This will be a little bit of a stream of consciousness post. I defend this by stating that, in sorting through the ideas of discarded trash, the working through of ideas related to nostalgia and the “social death” of late-capitalist waste, incurs a kind of necessary airing out, an inherent kind of decluttering (Guins 225).
My Haunted Media project kind of builds on Raiford Guin’s work on the “afterlife” of video-games in its treatment of objects as imprintations of humanity. (Which, as a side note, I wonder to what extent Guin’s is using or employing afro-pessimism’ terminology of social death that occurs in Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death. I was only previously familiar with that phrase through works in Africana courses).
My point in this is that I’ve always read the term social death in relation to humans. So for the term to refer to discarded emblems of humanity, the objects left after us, is a complicated reframing process for me.
To what extent are “objects” ever socially alive? When they’re in use by the humans who maintain their necessity and “use-value” (Guins 226). Guins sort of eludes to the fact that some objects may become more “alive” when they’re dead, they incur a kind of legacy value in our eyes as consumers.
But I’m more curious about this idea that we look at objects as somehow sentient, as having this kind of personified relation to us. Especially when thinking about the “uncanny valley,” I wonder to what extent that term necessarily only applies to robots.
The first thing I conjure in my mind is the series Toy Story, specifically the last movie in this trilogy. The audience of children and adults alike were forced to watch childhood toys face the only immortality objects can truly have–the decomposition of their use to humans (Guins 223-225). Many characterize the last Toy Story movie as frankly depressing and discomforting.
I myself experienced this, recalling my own shorn-headed barbies and dust covered baby dolls that lay in piles somewhere to mold in a storage bin. The idea that the objects we have fondness for somehow undergo an emotional abandoning, a kind of killing, I think represents perfectly this notion of the uncanny valley.
My questions following Game After are to what extent can we come to empathize, as Guins seems to show, with objects? And how do our notions of temporality and self become bound in the materiality of the objects our hands ply on a daily basis?