lapsedmodernist | atrophied visions

my drive to seek out abandoned buildings, to witness the processes of capitalism-authored history in the rust belt towns of the midwest and old mill towns of new england, and "declining" neighborhoods here there and everywhere, the ones that are marginalized by the social aphasia that blinds us to things that have lost their use-value--this drive, fueled by a desire for revelations and transparency, is being made moot by the history-in-progress, the meltdown of the American housing market, and this strange, abstract, impersonal economy built on symbols and gaps instead of solid barter and social relationships.

It's disconcerting the way I have been able to see everything at once in the last year or so. I don't know how else to explain it. It's not intuition, because I don't believe it is metaphysical, and, as I spent two hours explaining to my students yesterday, the metaphysical is the social, anyway.

But I am talking around in circles, and my point is, it started with abandoned buildings. I think visiting abandoned buildings regularly allowed me to develop a special relationship with the time-space continuum, the way Billy Pilgrim and the narrator of "The Aleph" did in their turn.

We are socialized into linear history, and as a part of cultural competency we are trained in negative hallucinations, where we don't see the things outside the linear narratives of capitalist economy. History is taught to us through narratives, and AS a narrative; the material props in these stories are carefully arranged in institutions to which we go on field trips. The selective and representative, rather than total, materiality of history is hidden from view.

I have developed a hyper-empathic ontological sense of objects. I see and sense the chain of events that has transformed them from raw materials to something we consume, and I see the histories of people and communities that this path of formation bent out of shape or burned through. The end of history came, although not the way Fukuyama meant it--it has just been made irrelevant, a nonsensical, nonlinear, rambling crazy old grandpa, still corporeal, still muddling through his zoe, but lacking the bios of the late-capitalist society.

Abandoned buildings helped me translate the cosmic model of concentric circles of consumption, where the trajectories of the flow of goods and materials form orbits around the consumer back into a pyramid of history, on a swamp of underlying causes.

I mean, it's hard, too, it's, like, there is blood in my apples, and atomic dust on my sunglasses.

But to see it, you need to re-sensitize yourself to the possibility of seeing messy history, as a complete set of material remains, and with explicit connections to the decay, the poverty, the and the our national pasttime of gazing away from the liminal objects of our society--the ones that retain materiality, but have lost their use-value.

That photograph, by the way, made me think of Ozymandias.

Anyway, here are some more photos from the Farm Colony for the poor and the mentally disabled. The place is more of a shell than an intense cluster of dense history, but I'd been meaning to take some photos there for a while.