Nothing, Arizona
In the 1990s, when I lived in Tucson, I used to make the 400-mile drive to Las Vegas pretty regularly to visit my family. Up I-10 to I-17, then across the Carefree Highway to U.S. 93, a winding, mostly two-lane road that went through the jagged cliffs and parched arroyos of an especially barren reach of the Sonoran Desert. It was the sort of road that was lined with white crosses to mark the traffic fatalities.
I usually made this drive alone, and I would dread that stretch, from Wickenburg to Kingman, where the radio reception would fade to static and the tractor trailers would pile up at the passes and slow speeds to a crawl. There were no guardrails along most of that stretch then, and there would be lots of time to daydream about going over the edge.
It was easy to lose perspective on how far I had left to go, so it was always a relief to reach Nothing. Then I knew I was getting somewhere. Nothing was a prominently advertised but mostly dilapidated outpost, with gas and washrooms and possibly even free ice water, like Wall Drug. It was the only turnout with more than a steel-drum waste can for many, many miles. There was a rock shop and a contextually comic sign that read ALLMART. Back then, when I would drive by, it typically looked fringy and forlorn, less a rest stop than a Mad Max set; now it is apparently entirely abandoned. The Arizona Republic had an article in 2009 about someone called Pizza Man Mike who tried to revive Nothing, but according to his own account, he ran afoul of some state bylaws and couldn't stay in business there:
The Health Dept. refused to issue a Mobile Food License if I was Based in Nothing, Building, Planning and Zoning stated it was residental and need to apply for comerical and basicly start over. as Nothing existis in Nothing and the DOT wanted me to pave the whole front and maintain it as my right a way. With all this said an done , since I could not sell anything in Nothing, not even water without a heafty fine. It left me no choice but to leave Nothing.
I never stopped at Nothing, but Nothing invariably sparked in me annoying trains of thought about its semi-ironic name — how the place was self-refuting, self-negating; how in choosing to be Nothing it became more of something than, say, Wikieup, the next town down the road. And I would invariably get mad at myself for falling for the dumb "Who's on first"-ness of it, for the name working on me and getting me to think about it. Why is there something instead of nothing? How can you get something from Nothing? Does declaring something nonexistent actually affirm its existence? And so on. At least it helped pass the time until I reached radio reception again.
***
Recently I had Nothing in mind because I have been reading sociologist George Ritzer's The Globalization of Nothing, in which he decides to assign a new and completely counterintuitive theoretical meaning to the word. "In many, many ways," he warns, "nothing as it is used here is in near-total opposition to the way people conventionally use that term. As a result, if readers do not make the definitional and broader mental switches required here, the conclusions they draw from this book will be totally different from, if not diametrically opposed to, those that I intend." This seems a strange choice, to anchor your theoretical insight on a term you fully expect many people to misread and misunderstand, but such are the alluring paradoxes of nothing.
Ritzer wants to use "nothing" to signify the absence of difference among mass-produced or highly rationalized experiences, in which anything potentially distinctive or personal or of local character has been refined away. His idea of "nothing" is an extension of Augé's "nonplace" so that it can apply not only to places but to things and practices and people. Basically, his theory of "nothing" holds that any distinctive character in a thing creates a kind of friction that makes circulation and consumption less efficient.
But the experience of friction in distinctiveness is fairly subjective. Difference can become its own kind of monotony; a stream of images on Instagram, say, can become consistently varied yet harmonized and banalized by their form in "the space of flows." Traces of "nothing" can be hidden in something, and vice versa. The folksy corniness of Nothing, Arizona, always struck me as a particular kind of contrived hokum, untempered by whatever species of desperation leads one to run a convenience store miles deep into nowhere. Nothing was something in Ritzer's terms, a singularity, but it always felt like nothing to me. Nothing exists in Nothing, as Pizza Man Mike says.
Ritzer argues that "that which is nothing is more likely to be disenchanted, to lack mystery or magic," and he cites things like Lunchables and Domino's pizza as examples, contrasting them with gourmet meals and artisanal chocolate. But he also claims that there would be little demand for a novel called Like Water for Lunchables. Who wouldn't want to read that?
The more I read about "nothing," the more I found myself wanting to resist "something," Ritzer's examples of which — farmers markets, mom-and-pop businesses, diners, artisanal foods — all now seem like overfamiliar elitist clichés. There seems to be more "mystery" in the sheer fact of mass production, in implausible feats of standardization — something like the appeal of square watermelons, or normcore. And there is something uncanny in nonplaces that can make them unexpectedly haunting in their very familiarity. When I saw a Wawa in Florida, I had this feeling. By embracing nothing, it seemed to me I could make myself into something.
***
On Tumblr, I saw some quotes circulating from what seems to be the source transcript for an old Esquire "What I Learned" with Harry Dean Stanton. He starts talking about nothing:
The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness. Anybody else you’ve interviewed bring these things up?
Hang on, I gotta take this call ... Hey, brother. That’s great, man. Yeah, I’m being interviewed … We’re talking about nothing. I’ve got him well-steeped in nothing right now. He’s stopped asking questions.
It reminded me of one of my favorite moments from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, where Stanton, ashen-faced in a ratty bathrobe, tells the FBI agent played by Chris Isaak, "You see, I've already gone places. I just want to stay where I am." (This, by the way, is how I imagine Pizza Man Mike would have looked and sounded.)
Is the void "something"? Does it become "nothing" only when it is attached to a niche celebrity, distilled into a trendy Tumblr post, and replicated across many sites? I wondered how many of the Tumblr users reblogging that post considered Tumblr itself to be the void that they were surrendering to, and that posting this sort of meme was the form of their submission.
Part of what makes Ritzer's something/nothing continuum so confusing is that, as he somewhat grudgingly points out, people are just as likely to fervently pursue nothing as something, to prefer the certainty of fast food to idiosyncratic local restaurants, to prefer the efficiency and expediency of Starbucks to a quirky coffee shop. I've already gone places; I don't want every cup of coffee to necessarily come with ersatz authenticity.
What is nothing and what is something is cyclical, socially determined. The degree to which things seem "magical" probably has as much to do with the perceiver's stock of cultural capital, and where one figures on the trend adoption curve, as with anything about rationalized production processes. Frictionlessness becomes its own form of friction once you recognize it, marvel at it. And what is so great about friction? It often is just a way of reifying existing distributions of knowledge and power. If "something" is basically a play for status, we've got more than enough of it. Maybe we'd be better off with too much of nothing.