Not Here - There (2020) - Trey Taylor's Portfolio

Not Here - There was shot over a four-day trip trip to Paris in the Summer of 2020. It explores the disorientation and homogenisation of space-time compression characteristic of late capitalism, situated within a wider meditation on the nature of the commodity form and its aesthetic-political implications - and indeed, whether it's pull can be escaped.

When I stepped out of Gare du Nord station, I was immediately met with the sight of a McDonalds. This particular McDonalds had clearly adopted some elements of the local vernacular, the ubiquitous Golden Arches now resting upon an appropriately French veranda, crested by swirling details. In one sense, this was totally unsurprising; the same sight would befall you exiting St Pancras, or the New York Metro, or New Delhi central station. But this innocuous familiarity was precisely what was disconcerting. International capital, needing to forever expand its site of accumulation, ingratiates itself into various distinct communities; the net effect, of course, is that their distinction is lost rather quickly. (McDonalds, it should be noted, has restaurants in over half of the world’s countries. When one examines the patterns of McDonald’s international distribu tion, where it is absent it is not the result of any conflict with local cuisine or sensibilities, but with local purchasing power. The rule of thumb is that where there’s money, there is McDonalds.)

There is a reason why capitalism so often operates through the expansion of sameness. It's central move, you will see, is one of subsumption. The commodity form and the nexus of exchange operate by making unlike things alike, since exchange requires commensurability: if I trade a pair of shoes for your old iPod, we are asserting the functional equivalence of these items in the process. Under capitalism, money operates as the medium of exchange, with the complexity and heterogeneity of distinct objects reduced to their monetary value, their exchange-value, and are bought and sold on the basis of this. The radical differences between the coltan for the battery, the factory premises, and the labour of the Chinese workers that went into the production of that iPod are all reduced to fungible quantities. This is how the production process can operate; it is also how the workers are driven to suicide. The fact is, of course, that the physical and cognitive energies of a living, breathing, embodied human being is radically distinct to the inert coltan. The effects of the deployment, operation, and disposal of the iPod is rather unlike that of a human being. However terrible your music is, you cannot drive the iPod to suicide.

By subsuming human labour under the commodity form, then, we do real violence to those qualitative, substantive aspects that are constitutively denied. The form is simply insufficient to capture the complexities of the object - in this case, an actual human subject, with desires, fears, dreams, needs, whose psychic stability is pushed to breaking point by the exceptional duress of exploitative working conditions. What Marxist economist Ernst Mandel termed late capitalism was defined by the extension of the commodity logic across basically all social processes and arenas of life, the total incorporation of capitalism’s ‘outside’ - both spatially and psychologically: the exotic no-man’s lands now rationalised according to the imperatives of multinational agriculture or Western manufacturing, and our desires formalised and exploited by advertisers and public relations companies. This inexorable push, capitalism always seeking more and more sources of accumulation, means that more and more of the world is subsumed in the manner elucidated, which means that more and more of our distinct and heterogenous phenomena are treated as if they are quantitatively commensurable first and foremost, which, in turn, often effaces much of the texture and distinctiveness of reality. As the commodity thus extends it levels, flattens out, steals the richness of our social world for its singular end of profit.

Perry Anderson writes of contemporary space that ‘where the thematic opposition of heterogeneity and homogeneity is invoked, it can only be this brutal process that is the ultimate referent: the effects that result from the power of commerce and then capitalism proper - which is to say, sheer number as such, number now shorn and divested of its own magical heterogeneities and reduced to equivalences - to seize upon a landscape and flatten it out, reorganize it into a grid of identical parcels, and expose it to the dynamic of a market that now reorganises space in terms of its identical value.’ Identikit new builds, springing up across an overheated housing market in the South-East of England; empty towers cutting jaggedly into the London skyline; degenerate ‘re- generations’, expelling a community for the rich’s safety deposit boxes, the ex-homes dangled first in Hong Kong’s real estate market - such aesthetic poverty and irrationalities derives from true poverty, the poverty of the commodity form.

