A Catalogue Essay for Styrofoam Huffer
We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and its effects, of the thousands of ways of moving the body, of dominating the body and the passions – but we do not even know what a body can do. Lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk. As Nietzche will say, we stand amazed before consciousness, but “the truly surprising thing is rather the body…”
— Gilles Deluze from Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
I worked with a man named Al; we called him Big Al because he was so large. The job itself was very poor – one of the worst I’ve ever had, although this was not Al’s fault. The solicitation that had lead me to it read “landscaping” but that was not an accurate description; it was used because the job itself was too vague, almost too primary for definition. People want clarity; they want to be able to say that they are something, but in this case such clarity was illusive. What we did was work, nothing more specific, but in a short internet solicitation, such words would have been inadequate and meaningless. It was only in the experience of the job that such apparently general words would gain their incisive clarity. The nature of our work was perhaps so hard to characterize or to properly name because it was so primitive, generated before proper names had being given to being. If it seemed much different from activities that people had done in the past, it was only because the context had changed and not an essential facet of our profession. We worked ten hour days. We did not take coffee breaks and were expected to work Saturdays, though I did not – citing an obligation to another (partly real) job as an excuse. It seemed improper that I should have been put in the position of making excuses about Saturday work, but it made things easier.
Our duties involved a multiplicity of laborious tasks: cleaning trash, repairing concrete, digging, cutting grass and so on. We did not really make anything that would be left behind, not in the sense that any of it would one day have a history, although we always left the environment changed. In this way it seemed similar to the work of our very ancient forbears.
There were between seven to nine of us depending on the ebb and flow of workers coming or leaving. We all did the same thing, except Big Al who was too obese for manual labor. He operated the various machines: the backhoes, the truck, the excavator and he repaired things that broke back at our shop. He worked the longest out of anyone – sixty or seventy hours a week, although his work was not as physically demanding as ours.
During my three months at this job I had two notable conversations with Big Al about work. The first started with a conversation about the oilfields of Northern Alberta. I explained that the people who built and maintained the rigs worked twelve hours per day, fourteen days in a row, followed by fourteen days of rest. I told him (it is a cliché as are the subjects of many conversations between working people) that the rapacious work schedule had a deleterious effect on the workers, leading to exhaustion and rampant drug consumption. Big Al dismissed the idea that twelve hours was a long day, recounting that he had once worked sixteen hour days, six days a week driving a machine that painted highway lines. “One hundred hours a week,” he said (The Kung San people of the Kalahari, a hunter-gatherer society spend about twelve to nineteen hours per week to meet their needs, just for the sake of comparison 1) a statement which at once seemed to contradict and embrace his pragmatic world-view. For the second conversation, he told me that the others were jealous that I did not work Saturdays and did not want to work Saturdays themselves.
“I told them,” he said “that you don’t work Saturdays because you have another job, and do you know what they said? They said that they would get other jobs on Saturday too. Now I understand that you had that job before you started here and you can’t do anything about it (the immovability of fate was one of the most valid justifications in Big Al’s world), but for the rest of them, I think it’s just bad attitude, especially when there’s work to be done.” But there was always work to be done; we were not farmers with produce about to rot in the fields. Our workload was dependent on the number of contracts our boss secured which was dependent on the number of hours per week that we could work. Our duties were not pressing. We did whatever we could convince others to pay us for – largely useless tasks. It seemed that his work gained value insofar that it imposed a structure on Big Al’s time, which gained its validity because it was imposed by some kind of (arguably economic) external necessity. Because he was forced to do it, as opposed to something that he would have chosen to do, it took on a greater meaningfulness and agency. Yet, Big Al didn’t do much of anything else. He had no other interests. As for economic necessity, as soon as he got a little extra money, he found a new way to put himself in debt. “Work is work” he said, and no job was too absurd so long as he was paid for it and he had not willingly chosen to do it himself. At the same time he viewed almost any act done willfully for no pay, above and beyond what was demanded for one’s basic maintenance with great skepticism. To work for others (but not altruistically), to have his desires subverted beneath another’s, was his true good. But this fails to capture the whole equation; when I think of Big Al and his peculiar version of asceticism, I think of this passage from the philosopher Spinoza:
“We neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we desire it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.” 2
In this contradiction we find a key to the enigma of work.
