Hut Tech and bare life
"When the shack dweller lays in supplies, she
is composing a politics."
Lisa Robertson
This issue of Perforations was generated because of papers found during
a reconstruction of Fehta Murghana's hut. She had constructed it herself
as a writer's retreat but was fond of calling it a 'witch hut', always
fantasizing putting it on legs as the famous hut-on-chicken-legs of the
Russian witch fable Baba
Yaga, creating an image of inner mobility only seemingly at odds with
the the apparent rooted nature of the hut.
This issue/node of Perforations will concede the perimeter to the hut
and hut dwellers everywhere, but also examines the oxymorons of thought
which the hut generates at the center (potentially), such as the 'rooted
nomadism' of the hut dweller and perhaps even the 'revolutionary conservativism'
of such, including its modern anti-modernism. Murghana herself was well
aware of the uncanny nature of the 'hut,' seeing it as enabling portents
and revenants, neither of which are wanted in the modern world, yet both
are continuously courted through the hypermodern technical networks which
course through contemporary life, binding and separating at the same time.
We begin with Murghana's musings on the hut, but several writers have
lately taken to heart, (not forgetting Rykwert's history of the hut),
the enigma of the hut, such as Anne Cline, Lisa Robertson, and most lately
Adam Scharff in a recently released book on Heidegger's Hut. We have enabled
the basic text along the way with quotes from the above.
What is 'Hut / Tech', that such frabjous entities can be held together
by a stroke, a dividing line between the nether poles of a magnet? Another
oxymoron? Who are the dwellers of huts, either in thought or corporeally?
Does the hut embody some sort of midway point between homeless and home?
Between presence and absence? Is there any future for the hut or is it
to be relegated to economic end-zones of emergency and to the camps of
the coming era? Is there the 'hut of last resort' and then the freely
chosen hut? Or is the very nature of the hut a last resort…and hence
a resort to primal potentiality, both ending and beginning? (After all,
the three most notable hut dwellers in recent memory are Henry Thoreau,
Theodore Kacynski, and Martin Heidegger, all of which would seem to be
problematic for the modern inhabitant --besides being white, western males
-- of the current wave
of hyperdevelopment in re: to lofts, townhouses, tract Macmansions,
all examples of a certain form of maximalism and neo-liberal justifications
of a new economic order. And of course with the above dwellers, the hut
is often seen as a breeding ground of primoridal darkness in its willful,
almost-Nietzschean separation from culture, civilization, and society.:
"What we crave is not Rosseau's solitude but the excellent series
of origin dwindling on ahead into the future. Thus we love shacks. Each
leads erotically to the next. One sojourns, or starts out, rather than
settles, in a shack. Domestic duration, like childhood, is transient,
serial. A shack is always timely. Typically an account of the history
of architecture will begin with a shack."
Lisa Robertson
But the hut also seems oddly timeless in its aspect of
catering to bare life, which exists as a possibility everywhere and everywhen.
Is there any place left for the minimalisms of the hut? For its limitations,
its 'insect politics,' its dark broodings, its centrality in a haunted,
uncanny landscape? Or are the compacted maximalisms of favelas,
the psychic densities and thickenings and potential new forms which they
seem to prophesy, more exacting? In all cases the 'hut' avers between
opacity and transparency, justifiying both, on different occasions, preserving
both as trans-temporal exigencies which advance, retreat (and sublime)
into spiritualities, goblins, ghosts, ethers, and materializations at
the drop of a hat.
Please fell free to send us your hut life, even
if it only resides as a dream, a whistle in the dark.
Please feel free to send us the minimals that you are able to squeeze
out of everyday, the disguised trans-temporalities that make up hut life
in the middle of empire, that make up hope in the middle of loss and abandon,
like lotus seeds found in the bottom of a three thousand year old pyramid.
notes
(1) Robertson quotes From Playing House: a brief account of the idea
of the shack Lisa Robertson in Occasional Work and Seven Walks
From the Office of Soft Architecture
Robert Cheatham
Atlanta January 2007
Hut / Tech
Fehta Murghana
1) How, now, could anyone possibly advocate the 'weakness' of the hut or the shack, its glaring idleness, downtime, bricoleur-ness, and embrace of decay? Like difficult or impossible speech, its perceived weakness (the weakness of opacity in the one, the weakness of the minimum in the former) is actually a form of strength.
