by Joanna Walsh
I’m sentimental, oh yes, but not about things to which my memories do not attach. Sentimentality, from sentir: to feel – that word again for physical, and emotional memory – is a feeling that objectifies. It crystallises feeling into a souvenir, a thing that holds – but cannot feel – emotion. It can’t carry on an exchange but, when you don’t have anyone else to care for, or when there’s something wrong with the feeling you offer (it’s re-sented), or because those you love won’t always care, or listen, or speak through anything else, yes, we use them.
‘Don’t you own an empathy box?’ After a pause the girl said carefully, ‘I didn’t bring mine with me. I assumed I’d find one here.’ ‘But an empathy box,’ he said, stammering in his excitement, ‘is the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans.’
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Oh yes, goods are good to think with.
Bon à penser.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
But, smash the memorial object – throw away the ring, break the birthday vase – and you have to reformulate, maybe even have a conversation with someone, if that’s still a possibility. But people don’t smash things, not on purpose, not often. This market is full of the sort of objects people couldn’t get rid of. I know all about the things that stick around: that if you buy cheap, the wrong style, a commemoration of the wrong relationship, a compromise of any sort, you can be stuck with them for life. If you never bought into the right version then, buffered by firewalls of the imperfect expressions you own, and reluctant to send good money after bad, you can turn away from the whole subject, refuse to think things through. These half-used things that block emotions are most likely to hang around even after you die, when someone else gets lumped with them. It is good to have the younger generations: if not for them then who could go on living? After a certain age everything we have accumulated for ourselves loses meaning, but meaning can be re-given by passing these things on, or by promising to. Belonging neither to us, nor to our inheritors, heirlooms acquire value without meaning. Even in the virtual world, the objects we inherit give us a kind of inheritance.
When objects are lost subjects are found.
Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects
Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which recreates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols.
Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone
In object-oriented-programming, ‘inheritance’ means a set of behaviours that can be used across different ‘objects’. An object in programming is not 3D of course, but a set of data, plus a method. A programmed object is its characteristics plus how it is used: its data is encapsulated in its functions. Why call it an object at all, why fit it to a figure of speech? Well, programming is semantic. Names are grasping tools, bridging the gap between concept and code, and what they grasp with is physical, or so it appears. The language of programming is one of metaphor: its ‘objects’ correspond to things found in the real world. When we think of data + method as a ‘library’, or a ‘checkout’, it’s easier to understand, to maintain, and to evolve the virtual, but this also means our behaviours are carried over from meatspace. A virtual object’s a real white elephant in the room, a whatnot, a bibelot, a conversation piece: useless in itself, until it prompts our response. As in the real world, ‘inheritance’ gives rise to a ‘hierarchy’ – behaviours carried across from one object to all its relations. Via concrete metaphors, we repeat our Real Life mistakes online. It shouldn’t have been like this. The net should have been perfect in its abstraction. It should have given us another chance.
We make objects without entirely knowing why. Maybe it’s for the joy of making. We say we make objects to meet our needs, which we so barely understand. It would be wrong to know all the uses of an object, to create an object entirely for use, as we can never see the ends of things: how a milk bottle will become a vase, or a urinal, a sculpture by Duchamp. And we can’t say when or how things will leave us, whether they will break, or wear out, at what moment any particular pair of tights will run, or whether a glass will meet its end thrown across the room in anger, shattered (you might have hit someone with it!), or if it will survive us. So we discard them to show them who’s boss, give them away, throw them out. We have to disassociate ourselves from objects in order to use them. For us to function, things must be different from us. We must make sure we are the non-objects.
When categories do not ideally exhaust their objects, then the contingent is in all respects preferable because it gets the imagination going.
Kierkegaard, Repetition
‘You’re just not my thing,’ you said, once.
You meant that I was nothing, or virtually. In any case, you said, my eyes were never your favourite colour. Well, if you looked around Amsterdam’s flea market, you could probably have found some glass ones that would have suited one of us better. You broke me down for spare parts, or I did, willingly dismantling myself, for what it’s worth, or for what each part might be worth to you. I knew my market, am used to being taken apart by different men. Break it down: there is no better way to come together again – or perhaps to come to terms with my brokenness. There’s something in me that wants to break things, even myself.
I sit down at a café that elbows me in the ribs with chunky pottery from the 1960s and ’70s – mismatched coffee cups, worn chintzy textiles ask me to notice the conversation these things are having with the customers – who are both handsome and entirely contemporary – and with each other. The objects in the café are all from different eras, but all ‘retro’, echoing the marriages of objects on the market stalls – a brass lobster peeking out of a wine cooler, cooking pots full of plastic bananas – that look like Surrealist art. What makes the objects surreal is their conversation, their ‘intercourse’: the way these objects are coupled. New sex-partners are always exciting, and no red-light district live sex-show could be so novel. The things on the market, and in the café were not designed to belong together. The sentences they make are screwy. With no conjunctions, grammar becomes impossible: a tea-pot without a lid, a pencil case full of rusty keys-without-locks, the single arm of a shop dummy, gesturing, at what?
