Inspecting Material Unconsciousness

"Construction sites, temporary yet lengthy occurrences in urban landscape, are sites of both production and performance. While resting on a complex set of regulations, planning and finance, construction embodies the collective consciousness in its most solid form. Each building material - the economies of its production, flows or labour required to put it up - can be scrutinised through the lens of its political agency."

• Ana Filipovic

Let us dive in the collective consciousness that construction sites embody, for the act of constructing and the act of consciously thinking may as well pose a line of flight worth taking. On the one hand, constructing is an act of putting things together, an act of assembly, an act of discrete tangible reasoning. An act of realization, an act of ordering things anew, an act of putting things rather inconsistent together and coherently. An act that in itself, denotes invariably a linear time - one brick at a time. On the other hand, the act of thinking prominently happens non-linearly. Thinking happens while experiencing, while processing inputs and outputs, while categorizing or de-categorizing, while dissolving abstract parts and letting a new thought emerge, anew. Thinking happens in-between. Thinking happens here and now, and simultaneously far away. Thinking may dissemble built walls or raise new solid grounds; thinking lets space take its place.

Both, however, may bring on something new and standing.

Just as we might perceive the imagery of construction sites as perhaps images of our own conscious thinking - universes of discrete things to be put together standing - down the road through the lens of each material's agency, lie other sites where the core of both ends meet. If construction sites embody collective consciousness, the infrastructural material harvesting/mining sites on the bottom of their grounds embody a collective unconsciousness.

Things in construction sites are pre-cognized things. Discrete parts we can put together under bright light. Harvesting and mining sites, on the other hand, exist always on the outskirts, away from urban areas and most of our western sight, at places constantly transformed into landscapes too alien for our senses. Tracing the complex threads of each material down to their harvesting sites - an endeavor in itself that might be just as difficult as exploring one's own unconsciousness - leads to a vast habitat of encountering different, unrecognized, intricate, continuous,  and either familiar or painful things. If construction sites territorialize our thinking, mining and harvesting sites, with their large-scale black-boxed infrastructural outsourced constant flow of material and hard under-paid labor, are indeed, deterritorializing matters for our thinking.

“The unconscious contains not only the painful matters which consciousness prefers to not inspect, but also many matters which are so familiar that we do not need to inspect them. Habit, therefore, is a major economy of conscious thought.”

• BATESON, 2000, P. 141

For the matters of such places are both too “painful” and too “familiar” (Bateson, 2000, p. 141) for conscious thought to inspect them, what we have instead are logical structures that automate thinking - a habitual automation that runs not through neurons but through the non-human flows of energy, material, and labor within such infrastructures. Would an inspection into such black-boxed infrastructures reveal not only glimpses of their inner-workings but also matters of thought upon which we have ceased to consciously address? Matters of which persist on the outskirts, peripheral, shadowed lands and landscapes deemed to unconsciousness?

Inspecting places of unconsciousness is unsettling; it affects the senses with both a reverential respect and fear. Respect, for such vast lands are places too big for our comprehension, and seeing with one's bare eyes the infrastructural entanglement with deep-time matters still in their raw and impure states, seem to question our own ontological understanding of reality and how we shape it through our thinking. These infrastructures automate matters of our own habitual cognition of turning the smooth into discrete pieces, but at a scale too big for we to be able to concretely grasp them. Fear, for we know far too well that this automated thinking automates as well bodies through hard underpaid labor, just as we know far too well that it cannot last much longer nor be reversed back to its environmentally balanced and earthly state. These are the matters that are indeed too painful for our consciousness to inspect.

I have sat by the fence of the open-cast mine of Jänschwalde on a Friday afternoon, alone in a deserted place, with a mixture of awe and anxiety. A few weeks earlier, the mining machines have stopped. The place has indeed surfaced to consciousness - after years of struggle, activists made their way to partially stop it. But the retrieving of already mined matters continue, so as the energy production; just as the vast residual land, a picture of years of eroded, sedimented, sorted unconsciousness remains.

I have looked up front the unstoppable treadmills filled with lignite (brown coal) for hours, and not a single gap in between. I have grasped my phone in my pocket, whose battery is electrically charged by that very matter I perceive, just a few kilometers down at the coal-fired power station. This thread happens all at once, constantly, unceasingly.