Survival, Spectres, and Secrets in “Lunch atop a Skyscraper”

20 Sep 1932, Manhattan, New York City, New York State, USA --- Construction workers eat their lunches atop a steel beam 800 feet above ground, at the building site of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
20 Sep 1932, Manhattan, New York City, New York State, USA — Construction workers eat their lunches atop a steel beam 800 feet above ground, at the building site of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Eleven immigrant workers, seated on a construction beam 850 feet above Midtown Manhattan, casually having lunch, sharing banter, and lighting cigarettes, their legs dangling over the bustling metropolis, with its labyrinth of architectural objects that aspire towards the sky, are the subject of this famous photograph. Upon encountering this photograph — a crystallised moment from September 20th, 1932, during the construction of the Rockefeller Center — one is taken aback, indeed punctured — the punctum — by the men’s casual demeanour despite being suspended at such a great height without any safety gear. Death appears to be a single misstep away for these men. One wonders just what sort of world they must live in for them to exercise such a fearless attitude towards height, surviving atop a skyscraper.

Against these eleven brave men lies the sprawl of New York City, shrouded in a hazy mist whose origin is unclear: Was it a misty day? Or were the men in such a great height that they were surrounded by the clouds? Or is it just an artefact from an ageing photograph? Or perhaps it was the spectre of the Great Depression. Indeed, the photo was taken while the city was in the depths of the Depression, when one in four New Yorkers was unemployed (Malm, 2012). In this time, large-scale construction projects which had begun during the boom years of the 1920s were nearing completion, and people were desperate for any jobs regardless of safety concerns. These were the nameless men, mostly immigrants, who, with their own hands, built the city, with its urban ambitions, invisibly accompanying and ushering the modern man’s reach for ever greater heights. They are the spectres with which we live. In this photograph, they are brought to light.

Photographs are a moment of spectral interruption (Derrida, 2010). They capture and eternalise a moment that is no longer, and never was as such — in them, “time is out of joint” (Hamlet). In this sense, photography is not a re-presentation of what is absent, but a creation of what was never present. In fact, as soon as one dislodges the rigid conception of time as a series of atomic instants —the time of the clock — of the Western metaphysical tradition, reference and re-presentation become untenable if not impossible; in the tradition, there is a great inflation of the present moment, with its metaphysics of presence and of total visibility, as if we are not in an originary way engaged in life but can become detached spectators, as if life is completely in our hands and not constantly exposed to and shaped by the invisible risk of dying. “It is originary: life is living on, life is survival” (Derrida, 2007, p. 26). What cannot be understood by the metaphysicians and physicists must have been so obvious to the men in Lunch atop a Skyscraper. Fled from their home countries, betrayed by the promise of the American dream, encountered by the pains of everyday life during the Depression, and indeed suspended in great heights above the city of promise, life to these men is from the start a suspended threat. They witnessed the death of their friends and fellow workers every day, and every moment on the beam was a moment of survival; on the little money they got they lived on from one day to another. “Thank god I am still here,” one of them must have exclaimed. They are thus spectres that interrupt the privileged metaphysical frame through which we see, which is also the frame of science, progress, and modernity. In this way, the photograph as the crystallisation of a moment that never was opens up a new gaze that is within and without time.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper is a gaze that looks at us. It reveals to us that we are ourselves always already surviving, always already mourning. This revelation coincides with the Heideggerean insight that art discloses truth. “The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work” (Heidegger, p. 668). For Heidegger, truth is not an object to be sought out, but rather a happening that one encounters without planning to be met — a passivity of activity. It is a dispossession of our privileged way of seeing, which views the world as an object and ourselves as the subject, and delegitimises our engagement with the world as mere “appearance” while displacing responsibility and urgency with explanations about “intrinsic” causes. Heidegger holds that this metaphysical way of thinking has colonised most areas of life in the modern man, and art uniquely remains access to truth as an encounter with the other. In particular, art brings out the clash between earth and world. Earth is the material underpinning of the world, which is a totality of significance that is constantly formed. While earth dynamically informs and sustains our world of meaning, it resists being interpretively exhausted by it: “The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world… The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there” (p. 676). In this way, the work of art is an intricate interplay between concealment and unconealment, secrets and exposure, and invisibility and visibility. It interrogates our Being.