Bricolage… this universe of instruments is closed and the rules of the game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials that is always finite.
Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.
Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play
Why do we need to hang onto this old stuff? Is it because the new stuff’s scary? Things don’t need us any more. We remake them anxiously, like the furniture designer my hosts sent me to see, whose tables and chairs were made from reclaimed sleepers, whose clothes were complicated stiff arrangements in denial of her flesh, and who wore a necklace made from the cogs of an old watch, like the sign made from interlaced cutlery that hangs above me in the café. We don’t need things to function any more. We pass them around as novelties, sell them for prices high as Dutch tulip bulbs, just for the way they look, for what they evoke. No wonder they have abandoned us. In supermarkets the last barcoded apples nudge each other to signal the forklifts to restock. Though I’ve never seen it done, I’ve heard your fridge can do your shopping for you, that your car can book itself in for a service. Now objects speak to each other virtually, they no longer fulfil our fantasies: we may fulfil theirs.
The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist.
Dick, ibid
It’s always happening in Korea, in Japan. It’s always h
appening somewhere else. But even here the web can net me just about anything I like. I can ask for knowledge, sex, love, and it will appear In Real Life a little later, through the post, as a printout from a 3D printer, on a high stool in a singles bar. There’s still a wait, a microvoid, so small sometimes as to be unnoticed, that means the net has an uneasy relationship with the real, as uneasy as a word with its object.
All objects are now surreal. It’s not only the vase that’s out of date. It’s any vase. Any use of an object is ironic, every thing is kitsch. This café speaks the language of kitsch, which is necessarily international, and full of queasy humour. Like an off-colour joke, kitsch is more comfortable with objects that are once removed by class or nationality. And, now any thing’s a sign – more than the thing itself – it’s easier to make a joke than a promise.
But not everything in the café’s old. There are the other things here that look old, but aren’t: skeuomorphs (that big clock on the wall, crackle-glazed, yellowed, purposely – perversely – dented: rust-spots spray-painted on are) promises we know will never be fulfilled because a promise is conditional on the future, and here there has been no timelapse between cause and effect. I was in a place like this with my dad once, on the wall a distressed tin sign listing drinks. He couldn’t tell the difference between the ‘aged’ and the really old. Antique himself, he’s too old, not for retro, but for its imitation. Maybe one day I’ll hardly know the difference either. There’ll come a time objects will outdate me – they’re tricky that way, that’s how things are. Is that what it means to be objectified?
I said we had no love tokens. Not quite true. Sometimes you sent me things – no, they were images of things: ASCII art, Instagram ‘Polaroids’, photos of retro chocolate bars obsolete before the web: reality twice removed: first by time, then by technology, the sort of pics that are passed round the net like cigarette cards, photos of things that never made it into the future, their heads stuck in time’s railings subject to taunts and kicks. Think and you’ll recognise them, like any classroom bully. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling calls this marriage of retro and high technology ‘atemporal’ (how much of the net is defined not by technologists, but storytellers!). I understood, played the game, sent you a clip of Buckminster Fuller’s proto-car, a smooth-parking manatee of a machine: a possible future that never went into production. I re-shot the grainy 1930s black-and-white filmstock on my crystal-clear smartphone in a Paris museum. Atemporal enough? An exchange of gifts is traditional in courtship. Each image, as it crosses the microvoid between us, a virtual bunch of flowers.
But online is a place where objects don’t matter as much as the connections they can make: the grammar, not the nouns – any noun, any object will do. Perhaps that’s how the clip of the car worked: what mattered wasn’t what it was but that, as it never became, it was available as a word for use in a private vocabulary, its meaning always unfixed, potential, personal.
I still live in a castle of meanings, not things.
Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark
‘Why don’t we buy a farmers’ house all together?’ Five smart urban Dutch drinking coffee at the rustic table behind me discuss possible retro-utopias in English. They want to live in the country, like the old days, but with friends and technology, like in the city. They’re young, don’t have kids yet, so everything is easy. ‘We wouldn’t need much, could live more simply, share everything.’ One man shrugs: ‘It’s always going to be a balance’ (he cups his hands, weighs them).
‘I know it’s gonna work really nice,’ a woman tells him. ‘You should move there too.’
‘It’s tough work,’ says another woman who, she tells them, used to run a B&B.
I sit, and type. ‘Ah,’ says the owner of the junkstall opposite, ‘you’re one of those people.’ (How many women, I wonder, has he seen, riffling through his broken goods for something that might complete them.)
Amsterdam 13th May
I get up and, disobeying my hosts again, walk to the docks.
The windows in the modern developments are smaller here, but I still pass coy arrangements: on stage between curtains, lacy as crotchless knickers, a topiary bush, a designer pendant lampshade placed centrally, for show. Both say, here I am, framed. Look at me. Mirror, window? Still as my host’s still lifes. Nature morte: is it living or dead, and, if dead, what can live on in it?
