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A Case for Doing [Almost] Nothing
Growth, Decay and Heritage In the Post-Human Convergence

Charlie Hayles – MSci Y4

Notes on the Piece

This is the second publication of this piece. The first no longer exists. Hand written onto one single sheet of receipt paper and left next to a chair in the studio for a day, students at the Bartlett were encouraged to pick up the initial publication and read it. With each reading, the piece was pulled further into a state of decay. Until, towards the end, only fragments remained. The reader thereby became an audience member to the previous readings that took place that day, as well as a performer for the readings to follow. A simultaneous act of creation and destruction. A production of heritage itself. The images seen in this second publication are selected from the readings of the first.

Prologue

“Watch out for the nettles, they’ve gotten out of control this year.” Following Ron’s footsteps carefully to avoid getting stung again, I began to lose sight of the footpath. The remains of a late 19th century mansion named Castle House lie in the chalky soil of Shooter’s Hill in Southeast London. The Inventor, Samuel Edmund Phillips lived in the house for 27 years before his death in 1893.1 Hidden on a piece of land owned by the NHS, part of the larger Oxleas Ancient Woodland, it has been left to decay for over a century.2 Amongst the broken flint tiles and chipped Victorian bricks, a sense of urgency appeared. An urge to step in at the last minute. To save this site (with which I had just become acquainted) from material disintegration; from being completely forgotten.

Memory and Material

Referred to as the “Noah Complex”, this impulse to rescue is not just the over-sensitivity of an architecture student, but rather a foundational pillar (perhaps unconsciously) upon which the western notion of Heritage is built.3 This ridding the “self of this nausea of loss and decay” has driven over two centuries of accumulation.4 This ‘Crisis of Accumulation’ as Harrison puts it, has led to us saving things ‘not because they are valued, but rather they are valued because they are being saved’.5 The importance placed on physicality is founded in the belief, dating back to the renaissance, that memory and identity formations can be stabilized in material form.6 This belief formed within the Aristotelian tradition and adopted in the 14th century, states that if objects are seen to stand as memory, then their destruction is taken to imply forgetting.7 Consequently, an objects unmaking threatens to unmake our identities.8 Despite being largely untested this entrenched perceived connection between memorial/identity function and material persistence, continues to this day.

The ruthlessly physical tangibility of heritage also allows it to be mapped, and protected through international charters, thus validating the practice of gathering the ‘usual suspects’ to ‘pass on to future generations’, furthering a certain set of western elite cultural values, under the guise of being universally applicable.9

For these mnemonic devices to be maintained, vast amounts of energy are invested, rare ecologies are curbed, and gloves are worn.10 And yet for a field at its core dedicated to the future very little is done to acknowledge in the present the planetary crisis we find ourselves in.

As we stand at the precipice of the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth extinction event, traditional approaches to heritage are proving to be not only inadequate but damaging to human and non-human entities.11

Proposition 1:
A Traditional Western Heritage Approach

A collection of moss-less brick walls, enclosed by a wooden fence and a small blue plaque, with the name of the man who lived there; this all too familiar approach, declares the singular “historically important” reason for why this site should be remembered.

Decay is seen as the enemy, and categorical fixing as the hero. The plants are taken to be a ‘generic collective of greenery’ that is to be curbed, unless it is a certain species to demonize, in which case it is to be eradicated.12 On the other side of the spreadsheet lies the materiality; the bricks are given priority, to protect the integrity of the human elements of the site, even if it does mean cutting down the endangered ash tree.

This form of heritage fails to recognize that ‘Decay is as life giving as it is life taking’.13 We are reaching a point where protection from decay and fragmentation can no longer be sustained to the level, we have become accustomed to. We need to form new methods of understanding the planet and our place within it.

Is there a different approach to heritage that is not shackled by the desire for material stasis?

The Posthumanities

Post humanist thought has a wide and sprawling genealogy.14 It is impossible to declare a singular definition of post human thought, but for the basis of this piece Braidotti’s approach to the ‘Post-Human Convergence’ will be applied.15 The basic structure of this infinitely challenging and probing approach, centers around the convergence of two strands, ‘Post Humanism’ and ‘Post Anthropocentrism’. ‘Post Humanism’ being a theoretical shift that questions long-held western doctrines of masculine mastery.16 And ‘Post Anthropocentricism’ as a process of ‘decentering the human altogether’ emphasising the ‘technological, ecological and biological entanglement of humans and non-humans’ in every dimension of our planetary existence.17

The reason for introducing posthuman thought here is not that the concepts emerging here are particularly revolutionary on their own, but because the crises that threaten the field of heritage cannot be fully addressed through a theoretical approach that takes ‘the human’ as the centre of heritage and its meaning. We must begin to accept that life exists not just within human but also non-human, material and non-material worlds.19

Proposition 2:
A Heritage approach within a Post Human convergence

Nothing. The real question is not how to intervene, but whether to intervene at all. Heritage as a concept is produced exclusively by and for human beings, no brick, stone or tree will ever question its own status as a part of the ‘common heritage of mankind’.20 Yet that doesn’t make them any less alive than us. The notion of a “true” post-human intervention thereby reveals itself as inherently paradoxical. Who are we to fell trees and clean bricks of their moss, under the premise of a concept that the current inhabitants could never be cognizant of? We therefore should let it continue its process of self-excavation, and decay, uninterrupted, only to be known by those who discover it by accident, like Ron. Not only does this remove the continuation of a dominant historical narrative formed by ‘doctrines of western masculine mastery’, but also decenters the human entirely.21

Locating the Human in Post-Human

There is one major issue however with this approach to simply ‘letting be’: we fundamentally undermine our own capacity for strategic action. If we truly follow post humanist thinking, then we would have ‘no hope’ in intervening in the anthropogenically caused consequences of climate change.22

As Soper raises; there is still a need to maintain a form of human exceptionalism when addressing the current ecological crisis.23 In other words ‘the price in recognizing the agency of artefacts need not be the denial of our own’. 24 By removing the human from the equation of heritage, it diminishes the potential of heritage to positively impact human and non-human alike. By looking beyond western epistemologies of heritage, beyond notions of mastery and dominion we can find modalities of heritage that emphasize witnessing and living with, ecosystems.25, 26 For millennia forms of heritage built upon radically different beliefs have been practiced outside of the recent AHU, that disengage from the idea that accumulation and decontextualized cataloging can serve as a mnemonic device. Heritage in this sense is more about the passing on of knowledge at appropriate times, and contexts.27 Heritage as a verb, aiding in the development of our own human sense of the past, present and possible futures, that is not at expense of the simultaneous non-human evolution on site.

Proposition 3:
Let people see that nothing is being done

What if the ethos of ‘letting be’ is sustained but with one single alteration: make the site easily accessible to the public? Shifting the human’s role from ignorant bystander of post-human heritage practice occurring behind layers of nettles and brambles, to an active witness or as Simmel writes an ‘accomplice’ of decay.28 By witnessing and actively accommodating decay, a form of ‘positive passivity’ is enacted; the human agent is ‘destabilized and distributed’ and the ‘illusion’ of control and cultivation is abandoned to make way for a form of ‘messier’ coexistence.29With no blue plaque on a fence, this form of heritage asks whether the visitor needs to know who this site belonged to, or when. This is a site of heritage as much dedicated to the unmarked house as it is to the unmarked tree that now grows within it. It is not for the remembrance of one man, but the century of ecological, material (and occasionally human) coexistence and negotiation.

Because of our own inability to countenance death, we deal with the anxiety surrounding it through intervention; attempts to control the uncontrollable, the unpredictable. And yet by doing this we deny that death and decay are an ‘adjunct to the living past’ a token of both the human and non-human condition.30 Could a form of heritage that not only embraces but actively displays decay, be means through which to recognize the common life cycles between ‘people and things.’ 31 To firsthand witness that on the other side of loss there is a possibility that new subjects and relations will emerge.32 For the bricks and mortar that make up the walls, have biographies that precede their formation, and have a future which will play out far beyond when the walls lose their current form.

The embracing and exhibition of the fragmentariness in many ways also removes the site from the hegemonic discourse on heritage, as well as a dominant historical narrative. This is because material and ecological fragments, appear as form of anomaly.33 They remind us that there is more to be found outside the constraints of the ‘normalized’ history seen within heavily fortified and preserved heritage sites.

Fragments remind us of a ‘world too complex and ambiguous to be described in whole and rounded forms.’34 Fragmentation and our acceptance with absence begins to relieve not only the immense amount of energy required to reconstruct and conserve, as well as the invasive ecological scaring caused by such actions, but also our over accumulation of artefacts. As Umberto Eco states ‘one forgets… not by producing absences but by multiplying presences.’35 In short, relief from our own commemorative fever, replenishes our ability to remember.

Because of our own fear of forgetting and being forgotten ourselves, we act with both hope and denial, believing that memories and identities can simply be deposited into stabilized physical containers for safekeeping. If we view memory however, as something that is ‘ignited in dialogue between mind and matter,’ then we need not rely on stable material for its expression.36

As time passes, the decay will cause further fragmentation, the strands will continue to fray. This form of heritage thereby encourages the visitor to view decay and fragmentation not as the enemy of memory but rather the aide-mémoire. The presence of decay and absence allows for a different form of recollection, requiring input from the visitor, imagination and agency. This form of heritage challenges the notion that the ‘public’ are passive consumers, empty vessels.37 Human and non-human entities are rather simultaneous performers and audience members of the heritage itself.

The Conversation Continues

If this seems like a lot of work, to simply do nothing. It’s because it is. It is against our primary instinct as humans. It is almost impossible. And so, it should be.

It is precisely the inability to endure the uncomfortable impossibility of letting nature take its course, that has paralyzed the western practice of heritage for almost two centuries. But it is also this impossibility that can also be used as a tool, a tool to keep decisions open, to reconsider our choices, to listen, wait and observe.38 It is this impossibility that doesn’t end the conversation with a stable answer but rather continues with an apt skepticism. Heritage not only has a vast public following, and public membership organization’s whose numbers run into the hundreds of thousands, but it also something that people often desperately care about, where they will enter the realm of public debate. Oxleas Wood, within which the site sits, has been the center for environmental and heritage debate and protest for decades.39 This piece asks: why stop now?

Can this site act as a rallying point, behind which notions of heritage are reframed to accept that we live in a world of environmental crisis, of crumbling economies, and mass migrations, harsher winters and hotter summers. A heritage that forces us to admit that we may not be in control anymore, ‘if we ever were’.40 Heritage that reminds us of what it truly means to be human. A celebration in the face of uncertainty.

Footnotes:

1 “Shooters Hill Shelter – a Spark in Your Veins.” E-Shootershill.co.uk, 8 Mar. 2012
2 Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1 Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London & New York, Verso, 1999, p. 144
3 Choay, Françoise et al. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Cambridge (Uk), Cambridge University Press, 2001.
4 Shanks, Michael. “ the Life of an Artifact in Interpretive Archaeology.” Fennoscandia Archaeologica , vol. 15, no. 17, 1998.
5 Harrison, Rodney. “Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: Late Modern Heritage Practices, Sustainability and Crisis of Accumulation of the Past.” 2013, pp. 579–595.
6 Forty, Adrian, and Susanne Küchler. The Art of Forgetting. Oxford, Berg, 2001.
7 Aristotle. Aristotle on Memory: De Memoria et Reminiscentia. Translated by Richard Sorabji, London, Duckworth, 1972.
8 Desilvey, Caitlin. Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 13
9 Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage. London ; New York, Routledge, 2009, p. 11

10 DeSilvey. Curated Decay, p. 10
11 Braidotti, Rosi. “Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Knowledge.”” Harvard GSD Lecture Series, 13 Mar. 2019,
12 DeSilvey. Curated Decay, p. 100
13 Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. BUILDINGS MUST DIE : A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2017, p. 69.
14 Rosi Braidotti, and Maria Hlavajova. Posthuman Glossary. London ; New York ; Oxford ; New Delhi ; Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
15 Braidotti, Rosi. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” 4 May 2019, pp. 31–61.
16 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. London, Routledge, 1991.
17 Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? London & Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press., 2009.
18 Sterling, Colin. “Critical Heritage and the Posthumanities: Problems and Prospects.” I, 30 Jan. 2020, pp. 1029–1046.
19 Harrison, Rodney, and Colin Sterling. DETERRITORIALIZING the FUTURE : Heritage In, of and after the Anthropocene. London, Open Humanities Press, 2020
20 Soper, Kate. “The Humanism in Posthumanism.” Comparative Critical Studies , vol. 9, no. 3, 2012, pp. 365–378. p. 376
21 Braidotti. Framework for the Critical Posthumanities,
22 Sterling. Critical Heritage, p. 1038
23 Soper. Humanism in Posthumanism, p. 375
24 Lucille Alice Suchman. Human-Machine Reconfigurations : Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr, 2009, p. 285.
25 Dove, Michael R. “Indigenous People and Environmental Politics.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 1, Oct. 2006,
26 Ricketts, Taylor H., et al. “Indigenous Lands, Protected Areas, and Slowing Climate Change.” PLoS Biology, vol. 8, no. 3, 16 Mar. 2010,
27 Smith. Uses of Heritage, p. 46
28 Simmel, Georg. “The Ruin.” Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, by Kurt H. Wolf, New York, Harper & Row, 1965, p. 261.
29 DeSilvey. Curated Decay, p. 115
30 Shanks. Life of an Artifact, p. 18
31 Ibid. p. 22
32 DeSilvey. Curated Decay, p. 171
33 Burström, Mats. “Fragments as Something More: Archaeological Experience and Reflection.” Reclaiming Archaeology, 2013, pp. 311–322. p. 319
34 Ibid. p. 321/322
35 Umberto Eco, and Marilyn Migiel. “An Ars Oblivionalis: Forget It!” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 103, no. 3, 1 May 1988, pp. 254–261
36 Petursdottir , Þora, and Bjornar Olsen. “Introduction: An Archaeology of Ruins.” Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, by Þora Petursdottir and Bjornar Olsen, London, Routledge, 2014. p. 9
37 Mason, Rhiannon. “Conflict and Complement: An Exploration of the Discourses Informing the Concept of the Socially Inclusive Museum in Contemporary Britain.” Mar. 2004, pp. 49–73.
38 Introna, Luke. “Ethics and Flesh: Being Touched by the Otherness of Things.” Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, by Olsen and Pétursdóttir, London, Routledge, 2014.
39 Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1 Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London & New York, Verso, 1999, pp. 259–260
40 DeSilvey. Curated Decay, p. 16