The earth in Lunch atop a Skyscraper continuously looks at us and calls to us. One of the secrets in the photograph concerns the identities of the men in the photograph. There has been an enduring interest in pinning down whom the men were, their names (Anderson, 2012). Interestingly, many people have tried to claim that the men were their fathers or grandfathers, but few have presented evidence that is convincing to the “experts.” From this, it appears that many people wish to trace their heritage through this photograph, which has become a trace of a collective memory that speaks to the American immigrant experience in the 20th Century. Whether these claims of familial associations were true or false, though, are irrelevant, because truth becomes an inadequate and even impossible parameter for the photograph, which is always a testimony of a moment that never was. As reference and re-presentation become impossible, the identities of the men remain undecided and radically undecidable. After all, earth continuously shelters itself from a total visibility; any frame that claims to be a total visibility is in the end regulated by a hegemonic invisible. In particular, the question of “who are they?” is a question of the what, which does not address the how. In the Western metaphysical tradition, there is the notion of identity as a fixed essence, which then enters into relationships with other identities. In this conception, identities are first, and relationships are second. Dislodging this metaphysical picture means no less than a rethinking of the way one engages with the world: one is always already situated, thrown into the they. In this way, relationships are first and identities are second. Even if the names — the what —were pinned down for all the men in the photograph, the how, its aura, remains something other that evades the constraints of the proper nouns, which are themselves idioms that are untranslatable — earth. “It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it” (p. 674). Our modern monotheistic obsession with origins and essences is thus resisted and put into question by the photograph, a work of art that de-stabilises our metaphysics that objectifies the world.

Related, it has been recently revealed that Lunch was staged, and not a spontaneous moment from the lunch break of the workers as was conventionally presumed. “The image was a publicity effort by the Rockefeller Center. It seems pretty clear they were real workers, but the event was organised with a number of photographers,” claims historian Ken Johnston (Malm, 2012). In the way mainstream media present it, this piece of information, its origin as a staged photograph, is supposed to render the photograph less legitimate and less authentic. However, as noted, the photograph is from the beginning a creation of a moment that never was. In this sense, the issue of authenticity is radically irrelevant because there is no referent to which it is supposed to point to. It may also be noted that every photograph is always already staged: it is always framed by things beyond the frame. In Lunch, they include the photographer, the “click” of the camera, the economic situation of the time, the global order that brought these men to New York, the human aspiration to ascend skywards inherited from the Enlightenment, and so on. However, because of this, every photograph is at the same time always already unstaged: it is always punctured by the unpredictable, the punctum, the unseen that regulates what is seen, and the secrets of earth that have yet to be fully brought to light. In Lunch, the men, together with the vertical grasp of 1930s Manhattan, unendingly constitute a world of meaning — a dynamic interrogation that thematise human displacement, human aspiration, and human determination.

The spectre of the human looms large in Lunch atop a Skyscraper. The humans who are displaced from their hometowns are also the humans who are displaced from the ground, the earth, suspended in the name of Progress; the human aspiration towards the heights is also an aspiration towards Truth and Reason; the human determination to strive and thrive is a relentless will to peace and stability. The figure of the human is revealed to be irreducibly complex, but is at the same time deconstructed through the splintered temporality which the photographic intervention opens up, a moment of survival. It asks: what makes up the recognisably human, who is and is not publicly grievable, and which lives are worth remembering in collective memory? The workers, all coming from elsewhere, contingently united on a beam of construction, who are on the verge of death every day — are they simply pawns and necessary sacrifices for the Hegelian historical progression and the human ambition for greater heights, despite their very deep and delicate humanity that is exhibited in the photograph? Provoking these questions, the photograph ruptures the frame which previously exists unnoticed while establishing the differential allocations of visibility — the humanity of the human that is a construction from the 18th-Century Enlightenment ideals, who is supposedly rational and autonomous, yet social, political, civil, and civilised. It turns out that this frame has always been haunted by an invisible Other, who quietly awaits hospitality.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper spectralises our being-in-the-world. Instead of living in communities of those we see and can count, it is brought to light that we always already survive amidst communities of spectres, who are torn by the violence of the past, coming from elsewhere, pointing to elsewhere, who are not yet present and no longer present. The spectres in the photograph continue to look at us, call for a witness, interrogate the secrets of earth, and dis-close truth.

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