumer products. The Unseen Hand (1969), for example, opens to “an old ’51 Chevrolet convertible, badly bashed and dented, no tires and the top torn to shreds. On the side of it is written ‘Kill Azusa’ with red spray paint. All around is garbage, tin cans, cardboard boxes, Coca-Cola bottles and other junk” (UH 5).2 Likewise, Cowboy Mouth (1971), Shepard’s quasi-autobiographical account of his failing relationship with Patti Smith, opens to a fucked up bed center stage. Raymond, a dead crow, on the floor. Scattered all around on the floor is miscellaneous debris: hubcaps, an old tire, raggedy costumes, a boxful of ribbons, lots of letters, a pink telephone, a bottle of Nescafé, a hot plate. Seedy wallpaper with pictures of cowboys peeling off the wall. Photographs of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rogers. Stuffed dolls, crucifixes. License plates from southern states nailed to the wall. Travel poster of Panama. A funky set of drums to one side of the stage. An electric guitar and amplifier on the other side. Rum, beer, white lightning, Sears catalogue. (FFL 147)

Shepard’s transition to dramatic realism in the late 1970s preserved this trash aesthetic. Curse of the Starving Class (1978) begins on a stage littered with the scattered remnants of a door broken by the doomed family’s patriarch (SP 135). Likewise, after Lee and Austin’s violent confrontation near the end of True West (1980), the final scene begins with the stage “ravaged; bottles, toasters, smashed typewriter, ripped out telephone, etc. . . . [T]he effect should be like a desert junkyard at high noon” (SP 50). In search of a term capable of representing the significance of this twilight of the trademarked, critics often settle upon entropy. Matthew Roudané, for example, concludes that the “entropic world[s]” of Shepard’s plays represent the fragile psychological states of American youths during this era of uncertainty. Just as the external world operates within a closed system in the process of running down, the internal world of a human subjectivity is cut off from its fellow human beings and “trapped within [his or her] own lies of the mind” (2). Christopher Bigsby reiterates this argument in a larger study, classifying the bulk of Shepard’s oeuvre as an

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   attempt to represent “the entropic forces of the modern” (10).3 In both examples, broken objects signal a world of diminishing opportunity, a cognitive heat death that accompanies the end of Shepard’s beloved Western cowboy culture and the beginning of the social upheavals of the 1960s. But rather than viewing Shepard’s wasted materials as simple signs of a culture in decline, I maintain that the useless objects on Shepard’s stages operate as open things on the order of the Whole Earth Catalog’s “tools,” which enable the entropic rationality of a technocratic consumer culture to be resisted and offer occasions for the material reinscription of collective as well as individuated human desires. I make this claim because Shepard’s young frontier-less frontiersmen are quite adept at finding new uses for materials that have broken down. For example, in Shepard’s The Unseen Hand, Blue Morphan—the play’s embodiment of a moribund, working-class cowboy culture—refashions the rotten ’51 Chevy convertible on stage into his home. With his need for shelter satisfied, he regains his strength as a gunslinger, and, in Shepard’s zany sci-fi plot, saves the universe. Morphan’s rugged consumerism thus testifies to the fact that the “unseen hand” of global (or in this case, interplanetary) capitalism may fail him, but his creative imagination does not (UH 8). Likewise, in Cowboy Mouth, the “[s]eedy wallpaper with pictures of cowboys peeling off the wall” certainly evokes the enervated status of southwestern rugged individualism, but its cowboys and cowgirls find life in the midst of death. One of the play’s two main characters, the fierce Cavale, fashions a “piece of ragged scarf” into a shoe on a refuse-laden stage (FFL 149) and bandages the beak of a wounded bird with “an old piece of lace” (FFL 153). Finally, in Curse of the Starving Class, the family patriarch’s son constructs a sawhorse from the broken kitchen door, which he uses to cut wood for a new door (SP 160). These actions testify to the stubborn resiliency of each play’s marginalized western antiheroes, who resist despair by reassembling new worlds from the fragments of the old. This is not to say that Shepard’s critics are incorrect when they classify Shepard’s world as entropic; rather, they ascribe the embodiment of this condition to the wrong materials. In the hands of Shepard’s rugged consumers, objects that can easily change functions are celebrated, but those that cannot be easily changed exert an opposite effect upon his characters’ actions and behaviors. In the counterculture’s ongoing “spiritual

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism conflict between material things” as the Spider-Lady puts it in Shepard’s surreal play about the Vietnam War, Operation Sidewinder, viable commodities encroach upon the landscape of the human imagination far more than the useless discards that his characters refashion. Indeed, these durable objects rather than their transient counterparts constitute the “material matters” that limit the creative expression of Shepard’s vexed characters. Through their interactions with both closed objects and open trash, Shepard’s rugged consumers thus show how everyday commodities and commodity waste products might be transformed from representations of mass cultural despair into sites of countercultural renewal. While I find Shepard’s off-off-Broadway experiments to be in themselves worthy of critical reexamination, the larger goal of this chapter is to show how early forms of rugged consumerism emerge in American cultural history as collective, left-libertarian critiques of the new economic realities of late capitalism. Shepard’s transvaluation of things and objects does not occur in isolation but instead corresponds to similar transvaluations in the larger off-off-Broadway movement and the even larger countercultural movement, which defined themselves in opposition to these same economic conditions. In this sense, Shepard’s stage trash and his characters’ creative repurposing of those materials provide a fluid archive for this short-lived but incredibly influential avant-garde movement and an early example of a Utopian form of rugged consumerism against which we can position its later manifestations.

The Economic Conditions of Off-Off-Broadway It is no exaggeration to suggest that the off-off-Broadway scene that shaped and supported Sam Shepard in the early sixties depended upon principles of rugged consumerism: one need only consider the locations within which these productions took place. None of the four major venues for 1960s off-off-Broadway theater could be considered a likely space for dramatic productions. Caffe Cino, the debut site of Shepard’s play Icarus’s Mother (1965), was a tiny coffee shop at 31 Cornelia Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and was known more for catering to an openly gay, transsexual, and drag clientele than for its theatrical schedule. A holdover from the Beat coffee culture of the 1950s, Caffe Cino translated this bohemian effort to

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   reimagine living poetry into an equally astonishing reimagining of theater. Just as the Greenwich Village coffeehouses of the Beat movement—including Figaro, the Bitter End Café, and the Café Wha?—looked nothing like the lecture halls where culturally sanctioned poetry was read, and just as the ’51 Chevy in The Unseen Hand looks nothing like the typical home of a middle-class American, “the Cino,” as its devotees affectionately term it, performed and parodied professional theater as its patrons performed and parodied the various gender roles that defined mainstream America.4 Measuring eight feet by eight feet, its charitably named “stage” was cleared of tables and patrons shortly before each performance, creating an open space subject to infinite dramatic refabrication.5 La Mama ETC (Experimental Theatre Club), where Dog (1964), Rocking Chair (1964), and The Unseen Hand (1969) debuted, was a clothing boutique before it became a theater. The gifted African American designer Ellen Stewart (the incomparable “Mama”) converted the store’s unused basement at 321 E. Ninth Street in the East Village into an unlicensed café-theater (Loney 3). When it was not staging plays, the Judson Poets’ Theater, site of the Red Cross (1966) debut, was (and remains today) a functioning activist church serving the diverse Greenwich Village community. Before founding the theater, the Judson’s Reverend Al Carmines had already established the church as a community art space, making many of its rooms available to visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg in the late fifties and founding the influential Judson Dance Theater in 1962. Finally, Theatre Genesis, the most frequent site of Shepard’s productions—The Rock Garden (1964), Cowboys (1964), Up to Tuesday (1964), Chicago (1965), Forensic & the Navigators (1967), and The Mad Dog Blues (1971)—was founded by Ralph Cook in a small room in the parish hall of the East Village’s St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. The history of each of these sites richly testifies to what de Certeau would call the hidden “poiesis” of everyday practices, which is constituted not by the design parameters of each space but rather by temporal “poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art for using those imposed on it” (31). Smaller off-off-Broadway theaters, including Take 3, Phase 2, Café Manzini, and Café Roue, emerged throughout the New York metropolitan

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism area in private lofts, basements, cafés, and state prisons. These humble locations stood in sharp contrast to the three-dozen professional theaters on or around Broadway that had come to represent America’s major contribution to the dramatic arts since the early nineteenth century. While advertising, critical attention, and the promise of professional productions brought people to Broadway theaters, proximity to local, heterogeneous communities, the allure of cultic authenticity (whether real or imagined), and the novelty of its unlicensed spaces brought off-off-Broadway theaters to the people. As David Crespy writes in Off-Off Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater (2003), the unconventionality of its theatrical spaces was matched by the do-ityourself themes, structures, and content of off-off- Broadway productions: “They were crafting plays that broke the traditional models of playwrighting, testing the limits in terms of play construction and theatricality, radical content, and untried ways of working with actors and directors in the process of developing new dramatic work. . . . [T]hey were reinventing theater for themselves” (17). From the frank depictions of homosexuality in Doric Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright (1964) to experiments with nonhuman characters in Paul Foster’s outrageous one-act play, Balls (1964), off-off-Broadway charted a path away from Broadway’s bourgeois American values and showed how “amateurish citizens” (to use Roszak’s phrase once again) might produce rather than simply consume aesthetic products. Unsurprisingly, the shift to nontraditional venues and subjects drew attention from the FBI, the IRS, and the New York City Police Department.6 Reprising their roles in the “coffeehouse war” of the fifties and anticipating their roles in the Stonewall riots of 1969, these organizations frequently interdicted off-off-Broadway spaces as brothels, unlicensed cabarets, Communist meeting houses, or transvestite bars.7 Without proper licensing from the city, venues including Caffe Cino and La Mama often faced prosecution for their performances, which forced their productions underground and drove home the fact that off-off-Broadway was a legal, economic, sexual, and political as well as merely aesthetic zone of misuse.8 In a manner akin to that of the Whole Earth Catalog, the outlaw aspects of off-off-Broadway’s theatrical venues were grounded in material

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   problems of access and creation. If the midcentury coffeehouse celebrated poetic experimentation as its dominant, immaterial form, off-off-Broadway’s theatrical experimentation was inextricably linked to each venue’s creative misuse of discarded or stolen objects recovered from New York City’s streets. The platform stage of Caffe Cino, for example, was assembled out of wooden milk crates (Playing Underground, 45–46). One of the Cino’s playwrights, Lanford Wilson, recalls that the venue’s founder had “stolen [the milk crates] off the street. [He] hadn’t bothered to nail them together, so they [were] rocking like crazy” during performances (Crespy 57). Another Cino playwright, Doric Wilson, attests to the often comedic results of the theater’s mania for misuse: “[T]he actors and Joe [Cino] shared the same butcher block in the kitchen—they, to make up; he, to make sandwiches. There was the night Joanna Vischer (Helen of Troy—and very much so) applied a slice of pepperoni to her cheek at the very moment [a waiter] delivered to a customer a rouge pad on a roll” (Wilson 7). In an audacious example of de Certeau’s “perruque,” Johnny Torres—Joe Cino’s “mad lover” and a fearless electrician—even managed to hook the café’s power lines into New York City’s public electrical system through a nearby subway line, thereby drawing electricity for the café’s stage lights (Patrick 3).9 This same spirit of oppositional rugged consumerism informed the other major venues of off-off-Broadway; Ellen Stewart, for example, used wood from orange crates as the flooring for La Mama, stole bricks from a local construction site to shore up its walls, and fused a salvaged A&P supermarket counter to a shoeshine stand to create a bar for its patrons (Playing Underground, 88, 94). The lack of commercial support for off-off-Broadway’s theatrical billings meant that each theater’s budgets for sets and costumes were quite limited. The Judson Poet’s Theater devoted $37.50 to each theatrical billing, and other off-off-Broadway productions survived on comparable stipends (Playing Underground, 73). As in the construction of the theatrical spaces, such financial constraints led to creative and often illegal acts of rugged consumerism. In addition to financing La Mama’s productions, Ellen Stewart used her considerable skills as a fashion designer to construct many of her playwright’s sets out of discarded or repurposed materials. A typical La Mama costume was composed of old clothing that had been torn apart and then re-formed

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism to suit a particular production, and the setting for a given play was often cobbled together by what could be found on nearby Greenwich Village streets (Crespy 104). This reuse aesthetic was nothing new at the Judson Church. Since Al Carmines’s promotion to associate minister in 1964, the church had welcomed artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Rauschenberg, who decorated the church with their readymade art. As the art critic Jill Johnston writes, Oldenburg like[d] to present objects from everyday life, and transmute them by abstraction or by placing them in some unexpected context. Fake food served at a real table; real food in a false situation (a suitcase full of lemons). . . . Oldenburg also often transformed his sphere of action into an environmental mess—a calculated rubble of paper, cardboard, stuffed burlap bags, dirty mattresses, tin cans, paintsplattered walls, and so on. (50)

Rauschenberg would also incorporate trash collected from his city walks to create his “Combine” art. As he remembers, “I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn’t a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing” (Rosetta Brooks). Playwright Paul Foster recounts a similar story of reappropriating objects for his play The Recluse, which was rehearsed at Caffe Cino but debuted at La Mama in 1964: The Recluse was not done at Cino’s, but I met Joe [Cino] coming across East 4th Street and told him I had to get a set together for no more than $12. Of course he didn’t think it strange the playwright had to get his own set. What else were playwrights for? Besides, if you don’t treat writers like work horses, they think you don’t love them. Everybody knows that. As we walked, Cino picked up a red box from the top of someone’s garbage. At the corner he found 10 yards of perfectly good, cheap, green nylon except for some suspicious stains on it which could have been cholera or dog piss. We found a store window mannequin, minus arms and lone leg, and just before we got to Sam Tepper’s Used Clothes on the Bowery (I was getting into it now), he found the piece de piece . . . a stuffed cat. (True!) He went up to Kenny Burgess’ loft over Sam’s, and I had an A&P shopping cart full of the most beautiful set I ever

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   built. . . . Later, NET filmed the play for television and spent $125,000 on the same set [that] Cino found for me. Ah, but the Grant Game changed everything. Now, one gets a grant of a thousand dollars for the broken mannequin, and the cat, well, that’s good for a major art purchase (Foster 7).

The striking contrast between the spontaneous discoveries of a neighborhood walk and later commercial or governmentally sponsored attempts to recover that spontaneity illustrates the close relationship between practices of misuse and aesthetic representations of misuse on the off-off-Broadway stage.10 Even the greatest champion of the division between production and exhibition, Andy Warhol, found the off-off-Broadway aesthetic appealing: “Everything was low-budget to the point of no-budget in those places. Joe Cino probably never made a profit over fifty dollars in his whole time there” (Warhol and Hackett 53). Sam Shepard staged only a few plays at La Mama, Caffe Cino, or Judson, but each theater exerted a profound influence upon the young playwright. Shepard was counted among Ellen Stewart’s “chickies”—a term of endearment for her closest theatrical friends. The young playwright and actor also was fond of talking with Joe Cino into the early hours of the morning at his café, and he knew and respected Al Carmines (Patrick 10). It is therefore unsurprising that Shepard incorporated these figures’ constructivist activities within his early plays.

Commodities in Drag The majority of Shepard’s early plays can be understood as playful games of tug-of-war between material circumstance and creative desire. For example, 4 H Club is a one-act play in which the central action is nothing more than coffee making and in which the central dramatic tension (if one might call it that) is how best to accomplish this task. At the beginning of the play, the lights come up on three boys goofing around in a kitchen covered in trash: “JOHN is downstage facing the audience kneeling beside [a] hot plate. He is stirring something in the pot with a spoon.” As the other two boys—Joe and Bob—search for kitchen items with which to amuse themselves, John begins a seemingly impromptu lecture on the differences between ground and instant coffee:

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism john.  You can’t call it coffee anymore. Brown powder for coffee, white powder for cream, saccharine for sugar. Water’s the only thing that stays the same. Put it all together and it comes out coffee. bob.  Put it all together. john.  I am. joe. Three. john.  Three colored waters. (He pours water out of a pot into three coffee cups; he hands a cup to bob, and a cup to joe, then sits on the floor with the last cup. bob and joe sit; a pause as they all sit and drink from the cups. bob slurps, a pause, joe slurps loudly, joe slurps even louder. They all stand suddenly and smash the cups on the floor. bob and john start kicking pieces back and forth across the kitchen.) (UH 95)

When read against the standards of dramatic realism that governed most midcentury American drama, the boys’ sophomoric behaviors are pretty thin gruel, but the scene is thickened by their strange interactions with the coffeepot and the coffee cups. Like most Shepard plays, 4 H Club is centered on an activity that simultaneously repeats and travesties American Western mythology. In this case, Shepard’s subject is the creation of “cowboy coffee,” which, as countless Western films remind us, is a process in which coarse coffee grounds are heated with water in a pot over an open flame.11 Significantly, the young characters parody this ritualistic, outdoor activity when they bring it into their northeastern urban context. After all, if “brown powder” is indeed instant coffee, John would have no reason to stir the water in the pot; he would only need to wait for the water to boil, add the “brown powder” to each cup, and drink. Though the coffeepot and the hotplate are conveniences that should liberate the boys from the tedium of older labor practices, the boys hold to these archaic practices, creating a debased cowboy Eucharist that fails to transubstantiate a trinity of artificiality into coffee. Shepard’s older audience members would have been particularly attuned to this ritual, having recently immersed themselves within another “authentic” coffee culture: New York City’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene. Since the 1950s, coffeehouses had become preeminent locations of the American counterculture, promising a safe haven for would-be Beats, leftist intellectuals, and folk musicians, but often amounting to little more then a new 4–H Club for America’s disaffected youth. As representatives

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   of this culture, Joe, John, and Bob attempt to build a new community around the hotplate’s surrogate fire, but the artificiality of the coffee renders its subsequent consumption unfulfilling. Instead of tasting the coffee, they “slurp” it in an increasingly theatrical game of manly consumption. Through their exaggerated activities, the characters of the play might be understood as embodying a kind of drag performance, in which “natural” human-object relationships such as drinking from a cup are subject to the same kinds of exaggerated parody as performances of gender roles in other off-off-Broadway contexts. As Judith Butler argues, practices of gender parody including drag acts have been used to further a politics of despair, one which affirms a seemingly inevitable exclusion of marginal genders from the territory of the natural and real. And yet this failure to become “real” and to embody “the natural” is . . . a constitutive failure of all gender enactments for the very reason that these ontological locales are fundamentally uninhabitable. . . . As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an “act,” as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status. (146–147)

In a similar manner, while he clearly fails at making coffee, John succeeds in demonstrating how far the technocratic rules of commodity usage had penetrated into the American imagination and, perhaps, offers a not-so-subtle critique of the coffee culture’s oppositional posturing. Instead of recovering some sense of authentic community, the characters employ empty rituals to recover an absent commodity, just as in Butler’s schema, gender parodies erase as they gesture toward the very notion of an authentic gender. Within the aesthetically barren landscape of the character’s city apartment, ritual and the Western legacy of rugged individualism become a drag structure for worshipping commodities, for systematizing and codifying our relationship to the world, and for advancing the feel but not the substance of the authentic. Nostalgia for an absent cowboy culture shapes the characters’ imaginations throughout the remainder of the play. When Joe boils more water for the coffee, his friends stop him and declare that they “couldn’t drink coffee out of the pot” (UH 100): bob.  We could be having coffee right now if it wasn’t for that. joe.  With cream and sugar. bob.  However you take it.

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism joe.  We could be sitting around on the floor talking and drinking. bob.  Yeah. It would be nice. joe.  It’s too bad. bob.  Maybe we’ll do it sometime. joe. Sure. bob.  We’ll get some more cups and sit around drinking. (UH 100–101)

The possibility of the real returns in the exchange (not only real cream and sugar but also a real community of talking and drinking) but does so through an absent commodity. Within this system, the disconnect between desire and material circumstance can only be overcome through continued consumption. Despite the fact that the water is ready, the two men cannot fathom the simple act of drinking without also imagining the standard object from which they drink. Ironically, drinking “out of the pot” would constitute a thematically consistent fulfillment of the cowboyEucharist ritual to which this commodity ritual aspires, but this counterritual and the communal conversation that it promises are obliterated by the ludicrous but incontrovertible supposition that coffee can only be served in coffee cups. In keeping with the parody of cowboy culture, the boys—gathered around the hot plate/surrogate campfire—begin to tell each other tall tales, but their stories initially suffer from the same problems as their coffee. Looking at the trash on the stage, each cowboy manqué begins to imagine mice and rats feeding upon the discarded refuse: “John: Rats usually go around in large groups. Ten at a time. They’re like coyotes in that respect. Constantly ravenous. They can never get enough to eat. Baboons too. There’s one kind of baboon called a mandrill that is known as the fiercest animal in the world” (UH 112). John pushes the ludicrous comparison of rats and coyotes further by imagining himself traveling through the jungles of Africa and stalking a “baboon called a mandrill that is known as the fiercest animal in the world”: The guide shows the specific area where the mandrills live and warns the passengers to keep clear of them. He says they are extremely temperamental and will charge a human without any provocation. He says they scream in high staccato voices and run on all fours. They charge in groups of four and tear mercilessly at the victim’s throat. They cut the jugular vein and then rip the head

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   off. They eat the brain first, then devour the body. They tear the arms and legs and carry them back to their mates. (UH 113).

Carried away by John’s story, Joe races to the coffeepot and begins to slam it against the hot plate to “scare [the mandrills and the rats] away” (UH 113).12 At the same time, Bob (playfully?) pleads with Joe to keep quiet and tries to wrestle the pot away from him lest the phantom mandrills attack. In the midst of the struggle, the cacophonous noise of the drum striking the hotplate becomes a “steady rhythm” or “steady beat” (UH 114) that signals the close of the play. Through its transformation from receptacle to drum, the coffeepot becomes what Johan Callens calls one of Shepard’s “decontextualized objects.” In a comparison of Shepard’s plays to Edward Weston’s photographic collages, Callens argues that both art forms “derive their disturbing, evocative power from the disjunction of found or combined everyday objects, which seem to push the limits of reality” (166).13 But whereas Callens casts this aesthetic effect as a product of spatial juxtaposition, in 4 H Club, the cognitive dissonance here is temporal: the rationalized object that constrains the characters’ behaviors becomes, in the sudden shift from civilization to wilderness, the deeply irrational instrument of musical expression. Having exhausted the coffeepot’s sanctioned use-value, Joe creatively misuses it, converting an object associated with an impoverished passive consumerism into a strange new thing that breaks the technocratic hold that mass culture exerts upon the characters’ material activities. In spite of its surreal plot, 4 H Club thus offers a fairly conventional collage structure that derives its power from changed relationships with objects. Just as Weston, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg place real things in false situations, Shepard introduces a coffeepot first into its expected context and next into its frontier or wilderness contexts. In the transition from a filthy apartment to the American West populated by coyotes to the African jungle populated by mandrills, the coffeepot departs from its older significance and calls forth the thing from the object. In its strange transformation from coffeepot into musical instrument, 4 H Club might also serve a political function by operating as an oblique commentary on the transition from inauthentic coffeehouse to an authentically wild and rugged off-off-Broadway theater movement during the early sixties. Trapped within the confines of a failed ritual, Joe, John,

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism and Bob can make neither instant coffee nor instant community, but only a faint imitation of the fading coffeehouse culture. When they destroy the cups and transform the pot, communal authenticity reemerges as a kind of radical play in which the rules of sanctioned use and singular identities break down. In this sense, the play’s “drag” coffee-making fulfills the same function as the “tools” of the Whole Earth Catalog: the broken cups and misused coffeepots of the play testify to the new “power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested” (1).

The Tyranny of Static Objects The shock that audiences would likely experience when viewing Shepard’s object transformations is necessarily short-lived, which in part explains why Shepard delays the repurposing of the coffeepot in 4 H Club until the final moments of the play. An object becomes a thing, as Bill Brown reminds us, “in the moment (and no doubt only as a moment) of reobjectification that results from a kind of misuse” (A Sense of Things, 76, Brown’s emphasis). Any apprehension of an object’s “thingness,” in other words, can only be achieved through dramatic surprise, and repetition deadens this sensation. The ephemerality of things may explain Shepard’s repeated insistence that he “really only cares about initial productions— the first ones. Once that first production happens, then I don’t care what happens to it really. I’m not concerned in tracking it down, in following it around like an ex-lover or something” (Lippman 3). But Shepard’s commitment to spontaneous theater would be tested as he gained recognition in and beyond New York City. Two years after the debut of 4 H Club, Shepard assisted in the publication of his first book, Five Plays (1967), for the Bobbs-Merrill press. The subsequent transformation of his plays from explosive, provocative assemblages into static texts threatened to literally and metaphorically constrain the play of object signification upon which his work depended. In interviews, Shepard framed these constraints in spatial terms that resonate with the great Western myth of the unfolding frontier: “The key to the whole thing is to keep moving, to always move in a new direction. In order to remain creative,

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   you have to open to new territory. You can’t stay in the same little four acres. You gotta move” (Goldberg 112). Given Shepard’s determination both to light out for the artistic territories and to assemble his plays into a readable collection, it is unsurprising that Five Plays included a new play, Fourteen Hundred Thousand, that dramatized the problems of making his plays into static commodities. As in 4 H Club, a brief synopsis of the first half of the one-act play reveals the way in which, upon assembly, an object’s sanctioned use-value imposes clear limitations upon the ways that humans can subsequently interact with it. Fourteen Hundred Thousand centers on a character named Tom, who throughout the play haphazardly hammers strips of lumber together to make a bookshelf, which will house his wife’s immense archive of fourteen hundred thousand books. At the start of the play, Tom’s friend Ed invites the couple to a wilderness cabin that he has recently acquired. The cabin, he tells them, is an isolated hovel without plumbing or electricity, and he needs to insulate it before the start of the winter snow season. While Ed tempts the couple with the promise of vibrant fall colors, Tom’s imagination drifts towards the material conditions of the cabin in winter: “A little tiny, eety, beety, teeny, weeny cabin like yours in the midst of a raging blizzard. In the midst of hail and snow and sleet. Calling out for some insulation. Calling for someone to warm its little hearth and seal up its cracking paint. Run to its side before it’s too late! Run to its aid and attention!” (UH 119). Tom’s stewardship of objects extends to his bookcase, and he insists that he cannot travel north until it has been assembled and painted. The problem, however, is that those tasks seem impossible; the bookshelf keeps falling apart as he struggles to hammer it together. As he tells the group, “We’ll be here forever. The winter will pass without a vacation, without a change of scenery. There’ll be no free moments to wander around through yellow fields or climb purple trees. The task will last forever” (UH 120–121). When Ed departs, Tom’s parents enter carrying handfuls of books, which, they complain, seem far heavier than they appear. As is clear from even this minimal summary, the structural mechanics and themes of Shepard’s earlier play are amplified here and, perhaps, shed light on the playwright’s difficulties with the labor required to

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism assemble the Bobbs-Merrill collection. The books that will occupy these shelves—like the coffee that fills Joe, Bob, and John’s cups—are explicitly cast as both physical and metaphysical burdens. Both plays proceed by way of deadened and draglike rituals instantiated by the central, neverto-be-constructed object; Tom, Donna (his wife), Mom, and Pop remain on stage for no other reason than the simple fact that, as Tom explains, the bookcase has to be built. Finally, the rustic cabin in Fourteen Hundred Thousand offers the same geographical and psychological promise of escape for Ed, Tom, and Donna as the African jungle for the characters of 4 H Club. When placed upon the stage of living theater, however, books are far richer material vehicles for cultural critique than coffee cups. It is now common practice for critics to position Shepard as a descendent of European avant-garde artists such as Beckett, Pirandello, and Artaud, who wrote against “the subjugation of the theater to the text” and advocated a rediscovery of a “language halfway between gesture and thought” (Artaud, “Theatre of Cruelty,” 242).14 In Fourteen Hundred Thousand, texts and their material bodies quite literally subjugate the theatrical action. Early in the play, the would-be rugged consumer, Tom, criticizes his wife’s fetishistic relationship with books: “You never read the books to begin with. The ones you did read you read halfway. The rest you bought for their color or thickness or just to fill up some space. Fourteen hundred thousand books to put in a bookcase once and never touch them again till the day you die” (UH 120). When Tom encourages her to throw away the books, Ed comes to her defense, telling Tom that “[a]t times I’ve found myself very briefly getting very attached to books. Very emotionally attached. Like you would with a pet dog” (UH 120). Tom disagrees, telling him, “You throw away the book, not the effect. The response of the book stays with you wherever you go, whatever you do. In sickness and in health and through the long sad wintertime” (UH 120). The central conflict of the play is therefore reducible to two models for the proper use of an object. On the one hand, books may endure through time as stable signifieds rather than playful signifiers, filling up the physical space of a room and controlling the behaviors of their owners. On the other hand, the same books might be deformed (or in this case discarded) and therefore endure only in the ways in which they are reshaped

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   to suit the conditions of their former owners’ minds. As the presentation of these possibilities makes clear, to misuse hoarded objects—to throw them away—is paradoxically the way to preserve each book’s integrity. Whereas a discarded book is instantaneously and immediately available “wherever you go, whatever you do,” the preserved book decays into a domesticated artifact that has a value based only upon its physical characteristics: its color or its ability to take up space. In this sense, Shepard casts books in a way akin to Michael Thompson’s definition of “transient objects”: the longer a book hangs around, the more it decays from an object of actual value to one of sentimental familiarity. At the end of its life, it becomes a “pet dog” rather than a theatrical object to be reused by some intrepid scavenger. But even Tom finally succumbs to the commodity’s technocratic colonization of the mind. The proper shape and function of the bookshelf’s boards “overpower” him: “I wake up thinking of this bookcase and I sleep dreaming of it. I walk around with the smell of it in my nose and I can see it in the future. I have a picture in my head of what it might become and I plan to fulfill that picture if it’s the last thing I do” (UH 128). The final form of bookcase exerts such a hold upon his imagination that when he finally assembles it, he immediately opens a can of paint, begins to paint the bookshelf, and (more than somewhat ludicrously) insists that his “whole body pulses with new life” (UH 130). On the heels of this final assembly, the play concludes in the material and cognitive whiteout prefigured by Tom’s earlier submission to his world’s objects. In a dialogue that seems to be as much about the codification of Shepard’s off-off-Broadway plays as about bookshelves, Donna tells Tom that his inspiration is short-lived: “The trouble is the longevity. Its lasting power. It seems like a stage to me. Just a frame of mind. Temporarily manic is the way I’d put it” (UH 130, emphasis my own).15 In response, Tom attacks Donna with a paintbrush, and they enter into a physical and verbal duel that plays upon the tension between mobile inspiration and cognitive stasis. Donna imagines a moment in which Tom has achieved his object-oriented desires by being absorbed into and therefore becoming an object: All you’ll have is a tiny little glimmer of your present excitement. The rest will have gone and you’ll lie there forever, trying to get it back. The bed will be your house and home and your head will be glued to the pillow . . . You lie in pools

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism of urine and feces for days on end until the bed and you become one thing. One whole thing and there’s no way of telling where the bed stops and you begin. You smell the same, you look the same, you act the same, you are the same. (UH 131)

At the same time, the couple’s comic swordplay figuratively converts each character into an object that, like a bookcase, needs to be painted. Coated with drying white paint, both Tom and Donna are subsequently erased from the equally white stage as the possibility of creative misuse gives way to the necessary strictures of a use-value imposed from without. Mom and Pop begin to read from one of Donna’s fourteen hundred thousand books, and Tom and Donna begin to clean the stage, removing first the books and next the bookcase. The distillation of myriad objects into a single book in the parents’ hands signals the play’s conclusion. All of the characters simultaneously chant out a story of the blizzard promised at the start of the play, giving their performance over to the book’s final, disembodied heat death: The place was in white as far as they could see and not a sound or a wind or a hint of cold or hot. Not a taste in their mouth or a sting in their nose. And they moved very slow away from the place. And they moved and they moved and they didn’t say a thing. Didn’t laugh, didn’t cry, didn’t moan, didn’t sigh, didn’t even cough as the snow came down. (UH 133)

Transformed from living stage to white homogeny, the play’s creative ephemeral acts of misuse give way to the entropic decay of textual whiteness—a whiteness that threatens and finally blots out its theatrical counterpart. Tom’s early dismissal of books thus carries with it a prescriptive (and proscriptive) mandate for the play in its textual form: that it is better for the reader to take the intangible, inalienable qualities of the work of art into him- or herself, to read theatrically on the level of (mis)useful memory, rather than simply to collect and preserve the play’s commodified husk.

Misusing Textual Objects While Fourteen Hundred Thousand concludes in textual and cognitive heat death, Shepard’s kitschy Caffe Cino play, Icarus’s Mother, offers provisional escape from the death-driven stasis of the printed page

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   through creative misuse of other textual objects. The plot of Icarus’s Mother revolves around another failed communal ritual—in this case, a Fourth of July picnic—but also sets up a tension between what occurs on an offoff-Broadway stage and how that performance is viewed by its audiences. On a stage covered with grass and sand, five characters relax between an afternoon meal and an evening fireworks display. Looking up at the sky, they notice a jet plane circling overhead. The two girls, Jill and Pat, are intrigued by the jet’s activity, insisting that its vapor trail is a message that the pilot is sending to someone on the ground, while one of their dates, Frank, is skeptical, contending that the jet is simply suffering from “excess gas” (Chicago 31). The other two men, Bill and Howard, side with the girls, and Bill goes so far as to suggest that the jet is sending signals to the group in response to their barbeque’s “smoke [signals]” (Chicago 32). After much idle speculation, the girls give up the conversation and depart the stage with Frank to look for a private place to relieve themselves of the many liquids they have consumed. When that group has departed (presumably for the Cino bathroom), Bill and Howard pick up the picnic tablecloth and drape it over the barbeque, trapping the smoke for a moment before releasing it and thereby sending enigmatic smoke signals to the jet overhead. After the girls return, Pat and Jill tell Bill and Howard that the pilot had spotted them with their pants down. The girls, it seems, have suffered from a bit of stage fright: You know how it is when you have to pee so bad that you can’t pee at all? Well that’s what happened. Neither of us could get anything out and we were straining and groaning and along comes our friend in the jet plane. . . . Then I started waving and the guy went insane. He flew that thing upside down and backwards and every way you could imagine. . . . Then he did a beautiful thing. He started to climb. And he went way, way up about twenty thousand feet or forty thousand feet. And he wrote this big sentence across the sky with his vapor trail. He wrote “E equals MC squared” in huge letters. It was really nice. (Chicago 54–55)

In keeping with the play’s title, the pilot’s techno-erotic response dooms him. In an extended, manic monologue, Frank observes the jet plummeting to earth and casts the subsequent explosion as the greatest firework of all: [Y]ou see the silver-sleek jet, streamlined for speed, turn itself upside down and lie on its back and swoop up, then give itself in so it looks like it’s floating. Then another boom and it falls head down just gliding under its own weight. Passing

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism cloud after cloud and picking up its own speed under its own momentum, out of control. Under its own force, falling straight down and passing through flocks of geese on their way back from where they came from. Going beyond itself with the pilot screaming and the clouds breaking up. And the windows cracking and the wings tearing off. Going through seagulls now, it’s so close. Heading straight for the top of the flat blue water. Almost touching in slow motion and blowing itself up six inches above sea level to the dismay of ducks bobbing along. And lighting up the air with a gold glint and a yellow tint and smacking the water so that waves go up to five hundred feet in silver white and blue. Exploding the water for a hundred miles in diameter around itself. (Chicago 58–59)

What are we to make of this description? While the play’s Cino director, Village Voice critic Michael Smith, insists that the play “is about fear— specifically, the so-called paranoia of the nuclear present—and its effect on people individually and in community,” the violent, erotic, and mythically charged conclusion suggests that there is more at stake in the play (Chicago 26–27).16 Behind his technological accoutrements, the jet pilot is a playful Icarus-figure (or, perhaps, a Shepard surrogate) whose desires lead him to an early death. As in most Romantic and post-Romantic readings of Ovid’s character, the pilot is more of an artist than a military man. Unlike the bored teenagers content to sit on the ground, he is motivated by some enigmatic lonely impulse of delight to write his message upon the living sky. Such aspirations stand in stark contrast to the representation of textuality of Fourteen Hundred Thousand. The skywriting and smoke signals do not linger like Donna’s fourteen hundred thousand books; they break down in the very act of communication. Like Shepard’s off-off-Broadway plays, the pilot’s jet trail and the group’s barbeque signals convert a byproduct of combustion/consumption into creative expression. While the scene creates many technical complications—particularly in a small and highly flammable café—Shepard insisted that the barbeque should be functional and the smoke should not be a false effect but should “ris[e] out of it” (Chicago 30), creating a situation where material signs dissipate into the air like spoken words—preventing their final calcification in some more stable print form.17 Not coincidentally, the coffee cups in 4 H Club; the bookshelf and paint can in Fourteen Hundred Thousand; and the barbeque, the jet plane, and the girls’ bladders in Icarus’s Mother operate both materially

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   and metaphorically as containers—objects that store and give shape to communicating materials. Yet, at the risk of crudity, it is only when these mediating objects break down or open up, failing in their function as literal and metaphorical containers, that language is finally allowed to carry out its renewing “effect,” spilling out into a world that replaces used texts with misused textual performances.18 In this context, Shepard’s message seems to be that one can create surprising art only by producing it on the ephemeral stage. The waste on his stages, in other words, is off-offBroadway: a collection of discarded things and people who are reinscribed in ephemeral communicating networks. Icarus’ Mother thus materially performs what it obliquely suggests: “My work is not written in granite,” Shepard insists. “It’s like playing a piece of music. It goes out in the air and dissolves forever” (quoted in Coe 59).19 But if Shepard’s play struggles towards flighty transcendence, it also grounds itself firmly in the terrain of America. After all, the play is not about the Icarus-like pilot (who never appears on stage) but Icarus’s mother, as its title insists. The characters suggest as much in their discussion of the pilot’s smoke signals: jill.  Who would he be signaling to? howard.  His mother, maybe. Or his wife. bill.  He could be signaling to anybody. frank.  Not likely. pat.  What if he is? So what? bill.  So, someone should be told about it. The community should know. (Chicago 33)

The elision of mother, wife, and community engenders a recognizable division between the masculine daredevil antics of the jet pilot and the feminized community below. Like the mythological mother of Icarus— Naucrate, a Cretan slave impregnated and subsequently abandoned by Daedalus—the picnickers (and, by extension, Shepard’s audience) are left behind in a state of sedate domesticity as the dramatic action concludes above. It is therefore unsurprising that the fatal, oppositional act is integrated into a fireworks display in celebration of corporate America. In a continuation of his final exuberant monologue, Frank casts the pilot’s death as an unabashed celebration of fire and light:

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism Boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. You guys. You guys have missed the fireworks altogether. You should have seen—this is something to behold, this is. This is the nineteenth wonder of the Western, international world brought to you by Nabisco Cracker Corporation for the preservation of historians to come and for historians to go by. This is. If only the weather and the atmospheric conditions had been better than they were it would have beaten the Hindenburg by far more than it did. By that I mean to say a recognized world tragedy of the greatest proportion and exhilaration to make the backs of the very bravest shudder with cold sensations and the hands moisten with the thickest sweat ever before known, ever. (Chicago 57)

Frank’s account expands to four times the size of this selection, suggesting a creative but ambivalent power that echoes John’s mandrill fantasy in 4 H Club. If the pilot’s crash is an ephemeral, suicidal act of mythic art, it is also a cheap advertisement that plays upon Americans’ insatiable appetite for spectacle. Frank’s account also speaks to the concerns of monumentalized memory outlined in Fourteen Hundred Thousand as the pilot’s suicide is framed “for the preservation of historians to come and for historians to go by.” The crash thus presents a violent encounter between air and land, between freedom and domestic confinement, between the masculine and the feminine, between myth and commerce, and between off-off-Broadway goals and off-off-Broadway accomplishments. Shepard’s reluctance (or perhaps inability) to offer a comforting resolution to these oppositional forces reflects his ambivalence toward the misused objects that populate his stage and world. In Shepard’s world, a jet plane can become not only a metaphorical symbol of Cold War paranoia (as Smith would have it); at best, it can be a giant pen in the sky or an instance of mythical reemergence. At worst, audiences might interpret it as a celebration akin to those “brought to you by Nabisco.” Comparably, at its best, the barbeque can serve as a signaling instrument to the pilot-artist above, a metaphor for the creative ways that Shepard wanted his audiences to respond to his plays, or an instance of another mythical, Wild West reemergence within America’s cultural history. At worst, of course, it becomes another clichéd accessory to the celebration of American consumer power during the 1960s. The rugged consumerism on display in the play is therefore less a direct critique of consumer culture than it is an occasion for understanding the various systems that govern the use and misuse of objects as diverse as barbeque grills and military planes.

