Þóra Pétursdóttir (2014) Things out-of-hand: the aesthetics of abandonment. In: Bjørnar Olsen & Þóra Pétursdóttir eds. Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology

19Things out-of-hand

The aesthetics of abandonment

Þóra Pétursdóttir

Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangenessof beings overwhelm us.Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouseand evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder – the revelation of the nothing –does the ‘why?’ loom before us.

(Heidegger, in What is Metaphysics?)

Introduction

Have you found something? This is a question echoing in the ears of archaeologists throughouteach field season and one I always find myself struggling to answer. Kneeling in the midst of apartly exposed turf structure, surrounded by the inconspicuous features of turf collapse,unexcavated postholes and a few small, but heavily corroded iron objects – or on a mottledMedieval surface in a 2.5m deep trench through a high status farm midden, surrounded by illcontrolled stratigraphic profiles mapping centuries of waste disposal – you cannot help butfind yourself searching for words. Strangely there seems to be no straightforward answer tothat question; Have you found something? Well, where to begin! You have come across suchquantities it is difficult to imagine where to start, but then again compared to those ‘somethings’particularly asked for, what you’ve found is mostly nothing of that sort – or nothing particularat least. I am being unfair, of course.Archaeology, its structures and features, is not at all obviousto an untrained eye, and oftentimes quite ambiguous to the trained as well. But that simplymakes the implication even more telling; what strange things archaeologists indulge in!

Archaeology is indeed the discipline of all things and everything and while a hierarchy ofmatter may surely begin to unfold already on site (only a select few will, for example, call forcelebration, cake or cold beer) the rule is yet to make no/few exceptions; spectacular or tedious,recognizable or not, all lumps of something should be collected, registered, bagged or boxedand thus get their share of our time and attention, storage and budgets. In the end, however,this is not because we show such democratic interest in whatever may show up at our trowel’sedge, but rather, that we take deep interest in the completeness of the image of the past we seekto reconstruct. And each odd fragment belongs to that whole.Thus, while we may all findourselves caught in a moment of naïve wonder in the face of otherness, holding an unknown

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object in our hand, we will soon enough be torn by the irresistible desire to make it part ofsomething already known (Olivier 2011: 31–2). And what this means is that the fate of themany inconspicuous, indefinite, deformed and, indeed, strange things encountered is toeventually more or less disappear into that seamless whole, to become a fraction of its total anda percentage of, say, the wood, metal or glass slice of a chart. In other words, they are includedbut effectively excluded at the same time, because it is generally not the fragment itself or its placein the present that is of value, but its addition to the wholeness of a past entity (and presentcollection) that is so sought after.

Archaeology is, of course, traditionally about the past and has long been defined by itstemporal detachment from its subject matter; it is about old things/things abandoned andphenomena that are considered final and sealed off rather than processes taking place here andnow,or ongoing. It might therefore be tempting to think that the strangeness of archaeologicalthings is somehow related to this temporal separation and, hence, has nothing to do with thethings themselves but is something which will be solved through further investigation andinterpretation. If that was true, archaeology of the recent past, let alone archaeology of thepresent, should be fairly straightforward – in any case it should be faced with considerably lessstrangeness to explain away.That doesn’t seem to be the case, however; possibly never beforehave terms like ‘strangeness’ or ‘unfamiliarity’ sounded so alarmingly familiar, or the othernessof things archaeological been such an accepted, or even expected, topic of discussion as afterthe introduction of this field of archaeological inquiry.The ground, however, seems to be theclaim that this is a created otherness and that destabilizing or questioning the things taken forgranted in our everyday material and habitual surroundings, i.e. making the familiar unfamiliar, isthe very analytical strength of the archaeology of the recent and contemporary past (e.g.Buchliand Lucas 2001; Graves-Brown 2000; see Harrison 2011 for critical discussion).While thearchaeologization of the present and recent does indisputably throw new light on old andeveryday matters, to refer solely to such making or creation of strangeness, I believe, overlooksthe properties and capacities (cf. DeLanda 2006) of things and their ability to affect us. Or is itnot contradictory that just like we have claimed that our scientific inquiry and deductivemethods have granted things with meaning, agency and significance – and thus made themmore familiar and sensible – we shall now, by the same means, also take full credit for makingthem less familiar, less sensible and in all aspects more strange? Can we truly maintain that theground of that strangeness or ‘exotic otherness’ (see Fabian 1983) is never found but alwaysposited – that archaeology of the recent or present is solely responsible, and guilty, of making thefamiliar appear unfamiliar? Do we then also claim that things themselves in their own/inherentdifference never affect us, and that strange things, if we can acknowledge that they exist at all,are simply things awaiting our demystification?

I find this hard to believe. Through my work in archaeology of the recent past I haveencountered many modern ruins, entered many abandoned buildings, and my reaction, I argue,is always one of sincere affection, awe and wonder provoked on the very encounter with thesesometimes utterly strange things.Thus, I am driven to ask whether it isn’t also possible thatsomething strange, something ‘magical’, happens in the abandoned state; whether thingsabandoned, and thus released from the shackles of human utilitarian relations, may expressthemselves differently, and thus whether aspects of their ownness – their otherness – maybecome more immediately present? In other words might it not be that ‘exotic otherness’ isneither found nor posited – but exposed and directly experienced on encounter and that partof our problem is rather that we find no proper way to include and express this experience in

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our scientifically appropriate, and politically correct inquiries and narrations? and In otherwords, that there exists an unspoken urge to make a choice, as stated by Michael Shanks inExperiencing the Past, between, on the one hand, reacting to private affective experience or, onthe other, concerning oneself with the past itself, namely doing archaeology (1992: 8)?

Like Shanks I deny the rationale of such a separation or choice. Rather, the character ofarchaeology, the logic of archaeology, is to me not least rooted in such first hand, unmediatedexperiences of things in their sometimes total and overwhelming difference. Grounded in thisbelief, this chapter, therefore, is not about the past, nor past entities, relations or processes, butabout things abandoned, and their evolving futures in the state of abandoned being.Based on myengagements with a modern ruin and its landscape of things, this chapter might be seen as anode to those strange things, to the many ‘nothings’ encountered and gathered through archae-ological inquiry, the processes they join and contribute to, and the affects they unleash onencounter.And as an attempt at an archaeology of things abandoned, its goal is not to overlookor instantly move beyond their strangeness, by means of purification, contextualization orinterpretation, but to remain besieged by and committed to their being out-of-hand in order toglimpse the tacit and mundane wonders that might be unveiled on the way.

Abandonment

Ruin and abandonment are concepts that usually go hand in hand; ruination, and the formationof ruins, is either seen as the faithful follower of abandonment or in other cases abandonmentwill follow abrupt ruination.And both concepts are of course well known to the archaeological

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Aesthetics of abandonment

Figure 19.1 Eyri herring station; the Storage house in the foreground (early summer 2011)Photo: Þóra Pétursdóttir


discourse, constituting the inevitable objects of interest in archaeological inquiry.This notwith-standing, both terms are within the archaeological imagination loaded with mostly negativeassociations referring to discontinuity, failure, absence, loss and incompleteness – underscoringa conception of abandonment as termination, rather than continuation of a different kind, andwhere the privileged focus is on something that was but is no more.

As defined by Schiffer in his discussion of the archaeological record’s formation processes‘Abandonment is the process whereby a place – an activity area, structure, or entire settlement– is transformed to archaeological context’ (1987: 89). This is confirmed in the openingstatement to The abandonment of Settlements and Regions, a volume dedicated to processes ofabandonment, reading that ‘All purely archaeological sites have been abandoned…’ (Cameron1993: 3).These are both fairly plausible statements, given that archaeology is traditionally adiscipline dealing with the past.As also confirmed in both works, abandonment has for longbeen a popular theme of the archaeological discourse.Mostly so,however,within compartmentsof processual archaeology where the studies of abandonment processes are considered importantmainly to understand how their resulting patterns, in the archaeological record, can be used toretrace the ‘dynamic’ living context prior to abandonment and, thus, to develop correctives fora less biased understanding of the past (e.g. Schiffer 1976, 1987; Stevenson 1982;Cameron andTomka 1993). Hence, abandonment is in this discourse seen as something divorced from thatpast; as a moment reflecting its discontinuity and succeeded only by various processes ofcontamination that need to be rewound through archaeological translations. As suchabandonment can be said to represent the ultimate reference point of archaeological inquiry,ironically marking both the beginning and end of archaeological interest, because, notwith-standing the legacy of abandonment studies in archaeology, abandonment itself has rarely beentheir interest.There is no archaeology simply of things abandoned and for things abandoned,since the ultimate goal is essentially to get beyond this nuisance in order to reconstruct a pureand un-abandoned past. It goes without saying that neglect of this uninhabited interval becameeven more apparent as post-processualism,with its more humanist interests, overran the earlierprocessual approaches in the 1980s and 1990s and peopling the past became a chief objective.Butwhy is that the case? What makes the abandoned uninteresting in and of itself?

