dissertation by billur turan

Have a Cup of Coffeeȱ

An Inquiry into the Domestic Everyday Interactions of People and Things

Written by Billur Turan Tutored by Emmanuelle Dirix & Naomi House Design Products Royal College of Art

Word Count: 10,660 2/10/2009

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

London, July, sometime before lunch

Chapter 1 – the subject

7stanbul, Early September, a rainy morning

Chapter 2 Ͳ the object

Chapter 3 – the ritual

London, End of September, packing to move

Chapter 4 Ͳ the setting

London, October, late at night

Chapter 5 Ͳ the Everyday

Conclusion

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 - Goldfish and Palette, 1914, Henri Matisse Figure 2 - Morning in a City, 1944, Edward Hopper Figure 3 - Woman With a Coffepot, c. 1895, Paul Cézanne Figure 4 - Self-Portrait, 1980 Alice Neel Figure 5 - Le Meutre, 1934 Pablo Picasso Figure 6 - What the Water Gave Me, 1938 Frida Kahlo Figure 7 - An American Painting-For Rose Paul, 1979, Ed Baynard Figure 8 - Table, Ocean, and Fruit, 1927, René Magritte Figure 9 - Broken Objects, 1944, Yasuo Kuniyoshi Figure 10 - Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Lord and Lady Passfield) , 1928-9, William Nicholson Figure 11 - Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, 1885-1886 Edgar Degas Figure 12 - Daily News, 1983, Dona Nelson Figure 13 - Table, Ocean, and Fruit, 1927, René Magritte Figure 14 - Study for a Portrait, 1953, Francis Bacon Figure 16 - Folding Dryer, 1962, Gerhard Richter Figure 16 - Victorian Parlor II, 1945, Horace Pippin Figure 17 - Portrait of Dr Hugo Koller, 1918, Egon Schiele Figure 18 - The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson and Julia), 1970 Alice Neel Figure 19 - Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, Francis Bacon Figure 20 - Morning Sun, 1952, Edward Hopper

Figure 1 Just like in social sciences where the everyday existence of the ordinary people has been overlooked, still life painting depicting inanimate objects has been considered the lowest form of painting. This painting through its ideal geometry makes a spiritual, essentialist statement. 1

1 Rowell, Margit, Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997 p. 89 3

PREFACE Ode to things I have a crazy, crazy love of things. I like pliers, and scissors. I love cups, rings, and bowls – not to speak, of course, of hats. I love all things, not just the grandest, also the infinitely small – thimbles, spurs, plates, and flower vases.

Oh yes, the planet is sublime! It ’s full of pipes weaving

hand-held through tobacco smoke, and keys and salt shakers – everything, I mean, that is made by the hand of man, every little thing: shapely shoes, and fabric, and each new bloodless birth of gold, eyeglasses carpenter ’s nails, brushes, clocks, compasses, coins, and the so-soft softness of chairs. Mankind has built oh so many perfect things! Built them of wool and of wood, of glass and of rope: remarkable tables, ships, and stairways. I love all

things, not because they are passionate or sweet-smelling but because, I don ’t know, because this ocean is yours, and mine; these buttons and wheels and little forgotten treasures, fans upon whose feathers love has scattered its blossoms, glasses, knives and scissors – all bear the trace of someone ’s fingers on their handle or surface, the trace of a distant hand lost in the depths of forgetfulness. I pause in houses, streets and elevators touching things, identifying objects that I secretly covet;

this one because it rings, that one because it ’s as soft as the softness of a woman ’s hip, that one there for its deep-sea color, and that one for its velvet feel. O irrevocable river of things: no one can say that I loved only fish, or the plants of the jungle and the field, that I loved only those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive. It ’s not true: many things conspired to tell me the whole story. Not only did they touch me, or my hand touched them: they were so close that they were a part of my being, they were so alive with me that they lived half my life and will die half my death.

Pablo Neruda

http://sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl/chile/misc/odas.html (20 September 2009)

Figure 2 Hopper frequently depicted female figures, nude or clothed in interiors. The women are seen in intimate, unsensational, unspectacular situations. Influence of Degas can be clearly seen in his depiction of an activity normally not witnessed by an outsider. 3

ȱ INTRODUCTION “Forget the ritual. You will not have a prescription with your design. Just focus on the object itself. Feelings will follow. ”

Frustration … Anger … Then doubt settled in. Did he have a point? Have I been following the lost cause of the modernist project without even realizing it? Who was I to tell people how to act, how to feel?

3 Kranzfelder, Ivo, Edward Hopper: Vision of Reality,Köln: Taschen, 1998, p. 39 8

This was the second tutorial since I had started designing a room in the process of losing its borders. Wardrobes, cupboards, doors, and windows, were going through an identity crisis; dismantling and mingling again into unfamiliar combinations. I was hoping the imaginary borders we have in our minds would dissolve as the domestic environment transformed into a recognizable yet strange entity.

However designing for the domestic everyday has proved to be tricky. “While studying the everyday or designing for it, the realness is replaced by a reference to the real, a depiction of the ordinary, an allusion to the common place. ” 4 Trying to avoid this trap and clarify my interest, I started a genuine inquiry into the most familiar: my everyday life.

I imagined my life to be a film. Every move I made and the slightest thought that crossed my mind would be recorded and narrated respectively in the third and first person. I picked the ritual of making Turkish coffee, at first instinctively. Though I came to realize it is quite appropriate for a few reasons; it is an act that carries cultural and personal significance, it requires certain material tools at the same time as staying independent of the “physicality of the house ”, the preparation process incorporates all the senses and it requires a time of non-activity. By that I mean standing and waiting for the coffee to be ready.

It fitted well with my theoretical investigation in which I tried to break down the daily domestic rituals into their elements: the actors, the setting and the time. I allocated a chapter to each element. Then I used common themes such as time, awareness, care, subjectivity, senses, memory and identity to analyze them.

Why do we have daily rituals? Do they change us? Do they offer creative power or passive escape from time? Do they have any potential for catalyzing social change? Do the intrinsic qualities of the objects affect the ritual? If so how? Up to what level do we share our response to an object ’s materiality? Could we see objects as separate entities existing free from our interpretation?

