Unmaking

unmaking

Dani Ploeger

In the practice of critical making, the focus is on the processes of making, rather than on the outcomes of these processes in the form of artefacts. This then forms the basis for critical reflection on creativity, production, and consumption (see criticality). If the aim of this critical engagement is to formulate alternatives to the mechanisms and cultural habits of endless accumulation and expansion—the backbone of economic liberalism—we must also consider material processes that take place beyond or in opposition to the making of new artefacts and look towards processes of deterioration and acts of destruction. In this, it is important to distinguish between the processes of destruction that are inherent in capitalist expansionism (see destruction) and those that destabilize or challenge the systemic status quo. The latter can be designated as acts of unmaking.

The study and exploration of these ‘outcast’ processes and the ways in which—and reasons why— they are excluded from dominant narratives in consumer culture could inform perspectives that challenge the myth of endless growth.

Unmaking may involve breaking technological devices, such as the Luddites’ attacks on textile machinery in the early nineteenth century, but it can also concern the creation of technological devices in order to destroy (part of) the domain of production and consumption. Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are an example of this. Such acts and technologies of unmaking are commonly dismissed as nihilistic violence aimed at the supposedly peaceful everyday of consumer culture. However, considering that destruction is actually an essential component of the very logic of capitalism—albeit often hidden below its shiny surfaces—processes of unmaking should rather be examined as transgressions of the inherent destructive violence of the ‘business as usual’ of production and consumption.

Practices of unmaking can be read in the context
of Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between subjective and objective forms of violence: ‘... subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal”, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this “normal” state of things.’

Acts of unmaking form an explicit response to the often-overlooked objective violence of destruction-based economic activity.

As such, unmaking can be experienced as subjective violence from the perspective of regular consumers. However, it should rather be read as a form of unmasking, a pulling away of the shiny surface of consumer culture to bring the inherent violence to light. But in fact, what is indicated with ‘unmaking’ here, is more than what is captured by the notion of unmasking. It is an affirmative escape from both the opaque glitz of consumer surfaces as well as from the extractivist (i.e., extracting natural resources from the Earth) business-as-usual of the larger capitalist machine. Unmaking is to be understood as a combined material, creative and symbolic negation breaking matter away from its looming capitalist burden and making it available for other meanings, other appropriations, other play.

Dani Ploeger, Laboratory of Electronic Ageing, 2019. An industrial drop testing machine is exhibited in a museum. Instead of its intended use as a testing device in production and innovation processes it is put on display to endlessly drop an unused high-tech shaving device. While the shaver decomposes to a state of bare materiality, the industrial machine is symbolically disconnected from the realm of production and reintroduced as a creative instrument. © Dani Ploeger

Dani Ploeger, Laboratory of Electronic Ageing, 2019.