Schiffer (1987), and others,who for methodological reasons have studied abandonment haveemphasized that it involves a sequence of episodes or complex processes through which anarchaeological context is formed, and thus that it represents a dynamic duration, yet a distortingone,between that context and a moment in the past (e.g.Gorecki 1985).So it is neither for lackof agency nor of temporal ‘depth’ that we find it less interesting; it percolates past, present andfuture like any other duration would do. But, might this also be part of our problem withabandonment? That is, that we find it difficult to relate to because we cannot tell whose agency,or indeed past, present or future this duration refers to? Devoid of humans, the abandonedcontext is nobody’s past; a no-man’s land between populated pasts and potential futures (cf.Andersson, this volume). It is an interval inhabited only by abandoned things and sporadic, inconse-quential and prosaic events, and therefore, a period we may find difficult to describe, or ascribemeaning, as past, present or future.

Given the recently proclaimed changes in the intellectual climate, and what has been calledthe turn to things (e.g. Coole and Frost 2010; Domanska 2006; Latour 2005;Wolfe 2010), onemight expect the emergence also of new conceptions of abandonment and the abandonedcontext.However, notwithstanding the proclaimed shifts or reappraisals of things and ‘the real’,the abandoned context in and of itself seems yet rarely considered a topic worthy of discussion.

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The problem is not that things aren’t bestowed agency and vitality or social life and signif-icance. Various biographical approaches, for example, have underscored things’ enduring butshifting identity and status, demonstrating that also they are holders of pasts and futures (e.g.Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Holtorf 2002; Hoskins 1998).However, such biographical approaches have mostly been restricted to those confined phaseswhen things can be defined as useful – that is, to those pasts and possible futures that things sharewith us. Focus is on the lives of things or sites, either in the past, in the service and company ofpast human actors, or after their retrieval, as heritage or archaeological and museum objects inrelational networks with archaeologists, curators, visitors, nations or global communities.Rarelydo these approaches consider things in their abandoned being, when out-of-hand and releasedfrom being things-for-us.

As follows, there is also a remarkable homogeneity among the things actually turned to inthe recent attempts at assigning matter a new stance of significance in social and culturalresearch.These are predominantly ‘nice’ things with clear functional qualities, and which withreasonable credibility accept the traditionally anthropocentrically defined virtues of agencyand mobility, speech and vitality (see, however, Edensor 2005b; DeSilvey 2006, 2007a, 2007b;Scanlan 2005). Everyday, dull, and mundane things are not the things most eagerly turned to,not to mention the most typical archaeological artefacts; soiled, broken, useless, discarded orabandoned (Pétursdóttir 2012).Abandonment, thus, understood as the moment when thingsfall out of use and are left behind, becomes little but the meaningless, or at best disturbing,intervals between the animated phases in things’ fragmented biographies; a life out of context,and control, where things silently anticipate their reconfiguration or re-contextualization.

The recent interest in modern ruins, referred to even as a ‘contemporary Ruinenlust’(Desilvey and Edensor 2012: 1), and the growth of archaeological approaches to the contem-porary past has, however, triggered a renewed concern for abandonment and one, potentiallyat least, quite different from earlier interests in the subject (e.g.Andreassen et al. 2010;Burström,2009; DeSilvey 2006, 2007a, 2007b; Edensor 2005a, 2005b; Harrison 2011, and chapters inthis volume). Here the abandonment and ruination of our own modern world is in focus; theliteral and conceptual dereliction of life ways, industries, economies, technologies and so forth,of the recent past.While in that sense no less past oriented than earlier approaches, the temporalproximity and even coalescence of this past makes it practically impossible not to also faceabandonment as such.And the subsequent fact that the processes it affords have not been ‘sealedoff ’ but constantly and involuntarily lend themselves to direct experience must, moreover,engender a conception of the abandoned not simply as a relic of something terminated but asan evolving and dynamic context in its own right.While this difference is truly reflected inmany of these approaches, through rich textual descriptions and visual depictions of the variousdynamics of abandonment, there is yet a tendency to see these as mainly serving representa-tional, critical or abstract purposes, signifying a manifestation or fragmentation of particularcultural or ontological orders (and this chapter is in no sense released from such trends).Hence,much like the past oriented approaches, these often eventually prioritize such meaningfuldomains over the abandoned context itself.

To approach the abandoned context in a different and more attentive way, to see it assignificant in and of itself, is a challenging project. Its ambiguity is indeed captured in the veryconcept itself; if we take it literally, abandonment implies termination and discontinuity, andthus ascribes a kind of nothingness or emptiness to places or things humanly abandoned. It is asif they loiter in a detached state of oblivion awaiting their reincarnation through either

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re-contextualization in a past long gone or by being bestowed with a future through enrolmentin new meaningful contexts of heritagization, critical aesthetics or knowledge construction.It is almost as if they themselves, and their everydayness in between these phases of directlyuseful interaction, barely existed at all. But, without undermining the significance of neitherrepresentational approaches nor the mutual and useful relations between people and things, Iwonder whether a more attentive consideration of abandonment as such might not also beworthy of something. In other words, I wonder whether stepping back to observe theabandoned condition, instead of stepping right in to manipulate it archaeologically (as conven-tionally understood), might allow us to see things differently. And whether acknowledgingtheir being-on-their-own and for-themselves might reveal another face of things, or fuel thoughtson their integrity, durability and frailty, or indeed their unfamiliarity and otherness. In short,I wonder whether taking a moment’s interest in this post-human context might, despite theobvious irony, be useful to us who aim to turn to things.

The abandoned Storage house in Eyri

On 14 October 2011 I witnessed the destruction of the Storage house in Eyri, a 320m2, singlestorey timber building in the midst of the abandoned herring station (Figure 19.2). It wasraining lightly and the timber was damp from a wet autumn in the Icelandic Westfjords. Ittherefore took a while before the drenched wood caught fire; first the wall panel beside thedoorway into the shop on the west side of the building, and then the rooms next to it – thelaboratory to the south and the room with the green wallpaper to the north. Sheltered from

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Figure 19.2 The Storage house, October 14th 2011Photo: Þóra Pétursdóttir


the fjord’s mouth and the incoming weather from the northeast the western gable was therelatively driest part of the structure.The time was 17:10pm and in a matter of only minutesthe whole western gable was burning. From there the fire spread rapidly through the building,to the stock room and storage space in the mid-area, to the offices along the north side andthe apartment rooms along the south side.At 17:25 the whole building was on fire, the flamesbursting through the gaping windows and between the plates of corrugated iron on the roof.A cloud of black smoke rose high above it, casting a dark, gloomy shadow over the strip of landand the sea.The wind was just right, a gentle breeze from the south that drove the smoke outon the fjord while securing the nearest buildings, the herring factory to the west and thewomen’s residence to the south, from the aggressive flames. At 17:43 the ridge broke in themiddle, the roof fell in and little by little pulled the outer walls with it, producing a strangemurky sound through the crackling fire. Only 20 minutes later, nothing of the structure wasstill standing and slowly the fire started to recede.When I left Eyri that evening, at 21:30pm,after a pleasant dinner and chat in one of the nearby farmhouses, the fire was more or less deadbut you could still see and hear the smouldering embers in the dark.

***

Eyri is the name of an abandoned farm on the south side of Ingólfsfjörður, on the east coastof theWestfjord peninsula, one of Iceland’s most isolated regions (Figures 19.1 and 19.3 ).Thethree farmhouses, now used as summerhouses, linger at the foot of the slope on the east sideof a river flowing down from the mountain and into the sea. It wasn’t the attractive farm,however, but the buildings and structures on the other side of the river that drove me to Eyri;an abandoned fishing station and herring factory from the early twentieth-century.Herring has

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Figure 19.3 Eyri in Ingólfsfjörður on Iceland’s Westfjord peninsula


an almost divine standing in narrations of Iceland’s recent past and economic development.Theherring industry affected more or less every settlement along the coast of the island, whilelanding – and processing stations were also established in remote and previously sparsely orunsettled areas where proximity to the resource was a first priority.Eyri in Ingólfsfjörður is onesuch community. Its herring history spans the period from 1915 to 1952, during which Eyriunderwent massive transformations – from a small scale salting station to a modern renderingfactory.And as part of these developments, the small community was formed on the strip ofland west of the river, opposite the farm; lodgings for male and female workers and more com-fortable dwellings for senior staff, canteens, a social venue, a laundry, a bakery and shop, inaddition to the factory buildings, garages, laboratory, stores and offices. It was this peculiar littlecluster of houses and strange things, and the memories they held, that initially lured me toEyri.

***

The house that came to be known as the Storage house (Lagerhús) was built in 1936,by KarvelJónsson and Egill Ragnars, who had leased land at Eyri to establish a herring salting station(Figure 19.4). In 1942 the house was taken over, together with all other structures at the site,by the Reykjavík based Ingólfur corporation which in the years that followed built and ran aherring rendering factory at Eyri.Throughout its lifetime, the Storage house served manydifferent roles at the station. It housed the offices for both the salting station and later theIngólfur factory, and a shop that sold almost anything one could possibly need at this outpost.It had two large storerooms for various things and spare parts for the factory’s machinery, astockroom for goods sold in the shop and 5–6 apartment rooms where workers and specialized

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Figure 19.4 The Storage house with excavated trenches marked in grey


staff resided. It housed the laboratory where the quality of the herring products was inspected,stored the archivs for the shop and factory in its attic, and the coal weighing machine in a smallshed attached to its eastern gable.After the herring station was shut down and abandoned, thehouse continued to live up to its name, faithfully storing myriad things that had been left in itas well as the occasional new articles added to its collection by the neighbouring farmers orothers; a load of timber that might come in handy, a broken bicycle, an nonworking washingmachine, unused drain pipes, and metres of rope. Sometimes this would happen in exchangefor things the house had to offer, like a few planks or timber panelling, a spare part or greasefor an engine, a table, a chair, an attractive glass bottle, an odd souvenir, or even a can of liverpâté.As time passed, the house’s collection grew more and more anomalous and its additionsmore prosaic; a film box or pencil accidentally dropped, a gnawed leg of lamb in a dark corner,animal droppings of different texture, an old nest, a fist-sized stone thrown through a window,a dead bird, the nibbled pages from a recent newspaper, an archaeologists’ lost line leveller.

***

The Storage house was probably the most inconspicuous of the buildings in Eyri; the lowestone and without a sturdy concrete foundation like the other two timber houses. It was neitherof modern design like the herring factory beside it nor did it have a distinct style like the othertimber built ‘Norwegian catalogue houses’. Its overall appearance was somewhat mundane,plain and simple, fully practical and without as much as a sign of frill or elegance. Most wouldprobably have defined it as dull, uninteresting and architecturally unimportant, not least in itsabandoned and decayed state – a definition officially affirmed, of course, with the heritage

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Figure 19.5 The laboratory (room 9 in the Storage house)Photo: Þóra Pétursdóttir


authorities’ permission to destroy it. All in all, notwithstanding its infrastructural significancefor the ventures at Eyri it was now simply a building, and by all common standards a veryunspectacular one.

Entering the Storage house, however, was by no means unspectacular. It was like enteringa world of its own. Small birds flew in and out of broken windows, and nested in nooks andcrannies, sheep sought shelter from wind and rain, and rodents hid in the darkness. It was fullof eerie noises and subtle dynamics; loose boards of corrugated iron or timber moving in thewind, hinges creaking, things falling or drifting, and the smell intense and sour. It was cold anddim,but, as your eyes slowly adjusted, a world of things lit up around you, appearing in familiar,less familiar or alien forms and assemblages everywhere you turned (Figure 19.6).Unused spareparts, screws, bolts and cogwheels in the storage, some still neatly packed and labelled; rustingcans of liver pâté, fish pudding and other supplies, bottles, buttons and hairpins in the stockroombehind the shop; an archive of damp books and documents in the attic above the office, somepartly consumed by mice or covered in mould; beds and straw mattresses in the apartmentrooms, stools, tables and cupboards; test tubes in different shapes and sizes, gloves and jars withstrange liquids in the laboratory (Figure 19.5).And everywhere, floors were covered with things,broken, crumbled or pulverized. Some were recognizable as fragments of paper, broken glassbottles, tin cans or ceramics, together with soil, dust and animal droppings.The bulk of thesefloor deposits, however, was composed of an almost formless mass of crumble and debris, athick carpet of things degraded and reunited into a state of complete unfamiliarity.Here, thingsshowed themselves in their most incomprehensible way – within my reach but simultaneously

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Figure 19.6 Things assembled in room 6 in the Storage housePhoto: Þóra Pétursdóttir


so far beyond it. It was as if my arrival was either too late or too early to be able to fully graspthem – that they had seized the opportunity to escape out-of-hand.

Learning to turn to things

Have you found something? The question echoed through my thoughts as I made my waythrough the Storage house on my first visit. Exhausted by the overwhelming and pesteringpresence of strange things everywhere I turned, I was, as usual, unsure how to respond.Thetedious question sounded less appropriate than ever before.How can you claim your discoverywhen everything is already there, revealing itself ? Besides, I was in doubt of what exactly it wasI was looking for; with what questions I was to confront these strange things. Because althoughit truly was the populated past and lively herring history that initially caught my interest andurged me to visit Eyri, it took only that one visit to convince me that it was rather the site’spresent and evolving future that would be my focus. I shall not pretend that Eyri’s things didn’tstir within me feelings of loss, absence and incompleteness.Considering their physical state, howcould they not? And being familiar with the herring industry’s densely written history, it wasalso impossible to rid myself of thoughts on failure, broken promises of progress, and unrealizedfutures. But inevitably, confronted with today’s Eyri, every thought of what has been, everythought of what is not there or did not become, will sway in comparison to what is there, andeventually persuade you to resist the desire to only reach beyond it.And as soon as you see thisaffluent landscape of things and its subtle dynamics, it actually represents anything but lack,absence or discontinuity – indeed, anything but abandonment.Things endure and outlive, changeand move and thus allow for new, unforeseen associations and new but different lives. Myconcerns for finding the right questions with which to confront these strange things weretherefore soon replaced with a more humble or attentive logic, and a hope that turning to themwould actually yield different questions, different answers and different insights.A naïve hope,it may seem, and far from any scientific ‘logic’, but one, I claim is firmly rooted in a phenom-enological way of apprehending the world, which, as designated by Heidegger, is ‘to let thatwhich shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself…’ (1962: 58). Inother words, it is a reclaimed ‘primitive’ perception grounded in direct encounters with theworld in its ownness, rather than mediated or disciplined through abstraction or contextual-ization. Thus, it is also a project committed to restore to things their integrity by seeing andrespecting ‘their own native ways’ of manifesting (showing) themselves.

These receptive delineations for how to approach things may very well recall what issometimes condemned as naïve empiricism. But it is precisely because of that relation that thisapproach also clings to an attitude that is attentive to the surface of things themselves, andwhich leaves room for wonder and affection (Malpas 2012: 251–67; Stengers 2011). In otherwords, a naïve or ‘banal’ openness for the strangeness or unfamiliarity of things, and for the‘presence effects’ that, as argued by Gumbrecht (2004), are normally silenced or explained awayas irrational disturbances in today’s more conventional scientific and hermeneutic chase formeaning. In his plea for a reconfiguration of practices, or conditions for knowledge productionwithin the humanities, Gumbrecht argues against the dominion of interpretation that for toolong has been allowed to forge a binary opposition between, on the one hand, surface andmateriality, and,on the other, depth and meaning.Rather than seeing these as opposites, bridgedthrough interpretation, Gumbrecht directs his focus towards the emergence and experience ofmeaning; that is, not only to that which appears but to how it appears, and thus, to the interface

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between materiality and meaning, and the ‘…oscillation…between “presence effects” and“meaning effects’’’ (ibid.: 2).