2) The hut/cabin/shack is the epicenter of 'experimentalism,' even if
'only' vernacular. Always successful and always a failure, both at the
same time; the necessity which the hut represents is precisely that: "The
economy of the shack enumerates necessity, or more exactly it enumerates
a dream of necessity, using what's at hand." (Lisa Robertson
1)
3) The Frankenstein dream of the West is intimately tied into the hut,
forming a low point (or perhaps, ala Kafka, a burrow) in a relationship
with the imperialist castle of scientific experimentalism. There the hut
forms a scraped macula on the great optic of science, a luminous blind
spot, the only place where music and ethics can take place confronted
with a totalizing/metastasizing empire of signs. (Remember: the blind
fiddler in the hut in the forest who takes in the monster, plays for him
and cares for him.). The modern horror film has moved from the humble
peasant shack as being a place of refuge, to a place of bones, a Golgatha
of anti-modernist intents, along with various excoriations by the modern
hyper-capitalist apparatus of every form of utopic discourse. (Not that
'hut life,' perhaps a variant of Agambenian bare life, is any utopia ,
but it does seem to act as a measure of soi-disant distance from a claustrophobic
modernity: in fact a mystico-poetic anarchic rival to aims and claims
of Empire, always destined to fall and rise in equal measure and counter
to the forces of imperium. The weak force of hut life is carried not in
itself, and this is its strength, but in its always everywhere opposition
to its organized other, to the Order of Things. And its simultaneous fealty
to the life of bare things, stripped objects, things in their primordial
necessity.)
4) The hut is nothing if not composed of limitations and in fact liminal
circumstances generally (a limitation is always a manifestation of a border
condition). The liminal as threshold, as in-between open-ness, befits
the hut inasmuch as it perpetually falls back on primordial starts ( always
a false start and always a true start: the hut's nature as both episodic
-- tied to time -- and primordial -- unhinged from time, and uncanny --
accounts for its seemingly oxymoronic nature).
5) The mythological version of the hut is the UFO: liminal, capable of
appearing anywhere, capable of inhabiting imaginal spaces in a completely
anti-imperial, cross-temporal (perhaps even anti-temporal) and almost
magical way (The oft-repeated statement of "If they exist, why don't
they set down on the White House lawn?" betrays its anti-hut mentality
but also is helpful in defining the parameters of the hut, if not the
UFO.) The UFO is capable of sedimenting out of thin air, pure threshold
or halo in fact, and disappearing just as suddenly, like a neck evaporating
leaving only the ring around the collar, minus the collar, only the ring,
asyncronous to predominant reality but, like the hut, also oddly attached.
The hut/favela/cabin/shack as dirty ring halo -- sublimed around the collar
of civilization … or in other terms, the thin gap between hub and
wheel. (2)
6) The hut always seems to have associated with it very strong corporeal
associations. In media representations, the hut brings forth dismemberment,
sexuality of both. Contemporary movies invariably set the scene of the
hut as either a presage of trauma or the very topography of injury. (One
has only to examine any number of very gruesome horror films to find point
here, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Cabin Fever to
many any points between. And certainly the first Poltergeist discloses
the uncanny return of the hut -- or at least the teepee -- as perfect
reprise to the subliee of the center. ed.)
7) Catastrophe is midwife to the hut. "How is it that placeÑa
site of traumaÑcomes to form an intimacy, fragmented with voids but haunted
by ghosts simultaneously, with an event which then means that place becomes
witness to the past?"
Dylan Trigg
(One is reminded of the British artist Cornelia Parker who had a the Royal Navy Munitions blow up a small shack and then hung the charred, blown-apart pieces from the ceiling in a gallery, a perfect image of the cathected place of the hut in modernity. 3.) As a phenomena of the periphery, the hut is sensitive to perturbations of the center and increases in density of reference during cultural shifts and consolidations at the center; from a hut point of view, almost everything is a catastrophe and collapse, nothing more representative of such than technology itself (if indeed it can be said to have an 'in itxelf' --- one's view of catastrophe no doubt rests on how one resolves such a question. The image of Benjamin's Angel of history resolves it particularly pessimistically but well in accord with a p.o.v. which looks from inside the hut toward the outside.
