µblog: Shipwrecks, Ruins, Pizza Hut

µblog: not necessrily 10x1^-6 the length of a normal post, but micro sounds cool and has its own symbol.

With other work obligations taking up more of my time, I'm going to do occasional shorter entries: quick thoughts, happy coincidences, open questions. I still have some longer-form essays in the hopper, too.

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I recently had breakfast with On Barak[1], a historian who came to Northwestern for a conference and to give a talk to the Program in Middle East and North African Studies. As I and the other students present were introducing ourselves, I mentioned that I was interested in the way francophone North African literature uses ruins (and archaeology in general) as sites of their relation to history. Barak smiled, perhaps something of a wry smile, and remarked that ruins seem to be everywhere in the humanities right now.
Barak's own talk later that day confirmed this, in its own way. Presenting work in progress for his next book project, "Coalonalism: Energy and Empire before the Age of Oil"[2] asked us to consider the role of the Middle East in the ostensibly-English story of coal-fueled industrialization. At the center of the talk was the shipwreck, or rather, the near-shipwreck of the SS Jeddah off the coast of Yemen in 1880.[3] Without recounting the whole tale here, suffice it to say that Barak's interest in the Jeddah is in its status as an accident. Accidents occasion and facilitate historical inquiry; in the disruption of the normal operation of things, the routine and the everyday become visible and enter into the historical record in the vast paper trail that accidents tend to produce. We might see the Jeddah, the shipwreck that failed to sink, as a kind of ruin, a place for the historian to renegotiate our understanding of the past.
Not all ruins are accidents, however, and they do not all get extensively reported or recorded. Indeed, ruins are often the byproduct of efforts to change the past, even to destroy it. In Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction,[4] Gastón Gordillo proposes the term "rubble" for such artifacts, in place of the structured, documented, and often monumental nature of the "ruin". Gordillo investigates interconnected sites of rubble in northern Argentina as a kind of negative critique. They persist as a void that speaks to the obverse side of sanctioned history recounted by the very powers that ordered the destruction.
I was struck by an odd parallel to Gordillo's book while listening to the podcast 99 Percent Invisible. Episode 103[5] tells of Pittsburgh comedian Tom Musial's routine about a GPS that gives directions in local terms, many of which refer to places that are no longer there. This is interesting because, without getting too deep into the details, many critics have argued that capitalism leads to homogeneous, interchangeable spaces: farmlands become subdivisions, strip malls are repurposed as churches, garbage dumps are transformed into sledding hills, and so on, in more or less any combination. If I may be wildly speculative, the joke about Pittsburgh seems to posit a space oriented on the retention of memory of these upheavals. (I think there are about a hundred other ways to read this. We're having some fun here.)
One line from Musial's routine, "turn left at the place that used to be Pizza Hut", unexpectedly became a phenomenon. This description resonated with Pittsburgh transplant Mike Neilson, who was unfamiliar with many of Pittsburgh's disappeared landmarks. The architecture of Pizza Hut franchise restaurants features a distinctive trapezoidal roof and, often, trapezoidal windows that made it immediately legible as such, even when the restaurant no longer occupied the building. Neilson started a blog,[6] which has since documented hundreds of U.T.B.A.P.Hs -- "Used to be a Pizza Hut" -- and the many things they have become all around the world. In these odd structures, interchangeable spaces became marked by their own ability to change, making the malleability of capitalist space visible.

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[1] On Barak presented on his recent book, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt. Berkeley: U California Press, 2013. [2] On Barak, "Coalonialism: Energy and Empire in the Age of Coal". Northwestern University, October 27, 2014. [3] Joseph Conrad drew on the incident for Lord Jim, which was later made into a film of the same name by Peter O'Toole. [4] Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Gordillo maintains a blog called Space and Politics. [5] "U.T.B.A.P.H." 99 Percent Invisible. February 25, 2014. [6] Used to Be a Pizza Hut.