I take that term - aesthetic poverty - from the late Mark Fisher, who used it to refer to the ‘dreary banality of these cloned spaces,’ ‘the dismal vistas of England’s hyper-corporatised high-streets.’ In the wake of the London riots in 2011, Fisher pushed back against reactionary attempts to position the participants as pure nihilists. ‘One feature of the moral panic over the riots’, Fisher wrote, ‘was the claim that the rioters “destroyed their own communities”. But this presupposes both that the rioters belonged to a “community” and that chain stores could constitute any sort of “commu- nity” in any case.’ JDSports and TKMaxx are the defining spatial artifacts of everyday life in this sense. We walk according to the prescriptions of shopping centres. The whole world increasingly appears as the perfume section in an international airport: indecipherable, winding routes, dazzled by gratuitously beautiful headshots, their pores glistening with impossible perfection - the only discernible logic of the whole stupefaction being to coax you into purchasing more things they’ve convinced you you need. The point of the spectacle is to conceal its banality, its paucity. The more things there are, the less there seems to be.

And so we arrive once again at Mc Donalds. A remarkable feat of expansion and standardisation - in fact, expansion by way of standardisation - it is of course not alone in its colonisation of the world’s cuisines. Nestle now sends flotillas up the Amazon, hooking rural communities on their Frankenstein bars. A burgeoning occupation in Brazillian favelas is being a door to door salesperson for these American conglomerates, flogging reduced price Cadbury’s to communities in desperate need of proper sustenance. (Their energy to cost ratio, not to mention their scientifically augmented addictiveness, makes them an offer you can’t refuse.) The ‘authentic’ of course still exists, but it exists as its own kind of commodity: the perfect, most organic experience is sold to you at a premium price, the escape of homogenisation being rationalised as a luxury good. Genuinely subcultural, resistive, and oppositional elements are now fugitives; they hide in the fractures and fragments of the new space, the market space, capitals space. To meet them, one must also be on the run, and even then, a frostiness born of self-preservation impedes your greeting.

In Paris, I did not meet them. I’m not sure I even met Paris. I met something; that is for certain, but something that existed in its absence, its negation. The great Republic, the site of the first bourgeois revolution that sparked the age of upturnings, once again seems afflicted by a decadence, a wilting. Scars from the gilet-jaune’s sporadic uprisings littered the facades. The inadequacy of the liberal ‘oughts’ - the non-materiality of merely formal rights and liberties - is visible in the occupation of its symbolic sites by the logic of capital. The Champs- Elysse, now a procession of luxury good stores, sign-twirlers, and beggers, is testament to liberal ‘equality.’ History, like everywhere else, has stopped here; it is now preserved, ticketed, decapitated and displayed. Space and time are linked in an eternal sameness; the sound of credit-card swipes echoing ad infinitum, chained to the clinking of coins tossed into a homeless man’s hat.

Faced with this obnoxious reality, the act of seeing must become an act of radical selectivity. One must avert their eyes from the totalising spectacle, must see the gaps of the images, the protrusions and distortions at the edges. The violent act inherent to photography, which abstracts a space and moment from the flow of matter and light, bears an affinity to this. Photography was always close to the epochal energies of the 1879 revolution itself, the guillotine and the camera intertwined. In the former invention, ‘the opening, meant to keep the neck completely immobile and perpendicular to the plane of the falling blade, is called the objectif - “lens” in French.’ ‘The person assigned precisely to take hold of the head of the condemned by the ears so it falls on target, is frequently nicknames the “photographer.”’ The central invention of the camera, ‘made up of a blade pierced with a hole that instantly falls between two grooves,’ was christened the 'guil- lotine shutter.' It arrests the flow of light to the sensor, creates an image through the severing of the beams. The truth of photography is in this resistance to overexposure; its proper use must be to combat the delirium and distraction, the proliferation of images and sounds which washout the world’s richness.

‘The Theatre of the Death of the Republic’ reads our first image; but I hope the series is more than that. The theatricality is apt, it must be said. Adorno is correct when he laments in Minima Moralia that ‘there is no longer beauty or consolation expect in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better’ - not only because the beauty of negation can never be underestimated, the strange allure and amusement congealed in the artifacts of a broken social system. But also because it always holds ‘fast to the possibility of what is better’; the discrepancies present in the force-field between subject and object, between capitalism’s virile self-ideal and its morose reality, pointing in the direction of the potential space, the non-space, the space-of-that-which-could-be. Not here; not yet.

TREY TAYLOR