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism  

Misuse as Play For all its surrealistic, metatheatrical excess, an attenuated realism still structures the human-object interactions of Icarus’s Mother. It still makes sense, for example, to ask the simple question: What is the new function of the barbeque on stage? But by far, the most unabashedly celebratory instances of Shepard’s rugged consumerism occur at moments in his plays when the objects that characters manipulate on stage cannot be said to have any stable use-value at all, but instead are governed by the irrational dictates of improvisational play. At these moments, objects become sites of imaginative exploration that bear no relation to the technocratic logic of production, use, and consumption that govern the world beyond the theater. Perhaps as a result of their utter lack of utilitarian value, these transformed objects find a reflexive purpose (if they might be thought to have any purpose at all) as Utopian, synecdochic representations of an imaginary world transformed by the off-off-Broadway theater movement. If off-off-Broadway demonstrated how theater might be brought out of the sanctioned spaces of art and into the democratic spaces of local communities, Shepard’s metatheatrical productions reveal how this translation might likewise democratize and aestheticize the humanobject behaviors of those communities. The clearest early example of Shepard’s prolongation of an object’s “thingness” occurs in Red Cross—an off-off-Broadway precursor to his later play, Fool for Love (1983). Both plays are set in seedy hotel room stages centered by a bed and revolve around long, intersecting “arias” (to use Stephen Bottoms’s term20) delivered by each drama’s principal characters. In Red Cross, the principal characters are Jim and Carol—a couple on vacation in the Woodland Hotel—and the hotel maid. Against an allwhite background, the lights come up on the couple as Jim halfheartedly attends to Carol’s headache. In typical Shepard fashion, the opening exchange conveys boredom, estrangement, and paranoia.21 Carol insists that her headaches are a sign of something sinister, while Jim replies with dismissive platitudes: “Maybe it’s just sinus or something,” “Take it easy,” “Somebody will take care of you” (UH 139–140). In an exaggerated response to this cold comfort, Carol concludes that her head will burst open the second that she is alone. Overcome by her abandonment fantasy,

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism she crosses to Jim’s bed, stands on it, and begins to act out her symbolically charged aria. At first she imagines herself at the top of a hill in the Rocky Mountain range: “I’ll be breathing deep. In and out. Big gusts of freezing cold air” (UH 140). As she begins to “descend,” she drops into the “egg position,” picking up speed until she is finally noticed by the other skiers: “I’ll be going so fast everybody will stop and look” (UH 141). Once she has captured her (real and imagined) audience’s gaze, her account gives way wholly to exuberant fancy: Then it’ll come. It’ll start like a twitch in my left ear. Then I’ll start to feel a throb in the bridge of my nose. Then a thump in the base of my neck. Then a crash right through my skull. Then I’ll be down. Rolling! Yelling! All those people will see it. I’ll be rolling with my skis locked and my knees buckled under me and my arms thrashing through the snow. The skis will cut into both my legs and I’ll bleed all over. Big gushes of red all over the snow. My arms will be broken and dragging through the blood . . . Then my head will blow up. The top will come right off. . . . My nose will come off and my whole face will peel away. Then it will snap. My whole head will snap off and roll down the hill and become a huge snowball and roll into the city and kill a million people. . . . Then there’ll be a long cold wind. A whistle, sort of. It’ll start to snow a little bit. A very soft easy snow. The squirrels might come down to see what happened. It’ll keep snowing very lightly like that for a long time until my whole body is covered over. All you’ll see is that little red splotch of blood and a whole blanket of white snow. (UH 141)

If Carol’s imagined death takes revenge upon those that would not minister to her ailments (the unfortunate “million people” of the city), her real condition remains unchanged. Moreover, her body’s fantastic interaction with the snow renders her—like many of the previous characters in Shepard’s plays—an object rather than a subject. Seeking the charity of some Red Cross figure, Carol finds disinterest and banishment; Jim tells Carol, “You have to go” (UH 141). When the hotel maid enters shortly after Carol’s departure, Shepard’s play returns to the failed caretaker/patient relationship but inverts the gender hierarchy. In place of a headache, Jim tells the maid that he has crabs that feed upon his body: “Bugs that get in your pubic hair and eat your skin and suck your blood and make you itch” (UH 143). Like Carol’s headache, however, Jim’s crabs seem to be more a vehicle to garner

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   sympathy from another person than a problem to be solved. To pique the maid’s interest, he tells her “I can show you one if you want to see it” (UH 143). Echoing Jim’s dismissive reaction to Carol, the maid (quite justifiably!) refuses, recommends that he scrub himself with sheep dip, and makes a halfhearted offer to take him to the country doctor (UH 144). To reclaim the maid’s interest, Jim leads her on a rollicking conversation ranging from the restorative power of tree climbing to the proper way to change a bed before fixating upon the mechanics of swimming. When the maid confesses that she does not know how to swim, he climbs onto the bed and begins to kick his feet and paddle with his hands, encouraging her all the while to do the same on the second bed in a hilarious halfscientific, half-exhortative aria: Keep it slow, trying to work on the points where you derive the most power. Think of the way an oar or a paddle is constructed. Regard your arms and legs as being paddles. A paddle has a broad surface and reaches its highest point of thrust when it is perpendicular to the surface line of the water. This is the way you should use your arms. Keep your fingers close together to make a broader surface. Be careful not to let any water pass between them. That’s it. Now the breathing is important. This requires added concentration and coordination. You will be able to breathe instinctively in the right manner if you keep in mind that the human being cannot inhale water. (UH 151)

Jim’s aria signals a transition back to the exaggerated gender dynamics that begin the play. As the maid struggles to maintain Jim’s frenetic pace on the adjoining bed, she develops a cramp and calls out in pain to Jim. Reprising his earlier role, Jim tells her “That’s good. It’s good when it hurts. It’s working then. Keep it up!” (UH 151). Now playing the role of Carol, the maid “drowns” in the middle of Jim’s imaginary lake and is reborn as a strange sea creature who is more of an object than a subject: You move through the water like you were born in that very same place and never knew what land was like. You dive and float and sometimes rest on the bank and chew on some watercress. And the family in town forgets where you went and the swimming coach forgets who you are and you forget all about swimming lessons and just swim without knowing how and before you know it the winter has come and the lake has frozen and you sit on the bank staring at the ice. You don’t move at all. You just sit very still staring at the ice until you don’t feel a thing. Until your flippers freeze to the ground and your tail freezes

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism to the grass and you stay like that for a very long time until the summer comes around. (UH 155)

I have described the plot of Red Cross and quoted its three arias at length to provide a sense of Shepard’s expansive, inchoate, yet highly suggestive symbolic lexicon. Each passage reinforces the caretaker’s impotent relationship with his or her patient. John can no more “save” the maid from drowning than he can assist Carol with her headaches. Nor, for that matter, can the maid save him from the crabs that threaten to “drain [him] of all [his] blood” (UH 144). Each aria expresses a refulgent, childlike fascination with performance and bodily transformations: Carol’s head becomes a giant snowball, Jim’s arms and legs become paddles, and the maid’s body sprouts fins and a tail. Each aria also avenges the callous response of the caretaker: Carol’s exploded head crushes the passive spectators, Jim’s swimming drowns the unreceptive maid, and the maid’s transformed body lies in wait for the town’s citizens to return to the lake when the “summer comes around.” Finally, each passage devotes a seemingly inordinate amount of time to the simple act of breathing: Carol breathes “in and out” at the top of her imaginary hill; Jim instructs the maid in the same language: “Breathe in. Breathe out. In, out. In, out” (UH 151); and the maid drowns for lack of oxygen but finds that she can breathe underwater. But I have also included these long arias to highlight the ways that they clearly fail to present a singular coherent narrative. If the themes of these arias resonate, they do so at some frequency below or beyond the threshold of conventional logic. Red Cross, like so many other Shepard plays, operates as a half-formed dream, a hallucination, or a drug-induced reverie. This is not to say that Red Cross is an aesthetic or formal failure.22 As Shepard has repeatedly maintained, “I don’t think I’ve ever written a play that looks like a play. They look more like apparitions” (Goldberg). Or perhaps in this case they look more like theatrical exercises. Indeed, the characters’ stylized breathing patterns and dramatic transformations echo the types of exercises that Shepard would have performed in his formal and informal theatrical training. Jim’s fascination with breathing resonates with exercises described in the translated work of Grotowski and Artaud, which had become popular during the mid-sixties.23 Grotowski believed that breathing exercises could strengthen an actor’s voice to such an extent that it could become

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   “stereophonic.” Drawing upon the teachings of Hatha yoga, he established a series of exercises that would expand the “type of respiration usually taught in theatre schools” (147, 148). Shepard took these lessons to heart and even incorporated yoga into one of his short stories. In “Montana,” the unnamed antihero performs a series of theatrical exercises after brutally murdering a prostitute. Shepard’s prose description clearly resonates with Jim’s activities in Red Cross: “He began to very slowly put himself through some Yoga positions. He’d been noticing how his flow of blood was slowing down. First he did the Plow for about five minutes. Then the Cobra. Then a head stand. Then the Lion. Then a few breathing exercises. After this he began to feel the blood flowing freely and felt refreshed again” (HM 21). In The Theatre and Its Double (1938), Artaud also regards breathing as “of prime importance” to avant-garde theater (Collected Works, 100). Borrowing ideas from Jewish and Hindu mysticism, Artaud believed that breathing provided an access point to creativity and emotion: “We can be sure that every mental movement, every feeling, every leap in human affectivity has an appropriate breath” (Collected Works, 101). More compellingly, Artaud suggested that the “feminine,” “masculine,” and “neuter” elements of breathing generated rather than recovered creativity. Just as Carol’s deep breaths give rise to her Rocky Mountain fantasy and Jim’s “instinctive” breathing transforms a bed into a lake, Artaud’s gendered breath calls up the imaginative and emotive: “For breathing which maintains life, allows us to climb its stages step by step. If an actor does not have a certain feeling, he can probe it again through breathing. . . . The same pressure points which support physical exertion are also used in the emergence of affective thought. The same also act as a jumping-off point for the emergence of a feeling” (Collected Works, 103–104). Regardless of whether the characters’ breathing literalizes Artaud’s “jumping-off point” for the emergence of their “affective thoughts” or resonates with the playwright’s early education in improvisational exercises, the tendency for Shepard’s characters to behave as actors in their plays-within-plays emphasizes the metatheatricality at the center of his early work. Rejecting the banal anonymity of their lives inscribed in roles dictated to them and finding the conventional modes of linguistic communication inadequate to their pain, isolation, and boredom, they create magic circles of the imagination in the most unlikely of spaces. That a

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism hotel room could function as a site of personal exploration suggests that all spaces—not just theaters—are imbued with the possibility of theatrical transformation. In short, Red Cross creates a material metaphor for the availability of a Utopian, theatrical mode of human existence that is based in each character’s willingness to transform the human-object relationships presented to them. What Shepard’s plays vividly illustrate are the ways in which departures from standard kinds of human-object interactions allow his characters to find new ways of communicating with others. Their bricoleur poetics thus offer a Utopian platform for understanding how seemingly obvious and incontrovertible use-values are actually manifestations of a broader technocratic culture that must be perpetually renewed to be sustained. By calling attention to the points at which off-off-Broadway materially diverged from Broadway productions, Shepard’s plays illustrate ways in which we might replace one sanctioned, singular performance of human-object interactions in favor of a diversity of alternative, messy, “incorrect” encounters with objects. Shepard certainly was not alone in his metatheatrical experiments with off-off-Broadway locations. Doric Wilson’s play Babel, Babel, Little Tower (1961) was quite literally a story about Caffe Cino: [The play] made use of the whole room, from behind the counter and the toilet in back (flushed on cue) to the tables which Ralph (Paul Vincent Romeo) took away from the customers and piled on top of each other to build a tower he hoped would prove I-forget-what to Eppie (Jane Lowry). At the time, the N.Y.P.D. were as happy as hornets preventing plays in coffee houses by handing out summons when not actually, physically stopping the performance. I incorporated this living history into the climax: a coppish looking actor entered from Cornelia Street, ad-libbed a fracas with the waiter/doorman (Scotty), demanded the actors put the tables back where they belonged. The actors, led by Lady Jane, refused. Authority in blue destroyed the tower. (Wilson)

H. M. Koutoukas went one step further, incorporating the cockroaches that infested Caffe Cino’s walls into his play With Creatures Make My Way (1965). Set in a sewer, the play’s action concerned a “single character, neither male or female, [who] finally consummates an eternal love with a passing lobster” (Kirkpatrick 305). In what was clearly a play with no

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   aspirations to verisimilitude, the cockroaches would prove to be the only realistic element on stage. Like these other playwrights, Shepard projects a world in which objects express a dual resonance as practical, necessary components of offoff-Broadway’s material existence and imaginative sites of pure fantasy.24 For Red Cross, that doubled object is a bed, upon which Carol skis and Jim and the maid swim. As Shepard and his audience would know, the bed in Red Cross is as much a metatheatrical object—an everyday component of an off-off-Broadway theater’s physical structure—as it is a theatrical object of Shepard’s invention. Easily obtained and often at no cost, beds were by far the most popular object for the stripped down stages of Caffe Cino, the Judson Poets’ Theater, La Mama ETC, and Theater Genesis. Indeed, the only set piece for La Mama ETC’s first shows was a bed, which barely fit the stage. David Crespy observes: “All the [early] plays focused on the bed, although rarely was the subject sex” (71). Likewise, Caffe Cino’s tiny stage was often anchored by a bed or a sofa (Playing Underground, 46), which probably served as inspiration for Robert Heide’s 1965 Caffe Cino play, The Bed. Stephen Bottoms’s plot synopsis reads like a precursor to Shepard’s Red Cross. The play presents “a banal, desultory conversation between Jack and Jim, two figures who seem almost incapable of getting themselves out of bed” (Playing Underground, 128). Another popular Caffe Cino figure, Lanford Wilson, wrote a play about a bed for explicitly practical reasons. As one of his friends recalls, when a hotel in which the group was staying threatened to throw them out, “Lance wrote a play to be done at the Cino which would incorporate our bed and all our possessions. After performing the play we would turn down the bed on stage and go to sleep.”25 Joe Cino also slept in his Caffe on numerous occasions, and Ellen Stewart was often ticketed for allowing her theater friends to sleep at La Mama after it closed (Crespy 43, 78). This dual functionality informs the bed’s subsequent theatrical transformation into a kind of second stage for Carol’s, Jim’s, and the maid’s plays within the play. When Carol is buried under the snow or when Jim and the maid “swim” out into the lake, the bed is divested of its functional value, becoming instead a marker of the singular, fluid body of water into which the separate tributaries of the characters’ metatheater, Shepard’s imaginative theater, and the real, material space of the theater

  Theaters of Rugged Consumerism converge. It is an agent of embodied communication; reinforcing, clarifying, and in many ways transforming the ineffectual messages of its inhabitants. In other words, the bed is a material platform upon which those messages can be acted out. Red Cross thus anticipates Shepard’s later play Fool for Love, in which the aging cowboy rancher, Eddie, lassos bedposts and chairs in a seedy Western hotel to “stay in practice” for some imagined future rodeo (FFL 34). Finally, the arias that it engenders reinforce the fact that the bed is a material site of dreams as much as it is a utilitarian space for sleep. Escaping from the confines of bourgeois realism, the characters play at being and expressing their artistic selves, with their bodies operating as a material signal of their hopes, fears, and fantasies. The bed in Red Cross thus functions as an access point to the imagination by interrupting each character’s habituated behaviors. Likewise, as a synecdoche for the material composition of off-off-Broadway, the bed illustrates how new aesthetic and practical orientations might be found in the most unlikely objects and how authenticity might be regained from the discarded remnants of a culture of commodification.

Objects as Characters In a rare instance of explicit commentary on the staging of his work, Shepard penned a “Note to the Actors” for the first production of Angel City (1976): The term “character” could be thought of in a different way when working on this play. Instead of the idea of a “whole character” with logical motives behind his behaviors which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation. This is not the same thing as one actor playing many different roles, each one distinct from the other (or “doubling up” as they call it), but more that he’s mixing many different underlying elements and connecting them through his intuition and senses to make a kind of music or painting in space without having to feel the need to completely answer intellectually for the character’s behavior. (FFL 61–62)

Many critics have understood this statement as a broader explanation for the chaotic structures of Shepard’s plays. Brenda Murphy, for example, argues that “[f]or Shepard, who is a musician, the notion of character as

Theaters of Rugged Consumerism   playing many variations around a single theme comes naturally, and it is crucial to the startling originality of his work” (126). As this chapter maintains, Shepard’s characterization of his play as a “collage construction” and a “painting in space” seems to be a valuable approach not only to understand the characters of Angel City but also to think through the treatment of objects in the majority of Shepard’s early plays. Like Oldenburg’s and Rauschenberg’s two- and three-dimensional collages on display at the Judson Memorial Church and their practical counterparts in off-off-Broadway theaters and productions, objects on Shepard’s stage are wrenched from their original contexts and placed within the sphere of art. In this process, these objects attain a provisional value that is the sum total of “many different underlying elements.” The note also serves as an important counterbalance to the critical pathways introduced at the opening to this chapter. When viewing plays such as 4 H Club, Fourteen Hundred Thousand, Icarus’s Mother, or Red Cross through the violent immediacy of a given production, it is tempting to conclude that Shepard wholly embraces the entropic dissolution of contemporary society depicted on his stages. But if a Shepard play can be understood as “a fractured whole with bits and pieces . . . flying off the central theme,” the breakdown of that naturalist “whole” need not be interpreted negatively. As a rugged consumer of commodities and commodity waste, Shepard, along with other off-off-Broadway figures such as Joe Cino, Ellen Stewart, and Al Carmine, richly illustrate the idea that the identity of humans and objects requires constant renewal if they are to avoid the empty roles assigned to each by the dominant technocratic culture. Finally, in the process of parodying and transforming humanobject interactions, Shepard’s plays serve as a fluid archive for the offoff-Broadway movement and an important countercultural example of American rugged consumerism.

 3

The Garden in the Machine: Biomimetic Hybrids and the Tragedy of Singular Use

Within the fields of industrial, architectural, and biotechnological design, a growing number of university research teams are investigating biomimetic methods of production. Coined in 1969 by biophysicist Otto Schmitt, who developed a new kind of computer circuit based upon the neurological pathways of squid, biomimetics and its related ideas of “biomimesis” and “bionics” bring together two kinds of production that are commonly conceived as separate phenomena—physica (that which is produced naturally) and techne (that which is made by humans). According to one of its proponents, Yoseph Bar-Cohen of the California Institute of Technology, the field of biomimetics is guided by a set of assumptions concerning nature as a personified design expert: “After billions of years of evolution, nature has learned what works, what is appropriate and what would last. It also learned how to use minimum resources to achieve maximal performance and came up with numerous lasting solutions” (Bar-Cohen, “Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technology”). At present, results in this field include artificial intelligence machines, spiderweb-like and silklike fibers, batlike acoustic detectors, and “remanufacturing” metallic and plastic machine parts designed for reuse rather than recycling.1 The advantages of such approaches, Bar-Cohen writes, are visible at the beginning and the end of a biomimetic object’s life cycle: “The fabrication of biologically derived materials produces minimum waste and no pollution, where the result is mostly biodegradable and is recycled by

The Garden in the Machine   nature. Learning how to process such materials can make our material choices greater and improve our ability to create recyclable materials that can better protect the environment” (Bar-Cohen, Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technologies, 20). Biomimetic teams thus might be thought of as high-tech counterparts to the decidedly low-tech scavengers of off-offBroadway. Instead of reassembling objects at the end of their life cycle, however, these teams build repurposing practices into the design phase of new technologies, creating intentionally fluid things rather than immutable objects. While the influence of biomimetic thinking has yet to be widely recognized outside of certain scientific communities, if these alternative design practices become more fully integrated into the popular imagination, they have the potential to overturn the monolithic and oppositional models of nature and technology that have preoccupied American literary artists and environmental advocates since at least the nineteenth century. Consider the pastoral. In his classic study of nineteenth-century American literature, The Machine in the Garden (1964), Leo Marx argues that the tension between the United States’ pastoral literary tradition and the economic systems of its burgeoning industrial economy generated insolvable contradictions within the works of major nineteenth-century American authors such as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. For Marx, these contradictions emerge not only in the periodic (and often catastrophic) intrusions of industrial machines into the American landscape—the locomotive shriek in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Sleepy Hollow,” the belching steamboat in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and so on—but also and more importantly in the “landscape of the psyche,” which translates “actual objects and events” into “the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, and images” (28). As these examples make clear, technologies do not behave like natural substances; they are always aliens in the natural landscape, and their violent disruptions in nature illuminate the damage that they inflict upon the Romantic imagination of man. This oppositional framework is not, of course, unique to American literary history; the putative conflict between technology and nature grounds most Romantic and post-Romantic discussions of the birth of Western modernity, which has been defined in no small part by ideologies of technological dominance. In Martin Heidegger’s “The Age of the

  The Garden in the Machine World Picture,” for example, the conditions of modernity envelope the phenomenal world in the universal garb of rationality: “In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e. technological, rule over the earth” (152). Or, as the great American environmental writer Edward Abbey writes in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), “The engineer’s dream is a model of perfect sphericity, a planet Earth with all its irregularities removed, highways merely painted on a surface smooth as glass” (80). Implicit in both models is a familiar set of assumptions: human rationality is inherently reductive, exists apart from the material substrates that surround it, and is driven by a mandate to convert the heterogeneous spaces of the earth into geometrical models on a computer screen or in a laboratory notebook. In keeping with the previous chapter’s reading of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the biomimetic work of Schmitt and Bar-Cohen challenges this asymmetric model of human relationships with the natural world and raises fundamental questions about the social lives of objects in the contemporary period: If nature and technology are historically opposed entities, can the two be made to work agonistically rather than antagonistically? Do biomimetic design systems encourage new ways in which nonhumans and humans might participate in collective, nonhierarchical, and environmentally sound modes of creation? How might we imagine or represent these future networks of human and nonhuman agents? Finally, how might the design and assembly of biomimetic objects participate in countercultural critiques of technocratic control? While environmental scientists have been exploring related questions since at least the 1960s, cultural critics—with the possible exceptions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—are only now beginning to take them up. Two of the most important figures of what has now been called the “posthuman turn,” Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, confront the putative division between human subjectivity and nonhuman objectivity as a problem of theory as well as practice. In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour argues that environmental perspectives such as those outlined by Leo Marx and Edward Abbey are but two manifestations of a

The Garden in the Machine   larger “modern paradox” at the center of our models of the world. On the one hand, he argues, Western metaphysics tends to view objects through fundamentally irreconcilable frameworks. When we interact with a technological artifact, we are aware that a human agent has assembled it to serve some function. If we are to avoid fetishizing the technology, we attribute whatever agency it has to its preestablished, socially determined usevalue prescribed to it by its creator. When we consider a natural substance (or when we reconsider our interactions with objects from the perspective of the natural sciences), we view it through a different kind of determinism—in this case, a set of physical and biochemical laws—which operates outside of systems of human control. On the other hand, the modern world is populated by a large number of what Latour calls “quasi-objects,” which are produced, used, and disposed of by a combination of human and nonhuman agents. To use one well-known example, stem cells come into being through biological processes independent of human governance, but their subsequent activities can be partially directed by research scientists to serve highly politicized social ends. Our understanding of stem cells therefore depends upon choosing between two fundamentally different sets of assumptions: either they are socially and politically determined phenomena or they are naturally determined phenomena. Given the inadequacy of both social and natural determinisms, Latour reaches two conclusions. First, in spite of our cognitive blinders, “[e]verything happens in the middle, everything passes between [the natural realm and the social realm], everything happens by way of mediation, translation and networks” (37). Second, a theoretical model by which we might understand the interconnectivity of human and object agents “does not exist. It is the unthinkable, the unconscious of the moderns” (37). Jane Bennett uses this problem as a departure point for her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), which raises the possibility that humans might think the “unthinkable” and work in concert with nonhuman agents. To do so, she maintains, would enable humans to escape the flawed “modern” model of conflict, assimilation, and dominance outlined by Latour and thereby achieve ecologically sustainable ends that benefit both humans and nonhumans. As she argues, this possibility would require rethinking even the most progressive expressions of

  The Garden in the Machine modernity: environmental paradigms, in which nonhuman objects and organisms are framed as a “passive environment or perhaps a recalcitrant context for human action” (111). Drawing upon Latour’s actor-network theory, Gilles Deleuze’s assemblage-based model of agency, and Henri Bergson’s vitalist theory of materialism, she concludes: “If environmentalism leads to a call for the protection and wise management of an ecosystem that surrounds us, a vital materialism suggests that the task is to engage more strategically with a trenchant materiality that is us as it vies with us in agentic assemblages” (111). Bennett’s vital materialism thus alters the models of thing-making discussed in the first two chapters of this book. If thing theorists such as Bill Brown and Ken Alder are preoccupied with creative ways that humans might turn closed objects into open things, for Bennett, this “constructivist response to the world . . . tends to obscure whatever thingpower there may be” independent of human beings (17). Because a typical thing-theory perspective is centered on human agency, it overlooks the “curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (6). Bennett’s self-consciously “naïve” attribution of agency to nonhumans flattens out the relationships between humans and nonhumans, enabling both communities to enter into networks of agency as what Latour would call “actants,” which operate upon and are operated upon by other actants. This ecological relationship introduces us to a new kind of rugged consumerism, in which the process of thing-making is not marked by the creation of new substance, but rather by the recovery of a thing-power that lies dormant within the substance itself independent of human action or thought. Put slightly differently, in this mode of rugged consumerism, creative networks of humans and nonhumans work together to transform singular objects into open things with new unmanageable functionalities. Both formally and rhetorically, this networked activity is modeled after transformations that take place within matter life cycles. Just as matter changes functions to suit the different natural environments in which it finds itself, a commodity can (and, if we use natural systems as a basis for ethically sound design practices, should) change its use-value as it ages and as it interacts with hybrid socialnatural networks. Within such a system, objects that will not change

The Garden in the Machine   their function over time are not only unnatural; they are also literally and figuratively unsocial, because they deprive human and nonhuman actant communities of their right to express their agencies in the world and upon themselves. In this chapter, I explore this ecological approach to rugged consumerism through a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic (and, I will argue, biomimetic) novel Gravity’s Rainbow. I begin by examining two interrelated technologies—the V-2 rocket and celluloid film— whose social histories within the novel reveal the divergent ethical and political effects of static objects and fluid things. Before the war, German scientists developed the rocket for the purposes of limitless interplanetary travel, and in this sense, the technology seemed to be designed to expand the agentic networks of humans and nonhumans. In the context of the Second World War, however, the German war machine converted the rocket into a singular instrument of death and thereby deprived it and the networks to which it belonged of their innate “thing-powers.” Along similar lines, celluloid, a synecdoche for all plastics, was originally conceived as a quasi-biomimetic wonder substance. Like natural substances, plastics had no prescribed end and thus called out to be fashioned into anything. In practice, however, plastics were designed to harden into deadened and deadly objects through a process that Pynchon’s narrator characterizes as “death transfigured.” In Bennett’s vital materialist terms, the novel’s tragic plot thus follows technologies that seem to take on active, agentic, natural properties at the moment in which they are assembled. In their subsequent histories, however, they are deprived of such an agency and become singular extensions of human will. The second part of the chapter shows how Gravity’s Rainbow balances the tragedy of human-object interactions with Utopian counterpractices of human-object assemblages. Built into the very structure of Pynchon’s biomimetic narrative, these practices are framed as a recovery of nonhuman thing-power, which brings collections of humans into closer relationships with natural assemblages. He thus offers a platform for resisting the technocratic powers of multinational corporations through a countercultural rugged consumerism based upon the principles of ecological design.

  The Garden in the Machine

Pynchon’s Object-Oriented World Critics have often asserted that Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is a difficult read, requiring either an encyclopedic mastery of history, popular culture, science, engineering, and anthropology, or a healthy dose of Keatsian or Derridean negative capability. In their attempts to ascribe a value to Pynchon’s inordinate complexity, they often go with the latter, which leads to descriptions of the novel as a kind of biomimetic thing rather than a singular object. Paul Maltby, for example, argues that “Pynchon’s objective is to fashion a discourse which maximizes the effects of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and paradox with a view to occupying the domain of the middle” (146). Likewise, Stefan Mattessich views Gravity’s Rainbow as a “‘broken machine’ that thrives on a certain entropy. . . . The ‘truth’ of the novel must be grasped, then, in the movement of a counterharmony or discord that agitates against the fluid restitution of meaning to the text” (72–73). Tony Tanner describes the novel in similar terms: “There is only one text but it contains a multiplicity of surfaces; modes of discourse are constantly turning into objects of discourse with no one stable discourse holding them together” (Thomas Pynchon, 77). Applying any totalizing interpretational framework to Pynchon’s conspiratorial history, these critics suggest, is to force a plot driven by multidirectional nonlinearity into a mold of death-driven linearity. The novel’s primary subject, the German V-2 rocket, seems to be one entity that departs from this framework. In contrast to the snarled interior that provokes the aforementioned critics’ conclusions, Gravity’s Rainbow begins and ends with scenes of symbolic symmetry. As the novel opens, British Captain Geoffrey “Pirate” Prentice watches a rocket rise from its launching pad in northern Holland and scream toward its London destination: Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short vertical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea . . . at least that far . . . icefields below and a cold smear of sun . . . . What it is? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight . . . it’s a vapor trail. Already a

The Garden in the Machine   finger width’s higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb. (6)2

As the novel closes, the narrative makes a sudden proleptic jump to Los Angeles’s Orpheum Theatre in 1970 and invites readers to watch as a rocket projected onto the movie screen plummets toward its (and our) final destination: [I]t was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see . . . it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know— And it is just here, just as this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t. (760)

For readers struggling with the complexity of the novel’s Byzantine internal structure, the bookends of its narrative present a conceptual foothold: through the numerous plots of shadowy governments and multinational corporations that compose the long middle section of the novel, the V-2 rocket that rises from World War II Holland becomes the apocalyptic intercontinental missile of the Cold War that falls toward Pynchon’s doomed American audience. In this sense, at least upon first inspection, the novel may certainly “agitate against the fluid restitution of meaning,” but the V-2 appears to be an object to which one might comfortably assign a negative value. If the novel’s bookends signal the metaphorical fall of the V-2 rocket into its negative rational use-value, Pynchon’s representation of the V-2’s production history calls into question the inevitability of this function. Indeed, over the course of the novel, what we learn about the V-2—how it was constructed outside the German coastal village of Peenemünde; how it maintained its flight path; what it sounded like; what it looked like; what it smelled like; how it dictated social relationships between engineers and concentration camp laborers, between German military personnel and British civilians, between soldiers and women, and between what Pynchon calls the elect and the preterite; and so on—imbues the rocket with a historical arc that far exceeds the psychological and spiritual limitations of Pynchon’s notoriously underdeveloped human characters. This is not to say (as many critics have maintained3) that the narrative lacks

  The Garden in the Machine psychological complexity but rather that the source of that complexity resides within what Jane Bennett, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls the “active principle” of vital materials rather than within the traditional boundaries of characters—what Pynchon calls the various “Soul[s] in ev’ry stone” (760) that always seem to accomplish and to express more than what their human subjects wish to ascribe to them. The V-2 makes history and Gravity’s Rainbow in many respects demonstrates its agency. In contrast, Prentice, the movie theater audience, and the majority of Pynchon’s poor preterite watch history and are its objects. This shift in priority does not mean that human desires and actions play no role in Pynchon’s postmodern history (the novel is, of course, suffused with both), but it does change the terms by which he presents these behaviors and, concomitantly, through which we might understand these behaviors. By highlighting the lengths to which his characters go to shape the rocket to their own ends, Pynchon suggests that in the modern era, the final testament to human psychological complexity is found not in some atavistic notion of a disembodied essential self abstracted from the material world but rather in human relationships with the objects that they assemble, launch, and watch fall upon their social worlds. Echoing Latour’s theory of quasi objects, which challenges systems of thought that separate “things themselves” and “speaking, thinking subjects, values and . . . signs” (37), Pynchon insists that within the novel, “everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected” (703). The metaphysical shift from divisions of subjects and objects to networks of quasi subjects and quasi objects precipitates changes in the possible structures of historical narratives, including Gravity’s Rainbow. As Bill Brown argues in “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” [I]f the history of things can be understood as their circulation, the commodity’s “social life” through diverse cultural fields, then the history in things might be understood as the crystallization of the anxieties and aspirations that linger there in the material object. . . . [In this system] “things” will come to designate less the unalterably given material object world than that which becomes visible or palpable only in (or as) its alteration. Things and the history in things becomes conspicuous in the irregularities of exchange—in the retardation of the primary

The Garden in the Machine   circuit of exchange wherein man establishes objects insofar as he is established by them. (935–936, Brown’s emphasis)

In Pynchon’s novel, technological “stars” such as the V-2 rocket are not simply objects that carry out singular functions; they are also subjects within a network of dynamic and highly irregular interchanges that bring them together with the menagerie of engineers, mystics, paranoiacs, and sadists who encounter them. As Richard Poirier’s perceptive early review maintains, Pynchon “is locating the kinds of human consciousness that have been implanted in the instruments of technology and contemporary methods of analysis; not content with recording the historical effect of these, he is anxious to find our history in them” (175, Poirier’s emphasis). As examples of this psychomateriality, each V-2 rocket is much more than a simple terror-weapon of mass destruction, functioning instead as an active substance caught within and responding to an array of conflicting signifiers and desires that simultaneously reflect, transform, and constitute human subjectivity. The details of the novel’s opening passage testify to the vital materialism of the V-2 and confound any reader’s attempt to ascribe to it a purely negative value. For Pirate Prentice, the rocket is an amorphous “something” that transforms into a “new star” before transforming once again through his memory of a film he had watched into a seemingly unalterable object: a secret rocket bomb. Shortly afterward, the situation is reversed; Prentice discovers that what he thought was a deadly rocket has been “altered” in Brown’s sense of the term. Instead of a bomb, this particular rocket is a juryrigged delivery system, which carries a secret message from occupied Europe. More strangely, the message is accompanied by an erotic picture of another “star”—in this case, Prentice’s former love interest, Scorpia Mossmoon, on the set of a Cecile B. DeMille film (71–72). Even more strangely, the message is printed in “Kryptosam”—a colorless “proprietary form of stabilized tyrosine” (a naturally produced amino acid) that transforms into melanin (skin pigment) when treated with seminal fluid. Using the photograph as a masturbation tool, Prentice dutifully ejaculates onto the Kryptosam, and his semen, together with the hidden dye, create another half-technological and half-biological quasi object. Pynchon’s depiction of the rocket as an open thing rather than a closed object is not limited to the opening narrative sequence. As the

  The Garden in the Machine narrator later suggests, while all V-2 rockets ostensibly serve the same death-driven function, in practice, individual V-2s and their contents are extraordinarily mutable and are imbued with the same amount of vital power as a human agent: [T]he Rocket has to be many things, it must answer to a number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch it—in combat, in tunnel, on paper— it must survive heresies shining, unconfoundable . . . and heretics there will be: Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne . . . Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter— rivets, burner cup and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute and combine into new revelations, always unfolding . . . Manicheans who see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle. (727, my emphasis)

From the very beginning of the novel, each V-2 rocket thus sheds its singular instrumental encoding, moving seamlessly among three categories: technological body, biomimetic hybrid, and immaterial symbol. Though certain V-2 descriptions suggest that the rocket’s value lies in its intimate relationships with humans (“it must answer to a number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch it”), in many respects the vibrant rocket enters into more compelling and complex relationships with other objects. Consider film: Prentice and the movie theater audience not only witness the V-2 rocket on film before they see the object itself; in both instances, the film seems to produce rather than reproduce the object that it represents. For Prentice, the indeterminate “new star” on the horizon becomes a V-2 only when he remembers that “[h]e has seen it in a film.” Likewise, at the novel’s close, the unfortunate movie patrons come to the theater to watch a moving image of the rocket but find in its place the deadly object itself. Critics typically understand this inversion of cause and effect as Pynchon’s way of thumbing his nose at rational systems of control.4 But Pynchon also provides a clear rationale for how film might be thought to have given birth to the rocket. As David Cowart argues, German engineers such as the fictional Franz Pökler drew inspiration for their work on the V-2 from the early cinematic fictions of Fritz Lang including, most

The Garden in the Machine   importantly, Die Frau im Mond (1929), a film about a trip to the moon which German rocket scientists “regarded . . . not as mere childish fantasy, but as pure prophecy” (“Cinematic Auguries,” 364). Fiction thus gave shape to the then inchoate German aspiration for interstellar transcendence and served as an important recruitment tool when the project became militarized. Because it was the first ballistic missile and the first object to exit the earth’s atmosphere, the V-2 required not only German interest but also a series of dramatic advancements in the technical understanding of combustion, cooling, and navigation. Without knowledge of the changes in air pressure, temperature, and aerodynamics at high altitudes, German engineers would have been unable to create a rocket stable enough to maintain a precise flight path. To obtain such data, engineers such as the fictional Franz Pökler would seal [t]hermometers and barometers [ . . . ] in a watertight compartment with a movie camera. During flight the camera photographed the needles swinging on the gauges. After the flight the film was recovered, and the data played back. Engineers sat around looking at movies of dials. Meantime Heinkels were also dropping iron models of the Rocket from 20,000 feet. The fall was photographed by Askania cinetheodolite rigs on the ground. In the daily rushes you would watch the frames at around 3000 feet, where the model broke through the speed of sound. (Gravity’s Rainbow (GR hereafter), 407)

Likewise, “technicians at Peenemünde [would] peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy” to create and perfect the V-2’s navigational system (GR 567). In both passages, Pynchon makes clear that the V-2 was thus quite literally as much a product of film as it was the ultimate film “star.”5 Just as Lang’s film conditioned Pökler’s interest in the idea of the V-2 and just as the other cinema “stars” that populate the novel—Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Bela Lugosi, James Cagney, and the fictional Scorpia Mossmoon—condition other characters’ behaviors, the Askania films of the rocket’s test flights actively shape its subsequent perfected form.6 While film might have created the V-2, the V-2’s explosive precursors created film. The rich social history of filmic celluloid suggests that this polymer could easily challenge the V-2 for the title of ultimate “thing” in Pynchon’s work. Invented by the Englishman Alexander Parkes in 1855

  The Garden in the Machine and marketed under the trade name Parkesine, celluloid—a combination of nitric acid and cellulose—is widely considered the first synthetic plastic and thus the world’s first truly artificial object. Parkes’s landmark invention created another quasi object that is subject to multiple human desires and goals at the same time as it generates them. As Pynchon’s fictional chemist Laszlo Jamf recalls, “we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given’” (413). While Jamf’s final contribution to chemistry would be the fictional Imipolex-G, his historical counterparts in synthetic chemistry created the unnatural polymer celluloid out of natural cellulose. Judging from the literature of early polymer chemistry, Pynchon correctly assesses industrial chemistry’s Promethean aspirations to improve upon nature. One celluloid patent application describes the substance as follows: Celluloid is “a solid, about the consistency of shoe leather, which subsequently becomes as hard as horn or bone by the evaporation of camphor. Before the camphor is evaporated the material is easily softened by heat and may be molded into any desired form, which neither changes nor appreciably shrinks in hardening” (Böckmann 75–76). The remarkable combination of initial pliability and final rigidness made celluloid a wonder substance. Trade publications in the field of material science celebrated plastic in prose that bordered on the Whitmanesque: Celluloid is used for a great variety of purposes that are constantly being extended, there being now few if any industries in which this substance does not find employment in some form or another. In its natural conditions, without the addition of colouring matters or other adjuncts, celluloid is very extensively used, especially as a substitute for horn, tortoise-shell, coral, malachite, lapis-lazuli, marble, ebony, yellow or black amber, bronze articles, caoutchouc, ebonite, etc.; and, in fact, there is hardly a single substance known but that attempts have been made to imitate it with celluloid. For the above purposes it is used to a very large extent, and many articles of fancy ware, ornaments, etc., are now made of celluloid. In many other branches, too, celluloid has found application, such as for making artificial teeth, flexible mirrors, decorations in the greatest variety, spectacle frames, watch cases, buttons, pipe mouthpieces, cigar-holders, ash trays, soap boxes and trays, etc.

