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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.
1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 263.
2 Ibid., 792.
3 Macabre as it would be, it is hard not to think that the profits made on selling the scrap as scrap of the Costa Concordia, rather than as anonymous materials hiding its tracks, would be far greater, especially in a span of years so obsessed with “reclaimed” materials that can name their provenance.
4 It's this meaning that underwrites Guy Debord's line in his final film: “Wreckers write their names only in water,” meaning, in short, propaganda by the self-negating deed.
5 Much of the town does so for reasons that anticipate George Miller's Mad Max five years later, although without the veil of post-fallout “necessity”: because they want to act out cargo cult fantasies and, above all, to modify their cars into death-mobiles ready for all occasions.
6 Wells, Jamin, “Professionalization and Cultural Perceptions of Marine Salvage, 1850–1950,” Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord, 17, 2 (2007), 1–22Google Scholar, 2.
7 A compelling effort to complicate the earlier racial history of this image – that of the Protestant white man as comber of the deep – can be found in Ungerer, Gustav, “Recovering a Black African's Voice in an English Lawsuit: Jacques Francis and the Salvage Operations of the Mary Rose and the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus, 1545–c.1500” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17 (2005), 255–71Google Scholar.
8 Wells, 15. There are potentially interesting echoes here of what John Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 55, sees as the tension between visions of the smooth and the striated in mid-nineteenth-century American literature's oceanic-imperialist imaginary.
9 Ibid., 16. See also Wells, Jamin, “The Lure of the Shore: Authenticity, Spectacle, and the Wreck of the St. Paul,” New Jersey History, 126, 2 (2011), 58–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),7.
11 Ibid. 8.
12 See Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 35.
13 Dorothea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6–7.
14 Salvage is best conceived as an operation within these drifts of meaning, rather than a driving force itself or a proposed solution. As mentioned, even if conceived as a solution or tactic, it has no inherent “politics” and cannot be chalked up as either cogently radical or reactionary. Simultaneously, it is a small image of how to function against the policed reproduction of capital, gender, and empire, and it is the form of thinking that undergirds and naturalizes paths of capital that end in the brutally toxic work of e-waste salvage yards of Agbogbloshie, Ghana.
15 Enough so that I identified this in Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, under the term salvagepunk, as an ongoing tendency whose instances had become more and more frequent in recent decades. There I argue it further as a possible framework through which to approach a relation between speculative culture and social history more broadly.
16 Mark Rich, C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2010), 291.
17 A. Bertram Chandler, “The Wandering Buoy,” in Chandler, The Hard Way Up (New York: Ace Books, 1972), 54–68, 55.
18 Paul J. McAuley, “The Passenger,” in Gardner R. Dozois, ed., The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003), 71–94, 73.
19 Charles Platt, Garbage World (New York: Berkley, 1967), 33.
20 Otherwise a player would not advance. She would just spend dusk to dawn hitting the walls and burrowing the ground, at which point she would simply be playing Minecraft, a game structured by the same principle on an even more granular level: smack a swath of pixels like it is a depth, and it will yield chunks that can be used to make masses, heights, fortresses, and other things that can themselves be smashed and left to gape.
21 In recent cinema of this ilk, that is a capacity literally limited to mutants, such as Magneto rewiring the Sentinels to do his bidding in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
22 Fitting that at this very moment, there is a game in development called Salvaged, in which you act as the commander of a deep-space salvage crew, directing their action not just from a computer but from a computer with a tablet for dual-hand puttering.