Blauvelt, Andrew. ’ Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life ‘ in Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Blauvelt, Minneapolis, Minn: Walker Art Center, 2003, p.35

* A phrase used in Turkey to descibe people who live in Germany. In the urban use it resonates with contempt, whereas in the rural areas with envy, since they are consireded to be making easy money

Figure 3

London, July, sometime before lunch He still has not called. A day and a half since he has arrived. So what!! Keep focused!! She jumps out of bed, runs down to the kitchen, gets out the cup, the coffee and the pot. Will be home in 5 days and

will have coffee with mum. I can ’t believe she started smoking again... A teenager of 52. The sugar has gone missing. With irritation she goes through all the cupboards, starts taking down spices. The salt, the pepper, the mint, and finally the SUGAR!! A full spoon, a few stirs and the pot is placed on the fire. Where were we when I taught him how to make coffee? Istanbul or Berlin? Of course it was

Berlin!! He had bought the coffee from a Turkish corner shop before I had arrived. He had even asked the girl how to make it and she was not sure. It must be difficult for them to feel out of place wherever they are; Almanclar * in Turkey and strangers here. The tiny brown bubbles make a rush to the edge of the pot; she is quick to remove it from the flame. I had almost let him spill all the coffee

and ruin the electric oven in his office. We had been preparing a small treat for his colleagues. It is incredible how he can make conversation with almost anyone. Then again he cares a bit too much about what everyone else feels about him. She fills the cup, a bit too much, and spills on the way back to her room. As the drops run down, they make obscure patterns on the outer sides. Is that a ship or

the crescent moon? Oh well, I ’ll never get any better at this. First thing when I ’m back, I will take myself to a fortune-teller.

Figure 4 For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of everybody - remained below the threshold of description. FOUCAULT, Discipline and Punish 5

Gutman, H., ‘Rousseau ’s Confessions: A Technology of the self ’ in Technologies of the Self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 99

CHAPTER 1 Ͳ the subject The Self Kant was immensely over taken by Rousseau ’s new conception of the self, even to the point of abandoning his meticulous daily routine in order to read his autobiography. In his essay on Rousseau ’s Confessions, Gutman argues that for a self to materialize, it has to be separated from the totality of things. The self emerges from this division with a sense of security and centrality. This feeling proves to be temporary and it soon dissolves into a sense of seclusion. The self, trying to feel, once again, in harmony with the world, creates imaginary worlds. 6 The paradox is that when lost in this imaginary world, the self dissolves into the unity. According to Freud this “oceanic feeling ” is an indication of the ego yearning to become one with the cosmos. 7 On the other hand, consciousness is the result of the ego regulating the openness to the world, through adjusting the senses. Subjectivity is founded on these dynamics. 8

I felt before I thought …. By this statement in his autobiography Rousseau points out that feelings come first and that the constitution of the self is progressive. 9 Although he is being quite radical by putting feelings first, he is not questioning the division between body and mind. After deeming the senses to be unreliable, Descartes concluded that the only reliable knowledge is the thinking act. Thus the famous principle

Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Cartesian dualism set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem for many years after Descartes' death.10 This division became one of the building blocks of Western intellectual thought and it mirrors the conflict between female sensuality and male rationality. Opposed to this dichotomy, David Howes calls for a holistic view of the self: one which integrates the sensuous relationships of body-mind-environment. He argues that if this

Ibid. p. 107 Ibid. p. 116 8 Stewart, Susan. ‘Remembering the Senses ’ in Empire of the Senses The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005, p. 60 9 Gutman, H., op.cit. pp. 99Ͳ120 10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes (20 September 2009 ) 7

non-existent partition is eliminated, it would become apparent that the mind is embodied and the senses are mindful. 11

Figure 5 “This is a variation of David ’s heroic painting of the Death of Marat; a pure scene of revolutionary martyrdom. Picasso includes Corday, with a huge butcher ’s knife, dismantled organs, and her mouth as the vagina dentata. Furthermore, she is attached to the signifiers of Western, middle-class, feminine domestic life- table cloth, high-heeled shoe, table, breasts. The female is a trap not just because she has a vagina dentata (unconscious) but also because she incarcerates the male – the hero, the artist- in a hideous web of bourgeois triviality. ” 12

Howes, David. ‘Introduction: Empire of the Senses ’ in Empire of the Senses: the Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005. p.7 12 Nochlin, Linda, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, Harvar University Press. Cambridge, mssachusetts, and london, england, 2006. Pp.103Ͳ107

He uses the term “senses ” as Marx had defined them; historical executions and sources of material memories. We may apprehend the world by means of our senses, but the senses themselves are shaped and modified by experience and the body bears a somatic memory of its encounters with what is outside of it. The environment is both physical and social. This is illustrated by the bundle of sensory and social values contained in the feeling of ‘home ’. 13 If each of our physical encounters is inscribed in either our conscious or unconscious knowledge, then, as Bergson put it, there is no perception which is not full of memories. So perception, which is understood to be internal, ahistorical and apolitical, is actually a shared social phenomenon. 14

How to Take Care of Oneself? How is this political, social sensuous self to be cared for without abandoning it either to the imaginary or to the isolation of the reality? The body-mind-environment relationship that constitutes the self might be the key.

Here we could follow Foucault, who studied the way in which the material environment, social customs, and linguistic usage create a collective psychological milieu in which the individual mind is immersed. 15 In his later works, he turned his attention to methods of self constitution and definition.

Technologies of the self, as he calls them, are practices that “permit individuals to transform their own, bodies, souls, thoughts, etc. as to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom. ” 16

Know thyself is a phrase we are all familiar with. It is known to be the golden principle of antiquity. However Foucault argues that in Greco-Roman culture it actually was the consequence of another principle: take care of oneself. Hence the meaning of the self is less important than the methods we employ to understand it. The quest for such knowledge is itself a form of self-care. 17

Stewart, Susan, op.cit. pp. 59Ͳ61 Stewart, Susan. ‘Remembering the Senses ’ in Empire of the Senses The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, Oxford &New York: Berg, 2005, pp. 59Ͳ61 15 Hutton, Patrick H., ‘Foucault, Freud, and the Technologies of the Self ’ in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 121Ͳ144 16 Foucault, Michel, ‘Technologies of the Self ’ in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 18 17 Hutton, Patrick H., op.cit. pp. 121Ͳ144 14

“The care of the self is the care of the activity and not the care of the soul-as-substance. ” Marcus Aurelius, in his letter to his master Fronto, gives a detailed description of his everyday life. Recording even the unimportant deeds of the day he writes; “ … I relieved my throat, I will not say by gargling but by swallowing honey water as far as the gullet and ejecting it again. ” Such details are important because they are what “he thought, what he felt. ” 18 To him, self was not something hidden inside; it was to be formed through attentive efforts. Thus at the end of each day he would ask himself “What bad habit have I cured today?

