A hammer is considerably more than a specific means to a specific end. As Paul McCartney points out, hammers aren't just good for hitting nails. Maxwell Edison, that violent character from the Abbey Road album, uses a hammer to murder a girl he asked out to the pictures, a teacher who gave him detention, and a judge who found him guilty of murder. Urinals aren't just good for pissing in. Marcel Duchamp put one in a gallery, and revolutionised modern art. Books aren't just good for reading with. Sometimes they stop doors, or kill flies, or provide unlikely decor in a J D Wetherspoons, or get ripped up and thrown into a fire, for warmth, for a political point, etc. etc. Nothing exists for one purpose only. Everything contains the possibility of many different relations. We need a way of thinking that accounts for this: something I will call 'democratic ontology'.
The song 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' is, in one sense, a trivial McCartney number. A joke song, hated by the rest of the Beatles for its lack of serious meaning, about a nonexistent serial killer. I think this interpretation is correct.
I also, however, see a deep ontological argument at the centre of the song, right from the opening line.
"Joan was quizzical, studied 'pataphysical / Science in the home"...
She studied what?
'Pataphysics (yes, the apostrophe is supposed to be there) is a satirical parody of metaphysics, and of science in general. It was invented, by a playwright called Alfred Jarry, to poke fun at science's belief that scientists have all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. 'Pataphysics satirises this confidence by claiming that absolutely everything that can possibly be hypothesised is true.
As one writer puts it, 'pataphysics "supports everything, believes everything, has faith in everything, and upholds everything that is".
We must learn to see the multiplicity of objects. This is what I am calling "democratic ontology". "Democratic" here just means "trying to listen to multiple perspectives" and "ontology" means "the study of real objects". We must look at real objects democratically, not choosing to impose upon them one function, at the exclusion of all others. We must see all the possibilities of every object, validating each as equally important and powerful. We must look at hammers and see not only the means for putting up a shelf, but for caving in heads, or for using as a metaphor to 'hammer home' a point in an essay.
This is almost a 'pataphysical project. It's absurd. How can we be expected to spend all day, every day, looking at a chair and thinking about how John Cena might use it to win a cage fight, or how it would feel to sit on it as a housefly, or how it could be used to blockade a door? Yes, all objects have many different uses, but we can't see all of them all of the time.
None of us are capable of understanding all the different means an object could be put to. But if we don't try, we might find Maxwell bearing down on us with his silver hammer.
"A plastic bag," writes Timothy Morton, "isn't just for humans. It's for seagulls to choke on". If we ignore the lethal potential of a carrier bag, if we refuse to see it as anything other than a tool with which to carry shopping, we commit ourselves to doing violence to our surroundings. We take our groceries home in a bag, designed to carry groceries. We throw the bag away, and it kills a bird. The bag hasn't become a different thing - the very same carrier bag always has both functions: grocery-container and seagull-murder-weapon. This second function becomes clear when we see photographs of seagulls choking on plastic bags - in other words, when it's already too late for the seagull. Once we have seen this evidence, we might go into the kitchen cupboard, where all the carrier bags are kept. We might sit on the floor, weeping at our stockpile of animal torture devices. How could we be so blind?
This is silly. But we're in a silly situation. A life in plastic, with the equivalent environmental impact of an atomic bomb. Life in the Anthropocene means constantly suppressing the awareness that the objects we buy and use are capable of immense violence. Our crisp packets wash up on Indian children's playgrounds. Most of the milk bottles we so conscientiously sort into the bin of the right colour end up in the ocean, disintegrating into microplastics for centuries, choking plankton, accumulating in the bellies of fish, which humans then dredge up, slaughter and eat, absorbing the toxic plastic particles back into ourselves. It would be miserable to contemplate the awesome destructive potential of everything we consume, all the time. Trust me.
The solution cannot be ignorance. Ignorance is merely wilful blindness to Maxwell's silver hammer. The plastic comes back to haunt us in the end.
One solution might be to design better objects. Biodegradeable carrier bags, for example.
But there's a lot of danger beyond design. Morton writes that "we have to be careful what we humans design, because we are literally designing the future, and that future isn't in our idea of the thing, how we think it will be used and so on - that's just our access mode. The future emerges directly from the objects we design." In other words: once built, it is the objects who have the ultimate agency, not their designers. A carrier bag doesn't care whether or not the person who made it loves birds; it's still gonna force itself up a seagull's throat and choke it to death, because that is what it was (unconsciously) designed to do. You could kill a fly with a book on how to be nice to insects. You could kill a police officer with a thick enough hardback book on non-violence.
Oh, and biodegradeable carrier bags only work if composted properly. But most users just chuck them in the bin, because who has a compost heap these days?