I find this humble and attentive ontology attractive because it takes seriously what may betermed the archaeological experience or sensibility; an acknowledgement of how sites and things,in their otherness, affect us and how these direct material engagements also contribute to, orbring forth, a mode of learning and understanding – an alternative ‘object lesson’, that cannotbe achieved through a detached intellectual stance alone (see e.g.Edgeworth 2012;Olsen et al.2012: 64–5).Therefore, this empiricism also willingly accepts the almost forgotten possibilitythat knowledge is sometimes revealed, and thus, like affection, directly experienced onencounter, rather than inevitably deduced or produced in its aftermath.While I could see thatthe things and fragments in the Storage house at Eyri would make a significant and unparalleledcontribution to understanding its past and herring history, I also saw that making sense of themin that way would risk rendering irrelevant this immediate sense of things themselves in theircurrent being (Pétursdóttir 2012).With a footing in the logic described I therefore ended upapproaching the abandoned context, the ruined Storage house, not as a remnant or relic ofsomething past and gone but as all there is, and as such full of potential for what may become.In that way, I could see its ruination not as a symptom of loss and incompleteness but asrevealing and constructive in that prospective sense (e.g. DeSilvey 2006); ruination asreaffirming ‘…the eternity of these ruins’ likeWalter Benjamin (1996: 470) expressed it. In thisway abandonment loses its purely negative association to be perceived instead as a conditionthat lets things be, in their own way for-themselves and out-of-hand. In other words, abandonmentceases to be abandonment to instead become, with reference to Heidegger’s concept ofGelassenheit (1966), a way of releasing things or letting them be.

In his discussion of our dealings with things, Heidegger distinguishes between two modesof their being; on the one hand their ‘readiness-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit) and on the othertheir ‘presence-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit) (Heidegger 1962).The former (ibid.: 98ff.) refers toour everyday and routinized involvement with things where we constantly engage with themin order to fulfil our assignments and conduct. In this mode, where we are united with thingsthrough the very act of doing, the thing in itself, however, is rarely an object of consciousconsideration (ibid.: 103). For things to come to view or ‘light up’, to become present-at-hand,this mode of familiarity has to be interrupted through for example malfunction, breakdownor loss (ibid.: 102ff.).When this happens, Heidegger argues, the thing itself, its role, as well asthe complexity of the operation or act of doing, is so to speak forced to mind.We are drivento consider, fix, replace and relearn in order to re-establish the harmony, and by so doing wesee the thing and become aware of ‘what it was ready-to-hand for’ (ibid.: 105).

It is arguable, however, that both modes mainly refer to things’ usefulness and relevance forus, the way they either enable or interrupt our everyday transactions, and thus refer to ouralways-already entangled and objective-driven relations with them as ‘things-for-the-purpose-of ’ (Introna 2009; see also Harman 2010). In other words, neither of the two modes leavesmuch room for genuine strangeness or uselessness, nor the possibility of positively acknow-ledging them or being aware of them as such – as strange things.The Storage houses things,decayed, broken and lost, and they may indeed be seen as things that have become present-at-hand; things that have come to view due to their malfunction or broken and decaying state.However, unlike the ‘present-at-hand’ mode, many of them do not so easily call attention totheir previous’ ready-to-hand’ state their former ‘in-order-to’ rationale, or ‘what they wereuseful for’.What we see in the Storage house, or what is more effectively ‘unconcealed’, are

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rather the broken things themselves in their current being, and their apparently ‘useless’, orincomprehensive, entangled relations. Hence, to put this in context, it becomes difficult tosituate the abandoned and affective things in the Storage house in any of these two modes ofbeing.

But Heidegger (1966) does, in discussing the concept of Gelassenheit, or ‘releasement towardthings’, and its kindred notion of ‘openness to the mystery’, imply a third mode of approachingthings.To clarify his idea of Gelassenheit he makes another distinction between two modes ofthinking; between on the one hand ‘calculative thinking’ and on the other ‘meditative thinking’(Heidegger 1966: 46).The former, he claims, is the kind of wilful, goal-oriented thinking thatalready expects an outcome and thus represents the conventional scientific and rationalizedmode of thinking.The latter, however, and the one important with regard to Gelassenheit, is akind of thinking that is released from such chains of anticipation, and instead waits for that whichmay come towards it (ibid.: 47). In other words, meditative thinking is an attitude that is opento the mystery of its surroundings and, thus, also disposed to perceive it differently.‘In waitingwe leave open what we are waiting for’, Heidegger writes (ibid.: 68), and therefore allow for areleasement into openness and toward the strange ways in which things may show themselves.

Because this attitude furthers an encounter with things that is neither demanding norintrusive, its advance is also never exhaustive; it will approach things, or see them, but simul-taneously acknowledge their remoteness and hidden aspects, and thus always retain a segmentof the mystery. Being situated somewhere ‘…beyond the distinction between activity andpassivity…’ (Heidegger 1966: 61), it also shows affinity with whatWalter Benjamin infers at inhis discussion of the ‘mimetic’ and ‘auratic’ attitude (Benjamin 1999b, 2002); that is, how theuniqueness and otherness of things, and our perception thereof, is dependent on a certainacknowledgement of their remoteness and solitude.The aura of things, Benjamin argues, is theveil that keeps us from grasping things fully: ‘A strange tissue of space and time: the uniqueapparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (Benjamin 2002: 104–5). And an appreciationof the aura thus involves an experience that is utterly fulfilled by the sensation alone of tracing‘…with the eye – while resting on a summer afternoon – a mountain range on the horizon…’(ibid.: 105), and to come no closer than to breathe in the expanse that secludes it. It is somethingthat the isomorphic modern gaze violates by constantly subjecting things to intimacy andsameness, definition and relation.

Like Heidegger’s phenomenology, Benjamin’s emphasis is on the ‘here and now’ (2002), ona primitive perception of the world that precedes calculation and thus, retains a certain naïveopenness and reciprocity to the perceived.And it is in such states of openness that things in theirotherness can be experienced and realized. Benjamin finds this attitude with children (ibid.;Benjamin 1996: 449), who in their play are able to recognize the most unexpected potentialsin the most ‘futile’ of things.The child’s recognition of things is, moreover, never exhaustive;the thing will always hold in reserve other unknown potentials, which may light up in newcontexts and new games and uselessness, therefore, has no place in their intuitive relationshipto the world of things. A similar attitude, Benjamin argues, is found in the collector (1999a:203–11) whose collection and relation to things is driven by an impulse that is unrelated to anyforeseeable utility. Instead the great collector is struck, in the very moment of ‘nowness’, bythings’ mere being, by their surprising otherness; an affection, thus, fully detached from theirpossible functional relations.

It is this kind of awareness, I contend, that is able to approach abandoned things and see themas the things that they are, here and now.This kind of awareness will not seek to make sense of

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them, to rationalize, contextualize or historicize them, but is rather itself a sensation rooted inan appreciation of their solitude, unfamiliarity and strangeness. And therefore, this kind ofawareness is also released from the restraints of having to see them as somethings ‘for-the-purpose-of ’ – that is, as being ‘ready-to-’ or ‘present-at-hand’ – to instead allow for a thirdmode of being: their out-of-handness.

Things out-of-hand

After herring production at Eyri came to a close in 1952, the Storage house and its smallcommunity of buildings were left more or less unattended.The ruination process, therefore, hasbeen uninterrupted, efficient and fast. Left to their own being and preferences, things havedeveloped unforeseen and sometimes disturbing mixtures and combinations, new forms andnear formless creations.Walls have decomposed, ceilings and floors have made new acquain-tances. Nature intruded, mingled and reclaimed and the previous clear distinction betweenthe man-made and the natural has evaporated creating ‘…manifestations of threateningotherness in a [yet] familiar space…’ (Edensor 2005b: 313).Accounting for this landscape is notan easy task, and avoiding any kind of abstraction or reduction is unattainable.Acknowledgingthe controversy of the project may, however, only underscore the essence of how things hereshow themselves; that is, their direct availability but simultaneous seclusion.And while we mayclaim that any description of things themselves is doomed to fall into its own trap, aiming forthe impossible is also an option. In his argument for Gelassenheit Heidegger in fact underlinedthat both releasement and openness could grow ‘…only through persistent, courageousthinking’ (1966: 56) which ‘…demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sightdoes not go together at all’ (ibid.: 53).And, moreover, being attentive to things themselves isnot only to pay attention to their physical surfaces, but also to their ‘presence effects’(Gumbrecht 2004) and the sensations and ‘involuntary memories’ (Benjamin 1999a) theyprovoke on encounter.Thus, to rephrase Heidegger,we may possibly say it is yet another ‘attackon things, but one which nevertheless allows things to be heard’ (1966: 88, rephrased). In thefollowing I will therefore attempt to enlighten a few of these attentive attacks through afragmented recollection of my trivial encounters with the Storage house’ things and theiraesthetic affect, as captured in thoughts, field-notes and photographs.