Care, Attention and Growth How to be attentive in the everyday life which seems dominated by habit and inattentiveness? Massimo Montanari who proposes slowness as a mode of attention and reflection in everyday activities, underlines care to be central for this new approach. This attitude might reunite “the aesthetic, the political, the corporal and the everyday, by its insistence on the centrality of pleasure and the body. ”

This kind of careful attention is opposed to alienated attention; what Marx called “false consciousness ”. It resembles flow which is a kind of integrated attention that serves to direct a person ’s psychic energy towards realizing his/her goals. The key elements of the flow experience are a merging of action and awareness, a centering of attention on a limited stimulus field, a loss of ego or sense of self, and control over one ’s actions and over the environment. According to Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, the free self is one capable of flow, of giving attention to objects and activities in a way that allows the psychic energy invested to be returned to the person as enjoyment. Through integrated patterns of attention, the self grows and cultivates its goals. 20

They coin the term “cultivation ” for this process of improvement, development, refinement, or expression of some object or habit due to care, training or inquiry. They base it on Dewey ’s distinction between perception and recognition. When confronted with an object, the user either interprets it

Foucault, Michel, op.cit. pp. 28Ͳ29 Parkins, Wendy & Craig, Geoffrey, Slow Living, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, p. 59 20 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, The Meaning of Things: domestic symbols and the self / Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi and Eugene RochbergͲHalton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 186Ͳ196 19

using a stereotype thus recognizes, or actively perceives the object so that its qualities might change his habits or schemes, thus perceives. Perception means that the scheme through which we interpret an object is challenged and expanded; which is how learning occurs. 21

Figure 6 In this feminine bathtub self portrait, bathing is shown as an activity of reflection and reminiscence, leading to construction of identity.

Ibid, pp. 173Í˛181

7stanbul, Early September, a rainy morning Coffee cups of all colours and sizes, from old fashion Turkish cups with oriental patterns to huge mugs that could hold coffee for two, are all waiting patiently in their nothingness. Their silence is only broken when she opens the cupboard and the emptiness fills with light. I cannot believe it ’s

raining at this time of the year. She reaches for the one with flowery patterns but hesitates. An irregular day, I should make an exception. And she picks the blue cup, the last member of an old six-cup series. She leaves the cup next to her mum ’s, for her to fill both with freshly made coffee. The mother is sitting on a high stool placed next to the oven; neither paying full attention to the pot nor ignoring it completely. I don ’t understand why her coffee always tastes better than mine. Better

then anyone else ’s really. You could say I am used to it, but others think so as well. As if someone has whispered to her, mother picks up the pot, fills the cups till they ’re both half full. The rest is boiled once again, this time rumbling violently, until poured down. She has done it again; perfect

bubbles, divided equally among the two cups. She moves towards the couch nearest to the window, eyes transfixed on the drops rolling down the glass. Where did all this rain come from so

suddenly? The sea must have a billion hues in store, is dark grayish blue today. I love it when it snows, then it turns a sweet ice green. Of course there is the happy blue if the sun is shining in a cloudless sky. She opens the window, takes a deep breath and a sip from the coffee. Replaces the old blue cup on the window sill, swirling vapours slowly vanish into the air. The smell of the coffee mixes with the damp smell of the earth. Great grandma used to say this is the smell of the dead.

Weird thing to say to a child …

CHAPTER 2 Ͳ the object We have to ask, as Georges Perec put it, “How are we to speak of these ‘common things ’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are. ” He encourages us to look into ourselves and to be astonished by the endonic instead of the exotic. 22 Brecht argues that in order to be aware of the familiar we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. “However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be labeled as something unusual. ”

Figure 7 With its frontal perspective, linear organization and simple depiction of the vessels, this painting in whole resonates with a sense of stillness.

Perec, Georges, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, pp. 205Ͳ207

Brecht, 1964, quoted in Highmore, Ben. ‘Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life ’ in The Everyday Life

Reader, ed. Ben Highmore, London: Routledge, 2002. p. 21

Objects Abstracted To classify objects and to illuminate their encounters with subjects, Jean Baudrillard leans heavily on semiotics. For him the everyday environment of objects is to a great extent an ‘abstract ’ system of signs. What the object signifies can only be understood by referring to the other object signifiers in this system. Consequently objects together make up the system through which the subject strives to construct a world, a private totality. Every object thus has two functions- to be put to use and to be possessed. 24

Even practical objects with functional value are continuously turning towards a cultural system. Furthermore, the whole system of needs, socialized or unconscious, cultural or practical surge back on the essential technical order and threatens the objective status of the object itself. 25 Here Arvatov could be mentioned. He criticizes the passivity of the thing in the bourgeois society which exists merely as a category of pure consumption, dead and fixed, outside its material dynamics and social process of production. 26

However using language as a structural model is restrictive and over focused on the visual aspects of objects. Judy Attfield states “Dealing only with the visual features of the artefacts, obscures the work of designers, makers and users as all involved in the making of meaning through things. ”

“We

have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things inmotion that illuminate their human and social context. ” 28

24 Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London & New York: Verso,1996, p. 86 25

Ibid. p. 8 Arvatov, Boris & Kiaer, Christian, ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing ( Toward the Formulation of the Question ) ’ in October, vol. 81, summer 97, MIT Press, p. 122 27 Attfield, Judy, Wild things : the Material Culture of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg, 2000, p. 43 28 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Things ’ in The Social Life of Things Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 5 26

Figure 8 Magritte named objects in contradiction with what they represent, hoping to liberate the viewer from conventions, and make him question the nature of representation and language.

Material Existence of Objects Roger-Pol Droit also claims that things reside outside of language and remain categorically removed from our world of words. 29 Following Perec ’s call, he embarks on a year long journey into the realm of things. Right away he is confronted with the dilemma of either grabbing things in their singular reality or seizing them in their ideal totality. He asks “Do I really have no choice between describing things without ever touching them, or else contemplating each one in an aphasic silence? ” Finally he finds a way through the middle, to remain suspended, in-between. Seeing things as folds of ancient and vanished phrases, he tries to discover ideas sealed inside some of the things woven into our everyday lives hour by hour, gesture by gesture.

What is so impressive about his investigation is that although it is primarily philosophical, it takes its cues from materiality of things and does not loose contact with their everyday use. As he questions mundane things such as an alarm clock, a set of drawers, a train ticket, a statue, etc. he realizes that that they link us to our past; personal and archaic. They can be loaded with both personal and shared meaning.