The Garden in the Machine   In fancy goods and hardware celluloid is used for making brooches, hairpins, bracelets, chains, earrings, crosses, medallions (either by itself or in combination with inlaid or riveted metals), imitation horn, tortoise-shell, coral, ivory, etc. It is also made into smooth, inlaid or stamped buttons, knife-handles, toothbrushes, prayer-book and album covers, cigarette cases, notebook covers, traveling cases, shoe eyelets, purses, pen and pencil cases, rulers, drumsticks, finger-stalls, serviette rings, cigar-holders, dolls’ heads and bodies, mirror and picture frames, figures for games, stick, umbrella and whip handles (in a great variety of shapes and patterns which compete successfully with handles of other materials), billiard balls, chessman and other figures used in games, etc. (Böckmann 108–109).

In a passage that resonates with Pynchon’s lavish description of the V-2’s many functions, this description conveys some measure of the excitement surrounding the discovery of celluloid’s seemingly infinite plasticity. In a manner akin to ivory, coral, precious metals, or other natural substances, celluloid’s lack of a singular objecthood became its ultimate strength. In its shapelessness and opacity, celluloid was cast as the tangible equivalent of a Rorschach diagram, an artificial substance that is also a raw material—a thing that becomes quite literally any thing. While Pynchon’s novel expresses a deep ambivalence toward the final products of polymer chemistry, it celebrates the “thingness” of plastics such as celluloid through intertextual references to the 1940s comic book Plastic Man. Created by comic icon Jack Cole, Plastic Man is a safecracking bank robber named Eel O’Brian who, in an ill-fated heist at a chemical company warehouse, is accidentally drenched with a large quantity of an unidentified acid. Just as nitric acid bonds to cellulose to form celluloid, this acid bonds to O’Brian’s body, giving him the remarkable ability to change his shape to take on the appearance of any object. Leaving a life of crime, O’Brian becomes Plastic Man—scourge of dope peddlers, Nazis, and mad scientists. In his first few comic adventures, Plastic Man takes the form of a rug (14), a rubber ball (16), a slingshot (20), a set of pipes (28), a flying squirrel (61), a snake (69), a dog (104), and a chair (119), Franklin Roosevelt (145), and even Adolf Hitler (145) in his ongoing attempt to keep the world safe from evil. Appropriately, Tyrone Slothrop—Pynchon’s hero and himself a man of many humorous transformations—is a fan of the comic series.7 Recalling his hallucinogenic voyage through the sewer systems of New York

  The Garden in the Machine (64–67), Slothrop daydreams: “Four-colored Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist’s lab, out of whose faucet Plas’s head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. ‘Yeah. Who’re you, Ace?’” (206–207). Through his daydreams of Plastic Man, Pynchon’s hero celebrates the kind of plasticity that enables people and objects to move seamlessly through and around the various blockades of the Zone. And if Pynchon’s aforementioned critics are correct, it is this same plasticity that seems to govern effective readings of the hyperkinetic, networked novel as a whole.

Gravity’s Rainbow as Parabolic Tragedy Of course, the passages within Gravity’s Rainbow that ascribe positive values to the V-2 rocket and its associated polymer, celluloid, are dwarfed by passages that link both substances to the nefarious activities of governmental and corporate bureaucracies bent on world domination. One of Pynchon’s mad scientists, the Pavlovian Géza Rózsavölgyi, remarks in his evaluation of Slothrop that celluloid’s remarkable plasticity made it a fitting agent for control as well as for creative transmutation. “[W]hen given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind” (81). Like LéviStrauss’s bricoleur, who communicates his “poetics” through this material action, the makers of Pynchon’s world (and, perhaps, Pynchon’s readers) express their desires by shaping things into objects. But if the polymer (or the rocket) falls into the hands of certain subjects, the results are catastrophic, precipitating the tragic fall into objecthood that drives the narrative toward its apocalyptic conclusion. While celluloid may have been the late nineteenth century’s ultimate thing, its late twentieth-century functional history suggests a tragic diminution in its capabilities. Ironically, during the time in which Pynchon published his novel, the very term plastic was undergoing a profound semantic change. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, when the term was coined in the mid-seventeenth century, plastic denoted “a

The Garden in the Machine   creative or procreative principle” or a “non-material” or highly malleable material. By the early twentieth century, plastic had has been stripped of its thing-power and instead designated “a permanent change in shape of a material” that signified its “in-elastic” nature (OED). This historical shift brought upon by advances in material science accounts for the greater symbolic value of Rózsavölgyi’s pronouncement: at the site of its production, a “shapeless blob” of plastic can imitate anything, but once its producer has decided upon its function, it hardens into a deadened expression of the producer’s will. The tragic diminution of celluloid’s vibrant materiality is foretold in its earlier function as a military weapon. A little over a decade before Parkesine was patented, the German-Swiss chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein and his colleague Rudolf Böttger discovered a new explosive formed by the combination of cotton (cellulose) and nitric acid. The pair named in resulting substance guncotton.8 As an explosive, guncotton proved far superior to gunpowder: it produced much more propellant force without smoke or excessive heat. Because of these properties, guncotton (marketed under the trade name Indurite) was adopted as the official powder of the United States Government in 1889 (Worden 900). That same year, the British government adopted a combination of guncotton and nitroglycerine as its official powder, marketing it under the trade name Cordite. Both powders persisted beyond the Second World War and exerted a profound influence upon Pynchon’s and other literary figures’ imaginations. For example, in a plot that inspired both Lang’s Die Frau im Mond and the V-2’s fatal final voyage in Gravity’s Rainbow, Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865) hypothesized that guncotton could propel a projectile containing three human beings into outer space. Tyrone Slothrop comes across a comparable scheme during his investigation of rocket propulsion in Pynchon’s novel: “It seems that early in 1941, the British Ministry of Supply let a £10,000 research contract to Shell—wanted Shell to develop a rocket engine that would run on something besides cordite, which was being used those days to blow up various sorts of people at the rate of oodles ‘n’ oodles of tons an hour, and couldn’t be spared for rockets” (240). Pynchon returns to this idea in his later novel Against the Day (2006), in which the “Chums of Chance” observe a series of airships “powered by guncotton reciprocators and naphtha engines” (27).9

  The Garden in the Machine The chemical kinship of guncotton and celluloid suggests that, in addition to the latter’s miraculously pliable properties, celluloid contained a rather sizable design flaw: unlike the natural substances that it emulated, this plastic could (and often did) explode without warning. If, as the chemical engineers of Gravity’s Rainbow insist, natural substances “can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given,” a curse falls upon these transformed substances as they age. To borrow the titular phrase from another Pynchon novel, the design flaw of celluloid constitutes its “inherent vice”: a term that refers to a hidden defect in an object that directly contributes to that object’s deterioration, damage, or destruction. Within Gravity’s Rainbow, this inherent vice falls most heavily upon a form of celluloid of which Pynchon seems most enamored— celluloid film. Compared to the long history of guncotton, the history of filmic celluloid is relatively short. A type of nitrated cellulose called collodion was developed during the 1850s for photographic use by the Englishman Scott Archer, but it remained a relatively marginal base until 1888, when celluloid began to replace glass plate as the dominant medium for photography. That same year, George Eastman marketed celluloid alongside his popular camera as the first widely available roll film. In the early 1890s, Eastman began to share his roll film with Edison’s laboratory for use with the latter’s Kinetoscope experiments. Though nitrate-based film quickly became the industry standard, it was (like guncotton) violently explosive—a property contributing to many devastating accidents, including, most famously, the May 4, 1897, fire at the Charity Sale Bazaar in Paris.10 Pynchon’s knowledge of this history can be intuited from the way he incorporates celluloid into his novel Against the Day, set around the same time period in which Eastman began marketing his celluloid film. In one notable scene, two characters in the novel pose for a photograph: The two men were posed as if for some ceremonial purpose. For the gray day, the exposure was a little longer, and you’d expect one at least to have moved and blurred the image, but no, they had stood rigid, almost defiant, allowing the collodion mixture its due measure of light, to record the two killers with unrelenting fidelity, as if set in front of some slow emulsion of an earlier day. (300)

In another moment from the novel, the traveling photographer Merle Rideout arrives in Audacity, Iowa, to discover a rowdy mob in front of

The Garden in the Machine   the “Dreamtime Movy” theater. Shortly before he arrives, the celluloid in the theater’s projector jams, freezing the film’s narrative at the climactic moment in which the female lead is being swept toward a giant waterfall. When Rideout offers his assistance to the projectionist, the two succeed in threading the film back onto the sprocket. In a humorous scene that resonates with the conclusion of Gravity’s Rainbow, Merle asks the projectionist about the machine: “O.K., light her off now, what’re these, gas burners?” “Acetylene.” It worked fine now, and the two of them stood a minute and gazed at the screen as the lip of the perilous cascade drew ever closer. (450).

As the audience watches one lip of a “perilous cascade,” Pynchon reminds his readers of the other perilous lip at the center of the projector—one spewing acetylene fire rather than water. “‘Frankly,’ [the projectionist] admitted later over a friendly glass of beer, ‘it has always scared the hell out of me, too much energy loose in that little room, too much heat, nitro in the film, feel like it’s all going to explode any minute, the stories you hear, if it was only the light it’d be one thing, but these other forces’” (450–451). The transition to acetate-based safety film in 1949 reduced the number of cinema fires in the United States and Europe. However, as nitrate-based celluloid began to age during the midcentury, another unnatural problem emerged. Because of its unstable chemical properties, nitrate film readily decomposes over time, discoloring the picture image and off-gassing noxious fumes (Slide 3). Because nitrate film often shrinks during this process, when it is run though a projector, its sprocket holes easily become misaligned with the projector threads. Film historian Stephen Herbert notes: Clearly this is very dangerous, because if you are running a film and it does not fit the sprockets, it is going to come off them, and then it is going to find its way into or onto the very hot lamp-house, and that is not what you want to do with nitrate film. . . . Sometimes the film would simply jam, sometimes it would actually feed its way into the gate only to get chopped up by the shutter into little pieces of flammable nitrate—either way, a difficult situation. (Smither 103)

This “difficult situation” concludes Gravity’s Rainbow. Wrapped in the polymer Imipolex-G, a young would-be-astronaut named Gottfried is placed into a repurposed V-2 rocket and launched into the sky. As the

  The Garden in the Machine rocket reaches Brennschluss (the end of rocket fuel burning), it begins its inevitable descent, which brings the novel to its frenetic conclusion: the black CATCH you’ve let a number of them go by, Gottfried, important ones you didn’t want to miss . . . you know this is the last time . . . CATCH when did this roaring stop? Brennschluss, when was Brennschluss it can’t be this soon . . . but the burnt-out tail-opening is swinging across the sun and through the blonde hair of the victim here’s a Brocken-specter, someone’s, something’s shadow projected from out here in the bright sun and darkening sky into the regions of gold, of whitening, of growing still as underwater as Gravity dips away briefly . . . what is this death but a whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches, detergents, oxidizers, abrasives—Streckefuss he’s been today to the boy’s tormented muscles, but more appropriately is he Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of pigment, of melanin, of spectrum, of separateness from shade to shade, it is so white that CATCH the dog was a red setter, the last dog’s head, the kind dog come to see him off can’t remember what red meant, the pigeon he chased was slateblue, but they’re both white now beside the canal that night the smell of trees oh I didn’t want to lose that night CATCH a wave between houses. (759)

Gottfried’s descent generates the aforementioned proleptic shift in narrative time to the immediate present, as the narrator recounts a rocket (perhaps Gottfried’s) descending upon the Orpheus Theater in Los Angeles. At this moment, the narrator explains that “we” are the audience within this theater eagerly anticipating our own destruction: “Come-on! Startthe-show! Come-on! Start-the-show!” Once again, as “we” watch, the narrator notes: “it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t” (760). Many critics have taken this final rocket to be an oblique reference to a nuclear warhead that signals the immanent apocalypse of the nuclear age. Tony Tanner, for example, likens the Orpheus Theater to “the old theatre of our civilization” that is annihilated by the Cold War logic of the rocket (55). This reading renders Pynchon’s readers as passive bystanders to their own destruction and suggests a final, cataclysmic end to Pynchon’s history of the Second World War. A more thematically consistent interpretation arises when one recalls the material composition of the film upon which Gottfried’s image is captured.11 If the “film” in Pynchon’s theater has indeed been “shot” in

The Garden in the Machine   1945, the material from which it is made is certainly cellulose nitrate or celluloid rather than the later acetate-based safety film. Thus, in a fitting moment of symmetry, just as the V-2 falls toward its final death, celluloid “CATCHes” in the projector, which causes the rocket to speed up, slow down, and change colors before disintegrating into an explosive powder. The final fragmented section bears this out; the concluding passage removes the reader from the “reality” of Gottfried’s narrative and places her into a theater of the absolute present with an undetermined projector problem: descent The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The last image was too immediate for any eye to register. (760)

As the film ages and the V-2 falls, both objects revert back to the deadly functions prescribed to them in their assembly, becoming unstable, explosive entities that leave nothing but the final “dim page spread before us.” In other words, the vibrant things that gave birth to each other fuse and explode, concluding the parabolic tragedy of objects that cannot escape the cultural gravity of their design flaws. Despite the profound pessimism that coats this final section, Pynchon leaves open the possibility of escape from this death-driven ride. After all, the final “dim page” is, quite literally, cellulose—one of the two primary components of nitrocellulose film and the basis of the Slothrop family’s business. This “chemical” transmutation of the narrative from film back into paper, coupled with the novel’s final lines, suggests that “There is still time” and that the tragedy of objects may yet be avoided. To this end, Pynchon offers an enigmatic song from another Slothropian patriarch, “centuries forgotten and out of print”: There is a Hand to turn the time, Though thy Glass today be run, Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low Find the last poor Pret’rite one . . . Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,

  The Garden in the Machine All through our crippl’d Zone, With a face on ev’ry mountainside . . . And a Soul in ev’ry stone . . . Now everybody— (760)

If the “glass” for the poor theatergoers has run out, Pynchon suggests that other groups might escape this fate by accessing what Slothrop’s patriarch calls the “Soul in ev’ry stone.” What I take Pynchon to mean here is that we must alter the ways that nature is transformed into artificial objects to forestall the explosive effects of the “inherent vice” of the process. For his rugged consumers, the challenge is therefore to find a practice of misuse that might achieve this goal.

The Rebirth of Natural Design Two years after the term biomimesiswas coined, Barry Commoner wrote his 1971 environmental manifesto The Closing Circle, which identified both the ideological basis of Western society’s environmental problems and a set of potential solutions to such problems through two metaphorical shapes: the line and the circle. Associating the line with post-Newtonian models of scientific causality, Commoner argued that the compartmentalization of scientific disciplines had effectively prevented society from making wise environmental policy decisions. Anticipating Bruno Latour’s later critique of modernity, Commoner argued that such compartmentalization creates an atomistic knowledge base that places a premium on singular cause-and-effect relationships and renders other systemic relationships unthinkable. Commoner believed that “the line” performs adequately in the controlled environment of the scientific laboratory, but he maintained that this method failed when it was applied to multivariable problems such as global pollution, because “[i]n looking at one set of relationships, we inevitably ignore a good deal of the rest” (23). This reductive model has direct political consequences within multivariable environments, because “the notion that every effect must have a singular ‘cause’ is conveniently embedded in public awareness of science,” leaving “a good deal of room for evasive tactics” by the industrial and agricultural sectors (109). Commoner argued that without a proverbial smoking gun to implicate a polluter of

The Garden in the Machine   streams or a consumer of finite natural resources, Americans feel powerless to reverse the continuing degradation of their habitat. Other environmental manifestos of the 1960s and 1970s reached similar conclusions. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), for example, meticulously documented the introduction of DDT into the earth’s ecosystem and charted the chemical’s migration up the food chain from algae to fish to birds. Adopting an apocalyptic tenor, Carson argued that the pesticide damaged not only human food supplies but also the genetic lines of human civilization. Such damage testified to DDT’s flawed design and, concomitantly, the failure of linear thinking: “This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits” (13). Like Commoner’s study, her work challenged this perspective through the recurrent metaphor of “the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology” (189).12 Commoner charts a way out of this eco-political quandary by establishing a handful of deceptively simple rules of ecology, the foremost of which is that in both nature and society “[e]verything is connected to everything else” (33). Like Pynchon, who insists that “everything is connected, everything in the Creation” (703, Pynchon’s italics), Commoner overturns the preestablished “linear” notions of causality that govern scientific and industrial production and stresses a holistic approach to technological design that incorporates an analysis of not only the various technologies produced by a given industry but also the effects of each technology’s inevitable demise in the wake of more advanced technologies. His conclusions call attention to the synergistic effects of multiple pollutants in the environment and address the necessary question: what happens to products that are designed to be indestructible or harmful when those products are no longer wanted? Finding such notions of waste analysis wanting in current design procedures, Commoner advocates a perspective aligned with the recycling principles of natural systems in which “there is no such thing as waste”— only transformation of value from one system to another. He offers the simple example of animal respiration to illustrate this cyclic principle: “Animals release carbon dioxide as a respiratory waste; this is an essential nutrient for green plants. Plants excrete oxygen, which is used by animals. Animal organic wastes nourish the bacteria of decay. Their wastes,

  The Garden in the Machine [and] inorganic materials such as nitrate, phosphate, and carbon dioxide, become algal nutrients” (39–40). This form of biomimetic reuse serves as an alternative to the death-driven polymer chemistry of munitions and plastics in Pynchon’s tragedy of objects. For Pynchon, the social histories of celluloid and the V-2 rocket demonstrate the shortcomings of design programs that manipulate vibrant things in order to assemble materially and semantically static objects with singular antisocial uses. As he writes, the polymer industry may have looked like the birthplace of new living materials, but such creations are merely “the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to deathtransfigured. The best you can do is polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerization is not resurrection” (166). The possibility that an object’s “resurrection” is simply “death-transfigured” informs all instances of object misuse in the novel. For example, Pynchon begins the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow, “Beyond the Zero,” with an epigraph from Wernher von Braun, former head of the German V-2 missile project: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death” (1). Taken from von Braun’s comments regarding the July 1969 Apollo moon launch, these words reflect the unique position of the former Nazi scientist, who had by then assumed a place atop the fully formed NASA space program. Moving out of the death-driven production of wartime rocketry, von Braun had likewise returned the V-2 missile project from its destructive goal of mass death to the romantic dream of early German rocket scientists: the pursuit of interplanetary space travel. Here appears the principle of creative misuse at its finest, with the avatar of death remade into a symbol of spiritual faith and immortality. The linear move from German rocketeering’s Romantic aspirations of interstellar flight to wartime destruction thus becomes circular in the life of von Braun, who moves from life to death, then back to life. Of course, given von Braun’s dubious past, the quotation cuts both ways, particularly in its fuller form: Many people seem to feel that science has somehow made “religious ideas” untimely or old-fashioned. But I think science has a real surprise for the skeptics. Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even in the tiniest

The Garden in the Machine   particle, can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation. Now if God applies this fundamental principle of indestructibility to the most minute and insignificant parts of the universe, does it not make sense to assume that He applies it also to the human soul? I think it does. And everything science has taught me and continues to teach me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace. (von Braun 119)

While the prospect of “Nothing disappear[ing] without a trace” seems appealing when applied to the human soul, von Braun’s idea takes on a very different appearance when applied to the technologies of a totalitarian power such as Nazi Germany. As technology critics such as Deborah Johnson have observed, “there is an inseparability, an inalterable link, between a technology and the institutions, practices, and actors that produced it. The inalterable link here is metaphysical in the sense that the carry over is in the very existence (being) of the thing, even though it may not be in any physical feature of it” (22). In other words, the original use-value of a given object may encode all of that object’s subsequent behaviors. Thus even in its “misused” state the V-2 may haunt the Apollo program, just as World War II clearly haunts the 1970s context from which Pynchon’s historical fiction proceeds. The passage’s curious attempt to prop up an embattled Christian telos proves doubly difficult to digest within the context of Pynchon’s novel, because the dominant material operation that governs transformations in the author’s world is entropy.13 Indeed, Pynchon’s context suggests that von Braun’s words have already begun to lose their value and will soon decay and scatter just as Tyrone Slothrop physically and spiritually scatters at the novel’s conclusion. Clearly, the uncomplicated overlap of natural and religious systems depends upon which natural system one chooses, and the fragmented quotation—serving as a synecdoche for this type of analysis—warns the reader against any reductive reading of nature as a simple alternative to the problems of human history. The ambiguity of von Braun’s epigraph—itself a language system in the process of being “misused” within the radically alternative context of a work of fiction—offers a useful foothold for understanding the value of reuse in Pynchon’s novel, which proceeds from a peculiar historical position caught between past (historical)- and future (fictional)-oriented

  The Garden in the Machine trajectories. Within his 1972 literary context, the absolute value placed upon originality within the modernist avant-garde aesthetic—once an affirmation of man’s liberation from history—became a burden that American artists could not bear. After modernism, postwar artists struggled to find their own voices in what appeared to be a diminishing creative space. Out of this belated milieu, artists and their critical counterparts began to reconsider the precepts of originality that seemed to govern aesthetic evaluations their field. These reconsiderations led to essays such as John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), which posited (albeit only provisionally) that “‘original’ literature” might be outdated, a sentiment echoed in Roland Barthes’s famous pronouncement of the death of the author in 1968. The supposed “exhaustion” or “used-upness of certain forms” of which Barth speaks cross-weaves aesthetic and stylistic threads through “high sixties” environmental webs. The coinciding notions of entropic decay within both models reveal a worldview of diminishing physical and metaphysical resources in which the value of material forms moves from high to low over time. The persistence of modernism within university and museum cultures threatened to render contemporary art repetitive (or worse, obsolete) before it had even emerged, just as the totalizing systems of the “Power Elite” threatened to efface the political power of emergent social groups. While the form or substance of a literary work, let alone a soul, may indeed persist through time, the “information” associated with this object, as Norbert Weiner argued in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), cannot be conserved (116). Eventually each object must transform or become waste. From the perspective of the great Western cultural project, such a pessimistic conclusion is anathema. Concerned as we (and von Braun) are with the preservation of cultural and social artifacts, the notion that such artifacts become emptied of meaning over time seems to strike at our desires for transcendence, historical place, and immortality. Environmental scientists offer a way out of this closed system of diminishing returns, however, by suggesting that “there is no such thing as waste,” only protean potential. The “products” of such transformed waste may indeed bear the “trace” of earlier forms or substances, but the purgative vital power of natural life cycles can cleanse the object of its previous incarnation, allowing

The Garden in the Machine   not only matter but also embodied language to be separated from its past and then reinfused with meaning. For Pynchon, the linguistic devices through which this idea is expressed are puns, which in Gravity’s Rainbow range from the simplistic to the ornate. Hunting for clues to the mysterious Schwarzgerät, Slothrop visits the German spa town, Bad Karma (457). Onboard the ship Anubis, he encounters a Japanese naval man with the Latinate appellation Morituri. In a pun only an engineer could love, Pirate Prentice encounters Sammy Hilbert-Spaess (who happens to share the name of a complex mathematical concept: Hilbert Space) later in the novel (540). Just as the name of Pynchon’s earlier protagonist Oedipa Maas establishes interpretative structures based upon a preexistent myth, “Bad Karma” and “Morituri” offer paths to understand the spaces and characters of Pynchon’s novel. For example, as Greta Erdmann dons a suit made of Imipolex during a strange sexual encounter with the “plastics connoisseur” Drohne, she confuses the chemical word “butadiene” for the more poetical “beauty dying” (487). Given the fact that butadiene is a common building block of plastics, the sonic disjunction of butadiene/“beauty dying” signifies the disappearance of natural cycles during the rise of linear design processes. But like the misleading allusive structures in The Crying of Lot 49, these puns often disappoint those who would view them as simple recurrences of the historical past or hermeneutical keys to Pynchon’s plot. For example, in spite of his fateful name, Morituri does not die for his country. As this minor example illustrates, within Pynchon’s postmodern environmental aesthetic, words can be divorced from their original meanings and reinfused with new provisional identities to such an extent that their original meanings signify nothing of their present conditions. In this sense, his puns fulfill Commoner’s program of a cyclic design in which reuse purges a substance of its earlier associations. Pynchon’s puns thus express his ongoing effort to make things out of words and to reintroduce these word-things into the natural cycles of the world. As his narrator stresses at one point, the novel’s wordplay is “not a malignant pun against an intended sufferer so much as a sympathetic magic, a repetition high and low of some prevailing form” (232). Translating objects out of a material science context and into the realm of magic, Pynchon allows new meanings to recode the old.

  The Garden in the Machine In several elaborate puns, the “prevailing form” of natural transformation establishes the structure of the preceding narrative. Consider the following exchange between a recurring character in Pynchon’s novels, Bloody Chiclitz, and Major Duane Marvy: Children come in and go out, bringing furs and taking them away [ . . . ] There are about 30 kids on Chiclitz’s payroll. “My dream,” he admits, “is to bring all these kids back to America, out to Hollywood. I think there’s a future for them in pictures. You heard of Cecil B. De Mille, the producer? My brotherin-law’s pretty close to him. I think I can teach them to sing or something, a children’s chorus, negotiate a package deal with De Mille. He can use them for the real big numbers, religious scenes, orgy scenes—” “Ha!” cries Marvy, dribbling champagne, eyeballs bulging. “You’re dreaming all right, old buddy! You sell those kids to Cecil B. De Mille it’s f’damn sure they ain’t goam be singin’. He’ll use them little ‘suckers for galley slaves! Yaahha-ha—yeah they’ll be chained to th’ oars, just haulin’ ass, rowin’ old Henry Wilcoxon away into th’ sunset to fight them Greeks or Persians or somebody.” “Galley slaves?” Chiclitz roars. “Never, by God. For De Mille, young furhenchmen can’t be rowing!” (558–559)

As Steven Weisenburger has argued, this entire self-contained digression seems designed for no other purpose than the production of the final gonzo pun: Forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong (240).14 The driving force of this narrative digression thus mimics the recycling tendencies of natural systems; the clichéd maxim of French sexuality—itself both the revelation and recreation of a specific historical event—takes on a new playful value. Pynchonian puns thus present a stylistic alternative to the death-driven progression of a history governed by linear design. By limiting his “design procedure” to the misuse rather than reuse of the world, Pynchon shows that words, like recycled waste molecules, can continue their transformative cycling against the deadening effect of history.15 If puns might be understood as the rugged consumption of language, other frameworks of object misuse might be understood as the rugged consumption of material things. These two devices converge in Pynchon’s description of the waste, manure, and vomit that compose Pirate Prentice’s unusual rooftop victory garden. As the narrator meticulously recounts, the rooftop and its topsoil are material assemblages generated by a long history of creative partnerships between humans and vibrant things.

The Garden in the Machine   [The building was constructed by] Corydon Throsp, an acquaintance of the Rossettis who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up in the roof (a tradition young Osbie Feel has lately revived), a few of them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning, as fragments of a peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize Wessex Saddlebock sows quartered there by Throsp’s successor, and dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean—all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas. (5)

Glancing over the passage, a reader can readily understand why early critics dismissed Pynchon’s work as bloated or overwritten. The roof is at once a pharmaceutical plant, an arboretum, a pig farm, and a vomitorium. But these critics overlook the stylistic function of such a bloated form: as the narrator insists, “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into” (3) a web of stories, each of which operates as a trace that dramatizes the formation of new narratives and new substances from historical waste. As the neologism suggests, three pigs, several hair nets, and a few bad meals all “scumble” together to bring a new polymeric thing into the world. Given its environmental framework, Pynchon’s plot does not and cannot obey the simplistic clarifying structures of the linear narration organized around the simple logic of singular cause and singular effect. Instead, the narrative present comes into being as an agglutination of many human and nonhuman assemblages that produce a chain of unstable effects. While Pynchon’s narrative nourishes itself upon messy traces of historical memory, the physical detritus of past events becomes the nourishment for Pirate’s highly improbable bananas. The story of Prentice’s bananas also establishes a structural foil to the death-driven V-2 rocket that Pirate observes at the novel’s opening. Hearing no explosion, Prentice muses that “God has plucked it for him, out of its airless sky, like a steel banana” (8). Like the V-2, the banana is a multitudinous vibrant thing that structures human behavior. Set against the production history of the V-2, however, Prentice’s metaphor reinforces the fundamental differences between the values of the two objects. The people who gather about Prentice’s bananas gain an appreciation for

  The Garden in the Machine natural cycles that has no parallel in the industrial design work of Pynchon’s polymer chemists or rocket scientists: Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations . . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell against falling objects. . . . (10)

Though Prentice transforms bananas in numerous ways—making banana waffles, banana mead, banana kreplach, banana oatmeal, banana jam, banana bread, and so on—such transformations require cooperation with, rather than domination of, nature: the banana “shares” Prentice’s secret spell against falling objects. Moreover, instead of preserving the divide between subjects and objects, such design processes reveal a shared force that unites both in the dance of living genetic chains. Serving as a symbol of the regenerative power of nature in the midst of the destruction of war, Pirate’s banana breakfast brings his fellow bunkmates together under the sign of natural community: “With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate’s mob gathers at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp’s mediaeval fantasies” (10). The vivifying transformations that produced the Pirate’s bananas act upon the motley crew that consumes them, creating new life-sustaining assemblages in the midst of death. In his essay “The Thing,” Heidegger describes a clay jug as a shaped void that attains its essential thingness through its existence as a metaphysical “gift” wherein “mortals and divinities dwell together all at once” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 171). Heidegger explains that the void at the center of the jug simultaneously constructs and is constructed by its fourfold surroundings: “In the gift of the outpouring, earth and sky, mortals and divinities dwell together all at once. These four, at one because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is

The Garden in the Machine   present, they are enfolded into a single fourfold” (171). Prentice’s banana breakfast also becomes a “gift” that gathers and transforms mortals (Prentice’s “mob”), gods (the feast of transfiguration that instructs Death to “fuck off”), earth (the clattering objects that are rearranged around the table), and sky (the banana-infused air) as it comes into being. As a representative of natural cycles, the “living genetic chains” of Pirate’s bananas suggest both rebirth and sexual reproduction. Within the novel’s transformative structures, Pirate’s bananas operate as a circular counterpart to the parabolic, death-driven flight of the V-2 rocket. Prentice’s breakfast offers a pastoral alternative to the technological products of the Zone. But if (as in biomimetic design) artificial objects can be renaturalized, even the V-2 can be repurposed into a new object in the hands of an appropriate community. In this spirit, Pynchon describes activities that anticipate the “remanufacturing” design work of later biomimetic teams. For example, when the American army begins to pack up a set of V-2 rockets for shipment back to the United States, a “company lounge lizard,” Nick De Profundis, steals components of the rockets and refashions them into one-of-a-kind treasures. A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains, money clips or a scatter pin for that special girl back home, burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the Telefunken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price. (295)

While the army disassembles the V-2 only to reassemble it later, De Profundis’s creative misuse of the V-2 component parts sends each burner cup, ball bearing, and diode on another journey toward new humanobject networks. Pynchon frames the biomimetic misuse of the V-2 as a process that, like Prentice’s bananas, leads to the formation of new communities and new life. The alcohol used to fuel the rocket, for example, becomes the fuel for a party that recalls Prentice’s breakfast: an “innocent salute to Postwar, a hope that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near” (593): Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of Army personnel, American soldiers, NAAFI girls, and German fräuleins. Fraternizing, every last one of them, shamefully, amid noise which becomes . . . a song . . . . From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced

  The Garden in the Machine in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets, and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn. (593, emphasis my own)

Later in the novel, American agent Roger Mexico discovers a marine salvage yard that has been converted into a pub (708), and the novel’s chief protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, drinks beer out of a large shell casing (307). Each instance of cyclic misuse reorganizes social relationships in ways that oppose the rigid military hierarchies required of the V-2’s original use-value as an agent of death. Across military and social lines, people gather about the V-2’s scattered remains like spiritual devotees around a feast-animal, transforming an object of death into a naturalized thing.

Two Vibrant Bodies If critics such as Stefan Mattessich are right, if the “truth” of Gravity’s Rainbow can only “be grasped . . . in the movement of a counterharmony or discord that agitates against the fluid restitution of meaning to the text,” then Pynchon has created a biomimetic narrative of sorts that illustrates the antisocial effects of negative design as it embodies an opposite, naturalized approach (72–73). In keeping with this biomimetic approach, instead of offering a chapter summary, I want to conclude here with a story of two vibrant bodies—Tyrone Slothrop and Byron the Bulb—that retell the sprawling story of this chapter in a smaller form. Pynchon frames Tyrone Slothrop and Byron the Bulb as renegade subjects capable of autonomous action; for this reason, they serve as threats to technocratic systems of authoritarian design. At the start of his tale, Byron looks down from “Bulb Baby Heaven” before “M-Day.” From this unmade state, he contemplates actions that extend far beyond what might be considered his role in the world: When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet Byron’s elated. He has passed the time hatching some really insane grandiose plans—he’s gonna organize all the Bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack (Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually trigger an epileptic fit! True. Byron has had a vision against the rafters of his ward, of 20

The Garden in the Machine   million Bulbs, all over Europe, at a given synchronizing pulse arranged by one of his many agents in the Grid, all these Bulbs begin to strobe together, humans thrashing around the 20 million rooms like fish on the beaches of Perfect Energy—Attention, humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time, a few of us will explode. (648–649, Pynchon’s italics)

Likewise, Slothrop begins the narrative as an anarchic agent in history. While he is an American liaison within one of the war’s numerous organizations (in this case, ACHTUNG, or the Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany), Slothrop cannot be considered one of “Them”: he is too messy, too gregarious, and all too human. Slothrop’s desk, for example, resonates with the earlier description of Prentice’s topsoil: It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Naline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukelele chords to a dozen songs. (18)

Ironically, the only object that Slothrop seems to keep organized within his office space is a map of London upon which he pastes a set of different colored stars that correspond to the locations of his multitudinous sexual exploits. If, as the narrator charitably posits, he “evidently [had] the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl chasing,” his erotic tour of duty would seem to counterbalance the death-driven affairs of the Second World War. Despite their anarchistic tendencies, however, both Byron and Slothrop suffer from similar problems of impotency. Byron’s “Strobing Tactic” certainly demonstrates a kind of thing-power that is akin to human agency; he can emulate the alpha waves of his human adversaries. But through this emulation, Byron turns human subjects into objects

  The Garden in the Machine and thus he participates in the same dehumanizing activities celebrated within the death-driven physical and social engineering systems in the Zone. In other words, Byron’s fantasy suggests that death-driven design flaws are inscribed into the very patterns of human thought, which inevitably transform any other agentic entity into a potential object to be controlled. The story of Tyrone Slothrop exhibits the same problem. In spite of his sexual proclivities (he beds nearly every woman that he meets in the novel), Slothrop never produces a child: “The Pope’s staff is always going to remain barren, like Slothrop’s own unflowering cock” (470). Instead, as he discovers in his travels, his erotic desires give birth to fiery death in the form of the V-2. Confusing an externally induced erection for self-generated desire, Slothrop acts upon this conditioned response by bedding the first willing partner he meets. As the alternatively hilarious and nefarious military organization PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender) discovers, these locations are also the places where V-2 rockets will later fall. The site of Slothrop’s erotic subjectivity, the “Penis He Thought Was His Own,” becomes instead a perverse divining rod for British intelligence services (216). Thus, Slothrop’s anarchistic urgings, like Byron’s “Strobing Tactic,” reinforce rather than challenge the logic of the singular use. If either character acts upon his desires, he also lays waste to everything around him. But Byron the Bulb and Slothrop offer provisional solutions to these logical double binds as they wander through the Zone. As Byron ages, his anarchistic fantasies split into two dreams, one of transcendence through recycling and the other of transcendence through rugged consumerism. Oddly enough, the former dream might be thought of as a form of surrender to the organization that hunts him: The plan is to smash up Byron and send him back right there in the shop to cullet and batch—salvage the tungsten, of course—and let him be reincarnated in the glassblower’s next project (a balloon setting on a journey from a tall skyscraper). This wouldn’t be too bad a deal for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus how many hours he has on him. Here in the shop he’s watched enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool from which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and wouldn’t mind going through it himself. (651)

The Garden in the Machine   However, since he, like the plastics that populate the Zone, is “immortal,” he offers another form of transcendence not through complete recycling but by exploiting certain unintended characteristics of his being: He has come to see how the Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of lightenergy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” (653)

If Byron, like so many other objects of the twentieth century, cannot return to the “structureless pool from which all glass forms spring,” he can attain a comparable state through indirect participation in the various assemblages that surround him. By the end of his story, Byron remains content to simply provide light for the various groups who require his services throughout the European theater: “He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. . . . ” (655). But his human counterpart, Slothrop, fulfills Byron’s desires as well as the other half of Pynchon’s rugged consumer platform. Slothrop “was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly—and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered” (738). After having undergone a series of changes in his identity, Slothrop begins to fragment around the narrative’s apocalyptic conclusion. Like Byron’s dream of resurrection, however, this scattering brings life rather than death, or, perhaps more precisely, life out of death: “At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon” (626). Slothrop, of course, makes for a strange Christ, but he does undergo a resurrection. As he walks through the desolate Zone, he witnesses a rainbow, “a stout rainbow cock driven down out of the pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural” (626).