Squares 4 and 5

Abandonment, when we turn to it, disobeys our very ideas about what it is and how it should behave; itdoes not dwell on or in the past nor is it still or dead but shifting and vibrant. Returning to Eyri andto the Storage house, several times, for shorter or longer visits drew my attention to theseongoing dynamics, which however subtle could not possibly be disregarded or mistaken for astandstill.Through my surveys and photo documentation I observed how some things werealmost constantly moving around; things I remembered to have seen or documented in oneplace were suddenly gone, sometimes replaced by other things, and themselves reappearing innew contexts. If often confined to specific rooms or spaces, things were,nevertheless, constantlyon the move within these limits; appearing on a shelf at one moment and on the floor the next,in the middle of a room at one moment but in a corner the next. Of course, while theirproperties and characteristics certainly vary, things are indeed steadfast and obstinate beings.They rarely change, appear or disappear in the blink of an eye – of that abandoned places are

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living proofs – but neither do they remain in place like rooted relics of past events.Theirexistence continues, they establish new,unforeseen relations, bring into play forgotten or hiddencapacities and they travel along new channels.

However, to be able to see this world of things, to follow their movements, I had to adjustto their pace and their temporality. In other words, it could only happen on their premises, onthe scale on which they showed themselves.Thus, it required me to show patience – to wait –to return, observe and wait again.This was a bit like a child’s game, inconsistent but deeplycommitted and endless. One of these ‘games’ was to revisit two square-metres, named trenches4 and 5 (Figure 19.4), several times between 2011 and 2012.The squares were located in rooms2 and 3,on the north side of the Storage house,where the station’s office and service desk werepreviously housed. Now their floors were covered with a thick deposit of things and debris,their windows broken and their ceilings leaking.The first visits, in June and August 2011,involved determining the exact location of the two squares and a documentation of themthrough photography, but no direct intervention. The observations in August were thenfollowed by the excavation of each square, using traditional archaeological methods. Thetrenches were documented immediately after excavation, and again the following day. I thenrevisited the trenches on 15 October 2011, the day after the fire, and for the last time a yearlater, in September 2012. My acquaintance with squares 4 and 5, and moments in theirunconstituted presence, can be seen in the respective photo sequences in Figures 19.7 to 19.10.As is clear from these instants, squares 4 and 5 were far from stable assemblages – things movedand mingled freely, in or out of the squares, and changed the assemblages and their internalrelations, even over night. Surely, small things travel lightly and thus move more frequently, butalso larger things shifted locations, tipped and turned. For example, both squares were invadedand/or abandoned by relatively large tables during the observation period.Of course there areseveral agents enabling this mobility; there is wind and water, snow and ice, fire, humans, insects,sheep, foxes, birds and rodents – all of which take part in the formation of the assemblages byenabling and encouraging things to live out their capacities.

Excavating these two small squares was no less interesting than following their alterations.Stratigraphy, for example, seemed a completely redundant concept relative to the tightlyentangled nature of these multi-faceted ‘single-deposits’, where any linear sequence appearedfar fetched, even otherworldly, and would in any case have given a completely wrong impressionof the way things and fragments ordered and reordered themselves, or welcomed ‘contami-nation’ with new intruders.The idea of deposits as events also turned out dubious; in light oftheir instability and transforming nature, it seemed more apt to think of these assemblages asmomentary gatherings rather than set events, because, strictly speaking, they had not yethappened. Observing these surface gatherings, their constant assembling and reassembling thusalso made it conspicuously clear that my excavation was an interruption of a process. Ratherthan retrieving a moment in a past, it captured a moment in a dynamic and constantlybecoming present which, thus, triggered reflections on the decisive impact of choosing justthat moment of intervention, as well as the importance of sometimes halting for a moment, ofwaiting, before doing so.

Room 18

Abandonment defies our rigorous ideas about what things are, and how they should be, by letting thingsbe useless and unrecognizable and hence express their resistance and independence from our categories,

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Figure 19.8 TR 4; the day after excavation in August 2011 (upper two), the day after thefire (lower left) and in September 2012 (lower right)

Photos: Þóra Pétursdóttir

Figure 19.7 TR 4; in June (upper left) and August 2011, before (upper right and lower left)and immediately after excavation (lower right)



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Figure 19.10 TR 5; the day after the fire, on October 15th 2011 (left) and in September2012 (right)


Figure 19.9 TR 5; in June 2011 (upper left), before excavation in August 2011 (upperright), and during and after excavation in August 2011 (lower left and right)



democracies and constrictions of care. Entering the little storeroom for engine spare parts at the eastend of the Storage house (room 18, see Figure 19.4) was a powerful reminder of just this.Deepwooden shelves, reaching from floor to ceiling, covered the walls of the room leaving justenough space in the middle for one person to stand and turn. On the shelves and on nails andhooks stood or hung a collection of strange objects, amendments and reserves for the manymachines needed in the herring industry.The big lock on the door also indicated that thesewere no ordinary things, but a ‘nobility’ neatly segregated and locked away from the civicmatters occupying the open store spaces (rooms 4 and 5) behind the door.The way the littlealcove also stood on a raised platform, slightly elevated from the wet turf surfaces, made thesentiment of ‘aristocracy’ even stronger. But opposing this segregation the door was now wideopen,banging in the wind, causing things to fall from shelves and move in the draught, allowingthem to enter or exit and thus abandon their ascribed categories of caste and value.The morestubborn, however, steadfastly remained on shelves and hooks, clinging to their place andrefusing to let go – and by so doing, also transforming the place from one authoritativelyascribed to them into one chosen and preferred by themselves; a place of their own, respectedand adjusted to by the world around; spiders spun their webs between them, dust accumulatedaround them and snow gently leaned up against them.

They were in good shape mostly and many of them still neatly packed and labelled (Figure19.11).Uselessness may therefore not have been the first association they brought to mind.Onthe contrary, labelled or not, the whole collection could be said to outshine a goal-orientedpurposeful being; the exact and sometimes complex forms, the varied but standardized sizes,and the many details in things’ manufacture, all pointed towards a specific, specialized functionand intent (in-order-to), and simultaneously to their importance, exceptionality and irreplace-ability. In other words, one might claim it was quite obvious what they were – what they wereready-to-hand for.But then again they were here precisely because they were never used, becausethey outlived their own purpose. And fixed only on that sole purpose prospected in theirproduction they easily become manifestations of failure and lost futures; things which despitetheir meticulous design were, in a way, born into uselessness, produced as ruins. But looking atthem now, from a more positive and future oriented perspective, they are also strangelyaestheticized things, aged and matured, that have long ago completely exceeded all ourexpectations of them, and which will continue to do so.They are things clearly gone out-of-hand. Not even the fire on 14 October 2011 was able to determine their fate by terminatingtheir being.When I returned to the smouldering remains the day after, they were there still –unpacked, sooty and fractured, maybe, but nevertheless there. And what I sensed in theirnearness, like in the face of a dark mountain or the ocean,was my mortality and their persistentsolitude, ownness and relative immortality.