8) The hut's relation to time: As Lisa Robertson says, the hut
is always timely, not because it is outside time but because it is always
about possibility, the latent potential of bare life to always everywhere
start again. Again and again and again, the hut forms, no matter where
it is located, a periphery, which is also a sort of center. Its relation
with time mocks the center and emulates the origin, always accessible
but mostly (or perhaps entirely) as potential, sharing modernity's fascination
and disgust with origin, origin as perfection and subsequent fall, but
finally sedimenting out an image of origin, if nothing else as a halo
of imperturable but unattainable necessity. 4.)
9. Thoreau's cabin
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which
is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
Thoreau began planning for his 10' by 15' house in March. The frame went
up in May. And he was ready to move in on the 4th of July. The interior
of the house was furnished with a bed, a table, a small desk and lamp,
and three chairs
-- "one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."
Cost of Materials for Thoreau's House (from Walden)
* Board's: $8.03 1/2, mostly shanty boards
* Refuse shingles for roof and sides: $4.00
* Laths: $1.25
* Two second-hand windows with glass: $2.43
* One thousand old brick: $4.00
* Two casts of lime: $2.40. That was high.
* Hair: $0.31. More than I needed
* Mantle-tree iron: $0.15
* Nails: $3.90
* Hinges and screws: $0.14
* Latch: $0.10
* Chalk: $0.01
* Transportation: $1.40. I carried a good part on my back.
In all: $28.12 1/2
These are all the material excepting the timber, stones and sand, which
I claimed by squatter's right."
10. Prophecy. A numbing presentiment often accompanies one in hut life, an orphic intensity; and along side that, an equally exultant epiphany. The prophetic, oracular mode presents itself almost as the genii loci of the hut, as an aggrandisement or frisson arising from the primordial soil of the hut, whether in the pragmatic mode of a Thoreau, the obscurity of the later Heidegger in dealing with the 'destitution of modernity,' and now to the violent polemics of Ted Kacynski and the unabomber mnifesto (5), prefigured perhaps in the Quonset hut of the second world war (6), its un-nerving geometricity, regular yet somehow chthonic in its half/whole emergence from the soil; still pointing to the ever present residual uncanniness in its readiness to process material, it is the iconic figure of that processing point de capiton. Small wonder then that it figures also as one of the primal images of that world conflict.
11. Imperceptible. Hut life relies on invisibility, or whatever
is closest to it, an alliance with weakness which is most un-becoming
in a society of spectacularity and extreme ocularity. Once the hut becomes
sufficiently visible to be identified as such, it's marginal status becomes
revealed. And from the point of view of empire any hut visibilty is an
excrescence of shame. At the same time, the multitudes who live in shacks,
huts, border camps of no providence, within sight of modernity's promise,
a world wide 'camp of saints,' which threatens the hegemony of western
technical discourse. (7)
12. Immaterial. "The body becomes a world, vast in its
potential to be haunted. And yet it too follows where memory leads."
Dylan Trigg
The hut participates in materiality -- how could it not? -- but it is an oeconomicos of flows both preternaturally close and sublimely far. On the other hand the oikos or economy of empire is entirely middle range, more domestic even than the hut in that empire discards whatever spectral remnants attempt to materialize through an economy become theological, the province of a restriction to a bad infinity centered on the nesting of objects: the only way out is in, the only life is a death-in-life of the puppet and the doll, the only circulation recognized is that which feeds on its own rotting remains, dead ship floating between stars waiting for system-on restart.
13. Production. The hut seems the antithesis of production, almost,
an escape from the urgencies and anxieties of production. It is there
that the thunderous engines of empire can be heard churning in the distance.
It is there that time thickens around itself, a production congealing
downward. I sit silent even now, hearing earthmovers on the bluff over
the hut, waitingÉ.
14. Secrets. "Only if one is capable of entering into relation with unreality and with the unappropriable as such is it possible to appropriate the real and the possible."
Giorgio Agamben
Even as a way station [and the hut is almost never a destination but always on-the-way], the hut carries a secret, without being a secret. It is the secret of an inconsolable blank spot, a void, wild, always in transit, covered over by the transit but protective of that primordial mobile necessary nothing; ultimately not appropriable at all, or rather, only contingently, only during the time of the hut, much like the time of language and the hoped-for Fall within language, out of language. The hut as destination would be the fulfullment of the stroke-between, the impossibly fulfilled/emptied destitution of a totally deconstructed time, before and after, always the impossible waiting of the time that remains.