Work, which is the most unmistakably practical of all human activities, which occupies such a large part of our time, has always been an intense topic of discussion. However, much of its fascination does not stem from its practicality, but from its more mystical, quasi-religious aspects – its link to myth, religion and belief – its ability to seem as both the product of rationality taking us towards the achievement of goals and as a dominating spirit that controls us. The debate about work has transformed in recent decades as traditional views of progress have proved to be problematic, as the intense energy of our collective efforts have created unwanted consequences. We are defined by our work.
Michael Drebert’s sculpture Styrofoam Huffer attempts to grapple with some of the contemporary issues surrounding this, admittedly general, subject. The name Styrofoam Huffer quite accurately describes its designated function; its composition includes tubing, tape, builder’s plastic, piping and two metal garbage cans; its purpose is to provide a venue and a method for the communal smoking of discarded Styrofoam.
The usefulness of styrofoam is well-known, as is the problem of its disposal. Drebert states: “I found this an interesting problem: how can I take this once extremely useful product (after being discarded), and make it useful again?” His answer lay in its transformation from a waste product (which consumes value in the cost of its disposal) into a leisure product (which could potentially create value). It is unnecessary to point out, of course, that its new function is to intoxicate and poison its users. It might also be observed that this new function in no way reduces the environmental impact of its disposal, in fact in most cases this activity would probably heighten it – making it about equal to open air incineration. However, that would miss the point. The point being not to make it less harmful, but more useful – a statement which at first may seem absurd until we understand that it is the very same rationale employed as a justification for many projects: the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands for example.
In the realm of human activity there are both work and works. Work is transitive – the activity: it is ephemeral, instantaneous – It fades. Works are objects. They are the products of work. They create and compose the material that allows us to access history, in a sense, perhaps they are history. There are art works, literary works, public works, city works and so forth. They alter, occupy and consume space. What interested Big Al, for instance, was work – the activity, divested of its products, as an activity which was transcendent in itself. Big Al was not interested in work as an activity that constructed history, but as an activity that freed him from it – or at least freed him from his own personal history. But Big Al also worked because somehow the totality of work gave his life significance, significance that a purely subjective existence focused around self-gratification or self-fulfillment could not give him. Work can be both cyclical and linear in character. As a repetitive act it is cyclical: freeing one from time – from the burden of past and present. It is not so much that this sort of work is useful, so much as, once one has devoted him or herself to this activity, use ceases to be a question. One has been freed of his or her own anxiety of progress through repetitive acts. On the other hand, it becomes linear in the sense that we build our identities and our understanding through actions, so that work provides the appearance of some kind of progression, that the anxiety of the past in relation to the future pushes us to make what we consider progress to relieve the fear of potential decline or stagnation.
“Interacting with things and understanding things cannot be separated." 3 Our linguistic development in childhood is mirrored by the development of our motor skills. Important milestones of similar significance in both typically occur concurrently with each other. As we learn to express ourselves physically, we also learn to express ourselves conceptually. 4 Is it safe to say that both abilities are interrelated? Before intelligence was a platform for self-reflection, it was an ability to accomplish tasks. Accordingly it seems viable to suggest that our understanding of intelligence would be inextricably bound to our understanding of action or work - that our concept of intelligence would progress from our ability to effectively organize ourselves in relation to our limitations. As such, it is only by struggling with and overcoming physical limitations that such a concept has any significance. By contrast, for an omnipotent being like God (hypothetically speaking) such intelligence would be meaningless. Even desire as we know it would be meaningless without the need to effectuate some kind of work to achieve that desire, since there would be no disjuncture between what one had and what one could have.
