Smokestacks and computers
In 1845 Friedrich Engels set out to describe the conditions of the working class in the prototypical industrial city of London, England. It was clear to him that the marvels of civilization had forced Londoners to sacrifice the best qualitites of their human nature; "that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully." Charles Dickens was there, too, to place this city into prose form, but Engels continues with unsurpassed reflective insight into the crowd:
[A]re they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance.
Whether or not it rings true today as an accurate description of the prototypical post-industrial city does not seem a relevant question in light of the more striking fact: Silicon Valley has no narrative culture. The smokestack grasps a truth that the computer somehow cannot. This may be the first social environment in the history of the world that does not produce, or even attempt to find, a voice through writing or any other cultural phenomenon. We know the Harlem Renaissance in New York; we know James Baldwin in Chicago; London we’ve gotten from Dickens all the way to Kureishi; Baudelaire in Paris; Bukowsi in LA. But no one writes Silicon Valley. How does this place achieve the impossible fact of resisting representation?
To begin facilitating a narrative culture I submit a homework assignment to all Entrepreneurial City readers: Answer the following question to the best of your ability. To you, what does Silicon Valley smell, taste, look, sound, and feel like?
Have you read The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth? Apparently it was inspired by a book (Eugene Onegin) he found in a second hand bookstore while he was at Stanford. In fact, that book changed Seth’s focus from academic production to (explicit) fiction. There are a limited number of second hand bookstores near Stanford. I want to know which one he got the book at.
Comment by minger — February 20, 2007 @ 8:17 am
In Edouard Manet’s _Argenteuil_ of 1874, a petit-bourgeois couple sits at the waterfront, her striped dress an ill-fitting disaster, his shirt clashing horizontal with his companion’s vertical patterns. She looks towards the viewer, her shoulders curved, her posture easy. On her lap rests a limp bouquet of flowers. She doesn’t seem to care. He looks at her, but she does not return the gaze. There is no connection.
Even here, in the foreground, it is clear something is awry. The boats’ masts are all fallen over, broken almost. And the water is too blue – a sea of ink the same hue as the woman’s dress. Then we see the smokestacks in the distance – the factories on the opposite coast made small and quaint by distance and summer afternoons. These chimneys give lie to this unnatural ocean: they are the chemical-dye factories slightly upstream from Argenteuil. They are the same factories which pour their indigo excess into the water.
But now, there is no indigo sea made unnatural by industry. There are only manmade lakes and spewing fountains around which seagulls confusedly fly. They’d be better off at the ocean, looking out over precipitous cliffs to the unrelenting water below. The wind is natural there, and it rushes thousands of miles with salt inside it. But then there is no dump nearby, no heaps of trash to be scavenged, no new deliveries by the hour. That dirt by this water’s edge stands firm and compressed, concealing tons of rubbish beneath. At the end of Embarcadero, where the earth begins to rise to the right and left, the only cars that pass are those full of people not wanting old things. The don’t stay long, but their broken chairs and cream-colored cabinets remain, jutting up from the soil in this temporary skyline. The black smoke from industrial towers no longer latches onto buildings and leaves. It has been rerouted underground, and the only token of its presence is the increasing shine of perspiration across our foreheads and backs.
What does Silicon Valley smell, taste, look, sound, and feel like? It smells like empty shoes arranged carefully across a doorstep, or a paper bag which minutes before held warm bread. It looks like earth overturned and delicately folded by the slight shift of feet now passed, or raindrops which have fallen around a parked car which is no longer there. It sounds like the small shreds of disposable chopsticks blowing across a plastic table, or the rope from a homemade swing sinched and gnawing the bark of a stout branch. It looks like reflection in rapid fire, located in the privacy glass of building after building, or a room full of dislodged chairs and used napkins at 1.05pm. It feels like missing the train you don’t want to be on but everybody is riding. It feels like remnants of the living, like they were just here but didn’t care to stay. Like drinking from an empty glass or cutting on a bare plate. Like setting the table for guests who will never come.
But sometimes, sometimes it feels like potential.
Comment by kiersten — February 24, 2007 @ 11:36 pm