Things impress themselves on our consciousness through the senses, which remember each encounter with the outside world. This explains why things are such powerful retainers of personal and social memory. Materiality of objects as capable of triggering remembrance and awareness is central to Walter Benjamin ’s texts on Proust. The past is somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, an unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us). 31 According to Neil Cummings things catch the moment as it falls from memory and sit as sediment forming our consciousness. 32 The sensation initiated by an object is dependent on its intrinsic qualities such as, material properties, form, use, personal history, and etc. For example the bowl is a figure of reassurance because it temporarily stops the endless flow, functions as the container. The user does not consciously think about this principle while using the bowl, instead its form and material intuitively raise this feeling of confidence in the user. “The bowl always fits the hand, more or less, and it always

29 Droit, RogerͲPol, How are Things?, trans. Theo Cuffe, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2005, p 72 30

Ibid. pp. 10Ͳ12 Proust quoted in Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Verso, 1973, p. 112. 32 Cummings, Neil, in Reading Things: The Alibi of Use, ed. Neil Cummings, London: Chance Books, 1993, p. 14 31

has the measure of the stomach. When the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, gives as its unit of time for a prayer or a ceremony, ‘the length of a meal ’, it means this: the interval of a stomach, a bowlful of time. ” 33

Objects as Social Actors The fact that objects are carriers of personal and social memory and that they can affect us without us realizing it, raises the question; what role do they play in the formation of the society?

Bourdieu developed the concept of orders, such as spatial oppositions in the home, agricultural tools and the seasons. Each tangible order was homologous with other less tangible orders like gender, or social hierarchy. Therefore as people interacted with everyday things, they came to accept the expectations characteristic of their particular social group. These became habitual ways of being in the world. 34

Miller adds that objects ’ power in determining our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behavior is rooted in the fact that we do not “see ” them. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so.

By conveying his words with a tape recorder instead of lecturing in person, Debord tried to illustrate that forms that are considered normal and not even noticed, are the ones which ultimately condition us. According to him, alteration is always the necessary and sufficient condition for experimentally bringing into clear view the object of our study, which would otherwise remain uncertain – an object which is itself less to be studied than to be altered. 36

Droit, RogerͲPol, How are Things?, trans. Theo Cuffe, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2005, pp. 16Ͳ17 Miller, Daniel, ‘Materiality: An Introduction ’ in Materiality ed. Daniel Miller, Durham : Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 1Ͳ51 35 Ibid. 36 Debord, Guy, ‘Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life ’ in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 237Ͳ245 34

Figure 9 The overall theme of the work is the destruction of objects that were once whole. Depicted objects are from the artist ’s everyday life and they contain references to his feelings during the last years of World War II. 37

Figure 10 The overall theme of the work is the destruction of objects that were once whole. Depicted objects are from the artist ’s everyday life and they contain references to his feelings during the last years of World War II. 38

37 Stokes, Sims and Rewald, Sabine, Still Life: The Object in American Art 1915Ͳ1995, New York: Rizzoli, p. 124 24

CHAPTER 3 – the ritual I ’m interested in the moments of transaction that occur every day, sometimes even unconsciously. Working late and having coffee... Holding a wine glass just before taking the first sip... Lying down after a long day …

By blurring the border between the perceiver and the perceived these daily rituals create a compression of time and a new kind of awareness. This is not an escape in time, rather a different way of inhabiting it. During such moments of transaction the nature of the perceiving subject can be joined to the nature of the object; creating a sense of harmony and unity. Objects may tone up or wear down this potential for unity, depending on their characteristics. Their intrinsic qualities are perceived intuitively through the senses and add to the distinctiveness of the ritual.

The Object/Subject Duality In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel defines objectification as a process in which the act of creating form creates consciousness or capacity like a skill. As a result both form and the self-consciousness are transformed. Given that they result from the same process, there can be no fundamental division between humanity and materiality. “Dialectically we both produce and are the products of these historical processes. ” 39

Hence the dualism of subjects and objects seems to be resolved. As brilliant as this resolution sounds, it relies on the abstract nature of philosophy. How could we make use of these understandings in a shifting and diverse world of practice?

When we get down from the philosophical heights, we are faced with the singularity of each individual existence. To grasp this reality we have to accept the subjectivity, the irregularity and the multiplicity of perspective involved in the permanent and inextricable intertwining of things and people, people and things. ”There is no continuity of being, whether in ourselves or in things ” wrote Montaigne.

38 Stokes, Sims and Rewald, Sabine, Still Life: The Object in American Art 1915Ͳ1995, New York: Rizzoli p. 124 39 Miller, Daniel, ‘Materiality: An Introduction ’ in Materiality ed. Daniel Miller, Durham : Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 8Ͳ9 Ibid. pp. 1Ͳ51

A cloud ’s shape and location is clear but its borders constantly change, rendering it permeable and detachable. “We need to imagine cloud-subjects, endowed with the usual characteristics, interacting with cloud-subjects, endowed with different properties. ” 41

Figure11 “Degas makes the most familiar thing in the world -the human body- unfamiliar. The face is distanced through the odd point of view. The pose projects bothintimacy and hiddenness, selfcontainment and display. ” 42

Droit, Roger-Pol, How are Things?, trans. Theo Cuffe, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2005, pp. 69-70 Nochlin, Linda Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2006 42

Interaction: senses, materiality, memory It is commonly considered that the subject acts on the passive object, whose part in the transaction is limited and based on the intention of the subject. Droit with the metaphor of interacting clouds assigns equal roles to the object and the subject and draws attention to their ambiguous borders. Likewise Serres defines the skin as the common border of the world and the body and underlines the role of the senses, mostly touch, in their relations: “In the skin, through the skin, the world and the body touch, defining their common border. …Things mingle among themselves and I am no exception to this, I mingle with the world which mingles itself in me. The skin intervenes in the things of the world and brings about their mingling. ” 43 (Serres 1998: 97)

As we mingle with the world, we might forget about the object at hand. This occurs mostly when there is corporal interaction, when the object supports us. It is easy to comprehend the bed as a separate entity if we are standing next to it. Conversely while we are laying on it, almost asleep, it ceases to exist on its own, becomes an extension of our body. 44 This sensation of fusing with the thing in use is felt intensely for clothes because they share our mobility. The clothing, as it joins, transforms and supports the body cannot be separated from it. It becomes integral to the body ’s memory along with associated gestures and sensations. The body has lived through a particular moment with a particular garment, and it silently remembers the fact. 45

This mingling between the body and things occurs as an involuntary disclosure of meaning through the senses. The senses are meaning-generating apparatuses that operate beyond consciousness and intention. The sensory is not only encapsulated within the body as an internal capacity, but is also dispersed out there on the surface of things as the latter ’s autonomous characteristics, which then can invade the body as perceptual experience. The interpretation through the senses becomes a recovery of truth as collective, material experience. Performance is also a moment when the unconscious levels and accumulated layers of personal experience become conscious through material networks,

Serres, 1998, quoted in Connor, Steven, ‘Michel Serres ’ Five Senses ’ in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005. P. 322 (Serres 1998: 97) 44 45

Droit, Roger-Pol, op.cit. pp. 97Ͳ120 Droit, RogerͲPol, op.cit. pp. 52Ͳ53

independent of the performer. In this moment the actor is also the audience of his/her involuntary implication in a sensory horizon.

In his research about the use of wood in interior decoration for establishing domesticity in urban Romania, Adam Drazin raises questions concerning care, senses and action. “In what sense does a person, or a family, experience caring, freedom or suppression? Is it possible to feel it on your skin or under your fingers? Caring is participatory, and this renders the material qualities of a substance such as wood important. Emotions of caring should neither be seen as arising inside and imposed on the outside world, nor as external and outside of the person ’s control, but arising in the sensitivity of interaction. Caring comprises both emotion and action, and it is this unity that makes it relevant to both one person ’s experience and the historical change. ”

Seremetakis, C.Nadia, ‘The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory ’ in The Senses Still Perception and Memory as Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis, Chicago & London: The University of

Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 6-8, 19 47

Drazin, Adam, ‘A Man Will Get Furnished: Wood and Domesticity in Urban Romania ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 173Ͳ201

Figure 12 Nelson has noted that all the details of this scene were observed from real life. The table ’s multiple functions are signaled by the teapot, the typewriter, the iron, and the hammer. The jacket evidences that still life elements can be used to portray the subject, who may be absent. 48

48 Stokes, Sims and Rewald, Sabine, Still Life: The Object in American Art 1915Ͳ1995, New York: Rizzoli, p. 102 29

Figure 13

Escapism or a New Type of Awareness Baudrillard, as he focuses on antiques and dynamics of collecting, develops a Freudian approach to human interactions with objects. The environment of private objects and their possession is a dimension of our life which is absolutely necessary. We cannot live in absolute singularity, in the irreversibility signaled by the moment of birth, it is this irreversible movement from birth towards death that objects help us to cope with. What man gets from objects is the possibility of continually experiencing the unfolding of his experience in a controlled, cyclical mode, symbolically transcending a real existence the irreversibility of whose progression he is powerless to affect. 49 Mythological objects are carriers of value in a closed circle and in a perfect time. They offer an escape from everyday, back to the childhood- or even to pre-birth reality where the subject could merge with the surroundings. 50 Droit agrees that sometimes we escape from time, however unlike Baudrillard who implies that this is a neurotic act; he sees this as humanityÂ&#x2019;â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s access to eternity.

49 Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London & New York: Verso,1996, p. 96 50

Ibid. p. 80

While he is riding a bike down a slope looking over the sea, he feels “out of time ”. “As a unit of time it lasts but a few instants, nothing more than a lapse. But being outside of time is by definition measureless. Without duration... ” 51 This is what Barbara Adam calls ‘temporal time ’; a sense of time as a becoming of what has not been before, it can be experienced rather than measured. Nontemporal time is measured and repeatable but also quantifiable and hence may run out. 52 Temporal time is embodied and embedded in all our social practices and the materiality of the body and its environment. (Adam 1995: 54, 44)

Correspondingly while she is describing the common practice of having midday coffee break in Greece, Seremetakis talks about a perceptual compression of space and time that is encapsulated in the small coffee cup. She gives this as an example to substances, spaces, and times that can trigger stillness; “a moment when the buried, the discarded and the forgotten escape to the social surface of awareness. ”

This is how the everyday offers moments of awakening. Habit is intervened by involuntary memories which have to be rearranged so that the totality of the past is recognized in the present. The reconstruction of that constellation can begin through involuntary memory with the most everyday object, like Proust ’s madeleine. 54

Proust is well aware that our sensual apprehension of objects can result in a breakdown in intelligibility to others. It is not just that the fetishist, obsessed with the magical power of objects, wants to keep things to himself, but that involuntary dimension of intuition and the carrying over of impressions into memory is something private to us; something that in fact forms us through an arbitrary but over-determined contingency. 55

51 Droit, RogerͲPol. How are Things?, trans. Theo Cuffe, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2005, pp. f226 52 Parkins, Wendy & Craig, Geoffrey, Slow Living, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, p. 40 53 Seremetakis, C.Nadia, ‘The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory ’ in The Senses Still Perception and Memory as Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p 12 McCracken, Scott, ‘The Completion of Old Work: Walter Benjamin and the Everyday ’ in Cultural Critique, vol. 52, 2002, pp. 157Ͳ158 55 Stewart, Susan. ‘Remembering the Senses ’ in Empire of the Senses The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005, p. 66 54

Habit; routine or inventive? Why do we need habits? According to Baudrillard, just like objects, they help us to cope with the irreversibility of time and inevitability of death. Thus the system of habits is analogous to the system of objects. Habitual patterns break up the temporal continuum and ensure repetition so that we can ignore the singularity of events, which otherwise cause us anxiety. 56

“The fact that small, domestic rituals can quiet the confusion of the human spirit has been recognized and institutionalized through the ages. ” In her insightful inquiry into the home, Akiko Busch states that when we are able to choose which chores to do and when to do them, they can give us profound comfort. 57 She records how her twin sons used to love setting the table and the meticulous care in the way one carried a pile of napkins while his brother softly laid out the forks. These simple rituals would remarkably calm their aggression. 58

There is a thin line, as Freud most persuasively argued, between the neurotic act and religious ritual, for both are equally “obsessed ” by the potentiality for significance in the commonplace. 59 When one morning, Jonathan is confronted by a pigeon outside his door, he is thrown out of his daily routine and looses all his confidence and control. In this state two things help him to control his raging thoughts; an informal, broken prayer and the act of cleaning the basin after he has had to piss in it. Attentive thinking and routine, physical activities help him to calm down and move on with the rest of his schedule. 60

It is commonly accepted that rituals aim to compel the world through representation and manipulation. On the contrary, they express the fact that the world cannot be compelled. The ritual offers a version of life without contingency, variability and out accidentally. During the course of things reflecting on the ritual provides a focusing lens on the ordinary everyday which allows its full

56 Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London & New York: Verso,1996, p. 94 57 Busch, Akiko, Geography of home: Writings on Where We Live, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. p. 46 58

Ibid. pp. 54Ͳ55 Smith, Z. Jonathan, ‘The Bare Facts of Ritual ’ in History of Religions, vol. 20, AugͲNov , 1980, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 112Ͳ127 60 Süskind, Patrick, The Pigeon, trans. John E. Woods, Zurich: Penguin,1987, pp. 13Ͳ14 59

significance to be perceived, a significance which the ritual ’s rules express but are powerless to effectuate.

