Zone One final day

1. Zone One final day • Incident in fortune teller shop • What kind of future is possible in this world? • Zone One = repeatedly questions whether progress is possible • What can be salvaged?

2. Divide in novel American Phoenix • Optimism • Buffalo’s plans • Bring back old world • Order, regulations, entertainment, medicine • Salvage as rehabilitating bulidings Straggler/Spitz/Quiet Storm • Accept world as it is. • Simply persist “I am here” • Look for whatever bits of humanity can be salvaged from ruins • Leave something behind of a human-less future.

3. Zone One and Progress “pheenie optimism” (16) “that many-headed pheenie hydra” (275). “It was a new day. Now, the people were no longer mere survivors, half-mad refugees, a pathetic, shit-flecked, traumatized herd, but the ‘American Phoenix.’ The more popular diminutive pheenie had taken off in the settlements, which also endured their round of cosmetics, as Camp 14 was rechristened New Vista, and Roanoke became Bubbling Brooks. Mark Spitz’s first civilian camp was Happy Acres, and indeed everyone’s mood did brighten a bit on seeing that name on the gate next to the barbed wire and electric fencing” (99) Thinking back on the novel, write down any examples of this kind of thinking.

4. One kind of salvage and progress Some acts of salvage--the reclaiming of a home, the occupation of a tenement loft, the repurposing of a Chinese restaurant, the repurposing of a bank, the rehabilitation of a hotel—all seem to participate in this optimism. New York City is a site of “relentless metropolitan renovations” (278) and Whitehead constantly offers examples of this. The big one, the one occurring while Whitehead wrote Zone One, was the rehabilitation of the World Trade Center site: pheenie optimism indeed.

5. Why have Spitz run toward his uncle’s building? “He ran. Uncle Lloyd’s building reared up as he turned the corner, one of the garrison’s spotlights fixed on the sheer blue metal of its midsection. He flagged: What was it trying to tell him? He’d pressed his nose to the thick glass of airliner portholes for a glimpse of the building when he returned from a trip, sought its profile in the rows of skyscrapers when he was caught on one of the expressways that fed the metropolis, and when he finally rescued it from the crowd, its blue skin soaring over the bores never failed to cheer him. Each time he thought: One day I will live in a place like that, be a man of the city. Now the shimmering blue moon the spotlight punched out of the night sky was alien and unnerving. It was not the same building. It had been replaced” (293).

6. The ocean had overtaken the streets, as if the news programs’ global warming simulations had finally come to pass and the computer-generated swells mounted to drown the great metropolis. Except it was not water that flooded the grid but the dead. It was the most mammoth convocation of their kind Mark Spitz had ever had the misfortune to see. The things were shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the avenue, squeezed up against the buildings, an abhorrent parade that writhed and palsied up Broadway until the light failed. The damned bubbled and frothed on the most famous street in the world, the dead things still proudly indicating, despite their grime and wounds and panoply of leaking orifices, the tribes to which they had belonged, in gray pinstriped suits, classic rock T-shirts, cowboy boots, dashikis, striped cashmere cardigans, fringed suede vests, plush jogging suits. What they had died in. All the misery of the world channeled through this concrete canyon, the lament into which the human race was being transformed person by person (302). The dead leaked in massive piles on the other side of the wall, mounting between the barrier and the buildings on the north side of Canal. It would have been impossible for the cranes to keep up, even in working condition. The dead clambered up the bodies of the fallen and were rent by the artillery, contributing to the heap, and these latest were trampled by the next wave, which was cut down in turn. The corpses entwined and tangled in a mutilated pile half as high as the wall, and dark fluids from their wounds sprayed and gurgled through the seams in the concrete where the broad sections met, the weight of the corpses compressing the interior murk from the carcasses as if they were overripe fruit (305). Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 

7. Zone One and Progress It strikes me that salvage is, on some level, always about the future: China Míeville: “A homage to, rather than repudiation of, the trash-world wanderers and breakfasters-among-the-ruins that always transfixed me. An undefeated despair: ‘despair’ because it’s done, this is a dystopia, a worsening one, and dreams of interceding just in time don’t just miss the point but are actively unhelpful; ‘undefeated’ because it is worth fighting even for ashes, because there are better and much, much worse ways of being too late. Because and yet.”

8. Opposite view “That’s straggler thinking.” He smiled. It was the faintest of disturbances on his face, as if a black eel miles below on the ocean floor had turned in its sleep and left this slim reverberation on the surface. “I’m grateful. Buffalo has given us some busywork to keep our minds off things. Dig a drainage ditch for the camp, shuck the fucking corn.” He raised his glass to his friends across the table. “Clear some buildings. You have to admit, it passes the time.” (271)

9. Fortune Teller • Tell me everything you can about the fortune teller’s shop (277-280)

10. But the ash did not shroud the metropolis, it did not taint the air in any sickening measure. A skel bonfire or kerosene party probably sent more toxic stuff into the air. But for Mark Spitz it was everywhere. In every raindrop on his skin and the pavement, sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead. It was in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body, and he despised it (235).

11. The machine’s mammoth claw dangled three stories above, stalled over the wall and dripping on the corpses piled on the other side. Pools of blood gathered at the seams in the concrete wall where the brackets held the segments together, a wrinkled skin developing at the edges where they dried. The pools were becoming giant scabs. (239)

12. There was always a point, sooner or later, when they crossed a line and became creatures: following a lachrymose display while waiting in line for admission to the avant-garde performance; halfway into a silent rebuke when he underplayed his enthusiasm about attending her friend’s wedding. Once it was only a look, a transit of anxiety across her eyes in which he glimpsed some irremediable flaw or future betrayal. And like that, the person he had fallen in love with was gone. They had been replaced by this familiar abomination, this thing that shared the same face, same voice, same familiar mannerisms that had once comforted him. To anyone else, the simulation was perfect. If he tried to make his case, as in his horror movies, the world would indulge his theory, even participate in a reasonable-sounding test, one that would not succeed in convincing them. But he would know. He knew where they failed in their humanity. He would leave (241).

13. Ever since the soldiers rescued him, he started losing them, the names. They were dust in his pocket. Their eccentricities, the moronic advice vis-a-vis food safety, the locations of the rescue centers they’d obsessed over lasted longer than their names. One night he got the urge to record what he remembered in one of the kiddie armadillo notebooks. It passed. He didn’t stir from his sleeping bag. Let them go, he thought. Except her (247).

14. Salvage Categories in Zone One • Salvage often involves broken things—things that seem worthless or beyond repair • Salvage requires a shift in context. • Salvage involves submerged violence. • Salvage as capitalist accumulation/greed • Salvage as bound up in survival—or “necessary salvage” • Salvage involves recovering value—or “ractical salvage” • Salvage has inherent limits, depending on the affordances of the object being salvaged • Salvage is labor (literally, in Tsing’s sense) • “Sentimental salvage” • “Salvage as style” or salvage/savage as attitude