This is the global fear about AI - that it might not listen to what we say. We might well design it to bring about world peace, but it might decide that the most efficient way to achieve world peace is to murder all living beings, thus eliminating the possibility of anything other than peace on Earth. Whoops! We tried to put up a shelf, and instead the hammer knocked us on the head.
Most of us go about our day without worrying that a silver hammer might suddenly come down on our heads. McCartney takes Maxwell to three places where our guard is especially low - where we would least expect sudden death. Maxwell kills Joan in her own home. He kills a teacher in a school, an institution that is supposed to be keeping children safe. He kills a judge - someone at the heart of the justice system that supposedly keeps all of us safe from murderers.
Patriarchal violence is becoming considerably more visible - to the point where a woman agreeing to go on a date with a man holds, somewhere, the fear that he may murder her. I know many of my female friends who have this fear during every date with a stranger. We have seen further evidence in recent weeks that schools are not the safe places to leave children that the state would have us believe: the very buildings themselves are made of crumbling concrete. And as prison abolitionists have been telling us for generations now, the 'justice' system is immensely unsafe; as the murder of George Floyd and so many others at the hands of the police has shown, the institution itself is a weapon. 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' isn't that far-fetched.
Paul McCartney has said that 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' isn't even really about a serial killer: the broader theme of the song is, absurdly, more relatable. He calls it "[his] analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does". The world that Paul McCartney describes in 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' is one in which your life can be radically disrupted at any moment.
That is the world all of us live in.
The Anthropocene is an epoch of unpredictability. We don't know what the weather's gonna be like any more. Europe, traditionally temperate, has become a zone of heatwaves, storm surges, floods and internal migration. You might think your home town is safe from flooding, or that there will always be food on the shelves of your local supermarket. You might believe that your taps will always produce clean water.
Most of the world has never had the luxury of these basic assumptions. Don't be so bold, especially not when the world is destabilising around you.
You might still be able to look at your dining room table and see an object upon which to place plates of food. This might not be how you always see your dining room table. One day, it might become a flotation device. Or fuel for a fire, while you await a rescue crew. Or an obstacle in your route to escape from your own house.
So what is to be done?
'Pataphysics.
Alfred Jarry, inventor of 'pataphysics, writes that "Contemporary science is founded upon the principle of induction: most people have seen a certain phenomenon precede or follow some other phenomenon most often, and conclude therefrom that it will ever be thus. Apart from other considerations, this is true only in the majority of cases, depends on the point of view, and is codified only for convenience—if that!"
Let me break that down. You look at your dining room table every day. You see it being used to hold plates of food every day. The more you see your own dining room table, and other people's dining room tables, holding plates of food, the more you associate dining room tables with the job of holding plates of food. Enough time goes by, and it becomes hard to even imagine that your dining room table might be used for anything else.
Until one day, your house floods, and you've got to use the dining room table as a flotation device.
'Pataphysics is the "science of imaginary solutions". It is not about establishing scientific rules; rather, it is the study of exceptions to rules. The unexpected. The possibilities we have never seen, have no reason to believe in, and no proof of. A good example being silver hammer that catches you completely off-guard in your assumption that your life won't suddenly, randomly, meaninglessly end.
The Anthropocene is based on similar assumptions: the assumption that economic growth can continue, forever, without being violently interrupted by tidal waves or revolutionaries. Also the assumption that humanity is supreme, that it can exist apart from everything else, that we are not intimately tied up in the fates of the more-than-human.
And now we find ourselves choking on plastic, just like the seagulls. It's time for a 'pataphysical approach, that embraces the absurd, that prepares us for exceptional times. The approach to science that allows us to live beyond the horizon of the way things have always been. If Joan was as quizzical a student of 'pataphysics as the song would have us believe, then it's likely she would've been vindicated by her sudden murder. It's exactly the kind of random, senseless thing 'pataphysics is preoccupied with.
We find ourselves in times of trouble. Mother Mary/Nature has come to us and said: there will be an answer. Let it be.
There will be an answer. There will be a new world that defies all of our assumptions. Currently, that world looks like it'll defy our assumptions in all the wrong ways: it'll defy our belief in our own safety, by rendering us extinct.
But if we believe in the science of imaginary solutions, imaginary answers, then we know there is an alternative path: to defy our basic assumptions in a new way. To defy the assumption that capitalism is the only viable economic system, and to replace it with something really weird. To defy the assumption that carrier bags are just for carrying shopping, and to interact with them as if they are biological weapons. To defy the belief that humans must be cruel to nature in order to live, and instead have weird friendships with the rest of the animal kingdom. To be intentionally weird, in response to a weird world.
In short, to decide what happens with the hammers of this world. Do we let them get more and more violent, eventually wiping us out, or do we take them up, and use them to build a world that we currently cannot imagine?
There will be an answer. We get to decide what it will be.
Fifty-fifty. Heads or nails?
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