  The Garden in the Machine If Slothrop’s revelation leaves him without “a thing in his head,” it is perhaps because he has begun to see himself as a natural thing that joins with other humans and nonhumans in creative, vibrant, material interchanges. Within this pastoral setting, he escapes the death-driven nature of his desires and begins to “scatter”: “Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering” (742). As Slothrop dissipates, the surrounding narrative fills with descriptions of rugged consumer communities that he, in a sense, seeds. When asked about Slothrop in an interview, for example, a “spokesman” for the counterforce prefers to discuss an act of creative repurposing: “I recall the time Christian found an old alarm clock, and we salvaged the radium, to coat our plumb-bob strings with. They shone in the twilight” (738). Later, two of Pynchon’s preterite reuse Slothrop’s kazoo as a smoking instrument: “[They] have unscrewed the holder and reed from [the] kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil—punched holes in the tinfoil, and are now smoking hashish out of the kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete the smoke” (745). Finally, one of the men screws Byron the Bulb into the reed of the kazoo/smoking bowl, creating a mute for the strange instrument that Bryon (hilariously) understands as “a declaration of brotherhood by the Kazoo for all the captive and oppressed light bulbs” (745). In each instance, lively and enlivened objects are assembled from Slothrop’s disassembly, with each newly ensouled vibrant thing testifying to the conjoined powers of natural recycling and man-made misuse. These creations counterbalance the pessimistic conclusion of Gravity’s Rainbow and provide the clearest expression of Pynchon’s rugged consumerism. For Pynchon, advances in industrial design procedures during the early twentieth century have created a multiplicity of objects that stand outside the cyclic systems of the natural world. As Byron’s strange story reveals, however, these design procedures can either support or jeopardize the conditions of human life and object “thing-power.” Bryon is “condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything” (655). Likewise, celluloid and the V-2 react in suicidal ways to human intervention in the life cycles; both substances seem intent on getting “all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast” (649).

The Garden in the Machine   Byron’s threat reminds us that death-driven industrial policies have an impact not only on the spiritual well-being of the natural world; they also affect already compromised relationships that connect people to one another within the new social world of the Zone. If humans and nonhumans are not to become objects for other people’s exploitation, they must collectively change the systems of thought that create divisions between subjects and objects, systems that—as Byron’s story suggests—are somehow built into our very alpha waves. As Gravity’s Rainbow and the work of contemporary biomimeticists richly attest, this Utopian change in perspective not only has the ability to effect change in our environmentally devastated world; it can also enable us to glimpse the world around us as a vibrant and fully democratic community of animate and inanimate bodies.

 4

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman [W]e are . . . defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations. —Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

In the previous two chapters, I associated rugged consumerism with a set of small and often clandestine left-libertarian communities that emerged within the larger cultural landscape of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. For off-off-Broadway, repurposed theaters offered the opportunity for a young artist community to practice its tactical behaviors, which, as de Certeau reminds us, always occur in “the space of the other” (37). Because of their limited economic resources and social standing, the temporary communities that emerged on the periphery of New York City’s theater network “accept[ed] the chance offerings of the moment” and “vigilantly ma[d]e use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers”—whether it be scavenging for theatrical props or stealing electricity from the New York City power grid (de Certeau 37). Gravity’s Rainbow presents a similar situation: within the open Zone of Pynchon’s Germany during and shortly after the Second World War, temporary and highly unstable communities of creative repurposers, working in concert with a set of vibrant materials,

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   operated as provisional counterforces within the much stronger networks of governmental and industrial powers that surrounded Pynchon’s preterite, and which continued to grow more powerful in decades leading up to the novel’s publication. The instability of these alternative human-object communities places clear limits upon rugged consumerism as a protopolitical enterprise. At best, the left-libertarian rugged consumerism of the American counterculture operates within the ideological terrain of Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” outlined in Marxism and Literature. Adopting a metaphor of fluids and solids similar to that which Pynchon adopts in Gravity’s Rainbow, Williams argues that “structures of feeling” are “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are evidently and more immediately available” (133–134). While Williams suggests that feelings of anxiety or dissatisfaction can be harnessed by collectives to alter the manner by which they interact with their culture, as the opening epigraph suggests, they are difficult to characterize, impossible to preserve, and, in hindsight, easy to contain or reappropriate within the institutions and formations of the dominant culture. If this conclusion holds true for the left-libertarian activities of the counterculture, it holds doubly true for any individual act of rugged consumerism, including perhaps the most well-known example of this activity: the Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles. In 1921, the Italian immigrant Sabato “Simon” Rodia purchased a small triangular lot at 1765 East 107th Street in the city of Watts—a suburb of Los Angeles situated between the city proper and Long Beach. For the next thirty-four years, he assembled a spiraling set of towers on his property out of steel wire mesh, cement mortar, broken pottery, mirrors, seashells, linoleum, telephoneline insulators, faucet handles, grilles from heat registers, cooking utensils, and soda bottle fragments. Working without blueprints, bolts, or outside assistance beyond that provided by local children (who would bring him scavenged supplies from the neighborhood), Rodia’s three decades of work resulted in five spiral towers, a colorful “Ship of Marco Polo,” a gazebo, and a garden spire (Figure 4). The tallest of the towers stretched one hundred feet into the air, and the structure was so sound that it could not be torn down by the city when Rodia left the property in 1955.

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman

figur e 4  “Watts Towers in Watts, CA.” Photo: 2005. Wikimedia Commons Images.

But in accordance with Williams’s elusive structure of feeling, Rodia provided few clues as to the significance of his grand enterprise.1 Shortly after he began construction on his plot of land, he attracted the attention of a curious documentary filmmaker and was asked to explain the strange architecture. “I’m gonna do something. I’m gonna do something. I’m gonna do something,” he replied (quoted in Goldstone and Goldstone 12). Rodia gave similar explanations to other interviewers who approached him with the same question, replying, “This is a great country,” or “I gave up drinking,” or, most ludicrously, “I buried my wife here” (quoted

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   in Goldstone and Goldstone 36). (He didn’t.) To skeptical Los Angeles building inspectors, he explained: “I build the towers in honor of the highways of California. . . . I build that tower 101 feet tall in honor of Highway 101; I build that tower 99 feet tall in honor of Highway 99, and I build that tower 66 feet tall in honor of Highway 66” (quoted in Umberger et al. 119). In an essay on the Watts Towers, Leslie Umberger et al. find Rodia’s 1939 explanation of his work closest to the truth: “One day I started building a fence ’round my place with tile. I find that’s lots of [fun], an’ I build the fence so much, I forget to drink. I no kid you, honest” (119). I tend to agree, though I am also partial to still another of Rodia’s explanations: “Why I build it? I can’t tell you. Why a man make the pants? Why a man make the shoes?” (quoted in Landler and Byer). Clearly, Rodia’s limited command of the English language contributed to his difficulties in explaining his project. But as his final two responses indicate, these difficulties pale in comparison to the difficulties of articulating any significance to his work beyond the subjective (and therefore largely apolitical) pleasure he derived from creative work. In this sense, Rodia is a prototypical bricoleur; he “‘speaks’ not only with things . . . but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities” (Lévi-Strauss 21). But to whom he communicates or for what he communicates is not and can never be known, not only because he refused to share the motivations behind his work but also because the towers exist outside the traditions and institutions of midcentury American culture, which render all production legible only through rational labor practices. The Watts Towers are thus quite literally a structure of feeling, which, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, is “taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.” If Rodia cannot or will not represent himself, the reception history of his project shows that he can easily be represented. In 1955, Rodia left the site of the Watts Towers after deeding the land to his neighbor. Shortly thereafter, the local Department of Building and Safety ordered its demolition. The towers were saved by a small group of local citizens, who formed the “Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts” and successfully advocated for its preservation. In 1975, the same committee donated the site to the city of Los Angeles, which, in turn, deeded it to the

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman state of California in 1977. During that same year, the National Parks Service entered the Watts Towers on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1990, the National Parks Service designated the site a National Historic Landmark. Unsurprisingly, the process of local, state, and national reappropriation made it increasingly difficult to decipher its significance. According to the current California Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) website, “Simon Rodia spent 30 years (1921 to 1955) building a tribute to his adopted country and a monument to the spirit of individuals who make their dreams tangible.” This brief account of Rodia’s Watts Towers outlines the predictable political outcomes of an individual’s practice of misuse. Because he relies upon objects and object manipulation as his dominant mode of communication, Rodia conceals (perhaps even from himself) the nature of the “dreams” he wishes to make “tangible.” This concealment, in turn, makes the towers understandable only in terms of the mythic American tradition of the rugged individual “spirit.” The towers become a monument to a deeply idiosyncratic subjectivity, and as the California DPR website’s platitudes suggests, the only proper reactions to the structure are Romantic feelings of bemusement or wonder. These limitations can help us to understand the towers’ public reception history as symptomatic of the reemergence of the myth of rugged individualism as a means of justifying the rise of neoliberal policies during the 1980s and 1990s. The California DPR website implies that the towers are worth preserving in the national register precisely because they are a “monument to the spirit of individuals,” who, presumably, rely upon nothing but their innate will to materialize their dreams in the form of idiosyncratic structures. In this sense, Rodia’s public history adopts a form similar to that of the bourgeois bildungsroman, in which, according to Franco Moretti, “inner dissatisfaction and mobility make novelistic youth ‘symbolic’ of . . . the ‘formlessness’ of the new epoch [of modernity]” (5). At the same time, Moretti rightly reminds us, this genre works “[o]nly by curbing [the youth’s] intrinsically boundless dynamism, only by agreeing to betray to a certain extent [his] very essence, only thus it seems, can modernity be represented ” (6, Moretti’s emphasis). In other words, like the prototypical bildungsroman (or, for that matter, the history of American libertarianism), accounts of Rodia’s enigmatic towers proceed by a

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   principle of ideological containment that Moretti calls “the interiorization of contradiction” between an individual’s formless creativity and the conservative social constraints that redirect this energy to serve normative ends (10). This principle of containment seems operative in all of Rodia’s nationalist explanations of his project, which anticipate the final ideological transformation of his work. Though the state of California did not, in the end, tear down the Watts Towers, its appropriation of the site as a national landmark demolished everything but the affective coding of the structure. In this chapter and in the chapter that follows, I examine this subjective form of rugged consumerism as a counterpart to the oppositional, Utopian activities outlined in the first two chapters. At stake in these two chapters are resolutions to several questions regarding the neoliberal strain of rugged consumerism that now dominates the contemporary cultural landscape; namely, how did rugged consumerism become individualized? Do individual instances of rugged consumer behaviors merely recapitulate a culture of neoliberal individualism (as in the reception history of Rodia’s towers), or can they address some of the problems associated with late capitalism as they are integrated with that system? Since many examples of contemporary rugged consumerism arise in the wake of failed governmental policies—the elimination of the public commons, the weakening of consumer safety regulations, the increasing overlap between business interests and politics, the failed responses to national catastrophes, and so on—should rugged consumerism be understood as a celebration of neoliberal doctrine or as a symptom of American liberalism’s failed policies? Finally, how can literary narratives help us to understand the relationship between the ways that rugged consumers interact with the object world and the ways that these same individuals interact with their cultures? In this chapter, I begin to answer some of these questions by examining two novels—Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Don DeLillo’s Underworld—that engage directly with the economic landscape of the late twentieth century but that illustrate the limits of rugged consumerism as a platform for structural rather than simply individual change within this environment. Each novel measures the development of its central character—the unnamed narrator in Fight Club and Nick Shay in Underworld—through the anxious feelings he experiences as he interacts

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman with the material world. For both characters, these feelings coincide with a partial recognition of the “thingness” that lies beyond (or, in the case of Underworld, beneath) objects, and, in what might be understood as each novel’s affective critique of late capitalism, the novels cast this feeling as an intuitive response to the profound transformations in American economic and social policies generated by the end of the Cold War and the internationalization of capitalist systems. These feelings of anxiety give way to feelings of pleasure as each character breaks his habitual modes of consumption and begins to manipulate the commodities that surround him. However, given the clear overlap between do-it-yourself modes of production and the era’s go-it-yourself neoliberal policies, each novel’s rugged consumerism often reinforces at the structural level what it undermines at the level of affect. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, DeLillo’s and Palahniuk’s primary characters thus embody Moretti’s conclusions regarding the structure of the bildungsroman and illustrate the ways that rugged consumerism’s oppositional coding is contained within the larger ideological structure of late-nineties capitalism. Classifying either novel as a bildungsroman is, of course, a crudely reductive framework, which “burns off the nuance” of their plotlines, to repurpose a phrase from DeLillo’s novel (785). But I maintain the term and the approach because they raise the questions of what communities (if any) each character joins as he develops his abilities and how effective (or ineffective) these communities are in reorganizing the conditions of productive work when set against the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. In this sense, my approach is aligned with Phillip Wegner’s shrewd analysis of DeLillo’s Underworld in his book Life Between Two Deaths 1989–2001 (2009). Following Lukács, Wegner defines Underworld as a “historical novel,” which makes “use of protagonists who are psychologically and in terms of the motivations for their actions representative of their historical epoch” (45). For Wegner, the novel is marked by a “decentered and chaotic landscape” that “marks the beginning of a period of shared nightmares” of globalized capitalism at the same time as it “offers us at least the hope that another history might be in the offing as well” (46, 59). While Wegner finds reasons for hope in characters on the periphery of DeLillo’s narrative, I will argue that Nick Shay (and Palahniuk’s narrator) also aspire less to passive integration with the dominant structures of American

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   neoliberal doctrine and more to active participation in a renewed project of democratic activism. The problem in both novels is that the “structures of feeling” through which they engage late capitalism remain localized in their protagonists’ narrative arcs. For a variety of expected and unexpected reasons, Mark Osteen’s fluid, unstable account of artist-figures in DeLillo’s work thus also seems true of the two rugged consumers at the center of this chapter. As he argues, DeLillo constantly “remodel[s] his vision of [the artist], from an ambivalent endorsement of Dedalian principles [of isolation] toward a negotiated compromise with the society of spectacle, in which the artist refashions the society’s own tools to attain a position ‘within or behind or beyond or above’ it” (145).2

The Accident Specialist After graduating from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism in 1986, Chuck Palahniuk was hired by the Freightliner truck manufacturing company to repair semitrailer trucks and write fix-it manuals. For the next thirteen years, he was a first-hand observer of a major American industry in the midst of significant change. Less than a decade before he took the job at Freightliner, the federal government passed the Motor Carrier Regulatory Reform and Modernization Act (1980), which eliminated the trucking industry’s major carriers’ ability to set collective rates, allowed free entry for new freight companies, and enabled carriers to adjust their prices for high-volume customers. As a bellwether of neoliberal policies that would come to characterize American economic policies during the Reagan and post-Reagan eras, the legislation led to the deunionization of the transportation industry, a sharp drop in shipping costs within the United States, and a dramatic rise in the number of trucking companies operating on American roads. Within this new economic landscape, figures including the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams raised concerns that deregulation would lead to a reduction in safety expenditures and an elevation of worker injuries and deaths. Scholarship seems to support this conclusion.3 Economist Michael Belzer argues that the Motor Carrier Act transformed semitrailers into “sweatshops on wheels,” in which low wages and increased consumer demand forced truckers to log longer hours on the

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman road under increasingly dangerous and unsanitary work conditions (7). At the same time, truck drivers were losing their share of company profits; predictably, average trucker salaries fell, and the economic gains produced by the legislation disproportionately benefited the white-collar workers and stockholders of a select group of shipping companies. Within this now familiar environment of increasing wage gaps and decreasing safety standards, Palahniuk began to write a short story that would become his 1996 debut novel, Fight Club. Like Palahniuk, the narrator of Fight Club works a job that depends upon objects breaking down. A budget analyst for an unnamed American car company, he calculates the costs and benefits of potential recalls for defective automobiles. The work offers little in the way of satisfaction and ample opportunities for the narrator to express his dark humor. He explains his work as follows: If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an outof-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. . . . If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall. (20)

Upon first inspection, the narrator’s account of his labor—a perverse mash-up of algebra and neoliberal self-regulation—seems to challenge Martin Heidegger’s and Bill Brown’s arguments regarding thing-making. Both critics maintain that the “thingness” of an object emerges when that object breaks down—when the worker’s hammer breaks in Heidegger’s case and when the drill breaks for Brown. In the passage from Fight Club, the narrator’s formula accomplishes the opposite task, converting vehicles into abstract sets of variables that replace the “thingness” of each automobile with the cold comforts of quantitative value. In the early stages of Palahniuk’s novel, the narrator cannot see (or, to be more precise, is paid not to see) the twisted automobiles and human bodies that he confronts every day. In a manner akin to Palahniuk’s transition from repairing trucks to writing about the repair of trucks, his

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   narrator’s work depends upon his ability to reduce the material details of car crashes into rational economic equations, converting mechanical failure into reified knowledge work. But given the cognitive effort required to force material things into immaterial categories, it is easy to see why the narrator casts his work in cynical and ghoulish terms: “Everywhere I go, there’s the burned-up wadded-up shell of a car waiting for me. I know where all the skeletons are. Consider this my job security” (20). Such musings also suggest a reason why the narrator, unlike Heidegger’s mythic manual laborer, cannot sleep at night. Heidegger’s “healthy” work requires objects (such as a hammer and anvil) that harmoniously merge with the worker’s body and thereby invigorate his or her mind. In contrast, Palahniuk’s narrator’s “job security” depends upon bureaucratic work designed to obscure the relationship between corporate policy decisions and material repercussions. So good is he at translating the material world into obfuscatory symbols that his work begins to carry over into his personal life, which begins to suffer as a result. “Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy,” he laments. “The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you” (11). What is the nature of this structure of feeling? Critical investigations of Palahniuk’s novel (and, more commonly, David Fincher’s film adaptation) often focus upon the transition from manual labor to knowledge work as a key historical backdrop for the novel. Omar Lizardo, for example, frames Fight Club (the film) as “as a poignant allegory of the cultural and social contradictions brought about by the capitalist socio-economic system in late modernity” (222). Likewise, Lynn Ta argues that the narrator’s “melancholic sadomasochism is the product of what he perceives to be the feminization of late capitalism; as a corporate drone, he feels victimized by a culture that has stolen his manhood” (266). In contrast, Henry Giroux views the same film as a “morally bankrupt and politically reactionary” example of neoliberal ideology: Consumerism in Fight Club is criticized primarily as an ideological force and existential experience that weakens and domesticates men, robbing them of their primary role as producers whose bodies affirm and legitimate their sense of agency and control. The importance of agency is not lost on director David Fincher, but it is restricted to a narrowly defined notion of masculinity that is as self-absorbed as it is patriarchal. (Giroux)

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman In Giroux’s scathing argument, Fight Club stands emblematic of a culture of neoliberalism that privileges private, male-dominated activities over “a politics that connects to democratic movements.” Through this argument, Giroux highlights the difficulty of articulating the political significance of feelings based in and conveyed through material culture. Because the novel (or in the case of Giroux’s analysis, the film) privileges material activity over collective communication, it renounces any claim to be a viable critique of contemporary economic conditions. He concludes his counterfactual argument with the following summary remarks: Fight Club is less interested in attacking the broader material relations of power and strategies of domination and exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism than it is in rebelling against a consumerist culture that dissolves the bonds of male sociality and puts into place an enervating notion of male identity and agency. Contrary to the onslaught of reviews accompany[ing] the film’s premier that celebrated it as a daring social critique, Fight Club has nothing to say about the structural violence of unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending, and the destruction of institutions capable of defending social provisions and the public good.

Needless to say, Giroux’s argument minimizes the significance of the narrative’s critique of neoliberal language and policy. The narrator’s “job security,” after all, depends upon his ability to conceal the “skeletons,” and this dependency constitutes a strong critique of a culture in which government regulatory policies are limited and through which human lives are reducible to corporate cost/benefit analyses. His arguments (and Ta’s and Lizardo’s arguments, for that matter) are also unsympathetic to the properties of the narrative that make it a bildungsroman: chiefly, the protagonist’s affective struggle to articulate in situ the very conditions that Giroux suggests he should have already mastered. But my greatest problem with Giroux’s argument is that it privileges abstract relations of humans and objects—what he calls “material relations of power and strategies of domination and exploitation”—over concrete ones, which suggests that any close encounter with local labor activity (such as Palahniuk’s experiences as a diesel mechanic) constitutes political disinvestment. In devoting more space to what the narrative does not accomplish than what it does accomplish, Giroux misses opportunities to demystify the ways in which—like the difference between Heidegger’s hammer and Palahniuk’s

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   automobiles—different types of local human-object interactions contribute to or weaken the desire to engage with the political problems of late capitalism. In Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology (2003), Albert Borgmann offers terms that clarify the differences between the narrator’s insomnia and the “healthy fatigue” of Heidegger’s manual laborer and, in so doing, help us to bring together Giroux’s insistence upon collective action with Palahniuk’s affective critique of passive consumerism. Drawing upon the work of Heidegger (and, by extension, Lukács), Borgmann argues that contemporary technologies make desires available in such a way as to conceal the means by which those desires are realized. To illustrate this argument, he examines two technologies that seem to produce the same effects: a wood-burning stove and a modern furnace. The former, he argues, cannot perform its function alone, but must accomplish its task with the assistance of human labor—chopping wood, building a fire, and so on. The latter, in contrast, requires only the push of a few buttons. Borgmann concludes by classifying the wood-burning stove as a “thing” and the modern furnace as a “device”: “A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption. . . . Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality” (31). Palahniuk’s narrator’s insomnia clearly reflects the “disposable reality” brought on by his interactions with a world of devices, which render all human engagement with the material world abstract. In an effort to bring himself closer to the object world, he decorates his apartment with IKEA furniture, which requires at least a modicum of creative engagement. As he suggests, he is not the only man to find comfort in the possibility of meaningful manual labor promised by the company’s unassembled products: “I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with IKEA furniture catalogues. We all have the same Johannesov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern” (33). The comparison between pornography and IKEA catalogs is telling. Just as pornography offers a disposable simulacrum of interpersonal relationships, the IKEA catalog and its products can only approximate more authentic, active

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman modes of human-object engagement. Unlike later DIY makers, for whom IKEA kits can be “hacked” into alternative objects, the narrator finds no satisfaction in assembling “the same Johannesov armchair” out of a set of predrilled component parts. Instead, he sees these objects as devices that enhance his sense of material alienation. “I am helpless. I am stupid,” the narrator laments, “and all I do is want and need things” (138). The narrator’s feelings of estrangement from the object world have clear political consequences. Devices, Borgmann argues, promote abstract activities as a surrogate for effective action (pushing buttons or solving mathematical equations), whereas things resist such abstraction and call attention to the labor required to keep automobiles running or to heat homes. Moreover, because devices obscure the nature of their inner workings, a user may be dissatisfied with their design or function, but he or she can register this dissatisfaction only on the level of feeling. Palahniuk’s novel operates from the same set of assumptions: whether the narrator’s inability to engage with the material conditions of the object world led to his cynical career as a corporate shill or vice versa, at this stage in his life, the two phenomena reinforce each other and suggest an agonistic relationship between passive consumer behaviors and unscrupulous white collar work. As is typical of the bildungsroman genre, the narrator attempts to escape from these feelings, but his quest is punctuated by a series of events that only seem to produce the conditions that would lead him to a more harmonious relationship with the material world. When his doctor refuses to prescribe him sleeping pills, he seeks out a community that will help him to cope with the symptoms of his existential malaise and begins to haunt weekly support group meetings for medical conditions such as brain parasites, degenerative bone diseases, and testicular cancer. By pretending to suffer from these conditions, he convinces himself to cry, and to pretend to “lose all hope” secure in the awareness that he will not soon die. He equates this feeling with freedom: “Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around” (12). His participation in the support groups (perhaps inspired by Palahniuk’s brief flirtation with ‘est’ theory) temporarily alleviates the narrator’s insomnia, but any relief they offer ends when another “faker,” Marla Singer, joins his cohort. Forced to confront the inauthenticity of his own

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   performance, he abandons the support groups and returns to his earlier daily activities only to find that his symptoms have gotten worse. At his work, he can no longer push from his mind the human casualties generated by his company’s failed automobile designs and perpetuated by his own bureaucratic activities. Indeed, whenever he discusses car crashes, his attention to material details seems to resist, without offering a clear alternative to, the very structures of abstract thinking that generate his anxiety: I know about the air-conditioning rheostat that gets so hot it sets fire to the maps in your glove compartment. I know how many people burn alive because of fuelinjector flashback. I’ve seen people’s legs cut off at the knee when turbochargers start exploding and send their vanes through the firewall and into the passenger compartment. I’ve been out in the field and seen the burned-up cars and seen the reports where cause of failure is recorded as “unknown.” (90)

These “thick descriptions,” to use Ken Alder’s term, foreshadow the novel’s Freudian plot device: the narrator’s repressed hunger for authentic engagements with things, coupled with his clear talent for acting, generates his second identity as Tyler Durden: a part-time waiter and full-time anarcho-terrorist who occupies the narrator’s body when he falls asleep and serves as the narrator’s imaginary solution to all of his troubles. Instead of reporting on the mechanisms of death that hover on the periphery of the narrator’s reports, however, Durden puts the narrator’s post hoc analysis into practice by taking advantage of design features of technological devices. Near the start of the novel, for example, Durden destroys the narrator’s apartment with a Rube Goldberg–style explosive that would not look out of place in one of the narrator’s car crash analyses. First, he extinguishes the pilot light of the narrator’s stove, causing the narrator’s IKEA nest to slowly fill with gas. When the compressor in the apartment’s refrigerator clicks on, the room explodes (34–35). As is clear from even this example, Durden’s work privileges a bluecollar skill set over white-collar knowledge work, and he frames the contrast in terms that concretize the labor conflicts (and, perhaps, Palahniuk’s own struggles with his split career) that were being fought during the 1980s and 1990s. As Durden tells the narrator, he has similar plans for the narrator’s employer, and his choice of pronouns hints at the narrative’s final revelation of the schizophrenic plot device:

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman I could drive to my boss’s house some night and hook a hose up to an outdoor spigot . . . and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell. (60)

In keeping with Brown’s rarified arguments on thing-making, the novel’s plot thus moves from the protagonist’s passive apprehension of accidental misuse to Durden’s anarchic applied misuse. Instead of simply watching a Borgmannian thing emerge from the device (the weapon out of the automobile) through chance failures, Durden exploits and directs the material properties of the commodities that surround him, turning the push-button functionalities of stoves and refrigerators into improvised explosive devices or, in his hypothetical aside, turning a shower head into a mortar. At the same time, he generates increasingly hostile fantasies that he directs toward the devicelike bureaucratic power structures that seem to be the sources of his problems. By inhabiting his alternative persona, the narrator thus seems to have found a means of redirecting his behaviors from the treatment of his symptoms of alienation to the treatment of their causes. But the fact that he has to don a fantastic alternative persona in order to do so casts his behaviors in the same light as his performances at the therapy meetings and at work. As such, it is unsurprising that Durden exhorts the narrator to change his life in ways that align rugged consumerism with the economic systems it purports to oppose. The refrigerator explosion metaphorically propels the narrator out of his consumer “nest” of “Johannesov armchair[s] in the Strinne green stripe pattern” (33) and into a dilapidated Paper Street rental where Durden lives—a house that “is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down” (48). Though the house is in a Pacific Northwest city center, the narrator’s description of his new dwelling aligns postindustrial urban decay with the conditions of the frontier that once defined the land. Faulty fuses in the house force the narrator to depend on things rather than devices: he carries candles for light. The lock on the front door has been kicked in, leaving the house open to the harsh environment. Their “only neighbors are a closed machine shop” and “a block-long warehouse” (48). Most importantly, though the narrator continues to hold his office

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   job, he begins to devote more time to relearning a set of skills that, ironically, he has already acquired in his second life playing Tyler Durden and, by extension, from the periphery of his work as a budget analyst. Though he attributes them to his alter ego, the narrator’s experiences at work inform all of Durden’s specialized knowledge, suggesting that, as Giroux argues, his fantastic identity is a product of neoliberal economics as much as he appears to be an enemy of its resultant consumer culture. The dematerialized violence of his car crash analyses, for example, becomes the tactile, ritualistic violence of the various “fight clubs” that Durden establishes throughout the United States in parking lots, basement storage areas, and so on. Likewise, his company’s car crash victims (and, perhaps, the dying members of his old self-help communities) return as the cannibalized raw materials for Durden’s later, mythic accounts of preindustrial civilization: “In ancient history,” Tyler says, “human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river. Thousands of people. Listen to me. The sacrifices were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre. . . . Rain . . . fell on the burnt pyre year after year, and year after year, people were burned, and the rain seeped through the wood ashes to become a solution of lye, and the lye combined with the melted fat of sacrifices, and a thick white discharge of soap crept out from the base of the altar and crept downhill toward the river.” (67)

While Durden clearly celebrates this kind of rugged consumerism, Palahniuk’s ironic narrative frames it as a horrific response to, rather than a celebration of, deregulative neoliberal policies. In his unconscious conversion of work experiences into a mythic narrative, the narrator’s projection of Durden might be understood as a postindustrial analog to Sigmund Freud’s famous “fort/da” game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Unable to align a traumatic event with his or her life narrative, a trauma victim compulsively repeats, dwells upon, or reexperiences that trauma. But whereas the fort/da game abstracts the material (the mother’s body) into the realm of the symbolic, Durden’s repetitive actions perform the opposite function, converting the immaterial postindustrial violence of multinational car companies into immediate (albeit mythically structured) violence inflicted upon flesh and bone. Out of the devastating policies of economic neoliberalism, the narrator constructs a neoliberal fantasy of individual responsibility and control.

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman In a doubling of the narrator’s earlier performances as a victim of testicular cancer or blood parasites, Durden’s shock therapy calls for the narrator to experience a car crash instead of reporting on car crashes. A little over halfway through the novel, Durden hacks the dealership keycode of a Cadillac (likely from the unnamed automobile company that employs the narrator) and arranges to have a “fight club mechanic” chauffeur the narrator for an evening drive (131).4 Joining him in the car are three other fight club members, who have brought with them a birthday cake. As the men travel down an old highway, the mechanic suddenly swerves into an oncoming lane and sideswipes a truck, throwing the narrator against the passenger door and then into the cake. Instead of fear, the narrator experiences the exhilaration of the death drive, pulling the wheel into traffic again: “The mechanic wrestles the wheel toward the ditch, and I wrestle to fucking die. Now. The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking and the next second, you’re an object. . . . The mechanic looks down. “Happy Birthday” (139). By violently confronting the death that consumes his life, the narrator seems to have been purged of his trauma and is reborn as both subject (maker) and object. Or, put slightly differently, he has replaced his earlier desire to adjust to the conditions of existential despair with a desire to be the agent of that despair. This same patterns exists in Durden’s decision to found the Paper Street Soap Company, which operates comfortably within the neoliberal context of deregulated production and distribution of goods. Inspired by Durden’s mythic stories of human sacrifice, the narrator and his alter ego (if the two personae can be separated) raid medical waste dumpsters in search of liposuctioned fat—a literal embodiment of postconsumer waste that they “sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked off” (142). The narrator cannot resist casting this morbid enterprise in terms that resonate with both the mythic frontier and the streamlined efficiency metaphors of neoliberal capitalism. “We’re a hunting party, and we’re hunting for fat,” he tells us (142). This conclusion dovetails George Henderson’s analysis of Fight Club in his essay “What Was Fight Club?: Theses on the Value Worlds of Trash Capitalism.” Henderson argues that Fight Club (the film) represents a “balancing act attempted by capital as it alternates between provisioning and undoing needs, between creating felt attachments to the materiel

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   of social reproduction and dislodging people from their current attachments” (144). For Henderson, the chief expression of this balancing act is Durden’s interaction with trash: Tyler inhabits waste . . . , dressing in “thrift store” chic and living in a dilapidated house at the dilapidated edge of town, exchanging old uses for new ones. And if Tyler is not busy inventing new dispositions for commodities, he is busy changing places himself, whether through small acts such as changing seats on a plane, or scaled up practices such as traveling from place to place to market his soap and to initiate new fight club “start-ups” . . . For a man so worried that “the things you own end up owning you,” Tyler is in fact in steady, constant contact with the world’s manifold and re-moldable materiality, playing with it, extending it, intensifying it and foisting it on the populace. Tyler is a juggler and reorganizer of things and the state of things, par excellence, a compressor of time and space, if you will. (149–150)

Though his methods are repulsive and, within the structure of the novel, ineffectual, Durden’s rugged consumerism expresses both characters’ dissatisfaction with American postindustrial work. Before founding the Paper Street Soap Company, Durden works a number of late-night, service-industry jobs as waiter and film projectionist. Like the narrator, whose only instances of object production involve the assembly of prefashioned IKEA kits, Durden’s only task is to be a passive conveyor of consumer goods—to make sure that the film device starts on time or that the soup does not get cold from the kitchen to the table. “I see the strongest and the smartest men who ever lived,” he tells the narrator, “and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.” “‘Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression’” (141). Though Durden cannot find a job that provides him with an opportunity to exercise his creative spirit, he translates his postindustrial careers into travesties of productive work. As a film projectionist, Durden splices pornographic frames into family movies—“a Grand Canyon vagina with an echo, four stories tall and twitching with blood pressure as Cinderella danced with her Prince Charming and people watched”—joining his anarchic labor with the rational labor of the Hollywood film industry and

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman thus turning one more device into a thing (21). In this sense, Durden’s early actions coincide with the narrator’s early behaviors, and perhaps suggest that the story is his bildungsroman and much as it is the narrator’s. Durden’s commentary on his “generation” also indirectly reveals the narrator’s desire for new and more authentic male maker communities that would replace his older support groups. To this end, he enlists the members of fight clubs in a terrorist campaign that he calls “Project Mayhem,” which is subdivided by committee: “Arson, Assault, Mischief, and Misinformation” (127). As a group of Project Mayhem men render soap, they skim the glycerin off the top of the slurry and begin to assemble improvised bombs with a set of unlikely materials including cotton, cat litter, paraffin, diet cola, and concentrated orange juice. These improvised explosive devices, Durden hopes, will bring about an end to human civilization and a return to the harder realities of subsistence living: “You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. . . . A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. [It] will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.” (116)

By depicting garbage picking as “hunting,” shopping for orange juice and cat litter as weapon-making, and spray-painting graffiti as carving totem poles, the narrator converts the countercultural, back-to-the land rugged consumerism touched upon in the previous two chapters into a vicious caricature. In Durden’s fantasy, the only way to oppose a consumer culture is either to destroy it or to prey upon it. Needless to say, this is a troubling version of rugged consumerism, but one worth examining at greater length. In their discussions of the novel, many critics uneasily note the resemblance between Durden’s Luddite fantasies and the actions of another infamous Luddite, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.5 Like Palahniuk’s narrator, who abandons the social world for a world of isolation, Kaczynski abandoned a stable university position in the field of mathematics for a remote cabin on the frontier without electricity or running water. From 1978 to 1995, he assembled a

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   series of improvised explosives at that location and mailed them to several prominent academics and businesspeople, killing three people and injuring twenty-three. Kaczynski justified his actions in a rambling manifesto entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” published jointly in the New York Times and the Washington Post about a year before Fight Club went to press. Kaczynski, like Durden (or Borgmann, for that matter), maintains that the current “industrial-technological system . . . reduc[es] human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.” In the first chapter, entitled “Feelings of Inferiority,” Kaczynski attacks what he loosely defines as the “modern left,” who assist the “industrial-technological system” in stamping out individuality. Unsurprisingly, he defines this group against the rugged self-sufficiency he attributes to the American past: [T]he 19th century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his own effort. In those days an entire county might have only a couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One may well question whether the creation of this community was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneer’s need for the power process. (Kaczynski)

The “modern leftist,” in contrast, feels no pressure to secure food and shelter, and instead pursues a series of unfulfilling “surrogate activities” ranging from the accumulation of wealth to stamp collecting (or, perhaps, creating an IKEA nest). Kaczynski argues that only by breaking away from technology and returning to nature can humanity survive and prosper into the twentyfirst century: Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature, because in the absence of advanced technology there is no other way that people can live. To feed themselves they must be peasants or herdsmen or fishermen or hunters, etc. And, generally speaking, local autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or other large organizations to control local communities.

