Stubborn Things: The Problem with a World that Won’t Fade

09-05-2024

“The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.”
(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] 2018, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 126)

The satellite image accompanying this post shows something many have found disquieting: a titanic heap of fashion items – 60,000 tons, some estimate – dumped in the middle of Chile’s Atacama Desert. To the contemporary spectator, such a gigantic pile of clothes poses what most of us today would consider an obvious problem: how on earth to get rid of it? Yet, the problem of ridding the earth of men’s things has not always been an obvious one. In fact, the problem that had traditionally seemed obvious to the makers of the world was quite the opposite: how on earth to make things last? This is true, at least, if we understand the material world in which we live in the terms suggested by Hannah Arendt: as the sum total of things that – by the work of their hands – men oppose to the ever-recurring cycle of growth and decay to which all life on earth is subject. Against the ferocious metabolism of nature, men erect a world which outlasts the individual lives of its makers thus providing the condition for a specifically human life: whatever enters into it is felt and received by men as a conditioning force, but only when surrounded by such a lasting world can men “retrieve […] their identity” and “establish a biography” – only in a lasting world can men be born and die, can they act, begin and be free. It is by virtue of its stabilising function that worldliness is among the basic conditions of human life on earth: by virtue, that is, of its durability.

In The Human Condition, which is where the quote I have chosen comes from, Arendt famously assigns a central theoretical place to the distinction between the perishable character of the outcome of labour – goods that are either extinguished by consumption or immediately returned to nature – and the durability of the products of work – things that outlast their use. She is also very clear, however, that such durability – this unnatural, artificial attribute that men willingly bestow to the products of their work – is never absolute. It is only for a limited time, indeed, that things can escape the metabolism of nature. As Arendt writes, once “left to itself or discarded from the human world, the chair will again become wood, and the wood will decay and return to the soil from which the tree sprung before it was cut off to become the material upon which to work and with which to build.” But the fragility of things has a second source, since their durability can always also be revoked at will by their makers. Unlike labour, which, belonging to the cyclical rhythm of nature, has neither a beginning nor an end, and unlike action, which, by virtue of the freedom it manifests always has a definite beginning but never a definite end, the activity of work always ends with the completion of the artifacts it brings into the world. Work is, thus, distinctively finite and as such always reversible: the products of work can always be unmade by the same hand that brought them into existence. The durability of things, in other words, is always contingent on men’s ideal and material commitment to achieve, respect and preserve it – on men’s sustained willingness to make things last.

How, then, did we end up going from worrying about the fragility of things to worrying about their stubbornness, from striving for the permeance of the world to being haunted by a world that won’t fade? Since the scenario from which this question springs is one Arendt, at her time, could not have envisaged, we cannot expect to find in her work a ready answer to it. What her work does offer, however, is a particular interpretation of history and a conceptual toolkit that helps us to think our way through it, and I have chosen this quote because I see it as providing an entry point into both.
The context in which the quote appears is Arendt’s discussion of the transformation of the work process which, in her view, accompanied the emergence of the modern age. By splitting the production process into discrete parts and thus separating work from its end product, the industrial revolution – particularly with the development of the production chain – robbed work of its finitude, instead assigning it the continuousness traditionally associated with labour. Altering, in this way, the very nature of work, the modern transformation of the production process – so goes Arendt’s critique – led to the progressive loss of work’s characteristic features and their replacement by those features that had previously distinguished labour. Abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans, replaced the ideal of durability, which had traditionally guided the hands of the world-makers; and consumption, the mode of relation to the goods of nature, replaced use, the traditional mode of intercourse between men and the things of the world.

Now, among the elements of Arendt’s critique, the most relevant to our question is possibly her observation that the ever-increasing acceleration brought about in the production of things by the modern mutation of work, had the potential to realize in actual material form the abundance that for labour could only ever be a dream. It is, indeed, the presence of such material abundance that changes the mode of intercourse between men and the worldly things from use to consumption, such that we end up “treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods, so that a chair or a table is now consumed as rapidly as a dress and a dress used up almost as quickly as food.” Caught up in the compulsion to devour objects as if they were the ripe fruit on a tree that, if allowed to fall, would swiftly be reclaimed by nature, we “can no longer afford to use them, to respect and preserve their inherent durability,” and it is, in turn, in this slow but steady retreat from the commitment to make things last that Arendt sees “the grave danger” to which modernity exposed the world: the danger that none of its objects will eventually “be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.” Not only, then, had the misplaced pursuit of abundance that characterized modern work processes locked man into an endless cycle of over-production and -consumption, but in doing so, it also threatened to erode the stability of the world and, with it, eventually, the material condition for action – for politics, that is, and for freedom.

