I’m not kidding, each of them looked like they had 10 or 20 parent-hours in them. They looked like architectural models. Without exception, they looked exactly like the houses that were already in this suburb, except they had a chicken coop, a solar cell and an electric vehicle. And I took a lot away from that. It was absolutely, abundantly clear that they wanted a green future, but they wanted that green future to be very familiar.
Thus decarbonization consultant Saul Griffith, describing an exercise in speculative architecture he observed in Wollongong, New South Wales, in 2021, when his son’s year 6 (eleven-year-olds) class was asked to design a “sustainable” home. The they who wanted a green future but wanted it to be familiar is the parents.
Is it fair to say they wanted a green future that was familiar? Or simply that they were unable to imagine a green future—perhaps any future—that was unfamiliar? Is this a question of desire or of a limit to the speculative impulse?
I would go further than Griffith and say that what many people desire—certainly the inhabitants of an affluent place such as Wollongong—is timelessness. Or perhaps desire is too strong, for what I have in mind is not a reflexively articulated desire but an inclination, a basin of attraction. We (“we”) value continuity in our habits, above all in our habits of relating to others. Of course we value novelty too. But the desire for novelty tends to be satisfied with novelties of a superficial character—styles of dress and adornment, music, the flavors and textures of the condiments we use to vary our food—whereas the inclination toward continuity demands continuities of a more abiding kind: of relationships, perhaps of ways of getting a living.
We value, as Joan Didion put it in the title of an elegiac 1978 essay, “quiet days in Malibu”, the steady, devotional life of the lifeguard station or the orchid greenhouse—even (especially?) when we know that the quiet is the quiet that settles on a place in the wake of a bushfire. (For Didion, the longing for quiet days is, among other things, a longing for the simplicity she attributes to working class life: career lifeguards and immigrant orchid breeders, she imagines, are unencumbered by the forms of competitive display that characterize life in the film, music, and publishing industries, as described earlier in The White Album.)
The economist Branko Milanović offers a different view of the “very familiar”:
People indeed can live happy lives with much less “stuff”. That is true for some special people like Christian or Buddhist monks. … But this is not true for the remaining 99.99% of the people who are not attracted by monastic lives. And it certainly is not true today when capitalism, and thus both the relentless search for profit and the value system that places wealth on the pedestal, is more dominant than ever[.]
If one really believed in, and wanted to argue for the incidental nature of economic growth (“whether or not the economies grow”), then he or she should start by trying to change the bases on which our (global capitalist) civilization has been built, namely insatiability of needs and commodification. But these features have become so strongly ingrained that I cannot see how they can be changed in any foreseeable future. All the rest is romanticism.
So the problem (including that, per the brief to the Wollongong year sixers, of designing a sustainable home?) is one of vision? We are unable to imagine a system of economic arrangements founded on something other than insatiability? I sense I am being unfair to Milanović—willfully misreading his remarks as a comment on what is imaginable as opposed to a comment on what is politically possible.
I am reminded of the anxiety I used to sense, reading the interoffice correspondence of the various government bodies dedicated, in Australia up to around 1980, to the management of “native welfare”: so much energy was directed at fostering in Indigenous Australians developed tastes, for packaged foods and other consumer goods (see The Meat Question, chapter 6). An acquisitive drive, an insatiable demand for stuff, was understood to be the thing that would pull Indigenous people out of poverty.
A different kind of anxiety animates the forums I read these days where resellers on the various secondary market platforms for clothing express frustration at the manipulative behavior they see from buyers on the one hand and the platforms on the other. Poshmark stands out in this regard. For many resellers, “Posh” represents a key source of income, and changes to “the algorithm”, the formula by which the platform surfaces different resellers’ “closets”—say, if you’re not posting enough new items or not holding enough “live sales”—could mean the difference between making rent or not. You cannot help but sense that representatives of the platforms are lurking on these forums, and that they’re gratified to see resellers anxious.
Every “we” is defined in part by those whom it excludes, and the “we” that values continuity in habits of relating to others is defined in part by those who, by virtue of appearance or some other bodily fact, represent unfit counterparts, unfit patients of relational gestures.
Thus a counter-we—or, really, a field of counter-we_s: we_s for whom an unfamiliar future, a rupture in human habits of other-directedness, might not represent such an unpromising option.
It has taken me a while to grasp that among the themes of The Meat Question and The Human Scaffold is the uses of other people’s history. In the stories I tell in those books, subjected populations, Indigenous Australians in particular, serve, for other actors (nutrition scientists, Paleo bros, cultural evolution theorists) alternately as exemplars and cautionary figures: showing us how we should be eating, demonstrating the need of skilled guidance in the cultivation of a developed palate, warning us of the dangers of falling off the “demographic treadmill” of cumulative technological development.
In Waking Paralysis traumatic brain injury serves to dramatize the bathos of the subject-maker’s prerogative run aground. Again this is something I realized after the fact. Toward the end the protagonist of the book’s first half, ∅, comes face to face with his old client and now patron Strangebird Cryptomeria in Strangebird’s pied-à-terre in what could be the suburbs of Shanghai.
Years ago, Strangebird had been ∅’s first client as a gallerist. Strangebird had made ∅’s career, then disappeared just as their stars were rising. Now, in the fading light of a hot afternoon, Strangebird tells his story—youth, formation as an artist, why he walked away from a lucrative career with ∅. At length he arrived in a position to help ∅ in his hour of need. You became, ∅ says, a professional savage. I did, Strangebird replies. But isn’t that what I’d have become with you?
“Look,” the older man said. “Maybe this is all bullshit. Maybe I’m a figment of your wrecked nervous system.”
“A fantasy.”
“A fantasy you’ve constructed. About how far we’ve come on race. Isn’t that the expression? ‘How far we’ve come.’ ‘On race.’” He winced, and ∅ heard the man suck in air through his teeth.
“What’s wrong?”
“Back’s acting up, that’s all.”
∅ and Strangebird are joined in a dissociative tendency encapsulated in the hypnopompic paralysis of the title.
[I]t was like being caught on a fence, Strangebird observes, between two states, two worlds, like you’d gone over and your trousers had snagged on the barbwire and you were hanging there, flailing your arms, the others halfway across the next field and the dogs getting louder, unable to go forward or back until finally you freed yourself, most likely tearing the trousers and your leg too.
This is something I used to experience all the time: waking before the GABAergic inhibition of motor activity has receded from the head and limbs, knowing you’re there but unable to move. I know some people learn to go into it, to explore it, this liminal space, but for me it’s never ceased to be a moment of struggle. Years ago, during a stressful period, I had a couple weeks, perhaps longer, when it came two or three times in a night. It got so I dreaded going to bed. Often the first thing I do when I can move again is cry out, for the intention has been taking form in me all the time I’ve been unable to move.
Didion J. The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979).
People indeed can live happy lives …: Milanović M. Degrowth: solving the impasse by magical thinking. Global Inequality and More 3.0 (newsletter), June 27, 2021.
If one really believed in, and wanted to argue for …: Milanović M. Inevitability of the need for economic growth—the n-th time. Global Inequality and More 3.0 (newsletter), June 27, 2021.
Seccombe M. The Joe Biden adviser living in Wollongong, The Saturday Paper (Sydney) N° 385 (February 5, 2022).