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman In this sense, Kaczynski fulfills Giroux’s earlier description of a neoliberal fantasy, one in which “[t]otalitarianism no longer breeds a contempt for the virtues of individualism, all things private, and the dynamics of selfinterest. On the contrary, totalitarianism now resides in a thorough dislike for all things social, public, and collective” (Giroux). But in what might be called Palahniuk’s ironic rebuttal to Kaczynski’s destructive program, if Durden is to carry out his plan, he must first return the newly “liberated” men of Project Mayhem to a state of imprisonment not far removed from the condition of the jobs they loathe. Through a description that dovetails the narrator’s career as an insurance analyst, Durden tells the narrator that when it comes to Project Mayhem, “No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly” (122). It is therefore unsurprising that the narrator begins to refer to them derisively as “space monkeys”: Teams of Project Mayhem guys render fat all day. . . . At night I hear other teams mix the lye and cut the bars and bake the bars of soap on cookie sheets, then wrap each bar in tissue and seal it with the Paper Street Soap Company label. . . . Pull a lever. Push a button. A team of space monkeys cooks meals all day, and all day, teams of space monkeys are eating out of the plastic bowls they brought with them. (122)

Durden may have regained access to the site of production, but his Fordist industrial labor practices, coupled with the fact that his workforce requires no salary, reproduce rather than transform the asymmetric conditions of neoliberal economic policies. In Durden’s repurposing of this system’s policies, the people in power have changed while the systemic problems remain.6 The narrator struggles to articulate an alternative to his alter ego’s neoliberal rugged consumerism, which he realizes is a fantasy of political engagement. At the same time, Durden begins the second phase of his plan to bring about the end of all state governance. After collecting the explosive byproducts of his soap-making process, Durden plans to bring about the end of civilization by destroying a 191–story skyscraper, which, in Rube Goldberg fashion, will “slam down on the national museum which is Tyler’s real target.” “‘This is our world, now, our world,’ Tyler says, and those ancient people are dead” (4). The narrator finally refuses to continue with this program and confronts Durden at the top of the skyscraper. To keep him(self) under control, Durden shoves the barrel of a

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   gun into the narrator’s mouth and begins to wait out the final few minutes before the building explodes. What happens next in Palahniuk’s novel differs considerably from its film adaptation and for these reasons is more difficult to interpret. In Fincher’s film, Marla (who has at this point become Durden’s lover and the narrator’s unlikely muse) is kidnapped by Project Mayhem henchmen and is brought to the narrator against her will. To save her from Durden, the narrator fires a bullet into his own head, which “kills” his alter ego but somehow not himself. Freed from Durden’s control, the two figures observe his anarchic vision of the world come to life as a series of buildings explode around them before the credits roll. In Palahniuk’s novel, Marla also interrupts the narrator’s solipsistic combat with Durden, but she appears of her own free will and, as importantly, is followed by the survivors of his abandoned support communities: Behind Marla, all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people are walking, limping, wheelchairing toward me. They’re saying wait. Their voices come to me on the cold wind, saying “Stop.” And, “We can help you.” “Let us help you.” Across the sky comes the whop, whop, whop of police helicopters. I yell, go. Get out of here. This building is going to explode. Marla yells, “We know.” This is like a total epiphany moment for me. (195)

Though the narrator never explains the nature of this “epiphany,” given its context within the narrative and the ways that it departs from Fincher’s film, it is worth exploring briefly. Clearly, the events leading up to the epiphany force the narrator to rethink his relationships with Durden and the support communities. Earlier in the novel, he insists that the only knowledge that can be gained from such communities is Durden’s lesson—how to accept death—and the narrator satirizes any attempt in the groups’ meetings to offer hope to the sufferers of fatal medical conditions (24–25). Moreover, any positive effect that he derives from these meetings is (like his fantasy of Durden) predicated on a lie; they enable him to experience the frisson of dying while remaining secure in the knowledge that he will outlive his temporary companions. At the end of the novel,

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman the communities know that he is a “faker,” but choose to put their already shortened lives at risk to save him. Through their sacrificial activity, they perform what the narrator can only ironically dismiss or vicariously experience: an authentic community at the periphery of the mid-nineties neoliberal culture. The sudden appearance of this community illustrates a way out of the narrator’s singular fantasy of neoliberal control, and fittingly, at this moment, Durden disappears: “Tyler’s gone. Poof. Tyler’s my hallucination, not [Marla’s]. . . . And now I’m just one man holding a gun in my mouth” (195). At this moment, the narrator appears to have finally treated the cause rather than the symptom of his existential malaise, leaving behind the anarchic individual acts of rugged consumerism in favor of some form of collective activity. But as quickly as the narrator raises this possibility, he rejects it in favor of Durden’s platform of self-annihilation. The narrator marks this final decision by pulling the trigger of the gun, becoming and at the same time dismissing his alter ego.7 The bullet fully penetrates his body but only wounds him, “[tearing] out my other cheek to give me a jagged smile from ear to ear. Yeah, just like an angry Halloween pumpkin. Japanese demon. Dragon of Avarice” (198). Bearing a physical reminder of his rejection of Durden, the narrator’s actions nonetheless reproduce his nihilistic program and illustrate the novel’s inability to articulate a third way between passive consumerism and active anarchism. Fight Club ends with the narrator in a mental hospital, where he maintains contact with Marla but insists that he “doesn’t want to go back” because “every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says ‘We miss you Mr. Durden’” (198–199). Clearly, we have come a long way from the countercultural modes of rugged consumerism described in the previous two chapters. Far from Utopian, the activities described in Palahniuk’s novel prevent its narrator from entering into any authentic communities and pushes him towards an isolation that recapitulates the cultural and economic conditions that he wishes to escape. In this sense, though rugged consumerism is framed as a local means of resisting the inauthentic culture of late capitalism, the violent and antisocial ways in which it is carried out ensure that whatever

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   value it might have remains on the level of the individual and, therefore, as the novel amply attests, on the level of affective fantasy.

The Waste Specialists Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) is haunted by the presence of a number of material things that are not reducible to their status as disembodied devices, and DeLillo’s figurehead of late capitalism, the multibillionaire assets manager Eric Packer, is disturbed by this complication. During his journey around New York City, Packer enters a diner for a lunch date with his ex-wife, spots an old cash machine and “want[s] to understand why [such objects are] not confined to display cases in a museum of cash registers in Philadelphia or Zurich” (71). From the fully digital command center within his limousine, he observes a police lieutenant speaking into a walkie-talkie: “He wanted to ask the man why he was still using this contraption, still calling it what he called it, carrying the nitwit rhyme out of the age of industrial glut into smart spaces built on beams of light” (102). Even computers do not escape his ridicule: “Computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. They’re just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They’re melting into the texture of everyday life” (104). Or later: “He was tired of looking at screens. Plasma screens were not flat enough. They used to seem flat, now they did not. He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists. He thought the image could be crisper” (140). If the digital tablets, cloud computing, and smartphones of the last decade are any indication, Packer’s feeling of disgust with the materiality of commodities carried prophetic value. Increasingly, digital technologies no longer frame their services within the material realities of stable objects. Instead, these material realities are increasingly expected to mimic the unique features of the digital world, “melting into the texture of everyday life,” and thus becoming the perfect representations of Borgmann’s device paradigm. Commodities that cannot accommodate such a transition—walkie-talkies, computer keyboards, cash registers, and so one—are the ghosts that “haunt” this cultural shift as the embarrassing residue of a predigital world. But this transition from a premillennial digital culture grounded in materiality to the fully digital, immaterial culture of the twenty-first

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman century is, of course, a myth rather than a reality. Packer’s insatiable desire for newer and smaller devices ensures that he will never be rid of reminders of the past. A transient object, as rubbish theorist Michael Thompson notes, does not disappear as it depreciates in value, “it just continues to exist in a timeless and valueless limbo” (10). Moreover, technological objects persist in this valueless limbo for far longer than their nontechnological counterparts, for the simple reason that their abstract use-values decay far more swiftly than their material parts: today’s new smartphone is tomorrow’s old rubbish. Within this system, Packer’s unease highlights what Evan Watkins calls the “technoideological” coding of late capitalism; the disappearance of obsolete objects serves as a marker for industrial “progress” and a measure of how the present appears to shed its history. But as Watkins argues, the endurance of these discards can be used to “break the links of survival narratives that equate the obsolete with the fading past, the residual, the nostalgic, the politically ineffective” (28, 40). For example, after he loses his job in Packer’s company, the novel’s antagonist, Richard Sheets (or Benno Levin, as he wishes to be called), lives off the streets as he plots his former employer’s death. “What people discard could make a nation,” he writes in one of his “confessions” that interpolate Packer’s narrative. Like these commodity discards, Sheets is a reminder that Packer’s brand of digitized financial speculation cannot fully escape into a hyperdigital present without some lingering trace (57). The mechanism that sustains Packer’s grand delusion is rational waste management, and DeLillo’s sprawling 1997 novel Underworld is centered on a character, Nick Shay, whose job is to carry out this process. And as the novel makes clear, this seemingly pedestrian industry bears a crucial role in perpetuating the illusion of a frictionless, dematerialized economy. Shay describes his work in ways that connect it with his Catholic upbringing: “We designed and managed landfills. We were waste brokers. We arranged shipments of waste across the oceans of the world. We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations” (102). This religious inflection foreshadows the way that Shay links his ability to manipulate, or “transmute,” the commodity underworld with his understanding of both his own psychic underworld and the underworld of his nation’s history. But in keeping with the reference to Catholic

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   hierarchy, Underworld frames its narrator’s emergent rugged consumerism as a means of enforcing on a systemic level the problems that it alleviates on the personal level. The more completely Shay can master the material world, the more that material world is mystified for the lay members of the “Church” of America, who view the world (as Packer does) as a “flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced . . . the convergence of consumer desire” (785). In this sense, Shay also illustrates the limitations of rugged consumer behaviors as Utopian activity in an era of late capitalism, because such behaviors are often carried out as a way of anesthetizing politically oppositional communal behaviors. Waste management plays such an important role in this culture because trash is the final category of objects with a visible history. After its celebrated preface, set in 1951, the novel opens with Shay driving a rented Lexus through the deserts of the American southwest. In a passage that testifies to the difficulty of material representation in an era of late capitalism, Shay struggles to imagine how the car was made: This is a car assembled in a work area that’s completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant—allow a little moisture where they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement backreferenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments of coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead. It’s a culmination in a way, machines made and shaped outside the little splat of human speech. And this made my rented car a natural match for the landscape I was crossing. Heat shimmer rising on the empty flats. A bled-white sky with ticky breezes raking dust across the windshield. And the species factually absent from the scene—except for me, of course, and I was barely there. (63)

As an emblematic product of a dematerializing culture, the automobile is a complete and singular device that seems to emerge ex nihil at the end of the assembly line. Shay cannot form the history of the automobile’s assembly in his mind because it has been produced outside of the realms of human work, vision, and speech. When he tries to describe the

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman component parts of his vehicle, his language fails him, and he resorts to melancholic feelings—“eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs,” “soaring ornaments of coachwork”—that constitute his “little splat of human speech.” At the same time, his thoughts on what is not required in the car’s assembly shed light on his central preoccupations: his clinical depression brought about by a fractured sense of his own subjective history. His automobile is thus a fantasy vehicle, a device that serves as an affective match for his thoughts about himself. The core plot of Shay’s story, which is narrated in reverse chronological order, involves the gradual uncovering of the details of his “assembly” in the Bronx and his extrication from a world of immaterial relations.8 Like the Lexus’s production, his formative moments occur in the absence of a crucial human presence: his father, Jimmy Costanza, who, as Shay’s internal monologue frequently reminds us, went out for cigarettes one day and never returned. This event imbues him with the properties of a Borgmann device: he “felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself” (810). Shay thus appears to himself as yet another object without a production history. In establishing the relationship between material mastery (or lack thereof) and self-mastery, DeLillo prepares his readers for a narrative that will move from unskilled to skilled interactions with objects. While Shay was a teenager, his “ready” anger culminated in a deadly accident; he unintentionally killed a man with a gun he did not know how to use. In his early memories of the event, he fumbles with his impressions of the experience in the same way that he fumbled with the weapon: The unhinged fling of an arm, the right arm whippy and haywire, like a part that runs amuck in a machine, and the whole body spasm, an arrhythmic thing, a thing outside the limits of experience. You don’t want to forget he was sitting in a chair. The chair moved not unlike the man. The chair could have been a version of the man, so drastic was its tumble into the wall. (509)

As in his description of the Lexus, here, Shay’s catalog of experiences vacillates wildly between the particular (“the unhinged fling of an arm”) and the general (“a thing outside the limits of experience”). When he attempts to connect the two through metaphor, his imagination also fails him,

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   yielding a vehicle far less precise than the tenor it seeks to clarify: “like a part run amuck in a machine.” To an even greater extent than that of Palahniuk’s narrator, Shay’s life thus proceeds through a continuous structure of feelings—anger, bewilderment, fear—provoked by and expressed through his limited command of the material world. Shay is unable to process the “thing[s] outside the limits of [his] experience” and thereby connect component parts to larger systems until he is transferred from a juvenile detention center in New York to a Jesuit reform school in Minnesota. His journey westward translates him out of the present and into the mythic frontier past: “We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order—except the natives, in this case, were us” (539). As he walks through the Jesuit campus in a “billowing white storm,” he develops a new appreciation for nature’s material power: “I had the edges of my watch cap unfurled over my ears and kept my forearm raised against the cutting sleet, against the whole hard physical thing, the snowstorm and the open spaces, the reality of a mass of land called North America, new to my experiences” (537, my emphasis). Significantly, his destination in this walk is the office of the local priest, Father Paulus, who eschews the “abstract ideas” and “eternal verities” (540) of European or East Coast culture for what David Cowart calls “the onomastic imperative” (159). When Shay arrives, Paulus quizzes him on the component parts of his wet shoes, and chides him when he cannot get beyond laces, sole, heel, and tongue: “You didn’t see the thing because you don’t know how to look. And you don’t know how to look because you don’t know the names” (540). Paulus proceeds by pointing out other areas of the boot: the cuff—“a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace,” the counter—“this stiff section over the heel,” the quarter— “this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole,” and so on (541). In “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass,” Amy Hungerford interprets this passage as an example of the author’s tendency to view language as a “retaining medium [that] frees [a] person from the strictures of reason to reach a mystical relation to the material world and to what transcends the material world” (375). But what interests me in this passage is how

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman Paulus urges Shay to view the mystical in the late twentieth century as precisely that which does not transcend the material. For a boy whose only experience with work has been service industry work in New York City— packing and unpacking ice cream freezers (693) and loading and unloading soda bottles (724)—and whose life has been irrevocably shaped by a failure to understand the workings of a material device (a handgun), the component parts of shoes or any other object remain a hazy white noise at the far end of the cognitive spectrum. Paulus’s priestly language interrupts this process and begins an education that culminates in Shay’s later work as a “Church Father of trash”: “Everyday objects represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word . . . An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace” (542). The transition between a metropolitan world of “thing[s] outside the limits of experience” and the “frontier” world of nature and manufacturing thus enables Nick to begin to excavate, handle, and give names to the irrational feelings that constitute his past.9 The process also ushers Shay into an elite community of like-minded individuals who share his growing knowledge of materiality and the language of materiality and who operate as the high priests of the dematerializing world of late capitalism. This knowledge does not mean that all of his activities need to be read negatively. As Matthew Mullins observes, “Instead of focusing on how objects permeate all aspects of culture to suggest the inherent evils of capitalism, DeLillo [in Underworld] acknowledges the ability of such pervasive objects to act as a foundation for being-in-common, or for community” (286–287). While Mullins’s work is preoccupied with the 1951 baseball hit by Bobby Thomson, the “shot heard ’round the world,” numerous other Heideggerian “things” (including shoes) gather rugged consumers together. For example, when Shay and his brother Matt find themselves in the same room together after several years of strained relations, they pass the time by remembering an old fluoroscope that “transmit[ed] x rays through the shoe and into the foot.” As Matt remembers the machine, one of the few memories of his father emerges as well: “I can just barely remember this. Jimmy’s buying you a pair of shoes and then he’s lifting me up so I can look into the machine and see your feet inside your shoes and your bones inside your feet” (197).

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   An object’s ability to instantiate a community crosses gender lines. As a young man, Shay carries out a brief affair with Klara Sax, an artist who produces ready-mades from waste products, converting shampoo caps, sardine tins, and aerosol cans into art installations (70): She had a former student who gathered materials for her. She’d taught a class in sculpture for some years and one of her young men went to abandoned buildings, to boatyards, glazieries, he scoured the outer boroughs, went to garages and bowling alleys and came back once with a dozen old pillows from a condemned hotel, stained gray by how many transient heads—such sad and eerie objects to have around. (380)

“We took junk and saved it for art,” she recalls. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully” (393). Sax sees beyond the “junk” that late capitalism relegates to the periphery of thought to the essential thingness of discarded objects including, it should be noted, Shay as an abandoned child. Though he prefers Sax’s body to her instruction during their affair, later in life, Shay seems to recognize a kinship between his career as a waste manager and her career as a repurposer. When he encounters Sax several decades after their initial relationship, he finds her hard at work on a new art installation, which is formed out of a large number of decommissioned B-52 bombers. Sax’s description of her work proves a fitting contrast to Shay’s earlier descriptions of his factory-made Lexus: See, we’re painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we’re trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there’s a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct—to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. The way the nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage. (77)

When compared to the mammoth, identical weapons that endlessly emerge from factories, her hands are “puny” and her effects uncertain. Sax’s descriptions of the B-52s, like Shay’s descriptions of his Lexus, seem to fail as well; the airplane is built out of “millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly,” but she provides no indication of what these parts might be. The B-52, like so many twentieth-century technologies, can

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman no longer serve as an object of human contemplation because it has no component parts; it is black box or a “hollow bod[y]” to be used but not understood. Nonetheless, the passage suggests that humans in an era of technological devices can reshape these devices through their “graffiti instinct” into objects that express their desires and literally “show who we are.” In other words, creative acts of repurposing reveal the thing beneath the device, the human beneath the rational consumer, and the individual history within the broader history of the Cold War era. Shay seems to sense this power when he views the installation for the first time. As he gazes over the two-hundred-and-thirty-plane installation, he is surprised that they “register such pleasure and sensation”: They pushed and pulled. They were in conflict with each other, to be read emotionally, skin pigments and industrial grays and the rampant red appearing repeatedly through the piece—the red of something released, a burst sac, all blood-pus thickness and runny underyellow. And the other planes, decolored, still wearing spooky fabric over the windscreen panels and engines, de-souled, waiting to be primed. Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave. (83)

Shay’s encounter with the B-52s clearly differs from his encounter with Paulus’s shoe. The former, aesthetic repurposing produces a situation that annihilates language; the latter, practical discussion recovers language. Nonetheless, both experiences produce the same heightening of the senses that renders the world and its objects new: “I felt a kind of wildness all around me” (84). This aesthetic sensation, in turn, propels him toward his rediscovery of himself and his past. This reading is reinforced by Sax’s identical reaction to Rodia’s Watts Towers, which she encounters on a trip to Los Angeles with her husband. In one of the least ironic passages in the novel, Sax falls in love with the structure: She went around touching things, rubbing her palms over the bright surfaces. She loved the patterns made by jute doormats pressed in cement. She loved the crushed green glass and the bottle bottoms that knobbed an archway. And one of the taller towers with its tracery of whirling atoms. And the south wall candied with pebbles and mussel shells.

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   She didn’t know what this was exactly. It was an amusement park, a temple complex and she didn’t know what else. A Delhi bazaar and Italian street feast maybe. A place riddled with epiphanies, that’s what it was. (492)

While both passages capture the affective power of Sax’s and Rodia’s repurposed work, their responses illustrate the limitations of these ephemeral instances of thing-making. In both situations, the characters experience what Sax calls a “buzzing” underworld concealed beneath the ahistorical sheen of late capitalism, but they imagine this feeling (or, perhaps, structure of feeling) as an aesthetic rather than a political experience (492). Their responses therefore recycle an older, modernist program of human-object encounters predicated upon seeing the thing temporarily displaced from its objecthood—“mak[ing] the stone stony” (to use Victor Shklovsky’s mandate) or “startl[ing] a dull reader into alertness” (to use Ezra Pound’s instruction in “A Retrospect”). What DeLillo’s characters do not (and perhaps cannot) do is ask larger questions regarding why this experience might be rare enough to provoke this aesthetic response and how this feeling might be harnessed to serve some Utopian end. The closest that Shay comes to making this transition occurs in his musings on dietrologia, an Italian word from his past that he translates as “the science of what is behind something” (280). Though he limits the term to the science of “what is behind an event,” his vision clearly frames human events as materially determined, with an object or set of objects always behind and invisibly determining history. The way out of this determining system is through thing-making, whether it be through creative practices of misuse or through his many encounters with objects that have ceased their signifying function. Shay thus reverses the course of events that lead the narrator in Fight Club to his anarchic practices of misuse. Instead of beginning with observations of objects breaking down and transitioning to applied misuse, he begins with object misuse and transitions to waste management. While this journey leads him to a similar mastery of the material world, it also ushers him into the same kind of hierarchical world that characterizes Durden’s neoliberal fantasies. When he takes up a career in waste management, one of his new colleagues, Simeon Biggs, tells him that “[t]he job follows me. The subject follows me.” Shay replies, “You see it everywhere because it is everywhere . . . You’re enlightened now.

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman Be grateful” (283). Later, he joins a conversation with another colleague, the “garbage archaeologist” Jesse Detwiler, who provides a framework for Shay’s vision: Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased . . . [Garbage] pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual . . .  [G]arbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in selfdefense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to re-process what we couldn’t use. (287)

For Detwiler and for Shay, “waste is the best-kept secret in the world,” and the men and women who know this secret are the masters of both the underworld and the visible world. This systemic reading of civilization is grounded in material things rather than the “abstract ideal” and “eternal verities” critiqued by Father Paulus. As Patrick O’Donnell argues, the waste in Underworld not only illustrates the “connective tissue that binds us as identities to a highly systematized culture and history,” it also “chart[s] the quasi-accident of our relation to abandoned objects in the world that we have made and used to fulfill our needs and desires” (112). But these insights are only granted to a small group of people who, as “Church Fathers,” obscure the process from the larger flock through their activities. This is not to say that Shay cannot share his vision of the material world with others, but such activities are limited to the local intersubjective relationships that he forges with his colleagues and with his family. When Shay gazes at his company’s office building in Los Angeles, “a series of bridge-linked buildings with mirrored façade,” he insists that he “could see it all shatter in slow motion in my mind.” “You don’t think this is what we’re supposed to see when we look at these buildings?” he asks one of his colleagues. “You don’t think it’s a new way of seeing?” (303). When he and his wife, Marian, go to a grocery store, they view commodities in their postcommodity states: We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled and come back as a tawny envelope that is difficult to lick closed? First we saw the garbage, then we saw the product as food or lightbulbs or dandruff shampoo. How does it measure up as waste, we asked. We asked whether it

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman   is responsible to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live a million years. (121)

This same vision emerges in the repetitive descriptions of Shay sorting his own garbage into different types of raw materials that interpolate the narrative: “At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did tin versus aluminum. We did plastic containers, without caps or lids, on Tuesdays only. Then we did yard waste. Then we did newspapers including glossy inserts but we were careful not to tie the bundles in twine, which is always the temptation” (89). In part, the passages show that Shay has strayed from the instrumentalized logic of modernity. Instead of viewing the grocery store’s wares through their putative use-values, Shay’s occupation and imagination enable him to both see and name them as unstable networks of material bodies—glass, plastic, tin, aluminum, cardboard, and so on. This atomistic vision reveals the raw materials lying dormant within or beneath commodities, which can be activated or brought to the surface as these commodities are recycled. In the process, a component of each commodity’s authority is transferred to the rugged consumer, who assumes control of the object’s disassembly. At the same time, the repetitiveness and ironic tone of DeLillo’s descriptions suggests that these activities have begun to melt back into the texture of everyday life and have lost any charged oppositional coding that they may have once had. In both cases, creative modes of human-object interactions remain grounded firmly in individual action and individual choice. After all, the only way for Shay to demonstrate his rugged consumer abilities is either through his comfortable career in waste management or through the commodities that he and his wife choose to purchase. In this sense, Nick’s recycling activities provide a fitting conclusion for his bildungsroman. The novel leaves Nick at a waste facility with his grandchild, watching tin, paper, Styrofoam, and plastic “fl[y] down the conveyor belts, four hundred tons a day, assembly lines of garbage, sorted compressed and baled, transformed in the end to square-edged units, products again, wirebound and smartly stacked and ready to be marketed” (809). In Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, Peter Boxall contends that if we are to understand Underworld as a novel of development, it is an “education in which the once rebellious protagonist ‘enters the concatenation

  The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman of the world, and acquires for himself an appropriate attitude to it’” (194). If this observation holds true for Nick Shay, then it also holds true for the kind of rugged consumerism of which he stands representative. Far removed from the countercultural work of the 1960s and 1970s, this new rugged consumerism remains forever at the level of structures of feelings and thus supports the structural conditions of late capitalism as it seems to oppose them. What remains to be discussed is how the intervening decade—the 1980s—provoked this change.

 5 Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism

Giorgio Agamben dedicates a chapter of his book Infancy and History (1978) to the relationship between ritual and play. Following LéviStrauss, he initially classifies the terms as antithetical: [T]he function of rites is to adjust the contradiction between mythic past and present, annulling the interval separating them and reabsorbing all events into the synchronic structure. Play, on the other hand, furnishes a symmetrically opposed operation: it tends to break the connection between past and present, and to break down and crumble the whole structure into events. If ritual is therefore a machine for transforming diachrony into synchrony, play, conversely, is a machine for transforming synchrony into diachrony. (83)

For Agamben, the difference between play and ritual is most visible in encounters with certain kinds of objects—most prominently toys, which he aligns with Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage. Both categories of objects use “‘crumbs’ or ‘scraps’ belonging to other structural wholes,” and both “belonged—once, no longer, to the realm of the sacred or of the practical-economic” (81, 80). To play with an object is to remove it from certain networks of power that stabilize its use-value and to therefore “break the [object’s] connection between past and present.” Ritualized interactions with objects serve the opposite function of stabilizing that value through the instantiation of laws of sanctioned use. Agamben ends his argument by suggesting that the conversion of sacred or practical objects into toys (or toys back into sacred or practical

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism objects) is never complete, because “every game . . . contains a ritual aspect and every rite an aspect of play, which often makes it awkward to distinguish one from the other.” From this overlap, he concludes: “we can regard ritual and play not as two distinct machines but as a single machine, a single binary system, which is articulated across two categories which cannot be isolated and across whose correlation and difference the very functioning of the system is based” (83–84). Agamben’s discussion of the overlap between ritual and play—between synchronic and diachronic tendencies—offers insight into the difficulties of positioning rugged consumerism as a critique of the “practical-economic” structures of late capitalism, particularly given the neoliberal philosophies through which this system is disseminated. On one hand, playful acts of rugged consumerism separate objects from their original use-values and replace older “practicaleconomic” behaviors with novel and potentially oppositional ones. On the other hand, these activities take place within an economic system predicated upon the creative destruction and reassembly of consumer desires, objects, industries, and workers and which, as Fredric Jameson (among others) has shown, depends upon the conversion of historical behaviors into a playful and politically ineffectual pastiche. As Jameson argues, after the exhaustion of the “high modernist ideology of style . . . the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past” (Postmodernism, 17–18). The emergent “historicism” in art is characterized by “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusions, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the primacy of the ‘neo’” (Postmodernism, 18). Within this gamelike structure, the ritual aspect of rugged consumerism becomes a kind of blank mimicry or pastiche of frontier culture that reinforces what Daniel Stedman Jones calls a “deeprooted cultural obsession with the rugged individualism of the frontier” in neoliberal doctrine (125). For this framework, any creative human-object interaction can therefore be understood as a ritualistic recapitulation of the very styles and structures from which it seems to break. American politics offers numerous examples of this ritualized frontier pastiche. In 1981, Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the Unites States in part because he promised to return the country to its mythic rugged past. Speaking a year later at Edwards Air Force Base after the completion of the fourth mission of the Columbia space shuttle,

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    Reagan noted the ways that space exploration simultaneously enabled Americans to regain access to the past and move forward into the future through technological play: There are those who thought the closing of the western frontier marked an end to America’s greatest period of vitality. Yet we’re crossing new frontiers every day. The high technology now being developed, much of it by byproduct of the space effort, offers us and future generations of Americans opportunities never dreamed of a few years ago. Today we celebrate American independence confident that the limits of our freedom and prosperity have again been expanded by meeting the challenge of the frontier. (Reagan, “Remarks at Edwards Air Force Base”)

Reagan was, of course, not the first president to appeal to the mythic frontier in his political speeches, but he was in many respects the most committed to remaking the United States into a modern equivalent of the mythic frontier culture through dramatic cuts in the social safety net, deregulation of American industries, and celebration of personal responsibility over public good. Reagan’s neoliberal obsession with rugged individualism traces its roots to Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis, which also operates through Agamben’s binary system of ritual and play. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), Turner argued that the American frontier’s influence radiated backward from the outer limits of western expansion to a set of geographical elsewheres: “The [frontier] effect reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World” (30). But according to Turner, as Americans moved west, they encountered a space that they viewed as simultaneously new and old. By departing civilization and entering the wilderness, migrating Americans destabilized the temporal coordinates of each geographical location, bringing the “primitive” new wildness of the west into the domesticated old civilizations of the Atlantic coast and the Old World. In this sense, Turner’s argument accords with Agamben’s notion of ritual, which “adjust[s] the contradiction between mythic past and present, annulling the interval separating them and reabsorbing all events into the synchronic structure” (83). At the same time, the journey into the American wilderness severed the frontiersperson from his or her European past and produced a fundamentally diachronic fissure in history

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism that resonates with Agamben’s notion of play. By entering the wilderness, the frontiersperson enters a living history. Richard Slotkin examines this platform of symbolic hybridization at length in his classic study of frontier mythology, Regeneration Through Violence (1973). As he argues, the dominant mythologies of the first 250 years of American colonial expansion centered around two symbolically charged situations: captivity and hunting. In the case of the former, a white female settler is captured by Native Americans and through the traumatic ordeal is led to “the perception of her own fallen, debased, even beastlike condition, her absolute dependence upon God, her weakness in the face of sin, and the precarious nature of all human conditions” (110). After she is rescued, “the chastened victim is returned to society and restored to her family and the community of Saints” (110). In the case of the latter, a white male settler departs for the wilderness and encounters a “beast of the woods.” This creature “is transformed into an object of love, a woman (perhaps the goddess of the place) to whom the hero is wedded in symbolic sexual violence” (156–157). Both myths thus might be understood as a means of containing and organizing a dangerous kind of play: white settlers leave the domesticated spaces of the Old World and enter a lawless wilderness, which Slotkin casts as “a metaphor for the human unconsciousness,” populated by “beast[s],” which represent the “secret, darkened soul within each man” (156). As he argues, such play is then structured by a return to civilization, which converts the chaotic activities of the wilderness into rites of civilization. Agamben’s dialectical terms converge in Slotkin’s account of the paradigmatic frontiersmen Daniel Boone, who was both captive to Native Americans and an expert outdoorsman: Boone’s “Adventures” consist of a series of initiations, a series of progressive immersions that take him deeper into the wilderness. These initiations awaken Boone’s sense of his own identity, provide him with a natural moral philosophy, and give him progressively deeper insights into the nature of the wilderness. Each immersion is followed by a return to civilization, where Boone can apply his growing wisdom to the ordering of his community, and by a momentary interlude of meditation and contemplation, in which Boone can review his experience, interpret it, and formulate the wisdom gained from it. As a result of these rhythmic cycles of immersion and emergence, he grows to become the

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    commanding genius of his people, their hero-chief, and the man fit to realize Kentucky’s destiny. (278–279)

In other words, when Boone returns to civilization, he brings with him the skills that he learned through his adventures—what Turner would call “coarseness and strength,” “a masterful grasp of material things,” and so on—which are subsequently hybridized with European skill sets for the purposes of enlightened governance. In Agamben’s terms, Boone’s journey therefore duplicates one kind of mythic past (man’s “primitive” origins) while it separates the frontiersman from another (his European origins). In fusing the two mythic origin stories, he combines the synchronic and the diachronic into a single mythic mechanism of American history. In Turner’s study, the possibility of such mythic hybridization ends with the closing of the frontier and the concomitant close of the “first period of American history.” But as Reagan’s speech suggests, repurposed forms of American frontier behavior reemerge in the late twemtieth century as a vehicle for the transmission of neoliberal ideas, as a justification for its destructive effects upon organized labor, and as a means containing alternative philosophies (38).1 When examining rugged consumerism within this neoliberal context, we can therefore expect that such activity would begin with an initiation into the wilderness-like world of objects divorced from their use-values, which enables the rugged consumer to intuit a new “moral philosophy” predicated upon free market systems, rugged individualism, and governmental policies “liberated” from the strictures of older modes of collectivist behaviors. In this final chapter, I return to the physical sites of the metaphysical American frontier—the deserts and cattle ranches of the American southwest—and explore how new American Westerns balance between free play and ritual in their depictions of rugged consumerism during the Reagan era. In the pages that follow, I depart from my previous focus of rugged consumerism as a real or imagined critique of consumer culture and concentrate on the ways that the activity comes to represent modes of production and structures of work within the neoliberal economy of the United States during the 1980s. I begin with a popular television program from the 1980s that elevates the rugged consumer to heroic status through a pastiche of mythic frontier conventions. I conclude with an analysis of an author—Cormac McCarthy—who lays bare the empty nature of this

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism pastiche by placing his Reaganist rugged consumers in a position of weakness and deprivation rather than strength.

A Modern-Day Daniel Boone A soft-spoken U.S. special agent has found himself in a bit of a bind. After tracking a downed American military plane to Central Asia, scaling a cliff, knocking a hapless enemy soldier unconscious, evading a number of other soldiers, scavenging a flare gun from the downed plane, and making contract with an imprisoned American pilot, he sneaks under a nearby tent and finds the object of his mission: a captured missile. Unfortunately, as he begins to defuse the weapon, he triggers its self-destruct mechanism and a conveniently placed digital clock begins to count down to zero. Undaunted, he coolly fishes through his pockets, comes out with a paper clip, and sticks it into the triggering mechanism. The clock stops at 001. The special agent then exits the tent and begins to construct an elaborate jury-rigged contraption. First he ties the guard’s machine gun to a tree with some string. Then he jams a tree branch between the gun’s trigger guard and the trigger and secures it with a rubber band. Next, he wedges a matchbook onto a section of the string between the tree branch above and the gun below. Finally, he lights the matchbook. When the fire burns through the string, the gun falls to the ground and the stick pushes back against the trigger, causing the gun to fire. The enemy soldiers run for cover, and in the ensuing chaos, the agent frees the American pilot and escapes with him unharmed. Curiously, the agent’s thoughts throughout his elaborate mission return to a story of his youth. “It’s funny, you know, the kind of stuff that pops into your head when you’re trying to work,” he thinks as he scales the cliff. “I remember there was this horse, a golden palomino. Old man MacGinny had got him in a trade, I think. I couldn’t have been much more than nine or ten at the time, but I made up my mind I was gonna ride that horse.” As he knocks out the first soldier, he recalls old man MacGinny’s dog Hector, who guarded MacGinny’s stables. While evading enemy soldiers and searching for the missile, he thinks, “Now, havin’ a golden palomino in a corral was all well and good, but actually getting right up to her, well, that would be a whole ’nother ball game. She was startin’ to look

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    a little bit bigger than I remembered, too. No, there was definitely more to ridin’ this palomino than it had occurred to me the night before.” Finally, when he begins to disable the missile, he remembers, “I’d always heard in ridin’ horses it was the horse that did the sweatin’. But I wasn’t even on her yet and you coulda wrung enough out of me to water the lawn. From here on it was easy does it. You move too sudden or worse, try jumpin’ on her back and you might just as well strap yourself to a, well, to a rocket.” This playfully preposterous story constitutes the opening sequence to the pilot episode of the popular American television series MacGyver. Between 1985 and 1992, the show followed the career of Angus MacGyver—a hero played by Richard Dean Anderson who escaped from innumerable tight spots with the help of his childlike imagination, a trusty Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and whatever he could scrounge from his local surroundings. Later in the pilot episode, MacGyver (now back in the southwestern United States) enters a subterranean government building to save a group of trapped scientists after a bomb explodes several floors beneath the surface. In his journey underground, he uses cigarette smoke to detect a laser security system; fashions a broken pair of binoculars into a mirror to destroy that system; turns on a high-powered water hose to lift a steel girder; plugs a hole in a tank of sulfuric acid with chocolate bars; makes a bomb out of sodium, a cold capsule, and a glass jar; and sends messages to his associates above ground by flipping the building’s power switch on and off. Alternatively amazed and amused by his creative use of surrounding objects, MacGyver’s love interest in the pilot, Barbara Spenser, speaks for all viewers when she asks him, “Don’t tell me you know how to make a bomb out of a stick of chewing gum?” “Why, you got some?” he coolly replies. As the pilot indicates, MacGyver’s cartoonish rugged consumerism draws upon the southwestern cowboy culture of American mythology. He recounts his childhood experiences with the “ornery golden palomino” as if it were a sexualized rite of passage that symbolically integrates the human and natural worlds: “I wasn’t even on her yet and you coulda wrung enough out of me to water the lawn.” It is this dark knowledge that guides him as he enters the surrogate wilderness of central Asia to rescue the downed pilot. By casting the ballistic missile as an “ornery golden palomino,” the television program allegorically unites MacGyver’s adult

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism actions not only with the playful actions of his childhood but also with the enduring frontier mythology of the American cowboy, suggesting that like the horse, modern technology (and, it should be noted, communist groups within the Asian continent) can be brought under control by the creative forces of individual ingenuity. In so doing, the program suggests that the hundred-year gulf between frontier living and 1980s techno-consumerism and the thousand-mile divide between frontier America and Central Asia can be overcome simply by playing with objects in nonstandard ways. Unlike the collectivist rugged consumerisms of Shepard and Pynchon or the conflicted rugged consumerism of Underworld and Fight Club, MacGyver’s creative repurposing comfortably aligns itself with the dominant culture of its period. Debuting at the start of Ronald Reagan’s second presidential term, the program celebrates the United States’ neoliberal turn by championing the work of private male citizens and by denigrating the work of governmental agencies, non-Western militaries, and women. The downed military pilot, the hapless soldiers, and the incredulous Barbara Spenser cannot think beyond the realm of an object’s sanctioned use and are placed in positions of danger because of this reliance. In contrast, MacGyver sees beyond the socially encoded object to its rarified substance, and this caricatured form of rugged individualism makes him the hero of his moment. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), David Harvey writes that neoliberal economic policies on the order of those advocated by Ronald Reagan “propos[e] that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills” within a context of “free markets and free trade.” Within this system, “if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, or environmental pollution) then they must be created by state action if necessary” (2). In the television series, this free market ideology is most clearly expressed through MacGyver’s decision to quit his job in U.S. intelligence and to join the Phoenix Corporation—a private think tank that operates free from the “red tape” of bureaucratic rules and regulations (“Legend of the Holy Rose”). The program often places this private military company in competition with its governmental counterparts, and in such circumstances, MacGyver’s individual creativity always trumps the government’s stifling bureaucracy.

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    For example, in “The Human Factor,” the opening episode to season two, the Phoenix Corporation is paid by the U.S. military to infiltrate one of its bases to test its advanced computer security system, Sandy, designed by computer scientist Dr. Jill Ludlum—a self-described “technocrat” who wants to remove the flawed “human factor” from security decisions. When the system malfunctions, MacGyver must rescue Ludlum by outwitting Sandy’s sophisticated but predictable defense procedures with the help of mirrors, a pair of blue jeans, and a lasso. “I say we trust our instincts, go with our gut,” MacGyver tells Ludlum as she struggles to find a rational means of outwitting the computer. “You can’t program that. That’s our edge.” The ideological message is painfully clear: the feminized government must be rescued from itself by the creative, irrational “gut” work of masculinized free market ingenuity.2 The troubling aspects of MacGyver’s asymmetric relationships with women, nonwhites, and computerized bureaucrats are brushed aside by the comic ways in which this neoliberal strain of rugged consumerism is presented. Operative in so many ideologically inflected movies and television programs of the 1980s (The A-Team, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Batman, and so on), this humor can be understood through the position of power granted to viewers and characters. In the MacGyver pilot, for example, the camera dwells upon the assembly of the machine gun diversion to such an extent that viewers can anticipate its new function before that new function is realized and thus can concentrate on and derive pleasure from the terrified or confused reactions provoked by its deployment. Yet as viewers follow MacGyver’s strange work, they are also aware of their own status as observers rather than participants in acts of rugged consumerism. Placed roughly halfway between the rugged consumer and his various opponents, viewers’ laughter signifies both recognition and surprise, both power and abjection. This ideologically encoded humor dovetails Reagan’s satirical portrayal of government employees throughout his political career. By presenting his policy decisions through antigovernment populist witticisms (for example, “[T]he nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’”), the “Great Communicator” effectively preempted more complex discussions of the relationship between public and private sectors. As the embodiment of this

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism Reaganist ideology, MacGyver does not use direct force to sustain his position of power. Instead, he often humors his ideological opponents into submission through his dazzling activities. Perhaps as a way of combating this reductive message, other television programs such as The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live have parodied MacGyver’s pastiche of frontier individualism. Marge Simpson’s sisters, Patty and Selma, are MacGyver aficionados and go so far as to kidnap the star of the show, Richard Dean Anderson, in “Kiss Kiss Bang, Bangalore.” Other episodes that deal with their (not so) strange obsession include “Black Widower” and “A Star Is Burns.” The Saturday Night Live parody skit “MacGruber” has been made into a feature-length film that recounts MacGyver’s son’s bumbling attempts to disable bombs. Thankfully, these equally simplistic parodies are not the only ways that contemporary artists have critically engaged with the problems of neoliberal rugged consumerism. For the remainder of this chapter, I explore the ways that Cormac McCarthy dirties the heroic sheen of the rugged consumer through his portrayal of the actual practitioners of object misuse in a neoliberal culture: the victims rather than heroes of a highly stratified and individualistic society. Like Agamben, McCarthy frames practices of misuse as an anarchic mechanism that severs the connection between an object’s past and present, replacing the ritualized behaviors of a stable culture with a chaotic and unstable series of “events” (Agamben 83). But in contrast to the comic jingoism of MacGyver, McCarthy’s more serious work portrays the shattering of rituals as an expression of the ways that human beings are divorced from stable communities and productive identities by the structures of late capitalism. If his work at times celebrates the creative misuse of objects, this celebration is tempered by a recognition—particularly in his 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men—that unlike MacGyver, his characters’ practices are a matter of desperate survival rather than a matter of choice. His novels therefore present a much gloomier vision of the rugged consumer that highlights the devastating effects of free market individualism upon the American working class.