Figure 14

Smith, Z.Jonathan, op.cit. pp. 112Ͳ127

London, End of September, packing to move They sit on the bed, recently stripped of its clothing, and look around the room. Leaned against the walls there are 2 big boxes and 5 small ones. Things are categorized in a different way while moving:

only their physical properties matter; their functions, for the time being, become irrelevant. Books are heavy, dry and sturdy; kitchenware is heavy, dry but fragile; sheets are dry, light and protective. Thus pillows and kitchenware might be a good mix. The aunt asks “ Shall we take a break? “ “We have some cake!!! Coffee or tea? “she shouts, already on her way to the kitchen. With the habit, she opens the cupboards where she always kept the coffee cups, which are laying deep down in a box, rapped in layers of newspaper. Of course!! We have to

manage with the big mugs for today. How am I going to measure the water? She reaches into the bagoff-stuff-that won ’t break, locates the coffee and the pot. After placing the pot in the limited space left on the counter, she fills the mug up to 1/3rd of its height with tap water, pours it out into the pot. Once again and the pot is almost full. She struggles with the plastic bag that covers the coffee, which seems to have a weird knot. What ’s the point!!!No matter how many plastic bags I use, it doesn ’t stay

fresh for long. Impatiently she tears it open, pulling the coffee out with a brisk move. I have just wasted a plastic bag, adding to the ever-growing junk of humanity. She locates the table spoon in the top drawer. No luck with measuring today!! One spoon should be fine for both of us. When she empties the spoon into the water, the coffee does not sink. Only with the consistent clockwise circular motion of the spoon, it is spread evenly on the surface. Never stir when it ’s over the fire. Never change

direction of stir. Otherwise you won ’t have bubbles. She puts the spoon in the sink and the pot on the stove; adjusting the fire to the lowest as possible. It takes longer but this is the way. They would

actually cook it on burnt charcoal. The surface of the liquid is tranquil, not showing any trace of change. I might help my aunt for a few minutes before it starts rising. Throwing one last glance at the pot, she runs to the bedroom where the aunt is busy stretching down to reach the bottom of a box. She tapes it all around, twice. That should be good enough. The pots are sandwiched between the

huge pillows anyway. What else is in there? The clothes dryer, the box of cutlery … the aunt arrives to help and together they place it on the other three smaller but heavier boxes; each full of books, magazines and things-that-should-not-be-broken. A hissing sound comes from the kitchen. Nooooo …

The coffeeeeeeeeee!! Even before the coffee spilt all over the stove comes into view, she knows it ’s too late. I have broken the golden ruler: Never leave the pot alone. Now I have to clean all this mess …

Figure 15 Richter said that he looked for photographs that showed his present life and picked amateur family pictures, those banal objects and snapshots. As he put it “Life communicates itself to us through convention and through parlor games and laws of social life ” 62

62 The Painting of Modern Life: 1960s To Now, London: Hayward Publishing, 2007, p. 59 35

CHAPTER 4 Ͳ the setting The total context of artifacts in the house act as a constant sign of familiarity, telling us who we are, what we have done and plan to do, and so reduces the amount of information we have to pay attention in order to act with ease. Therefore inhabitants can channel their energy more effectively within it. How one learns to relate to things at home will have a decisive effect on the psychological growth of the person. 63

Furthermore the home is also, as Bachelard emphasized (1994), a poetic space, a space of the imagination, a sight of sensory richness because everyone variously ‘constructs its image in memory and imagination ’ (Chapman 2001) 64 Thus rather than a physical place it is a mind set, a personal way of doing things. It ’s where the individual sets the rules and feels confident. Any personal change, voluntary or involuntary, conscious or unconscious has to start there. Home always negotiates change and constancy and thus is productive of both identity and agency.

Home as Materialization of Identity The home facilitates the materialization of identity through two levels. To begin with home is the space where personal belongings are arranged as an extension of bodily habits and as support for routines. Additionally many of the things in the home, as well as the space itself, carry personal meaning as retainers of personal narrative.

As Lefebvre puts it, space is neither natural nor abstract, it is consciously created, and in turn, produces specific effects. Therefore as a social product, it encourages or discourages certain practices and behaviors. 67 Some people believe their homes have had significant influence on the course of their lives. Demonstratively Nan sees the successive homes she has lived in as central to the development of her own identity. Her biography is narrated as a sequence from the home of her childhood which originally gave her continued identity as a working-class Scot, and ends in her

63 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, The Meaning of Things: domestic symbols and the self / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene RochbergͲHalton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 180Ͳ185 64 Parkins, Wendy & Craig, Geoffrey, Slow Living, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, p. 64 65

Ibid. p. 65 Ibid. p. 65 67 Blauvelt, Andrew. ’ Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life ‘ in Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Blauvelt, Minneapolis, Minn: Walker Art Center, 2003, p. 19 66

present house, which is almost as much a museum as the actual museum where she works as a volunteer. 68

By recollecting and recounting her past, and in particular her childhood years, Nan manages to link her past, present and future. This enables her to reflect upon her experiences, as well as resolve certain conflicts and key events in her past. Her example showcases the intricate interaction between narratives, materials and sensory manifestations. Furthermore it confirms that the perception, preservation and presentation of personal histories and memories is by no means solely linguistic, given that our experience of the world, especially in early childhood days, is primarily sensual.

