The Broken

What is so troubling about the shattered, the torn, the marred, the inoperative — in a word, the broken — is that it jeopardizes the validity of the distinction for which it is a functional term. The Broken calls attention to those considerations papered over if not totally elided by notions of utility. Broken objects do present some real dangers — a chipped glass can cut the drinker’s lip, and a punctured tire can pull a car off the road — but to these practical concerns is added the fact, not acknowledged in utilitarian calculations, that the broken object in its broken state acquires new powers: only broken glass can cut, only a punctured tire can draw the car off the road. The in-tact object meanwhile can only perform its designated function successfully if it performs other functions poorly. The broken object’s mal-function is indeed then a malefic function — fugitive, deviant, dangerous in its disutility.

The Broken enjoys the added ability to bring the Whole into doubt, because it both defies and descries the Whole. Every identifiable absence — the chip missing from the goblet, the frayed end of an electric wire, the flabby amorphousness of a punctured tire — points to a prior wholeness from which the broken thing has deviated. It is the terminus of a line of flight always already a property of the Whole. One can in fact claim that the Whole is in fact nothing more than a massive aggregation of a huge number of these points of departure, of these originary points of possible trajectories of becoming-broken.

This tension characterizing the relationship of the Broken to the Whole finds early expression in the mania for “the picturesque” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A crumbling castle, a dilapidated spire, a tumbled-down tower — such elements of the landscape were precisely those which the typical Regency ambler found so appealing, because every crack, every dislodged stone, every jagged line or interrupted curve univocally bespeaks of the previous wholeness which made it possible. In order for it to crumble a castle must first be built.

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In The System of Objects Jean Baudrillard speaks of “the ambiguity of the object,” an infernal consumerist toil “in which individuals never have the opportunity to surpass themselves, but can only re-collect themselves in contradiction, in their desires and in the forces that censor their desires.” And this state of affairs is brought about by the fact that “a censor is personalized in the object,” resulting in “censorship [that] operates through ‘unconstrained’ behaviors (purchasing, choice, consumption), and through spontaneous investment.” The system of objects is thus a system of personalized censors, each one seeing to it that the individual’s desire is aroused in such a manner that it may be channeled into an “impoverished language” of limited signs (i.e., saleable goods) and indexed assumptions about desire (i.e., market research, target demographics)— desire as alienation, a fuel for the juridical mythopoeisis of advertising.

Does Baudrillard’s analysis presume, however, a system of objects eternally whole, eternally unbroken yet of more or less fixed signifiance? If the answer is “yes,” then the relationship of the individual to the system of objects, lamentable as it may be, is largely unvarying. If “no,” then it becomes incumbent upon us to discover some of this system’s unaddressed complexities. For instance, the power of the Broken is one of absolute negation. When something breaks, it becomes de-coded, not in the sense that one deciphers it, but in the sense that it spontaneously resituates itself in the chain of significations that is the series of dislocations that determine that thing’s value. But whereas these relative dislocations — not use or exchange value simpliciter, but some admixture of both along with other social significations — remain necessary to an object’s value, breaking represents near-absolute dislocation vis-à-vis the other signifiers in the chain.

Broken things sever possibilities of synecdochic metonymies; a potshard can never aspire to the arête of the pot. Rather broken things in their brokenness tend paradoxically to be whole and complete unto themselves, and thus resist enlistment into the same proximal representations as their in-tact counterparts.

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When one wants to convey the fact that she is the offspring of parents no longer married to each other she may say she is from “a broken home.” The implication here is that the lines of filiation constituent of one’s identity as a member of a nuclear family are no longer triangular, but radial. Being from “a broken home” brings one into a relation with a non-relation, though no less a relation for it, because it is measurable and therefore finite, but only so because it it has broken with its futurity. Its wholeness instead rests solely in its eternal anteriority, the only futurity allowed it. The offspring of divorced parents actually stands in relation to a severing that continues to sever, but that also continues to signify.

What we should conclude from all of this is that to break is never to destroy, but simply to re-make in some way in which the significant implications have yet to manifest themselves. If, as Carol Burnett once said, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” then truly the Broken is but the Whole plus time.