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism   

Cormac McCarthy’s Early Rugged Consumerism McCarthy’s early novels take place in the rural counties of Appalachia, an area characterized by poor economic prospects and poorer educational opportunities, and which served as the backdrop for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s poorly fought “War on Poverty” in the mid1960s. Within this environment, daily activities center on the fulfillment of basic human needs—proper food, shelter, and heat—which, absent a stable social safety net, must be gleaned from the objects abandoned in junk heaps or mountain forests. McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968), for example, includes the story of a “tinker,” who wanders through the desolate mountain region, dragging a cart of “tinware hung from the travis poles [that] swing[s] in mounting discord like a demented symphony” (184–185). Because he is “rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit” by each community that he encounters, he must travel continuously from town to town peddling his strange wares to other victims of poverty (193). Scavenging is also a prevalent activity in McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God (1973). The novel’s main character, Lester Ballard, is an impoverished and violent outcast from his Sevier County, Tennessee, community. After he is falsely accused of rape, he is forced into the surrounding forests, where he shelters himself in an abandoned cabin. Like the tinker, he spends the bulk of his time “search[ing] for artifacts, tilting old stoves and water heaters, inspecting bicycle parts and corroded buckets” before his final descent into murder and necrophilia (39). The novel’s descriptions of Ballard’s surroundings suggest that Appalachia is fertile ground for gleaning if not for community. His closest neighbor is a “dumpkeeper” whose property is marked by a “clearing where two cars lay upturned at either side of the road like wrecked sentinels” and whose accumulated waste is dammed up by “great levees of junk and garbage” (26). But even the dump cannot hold all of the discards of Ballard’s community; he salvages a thin mattress and a rusted axe head from the woods early in the novel and, more disturbingly, a woman’s dead body from a wrecked automobile later. His fellow untouchables in Sevier County perform similar activities. One neighbor makes a chicken coop out of “the roof of a car sliced off and propped on the ground with cinderblocks” (76) and the dumpkeeper adopts a similar approach to housing his family.

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism McCarthy’s narrator frames these grotesque survivalist activities in a tone that stands in stark contrast to the celebratory prose of his depictions of older labor practices in the novel. When Ballard takes his axe head to have it sharpened, the smith insists: “You cain’t just grind a axe and grind it . . . See how stobby it’s got? . . . You want to wait a minute I’ll show ye how to dress a axe that’ll cut two to one against any piece of shit you can buy down here at the hardware store brand new” (71). For the remainder of the chapter, the smith and McCarthy’s narrator take turns recounting the flame into which the axe head is thrust, the color of the heated steel, the method of hammering the axe head into a point, and hiss of the water as the steel is hardened (71–74). In the process, McCarthy casts the smith’s activities as a kind of ritual that links the present narrative to older traditions of manual labor and presents the possibility of a new community predicated upon the sharing of useful skills. While McCarthy celebrates these older labor practices, his novels illustrate their ineffectualness within a more modern culture focused on moment-to-moment survival. At the end of his disquisition on axe grinding, for example, the smith asks Ballard, “Reckon you could do it now from watchin’?” “Do what?” Ballard replies blankly. As this anticlimax suggests, Ballard and many characters like him hold no truck with tradition. Cast out by society, they reject the traditions associated with stable manual labor practices, including their generous collectivity. If gleaning serves some of Ballard’s needs, his other needs are achieved not through skilled labor but by playfully transforming his salvaged materials in ways that travesty such skills. When he first enters his cabin in the woods, Ballard sweeps the dirt from its floor using a piece of cardboard. Without a functioning stove, he skewers potatoes on a coat hanger and cooks them over the chimney of an oil lamp (14–15). The dumpkeeper also operates through the principles of grotesque repurposing, choosing names for his nine daughters “out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked”: Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue, and so on (26). Clearly, these activities set ritual into conflict with play and suggest a fundamental and irreparable break between communal labor traditions and a disposable culture of the present. McCarthy’s later work shifts from Appalachia to the American southwest, which amplifies the conflict between synchronic myth and

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    diachronic play. Many critics note the increasingly antagonistic relationship between humans and nature in McCarthy’s historical Western novels. For example, Dianne C. Luce finds symbolic value in the pickup truck that strikes an owl early in Cities of the Plain (1998). For Luce, what McCarthy calls the “cruciform” owl (34) becomes “an image of the natural world crucified at the hands of man, the truck and the fence manifestations of the imposition of his mechanized world on the world of nature” (162). In a recent study of McCarthy’s novels, Jay Ellis argues that the author’s later work expresses its critique of the American West’s economic development through similar terms. As the region transitioned from the stark, agricultural, geographically open cattle culture of the early twentieth century to the enclosed, rational, military-technological culture of the late twentieth century, the connection between the social and natural worlds grew increasingly attenuated. For McCarthy, “the loss of skills such as trapping, hunting, riding, and skilled manual labor in general signal a loss of important human potential for connection with, if through dominance of, the natural world” (Ellis 334). McCarthy honors these disappearing skills by devoting attention in his later novels and plays to the same kinds of creative relationships between humans and the human-made objects that characterized the smith’s monologue in Child of God. In The Crossing (1994), for example, McCarthy’s narrator observes a man examining a wolf trap, but the metaphors within his description attest to the idea that this object offers a way of orienting oneself within a synchronic world of myth as much as it serves a particular function in the material world: “Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sun he looked to be truing some older, more subtle instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was” (22). In another retelling of Slotkin’s hunter myth, the central object of The Crossing is a muzzle that the hero, Billy Parham, fashions from a paloverde tree and rope. Through this sexualized prosthesis, Parham unites with the she-wolf that he traps, enabling a communion of sorts between the young boy and the last vestiges of a disappearing wild. Likewise, the manual labor that Ben Telfair performs in McCarthy’s play The Stonemason (1995) connects him by way of his grandfather to the “ten

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism thousand year” tradition of the masons, and finally to God (26): “According to the Gospel of the true mason God has laid the stones in the earth for men to use and he has laid them in their bedding planes to show the mason how his own work must go. A wall is made the same way the world is made. A house, a temple” (10). With varying degrees of success, critics have begun to explore the tensions between McCarthy’s nostalgic world of ritualized labor and the chaotic realities of American economic development during the modern period. In keeping with more general accounts of the American Western, which classify the genre as centered around a conflict between the primitive and the technological, such studies conclude that McCarthy’s nostalgic narratives eulogize the departure of artisanal forms of production and lament the subsequent arrival of industrial capitalism’s anarchic world of commodities.3 A clear example of this tendency in McCarthy scholarship and its accompanying strengths and weaknesses can be found in David Holloway’s The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy (2002). Following Vereen Bell’s seminal commentary on Blood Meridian, Holloway begins the third chapter of his study with an extended discussion of a scene from that novel involving a shotgun: David Brown, a member of the fictionalized (though historically based) Glanton gang, acquires the weapon on one of the gang’s violent forays through the American West in search of aboriginal scalps. To improve the weapon, he visits a San Diego farrier to have the barrel cut down but is summarily refused. As McCarthy’s prose lovingly details, the farrier’s reasons are obvious: it is a beautiful weapon. There was a raised center rib between the barrels and inlaid in gold the maker’s name, London. There were two platinum bands in the patent breech and the locks and the hammers were chased with scrollwork cut deeply in the steel and there were partridges engraved at either end of the maker’s name there. The purple barrels were welded up from triple skelps and the hammered iron and steel bore a watered figure like the markings of some alien and antique serpent, rare and beautiful and lethal, and the wood was figured with a deep red feather grain at the butt and held a small springloaded silver capbox in the toe. (265–266)

Clearly this is no simple weapon. In its combination of functional precision and aesthetic beauty, the shotgun recalls the shield of Achilles and all of its successors; it is “a symbol of an order of being, aesthetic

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    and economic, that [Brown’s] whole existence denies” (Bell 117). Brown’s request and subsequent decision to cut down the barrels himself becomes for Holloway “a parabolic act of desecration, a figural erasing of craft labor from the weapon” that leaves “the particularity of the gun very much diminished. Sited within the proto-industrial anarchy of the market, the gun is ‘liberated’ from its roots in small craft labor and distanced from its status as a unique artifact” (104). Echoing Theodor Adorno’s well-known critique of art in the modern era, Holloway concludes that the gun stands emblematic of a historical moment in which “the heterogeneous diversity of the object world is reduced to a single identity, a homogeneous mass of matter, a collection of things linked together by their common exchangevalue, their shared status as commodities in a commodity world” (104– 105).4 In the terms of Western genre criticism, the farrier’s refusal, like the smith’s disquisition in Child of God, represents an older, more natural position with respect to craft production, while David Brown’s actions, like Ballard’s, represent the encroachment of a new, capitalist society upon that position. While Holloway’s reading might seem fitting when the shotgun is viewed as the product of Brown’s intention (after all, Brown treats the weapon as indistinguishable from any other at hand), it is telling that his conclusion overlooks another materialist reading: Brown regards the weapon as a violently practical object with use-value rather than as a fetishized artifact of exchange-value. Through the cold logic of a killer, Brown (like Ballard in Child of God, who does not care how an axe can be repaired) sees beyond the aesthetic finery of skelps and serpents to the functional form that that finery encases. Indeed, when the farrier offers to purchase the shotgun, Brown refuses, insisting, “It aint for sale” (266).5 Holloway’s reading also overlooks the kind of labor associated with modifying the weapon to its deadlier truncated form. By joining his own crude labor to the London maker’s craft, Brown, if anything, makes the object more singular; no other prized artifact would be played with so rudely. As Walter Benjamin has written, “The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it” (22). While many scholars, including Holloway, would privilege the former terms of this pronouncement, many post-Benjaminian scholars, including

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism Heather MacNeil and Bonnie Mak, remind us of the latter terms of discussion: the auratic authenticity of an object need not be circumscribed by its initial moment of production. Indeed, that aura is redoubled by its subsequent transformative history: “[A] work of art is not necessarily fixed at a single point in time; its survival and ongoing preservation mean that, in an important sense, it is in a continuous state of becoming” (32–33). In this sense, the shotgun may simply be another example of the reappropriation of use-value on the plains, a situation akin to the chilling and equally symbolic description of the Comanche attacker clad in “white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil” (52) that greets the gang early in the novel. Across the violent racial divide, use-value—red in tooth and claw—achieves a sublime victory over the modern symbolic exchangevalue systems of Western culture. If we were to “misuse” Holloway’s argument, we might contend that the question is not use-value but intended use-value: the practical result of social conventions that sanction certain use-values for certain objects. Within this system, the measure of Brown’s “desecration” of the shotgun (or the Comanche warrior’s desecration of the accoutrements of Christian weddings) would be its deviation from prescribed or sanctioned use. Despite the fact that, from Brown’s perspective, a shorter barrel improves the weapon’s killing power, the farrier insists that cutting the barrels would “ruin a good gun” (266), suggesting that the proper use of an object has less to do with that object’s brute function and more to do with its ritualized aesthetic function. In short, Brown might be guilty not of commodity fetishism but of its acultural opposite: misuse. Bill Brown’s theory of misuse value provides a series of critical terms that prove helpful at this juncture. As he argues, the ritualized daily habits that give form and sense to our perception operate as cognitive buffers that allow us to see things only as socially constructed objects. Humans escape from this conceptual imprisonment either by witnessing the object as it breaks down or by intentionally changing the object’s function and thus releasing its ephemeral “thinghood” from its standard conceptual frame—its “objecthood.”6 While Brown casts misuse as a psychological condition that generates an aesthetic effect, McCarthy shifts aesthetic misuse to pragmatic misuse in his description of the farrier’s interaction with David Brown. As a skilled laborer and tradesman, the farrier views

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    the shotgun in its culturally encoded objecthood, while the decidedly acultural David Brown treats it as a thing to be molded to his individual will. But breaking away from an older craft labor does not mean entering into a world of homogeneous exchange; in this context, it means breaking away from all remnants of stable culture and creating a realm of isolated individuals that prey upon rather than cooperate with each other.7 When integrated with Agamben’s system of play and ritual, Bill Brown’s arguments thus transform some of the terms of McCarthy’s late modernism. If modernist misuse “interrupt[s] the habits with which we view the world, the habits that prevent us from seeing the world” (Brown 78), this passage from Blood Meridian can help us to understand the intimate connection between early champions of a modernist material aesthetic and the individualist neoliberal philosophies emergent at the time of the novel’s publication. Indeed, the “brute physicality” of neoliberal play in McCarthy’s historical Westerns could in some sense be thought to constitute the reductio ad absurdum of modernism’s fascination with “primitive” sites and found art, its ceaseless quest for individual authentic experiences, and its violent rejection of the repressive tendencies of not just passive consumerism but the larger twenty-five-hundred-year-old culture. The obvious problem with such activity is that far from challenging the structures of late capitalism, this kind of play liquidates the residual labor traditions that precede rational economic development. In Agamben’s terms, Brown’s world is a kind of late capitalist “[p]layland whose inhabitants are busy . . . manipulating objects . . . , whose sense and purpose they have, however, forgotten” (79).

“Anything Can Be an Instrument” Blood Meridian can be understood as a vehicle by which McCarthy critiques the culture of neoliberal play that was emerging at the time in which he was writing. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men returns to this theme and might be considered his attempt to explain the more exaggerated conditions of post-9/11 neoliberalism by returning to its primal scene. Set at the beginning of Reagan’s presidency, the novel dramatically expands its descriptions of neoliberal rugged consumerism. In this crime thriller, Llewelyn Moss not only duplicates David Brown’s actions

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism in Blood Meridian by sawing down a recently purchased shotgun (87); his boots become a gun stand (9), his shirt becomes a sock (35), tent poles and a hanger become a prosthetic grip (87, 101), and venetian blind cords become a handle (84). The novel’s satanic villain, Anton Chigurh, is if anything more skilled at turning objects with sanctioned use-values into deadly “toys.” His ubiquitous gas canister and stun gun combine to form not only his weapon of choice but also his universal key. Chigurh uses the contraption to “sho[ot] out the lock cylinder” of at least five doors in the novel (80, 103, 198, 203, 242–243). MacGyver before MacGyver, Chigurh also fashions venetian blind cords and a towel into bandages (120–121), turns a car into a bomb using a coat hanger and shirt (162), and creates a silencer from “brass mapp-gas burners fitted into a hairspray can and the whole thing stuffed with fiberglass roofing insulation” (99). Finally, in what might be the most audacious inversion of use-value, Chigurh opens the novel by strangling a police officer with the very handcuffs designed to restrain him (5–6).8 On the one hand, this proliferation of misuse continues McCarthy’s ambivalent portrayal of rugged consumerism as an activity that emerges in the absence of stable social and economic structures. If McCarthy’s earlier work concerns the problem of survival under conditions of extreme economic deprivation, the misuse of objects in No Country for Old Men might initially appear to be an individual strategy for working-class survival in an era of disappearing social safety nets. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of misuse relations in the novel, coupled with Moss’s and Chigurh’s refusal (or inability) to acknowledge such human-object relations as misuse, shatters the very social structures by which one could distinguish between the proper use and an improper misuse of commodities. In this more radical reading, Moss and Chigurh assume the selfmade and self-sustaining nature of their Wild West antecedents—Judge Holden, Billy Parham, and John Grady Cole—and become, in a sense, the avatars rather than the victims of neoliberal ideology. By hollowing out the prescribed utilitarian telos of commodities, McCarthy’s late modernist hero and antihero enter into an ahistorical world of radical play constituted by empty, violent destruction. The novel’s blank pastiche of the rugged individual frontier lacks the palliative humor of MacGyver and becomes what the third main character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, calls an

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    “out of hand” situation. When the desire for community fails, he muses, “You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it’s just too late” (304). The setting of No Country for Old Men would seem upon first inspection an unlikely place to remake the natural frontier. Within the novel, McCarthy’s celebrated descriptions of natural phenomena give way to the laconic prose of the crime fiction genre. As James Browning writes: “The master of Southwestern gothic has written his first indoor book, breaking his own prose the way John Grady Cole broke colts in All the Pretty Horses (1992), the broken prose and colts still lovely shadows of their former selves” (Browning). In marking this transition from outdoors to indoors, McCarthy’s keen eye turns from natural phenomena to the technological commodities that populate the new West. At the beginning of the novel, Moss searches for antelope on a west Texas ridge but finds instead the remains of a drug deal gone bad: rotting bodies, a set of trucks, heroin, and the drug money that he foolishly decides to steal.9 Likewise, in place of Parham’s fascination with the huge tracks of a female wolf in The Crossing, McCarthy gives us Sheriff Bell’s commentary on the “allterrain” (11) tire tracks of the drug runners’ four-wheel-drive trucks: “It’s the same tire tread comin back as was goin down. Made about the same time. You can see the sipes real clear” (71). Physical tracking, in turn, gives way to Chigurh’s dematerialized tracking of the stolen money with his radio transponder. In McCarthy’s late capitalist denouement to the dream of the mythic West, animal prey becomes human prey, animal tracks become automobile tracks become signals, cattle smuggling becomes drug smuggling, and horses become off-road vehicles. Fittingly, Llewelyn Moss meets the woman whom he would have as his wife not at a cattle ranch (as John Grady Cole does in All the Pretty Horses) but at the local Walmart. As Carla Jean tells Sheriff Bell: When I got out of high school I was still sixteen and I got a job at Wal-Mart. I didnt know what else to do. We needed the money. What little it was. Anyway, the night before I went down there I had this dream. Or it was like a dream. I think I was still about half awake. But it come to me in this dream or whatever it was that if I went down there that he would find me. At the Wal-Mart. I didnt know who he was or what he looked like. I just knew that I’d know him when I seen

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism him. . . . And on the ninety-ninth day he walked in and he asked me where sportin goods was at and it was him. And I told him where it was at and he looked at me and went on. And directly he come back and he read my nametag and he said my name and he looked at me and he said: What time do you get off? (131–132)

Edwin T. Arnold has argued that dreams serve as important narrative structures in McCarthy’s work, offering a solution to the seemingly unbridgeable contradictions between man and nature, community and self, and desire and reality. Dreams present “a different way of seeing the world(s), of finding our place therein” (67). That Carla Jean dreams of a Walmart romance marks just how far late capitalism has encroached upon human psychology. In this bathetic inversion of the hunter myth, love becomes the fetishized byproduct of consumer desire, a desire ludicrously ascribed to fate. In McCarthy’s new consumer frontier, the hunter goes to Walmart for some sporting goods and emerges with a sporting wife—tagged and bagged. But if the natural (to borrow from Fredric Jameson) has been eclipsed by the technological in the novel, and if these quintessentially postmodern moments illustrate the waning influence of nature as an oppositional force to late capitalism, each character’s desire not only to understand but also to manipulate and create useful objects from raw materials remains. Fittingly, one of the most prominent examples of misuse in the novel involves an object that, when read against McCarthy’s early work, comes to symbolize the final collapse of the American wilderness inhabited by his earlier heroes. On the run from Chigurh, a Mexican drug cartel, and the malevolent “Matacumbe Petroleum Group” (171)—a faceless archetype of late capitalism if ever there were one—Moss stashes his stolen money in an air duct at a cheap west Texas motel. After his location is compromised, Moss plans to retrieve the cash by checking into an adjacent room and fashioning a prosthetic arm to reach down the duct. To this end, he enters a sporting goods store for “raw” materials—in this case, tent poles—which elicits the following comic but structurally significant exchange between Moss and the clerk. He tried to explain that he didnt care what kind of tent it was, he just needed the poles. The clerk studied him. Whatever kind of tent it is, he said, we’d still have to special order poles for it. You need to get the manufacturer and the model number.

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    You sell tents, right? We got three different models. Which one has got the most poles in it? Well, I guess that would be our ten foot walltent. You can stand up in it. Well, some people could stand up in it. It’s got a six foot clearance at the ridge. Let me have one. (87–88)

A characteristic example of McCarthy’s humor, this interaction highlights a crucial set of differences between characters who, to use Agamben’s terms, play with objects and those who view objects through the structures of ritual. The clerk cannot comprehend why Moss would need only the poles, because he views the commodity as designed for a singular, specialized use. That objects as banal and seemingly interchangeable as tent poles would require knowledge of a “manufacturer” and “model number” suggests the specialization and (absurdly enough) professionalization of recreational behaviors. The exchange is made doubly ironic by its ostensible subject: the nature enthusiast. While McCarthy’s early twentiethcentury heroes John Grady Cole and Billy Parham sleep under the stars on horse blankets and saddles, and while his postapocalyptic father and son sleep under scavenged plastic film in The Road (2006), the men and women of No Country for Old Men denaturalize the natural by fashioning tents as large and as accommodating as hotel rooms out of materials designed for one use and one use only. Though he does not (and perhaps cannot) articulate his viewpoint, Moss sees beyond the singularity of the commodity to the material quiddity of the thing. Returning to his new motel room, he methodically assembled three [poles] and taped the joints with duct tape so that they wouldnt pull apart. He went to the closet and came back with three wire hangers and sat on the bed and cut the hooks off with the sidecutters and wrapped them into one hook with the tape. Then he taped them to the end of the pole and stood up and slid the pole down the ductwork. (101)

Through these two narrative moments, Moss simultaneously participates in commodity exchange (he purchases the tent, after all) and seems to resist the deadening aftereffect of that exchange. By treating the tent poles as raw material for his postproduction production rather than as predetermined objects with predetermined functions, he tries to reclaim some semblance of the natural “thinghood” of these domesticated objects. In

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism other words, he strives (though finally fails) to live off rather than through the late capitalist landscape as a paragon of rugged consumerism.

McCarthy’s Humor As Moss’s encounter with the sporting goods employee suggests, the novel’s representation of rugged consumerism is not wholly negative. The peripheral characters in No Country for Old Men not only struggle to understand how an object might be reshaped into a thing; they also comply with standard notions of use-value in their attempts to interpret the aftereffects of misuse. The ill-fated deputy who arrests Chigurh at the novel’s beginning cannot properly describe Chigurh’s idiosyncratic weapon of choice in a telephone call to his sheriff: “Sheriff he had some sort of thing on him like one of them oxygen tanks for emphysema or whatever. Then he had a hose that run down the inside of his sleeve and went to one of them stunguns like they use at the slaughterhouse. Yessir. Well that’s what it looks like. You can see when you get in” (5). That a west Texas deputy would separate two interrelated objects into a stungun (a common slaughterhouse instrument more commonly called a captive bolt pistol) and an oxygen tank for “emphysema” (rather than for propellant) and struggles to articulate the combined objects’ function suggests just how far removed from cattle culture that area had become.10 But what I find more telling is the fact that west Texas law enforcement cannot recognize this material instrument in its effects throughout the novel. Chigurh uses the bolt pistol to shoot out locks and shoot in skulls on numerous occasions, but tracing the holes in doors and human bodies to the obvious source is a task the law refuses to perform. When Sheriff Bell comes across Chigurh’s second victim, the unfortunate Bill Wyrick, he studies the hole in the man’s head and remarks: “Looks like a .45. Clean. Almost like a wadcutter” (43). The subsequent coroner’s report elicits a darkly comic exchange between Bell and his deputy that deserves to be quoted in full: What do they say. Not much of anything. What was he shot with? They dont know. They dont know?

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    No sir. How can they not know? There wasnt no exit wound. Yessir. They freely admitted that. Freely admitted? Yessir. Well what the hell did they say, Torbert? They said that he had what looked to be a large caliber bullet wound in the forehead and that said wound had penetrated to a distance of approximately two and a half inches through the skull and into the frontal lobe of the brain but that there was not no bullet to be found. Said wound. Yessir. Bell pulled out onto the interstate. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He looked at his deputy. What you’re saying dont make no sense, Torbert. (78–79)

Despite the fact that Sheriff Bell finally comes to the correct conclusion later in the novel (106), for the reader, part of the perverse pleasure of the scene lies in recognizing the cause in the effect, in making sense of what “dont make no sense.”11 While even the forensic experts at Austin (who, improbably, did not contact the dead deputy’s sheriff, who, even more improbably, did not find the detail important enough to share with his fellow lawmen) can think only in terms of the prescribed relations between objects and their effects, McCarthy’s humor pushes the reader toward an identification of the world outside the law of sanctioned use. At the same time, it—like MacGyver—demonstrates the inability of governmental organizations to perform competently and efficiently. McCarthy’s narratives are full of humorous exchanges between rugged consumers and passive consumers. Perhaps the most memorable exchange occurs in McCarthy’s early novel Suttree (1979), when two farmers make a hilarious discovery on a walk through a watermelon patch: You aint goin to believe this. Knowin you for a born liar I most probably wont. Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons. What? I said somebody has been . . . No. No. Hell no. Damn you if you aint got a warped mind. I’m telling you . . .

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism I don’t want to hear it. ... I’m telling ye I seen him. I didnt know what the hell was goin on when he dropped his drawers. Then when I seen what he was up to I still didnt believe it. But yonder they lay. What you aim to do? Hell, I dont know. It’s about too late to do anything. He’s damn near screwed the whole patch. I don’t see why he couldn’t of stuck to just one. Or a few. Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse. (33)

The vegetable Lothario, Gene Harrogate, is a comic antecedent to McCarthy’s late heroes and can be thought of as a bridge figure between the author’s Southern and Western novels. In this passage, his actions, like those of Chigurh, elicit disbelief and humorous surprise. More importantly, this stunning transgression provides the clearest indication that Harrogate, like many of McCarthy’s later characters, sees the world from a position completely removed from the socially encoded laws of proper object use. This perspective extends from natural objects to artificial commodities. After he is released from jail, Harrogate dons clothes that he scrounges from a workhouse and walks to Suttree’s houseboat. “You look crazy,” Suttree tells him: What is this? Harrogate held his arms aloft. I dont know, he said. Suttree was turning him around. Good God, he said. The shirt was fashioned from an enormous pair of striped drawers, his neck struck through the ripped seam of the crotch, his arms hanging from the capacious legholes like sticks. (114)

Harrogate’s inability to name his shirt as a pair of drawers marks him as a rugged consumer by default: he sees the world through a childlike vision that colors all of his subsequent interactions with objects. Later in the novel, he builds a house from the discarded refuse of Knoxville (116), creates a riverboat by welding two car hoods together (208–209), fits this boat with oarlocks made of dog chain (210), and grounds a streetlight to electrocute the doves that will become his primary food source (137). Though he is the butt of many a joke in the novel, he is the most creative and endearing of Suttree’s motley crew.

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    McCarthy employs this type of humor throughout No Country for Old Men as a measure of the gap between the collectively agreedupon laws of sanctioned value and the lawless individualism of rugged misuse. Consider the following exchange between Sheriff Bell and his mentor, Ellis: How many cats you got? Several. Depends on what you mean by got. Some of em are half wild and the rest are just outlaws. They run out the door when they heard your truck. Did you hear the truck? How’s that? I said did you . . . You’re having a little fun with me. What gives you that idea? Did you? No. I seen the cats skedaddle. (266)

Like his initial response to Torbert’s report, Bell’s words reflect a standard, lawful way of making sense of sensory perceptions while Ellis perceives sounds indirectly, through sight. Fittingly, the “outlaw” cats are objects of Ellis’s lawless misuse; he uses them as prosthetic hearing aids. In both passages, McCarthy’s humor considers the world as a collection of underdetermined phenomena—a world of dwindling but still recognizable possibility.12 This prospectival shift in the reader’s perspective dovetails one of the most perceptive accounts of Chigurh’s weapon. As Jay Ellis writes, the bolt gun “feels like a gimmick” but isn’t: “By killing people with a cattle gun, Chigurh is turning them into livestock, denying their humanity. Moreover, by shooting them in the forehead with it, Chigurh simultaneously deprives them of their living sight while imprinting in them a symbolic third eye—a visual representation of the enlightenment on matters of chance and destiny that he sometimes provides in a brief premurder Socratic dialogue” (228–229).13 If Chigurh’s “third eye” is indeed symbolic, readers (and perhaps Sheriff Bell) serve as final accountants for that symbol. Like Bell, McCarthy’s readers are enlightened as to the relationship between chance and destiny in human-object relationships. Rather than viewing objects as fated to a particular function, Chigurh’s “third eye” serves as a material testimony to the arbitrary nature of an object’s use: a stun gun can kill cattle or people.14 Again speaking as the

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism voice of the law, Bell touches the brass lock that Chigurh has knocked out of Moss’s door and notes, “You could weigh this thing and measure the distance and the drop and calculate the speed” (93). But that measurement will never find its way back to some physical cause unless Bell first separates effects from sanctioned causes. If Bell’s Newtonian approach cannot provide satisfactory answers, Chigurh’s approach perhaps can. When the reader encounters Chigurh’s disquisition on probability, he or she is therefore already predisposed to its rhetorical and logical structures. We therefore find something uncomfortably familiar in Chigurh’s philosophy of the world, for the novel has been training us to recognize its bleak humor before he opens his mouth.

Performative Utterance and Rugged Consumerism “It’s nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And I’m here. And I’ve got my hand over it. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it” (56). With this description of a coin, Chigurh introduces us to the strange relationship among use, misuse, chance, and fate, which functions as the outlaw structural principle of the novel. A brief context: After escaping from a Texas prison, Chigurh begins his pursuit of Moss and the money that Moss takes from the last surviving member of a failed drug deal. In his journey to this first site of human carnage, Chigurh pulls into a gas station to make a phone call, purchase some provisions, and fill up the tank of his stolen car. During his subsequent encounter with the station attendant, Chigurh forces the man to make a decision that will either leave him with his life or add him to the long line of bodies that leads to Moss. In a novel obsessed with the circulation of capital and in an environment where that circulation is given clearest expression, this sudden transformation in the function of a coin suggests a defamiliarizing misuse. Through this new exchange, the coin is stripped of its fungible status as an element of exchange and emerges as a solidified, circular object with two different and distinct sides. The attendant, duplicating the responses of both the sporting goods clerk and Sheriff Bell, meekly protests, “You aint makin any sense, mister” (56). If Chigurh’s performative language changes the nature of the coin’s use, it also liberates that coin from its status as an object of mass

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    reproduction and circulation. The coin is not just a coin; it is the coin that has “been traveling twenty-two years to get here.” McCarthy calls attention to the transformed status of the coin by having it serve as the one economic object with which Chigurh parts without an equivalent exchange. “Take it,” he tells the attendant. “It’s your lucky coin” (57). When the man takes up the coin, Chigurh lays bare his formal principles of misuse: Dont put it in your pocket. You wont know which one it is . . . Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it? (57)

In this aphoristic monologue, Chigurh insists that the coin should be taken out of circulation and should serve instead as an emblem of the storekeeper’s life: his “lucky” coin. Echoing the consequences of Bill Brown’s misused objects, the coin “is saved from the humiliation of homogeneity” and maintains its idiosyncratic “thinghood” (Brown 8). Much can be gained from setting this structure of misuse against J. L. Austin’s understanding of performative utterance in How to Do Things with Words (1962). Austin’s work distinguishes between statements that describe conditions and statements that instantiate action. He designates the latter utterances “performative” and provides two examples that shed light on Chigurh’s words: “‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’—as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem” and “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” (5). By distinguishing between the two sides of the coin and by forcing the storekeeper to “call it,” Chigurh first names the conditions of his sadistic game and then performatively engenders the conditions of the bet that might cost the attendant his life. He then pronounces the coin the attendant’s “lucky coin,” marking it out from all other coins produced in 1958 or any other year. Through his performative pronouncements, the coin achieves the status of a symbolic talisman on the order of the doubloon in Moby-Dick or a Eucharist wafer.15 In such a context, the object can no longer hold its perfunctory social role

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism and becomes instead a thing wrenched by linguistic misuse into its new function as a singular “instrument” of fate, just as the undifferentiated ship becomes Queen Elizabeth or rain becomes a signifier for the conditions of a bet. Chigurh’s (and perhaps by extension Austin’s) performative utterances thus can be thought of as modes of resistance to a linguistic and economic world of abstract exchange. The act of naming and the act of betting both particularize the otherwise indistinguishable journey of objects and conditions through space and time. Misused coins and their function as “instruments” of fate have a long history in McCarthy’s work. In his early novel Suttree, the creative miscreant Gene Harrogate uses a spoon to try to beat a silver coin into a ring while in prison for his crimes against melon-kind (themselves astounding if not terribly palatable examples of misuse). Though unsuccessful, Harrogate manages to forge an unexpected friendship with the eponymous protagonist through his idiosyncratic actions (51). In Blood Meridian, Judge Holden dazzles his doomed compatriots by hurling a coin over a campfire only to have it return to him in a mysterious arc: “The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons, coins, men. His hands moved as if he were pulling something from one fist in a series of elongations. Watch the coin, Davy, he said” (245–246). Most importantly, the exchange between Chigurh and the attendant echoes a lavish description of fate in All the Pretty Horses. When John Grady Cole meets with the Dueña Alfonsa to discuss Cole’s petition to marry Alejandra, the Dueña begins her conversation with a parable: My father had a great sense of the connectedness of things. I’m not sure I share it. He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes. . . . It’s a foolish argument. But that anonymous small person at his workbench has remained with me. I think if it were fate that ruled our house it could perhaps be flattered or reasoned with. But the coiner cannot. Peering with his poor eyes through dingy glasses at the blind tablets of metal before him. Making

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    his selection. Perhaps hesitating a moment. While the fates of what unknown worlds to come hang in the balance. My father must have seen in this parable the accessibility of the origins of things, but I see nothing of the kind. For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. (230–231)

The Dueña’s parable outlines the conditions of fate and chance in a world of objects increasingly estranged from their origins. Paradoxically, the parable casts the function of objects as inscribed within these origins, with the outcome of every toss of the coin dictated by the coiner’s decision to place a slug into a die in one of two configurations. In a way akin to Austin’s performative pronouncement, the anonymous coiner converts the undifferentiated metal mass into an object with a permanent symbolic dipole, one that assigns a meaning to every subsequent use. Had the coiner inserted the slug in an opposite configuration, every coin toss that followed would have had an opposite result, converting a positive into a negative or, in the case of Chigurh’s coin, life into death.16 Set alongside the other misuse structures of McCarthy’s novels, this glimpse into the primal scene of object creation engenders telling contradictions in Chigurh’s deterministic worldview. If the Dueña’s father and Chigurh truly believe in the “accessibility of the origins of things,” they both ascribe a telos to that origin and a concomitant intentionality to the object that might or might not be acknowledged by its producer. For both men (and for the Judge), God does not play dice with the universe, because he has created the dice through which the universe extrudes its laws. As Chigurh tells Carla Jean before he kills her: I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. . . . You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see? (259)

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism But if Chigurh’s earlier, playful remaking of objects is any indication, he has little trouble “second say[ing] the world” when it suits his purposes. His misuses of the cattle gun, handcuffs, hairspray can, and venetian blinds suggest that the origin of objects need not dictate their future use. Lines can always be erased and reformed, heads can always be pronounced tails, death can always become life. If, as Chigurh tells her, “I got here the same way the coin did” (258), his previous acts of misuse testify to the fact that he is no more obligated to kill her than tent poles are obliged to support a tent or coins are obliged to operate as markers of capitalist exchange. In what may be the greatest enigma of this most enigmatic character, he thus interprets his actions in ways that completely and precisely undermine their agency. Far from being the superhuman creature that his actions suggest, Chigurh at the end of the novel turns out to formulate his thoughts in ways little different from a sporting goods clerk or a gas station attendant. Each of these figures strives to fulfill the prescribed intention of some anonymous producer: in the case of the sporting goods clerk, the “manufacturer;” in the case of Chigurh, “the world” and its accountant. In so doing, Chigurh views himself as an object of history rather than a subject with free will, and thus occupies a position on both extremes of Agamben’s ritual/play machine structure. As Linda Woodson shrewdly notes, this worldview distinguishes Chigurh from the villainous Judge in Blood Meridian—a figure with whom he is often compared. For Woodson, the Judge is a “fashioner of men’s fate” and a locus of power. “Chigurh, on the other hand, sees himself not as having the power to pull together the strings of an absolute destiny, but rather as an ‘instrument’ of that which has already been determined” (6). In a fitting addition to McCarthy’s story, the Coen brothers’ movie foregrounds this self-abnegation by modifying an angry exchange between Chigurh and his supposed employer. When Chigurh discovers that they have given the transponder to a group of bounty hunters, he tells them, “That’s foolish. You pick the one right tool.” Chigurh is the “one right tool” for the job, a killer who wills himself to relinquish will. With this addition, Dennis Cutchins argues, the Coens show “that part of the nature of evil, perhaps the central part, is its denial of agency, especially its own” (168).

