The Auto Salvage: “On the Inside Looking Deeper.”

    Autosalvage: the band recorded a single album for RCA records in 1968, played a few dozen gigs and then disappeared. They were discovered and named by Frank Zappa who simply took their song “Auto Salvage,” elided the space, and thus created the tantalizing neologism Autosalvage – the noun “auto” returning to its primordial prefix and the noun “salvage” dancing into a verb. The album isn’t astounding. It’s not musically groundbreaking or sentimentally heartbreaking or even backbreaking “hard rock” (it’s heavy, but not that heavy). Yet, it’s solid rock & roll – replete with buttery melodies somehow (and strangely) mixed with clanky, rollicking gearshifts. It’s a “nugget” in the parlance of record collecting circles, a diamond in rock’s rough classic quarry, or more appropriately, a shiny break-pad in a pile of rusted-out auto parts.

    The album begins with a woman’s serene voice describing an idyllic locale: “I know a place high in the mountains…in Switzerland…where there are lakes, and trees, and woodland paths and music, beautiful music everywhere….” She speaks as if conjuring a fable. Her voice whimsy and whispering, a fairy casting a dreamspell: the word “high” is pitched into the clouds, the “a” in “paths” is pronounced like “ma and pa,” and she stretches “beautiful” as if reflecting on the timbre of her own voice. Like an accident (there is no other way to put it) the narrator’s sleepy introduction abruptly trails off and a 60s fuzz guitar baths the auditory space. “Auto Salvage” – the first track on the album – begins. The difference between the utopian, mountainous images invoked by the narration and the junky noise of the distorted guitar is startling. The image of the auto salvage yard – replete with knolls of discarded parts, smashed auto-pancakes puddled with oil, vistas of narrow, scrap metal canyons – disassembles the peaceful mountain locale initially invoked by the feminine voice. The band was, after all, from New York City and not San Francisco.

    Yet, this initial auditory discordance seems slight when compared with the inaudible difference that Zappa created: the difference between the name of the first track, “Auto Salvage,” a place, and the name of the band “Autosalvage,” an action. What might autosalvage mean? Following words like “autopilot” or “automobile,” autosalvage implies an automatic salvaging process – a self-driven salvaging process. Yet, it also suggests a salvaging of the self, a self-saving, the “auto-“ prefix stemming from the Greek word for “self.” On the one hand, it is the meaning of this neologism, this “autosalvage,” that I wish to follow within the ambulation of thought and within the etiological drift of research; on the other hand, I am generally concerned with the auto salvage as a particular manifestation of our current cultural geography, a marginal space involved with the transmission of objects and the circulation of desire.

The Exhaust Pipe

    Modernization is a process by which capitalism uproots and makes mobile what is grounded, clears away or obliterates that which impedes circulation…. Modernization becomes a ceaseless and self-perpetuating creation of new needs, new consumption, and new production (10). - Jonathan Crary

    The auto salvage often appears on the edge, the selvedge, of the city. If we view the city as an organism – or like the city of Leonia in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that renews itself everyday, exporting its garbage to its escalating borders – the auto salvage appears first on the epidermal layer of the metro, a waste-yard that collects the sloughed objects of urban vehicular use, the cleared away objects that are no longer auto-mobile. If the salvage yard emerges within the city it inhabits industrial zones or dilapidated warehouse districts; it lodges beside train tracks or nests along highways; it lives where people don’t want to live. Often fenced with corrugated metal walls and looping spirals of barbed wire – and populated by the legendary “junkyard dog” – these marginal salvage yards visually and physically deny the exterior and harbor a secretive interior. Like our domestic middens and exurban landfills, salvage yards visually efface our discards, but the barking hound and whorls of wire belie the protection of value, of property.