30 August 1945

Abandonment constructs its own hierarchies that deviate from our notions of what is important,meaningfuland reliable and thus allows us, involuntarily, to reflect on our conceptions and remember their alternatives.I came across the Storage house’s hidden archive on a rainy day in mid-August 2011.We hadjust finished excavating square 4 in room 2 and I was standing on top of a table trying to geta perfect vertical shot of the excavated trench, but had problems standing upright because theroof panelling was loose and part of it hanging down just above me.When I tried to lift it withmy hand I noticed a book cover drooping down from above it, and as soon as I got a closer

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look I saw another, and then another. I was surprised, as I had not realized before that therewas anything up there, under the sloping ceiling – maybe because there were no stairs, no stepsindicating this either.While I had, from the moment I first walked into the Storage house, feltsurrounded by things that constantly demanded my attention, these unknown residents cameto my view in a very different way, discrete and reserved.By placing a ladder up against the wallin the stock room (room 20), which had no lower ceiling, I could climb up to discover thishitherto hidden part of the house; there was an attic under the sloping roof, all along the southside (Figure 19.4), the western gable and part of the north side (above rooms 1, 2 and 3). It wasmore or less empty in the eastern part but above the laboratory (rooms 8 and 9), the shop(room 7), apartment room 1 and the office (rooms 2 and 3) it was all strewn with documents,books and boxes full of paper. It was the archive from the herring station and the shop for theperiod between 1930 and 1952 – telegrams, catch records, sales records, timetables, unusedletter sets and account books, wage rates, inventories, and more. All were soggy and somenibbled, half eaten or covered in mould, and if ever ordered in any ‘sensible’way that order hadlong been abandoned for a different kind of order. Feeling slightly nauseous, I carefully passedbetween the crossbeams and went through all I could get my hands on.

Crawling around under the low ceiling was, undeniably, a bit comical, not least, consideringthat while initially preparing the project I had spent days at the National Archive in Reykjavíksearching for just this. Considering that, it was even more ironic that now, 350km away fromthe controlled comforts of the National Archive, but faced with the actual archive, I wasinterested in something entirely different – and was actually quite delighted my days there had

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Figure 19.11 Wrapped spare parts, room 18 in the Storage housePhoto: Bjørnar Olsen


been wasted.This damp, half consumed archive held many interesting facts, of course, yieldingvaluable information about life and subsistence at the herring station, as well as details rarelycaptured by archaeological artefacts; exact dates, precise numbers and full names. However,although frequently voiced as a weakness of archaeological reconstruction these rare detailsnow rather appeared as superfluous, utterly out of place in the Storage house compound – asif written in another language, or speaking of another world, and thus incommensurable withall the information that was already there, revealing itself in its own, completely different dialect.In their strangeness, though, these details compelled reflections about the far from overt relationsbetween text and meaning, between numbers and value and between dates and time. Onething I found particularly fascinating in this respect was a simple account book. It was one ofseveral and thus quite ordinary to the collection, but still differed rather significantly from therest; its front and back cover had been stamped with the date ‘AUG 30 1945’, in blue ink, noless than 91 times (Figure 19.12).The date was laid out quite randomly but following theoutline and design of the cover it created somewhat a pattern of vertical and horizontal lineswith a few skewed ones in between them. In most instances, the ink was dark and the date clear,but faint or barely visible in a few. I had never before come across an archaeological artefactanything like this one and it was definitely one, of the strangest ones I encountered in Eyri.

Obviously, notwithstanding your determination to study the present and future of theStorage house things, when faced with the same date stated 91 times in one instance, youcannot but drift to that moment in the past, to 30 August 1945, and wonder what kind of dayit was.What was special about it? I had no idea. Surely,with a little source reading and googlingI could trace down quite a few events that occurred on just that day, but the bulk of them, ofcourse, had nothing to do with that little corner of the world.And actually, when I kneeledthere in the attic inspecting it, the ‘well-dated’ book cover rather reflected that there was reallynothing at all particularly special about that day – that it was a day filled with everydayness likeso many days before and after, or even that it was a day of idleness, boredom and daydreaming.The fact that the date was repeated 91 times, I thought, also rather conveyed how insignificantthat little detail was on that very day, 30 August 1945, and could therefore be ‘read’ as an ironicarticulation of our strenuous and conscientious efforts to order every incident of the pastthrough this particular principle of linear time. It critically enlightened the irony ofarchaeology’s lasting humiliation opposite the idea of historic accuracy, and the obligation to bemore precise, to always rewind ‘disorder’ to reconstruct pure sequences of detached events inchronological time.The memories of my own past rarely bear dates in blue ink, or come tomind in a successive sequence.To me, thinking back is like navigating a landscape that muchrather resembles the topology and architecture of the Storage house than an indexed archive;where time looms over like a tangled web and memories cling to features of the land, to thingsowned or lost, to places lived or seen; where daylight gets in but nooks remain dim and atticsforgotten; a topographic landscape that from each perspective involves aspects in view andothers out of view, where remembering thus involves forgetting and dates have no weight,reliability or consistency.

The stock room landscape

Abandonment allows for the formation of new relations between things previously kept apart, and thus fornew collaborative beginnings and strange irreversible wholes. Room 20, the stock room behind theshop, is situated at the heart of the Storage house. It is inaccessible directly from the outside,

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but may be entered through the shop (room 7) on the western gable, the office (rooms 2 and3) on the north side and through the storage spaces (rooms 4 and 5) to the east.As the nameindicates, the room previously served as storage for goods sold in the shop but has, however,for the last 60 years, paradoxically, served as storage for the goods never sold in the shop –those left behind, and for whom a different fate awaited.And the stock room has served its pur-pose well. Located at the centre of the building it is exceptionally well sheltered; it is windowlessand dark, has an elevated concrete floor, keeping it cold and dry, and no lower ceiling, thusenabling good ventilation.When standing on the concrete floor in the dim and cold room youare at the core of the Storage house’ otherworldly landscape, you have no view of the outsideworld – you are completely surrounded, as if swallowed by the building (Figure 9.13).

The room is equipped with deep wooden shelves along the southern wall and part of theeastern and western walls, where goods could be stacked, but they could also be hung on nailsand hooks on walls and crossbeams. It takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to thedarkness, then it slowly comes into view.As your eyes adjust, you can see that the shelves arenow mostly empty.There is a pile of different sized paper bags in the southwest corner, andsome cardboard boxes on the shelf above them. On another shelf by the south wall is a stackof tin cans of different design; there is liver pâté in abundance (Figure 19.14), fish pudding anda few resembling spice canisters, possibly cinnamon.Apart from these stubborn installations, theshelves appear more or less empty.The cold and dry concrete floor beneath them, however, isfar from empty. It is covered with a dense mass of things. Many recall a past up on the shelves,

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Figure 19.12 ‘Aug 30 1945’Photo: Bjørnar Olsen


but some are clearly later intrusions: fragments of paper and cloth, broken glass bottles andpottery, hairpins, buttons, nails, rusting tin cans, plastic bags, dust and sheep manure togetherwith a mass of stuff unrecognizable as anything particular.This layer of things covered the entirefloor of the room, flooding into every corner, over each threshold, forming one entangledwhole without beginning or end. Like the sediment of a riverbed – coarse where the currentis slow but fine and dense where it picks up and flows freely.And through its mass this layer ofthings generated a stillness, a saturated silence, interrupted only by the sound of things crushingunderneath my feet as I tried to carefully move across it.

As the darkness faded, and things lit up, the otherness of the stock room assemblage grewmore and more apparent. An aura of otherness and wonder had indeed designated myencounters with most of the Storage house things, but most of them also had clear forms, evenrecognizable and familiar forms. Here, I was rather confronted by a landscape of things – ofsomethings and nothings which I had no means of grasping.This entanglement of nothingsevaded every category, every concept and every instrument I mastered; I could neither namethem nor count them and they did not obey as I knelt down to tell them apart. How wouldone make sense of this, I thought, or translate it into a historical sequence? Surely, throughpersistent and meticulous work I could have rewound much of the stock room landscape towhat it might have been 60 years ago. I could have rinsed away contamination, mendeddistortions and traced many of the decaying objects and fragments back to a possible origin. Icould even have traced past events, transactions and patterns of consumption.That would havebeen the conventional archaeological way of attacking it. But in the face of this strange mass,so utterly out-of-hand, it was hard to get rid of the feeling that choosing that conventional path

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Figure 19.13 The stock room landscapePhoto: Þóra Pétursdóttir


somehow also involved an attempt to reclaim my obvious lack of control over these strangethings.And what these worn and fractured things made so conspicuously manifest was that theyhad neither anticipated my coming nor were they awaiting my salvation. Abandoned andreleased long ago, I could hardly claim that I had found them, but rather stumbled over theirworld,where they had been this whole time relating and mingling freely. In other words, I hadno indispensable role in their past or future.