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    Such a conclusion is supported by other characters in McCarthy’s works who also manage to escape from the confines of their origins. The protagonist in Blood Meridian, for example, is referred to as “the child” until he runs away from home and travels to the southwest on his own: “Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not of another type of clay” (4–5). The eponymous hero of Suttree abandons his privileged Knoxville family for a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Likewise, Billy Parham and John Grady Cole leave their families for the southwest in The Border Trilogy. Unlike these characters, McCarthy provides no evidence in the novel that Chigurh is a product of his origins despite his insistence to the contrary. Indeed, the author seems to go out of his way to deny that Chigurh even has an origin. Like the Judge in Blood Meridian, Chigurh enters No Country for Old Men as an enigma. As Woodson writes, “He exists outside of society and is of indeterminate origin and purpose. It is never very clear why he involves himself in the hunt for Llewelyn Moss. Even his name is indeterminate in origin: if he is of Eastern European origin, one would have expected the use of a patronymic to make that clear, yet there is the fact of his Christian first name, Anton” (6). Whether or not Chigurh’s past determines his present is therefore irrelevant. McCarthy’s world provides no access to these origins, meaning we can only understand his desire to become an instrument through his interactions with physical objects. Since he clearly misuses the world around him, he himself can be misused. It is therefore fitting that Chigurh’s final misuse appears bereft of the Promethean power of his previous encounters with objects. After killing Carla Jean and departing from her home, Chigurh is struck by a car speeding through an intersection—a reminder that the dictates of chance outweigh any naive appropriation of order from chaos. His arm broken, Chigurh asks two teenage boys for a shirt to fashion into a sling. When the boys ask Chigurh which shirt he wants, he angrily replies, “Any damn shirt. How much?” (261). No longer singular, no longer an object traveling a few months or years to reach him, in this final act of misuse, the

  Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism undifferentiated shirt is pressed to Chigurh’s side as he hobbles off into the future. The contradiction between Chigurh’s deterministic speeches and acts of misuse foregrounds the difficulty that the main characters of No Country for Old Men face in articulating a version of rugged consumerism within late capitalism that is not an empty caricature of free market individualism. With the notable exception of Chigurh’s performative (though semantically two-sided) coinings, these outlaws, like Gene Harrogate before them, are unable to abstract their various misuses of objects into a language that might balance between a celebration and critique of individual agency. Chigurh and Moss simply do what (for them) seems natural; they translate commodity objects into playful things using their hands rather than their mouths. In a world where the naming of objects becomes an economic “coining” of objects, where such economic coining organizes all subsequent interactions with those objects into sanctioned and unsanctioned use, and where such categorization divests human-made objects of the infinite potentiality of the objects of the natural world, actions rather than words might seem to be the only resistant behaviors available. As Ben Telfair remarks in The Stonemason, “The work is everything, and whatever is learned is learned in the doing” (64). All political or social knowledge that work teaches a person “is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of work” (65). From this conclusion, we not only can begin to reconsider the uneasy relationship between object use and materialist theories that frame current discussions of McCarthy’s aesthetic project, but by extension, we can also ask new questions of the relationship between an object’s production history and its function as we move from a modern to a contemporary context. While David Brown’s mutilation of the artisanal shotgun in Blood Meridian could be thought an outrage, engendering an irreversible severance of the object from its ritualistic origins, comparable instances of object misuse in No Country for Old Men cast this severance in a manner that is stripped even of this coding. Indeed, against the Dueña’s parable and Chigurh’s sadistic logic we could argue the antithetical position that knowledge of the origins of a given object—what Benjamin would call its “historical testimony”—engenders a situation far worse than alienation: conceptual imprisonment (22). McCarthy seems to suggest that by

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism    fetishizing the original intention of a given object, a late capitalist citizen is bound by some irresistible law to subscribe to that intention, creating a situation in which the consumer becomes an extension of the commodity rather than vice versa. Moreover, given the fact that this intention can never derive from a recognizably human agent, we are forced to question why we would ever want to subscribe to such an arbitrary ritual. Unlike the Dueña’s coin, which was made by the coiner’s hand; the tent poles, the shotgun, and even Chigurh can be traced back only to machines or faceless corporations. To an even greater extent, the social history of objects in the contemporary world is a “puppet show,” in which “the strings . . . terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, . . . and so on.” By playing with objects, Moss and Chigurh sever the strings that dictate the show, forging a new purpose and therefore a new origin for the objects at hand. But McCarthy provides no indication that Moss and Chigurh are capable of translating their misuses into the abstract logic of language. Moss’s and Chigurh’s actions never serve as a platform from which to mount a sustained critique of the systemic practices of late capitalist conditioning. They therefore cannot reconcile the rugged consumer critique of passive consumerism with its troubling celebration of neoliberal economic and social policies. Or, perhaps more optimistically, a critique does emerge in the interstitial space between utterance and performance, in the often humorous disjunction between generalized definition and particularized meaning. Ironically, perhaps Chigurh was right after all. Anything can be an instrument so long as it is understood that anything cannot be the instrument.

 6

The Commodity at the End of the World

McCarthy’s critique of neoliberal rugged consumerism in No Country for Old Men—set in the early 1980s but published in 2005—returns us to the ambivalent practices of misuse outlined in the introduction to this book. If the story of rugged consumerism begins with countercultural practices designed to disrupt, alter, or abandon late capitalist modes of designing and consuming commodities, it seems to end with either the comfortable assimilation of such practices into the economic structures of neoliberalism or desperate attempts on the part of the disenfranchised to survive within this culture. In this conclusion, I want to explore two kinds of practices of misuse that both respond to the economic and geopolitical crises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and raise the possibility of a renewed politics, grounded in human-object interactions, that engages with these crises. On April 14, 2008, Barack Obama, campaigning for president, addressed a crowd of union workers at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Recounting his early years as a community organizer, he began his speech with an account of the first time he saw an abandoned steel mill: It was late in the afternoon 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 probably 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.

The Commodity at the End of the World    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 2007 was old news for the manufacturing centers of the rustbelt states. In the early 1950s, industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis were among the top ten population centers in the country. By the early twentyfirst century, an economically transformed and substantially depopulated Chicago was the only Midwest city within the top ten. In the midst of this dramatic transformation, Midwestern artists began to assemble strange new art spaces out of the broken, trash-filled landscapes of abandoned urban centers. One prominent example of such activity is the Heidelberg Project in Detroit. In 1986, thirty-year-old African American Detroiter Tyree Guyton and his grandfather, Sam Mackey, began to paint colorful circles on abandoned houses in their east-side neighborhood—then (and now) one of the nation’s most economically depressed areas.1 Mackey was a housepainter by profession and would often use the rotting walls of the decaying buildings that surrounded his house on Heidelberg Street to remove paint from his brushes. Inspired by the strange color effects of his work, he encouraged his grandson, a struggling art school dropout, to paint a nearby abandoned house in multicolored polka dots. Guyton’s project soon expanded to urban sculpture. Along with Guyton’s wife, the two men collected scrap metal, abandoned appliances, and other discarded objects from the local neighborhood. From this detritus they assembled large, bizarre art installations in vacant lots surrounding Heidelberg Street. As Marion Jackson recalls, “Before long, fascinating assemblages of painted doors, stacks of tires, constructions of car hoods, and rows of drinking fountains and vacuum cleaners began to appear in the empty lots. Guyton nailed truck tires, baby dolls, telephones, and other objects to the exteriors of abandoned houses and hung bicycles, shoes, and other objects from the trees” (Marion Jackson 25–26). Guyton’s rogue project was soon expanded to two full city blocks, and in 1988, he founded the nonprofit Heidelberg Project on the site (Figure 5). In its eclectic heterogeneity, Guyton’s project certainly dovetails Lévi-Strauss’s description of bricolage. Like the bricoleur, Guyton “‘speaks’

  The Commodity at the End of the World

figur e 5  The Heidelberg Project, Detroit, MI. Photo: 2013. Courtesy of Daniel Malewitz.

not only with things . . . but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities” (21). According to Guyton, the polka dotted houses represent his early childhood fascination with colored gumballs, and his “Stuffed Animal House” represents the relationships between hidden animals and marginalized humans that emerge in structures that have been occupied by homeless Detroiters. But unlike the bricoleur’s work, Guyton’s project also testifies to the unique social conditions that surrounded the city of Detroit during the late twentieth century. After enduring devastating race riots in 1967, Detroit by the late 1980s was viewed as both a mythic and a literal frontier. In his preface to Connecting the Dots: Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, Jerry Herron describes Guyton’s Detroit through an extended analogy to the city’s Great Fire of 1805. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, he

The Commodity at the End of the World    writes, Detroit was a “shabby frontier outpost of five hundred souls” that rose from the ashes to become a great metropolis in the early twentieth century (6). By the late twentieth century, however, “Detroit began to be overtaken by an expanding urban prairie, as if nature is returning the city to a preplanned state” (8).2 This idea of a return to frontier living in an urban center colors the left-libertarian philosophy that such conditions often provoke. As Guyton recalls in the documentary Art from the Ashes, “The system was broken. Nobody had any plans. No one was going to go out there and fix it. And I saw that the people needed to do it for themselves.”3 But while the Heidelberg Project cannot correct the systemic problems of Guyton’s community, it does attempt to ameliorate them by serving as a site for new kinds of community building, operating as a kind of trash archive that does for the neighborhood what the local, state, and national governments cannot do. It gives the community a stake in its own representation. In “Trash as Archive, Trash as Enlightenment,” Patricia Yaeger argues that “discrete forms of ‘trash’ work to preserve particular ethnic histories only because they create such unorthodox ledgers: spaces where part-bodies and part-cultures mingle perversely” (113). “[T]he trash heap,” she argues, “makes the labor of trauma—the cost of enduring trauma— visible. The discarded object can reassemble the pangs of history in an oddly resilient form” (113). While Yaeger’s argument is primarily concerned with ethnic American literature (her chief examples are Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone), her argument certainly applies to Guyton’s project. In addition to the aforementioned polka dots and stuffed animals, within the project, shoes hanging from trees represent the “souls” of departed friends, relatives, and neighbors and car hoods represent the lost auto industry. As Heidelberg Project executive director (and Guyton’s wife) Jenenne Whitfield maintains, in the process, “[y]ou literally breathe new life back into these things. We were green before green was popular. . . . We want people to understand that in recycling these things, we can also recycle our own minds and think differently about how we rebuild our community” (Art from the Ashes). Over the past forty years, art installations such as Guyton’s project have emerged in nearly every other rustbelt city in the United States

  The Commodity at the End of the World at the same time as their industries have diminished.4 To offer only one more example, the City Museum of St. Louis promises to reveal the inner secrets of formerly everyday but now suddenly strange industrial objects. Local artist Bob Cassilly opened the museum in 1997 in a six-hundredthousand-square foot abandoned factory, drawing inspiration for the project from the city’s industrial discards. The museum displays only objects taken from within the municipal boundaries of St. Louis, but the experience of encountering these objects is rendered uncanny by the different functions that they serve within and beyond the museum space.5 Wandering about the largely unmarked spaces of the warehouse, museumgoers are bounded by crude fences made from drill bits and rebar, walls made from metal stamps and ice cream canisters, and industrial chutes that have been turned into slides several stories tall. The museum contains little in the way of curator commentary or instructions, which means that what these people choose to do within the repurposed space is up to them.6 Perhaps the strangest aspect of Cassilly’s repurposed space lies in the distinctly erotic coding of its transformed artifacts. The museum encourages such an interpretation by juxtaposing repurposed objects with images of burlesque shows. Tucked away in a corner of the third floor of the building is a sign advertising a “Travelling-Road Show Burlesque” that promises “New Faces Every Week” to patrons eighteen years of age and over. Nearby is an installation entitled “Adult Peep Show,” in which fragments of a naked 1950s pinup girl can be seen recessed within a towering metal canister. Both areas encourage viewers to connect the scopophilic act of seeing beneath a woman’s clothed exterior with the act of seeing a thing metaphorically disrobed of its object exterior. While the “luminous” work of Guyton and Cassilly show how postindustrial discards can gain new life and forge new communities in site-specific settings, the most extreme examples of theory overlapping with practice emerge in the apocalyptic literature written shortly after the events of 9/11. A few months after the World Trade Center towers fell, Don DeLillo wrote: Now a small group of men have literally altered our skyline. We have fallen back in time and space. It is their technology that marks our moments, the small, lethal devices, the remote-control detonators they fashion out of radios, or the larger technology they borrow from us, passenger jets that become manned missiles.

The Commodity at the End of the World    Maybe this is a grim subtext of their enterprise. They see something innately destructive in the nature of technology. It brings death to their customs and beliefs. Use it as what it is, a thing that kills. (“In the Ruins of the Future”)

In this strange reading, DeLillo recounts his horrified fascination as he watches objects return to their deadly innate ”thingness”: radios become signaling devices, planes become manned missiles, towers—“technology’s irresistible will to realise in solid form whatever becomes theoretically allowable”—become rubble (“Ruins”). In the same essay, DeLillo speculates that these shocking instances of object misuse might forever alter the way that Americans view the commodities that populate their world: “We may find that the ruin of the towers is implicit in other things. The new Palm Pilot at a fingertip’s reach, the stretch limousine parked outside the hotel, the midtown skyscraper under construction, carrying the name of a major investment bank—all haunted in a way by what has happened, less assured in their authority, in the prerogatives they offer” (“Ruins”). In other words, DeLillo anticipates a future world in which the seamless relationship between external object and hidden thing is broken apart. The Palm Pilot no longer merely represents a friendly airman taking knowledge workers from place to place in the networked world of telecommunications; it also becomes the suicide pilot delivering messages to hidden explosives. The stretch limo parked outside a hotel signifies opulent aspects of the transportation industry; we also see it (if only in our imagination) as a fertilizer bomb. The new skyscraper no longer provokes a singular vision of market-driven success; it is also haunted in its assembly by the near-instantaneous destruction of the twin towers. The breakdown in a commodity’s “authority”—its failure to regulate its own use-value—reaches an apex in two novels written in the wake of 9/11: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Scenes from each novel illustrate the reemergence of a politically oppositional mode of object misuse: the end of late capitalism signals the return of the authentic thing. Set in the same postapocalyptic future as Atwood’s later novel Year of the Flood, Oryx and Crake follows a young man named Jimmy (or the abominable “Snowman” as he calls himself), one of the few survivors of a viral “flood” to which the later novel refers.7 Through a series of flashbacks, the novel reveals how Snowman’s friend the bioterrorist

  The Commodity at the End of the World Crake creates the catastrophic “bio-form” as a permanent solution to the environmental and social problems of the early twenty-first century. In place of humans, Crake engineers a set of childlike humanoids who are designed to wander naked through the harsh terrain, munching leaves, singing songs, and copulating during their limited mating season. Snowman watches over these simple “Crakers” after their creator dies, leading them out of their laboratory confines and into a world populated by vicious bioengineered chimeras and useless objects. In an early chapter entitled “Flotsam,” Atwood shows how this garbage experiences a strange kind of regeneration through violence: The children scan the terrain, stoop, pick up flotsam; then they deliberate among themselves, keeping some items, discarding others; their treasures go into a torn sack. Sooner or later—he can count on it—they’ll seek him out where he sits wrapped in his decaying sheet. . . . Here they come now. . . . Opening up their sack, the children chorus, “Oh Snowman, what have we found?” They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail. Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There’s no way of explaining to them what these curious items are, or were. But surely they’ve guessed what he’ll say, because it’s always the same. “These are things from before.” He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent uncle—that should be his tone. “Will they hurt us?” Sometimes they find tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic bottles of bleach. Booby traps from the past. He’s considered to be an expert on potential accidents: scalding liquids, sickening fumes, poison dust. Pain of odd kinds. “These, no,” he says. “These are safe.” (6–7)

In a scene that dovetails Richard Slotkin’s critique of the myths of American frontier culture, Regeneration through Violence, the effete commodities of human civilization are transformed from what they “were”—the empty containers of lust (BlyssPluss), gluttony (ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins), and so on—into what they “are”—primitive tools that are either safe or dangerous. Just as Slotkin argues that American Western myths depict early frontier settlers who first confronted and then internalized the

The Commodity at the End of the World    “savage” energy of American nature to regenerate an overcivilized European culture, Crake’s violent extermination of human beings clears away the preexistent framework of social relationships that make an object into a commodity, and, in so doing, regenerates the alienated thing. In an inadvertent parody of consumer relationships, the Crakers “hold [objects] up as if offering them for sale,” but perform these actions innocently; they cannot translate an object into a quantitative exchange-value or a singular use-value. Snowman recognizes the vestigial market behaviors, but this recognition causes the “thingness” of each object to flicker forth: the computer mouse becomes a mouselike thing with a “wiry tail.” He achieves this perspective in his efforts to see the world from the vantage point of the playful Crakers, for whom the objects were never objects in the first place; rather, they remain “curious items” or “things” that are either immediately, innocently, and therefore idiosyncratically useful or useless. The same conclusion holds regardless of whether the purified thing becomes a new object with a new use or if it returns to its older use-value. In Oryx and Crake, the only object of the Crakers’ set that garners later mention is the hubcap, which they turn into a cymbal (360). In McCarthy’s The Road, however, a can of Coca Cola remains (in some senses but not in others) a can of Coca Cola. As an unnamed father and son travel west through McCarthy’s bleak vision of a postapocalyptic American countryside, they reach the outskirts of a burned out city and enter a supermarket. Near the entrance, the father discovers the remains of two vending machines: “He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola” (19). Like the Crakers, the son asks the father what this remnant of civilization is, and like Snowman, the father allows the object to speak for itself: What is it, Papa? It’s a treat. For you. What is it? Here. Sit down. (19–20)

McCarthy’s subsequent description transports the object out of its everyday context and into the realm of ritual. He slipped the boy’s knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can

  The Commodity at the End of the World and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said. The boy took the can. It’s bubbly, he said. Go ahead. He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It’s really good, he said. (20)

McCarthy’s prose both depicts and instantiates the common human phenomenon of seeing the world anew through the eyes of a child. Though readers are surely quite aware of the mechanics of opening a soda can, McCarthy chooses to narrate the action precisely (“he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it”), and in so doing calls attention to the curious singularity of this repetitive action. In other words, the father and son misuse the can of Coke, turning a disposable object into a ritualistic thing. The bizarre sanctification of consumption, in turn, suggests that the material thing has begun to break free from its commodity status. As the thing gathers the father and son within the shared space of ritual, it also emanates a greater authenticity or aura: this can of Coke appears to be the last of its kind. While Heidegger and Brown suggest that the thing emerges at the moment when an object breaks down—when the thing refuses to adhere to its socially constructed function—in this case, the same effect is achieved through the opposite circumstances.8 In the context of McCarthy’s work, the can of Coke has not broken down, but the larger social order that surrounds it has; the object has been removed from the networks of production, distribution, and advertisement that inform behaviors in an age of mass commodification. Thus, even if the boy’s delight in the beverage—“It’s bubbly” and “It’s really good”— duplicates preexistent consumer behaviors, his behavior, like the Crakers’ inadvertent parody of consumer relations in Orxy and Crake, can be understood as an original, authentic encounter with the thing. Both actions seem to suggest that the only way that a commodity can become the celebrated product promised in company advertisements is for its company to disappear. Fittingly, just as Atwood’s and McCarthy’s apocalyptic narratives respond to post-9/11 rugged consumer communities, these works have also played a prominent role in producing and shaping these communities.

The Commodity at the End of the World    For example, Chris Hackett, the leading figure of the Madagascar Institute, the most prominent maker community in Brooklyn, New York, drew inspiration for his activities from McCarthy’s novel. “When I read ‘The Road,’ it got me thinking: ‘OK, so there’s all this stuff lying around. How do you recreate civilization?’” (quoted in Feuer). Hackett’s answer to this question lies in what he calls “obtainium”: the various discards that he finds around his neighborhood. A New York Times article defines this “element” through a variety of McCarthy-inspired examples, including “the discarded teapot that he once turned into a propane burner, or the broken beer bottle he used to make a razor, or the 9-millimeter shell casings he acquired some time ago, melted in a backyard foundry (also made of obtainium) and cast into brass knuckles for a girlfriend” (Feuer). In Hackett’s hands, these repurposed objects clearly serve political as well as practical ends. The most famous Hackett “hack” is the Occupy Wall Street art van nicknamed “the Illuminator,” which served as Zuccotti Park’s tactical propaganda vehicle and thus “illuminated” (at least provisionally) the possibility of a new economic order based upon local creativity. Hackett’s work and the novels of Atwood and McCarthy fulfill the apocalyptic vision of DeLillo’s “Ruins of the Future” and raise the possibility of a renewed vision of rugged consumerism that emerges in the wake of the economic crises of economic deregulation and the geopolitical crises associated with the “War on Terrorism.”9 Like the extreme cases of McCarthy’s protagonist before a set of broken vending machines and Snowman before the Crakers’ scavenged possessions, twenty-firstcentury American laborers and artists are surrounded by an elaborate network of mysterious, terrifying, and wonderful objects that call out for creative engagement. Unfortunately, the ways that commodities are designed and the structures that govern their proper use resist or anesthetize such impulses. The literary imagination offers partial solutions to the cognitive, industrial, and ecological endgames of late capitalism by not simply reflecting the current repurposing culture but also by asking us to reimagine the creative relationships between humans and all objects that populate our worlds. Perhaps, just as the mythical disappearance of the American frontier in the nineteenth century brought renewed attention to the characteristics of rugged individualism, the

  The Commodity at the End of the World various economic and geopolitical crises of the twenty-first century might now create a desire to reimagine or to remythologize humanobject relationships in ways that serve progressive rather than negative ends. In cradle-to-cradle fashion, the new myths of the American present will once again repurpose the terms of its mythic beginnings. To what end remains, always, the question.

Notes

chapter 1 1. Materialist arguments are commonly predicated upon the determining power of modes of production, which, according to these theories, express their power by obscuring the origins of objects. In Lukács’s reification framework, “the ceaselessly revolutionary techniques of modern production [still!] turn a rigid and immobile face toward the individual producer,” and as such, objects “acquire a new objectivity . . . , which destroys their original and authentic substantiality” (Lukács 97, 92). And as Fredric Jameson argues in Marxism and Form, demystification can only be undertaken by contrasting this bourgeois perspective on a commodity as “a solid material thing whose cause is relatively unimportant” with the perspective of a laborer, who “knows the finished product as little more than a moment in the process of production itself,” albeit the culminating moment (187). 2. Regarding New Historicism, I am thinking here of Stephen Greenblatt’s account of Shakepeare’s Richard II in his introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. While scholarship preoccupied with the play’s original context understands it as “a hymn to Tudor order,” Greenblatt demonstrates how participants in the Essex uprising used the play’s content to convey regicidal ideas (4). “Users” therefore determine the play’s function as much as its maker or original historical context. 3. Bruno Latour makes a similar argument in Reassembling the Social. For Latour, objects frequently act in ways other than “the ones granted to them by their author’s own philosophy of matter. Even as textual entities, objects overflow their makers, intermediaries become mediators” (85). 4. Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979) has spawned a number of historical, sociological, and anthropological studies of trash, including John Scanlan’s On Garbage (2005), Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999), Heather Rogers’s Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2005), John Knechtel’s edited collection Trash (2006), and, most importantly, Gay Hawkins’s The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Trash (2006).

  Notes 5. Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver offer an analogous argument from a perspective aligned with anarchism in their jointly produced manifesto Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. 6. This perspective is somewhat aligned with Jameson’s speculation on an “enlarged perspective for any Marxist analysis of culture,” which unifies what he calls a purely “mechanical” or “instrumental” negative hermeneutic with a “Utopian” or “positive hermeneutic” outlined in the same chapter of The Political Unconscious (292). 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reach similar conclusions, viewing the bricoleur’s actions as the embodiment of desire in the contemporary era. Like the schizophrenic (and, as we shall see, many rugged consumers), the bricoleur demonstrates contemporary culture’s “rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product” (7). For Deleuze and Guattari, the bricoleur produces things that are “not intended for any specific purpose” but merely celebrate the act of creation itself (6). The bricoleur therefore experiences “an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved” (7). 8. Bruno Latour reaches similar conclusions in Reassembling the Social. In a section entitled “A list of situations where an object’s activity is made easily visible,” Latour observes that in the case of object breakdowns, “all of a sudden, completely silent intermediaries become full-blown mediators; even objects, which a minute before appeared fully automatic, autonomous, and devoid of human agents, are now made of crowds of frantically moving humans with heavy equipment” (81). 9. In Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, Lucien Goldmann offers a more sustained analysis of the ways that Lukács’s theory of reification informs Heidegger’s theory of tool use: Starting from the famous analysis of commodity fetishism developed by Marx in the first chapter of Capital, Lukács, by substituting the word “reification” for the Marxist term, had developed a general theory of false consciousness to which he dedicated half his work and in which he showed how this reification, bound to market production, finally led to the different forms of false consciousness and to the perception of the external world as a pure object only capable of being known and modified, to what Heidegger would call Vorhandenheit, which is found at the basis of every objectivist interpretation and, especially, all metaphysics as theory of being. (12) 10. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno maintains that critical self-reflection can recover the particular thingness of an object from its abstract status as a concept: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.” As he argues, the

Notes   contradiction between the object-as-concept and the material conditions of the thing illuminates the “untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (5). 11. This model accords with Jane Bennett’s metamorphic model of “enchantment,” in which humans express a “desire for mobility, for the space to become otherwise . . . Mobility is widest when it is not random, erratic, or too fast; space for becoming is greatest when it is not an accidental effect; and novelty is most valuable when it is not treated as an end in itself” (The Enchantment of Modern Life, 28). Indeed, rugged consumerism might also be understood as a way of resisting modernity’s disenchanting narrative, which Bennett argues “discourages affective attachment to that world” (3). 12. The online Urban Dictionary offers the following definition of ”shade tree”: “Basically, someone who works on their car by themselves, as a ‘do-it-yourself’ project. He/She often employs jerry-rig techniques to fix his/her automobile. Could also apply to anyone who is a ‘do-it-yourselfer’ in any aspect of life” (www. urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shade%20Tree&defid=1956189). 13. Swigert is in many respects the most rebellious of the film’s rugged consumers. While in space, Swigert radios mission control to tell them that he has forgotten to mail his tax forms to the IRS. The incident is historically accurate, but in the film, Swigert’s admission elicits a presidential pardon of sorts. Clearly, Swigert does not play by the rules, and the humorous exchange casts such behavior in a positive light. 14. For example, the popular music video “This Too Shall Pass” (2010) by the indie rock group OK Go follows the path of a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Four months after the video was posted to YouTube, it had been viewed over 15 million times. 15. In Howard’s tribute to the Apollo 13 mission, Krantz’s heroic work of “Yankee ingenuity” overcomes the design flaws that not only rendered the carbon dioxide filtration systems on the LM and CM incompatible but also rendered each module as singularly distinct. Though exaggerated, this depiction remains closely aligned with the historical record. In the Report of the Apollo 13 Review Board, NASA scientists acknowledged that “consumables and emergency equipment in the LM and the CM should be reviewed to determine whether steps should be taken to enhance their potential for use in a ‘lifeboat’ mode” (5–40). Presumably, this included reminding the companies who produced both modules of the difficulty of putting squares into circles and, if the need should arise, circles into squares. If we believe Howard’s mythic portrayal, this review might also have led to a rethinking of the thruster design of both modules. 16. The most exhaustive literary account of this phenomenon is David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King. Within the novel, an instructor casts tax professionals as the natural descendents of older American heroes:

  Notes “Yesterday’s hero pushed back at bounds and frontiers—he penetrated, tamed, hewed, shaped, made, brought things into being. Yesterday’s society’s heroes generated facts. . . . In today’s world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing” (232). In the passage and in the novel as a whole, an imaginative culture based upon making things gives way to a culture based upon codifying things. 17. Faludi reaches the same conclusions but focuses her attentions upon what she views as a crisis of masculinity in the late twentieth century: “As an ideal of manhood, utilitarian masculinity traditionally required that a man wrest something out of the raw materials of the physical world. . . . Another important aspect of such masculinity was the importance of commanding the inner skills to work with materials. Workmanship generated a pride founded on the certainty that what you did bespoke know-how not acquired overnight. . . . Out of that security grew authority—an authority based, as in the root meaning of the word, on having authored something productive” (85–86, Faludi’s italics). 18. In this sense, modern or contemporary cultural workers who re-form art from dead objects are harbingers of a larger transformation taking place in all areas of work. 19. I define neoliberalism here in accordance with its emergence in European rather than American discourse on liberalism. As Ben Alpers explains, two kinds of “neoliberalisms” converge in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the American sense of neoliberalism coincides with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and describes figures such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gary Hart, who broke with the New Left of the 1960s and advocated for a centrist platform of economic regulation. In contrast, Alpers argues, The early history of the term “neoliberalism” in the European sense is associated with attempts in the 1930s and 1940s by members of the Austrian School of Economics like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke, to revive liberal economics in the European sense, i.e. laissez faire economics, in the face of the challenges posed by socialism (including social democracy) and fascism. I say “is associated with” because, as far as I can tell, these thinkers did not always (or even usually) describe themselves as “neoliberal” (or “neo-liberal”). They certainly were aware that they were renewing what they called liberalism. But they often used more descriptive neologisms (e.g. the German Ordoliberalism) or simply stuck with “liberalism.” (“The Strange, Transatlantic Career of ‘Neoliberalism’”) As Alpers concludes, this form of neoliberalism begins to converge with the economic policies of the Clinton and Obama Administrations, which, to a

Notes   greater extent than their “neoliberal” antecedents—Moynihan and Hart—might be understood to recapitulate Reaganist economics of the 1980s (deregulation of business practices, a skepticism toward the enduring value of worker unions, an abandonment of the public commons, and so on) as much as they define themselves against such policies. 20. Other examples of this neoliberal figure abound, ranging from 1980s action heroes such as John Conner in Terminator, John McLane in Die Hard, Rambo, and the A-Team to their more recent counterparts such as Jason Bourne of The Bourne Identity, the Joker in The Dark Knight, and, it might be argued, Mitt Romney in Ann Romney’s speech to the Republican National Committee. Needless to say, all of these characters are white heterosexual males. 21. Indeed, one of the most critically acclaimed television shows of the twentyfirst century, Breaking Bad, centers around the production of methamphetamine from a set of unlikely chemical reagents. 22. In his tongue-in-cheek survey of the artisanal movement within the United States, Adam Sachs links the modern artisan to “some rather unlikely types,” including “hippie,” “fundamentalist,” “inmate,” “hick,” and “separatist” (75). 23. David Owen of the New Yorker reaches the same conclusions in “The Inventor’s Dilemma.” According to Owen, Griffith is a “prime exemplar of ‘maker culture’—a community of sophisticated do-it-yourselfers who view hardware in the same provisional way that computer hackers view software, and who believe that making, modifying, and repairing things can be an antidote to throwaway consumerism” (44). 24. In keeping with earlier studies of Patchwork Girl, I cite the title of each hypertextual lexia throughout my analysis of the work. 25. As many arts and crafts histories have noted, the crazy quilting trend of the late nineteenth-century movement was fueled in part by inaccurate stories of frontier women, which justified the high prices for these products, which, in turn, generated consumer demand. 26. Though Atwood is a Canadian writer, the setting (a postapocalyptic United States) and thematic content of Year of the Flood place the novel within the American tradition of rugged consumerism. 27. Garbage Liberation Front activity predates the publication of Atwood’s novel and may have served as part of the inspiration for her God’s Gardeners. The group’s colorful rhetoric certainly sounds Gardener-esque. The group’s tribe. net site defines its goals as follows: “To liberate garbage that has been discarded for no apparent reason and [to] put . . . to good use that which would otherwise go to waste. To encourage a society of consumerism and wastefulness to reduce waste by reusing it. What still gets thrown out after that we will take care of! Dumpster Divers Take To The Streets!” In an earlier “Communiqué,” one member casts the Garbage Liberation Front’s oppositional stance to global capitalism

  Notes in the same way that the Gardeners resist the pleebland/compound structure of their world: “We are the reconstruction workers, come in the name of liberation to demonstrate the power of community, the beauty of diversity, and to allow for the freedom of all. We are picking up the trash of free trade” (quoted in Trash, 223–224). 28. This idea of redeeming recyclable materials from garbage serves as the basis for several critically acclaimed documentaries in recent years. Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010) follows the Brooklyn-based visual artist Vik Muniz as he travels to the Jardim Gramacho landfill site outside of Rio de Janeiro. There he encounters a diverse group of garbage pickers, or “catadores,” who scour the site in search of recyclable paper, plastics, and metals. Muniz uses scrap materials from the site to create enormous portraits of the catadores. Scrappers (2010) follows a group of metal scavengers in Chicago as they confront falling metal prices during the “Great Recession” of the twenty-first century. Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002) follow the lives of urban and rural glaneurs throughout France. 29. I am thinking here of Schumpeter’s classic economic study Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, in which he outlines “Creative Destruction” as the mechanism that allows for capitalism’s perpetual motion. The competition that “counts” in this model is “competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization” (84). Needless to say, this new product leaves in its wake a multitude of physical wastes. chapter 2 1. In his important book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner convincingly argues that Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog illustrates the strangely agonistic relationship between the American military-industrial complex of the 1960s and the countercultural movement that emerged during the same time. 2. For the sake of clarity, I have grouped Shepard’s plays into five categories based upon the collection in which they appear. The abbreviations are as follows: The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (UH ), Seven Plays (SP), Fool for Love and Other Plays (FFL), Chicago and Other Plays (Chicago), and Hawk Moon (HM ). 3. Bonnie Marranca argues that Shepard’s Action (1975) “centers on the experience of entropy,” but she locates this experience not on the external stage but within the neurotic minds of the play’s characters (32). Describing the protagonist of Chicago (1965), Martin Tucker argues that “[b]y metaphysical extension, Stu may . . . represent American culture, or rather that stage of it sinking into entropy” (37). 4. Laurel Klinger-Vartabedian and Robert Vartabedian offer a succinct overview of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in “Media and Discourse in the Twentieth-Century Coffeehouse Movement.”

Notes   5. This argument dovetails Judith Butler’s contention in Gender Trouble that “the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that gender can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (136). In this sense, we might think of Caffe Cino as a space within which objects are “queered” in the same way that gender is “queered.” 6. Stephen Greenblatt’s famous account of the Essex rising during the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England can thus be reused in this account of off-off-Broadway. “In the streets the story begins to lose the conventional containment of the playhouse where audiences are kept at a safe distance both from the action on stage and from the world beyond the walls. And in the wake of this subversive deregulation, the terms that mark the distinction between the lucid and the real become themselves problematical.” (3–4). 7. In Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway, Wendell Stone writes, “The story of the Cino is inseparable from the story of the coffeehouse war” (4). Stone’s work illustrates how the city’s struggles to combat the proliferation of coffeehouse culture shaped the political and aesthetic projects of Caffe Cino. 8. Ellen Stewart rarely saw her shows. As Jean-Clause van Itallie remembers, she would sit “outside her firedoor several flights up on Second Avenue [and guard] the performance inside against the fire inspector [or] neighbors irate at the noise” (8). 9. This act forced Cino’s workers to play an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with the power company. As one worker recalls, “Con Ed [came] because the bill wasn’t paid. The whole ceiling was full of lights—Johnny Dodd was the lighting man and he wired them to somewhere else. On meter-reading day I used to watch for Con Ed. When they came down the street, the lights went out and Cino lit the candles” (Loubier 8). 10. This sentiment may also explain the difficulties that many critics face in analyzing Shepard’s early plays. Looking back at Shepard’s career, Gerald Weales notes: It is as though [Shepard’s early] works, which once stirred such excitement, had dwindled to biographical matter, critical matter, as though the stage had forsaken them. I feel . . . like an archaeologist, digging among the ruins of a once-thriving civilization trying to understand its customs and its people and bemused to find so many traces that still mark the present. . . . It would be valuable to see first-rate productions of . . . these [early] plays, but only Red Cross has the look of living theatre about it, and even it is an artifact. (19) 11. A number of recent “re-mix” YouTube videos celebrate the love affair between cowboys and their coffee. In Blend 37, Richard Knew condenses

  Notes Anthony Mann’s 1950 Western, Winchester ’73, into an eleven–minute film short that “removes the sub-text” and reveals the “true” subject of the film, “caffeine addiction.” Needless to say, cowboy coffee plays a prominent role. 12. It should be noted that John’s fantasy regarding the untamed landscape of Africa is as inauthentic as his earlier coffee fantasy. Far from directly engaging with nature, John imagines himself in a plane flying above the wilderness. “Then you land and go to the hotel. The air smells so good and you can taste it. They have breakfast all ready for you. It’s sitting there on this glass table in front of a huge picture window. You just sit there and eat and look out over the ocean” (UH 114). His friends’ responses thus become the fear of a doubly mediated nature. 13. ‘Hot Coffee,’ Mojave Desert shows a giant, papier-mâché coffee cup against the bleak expanse of the Mojave Desert. Likewise, Shoe, Moonstone Beach is a photograph of a rotten shoe adjacent to an empty can of pork and beans. 14. See, for example, Lynda Hart’s Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages; John Orr’s Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Plays and Performance from Beckett to Shepard; and Michael Vanden Heuvel’s Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text. 15. Tom repeatedly emphasizes this metatheatrical conceit in the play. As he assembles the bookshelf, he insists: “This is not a show! I happen not to be a professional carpenter or an expert nailing person. There’s no reason to watch me work” (UH 121). 16. This scene also anticipates the erotic conclusion of Curse of the Starving Class, in which an eagle and a tomcat, locked in a death embrace, plummet to earth “like one whole thing” (SP 200). 17. On his personal website, director Michael Smith remembers: “I was distracted by the technical demands—smoke signals from the campfire, terrifying sound effects—which overtaxed the resources of the Cino. We had a hard time making the play work, and Sam was not much help.” 18. The same reading holds for Curse of the Starving Class. Shepard’s play Seduced offers a final example of this pattern. In that play, Henry, a thinly disguised Howard Hughes, is forced to sign over his investments to his servant Raul. For a writing utensil, Raul gives Henry the intravenous drip that has kept Henry alive throughout the performance. Henry thus quite literally signs his name in blood (FFL 272–273). Far from weakening Henry, the emptying container catalyzes his soaring dramatic monologue at the plays conclusion: I can move anywhere I want to now. Freer than life. Flying. My body’s gone. You can’t even see me now. Nothing can see me. I’m dead to the world but I never been born. I’m dead to the world but I never been born. I’m dead to the world but I never been born.

Notes   I’m dead to the world but I never been born. I’m dead to the world but I never been born. I’m dead to the world but I never been born. (FFL 276) 19. Coe explains that the quotation comes from a letter to Daniel Nagrin regarding the dance/play Jacaranda. 20. In The Theater of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis, Stephen Bottoms writes that “Shepard’s monologues have often been compared to operatic arias, and it is easy to see why, although the solo jazz break provides a better analogy: each speech contains its own internal dynamic of shifting tempos, crescendos, and diminuendos. . . . The ‘aria’ has remained a facet of Shepard’s work throughout his career, yet nowhere is the technique so persistently and uncompromisingly used as in [his] early plays, where they form the most distinctive stylistic feature” (36). 21. Other examples include Stu and Joy’s opening exchange in Chicago or the equally banal dialogue between “Boy” and “Woman” in The Rock Garden. 22. Indeed, it was one of many Shepard plays to garner an Obie Award. 23. Lynda Hart provides a more extensive account of Artaud’s influence upon Sam Shepard in her book Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages. Departing from the critics who would cast Shepard as an exclusively American dramatist, Hart contends that European playwrights such as Artaud, Brecht, Ibsen, and Beckett inform the “metatheatrical” structures of Shepard’s early plays. 24. In “Shepard and Off-Off-Broadway,” Stephen Bottoms reaches a comparable conclusion regarding Shepard’s Chicago. The essay explores the relationship between Shepard and Ralph Cook—the art director of Theatre Genesis. Both men, Bottoms argues, moved “toward the use of a single, distilled theatrical image, a ‘found object,’ which would act as the visual anchor for the play’s flights of rhythmic, imagistic language.” Bottoms quotes another Theatre Genesis playwright, Murray Mednick, to describe this language: “[We found that] you could use a certain kind of visual symbology . . . to great effect in a small space. We were really interested in discovering iconographic usages: what would have the resonance of an icon, a newly discovered icon, so that you can communicate directly to the audience’s subconsciousness?” (43). 25. I quote here from Wendell Stone’s informative history, Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway (72). chapter 3 1. The website for the University of Toronto’s Biomimetics for Innovation and Design Lab contains many other examples of this kind of activity.

