Affluvia (Johanna Drucker, 2025), thoughts on teaching and a conversation with a friend
I was raised in a house of Gods. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense. All around me, every surface held an image of God. Each morning I woke up to a menagerie of Gods housed in a mandir at the foot of my bed. My cupboard lined with stickers of ‘em, the fridge with magnets. The computer desk: God. Computer wallpaper: God. Open a book and it’s likely that a credit-card-size picture of God might just slip out. Every occasion a God, every god a prayer. I prayed by force, I prayed with love and I prayed out of fear. I left home (late) each morning only to arrive in time for prayer at my catholic school. God.
Later hostel life and a coterie of understanding friends would prod me to examine my faith and have me embark on the journey from god fearing simpleton to agnostic nomad to militant atheist bro to (hopefully) a tolerant atheist person. But a strain of godliness lingers. When faced with sudden convulsions of gratitude or inspired by stray moments of wonder, I’ve often found myself muttering a simple player memorised from my time in the house of Gods: thank you god for the food we eat, thank you god for the air we breathe, thank you god for everything.
Today, the word ‘god’ (small g), bleached of all ‘divine’ meaning, stands in for something I find much more spectacular: the vast array of species and labour that places me at the door of pleasures simple and transcendent. Reading Drucker’s Affluvia reminds me of that solemn tercet while also persuading me to confront the costs.
Drucker’s premise is a simple one. To follow the lifecycle of the actual things that make up her morning routine: have coffee, feed cat. This isn’t a simple lament that settles for a description of brown hands in fields afar sifting through coffee or meat. The internet is awash with varying degrees of information and recrimination. Drucker’s study proceeds from her sense of wonder at the underpinnings of a ‘modern’ life.
The term supply-chain-logistics is often invoked by the suits to either thump their chests or shrug their shoulders when called to explain the material nature of their enterprise. But this obfuscates a range of materials, people and power that mobilise their businesses and in turn our lives. Drucker grabs the term by the hyphens and tugs and tugs until she’s visibly lost in the entangled nature of it all.
For Drucker, a cup of morning brew relates to more than just the origin of the humble coffee bean. The story of that cup is as much a story of the coffee-maker and filter paper, of the rocks and trees split and felled and eventually flattened into shapes alien to their original form. It is the story of the callused hand and collapsed lung. Implicated within the contents of the cup are histories of ideas, of the electric grid and city waterworks. It is a story of extraction, the instruments of extraction, the instruments of the instruments of extraction and so on and so forth.
That we are helplessly codependent is no novel insight. But there’s no ledger large enough to audit the life of things. Yet an attempt such as Drucker’s should be considered worthwhile. Hers is one guided by equal parts wonder, gratitude and guilt. The book is less interested in being a piece of investigative journalism and instead — written in the first person — represents a personal search.
There should be far more exacting economic analyses of coffee production, keener material examinations of labour laws and expansive histories of our infrastructure. Each of those would represent an author’s search for an explanation, a truth. Works such as those strive for depth which inevitably renders them deterministic and myopic. However Drucker’s free fall into an ‘infinite regress of causes’ is ‘research as performance’. Not citation wielding ‘performative’ research. A performance, where the objective is to endeavour as much ground with as much depth and, transparently and repeatedly, fail.
✿
For the third year running I’ve been tasked with introducing ‘the research process’ to first year students at a college nearby. Admittedly my first foray into the classroom was leaden with theoretical jargon that left the kids either dizzy or dozy. For my second rodeo I reflected on my own practice in a manner that implicated me within the socio-economic contradictions that govern my trade. If my convenor is to be believed this was a success. But I can’t shake the feeling that the relatively esoteric nature of my field might have detracted from the lesson I wished to impart.
Lectures that only rely on theoretical foundations or personal anecdotes rarely let in students on the method. The work on display appears too complete for undergrad freshmen to engage with critically. On top of that guest lectures are too short to allow for such insights. Which explains why most guest lectures (especially in design school) are simply platforms for showmanship. But the goal ought to be to get the students interested in doing the work.
I think Drucker’s Affluvia presents a third way. An accessible, roving exploration of a field that isn’t led by theory or observations but only questions. I imagine a class that begins with a singular object and slowly questions its way into it, around it, plunging into its origin, manufacture, history or even pondering its ontology.
A class such as this relies on the lecturer having a broad knowledge of the field but permits them to say out loud, “I don’t know, I might need to look that up?” Or even better, “What do you think?” Teachers who admit doubt inspire. In turn they present to students various points of ingress into the work and thus facilitate a shared understanding.
Drucker’s work inspires precisely because it expresses doubt. Rather than fill in the blanks with citations and certainty, it shows a method to think about object histories. This is a book unlimited in its scope but purposefully limited in the answers it can provide.
✿
That being said the book does have its flaws. First, I could’ve done with fewer witticisms. Next, the sense of wonder that drives the first third curdles by the end. In theory (or in hindsight) I appreciate this honest part of the textual performance: good research saps, more so when the goal is inhuman omniscience (there’s a reason advisors request students to narrow the remit of their research). But read in real time, all of ‘Part two: feeding the cats’ feels like tired prose. The crime is not in the representation, but that the presentation gets boring.
A more damning weakness is Drucker’s unwillingness to reflect upon what this new found knowledge might mean for her coffee and cats. Sure, it would be naive to demand a resolution. But Drucker’s concluding call for a more ‘peaceable kingdom rooted in social justice environmental equity, genuine commitment to a world without exploitation or pollution’ sounds glib and forswears the real work.
I’d rather Drucker trade in an inchoate second chapter and the galaxy-brained afterword for an honest reflection on her personal agency within such political systems. I would’ve loved to witness her sisyphean attempts to drink coffee more ethically only to see her get further entangled in ways that would have tested her political resolve. A counterpart to the narrative of diffuse histories held within a cup of coffee could have been an equally meandering meditation on the fruitful or futile nature of human agency.
As I type this I am reminded about a conversation (or argument) I often have with a dear friend. The conversation starts off in a low whinge, “As a designer, I loathe the fact that my profession compels me to peddle snake oil. I do not make said snake oil, but I sure do supply the tools for its sale. And as I’ve grown older — and I’ll admit, relatively well-off from the business — I find it increasingly uncomfortable to continue to ply my trade.” Now, any attempt to interrogate my own morality is always met with two rebuttals. The first goes: “It’s easy for you to think this way, especially once you’ve already made the money”, which then segues into the second: “There’s no other way. How else do we survive?”
I’ll dismiss the first because it presumes that morality is absolute. That the slightest hint of sin should render moot any shot at correcting course. That the only option is to keep on sinning. Farcical. The second hinges on the fungible definition of the word survive. Subsumed within the word survive are the very objects of Drucker’s book: Drinking coffee, feeding cat and host of other seemingly routine activities of the moderately privileged. That these should go unexamined feels ignorant or evasive at best and cynical — does personal choice even matter? — at worst.
In this regard Drucker’s book is a radical act of optimism. Don’t let neologisms like affluvia and toxic-offgassing fool you. To locate oneself in the latticework of organic and inorganic life is to think in prayer: of wonder, gratitude and guilt.