This paper was originally presented at the 2024 International Gothic Association conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is republished here in slightly modified form.
This paper is a small part of a larger project on salvage. It is also an attempt at an approach and presentation style that still don’t feel like they are mine. I tried to write a paper about body horror and architectural salvage writing, and failed. This paper is haunted by something, and I don’t know how to exorcise it. As Avery F. Gordon writes in her book on haunting and the sociological imagination, “ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish” (p. 8).
Instead, and in an attempt to stay true to the creative-critical methods I promised in my abstract, I’m going to share a few Gothic meditations on the things this failure to write what I set out to write produced, or what I have learnt about salvage and haunting through this failure. It is an experiment with salvaging that work, or with exorcising it. This paper is about architectural salvage. But it is also about salvage on a more personal level.
This paper immediately follows a period of burnout wherein I’ve very seriously considered leaving my job, and possibly research altogether. In 2020, I had just been granted a permanent contract at Winchester School of Art (part of the University of Southampton) after several years of temporary, teaching-only posts. I took on an administrative role with a research allowance. Instead of being rewarding, it was extremely disillusioning, and it exposed me to some of the more brutal exploitations (of myself, of others) that the academy runs on. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. For two years, all of my creative energy was funnelled into keeping broken systems and people afloat, at the same time that I was fundamentally questioning whether this system deserved to be salvaged. I dreaded opening my e-mail, dreaded entering the classroom, and in the end, dreaded the research that my new contract allowed. But you’re so lucky, I told myself. This reassurance didn’t help as much as it should have.
Numbness replaced crisis. Eventually, I stopped being able to push through the things I hated. I went on sick leave.
I passed idle time between stints of pushing through with, I thought, something that had nothing to do with work: learning about the salvage industry – across all kinds of sectors, though in today’s examples I’m only looking at architecture, and the salvage of materials from a house slated for demolition. Salvage is a process that begins when something is beyond saving, or on the verge of being so. When you salvage something you save it in a way, but it also becomes something else. Sometimes something unrecognisable.
Evan Calder Williams describes salvage as a process of ‘waste sorting and value recuperation’ (2010, 20), wading through trash or ruin to try and reclaim something of use.
In 2023, with a new sector-wide research assessment on the horizon (REF 2029 for those based in the UK), a plan was finally put into place in my department to help those who were left recuperate their work. If I could find a suitable research topic, I would be sent off on a four-month sabbatical. I didn’t have anything else besides salvage that I could stand to look at and, figuring there must be some kind of parallel with my work on remix and the Gothic, salvage is what I put down on the form. My application was successful. I turned off my e-mail this spring and re-opened my books and salvage magazines and television programmes and I immediately hit a wall. The information I had been so interested in before refused to stay in my brain, and no matter how long I stared at the blank page or the full one, I couldn’t make meaning of any of it. But I couldn’t stop looking. It made me angry. It made me anxious.
The problem with haunting, Gordon writes, is that the ghost must be reckoned with before it can be satisfied or exorcised: ‘haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed, it seemed to me that haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done’ (2008, p. xvi).
I am haunted by salvage, precisely because I am stuck in a moment of re-learning, because I am on the verge of losing something vital. I don’t know what the work of salvage requires of me, or if I can do what it demands, or if I should. But the material compels me.
‘Being haunted,’ writes Gordon, ‘draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition’ (p. 8). I need to reckon with the structures of my feeling before I can move on past my haunting, or with it. I need to finish unbuilding before I can rebuild.
In working on this project, my body absolutely failed to engage with the texts and objects of my research through close reading or literary deconstruction. I began trying to unbuild them in the only other way that I could think of—literally.
With a pair of scissors I cut out words and phrases that troubled me, or that refused to be understood. By the time I reached the end of a document I had a small pile of paper, fragments of meaning and material that I rearranged into something that, eventually, made some kind of sense to me. This process usually took between two hours to two days. Sometimes my rearrangements were encyclopaedic, often they were poetic, and always they felt Gothic.
Cutting apart and rearranging these pieces of writing felt a bit like trying to construct a summary of the text: one that didn’t necessarily reflect the text’s own arguments, but that represented the way I had been haunted by the act of ‘reading’ and sense-making – by how I was trying to make these texts mine. Through my cutting and re-suturing of these texts, I often made them say things they didn’t necessarily want or mean to say in their original configurations. It felt like a kind of violence, a way of making other people’s stories mine, and it also felt like an act of laying bare the extractive and manipulative nature of all critical interpretation. The materiality of it felt important—smudging my hands with ink and glue, filling my desk with discarded bits of paper, having to stay in my body and wade slowly through the words, selecting them by feel and shape rather than intellectual interest.
I pasted some of these fragments onto pages torn from magazines, or from remaindered library books, and folded them into zines – a medium I love precisely because it doesn’t demand polish or mastery. Zines don’t ask to be perfect. Folding the words up in zines up also felt like keeping them secret, tucking them away into corners, enclosing them in spaces that need to be deliberately unfolded to be accessed again. New images and parallels, sometimes surprising, arose from this folding and fragmenting of the page. In a way these zines became physical manifestations of the ways I was haunted by my attempted work on salvage.
Instead of a paper, what follows, then, are four fragments, or lessons, that my zines took from the architectural literature (each lesson is taken from a different text, and a different zine, and each represented a different attempt to write this paper, to reckon with my haunting):
——– Fragment 1
The language of architectural salvage is often violent, sometimes alluring, and always Gothic.
Sagging floors and walls can be jacked up slowly—over a period of weeks
gut the interior to bare studs
then—
blown-in insulation
blown-in cellulose
an authentic look, smooth luster and durability over latex.