Can we see a tacit understanding of this relationship between work and knowledge in our naming of various hominid lineages: Homo Faber: man who makes, Homo Habilis: able man and Homo Sapiens: knowing man?
Our actions posses a certain power which in many ways surpasses our rational consciousness; to quote Gilles Deluze discussing Spinoza:
What does Spinoza mean when he invites to take the body as a model? It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge that we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it. There are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So it is by one and the same movement that we shall manage, if possible, to capture the power of the body beyond the given conditions of our knowledge, and to capture the power of the mind beyond the given conditions of our consciousness. One seeks to acquire a knowledge of the powers of the body in order to discover, in a parallel fashion, the powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to compare the powers. In short, the model of the body, according to Spinoza, does not imply any devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important, a devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body.5
To put it another way: “we don’t even know what a body can do.6” Or one could say that the intelligence of the body and its ability to construct and create greatly outstrip one’s awareness of that ability, or one's ability to form a conscious picture of what he or she is doing. Or more properly perhaps we can see an alternative way to consider intelligence, one less wrapped up in some vague concept of rational comprehension and much more connected to an ability to act. It is to view intelligence more as a matter of ability. In this sense work - on both a personal and collective scale - embodies an immense but largely unconscious intelligence. That is to say, our understanding locates itself more in gathering and perfecting abilities than it does in increasing our awareness of their various significances. In this we can see a potential danger – to construct, create and transform ad nauseum through a kind of unconsidered brilliance until we have constructed and transformed our environments and situations into things hostile to us.
There can be a certain sublimity to work; in fact there often is. Not only do we find work meaningful, but we need work to make meaning. Drebert puts this in his own words in a letter he wrote me: “it seems that working is something that best helps us to pass the time, to ease the feeling that all is meaningless and useless. But there is something even more valuable about hard work, the kind which doesn’t allow for daydreaming, the kind which pushes to the sublime.” We desire work – it can become addictive like food or sex or alcohol; it can inspire pleasure; it appears as a good in and of itself (recalling Spinoza’s comments from above). When we devote our time to work, we can be freed from the anxiety of consciousness of time. We can transcend, or at least appear to transcend our situations momentarily.
This can be problematic however; the magnitude of our ability to transform through work creates a profound and awe inspiring object to put before consciousness. Accordingly it risks becoming a dangerous fetish object, a punishment for the insecurity of consciousness or conscious animals, as exemplified by the horrifically ironic sign above the gates of Auschwitz and Dachau: Arbiet Macht Frei 7, which had previously been used as a phrase to promote public works projects under the Weimar regime.
Styrofoam Huffer’s reflections on the dark side of work are perhaps some of its most striking elements. Drebert conceived of the sculpture in response to a documentary he watched called Darwin’s Nightmare. In one segment of the film, the story depicts the lives of some small children living on the banks of Lake Victoria. The film revolves around the introduction of the Nile Carp to the lake as an economic resource. Nile Carp are robust and aggressive fish and they have wiped out much of Lake Victoria’s biodiversity. The inhabitants of its perimeter, who once used the lake to live, now depend on the market value of Nile Carp for survival. These children occupy the lowest position in this economy, eking out their existence by scavenging and reusing the waste parts of the fish, which are sold as fertilizer ingredients and other such things. At night they often fall prey to sexual predators. In order to escape the brutality of their existence, they utilize the only material available to them: the waste Styrofoam packaging that once carried fish, which they vaporize over campfires, inhaling the fumes to get high. From this Drebert began to consider what constituted useful activity: if the pre-processing of fish waste products for utilization by industry could be deemed sufficiently necessary then the smoking of Styrofoam would also become useful insofar as it allowed for the unhindered processing of fish waste products. Furthermore the Styrofoam, which would otherwise be discarded, would be useful once again. The standard reaction to such a thought would be horror. It is clear that the children live an unjustifiable existence; however, it demonstrates a kind of mentality that views usefulness and productiveness over human or environmental harmfulness in importance (clearly they can be separated), a viewpoint obviously supported by the collective majority of political and environmental decisions that we have made as a species.