15. Magic. If 'magic' is a suspension, a form of a-nomos and a balancing of liminal conditions (and convertible as a form of 'certain hope' when it seeks to become law-like) then its transfer tokens of trauma, memory, catastrophe will always end in the container of the hut; no matter the transfers take place in a penthouse, their vector is toward the hut.
16. The hut attempts, perhaps in vain at this late stage, to re-integrate the three aspects of life that Aristotle extolled: the life of pleasure, the life of contemplation, and the life of the polis or political life. Problems already arise for hut life with the latter, political life, since the unitary, simple life of the previous two is split by the multiplicity of political life. The archaism of the hut derives from this simple triad, this condensate of 'bare life' which takes on an entirely new aspect under the auspices of a society of total administration and survelliance. Bare life now meets itself coming from the Multiplex down the street, sees itself projected, questioned and controlled.
17. Play. "The immediate result of the invasion of life by play is a change and acceleration of time...[....] The calendar, whose essence is rhythm, alternaton and repition, is now stopped short in the measureless dilation of one long holiday. [....] the 'pandemonium', the 'uproar' and the 'bedlam' of Playland result therefore in the paralysis and destruction of the calendar." G. Agamben
Agamben goes on to make several more observations pertinent to hut life: that play converts event into structure and that play derives from the realm of the sacred, as well as radically transforming it: "games of chance derive from oracular practices; the spinning top and the checkered board were tools of divination." (from In Playland in Infancy & History)
The hut is doubly festered and redeemed by its connection with childhood play: forts, huts, fairy bowers, frog houses, all occuying the long stroke of childhood before the verdict of adulthood; the child, ghost-like, occupying the adult, larval time, past troubling the future by playing with toys and then 'burying' them, minatureized condensations oftime and death.
The hut reopens the field of practice and play, freezes time, opens death.
notes
(1) From Playing House: a brief account of the
idea of the shack,
Lisa Robertson in Occasional Work and Seven Walks From the Office of
Soft Architecture
(2) "As Lao Tzu reminds us, the cartwright's art is most focused
not on the rim, the spokes, the hub, or the axle, but on the space he
must leave between the hub, or the axle: it is there that the wheel turns
and the cart moves.
What this means is that the essential, the irreducible, or the fundamental
point in the world, in discourse, and in machines is very like something
which is not there: an opening, a space, a gap which joins. If the wheel
and axle were to fall into the background, one could see this space where
the movement is a ring of light."
The Persistence of Memory: Myth, Organism, Text
(3) http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/parker_1.html
(4) One is reminded of Giorgio Agamben's invaluable description of halo
in The Coming Community:
"One can think of the halo ...as a zone in which possibility and
reality, potentiality and actuality, become indistinguishable. The being
that reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus
receives as a gift a supplemental possibility. [....] This imperceptible
trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminable and allows
it to blend, to make itself whatever, is the tiny displacement that every
thing must accomplish in the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of
a potentiality that comes only after the act, of matter that does not
remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo."
(5) http://www.42inc.com/~estephen/manifesto/unabe2.html
(6) History: http://www.kadiak.org/quonset/quonset.html
"The first Fuller design, created at their Quonset Point, Rhode
Island facility, was a half-cylinder, corrugated steel structure with
arch ribs. It had insulation, pressed-wood interior, could be erected
on concrete, on pilings, or on the ground with a wood floor. The wood
ends had a door and two windows. The first units were 16 by 36 feet but
soon they made them in 20 x 40 foot and 20 x 56 foot models. The 56 foot
one provided for an overhang past the end walls. They also made a 40 x
100 foot warehouse and other sizes.
The army ordered 16,000 of them after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eventually
170,000 were produced.
The outsides were galvanized and, that being too easy to spot from the
air, they were painted olive drab.
The steel used in this design was a bit of a problem. So they designed
one using all pressed-wood. This design was conjured in the Seattle area
and was termed the Pacific Hut."
7. It is estimated that throughout the world there are more than a billion
squatters living on the margins of urban populations, living on land that
is not legally theirs, over one out of ten of the earth's population.
See Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a new Urban World, Robert
Neuwirth, also Planet of Slums, Mike Davis.
.