    Following Yves-Alain Bois, the auto salvage is related to the zone: “On an urban scale, the zone is what dust is on the scale of a single dwelling: it is the waste that inevitably accompanies production… (226).” Indeed, the auto salvage lies between the used car lot and the metal shredder. It is a zone of accumulated waste from past production, but from this waste objects are extracted that still harbor a use-value; the salvage yard functions to separate the useable from the unusable, to save a possible use-value from loss. In this way the salvage yard is similar to the junkyard. Although “junk” can mean useless material, it typically harbors the potential for reuse; hence, “One man’s junk is another’s treasure.” Rubbish, waste, and refuse designate unusable objects or matter without value. They may retain the mark of humanity but are emptied of worth, even salvageable worth. Depending on the particular yard, unusable materials and reusable parts are present in various degrees. Sometimes the operators of the salvage yard have removed, collected and arranged the valuable parts so that customers need not wander into the corridors of eviscerated, stacked cars; while in other yards a customer may extract a needed part from a vehicle by him- or herself, thus acquiring the object at a cheaper rate.

    There are two utopian systems antithetical to the autosalvage. First, Calvino’s city of Leonia represents a total unchanging, unbroken (and unbreaking) system. Its daily “urban renewal” undermines the premise of reuse central to the concept of salvage: in Leonia one use reigns supreme. Citizens literally awake within and enveloped by the new. Calvino’s imaginary city acts as an allegory for a completely “disposable society” (diapers being the preeminent example, hence Leonia’s “joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity”). The desire to discard and excrete completely obscures any desire to use-up and exhaust. Leonia forms the pinnacle of modernization: a constantly renewed consumption that endlessly consumes everything but which “consumes” nothing, which uses up nothing. Second, one imagines a system of products built on the model of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “One-Hoss Shay.” Holmes’ poem narrates the yarn of a deacon who builds a one-horse carriage composed “in such a logical way / It ran a hundred years to a day.” That is, each part of the structure ran perfectly for one hundred years, at which point – on the same day and at the same moment – the entire carriage “went to pieces all at once,-- / All at once, and nothing first,-- / Just as bubbles do when they burst.” Thus the carriage retained and exhausted its value completely; no one part outlasted another. In The Human Use of Human Beings Norbert Wiener describes it thus:

    Actually the “one-hoss shay” represents the pinnacle of engineering, and is not merely a humorous fantasy. If the tires had lasted a moment longer than the spokes or the dashboard than the shafts, these parts would have carried into disuse certain economic values. These values could either have been reduced without hurting the durability of the vehicle as a whole, or they could have been transferred equally throughout the entire vehicle to make the whole thing last longer. Indeed, any structure not of the nature of the “one-hoss shay” is wastefully designed (60).

    For Wiener, Holmes’ carriage represented the ideal of engineering not the humorous and wry comment on the inevitable “wearing out” of all logical systems that Holmes had intended. Wiener’s “pinnacle of engineering” represents a society without waste and without reuse. It is a society where consumption actually means consumption: to use-up entirely, to completely exhaust or burn-up, hence what remains of Holmes’ carriage after a hundred years: “The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, / As if it had been to the mill and ground!” Both utopian imaginations – Leonia and the One-Hoss Shay – conceive societies without breakdown and hence without the need of the auto salvage. The former defeats breakdown by temporally excluding its possibility: objects do not have a chance to break since they are always renewed. The latter defeats breakdown by spatially distributing “value” throughout the parts of the system: objects do not malfunction since their parts simultaneously wear out. Whereas Leonia does not exhaust any object, Holmes’ carriage, as a model (for the) commodity, depicts the exhaustion of every object. These two visions exist on opposite poles of a spectrum of exhaust, a word ultimately meaning “to draw out.” The auto salvage exists between these two “utopias.” It draws out useful items from discarded or broken down vehicles, and it separates out the worn parts to be sent “to the mill and ground.” On the one hand the salvage yard draws out scrap to be recycled for new production, and on the other it recirculates the reusable and re-mobilizes the immobile. On the one hand the salvage yard perpetuates modernization in its reclamation of materials for new production, and on the other it stymies modernization through the reuse of the old.

