Symbolic-Material Entanglement
Monetary Economies and IndustrialisationIn our late-capitalist, techno-embedded world,
symbolic landscapes have become centric in view, namely as *virtual reality*. Confusion
regarding the lack of separation between *virtual* and “material” worlds stems
from reductive, binary thinking of technology vs. nature and symbology vs. reality
(Haraway, 1991). Our language – *virtual reality* – constructs the illusion of
separation, that *virtual reality* does not exist within the real world but in
parallel to it. Virtual reality is, however, grounded materially through
hardware, radio waves vibrating between routers and receivers, making it a
material “thing” or “place” (Lohnes, 2017). It’s sense of virtual-ness, as our
lacking language defines it, is therefore its symbolic presence and irrational
impact on non-virtual living. Material portals, hardware, can transport us to
an image landscape in which interact and effectively live. Once focus returns
to the “real” world, there is an imposing memory and continuous living in the
symbolic world. Our exponential investment in *virtual* worlds (i.e. social
media), is driven by surveillance corporations who have convinced us to survey
ourselves, using this data to curate personalised advertising space which
further embeds our psyche with commodity fetishism (Posthumanism &
Technology, 2021) (Han, 2010)
(Doctorow, 2023). Intrinsically linked to our profiles, hyper-consumerism
becomes not only for products, but bodies. Our *selves* become commodity,
curated for the purpose of selling to others (Žižek, 1989). However, hangovers
from the symbolic to the material have been present long before 21st
century technological explosion.
Currency is purely symbolic, is virtual; note/coin/card its hardware, and cultural weighting its software. Interaction between the symbolic world and the material world as intrinsic; the development of economy, immense value given to pure symbology has distorted our perception of material reality, making it unimportant in the shadow of an idea. The value of reciprocal relationships, and Gaia’s gifts, have been replaced by a drive to collect as much symbol of accessibility to resource as possible. Currency is real, it dictates material accessibility to food, shelter, land. It is the driving interest behind industrialisation, resource-ification of land and people etc, but it also isn’t real. It is an imposition from the western world, and useless is a non-human, post-Capitalocene sense of time. Within a monetary economy, the human world is centric, thus distorting, and de-personalising the more-than-human-world so it can be utilised without guilt to gain something effectively useless. It is the system that maintains its usefulness. It is a fabulation, a story, with apparent and violent material consequence. It matters what stories we tell.
Pre-colonisation, many indigenous tribes in North America and Australia functioned through an economy of gifts (Kimmerer, 2013, p.26-32). Within this system, what is given from earth, person, animal, river, plant, etc. is taken (never in full) with gratitude and expected to be returned through some capacity. The gift economy grows a sense of love between things, embedding the cultural importance of living and dying well for the human and more than human world. Interdependency is inherent to cultural understanding: we need the land, the land needs us. Under this guiding practice ‘objects … remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts,’ (Hyde, 1979, p.27).
Within a world whose:
Currency is purely symbolic, is virtual; note/coin/card its hardware, and cultural weighting its software. Interaction between the symbolic world and the material world as intrinsic; the development of economy, immense value given to pure symbology has distorted our perception of material reality, making it unimportant in the shadow of an idea. The value of reciprocal relationships, and Gaia’s gifts, have been replaced by a drive to collect as much symbol of accessibility to resource as possible. Currency is real, it dictates material accessibility to food, shelter, land. It is the driving interest behind industrialisation, resource-ification of land and people etc, but it also isn’t real. It is an imposition from the western world, and useless is a non-human, post-Capitalocene sense of time. Within a monetary economy, the human world is centric, thus distorting, and de-personalising the more-than-human-world so it can be utilised without guilt to gain something effectively useless. It is the system that maintains its usefulness. It is a fabulation, a story, with apparent and violent material consequence. It matters what stories we tell.
Pre-colonisation, many indigenous tribes in North America and Australia functioned through an economy of gifts (Kimmerer, 2013, p.26-32). Within this system, what is given from earth, person, animal, river, plant, etc. is taken (never in full) with gratitude and expected to be returned through some capacity. The gift economy grows a sense of love between things, embedding the cultural importance of living and dying well for the human and more than human world. Interdependency is inherent to cultural understanding: we need the land, the land needs us. Under this guiding practice ‘objects … remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts,’ (Hyde, 1979, p.27).
Within a world whose:
wild places of
spontaneously occurring biodiversity is now limited to 25% (or less, this
figure is contested) (Ollos, 2022) (Tyag, 2018),
weather and natural disasters are more extreme and fluctuant than they have been for the past 50 years (Met Office, 2023),
mass inhabitants pollute approximately 37,000,000 metric tonnes each year of CO2 alone (Tiseo, 2023),
produces 2,000,000 metric tonnes in landfill per year just in household waste (Alves, 2023),
human population will stabilise at a peak of 10.4 billion by mid-2080 (United Nations, 2022),
weather and natural disasters are more extreme and fluctuant than they have been for the past 50 years (Met Office, 2023),
mass inhabitants pollute approximately 37,000,000 metric tonnes each year of CO2 alone (Tiseo, 2023),
produces 2,000,000 metric tonnes in landfill per year just in household waste (Alves, 2023),
human population will stabilise at a peak of 10.4 billion by mid-2080 (United Nations, 2022),
idealism of humanity living off the land in a gift economy
with(in) Gaia is far from achievable. Post industrial revolution, our planet
has changed drastically. The *natural* gift economy is system built from and
for balance between *human* and the more-than-human-world. Considering mass
*human* overpopulation, and resultant unsustainable manufacture, production and
farming practices that prioritise this population at expense of wild places and
spontaneous biodiversity, the gift economy is inaccessible for most ecosystems.
Not to mention carriers of this knowledge have been subjected to continuous
genocide, forced assimilation into euro-centric capitalist culture through
colonialist practice (Kimmerer, 2013). Under capitalist hegemony, the mobilisation
of gift economies could also easily pervert, reinforcing ideologies of the
more-than-human-world as property to be equally distributed, under the name
“gift” instead of “resource”. However, hope prevails; gift economies can be
constructed within our metropolitan late-capitalist dystopia. Rather than
abundance in wild places, we have abundance in wastage. This is where we can
scavenge for gifts; food, clothing, construction material, technology, and live
in the glitch from monetary economy, reducing the need for continual mass
production.
f.7-9 Discarded Stuff in Paddington, Dalston & Peckham (2023) Author’s own
Working with one crew in the London squatting
community, we set up a “Free Shop” which included rails of found/donated
clothing, and free food found from bins, cooked into delicious soups and stews.
This glitched space was a gift economy, built from garbage. The nature of
costless items saw members of the public behave differently in the space – they
took little and gave back what they could. People had said if the clothing was
listed for a very low price (i.e. 1 pound per item), they’d feel inclined to
buy as much as they could – its great value for money! But removing money,
consumerist inclination was also removed, and items were left for the next
person to stumble upon them. The “Free Shop” was repeated at Craftanoon atThe Great Imagining, and the same gratitude and caring consumption was practiced
without suggestion by a completely different demographic (Craftanoon, 2024). Projects
like this are powerful systemic glitches.
f.10 Dalsten Free Shop (2023) f.11 The
Great Imagining Free Shop
via @the_friendly.society (2023) Author’s Own
via @the_friendly.society (2023) Author’s Own