While Anna Tsing’s Nine Provocations for the Study of Domestication obviously details qualms with ‘domestication’, she also highlighted the dissonances between the concepts of “home” and “civilization”. Her idea that “‘home’ too often sugarcoats captivity” spoke to my internal dissonances surrounding “home” in Ohio and “home” here at Columbia. I’ve been thinking about where I (and my friends) will end up after my time at Columbia is over: will I go home? Will we stay in NYC? Where are we going?

The “Domus”

For the past few weeks, I've been doing what my only-child-ness has conditioned me to do best—staying in my room—with the only thing prompting me to leave being basic human necessities. When I’m in my room—my domus—, time doesn’t seem to fade, or, if it speeds by, that concept of time doesn’t much matter. Likewise, I have spent long, insomnia-filled nights staring at the walls and floors, considering their whiteness to be something more of a yellow, or maybe something lacking pigment all together in my sleep-deprived brain. I listen to the voices in my head, the ones asking uncomfortable questions: where are we going? I’m deeply puzzled by this question and resort to my world of superficial “white” and impassable “time”, the one bit of stability I have to satisfy the voices in my life. Here, I don’t mind being held captive by the university. My room is curated exactly the way I like: varying textures, colors, clothing, study resources, and more all coming together into artwork (like paintings) upon my walls. Upon reading Ian Hodder’s Where Are We Heading?, though, I began to feel guilty for my walls.

Hodder’s work focuses largely on the complex relationship between humans, things, humans-as-their-things—objectification—and the cycles in between. He brings up various examples of things in the world that seem to be deeply ingrained in this object-ness. Between Christmas Lights, T-shirts, and Opium (to name a few examples), Hodder recognizes that our ideas of the production of these things are totally defined by objectivity. On page 62 he confesses, “modern capitalism has produced a world in which we are trained to expect things, as objects of our desires, to bring us fulfillment and happiness,” noting the environmental impacts of this reality. While I do agree with his concern for the environment—as it is what I suspect causes my guilt—I do think that Hodder fails to recognize the fundamental depth and reliance that humanity has on these desires in his own realization.

Consider the set in a play, movie, or other production. Each item in the frame of view has an intentional purpose. A teacher’s desk might have a book, an assortment of pens, calendar, and statue of Batman. Each of these things are designed to convey a certain element of the teacher’s character; every object has a purpose. The book represents intellectual curiosity. The pens assume that the teacher writes an awful lot, perhaps needing different colors for different purposes; this idea extends itself farther with context—look at the calendar. If the calendar is completely barren, it might be assumed that the teacher has little ‘life’, or if it is paired with stacks of papers, the teacher might be considered disorganized or frazzled. The statue of Batman more obviously speaks to the teacher’s interests beyond his basic occupation. Each element is in communication with one another, a sort of agency given by humans to convey our desires—a point really driven home in Koyaanisqatsi—so further examination would result in examining the teacher’s character to understand why he might like Batman, and, often, these clues can be found by examining the scene more carefully. Look at the walls, look at the floors, look at cracks and crevices for signs of aging, mistreatment or immaculate care; everything matters.

The “Wall”

This scene, of course, is important primarily to the outside onlooker because, admittedly, people can completely fabricate scene, but for my purposes, I’m the only one, ideally, who will see my room. Why, then, do I feel the compulsion to adorn my walls with “pretty” things like paintings? Why do I even feel the need to create these things to begin with? It might seem quite obvious that I am satisfying my own desires, but I still can’t help but look back upon Chauvet Cave and other Upper Paleolithic art. Shamans slather their visions onto the walls as light from a tiny fire fades in and out. They later reside in their hearths, admiring their masterpieces. Some of these pieces are in dark recesses of the cave, probably never intended to be seen by anyone other than the creator. Given the suggestions towards feminist shamanic practices—in both Tedlock’s medicinal sense and Power’s coming-of-age sense—these paintings resonate with me even more. Sometimes I think I am trying to talk to future-me through my paintings. By encapsulating a past-me or reflecting the voices in my head reflected into one, physical medium, I am materializing a work all for another-me. My paintings give permanent-past thoughts, complex-current thoughts, and unforeseeable-future thoughts a vessel, a place to exist upon my walls. The aspect of projecting oneself onto already provided “naturally-occuring” an immobile medium seems to be something intrinsically human. While I paint to adorn my Columbia-provided “white” walls, earlier humans also painted directly onto Earth-provided cave surfaces.

