Currently reading: Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl, 2012, eflux Journal, Sternberg Press. Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle.
Part 4/5
A Thing Like You and Me
In this essay Steyerl discusses the image as fragment (p.52) and the notion of images (pertaining to) forensic evidence (p.53). Here, images are ruins and scraps symbolising power and violence. She references Benjamin: “Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.” Walter Benjamin – On Language as such and the Languages of Man in Selected Writings 1:69.
Rubbish, like the image, is often fragmentary and Steyerl also uses two key synonyms ruins and scraps. Rubbish as forensic evidence (of destruction/power/violence) has been noted here before. Rubbish and the image could be made synonymous for purposes of illustration, but really they are separation notions with significant overlap. Rubbish is made into or represented as image and image becomes rubbish (scrap or ruins).
The notion of rubbish ‘containing’ social histories has also come up many times before in my research. The pre-used aspect loads rubbish with meaning. Even a brand new commodity on a shop shelf has a social history in that it has had a life before – being manufactured, handled and shipped – and has a potential life ahead – being purchased (exchanged for money), used, discarded and replaced or exchanged again. As Steyerl puts it: “The commodity, too, is understood not as a simple object, but a condensation of social forces,” (The Language of Things, June 2006).
In summary, Steyerl brings Benjamin back into focus and updates his post-war notion: “History, as Benjamin told us, is a pile of rubble. Only we are not staring at it any longer from the point of view of Benjamin’s shell-shocked angel. We are not the angel. We are the rubble. We are this pile of scrap.” (p.56)
