Zone One final day Incident in fortune teller

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?

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 humanless future.

Zone One and Progress Thinking back on the novel, write down any examples of this kind of thinking. “pheenie optimism” (16) “that many-headed pheenie hydra” (275). “It was a new day. Now, the people were no longer mere survivors, halfmad 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)

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.

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).

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

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 trashworld 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. ”

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)

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

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).

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)

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 reasonablesounding 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).

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).

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