So, within that context of a web of things, Hodder is completely focused on the surface attributes of these things, not the reason we want things in general; that omission creates an argument that completely circumvents the way to disentangle, or at least recognize how much farther down the path humanity is going. Christmas lights are only relevant given their cultural context. In that same way, there is no reason that humans need to continue buying t-shirts or other elements of fashion once they have an adequate number for daily use. However, people continue to buy Christmas lights for aesthetics and more shirts for the graphics, textures, and ideology: elements that evoke other emotions pleasing to a person.

I will lend to Hodder, though, that capitalism has made the concept of emotion a very common omission; advertising has led to the objectification of human desire, suggesting that items are just the result of desire. We live in a materialist world; we only focus on the objects, not the subliminal and overt ideas associated with them. However, by looking beyond the mass production of Capitalism and into the world of creativity, one can begin to realize the power of thought and emotion. My realization of the former has caused me to confront another reality: I consume way too many man-made ‘portable’ mediums.

The “Mobile”

Hodder, and Koyaanisqatsi in particular, provide a bleak perspective to the wheel, but even the wheel, with its innumerable uses, is inspired by desire. Humans, in one example, use the wheel to satisfy a desire to move and relocate; transportation itself evokes emotion. For some, it is a way to leave the rooms full of objects and be transplanted into another or a way to enjoy the change-of-scenery or companionship of others—the journey—during the act of traveling itself.

I have the words “quo imus” fixed upon my wall on a bright, pink notecard. It’s a unified medium—overly-drawn calligraphy done in a cheap marker I bought from Wish inscribed precariously onto one of the hundreds of pink cards I found on the bottom shelf of a Walmart stationary shelf back home. ‘Quo,’ is a Latin interrogative meaning ‘where’, and ‘imus’ means ‘we are going’ in the first person, plural, present (progressive), active, indicative. Where are we going? It shouts to me with all its grammatical progressiveness. The idea of progression, this sort of ‘forward-moving’ directionality, somehow manages to bother me; I suspect Hodder would agree.

When looking at these words, I’m met with the same flood of emotion that amavit brings. He loved. It’s such a sad, and deeply perplexing phrase; the completed-ness of the action, combined with its “perfect” tense showing that he was loving (a simple, or progressive, aspect) up until this very point in time. That sort of completed-ness in amavit radiates out into something deeper.

This, I suppose, is the very convoluted part of entanglement: my obsession with a notecard—this sort of iconographic image—is more than just a couple words. Quo imus is more than a fancy way to say “where are we going?” Language—as words, sounds, and grammar—is a human-made construct designed to allow humans to express things more efficiently. Eventually humans wanted a way to capture those words onto paper, a way to prolong that specific idea. That’s where written language comes in: words are strings of symbols—objects—connected by common knowledge of their meanings, a sort of sentiment or ideology, that are then transplanted onto physical mediums. Humans did not stop at bringing mental images into the physical world; they went beyond, manufacturing the whole system of language to allow free-floating ideas to be expressed with physicality. Human-made meanings put onto human-made paper to convey our human-made thoughts. Societies even manufactured paper—the item I feel I consume far too much of—to allow for the mobility of these materialized ideas.

To touch on the idea of labels and their significance, I turn to The Existentialist’s Guide by Gary Cox. On page 60, Cox responds to the notion of ‘homosexual’ as a label: “The homosexual does not deny his homosexual desires and activities. Instead, he denies that homosexuality is the meaning of his conduct…This belief is justified in so far as a person is never what he is but only what he aims to be through his choices. The homosexual is right that he is not a homosexual-thing”. Cox asserts that the label of ‘homosexual’ is only applicable if the entity given the label is striving to conform with the stereotypes—or sentiments—commonly associated with that label. Later, on page 61, Cox goes on to claim that “to declare ‘I am what I am’ is to assert the fallacy that I am a fixed entity, while at the same time evading the existential truth that I am an indeterminate being who must continually create myself to choice and action.” This builds upon the idea that premature labeling is harmful to entities, especially when done by another. It strips their agency and prevents them from pursuing a different ideology in the future.

I point to this example because ‘stationary’ is often used as a term to describe common office utensils like pens and notecards. ‘Stationary’ is also used as a term for immobility, an interesting concept given that all of these items are small and specifically designed to be more portable and accessible. This conflicting definition of ‘stationary’ reminds me of Tsing’s provocations where items were brought into the domus, and more intensely, these new ways of living “captured women, imprisoning us in the domus.” Grains and animals were brought into the domus, forcing women to assume a domestic role; their agency was stripped to a sheer point where art and symbolic representations of them focused solely on fertility. Tsing details “all those figurines” of women, stating “their vulvas and breasts, emphasize only women’s fertility. Even before the encompassment of the domus by the masculine agrios, women’s mobility is gone, at least in a symbolic register”. In the same way that women were forced into the captivity of the domus, I can’t help but feel the labels we use to categorize objects pin material objects into a linear purpose.

