Little Boxes

You were driving along a wide, semi-rural road, taking in the morning air with your windows rolled down when you first spotted them. Legions of tiny pyramids on the horizon, all gray, steeply sloped, and lopsided, with protrusions and tumors deforming their symmetry in a myriad of untold ways. You looked at them, I’m sure, for a few moments as you drove past, both fascinated and horrified by the surreal presence they seemed to exude around them; by these hundreds of tiny monuments which all mimic, with a strange fidelity, the monuments of pharaohs, though you knew the resemblance was hardly intentional. It was already Hegel who noted in his own time that art had begun to stagnate. He writes grimly in his Introduction to Aesthetics that art is no longer capable of significance all its own. Meaning could only be saved through distance. But what meaning could these structures possibly have? What numerous phantoms had flocked to occupy this space?

McMansions were always going to be the perfect haunted house. The gothic spires paired with bay windows and farmhouse furniture. The vaulted ceilings and faux Victorian turrets. All elements of these bizarre boxes evoke a historical grandeur, a powerful and libidinal past. But sitting there, speeding past at 55 miles per hour, what is most noticeable about them, what most pervades and overwhelms your senses, is what is absent. There was no now, and there is no future. It was Derrida who coined hauntology, the failed futures we grasp for, the impossible past. Maybe if you squint you can see them drifting around the privacy fences or crying out from the chimneys. All around you are wisps of what wasn’t, unexpressed and unspoken, un-signified. They lurk out of frame, but you know they are there. Perhaps Marx was right to call communism a spectre. In omitting the future, they become a simulation of the past, or better yet they are transformed, transitioned, transmogrified into simulacra. The referential to which these places referred is now buried beneath their own content and context. Do they even have context? You sit and quietly speculate about the horrors concealed in those cal-de-sacs, “look for the id beneath the suburban superego.” Mark Fisher was right that it's “more interesting to recognize that the surface is already psychotic, that Nothing lies beneath….” The dynamism of history is absent and so we reenact it. The pyramids may be buried and Notre Dame can burn, in tract housing we will preserve their form, in TV documentaries their history. But we cannot reproduce what is preserved. The McMansion perhaps better than any other structure exemplifies that we have moved beyond history. As late stage-capitalism gets later, we are unable to contextualize ourselves, our moment becomes nothing more than a conglomerate, an apparition of all that preceded it; So what we can’t imagine a future. We don’t even have a past. Our energy is expended in reproducing an un-present. Negativity ad nauseam.

Or maybe you were wrong to be looking for some original vitality. Falling for that oldest of fallacies, the promise of a grand history you can be reunited with, a long lost thing that has been stolen from you. Maybe the most remarkable thing about these little boxes is that the longer you focus on them the more confusing they become, the more frankensteinian they begin to feel. Something dynamic, with an agency outside ourselves that we can no longer control. They are not a symptom of our psychology, but our psychology itself. The mirror we gaze into. They feel lifeless because they reflect our lifelessness. And then, as quickly as they had appeared, the moment expired, you sped on, and these bizarre monuments to late-capitalism receded in your rear-view mirror. Alone you were left to wonder what cosmology had made such a moment even possible.