Keeping in mind Arendt’s concern for the material abundance achieved by modern workmanship, we can now start to see why, in spite of the ongoing resonance of her analysis, the course of events that has led to our contemporary predicament with waste departed somewhat from Arendt’s prophecy, and may be in fact leading towards an even more disquieting epilogue than the “mere” end of a durable world as she had envisaged it. What seems all too clear, from the perspective of today, is that, whereas the ideal of abundance did effectively replace the ideal of durability – something that the very existence of planned obsolescence suffices to demonstrate – the material abundance attained by modernity did not actually displace the material durability of things: in fact, it added itself to it.

Arendt was surely aware that what consumption, as the modern modality of intercourse with the things of the world, truly erodes is not the durability of things’ materiality but rather the durability of things’ utility. Writing in 1958, however, before the dire consequences of the explosion in the use of synthetic materials such as plastics and “forever chemicals” had become clear, Arendt could not foresee the extent to which the combined effect of material abundance with the durable materiality of discarded use objects would one day become a problem for humanity. At this time, her conviction that “left to themselves” or “discarded from the world” the (no longer useful) things would eventually “vanish” was certainly more plausible than it seems today.

Whilst we do know that, on geological timescales, almost all traces of human activity, including great mounds of waste garments, will eventually disappear, Arendt’s description of work as a process that, unlike labour, “takes matter out of nature’s hand without giving it back to her” now seems true in a much more literal sense than she had originally intended. Not only can we not truly eat the things of our material world, but, for many things we produce, we do not yet know of any other organic or inorganic process on earth that can. On the timescales of human lives, or even generations of human lives, then, the things we discard do not vanish, they pile up, and we call them waste.  So great is the volume of these things, that in places such as the Atacama Desert, these piles – the stubborn material remains of a world that cannot readily be re-assimilated into nature – are visible from space.

This, to be clear, is not to say that Arendt was unaware of the problem of waste. In fact, she was deeply concerned with the extent to which the economy had become a “waste economy.” Her concern with waste, however, we might understand as being focused on the input side of production, the excess of resources mobilized in service of a misplaced ideal of abundance.  Today, instead, we ought to be at least as concerned by the output side of production – that is, with the destiny all the accumulated materials that cannot be consumed, in a literal sense.

Whether Arendt would call the pile of waste in the Atacama “of the world” is difficult to say. On the one hand, having been discarded from the world, these things have ceased to be part of it, but on the other, enduring beyond their utility, they keep conditioning us and would, for this reason, still belong to it. Only things that had ceased to condition human existence, indeed, could have ever appeared to Arendt as “a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world.” Certainly though, with the stubbornness they oppose to our will to extinguish their conditioning force, they resemble, more and more, the nature against which they had been originally erected – though maybe more inimical and certainly uglier. Sometimes, as has been tried in the Atacama, we attempt to destroy piles of waste simply by burning them, but this only displaces the problem: even when they are transformed to the point that we can no longer see them, their chemical remains persist as pollutants in our atmosphere, our seas, our soils; they leech into our foods, our water, and – as if we had truly devoured them –  make their way into the very cells of our bodies.  Research has detected the presence of microplastics in human placenta, meaning that, even before being born into it, newcomers to the world cannot escape its conditioning.

In Arendt’s view, modernity set in motion the series of events that led to our present predicament, and while she might not have seen the problem that the excessive durability of the things of the world faces us with today, her work provides powerful tools to understand it. More importantly, as damning an indictment as her account of the modern age is, in her theory of action we still find faith in the capacity of men to change path. As work appears to have acquired the irreversible character that had been distinctive of action, the remedy to the irreversibility and the unpredictability of the processes that,  as world-makers, we have set into motion ought to resemble the means of redemption of the men of action, those means by which we take responsibility for the consequences of our doings and interrupt an old series of events, by starting anew.

Acknowledgement:
This reflection has been developed and written in close conversation and with the help of Dr. Leo Steeds, University of Glasgow, to whom I am deeply grateful.
 
About the author:
Clementina Giulia Maria Gentile Fusillo is a Justitia Center for Advanced Studies research fellow at Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. She has previously lectured in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Sheffield and been a doctoral and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Warwick.