Hauntology : Sapphire and Steel and the objects of our past.

  Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher begins with a passage about a British sci-fi television programme called Sapphire and Steel that was shown on ITV from 1979 to 1982. The premise of the series is that there are two characters, Sapphire and Steel, who are sent to fix problems with time breaking down. They are not quite human with special abilities like telekinesis, reading the history of objects, and the two of them being able to communicate mentally. As Fisher puts it, “Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down.  In one of the earlier assignments, Steel complains that these temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings’ predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras.” (pg5) The first story was about how the saying of nursery rhymes worked as an incantation across time. This was because they have been said over and over again throughout time that these words become timeless.

Contemporary meets the past in Liverpool.

  Whereas the plot point of the series were these objects of anachronism causing the breakages in time, it seems fitting that the time period in which the series was made was the beginning of Thatcher-ism (and the American compatriot Reagan-ism). The 80s were defined with wealth generation for the rich while an ending to social protections, like unions, for the working classes. Like Michael Douglas said in the 1987 film Wall Street, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." And that greed corresponded to the consumption of goods being made of lower and lower quality materials. The culture of the time was no longer about maintaining one's goods but replacing them as they broke down at faster and faster speeds. Perhaps this is what was so counter culture with the punk rock aesthetic and its DIY approach. The growth of plastics exploded in this time becoming pervasive in everything. As Fisher says, “While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.  It doesn’t feel like the future.  Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet.  We remain trapped in the 20th century[.]” (pg8)

Sapphire and Steel from the 3rd series.

  In the 3rd series of Sapphire and Steel, the problem they are sent to fix is that there is a dinner party being thrown by a rich businessman celebrating the 50th anniversary of his company. The theme of the dinner party is the 30s as that was when the company was started. The guests are required to wear outfits tailor-made with materials only from the 1930s in order to attend and enter the house. Electric razors are mysteriously replaced with safety razors and other personal accessories transform, with the guests assuming that it must all be a very elaborate trick by the host. Much in the vein of the game Clue, the dinner guests start dying and the guests all accuse one another by bringing up dark pasts. The reasons for their deaths are discovered to be that the youngest are dying because they never lived during the 30s and time is attempting to fix itself by eliminating them with the objects in the house themselves being the murderers. The knowledge of the past is haunting those who never experienced it by killing them off. This crack through time ends up bringing back a ghost who died in the 30s and in order to fix this problem with time Sapphire and Steel make sure that this person dies again to reset time.

  As product design switched to designing products not for longevity and repair but to be replaced, it feels like we started opening up a gap for anachronism to occur. We have our items from the 1930s continuing to exist, but the objects from our near present are already breaking down and disappearing. People's lives used to be filled with the objects of the past. Family heirlooms were things that spanned generations. Now in our current era of consumption, those family heirlooms are being replaced with items that are not made to last generations. The contemporary anachronism is that we are being surrounded by items that don't reflect the history nor areas in which we inhabit. The artefacts of our homes are less so now from different eras so much as they are cheaply-made mass-produced objects from a world away, but found everywhere.

  It doesn't help that the creation of the objects in our lives have been outsourced. The industrial elements of our cities have disappeared. For example, when traveling the world and visiting exotic locations when one visits the souvenir shop it is filled with plastic trinkets from China not regional specialities. Antique shops are where we are left to find the unique items that used to be locally made. Sadly, antique shops are disappearing. Perhaps it is part of a cultural shift away from people purchasing these kinds of objects, although I think it is partially that and a multitude of other things. Such as rising rents that displace with how the shops function on a slim profit margin and the internet marketplace decentralizing the shop format. It's a nice convenience to be able to find almost anything you might need on eBay (although there has been a rising trend problem of knockoffs flooding the selections) but it lacks the same thrill of finding diamonds in the rough. Although, with this online convenience, these objects lose their sense of place. To purchase something online from the far corners of the world means that these things arrive with a lost sense of where they have arrived from.

  Since objects are disposable and replaceable, our buildings are what remains to give us a sense of identity through regional differences. Much like the issue with our objects being outsourced, so have our building materials. Where once we used to have an array of different brick colors due to local soil composition, we have gravitated towards a generic international housing format (sans brick). Like the 1979 Russian comedy film, The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath, where a man accidentally goes to another city to find that it looks the same due to standardization. He heads home to find an identical looking apartment building at an identical address and finds what he assumes to be a stranger living in his supposed home, but is in fact in the wrong city. Where this could be used in the West as a means of making an argument against the banality of Communist design, it could also be argued that the Capitalism of the West is fast-tracking this banality in its own fashion. For example : AirSpace. (But that can be a deep dive for another day.)

What defines this AirBnb as being in Liverpool ?

  Whereas Sapphire and Steel argued in their series that objects from the past disrupt the present, I would take the opposite stand that a lack of objects from our past leave us feeling disconnected from our present. If we don't know where we are from, or where we are, how are we supposed to perceive where we are headed ?