In constructing this piece Drebert has probed into the circular relationship that exists between our beliefs about work and usefulness and furthermore into our fetishization of useful things. That is not to say that he does not also celebrate work with this piece: the creation of art works demonstrates most literally the connection between action and understanding, of work and knowledge (being ironically also one of the activities most commonly viewed as useless). But he also raises a danger; a danger in the human impulse to work – as a way to create meaning and as an integral part of the structure through which meaning comes into existence, which is so great that we would quite often rather create injurious things – create catastrophes rather than do nothing at all: the impulse which is so strong that we insist on its usefulness. That necessity which Nietzsche describes as “the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui 8: it needs a goal,” he says “– and it will rather will nothingness than not will.” 9
The vacuum has always been intolerable. Willing nothingness is not equivalent to accepting nothingness. To will nothingness is to create a certainty of purpose in the project of self-effacement. It represents one of the ways in which people create illusions in order to justify their actions. Illusions are necessary, but also subject to problems.
At the core, our decisions must be based on illusions that we have been able to construct, so that we may conjure some kind of movement and progression (progression, not necessarily progress). Otherwise we must face the vacuum: of history, of time, of work, of the elements which are too fundamental to our understanding and too large to be subject to language; we seek fantasies that calm the rational mind; fantasies that help our inadequate consciousness’ to channel the powers and intelligences of the body that are too large for them. Every justification is a work of art. But in the process of creating the work, it is easy (one should say almost inevitable) that people will forget the art; in this situation there is a large risk of reifying these too-large concepts, or pre-concepts. Isolated activity takes on an all encompassing dimension. For instance, the lives of the Lake Victoria children can only be justified by the belief that they and those who profit from their labor are all engaged in a similar activity with a unified purpose – towards a goal that all of humanity tries to reach together. Similarly, people often justify third world working conditions with the argument that there are distinct levels of economic development; suffering now will result in prosperity later. This belief is evident even in the division of the world into the designations “developed” and “developing.” This belies a belief in the religious nature of work – of redemption and salvation – towards a particular end that all peoples of the earth must go through in the same way. Otherwise there are just people living and working all over the earth in the present: some who are prospering and others who are suffering.
One of the values of art is the quality whereby it presents itself as both essential and useless at the same time; practically everyone understands its absurdities (that is to say jeers at its absurdities) and yet few would be comfortable to deny its necessity to society (granted most would find it difficult to explain exactly why they believed this). It is the strength of art that it shows us both the necessity and the nature of our illusions. Drebert’s sculpture comfortably straddles this understanding. Styrofoam Huffer invites us to evaluate what we consider useful in our lives and what we consider harmful – to inspect our motivations. Drebert asks us to expose and question structures that normally we take so entirely for granted, we often cease to see them as existing at all. In asking us to consider what we believe useful or useless, he simultaneously asks us to reconsider certain constructs which often go unnoticed, taken simply as part of the fabric of reality and to consider the significance of their human origins.
1 Rudi Volti, An Introduction to the Sociology of Work and Occupations, [Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press, 2008]: 4.
2 Beruch Spinoza, Ethics, III, 9, Schol.
3 Robert Hurley, “Introduction,” Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deluze [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988]: ii.
4 John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self, [London: Rutledge, 1989]: 74.
5 6 Gilles Deluze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988]: 18.
7 “Work Will Make You Free.”
8 “Horror of a Vacuum.”
9 Fredrich Nietzche, “Geneology of Morals,” Basic Writings of Neitzche, ed. Walter Kaufman [New York: Random House, 1968]: 533.