Viewing this strange landscape was a powerful reminder of things’ ownness; their persistencebut inevitable alteration with age – their own life, evolving at its own pace.This is a reality we tendto forget in our interactions with tamed, domesticated things rarely allowed to decay or wearout.Here, in the Storage house, the deficiency of our jurisdiction manifested itself. Everythingthat once was,what things had been, had long retreated for something new and entirely different,recalling that despite our claimed control over design,production and intent,making things andmaking them public always also involves eventually letting them go; however hard we strivetowards it we do neither fully control their fate, nor what they may become.And, importantly,unravelling that tightly woven carpet of things would have involved completely ignoringexactly that; that is, what it was – what things had become. Because the properties of its parts,their colour, texture, size and compound could never in isolation enlighten what they hadcome together to form – there was no reversible logic between this amazing whole and itsisolated parts. It was not something to be made sense of but rather something that had to besensed in its strangeness at that very moment – here and now. Thus, what also became‘illuminated’ in the encounter with that landscape of things was that its otherness was not ofmy making, it was not the result of my objectifying, scientific gaze – but quite the opposite;

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Figure 19.14 ‘Kindakæfa’ or Liver pâtéPhoto: Þóra Pétursdóttir


things’ strangeness was genuinely theirs but could be enjoyed and observed only because myprospect was open for that strange angle.

Strangeness, wonder and the aesthetics of abandonment

When I first came to Eyri, and I entered the Storage house, I was overwhelmed by the aestheticotherness of the place and its things.Notwithstanding the time I have spent there,my repeatedvisits and growing acquaintance with the site, that otherness has never faded, but continues tostrike me.There is always something new to be seen or experienced – new cracks illuminepreviously hidden features of its landscape but concurrently veil others in shadows. Thisinscrutability of the site, together with the gravity of its presence, has thus always stirred withme an uncanny feeling of wonder; uncanny not least because of its congruent impression ofproximity and remoteness, lucidity and opacity. It was as if things themselves, in the way theyshowed themselves, so utterly out-of-hand, radiated a persistent and affective strangeness.And thequestions that have pursued me, therefore, regard just this; the origin of strangeness and thedifference of things.

As articulated at the beginning of the chapter, this ability to make the familiar lookambiguous has been underlined as an analytical asset of archaeological approaches to the recentpast. However, while there may be some truth in this, I hesitate to claim that this also accountsfor the way the things encountered actually show themselves. Because, no matter how I haveturned it I have so far been unable to see how I could take credit for making this place, theStorage house and its things, appear unfamiliar, uncanny or strange, by merely turning my gazetowards them.

Rodney Harrison (2011) discussed just this in a recent article,where he described the appar-ent ingrained conception of an archaeology of the recent past that is both ‘a work of alienation’and of recovery, a work of creating distance while gaining proximity, as a paradox that may behalting further development within the field. Rather, Harrison rightly argues, this opposingduality, and the emphasis on alienation, has the effect of further underscoring a distance ordetachment between the past and the present, between the objects studied and the archae-ologist-as-observer, and may therefore work to undermine ‘…any aim which the archaeologyof the contemporary past might have of …making the past more accessible, egalitarian or know-able’ (Harrison 2011:150).However,while stressing the opposition itself as problematic,Harrisonnevertheless also seems to accept that there is an ongoing creation of otherness within the field;that archaeologists seek ‘to draw attention to the everyday by making it “uncanny”…’ (Harrison2011:150, emphasis added).As an example thereof,he also refers to how archaeologists’ dealingswith modern ruins ‘…have often been drawn into a mode of representation where modernruins are aestheticized and equated with romantic notions of the ruin’ (ibid.: 151) as for exampleevident in ‘…a particular mode of photography which presents ruin in an explicitly nostalgicmanner, and in the process romanticizes it’ (ibid.). Instead, and to realize its potential, Harrisonsuggests that archaeology of the recent past reorients itself to become focused on the present asan ‘unconstituted’ surface (cf.Lucas 2004),where past and future also come together – to become‘an archaeology in and of the present’. But to do so, he argues, requires that we ‘…shiftarchaeology away from the study of the ruin, the derelict and the abandoned to become adiscipline which is concerned with both the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ (Harrison 2011: 160).

I agree with Harrison that we do have examples of approaches to modern ruination that areof a nostalgic character, and many of which may thus fall into the trap of ‘romanticizing’ or

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‘aestheticizing’ them. However, rather than seeing archaeology’s focus on the derelict orabandoned as a problem, I would argue that it is archaeology’s conception of abandonment thatis problematic.That if we want to overcome the opposition of past and present, what we needto shift away from is not the study of the ruin, but the misleading notion that studying thederelict and the abandoned is a study of the lost, the forgotten and the dead.What we need tounderstand is rather that precisely through its relentless focus on ruination and abandonment,archaeology has always been a study of both the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ – and indeed of humanand non-human vitality. And, moreover, with a less nostalgic and derogatory conception ofabandonment, studying the ruin is in fact just as much a study of an unconstituted present and anevolving future as it may be a study of possible pasts.

I furthermore agree that a sensation of otherness may be enhanced, and problematically so,in the way archaeologists (and others) sometimes represent modern ruins, through, for example,a particular kind of photography. However, I also believe that photographs, as well as richtextual description, are able to express, or recall, a sensation of encounter with the other that ismostly forgotten or excluded in the dominating and scientifically acknowledged modes ofdisseminating archaeology (cf. Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014). Photographs, for example, carrya unique potential to recall the initial encounter with things prior to their subjection toexplanation, and thus also their otherness and the responding wonder that was evoked on thatencounter.And therefore, rather than seeing the sensation of otherness and unfamiliarity in thework of archaeologists of the recent past as ‘a work of alienation’, I would argue that it is ourmode of expressing ourselves as archaeologists that has become so alienated, so detached fromthat encounter with things in their otherness, that we can no longer deal with it as an authenticpart of the way things show themselves and, thus, of the way we also see them. Or, to recallOlivier’s (2011: 31–2) argument,while we may all find ourselves startled in a moment of naïvearchaeological wonder, we are almost instantly called by the rational urge to domesticate andmake things known – to shun the wondrous aspect of the revealed.Thus, we might claim formuch of contemporary archaeology what Jeff Malpas claimed for contemporary philosophy(Malpas 2012: 265, emphasis added); that it may

begin in wonder, but inasmuch as the demand for explanation constitutes a demand forillumination and transparency, so it can also come to constitute a blindness to … theprior belonging to the world that first drives the demand for explanation as such.Philosophy begins in wonder, but it often ends in alienation – alienation from self, from others,and from ordinary things, as well as the extraordinary. Such alienation is not just a matterof the experience of philosophical difficulty in understanding or explaining how therecan be knowledge of the external world … but also of how the philosophical activitycan connect up with the fundamental and everyday experiences of human life,with thethings that drive us, that affect us, that matter to us.’

And things, of all things, should matter to us as archaeologists. On that note we could say thatthis also relates to how we understand our role as archaeologists; that is, whether we see itmerely as that of making sense of things, or whether we are open to also include in it a concernfor mediating an affect or sensation – even if that sensation may be one of unexplained other-ness. I am a dedicated follower of the latter, because I sincerely believe that we may otherwiseoverlook an essential affective aspect of things, an aspect that has to be part of any understandingof them (or our relations with them), namely their very difference and inherent remoteness.

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This further points toward another problematic aspect of the critique directed at a claimedcreation of otherness or alienation; that is, that such arguments may themselves imply a binaryopposition between, on the one hand, familiarity and meaning, and on the other, remotenessand futility – or, as claimed by Malpas (2012), between transparency and opacity.According toMalpas wonder is the genuine response we find ourselves caught up in when facing theimmediacy of things’ existence and the reality of our encounter with them.However,while thiswonder may involve a definite puzzlement and questioning – a ‘why’ that looms before us – it alsoquite explicitly, on that moment of encounter, evokes a certain experience and sympathy forthe inexplicability of the thing encountered; for its ‘self-presencing’ beyond question or answer.It is this interplay, Malpas argues, between transparency and opacity, and their simultaneousincarnation, that allows us to experience both that part of a thing which may be explicable andthat which is not. Importantly, however, they always come hand in hand, at moments ofencounter, since,‘…the lighting up of things, their intelligibility, brings with it an essential andimpenetrable darkness’ (Malpas 2012: 264; cf. Heidegger 1993a). A darkness, though, that isneither to be contrasted nor eliminated with light, because it is not the kind of ‘…darkness thatarises through lack of light, but the darkness that arises as a consequence of light – like the darknessthat stands behind the lit object itself, the darkness that stands behind the source of light’ (ibid.,emphasis added). It is the kind of darkness therefore that, very much like Benjamin’s aura,prevents us from coming too close to things and thus enables them to always hold something,a part of their otherness, in reserve – a part that may continue to surprise us.