It could be concluded that “Home as materialization of identity does not fix identity, but anchors it in physical being that makes continuity between past and present. Without such anchoring of ourselves in things, we are, literally lost ” (Young 1997: 149-151) 70

Home as a Set of Practices Places are ‘contexts for human experience, constructed in movement, memory, encounter and association ’ (Tilley 1994: 15). Paraphrasing Mary Douglas, home is rather ‘a kind of place ’, which acquires its meaning through practice; and as such it forms part of the everyday process of the creation of the self. The concept of home can be realized in sets of practices, styles of dress and address, in memories and myths, in words and jokes. (1984 Berger)

Elia Petridou, goes a step further and conceptualizes home away from the physicality of the house. She focuses on the material world of the home and argues that the process of self-creation of the subject through the interaction with objects associated with home does not need to be geographically bounded. She studies home as practice and combination of processes through which its inhabitants acquire a sense of history and identity.

Miller, Daniel, ‘Behind Closed Doors ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, p. 11 69 Hecht, Anat, ‘Home Sweet Home: Tangible Memories of an Uprooted Childhood ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 123Ͳ149 70 Parkins, Wendy & Craig, Geoffrey, Slow Living, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, p. 65 71 Petridou, Elia. ‘The Taste of Home ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 87Ͳ107

Figure 16 The needlework on the floor, floral patterns of the carpet, the crochet, the warm light of the table lamp suggest that this is a comfortable and nourishing domestic environment.

Petridou ’s research focuses on the Greek students living in Great Britain and notes that the very mobility of food, its transferability from one country to another, makes it suitable for a means to stabilize the students ’ sense of home. Food is associated with the ‘taste ’ of homeland and it becomes the basis of a process including social relations of preparing food, cooking and eating, which turns the superficial quality of taste into something that is sufficiently profound. So in this case a taste of home that has itself become fully mobile can in turn be mobilized in the defensive constitution of identity.

By showing that the home and its attendant material culture can be central to the practices that make people mobile and able to re construct their relationships and indeed themselves in tandem with the changes that take place in the contexts within which they live, she reinforces the nature of home as a process rather than just a place.

Miller, Daniel, ‘Behind Closed Doors ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 8Ͳ9

Moving House: Mobile Possessions and Selective Memory Another example that highlights the important role of mobile possessions in securing memory in motion is Benjamin ’s talk about book collecting, as he unpacks his library after moving to Berlin:

“The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom or order, I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood …which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, an on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. ” (Benjamin 1999; 61) 73

In the case of refugees, the things they take with them help to reobjectify in a new environment. We could say that the things people take with them help preserve a certain consistency and continuity. Even further, memory maybe created in motion through the displacement of objects. A given thing is not only kept because it bears some value, be it economic or sentimental. It acquires value through the sorting process.

Therefore the confrontation between people and their possessions could be seen as an opportunity to reconfigure both the repair and rewriting of the narratives of their own personal biography and also the way their relationship to others has formed part of this biography. Since the objects of the home are mementoes and reminders of the past, the decision to discard some and retain others when moving house becomes the active management of one owns externalized memory.

Marcoux, JeanͲSebastien, ‘The Refurbishment of Memory ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind

Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 69Ͳ87

Marcoux, JeanͲSebastien, ‘The Refurbishment of Memory ’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 69Ͳ73Ͳ84

Figure 17

Domestic Practices Given that interaction with the objects of the home adds up to the everyday process of the creation of the self, we have to take a closer look at these domestic practices. Perec had called for a fresh investigation of the common things that surround us; Highmore suggests a re-evaluation of our daily interactions with them. He asks: “Can domestic routines become precious moments snatched from more thoroughly exhaustive work practices? How would we call attention to such “non-event ” without betraying them, without disloyalty to the particularity of their experience, without turning them into

events? “(Highmore 2002: 207)

Figure 18

London, October, late at night First a cupful of water, then a full spoon of coffee, she gives it a few stirs before placing over the stove.

It ’s not going to keep fresh; I should have told them to wrap it in two bags. But then they were in such a hurry to keep up with the queue. I wish the house smelled like that street; fresh ground coffee... She won ’t leave the pot alone, leaning over it from time to time, stands; waiting. I can ’t tell if it takes a

minute or ten. Time feels different when you ’re just an observer. Does the anticipation make the coffee taste better? The surface is filled with bubbles, clinging to each other they rise gradually and make a hissing sound. Abruptly she picks the pot and pours the coffee into the cup. Is it the red cherries that

give it an air of optimism? Grandma used to serve afternoon tea with this cup. We would be coming back from the beach .Then it would sit in the corner cabinet until another round of visitors. She leaves the kitchen with cup in one hand, looking straight ahead so she won ’t spill.

CHAPTER 5 Ͳ the everyday We do not pay much attention to our daily domestic rituals because of their regular and non-eventful nature. Surprisingly these are the exact reasons for their power and potential. In order to answer Highmore ’s question concerning their generative potential, we have to enter the realm of the everyday.

The Critical Potential of the Everyday Lefebvre strived to both diagnose the modern everyday life and reclaim its critical potential. To him critique is not solely an analytic perspective for assessing contemporary everyday life. It must also contain the recovery of critical practice to be found within everyday life itself.

Similarly, Arvatov believed that reconstruction of the everyday would be the way to form a proletarian society. “Everyday life (byt) consists of the fixed, skeletal forms of existence (bytie). The transformation of everyday-life-creation, in which changes in byt will move organic, constant, and flexible step with changes in bytie, will lead, in effect, to the liquidation of the everyday as specific sphere of social life- so long as the process of dissolving class barriers continues. In proletarian society, where production will directly inform all aspects of human activity, the static everyday life of consumption will become impossible. ”

Debord observed that modern capitalism, in need to increase consumption, also plays on the structure of the everyday, manufacturing a daily passivity. Advertising, propaganda and all the forms of the dominant spectacle frankly admit that wasted time is the time spent at work, which is only justified by passive pas-times such as rest, consumption, entertainments. 77

75 Lefebvre, Henri, ‘Work and Leisure in Everyday Life ’ in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 224Ͳ236 76

Arvatov, Boris & Kiaer, Christian, ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing ( Toward the Formulation of the Question ) ’ in October, vol. 81, summer 97, MIT Press, p. 121 77 Debord, Guy, ‘Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life ’ in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 237Ͳ245

However in the last decade or so design history has turned from a strong focus on production to consumption, concentrating on the stage at which a product is distributed, sold and appropriated. 78 “It is obvious that forms of social consumption are not primary- that they are defined by production – but without studying them it is impossible to grasp culturally the style of a society as a whole. They immediately influence both the society ’s world-outlook and more importantly, its world-feeling. The relation of the individual and the collective to the Thing is the most fundamental and important, the most defining of social relations. This thesis flows directly from the theory of historical materialism. ” 79

