Making Nothing: Institutional Practices of Producing Absence II

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

How do you make nothing? Brian Rappert and Wenda Bauchspies (2014) suggest that the “potential of what isn’t” not only signals lack, it can alert us to a misplaced presence, foster an appreciation of presence, or even be a presence. A range of scholarship has worked to reveal, unveil, or make present that which is normally unseen, yet the actual making of absence, and its affects and effects, remains under-examined. Many institutions routinely practice erasure: courts erase debts through bankruptcy; websites disappear; engineering firms design to remove noise from buildings and vehicles; food scientists mask off flavors in foods or medicines; environmental crews “clean up” toxic spills; corporations swallow each other, then let entire arms of production “die” out. These erasures are rarely complete; traces obdurately remain of the someones, and somewheres that make nothing. What types and forms of labor – visible or otherwise – go into the making of nothing? What infrastructures are put into place to enable the making, and circulation, of these nothings? How are meanings emptied out of objects, places, services, and peoples to facilitate global flows (Ritzer 2007)? How does the making of nothing shape aesthetic choices, daily environments, and behaviors (Bourdieu 1979)? Finally, what “hauntings” (Gordon 2008) do these institutional practices of erasure impose on bodies and communities? This open panel invites abstract submissions that explore the techniques, negotiations, practices, and consequences of making nothing as well as practices of mobilization and circulation inherent to these processes of making nothing.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Christy Spackman, Harvey Mudd College

Discussant

• Jennifer Croissant, University Of Arizona

Individual Presentations

• Unbreathable: The Absence of Air in Asthma Treatment - Ali Kenner, Drexel University

• ‘Nothing to See Here’ – An Ethnography of Absence at the European Spallation Source - Ivanche Dimitrievski, Linköping University, Tema-T (Tema Technology and Social Change)

• Trading in the Mystery of Commodities - Susanne Freidberg, Dartmouth College