The Final Frontier
Space
I grew up knowing George Carlin as Mr. Conductor, my parents knew him as the dark and controversial comedian. It wasn’t until my early college years that I came to know him beyond those roles, not just as a satirist and observationist, but as a philosopher.
Those familiar with Carlin’s work knew that his favorite subject matter was the excesses, oddities, and hypocrisies of human life (though he was also big on the use language, both everyday and profane). The man once described the human condition saying, “If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.” In the course of his life-long career, he brought forth the notion of “stuff” repeatedly. Consider this joke:
“So stuff is important. You gotta take care of your stuff. You gotta have a place for your stuff. Everybody’s gotta have a place for their stuff. That’s what life is all about, tryin’ to find a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.[…] So, now you’ve got a houseful of stuff. And even though you might like your house, you gotta move. You gotta get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff! And that means you gotta move all your stuff. Or maybe, put some of your stuff in storage. Storage. Imagine that! There’s a whole industry based on keepin’ an eye on other people’s stuff.” <!–[endif]–>
I apologize for the length, but that pretty well summarizes a large portion of the fixation with property that we have in the United States. The United States (as discussed briefly in the last posting) was founded in part due to the right to taxation only with representation (the principle the ‘tea party’ protesters of last week may or may not have possibly sorta kinda understood and maybe somehow been trying to state that they wanted to revert to because they were in a sorta kinda repressed or underrepresented minority maybe?). The US version of capitalism, differentiating itself from the English version, involves the right to not have property taken away without just cause. Carlin commented, “Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.”
And the American dream? “You have to be asleep to believe it.” (Video below. Worth watching. Contains strong language.)
But why is all this important, this fixation with stuff? Stuff has one distinct property: It goes somewhere. It’s physical. And though it may be just as real as abstract concepts such as love, “stuff” takes space. It goes somewhere. Space and stuff have a dynamic relationship. Anything that occupies space? Stuff. Anything that can be classified as “stuff” inversely occupies space. As Naomi Klien notes, the wars of businesses fight is the fight for space, the space of billboards, the space for store fronts, the space on store shelves, the space in factories, the ad space on the newspaper page, the space in the kitchen cupboards and bedroom closets, and market territory. Even beyond, the fight for space is so embedded in the business culture that when no space is left, more space is made—space that is essentially imaginary, the airwaves, the sound waves, traveling across television and radio. These wavelengths are theoretically unlimited, but government and industry place standards and regulations, making the unphysical—and therefore limitless—limited. The same method of limiting the limitless occurs in the human mind. Infinite in capacity, the human mind is capable of nearly anything. However, the battles for physical space as also battles for space of mind, recollection, and fixation. In terms of ads, product connotations, experiences with the corporate world, our limitless minds are limited to the most relevant and strongest stimuli, gleaned from the available space. It’s just that important to our corporate America that we buy “stuff.”
The joke you quoted points out an interesting thing about space. So much of space and how we view and interact with it is based on stuff. The part where he said “If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time” really made me think. If we had less stuff we would have an almost unlimited space to exist and interact in. But our incesent need to own stuff ties us down and limits our space.
Nice thoughts!