Active Consumption Bringing a fresh perspective to this discussion De Certeau argued that consumption is a way of production. “The ‘making ’ in question is a production, a poesis – but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of ‘production ’ (television, urban development, commerce, etc.) and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves ‘consumers ’ any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. ”

Aiming to bring to light how the common people manipulate and utilize the culture imposed by the dominant economic order, De Certeau analyzed reader ’s practices, practices related to urban spaces, utilization of everyday rituals. His analysis showed that each individual is a locus in which incoherent and often contradictory social relations interact. 81

Routine practices such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling and cooking contain an element of creative resistance to the repressive aspects of modern society. While organizational power structures deploy strategies to institute a set of relations for official proper ends, those who are dominated use tactics. Tactics are defensive and opportunistic. 82

“A ‘tactic ’ because it does not have a place, depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the wing. For instance reading seems to constitute the maximal

78 Attfield, Judy, Wild things : the Material Culture of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg, 2000, p. 36 79

Arvatov, Boris & Kiaer, Christian, op.cit. pp. 119Ͳ128 De Certeau, Michel, ‘General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life ’ in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore, London: Routledge, 2002. p. 65 81 Ibid. pp. 64Ͳ67 82 Blauvelt, Andrew. ‘Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life ’ in Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Blauvelt, Minneapolis, Mini: Walker Art Center, 2003. p. 20 80

development of the passivity assumed to characterize the costumer, who is conceived as a voyeur in a ‘show biz society ’. In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production, which is also an ‘invention ’ of the memory. The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal ’s text: the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. Different world (the reader ’s) slips into the author ’s place. Reading thus introduces an ‘art ’ which is anything but passive, a subtle art of ‘renters ’ who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text. ”

New Consciousness in the Global Everyday Kinser suggests that De Certeau should be read in order to learn what “everyday practices could be and what they may still in part be as a residue from one of our collective pasts. ” Although our megacities are not the city De Certeau talked about, “the temporal-spatial grids defining the pathways of everyday life do not change by sweeping away the past but by fragmenting it, so that new forms of the grids appear both beyond the old ones and in its cracks. ”

Furthermore, Kinser speaks of the formal structure of everyday practices. That structure has two modes; physical and mental, and has two aspects, spatial and temporal. The paths of ordinary people through the city, like those of the elite, are rooted in routine as well as artfulness. Ordinary people maintain this store of mixed ways of behaving – inventive and repetitious, subversive and cooperativesemi-consciously. 84

One of the responses to this radically uneven and heterogeneous production of space and time in post-traditional societies is slow living. “It embraces two assumptions about everyday life: that it has a creative and ethical potential; and that it must be reflexively negotiated and managed by contemporary subjects. ” 85

De Certeau, Michel, ‘General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life ’ in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore, London: Routledge, 2002. pp. 69Ͳ72 84 Kinser, Samuel, ‘Everyday Ordinary ’ in Diacritics, vol. 22, No. 2, Summer, 1992, The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 70Ͳ82 85 Parkins, Wendy & Craig, Geoffrey, Slow Living, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, pp. 7Ͳ10

Figure 19 Some interpret these three figures to be Isabel at different times of the day, while others believe they are her id, ego and alter-ego. In both cases this is the individual experiencing the discontinuity and variability of time and space in the global everyday.

On the topic of paying attention to the present Alberto Melluci has claimed that it ’s influence reaches beyond the individual subject to mobilize new forms of political investment and revivify everyday life. “The unity and continuity of individual experience must be based on an inner capacity to change form, to redefine itself repeatedly in the present as a unique, unrepeatable experience within which I realize myself. To live the discontinuity and variability of time and space we must find a way to unify experience other than by our ‘rational ’ self. Fragmentation and discontinuity … demand the wisdom of more immediate perception, intuitive awareness and imagination. What this requires is learning a ‘new consciousness practice ’ involving the body and emotions as well as perception and thought. ”

(1998:

185-186)

Parkins, Wendy & Craig, Geoffrey, Slow Living, Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, pp. 7Ͳ10

CONCLUSION As I came close to finalizing this dissertation I finally grasped what Daniel Charney had meant at that tutorial. I also saw where I had gone off the road. I had aimed for people to feel and question in a certain way. Instead all I had to do was to design an object that embodied my questions and leave it to the users to decode and answer them, each in their own way. After all meaning is not something I can assign; it will arise in the interaction with each user.

The self is not to be found in a hidden place; fixed and perfect. Its constitution is progressive and occurs as a result of the interactions between the body-mind and the environment. Senses which have an important role in the formation of subjectivity are themselves socially constructed. During these interactions the self might be immersed in a state of unity, which would be facilitated by activities engaging the senses and care for the activity at hand.

As opposed to common understanding objects have an active role in these interactions. This is because perception involves remembrance and objects entail themselves on our consciousness through the senses. What renders things as powerful retainers of personal and social memory is not just their assigned cultural meanings but their materiality. Materiality of objects as capable of triggering remembrance and awareness without us being conscious of it is what gives them potential for transforming people and societies.

The place where the interaction of objects and subjects occurs most intensely and continuously and where its effects can be seen most clearly is the home. Home should be defined free from the physicality of the house. It could be described as an imaginative place or as a set of practices and activities related to certain objects associated with home. Therefore it forms a crucial part of the everyday process of the creation of the self.

Everyday domestic rituals taking part in the global cities involve both active and passive elements. The subject, by developing the ability to involve care and attentiveness in these routines, and learning to inhabit temporal time, could increase their inventive and creative potential. However as discussed before the object has an important role in determining the chemistry of the ritual.

During my interview I had mentioned that I was inspired by both the functional minimalist design of Naoto Fukasawa and critical design of Dunne & Raby. However I had felt there was an inconsistency in my thinking. Now I realize they having the same subject and only differ in their attitude. They are both concerned with our daily, intimate interactions with objects. The former proposes a new materiality, with a sense of idealism, the latter aims to question our relationship to everyday objects with irony.

Now all I have to do is find my own attitude.

Figure 20 According to Hopper mundane life diverts people from considering the deeper reasons and causes behind their actions, but in private moments such awareness may suddenly surface. The unreal light that fills most of his interiors might be a reference to that moment of awareness. 87

87 Kranzfelder, Ivo, Edward Hopper: Vision of Reality,Kรถln: Taschen, 1998, p. 43 48

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