When salvage is held up against the alternative of demolition, it is hailed as life-saving, but it is hard sometimes to say how deep this liveliness goes.
Often it feels like:
“taxidermy preservation.”
Only the outside “skin” remains.
The possibilities of salvage, it is suggested, are limited only by your commitment. Who is committed to salvage? What does this commitment look like?
——– Fragment 2
Your home reflects your character
Materials often used in modern design
glass, plastic and concrete,
benefit greatly from rubbing shoulders
with items that have the patina of age.
We identify with, and are identified by, the places where we dwell. They are prosthetics, extensions of ourselves, bodies that house our bodies. In the first printed book on architecture, Leon Battista Alberti writes that ‘the building is a form of body, which like any other consists of lineaments and matter’ (1988 [1485], p. 5). Olivia Crane extends the metaphor in the 2018 TV adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House: ‘The walls are like bones, the pipes are veins, it needs to breathe, it needs light and flow, and it all works together to keep us safe and healthy inside’ (Hill House e2, ‘Open Casket’, 46:39).
There are gradations, of course, on what a ‘safe and healthy’ body entails, and on who can afford to meet these ideals. As with our fleshly bodies, the health of buildings is raced, classed, and gendered. When we go in to salvage our built bodies, our decisions about what and why and whether to salvage are also raced, classed, and gendered. For those who are most privileged, and most distanced from the possibility of total collapse, salvage becomes a game:
There is something satisfying about knowing that your newly-acquired dining table came from the original British Library, when it was still housed in the British Museum.
to retain the character of a period home is to capture a sense of the past.
Hunting for salvage has all the excitement of the chase.
There is something particularly attractive about an object that has a history
virtuous as well as entertaining, enjoyable, satisfying and educational.
It’s hard to imagine anything more like Aladdin’s cave than the reclamation world.
the obvious pleasure in returning the things that belong to a traditional building, everything in its place,
——– Fragment 3
What does it mean to be responsible for a place, and to claim the right to salvage it?
In the developed world, the UK has by far the worst percentage of homelessness, with one in 200 households sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation. “In 2012/14, four-in-ten adults had no wealth in property at all, but one-in-ten had wealth in multiple properties.” Of these, more than a million properties are unoccupied. Is it the places or the people that need to be rescued?
The British seem uncommonly able to ignore their environment.
Just as we pass by piles of festering rubbish, broken street signs, old refrigerators and mattresses, graffiti and all manner of environmental junk without a care, we seem just as able to turn a blind eye towards the corpse of a house, which may in fact not be just that, but rather a sick home simply in need of hard work, dedication, love and attention.
In late capitalism, the crisis that necessitates salvage is a feature, not a bug. Capitalism thrives on Gothic melodrama:
It goes like this.
empty houses
They sit there atrophying into
The landscape like accidental romantic follies
[…]
Just as a thousand crisp packets blindly blow down the high street, so broken sash windows rattle wantonly around our land.
Rather than focusing on how to make sense of what has been wasted, some rebuilders use the language of loss to remake spaces in their own image. Though the process is called salvage and the rebuilder framed as a saviour, the language ultimately breaks down into a logic of erasure and demolition:
Eradicate the rotten teeth in otherwise smiling streets.
Demolition is a luxury afforded to those who don’t have to live in the rubble.
——– Fragment 4
How do we know what is worth salvaging?
Not everything is designed to last for long enough to be salvaged.
Some things are designed to last, but we can choose not to salvage them anyway.
the willful undoing of the built
environment
is a form of sanctioned self-destruction,
the loss of collective memory
an editing of our built history.
Writing about post-hurricane salvage in New Orleans, Hazel Denhart writes that currently, salvage and ‘deconstruction is only available to those with the financial means, or […] supported by [a] humanitarian agency’ (2009b, p. 200). She demonstrates that if governments bothered to cost the whole process, all-in it is significantly cheaper to un-build than to demolish, even in a large-scale crisis scenario like that of hurricane Katrina. It is also much more sustainable; building demolition accounts for ¼ of landfill waste in the US (Endicott et al 2005, p. 16). Both emotionally and financially, it is less costly to salvage than to burn it all down.
un-building is a significant undertaking, requiring a
combination of careful planning and brute physical
force.
rigorous disruption
Normative building systems are broken down, releasing the potential energy stored within static walls.
Of necessity salvage exists in a network of community, expertise, and care. Denhart also outlines the visceral, Gothic hope salvage can bring to situations where the only alternative is total loss. Katrina victims, she writes, ‘characterized the sharing of their [architectural salvage] material as akin to donating human body parts’ […and ] deconstruction was like, ‘‘caring for a person, you know, helping them have a dignified death” (GD, M, L 148).’
In an uncanny occurrence, lost places are
apparitions of desire and loss.
that solidify and dissolve in space.
Dark holes become places of
passage.
A network of undone spaces,
a grass-roots building deconstruction
re-seeding fields of vacancy
What does this mean? How can I make it mean something? I don’t know. But it haunts me.
Have I salvaged this paper? Have I exorcised it? I don’t think so. And I am no longer sure it matters. Really, I share it in the hopes that we can work through it together. As Gordon concludes, ‘ultimately haunting is about how to transform a shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation’ (208). I present my haunted paper to you today because the process of salvage and rebuilding and of reckoning with ghosts can’t be undertaken alone. Instead, ‘In this necessarily collective undertaking, the end, which is not an ending at all, belongs to everyone’ (208).
Download PDFs of the full mini-zines mentioned in this talk here:
THE BEST USE OF SALVAGE (2023)
MAKING AN OLD HOUSE ATTRACTIVE (2024)
For instructions on how to fold a mini-zine click here.