An Odd Shoe

    Language itself engages in perpetual autosalvage – a diachronic self-salvage. That is, language constantly reintegrates itself into itself; it tills itself. Words are constantly reused in new assemblages that bestow upon them new meanings. Language reuses its parts, salvaging value that can be reapplied in new situations. The word “salvage” burrows toward the Latin salvāre, to save. Years ago salvage referred to the fee that one received from voluntarily saving a ship – and/or its cargo – from danger or harm; this rescue could occur before a wreck or after. It also referred to the instance of saving a ship and/or its contents. Finally, the term was used to name the actual property that was rescued. Only in the 20th century did the word “salvage” blossom into a verb, not only meaning to recover property from a shipwreck (thus attached to its older noun form) but also, more generally, to appropriate another’s unused or discarded property for further use. The historically older noun “salvage” marks objects – the act and worth of their rescue, their being as property. The historically recent verb form of “salvage” activates the subject in relation to objects; that is, “to salvage” indicates the action of saving another’s objects from disuse. The old noun “salvage” marks objects separate from the self; the historically recent verb form of “salvage” activates the subject in relation to objects that have become intrinsically interwoven with the definition and operation of the subject itself. I am not here salvaging a discarded word from the past in order to reinsert it within a contemporary discourse or situation; rather I am merely noticing a moment of salvage that language has already accomplished. Viewing a word’s history offers a glimpse of its shifting gears of significance and allows one to pose the question of why a new meaning has emerged. In order to investigate this why of a word-shift I turn toward the shore of the present where the past washes up only to recede into the future, washing up and leaving the spoils of its surge splayed upon a tablecloth of sand. The present is but the detritus of the past; the future, but the hope of what to make of the past’s wreckage.

    In the short story “Salvage,” contained in a collection where the author engaged in her own act of historical salvage, Emma Donoghue writes, “Over the last ten years, I have often stumbled over a scrap of history so fascinating that I had to stop whatever I was doing and write a story about it.” Indeed, she writes that her stories are the “flotsam and jetsam” of history, an act of “digging up the past” (Preface). In her story “Salvage” a shipwreck is brought to the attention of Anna Gurney and Sara Buxton (cousins who were historical figures, a modern Dioskore for Anna Gurney in particular was remembered for her “attempts to rescue drowning sailors” (127)). On the shore, the determined Anna manages to motivate her fellow townspeople in the succor of two Russian sailors, who, upon being saved wish to remain on the shore gathering their lost possessions instead of retiring to a nearby barn in order to warm themselves. I extract the end of the story at length:

    But as the two men were being wheeled up the beach, the more alert one wailed in protest and climbed out of the barrow.
   Anna caught up with him as he was crawling down the beach; she bent out of her chair to touch his wet head.
   “What is it now?” asked Fowell, his nose streaming. He looked at Sarah and raised his eyebrows. She gave a little bewildered shrug.
   “Wait,” Anna told them. Then, after another exchange of strange guttural phrases, she said over her shoulder, “As far as I can tell – though the dialect is a strange one – they want to save themselves.”
   “Save themselves?” shouted Fowell. His nose was purple. “Save themselves from what? Why would we have bloody well saved them from drowning if we meant them any harm?”
   Anna went into another huddle with the sailors, then straightened up in her chair. “I have it now. How stupid of me. The word must correspond to salvage. It appears they want to stay to see what can be saved. From the water, you know.”
Fowell let out his breath in a baffled puff. “Nonsense. What’s there to salvage that’s worth their catching their death?”
   Sarah stared out at the gnawed, splintered remains of the Russian ship. She wondered what detritus the tide might bring in, tonight or tomorrow. A barrel of spirits? An odd shoe? A scattering of wet letters from home? The bodies of their shipmates?
   But Anna wheeled herself past Fowell up the beach to Sarah. Her face was marked with the wind’s radiance. “Let them be. Come along,” she said. “We’ll fetch them more blankets and flasks of hot wine” (125-6).

    The salvage within Donoghue’s story is doubled: the rescue of the sailors by the townspeople and subsequently the sailors salvaging the objects that remain. Indeed, before Anna translates correctly she mistakes that the sailors want to “save themselves” when in truth they want to save their belongings. Yet, she does not completely mistake the word the first time for the sailors do indeed wish to save themselves, that is, through the very act of saving their objects – their scuttled memories, their quotidian belongings, their “letters from home.” It is as if the foreign sailors, saved from one death, must save themselves from another potential death, the death of their past selves and their past lives. Fowell, one of the townspeople, exclaims, “What’s there to salvage that’s worth their catching their death?” He does not understand that to forgo the salvage of the remains the sailors would condemn their-selves to the death of forgetting. The potential for the second death resides in the looming loss of their objects. It is not just life – the fact of living within the present – that bestows meaning upon the self, but the objects that accompany and occupy a life. Objects anchor the self. To turn away from the shipwreck and its detritus would be for the sailors to accept death as if drowning in a new world completely unanchored from the past; yet, to stay upon the shore and salvage the remainders of the shipwreck would be to accept a second chance, a chance to “catch” a second life, to live this second chance with the help of the objects that they save.

    Immediately after rescue the sailors automatically turn toward their own act of salvage, almost like machines that, upon being disassembled by the trauma of shipwreck, automatically attempt to reassemble themselves from the scattered objects cast ashore by the rumbling violence of the surf. Looking out into the sea the sailors are figures in the act of autosalvage; they are automatic transmissions: transmitting their old selves (their “otherness” from pre-shipwreck) to be used in the operating assembly of their new selves. Indeed, autosalvage forms within and follows the traumatic wreckage of the event that breaks like a wave on the foreign sands of the future. The autosalvage carried out by these sailors is an act of repairing their “selvedge” (etymologically: self-edge), a word which refers to the treated or sewn edge of a fabric that prevents the fraying of the fabric itself. The shipwreck marks the radical unwinding of the sailors’ selvedge: autosalvage is the automatic-saving response to the unraveling of the self. The “auto-“ here also bespeaks a becoming-object, a becoming-automaton of the subject. Stripped of all possessions, divested of all ownership, the “objectness” of the subject radiates brightly. Though seemingly paradoxical, the dispossessed sailors on the beach do not differ from the lifeless bodies of their shipmates, that is, until the living sailors gather the corpses and salvage what remains of the wreckage. The complete loss of objects does little to reveal a purified self or subject (the drifter-dream of casting away all “possessions”); instead it reveals the subject as a “part” in a greater engine, a part which functions as a particular kind of selfhood (a mode of subjectivity) according to the objects which surround it.

    The title of Donoghue’s story, “Salvage,” is ambiguous and multiple for we witness both the use of the old meaning of the noun – the salvaged property from the wreck – and simultaneously the use of the verb – the villagers saving the sailors (providing salvation) and the sailors collecting objects from their past for reuse in their new life. If the verb “salvage” marks the appropriation of an-other’s discarded items, then the “others” of the salvage are the sailors themselves, the past lives of the sailors pre-shipwreck. Moreover, the sailors are already “rescued” before they turn to salvage the ship’s wreckage, and they might even “catch their death” because of this turning. Yet, something calls them back to the shore. The delightful intricacy within Donoghue’s tale is that the sailors are only saved through the saving or rescue of their objects. The multiple salvage reveals the sailors as both objects (that are saved) and subjects (that save their possessions). Their saving of the objects accomplishes their passive “being saved” by the objects. The same occurs for the objects: in the act of saving the sailors, they are salvaged from the wreckage: “indeed, we have the steadily growing impression that a process of reciprocal osmosis has occurred between man and things, with the result that the former has become similar to the latter, while the latter have assumed increasingly human characteristics” (Perniola, 44). Or, in the words of the “salvage artist” HervÈ, interviewed in AgnËs Varda’s film The Gleaners & I,

    I make images from salvaged material. Frames from wood. I use food packages, slates, and then I also recycle my own packets of cigarette paper, and what’s good about these objects is that they have a past, they’ve already had a life, and they’re still very much alive. All you have to do is give them a second chance.

    The sailors stay on the shore to save themselves through the act of gathering what calls from the wreckage of their past (be)longings. The sailors’ second chance is bound to the second chance of the salvaged items. In Donoghue’s story Sarah wonders what remains the tide will deposit, “A barrel of spirits? An odd shoe? A scattering of wet letters from home? The bodies of their shipmates?” Much could be said about these objects. At one pole of the spectrum the polysemic “barrel of spirits” would retain usable worth whereas at the other pole the lifeless corpses would mark the loss of spirit, the inanimate, the unsalvageable (literally, the unsavable). The “wet letters” would fall between these two poles, retaining partial legibility though also smeared with oozing ink. Yet the “odd shoe,” stripped of its proper use-value and detached from its pair, becomes an odd remnant, or more precisely, a vestige – a word which arises from the Latin word for footstep or footprint, a word which also signifies a left-over part (a vestigial organ), and a word which usually appears as a “vestige of something” thus indicating its belonging to something else and its attachment to the past. Through its presence the odd shoe signifies the second chance; through the invoked absence of its pair, a part of life that has sunk into the past.

Somebody’s Time Inside the Auto Salvage on the inside looking in, looking in. On the inside looking deeper.

    Thus begin the rather bizarre lyrics of Autosalvage’s first track, “Auto Salvage.” In terms of an actual salvage yard these lyrics can be read as a quest to discard the layers of refuse that one must search through, that one must dig deeper into before locating the part that is sought after. When one seeks out the auto salvage he or she is usually in search of a part, a part needed to repair a broken vehicle, to get it up and running again. Once one is inside the confines of an Auto Salvage, usually fenced with corrugated metal walls and looping spirals of barbed wire, one’s only choice is to progress further into the inside of the “stuff.” Once inside – further into the inside. Entering into the bodies of cars. Jimmying rusted doors. Crowbars prying, loosening stubborn trunks and clinging dashboards. Heads burrowing beneath gaping hoods, peering into metallic mazes of engine innards. Fingers searching gloveboxes, dismantling steering columns, draining fluid systems. Looking in, looking in, looking deeper. Looking for the part that can still be used. The poet Ted Kooser writes:

In that muddy junkyard, wrecks were stacked
like manuscripts, each with some terrible story
the roads had rejected. We opened them slowly
and read by the light of our cutting torches,
breathing the fleshy odor of acetylene,
peeling the deckled pages back, so many alike:
a woman’s shoe with a snapped-off heel
crushed up against the firewall, dried blood
on the cheap seat covers, splatters of brains
on the dashboard clocks, a few of which,
somehow still alive on a trickle of current,
kept somebody’s time, whining like flies
trapped under glass. …

    Peeling through the twisted fibers of the steel palimpsest, one digs in the library of twisted unused knowledge for a part that might just work, that might just get this thing running again: a caliper, air pump, oil pan or transmission. Kooser’s poem aligns the search through the junkyard as a particular form of reading, a reading that “opens,” “peels,” “cuts” through the “deckled pages” of “stacked manuscripts.” The light or insight gathered in order to read the junkyard text is acquired through the “cutting torches” that physically investigate the material meaning of the heap, the textual heap. The pages of the wreck are “deckled” – rough-edged – and thus a rough hand must turn and peel them back. The “fleshy odors” of such a reading process invoke both the sweaty labor of the reading itself (assisted by the mechanics of the hand-torch) and the remnants of the written wreckage inscribed with the “dried blood” and “splattered brains” of the original driver (the author of the accident as “terrible story”). Blood and brains – the writing is marked both with the physicality of the bodily text (blood) and the immateriality of intellect (thoughts); yet the latter is an immateriality that has become material just as the immaterial signified is attached to a material signifier. In Kooser’s poem one literally reads the dashboard as the “page” on which the scattered thoughts of the brain have left their etchings; one can read the clock as “still alive on a trickle of current” or one can read, perversely, the speckled brains as that which is “somehow still alive,” parasitically drawing from the energy of the clock. Somehow the material signifiers of the brain (the splatters on the dashboard) are still alive through the transmission of their immaterial thoughts through time; the message of accident and contingency persists as a broken, written text and the reader/salvager strives to decode the wreckage. Reading the junkyard requires reading the marks of the body left as writing. The junkyard is a rich – though broken, warped and twisted – semiotic space that contains the “terrible stories” of ejected subjectivity “that the roads had rejected.” Yet, in the last analysis, these stories cannot fully be reanimated from the signifying evidence at hand. Autosalvage sings:

It’d make your head swim to think
of the people that owned them.
Like the fifty-three Nash was a
streamlined car.
When the streamlined car had come
and gone.
What kind of person owned a
fifty-three Nash?

    The lyrics tempt us to move from the contemplation of the inside of the salvage yard, from the interior of the vehicles, toward the contemplation of the other. One can read into the auto salvage only so far – “looking deeper” – before he or she is confronted with the material signifiers of another’s past life. In Kooser’s poem these include the woman’s shoe, the substances of blood and brain, the clock ticking another’s time. Our heads swim when confronted with the broken signifiers of violence and wreckage; they swim when confronted with the remains of shipwrecked lives (“remains” are the remainders of “to be,” of being); our minds swim because we encounter the unknown and the limits of our ability to know. The head swims when thoughts cannot find stability, a ground on which to stand. Following Kooser’s poem one sees the woman’s shoe, the trickling clock, the blood, the brains, the shape of the wreck as signifying a vague trauma but failing to ground a stable narrative. The shoe is broken. The blood marks the broken body. Yet, these signifiers do not accumulate into complete, individual narratives. Thus, Kooser returns to the indefinite pronoun “some” when the mind turns toward the lives and events that the material wreckage suggests: “some terrible story,” “somehow still alive,” “somebody’s time.”

    In Kooser’s poem the shoe is not an “odd shoe” of a sailor or his shipmate, but a broken shoe of another whom one will never know. Just like the “odd shoe” of the sailor the woman’s shoe in Kooser’s poem is divested of use – it’s broken. Yet, whereas the sailor could salvage the odd shoe for reuse as a vestige of his past life, the broken shoe within the salvage yard will never be salvaged itself. Indeed, within the auto salvage the signs of the other are of little use. In the language of Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, items like the broken shoe are objects from the practical, cultural system of “everyday environments,” whereas auto parts and their interrelations stem from the “technological system:” “a coherent system that is never directly experienced, never apprehended at the practical level” (7). The auto salvage yard addresses the technological system, extracting reusable parts from one broken system and integrating them into another. The signs of the other that remain in the salvage yard – either the marks of the other’s body or his or her discarded objects – are remnants of the cultural system. In the eyes of the auto salvage, which sees only the technological system, the objects from the cultural system remain invisible; they are pushed aside as the technological surgeons extract reusable organs. Yet, one can partially read the vestiges of the other as vague parts in some imagined story. In Second-Hand Cultures Nicky Gregson terms these stories imagined history making: “this form of object attachment is largely based around romantic and fantasized visions of the lives and times of imagined others” (147). What kind of person owned a fifty-three Nash? Who owned the basket in the trunk of that pinto? What happened to that Volkswagen with the crumpled, smashed windshield? To enter the salvage yard in search of the stories of the other – to look for the broken shoe, the remains of ownership – is to read the salvage yard against the utility of the technological system and toward an imagined reconstruction of the other’s cultural system. But what do such readings ultimately offer the reader?

    Whereas previously we salvaged the double sign of the sailor’s “odd shoe” from Donoghue’s story – a sign of a past life and of a second chance – in the auto salvage we rescue Kooser’s trickling clock. Baudrillard writes: “The clock is a mechanical heart that reassures us about our own heart” (24). Indeed, within the mise en scËne of the salvage yard the clock marks a point of transference from the (past) other to the (present) self, which is a central, functional aspect of the salvage yard as well: the recycling of another’s old, used part into new life within another’s vehicle. In the auto salvage, purchased objects are always obtained from the discards of the other. On the one hand, the other’s trickling clock allows an “imagined history making” and leads one toward a limited reconstruction of an imagined past; the clock, “somehow still alive,” excretes a trace of the past event. On the other hand, the clock continues to function and could potentially be salvaged; it remains within the logic of the auto salvage and its technological system; it calls out for a “second chance.” Baudrillard writes that,

    …the intimacy of the car arises…from the fact that [it] may at any time become the locus of an accident: the culmination in a chance event – which may never occur but is always imagined, always involuntarily assumed to be inevitable – of that intimacy with oneself, the formal liberty, which is never so beautiful as in death (67).

    Indeed the trickling clock ties the imagination of the living subject to the other’s “chance event” – a moment when the other’s imagination was actualized in the accident, a moment of the absolute intimacy of the other with his or her own death. The trickling clock “reassures us about our own heart,” our own aliveness and presence, but it also invokes the “passing of the other,” the transmission of the other, through time, to the present self. Yet, we should not read this as a simple reminder to the self of what is to inevitably come, but a reminder that the present is already the second chance of a life that is never regained or experienced as first chance. As Judith Butler writes following Hegel: “Difference casts [the self] forth into an irreversible future. To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity…but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself” ( ). The potential “second chance” of the salvaged clock reminds the salvager of his or her own secondness; the remnants of the other’s accident remind us of our own ejected subjectivity forever thrown into the future.