  Notes 2. The frequency of Pynchon’s characteristic ellipses requires that I adopt a special form of documentation. In quotations, all ellipses and italicized passages are Pynchon’s unless bracketed (e.g., [ . . . ]). 3. Two of Pynchon’s early champions—Tony Tanner and Harold Bloom— offer the most charitable evaluation of this tendency. Tanner writes, “There are over 400 characters—we should perhaps say ‘names,’ since the ontological status of the figures that drift and stream across the pages is radically uncertain” (Thomas Pynchon, 74). Similarly, Bloom writes: “There are more than four hundred named characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, and perhaps twenty of these have something we might want to call personality” (2). Even Tyrone Slothrop, the novel’s central character, is described as lacking “gusto”: “he is the American as conditioned reflex, colorless and hapless” (2). As is fairly typical of his work, Bloom devotes the majority of his introduction to his critical collection Thomas Pynchon to the “Sublime”—in this case, the sublime story of a sentient commodity, Byron the Bulb. 4. The most succinct statement of Pynchon’s dismissal of causality occurs at the ironic opening of one chapter of Gravity’s Rainbow: “You will want cause and effect. All right” (663). The approach doesn’t last. 5. Richard Poirier reaches a similar conclusion in his early review of Gravity’s Rainbow. In his account of Pökler’s relationship with his daughter, he writes: “The loved child was in [a] sense begotten of a film and has since become as if ‘framed’ by film, just as Gottfried is at last ‘framed’ by the Rocket that Pökler helped develop. And both film and Rocket derive from the same analytical and technological legacies” (175). 6. The role of cinema within Gravity’s Rainbow has garnered the attention of many critics. In addition to Poirier’s review, critical work such as David Cowart’s “Cinematic Auguries of the Third Reich in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Antonio Marquez’s “The Cinematic Imagination in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Scott Simmon’s “Beyond the Theater of War: Gravity’s Rainbow as Film,” and Mack Smith’s Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition have argued persuasively that film influences both Pynchon’s narrative and his characters’ behaviors. 7. At various points in the novel, Slothrop takes on the identity of war correspondent Ian Scuffling, superhero Rocketman, the Russian deserter Max Schlepzig, and the pig-hero Plechazunga. 8. In the accepted version of the story, Schönbein was working in his kitchen one day when he accidentally spilled a combination of nitric acid and sulfuric acid on the table. After he wiped the spill with a cotton apron and hung it on the stove door to dry, the apron exploded. 9. The plot of Against the Day is a rich testament to Pynchon’s fascination with the history of explosives. In addition to its recipes for homemade dynamite, the novel contains a man who calls himself the Kieselguhr Kid in honor of a primary

Notes   ingredient of Nobel’s dynamite. In many respects, the novel can be read as a late prequel to Gravity’s Rainbow. Like the V-2, dynamite is a substance that gathers many functions and desires. Lew Basnight, the novel’s “psychical detective,” ingests dynamite as a hallucinogenic drug (182–183). Elsewhere, dynamite explosions are likened to “the text of . . . sermon[s], preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts” (214). In an ingenious act of rugged consumerism, one character fashions a baby cradle out of the wooden boxes that he uses to store dynamite (360). 10. The fire began when a cinematograph lamp ignited a strip of celluloid film and quickly spread throughout the wooden building housing the bazaar, killing over 150 wealthy Parisians (Burne 309–310). Ten years later, on September 7, 1907, ignited film caused a fire in Newmarket, England, that killed three and injured over three hundred. As a result of the fire, the British government passed the Cinematographic Act of 1909 and the Celluloid and Cinematograph Film Act of 1922, which required all commercial theaters to comply with certain safety regulations. Similar requirements were put in place within the United States, but such legislation did not prevent a series of explosions at movie theaters and film manufacturing and storage companies during the first half of the twentieth century. On February 27, 1909, the Ferguson Building in Pittsburgh was destroyed by the ignition of a large number of films stored in a vault, injuring fifty people. Celluloid fires also consumed the Lubin Film Manufacturing Company building in Philadelphia; the Edison plant in Orange, New Jersey; and a Fox Film Company storage building in Little Ferry, New Jersey. Other nitrate fires occurred in Seattle, New Orleans, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Hollywood, Kansas City, and Boston (Slide 12–13). 11. Charles Clerc relates the breakdown of this film to the novel’s ongoing metaphorical relationship to the celluloid medium, reading the “CATCH[es]” as linguistic phenomena evoking a film catching in its projector. Following earlier critics, Clerc also notes that the seven enigmatic squares that divide each of the four chapters into subsections suggest sprocket holes for film, completing the analogy that links the page to a discrete, photographic instant in time—another “delta-t” in Pynchon’s calculus. 12. Carson’s study was the driving force behind many grassroots efforts to “save the environment.” The groundswell of environmental support resulted in the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970, an event that mobilized 20 million Americans and brought the environment to the forefront of political debate. The same year, Richard Nixon formed the Environmental Protection Agency and within two years would sign into law three pieces of legislation that would serve as cornerstones of American environmental policy for years to come: the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1972).

  Notes 13. See, for example, Tony Tanner’s “V. and V-2.” For Tanner, “[t]he vision of a world in decline, heading irreversibly for the terminal wasteland and scrap heap, permeates Pynchon’s work” (47). 14. The transformed sentence is “a variation on a phrase attributed to actress, speakeasy owner, and dance girl Texas Guinan,” who traveled to Paris in a failed attempt to open a nightclub outside the jurisdiction of prohibition era America. Deported at the border, she returned to America and proclaimed “Fifty Million Frenchmen can’t be wrong” in reference to her physical attributes. The saying has since “been taken to comment in general on the (supposed) sexual preference of Frenchmen” (240). 15. This recycling aesthetic may help to explain the enigmatic “Kenosha Kid” sections of the novel. Under the influence of sodium amytal, Slothrop works through a variety of interpretations to the nonsense sentence, “You never did the Kenosha Kid.” In each iteration of his analysis, an entire story must be generated to countenance a particular stress laid on the sentence. For example: minor employee.  Well, he has been avoiding me, and I thought it might be because of the Slothrop Affair. If he somehow held me responsible— superior (haughtily).  You! Never did the Kenosha Kid think for one instant that you . . . ” (61) In this representative section, Pynchon simultaneously creates the material upon which the pun is based and illustrates how language cycles playfully along. chapter 4 1. Rodia’s activities before coming to Watts are as mysterious as his motivations for producing the towers. As Leslie Umberger writes, scholars have trouble even establishing the year of his birth, which may have been 1879, 1885, or 1898 (125). 2. Though he does not use the term bildungsroman, Osteen reads DeLillo’s Mao II and The Body Artist against James Joyce’s paradigmatic bildungsroman, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He sees the same tension between isolation and integration at work in DeLillo’s interviews: “[I]n one interview he echoes [Bill] Gray [of Mao II ], insisting that writers must refuse to be ‘incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power . . . against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation.’ But in a 1993 interview, he maintains that a writer cannot ‘separate himself from the crowd. . . . It is indispensable to be fully involved in contemporary life, to be part of the . . . clash of voices’” (144). 3. Donald L. Alexander’s “Motor Carrier Deregulation and Highway Safety: An Empirical Analysis” offers a good background to this debate.

Notes   4. Like many other areas within the narrative, the details are a bit hazy here. The car might also have been hotwired: “Our fight club mechanic says he can start anything. Two wires twist out of the steering column. Touch the wires to each other, you complete the circuit to the starter solenoid, you got a car to joyride” (130). Either explanation can be traced back to the narrator’s experiences at his automobile company. 5. See, for example, Ruth Quiney “‘Mr. Xerox,’ the Domestic Terrorist, and the Victim-Citizen.” 6. Through a framework based upon Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic,” Omar Lizardo reaches the opposite conclusion: “The return to the ascetic logic of work as a calling is also present here: for the ‘space monkeys’ making soap is now fulfilling work, because they are now part of project to change the world into their image” (239). 7. The handgun in this sense is a symbolically charged weapon, as the narrator’s actions appear from an outside perspective to be merely a push of a button. His internal thoughts suggest that the handgun is, in fact, a thing. 8. As John Duvall writes, Nick’s actions are also DeLillo’s: “It is precisely DeLillo’s recovery of his ethnic roots that marks Underworld as his most personal work to date. As DeLillo notes, it was only in reading the galleys for Underworld, with its representation of 1950s Italian-American Bronx life, that he realized he was ‘reliving experience’ through his central character, Nick Shay (whose mother reverts to her Irish maiden name after his father, Jimmy Costanza, disappears), ‘in a curious and totally unintentional way” (8). In this sense, DeLillo casts his novel as a bildungsroman of sorts, in which he and his protagonist slowly comes to terms with their Italian-American heritage. 9. Paulus’s faith in language as a means of redeeming the world of Borgmann’s devices links him to many of DeLillo’s memorable characters. Near the end of Cosmopolis, for example, Sheets finally catches up with Packer, but Packer delays his execution by convincing his assailant that his weapon is not real: “Even your weapon is a fantasy. What is it called?” The subject looked hurt and betrayed. “What’s the attachment that abuts the trigger guard? What is it called? What does it do?” “All right. I don’t have the manhood to know these names. Men know these names. You have the experience of manhood. I can’t think that far ahead. It’s all I can do to be a person.’” (196) The encounter pushes Packer away from his device-fantasy of becoming “quantum dust, transcending his body mass” and toward the novel’s final celebration of materiality:

  Notes His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar makes him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click of his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end. (208) chapter 5 1. Richard Slotkin’s excellent study Gunfighter Nation explores similar themes in American culture. Covering the time period between the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War, the book examines a number of surrogate frontiers including space, Asia, and Hollywood narratives. 2. The episode’s secondary plot reinforces this reading. While MacGyver tries to thwart the computer system, his partner at Phoenix Corporation, Peter Thornton, tries to convince the colonel in charge of the complex (who also happens to have served in the same unit as MacGyver’s friend during the Vietnam War) to abandon the rational procedures he has been given to handle the situation and to “think like MacGyver. . . . We’ve gotta put our gut to work.” When the colonel refuses, Thornton reminds him that they lost friends in the war because “military minds were sitting behind their desks three hundred miles away.” 3. McCarthy’s work provides plenty of support for this reading. For Ben Telfair in The Stonemason, the new world of late capitalism is embodied in quick setting Portland cement, which “made it possible to build with stone and yet know nothing of masonry” (9). In All the Pretty Horses, this new world is likened to a prison: “[W]ithin it occurred a constant seethe of barter and exchange in everything from radios and blankets down to matches and buttons and shoenails and within this bartering ran a constant struggle for status and position. Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to die” (182). 4. In his essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno argues that cultural goods are no less subject to the totalizing, instrumental logic of the modern marketplace than other objects. As a result, it is unsurprising that the use-value of these goods is effaced by exchange-value: “If the commodity in general combines exchange-value and use-value, then the pure use-value, whose illusion the cultural goods must preserve in a completely capitalist society, must be replaced by pure exchange-value, which precisely in

Notes   its capacity as exchange-value deceptively takes over the function of use-value” (296). 5. Karl Marx presents the opposite situation in Capital: “[The owner’s] commodity possesses for himself no immediate use-value. Otherwise, he would not bring it to the market. It has use-value for others; but for himself its only direct use-value is that of being a depository of exchange-value, and, consequently, a means of exchange” (89). Brown’s statement anticipates later, celebratory instances in McCarthy’s novels in which characters refuse to sell objects that they have gleaned from their surroundings, including, most prominently, Billy Parham’s frequent rejoinder to requests to purchase his captured wolf: “She aint for sale,” “No puedo venderlo,” “He said he could not sell her” (70, 90, 110). 6. Brown’s observation proves applicable to a large number of American modernist texts. For example, in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson’s servant, Luster, becomes preoccupied with a man who makes music by striking a saw with a wooden mallet (15, 49). As he attempts to duplicate the action in the final chapter of the novel, he and Faulkner’s narrator remake an object into a thing: “The saw gave forth a single sluggish twang that ceased with lifeless alacrity, leaving the blade in a thin clean curve between Luster’s hand and the floor. Still, inscrutable, it bellied” (287, emphasis my own). Given Faulkner’s substantial influence on McCarthy, the scene may have served as a partial inspiration for McCarthy’s misuse relationships. 7. Brown’s division therefore differs slightly from mine. For Brown, “The history of modernity, propelled both by capital and by instrumental reason, is the history of proscribing objects from attaining the status of things, proscribing any value but that of use or exchange, secularizing the object’s animation by restricting it to commodity fetishism alone” (185). 8. In Joel and Ethan Coen’s excellent film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, Chigurh also unscrews the panel of a hotel air duct using a coin. 9. Though McCarthy does not explicitly establish the link between the distribution and consumption of illegal drugs and object misuse, the two activities are frequently paired. For example, the glass tubes of single roses sold at convenience stores are frequently used as crack pipes (Lengel). Unsurprisingly, a quick Internet search of the phrase “DIY Bong” yields images of marijuana-smoking instruments made out of everything from toilet plungers to plastic jars. 10. To be fair to the deputy, captive bolt pistols often use gunpowder as propellant rather than this pneumatic alternative, a grisly distinction I owe to Dr. Temple Grandin’s informative personal website. 11. Bell’s correct hypothesis suggests a common thread linking each of the three primary figures in the text. Moss, Chigurh, and (though reluctantly) Bell operate within a world of things rather than a world of objects.

  Notes 12. The intimate though indirect ways that nature announces a human presence recur throughout McCarthy’s work. Consider the gorgeous opening passage of All the Pretty Horses: “The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots” (3). 13. Scott Covell offers another perspective on this humor. Setting Chigurh’s strange weapon within the context of the traditional Western, Covell writes that the captive bolt pistol turns Chigurh into “a stunning parody of the classic Western gunslinger . . . , for the air ‘gun’ offers an inversion or subversion of the usual manly implementia carted about by our Western villains: it suggests a subversion of the ubiquitous cowboy and his use of a rifle to guard the vast herds of steer back in the ‘Wild West’ days. This gun is used to kill the steer—not guard them—and its usage is promulgated not by its firepower but by its functional simplicity and effectiveness” (106, Covell’s emphasis). 14. The captive bolt gun is marketed (and therefore “intended”) as a humane way of slaughtering livestock. 15. In his essay “Genre, Voice, and Ethos: McCarthy’s Perverse ‘Thriller,’” Robert Jarrett makes a similar claim: “McCarthy’s coin evokes the coin Ahab nails to the mast and, through it, the metaphysical novel in which the real is momentarily transcended by the metaphysical or sacred” (65). 16. Many characters resist this model of fate. In All the Pretty Horses, Pérez remarks, “[Americans] talk about tainted money. But money doesnt have this special quality. And the Mexican would never think to make things special or to put them in a special place where money is no use. Why do this? If money is good money is good. He doesnt have bad money. He doesnt have this problem. This abnormal thought” (195). chapter 6 1. According to the U.S. Census of 2005, the neighborhood’s zip code (48207) corresponds to unemployment rates of 75 percent with over 90 percent of people living below the poverty level. 2. Such frontier behaviors are often mentioned in critical accounts of Guyton’s work. For example, Marion Jackson notes that Guyton’s mother, Betty Solomon Guyton, was a “seamstress and domestic worker” who “struggled during [Guyton’s] childhood to meet her family’s needs through improvisation and invention, mending and altering hand-me-down clothing to dress her children and making patchwork quilts to keep them warm” (Marion Jackson 25). Jackson concludes that Guyton “drew strength from his heritage and the lessons of his mentor” (25).

Notes   3. If anything, the city government opposed Guyton’s strange project, finding it an eyesore and a humiliating reminder of the social problems that plagued the inner city. Sections of the installation were destroyed on two occasions by city bulldozers, and Guyton’s project has encountered resistance from both city government and the local community. For example, in May 2013, one of the installations was burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances. Michael H. Hodges offers a balanced account of the racial and civil politics of Guyton’s work in his essay “Heidelberg and the Community” within the edited collection Connecting the Dots: Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project. 4. Of course, these displays are not limited to the rustbelt. In 1996, the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, produced an exhibition entitled Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. According to the museum’s website, the exhibition’s “Conspicuous Recycling” calls attention to itself as an “All-American Art”: “Many Americans have recently become ‘hip’ to the need for recycling on an industrial scale. But some of us may think of ourselves as always having been recyclers—and not just of the curbside variety. Whether it’s using old mayonnaise jars to store nails or making quilts from scraps of worn-out clothing, ‘making do’—and ingeniously using what is at hand—is part of the American story.” 5. The City Museum operates according to an aesthetic that Evan Calder Williams calls “salvagepunk.” In his manifesto Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Williams classifies salvagepunk as a movement that resists the postmodern tendency to efface the “lived history of the world” through pastiche. Instead of viewing objects as “unmoored from [their] original situations,” salvagepunk “realizes the eccentricity of discarded, outmoded, and forgotten things still marked by the peculiar imprint of their time of production and the store of labor and energy frozen in their form” (40–41). In other words, like the “instructable” objects of the new arts and crafts movement, the objects of salvagepunk are recognizable both in their new functionality and in their older use-values. 6. As Patricia Yaeger argues, the pleasure of trash art lies in the simultaneous apprehension of the trace of older objects within their new contexts: “When I visited [Vik] Muniz’s photo at the Museum of Modern Art, two young men standing beside me exclaimed, ‘There’s a battery! There’s a chassis!’ and I joined in their glee” (“Rubbish Ecology,” 324). 7. In an interview with Random House, Atwood reveals that she was halfway through the novel when the World Trade Center towers fell. Though she insists that the central plot did not change, she notes the overlap between history and her speculative fiction: “Real life was getting creepily too close to my inventions—not so much the Twin Towers as the anthrax scare. That turned out to be limited in extent, but only because of the limitations of the agent used” (Bateman).

  Notes 8. Victor Shklovsky makes a similar argument in his analysis of Tolstoy’s short story “Shame”: “Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects” (13). Shklovsky’s analysis, like Bill Brown’s arguments, explains the surprisingly close relationship between artistic vision of objects as mediated through language and survivalist visions of objects as mediated by the apocalyptic breakdown of social order. Or, put somewhat differently, the imagined conditions of the apocalypse in McCarthy’s novel are the vehicle through which he can fulfill the defamiliarizing function of modern art. 9. According to one of Hackett’s longtime collaborators, “He’s a history geek—it interests him to know where things come from, how they work. But I think what really interests him is self-reliance” (quoted in Feuer).

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Index

Abbey, Edward, 78–79 actor-network theory, 79–81. See also Latour, Bruno Adorno, Theodor, 161, 192n10, 204n4 aesthetics: authenticity and, 160–63, 207n4, 207n6; labor practices and, 160–61; misuse practices and, 9–14; modernism and, 13, 27, 99–100; subjective or apolitical element of, 112–19, 131, 141–43 Against the Day (Pynchon), 91–93, 200n9 Agamben, Giorgio, 147–51, 156, 163, 167, 176 agency: countercultural movements and, 44–48, 58–66, 75; design purposes and, 79–81, 106–11, 175–76; gender and, 21–23; late capitalism and, 21–24. See also neoliberalism; objects; rugged consumerism Alder, Ken, 2–3, 6, 14, 38, 80, 125 All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), 165, 174, 177, 204n3, 206n12, 206n16 Angel City (Shepard), 74–75 anxiety, 21, 84–85, 113, 117–19, 125 Apollo 13 (film), 18, 20, 23, 193n15 Apollo 13 (mission), 14–24, 36–37, 99 Appadurai, Arjun, 2 Artaud, Antonin, 60, 70–71, 199n23 Atwood, Margaret, 32–33, 35–36, 185– 89, 195n26, 207n7. See also specific works Austin, J. L., 173, 175 authenticity, 10–12, 50–58, 74, 123–25,

134–35, 160–63, 178–79, 188. See also aesthetics; design-purposes; modernism; objects; origins Barthes, Roland, 1, 100 Baum, L. Frank, 30–31 Beckett, Samuel, 60 Benjamin, Walter, 161, 178–79 Bennett, Jane, 39, 78–79, 81, 84, 193n11 bildungsroman (structure), 40, 116–19, 124, 129–30 biomimesis, 76–81, 96–106 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 40–41, 160, 163–68, 174, 176–77 blue collar work, 120–22, 124–25, 131– 32, 138, 158–60 books (as objects), 58–62 Boone, Daniel, 150–51 Borgmann, Albert, 123–24, 131, 135, 138, 203n9 Bottoms, Stephen, 38–39, 73, 199n20, 199n24 Brand, Stewart, 25, 42, 44, 78, 196n1 Braungart, Michael, 34–36 bricoleurs, 7–8, 18, 37, 72, 90, 115, 147, 181, 192n7 Brown, Bill, 9–16, 58, 80, 84–85, 120, 126, 162, 173, 188, 205nn5–7, 208n8 Butler, Judith, 55, 197n5 Caffe Cino, 48–53, 62–64, 72–73, 197n5, 197n7, 197n9 capitalism: alienation and, 14–24; cultural materialism and, 1–3, 11,

  Index 136; gender and, 121–22; ideological containment and, 14–24, 36, 64– 66, 72, 116–19, 132–52, 163, 165–68, 178–80; misuse value and, 172–79; rugged consumerism and, 128– 31. See also neoliberalism; objects; politics; United States Carmines, Al, 49, 52–53, 75 Carson, Rachel, 33–34, 97, 201n12 Cassilly, Bob, 184 celluloid, 81, 87–90, 92–95, 98, 110–11, 201n10 Chicago (Shepard), 49, 199n24 Child of God (McCarthy), 157–59, 161 Cino, Joe, 51–53, 73, 75 Cities of the Plain (McCarthy), 159, 177 citizenship, 22, 43–45, 50, 154, 179 City Museum of St. Louis, 184, 207n5 class, 1, 7, 21–24. See also blue collar work; neoliberalism; white collar work Coen, Joel and Ethan, 176–77, 205n8 coffeehouse culture, 54–55, 197n7 Cold War, 66, 83, 94, 118, 142 collages, 30, 57, 74–75, 147. See also bricoleurs commodities: fetishism and, 60, 79; Fordism and, 39, 132; materiality and, 135–46; production histories of, 2; recycling of, 33–36; tactical consumption of, 3–4, 8, 27, 36– 37, 107, 112; use-values and, 11– 12, 43. See also objects; rugged consumerism; use-value Commoner, Barry, 39, 96–97, 101 consumption: ideological containment and, 116–19; passivity and, 45, 118– 19, 123–26, 134, 142, 178–79; tactical forms of, 2–4, 8, 27, 36–37, 107, 112. See also agency; rugged consumerism Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 135, 203n9 counterculture, 42–48, 58–66, 75, 154, 180 Cowboy Mouth (Shepard), 46–47 Cradle-to-Cradle (McDonough and Braungart), 34–36

craftsmanship, 158–64, 178–79. See also aesthetics; agency; design-purposes Crawford, Matthew, 22–23 Crespy, David, 38–39, 50, 73 The Crossing (McCarthy), 159, 165, 177 The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), 19 Curse of the Starving Class (Shepard), 46–47, 198n16 death drive, 82, 98–111, 128 de Certeau, Michel, 2, 8, 27, 49, 51, 112. See also tactics (term) defamiliarization, 13, 208n8. See also misuse Deleuze, Gilles, 78–80, 84, 192n7 DeLillo, Don, 40, 117–19, 135–46, 184– 85, 189, 202n2, 203n9. See also specific works democracy, 43–45, 50, 67, 111, 119–22, 154 demystification, 5, 122–23, 191n1 Derrida, Jacques, 82 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 8 design-purposes, 17–18, 43, 57–62, 76– 85, 90–106, 129, 160–78, 185, 193n15 desire, 6–8, 19, 28–29, 53–64, 84–90, 108–10, 123, 136–48, 166, 190 device paradigm, 123–26, 135, 138, 203n9. See also Borgmann, Albert drag, 53–58, 60 Duchamp, Marcel, 13–14, 27 durability (of objects), 3–4. See also obsolescence Edison, Thomas, 19, 92 entropy, 46–47, 82–90, 99–100, 196n2 environmentalism, 26–27, 32–36, 40– 41, 96–106, 159–63, 185–87, 201n12 Etsy.com, 29 exchange-value, 11, 160–61, 172–79, 205n5, 205n7. See also capitalism; commodities; objects false consciousness, 5, 192n9 Faludi, Susan, 21, 194n17

Index    fate, 172–79, 206n16 fetishism (commodity-), 60, 79, 204n4 Fight Club (film), 121, 133–34 Fight Club (Palahniuk), 40, 117–35, 143, 154 film, 81, 91–95. See also celluloid Fincher, David, 121, 133 Five Plays (Shepard), 58–62 Fool for Love (Shepard), 67, 74 Fordism, 39, 132 4 H Club (Shepard), 53–57, 64, 66, 75 Fourteen Hundred Thousand (Shepard), 58–62, 64, 66, 75 Frankenstein (Shelley), 29–30 Freud, Sigmund, 127 frontiers (real and metaphorical), 58–59, 139–40, 147–56, 181–90, 204n1 Geertz, Clifford, 3 gender: American mythology and, 16, 19–21, 65–66; consumption strategies and, 5, 32; performativity of, 1, 21–22, 53–58, 124–25; race and, 150; Shepard’s theater and, 67–69; work practices and, 121–30 Gibson, William, 1, 35 Giroux, Henry, 121–23, 127, 132 Goldberg, Rube, 19–20, 24, 125, 132–33, 193n14 government (ineffectiveness of), 18, 21– 23, 117–22, 151–55, 168–69, 183. See also neoliberalism Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon): biomimesis and, 106–11; entropy and decay in, 96–106; objecthood in, 39, 82–90, 112–13; tragic materialism and, 81, 90–96 Grotowski, Jerzy, 70 Guattari, Félix, 78–79, 84, 192n7 Guyton, Tyree, 181–85, 206n2, 207n3 hackers, 27–30, 123–24 Harvey, David, 154 Heidegger, Martin, 9–14, 29, 40, 77– 79, 104–5, 120–23, 188

Heidelberg Project, 181–85 Howard, Ron, 18, 20, 23, 193n15 humans: object relationships of, 3–4, 6, 8–9, 12–14, 36–41, 45, 61–62, 74–81, 102–8, 122–23, 171, 189–90; social and political relations among, 67– 74, 132–46, 160–61, 164–65. See also objects; politics humor, 19, 156, 164–65, 167–72, 206n13 Icarus’s Mother (Shepard), 48, 62–66, 75 ideological containment, 14–24, 36, 64–66, 72, 116–19, 121–52, 178–79, 195n20 IKEA Hacker (site), 25, 28–29, 123–24 individualism, 8, 23–32, 40, 47, 55, 116– 17, 132, 148–56, 171, 178, 189–90. See also frontiers (real and metaphorical); neoliberalism; rugged consumerism; West, the (American) inherent vice, 39, 92–93, 95–96, 98 Instructables (site), 25–28, 32 instrumentality, 37, 86, 145, 160–63, 172–79, 192n6, 204n4. See also design-purposes; manual labor; objects “In the Ruins of the Future” (DeLillo), 184–85, 189 invention, 19. See also misuse; rugged consumerism Jackson, Shelley, 29–32, 35, 37 James, William, 12–13 Jameson, Fredric, 5–6, 29, 148, 166, 191n1, 192n6 Jencks, Charles, 45, 192n5 Judson Poets’ Theater, 49, 51–53, 73 Kaczynski, Ted, 130–32 Kennedy, John F., 16 knowledge work, 120–21, 125, 127, 138 Koutoukas, H. M., 72–73 La Mama ETC, 49–53, 73 Lang, Fritz, 86–87, 91

  Index language, 8, 37, 58–62, 90–91, 99– 101, 140, 172–79. See also Austin, J. L.; Latour, Bruno; performative utterances Latour, Bruno, 78–80, 84, 96, 191n3, 192n8 left-libertarian philosophies, 33, 44, 48, 112–13, 181–90 Lethem, Jonathan, 1 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7–8, 18, 90, 147, 181 Luddites, 44, 130–32. See also counterculture; technology Lukács, Georg, 2, 12, 45, 118, 123, 191n1; capitalism and, 11 MacGruber (film), 156 MacGyver (show), 26, 152–56, 204n2 makers, 123–24, 130, 189. See also hackers; rugged consumerism manual labor, 120–25, 127, 131–32, 139– 40, 158–64, 178–79 Mao II (DeLillo), 202n2 Marx, Karl, 2, 11–12, 205n5 Marx, Leo, 77–78 masculinity: consumption and, 5; performativity of, 21–23; rugged consumerism and, 16–21, 24, 65– 66, 150–52, 154–56, 194n17; work practices and, 121, 130, 154–56. See also frontiers (real and metaphorical); gender; rugged consumerism McCarthy, Cormac: All the Pretty Horses, 165, 174, 204n3, 206n12, 206n16; Blood Meridian, 40–41, 160–64, 174, 176–77; Child of God, 157–59, 161; The Crossing, 159, 165; late modernism of, 160–63; neoliberal ideologies and, 151, 156; No Country for Old Men, 40–41, 156, 163–68, 171–72, 180; Outer Dark, 157; The Road, 167, 185, 187–89; The Stonemason, 40, 159, 178, 204n3; Suttree, 169–70, 174, 177 McDonough, William, 34–36

metaphysics, 43, 60, 79, 84, 99–100, 192n9, 206n15. See also Heidegger, Martin; Lukács, Georg metatheatrical elements, 66–74, 198n15, 199n23 misrecognition, 168–72 misuse: aesthetics and, 9–14; environmentalism and, 32–36, 96– 106; fate and, 172–79; ideological containment and, 28–29, 36–41, 64–66, 72, 116–19, 123–52, 165–68, 178–80; language and, 99, 101– 5; misuse-value and, 12, 156–68, 172–79; politics of, 113–19; rugged consumerism and, 6–8, 14–24, 101– 6; theatrical productions and, 38–39, 47–53, 67–74; Utopian views of, 5–7, 35–40, 42–48, 67–74, 81, 111, 117, 137, 143. See also design-purposes; ideological containment; objects; rugged consumerism modernism: aesthetics of, 13, 27, 99– 100, 143, 160–63; metaphysics and, 78–79, 96; rugged consumer responses to, 36–41. See also aesthetics; rugged consumerism modification, 29–30. See also hackers; misuse; rugged consumerism Moretti, Franco, 116–19 NASA, 15–16, 20, 22, 98, 105–6 Native Americans, 150–51 neoliberalism: aesthetic responses to, 181–90; American mythology and, 147–52; definitions of, 23, 194n19; DIY ethos of, 24–32, 124, 132, 142– 44, 152–56; gender and, 121–22, 127; government’s denigration and, 18, 21–23, 117–22, 151–55, 168– 69, 183; play and, 163–68; rugged consumerism and, 26–27, 41, 116–19, 180; United States policy and, 8, 16–17, 119–20. See also ideological containment; politics New Historicism, 2, 191n2

Index    No Country for Old Men (film), 176–77, 205n8 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), 40, 156, 163–68, 171–80 Obama, Barack, 180 objects: aesthetics and, 160–61, 180–90; agency of, 82–90, 175–76; biomimetic character of, 76–81; commodification and, 11–12, 53–58; community and, 140–41; decay and, 96–106, 135– 36; design-purposes and, 17–18, 43, 55, 57–62, 76–81, 85, 90–91, 96– 106, 129, 160–72, 175, 177–78, 185, 191n3, 193n15, 206n15; humans as, 67–74, 107–8, 171; misuses of, 4–8, 12, 14–24, 43–44, 60–61, 160–68, 172–79; origins of, 2, 17–18, 178–79; performativity of, 53–60; quasiobjects and, 79–80, 84–86, 88; rituals and, 54–63, 127, 144–51, 156–63, 167, 176–79, 187–88; social histories of, 1–2, 29, 39, 136–46, 160–72; strategic repurposing of, 5–6; textuality and, 58–66; things’ relation to, 9–14, 36– 42, 46–47, 58, 61–62, 80–81, 84–85, 89, 104, 107, 120, 161–63, 167–68, 173, 184–85, 188, 205n11; tragedy and, 81, 90–96, 98; transient-durable axis of, 3–4, 60–61; waste and, 97–106, 119–35. See also recycling; rugged consumerism; vital materialism obsolescence, 4–5, 14, 100, 136–37 Occupy Wall Street, 189 off-off-Broadway, 38–39, 45, 48, 63, 72, 112–13, 197n9 Oldenburg, Claes, 52, 57, 75 oppositional ideologies, 4–6, 24–29, 35, 42, 51, 65–66, 77, 117–18, 137, 145–48, 185. See also counterculture; ideological containment Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 185–87 Outer Dark (McCarthy), 157 Palahniuk, Chuck, 40, 117–35

passive consumer behavior, 17–25, 40, 45, 57, 80, 94, 118–29, 134, 163, 169, 179. See also agency Patchwork Girl (Jackson), 29–31, 31, 32, 35, 37, 195n24 performative utterances, 172–79 performativity, 53–58, 60, 67–74, 124– 28, 172–79, 197n5 phenomenology, 9–14, 42–43 Picasso, Pablo, 13–14 plastics, 81, 87–91. See also celluloid; design-purposes; tragedy (genre) play (term), 67–74, 147–52, 163, 176 politics: aesthetics and, 112–19, 141–43, 180–90; community and, 132–46, 160–61, 164–65; counterculture and, 42–48; environmentalism and, 33–36, 96–106, 110–11; gender and, 121–22; misuse practices and, 12–14; neoliberalism and, 123–35, 154–56; oppositional ideologies and, 4–6, 24–29, 35, 42, 51, 65–66, 77, 117–18, 137, 145–48, 185; rugged consumerism and, 6–7, 64–66; structures of feeling and, 112–19; tactical consumption and, 3–6, 8, 27, 36–37, 107, 112. See also capitalism; counterculture; ideological containment; left-libertarian philosophies; neoliberalism; rugged consumerism; Utopianism posthumanism, 78–79 postindustrial society, 21, 129 Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49, 19–20, 101; Against the Day, 91– 93, 200n9; Gravity’s Rainbow, 81–111, 200n3, 200n6; inherent vice notion and, 39, 92; puns and, 101 quasi-objects, 79–80, 84–86, 88 Queer Theory, 1, 197n5 race: American mythologies of, 16; consumption strategies and, 5; gender and, 150; rugged

  Index consumerism and, 7, 23–24, 28; social construction of, 1 rationality (in design-purpose), 37, 86, 106–11, 145, 160–63, 172–79, 192n6, 204n4. See also design-purposes Rauschenberg, Robert, 49, 52, 57, 75 ReadyMade (magazine), 26–28, 32 Reagan, Ronald, 23, 119–20, 148–49, 151, 154–56, 163–64 recycling, 76–77, 97, 196n28, 202n15 Red Cross (Shepard), 49, 67–75 reification, 2, 191n1, 192n9 rituals, 54–66, 127, 144–52, 156–63, 167, 176–79, 187–88 The Road (McCarthy), 167, 185, 187–89 Rodia, Sabato “Simon,” 113–19, 143, 202n1 Romney, Ann and Mitt, 5–7, 195n20 Roszak, Theodore, 43, 45, 50 rubbish theory, 3–4, 33–36, 135–36 rugged consumerism: aesthetics and, 181–90, 194n18; agency of, 18–23, 79–81, 106–11; bricoleur practices and, 8; definitions of, 6–8, 31; environmentalism and, 32–36, 185–87; gender and, 121, 150–52, 154–56; ideological containment and, 14–24, 36, 64–66, 72, 116–19, 132–56; misrecognition and, 168–72; narrative structure and, 29–31, 37– 38; neoliberalism and, 116–19, 123– 35, 147–56, 178–80; politics of, 6–8, 13, 26–27, 33–48; race and, 7, 23–24, 28; structures of feeling and, 112–19, 135–46; theatrical productions and, 38–39, 47–53, 67–74; waste and, 129–31, 156–63. See also ideological containment; individualism; misuse; objects Second World War, 81–90, 94, 99, 107 sexuality, 1, 24 shade-tree mechanics, 18, 193n12 Shepard, Sam: imaginative misuse and, 67–74; off-off-Broadway milieu and,

48–53, 154; open objects and, 45–47, 58–62. See also specific works Shklovsky, Victor, 13, 143, 208n8 The Simpsons (show), 156 Slotkin, Richard, 150, 186, 204n1 Stewart, Ellen, 49, 51, 53, 73, 75, 197n8 The Stonemason (McCarthy), 40, 159– 60, 178, 204n3 structures of feeling (term), 112–19, 138– 39, 142–43 survivalism, 18, 27, 156–68 Suttree (McCarthy), 169–70, 174, 177 tactics (term), 2–4, 8, 27, 36–37, 107, 112 technology: counterculture mistrust of, 25, 42–48, 50, 58–66, 75; humans’ objecthood and, 67–74; manual labor and, 123–24, 131; metaphysics and, 77–78; nature and, 78–81, 96–111, 158–63, 165–68; passive interactions and, 17–25, 40, 45, 57, 80, 94, 118–29, 134, 163, 169, 179; tragedy and, 82–90, 98–99. See also celluloid; film; V-2 rocket theater: material limitations of, 38–39, 48–53, 63, 112–13; metatheatrical elements and, 66–74, 198n15, 199n23; published texts and, 58–66 Theatre Genesis, 49, 73 things: aesthetics of, 112–19; bricoleurs and, 7–8, 37, 88–89; commodification and, 11–12; counterculture movements and, 44–48; objects and, 9–14, 36–41, 58, 80–81, 84–85, 89, 104, 107, 120, 161–63, 167–68, 173, 184–85, 188, 205n11; rituals and, 54–63, 127, 144–51, 156–63, 167, 176–79, 187–88; tactical uses of, 3–4, 8, 27, 36–37, 107, 112; thick things and, 3–4, 6, 14, 38, 125; tragedy and, 81, 90–96. See also Alder, Ken; Brown, Bill; objects; vital materialism thing theory, 2, 9–14, 29, 80, 126, 140– 41, 162

Index    Thompson, Michael, 3–4, 61, 136, 191n4 tragedy (genre), 81, 90–96, 98 True West (Shepard), 46 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 149, 151 Underworld (DeLillo), 40, 117–19, 135– 46, 154 United States: countercultural movements in, 42–48, 58–66, 75, 154, 180; DIY ethos and, 24–33, 124, 132, 142–44, 152–56; economic policies of, 8, 36, 119–20, 132–35, 194n19; mythologies and ideologies of, 14–24, 27, 58–59, 116–19, 148– 56; neoliberalism and, 116–19, 127, 147–52. See also politics; West, the (American) The Unseen Hand (Shepard), 46–47, 49 use. See design-purposes; misuse; objects; rugged consumerism; things use-value, 2–4, 11–12, 39, 43, 72, 83, 163–64 Utopianism, 5–7, 35–40, 44, 48, 67, 72, 81, 111, 117, 137, 143 V-2 rocket, 39, 81–85, 87, 89–96, 98, 103, 105–6, 108, 110–11

vital materialism, 80–81, 84–85, 90–91, 93–96, 107–11 waste: aesthetics and, 113–19, 141–43; biomimesis and, 76–81; capitalism and, 130–31, 136–46; decay and, 96– 106, 135–36; environmental activism and, 33–36, 97–106; makers and, 24– 33, 142–44, 185–87. See also rubbish theory; Underworld (DeLillo) Watkins, Evan, 4–6, 18, 24, 136 Watts Towers, 113–19, 202n1 West, the (American): cowboy mythologies and, 16–17, 40–41, 53–58, 74, 147–56, 186–87; frontier imagery and, 58–59, 147–52, 189–90; rugged consumerism and, 31–32; Shepard and, 46–47; technology and, 158–63 white collar work, 21, 120–25, 127 Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), 25, 42, 44–45, 47, 50, 58, 78, 196n1 Wikipedia, 27–28 Williams, Raymond, 5–6, 112–14 Williams, William Carlos, 13–14 Yaeger, Patricia, 183, 207n6 The Year of the Flood (Atwood), 32–33, 35–36, 185, 195n26