Exit

Laura Waddell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501358166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Critique de l'architecture

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Exits are all around us. They are the difference between travelling and arriving, being on the inside or outside. Whether signposted or subversive, personal or political, choices or holes we've fallen through, exits determine how we move around our lives, cities, and the world. What does it really mean to 'exit'? In these meditations on exits in architecture, transport, ancestry, language, garbage, death, Sesame Street and Brexit, Laura Waddell follows the neon and the pictograms of exit signs to see what's on the other side. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 Words Associated with Exit

I type in words associated with exit. I used to work for a British rival but a Google search puts an American dictionary at top, extracting info and auto-generating a box of text, intended to answer my question at first glance. Anyone culturally online is used to navigating varieties of English language not their own, and as I write this book for an editor in a different time zone, I take it in my stride. I am presented with the following words, grouped around bullet points like metal shavings to magnets. From these, I am meant to extrapolate meaning:

1 flight, retirement, retreat, running away, withdrawal.

2 diaspora, emigration, evacuation, exodus.

3 embarkation, embarkment.

4 disembarkation, egress.

5 abandonment, forsaking, relinquishment.

Emigration, but not immigration. That’s despite embarkation and disembarkation, two opposites confidently taking up two bullet points. You get on a train, you get off a train. Either way you’re going somewhere, unless there’s a tree on the line. It’s pretty much a continuous process, with the exit and the entrance mapped out on each side. Transportation that can be embarked or disembarked from pretty much always goes in a straight line, or between two easily definable points. Station to station. Port to port. A to B. Why do more complex journeys get fewer points, fewer words—don’t we need all the help we can get to understand them?

At which point does emigration stop being an exit, and become an entrance? The algorithm is an extension of ourselves and our prejudices. It’s materially different enough for us to deny its digital reflection on our faces. It is coding. We are flesh. But man built it. And like the dictionary, we are built into it. Its rules of form meet our conventions of usage and now our searches learn from us, trying to give us what is most useful, most saleable, most relevant. We get more of what we click on. Our opinions become serviced with complimentary information. There is no independent logic, no overarching rationale at play. Algorithms: they’re just like us.

In an episode of the Twilight Zone about journeying to Mars, that was the punchline. Aliens were frightening because they mirrored our worst human tendencies.

The algorithm has decided emigration is a relevant answer, but immigration is not. Perhaps it is disinclined to include immigration as relevant to “exit” because so often our press and our politics focus on the numbers, dividing resources by people, dropping other details to the floor and kicking them to one side. Perhaps because much of what we see on tickertape or trending timelines can’t encompass the meaning of any of those journeys (lives built or lost or made new or left out); and cannot comprehend that any entrance has been preceded by an exit predicated on a reason that exists in the minds of people in other places. That it is a process. That it is not, despite reports to the contrary, exclusively about us and our resources and our borders and our guns and our spaces and our places and our way of living and our cash and our Capitalism and our . . .? In, out. Us, them.

Not that it’s necessary for “immigration” to be suffused with meaning palatable to you or me for it to be considered exit adjacent. Where there is an entrance, there is always an exit behind it of some shape, form, circumstance, locale, sentiment, or legal reality. It’s tempting to point to those exits and “justify” them some way (he has exited Syria because of civil war; she has exited Germany to work in the English-language tuition sector) to make the entrance “legitimate,” with the aim of countering xenophobic political ideas, but the exits exist either way. The point I’m trying to make is that we might only be witness to one side; we often forget the other. We see most clearly what is closest. But exits and entrances are dependent on each other for their meanings. So too, then, are immigration and emigration.

Of course, not every emigration/immigration has the neat resolution of entrance/exit, one on the other side of the other. (Not every disembarkation/embarkation does either. There were ten fatal airline accidents in 2018.) Purgatory exists in the form of migrant detention centers or, more rarely, denial of citizenship suspending an individual in legal limbo, neither here nor there. Exits are as likely to be as simple as they are long, tiring, frustrating, frustrated, and declined. And exits of one kind can be followed by exits of another.

• As I write this chapter:

• the news tells me thirty-nine people from Vietnam were found deceased in the back of a freight truck in the south of England in autumn 2019¹

• US Border Patrol reported 294 migrant deaths in the fiscal year 2017² (heat stroke, dehydration, hypothermia)

• according to the UN, 4,503 migrants died across the world in 2018³ (mostly in the Mediterranean Sea)

• San Diego–based Border Angels estimate over 10,000 deaths have occurred across the US-Mexico border since 1994⁴

• the Missing Migrants Project, which “tracks deaths of migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, who have gone missing along mixed migration routes worldwide,” has a count surpassing 60,000 over the last two decades. (A footnote on the website’s “about” page notes that “the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the Government of the United Kingdom’s official policies.”)⁵

• and on the day I stop writing and send in this manuscript, a UN study has revealed the US has the highest number of children in immigration-related detention, at over 100,000.⁶

These are some numbers associated with Exit. And there have been cases of individuals charged and prosecuted under federal law, for the misdemeanor of entering private land without permit, while leaving water in Arizona for anyone crossing the land under triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures.

Immigrants are lumped together in an ideological category encompassing those who arrive, contemplate arriving, may one day contemplate arriving, or who never arrive but seep into the political consciousness as abstract figures, the reasoning underpinning domestic politics, distribution of resources, and the amping up of nationalist militarist rhetoric. Immigrants and asylum seekers are lumped together clumsily. They are carefully kept away, however, from discussions on weapon sales and war.