Again, the sensation of otherness, of strangeness, in the work of archaeologists of the recentpast, should therefore not immediately be considered a work of estrangement or alienation, buteven quite the opposite; as a successful translation of things being, and their ‘self-presencing’ on theinterface between transparency and opacity, explicability and seclusion. Moreover, contrastingsensation with sense/rationality, or, to recall Shanks’ argument from Experiencing the Past,contrasting private affective experience with that of doing archaeology (1992: 8), is not onlymisleading in that it seems to suggests the possibility of an outright positivistic paradigm, butalso because it fails to acknowledge that this private affective experience ‘…is not so much abarrier to understanding as it is, in part, its enabling condition’ (Malpas 2012: 266). It is becauseof this interplay that any ‘turn to things’, or any movement towards an understanding of them,requires just that kind of naïve openness for the mystery that secludes things’ being out-of-hand.

What remains to be addressed, however, is why this otherness of abandoned things is soexplicitly apparent in the work of archaeologists of the recent past – more so, it seems, than inthe work of their colleagues dealing with matters of more remote pasts, where more othernessis perhaps to be expected. Of course, being abandoned is, in one way or another, somethingthat most sites and things of archaeological interest have in common.Abandonment, however,is not a fixed state, but a complex process which, although unique for each site in question,mayindicate different phases and modes of becoming.That is, despite obvious exceptions, a buildingor site abandoned a decade ago will most likely appear differently on encounter than a buildingor site abandoned 500 or 1,000 years ago.While the processes of abandonment are no lesspresent in the latter, they are so, often, on another ‘pace’, ‘scale’ or ‘temporality’ than in theformer (e.g.Gorecki 1985).This is very clear in the case of Eyri; abandoned 60 years ago it findsitself in a state of very active and even abrupt transformation.And as a site of standing structuresand surface assemblages (in contrast to overgrown or submerged sites) these transformations canbe directly observed.Thus, although these alterations do take place on their own scale (whichmay indeed vary and fluctuate with, for example, seasonal shifts) their pace, I argue, stands

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closer to our own temporality than that of an overgrown Viking age long house, or that oftectonic drift, to name an even more extreme example. In other words, their very ruination andalteration is exposed to us in a way radically different from what is often the case in what wecould refer to as ‘ready ruined’ ancient sites.

The disturbing effects of discernible decay, however, also point towards another and relatedphenomenon that no less effectively provokes the unsettling aura of modern ruination andabandonment; things’ bringing out-of-hand.Heidegger argues that in our being ‘… lies an essentialtendency towards closeness’ (1962: 140), towards what he calls ‘desevering’ (entfernen), orconquering the remoteness of things by bringing them closer to hand.What is conquered inthis quest, however, is not a measured distance but a thing’s illuminated presence-at-hand, as itdisappears into utility and a mode of being ready-to-hand for us. If a tendency in this directionis indeed grounded in our very nature, as a means to come to terms with our surroundings bymaking things near and familiar, it appears more or less natural that an observation of thereversed process causes distress and anxiety; that to see familiar things become redundant anduseless, to directly face their decay, will bring attention to their releasement from us and, thus,their re-surfacing remoteness.While ancient things are indeed no less out-of-hand (or different),wemay argue that it is also the very mode we expect to encounter them in and thus that they areunfamiliar in a different and less abrupt way.Conversely,what makes modern things, our things,in abandonment and in ruination, particularly disturbing is the exposure of the very act ofbringing what is familiar out-of-hand, the experience of things’ re-surfacing difference, or graduallydisclosing otherness which happens directly in our face.

However, notwithstanding these differences, the otherness or strangeness of things is ofcourse experienced independent of any kind of temporal obstacle; the encounter, or theappearance, always happens ‘here and now’, and we may just as well be caught in wonder onencountering theViking-age long house as when encountering the modern ruin.Hence, theremust be something more at play here. In his discussion of wonder, Jeff Malpas (2012: 260ff.)argues that wonder is evoked through a ‘doubling’ of two modes of strangeness; the strangenessof the thing that appeared, and the strangeness of the appearing itself.The former, he argues,may then be settled through explanation while the latter, the strangeness of the appearing, doesnot abide to any kind of rationalization.Wonder, therefore, and the experience of strangeness,is partly independent of explanation – it does not end with rationalization.Turning this around,this also means that an experience of strangeness is not secluded to the encounter with theutterly unknown – that wonder isn’t merely evoked on encountering the unexplained, butalso on encountering that which is familiar and already understood.But what happens on suchencounters is not the doubling of two modes of strangeness but rather ‘… the coupling of theremarkable and the ordinary, of the strange and the familiar, of that which is outside of anyexplanation and that which is explicable’ (Malpas 2012: 260).And it is this coupling of contraststhat makes the wondrous encounter with the familiar and ordinary, like the lasting love for theones you also know best, so enduring and strong.

In the recently abandoned ruin, we are constantly confronted with the coupling of suchcontrasts; it looks familiar but different at the same time – it is very much like our ordinaryworld – our home – only utterly out-of-hand.We recognize it and we don’t, simultaneously.Things present themselves independent of how we know them, as liberated from any usefulrelations, which also makes them present in a very different way.Things that previously coulddisappear into readiness-to-hand, into utility, now light up and couple with what they alwaysheld in reserve, with the aura that never could be penetrated; thus, releasing a strangeness that

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is doubled up with its own contrast and which for that reason is more intense and more aesthet-ically affective than any other strangeness we may encounter – and which for that reason will,moreover, not be settled but continue to unsettle us.This is unsettling not least because in theirbeing out-of-hand things bluntly show their autonomy, their independence from our control,ideas and rationality – indeed their independence from our existence and their overwhelmingchances of outliving us.

This unsettling anxiety is hardly anywhere better captured than in Franz Kafka’s tale of thefamily man’s encounters with Odradek; a strange thing of unknown origin or function – whichat first glance looked like a messy little star-shaped spool of thread – that repeatedly and withoutwarning appears at his feet in the garret, the staircase, the hallway. In his bewildered wonder inthe face of Odradek’s otherness, and apparent uselessness, the family man asks himself;

what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had somekind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not applyto Odradek.Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, withends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’schildren? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely tosurvive me I find almost painful.

(Kafka 2005: 429, emphasis added)

More than anything else, we could therefore say that the sense of strangeness, and the anxietyit calls to mind, is a ‘reality check’ that brings our feet to the ground and returns us to theworld. And that rather than rendering its existence, or our existence within it, in any wayuncertain it allows us to experience the world in the most abrupt, convincing but simulta-neously wondrous way.This is the aesthetic effect of abandonment, of things out-of-hand. It is aestheticin the sense described by Terry Eagleton as ‘a primitive materialism’, or as ‘the body’s longinarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical’ (Eagleton 1990: 13). It is aesthetic,thus, in the sense that it is beyond description – beyond description because it refers to thatmoment, to that ‘here and now’ that is full of sensation and not yet overtaken by sense. Anaesthetic affect, thus, that refers neither to the creation of estrangement nor the stimulation of false effects,but to ‘… the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces’(ibid.), and to the experience of the most everyday wonders.

I opened this chapter with a reference to Heidegger’s ode to Metaphysics where he says;‘Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only onthe ground of wonder – the revelation of the nothing – does the ‘why?’ loom before us’(Heidegger 1993b:57).Thus,we might say, and these are appropriate last words, that it is actuallymanifest in the ground of being, of thinking, of archaeology, of science, to begin and end inwonder – in an admiration of the nothing that refuses to be named.

Acknowledgements

The fieldwork at Eyri was conducted as part of the Ruin Memories project, funded by theNorwegian Research Council, and was the focus of my PhD research. I would like to expressmy gratitude to the other participants in the fieldwork: first to my supervisor Bjørnar Olsenfor his invaluable part in the whole project, but also to Howell M. Roberts and Oscar Aldredfrom Fornleifastofnun Íslands ses. (Institute of Archaeology, Iceland) for their part – thank you!

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Documents

Þóra Pétursdóttir (2014) Things out-of-hand: the aesthetics of abandonment. In: Bjørnar Olsen & Þóra Pétursdóttir eds. Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology