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In the New York Times movie review of Decasia, Sarah Boxer (2004) opines that popular culture has seen a revival of interest in the will of things to become more disorderly, to resist form, to seek entropy, maximum disorder, minimum sense. There is a growing aesthetic fascination with the deterioration of objects into matter, shape into stuff, form into deformity. The subject of decay has acquired new drama and character. It has fans, chroniclers, hangers-on.


Today’s interest in thingness has its roots in Romanticism, though not quite the spiritual kind of yesterday. Today, we are physical with Romanticism. The slogan for our time is nothing falls apart, but things come alive. “The modernist anxiety over the collapse of structure is replaced by the panic over uncontrolled growth of structures—cancers, viruses, and other rapidly evolving entities” (H.T. Mitchell 2001:171-2).





In her work on dwelling in West Virginia, anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, examines how progress literally creates the conditions for a kind of forgetting and discarding of things — old trucks, factories abandoned and worn down by rain, rust and cast away littered in out of the way spaces, hollers, streams, across Appalachia. For dwellers living among these neglected spaces on the road to progress — the discarded objects become a time and space experience.


Objects long abandoned become relevant and potent emotional markers of a personal present, past, and future. By binding themselves in folksy (ethical) and practical (mimetic) ways to “useless” objects, Stewart’s informants are members of a cultural landscape — defined by being “passed over” — an externalized space on the side of the road.






James Faubion (1994) has a similar take on debris, in particular, the remnants of Greek architecture within the city of Athens. Here, decayed materials are a mode by which Athenians historically construct their present. Thus, our daily relationship with the past is analogous to the practice of bricolage, a kind of practical living that privileges historical facts selected from an inexhaustible multitude of psychic movements (Levi-Strauss 1966) or, in Faubion’s words, different modalities of the modern.






The Shtokman natural gas project calls for a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas off-loading facility near the Barents Sea village of Teriberka. Its details, available to Teriberkans from charts, images and plans available on the internet and from town hall presentations by developers promise to bring a new technological wonder to this remote fishing village several hours drive from Murmansk.


Today, the four hundred villagers of Teriberka live amidst modern day ruins. They also live in expectation that the Shtokman energy project will bring a new modernity. That is, they live partly in an imaginary space of a promised future. Teriberka is a World of Tomorrow where folks actively are binding their consciousness to remnants of the future.