Amsterdam is made entirely from material things. Maybe it’s because they had to make the land, pulling it back from the sea, brick by brick. Already, by rights, I should be more than half below the water-line. The new buildings here, where they do not look like shipping containers, look like ships. This area used to be rough, I was told. Now rough-sided warehouses, their raw edges carefully preserved, are bars and flats, a gallery, a museum. Gentrification is a northern European thing: it’s shabby chic – to take something old and remake it not so it looks new, but so it still looks old, and then to say that it is better than new things. I don’t mean old like an antique (echt, kosher) I mean old like an old, old thing – down at heel, worn by use – and to say it’s a better thing than something new, or shiny or functional, to say it is more authentic because of what has been done with it. That’s puritanism. And though I’m a puritan, the kind that could worship the absence of an oculus, I’m a little too absent-minded for this kind of material.
I find a café, write up my notebooks. Thirty thousand words. That’s a lot, I guess. That’s when you email to ask when I’ll be back in London: Can you see me? I answer that one, right away. You write back. You might be there then, which train will I come in on? I tell you. Nothing more. Those are the rules. Object-oriented programming: love points at a space and some kind of data arrives to fill it. Data + behaviour: an object is created. I answered you again. This is inherited behaviour, and there is nothing I can do to make it die in me.
Amsterdam–Berlin, 14 May
Time is so very useful when you want to catch your train, but maybe not for other things.
I leave Amsterdam, later than I’d hoped. I am increasingly slowed down.
I speak some German, though I don’t speak German, not really. Wan geht das nexte trein nach Berlin? Nach: (preposition) up to, and including – but not including Bad Benthof, where we are delayed for three further hours due to something that happened some time ago, somewhere else down the line. On the platform there’s a small store selling chocolate and an obscene lone dildo of a frankfurter displayed in a glass steamer like the window of an Amsterdam sex shop. I can stray from the station, but not far. And I don’t get far. The roads are wide and lined with green trees, but there are no pedestrians and many cars. Across the triple-laned highway there is a cheap clothes shop, and because there is nothing else to look at, I jaywalk the highway to see, but there are no more shops by it, and there is nowhere to buy a coffee, nowhere to sit, to meet, and nowhere in the distance down the long road in either direction that will answer any of these thoughts: nothing but white low modern houses from which nobody comes and goes, but beside which cars pass at frightening speed, having other places to go. I seem to be getting nowhere fast, whatever speed I walk. I’m not used to this. It takes such a long time to get back across the highway to the station. Bad Benthof is the opposite of the city: a suburb. I had assumed the opposite of the city might be the country.
Back on the platform, I smoke a cigarette and wait, peering in both directions towards potential distant trains and, watching for the same trains, there is a dancer who is travelling to Weimar. He is beautiful, young and nervous. He lights my cigarette, asks me what I am writing. I tell him.
He says, ‘I don’t like to talk on the internet. I always have to explain myself twice. I am not good with words.’
‘But you speak four languages.’ He has already told me: French, Dutch, Spanish and English. He understands a little German too, yes, he says. But not to write, no.
‘I’m the opposite,’ I say. ‘Also, sometimes a good writer will write something that means two di
fferent things, even at once, and in the same language.’
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘now that is very confusing.’
13 Berlin/Dreaming
14/15 May
Berlin is my last city, a city I do not know, am too tired to meet. At the station – a glass jigsaw with eight levels, and many shops, which has no link to the U-bahn – no one meets me, and I can’t leave. I am too tired to leave, almost. I find a map, but the city is so big: bigger than Rome, Paris, bigger than Amsterdam, Athens, Sofia. I give in, for once, take a taxi.
I want, here, to know nothing. I have, here, nothing to say. I’m dropped in the main street in the centre of Kreuzberg outside a friend of a friend’s flat in a hof. Each hof is a castle courtyard with towers, four-cornered, near-identical, each blue square above each hof the same with birds flying over. Each tower I try is the wrong tower. I call my friend but her words could meet any tower, any hof. My phone is running out of charge when I find it. The flat in the hof is one room front, one room back, no central heating, a shared toilet on the stairs. In the entrance between the two rooms, a vast and rusted machine that could be a stove, could be a boiler. It does not work. No one has lived here for some time. It’s so cold. I switch on the tiny portable heater, lie awake under a thin slice of synthetic duvet, get up again, call the friend, who has another friend who lives around the corner, who has a spare room. I walk to his apartment, which is in another Berlin, also so Berlin, in his hall an androgynous mannequin, ’30s movie posters. Does he wear a bowler hat? Does he have a small grey moustache, does he want to talk? Does he give me red wine and does he ask for the same thing all my hosts demand in payment: my story? Because of the red wine, does my story slip out smoothly along its grooves, though I am surprised it does because I am so tired. Do I regret, resist this smoothness, which is not what I sought, but is what I have? Yes, but there’s nothing I can do. I am a storyteller now.