Of course, these words are the tools that we use in order to convey personal purpose and desire. Language and grammar also does solidify the very concept of an idea into the material world, noting both time and its aspect with relativity, but this note card has served as a constant reminder of two things: we’re all vagabonds, and, because of that, ‘going’ as a mode of progression is deeply flawed. These two words are able to signify a meaning that goes beyond the phrase ‘where are we going?’ The very fact that I have tacked this pink slip of paper to my wall seems to conform to his sort of haunting irony. Humans created the paper for the mobility of ideas, and I’ve conformed to the dual-definition of ‘stationary’ by tacking it to my wall instead of granting it the agency to remain mobile; that paper isn’t going anywhere. So while I’ve thrown my ideas onto paper, stuck it on my wall, and forced it into my domus, I am left asking who really is the ‘we’ implied to be progressing in our fundamental question?

The “Artificial”

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to this question, but I can say that the continuous cycle of using human-made materials to excess will likely never stop. That, in part, is why I feel that the next step for humans is to exist in an entirely artificial world. In fact, I envision a world so artificial that it doesn’t even exist physically on its surface. In this world, people access eachother through a complex web of ideas, strings of thought, and consciousness. Each idea is conceptualized into a human-made nonmaterial existence—a purely non-physical existence. The only element of physicality are the devices used to access this world. People’s objectified ideals of one another are concealed by the devices used to connect one another.

What I propose for the future is actually a reality in life; simply, the thing I’m describing exists as the internet. The internet is an entirely man-made artificial world, a small fragment of my room that allows me to entirely escape. In a paper I wrote on the Dark Web for another course, I stated that “the internet has become a sort of extension to the human experience. Beyond just being a library, the internet has matured to encompass its own landscape, language, and leaders—or lack thereof—to become a stern juxtaposition to the outside world. Within its vast existence, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the internet—and more importantly what draws people to it—is the instant access to another person; this connected nature of every user, regardless of physical barriers present in the real world, is the true definition of the internet.” This is a new world completely created by humans, a new space for ideas to be ‘materialized’. This, in turn, is also a new domus, but this time, everyone is able to collectively capture information.

Moreover, I envision that this new world is an alternate reality. Much like simulations or the video games I had frequented growing up, the internet is a platform where anyone can create and navigate their own digital reality, removed from physicality. Likewise, digital music exists in a similar way; it’s an artform to capture ideas and sentiment that is not reflected materialistically. So, in this world, objectivity will be completely removed with the exception of the device—my laptop in my case—used to access the new world itself (which could also be as small as the palm of my hand with smartphones). Entanglement will still exist, but only in the sentimental sense I have presented in previous parts of this work. The only way to disentangle is to transcend the physically of our material world, only settling on the arbitrary world of our sentients: something completely artificial. We have created one material object to unite all other material elements artificially.

The “Cyborg”

With all of this in mind. The concept of life itself is fragile. The physical vessel of being, as far as humanity is concerned, is limited. People are objects. They are flesh, blood, bones, muscles, and organs all bundled up into complex systems: machines. Machines that will one day run out of fuel after their parts have deteriorated and finally cease to function. Humans, machines, animals, these all die. Every object in this world, as a result, has a life expectancy. This includes the earth, the elements, and even the universe itself if one lends their imagination to certain theorists.

We as humans, however, gawk at this simplification; it discredits our imagination, our ability to feel, and our very perception of humanity. The thing that truly makes us human is our cyborg-ness. We’re dynamic beings often defined by our personalities and mental characteristics; the things that make us human are the deeper, more symbolic elements of existing. Ideas are humanity and our vessels—whether they be our bodies or our extra somatic extensions—are simply the objectified, materialistic attributes. I can use the material world to plant my inner voices into a single stationary state. While the idea of the entire world is “going” or “progressing”, the material world allows me to capture a moment, reflecting and seeing that moment at another point in time, removed from progression altogether. If anything, I think we're going back, we are not “progressing”. We are forever dynamic beings yearning to reconcile with stagnant moments that speak to us. Physicality, that idea of being stationary, is just the baggage that comes with existence; it always has been. Early humans reflected their thoughts onto naturally occurring surfaces, to later create their own, human-made surfaces. Today, we still do both of these, exemplifying them into even more abstract means. It’s come to a point where we are intrinsically connected to our things because, as humans, we are constantly creating new worlds. Whether it be a landscape-painting or a text on our phones, Hodder is right; these are a part of us. Communication of ideas is what completely transcends that objectivity. To truly live is to be a mental vagabond, drifting from one idea to another. Things, as of right now, are just the vehicles that allow us to drift.