April 8: Broken World Thinking

This essay was published in 2014 and has been widely read across a whole spectrum of disciplines. It juxtaposes two world views: a story of innovation and infinite progress versus a world always in the process of breakdown and decay. I first assigned it in a class on the Anthropology of Fashion which focused on the environmentally devastating effects and oppressive labor conditions of fast fashion. The final project for the course was to create an upcycled fashion design for presentation to the class (a runway show of a sort). It was a project that was meant to encourage a kind of caring (the ethics of care) for cast off material objects that might be redeemed for an afterlife of the commodity.

Jackson makes the point that innovation does not emerge from inventing something new but rather from the constant need to fix and find workarounds for things that are not working. He is addressing technology studies, but I think we can use his essay evocatively to start imagining how we might live in the COVID after times.

He ends the essay with the figure of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” which was Benjamin’s rejection of the 19^th-century myth of history as an upward movement of progress (everything getting better and better). Instead, the angel flies backward against the wind with wreckage piling up beneath its feet. Benjamin wrote this shortly before his suicide while fleeing the German invasion of France in World War II when he was in a state of great despair.

However, Jackson’s essay wants us to view the processes of erosion, breakdown, and decay as the norm rather than the exception, but to not have us give in into despair, rather to help us see the possibilities of regeneration and rebirth in building a world that is more humane, just, and sustainable.

When we get to the other end of this pandemic, our world will have changed. We can grieve for what we have lost but we will have to confront the fact that we can’t go back to that past. We have to pick up the pieces and apply what we have learned to building a new world.

What has been broken? And what can be made anew? That is what I would like you to write about. Don't forget to use quotes from the reading as a basis for your comments.