The algorithm is in denial. We are to believe exits and entrances have nothing to do with one another, that the only duo is legal/illegal. Tickets are printed, and with them recipient citizens come and go, cross borders, come back. Others, who are considered to have appeared suddenly, as though out of thin air, we deny they have been on any kind of journey at all.

In the 2017 book Tell Me How It Ends,⁷ author Valeria Luiselli reflects on her experience as volunteer translator for unaccompanied children reaching the US–Mexico border. Questions asked of migrant children after arduous travel build their case to stay. The process, full of gaps to fall between for anyone not least the small, stretches too thin the volunteers and charities providing legal and other services. Try as they might, they cannot meet demand. Children answer box-ticking questions that will determine their fate with lack of comprehension, fear, and nonlinear answers. They are so young. Their journeys have had confusing beginnings, middles, and ends.

I once stood for a long time before an exhibition of the photographs of Sergey Ponomarev, documenting boats reaching shore and trains packed tightly with people. Unusually, he gets close enough to see fatigue upon individual faces. I was unable to look away from the direct gazes of people waiting wearily in a long registration line, herded by Slovenian police. How often do we look need right in the eye? Petty frustrations are my only frame of reference; timetabled travel gone awry. Delays. Perhaps we need to bear witness to each stage of the journey in order to understand it better. To see that immigration is emigration. To see that exits are entrances, and vice versa, and that everything is linked by long, fine threads across the world. But I realize the problem isn’t logic. The algorithm runs on something else.

I close the tab with the search results. I scroll down my timeline. I see a tweet from immigration attorney Bridget Cambria reading: “Longest child in family detention is MSHS, age 6. She’s been in immigration detention for 128 days. She was a spider for Halloween. Last night she sat in a corner in the Berks babyjail and cried to be reunited with both her mom and dad. #endfamilydetention #freetheBerkskids.”⁸

Followed by “We sat with her tonight to braid her hair. Her fav. animal is a rabbit. She misses her puppy. She wants to be a vet. When she leaves jail she wants the biggest pizza she can find. There’s really good pizza in NJ—where her mom is waiting. She likes pineapple on her pizza.”⁹ and “BTW—it’s the longest child in family detention in the entire US—if it wasn’t clear. We only do this in Pennsylvania. Their family could be reunited instantly, if immigration would choose to. Like tomorrow. It’s ICEs discretion to keep her locked up. Her case is just pending.”¹⁰

There is a petition. Online support is gathering around this child who has not seen her mother for six months. I hope her case is resolved; I go back to check for updates. I hope that an entrance follows her exit, that no part of her is denied. And this is only one of many children, many of whom have no legal support. Words related to exit: abandonment.

I have realized I am always certain of the destination on my ticket. Other than disaster, I trust my exits will be followed by entrances. This girl is at this moment the longest detained, but it is an ongoing story; the days detained get longer every day.

2 After The World of My Own Language Sank

Art, for its ability to humanize, to provoke empathy, and generally to communicate ideas between one person and another, has been a focus of fascist regimes throughout history.

• diaspora, emigration, evacuation, exodus.

These words linked to exit which speak of necessity and question the possibility of choice. That tell a story, accidentally, in their algorithmic grouping. Exit as forced, and widespread, and dangerous, and depleting. Exit as all of these things at once.

The cultural policy of the Nazis was the remit of Joseph Goebbels, who had the responsibility of scrutinizing many forms of art and media and found creative opportunities for cruelty in the task. In the autumn of 1933, it became mandatory for creators across art, film, books, music and more, or anyone who sold art, to become a member of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber). This was a way for the Nazis to control artistic and media output, promoting classical aesthetics inspired by the Greeks and Romans that were considered instructive to the Aryan ideal, and banishing anything else. Among other things, they disallowed surrealism and Dada, Jewish music, and the blues. Trading was banned for anyone on the outside. Artists without membership could not exhibit their work and were cut off from materials. But worse even than being prevented from working was that those who did not register—or more accurately, weren’t permitted to register—were labelled degenerate. It was not long before this developed along explicitly anti-Semitic lines, as had always been the underlying aim.

“From May 1935, the right to membership also required proof of Aryan ancestry. However, artists such as Ernst Blensdorf who was neither Jewish nor had a Jewish background nor was a member of a political party were also rejected. This shows that all artists whose work did not confirm to the National Socialist ideologies risked rejection and subsequent persecution.”¹

The intention was to depict these artists as outsiders, not only where their racial and religious heritage overlapped with the Reich’s program of widespread persecution, but for their ideas. They were held up as examples; entire movements cut off from peers and collaborators. A fascist regime will always view ideas, even when not explicitly political but those which are artistic, creative, and so open to interpretation, as a threat. Fascist regimes depend on unity of thought, or submission to it. Art lifts the spirit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Words Associated with Exit
• 2 After The World of My Own Language Sank
• 3 Some Poet Throwing Forked Lightning
• 4a The History of Exit Signs
• 4b The Poetics of Exit Design
• 4c The Future of Exit Signs
• 5 Grouchland: Brexit, Sesame Street, and Garbage
• 6 Elevation
• 7 Evictions and Evacuations
• 8 Existential Exits
• 9 Exit This Way
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright