Thinking Design Through Literature 9781138712560, 9781315200071

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THINKING DESIGN THROUGH LITERATURE S USA N YE LAVI CH

ISBN: 978-1-138-71256-0

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ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN DESIGN STUDIES

THINKING DESIGN THROUGH LITERATURE SUSAN YELAVICH

Foreword by Paola Antonelli

THINKING DESIGN THROUGH LITERATURE

This book deploys literature to explore the social lives of objects and places. The first book of its kind, it embraces things as diverse as escalators, coins, skyscrapers, pottery, radios, and robots, and encompasses places as various as home, country, cities, streets, and parks. Here, fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction are mined for stories of design, which are paired with images of contemporary architecture and design. Through the work of authors such as César Aires, Nicholson Baker, Lydia Davis, Orhan Pamuk, and Virginia Woolf, this book shows the enormous influence that places and things exert in the world. Susan Yelavich is Professor Emerita, Design Studies, Parsons School of Design, The New School, NYC. Cover credit: Anselm Kiefer (Germany; France, b. 1945) Women of antiquity, 2002 (detail) Collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales © Anselm Kiefer Photo: Mim Stirling, AGNSW

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN DESIGN STUDIES

Routledge Research in Design Studies is a new series focusing on the study of design and its effects using analytical and practical methods of inquiry. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Thinking Design Through Literature Susan Yelavich https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Design-Studies/book-series/RRDS

Thinking Design Through Literature SUSAN YELAVICH

NEW DELHI LONDON NEW YORK

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Susan Yelavich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-71256-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20007-1 (ebk) Publisher’s note: This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the author. Typeset in Quiosco (Cyril Highsmith, Occupant Fonts, 2006), Plan Grotesque (Nikola Djurek, Typotheque, 2009) and Tangly (Zuzana Licko, Emigre Fonts, 2018) by Green Dragon Office, Los Angeles.

Text, Sarah Charlesworth, 1992–1993

11 Acknowledgements 13 Foreword Paola Antonelli 16

Introduction

32

Culture: Identity, Displacement, Exile

74

Politics: Prosecution, Obfuscation, Possibility

108

Beings: Unruly Things, Golems, Cyborgs

144

Technology: Connections, Disruptions, Amplifications

180

Domesticity: Cleaning, Mending, Caring

222

Consuming: Shopping, Collecting, Hoarding

264

Senses: Perceptions, Vibrations, Visions

302

Mortality: Death, Burial, Resurrection

338

Literary works discussed

340

Index

For my mother, Marie

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For most of my life, literature and design were filed under separate headings. I enjoyed them equally but separately. Literature was a private passion and design, a more or less public profession. That changed in 2006 after I read my son Henry T. Casey’s undergraduate thesis on fiction that, counter-intuitively, revealed how technology hinders contact and communication. Henry, now a writer himself, opened a path between two realms I loved and allowed me to ‘think’ design differently through poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. I am forever grateful for Henry’s gift to me and in awe of his gifts, which in no small way, have been shaped by his father Michael Casey, my beloved husband. I am also indebted to my own father Paul; his pleasure in prose and love of the early English novel in no small way made me the writer I am. Like most projects, Thinking Design through Literature emerged from a matryoshka doll of relationships and circumstances. It grew from a course I developed and taught at Parsons School of Design entitled “Design Fictions: Illuminating the Nature of Design.” My students invigorated my thinking throughout the ten years that the course was offered. Treasured colleagues and collaborators, most especially Barbara Adams, Malgorzata Bakalarz-Duverger, Alessandro Esculapio, and Virginia Tassinari, directed me to writers with whom I was unfamiliar and enriched this book immeasurably. Lorraine Wild of Green Dragon Office – the designer of this book and one of my generation’s most gifted book designers – has made the book’s correspondences between contemporary practice and specific literary works beautifully lucid. Joseph Lemelin, a rare combination of philosopher and design studies teacher, brought his ever-thoughtful editorial scrutiny to the ideas and the prose of Thinking Design through Literature. Thanks also to Ceciel Meiborg for her attentive reading. I am especially grateful to Kayla O’Daniel, Komal Sharma, and Yijia Wang from Parsons’ MA Design Studies program for their support. I thank the Bogliasco Foundation, which awarded me a residency in 2018 and gave me the time and an (extraordinary) space to finish this book. I am also deeply grateful to the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons has been supportive with funds for design and research during the period of the book’s writing.

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Finally, I want to express special thanks to my editor Isabella Vitti and her staff at Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group for their generosity in realizing this deeply personal project into a book.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

Design is everywhere. As goes the adage, so goes the truth. John Heskett’s famous, Gertrude Stein-like quip – “design is to design a design to produce a design”1 – hints at just how overarching and, simultaneously, slippery a concept design is, to both grasp and communicate. Every moment of every day, with pills, cell phones, sneakers, snacks, and TV titles, humans live and breathe design. And yet, most of them go through life without really minding its influence and recognizing how much it can shape the world. If a design works well, it is likely that its users won’t notice its impact. While every single person is equipped with the tools to discern between good and bad design, most usually she does not use them. To adapt a quote by Reyner Banham, design is like the weather – we speak about it only when it is exceptionally bad or exceptionally good, but it is always there.2 For those of us whose work revolves around making people notice the importance of design, the question is not only how to highlight, but also to make compelling and epic the “banal” objects that people use everyday. It is usually the things that are closer to us that are harder to notice. Our role as scholars and curators is to draw people toward design, make them aware of their surroundings and of the power and responsibility that comes with such awareness. With Thinking Design Through Literature, Susan Yelavich has enlisted as her weapon the resonant power of literature – its capacity for generating empathy and self-reflection. In particular, by enlisting remarkable examples of narrative and depiction, often well known and celebrated, she wants readers to pause and peel another layer of reality, to notice that objects have power. At the heart of this volume lies the urgency to demonstrate that, when gone unnoticed and uncontrolled, objects have the capacity to slip from us. They can slip away from designers and manufacturers, and pervert the use they were originally intended for, thus becoming a danger to society, to the environment, to human beings. Yelavich successfully interweaves her exercise in exploring a “literature of things” with pertinent examples of contemporary design, portraying designers as interpreters and connectors, as bridges between objects and those who use them. However, she also shows us that designers’ influence and control can only go so far before outside factors take over. Agencies need to be reconceptualized in 13

order to imagine the future of objects, and it is only by making all citizens part of the lifecycle of design that a modicum of control can be attained. Great writers know how to imagine these futures, whether pernicious or benevolent, and they have a lot to teach designers and those who love them. Writers can interpret the ways in which objects have shaped and will shape culture, politics, and even mortality long after designers conceive of them. In Thinking Design Through Literature, Yelavich creates a new kind of design research with the aid of comparative literature – one that, if at all possible, makes design seem more human than ever. — Paola Antonelli

1 John Heskett, Design: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.

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FOREWORD

2 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2009 [1971]), 43. The original quote refers to the Spanish Colonial Revival style in LA architecture.

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City of Words, Acconci Studio, 2010

Vito Acconci’s City of Words plays with the dimensionality of words and the multiplicity of perspectives they are able to contain in accordance with our manipulations. In a sense, Acconci’s is a reversal of the project of this book: namely, to discover the vitality of design, a vitality that emerges from words. By contrast, City of Words is a denial of the communicative nature of architecture and design. Here, the form language of a city – its scale, style, and materiality – is less

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INTRODUCTION

important than the fragmented sentences it utters. Like a flâneur who prefers eavesdropping to gazing, Acconci maps the city by its stories. But where his are anonymous, the stories in Thinking Design through Literature each offer a particular characterization of the things and places we design, alter, and destroy. That said, the reasons why we design might well be found in Acconci’s labyrinth of utterances; in other words, in what we tell each other about our lives.

Introduction Design and literature. Both plot situations that are variously, and sometimes simultaneously, driven by generosity, vanity, necessity, ambition, even desperation. The novels, poems, and essays considered in Thinking Design through Literature reveal how those impulses are designed into things and places both in their making and how they emerge in their afterlives of use and disuse. This is a literature that does more than describe and analyze; it is a literature that gives voice to objects and spaces, and the force fields that bind and break them. Where design projects possibilities, literature activates their potential and shows their effects. Together they form a new and wider tributary in the thought of things and places. Think of design as the configuration (and reconfiguration) of things and places that set up the conditions for alternate plot lines. Think of literature as a compendium of scenarios in which those things and places act. When we fold these two forms of speculation into each other, otherwise familiar things and places become catalysts for unexpected encounters, producing epiphanies that are oddly fragile and moving, because they are always almost palpable. None of the works I’m concerned with are likely to be shelved under design. For that matter, they are unlikely to be shelved together under any imaginable system. The poetry and prose featured here are not organized by region, e.g., Latin American, European or East Asian. Nor is it considered by type: novel, poetry, or essay. My sole criterion is that their authors allow objects, systems, and places to perform. One thing is certain: this work is not a literature of product design, interactive design, graphic design, fashion, urbanism, or architecture but a literature of things and places that exceed confines of professions. Some things are designed and made self-consciously as with the pottery in José Saramago’s The Cave; some by a mix of intent and circumstance as with the debris in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things; and some by dint of accident as happens in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake with the redesign of nature. Design in the 17

conventional sense of designer cars, jeans, or lamps gives way here to another interpretation that views design as inextricable from a dense web of social, material, and historical factors. The parallel narrative of images and captions running through each chapter further underscores the point that design is nothing less than a set of propositions about how things might be otherwise. These are propositions we return to with surprising regularity across centuries and decades – propositions that ask us to reconsider, for example, our instruments of power, our signs of culture, and our markers of death. The literary selections included here implicitly (and often explicitly) reflect this more capacious understanding of design – one that embraces both designing and living with design, one that sees design as a means of shaping, and often controlling, how we live with things and places. This more expansive view embraces not just objects of design but also their consequences, as happens in Things: A Story of the Sixties, Georges Perec’s novel of a young couple’s compulsion to shop. It offers a vantage point on the ways in which we adapt designed things to our own ends, as Kōbō Abe’s The Box Man, in which a cardboard box is simultaneously a window, a disguise, and a home. Each of the authors included in Thinking Design through Literature provokes the recognition of some thing or some place that, for reasons we can’t fathom once it is brought to our attention, wasn’t available to us before. Sometimes, as with Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, the entirety of a work depends on the characterization of particular things in particular places. (Authors like these, whose affinity with the stuff of life is especially strong, will be met here more than once.) Other times, as with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping or William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic, things make cameo appearances, less protagonists than supporting cast, but critical foils nonetheless.

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INTRODUCTION

The objects and places that figure in these works are so various, and often so self-effacing, that it may be hard to recognize them within the ambit of design. It might seem strange to include a tailor’s dummy, death notices, pottery, and hatboxes, alongside office buildings, televisions, radios, and smart phones – the latter all assuredly design. But rather than segregate self-consciously designed things and places from those which are not (e.g., a Mies van der Rohe lounge chair from an anonymous sofa), I present them as part of a continuum (in this case, of sitting). This is not just because the lounge chair and the sofa have common functions but also because formally and informally designed things have always comingled in all but the most tightly controlled situations. Readers will also find that disparate works of literature and their thingly protagonists share another trait. By and large, they echo the themes of modernity, which for our purposes entails the gradual replacement of stable agrarian values and cycles with the less predictable but inexorable movement central to the notion of progress. Indeed, the beginnings of design are often thought to be coterminus with the emergence of nineteenth-century steam engines, train stations, department stores, and manufactured products. Operating on a much larger scale than the carriages, shops, and dry goods that preceded them, these machine-age innovations called for a different kind of forethought and planning. However, to view design as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution – born sui generis from mass production and the rise of capitalism – is to deny the sensory and poetic dimensions that have driven the making of things through time. Such claims also ignore the fact that design grew out of a culture of specialized labor and crafts variously practiced by masters and apprentices that predates industrialization by centuries. Consider Hans Christian Andersen’s fable “The Pen and the Inkwell.” The inkwell wonders at the brilliance of the poetry that flows from and through him. The quill pen rejects his claim fuming: “You do not understand because you cannot think; if you could, you would realize you are only liquid. You exist so that I can express upon paper the thoughts that are within me, so that I can write them down.”1 The poet, who is ostensibly the master of these bickering tools, also marvels at the power of things. Thinking about the concert he just heard, he says, “The violin sang by itself and the bow moved by itself; the two were one.”2 Humbled, he concludes that humans and things are all equally instruments of God.

INTRODUCTION

19

Not only have these decidedly pre-industrial artifacts acted in excess of their individual physical constraints, they also foreshadow our secular view of things and humans as mutual creations, though not always with mutual aims. It is this quality of interdependence in the production of writing and music that make the inkwell, quill pen, violin, and bow recognizable as “design” as any tablet or screen we write on today. This is not just because they are instruments with a common purpose. They fall under the rubric of design because they mediate our behaviors through their form, their feel, and their affect. Those same factors also condition our ideas about those behaviors: generally speaking, the design of a tablet places a premium on speed, while the pen is associated with a more considered form of communication. In this sense they are variations on a theme. Now at the same time that I’m arguing for a more capacious understanding of design, I acknowledge that few people, if any, refer to their possessions or homes or cities as “design.” No matter that someone – or someone’s algorithm – has brought them into being. The reality is, we give our things names like tables or apartments; we refer to places as uptown or downtown. In naming these things, we bring design into life; but, perversely, they then become unremarkable. That is, until we meet them again in a different context, contexts we may never notice except in literature like Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus. Here, we encounter a young Englishman visiting the apartment of his fiancé for the first time. The room itself appeared unawed by him – not from any disorder but from very naturalness. A room where there had been expectation would have conveyed the fact – by a tension of plumped cushions and placed magazines, a vacancy from unseemly objects bundled out of sight; by suspense slowly dwindling in the curtains. This room was quite without such anxiety. On its upholstery, the nap of the usual was undisturbed. No tribute of preparation had been paid him here, unless perhaps the flowers, which were fresh, and which he himself if he had only thought.3

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INTRODUCTION

A woman’s independence from “expectation” is limned in a room. A man’s sense of entitlement is defeated by curtains, magazines, and upholstery. There is something mildly surreal, something beyond the techniques of metaphor and simile, in the way that authors like Hazzard write us into things. She captures their fleeting presence in our thoughts and makes them linger, “slowly dwindle,” just long enough to speak for us. Even so, this inversion of expectation – the quality of art that is requisite of all literature – is generally anathemic to design, which is supposed to perform predictably. Design is customarily viewed as the progenitor of passive, servile things and places. But as Hazzard shows us, this is not quite right. Still, we tend to squelch our suspicions that objects exert their own force because, like Hazzard’s fiancé, we feel uneasy when the stuff of life contradicts us, when it exposes our inconsistencies and failures. Similarly, we are unsettled when things surpass us, as they do in Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Museum”: Here’s a fan – where is the maiden’s blush? Here are swords – where is the ire? Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour. Since eternity was out of stock, ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.4

Literature offers us enough distance from things to recognize the full range of their capacities to work with us and against us. Yes, the work of the designer is to align the ambitions of things and us who use them, but designers cannot control how we will appropriate them in the meantime. Nor can they clearly foresee their afterlives. Even when care is taken to recycle things and reinvigorate their materials, designers cannot vouch for their futures. But writers can. The prose transplanted here is not offered as a retreat from reality into art, but as a designerly deployment of literature to get closer to the real. For the real is not solely made up of the tangible but also of the ineffable, which written words do their best to convey when we and our things are otherwise mute. The authors included here go further. They craft a literary synesthesia.

INTRODUCTION

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The stanzas and passages selected for this very partial anthology constitute another kind of design research. They immerse us in places and things, at the same time, they pull us back into a state of reflection, raising existential questions on the order of “what is this house, this shirt, this key?” These kinds of questions, which tend to induce paralysis in daily life, are opened up in the space-time of language – in poetry and prose that capture the ideas hidden in the minutia of materials, hidden in those things and places that we’ve lost sight of because we see them all the time. This is quite different from the usual means of testing and understanding design, where the particulars of an object or a space are studied for their immediate affects. More conventional modes of inquiry rely on direct observation, surveys, focus groups, video monitoring, and the like. But these strategies are limited. They rarely ask how that house, shirt, or key will be part of our lives beyond the short term of their use. These kinds of investigative techniques are even further hobbled by their quest for veracity, for reliable information about our experiences with things, when in reality those experiences are nebulous and multifarious. They are hobbled because the truth does not have a one-to-one relationship with reality. As counterintuitive as it might seem, literature comes much closer. It offers particular truths within its artificial realities. Literature holds insights within experiences built from the words of writers; it doesn’t collect those experiences after the fact. We know a chair only after we sit on it, but a writer knows it beforehand. A writer can make it break, rock someone to sleep, or invite a stranger to the table, then tell us what happens next, describing who and what will be affected and how. Of course, designers create similar scenarios, which grow out of the stories they listen to and stories of their own. They can, and do, ask “what if” all the time. But only we, and our counterparts in literature, can produce and know the affects of the things and places they help bring into being. Written for readers who design and for readers for whom the world is built in words, this book is as much about the consequences of design after it leaves its birthplace – whether the factory, the knitting needle, the scrap heap, or the motherboard – as it is about the ways we design, by which I mean both the ad hoc and the considered ways that we rearrange the furnishings of our lives.

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INTRODUCTION

The process of mining literature for such insight might be purely an academic exercise were it not committed to what literary critic George Steiner calls “a politics of the primary.”5 This is a politics that demands a willingness to open ourselves to an author’s way of presenting a world before we formulate a response. It demands that when we do respond, we do so through a performative criticism, the practice of repeating an author’s words (or a composer’s work) and then rephrasing it. So, if the relationship between words and things is to be of any consequence, we need, as Steiner exhorts, to ingest these stories, not just consume them. To do this, I’ve selected passages that offer opportunities for considered concentration. This is not a casual commitment. It entails an ethics – one that calls for assuming the responsibility of “answering” the work at hand. Steiner would have us actively acknowledge the voice that is speaking – here, through prose – instead of looking for insight in critical commentary or customer reviews. He asks that we give the same kind of attention to an author that we give to each other when we answer a spoken question. This is the aim of this book: to discover design directly through each author’s prose. Listening to that prose to better understand design is not a purely instrumental use of literature but a conversation with works and words that were written to be a part of life. I am guided by Steiner’s proposition that all thoughtful exchanges – here, between perceptions of words and things – are reciprocal explorations of perennial preoccupations: Do we want to live this way, with this, with that? What follows is an attempt at a pairing of questions being pursued by writers and designers: questions of culture, politics, beings, technology, domesticity, sensing, collecting, and mortality parsed out in chapters and taken up in a parallel narrative of images drawn from contemporary practice.

AaA

INTRODUCTION

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With its sights set on culture, the first chapter looks at how power, geography, beliefs, manners, and mores are coded into observable, everyday aspects of existence. This is not an entirely arbitrary starting point, given that design is often thought to be a primarily visual endeavor and, just as often, disparaged as merely style. But “merely” hardly covers it. The shapes, forms, hues, patterns, and arrangements that distinguish places and possessions quite literally color our status as insiders, outsiders, or aliens. Writers as distinct as André Aciman, Italo Calvino, Darryl Pinckney, Luc Sante, and Wim Wenders variously depict culture in the light of leaving home or homeland and the identities we carry, deny, or adapt when we do. They deal in the displacements and separations, real or imagined, that create space for comparisons. In these works, a heightened awareness of cultural divides is made evident in the commonplace: a coin, a comic book, a suite of furniture, a bridge, a cardboard box. Like the cultures they embody, these things can never be stable. Recognizing another’s way of living, and the places and things they live with, puts our own in relief. It puts value systems – the beliefs we care about – in focus, and sometimes in doubt. It opens the door to politics. The politics of control – especially when exerted by totalitarian means – are the second chapter’s concern. In these stories, hyper-rationalization reduces lives to rationed spaces and goods. Their worth rises and falls in proportion to their rarity and the degree of deception (or delusion) required to live beyond what is permissible. Buildings, doors, furniture, and mailboxes variously disappear, collapse, even revolt. In the work of writers like Julio Cortázar, Franz Kafka, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and José Saramago, tactics of resistance and strategies of compliance operate at cross-purposes – and often within a single space. Less fantastical but equally powerful are the politics acted out in the objects and places written by Constantine Cavafy, Salman Rushdie and W.G. Sebald. With Cavafy and Sebald, we enter sites of willful neglect and repositories of buried memories in which the politics of compromise become the politics of cowardice. Rushdie, however, writes of the all too rare exception: a space of compromise designed to produce a politics of tolerance. There are, on the other hand, those conditions that overwhelm our ability to cope – situations that divert energy that might otherwise go into building political momentum, circumstances that redirect that energy into anxious dreams of rescue. These states of helplessness, fear, and frustration 24

INTRODUCTION

Sit Bag Chair, Erdem Akan, 2009 To stay at home or go away, to remain within the comfort of one’s culture or to brush up against another’s –these are the conflicting impulses that Erdem Akan brings into temporary detente with his Sit Bag Chair. Akan practices in Istanbul, a city whose history has been shaped by the cultural complexity of being a port that straddles two continents. Today, as in many other world cities, cultural differences in Istanbul can be distinguished among the suitcases that travel first class, the economy-class luggage of tourist hordes, and the baggage

born on the backs of refugees and economic migrants. Regardless of their differences, most of these mobile citizens would probably welcome the sentiment, if not the fact, of Akan’s Sit Bag Chairs. Upholstered in bright optimistic stripes, they offer a chance to sit and enjoy a moment’s rest amidst the jolts of culture shock that come with travel. The chairs are also a reminder that the bureaus and cupboards that seem such stable fixtures today originated in the traveling chests and trunks of medieval nomads of virtually every class and culture.

Kokon Furniture, Studio Makkink & Bey, 1999 Rianne Makkink and Jurgen Bey’s ghostly Kokon Furniture denies each chair its separate identity, while still preserving a silhouette of the chairs’ distinctive forms. Depending on your aesthetic politics, history – written here in chair backs – is either smothered or reinvigorated. The designers would likely claim the latter, but the power of the piece lies in its ambiguity. Likewise, the fiction that is critical of totalitarian

regimes frequently deals with the politics of space, often vacillating in their regard for the advantages and disadvantages of personal space. I suspect this is partly to throw off censors who would be critical of any signs of individualism, and partly because the authors themselves understand the danger of frozen spaces and frozen ideologies.

INTRODUCTION

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Street of Crocodiles, still, Stephen and Timothy Quay, Zeitgeist Films, 1986 In the Quay Brothers short film Street of Crocodiles, a puppet’s strings are cut, screws spiral and dance across the floor, light bulbs become creatures, leather thongs curl, and a pocket watch’s workings are made of meat. The film, loosely based on Bruno Schulz’s story of the same name, achieves its uncanny affect by amplifying the inherent

characteristics of materials. Like their literary counterparts – beings, golems and creatures that oscillate between the human and nonhuman – the filmmakers’ thingly characters are both lively and fragile. They are imbued with the pathos of all life forms, of which we humans are but one.

Asymmetric Love Number 2, Addie Wagenknecht, 2012 Addie Wagenknecht’s security camera chandelier plays with the idea of shedding light on the things we can’t see in the dark, making the point that the primeval desire to protect ourselves has evolved into something far less innocent.

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INTRODUCTION

Yes, we want to guard those we love, but today that love has been twisted and paranoia thrives, aided and abetted by technology. Technological surveillance has become so omnipresent as to be invisible, unless it is flaunted as décor.

are fertile spawning grounds for prodigious marvels and monsters. The third chapter, devoted to beings, centers on objects endowed with unnatural powers and places of surreal possibility, some of which have been designed into being with magical thinking and some with the very real capacities of lively materials, albeit here in fiction. Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, Cynthia Ozick, and Bruno Schulz, among others, recognize the perennial urge to fabricate other versions of our selves. Their hybrid beings thrive in utopias governed by escape and denial. They also invade ordinary lives, mocking their order with a strangeness that is frightening and alienating, at the same time it is liberating. Wood is made flesh, alchemy animates the dumb and senseless, and the line between human and nonhuman is erased – sometimes in the name of transcendent progress, sometimes to keep the future at bay, or at the least, to reroute its direction. Technology, grounded in science’s hypotheses and proofs, is meant to give us more time and agency. But there is a particular poignancy to its pragmatism. Technological systems and devices, with their vast reach into daily life, usefully extend the reach of human bodies, but they simultaneously overrule (and increasingly supplant) those bodies. The fourth chapter presents a series of audits that try to account for just how effective and affective our tools and devices are, especially after they leave their think tanks, laboratories, and factories. We have our ways of doing things, and things have theirs. At its best, design is the arbitrator between these two willful forces; at its weakest, design sides only with one imperative, the purely technical. With varying degrees of sanguinity for the technological fix, authors such as Nicholson Baker, William Gaddis, Tom McCarthy, Marcel Proust, and Gary Shteyngart chart the oxymoronic project of harnessing the unpredictable forces of energy. With a menagerie of telephones, radios, staplers, clocks, and LEDs and sensors – some of it vaporware, most of it not – they confront our shortcomings in the limitations of the things meant to do our work. Work, however, is not always about forward motion. It becomes something else when it is routinized, when labor becomes laboring. This is often the case with housework, which figures prominently in the fifth chapter devoted to domesticity. The maintenance and sustenance of the spaces and the furnishings of home – even when the home in question someone else’s – are more private, more intimate, and often lonelier. But no less pregnant with possibilities. Here INTRODUCTION

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we encounter the unsung acts of designing and redesigning that is done without fanfare by those who clean, sew, order, and mend. Dusting furniture, mopping floors, picking up what’s left behind, sorting through old clothes are all about claiming or rejecting territory. Lucia Berlin, Raymond Carver, Magda Szabó, and Natasha Trethewey are among those writers who salvage the dignity of cleaning up; and they do so with a vehemence that is belied by the modesty and the meanness of their real estate – a shelf, a door, a room, a bombed-out neighborhood – all of which solicit care. There are those who sort and edit, and there are those who can’t choose. The sixth chapter, under the rubric of consumption, takes the part of collectors, hoarders, and magpies. Here, things and places, but mostly things in places, are in control. We are accustomed to censuring the excess of things in people’s lives as a sign of over-weaning pride in having more and better things than their rivals have. Walter Benjamin, Lao She, Virginia Woolf, and Émile Zola (to name just a few) are writers, who each in their way add more subtle dimensions to our thingly addictions. In this literature, characters’ judgments are colored by the nature of the objects themselves – whether crude or highly refined – along with the motivations behind their pursuit. Plans are diverted by a find, a fake confers dignity, loyalty is compromised by a love of the self that is mirrored in things. We can understand this. Less palatable, however, but equally human (so we cannot disown them) are the delusions amassed in material form, whose provenance is traced, here, by César Aira and Georges Perec. These things cannot fail to disappoint because they are the products of insatiability. They don’t really matter, only their successors do. For matter to matter, a different kind of investment is needed. One of the deepest comes with the experience of sensing. Chapter seven considers how design elicits our senses in acts of perception, in the vibrations of touch, and in the space between sight and seeing. Here, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Coover, J.-K. Huysmans, Vladimir Nabokov, Colson Whitehead, and others explore the largely ignored sensory dimensions of our relationships with things. They recognize that the senses deployed by makers and the senses that are aroused by their work are the twin antennae of mutual recognition – a recognition that offers a respite from loneliness. We make things to keep company with us. In turn, these things affirm someone has thought of us, even if at a great distance. 28

INTRODUCTION

Untitled, Ellie Birkhead, 2015 Ellie Birkhead’s brush disrupts the familiar gestures of cleaning so that whoever does the sweeping-up can invent new ways of doing it. This double-headed brush with two sets of bristles facing in opposite directions is designed for sweeping two parallel surfaces at once. Birkhead has also designed other brushes to do things like get into small crevices, clean cylindrical objects, and scrub the hide of an animal. Still,

for all their attempts to elaborate the possibilities of cleaning, these eccentric objects don’t deny that housework is demanding manual labor. More like a hedge clipper or a bellows, the brush pictured here looks like it requires muscle. In making the tool appear monumental, Birkhead tacitly pays tribute to the undervalued work of housekeeping and the maintenance of domesticity.

Receipt Rug, Virgil Abloh, 2018 Abloh, founder of fashion label Off-White, was commissioned by IKEA to create a line of products for a young person’s first home. His Receipt Rug proudly announces its price of $599.00 to all who walk on it. The rug flaunts the custom of concealing the price we pay for things. Here, the banal image of the receipt, complete with bar code, belies the fact that it is being sold as a limited edition and marketed as high value design object of and about consuming. IKEA unveiled it at an event called “Democratic Design Days,” using the word “democratic” to mean affordable. But it

would be more accurate to call it “collectible.” Furthermore, the conflation of shopping and democracy is problematic, especially in the United States, where spending has been celebrated as patriotic, while tacitly encouraging credit card debt. That said, whether by accident or intention, the rug does evoke a famous critique of consumerism in its echo of the scene in David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club where Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) inventories his possessions by recalling the IKEA catalog pages they came from.

INTRODUCTION

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Table, Hella Jongerius, 2009 In act of sewing plate to cloth, Hella Jongerius plays with the power of the counterintuitive. However, she doesn’t just disturb our sense of table etiquette, she also reverses our perception of piercing from one of sensing pain to one of surprising pleasure. The fact that the stitches are sewn

through porcelain makes their tactility all the more compelling. After marveling at how it’s done, you just want to touch it. Moreover, the interplay of pattern, porcelain, and cloth mirrors the layers of information that are part of every experience. No sense is every truly discrete.

Infinity Burial Suit, Jae Rhim Lee, The New York Times, 2016 The Infinity Burial Suit, which incorporates mushrooms to break down tissue and add nutrients to the soil, is designed to change attitudes toward dying. Artist Jae Rhim Lee believes that customs like wakes and open casket funerals constitute a denial of death. (Indeed, a mortician’s role is to preserve some semblance of the formerly living body.) Her alternative is more environmentally sound in that it eliminates embalming chemicals, formaldehyde, and the metals and gases produced by cremations. It is also much

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INTRODUCTION

less costly. Interestingly, at the same time this project joins the ranks of those who equate corpses with compost, it recognizes the human need to pause and mark the occasion of death. The mushroom patterns stitched on the shoulders and borders of the pajama-like suit add dignity to the prospect of eventual decay, and possibly a small sense of comfort that the living invariably seek in the face of mortality. Although, instead of memorializing a person, the embroidery memorializes the processes that start after death.

The writings of Baker, Borges, Calvino, and Pamuk come back for a special encore, appearing here for their respective gifts in detecting the sensory provocations contained within the artifacts of narrative. These writers understand the physiognomy of signage, books, and letterforms as co-producers of narrative. They understand “knowing” as something that happens in between matter and mind, something impossible without the senses. Chapter eight looks at the things we bring to bear on mortality. The works considered here delve into all manner of things and places – themselves in varying degrees of health – that have been designed to defend, and sometimes bridge, the border between living and dying. Our lookouts are numerous; among them are Mahmoud Darwish, James Fenton, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Haruki Murakami. Some see insult in the fact that we are more mortal than much of what we make. Others see us as surrounded by decay and wonder why we are assailed by grief when faced with our own deaths. Then there are those who would have things mourn us and those who write with gratitude for the things that tell us we have yet a bit more time. The things of the bedside and the graveyard are the cousins of those objects, systems, and places that populate the realms of culture, politics, myth, and technology. They make us as much as we make them. We collect them, clean them, and occasionally bury them. Thinking Design through Literature exhumes them, that we might relish them a little bit longer and take them as seriously as we do ourselves.

1 Hans Christian Andersen, “The Pen and the Inkwell,” in The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (New York: Doubleday, [1874] 1974), 639. 2 Ibid. 3 Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 21.

4 Wisława Szymborska, “Museum” in Poems New and Collected 1957–1997, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998), 30. “Museum” from VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND. Selected Poems by Wisława Symborksa, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak and Claire Cavangh. Copyright © 1995 by Houghton

Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 Cztelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 5 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 6.

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Lamp, above; Baby, left and right below, Oki Sato, Nendo, 2015 Doors require choices and intentions. We can either enter or exit through their frames. As such they create a division between being inside and out, and, by extension, the cultural choices involved in making the decision to cross a threshold. Oki Sato’s variations on the door open up those choices further with indications of welcome with a built-in lamp and an

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expanded framework that accommodates a child’s height, a wheelchair’s width, as well as any other object that would otherwise be denied entry. In the process, Sato unbalances the symmetry between “exit” and “entry” embodied in the archetypal door, accentuating the choice to enter. His is a warm invitation to cross into other domains.

CHAPTER 1

Culture: Identity, Displacement, Exile “There’s no place like home.”1 Or is home no-place? Houses are spaces and cities are places, but “home” is an abstract destination. It is also our first introduction to culture. Getting “home” involves the act of recognition (this place, these things, seem familiar), coupled with compatibility (this place, these things, seem inviting). When these sensations are absent, the feeling of being “at home” disappears. What replaces it is an awareness of other ways of doing things, other notions of “home” and identity. It is only when we encounter the unfamiliar, only when we leave home, that we begin to understand the notion of culture. Such encounters can be especially unnerving when they happen in places we’ve come to think of as “ours.” Cultural markers like childhood haunts and hometown fixtures can become almost unrecognizable over time for any number of reasons. The gulf between how we remember things being and what they are now may be among the most unsettling cultural terrains we have to negotiate. No less painful are the adjustments required by forced migration or exile; though in those cases there is far less expectation of finding the familiar on street corners or at the kitchen table as there is when we go home. Our first experience of culture is in the microcosm of the family. Adults loom over children, siblings create a pecking order, aunts, uncles, and grandparents carry a whiff of someplace poorer or richer, and certainly older. With time, those signs of rank, power, and place appear in ever more intricate gradations of social and geographic difference. We give ourselves away in the cut of our clothes, the fabrics of our cities and towns, and in the things we take and leave behind as we move to and fro – evidence usually assessed decades, centuries, or even millennia later. 33

Literature, however, has the advantage of being able to embrace larger swathes of time and space than most of us could ever hope to cover. It can map the shifting distances between home and house, home and place, home and things, in ways that make us more alert to the meaning and substance of “where.” That it does so without the rigor of history, anthropology, archeology, or the precision of sciences like geology and biology, makes it no less instructive. In fact, it is arguable that literature, in the ways it animates the tensions that arise around things and places, makes the consequences of culture that much more affective. Consider the old saw about two emigrants. One tells the other that he plans to migrate to Uruguay. To the surprised reaction: “That’s far away!” the man responds: “Far away from where?”2 The answer of course is home and the flotsam and jetsam of things it encompasses. Every time we leave home, whether we are “far away” or simply on an unfamiliar street, those things appear in “a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”3 (So says Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.) It is an uncomfortable discovery. We feel curiously present and not present, sensing the peculiar homesickness that Germans more accurately call Unheimlichkeit, no matter where we actually are. The works discussed in this chapter show how things as disparate as cardboard boxes, fireworks, bridges, coins, comic books, dining room chairs, and city parks can make us feel at home or far away, or both at once. We rarely think about these things in terms of culture – the constellations of people, customs, and things that make up our identities – until their familiar patterns are interrupted. Even then, culture is probably the last word that comes to mind. More likely, when we are “far away,” we just think that something is a little off.

IDENTITY: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THINGS AND PLACES

Tim O’Brien captures this friction between the familiar and the strange in the most extreme of circumstances: war. In a passage from The Things They Carried, O’Brien shows how America’s surfeit of goods comes into sharp relief in the jungles of Vietnam. Soldiers routinely received packages filled with things that were as remote from the realities of war as those who packed them.

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Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters – the resources were stunning – sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter – it was the great American war chest – the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat.4 In Vietnam, things like woolen sweaters and colored eggs are not only superfluous, they are also absurd. These men exist in the ambiguous zone of military culture – a state of being someplace foreign while also living in a transposed United States of America. The soldiers and these things are as out of place as Christmas decorations in a landscape of temples and tarmacs. But just as certainly, the men are “of” a place, and, as the title of the novel tells us, each man carries his own piece of America with him in things like canned peaches, a girlfriend’s pantyhose, and a family Bible. Their talismans, keepsakes, and trophies have only one purpose: to get the soldiers back home. Psychologically. And, if they are lucky, physically. O’Brien’s novel is an acute demonstration of how the identity of things is affected by where we find them and where they are from. And “where they are from” is never self-evident, as most things are made in places far from where they’re found, e.g., “American” fireworks are just as likely to be Chinese or Mexican. But no matter how fictitious, perceptions of place and origins continue to shape our responses to others, creating a patchwork of tightly bordered territories, contested lands, cosmopolitan environs, and zones of exclusion. In addition to real and imagined geographies, the dynamics of wealth and poverty are critical facets of culture and identity. In economies that are rigidly fixed, our place along that spectrum is evident in our things. When the strictures governing access to wealth are more elastic, things make it possible to reject or transcend any pre-assigned status of birth or upbringing – at least to the extent that prejudices against new money, and prejudices of race and gender, will allow. Questions of identity – the opportunities to complicate or confine how we think of ourselves and how we present ourselves – multiply in proportion to the psychic and physical distances we are able, free, or forced to travel. CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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Such questions are, of course, a relatively recent phenomenon. The word “identity” is rooted in the Latin idem meaning “same.” For centuries the idea of questioning one’s identity was tantamount to a futile examination of the self, since that was predetermined by where and to whom you were born. Except for the most rebellious, identity and culture were largely synonymous. Identity and culture became more loosely linked with the growth of long-distance travel, stimulating new allegiances and sympathies, which were just as likely to be feared as welcomed. Identification became even more complex with the advent of technologies like telephones, which allow us to be in two or more places at once, making it possible to identify with another culture without necessarily embracing it wholesale. The ensuing “identity crises” would have completely puzzled our ancestors. Today, identity as a tightly scripted concept has become unmoored, leaving those fortunate enough to be allowed to choose for themselves an increasingly wide array of inflections and possibilities. The alternative to a fixed identity is no longer another fixed identity but an inner stratification that allows us to act and appear in different registers. Design – the character of the things and places we surround ourselves with – is one of the most immediate ways we signal how we want to be identified in any given moment. And conversely, it is how we are identified by others, as in conditions that preclude the luxury of choice like that of homelessness. In both cases, clothing may be the strongest public utterance we make apart from the languages we speak. If dressing is the way we take up temporary residence in different milieus (wearing a mother’s sweater or a father’s watch), fashion is the self-conscious attempt to play with identity, to manipulate our relationships with home and culture. In the opening monologue to his 1989 film Notebook on Cities and Clothes, the filmmaker Wim Wenders captures the poignancy of being both part of and apart from culture in a society that prizes individual identity. “Identity.” The word itself gives me shivers. It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity?

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To know where you belong? To know your self worth? To know who you are? How do you recognize identity? We are creating an image of ourselves, We are attempting to resemble this image… Is that what we call identity? The accord between the image we have created of ourselves and… ourselves? Just who is that, “ourselves”? We live in the cities. The cities live in us… time passes. We move from one city to another, from one country to another. We change languages, we change habits, we change opinions, we change clothes, we change everything. Everything changes. And fast. Images above all…5 Though it has certainly accelerated in recent years, change isn’t always as “fast” as it is for global citizens like Wenders. For most of the world, it is unevenly paced; it operates against centuries of tenaciously held physical and psychological boundaries. However, what is true is that it is easier to shift identity and adopt a different persona than it is to change cultures. We know this from the costume traditions of Carnival and Mardi Gras and other such events – holidays when dressing up and acting out is not only sanctioned but also encouraged as a release valve from the pressures of daily life. Today, as Wenders’ laments, we have the liberty of living in a perpetual state of Carnival with endlessly curated online identities – a state of being CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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that paradoxically has the affect of inducing cravings for enduring relations, enduring places and things. This seemingly contradictory desire to be separate and together may be hardwired. It may be the essence of the reason why we design, not just our appearances as in the case of fashion, but also the world as it appears to us. As sociologist Georg Simmel observed over a century ago: We are at any moment those who separate the connected or connect the separate. The people who first built a path between two places performed one of the greatest human achievements. . . . [I]t was only in visibly impressing the path into the surface of the earth that the places were objectively connected.6 Otherwise untouched, the landscape, despite its diverse species and elements, would remain a directionless whole.7 Decisions to conjoin or divorce by material means – shaping paths, building bridges and walls, or framing doors – are also the bases for culture-making; moreover, each of those archetypes is weighted by different measures of separation and connection. The tension between these two incestuous states of being together and apart drives the plots of Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina (1945) and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (1998). Both revolve around a mix of fact and fiction about the Ottoman Empire.

bBb In point of fact, the bridge of Andrić’s novel still stands strong in Bosnia, spanning the Drina river, which flows through the town of Višegrad. Commissioned by Grand Vezir Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and designed by the architect Mimar Sinan (most famous for the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul), it was built in the sixteenth century. Its creators may have been luminaries but this wasn’t a bridge for sultans or rich men. It was meant for the townsfolk who crossed it and lingered in the circular space of the kapia at its center, described by Andrić here:

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Two buttresses had been built on each side of the central pier which had been splayed out towards the top, so that to the right and left of the roadway there were two terraces daringly and harmoniously projecting outwards from the straight line of the bridge over the noisy green waters far below. The two terraces were about five paces long and the same in width. . . That on the right as one came from the town was called the sofa. It was raised by two steps and bordered by benches for which the parapet served as a back. . . . That on the left, opposite the sofa, was similar but without benches. In the middle of the parapet, the stone rose higher than a man and in it, near the top, was inserted a plaque of white marble with a rich Turkish inscription, a tarih, with a carved chronogram which told in thirteen verses the name of the man who build the bridge and the year in which it was built. Near the foot of this stone was a fountain, a thin stream of water flowing from the mouth of a stone snake.8 Every bridge is an architectural interlude, an interim space between two embankments. This one with its kapia facilitated far more than traffic, it provided a forum. Its very shape enhanced the innate cosmopolitanism of the bridge where Višegrad’s Muslims, Christians, and Jewish people rubbed shoulders on a regular basis. In the embrace of the kapia they made deals, philosophized, quarreled, and reconciled. Teenagers flirted and children played around it; wedding and funeral processions passed through it; even soldiers quartered in the town lingered on it from time to time. Above all, the kapia was a place to rest, to have a cup of tea. It was a parenthesis in time. But shifts in political currents would dramatically affect the bridge’s use, testing its tolerant character. Under the varied pressures of colonialization, war, and diplomacy, the normally pacific kapia would serve variously as a checkpoint, execution scaffold, and a space of detente in the borderland conflicts between Serbia and Bosnia and the competing interests of far-flung capitals. Even from the start, there were signs of that it would be a site of contention. Building the bridge was a struggle all its own. Its construction took so long as to seem impossible. More painful was the fact that it was built by conscripted labor. Acts of sabotage were common and viciously punished: Children grew up hearing the tale of the twin infants walled into its piers and the horror story of the obstructionist peasant CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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Festina Lente, Adnan Alagić, Bojan Kanlić, and Amila Hrustić, 2007–2012 Called Festina Lente (Latin for “make haste, slowly”), this looping bridge, designed by product designers Adnan Alagić, Bojan Kanlić, and Amila Hrustić, spans the Miljacka river where it passes through Sarajevo.1 Giving a contemporary twist to Sinan’s bridge on the Drina (also in Bosnia), the designers turned the kapia 180 degrees. Here they’ve made a loop (instead of a flat circular space) that rises in the middle of the crossing. Their contribution to the form is that their kapia offers shelter from the elements in addition to the

seating of Sinan’s sofa. However, it is very like its antecedent in that Festina Lente also offers a respite from the insistent back and forth of conventional bridges. 1 Emilie Chalcraft, “Festina Lente Bridge by Adnan Algaić, Bojan Kanlić, and Amila Hrustić,” Dezeen, December 12, 2012, http://www.dezeen.com/2012/12/12/ festina-lente-looping-bridge-in-sarajevo-by-adnan-alagicbojan-kanlic-and-amila-hrustic/.

who was tied to a stake on the kapia. Built of stones and bones, the bridge on the Drina was as bonded to the life of the town as it was to the banks of the river. The force of that connection was not just a matter of memory and folklore. It was intrinsic to the very essence of a bridge, which generates more than lateral movement. Andrić captures the seemingly impossible state of being above the ground while still connected to it, writing: “A man was then as if in a magic swing; he swung over the earth and the waters and flew in the skies, yet was firmly and surely linked with the town and his own white house there on the bank with its plum orchard about it.”9 The space itself was liberating and the villagers’ exchanges were elevated in both senses of the word. Indeed, the townsfolk – Turks and Serbs alike – didn’t “like unfavourable news or heavy thoughts or serious and despondent conversations on the kapia.”10 It had always been a secure space in tenuous times. They especially disliked the nagging rumors of Austrian-Hungarian control, which became fact in 1878. 40

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That year, the town’s four “notables” – Mula Ibrahim (the imam), Husseinaga (the schoolmaster), Pop Nikola (the Serbian priest), and David Levi (the rabbi) – assembled to meet the new Hapsburg emissary on the bridge. As they did in the past when facing calamities of flood and plague, the four elders put aside their differences. They were united in common apprehension for their flocks, united in being outsiders in a new realm whose representatives came in military uniform. These men, born and brought up in this remote district of Turkey, the rotten-ripe Turkey of the nineteenth century, had naturally never had the chance of seeing the real, powerful and well-organized army of a great power. All that they had been able to see till then had been the incomplete, badly fed, badly clothed and badly paid units of the Sultan’s askers or, which was even worse, the Bosnian irregulars, the bashibazouks, recruited by force, undisciplined and fanatic. Now for the first time there appeared before them the real “power and force” of an Empire, victorious, glistening and sure of itself. Such an army dazzled them and checked the words in their throats. At the first sight of the saddlery and the tunic-buttons another world could be sensed.11 Like all colonized people, they had seen another culture without going anywhere. Under the rule of the Austrians, who showed a passion for all sorts of measuring, the outward appearance of the town and its denizens began to change. Though life within their homes remained much the same, reluctant signs of assimilation appeared when their sons were conscripted into Franz Josef’s army and began to travel. Likewise, the soldiers and officials stationed (also not by choice) in Višegrad made their accommodations. Many of these officials, the fiery Magyar or the haughty Pole, crossed the bridge with reluctance and entered the town with disgust and, at first, were a world apart, like drops of oil in water. Yet a year or so later they could be found sitting for hours on the kapia, smoking through thick amber cigarette-holders.12

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For centuries the bridge had been the central feature of the town and its kapia a small cosmopolitan haven for all manner of negotiations. Indeed, negotiating people and borders was its unique design capacity. The embodiment of compromise, it spans both marks and overcomes separation, though not necessarily in equal measure. Over the course of history, the bridge’s twinned values of division and unification would take on a different weight. To begin with, the bridge marked the divide between east and west – between the Bosnian birthplace of the vezir who commissioned it and the seat of his power in Turkey. But after the arrival of the railroad in the early twentieth century, “the bridge no longer led to the outside world.”13 The world and its influence would increasingly come to it, not just from two opposite shores of a river, but also from the skies, as it did during World War I. Like all bridges in disputed territories, the bridge on the Drina was a target; its unifying nature was now a threat not a promise. For the first time since it was built, the seemingly indestructible bridge was severed by a blast triggered by a bomb. The singular structure became the victim of the darker side of its history. For all that the bridge opened up new possibilities through the introductions made on its span and forged in its kapia, it was also a place where lives ended. Remember, this is a bridge in which babies were sealed and where heads were mounted on pikes. The bomb that fell on the bridge during World War I reopened one of its wounds: it hit the spot on the bridge that hid a landmine planted by the Austrians almost a decade ago. The bridge on the Drina would be repaired and damaged again, but with each incursion more of the stones of Višegrad’s Turkish legacy would crumble away.14 Over time, even without the force of incendiaries, everything “that was old and local was always forced to give way and adapt itself.”15 Yet, while modern transportation and warfare brought new goods and new people into the town, changing habits and aspirations in the process, cultural allegiances weren’t eradicated. In some cases, they metastasized. “Giving way” and “adaptation” are never without consequence. Andrić’s novel makes it clear that Turkish citizens, even those in the most remote regions of the empire, haven’t been spared from unflattering comparisons with the West’s ideas of progress. (The citizens of Višegrad were extremely conscious of the disparity between themselves and the outsiders who found them rustic.) However, for all that Western ideas are indebted to the 42

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abstractions of Enlightenment reasoning, they are most frequently encountered materially. Not just in goods and clothing, but also in images. As Wenders says in his paean to identity, they travel faster.

CcC Pamuk’s My Name is Red is such a tale of images. Under the guise of a historical mystery, the novel uses the conceit of portraiture to explore how we see the world and more critically, how the world sees us. Set in sixteenth-century Turkey, the events of the book take place at a time when disturbing intimations of Western influence (and its threat of dominance) are just beginning to be felt. Where Andrić maps those reverberations in its outposts, Pamuk takes us to their epicenter: Istanbul, the Sublime Porte itself. To call Istanbul a center, with its implications of a unified whole, may, however, be a bit of a misnomer. For this is a city that sits on two continents – a city whose bifurcated geography is the foil for a fatal cultural conflict. Here, the most rudimentary elements of design – form, line, and color – are a death sentence. The victim is one of Turkey’s most gifted miniature painters. Along with three other specially selected miniaturists, he was working on a book commissioned by the Sultan himself. It was to include his portrait in the Western style. In other words, so realistic there wouldn’t be any question of his identity. (Plus, it would show him in the same light as the increasingly powerful Western princes; the Sultan was not to be outdone.) This meant a radical departure from the Turkish manner of drawing, where figures were so generalized that the only sign of identity might be the size of a turban. Despite attempts to keep the project under wraps, the stylistically compromised book opens a rift between identity and culture. The reigning power on the Bosphorus finds itself embroiled in a paper war with the upstart on the Adriatic. The weapons of choice are words and images. In the West, Renaissance thought is churning the secular waters. A renewed attention to the body has been prompted by the rediscovery of Greek and Roman sculptures of athletes and warriors. Even their gods took on human form. As a result, paintings of haloed saints began to face stiff competition from those of fur-clad princes; and sometimes the saints took on the faces of the current Doge. (The godly were now made in man’s image, not the reverse.) At the CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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same time, religious texts had to compete with secular treatises, a phenomenon accelerated by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. The printing press had another important effect: it prioritized letterforms. The realms of words and images, no longer drawn but printed, began to grow apart. (In Europe, printed books had eclipsed illuminated manuscripts by the second half of the fifteenth century, well before our story in Istanbul begins.) As a result, painting – now separated from words – is enjoying a more independent status and portraiture is on the rise as the next best way to advertise the newly important, individual self. Meanwhile, in the East, the notion of a self apart from a community makes no sense, just as “painting without its

Doily necklace, Ela Cindoruk, 2004 It is not an accident that Ela Cindoruk displays her Doily Necklace on a bold red backdrop. Born in Ankara and residing in Istanbul, Cindoruk has chosen the color of the Turkish flag to set off her paper necklace. The cultural reference doesn’t stop there, though. The doilies are part of the everyday ritual of drinking tea, which comes in a tulip glass that sits on a doily. Cindoruk, who also designs and makes

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jewelry of silver and other more permanent materials, has maintained a personal practice in tandem with her business. This is just one of her efforts to get closer to the sensibility of the unofficial Turkey that exists uneasily besides official culture. This tension between the informal nuances in the habits of daily life and the strictures of the doctrinaire is the same tension that infuses into My Name is Red.

accompanying story is an impossibility.”16 But as Enishte Effendi sees on his ambassadorial travels to Venice that a Frankish “painting wasn’t the extension of a story at all, it was something in its own right.”17 No other explanation is needed since its imagery is so precise. His epiphany was so profound that he decides the Sultan should be painted with the same exactitude. However, not on canvas or board – that would have been a step too far – but within a book of manuscript paintings.18 In the process, Enishte Effendi raises fateful questions about how to read, how to see – and whether seeing and reading could possibly be separate realms. No one at the time would have said that the controversy sparked by his decision was about design, per se.19 But Enishte Effendi’s choice most certainly was a design choice, in the sense that one of the things design does is offer organizing principles. The arrangement of pictures and words on a page is an act of translation and, like all translations, their appearance, order, and inflections shape the ways we understand (or misunderstand) them. Here, the miniaturist Elegant Effendi has been murdered for just such a misunderstanding. The Sultan’s ambassador certainly didn’t intend to provoke either Elegant’s death or his killer’s insecurity. Nonetheless, Elegant believes that the introduction of the Western style was, indeed, meant to cause harm. As first (but not last) victim of this aesthetic crime, he exhorts anyone who will listen: Open your eyes, discover why the enemies of the life in which you believe, of the life you’re living, and of Islam, have destroyed me. Learn why one day they might do the same to you.20 Elegant’s conflation of belief, life, and Islam is tinged with a defensiveness that overlooks the fact that there might be variety within each, particularly as they are practiced in daily life. He fails to consider that beliefs are the assumptions and expectations on which we tacitly operate; that life refers to the realities that confirm, contradict, or challenge those assumptions; and that the principles of Islam (like all religions) are based on the mystery of faith. My Name is Red is built on this tense triangle of culture – predictable habit, unpredictable experience, and unattainable ideals. No single one of them is solely responsible for Elegant’s brutal end. However, this is something that only emerges gradually from the testimony of the sundry characters whose lives are touched by the crime. CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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What is immediately apparent is that not every voice speaking to the reader is that of a human being, since the first one comes from a corpse and the next from a dog. A coin, a horse, a tree, even the color red speak as eloquently as the book’s detective Black, the four miniaturists Stork, Olive, Elegant, and Butterfly, and their masters Osman and Enishte. And who better to speak about an invasion of images than the images themselves. “I don’t even know where I belong.”21 The tree’s lament (more precisely, the lament of a tree drawn on a page) is the first intimation of his cultural confusion. He was meant to be part of a book. (In an early form of globalization, the design and execution of Turkish books were distributed between calligraphers, gilders, and painters in workshops separated by miles and mountains.) A casualty of the road, this particular tree-on-a-page never made it to his destination. A band of robbers attacked his courier and separated him from the manuscript he was meant to join. Denied his place within a scene among a cast of characters, he feels incomplete. He’s not just lost in transit, he’s also mistranslated. A stranger finds him lying in the mud, pins him up on a wall, and admires him just the way he is. But the tree is disoriented. He’s not part of a story – not part of a romantic garden scene or a forest teaming with soldiers. Admittedly, he feels the attraction of being recognized for himself and confesses to a streak of vanity. At the same time, he worries that: “Since I’m not representing something in a book . . . the likes of pagans and infidels will prostrate themselves before me in worship.”22 Westerners are apparently notorious for staring at their paintings. Appalled by this direct and degenerate way of looking at each other and the world, the tree opines: Now, these Frank painters depict the faces of kings, priests, noblemen and even women in such a manner that after gazing upon the portrait, you’d be able to identify that person on the street. Their wives roam freely on the streets anyway – now, just imagine the rest.23 The tree-on-the-page likens these painters to pimps whose only purpose is advertising. (In fact, women – really girls – were “pimped” to royal suitors when their portraits were circulated to the European courts.) Ultimately, the tree thanks Allah that he wasn’t drawn in the Western manner. “And not because I fear that if I’d been thus depicted all the dogs in Istanbul would assume 46

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I was a real tree and piss on me: I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.”24 In other words, he doesn’t want to be a lone cypress or a majestic palm, but a tree whose meaning is defined by its context, whether sheltering lovers or shading a tired warrior. In contrast to the tree, who rejects the egoism of the West for the communal ethos of the East, there is the horse – a drawing of a horse – who thinks otherwise. He knows he’s an archetype. As he says, he’s been galloping for centuries, in countless illustrations. He’s proud of that but he “question[s] whether, indeed, it is I being depicted in all cases.”25 The very notions of seeing and being seen, of existing and being recognized are at stake here. He says, “all horses are in fact distinct, and . . . . [m]y God-given marvel has a shape and curve all its own. . . . I’m sick of being incorrectly depicted by miniaturists who sit around the house like ladies and never go off to war.”26 With no small measure of self-hatred, he feminizes the Turks who drew him, just the way the West would come to feminize the East. To make it clear that the Turkish way of painting isn’t without serious consequence, the horse tells a story about an imprisoned prince who only knew the world from illustrated books. When he was finally released from his jail, one of the first things he did was to ask to see a real horse. On realizing it wasn’t as beautiful as those in the miniatures, the prince was so disappointed that he ordered the slaughter of all the horses in his kingdom. “But [says our horse,] Exalted Allah did not refrain from meting out His justice.”27 Without a cavalry, the new king was routed and hacked apart by his archenemy. “As all the histories will reveal, the nation of horses had taken its revenge.”28 The horse also insists he’s no heretic. He says the miniaturists are the true sinners because they attempt to depict the world that God perceives, not the world that they see in front of them. The customary prohibition against imitating Allah is reversed showing how fungible hallowed truths and injunctions can be. Written by imperfect humans, they are always fallible (some would say fictional) interpretations of the sacred. The relativity of truth is also taken up, quite pointedly, by a counterfeit coin, who is not the least bit embarrassed that he is a copy. He says those who believe he is real haven’t been conned. In fact, their assessment is justified for there’s “no better measure of an illustrator’s talent.”29 (Notice he says “illustrator” not “forger.”) To his way of thinking, making things look the same is more CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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important than originality; and of course, generations of Ottoman miniaturists prided themselves on the fidelity of their copies. The rub is that the most gifted painters actually do find ways to distinguish themselves with subtle alterations of line-weight or in gestures like the flare of a horse’s nostril. It seems signs of style are unavoidable even in this self-effacing tradition. And as the story’s skeptical detective admits: “Everybody secretly desires to have a style.”30 It would be hypocritical to say otherwise. Moreover, as the coin points out, the West is just as hypocritical: “When these Venetian infidels paint, it’s as if they’re not making a painting but actually creating the object they’re painting. When it comes to money, however, rather than making the real thing, they make its counterfeit.”31 In addition to deploying the tactic of counterfeiting, the West has begun assembling an arsenal of novel rendering techniques from perspective to shadowing to shading. The latter is particularly offensive to the color red, who dismisses all shades of red – especially Venetian pink – that vary from his own pure-blooded color, declaring: “For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness or subtlety, but through determination and will. . . . How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being!”32 The undiluted power of red reigned without question for centuries, but now his court is infiltrated by insidious “subtlety.” In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire is a formidable force in the world, but it is starting to feel tremors of anxiety at the prospect of competition with Venice and the West it represents. The contest will be played out in future generations, but its affects – a nagging sense of cultural insecurity – are already strong enough to provoke a man to murder a second time. It seems that the Sultan’s ambassador Enishte Effendi also has to be disposed of when he discovered the culprit’s identity, the miniaturist who is called Olive. Olive claims that his real crime was succumbing to the temptation to paint his own likeness in the Frankish style and insinuate it in the Sultan’s secret book. His victims were only collateral damage. Had they not discovered his act of hubris, they would still be alive. Nevertheless, he’s denied any satisfaction from his feat of technical prowess. In fact, he feels humiliated: “Imitating the Frankish masters without having attained their expertise makes a miniaturist even more of a slave.”33 The price extracted is death – not of Olive’s body but of his identity, an identity held so tightly that it doesn’t admit the awkwardness of compromise. 48

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East Meets West tea glass, Erdem Akan, maybedesign, 2003

In Erdem Akan’s East Meets West tea glass, the Western cylinder and Eastern tulip are joined at the lip in an especially intimate union. An initial interpretation might conclude that the “East” is contained (and thus dominated) by the “West.” But if you look carefully, you can see there is a more nuanced cultural exchange happening within these thin glass walls. When the glass is used – when it is filled with tea – it is the East that emerges more strongly. Moreover, where the

voluptuous form of the liquid exerts a visual attraction, the straightforward cylinder appeals to the sense of touch. When you hold a full glass, you find that it is insulated; you can pick up a hot beverage without burning your hand. Just as Enishte Effendi champions the cross-pollination of painting styles in My Name is Red, Akan brings together two different cultural aesthetics revealing the unexpected pleasures of hybridity.

Against the prospect of subjugation, Pamuk offers a more promising alternative. It comes from Enishte Effendi, the ambassador who brought the seeds of conflict and possibility to Istanbul in the first place. Just before he dies, he tells his assassin: CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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Nothing is pure. . . . In the realm of book arts, whenever a masterpiece is made, whenever a splendid picture makes my eyes water out of joy and causes a chill to run down my spine, I can be certain of the following: Two styles heretofore never brought together have come together to create something new and wondrous. We owe Bizhad and the splendor of Persian painting to the meeting of an Arabic illustrating sensibility and Mongol-Chinese painting. Shah Tahmasp’s best paintings marry Persian style with Turkmen subtleties. Today, if men cannot adequately praise the book-arts workshops of Akbar Kahn in Hindustan, it’s because he urged his miniaturists to adopt the styles of the Frankish masters. To God belongs the East and the West. May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated.34 In matters of culture and identity, Pamuk tips his hand toward Enishte’s cosmopolitanism. He names his book Red, which is decidedly not a Venetian pink. At the same time, he titles each chapter with the decidedly egoistic “I”: “I am a Gold Coin,” “I am called Black,” “I am Death.” Instead of choosing a singular allegiance, Pamuk sees productive possibilities in selectively choosing among affinities, in spite of the fact that those choices will almost inevitably entail conflict. We only seem to be able to come to a state of equilibrium after cultural changes have been absorbed. We see this in the hybridized evidence Pamuk provides in Enishte’s last speech. When he speaks of marrying styles, he isn’t suggesting abandoning one for another; he’s not advocating a rootless kind of cosmopolitanism either. He’s making the case for what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a “partial cosmopolitanism,” one qualified from the start.35 Because even if we do manage to feel loyal to the cosmos (those we view as strangers in the broader world) and also feel loyal to the polis (our “kith and kind”), in practice, this kind of cosmopolitanism is always a balancing act. It all depends on what stage of our lives we are at and how open we are to what Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination” that is essential for “partial cosmopolitans.” Add to those circumstances, the places and things around us at the moment, and the weights we assign to our allegiances will rise and fall accordingly – often by dint of accident.

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DISPLACEMENT: MATERIAL MEASURES OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

Short of being abducted, taking a long flight and landing on a different continent doesn’t happen by accident. And even though air travel has become commonplace, it can still have the effect of jolting us out of our routines and into the rhythms of someplace else. Our cultural antennae are raised as we seek out differences at the same time we are scanning for signs that we aren’t completely alien. On occasion, however, the experience of being elsewhere can unexpectedly tip scales toward the self-congratulatory thought that we are “at home” wherever we go. This is what happened to Charles D’Ambrosio when he found that the usual notions of a “good home” didn’t fit with what awaited him after his flight to Russia. In 2002, D’Ambrosio was commissioned to write a piece about an orphanage in Svirstroy, five hours outside of St. Petersburg.36 The Svirstroy orphanage occupied a run-down brick pile, which was once a garrison and then a prison before it became a state-run children’s home. Home and orphanage were already an uneasy pair, but the combination of home and broken barracks was disturbing. Displacement piled on displacement. The writer from Seattle would spend his time reevaluating his American expectations against the Russian reality in front of him. D’Ambrosio is quick to see the small adjustments the children have made to create an intimacy otherwise absent in the dilapidated building. And no matter how unselfconscious, their alterations are acts of design – tactical, temporary, but still design. A hole punched into a wall between the boys’ dormitory rooms lets them talk between rooms. “They called it their telephone.”37 Elsewhere it would be called vandalism. Here it is a compensation of sorts for lost familial connections: “that hole in the wall was about their hope for love.”38 While the children effectively “restructured the building to suit their needs,” the building accommodates them, taking on the wear and tear of daily 39

contact between feet and stairs, between hands and walls. Heavily trafficked areas of the orphanage received the most paint, so the lower walls had a receptive, accepting density, an imperfect but pliant look, and the railings on the stairwells, though made of metal, looked like they’d been recently dipped in hot caramel.40 CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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The physical edges of the orphanage melt away under the rub of daily routines. Similarly, D’Ambrosio dispels any institutional aura with one word: “caramel.” He sweetens the picture with a confectionary metaphor, which is probably as close as the children come to sugary desserts in the modest way station they call home. He also captures the children’s perspective on things in a place where money plays no role. He notices: Some of the boys held onto dead batteries, for instance, collecting them for their trinket value long after they’d lost their utility. Hair clips and cigarettes are known as commodity money, money with intrinsic value, which is close kin to barter. . . . [O]ver and over what I saw at Svirstroy were these little hands passing things, bottle caps and cigarettes, a cookie, a twig or leaf, small frequent exchanges where skin contacted skin, just briefly, but perfectly timed, now. In the enormity of their dislocation, the kids arrived for each other, always. They were there, they were present, and bartering was the deal that confirmed it.41 Barter is crucial to D’Ambrosio’s line of cultural questioning. Communism was predicated on the idea of sharing. Personal possessions were, in theory, property of the proletariat, conflated with the state – or, in this case, the orphanage. However, D’Ambrosio isn’t exactly making the case that the orphans’ shared existence is a microcosm of a beneficent communism. The decay at Svirstroy and the children’s paltry treasures belie it. This is hardly the stuff of utopia. But he does makes it clear that we would be mistaken to think that a better life resides only in the new – in the next purchase, better model, or latest upgrade, writing: The clinical rectitude that serves us so well in America might also prevent us from doing the human thing in some cases, and I can’t quite imagine an old building, owned by the government, turned over to the care and maintenance of kids; the impulse would probably be quashed by the obstacles. We’d have to knock Svirstroy down and haul it away in pieces before we could begin.42

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D’Ambrosio doesn’t draw such comparisons to fetishize decrepitude. Like Pamuk, he uses things to give us access to views we might otherwise not see. One of his most revelatory experiences comes when a girl named Yana shows him her photo album: One thing that was immediately apparent was that Yana herself did not own a camera. The pictures in her possession were taken by others, by visiting Americans, by one or two kids who’d been adopted and then sent back snapshots of themselves in Disneyland, by representatives of the various charitable organizations that come through a couple times a year. In other words, they were copies of photographs taken, most centrally, as an event in someone else’s life. Yana herself was a touristic stop in somebody’s trip to Russia. . . . Naturally, the pictures didn’t serve a nostalgic function. They hardly offered a chronology, capturing, instead, the present tense of life at Svirstroy.43 Yana and the other children are exiled in the remains of another era, living in ways that contradict the values of the new Russia and, for that matter, much of the developed world. The leanness of their circumstances is not by choice, and would mostly likely be cause for complaint if there were the possibility of change. In its absence, the children improvise with what they find; and unlike other children, they have to do it without the usual props of make-believe. There are no dress-up clothes, no wigs or masks, or store-bought toys in which to nest their fantasies. Yet, as D’Ambrosio writes, None of the kids expressed a sense of being rooked out of an imagined rightful life, and if perhaps, darkly, they’d developed minds and equipped their souls with buffers so pain was not cumulative and the present tense of experience neither stemmed from the past nor was predicated on a future, so be it. They were home.44 Inside the bell-jar culture of the orphanage, the children have only each other, that is, until they leave its confines. Then they will have to contend with other people’s ways of doing things and other people’s ways of using things.45 They’ll chart their cultural moorings in terms of before and after, as well as here and there. CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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Tintin pleure (Tintin weeps), Sylvain Grand’Maison, 2016 This silhouette of a weeping Tintin appeared on Sylvain Grand’Maison’s Instagram account after the Brussels bombings on March 22, 2016. The attacks by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed 32 victims, three perpetrators, and injured over 300 people. The

designer’s use of the colors of the Belgian flag in combination with the immediately recognizable profile of the boy adventurer is a nationalist response to a phenomenon that respects no national borders. The thin lines that marked old territories, the lines that Luc Sante writes of, are broken.

DdD No one is exempt from the dislocations that come with time, unless, that is, they are made out of the “clear line” that gave us the boy detective Tintin. Though fictional, Tintin has something in common with Yana and her friends: he has no parents and he exists in a closed world – which is ironic, since he famously travels the globe, even venturing into outer space. Tintin lives on the pages of his own comic book series, which first appeared in 1929, drawn by the Belgian artist Georges Remi, better known as Hergé. In an essay called “The Clear Line” (the term of art for Hergé’s style), Luc Sante frames Tintin’s perpetual adolescence within the insular cosmos of childhood and the insular smugness of colonialism. The dislocation here comes from the refusal, not the messiness, of cultural contact. 54

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Sante notes the comic’s “grotesque simplifications” of cultural difference, particularly in the episode set in the (then) Belgian Congo. But instead of writing about stereotypes or taking on colonialism directly, Sante shows how they permeate the design of the pages themselves. Hergé’s unwavering black outlines and consistently flat planes of color depict a universe understood through the eyes of a someone who seemed to have never aged beyond twelve – which Sante believes accounts for the impenetrable veneer of innocence of Hergé’s stereotypes. Not just of “foreign” people but also of “foreign” places. The great heights, deep cold, and blinding snows of Tibet; the horror vacui of the featureless Sahara; the threat of a tempest at sea as experience on a raft; even the empty and unknowable surface of the moon (c. 1955) – all of these can be not only managed but appreciated. . . . What [Hergé] did was to bring them into the child’s compass, not only through the heroic surrogate of the boy reporter, but also visually, by scraping away the murk and muddle and purifying it, revealing the world as an awe-inspiring but comprehensible series of planes.46 Nuance has no place in a world of surfaces where difference is reduced to a shorthand of fezzes in Egypt, teepees in America, nose rings in Africa, and opium pipes in China. Without these specific objects, it was supposed that the reader might not know where Tintin is off to given the flatness of the illustrations. At the same time, the effect of piling cliché upon cliché is also one of homogenization. The blond Tintin takes it for granted that he can go anywhere. No place is too rough or too hostile to his presence; no crumbling orphanages here. Every place is reassuringly exotic, except for Tintin’s native Belgium, forever and always stable as home should be. No subject is so obscure that there isn’t in Brussels some smock-wearing expert who knows all there is to know about it, and possesses the bookand artifact-stuffed apartment to prove it. It is a cozy world in which every detail is correctly labeled and filed away on the appropriate shelf. The world may contain its share of evil, but it is regularly swept and, like Belgian sidewalks, washed every week. There are no areas of gray.47

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In starkly different settings, both Sante and D’Ambrosio come up against ideals of cultural purity. D’Ambrosio finds virtue in the worn and imperfect and has qualms about American perfectionism. Sante praises Hergé’s aesthetic as a graphic Eden, but as a fiction as fantastic and unattainable as any Paradise – and also ultimately as suffocating as the colonial yoke. Clear lines are figments of the imagination. This is true of all demarcations – even our own skin isn’t “separate” from the air around it. Yet, the rules and measures we invent are not to be lightly dismissed. As Simmel reminds us, we are bordering creatures who have no borders, so we must make them.48 It’s either that or perish in a chaos of undifferentiated reality. At our best, we don’t impose them unilaterally, we negotiate them. In Darryl Pinckney’s semi-autobiographical novel High Cotton (1992), such negotiations are paramount.

EeE Set in the later half of the twentieth century, High Cotton is a coming of age story of a black man who describes his family as the “Also Chosen.” A cultural framework of “us” and “them” makes the habit of naming and categorizing all but fundamental to their lives. By virtue of that other kind of culture – art and education, his family is “almost” accorded the status claimed by whites. Descended from the “Talented Tenth,”49 they are also different from other black neighbors in Indianapolis. The narrator’s great-great-grandfather Limus may have been born enslaved but his grandfather Eustace was educated at Brown and Harvard. Dark blue blazers and penny loafers, good grades, and an Ivy League relation put the teenage narrator in an uncertain in-between. Within the realm of family, he’s not so different from many other adolescents for whom the past is alien territory and an older relative’s home is decidedly foreign; but seen in the larger context of a racially divided nation, there is no doubt he is. His psyche also has to contend with the variance in generational perspectives on what it means, meant, or could mean, to be black. In High Cotton, family and institutionalized identities – variously framed by race, age, and high culture – converge in a single living room. On a visit to relatives in the “Old Country” (a.k.a., Alabama), this son of the north describes the mis en scène in his aging Aunt Clara’s home. Here, culture lies less in things like her slipcovers and candy dishes and more in the sum of their parts. The tropes of race can be read in her furnishings. 56

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Racism & . . ., Cedomir Kostovic, 1996 Modern pianos have eighty-eight keys: fifty-two are white, thirty-six are black. The black keys represent the halfstep intervals – the sharps and flats – between the white keys, which play the whole notes of A, B, C, D, E, F, and G). Cedomir Kostovic’s use of the language and structure of the keyboard mirrors the “algebraic notation” of race that Pinckney ascribes to Aunt Clara in High Cotton. His poster not only plays on the myth of race as a measurable phenomenon, it also uses the geography of the keyboard to point to the constrained role of blacks as “half-steps” in a field of

“whole” whites. However, it should be noted that while all “black keys are either a sharp or flat, but not all sharps and flats are black keys. Remember, an accidental (a sharp or flat) merely means to play the next higher or lower key on a piano, and that next key may be black or white.”2 The fluidity of the musical convention is not unlike the ambiguous status of Pinckney’s “Also Chosen.” 2 Piano Key Chart, key-notes, accessed September 5, 2018, https://blog.key-notes.com/piano-key-chart.html/.

Her house was a zoo of things . . . a wild preserve for the pedestal sideboard . . . . I was perfectly free to study the living habits of lyre-backs in the vestibule, rockers, tables, mirrors, walls, secret doors, and gilt settees maybe because Aunt Clara counted on my not daring to. A sign on my mother’s face said, “Don’t feed the rugs.”50

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The self-conscious evocation of “zoos” and “living habits,” the maternal warning worded like a sign on a cage, all echo the less-than-human status assigned to those of African descent in America. A compromised past is contained within prism lamps, fire screens, and an ancient Steinway. “Even Aunt Clara seemed like an exhibit, part of the uncontrolled decor, a specimen in the menagerie of ceramic dog figurines.”51 Pinckney is the outsider looking in, while ever an outsider himself in eyes conditioned to see race. But here, it is his youth that sets him apart. For him, “the Old Country became a sort of generalized stuffy room.”52 Aunt Clara, born in Alabama in 1896, was “as obsessed as Thomas Jefferson with the ‘algebraic notation’ of blood mixture.”53 She comes from a family of the “middle kingdom,” a fiction of race plotted on percentages of blood mixtures. She doesn’t hesitate to let you know that her grandfather was “seven-eighths Caucasian and possibly one-eighth Negro.”54 Such numerical formulations were also reflected in her less precise (but no less affective) observations on skin color. She had no compunction about saying, “Why, you’re the darkest one in the family.”55 In spite of all the evidence that “race” is not a fact but a social fiction, we still discern and discriminate along the spectrum of flesh colors, a habit that continues to shape cities and city services. Less immediately visible systems, some of which are now notorious and illegal, took the place of branding bodies. Banks and insurance companies drew red lines around neighborhoods to keep them racially homogenous; and until as late 1965, Jim Crow signs were still posted prominently. For all but those with the lightest skin, these instruments were part of a larger plan. Enslavement was replaced by quarantine. Aunt Clara’s own mother “believed that the Also Chosen should give to Jim Crow the subversive inflection that the custom of segregation shielded nice Negroes from the contamination of whites.”56 Social insulation was a matter of self-preservation, something she could only insure by defensive means. In High Cotton, that insulation takes form in a home. And while virtually all domestic interiors offer respite from the outside, Aunt Clara’s does so pointedly. For it was only two generations back when slavery denied Aunt Clara’s family the possibility of owning a home, much less themselves.

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fFf For those dispossessed from homes they thought were theirs for the duration, the everydayness of life conducted in a different place is often more disconcerting than the act of migration. And for those who have even a little time to prepare, the mourning begins before the journey starts, as the poet Stanisław Barańczak writes in “If China.” If china, then only the kind you wouldn’t miss under the movers’ shoes or the treads of a tank; if a chair, then one that’s not too comfortable, or you’ll regret getting up and leaving; if clothes, then only what will fit in one suitcase; if books, then those you know by heart; if plans, then the ones you can give up when it comes time for the next move, to another street, another continent or epoch or world: who told you you could settle in? who told you this or that would last forever? didn’t anyone tell you you’ll never in the world feel at home here? 57

Barańczak makes it clear that our possessions are only provisionally ours. We can only pack what fits in a suitcase; movers and haulers will levy their tolls on fragile plates and chairs. As a dissident, the poet was writing from experience. In 1981, when martial law was imposed in Poland, Barańczak left his own home to live in the U.S.58 He would, like all émigrés, experience Dante’s fate after his expulsion from Florence. You will know how salty is the taste of another’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and come up another man’s stairs.59 CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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These are the lines that Egyptian-American writer Andre Aciman invokes to describe the feelings of those who have left everything behind and must make their accommodations to foreign ways and foreign things in order to survive. One could also say, in order to truly live.

Upstate Plates, Pataukunk, NY, Boym Partners, 2001 Depicting the most ordinary scenes of small town life, Constantin Boym’s Upstate Plates are unlikely souvenirs. Yet they are familiar because they use a common convention of traditional commemorative china: the centered image. This type of souvenir would normally feature a landmark like the Eiffel Tower or an important person like John F. Kennedy. By substituting an image that doesn’t resonate with prestige or power, Boym subverts the souvenir to honor the everyday

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and the nondescript – the unsung places and things that we often miss the most when we move away. These plates convey the ennui of small town life and the particular sense of mourning that accompanies all migrations. Each scene has a road running through it, subtly calling attention to the transience of contemporary life, both for those who move to fulfill their dreams and those who move because they’ve been forced to abandon them.

EXILE: NECESSARY THINGS IN PERMANENT LIMBO

In his 1994 memoir Out of Egypt, Aciman gives us a portrait of a lost world, the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, where his family lived until 1965 when they were evicted by the Egyptian government for the fact of being Jewish. It was of no consequence that they were also Arab and Italian or that, in addition to speaking Arabic and Italian, they were also comfortable in English, French, and Ladino. The Acimans, like most of their friends and neighbors, were victims of the successive waves of anti-Semitism that had been building momentum since 1956 when Israel, France, and England fought a brief war with Egypt over its nationalization of the Suez Canal. Officially, the polyglot family is reduced to a singular identity, contrary to their habit of conversing in different tongues. Siamo o non siamo? (Are we or aren’t we?)60 This is the question around which most of the families’ arguments circle. And it is arguments that seem to matter most, even more than things – up until things fall apart. Then they command attention. I did not fully understand what was so frightful about losing one’s fortune. A few of those we knew who had lost theirs went about living normal, everyday lives, with the same number of houses, cars, and servants. . . . On them, however, loomed the stigma – even the shame – of the fallen, the ousted, and it came with a strange odor that infallibly gave them away: it was the smell of leather. . . . Every family that had lost everything knew it was destined to leave Egypt sooner or later, and, in one room, usually locked and hidden from guests, sat thirty to forty leather suitcases in which mothers and aunts kept packing their family’s belongings at a slow, meticulous pace, always hoping that things might right themselves in the end.61 Aciman is a teenager when they are told the government has seized the family’s assets and his father tells him, “It’s finished.” The stuff of their everyday lives would soon be off-limits. They would disappear, but not entirely. The family never completely extract themselves from home; rather, an imagined Alexandria takes its place. In this, they are like the inhabitants of Ersilia, one of the cities in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses . . . . When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia . . . . spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.62 They find that form in another essay by Aciman, written six years later in New York. Like Calvino, he understands that cities are places where the ephemera of conversations, memories, and countless other events and transactions commune with its architecture, its signage, sidewalks, and benches. Aciman’s “Shadow Cities” opens on a note of loss, not nearly as momentous as leaving Alexandria but almost: “Straus Park was being dismantled, demolished.”63 In this small patch of land on the Upper West Side of New York, “just where Broadway intersects West End Avenue on West 106th Street,”64 Aciman had found an “oasis.” Despite the pocket park’s grubby state of disrepair and its lack of any historical interest, he’s dismayed at the prospect of its loss. He recognizes his tendency to domesticate even the most banal of places – like this one, not really a park at all – is something he shares with other exiles who “look for their homeland abroad, to bridge things here to things there, to rewrite the present so as not to write off the past.”65 However, Aciman’s melancholy isn’t a simple case of nostalgia. True, he’d spent many afternoons talking to the denizens of the Park, many of whom were exiles themselves. He recognized their stories but those tales remained stranded in the past, while the city around him made the past uncannily present. Suddenly, before I knew why, I felt quite at home. I was in one place that had at least four addresses. . . . Broadway, which so far uptown had an unspecified Northern European cast; West End Avenue, decidedly Londonish; 107th street, very quiet, very narrow, tucked away around the corner, reminded me of those deceptively humble alleys where one finds stately homes along the canals of Amsterdam. And 106th, as it descended toward Central Park, looked like the main alley of a small town on the Italian Riviera.66 62

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Perhaps not surprisingly, Aciman notes it is a common trait of exiles to hate change. He points out that when you’ve lost your own home, “you’ll build on anything, rather than look for land.”67 Straus Park – which, thankfully, is not headed for oblivion, just renovation – is the place where he builds his New York. He can recite a litany of places that have disappeared with uncanny thoroughness: “the Olympia Restaurant, the Blue Rose, the Ideal Restaurant, Mr. Kay’s Barbershop, The Pomander Bookshop, the Siam Spice Rack, Chelsea Two, and the old Olympia Theater.”68 But as he points out, sometimes it isn’t specific places that matter as much as it is the parallels we draw between them and other places we’ve known. This is yet another capacity of design – the evocation of memory. But, with the exception of the most compelling memorials made for the purpose of recollection, design performs that job largely inadvertently. Things like the curve of a street, a winding set of stairs, or a neon sign are latent with possibilities to trigger unexpected connections between experiences. These are connections designers can try to anticipate and often do with deliberate references to historical styles, but they cannot fabricate happenstance epiphanies like Aciman’s. Architects, urban planners, and designers can offer an array of forms and materiality in the hope that they might resonate, but they cannot predict why they will, or how and when. That we recognize a place from the way light hits the pavement or the way a street leads up to a vista of water has to do with the features of cities that are important to us, be it their fountains, their boulevards, or their ruins. However, the moments of recollection they evoke don’t follow a straightforward timeline. Straus Park not only takes Aciman to other cities he’s traveled to and through, it also takes him back to the New York of his younger self, when he was studying at Columbia. For Aciman, Straus Park is both a place and a palimpsest. This is why he can feel at home in the Park. It is a surrogate “unreal Alexandria” – the crossroads of all his worlds.

hHh

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Conversely, Dominic Pettman’s New York City offers a different kind of compression. In “Moving Four Blocks,” one of the entries in his 2013 novella In Divisible Cities, he describes an experience of city as a series of border-crossings. Instead of overlays, Pettman finds territorial microcosms, writing: Moving four blocks in New York City can mean moving between countries. When I changed apartments from Rivington Street to Grand Street, this didn’t seem like a big change, geographically speaking (since I would still be using the Delancey subway stop). Culturally speaking, however, this was a massive shift. Whereas before I was living in the rowdy, music-filled streets of Puerto Rico, I now found myself housed in a much more sedate Central European enclave. Out my study window I could see China, which itself has all but colonized Little Italy. No doubt my next move will be South East, across the river; despite the fact that living in Brooklyn is like marrying the most exciting woman in the world, and then sleeping in the next room.69

IiI Pettman’s moves bring him into new states of mind, new geographies of being, while Aciman’s movements consolidate in a state of exile, within which are gathered all of the places he’s encountered before and since his forced departure. Despite the difference, both authors remain fully engaged with the world. Not so with self-imposed exile, a condition that is rarely thought to be a chosen state. Apart from those who freely enter cloistered religious orders, we tend to look upon lives led in extreme isolation as damaged, even deranged, and the spaces they occupy, noxious. People without fixed addresses – by choice or circumstance – are especially suspect. And it is the choices and circumstances of living on the streets of Tokyo that are the linchpins of The Box Man, written by Kōbō Abe in 1973. This dynamic of mutual ostracization appears on the opening page. We see it in an image of a newspaper report (one of several that interrupt the narrative) about “hobos” arrested in Ueno Park. We read it in the first utterance of the novel’s narrator:

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This is the record of a box man. I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it on over my head. That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me.70

The box man insists that he is not a vagrant or a hobo, but someone who chooses to live in a cardboard container. As if to establish that the decision to put on a box involves nothing particularly out of the ordinary, he gives clear “Instructions for Making a Box,” beginning with a list of materials necessary to make it inhabitable: paper, vinyl, tape, wire, and a small pointed tool. The primer is quite specific that: “The greatest care must be taken when making the observation window.”71 Apart from the box man’s lower legs, only his eyes can be seen. But even then, only when he wishes to be seen, for one of the critical features of the window is its curtain. As much as the box itself, the prescribed frosted vinyl curtain protects his anonymity, allowing him to see without being fully seen. If the box replaces his face, the window acts as his eyes. For a box man the slit in the vinyl is comparable, as it were, to the expression of the eyes. It is wrong to consider this aperture as being on the same level as a peephole. With very slight adjustments it is easy to express yourself. Of course, this is not a look of kindness. The worst threatening glare is not so offensive as this slit. Without exaggeration, this is one of the few self-defenses an unprotected box man has.72 “Window,” “aperture,” and “slit.” Each of these things is a variation on the spatial divides created by the box. The nature of this separation is so elementary, and at the same time so radical, that it is not unlike the first act of building. So profound is this act that Simmel sees it as a defining characteristic of being conscious of the self in the world, writing: The human being who first erected a hut . . . cut a portion out of the continuity and infinity of space and arranged this into a particular unity . . . . A piece of space was thereby brought together and separated from the whole remaining world.73 CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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Just as Simmel views the act of claiming space as primal, so Abe scratches the veneer of city life and reveals it as elemental. The primitive and the evolved (or so-called modern) coexist in a continuum.74 To wit, at one point, another box man simply called “A” paints his lips green and traces, “in gradually expanding circles, the seven colors of the rainbow, beginning with red, around his eyes. His face resembled that of a bird or a fish rather than that of a man.”75 Having summoned the courage to put a box on, and become neither man nor box, “A” asserts his ambiguous status – a man of instinct, a man of reason – with face paint. Even while he’s hiding his identity under the box, he asserts it, then denies it again, saying he thinks he will ultimately become the contents of the box. This vacillation raises the question as to whether we are to understand the box man as a self-curating brain with an ever-vulnerable outer body, or another commodity headed for the trash. Abe suggests this isn’t a matter of either/or, given the taboos on eccentricity in 1970s Japan. Still, he obscures the issue of the degree to which the box man is responsible for his actions. His use of the box as a space of protest against social codes and as a mask for lascivious spying are not mutually exclusive – nor is its use as a camera. In fact, the narrator hides behind the “aperture” of his box, just as he did when he worked as a photographer and the camera was his surrogate eye. Taking a photo in the 1970s meant keeping a distance from the scene to maintain a perspective on events as a watcher. (Today, the camera has been fully socialized, thanks to cellphones and selfies.) A photographer-box man is, therefore, primed for being an outsider. However, he takes that status to such an extreme, that he creates his own tribe of outcast alter egos. They have no names, just letters: Box Men A, B, C, and D. Even if he’s only talking to himself, the box man has created a community of the unseen, which of course does exist among the homeless, despite his protestations that he is not one of them. His is a condition of freedom, he says, such he empathizes with those who wish to join his ranks in “that city . . . where you can walk on your head or sleep by the roadside without being blamed; where you are free to sing if you’re proud of your ability; and where, having done all that, you can mix with the nameless crowds whenever you wish.”76 The gift anonymity and its liberties enlarge in reverse proportion to the scale of the box man’s cardboard architecture. This is architecture-cum-appliance. Wires are strategically placed to hold a flashlight, radio, thermos, mug, and towel, plus a small bag for toiletries and other miscellany; portals the size 66

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Border Life, Biancoshock, 2016 Throughout the Lodi district of Milan, urban artist Biancoshock turned abandoned manholes into subterranean dwellings. The project is meant to draw attention to the situation of people forced to live in extreme conditions, particularly in the underground, as many do in subway systems around the world. For all the care given to these miniscule interiors, Biancoshock recognizes that his public interventions are ephemeral and only survive in documentation. Their

purpose is not to “solve” the problem of street people who live like Kōbō Abe’s box man, but to magnify the cultural void in which they live. The Border Life series shows that the unmet needs of the indigent extend far beyond a handout or a free meal. In these bizarre conflations of the ordinary and the extraordinary, we see the extent to which even the most mundane objects of design – tiles, wall clocks, shower heads, and towels, even a hat – are essential to our sense of dignity.

of nail heads are made to pick up ambient sounds, conflating ears and radio into one. And, of course, there is the aforementioned curtained window. Among his most prized possessions is a multi-purpose plastic board. It serves as a table for eating and writing, a chopping board for cooking, a shutter against the rain, a fan in the heat, and a table for undoing and rerolling the cigarette butts he finds. His CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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gift for improvisation, the design tactic of the powerless, is considerable and his portable piece of real estate is so valuable that a woman offers to buy his box for 50,000 yen (approximately $900.00 in today’s dollars). Following the bizarre offer – after all it is still just a cardboard box – the box man enters a maze of equally surreal encounters. He seeks out the woman who asked to buy the box and finds her in a hospital where she works as a nurse. She’s naked (apparently she used to be an artist’s model), and she’s talking to a fake box man – alternately a doctor and our photographer-box man – who ogles her in a hospital room. The doctor, whose identity has been assumed by his orderly in another instance of fakery, has also been reported to have been seen walking around town in a cardboard box. Levels of deception and confusion grow exponentially. No thing and no one is constant in this paranoid state – certainly not a sense of self. Like many of the vagrants the box man disdains, he’s either completely delusional or he’s being subjected to treatment against his will, or both. The box man’s existence is threatened not only by his many imagined adversaries, but also by the mere fact of being seen: “In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen.”77 To be seen is different from being recognized, just as being naked is different from being nude; so says one of the alter egos, who is obsessed with the female body. The truth of his observation lies in the fact that what is “seen” and what is “naked” (as well as other distinctions like class and race) are determined by preconceptions fostered in the media. To drive the point home, Abe visualizes them in the newspaper clippings embedded throughout the narrative. A grainy image of people in wheelchairs, a news item about a man found dead on the street, and a fuzzy photo of a man laboriously pushing a cart loaded with plastic bags – all these are designed to magnify people’s differences with little or no sympathy. However, more culpable than photographers, more influential than the press, is the nationalist context in which they operate. Among other countries, Japan has a long history of viewing other body types and other bloodlines as a threat to racial purity, thus inferior. The notion of what it means to be “truly” Japanese is the primary culprit in framing people as outsiders, even and especially those within its own borders.78 It isn’t only those of mixed race who are affected. Abe makes it plain that all Japanese can be subjected to shame when cultural codes are breached. In one of the box man’s 68

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dreams, he’s a prospective groom who can’t afford a horse drawn carriage to take him to his fiancé, so his father draws the carriage wearing a box to cover his body and his son’s embarrassment. The fact that the dream is set in a pre-modern context – a taxi is not an option – shows that the practice of humiliation is not particular to the box men of Tokyo in the 1970s. Nor can the choice to withdraw be solely attributed to the anxieties of urban living. It is the larger social pressure to conform that prompts withdrawal. The compulsion is so widespread that “rather than asking who is a real box man, it would be better to ascertain who is not a real one.”79 Of course, many people retreat under the stresses of their lives. But the box man chooses something more radical; he chooses self-erasure. Escape is the ultimate purpose of the box and also its pathology. By refusing to assume an identity that would allow for social attachments (for better and worse), the box man is trapped in a solitary confinement of his own design. The isolated mind and the truncated body go mad. Actually a box, in appearance, is purely and simply a right-angled parallelepiped, but when you look at it from within it’s a labyrinth of a hundred interconnecting puzzle rings. The more you struggle the more the box, like an extra outer skin growing from the body, creates new twists for the labyrinth, making the inner disposition increasingly more complex.80 Shifting from right angles to rings, the box morphs from house to brain. Likewise, manifestations of culture – houses, towns, cities, dress, body language, possessions – are made out of internalized proscriptions – our thoughts and hopes – as much as they are materially constructed. It is when those proscriptions are re-examined in light of possibilities other than those most familiar, as was the case with the bridge on the Drina, that culture and design are reinvigorated. But such equanimity is rare. Pamuk’s parable of the portrait and D’Ambrosio’s of an orphanage are studies in contrasts of style in which cultural contrasts are vital. Barańczak, Pinckney, and Sante recognize parts of themselves in homelands left behind; Pettman finds himself surrounded by countries in a single city; Aciman bridges all of his homes in a park. Each of them writes about cultural identities unmoored, while Abe describes a man who is trying to unmoor himself from culture. CULTURE: IDENTITY, DISPLACEMENT, EXILE

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Collectively, these authors suggest that the tension between culture and identity is one to be relished, not feared or abandoned. By extension, they are also making the case for an approach to design that takes the measure of its context, while looking for openings to inject unexpected encounters. Without acknowledging the presence of others, without at least considering other ways of making the world, we risk stagnation. Or worse, we unwittingly cultivate the volatility that thrives under repressed differences and make them ripe for exploitation with a force far more lethal than change.

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1 In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy gets back to Kansas by clicking the heels of her famous red shoes three times, saying: “There’s no place like home.” In 1939 when the film was made, women were supposed to stay at home, especially young women like Dorothy. Despite the fact that the most famous song from the movie is “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” an expression of her desire to find happiness somewhere else, Dorothy is punished by a nightmare that only ends when she wakes in her grandparents’ farm in Kansas and embraces her family. 2 This anecdote was told to me by sociologist Malgorzata Bakalarz-Duverger in April 2016. Bakalarz-Duverger used it to frame a conference and exhibition she organized at Parsons School of Design, both entitled “Far Away From Where?” 3 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1972), 29. 4 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 16. 5 Opening monologue of Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989) narrated by Wim Wenders, director. In the film, Yoji Yamamoto and Wenders compare their trajectories in fashion and film through their experiences of Paris and Tokyo. Wenders shoots their conversations with both “old-fashioned” cellotape film and video. Yamamoto, showing his work in Paris for the first time, looks to uniforms of the past for inspiration for his carefully abstracted garments.

6 Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” trans. Mark Ritter, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publisher, 1997), 171. Note, in the same essay, Simmel usefully expands on the idea of separation and unity, writing: “The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in external nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements. On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of space; no particle of matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse does not exist in spatial terms” (170–1). This is the condition of separateness that prompts us to make connections, which in turn prompts the making of things such as bridges. 7 Simmel is writing from an entirely human perspective, under the assumption that only we can objectify relationships. One hundred years ago, it would have been unlikely that he would consider the capacities of animals to do the same, for example, by making burrows. He would distinguish between animal instinct and human choice. And while they are clearly different in degree, there have since been many studies that show animals (e.g., bears and primates) can use tools to shape their environments. 8 Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 14–5. From THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA by Ivo Andrić, translated from the SerboCroat by Lovett F. Edwards. Copyright © 1959 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., renewed 1987 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

9 Ibid., 96–7. 10 Ibid., 95. 11 Ibid., 130. 12 Ibid., 174–5. 13 Ibid., 214. 14 The bridge on the Drina would be bombarded and damaged again in World War II and be repaired yet again. 15 Ibid., 140. 16 Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, trans. Erdağ M. Göknar (New York: Vintage Random House, 2002), 26. CREDIT LINE: Excerpt(s) from MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar, translation copyright © 2001 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 17 Ibid. 18 Not coincidentally, the Venetian Renaissance painter Gentile Bellini did such a portrait of Mehmed II in 1480, a century before the events of My Name is Red. 19 The term design had only recently come into currency with the Italian Renaissance concept of disegno or drawing – a particular way of organizing lines on a page. Though one could also argue that, in the West, design came into being by default at roughly the same time when it was distinguished from art, whose sole raison d’être was aesthetic. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ibid., 47. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 50. 24 Ibid., 51. 25 Ibid., 217. 26 Ibid., 217–8. 27 Ibid., 219. 28 Ibid.

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29 Ibid., 102.

43 Ibid., 132.

30 Ibid., 396.

44 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 104.

45 Children are especially sensitive to even minor changes in the familiar. I remember staying at a friend’s house when I was eight and being horrified that they made me sleep with my socks on, though I was delighted to be offered soda instead of milk.

32 Ibid., 186. 33 Ibid., 399. 34 Ibid., 160–1. 35 Appiah believes that we have obligations to our immediate culture and to cultures removed from our own, particularly today when mass media puts us into contact with (or at least gives us an undeniable awareness of) peoples who would have been otherwise unknown to us. He uses the phrase “partial cosmopolitanism” to reflect these dual loyalties to the local and the global. Fittingly for my purposes, he too turns to fiction for an example: George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Deronda, raised a Christian, discovers late in life that he is Jewish, but as Appiah notes, he doesn’t reject one faith or allegiance for another. Instead, he says he found “an added soul” and thus becomes a partial cosmopolitan, not rootless but also not divorced from other influences. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism:Ethics in a World of Strangers, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006], xvii). 36 The essay was commissioned by Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, a now-defunct magazine, known for its iconoclastic design and its literary content.

46 Luc Sante, “The Clear Line,” in Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005 (Portland, OR: YETI/Verse Chorus Press, 2007), 236. 47 Ibid., 234. 48 Simmel, Simmel on Culture, 174. 49 The term “Talented Tenth” was purportedly used by Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth century but it was more famously taken up by W. E. B. Du Bois in an essay of the same name, written in 1903. He begins the essay with this assertion: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: James Pott and Co., 1903), 33.

57 Stanisław Barańczak, “If China,” trans. Magnus J. Krynski, in Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, ed. Carolyn Forché (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), 480. 58 Barańczak, whose poetry had been banned in Poland, left in 1981 after the Polish communist government declared martial law. He took a threeyear teaching position at Harvard and never returned. 59 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, vol. 3 of The Divine Comedy, Canto XVII, lines 58–60; quoted in André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York: Picador, 1994), 273. 60 Aciman, Out of Egypt, 3. 61 Ibid., 307. 62 Calvino, Invisible Cities, 76. 63 André Aciman, “Shadow Cities,” in False Papers (New York: Picador, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), 37. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 38. 66 Ibid., 42. 67 Ibid., 39. 68 Ibid., 37. 69 Dominic Pettman, In Divisible Cities: A Phanto-Cartographical Missive (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2013), 40.

50 Darryl Pinckney, High Cotton (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1992), 32–3.

70 Kōbō Abe, The Box Man, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage, 2001), 3.

51 Ibid., 33.

71 Ibid., 5.

38 Ibid., 131.

52 Ibid., 49.

72 Ibid., 6.

39 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 33.

73 Simmel, Simmel on Culture, 172.

40 Ibid., 130.

54 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 134.

55 Ibid., 35.

42 Ibid., 131.

56 Ibid., 33.

37 Charles D’Ambrosio, “Russian Orphanage,” Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors 18 (Fall 2002), 130.

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74 As I am attempting to show with analyses of the common concerns of contemporary design and literature, I am in deep sympathy with Bruno Latour’s assertion that “nothing obliges us to maintain modern temporality with its succession of radical revolutions, its antimoderns who return to what they think is the past, and its double concert of praise and complaint, for or against continual progress, for or against continual degeneration. . . . We do have a future and a past, but the future takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions, and the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled.” (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 74–5). 75 Abe, The Box Man, 13. 76 Ibid., 14. 77 Ibid., 80. 78 The ingrained insularity and rejection of foreigners have been a part of Japan’s history dating back to at least 1639, when the ruling Tokugawa shogunate cut Japan off from the rest of the world. Today, despite efforts to the contrary, the dubious status of foreigner can be also earned by Japanese citizens whose appearances suggest mixed race or deformities of the body. 79 Ibid., 143. 80 Ibid., 178.

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Keys, El Sueño Americano (The American Dream), Tom Kiefer, 2007– Considered potentially lethal, these keys were taken from people who crossed the Mexican-American border. This is one of a series that examines the psychological cost of the American dream in everyday things. They were taken by photographer Tom Kiefer when he worked as a janitor for the Customs and Border Protection agency in Ajo, Arizona. Other images in the series are of rosary beads, water bottles, wallets, combs, brushes, jars of baby food, to name only six

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of the otherwise innocuous things taken from the detained and deported. Singly and together these images testify to the process of dehumanization that begins when people are stripped of their possessions. It would seem that the loss of a key is negligible in the greater scheme of things, but for the fact that it means “No entry” and, worse, because they were found in the trash, “No entry to garbage.” No matter that their keys look just like ours.

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Politics: Prosecution, Obfuscation, Possibility
 Although rooted in polis (ancient Greek for city-state), the workings of politics have come unmoored from place and space. It is assumed that politics “happens” through speeches and laws, that it traffics in ideology, not spaces or things – this, despite the glut of posters, television ads, stage sets, websites, and tour buses slathered in super-graphics that accompany virtually every campaign in one form or another. Almost certainly, these backdrops reinforce the perception that design doesn’t contribute anything of its own to the realm of politics, that it just parrots the party line. Yet, against all evidence to the contrary, politics is not only conducted in space, it is also conducted by spaces, places, and things. Fortunately, there is a body of literature, a subgenre if you like, that recognizes that design can also be a mode of speech and action – one that raises questions about the power relations that constitute politics.1 Even so, the idea that design exerts agency, that objects and places speak and afford opportunities for action to change the status quo, would seem to defy common sense. We are far more accustomed to think of the works of design as merely enforcing or emphasizing a previously articulated stance within the political realm. This is because design and politics tend to operate strategically – a state of affairs that has become as unremarkable as it is problematic. It is problematic because strategies seek predetermined outcomes – in the case of conventional politics, closing off debate with talking points instead of opening it up; in the case of design, predetermining our options, whether through the software that contains our information or the infrastructure (or lack thereof) that enables public transportation. Strategies in design and strategies in politics are both means to ends. They assert one way of doing things and rarely embrace alternatives. That said, strategies can have salutary effect of eliciting tactical responses, and such workarounds are more familiar than we might think.2 75

Who hasn’t used stairs meant for climbing as a place to sit and not given it a second thought? It probably wouldn’t occur to most people that such an insignificant act has its politics. But stairs, like more obviously controlling fences and walls, assert an intent; and that intent flows from someone else’s power to design and position them in space. But the very same stairs can also be put to other ends, like relaxing, loitering, or slowing down instead of racing up to a destination. These actions and reactions, whether deployed on things as modest as stairs or as massive as a wall between Mexico and the United States, constitute one way for ordinary citizens to challenge the (presumed) reasonableness of those who put these controls in space and place.3 The literature in this chapter exposes this tension and its affects. The fact that many of the authors enlist horror, fantasy, and fable to make power relations more vivid does not imply that their work is less authentically political. Rather, these poems, short stories, and novels are themselves tactics. In practice, tactics are often deterred by the forms that power takes on, whether in tall buildings or barbed wire. However, this is not the only way in which design acts as a dimension of politics. Apart from just looking powerful, things like buildings and barriers are, quite literally, embodiments of power. And because they seem “complete” when we encounter them, they obscure any thoughts about the sources of energy – human and nonhuman – that made them and sustain them. Buildings and barriers are not in and of themselves a threat to freedom but they are the products of force, of the extraction and manipulation of the materials from which they are made. At its essence, design involves power over the shape of things and the behaviors they encourage. Our access to the products of design (and the resources they consume) amounts to a distribution of power that is also innately, if silently, political in nature. Of course, without participating in that power dynamic, we wouldn’t survive very long. For the most part, we are more than happy to accept the authority of things like traffic signals and emergency equipment. And flawed though the balance of power can be between those who design and those who live with the results of design, it is also true that we depend on design for pleasure, be it in the enjoyment of a park or in the satisfaction derived from a well-made tool.4 At issue is the degree to which we understand how that power is exercised and who and what it serves – not who and what it dominates. 76

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The even larger question is whether power can be reorganized within politics and more fairly distributed. The challenge is enormous, given that any efforts to ameliorate its abuses of authority must operate in contexts shaped by centuries of uncontested entitlement to land, people, and resources. This pattern of conquests has colored and continues to color every aspect of culture. Design is no exception. Most of us don’t give a second thought to doors, for example. Yet, without superpowers to break through walls, even a door can be an implacable medium of control.

Canned Form, Study B05/01-077, Intuitive Cartographies, Book 2, Atlas, Enrique Martinez, 2014 Part of a series of collages and drawings that comprise Enrique Martinez’s Intuitive Cartographies, Canned Form calls attention to the seemingly innocuous constraints on our movements that are mapped into architectural blueprints. Canned Form shows twinned dwellings much smaller than the space that surrounds them, not unlike

Communist-era buildings that allotted disproportionately more space to common hallways than to rooms in private residences. In that sense, it can be read as either generous or punitive, but like all floor plans, this one is only an ideal that cannot account for the tactical adaptations its hypothetical residents might make.

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These largely unexamined aspects of design as power make it easy to accept the behaviors of things like doors and walls without question. It seems we only see their full impact with a shift of scale. This is all too obvious in historical structures like the Berlin Wall. It can also be seen in subtler constructions of division. For example, in the 1950s, anyone who depended solely on public transportation could not experience New York’s public beaches because Robert Moses made sure that the bridges over the parkways on Long Island were too low to accommodate buses. The decision especially affected (and was tacitly directed toward) black neighborhoods of the Bronx.5 This type of built discrimination outlives its designer, making it the case that, even if they are not conscious beings, such intransigent structures can and do operate independently. Then, and now with the twenty-first century global refugee crises, objects of design from guns to barbed wire to barriers continue to enforce the rhetoric of exclusion – something we can barely comprehend unless we ourselves are expelled from a homeland or exiled from a community within that homeland. It is however, within the power of literature to make us feel and internalize the politics of design. The real politics of barriers, their truly personal politics, are visceral in Constantine Cavafy’s poem Walls, written in 1896. With no consideration, no pity, no shame. they have built walls around me, thick and high. And now I sit here feeling hopeless. I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind – because I had so much to do outside. When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed! But I never heard the builders, not a sound. Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.6 Cavafy’s is a familiar tale. The distractions of daily life induce a state of denial. That is, until it is too late to notice that power is not content to remain an abstraction.

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As this chapter will show, the injunctions of power variously trip us up, lock us out, and deny our presence – a presence inseparable from the things we cherish and depend on for both psychic and corporeal survival. If we are to change our habit of turning a blind eye to power, it might help to begin by identifying the politics of the objects and places that are part of daily life. Then politics would not be limited to the “news.” Even when we go beyond being passive observers and exercise what measure of political agency we have – as in a community debate on the merits of a new school – we only have access to information selectively presented to us. With the best of intentions, true debate is all too often sacrificed to the exigencies of time and money, and gives way to force of habit. This is where power finds opportunity.

PROSECUTION: DEVICES OF JUDGMENT, SYSTEMS OF EXPULSION

The insincerity of the invitation to observe, consult, debate, and judge has rarely been more effectively and painfully portrayed than in Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony. The very purpose of a penal colony, especially one on an island, is to keep the techniques of punishment completely out of sight.7 But here we find an exception – an effort to court an outside perspective. This particular prison complex has a visitor called the explorer. His opinion has been actively solicited by the Colony’s new Commandant, who is questioning his predecessor’s methods. In the Penal Colony is familiar to many as a parable of injustice involving a prisoner, a soldier, an officer, and a traveler. However, missing from that list is the story’s silent protagonist: an instrument of injustice that writes its verdict on human flesh. The prisoner to be tortured is of no real consequence. He is only an excuse for the Colony’s officer to show off his beloved but endangered “apparatus.” Here, power and politics merge in prowess. The apparatus is an industrial device that’s not so different from an ordinary sewing machine, except for the fact that instead of stitching fabric, it is designed to pierce human skin. The sentence, which in other circumstances would be an intangible expression of the state’s decision, is literally inscribed on the prisoner’s body, who is never told his punishment. As the officer explains,

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“There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body.” The explorer intended to make no answer, but he felt the prisoner’s gaze turned on him; it seemed to ask if he approved such goings-on. So he bent forward again . . . and put another question: “But surely he knows that he has been sentenced?” “Nor that either,” said the officer, smiling at the explorer as if expecting him to make further surprising remarks.8 The prisoner’s guilt was never in question. Moreover, it is incidental to the theatrics of the impending execution. (The prisoner’s crime was falling asleep.) More worrisome for the officer than the prisoner or his fate is his sense that the explorer has serious doubts about the use of the machine. Unless convinced of its merits, the explorer’s report could lead to condemnation of the apparatus and the authority behind it, currently in the form of the officer who believes his only duty is to continue the legacy of the old regime. To make his case, the officer launches into a detailed explanation of the contraption’s essential parts. There is the Bed to which the body is strapped, the Designer that makes a template of words and decorative flourishes, and the Harrow that pierces them into the body. The gruesome twelve-hour operation is further finessed by the addition of a water jet, which disperses the blood from the punctured flesh, and a felt mouth guard, which stifles the cries of the condemned until he “has no longer the strength to scream.”9 The machine, which the officer reveres for its efficiencies, also has an aesthetic dimension. When the Harrow does its work, the “script itself runs around the body only in a narrow girdle; the rest of the body is reserved for the embellishments.”10 In this particular instance, the ornamented script reads: “Honor your superiors.” The penalty isn’t inscribed, just the principle that is violated. Kafka is describing the workings (and quite literally the writing) of power on the body after it infects the mind. The officer has been completely seduced by the workings of the apparatus, itself a hyperbole for the innumerable legal and physical instruments that constrict our choices and our movements. Laws and their material equivalents tell us where we can and cannot go, how and what we can touch, drink, eat, make, and so on – some of which are quite welcome, others unfairly restrictive. But this particular performance of power is the stuff of nightmares. 80

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Drawing Blood, Ted Lawson, 2004 Ted Lawson used a robotic painting machine to draw a self-portrait with his own blood. The process entailed hacking a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machine that was originally programmed to paint with a self-filling brush and ink device.1 Instead of ink, blood from Lawson’s veins produced a prone nude image of himself, not unlike that of a martyr. Similarly, Kafka’s Officer also offers himself up to an apparatus in In the Penal Colony. But instead of posing as a

martyr for justice the Officer becomes one in the name of a twisted reverence for power. 1 Katie Treggiden, “Ted Lawson uses his own blood to print a self-portrait with a CNC machine,” Dezeen, September 1, 2014, http://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/01/ ted-lawson-self-portrait-robot-paint-blood/.

Indeed, the perverse aesthetics of Kafka’s apparatus go well beyond the sight of embroidered skin. They are the sum of all the sensations endured by the hapless prisoner, who is even fed a bowl of rice gruel a couple of hours into the process. As to the judicial pronouncement itself, the officer says, “our man deciphers it with his wounds.”11 Indifferent to their actual effects, the officer, like those before and after him, uses instruments of torture to impose both a psychological and physical distance from the sensory world of the victim. The apparatus sanitizes the process on every level; it must be kept clean so its muscles can do the dirty work and the hands of power remain clean. The victim’s blood is absorbed by felted cotton, with any excess washed away. Even the tattooed judgment is made to look decorative – not unlike the patterns mechanically stamped onto countless fin de siècle objects from tin ceilings to leather book bindings. In this, Kafka offers a tacit but POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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familiar modernist critique of ornament as deceit, as a concealment of “honest” structures. (It is possible that he was familiar with architect Adolf Loos’s seminal essay Ornament and Crime published in 1913, six years before In the Penal Colony. In it, Loos politicizes ornament by equating it with criminality.) By the time of the story’s publication, the power exerted by machines over materials –and laborer’s bodies – was not especially novel. The Industrial Revolution had been in progress for over a century and a half. Concerns about deadly working conditions persisted, but readers’ more likely point of reference for Kafka’s scenario of torture would have been World War I, the “Great War” of 1914–18. Europe was still reeling from its slaughter and the devastating affects of mustard gas on soldiers’ bodies. On Kafka’s island, war is waged on just one body, but with the same result: the product of the machine is a mangled corpse. It is precisely this spectacle of gore that keeps Kafka’s officer enthralled to the apparatus. He fiercely defends it in the language of the sublime, fondly recalling past sufferers’ “look of transfiguration.”12 Here, torture is rationalized as both lethal and carefully crafted, with no end beyond the sadistic ecstasy of pain observed. Unpersuaded, the explorer says he cannot support this gratuitous cruelty. Words having failed him, the officer opts for the most extreme demonstration of his conviction. He changes places with the prisoner and sacrifices himself to the apparatus. The inscription he chooses for his own mutilation is “Be just!” But, instead of giving him the justice he sought – the experience of “exquisite torture” which he so desperately wanted – the machine impales the officer instantly, as if to take its own revenge. Once set in motion, Kafka’s device doesn’t respect its creator’s intentions, no more than wars (and the machines that run them) go according to plan. Despots and democratically-elected rulers alike invest power in armaments and lose the control they sought in the first place when their weapons turn against them. It is important to note that they “turn” and are not “turned against them.” To ignore the possibility that the performance of the things we design (weapons or plowshares) will vary is to deny the fact they are designed by fallible beings – we, who transform their ambitions into things. And precisely because these things (be it Kafka’s machine or a bomb) exceed our strength, they are that much more dangerous to us.

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jJj Unlike the tools of torture, domestic objects and places don’t usually arouse strong feelings. Absent a natural disaster, we count on our homes and our possessions to be there unchanged. Anything else would be a matter of theft. In democracies, the exception is eminent domain, as when a homeowner forfeits his property to the government in return for an (ostensibly) equitable recompense. However, under totalitarian regimes there is no need for even a pretense of compensation. Instead, outright property theft and strictly rationed goods are requisite sacrificial offerings to the state. Any conclusions or complaints about who or what determines one’s living conditions must be done surreptitiously under the watch of neighbors and political spies. Two stories, one by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky set in Soviet Russia, the other by Julio Cortázar in Peronist Argentina, are masterpieces of politics-as-space. Not the spaces of official grandstands or the marching fields of ruling party celebrations, but the intimate spaces of house and home. “House” is actually too grand a term to make sense in 1926 in Moscow, the setting for Krzhizhanovsky’s “Quadraturin.” Under the Soviet collective housing system, a single room could suffice as home. It was an especially generous home if occupied by just one person and not the usual menagerie of related and unrelated residents. Krzhizhanovsky’s narrator Sutulin is just such a fortunate case. In fact, he seems to be on a run of good luck. One day, a visitor knocks on the door of Sutulin’s miniscule living quarters with a bizarre proposition. Pushing his way in, he explains, “I’m here on business. You see, I, that is, we, are conducting, how shall I put it…well, experiments, I suppose. Under wraps for now. I won’t hide the fact: a well-known foreign firm has an interest in our concern. You want the electric light switch? No, don’t bother: I’ll only be a minute. So then: we have discovered – this is a secret now – an agent for biggerizing rooms. Well, won’t you try it?”13 There’s a further inducement: Quadraturin – the biggerizing agent – won’t cost Sutulin a kopeck. Any warning bells set off by the triumvirate of “secret,” “foreign,” and “free” are quickly overcome. POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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The “experiment” seems so simple. Sutulin need only add one teaspoon of the Quadraturin to a cup of water and apply it to “the room’s internal walls designated for proiferspansion.”14 Which he does with immediate but only partial success. Struggling to reach the ceiling, he drops the tube and the rest of Quadraturin leaks out onto on the floor, and the job remains unfinished. The next morning, he finds his room has indeed expanded, but he hasn’t reckoned on the effect of the unpainted ceiling. The room starts to warp; and, even more disturbing, the walls and floor continue to grow. He needs more Quadraturin.

Magic Carpet/Home, Maria Elena González, 1999 In this outdoor installation, Maria Elena González replicated the floor plan of a six-room unit in Red Hook East Housing in Brooklyn. Complete with the outlines for a kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, and closets, González transforms the apartment layout into a flying carpet.2 Raised in Cuba, as a child, González experienced the constrictions of daily life that were a consequence of both Fidel Castro’s dictatorship and the embargo imposed by the U.S. on Cuba in 1960. Her piece evokes the fantasy of having larger living quarters

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– the fulcrum of Krzhizhanovsky’s “Quadraturin,” only here it is transposed to the spatial limitations of public housing apartments in New York City. 2 Maria Elena González, Magic Carpet/Home, Public Art Fund, 1999, accessed September 5, 2018, https://www.publicartfund.org/view/ exhibitions/5742_magic_carpet__home.

Back from a fruitless search, Sulutin discovers that his apartment hasn’t stopped swelling. The light from the single bulb in his room can hardly reach the “dark, ever-receding corners of the vast and dead, yet empty barrack, which only recently, before Quadraturin, had been a cramped but cozy, warm, and lived-in cubbyhole.”15 His few possessions seem to shrink away from him. He tries to get his coat off the hook but it has moved out of reach, leaving him with “a sense of mooringlessness.”16 Sulutin’s feeling of estrangement from the familiar is quickly compounded by fear when he receives a visit from his landlady and a representative of the House Committee. Naturally, Sulutin can’t reveal his unexpected largesse to either of them; it would violate all principles of shared property. Sulutin manages to put off the official by saying his light has burned out, and his landlady, suspecting nothing, inadvertently comes to his aid: Oh, what is there to look at? Eighty-six square feet for the eight-sixth time. Measuring the room won’t make it any bigger. He’s a quiet man, home from a long day at the office – and you won’t let him rest: have to measure and remeasure. Whereas other people, who have no right to the space, but –17 Under the stress of his ever-changing domestic arrangements and the prospect of being accused of political heresy, Sutulin decides that he has to move out. He returns to the apartment to collect a few things, only to find that he cannot leave. The door, like the rest of the room, keeps moving away from him. Sutulin is both victimized and punished for wanting more space. The price for his rejection of Soviet values, or even “experimenting” with them, is life imprisonment. This would seem to be a tale of power intervening when anything threatens to distort the status quo. Yet, Krzhizhanovsky seems to equivocate in his judgment. He arouses our sympathy for Sulutin’s longing for his “cozy” pre-Quadraturin apartment, inferring that such “foreign” inventions and interventions are truly poisonous to a citizen’s happiness and that Sulutin should have been content with his lot. At the same time, there is no mistaking the helplessness of the individual, even when opportunity knocks. Subject to unpredictable inspections by the state, Sulutin is now also subject to his apartment as it seizes control of him. POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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However, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. The pathos of loss that infuses “Quadraturin” eschews simplistic judgment. (Soviet censors suffered from no such equivocation and banned Krzhizhanovsky’s work.) It is simplistic, single-minded enforcement of ideals, communist or otherwise, that destroys the possibility for true politics, which are always a matter of negotiation. It goes without saying that spatial politics can be far more flexible than Krzhizhanovsky’s “either-or” scenario. Things as simple as a loft bed or folding chairs can negotiate the compromises needed to counter fantasies of spatial aggrandizement. But here such pragmatic accommodations are not the point. Of greater relevance is the way in which exercising control over space is a political act whose power is delegated to walls, floors, and ceilings – power that vacillates between benign protection and malign confinement.

kKk A similar ambiguity about the right to space filters through Cortázar’s “House Taken Over.” The short story was written in 1946, the year that Juan Perón was elected president of Argentina. This was also the year that pressures from Peronist forces caused Cortázar to resign from his teaching post and emigrate from Argentina to France six years later. Not so surprisingly, given Cortázar’s experience of attenuated loss, the protagonists of “House Taken Over” have the opposite problem of Krzhizhanovsky’s Sulutin. Their house is shrinking. And just as Sulutin’s house seems too small for him, this house seems too grand for its occupants: a brother (the narrator) and a sister Irene. The story begins with the brother’s rationalization that even though there are only two of them left in the house, they remain because this is their ancestral home. However, because it’s so spacious and so much larger than their needs, he feels compelled to explain in his narration: Irene and I got used to staying in the house by ourselves, which was crazy, eight people could have lived in that place and not have gotten in each other’s way. . . . It was pleasant to take lunch and commune with the great hollow, silent house, and it was enough for us just to keep it clean.18

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In a country where the gulf between rich and poor was (and is) vast, such claims to space for the sake of family memories and sheer habit may seem pointedly selfish. It is easy to frame the sibling’s decision to keep their home as a reflection of the politics of private property and individual control over its uses. However, the very same politics that elevates personal rights over the collective has, in this case, encouraged the practice of destroying old houses for the profits to be made from their materials. The thought of some distant cousins tearing the place down for its bricks and getting rich on the sale of the lot is so disturbing that they’d rather topple it themselves. But they are denied that luxury by another force, one so remote they never see it, so close they can’t avoid it. Despite their inherited wealth – evident in the house and the fact that they don’t hold jobs – sister and brother live modest lives knitting, collecting stamps, and browsing local bookstores. These innocuous activities would hardly seem to be a threat to the powers that be, except perhaps for the brother’s penchant for French literature, unavailable since the outbreak of World War II in Europe.19 However, the pair’s domestic brand of peace is abruptly broken when the brother hears a disturbance – sounds of muted violence like “a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation.”20 Unhinged by the intrusion, the brother informs Irene: “I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.”21 Not only is half their house closed off to them, they have lost access to things they cared about: a pipe, a pair of slippers, a bottle of medicine, and, perhaps most significantly, the narrator’s collection of French literature, a likely sign of subversion. Just as in Krzhizhanovsky’s world, the shift in the scale of the siblings’ domicile – which would seem radical enough on its own – changes the status of their possessions. They become dispossessions, either impossible to find or locked away. And in both cases, the process is staggered, creating the illusion that it is survivable. In “House Taken Over,” the siblings’ self-deception is shattered after a second and final act of subtraction, signaled once again by sounds. These are not the familiar “household sounds, the metallic click of knitting needles, the rustle of the stamp-album pages turning.”22 Brother and sister are driven out by a racket coming from their side of the oak door that had been their Maginot Line until that moment. Any sounds – voices – of reason are overwhelmed by the noise of faceless and cowardly tyranny. POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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Standing in the vestibule with only what they had on, the two are now refugees. Expelled from their own house, they leave, but not before throwing the key down the sewer. As the brother points out: “It wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and the difference with the house taken over.”23 No eviction notices are needed or given.

OBFUSCATION: BANISHMENT UNDER THE COVER OF BUREAUCRACY

Where Krzhizhanovsky and Cortázar deal with the politics of expulsion, José Saramago takes on the workings of repression. Both techniques protect power. The first is openly divisive, with spaces where entry is granted or denied, where restrictions only become evident with hyperbole: rooms that grow too big or small. The second strategy – repression – creates the delusion that no one is excluded from power but only when rules are followed and alternative actions suppressed.24 Saramago targets those rules. In his novella “Things,” characters have to negotiate a maze of bureaucracy, complicated by some very strange impediments and endowed with their own volition. “Things” is set in a thinly-disguised version of Saramago’s native Portugal, which had been under fascist rule for four decades just before it was written.25 The story is narrated by an anonymous civil servant who is a figure of control himself – part of an especially rigid city government whose offices and regulations are known by an endless litany acronyms. The government (whose purpose is “to galvanize industry”) goes by the reductive “G.” Our conscientious worker is an underling in the DSR (Department of Special Requisitions). And like his fellow citizen-clients, he has a rank that indicates the limits of his purchasing power. His designation is a lowly H – painful not only because it denies him things like the carpet he has wanted for years now, but also because his job puts him in daily contact with clients, who have the coveted status of an A, B, or C. As with all propaganda, reduction is the mechanism of control. The less that something – an idea or an identity – is articulated, the less it can be questioned. The forces of power use euphemisms and codes like Saramago’s because they work as more palatable ways of signaling discrimination. They know that revolt is less likely when outright 88

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Sculpt Cupboard, Maarten Baas, 2007 Maarten Baas takes everyday objects that no longer cause any surprise anymore and redesigns them so they do. The asymmetrical ripples of the Sculpt Cupboard evoke the same sense of instability that runs through José Saramago’s story “Things.” The difference is that this cupboard doesn’t hide a human body; it just resembles a rather stout one. This

millennia-old habit of conferring human traits on non-human entities originated as a means of making sense of the unknown. Works like Baas and Saramago’s draw on this primal anthropomorphic instinct, as if to contradict the belief that it is only we who are conscious.

persecution is dissembled by design, whether a tattoo, a letter of the alphabet, or a yellow star.) This is a story of citizens’ pent-up frustrations voiced for them by things, since public dissent is effectively gagged. It seemed innocent enough when a “tall, heavy door caught the back of the civil servant’s right hand and left a deep scratch.”26 But it’s really unnerving when a settee gets a fever, when watches stop telling time but continue to tick away, and paper bills wrap themselves around peoples’ fingers, refusing to let go. Still, the clerk performs his duties, always careful to address his clients using “phrases stipulated by the rule book.”27 POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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However, when a mailbox disappears and the civil servant is chided by a patrolman for not having watched over it, more sinister aspects of state control emerge: fear, spying, and self-rebuke. Without a mailbox, our narrator can’t mail his petition for a carpet, when he goes home he finds that treads are missing from his staircase, and his television screen afflicted by flashing images. All he can think is that it must be his fault, despite the fact that “faults and defects in certain objects, utensils, machines and installations (OUMIs in abbreviated form) . . . have become increasingly common in recent months” all across the city.28 What seems to be a tolerable irritation with broken things becomes a full-blown calamity when building facades start to go missing, water pipes burst, and whole streets, even the cars parked on them, vanish without explanation. A state of emergency is declared: citizens must only carry identity cards at all times and they have a legal obligation to show their alphabetical status on demand: “Anyone in a category Z can and must demand that a person in category A show his hand.”29 Those with no brand are disloyal and so dangerous they must be eliminated. The only entities without an alphabetical identity card are things. These are the very same things that keep acting out – each a chrysalis from which a person finally emerges at the peak of the crisis. People refuse to be treated as rambunctious “things” and actively rebel against the city’s political system – a system whose criteria for citizenship are purely economic. In transforming the OUMIs into human bodies, Saramago seems to be confining the agency of the products of design to the realms of simile and metaphor. A fevered settee is like someone sickened by repression; a door that gashes a hand is a powerless citizen lashing out. The only agency these things and their owners have lies in their role as commodities, and even that is assigned. But there is also a suggestion that power relations between things and people could be up for renegotiation. The story closes with a resurrection. The entire population emerges naked from the chaos, free of things and fully human. However, I don’t take this as a call for a bare utopia. Saramago’s other novels belie such a Puritanical interpretation, particularly The Cave, discussed in chapter seven. His is a protest against the suffocating weight of consumerism, a totalizing if not totalitarian regime. He holds out the hope that its citizens can summon the will to resist its worst incursion; namely, determining who is human, who is worthy of our attention, solely according to their purchasing power. 90

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MmM In W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, people do not emerge from things; they remain within them. Sebald’s protagonist – Jacques Austerlitz – is an architectural historian, acutely attuned to the lives of buildings. His sensitivities are more than professional, however. Austerlitz has the uncanny ability to sense human presence within spaces charged by events. Sites and sightings converge to shed light on the personal and political trauma inflicted by Nazi Germany. The novel opens in 1967 when an anonymous narrator notices Austerlitz sketching in Antwerp’s Centraal Station’s salle des pas perdus, the equivalent of a waiting concourse. (The phrase’s literal translation – room not lost – will prove to be more apt, as Sebald’s is a tale of rooms found.) Austerlitz and the narrator share an affinity for architecture. Their mutual interest in the station’s stupendously impressive nineteenth-century steel and glass dome leads to a conversation that continues on and off in the late ’90s. It is during this time that Austerlitz’s capacity for observation becomes recuperative and twofold, directed at the present and the past simultaneously. The novel itself is an amalgam of fact and fiction underscored by Sebald’s incorporation of photographs that are both documentary and loosely analogous to the passages they refer to. What is real is surreal; what is surreal is ordinary. For much of the novel, the middle-aged Austerlitz travels across Europe, disappearing for years then reappearing to share his experiences. During his seemingly aimless wanderings, he reflects on the histories still held within the stones of fortifications and other historically significant buildings. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years. . . as if they were the mortal frames of those who lay there in that darkness.30 “Mortal” plank beds are participants in history, just like the fortress itself, but even more poignant for the evidence they give of “those who lay there” – who for Austerlitz are immortal, or at least not out of the reach of the present. Up until this point, our historian’s preoccupation with the nature of temporality appears to be just an occupational hazard. However, it soon takes on an urgent POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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objective – one might say “focus” except for the fact that so many of the particulars will remain uncertain – when Austerlitz sees himself in the past. Along with hundreds of other children, he was sent away from the geography of National Socialism’s Final Solution, which ultimately claimed his parents’ lives. He was only four when he left on the kindertransport that took him to London and ultimately to Wales. Sensations and images from that time start resurfacing; and like virtually all of Austerlitz’s insights, they are hinged to the character of tangible things. Some of these places and objects are intact, and some survive only as fragments. Some are grand, and some are derelict, like the abandoned Ladies’ Waiting Room in London’s Broad Street, which offers him this rearview insight: In fact, I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time. Perhaps that is why, in the gloomy light of the waiting room, I also saw two middle-aged people, dressed in the style of the thirties, . . . [I] saw the boy they had come to meet. . . . His legs, in white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the rucksack he was holding on his lap I don’t think I would have known him.31 Austerlitz’s first encounter with his reality of his past – more like a hallucination – merges with the pattern of a waiting room floor. In it and through it, he sees – not remembers – his displacement and reorientation to a mystifyingly different way of life. (His adoptive parents led Spartan lives, husbanding both their emotions and their modest resources.) Reflecting on his experience in the waiting room, he says:

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I realized then . . . how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past. Inconceivable as it seems to me today, I knew nothing about the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the persecution I had escaped.32 Austerlitz begins to search for information about his biological parents – Agáta Austerlitzová and Maximilian Aychenwald – and the conditions that destroyed them: the politics of the less-than human. His parents’ experiences are his legacy. For Austerlitz, they (and the Nazi’s program of extermination) exist out of time, which is why things like concentration camp ledgers, photographs, houses, and even a scrap of film are not simply documentary evidence. Places and things live in the present, their half-lives not fully dissipated.

“Jews in Berlin may only buy food between four and five o’clock in the afternoon,” Places of Remembrance, Renata Stih, Frieder Schnock, 1993 In 1993, conceptual artists Frieder Schnock and Renata Stih, created Places of Remembrance, an installation of 80 street signs in a once predominately Jewish neighborhood of Schöneberg, Berlin. On one side of each sign there is a text of an anti-Jewish regulation or law; on the other, an image that makes it vivid. The Nazis’ deliberately staggered prohibitions had the effect of making them seem to be less draconian than they would (or might) have been were they instituted all at once. One effect was that the concerns they raised were rationalized away with the false hope that these would only

be temporary. The very ordinariness of a street sign, combined with an extraordinarily dehumanizing regulation, collapses the psychological distance between the historical Holocaust and our habitual disregard of the small encroachments on human rights that persist today. W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is also an exercise in memory; and like Stih and Schnock’s signs, his protagonist’s memories are frequently found in unexpected places. Both Places of Remembrance and the artifacts in Sebald’s novel operate on a gradual but inexorable accretion of losses that are bearable until they are not.

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He manages to track down his nursery maid Vera, who still lives in the building in Prague where he and his parents had lived. During that visit, she shows him the only photograph she has of his parents. He learns that his father was away in Paris when his mother was sent to Terezín (30 miles northwest of Prague). His search now moves in two directions. He goes first to Terezín. Renamed Theresienstadt during the German occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), the town already had two fortresses. The larger became the site of the ghetto-cum-concentration camp; the smaller, a Gestapo prison.33 Austerlitz finds the town deeply disquieting. He notes there are only two shops, one of which, strangely enough, given the town’s history, is an antique store; and he sees only two people over the course of an entire morning. In the muteness of the shuttered village that turns a blind eye to his gaze, we sense, with Austerlitz, the politics of denial, a perceptible aesthetic of denial. The surreality is compounded at the town’s Ghetto Museum. There, Austerlitz reads that in December 1942, the month his mother was brought to Terezín, some sixty thousand people were confined in the ghetto, roughly one kilometer square. Leaving the museum, he reflects that, “it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that they had never been taken away after all, but were still living crammed into those buildings and basements and attics.”34 In some sense they were; the world is composed of matter in various stages of decay. But with Sebald, this is less about the bio-chemical than it is about the psychological and the temporal character of space. This is particularly true of those spaces that take on the aura of the uncanny during times of loss and transition. This phenomenon, of simultaneously recognizing and not recognizing something familiar like a house or a neighborhood that’s changed, is often associated with the rise of cities when people felt alienated by impersonal crowding and endless buildings. Theresienstadt – itself a highly organized (albeit hastily assembled) city – was explicitly intended to turn citizens into aliens. Little wonder that Austerlitz finds that the walls of the ghetto are still permeated by the uncanny. But he is unprepared for that sensation to become even stronger, as it will when he discovers that the camp was used as a Nazi showcase. Physically and emotionally overpowered, Austerlitz returns to London. There he begins reading an extraordinary book written by one H.G. Adler.35 Eight hundred pages long, it exhaustively details the organization of the 94

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Theresienstadt ghetto. Adler, a German-language poet and Holocaust survivor, chronicled every detail of the ghetto system’s “almost futuristic deformation of social life,”36 which included a perverse redesign of the camp in anticipation of a Red Cross visit in 1944. The word “redesign” seems incongruous in such a dehumanizing context but the ghetto’s structure has a considerable architectural pedigree; it was an eighteenth-century star-shaped, Austro-Hungarian fortification that was laid out according to the ideals of seventeenth-century philosopher Tommaso Campanella. (In Campanella’s utopia, shared work meant less work – an ideal corrupted at the entrance to German concentration camps by a sign that read: “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work will set you free.”) That the same structure (and the same motto) could be adapted to the opposite ends – a labor camp – and then disguised as an ideal community for Jewish “citizens” of the Reich, isn’t just painfully ironic. It points out that design is at its lowest moral ebb when it is used as (or understood to be) a superficial gloss – when acts of design refuse to question deeper structural issues. This isn’t to say that masquerades have no value; they do when they are a form of social release, but not as a form of deception. At Theresienstadt, the Nazis deployed the same talent for theater that they brought to their gargantuan Nuremberg rallies, but on a smaller, though much more insidious scale. They transformed the ghetto into a Potemkin village for an audience of three – one Swiss and two Danish inspectors. Instead of the industry of slave labor (including the carting of corpses), the chaperoned visitors saw a picturesque small town, replete with a nursery with “fairy-tale friezes,” a concert hall, shops, a chapel, a library, post office, even a bank, variously decorated with Tyrolean ornamental touches. The “sham El Dorado” is doubly cruel because it offers the camp’s population the sense of possibility offered by both the practical improvements and embellishments of design, which were just as quickly withdrawn by the greater design of systematic persecution. This isn’t at all to suggest that “improvements” and “embellishments,” as a general matter, are unworthy acts of design. Sometimes the smallest things like a hairbrush or a decent pair of shoes can afford great dignity, as they did for a scant few hours in Theresienstadt. But divorced from an ethos of care, beauty and comfort are not just undermined, they lose all value. POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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Austerlitz learns that the SS had made a film to document the Red Cross charade (as they documented everything). In the course of viewing it, Austerlitz identifies a woman he believes is his mother. I gaze and gaze again at that face, which seems to me both strange and familiar, . . . [running] the tape back repeatedly, looking at the time indicator in the top-left hand corner of the screen, where the figures covering part of her forehead show the minutes and seconds, from 10:53 to 10:57, while the hundredths of a second flash by so fast that you cannot read and capture them.37 Vera also sees the tape and confirms that the woman so briefly reanimated in that five one-hundredths of a second is, indeed, Agáta. He now shifts his focus to his father and Paris, where he meets up with the narrator once again. Austerlitz tells him that he can “feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems . . . as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space.”38 For Austerlitz, that “same space” is occupied by places whose physical qualities and materiality (e.g., mean or generous, light or shadowy, rough or smooth) hold the presence of those who occupied them, no matter how temporarily. In Paris, Austerlitz becomes a denizen of two of its national libraries, first over the course of his academic researches and then in his search for this father. He favors the older of the two, the Richelieu, best known for Henri Labrouste’s nineteenth-century reading room. He finds the newest, the François-Mitterrand Library designed in 1989 by Dominique Perrault, calculatingly sinister. Describing what feels like a subterranean entrance – a descent to the ground floor, Austerlitz says of the experience, “I can think of no other explanation [but] to instil a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers, especially as it ends in front of a sliding door . . . where you have to let yourself be searched.”39 He soon learns that there is a far more substantial justification for his antipathy, one that eerily coincides with his objection to feeling submerged.40 A member of the library staff shows him the view from the eighteenth floor and explains that,

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Drone Strike Investigation: Case 2, The Architecture of Memory, video stills, Forensic Architecture, 2013 Here, design is able to restore sight and memory of the experience of a bombing to one who survived, to tell about the effects of its power. With the help of Forensic Architecture, a woman uses digital technology to build a detailed digital model of her home. It was destroyed by a drone strike in Mir Ali, Pakistan, which killed five people, including her brother-in-law.3 This is more than a retrospective act of witness; the life-like renderings of her furnishings restore what is lost to a surrogate, but nonetheless affecting, reality. She hopes to draw attention to the nature and consequences of these strikes, which are rarely photographed.

Forensic Architecture tells a different story of survival from Sebald’s, but like Sebald, they excavate appearances to show the magnitude of loss that is intentionally obscured unless it is rescued in images and prose. 3 “Case Study No. 2: Mir Ali, North Waziristan, October 4, 2010,” “Drone Strikes: Investigating Covert Operations Through Spatial Media,” digital reconstruction done in Düsseldorf, Germany, May 21, 2013, Forensic Architecture, accessed September 5, 2018, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/drone-strikes/.

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on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.41 A national disgrace is literally buried under the foundations of a national library, which will never reveal its contents. (Nor any information about Austerlitz’s father.) Design – in concert with Mitterrand’s presidential ego and politics – becomes a collaborateur.

POSSIBILITIES: TACTICS OF CHANGE AND RESISTANCE

Only rarely do we find cause for feeling optimistic that workings of power are being distributed instead of hoarded, that they are shared instead of fought over. Even then it is likely to be a fleeting state of affairs, as it is in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. The novel is set in Fatehpur Sikri, the legendary capital of the Mughal Empire from 1571 to 1585. In its synthesis of Hindu and Islamic architectural styles, Fatehpur Sikri reflected the (ultimately ill-fated) attempts of Abu Akbar, the third Emperor of India, to absorb other religions into Islam. Prophetically, the city itself was abandoned right after it was built, though the deciding factor was apparently drought and not politics. Against that historical framework, Rushdie imagines a radical ecumenical encounter. The irony is that it’s prompted by a demonstration of absolute power. A defeated princeling is about to be beheaded by Akbar for the crime of sedition: Rana of Cooch Naheen was inclined to proselytize the virtues of freedom. “In Paradise, the words worship and argument mean the same thing,” he declared. “The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose, and that is the form of their devotion.”42 Irritated by his self-righteousness, Akbar was nonetheless moved: “‘We promise you,’ the emperor said, ‘that we will build that house of adoration here on earth.’”43 Then he chopped off his head. The arrival of a Florentine visitor gives Akbar further reason to make good on his commitment to Rana of Cooch Naheen. This imposter – who calls himself Mogor dell’Amore – presents the emperor with a letter from the British 98

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Queen Elizabeth I. Our Mughal of Love not only stole the letter, he also falsified its contents. Akbar, now obsessed with Elizabeth, entertains futile but “megalomaniac fantasies of creating a joint global empire that united the eastern and western hemispheres.”44 More immediately, however, the emperor decides to embody his nascent democratic leanings in a lavishly embroidered, mirror-studded Tent of the New Worship. He erects it on the grounds of Fatehpur Sikri. And, yet, despite the prestige of the venue, Akbar had decided that this revolutionary temple would not be a permanent building. Argument itself – and no deity, however multilimbed or almighty – would here be the only god. But reason was a mortal divinity, a god that died, and if it was subsequently reborn it inevitably died again. Ideas were . . . . temporary dwellings, like tents, and a tent was their proper home.45 Ideas could also have mortal consequences unless deflected by equally powerful words, as Mogor dell’Amore discovers once inside the tent. Two camps – the Wine Lovers and the Water Drinkers – are debating. Listening to their discussions, which are little more than insult and name-calling, Akbar wonders if this discord will ever end in harmony. Equally unpracticed in the art of give and take, the king offers a bromide to the effect that only in death will life be understood, prompting Mogor dell’Amore to observe that such a paradox offers only the illusion of intelligence. When asked if he understands he could die for challenging the king that way, dell’Amore wisely appeals to the king’s pride in his progressive temple of fabric, saying: “‘If I can die for such a thing in this city,’ he replied, ‘then it’s not a city worth living in. And besides, I understood that in this tent it was reason, not the king, that ruled.’”46 Rushdie’s is a tale of two political paths. One seeks the ideal of unrestricted freedom and a tolerance for entertaining change, even at the risk of indecision. The other is drawn to the allure of incontestable power and the psychological reassurance of order. Fatehpur Sikri is the product of the twinned attractions of the changeable and the stable. Thinking about his temple, Akbar muses that:

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portable pagodas, pavilions, and palaces had even inspired the stonemasons of Sikri – but a tent was still a tent, a thing of canvas, cloth, and wood that well represented the impermanence of the things of the mind. One day, a hundred years from now when even his great empire was no more . . . his descendants would see the tent pulled down and all his glory vanish.47 Even if the filigreed stone porticos of Sikri survive (and many of them do), Akbar realizes they will be bereft of the power that brought them into being. His energy will have been spent. From here on, the king turns his attention away from the finite nature of his built legacy, focusing instead on the endlessly renewable resources of love and sex. Qara Köz, the enchantress of the novel’s title, becomes a medium for a mythical woman who travels from East to West, appearing in different guises according to circumstance. She is, in essence, a memory palace filled with pasts and presents that, unlike Fatehpur Sikri, exceeds time and containment. The fixed palaces and temples built by men become purely incidental to the politics of the feminine, embodied here in the mobile nature of the tent, whose impermanence becomes a virtue. Requiring repeated re-building and attention to repairs in its fabric, the tent (and its politics) models an approach to mitigating centralized power.

oOo The power and problem of a feminine nature that troubles Akbar’s psyche takes on a completely different cast when the very idea of individual femininity is seen as a political affront. For most of the twentieth century, women in the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union could see, but not remotely think of having, the clothing, cosmetics, hair products, and fragrances that their Western counterparts sported in the all too rare fashion magazines that came their way. In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić describes a denial of feminine power enforced by the abstraction of the ideal socialist woman – a woman who is unable to differentiate herself through tangible choices that reflect her taste and flatter her appearance. To our ears, this sounds almost trivial, particularly in light of the glut of choices we take for granted, and the rapacious sexual industry preying on women (and boys and girls). But these tend to be economically driven plagues, where Drakulić’s is political. Her real 100

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concern is the ability of the state to humiliate its people by denying them access to the things that make them visible in the most essential way. Like Sebald, she asks us to be aware that subjugation, too, has an aesthetic, writing: By abolishing one kind of so called “bourgeois” aesthetic, not with a plan . . . but more as the natural result of ideology, the state created another aesthetic, a totalitarian one. Without choices of cosmetics and clothes, with bad food and hard work and no spare time, it wasn’t at all hard to create the special kind of uniformity that comes out of an equal distribution of poverty and the neglect of people’s real needs. There was no chance for individualism – for women or men.48 Drakulić is sympathetic to everyone worn down by the system, but she is primarily concerned with the indignities she knows best, those suffered by women. Women were “instructed to be good workers and party members first, then mothers, house-wives and sex objects next.”49 What efforts they were able to make to achieve a small bit of style, were hampered by chronic shortages of goods and faulty ones at that. She recalls being in Warsaw and seeing an unusual number of women whose hair was dyed a lurid burgundy-red. “Most likely it had to do with the chemical industry to produce or deliver other kinds of dye.”50 Garish hair color and awkward cuts were not a local fashion trend; worse, they would become a pejorative trope that typecast women as “Slavs.” And lest we forget, “slav” means slave. Such public mortifications were compounded by the private indignities inflicted on whatever remained of women’s personal lives. Hygiene products were almost non-existent. (In fact, at one of the demonstrations leading up to the end of communist rule in Poland, protesters made a show of giving them out for free to embarrass the government.51) An actress in Bulgaria tells Drakulić: “We don’t have sanitary napkins and sometimes not even cotton batting. I have to hoard it when I find it, or borrow it.”52 Drakulić “had already left one package of tampons and some napkins, ironically called “New Freedom,” in Warsaw (plus Bayer aspirin and antibiotics), another package in Prague (plus Anaïs perfume) and now here in Sofia.”53 Though Drakulić is describing conditions of the mid- and late-twentieth century, her larger point is no less valid: politics and its ideologies act on bodies, not just minds. And since our bodies depend on things and places, the design POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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Fakeup, prison makeup The U.S. nonprofit news organization the Marshall Project, which strives to put a human face on those in prison, reports that “inmates held in the adult detention center in Fairfax County, Va., aren’t allowed to receive lipstick-stained letters.”4 Never mind lipstick qua lipstick. The improvisations used by incarcerated women, ranging from using pink ink soaked from newspaper ads to sugar sprinkles, show the

lengths people will go to in order to feel more fully human when they are classified as substandard. This is tactical design in the form of do-it-yourself. 4 Simone Weichselbaum, “Fakeup: How Women in Prison Remake Makeup,” The Marshall Project, November 19, 2014, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/19/fakeup.

and use of those things and places are also political acts. Hewing more closely to Drakulić’s feminist concerns, we can also say without a doubt that women’s bodies continue to be a specific target of political and religious powers. Some go so far as to renounce the very sight of a woman’s body with restrictive dress codes and confinement to the home, all the while exploiting those bodies by denying them contraception. Subtler are the politics of discrimination in institutions that want women to be visible as signs of diversity, but don’t provide rooms for childcare or don’t offer seats in the rooms where decisions are made. It is, however, a bit too facile to say a woman’s life, or for that matter anyone’s, is completely designed by policies. Focusing on the big picture – the larger socio-political and cultural strictures – is useful and necessary, but grossly insufficient without also acknowledging the politics of small things.54 102

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The consequences of wearing a skirt, a veil, an earring, or a tattoo are sensed (and sometimes physically felt) immediately and provoke instantaneous reactions. It is in the everyday realm of tacit and explicit taboos that design can offer tactics of resistance just as powerful, if not more, than the politics of speech. The fact that Drakulić’s “Makeup and Other Questions” is non-fiction is worthy of note. Most of the fiction involving clothing, or for that matter, adornments like lipstick or hair coloring, takes a censorious tone. Articles of fashion carry a not-so-distant whiff of lasciviousness. Women (and men – think of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) who seek out the pleasure of a new pair of shoes or a new dress are typecast as vain, proud, deceitful, shallow, and/or competitive. By contrast, Drakulić recognizes the dignity they can offer. Even more pointedly, her chapter “Makeup and Other Questions” shows that such aspersions are the rhetoric of power hoarding, of sustaining artificial hierarchies. The counter-argument that clothing and adornment have virtues only seems radical because the idea of power sharing would sound like an oxymoron. That, however, is the real potential of politics: to propose and negotiate alternatives to unilateral power. However, if we tally the evidence gleaned from Cavafy, Kafka, Krzhizhanovsky, Cortázar, Saramago, and Sebald against that of Rushdie and Drakulić, we see we are far better at making things and places of thwarted possibility. Design’s essential capacity to disclose what might be otherwise would seem to be under-utilized and underestimated as a means to question static concentrations of power. That this is so, is likely due to its tendency to operate strategically, for worse as well as for better. This is where we began this chapter – a chapter dominated by the intransigent politics of walls, of instruments of pain and torture, of bureaucracies, and concentration camps. Design intended to counteract such intransigence has to be watchful of its natural tendency to act, as Jamer Hunt writes, as “a buttress against time . . . . perpetuating a set of relations with the goal of sustaining those relations in fixed positions.”55 The conceptual models offered by Rushdie (the flexible, temporary tent – a stand-in for formal design) and Drakulić (the performative possibilities of makeup – a stand-in for informal design) are being increasingly taken up in the early years of the twenty-first century with approaches that admit multiple outcomes. At the very least, they make room for alternatives within the strategies they can’t help but be, like a bridge that must stand firmly in place, but offers benches for pedestrians to rest and lanes for biking as well as cars. Such designs POLITICS: PROSECUTION, OBFUSCATION, POSSIBILITY

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Me, Myself and You, NEXT Architects for Droog Design, 2000 Multi-purpose objects, from murphy beds to highchairs that can expand as a child grows, are largely designed for convenience. NEXT Architects’ transformable fence was designed for sociability. Neighbors can keep their privacy and also use the fence to hang garden equipment. Alternatively, they can share their fence as a bike rack or play a game of table tennis

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with whomever is on the other side of the fence. Tactical design that builds in options like this encourages even further invention by and among the people who use it. This modest design recognizes that one entity doesn’t have to have all the answers or all the power.

are imperfect (the bridge gives tacit permission to putting car exhaust in the air) but they have the virtue of rejecting the utopian position so aptly described by John le Carré in Absolute Friends (2003). The novel retraces the infinite loop of radical politics, as it plays out in the Cold War and the hot wars after it, caricaturing the ultra-altruists who promise: “There will be no war, but in pursuit of principle not a stone will be left standing.56 Here stones, so emblematic of strategic design, are not the problem; in fact, they might have offered welcome shelter or been the repository of cultural heritage like the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The problem is, as always, the desire to control others. Indeed, without such solid points of orientation, we risk losing legible ways of being mutually responsible for caring for the world. We enter a void just as terrifying as the space inside a jail cell. If design is to participate in politics, consciously and not passively, it needs to temper its strategies and scrutinize its tactics. More critically, it must embrace (as many designers already do) a civic process of checks and balances established not by industry or government, but by and with the communities with which it hopes to engage.

1 In The Human Condition, political philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that the polis emerges as people act and speak together (The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1958) 1998], 198). She also argues that actions and speech require objects and spaces of design to reveal a common world. “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time” (52). The political potency of things is inherent in both their form and how they are used. Arendt’s roundtable is not a guarantee of equality but it can be instrumental in redistributing the balance of power.

2 Sociologist Michel de Certeau develops this notion of the tactical and the strategic. According to Certeau, “strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose” while “tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert” (The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley: University of California, 1984], 30). Strategies are the domain of the empowered and involve “a specific type of knowledge, one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place” (36), while tactics are an “art of the weak” – improvisational and interventionist responses to strategies, carried out by those who are oppressed (37). “Tactical trajectories . . . select fragments taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose

new stories with them” (35). Pointing directly to functions of power, Certeau notes: “a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power” (38). 3 Design, however, cannot confine its activity to tactics. Then it is only reactive. In recent decades, much has been done in the way of participatory and co-design to mitigate the strategic nature of design, which tends to make things that are completely finished and fixed. However, even the best-intentioned design processes are restricted by predetermined conditions set up by larger power structures. These conditions are framed as reasonable but rarely questioned as such. This is

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the argument made by Karl Palmås and Otto von Busch in “Quasi-Quisling: co-design and the assembly of collaborateurs.” They write critically of their experience on a team of citizen consultants about the redevelopment of the harbor area in Gothenburg, Sweden. They note that “formal politics is about reducing a plethora of dissonant voices into one consensus . . . . [Our concern] is the manner in which this consensus is reached” (“Quasi-Quisling: co-design and the assembly of collaborateurs,” CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts 11:3–4 (2015), 246). Palmås and von Busch point out that seemingly innocent communication tools, such as newspaper articles and posters that describe the process, have a tendency to edit out what is deemed superfluous. Efforts to be efficient are prized more than extended debates that probe more radical possibilities and elements more difficult to visualize such as “experimental governance arrangements, and new economic models that would safeguard social justice.” (242) Their conclusion: things (especially modes of representation) shape politics as much as people and not always for the best (241). 4 The idea that pleasure is an unnecessary condition of social justice has been vigorously challenged by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In her discussion of the central capabilities necessary for a dignified and flourishing life, she notes the following: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment (Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011], 33–4). 5 In his essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” social scientist Langdon Winner writes this of the discriminatory design of that era: “For generations after [Robert] Moses has gone and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile over the development of mass transit, will

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continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, becomes just another part of the landscape” (“Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity?, special issue of Daedalus 109:1, [1980], 124).

19 Argentina was technically neutral but had a strong German immigrant population that inclined the country toward the Axis powers.

6 Constantine P. Cafavy, “Walls” in Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1897] 1992), 3.

24 Drawing on the work of Claude Lévi-Straus, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the two ways in which we have historically dealt with strangers – the strategies of the anthropoemic and the anthropophagic. “The first strategy [the ‘emic’] consisted in ‘vomiting,’ spitting out the others seen as incurably strange and alien: barring physical contact, dialogue, [and] social intercourse” (Liquid Modernity [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000], 101). (This manifests itself in prisons, ghettos, and other forms of segregation.) “The second strategy [the ‘phagic’] consists in a soi-distant ‘disalienation’ of alien substances: ‘ingesting,’ devouring’ foreign bodies and spirits so that they may be made, through metabolism, identical with, and no longer distinguishable from, the ‘ingesting’ body. This strategy took an equally wide range of forms: from cannibalism to enforced assimilation” (ibid.). (We see this today in anonymous spaces like airports and shopping malls.) Bauman summarizes the affect of these strategies: “If the first strategy was aimed at the exile or annihilation of the others, the second was aimed at the suspension or annihilation of their otherness” (ibid.).

7 It’s worth noting that Guantanamo Bay detention camp – perhaps the most infamous prison of the twenty-first century – is also located on an island: Cuba. More to the point, the punishments meted out there were also kept out of sight. The knowledge that torture was being used on its inmates could not raise sufficient outcry; empathy is deeply diminished when not accompanied by the sight, sound, and smell of abuse. This is why solitary confinement persists in U.S. prisons; it is completely out of view. 8 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Norbert Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 145. 9 Ibid., 149. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 150. 12 Ibid., 154 13 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Quadraturin,” in Memories of the Future, trans. Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 3. 14 Ibid., 4. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 11. 18 Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over,” in Blow-Up: And Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 11.

20 Ibid., 13. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 15. 23 Ibid., 16.

25 António Salazar (1889–1970) was dictator of Portugal for a large part of Saramago’s life (1922–2010), and the climate of repression during his reign had enormous impact on the writer, whose work and politics were mutually reinforcing. Saramago became a member of the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, and frequently took public positions on issues that alienated powerful institutions. To wit, in 1992, the Portuguese government, under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked the nomination of one of his novels for a European literary prize. (The supposedly blasphemous novel was

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.) After that he took up residence in the Spanish Canary Islands (José Saramago, “New Ways of Seeing,” interview by Maja Jaggi, The Guardian, November 22, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/22/ jose-saramago-blindness-nobel). 26 José Saramago, “Things,” in The Lives of Things, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: Verso, 2012), 65. 27 Ibid., 69. 28 Ibid., 79–80. 29 Ibid., 93. 30 W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2001), 24. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Ibid., 139.

between self and object. . . . When we are unable to use the object or its processional potential, the object is evocative only in the sense that it gives rise to a form of dejection . . . . a form of depression that the self knows cannot be resolved (The Evocative Object World [New York: Routledge, 2009], 91).” Then again, when Bollas writes that “the only solution is to be removed from the object itself” (ibid.), he could equally be describing the “burial” of the warehouse that held the furniture of dispossessed Jews during the German occupation of Paris. 41 Sebald, Austerlitz, 288. 42 Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence (New York: Random House, 2008), 35. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid, 72.

33 Official extermination camps were located farther east and for many who came through Theresienstadt that was their destination. Of course, labor camps such as Theriesenstadt contributed their share casualties to the statistics in the tens of thousands who succumbed under their brutal conditions

48 Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 23.

34 Ibid., 189.

49 Ibid.

35 Adler is not a fictional character.

50 Ibid., 26.

36 Ibid., 236.

51 Waldemar “Major” Fydrych, leader of the Polish Orange Alternative staged demonstrations on the main square of Wrocław, Poland, during the late 1980s. In one, he and his followers famously handed out sanitary napkins, which the Polish Communist government was unable to supply.

37 Ibid., 251–2. 38 Ibid., 257. 39 Ibid., 278. 40 Note here that Austerlitz’s response to the François-Mitterrand library is so absolutely negative as to induce what psychoanalytic theorist Christopher Bollas calls “aesthetic dejection.” Bollas is noted for, among other things, his argument that the self develops through experiences with objects (material or non-material, i.e., one’s home or one’s parent) – experiences we seek out or that we take in through unexpected encounters. When confronted with something we cannot contend with (as Austerlitz is in Perrault’s François-Mitterrand Library), there is “an irresolvable mismatch

45 Ibid, 78. 46 Ibid, 79. 47 Ibid, 78.

lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders but with scarlet red lips. . . . I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity” (“Extract from the Diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willet Gonin DSO, May 23, 1945, http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/ pages/Database/ReliefStaffAccount. asp?HeroesID=17&). 55 Jamer Hunt, “Just Re-Do It: Tactical Formlessness and Everyday Consumption,” in Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 62. 56 John le Carré [David Cornwall], Absolute Friends (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 307.

52 Ibid., 30. 53 Ibid. 54 Lipstick’s restorative properties are also movingly documented in this recollection from a survivor of Bergen Belsen concentration camp: “It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for

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Child Bollards, Leicester, England, 2009 These uncanny child bollards were placed outside Avenue Primary School in Leicester, England. Life-like in scale, their features are convincingly real to drivers moving at speed.1 Though they were designed to slow traffic, it is pedestrians who find them most disturbing. The frozen children staring straight ahead signal something is wrong. The dummies usurp the authority of adults, instructing them through fright. In making this a safe place for children, the city has

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inadvertently cast them in the role of zombies. 1 “‘Scary children’ placed outside primary school to shock speeding drivers into slowing down,” Daily Mail Reporter, September 16, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-2421704/Child-bollards-placed-outsideLeicester-primary-school-shock-speeding-driversslowing-down.html.

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Beings: Unruly Things, Golems, Cyborgs Stories of the supranatural would seem to be among those childish things it is long time we put away. But somehow we never do. Legions of superheroes with artificial appendages continue to invade our home screens. Monsters and aliens still want a piece of real estate on planet Earth – a suburban house or a skyscraper will do just fine. Crop circles and stone carvings are taken as signs that others have already been here. Clearly, all these Hollywood-manufactured scenarios are designed to exorcise our fears and hopes about the presence of other beings within the safe confines of fiction. But box office proceeds aside, these fabrications are driven by deeper investments in making more perfect companions. (And what could be more perfect than an idealized copy of oneself?) The perennial urge to make our own doppelgangers would seem to be the ur-act of design – the creation of sentient beings by mortal beings. This is not simply a matter of mystical vitalism or escapist fantasy. The golems, puppets, cyborgs, and mutants of literature are manifestations of recognizable cultural neuroses, real psychological traumas, and the ever-fertile territory of visionary design. Their authors situate the outlandish in the familiar so that the outlandish can’t be dismissed as unthinkable.1 Their narratives fall along a spectrum from innocence to corruption. Virtually all of them are allegories of ethics and morality told through creatures – material surrogates – not abstractions. Some draw attention to the lively nature of things (e.g., dancing puppets), while others are enervating and lethal (e.g., rabid hybrids). In an important sense, the literature of artificial proxies is as much about the reasons for designing as it is about the consequences of designing. These fictions – like design itself – combine a dicey pairing of hyper-rationalism and messianic romanticism, tilting toward the latter with its lore of the lone genius. In some cases, the design “products” in these stories are conscientious correctives to social or personal shortcomings. In others, they are avatars 109

of unconstrained power, dangerous results of a single-minded determination to create another species at any cost. Designing with unfettered freedom in an exalted state of privilege is always risky, but never more so than when the goal is to assign sentience to mute materiality. If we are to entertain these stories as seriously as they deserve to be (given that their fictions are gradually being realized), we must become temporary romantics. We need to admit the possibilities for the bizarre in otherwise ordinary situations – all the while acknowledging that the verifiable and the inexpressible qualities of places and objects do not observe strict borders, especially when viewed from a historical perspective.

UNRULY THINGS, RAMBUNCTIOUS MARIONETTES

To understand how deeply the idea of willful things has permeated our consciousness, it is worth pointing out that the lore of animated matter isn’t just confined to the realms of fiction and poetry. History tells us that enlivened entities were not exceptional in antiquity. There are records of “soulless objects” being “sued, tried, convicted (but probably not acquitted), exiled, executed, and rehabilated.”2 In ancient Greece, a javelin could be tried and found guilty of murder “quite apart from the person who threw it.”3 Perhaps even stranger than the custom of attributing autonomous behavior to things is the fact that such legal decisions continue to inform the law today. Judgments like that of the javelin form the underpinnings of the legal fiction we know as forfeiture law. The practice of punishing things persists. Unlike those who would dismiss it out of hand, legal scholar Paul Schiff Berman looks at how and why we continue to assign blame to objects. Little more than two decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court stood by the State of Michigan’s decision to confiscate a jointly-owned car from its owners because it was the scene of a crime, despite the fact that one of the owners had no part in the incident.4 The automobile in question wasn’t forfeited because it had an “inherent vice” – the legal term for the fundamental instability of materials of the kind that accounts for rust. The car was taken from its owners because it was deemed to be what theologians call an “occasion of sin,” a person or thing that invites immoral acts. In this case, illicit sex. Whether the act of banishing an offending 110

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object hinges on animism (as in the case of the actively guilty javelin) or association (as with the passively guilty car), the intention is the same: to heal a rupture in the social order by removing the corrupted object from sight. The object is punished – removed from society – not the person or persons. Virtually all such banishments occur after the commission of crimes; there’d be no point in exiling an innocent thing. But innocent doesn’t mean mute. The notion that things talk to each other and that they talk back to us, reflects their relational nature as well as the interdependence of people and things. We swear when something fails us; we say things like “my car has a faulty battery,” as though the battery were culpable. Such conflations of feelings and functions recognize that a capacity for action inheres in things – in their hinges and joints, their sensors and skins, even their data, which is arguably a form of speech.5 This is why multiple potentials – latent and obvious – can be identified in things well after they are designed. But what about before they are designed?

Unabomber Cabin, FBI Storage, Sacramento, CA, Richard Barnes, 1998 The Unabomber’s Cabin wasn’t removed from the community because anyone thought it was the embodiment of evil – even though it harbored a terrorist. Nevertheless, it was placed in secure FBI storage (an act rationalized as the protection of evidence) as though it carried a taint of evil in its

wooden boards. The phenomenon of placing the banished on display is also repeated endlessly in museums. A perverse romanticism pervades the narratives of their isolation. Whether in a typical exhibition case or a mammoth hangar, they take on the aura of caged animals.

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pPp Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi in 1883, is such a case. Its famously naughty, eponymous protagonist makes his first appearance in an indeterminate state of nature – a rambunctious spirit trapped inside a raw piece of wood. He has a mind of his own but as yet no form, and more critically, no conscience. The design project is the union of this trinity: brain, body, and a moral compass. Indeed, much has been made of the Blue Fairy as the Madonna, Geppetto as Joseph the Carpenter, and Pinocchio as the Christ taking on human form. But this puppet is not the incarnation of divine power or any kind of rival to the Messiah. Pinocchio just wants to be a “real boy.” (In the newly united Italy of the time, “real” could be also taken as a metaphor for the process of making a nation out of formerly separate provinces.) Even his name tells us that this is a decidedly earthbound myth. Translated literally from Italian, pino means pine and occhio means eye. Pinocchio’s journey of becoming starts when Geppetto sets out to carve the block of wood. The carpenter quickly discovers he’s not in control. When Geppetto fashions the nose, it keeps growing; the mouth, even before it was finished, starts laughing and mocking him. Geppetto is a designer who believes he can determine how raw materials will evolve despite all the evidence to the contrary right in front of him. “Stop laughing!” said Geppetto, annoyed. But it was like talking to a wall. “I said stop laughing!” he yelled in a threatening tone. The mouth stopped laughing but stuck its tongue all the way out. Not wanting to damage his own handiwork, Geppetto pretended not to notice and kept on working.6 Taming the wild child would seem to be the project of the book – Pinocchio’s progress is constantly halted by temptations – but as the philosopher Benedetto Croce observed, Pinocchio is carved from the “wood of humanity itself.”7 The idea of designing with live matter – which is what Geppetto unwittingly is doing with his tools – raises another prospect: that we animate to exceed our limitations. (Deploying a familiar trope in the literature of beings, Collodi empowers Geppetto with the capacity to make a son, not out of 112

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Welcome to Seraing, Nik Baerten and Virginia Tassinari, with Yara Al Adib, Elisa Bertolotti, Pablo Calderón Salazar, Henriëtte Waal, 2015 Welcome to Seraing is a storytelling project that encouraged social innovation in the Trasenster neighborhood in Seraing, a Belgian city once famous for its steel industry, now facing severe socio-economic challenges. In collaboration with a local puppeteer, the design team worked to foster new forms of civil participation.2 Here, suspension of disbelief is not a retreat into fantasy but a state of mind and a safe space in which to speak out. The designers write that: “The anarchic character of the puppet theatre allowed [the puppeteer] the freedom to make the voice of Tchantchès (an outspoken working-class character) forthright and honest, and to introduce characters such as the Devil, representing the private owners of industries, and the White Fairy, representing the designers, who arrive with good intentions and a great deal of naiveté. Furthermore, an anonymous local hero was created as a surrogate for each and every inhabitant of Trasenster.”3

“Reciprocity 2015,” the International Triennale of Design & Social Innovation, Liège, Belgium, “Welcome to Seraing :: Me Too, I Transester!,” accessed September 5, 2018, http://www. reciprocityliège.be/2015/welcome-to-seraing-me-too-itransester/. The storylines of the puppetry performances were co-created with inhabitants of the neighborhood via a storytelling toolkit, developed by the design team and based on the team’s engagement with the inhabitants during field research. The project was carried out by an international team of designers including Pablo Calderón Salazar, Yara Al Adib, Henriëtte Waal, and Elisa Bertolotti, led by Nik Baerten (Pantopicon) and Virginia Tassinari (MAD Faculty Genk), assisted by Daniel Rossi (Pantopicon). 3 Excerpted from Elisa Bertolotti and Virginia Tassinari’s proposal to Design Research Society annual conference in 2016. The proposal was entitled, “Designing states of exceptions: The co-creation of ‘theatres’ for social innovation.”

2 Welcome to Seraing took place within the framework of

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a woman’s womb but out of love for his wooden miscreant.) This kind of design ambition in extremis plays out in cautionary narratives that don’t always come with happy endings. Characters like Pinocchio – who after all his misadventures is amazed and delighted to be fully human – are greatly outnumbered by beings that materialize out of plans and accidents much less innocent than Geppetto’s.

GOLEMS: SAVIORS, MONSTERS, SINGULAR SURROGATES

Where an excess of life force invigorates Collodi’s puppet, dread and fear mold creatures of crisis, like superheroes, figures whose powers compensate for our lack. In Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, caped crusaders emerge on American comic book pages, drawn out of their Jewish creators’ frustrated hopes for the rescue of family and friends stranded in Hitler’s Europe. In this quasi-fictive version of the birth of the comic book trade, we bridge the world of childlike toys and adult escape of the most literal sort. Written in 2012, the novel centers on two cousins, Sam Klayman and Josef Kavalier. Josef arrives in New York in 1939, an émigré from Europe. Sam gets him a job where he works at the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company and they begin working together to create their own superhero. Spirited out of Nazi-controlled Prague in a magician’s wooden box, Josef’s near-miraculous escape is the set up for the cousins’ choice of hero and his roots in the myth of the golem. A creature of Jewish folklore, the golem is a giant typically fashioned out of clay or wood and brought to life, first by incantations and then by the hands which give it form. Sam explains to Josef that: Every universe, our own included, begins in a conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language . . . literally talked into life.8 Together they create “the Escapist, Master of Elusion,” a golem formed out of “black lines and the four-color dots of the lithographer,” who carries his power in a Golden Key: “He frees people, see.”9 Chabon’s golem lives in that liminal space between metaphor and material reality. For Josef, it was briefly 114

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incarnated as a wooden coffin made for rescue, his vehicle for a Houdini-inspired escape from Prague. Sam’s golem, the Escapist, is a figure of conscience but also a figure made of lines on a page that made them into artists. And like the golem, these lines exist in a liminal space between the image and the imagined.

Talos, Neri Oxman with W. Craig Carter (MIT) and Joe Hicklin (The Mathworks), produced and 3D printed by Stratasys, 2012 Like wearable golems, Neri Oxman’s prototypes augur an era in which myths become wearable and habitable. Her project Talos is one in a series entitled “Imaginary Beings: Mythologies of the Not Yet.” (In Greek mythology, Talos was the embodiment of armor.) Oxman’s wearable shield varies its thickness to accommodate for soft regions requiring more protection and for stiff regions covering bone perturbations.4 Talos bears

no small resemblance to the superhero costumes that glorify the human physique. However, like all armor, it positions the body itself as a threat to life by virtue of its vulnerability. 4 Neri Oxman, Talos, “Projects,” 2012, accessed September 5, 2018, https://web.media.mit.edu/~neri/site/projects/talos/ talos.html.

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Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Golem” also portrays the creature in words. However, this one is conjured not to save others but out of a desire for self-aggrandizement. Borges uses the structure and tempo of poetry to gesture toward the ritualized nature of a pseudo-divine creation. This is a step beyond the naïve, wishful thinking that Kavalier and Klayman brought to life with ink and paper. With Borges, we move from the altruism that renders Chabon’s golems to the hubris that attempts to make a being, an attempt whose only purpose was wield the power of life without the intervention of God or a woman.10 (It is as though Pinocchio is written in reverse; instead of discovering life in a puppet, Borges’ rabbi tries to insinuate it into a dummy.) In this excerpt from “The Golem” not only do we get a more visceral understanding of matter conjured to life, but also an echo of the Biblical origin myth in which God fashions Adam out of clay and creates a flawed (albeit, human) being. Thirsty to know things only known to God, Judah León shuffled letters endlessly, trying them out in subtle combinations till at last he uttered the Name that is the Key, the Gate, the Echo, the Landlord, and the Mansion, over a dummy which, with fingers wanting grace, he fashioned, thinking to teach it the arcana of Words and Letters and of Time and Space. The simulacrum lifted its drowsy lids and, much bewildered, took in color and shape in a floating world of sounds. Following this, it hesitantly took a timid step. Little by little it found itself, like us, caught in the reverberating weft of After, Before, Yesterday, Meanwhile, Now, You, Me, Those, the Others, Right and Left.

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That cabbalist who played at being God gave his spacey offspring the nickname Golem. (In a learned passage of his volume, these truths have been conveyed to us by Scholem.) . . . . Perhaps the sacred name had been misspelled or in its uttering been jumbled or too weak. The potent sorcery never took effect: man’s apprentice never learned to speak. Its eyes, less human than doglike in their look, and even less a dog’s than eyes of a thing, would follow every move the rabbi made about a confinement always gloomy and dim. Something coarse and abnormal was in the Golem.11 Failing to acquire the infinite knowledge and power of God, the rabbi produces a deeply fallible creature and suffers the consequences of seeking total control. (This is a risk that gods and designers take repeatedly.) Borges’s creature exists only to punish its maker’s hopes, living as it does trapped in a human chronology of “After, Before, Yesterday, Meanwhile, Now.” Not only is the golem denied access to the divine, it is also denied the possibility of being completely human. In that sense, Borges’s golem is also like Adam’s descendants, who were forced to live half-lives imprisoned in the confines of ghettos. In another sense, the poem is also recognizable as a portrait of failure: of the “potent sorcery” that “never took effect.” This is also the failure of design (or any kind of making) when it is approached as pure invention (flowing solely from the designer’s “sorcery”) instead of as the work and play of discovery. Nothing, and more to the point, no one, is sui generis.

qQq

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Apart from functioning as prophetic signs of warning, the golem and other paranormal figures are significant as objects – objects not outside the mind but within it– objects that form us. Such imaginings are as much a part of our psychological makeup as the things we played with, the environments we grew up in, and the persons we’ve encountered. We are as much the product of the stories we hear and tell as we are of our tangible surroundings. When we internalize such object-myths – like that of the incompletely human “thing” that Borges describes, they carry the potential for what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “a complex psychosomatic experience.”12 In other words, a state of mind that elicits the senses, and thus cannot be divorced from reality. This is why, I would argue, we cannot dismiss golems or other invented beings out of hand. These “evocative objects,” to use Bollas’s term, are designed and deployed with consequence, namely as projections of more powerful selves. It is worth noting here that the particular psychosomatic experiences that nourished generations of golems have been the exclusive province of men who, it must be said at the risk of being obvious, cannot otherwise give birth. It is not just Jewish men who have felt compelled to project themselves into the world by creating living beings from scratch, as it were. The notion that a life can be engendered solely (and literally) from a male body has roots in ancient beliefs in the superiority of sperm over menstrual blood. This fiction (and no doubt others beyond our scope) laid the groundwork for the notion of monogenetic reproduction that alchemists would find so compelling in the sixteenth century.13 One of the best known was the Swiss physician and occultist Paracelsus, who believed it was truly possible to create a “Man out[side] of the body of a Woman.”14 (It involved keeping sperm heated by horse dung.) Putting such radical attempts to make women completely expendable aside, we find history casts women in the role of mediums. (Even the “Immaculate Conception” entailed the intervention of the Holy Spirit.) Women are almost never independent progenitors. We had to wait until the last gasp of the twentieth century for a female golem to emerge from a woman, not from her womb but from her mind and a messy urban environment.

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rRr Cynthia Ozick’s 1997 novel The Puttermesser Papers is a story of revenge against centuries of myth mismanagement – mismanagement as viewed from a feminist perspective, which would argue against male privilege in the art of the golem. The story opens in an equally mismanaged New York City. The traditional rabbi’s role is given to Ruth Puttermesser. Fortyish, childless, and unmarried, Ruth is an attorney who works in the Department of Receipts and Disbursement, from which she is summarily demoted and fired when political patronage favors someone else. Humiliated by bureaucrats, she’s then dumped by her married lover Rappoport for reading Hebrew in bed. The next day Ruth wakes to find a naked adolescent girl – a golem unwittingly fertilized by Ruth herself with the flotsam and jetsam of her Manhattan apartment, specifically the soil from the broken crocks of her houseplants and a particularly hefty bundle of the Sunday Times. As always, in the beginning was the word: words and dirt. Like her predecessors, Ruth’s golem Xanthippe exists to serve. Xanthippe takes her name from Socrates’ wife, and as a wife, her first duties are to cook and clean. But also, like Socrates’ wife, whose argumentative nature purportedly prepared him for his dealings with men, she is far more than a servant. She becomes the force behind Ruth’s rise to power. When Ruth decides to run for office, Xanthippe takes on the role of campaign manager and becomes Ruth’s first political appointee. Her trajectory from home to office allows her to realize Ruth’s civic-minded dreams and insure she succeeds in becoming Mayor Puttermesser. None of this is accidental because we’re told from the start that “the difficulty with Puttermesser is that she is loyal to certain environments.”15 She is especially dedicated to the difficult city she grew up in. So, when she discovers that a golem thrives on a vision of Paradise, Ruth immediately recognizes the Eden that she and Xanthippe will bring about:

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A city washed pure. New York city (perhaps) of seraphim. Wings had passed over her eyes. Her arms around Rappoport’s heavy Times, Puttermesser held to her breast heartlessness, disorder, the desolation of sadness, ten thousand knives, hatred painted in subways, explosions of handguns, bombs in the cathedrals of transportation and industry . . . the decline of the Civil Service, maggots in high management. Rappoport’s Times, repository of dread freight! All the same, carrying Rappoport’s Times back to bed, Puttermesser had seen Paradise. New York washed, reformed, restored.16

Under Mayor Puttermesser, crime goes down and the city becomes a paragon of Vitruvian virtues: firmness, comfort, delight.17 Subways and their tunnels sparkle; sanitation carts are heralded by flutes and clarinets. Vandals form dance clubs, children jump rope in the streets unharmed, office workers flock to libraries to study different languages. Puttermesser’s dream of a civil society, backed by her golem’s tireless energy, transforms the city into a latter-day Eden. Its “streets are altered into garden rows . . . . There are . . . a hundred urban gardening academies. There is unemployment among correction officers; numbers of them take gardening jobs.”18 All goes according to her “radiant PLAN” for the redemption of New York – a utopia by another name, and a wink to architect Le Corbusier’s ideal of the modern city, the Ville Radieuse, a.k.a. the Radiant City. Everything thrives. “Nothing is broken, nothing is despoiled. No harm comes to anything or anyone.”19 That is, up and until Xanthippe discovers sex. Eros crushes justice, putting an end to Mayor Puttermesser’s stint in office. Her ideals foreclosed, the topos of her utopia loses its blooms and starts to brown, all because Xanthippe is infertile. There can be no “next generation” for a limited edition of one. Infertility is the tragic flaw of golems, robots, puppets, and other such creatures, seemingly regardless of their gender. Their progeny come through imitation, and one golem’s story begets another’s. It seems that each generation – driven by its own existential anxieties about the future – is impelled to revisit the same stories and transfer its fears onto, and into, surrogate forms. We labor under the delusion that we can control these objects of design (and their consequences) since we cannot dictate our own scripts. But the best we can do is make them in 120

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Madonna Lamps from People and Saints of Four Races series. Konarska-Konarski, 2010 These Madonna Lamps are designed by Polish designers Beata Konarski and Pavel Konarska. Perhaps even more interesting than the lamp’s chromatic allusions to race is its merger of lamp and figure to produce the ineffable light of a halo. The convergence of secular and sacred would seem to

be a fitting tribute to someone we are told was an ordinary girl graced with an “immaculate” conception. Made of concrete and light, the lamps, like O’Brien’s characters, conjure a state of being in-between that characterizes myths like Mary’s.

such a way as to not foreclose the future, itself, from possibility – either because they encourage fantasies of rescue (as with golems) or because they obscure the toll they take on the environment (as with products of design that contribute to global warming). All the works in this chapter could be said to be manifestations of the desire to exceed our capacities for control. But where most revolve around a utopian desire for a better world in this life, Flann O’Brien (pen name of Brian O’Nolan) situates his quest for equilibrium in the next. The Third Policeman is set in the hereafter – a most bizarre hereafter at that. (There is some irony in the fact that the novel was published posthumously in 1967, after O’Brien’s own death in 1966.) Here, bodies aren’t resurrected intact. Instead they are recomposed. The molecules of objects and people get mixed up to the point where they’re no longer completely separate. At the time this truly was a fanciful idea, BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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whereas today there is ample evidence that particles of microplastic have infiltrated our bodies by way of our food. O’Brien, however, is projecting a scenario that is far less granular; his is less a critique of science than of religion and bourgeois values. Accordingly, the hybrid beings in The Third Policeman are trapped in an afterlife that’s closer to limbo than a state of final rest. We are never explicitly told that this is the case; even our protagonist doesn’t seem to know he’s dead. Rather, we (and he) experience this peculiar Irish purgatory in the vagaries of novel’s circular plot – a plot driven by bicycles. The tale begins with an admission of murder by the accomplice to the crime. The narrator doesn’t so much confess as matter-of-factly state that he delivered the final blow to “old Mathers.” As it happens, the first (and fatal) blow came from one John Divney, who hit the man “with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.”20 (The pair of conspirators were after the man’s strong box.) From here on in, our narrator will never escape the ubiquitous bicycle and its accessories. It is by bicycle that he returns to Mathers’ house, where Divney claims to have hidden their ill-gotten gains for their own safety. Of course, they aren’t there, but Mather (or his specter) is. After a conversation about policemen who give out gowns whose color indicates whether one’s life will be long or short, our man is persuaded that these prescient authorities – the guardian angels of bicycles – must be able to help him find the missing box and the thousands of negotiable securities inside it. Arriving at the police barracks, he’s asked if he’s come to inquire about a bicycle. Incredulous that he hasn’t, officer Sergeant Pluck is faced with “a very difficult piece of puzzledom, a snorter.”21 (And my favorite, “a supreme pancake.”) Pluck insists that the only possible crimes in these parts have to do with bicycles, not watches like the one our narrator uses as a pretext for his queries. Indeed, if the watch is found, says Pluck, “I have a feeling there will be a bell and a pump on it.”22 As if to clarify his non sequitur and explain why a bicycle must be implicated, the Sergeant tells him of another missing item. It seems an elderly woman was reported lost by her son, who describes her as suffering from rusty rims and jerky brakes. She and others appear to have been “banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory.”23 (It’s worth remembering that nuclear fission was responsible for the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and more to the point of The Third Policeman, that the resulting fragments of fission are not the 122

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same element as the original atom. O’Brien gives the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation a neat double twist here.) No other theories of loss or existence apart from the “principle of Atomic Theory” could possibly matter. Everything and everyone, including the narrator’s made-up missing watch, is subject to the law of dancing particles “lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone.”24 Though in Pluck’s domain, the jig is more of a square dance. When an action is repeated enough, particles change partners. The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.25 The problem is that these centaurs of the mechanical age can become unbalanced: Pluck’s parishioners find themselves in all kinds of trouble. The postman has cycled himself into such a state that if he walks too slowly he collapses. A new “lady teacher” and a local man named Michael Gilhaney raise eyebrows when they go out with each other’s bicycles. Pluck worries that if things go too far bicycles will want the vote and “get seats on the County Council.”26 But the bicycle is only partly to blame. The real crime is exercising – exercising a measure of independence from the strict social norms of 1960s Ireland. But the bicycle isn’t altogether innocent either as it is also a source of temptation and sin. The bicycles in The Third Policeman are endowed with latent (and sometimes lascivious) capacities, ready and waiting to be activated. This is precisely the double-edged nature of design and its capacity to delegate morality to the stuff of life – the kind of delegation we usually associate with air bags or smoke alarms that keep us safe, but rarely with ordinary things like the two-wheeled vehicle at the hub of this story. Nor do we pay much attention to the most basic ways that things act,not just for and with us. but also instead of us – ethically or not. As the sociologist Bruno Latour argues, things exert agency, albeit indirectly, all the time: “In addition to ‘determining’ and BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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serving as a ‘backdrop for human action,’ things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.”27 Thus, the products of design – and designing itself – can be thought of as temptations to act, in the sense that temptation involves a conscious choice to act one way or another. In Sergeant Pluck’s domain, bicycles activate a mobility that is measured in both molecules and miles with statistical precision, as if to counteract the freedom inherent in movement. Though as we have seen, things don’t generally submit to the law’s checks and balances – hence their history of banishment and forfeiture.

Umbrella + Watering Can, part of One + One collection, © 2012 Daniel Eatock The umbrella-cum-watering can operates on the logic of the bicycle-characters in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Both rely on the absurd to demonstrate an uneasy mutual dependence. In the case of One + One, the rain we wish to avoid is essential for watering plants; in the case of the half-human bicycles, wheels and legs, handle bars and arms, are as essential for getting around as they are for getting in trouble with the law. The umbrella complements the workings of the watering can, and in The Third Policeman, the bicycle

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does the same for the body. To paraphrase design scholar Clive Dilnot, design is indispensable because we humans are “essentially failed animals.”5 Unable to shed or collect water with our hides, we make portable canopies and spouts. Here, Eatock’s objects are not linked with people but with each other, resulting in an uncanny new being, apart from us. 5 Clive Dilnot, “The Matter of Design,” Design Philosophy Papers 13:2 (2015), 120.

The loveliness of O’Brien’s choice of the bicycle is that it is a fulcrum for critiquing provincial prejudices at the same time exposing the risks of designing even the most modest of things and letting them loose in the world. Case in point, despite the fact that he rides one himself, Sergeant Pluck is suspicious of bicycles. He fears they carry a high quotient of humanity within them and that their capacity for movement extends well beyond the road. “You never see them moving by themselves but you meet them in the least accountable places unexpectedly. Did you never see a bicycle leaning against the dresser of a warm kitchen when it’s pouring outside? . . . Near enough to the family to hear the conversation? Not a thousand miles from where they keep the eatibles?” “You do not mean to say that these bicycles eat food?” “They were never seen doing it, nobody caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that food disappears.”28 Here, things, not people, are to blame. In this sense, the bicycle is a direct descendant of the criminal javelin prosecuted in ancient Greece, and a precursor of the sexualized American car, exiled in 1997. Although, in the context of O’Brien’s Catholic Ireland, it might be more apt to think in terms of original sin, the stamp of guilt everyone is believed to be born with. Here the sin of pride is transferred to everything we create – most especially bicycles. Yet, because sin is invisible, people (and their bikes) don’t look any different. As the Sergeant patiently explains, you can’t expect a man “to grow handlebars out of his neck.”29 He takes it for granted that the potential for sin infuses everyone and everything. However, new kinds of punishment are needed to fit the crimes of the parish’s doubly complicated citizens. The peculiar workings of justice become clearer in the story of MacDadd and Figgerson. A simmering feud between the two men takes a bad turn after MacDadd assaults Figgerson’s bicycle with a crowbar. Figgerson challenges MacDadd to a fight and loses – badly. Defeated, dead, and properly waked, Figgerson and his bicycle are buried – the latter in a bicycle-shaped coffin specially fitted out to accommodate its extremities, its handlebars and foot pedals. Meanwhile, the search for the killer MacDadd goes on. BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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We could not find MacDadd for a long time or make sure where the most of him was. We had to arrest his bicycle as well as himself and we watched the two of them under secret observation for a week to see where the majority of MacDadd was and whether the bicycle was mostly in MacDadd’s trousers pan passu if you understand my meaning.30 Appointed judge and jury, Sergeant Pluck duly condemns the bicycle to be hanged, entering a nolle prosequi for “the other defendant.” Surrogates are not projections of the ego here; they are sacrificial lambs. Indeed, our narrator is never punished for his alleged crime but nor is he free. Without a full confession of guilt, he’s left in purgatory, forever to be plagued by the question: “Is it about a bicycle?”31 The answer to the rhetorical question must be “yes,” because blaming things lets everyone off the hook.

sSs In O’Brien’s world, the bicycle plays the part of the scapegoat. This alter ego, however, is never fully detached from the human body. The possibility of a completely independent proxy belongs to the realms of simulation and transgenic mutation. Rabbinical incantations and magical thinking are replaced by more recognizable forms of math and science. One of the more prescient writers in this regard was himself a chemist: Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Levi is best known for his writing about the Holocaust and plans for eliminating all but mythical Aryan Übermenschen. Less well known is his work on other insidious, if subtler, ambitions to improve on the human, of which he was justifiably skeptical. In The Sixth Day and Other Tales – a collection of short stories written in the late sixties and early seventies – Levi explores the latent dangers posed by the scientific positivism of corporate research and development.32 In “Order on the Cheap,” the narrator introduces us to Mr. Simpson, a salesman who works for an American company called NATCA, post war engine for a new breed of machines. Simpson “believes in them with innocent faith.”33 On this particular day, Simpson shows him a duplicator called the Mimer. This isn’t a printer but a machine able to produce three-dimensional copies identical to their originals using a new genetic process that transmits data from cell to cell. 126

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Though he’s not without qualms about the risks involved, our narrator purchases one for himself. Simpson successfully duplicates diamonds, fresh beans, peas, a tulip bulb, cheese, and sausage, even a spider. So far, only a lizard presents some challenges, prompting our curious narrator to ask if the machine could be modified to reproduce a person at full-scale. (Levi was evidently aware of early experiments with cloning.34) Simpson, the salesman, is horrified. Our narrator, however, only sees the loss of opportunity – an opportunity not lost on his friend Gilberto, an incipient technocrat who already spends his time taking things apart and repairing them. In another episode called “Some Applications of the Mimer,” Gilberto tells the narrator he’s fabricated a larger Mimer and used it to duplicate his wife. There are now two Emmas, and against all odds they seem to get along, offering “a valuable confirmation of imitation theory: the new Emma, twenty-eight years old when born, had inherited not only the identical mortal form of the prototype, but also her entire mental endowment.”35 Though there is one small difference – a germ of trouble bound to disturb Gilberto’s connubial bliss – the duplicate has a cold. Apparently these women are more like identical twins. They appear the same but can hold entirely different views. In particular, they have very different views of their husband’s experiment. Emma the second naturally thinks it was an excellent idea, while Emma the first has serious doubts. At this point, the narrator is sure his friend has literally made his own ruin. However, when he comes to visit him a few months later, he has underestimated Gilberto’s genius. He pronounces him a champ and marvels how he’s managed to settle “everything in the blink of an eye.”36 Although it was more like the press of a button, as that is how Gilbert solved the problem: he duplicated himself. It seems the narrator is speaking to Gilbert-the-copy, who just stopped by to brag about his good luck. On his way to marry Emma the second at the city clerk’s office, he stops to reflect: I can’t exclude the possibility that we may need to have recourse to some small deception, for example get married, Emma the second and I, and then distribute ourselves each with the spouse he or she wants. And then, naturally, I’ll have to look for a job; but I’m convinced that NATCA would gladly welcome me as a publicist for the Mimer and their other office machines.37 BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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Gleefully amoral in their respective applications of the Mimer, the narrator and Gilbert have no trouble accommodating “small deception.” Expediency overrules conscience, as it always does when we believe (often erroneously) that the consequences of design will be identical to their thoroughly rationalized intentions. So far our narrator seems to be caught up in a comedy of errors. But the business of simulation takes an ugly turn in “Retirement Fund.” Levi’s characters are debating the merits of an immersive technology called the Torec, which enables a person to enter into a wholly other realm. (“Retirement Fund” was written just two years before virtual reality helmets were invented.38) Simpson, the NATCA salesman, is now retired and has agreed to test the Torec for his former employer. He convinces the narrator to try it out, too. He dons the Torec helmet, which has been programmed with a tape of a soccer game, a game that the narrator has never played. He describes the experience – specifically what his body experiences – saying: I perceived an intense odor of churned-up dirt. I was sweating and one of my ankles hurt me a bit . . . . I heard the burgeoning roar of the spectators, I saw the ball pushed back over to me and slightly ahead to take advantage of my forward movement: I was on top of it in a flash and my left foot kicked it into the goal with precision, effortlessly, neatly, right past the outstretched hands of the goalie. I felt a wave of delight surge in my blood, and shortly after the bitter taste of the adrenaline discharge in my mouth; then everything ended and I was sitting in the armchair.39 The pretense of role playing gives way to something truly visceral. As Simpson explains, these tapes are meant to give retirees lives they can no longer live. Inside the Torec helmet, the brain and all of the senses it enables are engaged, heightening those that aging has dulled. But not all the tapes are for one demographic and not all are so invigorating. The narrator tries one designed to mirror stereotypes in which our Italian protagonist is beaten, abused, and called racist names by American bigots. Then there’s a mix-up with the pornography tapes, where he’s put inside a sexual scenario meant for a woman. Simpson admits that not all the tapes provide pleasant experiences:

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some are meant exclusively for scientific purposes. There are for instance recordings made on just-born babies, neurotics, psychotics, geniuses, idiots, even animals. . . . [O]n superior animals whose nervous systems are akin to ours. There are tapes on dogs – “grow a tail!” the catalogue suggests enthusiastically; tapes of cats, monkeys, horses, elephants.40

In the Eyes of the Animal, Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), 2015 Exploring the line between virtual and real-world experiences, Robin McNicholas and Barney Steel of MLF use immersive virtual reality to enable audiences to encounter the forest anew. Wearing headsets as they walk through the forest, participants view a 360-degree animated film told from the viewpoints of the inhabitants of the forest.6 Here, the act of temporarily inhabiting the bodies of animals is done to shed light on the life-cycles of three different species. The opposite of the voyeuristic experiences encouraged by Primo

Levi’s Torec machine, In the Eyes of the Animal is designed to evoke empathy. The aim of the project is to go beyond the realm of fantasy and allow humans to come closer to understanding that their bodies share a planet with other bodies. 6 Marshmallow Laser Feast, “In the Eyes of the Animal,” AND for AND Festival 2015, accessed September 5, 2018, http://www.andfestival.org.uk/events/ in-the-eyes-of-the-animal/.

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Here, experiments to amplify the self – body and mind – through virtual means lead to the nullification of the particular self, namely the person wearing the Torec helmet. In designing convincing alternatives to (and for) everyday life, NATCA has essentially designed a state of irresponsibility, so seductive that being someone else becomes addictive. Simpson can no longer bear to live outside of the Torec; he is completely absorbed in being elsewhere, in others’ bodies. Now the only thing he can look forward to is death, something he’s already experienced six times with six different tapes. Unlike the insular worlds of puppets, golems, and bicycle-beings, the Torec is populated with endless variations of alter-beings. This is the design of escapism not of imagination. Where imagination suggests the possibility of living differently, devices like the Torec offer facsimiles that can never be realized. It is the kind of design that produces places like theme parks and gated communities, not to mention the self-contained realms of cyberspace Levi describes. Whether they’re made out of concrete and iron or electronic bits and bytes, they segregate people within different realities. They may seem relatively harmless since their denizens are not physically locked into their ghettos. But Levi understood only too well that any system offering the promise of complete control is at risk of becoming fascist.

tTt In his novel The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz conjures something rare, and that is freedom within the confines of fantasy. Fantasy is usually infertile because it exists in a vacuum of the impossible, but in 1930s Poland, it is a form of resistance both to poverty and prejudice. (Schulz was Jewish in an overwhelmingly Catholic country.) The Street of Crocodiles is dominated by a father figure, who constructs an alternate world from the scraps of the one he is given. He isn’t designing a protector, a soul mate, a twin, or a surrogate persona but something wholly other that is capable of spawning without his interference. His beings are made of the latent energy in matter. They are a rejection of the very idea of perfection, and ironically for a creator, a rejection of ego. Schulz finds fecundity not in one golem-like figure, but in a variety of creatures. His is the sort of unadulterated speculation of children who invent 130

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wild stories to explain the unfamiliar. And given that “unfamiliar” is a fair description of virtually everything children initially encounter, such mythmaking might be considered an early form of reasoning. It is one of the first ways we make sense of things generally and learn to think with things in particular, as when a dark shadow first appears to be a monster and later takes on the outlines of a beloved doll, which in turn becomes a substitute companion. True, none of us is able to remain in that state of childhood where the unreal can be confused with the real, where both dolls and people talk, but it is possible to reverse engineer the ways we’ve been accustomed to thinking. Designers and artists are especially good at de-familiarizing the world. Schulz himself purportedly said his ambition was to mature into childhood.41 His fabrications, however, are not so much unreal as they are magnifications of reality and its possibilities – which here reside in a home in the small Polish town of Drogobych, now part of western Ukraine. This is where the tailor holds forth in the evening for his son and his seamstresses, who work into the night, plying their craft on a mannequin. They cut and pin yardage of silk and wool onto the “silent idol” in the corner, while he gives his rambling lectures – his “Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies, Or, The Second Book of Genesis.” “The Demiurge,” said my father, “has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, in exhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well.”42 Here we are to understand the Demiurge as God and the father as a kind of Everyman who believes that God has no exclusive claim to creation. (Extrapolating to the present, we might also consider designers as Demiurges, particularly who fail to recognize how ordinary people design their lives informally.) He protests that “for too long the perfection of [the Demiurge’s] creation has paralyzed our own creative instinct.”43 (It’s worth noting here that Plato’s Demiurge constructed the world according to mathematical principles; it is that kind of precision the father rails against.) As proof of his own “creative instinct,” the narrator’s father outlines his vision for a new breed of beings with limited capacities. There will be a different creature for every gesture. These new beings BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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will have one of each limb, not two. More significantly, Schulz’s beings will not be precious rarities. We shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material. . . . “In one word,” Father concluded, “we wish to create man a second time – in the shape and semblance of a tailor’s dummy.”44 The tailor’s dummy is not a golem, nor is it a superhero. Instead it is a modest totem of the incomplete. Like all mannequins, it is the foundation for works in progress. In fact, the father envisions making not just one, but many creatures with only one limb and only one function – in other words, beings that are prostheses, for whom symmetry ceases to be necessary. (In this, he anticipates the one-armed factory robots and driverless cars that no longer need us.) Yet, the same time Schulz’s visionary wants to reduce bodies to parts, he recognizes that his creations will feel and suffer. “Figures in a waxwork museum,” he began, “even fair-ground parodies of dummies, must not be treated lightly. Matter never makes jokes: it is always full of the tragically serious. . . . Can you imagine the pain, the dull imprisoned suffering, hewn into the matter of that dummy which does not know why it must be what it is, why it must remain in that forcibly imposed form which is no more than a parody? . . . Weep, ladies, over your own fate, when you see the misery of imprisoned matter.”45 The father’s concern for dummies trapped in unchanging state, combined with his idea of abstracting the human body into a series of limbs, can be read as a parable of the effects of injury and age. (Certainly in the years after World War I, amputees were a common sight in Europe, and those past enlistment age to fight in the Great War would indeed be old by now.) Frustrated by the constraints of the human body, whether in performing discrete tasks or moving at all, Schulz’s protagonist wants to design his way out of them. In his concluding lecture, he shares his dream for new species of pseudo-flora and pseudo-fauna. Half organic and half inorganic – but never dead, these ephemera 132

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sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps, abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom.46 A self-styled phenomenologist, the father figure (once again a male who cannot actually give birth) apprehends the world in terms of experience and sensations, not through predetermined categories of people, objects, and matter. For him nothing sits still. Or, if it does, it suffers, like the chests and tables he describes as “crucified timbers, silent martyrs to cruel human inventiveness.”47 That this kind of petrification isn’t limited to furniture (or other kinds of lively materials) is confirmed in one last anecdote: The father confides that his extremely sick brother has turned into the tubing of the enema used to treat him. His body has morphed into a tangle of petrified rubber veins. For Schulz, we mortal, breathing objects are no different from tailors’ dummies. We are, simultaneously, canvases for other’s designs (and potentially objects of cruelty) and lively material beings, free to harbor brief dreams of outlandish possibilities, at least until our daily decomposition runs its course. When Schulz collapses the boundaries between animate and inanimate, he raises both the dangers and possibilities of making things in our own likeness. He doesn’t call on science to validate his quasi-human dummies or his sentient furniture and waxworks. Instead, he draws on the poetics of the flawed and the deformed, in what might be a cautionary tale for designers working with organic material today. The father’s joy in his ungainly organic beings is an implicit critique of romantic nationalism and the Nazi myth of pure Aryan blood. He rejects an aesthetics of uniformity that requires categories of exclusion and, ultimately, elimination. And in this, Schulz anticipates the critique of modernism – a modernism that prunes and never accepts grafts – that would take on a heightened urgency after the events of the twentieth century that took his life and millions of others.

uUu

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Biodegradable bottles, Ari Jónsson, 2016 These are bottles made from oceanic life. They seem to take on the form of the pseudo-flora whose potential is tapped by Schulz’s father in his protest against things in their given state. In a different time and context, Ari Jónsson’s project is also a protest, a protest against the given form of drinking water today: plastic water bottles. To make these biodegradable bottles, Jónsson combined red algae powder (agar) with water. When agar powder is added to water, it forms a jelly-like material. As long as the bottle is full, it keeps its shape, but as soon as it is empty, it will begin to decompose.

As the bottle is made from natural materials, the water stored inside it is safe to drink – one can even eat the bottle, bridging the ever-narrowing gap between things and our bodies.7 7 Alice Morby, “Ari Jónsson uses Algae to Create Biodegradable Water Bottles,” Dezeen, March 20, 2016, https://www.dezeen.com/2016/03/20/ ari-jonsson-algae-biodegradable-water-bottles-iceland-academy-arts-student-designmarch-2016/.

Schulz’s hermetic imaginings about organic matter and matter with organs are taken up by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake. Instead of nationalism, she gives us technocracy. Built on the temptation to exploit the inherent liveliness of materials, Atwood’s world is driven not only by their innate allure – a fascination with activating their potential of the kind that Schulz describes – but also by the temptation of their power and profitability. Here, the shamans reside in the corporate campuses, laboratories, and academic think tanks, which produce dubious commodities through less than transparent processes. Instead of melding the organic and the inert in golems or bicycles, Margaret Atwood’s characters devote themselves to the merger of living cells. Most of this near-future’s hybrids are only marginally strange, given the fact 134

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that it’s more than possible in our so-called real world to buy ligers and tigons on exotic animal websites.48 They’re certainly not foreign to the novel’s protagonist Jimmy; he grew up surrounded by rakunks and pigoons. His father was a genographer. In fact, he was “one of the foremost architects of the pigoon project, along with a team of transplant experts and the microbiologists who were splicing against infections.”49 But all this is in the past. Jimmy’s stories are after the fact. His is a post-apocalyptic tale, foretold in the names of the company compounds like OrganInc, HelthWyzer, NooSkins, and AnooYoo. Within these clusters of housing, laboratories, and schools, genetic experiments conducted in the name of health and longevity go awry. But before the inevitable implosion, there is entertainment – the tried and true cover for suspect products from junk food to the sex trade. Jimmy’s no stranger to either. Jimmy is about eight years old when he first encounters Oryx, the “Blue Fairy” of the novel. Oryx’s origin myth is that she’s from somewhere in southeast Asia, where she was sold into slavery as a child. Oryx exists for Jimmy to rescue him with love (and sex) of a purer sort. But she also exists for Jimmy’s friend Crake; she becomes a surrogate mother to the progeny of his unstable genius. Girl-child, mother-whore, and saint, Oryx is a familiar fabrication. She is elusive but not remotely as bizarre as the things that Crake shows Jimmy over a weekend at the Watson-Crick Institute. (Jimmy’s college is the much less prestigious Martha Graham Academy.) The elite Watson-Crick is laid out with “drought-and-flood resistant tropical blends, with flowers or leaves in lurid shades of chrome yellow and brilliant flame red and phosphorescent blue and neon purple,”50 created by the students in Botanical Transgenics. But the work of the “Ornamental Division” is just that compared to that of the NeoAgriculturals. “This is the latest,” said Crake. What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.51

Jimmy is repulsed by the sight of chicken parts growing from chicken parts, but what upsets him most is the fact that they have no heads. The BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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scientists have determined that the best way to denature living creatures is to remove their faces. Plus, they needed to remove “all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth”52 in order to speed up the production of breasts. Crake boasts: “They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.”53 Needless to say, the franchise for takeout ChickieNobs has no shortage of investors. Bent on attracting venture capital, the brains at Watson-Crick don’t quibble over distinctions between domesticating and weaponizing nature; hence, the BioDefences division. It’s packed with cages of vicious wolvogs. Far more effective than any fence, they are an alarm system that can’t be disarmed. Crake dismisses Jimmy’s qualms about what could happen if they escape with the glib assurance that they’re not going anywhere: “Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.” . . . “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either, said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.”54 Crake would have been more accurate had he said nature no longer exists apart from human influence. He would have had no shortage of evidence either. Unseasonable droughts, more frequent flooding, and increasingly violent storms would do for a start. Crake pays lip service to environmental degradation, much of which can be laid at the feet of design. But the nature he’s really obsessed with is his own. After college, Crake goes to work for RejoovenEsense, where he lets Jimmy in on their biggest project to date: the BlyssPluss Pill. It is sold as a trifecta of libido enhancer, protection from sexually transmitted diseases, and a fountain of youth. But the pill also sterilizes everyone who takes it – without their knowledge. Zero-population growth for a planet with limited resources and huge profits for Crake and company are immanent. That’s Crake’s sales pitch, but the true purpose of the pill is to eliminate the human race altogether and replace it with something better. Crake brings Jimmy to a large picture window that looks onto a bubble dome filled with trees and plants – and more.

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That was [Jimmy’s] first view of the Crakers. They were naked, but not like the Noodie News: there was no self-consciousness, none at all. At first he couldn’t believe them, they were so beautiful. Black, yellow, white, brown, all available skin colours. Each individual was exquisite. “Are they robots or what?” he said. “You know how they’ve got floor models, in furniture stores?” said Crake. “Yeah?” “These are the floor models.”55

This is the Paradice Project. The Crakers have none of the faults and flaws of human beings. Racism, jealousy, and competition have been designed away. Even the fear of dying is gone. They’ve been conceived “to drop dead at age thirty – suddenly, without getting sick. No old age, none of those anxieties. They’ll just keel over.”56 According to Crake, the notion of mortality is only the foreknowledge of dying. Eliminate that and the attending fears around death are moot. The rhetoric is pretty convincing, at least from the human perspective. As for the Crakers, they aren’t programmed to have a point of view. But they are alive; and unlike the ChickieKnobs, they have faces. They also learn to tell jokes – a small but sure sign of rebellious criticality that Crake thought he’d designed away along with any ability to improvise. But it is that very trait that enables the Crakers and “neurotypical” Jimmy to survive the collapse of RejoovenEsense and the rest of the known world. (Interestingly, though “improvise” and “improve” share the same root, there is a slight difference between them, a difference between a position of adaptability and one of moral authority; it is the difference between designing with people and circumstances and designing for them.) The Paradice Project’s fatal flaw is that it’s predicated on an oxymoron: static life. It is fatally undermined from the start. Any good intentions are compromised by Crake’s ruthless egotism and his neo-enlightenment faith in the ability to reason away the feelings that make us unhappy and violent. Crake isn’t interested in making more intelligent beings; he seeks salvation in a reduced form of intelligence. For him, emotional intelligence is an oxymoron. BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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In the figure of Crake, we find the least defensible reason for designing other versions of the human: the refusal to cultivate the self and the abandonment of the very notion of being. This is all the more critical as we are already in the future of robotic companions, synthetic bodies, and transgenic transplants, and we’re long accustomed to things that make decisions for us from the cellphones in our pockets to the algorithms of the stock market.

Empathy Bomber Backpack, Monique Grimord, 2016 The plot of Oryx and Crake revolves around an attempt to rid the world of hatred and jealousy by limiting the emotional intelligence of a race of creatures designed to replace volatile human beings; in other words, all human beings. The Empathy Bomber Backpack is also intended to eliminate violent emotions, but it is not premised on the elimination of people. Monique Grimord’s speculative design is made for extreme activists in a near future, who want to constructively counter the hatreds that stimulate political violence across the globe. This film still is from Grimord’s speculative story of the “empathy bomber,” in which two bio-hacking

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activists have perfected a compound that releases high doses of oxytocin; a hormone that creates feelings of contentment and increases bonding.8 The unspoken questions are: What happens when their effects wear off? Or do we need to remain constantly drugged? 8 Monique Grimord, “Monique Grimord Hijacks the Tactics of Terror in Empathy Bomber Project,” ed. Nick Brink, Designboom, February 16, 2016, https://www.designboom. com/art/monique-grimord-empathy-bomber-backpack-project-03-16-2016/.

vVv The question is: can responsibility be designed away from us, can it be taken out of our hands? Until the answer is yes, with all due respect to judges who confiscate cars, we alone are accountable. If objects exert agency, at least for now, it is only because we design that agency into their structures or exploit and release the potentiality of their materials. It is in this practice of assigning actions to things that we find the core of the impulse to create artificial others. It is difficult and lonely work being responsible: ergo, Collodi’s puppet, Meyrink’s golem, Ozick’s Xanthippe, and Schulz’s imperfect prosthetics. Then again, leaving responsibility to others is equally human as we see when O’Brien’s policemen string up bicycles, when Levi’s Mr. Simpson escapes into virtual reality, and when Atwood’s Crake chooses death over a flawed existence. Admittedly, such stridently polar positions between the social instinct that drives us to create companions and the asocial rejection of troublesome human relationships do not take into account the checks and balances that govern the majority of design practices. But as caricatures, they are not without merit. Even as growing numbers of designers are choosing more collaborative roles for themselves, design is still shaking off the remnants of its own narcissism, what Isaiah Berlin once described as “the exfoliation of a particular self, its creative activity, its impositions of forms upon matter.”57 However, at the same time that the blinkered vision of the sole author is being checked by more generous forms of practice, design need not, and should not, abandon the terrain of aesthetics – for one thing it would mean succumbing to amnesia, forgetting the history and culture of design that grew out of both artisanry and planning. Indeed, the importance of aesthetics was not lost on perhaps the most famous creator of monsters, Mary Shelley. In the rewritten text of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus and the intermediary notes she made in 1823, it becomes clear that Shelley realized how strange it was that Frankenstein should work so passionately and for so many months on his Creature, but never grasp how repulsively ugly it was until that crucial moment of animation. This fatal ugliness, which will become its doom, is central to the Creature’s entire destiny and the novel’s whole plotline of rejection and revenge.58 BEINGS: UNRULY THINGS, GOLEMS, CYBORGS

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The author and her protagonist conceived their Creature as scientists and engineers would; the point was to make it live, not give it a life. If they had, they would not have been deaf to his pleas to make “him a female companion: ‘Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request.’”59 That Shelley made the Creature repulsive, and then later questioned her decision to do so, suggests that (as with Dr. Frankenstein) her creation took on a life of its own on the page before she realized what she’d made. Of course, had she made him handsome, the story would probably have been a romance, not a cautionary tale about the mortal consequences of building a living being. Today, however, as designers enter into collaborations with mathematicians, biologists, neurologists, and computer scientists, there is the opportunity to think more sympathetically about the prospect of designing life.60 Though these explorations are literally and figuratively embryonic, and nowhere near the scale of Frankenstein’s monster, they have already raised questions about traditional models of authorship, particularly within the scientific community.61 Increasingly, the case is being made that the risks of defining artificial life too narrowly (e.g., primarily for profit or military use) can be mitigated by collaborating with designers and artists, who are particularly attuned to the effects of manipulating materiality; and, by virtue of their experience, sensitive to the social implications involved. This is not to say that designers have a particular purchase on ethics, as much as to say that their knowledge and experience of the relationships between things and people might help steer the juggernaut of designing alternate life forms toward creating better and wiser Creatures.

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1 This genre of literature shares much the same concerns as those explored in speculative design. Speculative design is a field pioneered by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who produce surreal artifacts and environments as a means of exploring the very real consequences of design avant la lettre. For more on speculative design and the work of Dunne and Raby, see their book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 2 Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 78–9. 3 Paul Schiff Berman, “An Anthropological Approach to Modern Forfeiture Law: The Symbolic Function of Legal Actions Against Objects,” Yale University Journal of Law & the Humanities 11:1 (1999), 21. 4 The case entailed a man who used a car, which he owned with this wife, to have sex with a prostitute. The court ruled that car must be forfeited, despite the fact that its co-owner was not on trial (ibid., 7–8). The justices, citing precedent as the basis for their ruling, effectively perpetuated the “legal fiction” that has been part of Anglo-American law since the British custom of the deodand was enforced in ninth century. Deodand translates to “given to God.” Thus, according to custom, the offending object was taken from its owner, sold with the proceeds going to the King (God’s representative on earth) who dispersed them to charity (25–6). It is doubtful any worthy cause benefited from the forfeiture of the couple’s maligned car.

5 Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc., has argued that failure to protect cellphone data could infringe on U.S. citizens’ right to privacy. His argument was in response to the FBI’s demand that Apple produce a new de-encryption code to access the data on the cellphone of Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook. (The couple shot and killed 14 people and injured 21 others at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015, before being shot themselves.) Lev Grossman, “Inside Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Fight with the FBI,” Time, March 17, 2016. http://time.com/4262480/ tim-cook-apple-fbi-2/. 6 Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio, trans. Geoffrey Brock (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), 10. 7 Benedetto Croce, quoted by Rebecca West, afterword to Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio, trans. Geoffrey Brock (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), 168. 8 Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2012), 119. 9 Ibid., 165, 119, 121. 10 Scholars have traced the origins of the Jewish myth of the golem as far back as the twelfth century. Over the ensuing centuries, the figure has been variously understood as servant, a source of danger, and ultimately, a protector. However, the latter belief – that a monster of clay was made in Prague to defend the Jews against violence – is largely a modern invention. It wouldn’t have made much sense in sixteenth-century Prague, the city with which the myth is most strongly associated, since that was a period of remarkable tolerance for Jews and Protestants under Hapsburg rule. (See Hillel J. Kieval, “Golem Legend,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, October 27, 2010, http:// www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article. aspx/Golem_Legend.

11 Jorges Luis Borges, “The Golem,” trans. Alan S. Trueblood, in Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 193–5 12 Christopher Bollas, The Evocative Object World (New York: Routledge, 2009), 50. 13 See Mary Baine Campbell, “Artificial Men: Alchemy, Transubstantiation, and the Homunculus,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1:2 (2010). 14 Paracelsus (via Sandrovigius), Of the Nature of Things, printed and bound with A New Light of Alchymie: Taken out of the Fountaine of Nature, and Manuall Experience. To Which is Added a Treatise on Sulphur: Written by Michael Sandivogus . . . , trans. J.F.M.D. (London: Richard Cotes for Thomas Williams, 1650), 8; quoted in Baine Campbell, “Artificial Men,” 12. 15 Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers: A Novel (New York: Vintage, Random House, 1997), 12. 16 Ibid., 64. 17 Circa the end of the first century BCE, Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio wrote his Ten Books on Architecture. In it, he specified three elements necessary for a well-designed building: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, which here I transpose to the city – its infrastructure and its architecture (Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland and ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], bk. 1, ch. 3, §2). The Vitruvian triad was translated into English in the seventeenth century by Henry Wotton as, “commodity, firmness, and delight” (The Elements of Architecture [London: Iohn Bill, 1624], 1). Note that in the context of the twenty-first century, however, “commodity” means “comfortable,” or “commodious”; the word does not refer to an object for purchase. 18 Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers, 76–7. 19 Ibid., 77.

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20 Flann O’Brien [Brian O’Nolan], The Third Policeman (New York: Plume/ Penguin Books, 1976), 7. 21 Ibid., 56. 22 Ibid., 62. 23 Ibid., 83. 24 Ibid., 84. 25 Ibid., 85. 26 Ibid., 90. 27 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72. The idea that people and things are mutually affective, the conceit of O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, has been central to the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) developed by sociologist Bruno Latour. ANT grew out of his observation that what we call “the social” (i.e., community or family) is not a fixed entity. Rather it is a temporary state forged by links between actors – actors that include both people and things. (In design, this is thought of in terms of dynamics generated of things in systems.) This is not to say that Latour accords things like tools that modify a state of affairs by making a difference, free will of the kind that gets the wooden Pinocchio into so much trouble. As he writes, “rather, it means that there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence” (ibid.). 28 O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 89. 29 Ibid., 87.

32 Criticism of positivism came from within the scientific community as well, and, indeed, preceded Levi’s critique by twelve years. Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Laureate for his work in quantum physics, wrote: “The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies” (“Positivism, Metaphysics and Religion (1952),” in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, trans Arnold J. Pomerans [New York: Harper and Row, 1972], 213).

31 Ibid., 199.

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42 Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), 59. 43 Ibid., 61. 44 Ibid., 62. 45 Ibid., 64.

34 Cloning experiments began as early as 1885 with sea urchins. Steen Willadsen created an early clone of a sheep in 1984. Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell wouldn’t clone Dolly the sheep until 1996. Dolly was the first mammal to be created by somatic nuclear cell transfer. See “The History of Cloning,” Genetic Science Learning Center, University of Utah, accessed September 5, 2018, http://learn. genetics.utah.edu/content/cloning/ clonezone/.

48 Ligers are the cross of a male lion and a female tiger, and they are the largest of all living cats and felines. Their massive size may be a result of imprinted genes which are not fully expressed in their parents, but are left unchecked when the two different species mate. Some female ligers can grow to 10 feet in length and weigh more than 700 pounds. Ligers are distinct from tigons, which come from a female lion and male tiger. Various other big cat hybrids have been created too, including leopons (a leopard and a lion mix), jaguleps (a jaguar and leopard mix), and even lijaguleps (a lion and jagulep mix). (See Bryan Nelson, “11 Amazing Hybrid Animals,” Mother Nature Network, April 21, 2010, http://www. mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/ photos/11-amazing-hybrid-animals/ ligers.)

35 Levi, “Order on the Cheap,” 41.

37 Ibid., 43–4. 38 Virtual reality began with flight simulators in the 1920s, but virtual reality headgear was not introduced until the early 1960s. 39 Primo Levi, “Retirement Fund,” in The Sixth Day and Other Tales, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1990), 113.

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41 See Jerzy Ficowski, introduction, trans. Michael Kandel, to Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), 17. Originally published in Poland under the title Cinnamon Shops in 1934.

33 Primo Levi, “Order on the Cheap,” in The Sixth Day and Other Tales, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1990), 26.

36 Ibid., 43.

30 Ibid., 105.

40 Ibid., 122. Reading this, it is hard not to think of the experiments the Nazis performed two decades before, of which Levi would have been all too aware. He had been an inmate at Auschwitz where Josef Mengele conducted atrocities, also “for scientific purposes.”

46 Ibid., 67. 47 Ibid., 69.

49 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake: A Novel (New York: Archer Books, 2004), 22.

50 Ibid., 199. 51 Ibid., 202. 52 Ibid., 203. 53 Ibid., 202. 54 Ibid., 206. 55 Ibid., 302. 56 Ibid., 303. 57 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 95. In The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin offers a multifaceted picture of the romantic movement with implications for design, which has a history rooted in both the intuitive nature of art (i.e., the applied arts) and the methodological nature of science (i.e., design methods). The supranatural creatures in this chapter, golems and puppets – even robots and cyborgs – certainly owe their existence to the romantic strain of design that seeks extraordinary powers. This is not to censor the visionary. On the contrary, design is intrinsically speculative; it just can’t close off debate.

61 The argument against a purely technological approach to the work of synthetic biology is expressed quite compellingly by the authors of Synthetic Aesthetics – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Jane Calvert, Pablo Schyfter, Alistair Elfick, and Drew Endy – in their cautionary letter to the UK’s Synthetic Biology Leadership Council. The following excerpt captures the issue succinctly: “Design cannot be equated with the mere manipulation of molecules or the commercialisation of applications. Designs are necessarily value-laden; they turn wishes into realities. This makes it crucially important that strategic decisions about ‘better’ design should not be limited to a select group of experts with a controlling stake in the technology” (Letter to the Synthetic Biology Leadership Council, March 16, 2016, http://syntheticaesthetics.org/sites/ default/files/BiodesignLetter_SBLC_ SyntAes_032016.pdf).

58 Richard Holmes, “Out of Control,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017, http://www. nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/ frankenstein-out-of-control/. 59 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, ed. David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 121; quoted in Holmes, “Out of Control.” 60 In fact, there is a name for this new field: synbio or synthetic biology, which in turn has led to explorations called synthetic aesthetics, see Synthetic Aesthetics, accessed September 5, 2018, http://www. syntheticaesthetics.org.

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Dead Drops, Aram Bartholl, 2010 In espionage tradecraft, dead drops, usually placed in in unexpected locations, are used for covert communications between agents when a face-to-face meeting would compromise an operation. Aram Bartholl’s Dead Drops reverses the equation, opening up information to all. He describes it as “an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite

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files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project.”1 Bartholl works in Berlin, the site of the infamous eponymous Wall and decades of Cold War spying. His Dead Drops may not have been informed by any direct memory of that climate, but it does coopt their surveillance dynamic – one that continues to infuse information technologies regardless of their intended uses. And it’s this dynamic that colors the literary lives of telephones, radios, televisions, and more recently, the various and sundry digital devices with which we are entangled.

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Technology: Connections, Disruptions, Amplifications It is hard to think of an action that can’t or won’t involve technology. Meditation, prayer, and daydreaming all have apps today. Even walking, talking, thinking, hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, and other such activities, ordinarily thought of as free from things, depend on the complex coordination of instruments – a toolkit of muscles, bones, nerves, brain, and other vital organs. However, calling the body “tool-like” is not to say that the body is a work of design. It is precisely because design and biology are not co-terminus that design is necessary. If the boundaries between them are compromised, it is not a matter of anything like natural selection. Desire, not evolution, propels advances in tools, appliances, prostheses, transplants, and artificial intelligence. They and myriad other technologies arise from deep-seated longings to see and hear more clearly, to live longer, get closer, move faster. Taken together, they amount to nothing less than the urge to defy the limits of being human. In his 1985 novel Garden, Ashes, Danilo Kiš captures the technological drive that allows us to exceed ourselves in a passage describing an overnight train trip, in which a fairly ordinary conveyance elicits the extraordinary: I was particularly excited by the fact, vaguely sensed, that while I was asleep my body, stretched out in the soft wing of sleep, was passing through spaces and distances despite my immobility and despite sleeping state, and at such moments I did not fear sleep, I even felt that the exciting speed with which my body was hurtling trough space and time was liberating me from death, that this speed and movement represented a triumph over death and over time.1

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It is this kind of ambition that gives rise to design. Kiš’s train certainly achieved its ambition for speed, if not its passenger’s supranatural fantasy. But just as often the design of technology fails – one only has to think of Icarus’s doomed wings. What does not fade away is possibility, the raison d’être of design. It is this iterative, future-oriented impulse that drives technology; and it involves a specific kind of design – not of homage to precedent, but one of critique. Our tools, implements, and networked devices are designed for what has yet to be done. Not just “done” but done better. Hammers, telephones, airplanes, shoes, shovels, pixelated images, and transmission cables – the litany is endless – are designed to give us more purchase on the world. We use calendars to tame time, phones and screens to conjoin the spaces of labor and love, vehicles to conquer distance, and weapons to harm and protect. Technologies like these are meant to be the control knobs of daily life. Or so we hope. We differ from Icarus (or more accurately, from Daedalus, his designer) only in risk management. Now we make actuarial bargains with fate. Technology may no longer be a blind leap of faith but it is still a calculated act of faith. In spite of limited warrantees, we continue to trust that technology will insure not just a better future but the future itself. Medical technologies promise the most intimate of futures, that of our bodies, while alternative fuel technologies promise the most ambitious of futures, that of a viable planet. Such enterprises are driven by presumptions of success – a variable mix of hope and hubris. This is why technological failures tend to be dismissed as nuisances, and in extreme cases, tragedies – tragedies that, for the most part, we watch live but remotely on our screens. And because we are hardwired to forget the discomfort and pain of loss, we repeat the same patterns of creation and destruction. We do so for the simple reason that tools are extensions of the self, the senses, and ourselves. These things are not immune to our frailties. Still, we are continually surprised and let down when we encounter weakness in our technological appendages. After all, they are meant to support us. We exist in a purgatory littered with things produced by motives ranging from the altruistic to the self-centered. But perhaps the biggest reason for their purgatorial status as neither damned nor saved, comes from the limits of care we take with them, the degrees to which we invest them with love of self and others. As Dante writes in the Purgatorio:

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On/Off, Escif, Katowice, Poland, 2012 Escif, a muralist from Valencia, Spain, changes the proportions of switch to wall, dramatizing the way our perception of energy use is minimized under normal conditions. A flick of a switch is incommensurate with the systems that it

activates. Design has made it too easy to waste electricity. Moreover, the wall itself is turned inside out, making the point that indoor energy consumption is a matter of public consequence.

“Neither creator, nor creature was ever” He then began, “my son, without love, Either natural or rational; you know that. Natural love is always without error, But the other kind may err, in the wrong object, Or else through too much or too little vigour. While it is directed to the primal good, And keeps to its limits in relation to the secondary, It cannot be the occasion of sinful pleasure; TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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But when it is twisted to evil, or seeks the good With more or with less concern than it ought to have, The creature is working against the creator. So you can understand that love must be The seed of every virtue that is in you And of every action deserving of punishment.2

Likewise, technology becomes vulnerable when it is the product of “more or less concern than it ought to have.” To identify these states of “more” and “less” concern, we have our own literary Virgils and Beatrices. Our particular guides will point out technology’s foibles as all too human and very much alive. They will take us through the circles of compromises made between convenience and complacency, between perfection and flaw, as we continue to plot our technological escapes from the limits of the body.

CONNECTIONS: BRIDGING AND SPYING TECHNOLOGIES

For citizens of the twenty-first century, technological change has become a nonevent. New devices are so expected that in order to be noticed they have to be introduced in spectacularly staged product announcements. After the shock and awe, they slip into our routines with stealth unimaginable a century ago. There was a time, however, when new inventions could surprise. To glimpse it, we look to Marcel Proust, our first guide on the precipitous ledges of the modern technological Purgatorio. We meet up with him in chapter one of The Guermantes Way: Cities of the Plain, volume two of Remembrance of Things Past. In this passage, Proust’s narrator has gone to the post office to receive a telephone call from his much-beloved grandmother, from whom he is separated for the first time in his life. The telephone is so new that it hasn’t moved out of its postal incubator, the place where people were long accustomed to getting messages and information from afar. So, in spite of the heightened intimacy that the new technology offered, telephone calls had to be placed and received in a semi-public context, one that depended on things and people beyond the control of the parties speaking. 148

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To begin with, a call had to be placed; wires had to be connected and reconnected by switchboard operators who were as invisible as the callers on the other end of their lines. The first thing our narrator notices is his impatience with the process: Habit requires so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that, not having had my call at once, my immediate thought was that it was all very long and very inconvenient, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like all of us nowadays, I found too slow for my liking, in its abrupt changes, the admirable sorcery whereby a few moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we wish to speak.3

AlterEgo headset, MIT Media Lab, 2018 This prototype headset is named AlterEgo because its designers see it acting as a second self. It enables those who use it the ability to communicate with a computing device without speaking aloud or making any visible gestures. AlterEgo picks up the neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered when we talk to ourselves, wondering, for example, how much something costs or what time it is. The idea is that

by vocalizing silently, we will be able to interact “with other devices, the internet, AI assistants or applications to receive certain information, or make commands”2 without looking at a screen to do so. More significantly, the headset could make smartphone apps obsolete, and presumably the phone itself. Proust would only have to consciously think the words “appelez grand-mère” to hear her voice.

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Time is becoming synonymous with speed, thanks to the technology’s promise of instantaneity. The telephone’s implosion of space and time seems so outlandish that Proust attributes it to the work of “sacred forces” and their “admirable sorcery.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, such comparisons to the ineffable and mysterious would not have been unusual. Electromechanical artifacts (whose workings depended on visible mechanical parts and invisible waves of sound) were rare and access to them was complicated. Such inventions were held in a kind of public trust until they could be made safe for private consumption. Unlike today’s digital devices, the early telephone required initiation into its protocols and rituals. So, not for the first time, a new technology was situated where something similar was last found. It was housed within the institution where the telegraph grew up – the aforementioned post office – since both were recognized as places for long-distance communication. Proust, however, reaches far deeper into the past to make sense of the process of making a call. He locates the phone’s ventriloquists in the distant landscape of myth, endowing them with the Olympian status of quixotic goddesses. “All-Powerful” telephone operators conjure voices without faces and just as often drop them. In his frustration with the ineffable and inexplicable workings of the medium, Proust enlists a chorus of deities and demons. He writes that like characters in fairy tales, We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke . . . the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our guardian angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so jealously guard; the All-Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the Danaids of the unseen who incessantly empty and fill and transmit to one another the urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a confidence to a loved one, in the hope that no one could hear us, cry brutally: “I’m listening!”; the ever-irritable handmaidens of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone.4

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Few of us today would describe the telephone’s space as “the dizzy realm of darkness.” Yet, the metaphor continues to dog technology. We see it in popular culture with television programs like Black Mirror, in nefarious digital spaces like the dark web, and also in the realm of physics that studies dark energy with telescopes thirty-meters wide. Proust, however, taps into the capacity of technology to do more than evoke fear or awe. He quite literally describes what a phone does in isolating the sense of sound – something we have all but forgotten in our familiarity with disembodied voices: And as soon as our call has rung out, in the darkness filled with apparitions to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an abstract sound – the sound of distance overcome – and the voice of the dear one speaks to us. It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there.5

Her voice, produced by her body, has a reach that’s been extended artificially, at once both an “abstract sound” and “she.” This simultaneity, the sense of both-at-once, would become a distinctive quality of modernity, yielding a paradox of alienation and connection. Proust registers noises from a thing and the voice emanating of a person as one phenomenon. This sense of the uncanny embodied in the phone itself is reinforced when he enters a phone booth and finds that “the line was engaged; someone was talking who probably did not realize that there was nobody to answer him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless piece of wood began to squeak like Punchinello.”6 In the 1920s, the instrument was just as vital as its performance. It produced an in-and-out-of-body sensation: It not only dictated where you should place you ears and mouth, affirming that the body was involved, it was also a temporary (and rather unreliable) container for one of its immaterial products: speech. This variability would ultimately bring about a shift in design, away from the hardware and toward the phone’s software and the experiences it engenders.7 But to call Proust’s epiphany after the successful placement of his call an “experience” is woefully inadequate. It is fundamentally existential:

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I felt more clearly the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity, and at what a distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near – in actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation!8 This recognition of mortality in the midst of what seemed an otherworldly, sightless exchange effects a change in his behavior. When he hears her disembodied voice, he discovers: for the first time how sweet that voice was . . . . [W]hat I held compressed in this little bell at my ear was our mutual affection . . . . [T]he tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion which neutralised the affection I felt for her were at this moment eliminated and indeed might be eliminated for ever.9 The telephone’s erratic connections – its interrupted futurity – cause him to change his behavior and speak more sweetly to her in the present. At the same time, its instability anticipates the anguish he knows he will feel when his grandmother ultimately dies.10 That the telephone should be an instrument of rupture may seem all too literal to be interesting. However, Proust also touches on a bigger issue. He concludes the passage, saying, “I came away, feeling that the Invisible would continue to turn a deaf ear.”11 The “Invisible” are voices prematurely cut off – his, his grandmother’s, and the operators’ alike. However much it operates on animistic principles and no matter how its workings mimic people, technology, like death, is ultimately indifferent and “deaf” to us – which is particularly poignant given that the telephone was originally conceived thanks to the hearing impaired.

wWw

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The cautions that the telephone provokes in Proust become full-blown paranoia – a purgatory of torturous uncertainty – in Franz Kafka’s “My Neighbor.” In this, roughly contemporaneous, short story written in 1917, the narrator is convinced that his phone conversations are being listened to by Harras, the tenant of the office next door. Instead of an intrusive operator, a thin wall is the conduit; and the privacy implied in the telephone’s physiognomy of exchange – lips to mouth piece, ears to receivers – is once again denied. But here the stakes are nothing less than self-preservation. The story begins with the narrator’s claim: “My business rests entirely on my own shoulders.”12 With this declaration, we meet a man anxious that he is actually losing his business. This is a man under siege in his office, who imagines he is being betrayed by the telephone. He is convinced that Harras is stealing the information that escapes from the phone and floats into the flat next door. As with Proust, the phone changes the narrator’s behavior, only here to the point of contortion: “Sometimes I absolutely dance with apprehension around the telephone, the receiver at my ear and yet can’t help divulging secrets. . . . Harras does not require a telephone, he uses mine.”13 The narrator is sure that Harras is stealing his clients. His confidence is undermined; his decisions are more tentative, his voice is nervous. He is sabotaged by his own telephone. A cynic might argue that in both Proust and Kafka, technology is merely a conceit used to exaggerate their narrators’ idiosyncrasies. But that begs the question of why the telephone appears at all. Surely other devices could accomplish the same task, but we would be bereft of insight about the degrees to which things facilitate, compromise, or injure our relationships with each other.

xXx By 1947, when John Cheever wrote “The Enormous Radio,” the malevolent consequences of technology, usually the domain of science fiction, had started to seep into the consciousness of polite society. While the effects of the atom bomb weren’t fully comprehended (much less publically acknowledged) in the years immediately following the war, this short story picks up on an undercurrent of uneasiness with technology shading post-war euphoria. Cheever’s peacetime weapon comes in the disguise of a radio.

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At this time, technological appliances like telephones, automobiles, and refrigerators were no longer instruments of awe, but familiar fixtures in middle and upper-middle class homes. Televisions may have been largely out of reach, but radios were commonplace, even among the working class. So when Cheever’s college-educated protagonists Jim and Irene Westcott acquire a new one so they can listen to music with better sound quality, there is nothing unusual about it, nothing unexpected apart from the radio’s appearance. [Irene] was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor.14 After the radio displaces – actually destroys – the china ornament (a not so subtle declaration of war on the Westcott’s sense of decorum), it becomes a Pandora’s box of noise. No longer is the living room a private, stable haven for the couple. It seems that their space is invaded not just by the monstrous radio but also by the sounds of the other modern conveniences operating throughout their building. [Irene] began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner. By listening more carefully, she was able to distinguish doorbells, elevator bells, electric razors, and Waring mixers, whose sounds had been picked up from the apartments that surrounded hers and transmitted through her loudspeaker.15 As disturbing as it is to listen to the racket made by her neighbor’s appliances, it is nothing compared to what follows. The couple is finishing dinner when a Chopin prelude is drowned out by voices that sound familiar.

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Tivoli Audio Giant Model One BT, Ilaria Marelli and Tom DeVesto, 2013 This gargantuan version of a Tivoli bluetooth radio was installed on a street in Milan in 2013. Its front speaker played this plaintive refrain from Laurie Anderson’s “Walking and Falling”: “I wanted you and I was looking for you but I couldn’t find you. I wanted you and I was looking for you all day but I couldn’t find you.”3 Hidden behind it, however, were seven artificial trees that whispered secret messages – sounds ranging from Buddhist tantras to bird calls – all of which were selected by the radio’s designer Ilaria Marelli. These recordings would be heard by passersby who stopped and placed their ears on the “trunks.” This radio, like the one in Cheever’s short story, embodies the double-edged

nature of one-way communications: the selfish kind of audio-voyeurism that comes from privately “listening in” and the shared desire to be in contact with voices of others to mitigate our essential loneliness. Marelli’s design offers reassurance that the mutual dependence that comes from listening to each other can be deeply affirming. Yet, it is equally possible to view this public installation in light of its instrumentality – an advertising scheme, in the guise of an interactive experience. Both readings reflect Cheever’s portrait of the radio as a medium for random, haphazard broadcasts that is indifferent to the content it conveys.

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“Did your hear that?” Irene asked. “What?” Jim was eating his dessert. “The radio. A man said something while the music was still going on – something dirty.” “It’s probably a play.” “I don’t think it is a play,” Irene said.16 It isn’t surprising that Jim tries to rationalize the experience as a kind of radio soap opera. Serialized programs like “One Man’s Family,” about a San Francisco stockbroker’s family of five, had been bringing one fictitious household’s conversations into hundreds of thousands of American homes since 1932. Listening-in seemed innocent enough. The radio wasn’t just for music; it was also for entertainment. The Westcotts overheard that evening a monologue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game, running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank. They turned off their radio at midnight and went to bed, weak with laughter.17 Like the telephone, the radio is a technology of sound, offering only voices to the listener’s imagination. In listening to programs like “One Man’s Family,” there was no sense of spying. After all, these were actors and theater was sanctioned spying. Irene’s radio, however, knows no boundaries and it observes no social conventions. It shatters them like the piece of china it dislodged when it entered the apartment. The eavesdropping radio effectively strips away the facades of her neighbors’ apartments and their morés. The experience of these intimate broadcasts – a random mix of vulgarities, protestations, and laments – unsettles and upsets the sheltered Irene Westcott. Now when she sees her friends and acquaintances in the elevator, she wonders what other secrets are concealed under their furs and fancy hats.

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The fragility and hypocrisy of social decorum is Cheever’s main preoccupation. Nonetheless, his instrument of destruction dominates, and not just as a vehicle to expose that the fault lines in domestic arrangements are more covered-up than protected by apartment walls. The radio’s random reach into private domains also invites parallels with Cold War technological espionage – bugged rooms, sequestered listeners, and hijacked lives. Here, technology equates with the loss of control and the exposure of secrets. It turns out that the Westcotts are no different.

System Azure. Installation view of rhinestoned surveillance cameras, Jill Magid, 2002 Jill Magid installed gem-studded surveillance cameras in Amsterdam with the cooperation of the city’s police. She does more than dramatize their presence and increase citizen’s awareness of how much they are being watched. By treating the cameras like fashion accessories, she brings

them into the everyday world of commodities. Like Cheever, she reveals how much spying has become a social norm. Products like cameras and sensors designed to share and compare experiences now offer illusions and delusions of an impossible state of security.

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Annoyed by the emotional outbursts provoked by the radio, Jim rebukes Irene: Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What’s turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother’s jewelry before they probated her will. . . . [A]nd where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist?18 Shamed, Irene goes to turn off the radio, with its random mix of music, weather reports, and disasters, she holds out hope it might still bring her a soothing voice. But “the voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal.”19 The radio – now broadcasting news of fatal accidents in Tokyo, then orphans saved from a fire in Buffalo – is restored to its status as transmitter. We are left with an Irene who is becoming accustomed to the radio’s seamless flow of inconsistent and troubling scenarios – a flow that dulls their impact and her (our) ability to care, but one that still leaves her hoping for solace from one of its voices. Instead, Cheever leaves her stuck in a limbo of passivity, where her feminine desire is thwarted by an intrusive, masculine technology.

DISRUPTIONS: THE PROBLEM OF DISTRACTION

It’s now 1985 and we climb to another terrace of purgatory, this time with Elizabeth (Liz) and Paul Booth of William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic. It is one year after Apple’s Orwellian Super Bowl television ad, but Gaddis’s characters are not early adopters – no computers here. However, they do have the requisite television along with a radio and telephone – an unremarkable, but nevertheless unholy, trinity that wreaks havoc on their lives. Domesticated and taken for granted, technology is receding into the background; it is designed to take up less physical space. Out of sight, out of mind, yet not entirely. In Carpenter’s Gothic, they form the dissonant bass line of the plot. Designed to improve communication, they backfire, muddling conversations and causing endless confusion. The radio, television, and telephone are present as objects of annoyance and distraction, just as volatile as the novel’s human protagonists. 158

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Set in a time when most households had only one television, one radio, and one phone, Carpenter’s Gothic depicts technology as a tremendous source of contention, a cudgel in the marital battles of the Booths. Rarely does a conversation appear without the ellipses that signal literal and figurative interruptions. Early in the novel Paul asks Liz if he has had any calls. – Yes just now, Mister Ude? He said he’d call back. – That’s all? – Yes. No I mean there was a call for Mister McCandless, it was somebody from the IRS Paul when can we get this phone thing straightened out, all I do is answer these calls for… – Look Liz, I can’t help it. I’m trying to get a phone put in her under a company name, as soon as the… – But when they shut it off in New York the bill was over seven hun… 20 Deflecting attention from his own troubles, Paul turns on his wife, repeatedly accusing her of tying up the lines and ruining his chances to “get something going.” Liz can’t even manage the mail to his satisfaction: – Look Liz, we’ve got to get a system. At least you brought it in, good. Now there’s got to be a place for it. If I’m going to get any kind of an operation going here we’ve got to get a system, I’ve got to know where the mail is when I walk in, you’ve got to get a pad there by the phone so I an see who…21 In Paul’s mind, technology, like his wife, has to be subdued and controlled. They are both guilty of sabotaging him. He sees them as intrinsically incapable. As with the Westcotts, the wife is the scapegoat. When technology doesn’t deliver on its promise, when it is fickle, it sheds its traditional masculine garb for that of the beleaguered, belittled feminine. Here, in the usual tumble of fractured phrases, of voices speaking without pause (hence, no punctuation), the telephone stymies Paul’s manipulations, which depend on yet other outlets. TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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– Take this Reverend Ude . . . nationwide television a media center his Africa radio Voice of Salvation got all the God damn pieces he needs some good clear hard headed thinking in there to put them together, got him in today’s paper’s what he’s supposed to call me about. . . . – What you what. He called and you’re on the phone to Edie? Biggest break I’ve got going, he calls and he can’t get through because you’re talking to Edie.22

Throughout the novel, phone numbers are misdialed and mislaid. Liz finds herself talking to “the Lord’s hotline” or answering calls from shadowy figures in Washington. The radio gives her useless information, but always with numerical precision – the precision that we expect of technology, the service we expect of design. She hears that thirty-five million Americans are functionally illiterate, that twenty-five million can’t read, that rapes occur every six minutes. The television casts a “livid aura” when its screen comes to life. Watching Jane Eyre, Liz hears Orson Welles ask, “Whose house is it?”23 Meanwhile her husband is shouting over the film, desperate for her attention. It is as though Paul sees the phone, the television, and the radio as his rivals. Having feminized them as faulty, Gaddis also recognizes them as masculine, ambitious things that are meant to assert control. Instead, they threaten Paul, whose situation is rapidly deteriorating. Well before the information age of the computer, Gaddis’s characters are feeling the effects of the barrage of information being channeled into their home. Rather than clarifying the state of their affairs (and the affairs of state Paul seems to be enmeshed in), technology inhibits understanding. It blocks it with the force of conspiracy, effectively weakening the civil and social bonds it claims to foster. Published during the Reagan administration, Carpenter’s Gothic is set against the background of the arms deals, cults, and covert actions. This climate of secrecy and false information is mirrored in the domestic confusion of the Booth household. For all the phone calls made and received, Liz never really quite understands what Paul is up to, nor does Paul seem to know who he is up against. The phone, quite literally, is the diseased heart of the book; its ring, in the end, is the equivalent of an EKG. When Liz fatally collides with a table in the darkness of her house,

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She lay with her head fallen on her shoulder, the telephone rang and a choked bleat of sound came lost from her throat in a great sigh . . . the uneven trembling of her lip abruptly stilled spilling the tip of her tongue, and it rang again and was silent, and then it rang again, and it kept ringing until it stopped.24 Technology is designed to defeat time and space. It is, however, indifferent to its victories. The instrument that was Liz’s lifeline to her only friend can do nothing but echo her last breaths with its ringing. Moreover, unlike the telephone of Proust’s novel, which was subject to the small deaths of disconnection, Gaddis’s phone outlives its protagonist’s life with a (false) presumption of its immortality – and with little thought to the costs of our dependency on it or its technological cousins, now outfitted with alarms in case we forget to pay them attention. We count on these systematic things not only to regulate our days for us, but also for the false comfort that our days will continue predictably, despite the incontrovertible fact that those days are numbered.

AMPLIFICATIONS: EXPANDING, INCULCATING, AND CONQUERING TECHNOLOGIES

Today, we’ve become so dependent on our devices – smartphones, Siri’s, and other intelligent avatars – that there are now apps with names like AppDetox and Offtime that are designed to reduce the amount of time we give them. Against the background of technologically-enabled breaks and scheduled meditations, Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence is an atemporal oasis. Here, time is a much more fungible affair. Its durations are inconsistent, and ways of keeping time are more variable than ticking clocks and gridded calendars suggest. Precision, the utopian goal of technology, is secondary to what people do with their time and how they choose to mark it. This is no casual matter for Pamuk’s protagonist Kemal. Kemal spends eight years in a peculiar state of suspension (a romantic purgatory, if you will) that is entirely of his own making. Failing to marry his true love Füsun when he could have, he finds endless excuses to pay visits to her in the chaste company of her family, the Keskins. Pamuk has us sit with Kemal night after frustrating night TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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in their home, where he surreptitiously gathers the odd earring, a collection of lipstick-stained cigarette butts, and other small fragments of Füsun, which will amount to the museum of the novel’s title.25 The reader’s patience with Kemal’s obsessively catalogued longing is rewarded when he explains how and why he endured this time in a rumination on the limitations and possibilities involved in telling time. Like many westernized middle class homes in Istanbul, the Keskin family has a German-made pendulum clock housed in a wooden case, which was “there not to measure time, but to be a constant reminder to the whole family of time’s continuity, and to bear witness to the ‘official’ world outside.”26 However, by the early 1970s, when the novel is set, the clock’s function was all but vestigial. The radio, and more recently the television, had usurped it.

Askew Clock, Tibor Kalman, 1989 Tibor Kalman (1949–1999) found regulations claustrophobic, but instead of jettisoning conventions, he played with them. Here he subverts what may be the most familiar form of wall clock, the kind that office workers and children watched impatiently as it guarded the border between the zones of confinement and freedom. Askew accepts the strictures of hands and the boundary of the circle, but it rejects

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the idea that time is sequential. Instead, it shows that two hours could feel like nine or that four hours might feel like one, depending on who we’re with and what we’re doing. Like Kemal, Orhan Pamuk’s protagonist in The Museum of Innocence, Kalman recognized that time is told by durations of pain and pleasure, of boredom and curiosity.

Wound sporadically and inconsistently, the German clock with its “perpetual ticking” was meant to ward off time as “an ever-changing thing.” The family kept it to reassure them that everything remained the same in their home. In reality, Turkey was still reverberating from shock waves of Atatürk’s mandated program of westernization that began just a generation ago. (The trope of modernist anxiety has rarely been more apt in describing its after-affects.) So when Pamuk writes that the old clock chimed in order for Kemal and the Keskin family to “forget the time” (and feel the better for it), he is referring to time in terms of the relentlessly driven pace of modern life. Kemal – sitting beside Füsun in the company of her parents and making no romantic progress at all – is especially content to have things stay the same. He has gone to their home almost daily “to live for a time in the world whose air she breathed. This realm’s defining property was its timelessness.”27 “Outside time” respected no such pauses. In fact, the characters set their watches to it. They wind their workings every night at seven o’clock, when Turkey’s one and only television channel broadcasts the news. Kemal muses that they look at the clock on the screen as though it were the Turkish flag: As we sat in our patch of the world, preparing to eat supper or bring the evening to a close by turning off the television, we felt the presence of the millions of other families, all doing likewise, and the throng that was the nation, and the power of what we called the state, and our own insignificance.28 As much as Pamuk is at pains to distinguish the personal from the political, he also shows how checking the time by the television is both a private ritual and a collective pledge of allegiance. More than precision, their timepieces offer synchronization.

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When looking at the black and white clock that appeared on the screen every evening, just before the news, it was not Time we remembered but other families, other people, and the clocks that regulated our business with them. It was for this reason that Füsun studied the clock on the television screen to check if she’d adjusted her watch “perfectly,” and perhaps it was because I was looking at her with love that she smiled so happily – and not because she’d remembered Time.29 The capitalized “Time” is, of course, linear time – the proverbial march of progress: Time – that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present – is for most of us a rather painful business. When we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments, . . . the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death.30 Design would seem to be fatally complicit in reinforcing what Pamuk calls “that evil line.” It gives us the clocks and myriad other devices meant to establish order and witness the moments when we run out of time. But as Kemal explains, this is not such a terrible thing: “No one except for idiots and amnesiacs can succeed in forgetting it altogether. A person can only try to be happy and forget Time, and this we all do.”31 Having said that, he then shares a story of a watch owned by Füsun’s father, a watch that “had two faces, one in Arabic numerals, and the other in Roman.”32 Simultaneously Eastern and Western, the watch shows that while design can’t negate time any more than we can, design can complicate time – but only if we are willing to notice what fills it.

yYy

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Howie, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s 1988 novel The Mezzanine, can’t help but notice everything around him. Howie is not just observant; all of his senses are on constant alert. Like an overzealous anthropologist, he registers the minutest changes in his habitat, beginning in the blandest of settings: the office building where he works. Through his alter ego Howie, Baker dissects things with a compulsiveness that rivals that of Pamuk’s hoardings. Both authors gauge time in objects; both tally the losses of change while trying to cope with the present. Their novels are implicit critiques modernity and its presumption of improvement. Baker’s menagerie of things is as banal as the paraphernalia that fills The Museum of Innocence. The difference is that Baker’s is an office romance (more properly, a romance with the office) tied up with a story of technological inculcation: When Howie says that “shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master,”33 we are given to know how early our training starts. The novel begins when Howie has to contend with a broken shoelace. (He’s now an adult, but with the curiosity of a precocious child.) The snap of the slender cord leads to an elaborate lunch-hour quest full of philosophical detours. Howie isn’t just out to replace the lace but also to understand why he finds the fact that it broke so surprisingly traumatic. With seemingly disproportionate angst, Howie describes the “curve of incredulousness and resignation” that he “rode out” in search of answer.34 His reaction to this and other disruptions, however, may be less strange than it seems. Most of us recognize the annoyance that Howie feels when a role of tape comes to its end. We empathize with his vexation at running out of staples. But few of us bring such concentration to these minor skirmishes with things. Still, Howie has a point. Design has deluded us into thinking that these small “machines” are, if not immortal, then objects of perpetual reincarnation. The Mezzanine’s parallel narrative – conducted through lengthy footnotes – reminds us why we expect things to last. It is not because they don’t change but because they are continually redesigned with promises and expectations of reaching a higher plane of existence. In this sense, technology is a promise – not of permanence but of permanent improvement. That hope-filled trajectory is charted here in the development of the drinking straw. Howie follows the shift from paper to plastic and the ensuing “problem” of the floating straw, which refuses to stay put. TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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Intended to be a convenience (convenience being the objective of most technologies), the first plastic straws had to be held down to prevent them from popping up. This meant Howie couldn’t read a book, eat a slice of pizza, and drink from the straw at the same time. That would take three hands. This deficiency, the kind of minor glitch that often stimulates new products, gives birth to the pierced plastic cup-lid as a way to hold the bobbing straw in place. The travails of innovation finally come to a close when a polymer version arrives on the scene that could do its job unaided by a lid. Problem solved, at least temporarily if history is any guide. Success doesn’t always breed success though. Evolution is full of stories of extinction. So when things die out, like home delivery of milk in glass

Sand Glass LED Traffic Light, Thanva Tivawong, 2010 According to its designer, the image of the centuries-old hourglass on a traffic light is meant to restore intuition to observing the rule of the road.4 The thinking being that the movement of pixelated grains of “sand” communicates more effectively than an abstract symbol. The conflation of old and new in this deeply incongruous traffic light approaches the ideal that the protagonist longs for in Nicholson Baker’s The

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Mezzanine. Preoccupied with the disappearance of things like glass milk bottles and paper straws, Howie would like to see more stability in his environment. Tivawong’s hourglass is as much a lament for the obsolete as Baker’s novel is. In fact, one could argue that the traffic light is less the instructional device it claims to be than a jarring reminder of history – almost always anathemic to the technological new.

bottles, Howie mourns their loss. He has no choice but to accept a new system – in this case, self-service in the supermarket and waxed-paper milk cartons. He’s continually surprised when things disappear. In large part this is because of the serialized nature of manufacturing, which churns out countless copies and obscures the fact its products and systems are finite. The rupture is counterintuitive. Or at least it was at one time. We’ve since been conditioned to accept technology as a string of small deaths, euphemistically called upgrades. This doesn’t make The Mezzanine any less relevant. As accustomed as we are to changes in the models of our phones, our readers, and our tablets, it’s exasperating when their batteries die. And most of us are still flummoxed by the vast array of choices we have to confront when the gadget in question has been discontinued altogether. Of the various and sundry things that Howie encounters in his workday, the escalator is the most central. It is the key to this particular technological narrative, in one instance meriting a four-page, fine-print footnote.35 Its virtues are numerous. The escalator is Howie’s conveyance to the mezzanine of the book’s title. It lets him time travel, recalling memories of riding it with his mother; and it’s a source of private games that he plays when he rides it to the floor where he works. (He sees if he can get to the top without anyone else behind or in front of him, all the while feigning boredom but in a condition of “near hysterical excitement.”) Other times, the escalator is the occasion of potentially awkward social encounters, as when a colleague is about to glide by in a moment of “forced proximity” and he has to decide where to look. (Howie fakes a convincing distraction.) Above all, the escalator is mesmerizing: The absence of passengers, combined with the slight thumping sound the escalators made, quickened my appreciation of this metallic, uplifting machine. Grooved surfaces slid out from underneath the lobby floor and with a almost botanical gradualness segmented themselves into separate steps.36 Gliding between floors in a continuous elliptical loop, the escalator is transitory and stable at the same time; and this stability is echoed in its design. Howie points out that “because escalators have been around, unchanging TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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(except for that exciting season when glass-sided escalators appeared), for my whole life – nothing has been lost.”37 The escalator fits his ideal of technology – his ideal state of being – moving up and down in space and back and forth in time without being stuck or stymied. It seems to defy the logic of progress while still offering revelations. Case in point, Howie notices, with no small awe, how the building’s maintenance staff cleans it: “leaning motionlessly on a white cotton rag, using the technology, yet using it so casually that they appeared . . . as if they were lounging against their Camaros at the beach.”38 This is technology that facilitates its own care, and it’s worth noting that the choice of the gerund “using” is not just serendipitous. For all Baker’s fixation on the surfaces and structures of things, he portrays those things as inseparable from actions – which for the most part revolve around tending, repairing, and improvisation. Howie’s life is full of object-rich routines. We find him thoroughly engaged in tasks like sweeping dirt onto a piece of shirt cardboard, carrying paper sacks that “disguise” his purchases, hanging his ties on doorknobs, and washing his hands in the office men’s room – a point of departure for another exquisitely drawn out reflection. Noting the corporate largesse that provides his company’s restroom with generously proportioned paper towels, Howie feels it is “an honor to use them.”39 While performing his ablutions, he’s reminded that paper towels are a disappearing luxury. In an early case of the material ceding to the immaterial, air blowers are replacing paper with hot air. Adding insult to injury, the dryer is much slower at its job; it wastes energy (it can’t be turned off); and its on-button is a more likely source of germs than “a sterile piece of paper that no human has ever held from a towel dispenser.”40 And that’s not the worst of it. As Howie is at pains to point out, towels do more than just dry hands. They wipe off embarrassing food stains, polish eyeglasses, and double as face cloths. Without paper towels, he has to resort to using toilet paper, which not only disintegrates in his wet hands but also encourages littering – something he finds particularly true in fast food restaurant bathrooms, where crumpled tissues pile up in corners. Air dryers are also culpable for the absence of washroom wastebaskets in Howie’s favored burger joints. What we have here is a (barely palatable) lesson about the food chain of design. No object is an island and every object is an action waiting to happen – in this case, and seemingly inevitably, it is one of subtraction. 168

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zZz In the future-present of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, technology operates pretty much the same way it does today, just a bit more nakedly and with a higher quotient of public humiliation. Shteyngart extrapolates on our current penchant for externalizing each other’s successes and failures on social media. Digital devices assume the shaming function of the wooden stocks and pillories so popular with American Puritans; and privacy isn’t merely endangered, it’s non-existent. Bars and restaurants are filled with hopefuls using apps that broadcast (to each other) their chances of having sex (with each other). “Credit Poles” with LEDs flash people’s credit ratings as they walk past them on the street; and their rankings distinguish High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) from Low New Worth Individuals (LNWIs) – sometimes with fatal consequences. Published during the 2008 financial crisis, three years before the Occupy movement started on Wall Street, Super Sad True Love Story is paradoxically prescient and retrospective in its treatment of technology. The device du jour is an äppärät – a word play on the Russian apparatchik, a (human) agent or apparatus of the Communist Party. Only now the “agent” is a device that conducts the business of power – a technology considered normal in a culture inured to snooping by successive waves of social media. (Shteyngart was born in the Soviet Union.) Äppäräti devices scan for data about the denizens of a near-broke and heavily militarized United States of America, where the dollar is now tied to the yuan. In an only slightly distorted mirror of our narcissistic present, Shteyngart’s citizens-of-the-digital deploy their souped-up cellphones to peer into each other’s bank accounts, just as programs like Lexus Nexus can today. Likewise, they depend on them to get the kind of information available now from wearables like Fitbits: calories consumed, the breakdown of those calories into proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, and the hours spent sleeping, or not. Where once someone’s physique was passively assessed, now such micro data is openly scrutinized. At this stage of the present-future, the technologies once dedicated to making things work for us have now taken aim at us. We are their products: quantified, soulless selves. In the calculations of Shteyngart’s characters, the metric that matters most is an individual’s net worth: the sum of health and wealth and, unsurprisingly, a critical factor in finding a mate. TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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Lenny Abramov, our cicerone, thinks he’s found his mate in Eunice Park, a beautiful Korean twenty-something. But Eunice’s prospects for a technologically-enhanced life span far outstrip his, unless he gets his act together. Lenny is an antique at thirty-nine. The generational difference is significant to their Pygmalion relationship and it’s an even bigger factor in his professional life. Lenny is in the Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung, a corporation whose mission is to wipe out the decay of aging. Technology is up to its old tricks: proclaiming death to death. And where better to conduct such a messianic pursuit than within the walls of a former synagogue, where StaatlingWapachung is housed. Lenny, however, is not the ideal candidate for immortality or even a healthy relationship. Eunice complains he “verbals” too much; he should be checking his äppärät. His colleagues think his body is grossly overweight, a potential career-killer in a company dedicated to eternal life. And he’s universally suspect for reading printed books, of which he has many. On a flight to New York, he notices that: some of the first-class people were staring me down for having an open book. “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” said the young jock next to me, a senior Credit ape at LandO’LakesGMFord. I quickly sealed the Chekhov in my carry-on . . . . [and] took out my äppärät and began to thump it loudly with my fingers to show how much I loved all things digital.41 The sense of smell has been reduced to an annoying intrusion on the odorless world of data, to the point where Lenny starts using Pine-Sol on his books. Apparently, its chemical fragrance is preferable to that of paper and other organic materials. Their odors are harbingers of the scrofulous rot that StaatlingWapachung wants to cleanse out of existence. Lenny’s äppärät is also an indispensable sign of allegiance to his fellow passengers and their technology and to his homeland where it acts as a virtual customs inspector. At one point, Jeffrey Otter, the avatar on Lennie’s device, asks him what “kind of people” he met when he was travelling. Lenny says: “Some Italians.” The otter (not coincidentally, a member of the weasel family) insists he said “Somalians.” Networked technologies, which are intrinsically indifferent to lines on a map, have become inquisitors with the arbitrary vigilance of a police state. 170

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LNWIs, protesting this particular police state, gather in Central Park, only to be mowed down and shed “real-time blood.” Unmoved, StaatlingWapachung’s guru Joshie rallies his staff to insure that the (profitable) dechronification of HNWIs goes forward: We have to remember that all those who died in Central Park . . . were, in the long run, ITP, Impossible to Preserve. Unlike our clients, their time on our planet was limited. We must remind ourselves of the Fallacy of Merely Existing, which restricts what we can do for a whole sector of people. Yet, even though we may absolve ourselves of responsibility, we, as a technological elite, can set a good example. I say to all the naysayers: The best is yet to come. . . . “We are the creative economy.”42

This brand of technological elitism, in fiction and outside its pages, poses as neutral. Using the logic of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” its proponents “absolve” themselves. Their argument is that technology, like all design, presents possibility. The problem is how quickly “possibilities” can be instantiated, shifting our expectations and changing our behaviors without asking us first or offering other options. Things and places that satisfied us once become tragically insufficient. We see this after the “Rupture,” the novel’s thinly veiled end-of-days “rapture,” which collapses the U.S. economy. In this state of emergency, it seems no one’s äppärät will connect, and as Lenny tells his diary: Four young people committed suicide in our building complexes, and two of them wrote suicide notes about how they couldn’t see a future without their äppäräti. One wrote, quite eloquently, about how he “reached out to life,” but found there only “walls and thoughts and faces,” which weren’t enough.43 An unamplified world is found wanting by the young, while the notso-young will do almost anything to live forever. But technology deals a death blow to both. If it doesn’t make people suicidal, it murders them. It seems that TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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Staatling-Wapachung’s “genocidal war on free radicals proved more damaging than helpful.”44 Blaming the technology’s side-affects, Joshie, now dying himself, says, “There was no way to innovate new technology in time to prevent complications arising from the application of the old.”45 It seems there rarely is, or the term “recall” would be more obscure in our shared technocratic vocabulary.

AaA In Shteyngart’s fictionalized forecast, things like äppäräti and Credit Poles sustain the illusion that the technological forces acting upon us can be identified and resisted. Tom McCarthy is far less sanguine about our chances of detecting, much less seeing, those forces. Like Shteyngart’s, McCarthy’s 2015 novel Satin

Smell of Data, Leanne Wijnsma, 2016 The Smell of Data fragrance flask emits an odor when an unprotected website or Wi-Fi network is detected on a digital device. The designers’ alert works on the same principle as the warning scent of gas – a scent added artificially to the otherwise odorless threat. Here, instead of protecting physical health, the designers are raising concerns about the health and

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security of our personal data. This revelatory information is increasingly vulnerable and increasingly available to strangers and dubious data collection entities – like the one portrayed in Super Sad True Love Story and Satin Island. Leanne Wijnsma and Froukje Tan have essentially added a burglar alarm to the intelligent spies we blithely take into our homes.

Island is a work of present tense futurism with a narrator who also works for a genius. Only this genius – referred to solely as Peyman – has subtler but far more grandiose ambitions than Shteyngart’s Joshie, who still thought in terms of a target audience. In fact, the narrator U. spends much of his time trying to come to terms with the ambiguous nature of his own work by sifting through Peyman’s pronouncements. Another concept that he put about a lot, that was much quoted: narrative. If I had, he’d say, to sum up, in a word, what we (the Company, that is) essentially do, I’d choose not consultancy or design or urban planning, but fiction.46 U. is an anthropologist, the Company’s in-house behavioralist. (In point of fact, anthropologists have been fixtures of design consultancies for decades now.) U.’s been charged with writing the Great Report, the “First and Last Word on our age.”47 Deploying hyperboles of territory and conquest, Peyman tells U.: Shifting tectonics, new islands and continents forming: we need a brand-new navigational manual. . . . I want it to come out of the Company. We’re the noblest savages of all. We’re sitting with our warpaint at the spot where all the rivers churn and flow together.48 Our anthropologist, however, is stymied by the infinite number of factors and actors that need to be included to fulfill his brief. He’s also finding it impossible to choose a means of categorizing whatever data he does collect. It would have to be the system of all systems now that things, places, people, flora, fauna, and insentient matter are all seen as interdependent. Of course, this has always been the case, but now those connections are made by artificial means (like the genetic manipulation of crops and animals), which increasingly override the systems of natural ecologies. Satin Island, however, is not about market calculations that can produce a new strain of fish, drain a desert of oil, or increase the numbers of satellites that litter outer space. It is about the power of the multifarious data streams that catch us in their undertow. The Company’s network architecture project – Koob-Sassen – is just that. TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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It was a huge, ambitious scheme . . . on the same scale as poldering and draining landmasses of thousands of square miles, or cabling and connecting an entire empire – and yet, . . . it would remain, in an everyday sense, to members of the general populace, invisible: there’d be no monuments, no edifices towering above cities, spanning countrysides, dotting coastlines and so on.49 Likewise, U. imagines himself invisible. He sees himself like a nocturnal worker whose efforts are “unnoticed by the populace-at-large, but on which the latter’s well-being, even survival, is dependent.”50 And this may well be the case, particularly now that we’re subject to random invasions by computer viruses and attacks on our digital identities. That’s not to mention the more banal but relentless intrusions and confusions of software upgrades. It also doesn’t help that the workings of technology, and the dynamics of its effects, are well beyond most people’s ability to see or imagine them. As Rainer Maria Rilke so presciently wrote: More than ever, Things we might experience are falling away, for what forcefully take their place are acts without symbol.51 Once meaning was designed into the forms of things; now it resides in flows and transactions. As U. sees it, his job as an anthropologist is to “put meaning back into it the day before,”52 to make prognoses through retrospection. But he suspects that this role is becoming obsolete. The idea of being able to configure knowledge after the fact of events – through study or reflection – is suddenly less appealing. Instead of combing the past for patterns, he and his fellow “U-thnographers” would “place themselves inside events as they unfolded . . . bringing its true substance to the fore at every instant, in the instant, not as future knowledge but as the instant itself.”53 The prospect leads U. to speculate: “What if, rather than it finding its shape, the age itself, in all its shape-shifting and multi-channeled incarnations, were to find and mold it?”54 “It” is the zeitgeist, the character of an age. “It” is also the prospect, if not the fact, of the singularity – a term of art for the point when artificial intelligence is so generalized throughout our existence that it exceeds human capacity. 174

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This is the point when technology ignores us, when we are effectively left behind in a purgatorial time capsule from which there is no escape. U. finally understands that this is the Company’s ambition. I started seeing the Project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous. In fact, down-right evil. Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing on virtually their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it… .55 He realizes that the Great Report that Peyman commissioned him to write, and which he cannot write, has actually and already been written. It lives in cyberspace, where unfathomable numbers of daily transactions (now the sum of life) cannot be erased, deleted, wiped, or trashed. Instead, “the networks of exchange within whose web we’re held, cradled, created”56 live in a perpetual present of data as entwined as Medusa’s snakes. Systems design is itself an exercise in what some would call design anthropology, but as it is generally practiced, it is one in which systems are visualized to expose relationships, not conceal them. In Satin Island, McCarthy recognizes the risks of systems that exceed our ability to know them; in other words, systems whose design even the experts cannot perceive, and by extension, alter. (We laypersons are already oblivious to, and largely ignorant of, the digital disciplines that order our lives, since most of us cannot read their codes. At best we recognize “click-bait” ads when we see them.) In Satin Island, McCarthy makes the case for knowing-as-seeing. Seeing, even if only in his dream of garbage strewn Satin Island, allows him to break through the artificial surfaces created by corporate capitalism – surfaces designed to gloss over the human murk and environmental muck beneath them. (U. is not indifferent to the fact that satin is a kind of woven silk that has a glossy surface and a dull back; his dreams are pretty transparent.) Even if only by inference, the novel makes an argument for design’s capacity to give perceptible form to information and the layers of its sources. But perhaps even more important than any particular artifact of explanation (e.g., a dimensional digital map) is the possibility that design can model a way of seeing critically. (For an example, see Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s Dear Data project illustrated here.) And TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS, DISRUPTIONS, AMPLIFICATIONS

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seeing critically (with no visual aids apart from his sight and insight) is what U. finds himself doing at the end of his odyssey. He’s at the tip of lower Manhattan watching a crowd waiting to board the Staten Island Ferry. As the concourse filled up with incoming passengers, our arrangement, its sculpted geometry, which had impressed itself upon me with such clarity and (at the same time) mystery for a few minutes, faded back into the general mass of bodies. It was still there, though, camouflaged or buried: none of us had moved.57

“A Week of Eavesdropping,” Dear Data, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, 2016 Information designers Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec call attention to the fact that data come from life. This is quite different from the scenarios of data-driven life that characterize Satin Island and Super Sad True Love Story. The data that Lupi and Posavec collect derives from everyday actions; their observations have no utility other than to themselves. For their project Dear Data, Lupi and Posavec spent a year

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keeping track of their everyday actions, noting, for example, how many times they opened a door, looked in a mirror, or, in this case, eavesdropped in a given week. In their analog data drawing project, colored marks, patterns, graphic legends make information more visceral. The entire project asks the question: What data are valuable and to whom are they valuable?

However fleeting in this instance, pattern recognition is essential for our survival. One could even say it is the basis of knowledge, as long as we don’t let those patterns form into inflexible narratives. McCarthy suggests that knowledge – read as curiosity or inquisitiveness, not facts – is being diminished and sometimes intentionally obscured by technology. In this light, Satin Island can be read as a case for devising means of pattern detection that defeat the pattern detectors; namely, the algorithms that know what we read, eat, wear, drive, look and listen to, and so much more. If we are to avoid being governed the bits and bytes of intangible, tyrannical systems, we need to be able to see their outlines and comprehend their dimensions. We need design to translate them and if necessary, behead Medusa again.

bBb This chapter has been a long argument against a purely instrumental view of technology. Producing “solutions” without considering their larger social and political ramifications is nothing short of unethical. Fortunately, design derives from a humanist tradition, which can mitigate this kind of tunnel vision. Designers are also increasingly adopting what is sometimes called a post-humanist perspective – but would be better called sustainable perspective, since the human factor is always present – that looks at design’s effects on the totality of the environment: the matrix of animals, plants, minerals, and other matter with which we coexist. For all this, there is no getting around the fact that design acts on the world; it is not a spectator sport. But it can be, and increasingly is, a mode of research and development. Design cannot afford to shy away from its conflicted nature, liberating and limiting at the same time. It cannot deny its essential impurity, even if “imperfect technology” has an oxymoronic ring. (And, of course, “less than perfect” doesn’t advertise very well.) The fact of the matter is that the notion of a perfect technology – the aforementioned singularity – remains the Achilles heel of design. As authors in this chapter make clear, accidents of discovery and loss are inseparable from technology. Recognizing the fault lines in the things we depend on can only increase our attention to the human foibles designed into them.

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1 Danilo Kiš, Gardens, Ashes, trans. William J. Hannaher (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 22. 2 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, vol. 2 of The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Hubert Sisson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Canto XVI, lines 91–105. 3 Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way: Cities of the Plain, vol. 2 of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), 133–34. 4 Ibid., 134. 5 Ibid., 134–5. 6 Ibid., 135. 7 That said, scorn for the messenger seems a bit premature; until the day comes when all technology is implanted subcutaneously, we will still depend on the shells of our devices. Their forms will still have power. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 136.

10 Novelist Tom McCarthy offers evidence that the relationship between death and technology is not simply a matter of metaphor but design intent. In his essay “Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard,” he points out that: “Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus” (Tom McCarthy, “Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard,” The Guardian, July 24, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology). 11 Proust, The Guermantes Way, 137. CREDIT LINE: Excerpt(s) from REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, VOLUME 2: THE GUERMANTES WAY & CITIES OF THE PLAIN by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin,
translation copyright © 1981 by Penguin Random House LLC and Chatto & Windus. Used by
permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 12 Franz Kafka, “My Neighbor,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Collected Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 392. 13 Ibid., 393.

14 John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio,” The New Yorker (May 17, 1947), 28. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Ibid., 30. 18 Ibid., 33. 19 Ibid. 20 William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 10. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 Ibid., 39–40. 23 Ibid., 51. 24 Ibid., 253. 25 Orhan Pamuk did, in fact, create a museum and called it The Museum of Innocence. Filled with the kinds of objects that his protagonist collects in the novel – memorabilia of 1970s Turkey and a love story, the museum is in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of the Beyoğlu district in Istanbul. It opened to the public in 2012. 26 Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence: A Novel, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 283. 27 Ibid., 286. 28 Ibid., 287. 29 Ibid., 287–8. 30 Ibid., 288. 31 Ibid., 287. 32 Ibid., 288. 33 Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1990), 17. 34 Ibid., 13. 35 Ibid., 4–5. 36 Ibid., 65–8n. 1. 37 Ibid., 59. 38 Ibid., 41. 39 Ibid., 63.

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40 Ibid., 87. 41 Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2010), 37. 42 Ibid., 181. 43 Ibid., 270. 44 Ibid., 329. 45 Ibid., 61. 46 Tom McCarthy, Satin Island: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 48. 47 Ibid., 61. 48 Ibid., 62. 49 Ibid., 29. 50 Ibid., 34. 51 Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy,” in Selected Poems, trans. Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland, ed. Robert Vilain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 171. 52 McCarthy, Satin Island, 35. 53 Ibid., 78. 54 Ibid., 76. 55 Ibid., 134. 56 Ibid., 133. 57 Ibid., 188.

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Simulation of bio-detecting floor, Tashia Tucker, 2018 The future of cleaning will be increasingly automated. Automated not just by the roving robotic disks that vacuum homes today, but also by an emerging order of technology that is a hybrid of artificial intelligence and biologically driven operations. Case in point is this prototype of a smart floor: it is embedded with synthetic bacteria that will eat the dirt on and under our feet so we don’t track it inside. Designed by Tashia Tucker as part of a project called Synthetic Biology: The Future of Adaptive Living Environments, the floor changes color as the bacteria find

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and devour toxins.1 Tucker’s perpetual cleaning system might render Lydia Davis’s “housekeeping observation” moot, unless, of course, it turns out that someone or something has to clean up (or under) the bacteria-riddled floor after it’s gorged itself on filth. 1 Alyn Griffiths, “Bio-Surfaces Containing ‘Hacked’ Bacteria Could Clean Your Feet as You Walk on Them,” Dezeen, November 13, 2013, https://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/13/ bio-surfaces-containing-hacked-bacteria-tashia-tucker/.

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Domesticity: Cleaning, Mending, Caring Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean. — “Housekeeping Observation,” Lydia Davis1

Hinting at the chore that awaits, or more likely, questioning if it needs doing at all, the poet reminds us how paradoxical it seems that we care for things that have been designed to care for us. We understand the idea of caring for people, but are less inclined to extend that compassion to presumably independent objects. After all, the floor is meant to support us. The regularity of its surface is meant to offer reassurance that we are on protected ground, safe from nature. But what is dirt except domesticated earth? In anticipation of its eventual cleaning, Davis shows us that design – here, a floor – is never immune from interference. Mud from outside or dust from inside will inevitably compromise its originally pristine state. True, we could say that most things designed are only completed in use. Patina, scratches, and mends can add to an object’s charm. By the same token, we could say that those self-same objects are also depleted in everyday usage. Either through active abuse or passive neglect, dirt diminishes. The aversion to grime – and the need to expel any signs of it before it devalues our things and ourselves – is a remnant of primeval survival mechanisms that equated foreign matter with disease and death. While the instinctual avoidance of filth is still with us, dirt and its more substantive counterpart “mess” have been domesticated. Their corrosive effects have been mitigated by design, lowering the threat level to manageable. We tend to credit tools and appliances with these small victories, forgetting that someone has to buy them and activate them, if only to change their batteries. This is why any discussion of design as “caring for” – here, the modest objects that make housework less 181

back-breaking – must necessarily include those who do the caring. The initial acts of care may be done by those who design the tools and appliances that keep a house clean; however, designers’ effectiveness in making work less onerous is complicated by dynamics of power within which those tools and appliances do their work. The actors we are concerned with here –the housemaids, laborers, tailors, cleaners, and virtually anyone who picks up after someone else – variously contend with that power dynamic by becoming authorities on domestic improvisation. And as they know all too well, the state of affairs we call “domesticity,” with all the comfort it implies, is no small production. It requires a theater, props, and actors, performing under different economies of time and different conceptions of order and hygiene, not to mention an assortment of cultural assumptions tied to race, gender, and class. This is the complex matrix within which we keep house, seeking some measure of equilibrium with what comes in and out according to our tolerances. That it is done with varying degrees of comfort and discomfort is born out in the poetry and novels of domesticity considered here. As in previous chapters, I draw no stylistic or ideological boundaries around the things I treat as design. I am more concerned with how domesticity is produced and maintained – in other words, actively designed and redesigned – and to what costs and satisfactions. Home may be found in suburban houses, apartments, villas, bungalows, even in the clothing that shelters bodies. What is remarkable is how quickly we tailor them to ourselves and make them “ours,” regardless of how long or short a time we plan to be in them. So in addition to considering the actions of domestic care as actions of designing and redesigning the everyday, this chapter also looks at the objects of care themselves. We take it for granted that a table supports our dinners, but are annoyed when its aging, uneven legs begin to wobble. The bud vase that passively ornaments a shelf astonishes when it shatters after contact with an errant elbow. The bed that offers respite becomes a source of minor aggravation when the sheets need changing. The dress that flattered causes consternation when it no longer fits. It is precisely these kinds of irritants that account for an entire industry of human servants, whose job it is to engage with our material servants – the tools of maintenance like brooms and dust mops but also the things maintained for a home to stay a home, namely its furnishings. In spite of (and sometimes because of) our attention to its care, the domestic arena is fraught with the tensions that arise between a home’s 182

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occupants, animate and inanimate, served and servile. This intimate web of relations arises, for example, when a knickknack is broken in cleaning or a bedroom suite put up for sale after a marital rift. Complicating the matter further is the fact that people and their possessions aren’t perceived to be on an equal footing. Despite the fact that so many things of the home are integral to a person’s sense of self, an imbalance persists between the value we ascribe to the living and to the inert, no matter their codependence. Furthermore, this imbalance is mirrored in the hierarchical relationship between those who clean and those who have it done for them. Intimately linked with the cleansers and appliances they work with, housewives, maids, and domestic workers are too often treated little better than things themselves. This chapter attempts to mitigate that by upending a different hierarchy, that of the professional over the untutored designer. Here the work of repairing, cleaning, sorting, and disposing is encompassed as designing, at the very least these are acts of redesign, of reconfiguration. Likewise, I consider the artifacts and rooms where those activities of care take place to have been designed no matter how distant a table, carpet, or a cup might be from its first appearance in a studio or factory. Each of these things can be traced to an idea made into an object (or system of things), which is, after all, the very essence of design. The fact that others have, and will, modify things like these is not a disqualifying factor; nor is the fact that these things (especially those we live with everyday) are often unremarkable. Indeed, it may take a moment of rupture – a breakage or a loss – for the dormant power of things-in-place to fully emerge.2 While this could be thought to be true of any object, I would argue that there is a different register of awareness when household things are breached. This newly attuned awareness all but vibrates through this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping: Sylvie and I (I think that night we were almost a single person) could not leave that house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, like a brain, its relics to be pawed and sorted and parceled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fingerbone. Imagine the blank light of Judgment falling on you suddenly. It would be like that. For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value, like the dim coil of DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood, which was kept in a hatbox on top of the wardrobe, along with my mother’s gray purse. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned.3 This scene takes place at the climax of the book. The young narrator has enjoyed a rare degree of freedom growing up, thanks to the variously inattentive adults in her life. The most recent is her Aunt Sylvie for whom the conventions of housekeeping are completely foreign. We enter at the point when the neighbors decide that they can no longer stand this state of affairs. The righteous of Fingerbone cannot fathom raising children in a home where almost nothing has been thrown away, so the narrator and her younger sister are being resettled elsewhere. However, the campaign to break up the family won’t be complete unless the house is also purged. Its dereliction must be confronted if the situation is to be cleansed of amorality. Not only is the narrator recording an act of domestic censure, she is also describing a rape. This particular kind of defilement, simultaneously of things and women, also has to do with its physical and psychological immediacy – a quality described by philosopher Gaston Bachelard, when he writes about the critical role that furnishings play in our efforts to imagine the self. Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these “objects” and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy.4 Robinson records the devastating impact of breaching that intimacy. She recognizes the sacral quality of things we consider personal – a quality that begs, if not to be preserved, then at least to be respected. But in Fingerbone, order and cleanliness, and more pointedly, disorder and filth, have become synonymous. Thus, the offending evidence of the girls’ amoral lives can only be decontaminated by removal and repossession. But rather than submit to the townsfolk’s terms, the narrator and her aunt immolate the bodies of the hatbox, the lock of hair, the gray purse, along with the rest of the house. 184

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THE HELP AND THE PROBLEM OF HELPING

The existential contest of wills that Robinson describes is also endemic to more familiar types of house cleaning. Dusting, mopping, vacuuming, scouring, and countless other domestic acts are, more often than not, conducted by people whose lives are molded (for better and for worse) by our willingness to abdicate the care of intimate things to others. It is this kind of delegation that makes a citizen a maid, a writer a cleaning lady, a woman a housewife, and a homemaker an economist. Their labor is as much about a tug of war between identities as it is about the work itself. These are tensions that need and find their outlets. Sometimes they take the form of sabotage or of outright rebellion; and other times, albeit rarely, they are released in a qualified state of joy, as is the case in Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Domestic Work, 1937.” All week she’s cleaned someone else’s house, stared down her own face in the shine of copperbottomed pots, polished wood, toilets she’d pull the lid to – that look saying Let’s make a change, girl. But Sunday mornings are hers – church clothes starched and hanging, a record spinning on the console, the whole house dancing. She raises the shades, washes the rooms in light, buckets of water, Octagon soap. Cleanliness is next to godliness . . .

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Windows and doors flung wide, curtains two-stepping forward and back, neck bones bumping in the pot, a choir of clothes clapping on the line. Nearer my God to Thee . . . She beats time on the rugs, blows dust from the broom like dandelion spores, each one a wish for something better.5 Set against the not-so-distant history of slavery (in 1937, really only a generation or two behind), the woman Trethewey portrays is particular to the American South but she is also a surrogate for countless other women around the world. These are women whose work effectively compresses their private lives into a single day of the week and who spend that day cleaning, too – a condition that still prevails in some parts of the world. (Trethewey wrote these lines in the year 2000.) Cleaning, however, is different on Sunday. As the poem’s title tells us, this is work that is domesticated in the fullest sense. Trethewey’s housemaid makes it her own, a liberty not permitted between Monday and Saturday. Tethered to another person’s domestic rhythms so that she can make a living (indeed, live), this woman enjoys a temporary reprieve from the usual order of things. Her curtains sway, her rugs become drums, and her broom a wind instrument. Floors are scrubbed floors and laundry is washed with an energy that by rights should fuel larger possibilities. Those possibilities are, of course, thwarted, not just by the nature of her employment, but also by an entire system of oppression. Yet, she refuses subjugation by seizing what control she can, when she can – eliciting a different range of sounds from the very same instruments that identify her as a domestic.

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Toilet seat guitar, Paweł Romańczuk, Małe Instrumenty, 2012 This is one of the various and sundry improvised instruments designed, made, and played by Paweł Romańczuk, leader of the Polish musical group Małe Instrumenty (Tiny Instruments). Unlike the toy pianos the group often uses for their performances, this guitar is a standard size, but completely irregular in that its body is made of a toilet seat. Natasha Trethewey’s housekeeper beats out rhythms with

brooms and rug beaters in the privacy of her home and is just as much an improviser as Romańczuk. But he goes a step further with his found objects. Through a process of collage and sound engineering, he makes them functional instruments for professional concerts and recordings of compositions ranging from those of Frédéric Chopin to his own.

Such tactics are, of course, familiar to workers everywhere who refuse to surrender themselves completely to their circumscribed roles. In Lucia Berlin’s short story “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” freedom isn’t exclusive to Sunday; it is stolen here and there during the course of the week. Hers is a story of small acts of independence exercised on the job in the more contemporary context of the 1970s. Now the work of cleaning other people’s homes and things is a good deal more transactional, but there’s still a divide between the cleaning woman and the lady of the house. One cleans, one pays. However, the distinction is more economic than social, as Berlin’s narrator is a writer. She is more worldly than her employers and has a level of education virtually unknown to her peers. (She embellishes on a hard luck story to be accepted by the older cleaning women, who DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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have a hard time accepting her because she’s educated.) Though there’s no doubt that she really does need to clean. Apart from writing, she has no other skills. The setting for the story is Oakland, California. Full-time maids have been replaced by part-time cleaning women in all but the wealthiest homes. The relative job security of a virtually indentured servant like Trethewey’s has been supplanted by the insecurity of multiple gigs, each of which comes with its own idiosyncrasies. The tenuous nature of household employment where dismissals can come without notice is the manual’s raison d’être. But Berlin’s instruction manual is not prepared by an employment agency. Her protocols and admonitions are for her sisters in service. She offers maxims on how to keep the good jobs and how to avoid the worst – and most valuable of all, she shares her passive-aggressive coping skills for dealing with those in between. These tactics are effectively the only kind open to low-wage workers. They are especially useful to cleaning women, who labor under yet another burden: the presumption of guilt. Despite the fact that they are actually invited into other people’s homes, they are pre-judged as thieves, who subtract not just dust but valuable things. Berlin’s response isn’t denial; she never resorts to defense. Instead she opts for a sneaky kind of offense: Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays. Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is always to add a few pennies, even a dime.6

She also makes it a point to note where valuables are kept, so when the flustered woman of the house comes “running in all puffy and red-faced” fearing they’ve been stolen, she can tell her to look, “under your pillow, behind the avocado toilet.”7 She does, however, take a bottle of sesame seeds from a Mrs. Jessel who orders one every time she makes sesame chicken, reducing her stash of fifteen bottles to fourteen. The point is to take things that won’t be missed, a few sleeping pills for example. In fact, at a certain moment she realizes she’s amassed 188

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thirty pills from her various employers, noting that collectively they “have enough uppers or downers to put a Hell’s Angel away for twenty years.”8 Then there is the matter of how to deal with the awkwardness of receiving things. Berlin advises, “Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.”9 Typical gifts, more accurately hand-me-downs, are single earrings, torn bras, and hangers – incomplete things for lesser women. In contrast, the light-fingered cleaning woman’s booty is likely to be made up of more personal things like nail polish and perfume. In a sense, Berlin’s is a service design manual avant la lettre, written when the profession of service design was still in its embryonic state. Though economists chart the rise of the service economy from 1950 onwards, designers in the 1970s, the time of Berlin’s story, would have been more preoccupied by the artifacts of the home – vacuum cleaners and the like – than the services rendered in the home, particularly if those services were done by women.10 But if we accept the basic definition of service design as the improvement of relations between providers of services and the people who use them – via the reconfiguration of systems, communications, and the materials – then certainly Berlin’s cleaning lady is in the vanguard of a nascent field, albeit one she’s never heard of. The fact of writing a “manual” puts her in the company of the contemporary systems experts she parodies – experts who saw service design as a matter of bridging, but certainly not flattening, hierarchies in the workplace.11 In Berlin’s world, those hierarchies are unquestioned. It doesn’t matter that the provider (the maid) knows more about the nature of her service than the client (the lady of the house). The cleaning lady still doesn’t accrue any stature from her expertise; that remains with the “lady” who pays her. It is this imbalance of power and knowledge that leads Berlin’s character to resort to subversive tactics. Among other things, cleaning women have to deal with the inevitable assumption of stinting on the job. To forestall being accused of yet another form of thieving, Berlin advises:

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Let them know you are thorough. The first day put all the furniture back wrong…five to ten inches off, or facing the wrong way. When you dust, reverse the Siamese cats, put the creamer to the left of the sugar. Change the toothbrushes all around. . . . Doing everything wrong not only reassures them you are thorough, it gives them the chance to be assertive and a “boss.” Most American women are very uncomfortable about having servants. They don’t know what to do when you are there.12 Though they would never come out and say so, the ladies of the house are also ambivalent about work breaks. To avoid the appearance of robbing a client of time, Berlin’s protagonist resorts surreptitious techniques for rest. In one house, she takes her breaks lying under the piano, dust rag in hand, just in case her smokescreen of vacuum cleaner noise doesn’t work. The doubled functions of the rag and the appliance mirror the hyphenated identity of a cleaning-woman. A few moments of daydreaming flat on her back take on the guise of work, done by a woman in the guise of a maid. This, however, is not a matter of a writer using the cover of an apron to research her story, but rather a woman who does two jobs: writing and cleaning. The job of the manual is to transgress the protocols that divide them.

dDd The protagonist of Magda Szabó’s 1987 novel The Door has no need to resort to the covert in order to be herself. It would never cross her mind. Emerence Szeredás is only nominally a cleaning lady and cook. The plot is set in the postwar years when the savagery of Nazi rule has been replaced by communism – certainly a less terrifying regime but still a highly monitored existence. In this setting, Emerence is certainly not a servant, but not because she is a champion of the proletariat. She resists any and all sources of authority that might impinge on her autonomy, starting with the terms of her employment. The story opens when a married couple, both writers, asks Emerence to work for them. Tellingly, it is she who asks them for references. It is their temperaments, habits, and hygiene – not hers – that will determine whether they are suitable employers. Once engaged – “hired” would be too limiting to describe this social contract – Emerence exerts the kind of control usually thought to be the sole 190

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prerogative of the lady of the house. So perhaps not surprisingly, it is the lady of the house who struggles the most with Emerence. Free to write again after the end of government’s ban on her work, she’s hired a housekeeper to have more time to work. But with Emerence, the division of labor comes with an emotional tax. The harder the well-meaning narrator tries to understand the person she’s invited into her home, the more damage she does. There are endless hurt feelings stemming from the “lady” writer’s efforts to alternately confront and placate Emerence. In the process, domestic power relations are almost completely inverted, as the two women become increasingly dependent on each other. Emerence assumes it is within her remit to adopt a more maternal role, dispensing or withholding cooking and cleaning as a way to convey her approval or approbation. A perceived slight will keep her away for days. And when she does come to work, which is most of the time, the narrator registers her disdain for reading and writing, or any endeavor that doesn’t require physical exertion. She dusts the writers’ books with the same attention she gave their “candleholders or matchboxes. They were all the same to her, misdemeanours that might be overlooked, like eating or drinking to excess.”13 There is, of course, some political logic to her status in a socialist state, and not only in its dismissal of intellectuals. When she thought about it at all, Emerence viewed their work as selfish. (Though, she didn’t consider them a threat to the state with which she had no relationship in any case.) More germane to the postwar socialist context is the fact that various and sundry responsibilities for caretaking – whether of children, the home, or the streets – were redistributed to dilute class distinctions. (In Russia and many Iron Curtain countries including Hungary, the custom of Subbotnik [Saturday] required ordinary citizens to spend part of their weekends cleaning up their neighborhoods.14) Even so, Emerence cannot be reduced to either an ideal worker or a class-bound maid. As her employer (or is it her charge?) observes, “From the very first it was apparent to me that she had a sister in the Scriptures, the biblical Martha.”15 Cleaning is her vocation. The old woman worked like a robot. She lifted unliftable furniture without the slightest regard for herself. There was something superhuman, almost alarming, in her physical strength and her capacity for work, all the more so because in fact she had no need to take so much on. . . . When she found herself with free time, she had no idea where to begin.16 DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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If designing involves varying measures of control dedicated to aesthetic ends, Emerence elevates her profession to that of the authorship of the everyday. Sometimes her power is felt in her relationship to the home itself; sometimes through artifacts of peculiar provenance that she brings in to the home. The former – the writers’ house – is a particularly thorny issue. Much of the tension between the narrator and her housekeeper stems from the fact that while Emerence comes and goes as she pleases in the writers’ home, no one gets past the door to Emerence’s house. “And yet, even though she allowed no-one within her four walls, news raced to her door. The front porch of her flat was like a telex centre. Everything about everyone was reported there – death, scandal, glad tidings, catastrophe.”17 The “door” of the book’s title is quite literally the guardian of the housekeeper’s autonomy. Her employers’ doors offer them no such protection. Emerence has no compunction about disturbing the private space of their home – a fact that becomes unsettlingly apparent when they discover the following oddities in their house: a painting in a damaged frame, later discovered to be of some worth; one half of a pair of patent-leather boots; a stuffed falcon clinging to a branch; a pot for heating water adorned with a ducal coronet; and the make-up box of a former actress . . . . a garden gnome and the somewhat tattered statue of a brown dog.18 Too proud to actually present these gifts, Emerence had carefully placed them around the library before the pair woke up. A crowned water heater displaces a copy of Ulysses and a tattered stuffed falcon takes over their mantelpiece. Each item is shown to its best advantage – in Emerence’s considered opinion. But when the narrator’s husband discovers the additions to their rooms, he becomes enraged, going so far as to question “the point of living if such things were possible – if a godless garden gnome could take over his rug, next to half a pair of cavalry boots with spurs shaped like eagle’s wings?”19 He is describing the violence of things that enter the body of a home uninvited. They disturb the peace of mind of a man who prefers that domestic things recede into the background so he can concentrate on his affairs. As a writer he abhors distraction; as the nominal head of the house, he resents decisions made on his behalf. 192

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He sees Emerence’s gifts as damaged and damaging, and not because they are second-hand, but because they are too conspicuous and obtrusive.20 They are as obstinately present as she is. Not coincidentally, these oddball objects – which by now have put the house under virtual siege – were retrieved from the ritual neighborhood junk clearance, yet another form of housekeeping. By Emerence’s lights, the items she salvaged were not junk but treasures, and more importantly, tangible tokens of affection. The couple was used to her erratic gestures of kindness like an unexpected cake, but they had always been ephemeral gifts. This time was different; these things could not be consumed like food. They were objects that had no relationship to consumption at all. (As such they are also, perhaps, a tacit critique of the bourgeois tendencies that were creeping into socialism and the capitalist acquisitiveness that would begin to flourish in 1989, two years after the novel was first published.)

Hippopotamus, Animal Bowls, Hella Jongerius Like Emerence’s gifts to the writers, the hippopotamus in the bowl, designed by Hella Jongerius for Nymphenburg Porcelain, is plainly out of place. The customary function of a bowl as a vehicle for food is interrupted when Jongerius transforms it into a platform for a figurine. Likewise, Emerence’s patent leather boot and broken plaster dog disrupt the functioning of the writers’ home. The parallel

doesn’t end there, however. Jongerius literalizes the “animal bowls” of pet stores with a child’s fairy tale version of a hippo. Emerence’s offerings were also juvenile; not because she was sentimental but because she intended them to please the writers she thought of as children, given that they never did anything she could recognize as adult work.

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It soon becomes clear that most of the gifts are not, in fact, meant for the offended husband. They are intended for the narrator, who, in turn, attempts to accommodate them within her own admittedly eccentric décor by moving the gifts to places where they might seem less out of place. The patent leather boot becomes an umbrella stand; the garden gnome is put near a tub of lard in the kitchen, whose walls are clad in oilcloth patterned with squirrels, geese, and other poultry. However, the “writer-lady” cannot abide the chipped statue of the dog. She explains to Emerence that it is not a work of art but a piece of kitsch. Outraged, Emerence retorts that the dog is no less fake than their lion’s head doorknocker, and that its chip is no excuse for rejecting it. After all, she points out, they keep broken bits of pottery from Athens under glass. At this point, Emerence also discovers that her other finds have been rearranged. Seeing that they are now all but camouflaged – and to her mind, deprived of their uniqueness – she quits on the spot. Unfazed, the husband declares to her nephew that he won’t have his home filled with her tasteless rubbish. To which, the nephew responds, “Her taste is impeccable, doctor. . . . I thought you would have noticed that. It’s just that when she goes looking for presents for the two of you she doesn’t buy for grown-ups. She chooses for two young children.”21 And much like two young children, they are hapless without her. Emerence brought order to their lives, albeit on her terms. When the narrator finally works up her courage to ask her to come back, Emerence agrees – but only after extracting a promise that she can place the chipped canine statue wherever she likes within their home. She returns and promptly smashes the dog on the floor. The catharsis clears the air and allows Emerence to resume her place as their self-appointed guardian. What cannot be absolved, however, is the damage done by helping. This is the narrator’s tragic flaw; she refuses to respect Emerence’s will to live and die on her own terms. It is also arguably Emerence’s tragic flaw; she is too proud to accept the care of others. That is her exclusive right, a right that is taken from her after a long bout of illness and isolation. Paralyzed by a stroke, she can no longer walk and no longer work, nor guard her biggest secret: the priceless antiques given to her in thanks for saving the life of a Jewish child. The thought of Emerence suffering alone is so unbearable to the narrator that she cons her into opening her door so that her nephew and doctor can 194

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take her (against her wishes) to the hospital. Open for the first time in memory, the house stinks of cat piss and the fetid smells of a woman too ill to even clean herself. Now it is Emerence’s home which needs cleaning; more than that, it has to be fumigated and her furnishings have to be burned. The shame is unbearable, more deadly than any physical disease. A suite of late eighteenth-century furnishings, which Emerence had planned to give to the narrator, is rotten with wormwood. It turns to dust at a touch. The death of Emerence’s material legacy signals her own. Without the things behind her door – without the things of purely personal value that confirm her personhood beyond that of a maid – she ceases to exist.

FROM HOUSEWIFERY TO THE RATIONALIZED HOME

Housewife. Half thing, half woman – but “thing” first. Perhaps this is not so different from “garbage man,” which by now has been replaced by the more dignified “sanitation engineer.” Except that “housewife” is one word, not two. Anne Sexton’s 1962 poem “Housewife” reveals the visceral costs masked by that inequitable semantic union. Some women marry houses. It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements. The walls are permanent and pink. See how she sits on her knees all day, faithfully washing herself down. Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah into their fleshy mothers. A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.22 Anne Sexton describes an organic symbiosis in which wife, house, and mother become one. The identification of the body of the woman with the body of the house is total. Sexton gives us a specifically female space, both sustained by its working organs – heart, liver, bowels, and skin – and vitiated by assault. In DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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Sexton’s portrait of a housewife, the potential for a double life of the sort that a wage-earning cleaning lady might manage is not allowed or even alluded to. (At least in principle, cleaning ladies can also be writers.) Here, issues of race and class are evaded, but those that flow from biology persist. Wife and mother share the same flesh. Both are defined by their cavities; and by extension, the home is sexualized but not cared for. The house and the wife are dirty; they require “washing down.” This is housecleaning as perversion and a dimension of the systemic, unthinking degradation of women that was the flashpoint for feminists like Betty Friedan, who published The Feminine Mystique just one year later in 1963. At this point in time, no one would think to look under the dirt where, as Davis observes, everything in essence is clean. A fierce if all too brief flare in twentieth-century feminist literature, Sexton’s poem exposes the fault lines buried in nineteenth-century feminists’ efforts to dignify housework. Among the various American reform movements that called for simpler ways of living in the home like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond Project, there were influential publications by women and for women, specifically devoted to housekeeping. These manuals were less concerned with women’s personal autonomy (or lack thereof) than they were with bolstering their authority within the home. (By authority, I mean control over the seemingly endless scope of the job in increasingly servant-less homes.) Neither Sexton’s painful eros or Berlin’s vaguely sexualized sloth were remotely imaginable in the mid-nineteenth century when these guides were written. Nonetheless, the seeds of their discontent took root in them, despite the fact that their authors believed they were increasing a woman’s satisfaction with her life and not limiting it.

EeE One of these prescriptive works is worth special consideration, as it helped lay the groundwork for twentieth-century literature on domestic engineering. Written in 1841 during the relatively early years of the American Republic, the work of Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) played a critical role in the formulation of the ideal domestic citizen. Not quite independent but not completely subservient either, she is a product of the semantics and exhortations that comprised these reformers’ fiction of the model housewife. 196

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Pulse, Deepdesign, Raffaella Mangiarotti and Matteo Bazzicalupo, 2001 Pulse is a prototype for a washing machine that was commissioned by Whirlpool Europe. Designers Raffaella Mangiarotti and Matteo Bazzicalupo of Deepdesign chose this womb-like form to house a membrane that swells and contracts to simulate the hand washing of laundry. (Their design was based on research that showed that it is the most effective way to clean clothes.) With a doubled reference to the body, the gently curved Pulse takes its shape

from the female form and its performance from uterine contractions. It also references women’s bodies by honoring the laundresses whose hands laboriously did (and in many countries still do) squeeze and wring out heavy, water-drenched clothes. In this way, Deepdesign’s work both perpetuates and ameliorates Sexton’s poetic consummation of a marriage, of a woman, and of a house.

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“The chief cause of woman’s disabilities and sufferings, that women are not trained, as men are, for their peculiar duties.”23 So begins the Beecher sisters’ American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. Here, “Science” and “Economical” immediately signal the authors’ conviction that the chores of housework are less their concern than the business of their administration. Furthermore, their convictions flow from a “cause” – the cause of a young nation. And if there were any doubts about the civic virtue of housekeeping, they are dispelled by the dedication that prefaces the book: TO THE WOMEN OF AMERICA, IN WHOSE HANDS REST THE REAL DESTINIES OF THE REPUBLIC, AS MOULDED BY THE EARLY TRAINING AND PRESERVED AMID THE MATURE INFLUENCES OF HOME, THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.24 By invoking the language of science and patriotism, the sisters gave dignity to the running of the household, if not the menial work itself. It is telling that the Beechers never mention things like the messiness of kneading dough, the exertion of scouring pots, and the eye strain of sewing a family’s clothes. As one might expect from an incipiently modern perspective, it is the product, the clean house – not the process, the physical exertions of cleaning – that matters most. It is as if the act of cataloging discrete tasks like splitting logs, milking cows, or the care of rooms would of itself bring order to the house. How those chores were to be done may have been understood by their readers, but, in any case, the authors thought it important to subordinate the manual aspects of labor to their organization. Indeed, the sisters’ remedy for the “problem of labor [was] the acuteness of a disciplined brain.”25 Furthermore, cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and arrangement they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less expense of time and strength than others.26

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Interestingly these maxims appear in the chapter on “The Care of Servants” – “Care,” here, synonymous with “training.” Though despite their mechanistic characterization of servants as a “labor saving institution,” the Beechers do not argue for a complete separation of the realms of mistress and servant. This is partly because it belies the aspirational dimension of American equality, which, in theory, holds that a servant can become a mistress herself, and partly because the authors believe that housework cannot be delegated properly if it isn’t part of a woman’s experience. For “few servants will make a bed properly, without much attention from the mistress of the family; and every young woman who expects to have a household of her own to manage should be able to do it well herself, and to instruct others in doing it.”27 What follows then are the sisters’ instructions – as earnest as Berlin’s were caustic – in housekeeping protocols from the correct alignment of pillowcases to the airing and turning of mattresses, all, of course, without mention of the physical stamina needed to do so. Like many of the admonitions in American Woman’s Home, these “principles” of bed-making speak to a qualified (more accurately, embryonic) feminism that doesn’t so much liberate women as promote them to informed household supervisors. Likewise, the authors are ambivalent about just how much women should be educated in academic subjects. On the one hand, they assert that “every woman has rights as a human being which belong to no sex, and ought to be as freely conceded to her as if she were a man.”28 On the other hand, they caution against the “anti-domestic” character of the education of girls, who are now routinely taught subjects like mathematics. As the result, the young women in some of our country towns are, in mental culture, much in advance of the males of the same household; but with this comes a physical delicacy, the result of an exclusive use of the brain and a neglect of the muscular system, with great inefficiency in practical domestic duties.29 The result is that they are not equipped to educate their servants; or if they have no servants, they are not prepared to take on the household duties that inevitably await them after their education. A woman’s destiny is never questioned; hence, the need for American Woman’s Home and its daunting litany of domestic responsibilities.30 DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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The authors not only offer sage advice for coping with the complexities of running a house; they also offer propositions for its improvement, just as a designer might today. (It is not incidental that Catherine Beecher was a selfstyled architect, who drew spatial plans to facilitate the “economizing [of] time, labor, and expense by the close packing of conveniences.”31) They write: How would it simplify the burdens of the American housekeeper to have washing and ironing day expunged from her calendar! How much more neatly and compactly could the whole domestic system be arranged! If all the money that each separate family spends on the outfit and accommodations for washing and ironing, on fuel, soap, starch, and the other requirements, were united in a fund to create a laundry for every dozen families, one or two good women could do in first rate style what now is very indifferently done by the disturbance and disarrangement of all other domestic processes in these families. Whoever sets neighborhood-laundries on foot will do much to solve the American housekeeper’s hardest problem.32 Ironically, this actually would come to pass in the form of steam-powered commercial laundries in the 1890s, only to be made obsolete by the design and marketing of motorized home washers in the 1920s.33 However, the economies of time and energy afforded to women who had their own washers and dryers were soon consumed by other forms of housework. There was now more time for cooking, childcare, and serving meals.34 (As many have observed, the only way to spend less time on housework, apart from hiring someone else to do it, was (and is) to get a job outside of the home altogether.)

fFf Roughly a century later in 1948, the distinctly missionary tone of these proto-feminist Christian authors would be translated into a secular and more masculine context under the rubric of scientific management. In Cheaper by the Dozen, we see how this subset of what is now called domestic engineering is put into practice at home by a husband and wife team of professional industrial engineers: Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth. The autobiographical novel was 200

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written by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, two of Frank and Lillian’s twelve children. (Hence, the title.) Most of the book is a retelling of episodes in which the children are called on to test (and usually prove) the efficacy of their parents’ systems. The Gilbreth sibling authors, enthralled to their ingenuity, describe their home as “a sort of school for scientific management and the elimination of wasted motions – or ‘motion study,’ as Dad and Mother named it.”35 The inclusion of “Mother” is exceptional, however. Though she was the first of the pioneers of industrial management to receive a doctoral degree, a psychologist as well as an efficiency expert, who outlived her husband by forty-eight years and continued to work, Cheaper by the Dozen focuses almost exclusively on the father. The authors’ bias has the salutary effect of normalizing a male presence in the usually segregated realm of the home, but at the same time it takes the female presence for granted. This is family history written as light comedy. How else to understand why a man would bother with the workings of the house? No doubt, much of the book’s appeal centered around its role reversal. The progressive, well-meaning, often bungling, and larger-than-life father manages their home life with work charts for the children, a bidding system for additional chores, and regular family roll calls. He isn’t really interested in housework per se. He’s only interested in how he can reduce it. The children were both the subjects and the objects of their father’s time motion studies. Among other things, he filmed them washing dishes to see if they could reduce their movements and get the job done faster. He codified each unit of motion or thought involved in virtually any kind of task – searching, finding, loading, and so on – as a Therblig. (Therblig is Gilbreth spelled backwards with the “th” transposed.) In the factory setting, the point was to deconstruct the processes of work for gains in efficiency. This would be done by reducing the time taken to perform each Therblig. Perhaps certain parts to be assembled could be painted red and others green, so as to reduce the time required for “search” and “find.” Perhaps the parts cold be moved closer to the object being assembled, so as to reduce the time required for “transport loaded.”36 The Gilbreths’ confidence in applying their theories to the home reflected their view – most especially Frank’s – that the home was something like a machine DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra Kjøkkenet), Bent Hamer, 2003 Set in the post-war boom years of the 1950s, Kitchen Stories is a critique of time motion studies that Lillian Gilbreth would have found sympathetic. After studying how women worked in their kitchens, observers like the man in the tall chair in the back of the room were sent to watch how single elderly men cooked in their kitchens in rural Norway. This early form of design ethnography was intended to help manufacturers tailor the products to people’s actual

behaviors and sell more kitchen appliances. The Swedish project portrayed in the film puts all its energies into “doingmore-in-less-time” with both comic and poignant results. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that the managers of the fictional company could have taken a lesson from the Gilbreths. The Swedish monitoring project ultimately fails because it was blind to the the social and psychological nature of the “doing.”

for living, or more accurately, a place where a family could be trained to work as efficiently as machines. Unlike the architecturally minded Catharine Beecher, the Gilbreths never sought time savings in the design of space. Like most people, they adjusted their routines to the home as they found it. Even so, their thinking is not so far from contemporaneous modern architects, particularly that of Le Corbusier who wrote in his seminal work of 1923, Vers une architecture, that economic law inevitably governs our acts and our thoughts. . . . If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house, and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the “House-Machine,” the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful.37

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The Gilbreths may not have been as enamored with the appearance of machines as Le Corbusier was, but like him, they were devoted to the pragmatics of the mechanical – itself an aesthetic. Frank and Lillian’s preoccupation with ways of living in a home – rather than the form of a home – anticipates a divide in design that would emerge later in the twentieth century and continues into the present. Crudely speaking, this is the split between those who are concerned with ephemeral experiences and those concerned with the physical environment. It is an artificial divide, but one that gave rise to discrete arenas of practice nonetheless. On the one hand, there are design strategists who care more about planning than the details of execution. They are interested in designing ways of navigating complex situations, such as reorganizing traffic patterns in a city. On the other hand, there are those who are more concerned with the representation of ideas and put their faith in the ability of form to communicate, whether through monumental scale or highly-keyed colors. The Gilbreths were closer to the strategists in their pursuit of better living by beating the clock. Even so, their methods were never entirely intangible. Frank senior’s endless campaigns to inculcate his children with an acute sense of time and money always depended on physical props that turned otherwise abstract challenges into measurable results. In less than a century, in theory at least, the work of keeping house – keeping the larders stocked and the family cared for – had gone from civic duty to edifying play, all the while keeping pace with the rise of American confidence in the possibilities of the future. The very fact that the serious work of the household could be transformed into games was a measure of a general sense of optimism and prosperity in America, and more particularly, of the Gilbreths’ particular expressions of Yankee ingenuity. In the Gilbreths’ house, learning French and German was accomplished by listening to language records on Victrolas that were strategically placed in the children’s bathrooms – one for the boys and one for the girls. As with all of Gilbreths’ experiments, this, too, was subject to rules of economy. Nightly baths doubled as language lessons. No extra classes were needed because “a person who applies motion study can be in and out of the tub in the time it takes one record to play.”38 Frank senior also developed systems to teach the children how to type (fingers were colored with chalk that corresponded to keys); he taught them how to stack dirty dinner dishes the most quickly and gave them tricks for doing mental arithmetic. Moreover, conventional décor had no meaning for him. DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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Spreadsheet detail, Mateusz Halawa and Marta Olcoń-Kubicka, 2018 Anthropology and design scholars Mateusz Halawa and Marta Olcoń-Kubicka have studied the role of homemade spreadsheets as instruments for the management of household budgets, noting the ways in which couples in Warsaw, Poland, personalize calculating software such as Excel and Google Sheets. One couple – Alicja and Konstanty – even finds ways to use them to express affection. As the authors note, when Alicja “logs expenditures into their Google spreadsheet, [she] sometimes makes the mistake of separating the decimal with a comma instead of a period. A message pre-programmed by her husband Konstanty appears on the screen: ‘Validation Enter proper data, Kitten’ (this is their mutual term of endearment), followed by a

kissing emoticon.”2 This domestication of an otherwise sterile tool, primarily designed for business purposes, echoes the Gilbreth’s domestication of the time measurement units they invented for factories. These adaptations, conducted a century apart, demonstrate that even those designs that seem the most clinical and complete – in this case, systems of measure – are happily vulnerable to individual interventions. 2 Mateusz Halawa and Marta Olcoń-Kubicka, “Digital Householding: Calculating and Moralizing Domestic Life through Homemade Spreadsheets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 13 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018. 1486728.

Walls were blackboards, ceilings were star charts. Unlike his neighbors, Frank senior was indifferent to how bizarre they looked all covered in his patterns and glyphs. The only thing that mattered to him was imparting the satisfactions of speed and knowledge; the interior was merely a convenient set of surfaces for doing so. In short, what was considered traditionally feminine had little place in his idea of domesticity, for that matter neither did machismo. Boys and girls were equal as long as they hewed to their father’s plans. For all that, the authors of Cheaper by the Dozen don’t describe feeling bullied. Lillian Gilbreth receives much of the credit for muting any overbearing sense of authoritarianism. As a psychologist, she knew the value of giving people – workers and children alike – a voice in decision-making. As it happened, the need for 204

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a domestic variation on the notion of shared governance became eminently clear after the family moved to Montclair. The two working parents quickly realized that neither they, nor their handyman and cook, would be able to cope with their new larger house. As the authors explain: Dad decided we were going to have to help them, and he wanted us to offer the help of our own accord. . . . [and] set up a Family Council, patterned after an employer-employee board. The council met every Sunday afternoon, immediately after dinner.39 Frank’s plan for the family to share in the upkeep and cleaning of their new home almost ran aground at the first meeting. In the end, they did vote to help, but only after Lillian pointed out that the alternative (paying for help) would mean no allowances, desserts, movies, or new clothes for an entire year. Having conceded the point in their parents’ favor, the children were determined not to be out-maneuvered at their very first meeting. They entered (and won) a motion to spend five dollars on a puppy, defeating their parents, twelve to two. But when it came to the main business of the operations of the household, readers are told that “the Family Council was basically sound and, although it verged sometimes on the hysterical, brought results.”40 It brought competitive capitalism home and then softened it with filial concessions. In the process, the household was transformed into a social democracy, albeit one with a shadow dictator. That said, the patriarch always preferred negotiation to fiat, and was reluctant exercise his veto power. So with a bit of collective bargaining, the children enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy. Family purchasing committees, duly elected, bought the food, clothes, furniture, and athletic equipment. A utilities committee levied one-cent fines on wasters of water and electricity. A projects committee saw that work was completed as scheduled. Allowances were decided by the Council, which also meted out rewards and punishments.41 Unquestionably, the incentive for such organizational strategies was rooted in scale. Twelve children don’t make a labor force, but their various ages and appetites compound their numbers exponentially. The committees became experts DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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on things like buying in bulk directly from manufacturers and securing wholesale rates from department stores. They had everything but a five-year plan – those were for the Soviet Union. Echoing the patriotism of the Beechers, their systems were modeled on an American ideal of democracy. The Gilbreths ran their house on the principle that everything can be improved by analysis and reasoned debate, at least until reason didn’t work. Then they depended on cajoling, and when that failed, incentives. Ice cream seemed to work best. In short, their systems were malleable, and their parenting was flexible enough to be genuinely responsive. This is where they distinguished themselves both in the domestic and manufacturing arenas and where they parted ways with their more famous and senior industry counterpart Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). (Taylor believed there was only one “best way” to accomplish any task.42) Again, it was largely Lillian who made the difference; she believed systems needed to be humanized to be effective. That she appears less frequently in the narrative of Cheaper by the Dozen is an indication of the degree to which her children unconsciously absorbed a masculine cultural bias toward innovation versus a traditionally feminine bias toward preservation.43 It is worth pointing out here that, in the twenty-first century, “innovation” has become a term of art. (It has also been fetishized in business and design to the point of meaninglessness.) Predicated on a definitive break with the past, the word has taken on a distinctly Oedipal character. Now, innovation often tramples competing ideas. The Gilbreths’ approach may have anticipated the current appetites for rupture, but it was pursued in the service of care.

ATTENDING TO THINGS

Beyond the innovator’s bias toward speed and regimen that we see in the writing of reformers, and beyond the dynamics of servitude observed by the likes of Berlin, there is another approach to caring for things to be found in the literature of domestic things. This is the work of mending. In these poems and stories, acts of repair are not done as a means to an end; they are not necessarily practical in intent. Rather, these meditations offer reflections on the vulnerability of things when they are in that tenuous in-between state of discards, fragments, and shards. And in their vulnerability they point to our own. 206

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GgG Gillis Görll, the protagonist of A Scar of Belonging: Fragments of Fashion by Gillis Görll (1901–1975), is a tailor whose stitches are prayers, whose vocation is caring for garments. Görll is also the alter ego and pen name of fashion designer and self-declared fashion skeptic Otto von Busch, the author of A Scar of Belonging, which he wrote in 2014. Von Busch introduces the reader to his prose poem as a “moral rehabilitation of fashion through repair, faith and human togetherness.”44 What follows is a transcription from the tailor’s notebook, ostensibly discovered in a university archive and exhumed by von Busch. The conceit allows him to consider “what repair can be in the realm of fashion [given that] the two phenomena stand as opposites, or at least work in two opposite ways: new versus old, surface versus depth, waste versus care.”45 The vanities of fashion are the foil for the virtues of mending, and by extension, caring for bodies. Thus, the tailor sees his labors as simultaneously material and spiritual. It is this state of being that animates his work and rescues it from mere projection or metaphor, when he writes: A real dress, however, utters words; “I have life for you. Life abundant.”46 We needn’t, however, share the mystic’s faith to make sense of the notion that there is an “aliveness” to things, especially those close to the body. Literary scholar Elaine Scarry argues that it would be wrong to dismiss such ideas as fantastical because “the habit of poets and ancient dreamers to project their own aliveness onto nonalive things . . . is the basic work of creation.”47 In design, projection is not abstract thought but thought that takes form in the seam of a dress, or just as equally in the bytes of a pixel. Instead of thinking that someone feels what we feel, the designer articulates those feelings by making them tangible. To wit, Scarry argues that things like chairs, which relieve the weight born by our spines and legs, are “the shape[s] of perceived-pain-wished-gone.”48 Likewise, clothing that mitigates the affects of rain, sleet, and sun on our skin can be seen as “the shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone.”49 (Or conversely, the shape of warmth-wished-for.) Görll, however, is concerned with our DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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second skin. He attends to the damage done to clothing, our outer artificial dermis. He closes its rips and tears as a doctor might suture a flesh wound. Just as a physician’s stitches require tissue, muscle, or skin to suture, the tailor’s requires the damaged goods, the cloth of fashion. Without fashion the tailor doesn’t exist, yet there is a primal tension between the forward movement of fashion and the retrospective attention of (and to) what he calls façon, the act of making new incisions to remake a garment. Fashion, an armour: a sheeting for the soul. Façon, a wound: a cut that heals, leaving a scar of belonging.50 As façon can also be thought of as a “way” or a “manner” of approach, it is more than just a material reparation here; it is a worldview in tension with fashion. With an earnest defensiveness, he distances himself from its spectacle and tries to transcend its venalities – among other things, the rapacity with which each season lays waste to the last. Görll laments its effect as an “amalgamation / of selfishness and blindness / which makes man ignorant / as he comes to neglect / the possessions he already has.”51 He sees fashion as indifferent to the cruel comparisons it incites, the exclusivity it promotes, and the myopia it cultivates. A fashionable man, proud of his latest suit, is like the convict, proud of his short prison sentence.52 This is hardly exclusive to the realm of luxury. It is also a condition of much of what is recognized as design – the kind of design that conceals the brief nature of our material satisfactions and their long-term effects on the environment. Fashions in everyday things (e.g., smartphones, sports equipment, kitchen appliances, and so on) are meant to keep us perpetually hungry. Fashion is dictated by short-term considerations, whereas mending and caring have 208

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the duration in view. They are as much acts of responsibility as the chores of housekeeping. However, of all the cleaners, housekeepers, and efficiency experts who have filled this chapter, only Görll seems to reject the idea that there is any self-interest to his work. He is not interested in convenience, only conscientiousness. In a sense, his is a broader appeal to designers of all types to think not in terms of “users” and “audiences” – the jargon and techniques of distance – and instead, attend more closely to individual lives. Görll goes further, adopting a near monastic tone of self-effacement in these lines: My work must be like teeth on a zip: truthful response of a fellow soul, yet not a reflection of myself.53 Yet, for all the abjectness with which the tailor approaches his calling, the phrase “teeth on a zip” suggests a pride in the precision he has honed in the performance of his craft. He sees it as a disciplined process of salvage and salvation. Façon is his way of recuperating the soul – the soul of fashion and his own. Ultimately, however, façon transcends fashion’s realm of style and cut and the craftsman’s realm of seams and stitches. It is a notion “that embodies the domestic power of powerlessness, in which weakness and vulnerability open the door to less competitive and more cooperative ways of designing the world and living in it.”54

HhH Some things cannot be saved, either because they are beyond repair or the circumstances that bonded us to them have irrevocably changed. Rarely, however, does anyone pay attention to what happens to the fragments of our material-bound lives, apart from those who have the Sisyphean task of reducing the amount of garbage we generate. Theirs is a future-oriented view of waste as an environmental time bomb. But what of the retrospective view, one that considers debris in terms of loss? It often takes extremely violent events like hurricanes and volcano eruptions to make us notice the favorite chair that is no longer there to sit in, or the ordinary sweater we can no longer casually pull from a bureau. DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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The wreckage of war is especially overwhelming and deeply demoralizing – all the more so because it isn’t an accident of nature but an event of our own making. The war-dead go underground or otherwise disappear into dust, but broken buildings and things remain stubbornly present, often for years. For all that, it is nearly impossible to see the houses, schools, offices, and shops, to say nothing of their contents, in the deformities and the granules of matter that remain. The few absolved from oblivion are the cultural icons whose debris all but commands reconstruction. Otherwise, rubble is largely ignored, either because we are numbed by personal experience of trauma, or because we are unable or unwilling to look closely at conflicts not our own. The poet Wisława Szymborska takes exception to these forms of blindness. It is not that she fetishizes the remnants of home in the ruins. Her domestic impulse comes to the fore in how she responds to their damaged presence.

Zippppper concept model, Nendo, 2018 Pictured here is the fourth of five zippers reimagined by the Japanese design studio Nendo. (Hence, the five p’s in Zippppper.) This one allows three elements to be fastened together to create three-dimensional structures.3 Led by Oki Sato, Nendo’s designers focused on its pure function rather than its decorative aspects. But in arriving at their eminently practical solutions they also model different ways of being both together and apart without losing the tautness of being

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conjoined, and in that sense mirror the larger aim of Görll’s ethos of repair. 3 Alice Morby, “Nendo Designs Five Alternatives to the Standard Zipper,” Dezeen, October 18, 2017, https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/18/ nendo-zippppper-five-design-alternatives-standard-zipper/.

In “The End and the Beginning” we meet Szymborska the housewife. Her work has no walls to confine it, no outlets for appliances, no tools for repair. She is cleaning a flattened city; and unlike her counterparts in this chapter, Szymborska doesn’t shy away from telling us about the physical demands involved. The first four stanzas of the poem have a noticeable tone of impatience and resentment, not so unlike a parent trying to tell an apathetic child that there are chores that need doing. After every war someone has to tidy up. Things won’t pick themselves up, after all. Someone has to shove the rubble to the roadsides so the carts loaded with corpses can get by. Someone has to trudge through sludge and ashes, through the sofa springs, the shards of glass, the bloody rags. Someone has to lug the post to prop the wall, someone has to glaze the window, set the door in its frame.55

Though these lines were written in 1993, it is impossible not to think they were first thought (and enacted) in 1945, by which time approximately eighty percent of Warsaw had been pulverized in the Nazi campaign to raze the city. But Szymborska has no need or use for history, much less its villains and heroes. Her intent is to bring war down to the scale of “home,” both literally and metaphorically. And she does it, not through the language of memory, but fittingly, the language of housework. DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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The actions of tidying up, picking up, shoving, trudging, lugging, and glazing are not exclusively feminine. However, since women survived the war in far greater numbers, those tasks fell largely to them. They regularly did work of their dead or wounded fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers. (And soon, under communism, gender and labor would be completely divorced; it wasn’t uncommon for women to do the kind of strenuous physical labor once reserved for men.) Nonetheless, in Szymborska’s poem of “tidying up,” it is clearly a woman’s eye that brings “sofa springs,” “shards of glass,” and “bloody rags” into focus. She would already have known them as bits of her home’s infrastructure and recognized them readily, no matter how broken or bloodied. Over time, as with all things that become familiar, even rubble becomes less charged. The piles settle, concealing any last shreds of domestic evidence they might still hold. Mounds of brick become such a familiar sight that they raise little comment. Not only is the recent pain of war buried under their weight; it is officially expunged by the very same bricks, now valuable material for building the new Warsaw.56 Architecture is both murdered and born in war. In the second half of the poem, Szymborska pivots from the immediacy of cleaning and clearing the streets to the work of the city’s reconstruction. She also brings men into the picture. But the man who remembers the events that triggered the work in the first place – work that every citizen is compelled to do – that man may be seen as less truly masculine. We can judge this from the fact that Szymborska has him wielding a broom, not showing his prowess and speed as a quota worker. (Quota workers were glorified by the state for exceeding all production records; for example, by laying as many as thirty-thousand bricks in a single shift.57) The workers in Szymborska’s poem will receive no such recognition; and she knows that, despite official propaganda to the contrary, there will be No sound bites, no photo opportunities, and it takes years. All the cameras have gone to other wars.

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The bridges need to be rebuilt, the railroad stations, too. Shirtsleeves will be rolled to shreds. Someone, broom in hand, still remembers how it was. Someone else listens, nodding his unshattered head. But others are bound to be bustling nearby who’ll find all that a little boring.

War and Architecture (Scar Construction). Lebbeus Woods, 1993 Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012) was an architect, much of whose work was a response to his wartime experience of Sarajevo and elsewhere. He wrote, “In Sarajevo, I was trying to speculate on how the war could be turned around, into something that people could build the new Sarajevo on. It wasn’t about cleaning up the mess or fixing up the damage; it was more about a transformation in the society and the politics and the economics through architecture.”4 Szymborska, on the other hand, is interested in “picking up.”

Even so, despite their different responses to destruction, they share common cause in their respective ruminations on the politics of a less careless society. 4 Lebbeus Woods, “Without Walls,” interview by Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG, October 3, 2007, http://www.bldgblog.com/2007/10/ without-walls-an-interview-with-lebbeus-woods/.

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From time to time someone still must dig up a rusted argument from underneath a bush and haul it off to the dump. Those who knew what this was all about must make way for those who know little. And less than that. And at last nothing less than nothing.58

Finally, in the “End” of the poem’s title, it is ideas and “rusted arguments” that must be hauled off. Alien to the new regime, they are destined for the “dump.” Likewise, anyone with a memory best dispose of it, or take the risk being marked as a dissident, out of line with the Party’s program of modernization. A clean sweep is the order of the day; an order not open to discussion. What no one cares to see, however, is that the violent erasure of ideas and their embodiments in streets and buildings59 all but insures more conflicts where the cameras of Szymborska’s poem will be waiting.

iIi War may bring our most intimate things outside, but as Szymborska shows, almost never intact. In contrast, peacetime ruptures like divorce and death are overburdened with things that are stubbornly and disconcertingly undisturbed, remaining awkwardly whole under divisive conditions. Chairs, sofas, beds, clothing, knickknacks suddenly must be “dealt with.” Both prized possessions and inconspicuous objects enter a limbo of placelessness. They pose the same question that we ask ourselves in such situations: “Where do I belong now?” In Raymond Carver’s 1978 short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” the issue of destiny, of where a conjugal bed or a kitchen table might end up, is entangled with the more immediate circumstances of their dispersal. We meet Carver’s nameless protagonist when he has all but finished dismantling his domestic arrangements. It is never made clear whether his wife has 214

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died or left him. His offhand comment that his neighbors “thought they’d seen everything over here”60 suggests the latter – a couple who fought and split. Then again, in most break-ups, there is a fraught division of property, which is not in evidence here. The bedroom suite is quite complete, suggesting it was death and not discord that rendered its two pillows pointless. Regardless, any sense of loss, or even resentment, is muted by the way he organizes his furnishings on his lawn. Placed outdoors for a yard sale, they limn a geography of inside and outside, a set piece for a minor production about repression and exposure. We meet him in his kitchen where he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom – nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side. His side, her side.61

The sheets, bed, lamps, and nightstands somehow retain their ordinariness even though they are sitting on the grass. But there is an eeriness to the way the furniture has been placed just as it was in their bedroom, as if the pairing on the lawn as “his” and “hers” could delay the ultimate estrangement. The real desperation, however, lies in the attempt to control, while letting everything go. He assures himself that, except for the three cartons in the living room, all the stuff was out of the house. He had run an extension cord on out there and everything was connected. Things worked, no different from how it was when they were inside.62 All this “stuff” prolongs a sense of the usual in the face of an empty house. Furthermore, calling it “stuff” minimizes its significance. But these appliances aren’t neutral domestic servants whose only task is to work when they’re plugged in. They are testaments to a condition of living predicated on the pronoun “ours.” The fact that they can outlive us, or at least outlive a DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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relationship, means they have to be banished – in this case, consigned to a yard sale, which is now ready for its first customers. Just before they appear, the man makes a rather diffident but detailed appraisal of the scene, observing, The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot of the bed. He had emptied the drawers into cartons that morning, and the cartons were in the living room. A portable heater was next to the chiffonier. . . . The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the sides. A potted fern was on the table, . . . and a few feet away from this stood a sofa and chair and a floor lamp. The desk was pushed against the garage door. A few utensils were on the desk, along with a wall clock and two framed prints.63 In effect, he has sorted his belongings into small tableaux. The kitchen is nearly complete with its “potted fern.” But it’s not as though his careful staging confers any more value on a television or a bed. Credibility is more the point; it is as though he wants to be sure that prospective buyers don’t confuse the sale for a couple’s ritual spring cleaning. This one is final. Yet, somehow he still finds it necessary to set out the furnishings of each mis en scène just as they were placed inside – even and especially since the relationship that brought them together is broken. The story’s momentum shifts when a young couple turns up at the sale. The boy and girl begin to examine things, “the girl touching the muslin cloth, the boy plugging in the blender and turning the dial to mince, the girl picking up a chafing dish, the boy turning on the television set and making little adjustments.”64 They are preoccupied with whether things will work if they decide to take them home. They bargain with the man, not quite realizing there’s something more to these things than whether their “on” and “off” switches still function. After settling on a few items, the couple takes the man up on an offer of whiskey. The boy passes out drunk, while the man and the girl dance to one of his records. He says “I hope you like your bed.”65 She pulls him closer and says “You must be desperate or something.”66 Later, the girl talks about it with anyone who will listen, trying to understand what she felt surrounded by things that felt depleted yet still emanating something of their past. Like light from a distant but extinct star, something was transferred in the dance that cannot be dismissed. It 216

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is as though the double bed had absorbed the atmosphere of the man’s isolation and infected her with its morbidity.

JjJ In Carver’s story, every material vestige of domestic life is up for sale. His bed, his record player, his blender, all of it must go. This is the opposite of keeping house; it’s closer to the work of cleaning but far more ruthless. It will only happen once. There will be no repetitive movements of the sort described by Trethewey; the yard sale will eliminate the need for caring for things, or as in the case of Berlin, pretending to care. Any sense of power over the household is absent. Unlike Szabó’s Emerence who never questioned her dominion over the house, Carver’s protagonist has relinquished all authority over his things; he sets them free. He does, however, hang on to a measure of control in the way he orchestrates the yard sale, albeit, to dispose of things not to insure their preservation. Yet, longing has not been banished, nor by extension, love. The laconic way he bargains with the young couple masks an anxious generosity. He wants to rid himself of the bed and the television, but he also seems to genuinely want them to have them, the way a parent might pass along old furniture to a grown child for a new apartment. Though the impulse would appear to be less selfless than that of von Busch’s Görll, it is just as self-effacing – if anything, more literally so. Carver’s character subtracts a part of himself by the elimination of ordinary things. The toasters and pillowcases become part of the deficit in his emotional economy. By now it is clear that the Beecher sisters and the Gilbreths had different standards of economy. But, as in Carver’s story, innocuous (and often relatively small) objects exercise an influence disproportionate to their scale. In the nineteenth century, a needle and thread or an aerated cabinet designed to keep foodstuffs from molding could significantly affect a household budget. Still, domestic reformers in the 1840s placed far more emphasis on how things were cleaned and kept than they did on things themselves, unless it was to describe them as objects of temptation. The same was true for the Gilbreths, though by the early twentieth century the motivation had changed. Speed became the driver, its effects portrayed as variously comic, benign, and rewarding in their domesticated version DOMESTICITY: CLEANING, MENDING, CARING

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of industrial time saving. The Gilbreths may have made it child’s play at home, but in their work as professionals, they would have operated on the principle that time equaled money. Though one could argue that Gilbreths’ familial incentives (ice cream and extra allowance) operate on the same dynamic, it was hardly as mercenary. Nonetheless, the end result, both at home and at work, was that any pleasure to be found in doing work took a back seat to results. It is against the seemingly inexorable and corrosive riptide of progress that Szymborska and von Busch offer antidotes. Their microcosms of care – one in a landscape of devastation, one in a state of prosperity – couldn’t be more

Dea, Anna Barbara, 2014 Architect and designer Anna Barbara made this necklace from lenses that came from her husband’s broken eyeglasses. Oblong shapes of glass that she picked up, saved, and transformed. What might have been a gentle admonition to her spouse to be more careful is transformed here

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into an affectionate gesture and a talisman she can wear around her neck. This adaptation recalls the love that the tailor Gillis Görll brings to his repairs, not only in its sentiment but also in Barbara’s choice to find her fashion in façon.

different in character, but both writers share a deep attentiveness to the fate of things. They also recognize that the treatment of things is a litmus test of our responsiveness to others and our willingness to “repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.”67 Von Busch ritualizes repair, repeatedly going backward in time to restore a garment to its original state. His repairs are both reunions – between fashion and repair, between the tailor and the person who asks for his help. Szymborska’s reunion is of conscientious thought and practical action. Bloody rags are picked up and broken bits of furniture lugged away in the here and now of her poem. These are jobs done in tandem with the work of resistance, of fighting the forces of amnesia that take over when “the cameras have gone to other wars.”68 With Szymborska, we return to the gestures of bodies who clean up, the people and things most often taken for granted. Washing machines, mops, brooms, threads, and rags (bloodied or not) are dead things until we, and they, move into action together. This might be true of most objects, but domestic places and things and their care demand a particularly complex and intimate dance of bending, lifting, pushing, and moving. Cleaning or mending can be mapped out by efficiency experts, but it will always require someone’s muscle. They can be improvised as a dance or done as a private prayer. The choreography can be formal or informal, trained or intuitive, but it is always a matter of reconfiguration, and by plan or default, design.

1 Lydia Davis, “Housekeeping Observation,” in Can’t and Won’t: Stories (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015), 90. 2 This observation flows from Martin Heidegger’s argument in Being and Time that when objects break down, as Hubert Dreyfus puts it, “new modes of encountering emerge and new ways of being encountered are revealed” (Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-theWorld: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, division I [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991], 70). These encounters with objects would otherwise go unnoticed as would our dependence on them.

3 Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping: A Novel (New York: Picador, 1980), 209. 4 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin Books, [1958] 2014), 99. 5 Natasha Trethewey, “Domestic Work, 1937,” in Domestic Work: Poems (Minneapolis: Grey Wolf Press, 2000), 13. 6 Lucia Berlin, “A Manual for Cleaning Women [1977],” in A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, ed. Stephen Emerson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 27.

7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 30. 9 Ibid., 27. 10 David Brody makes a similar observation about service design today but in the context of cleaning hotel rooms: “The problem is that most practitioners and thinkers who engage with service design and physical design choices focus their attention on the experience of the customer while ignoring the realities, voices, and bodies of workers” (David Brody, Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016], 4).

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11 For more insight into the ways in which service design is practiced today in various settings from profit to nonprofit, see Lara Penin, An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 12 Berlin, “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” 35. 13 Magda Szabó, The Door, trans. Len Rix (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 117. 14 Barry Yourgrau, Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2015), 261. 15 Szabó, The Door, 24. 16 Ibid., 9.

23 Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: J.B. Ford and Company, 1869), i. 24 Ibid., dedication. 25 Ibid., 308. 26 Ibid., 311. 27 Ibid., 369–70, emphasis added. 28 Ibid., 316.

17 Ibid., 16.

29 Ibid., 317.

18 Ibid., 74. 19 Ibid., 75. 20 The husband’s extreme response to Emerence’s gifts is typical of what German scholar Jörg Kreienbrock describes as an encounter with “malicious objects.” In Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature, Kreienbrock elaborates on Heidegger’s observation that we take things (“equipment”) for granted when they are “ready to hand,” meaning in the spaces and conditions of usability in which we expect to find them. Kreienbrock writes that, when lost or broken, “equipment materializes as a resistance, constricting one’s ability to situate oneself. If things are too close, leaving no space between subject and object, they become obtrusive, creating emotions of indignation and outrage” (Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 150). 21 Szabó, The Door, 84.

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22 Anne Sexton, “Housewife [1962],” in The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (Boston: Thomas Wadsworth, 2005), 993.

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30 In his history of the home, architect and writer Witold Rybczynski writes: “The American interest in reducing housework was at least partly the result of the generally small use that was made of domestic help. . . . The lesser number of servants in the United States [vs. England] was not a question of demand . . . . Domestic employment – that is female domestic employment, for the great majority of servants were women – was not pleasurable . . . . Poor women preferred almost anything, including factory work, to domestic service. This continues to be the case” (Home: A Short History of an Idea, [New York: Penguin Books, 1986], 155). 31 Beecher and Beecher Stowe, American Woman’s Home, 25. 32 Ibid., 334. 33 Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 16.

34 Ibid., 19. 35 Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Cheaper by the Dozen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1948), 2. 36 Ibid., 127. 37 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1986), 6–7. In 1927, the architect Le Corbusier coined the phrase “machine for living” in Towards a New Architecture, to describe a “well planned and cleanly disposed” work of architecture – in other words, modernist (Frederick Etchells, introduction to Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells [New York: Dover, 1986], vi). 38 Gilbreth and Gilbreth Carey, Cheaper by the Dozen, 47. 39 Ibid., 37. 40 Ibid., 43. 41 Ibid. 42 Frederick W. Taylor (whose name has become synonymous with industrialized efficiency, i.e., Taylorism) developed stopwatch time study, while the Gilbreths pioneered motion study. The two practices combined became the field of time and motion study. 43 Negotiated change, Lillian’s forté, however, would have to wait until much later; it is evident today in participatory design, which began as a way to take workers’ knowledge into account in corporate decision making and has since expanded to other arenas of practice. 44 Gillis Görll, A Scar of Belonging: Fragments of Fashion by Gillis Görl (1901–1975), ed. Otto von Busch (New York & Göteborg: SelfPassage, 2014), 12. 45 Excerpt from email exchange between the author and Otto von Busch, February 13, 2018.

46 Görll, A Scar of Belonging, 31. 47 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 286). In The Body in Pain, humanist Scarry confirms the phenomenon of corresponding bodies that Görll claims for mending and she describes it as being more than a matter of poetic license, writing: “A material . . . artifact is not an alive, sentient, percipient creature, and thus can neither itself experience discomfort nor recognize discomfort in others. But though it cannot be sentiently aware of pain, it is in the essential fact of itself the objectification of that awareness; itself incapable of the act of perceiving, its design, its structure is the structure of a perception” (ibid., 289). 48 Ibid., 290. 49 Ibid. 50 Görll, A Scar of Belonging, 19. 51 Ibid., 23. 52 Ibid., 47. 53 Ibid., 30. 54 Excerpt from email exchange between the author and Otto von Busch, May 23, 2018. 55 Wisława Szymborska. “The End and the Beginning,” in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1996), 178. 56 The Polish government’s slogan for this monumental endeavor was “The entire nation builds its capital.” This was not an exaggeration because with able-bodied Varsovian men in short supply, recruits were brought in from across the country.

57 One of the best portrayals of the fraught practice of encouraging and celebrating quota workers in Poland was done by Andrzej Wajda in his 1981 film Man of Iron. 58 Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning,” 178–9. 59 While it is tempting to blame communist-socialism for delimiting personal freedom with communal apartments and brutal blocks of social housing that were built in Poland and elsewhere after World War II, it is worth recalling that similar (though less gargantuan) housing blocks were promoted by early modernist designers. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, architects viewed social housing as a benefit to individual independence that at the same time fostered community. In then German Breslau (now Polish Wrocław), the 1929 Workplace and House Exhibition (WUWA) featured a kindergarten for mothers who wished to work, had housing for families with rooms for shared childcare, and even housing (notably, designed by Hans Scharoun) for singles and newlyweds who wished to leave the yoke of their parents’ homes. Note that the WUWA complex survives today as a testimony to its architects’ idealism.

67 Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1999), 103; quoted in Karen E. Till, “‘Art, Memory, and the City’ in Bogotá: Mapa Teatro’s Artistic Encounters with Inhabited Places,” in Making Place, Space and Embodiment in the City, ed. Arijit Sen, Lisa Silverman (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 167. 68 Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning,” 178. “The End and the Beginning” from VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND. Selected Poems by Wisława Symborksa, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak and Claire Cavangh. Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 Cztelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

60 Raymond Carver, “Why Don’t You Dance?” in What We Talk about When We Talk about Love: Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 9. 61 Ibid., 3. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 Ibid., 3–4. 64 Ibid., 4. 65 Ibid., 9. 66 Ibid.

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Mmuseumm, Season 4, Alex Kalman, director and curator, 2015 Squirreled away on a side street in Lower Manhattan, the Mmuseumm is a cabinet of curiosities both familiar and bizarre. Founded in 2012 by Alex Kalman, Josh Safdie, and Ben Safdie, the Mmuseumm offers its visitors a carefully curated assortment of objects like corn flakes, peep show tokens, styrofoam rocks, plastic spoons, fake IDs, handmade shrines, homemade gas masks, pharmaceutical promotional objects, and embalming tools. The sidewalk closet thumbs its nose at the acquistion criteria used by most museum collections, since the objects on its shelves are unlikely to be rare,

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distinguished, or venerable. They are what novelist Georges Perec might have recognized as examples of the “‘infraordinary’ . . . everydayness that requires a kind of quixotic or excessive attention.”1 Here, collecting becomes a rescue operation, not just of neglected things but also of modesty itself. 1 Ben Highmore, introduction to Georges Perec, “Approaches to What? [1973],” trans. John Sturrock, in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (New York: Routledge, 2001), 176.

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Consuming: Shopping, Collecting, Hoarding Shopping, collecting, and hoarding. These three points on the spectrum of consumption span the ordinary patterns of purchase to the compulsive patterns of acquisition to those that tip over into the neurotic. Though they are never entirely discrete from each other, they are worth teasing apart as they depend on different dimensions of design. Shopping may seem an “ordinary” experience, but it is a highly orchestrated affair in environments specifically dedicated to moving merchandise. A “good shopper” is thought to have taste and a nose for bargains – a person both savvy and susceptible to the manipulations of advertising and display. Highly focused consumers are awarded the status of collectors; their acquisitions reflect a discriminating taste whether it is directed toward plastic Pez dispensers or gem-encrusted Fabergé eggs. Unlike most shoppers, collectors care less about prices and labels than they do about objects themselves. However, when they direct their concentration toward plastic bags, scraps of cardboard, or bits string, collectors are downgraded to hoarders – except, that is, when scavenging becomes a matter of survival. Then they are considered resourceful savers. Parsing out the differences between normative, ostentatious, and desperate modes of consumption also requires attention to contradictory mores and ethics. Historically, voices of moral censure have regarded all but subsistence levels of consumption as evidence of decadence, or at the least, an indication of apathy to poverty. In his book Empire of Things, historian Frank Trentmann notes that “in the first century CE, the Roman philosopher Seneca worried constantly about the way riches turned lesser mortals into slaves to pleasure.”1 Today, philosopher Peter Singer is less concerned with those who shackle themselves to their credit cards than those who suffer because money that could ameliorate their lives is spent on superfluous luxuries. (He argues this 223

position quite pointedly when walking past some of Fifth Avenue’s most expensive stores in Examined Life, Astra Taylor’s 2008 film about applied ethics.) Meanwhile, other voices maintain that consumption is innately social and civilizing, both as a function of trading and the practice of buying. For example, in Marguerite Yourcenar’s fictionalized Memoirs of Hadrian, that having just concluded a peace conference the young emperor rejoices that: “the circulation of gold and the passage of ideas (as subtle as that of vital air in the arteries) were beginning again within the world’s great body; earth’s pulse began to beat once more.”2 Such liberal (and often libertine) voices argue that the movement of goods and their consumption makes us hospitable to difference and open to unexpected pleasures. Admittedly, this argument is weakening in our current state of globalism. It takes more effort to find those differences when major brands are becoming all but ubiquitous. Nonetheless, each in their own way – shopping, collecting, and hoarding – has the power to be a source of pleasure, a tax on daily life and the lives of others. It is this pendulum swing between the suspicion of things as corrupt or at the very least distracting (think of the monastic life of self-denial), and the embrace of things as edifying (think of the curiosity stimulated by bookstalls and food markets) that characterizes the literature of spending and getting. Traditionally, design is thought to be a lubricant to both the hedonic and civilizing affects of consuming. After all, design for centuries has made life more interesting by offering seemingly endless sources of visual pleasure. (The 12,000-year-old history of ceramics, to take just one example, has always struck me as proof that there is no limit to invention by variation.) However, this view of design might be seen by many of its current practitioners to be deeply limited, if not totally outdated. Increasingly, socially- and environmentally-attuned designers are expending less energy on things and their appearances and putting more into designing sharing systems that eliminate redundant, energy-depleting vehicles and appliances, with the goal of changing the way we consume altogether. (Recent years have seen a rise in the development of co-housing units, both for economy-minded millennials and for seniors who want to enlarge their social lives.) That said, the bifurcation of design, on the one hand, as the generator of substantive form (things we consume) and, on the other, as formless behavior modification (consuming less) is flawed. To forgo the satisfaction and knowledge 224

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derived from the multifarious configurations of objects and places is to accede to the meanest standards of existence. To ignore resource depletion is, by default, to embrace a hopeless, imperiled existence, and to overlook the fact that shopping, collecting, and hoarding can also exhaust personal resources. But by the same token, I would argue that the things we acquire through purchase and of our own making (which in turn require us to buy materials) are often gratifying reflections of our most private selves. They narrate our lives. I find it hard to imagine a self so sufficient that it needs no affirmation in things. For better and worse, souvenirs, books, and clothes, even the arrangements of our furniture, reflect who we are. They can also be projections of who we would like to be.

Vase of Vases, Maxim Velčovský, 2008 Czech designer Maxim Velčovský created his Vase of Vases by pressing a variety of traditional Bohemian cut-glass vases into a neutral porcelain skin. The inverted economy of using many vases to make one satisfies the urge for “more” with multiple patterns on a vessel of complex geometry. The result is both singular and plural at once, offering a way to enjoy excess modestly. Even its pale gray tone seems to

contradict its flamboyance. In its vacillation between the austere and the baroque, the Vase of Vases embodies our own ambivalence about consuming things. But in the end, it comes down on the side of pleasure – the pleasure that comes from the process of designing and the pleasure that comes from owning a piece of that process.

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Still, using solid things to announce our aspirations risks delimiting the futurity implicit in the very notion of aspiration. More to the point, when our possessions become out of synch with our current selves or the selves we wish to fashion, the cycle of buying alternative clothes, furniture, homes, and so on is set in motion again. Design is then the fuel for capitalism’s creative destruction.3 Those clothes, furniture, and homes are discarded and, more often than not, completely replaced, no matter how much waste is involved. However, we can also understand design here more broadly as inextricable from the larger workings of culture. This is culture understood not as an entity (e.g., the culture of Japan or farming) but as a continual process of renewal – for our purposes, the seemingly inexorable urge to alter or replace the given with the better. Thus, culture, and the acts of designing that shape it, is a conflicted affair. In the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, it is “a daring dash for freedom from necessity and freedom to create. It is a blunt refusal to the offer of a secure animal life. It is – to paraphrase Santayana – a knife with its sharp edge pressed continuously against the future.”4 In this chapter, the knife edge that threatens the future takes form in overflowing shopping carts that could bankrupt a family, in manuscripts so precious they enable an act of treason, in the acquisition of luxuries that make poverty for others a certainty. But what of the “daring dash for [the] freedom . . . to create”? It appears here in a library of considered and often serendipitous purchases, in a collection of found objects that liberate a man from a career, and in strange acts of salvage that reinvigorate even the most damaged of things and people. Each of these stories pivots around the conflict laid out by Bauman, and in doing so they reveal both the affirmative and harmful effects of the restless, exploratory nature of design.

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SHOPPING: PLANNED SEDUCTION, DESIGNED DESIRE

Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise immerses us in the effects of that restlessness. It takes on form in the displays, the merchandise, and the architecture of a nineteenth-century Parisian department store. Zola aptly names his emporium the Paradise: Its promises of eternal happiness are always out of reach of its customers, though they’re bound to be found in the next shipment of merchandise and the one after that. The novel was written in 1883, when such grand establishments were completely unprecedented but so successful that they effectively wiped out an entire mercantile class, and in the process, radically changed the neighborhoods they occupied. (The Paradise was modeled on Le Bon Marché, which still operates in Paris today.5) The first casualties of Zola’s fictional behemoth are the independent purveyors of gloves, umbrellas, shoes, and clothing, including the uncle of the novel’s protagonist Denise Baudu. Denise has come to Paris for work and does work briefly in her uncle’s drapery shop. Unfavorable comparisons between his dingy store and its brightly lit rival were bound to arise, even in dutiful Denise. We see her pausing in front of the department store’s giant windows, watching the great crowds stare: Groups of women were crushing each other in front of them, a real mob, made brutal by covetousness. And these passions in the street were giving life to the materials . . . [a] huge velvet coat was billowing out, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh and blood, with a heaving breast and quivering hips. But the furnace-like heat with which the shop was ablaze came above all from the selling, from the bustle at the counters, which could be felt behind the walls. . . . [C]ustomers crowding into the departments, dazzled by the merchandise, then propelled towards the cash-desk. . . . [T]he vast horde of women were as if caught in the wheels of an inevitable force.6 The store’s energy is hypnotizing, effectively blinding its patrons to its less salutary effects. Shoppers now feverishly compete for its miraculous goods, which seem to have a life force potent enough to overwhelm free will. Workers are no less affected.7 When Denise succumbs to its attractions and goes to work CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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there, she effectively betrays her uncle and the protective system of family-run shops. Moreover, once installed as a salesgirl, she and her cohorts find themselves thrust into a newly combative servitude, with all its attending struggles for promotion within the ranks. Belle Époque galleries like those of the Paradise featured vast expanses of glass, which was then a daring choice and a sure sign of progress both in structural engineering and material technology. Glass was equally popular in the new massive train stations, which appeared at the same time as the department store. For the throngs of people arriving in the city from the country, these architectural wonders were of a scale that could only be likened to waterfalls and mountains. In compensation for the sense of loss that accompanied the rise of urbanization, the Paradise (and its commercial cousins) created their own versions of nature by enlisting the art of display in unprecedented levels of theatrics. One of the store’s most spectacular installations – the “Paris-Paradise” – was designed to conjure an Eden onto itself, where: First, pale satins and soft silks were gushing out: royal satins and renaissance satins, with the pearly shades of spring water; light silks as transparent as crystal – Nile green, turquoise, blossom pink, Danube blue. . . . And at the bottom, . . . velvets of all kinds, black, white, coloured, embossed on a background of silk or satin, their shimmering flecks forming a still lake in which reflections of the sky and of the countryside seemed to dance. Women pale with desire were leaning over as if to look at themselves.8 The patrons of the Paradise are captivated. Needless to say, they are completely unaware of the broader environmental implications of their gazes and their purchases. The relationship between the consumption of manufactured goods and the increased demands on natural resources, like water, was invisible. It is doubtful that Zola was concerned with how the price of a yard of silk might have reflected nineteenth-century factories’ need for more water to sustain their output.9 However, he more than hints at the connection between nature and production with an avalanche of metaphors when he describes what Octave Mouret, the ambitious owner of the Paradise, sees on his daily rounds. Mouret starts in the basement and, on this particular day, pauses by the delivery chute and ruminates on the store’s commanding infrastructure. 228

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It was still in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin; but it had had to be enlarged, and was now as wide as a river-bed along which a continual flow of goods rolled with the resounding noise of a flood tide; there were deliveries from every part of the world, queues of wagons from all the railway stations of Paris ceaselessly unloading boxes and bales which, flowing underground, were swallowed by the insatiable shop. He watched this torrent falling into his shop; he reflected that he was one of the masters of public wealth.10 In his plans for the Paradise, this “master of public wealth” has unwittingly tapped into the confusion between public and private that troubled the nineteenth century and continues today.11 Filled with people who meet randomly, just as they might on a city street, the Paradise offers the illusion of being a public commons. Simultaneously, it loosens certain social strictures. The early department store was considered a socially sanctioned place in the city where women could wander unchaperoned. This was possible because the stores were privately owned and highly controlled – though no one would know it with so many distracting amenities on offer. By our standards, the Paradise’s tearooms, concert spaces, lounges, and restaurants offer only an illusion of independence, contained as they are in one space. There is little doubt about where most women belong, and if there is, it is dispelled when Mouret exclaims, “these ladies aren’t in my shop, they’re at home here!”12 In addition to offering women a respectable destination in the city, the department store presented the public with what amounted to stage productions that artfully demonstrated the flows of global capital. In a very real sense, it domesticated the circulation of goods that flowed from the West’s imperial expansions. Indeed, one of the highlights of the Paradise is the “oriental hall” with its richly hued rugs from Smyrna and Kurdistan. Here, Zola, never subtle, doubles down on his characterization of consumption – its goods and its behaviors – as specifically feminine. Shoppers are overheard exclaiming, “‘It makes you feel you’re actually there!’ ‘Yes, a real harem, isn’t it? And quite cheap!’”13 The Middle East (always feminine in Western minds) was thus transformed from a vaguely dangerous landscape of sword-wielding Ottomans to a place of harmless, if titillating, romance for Mouret’s clientele. Yet, the Paradise is also described in more muscular terms when Zola compares it to other technological feats and novel forms of iron truss work. CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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Caryatides wallpaper, 2x4, 2011 Caryatides are those draped female figures that act as architectural pillars. They are usually seen supporting balconies and flanking the doors of buildings, demonstratively asserting a Grecian lineage (no matter how remote). Those in the Prada store in New York’s Soho may be flattened on the wall but they are no less fantastical than their classical sisters of stone. Surreally headless female bodies emerge from lushly gathered fabric; they’re all but smothered by lilies, tulips, roses,

and unidentifiable flora. The hallucinatory scene parodies the romantic (and still familiar) advertising trope of zaftig women cossetted in luxury and surrounded by the exotic. In Zola’s novel, women were meant to lose themselves in the labyrinth of the department store and little has changed since. From the retailer’s perspective, the shopping experience requires a suspension of time (no clocks in sight) and a tolerable level of spatial disorientation to lead the shopper on, as it were.

It was like the concourse of a station, surrounded by the balustrades of the two upper storeys, intersected by hanging staircases, and with suspension bridges built across it. The iron staircases, with double spirals, opened out in bold curves multiplying the landings; the iron bridges thrown across the void, ran straight along, very high up; and beneath the pale light from the windows all this metal formed a delicate piece of architecture, a complicated lacework through which the daylight passed, the modern realization of a dream-palace, of a Babel-like accumulation of storeys in which halls opened out.14 230

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A masculine structure with feminine delicacy, the Paradise is a demonstration of the tectonic prowess that would erect the Eiffel Tower only four years after the novel’s publication. The store’s bridges, landings, and iron lacework open up glimpses into its labyrinthine galleries, signaling that this is a building of infinite possibility. But being “Babel-like,” it is also an architecture of strategic confusion. It is a building designed to encourage getting lost, a marvel that opens up even more opportunities to find and buy.

kKk In stores like the Paradise, design is the tease that tests shopper’s capacity for restraint. It dares them to think of stores as museums and enjoy the pleasure of looking, knowing that something even more attractive will replace whatever it seems we have to have now. Games like this make it possible, at least in theory, to defy the purposes to which design is put when a price tag is added. But as Italo Calvino shows us, there is a different kind of cost attached to remaining a voyeur in a store. Calvino’s Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City, first published in 1963, explores the attractions and perils of the city. But where the urban landscape was the background for Zola’s plot, it is the foreground here. Marcovaldo is a peasant who’s moved his family to an industrial city to make a better living. Calvino doesn’t name the city but it could well be Turin, where companies like Fiat accelerated Italy’s post-World War II economic growth so rapidly that it came to be known as the Italian miracle. Subsistence agrarian life gave way to the promises of an urbanized prosperity – an affluence that couldn’t be harvested, only be bought. Marcovaldo discovers this early on when he and his family land in the hospital after eating mushrooms found growing near a tram stop. He was so used to picking his own, he didn’t realize he was meant to get them from a market. This is a novel of an uncomfortably commodified life, too expensive for its protagonist to own. In the twenty stories that make up the novel, we follow the neophyte city-dweller as he tries to adapt to a different way of life and its unwritten rules. In each of these tales, Calvino leverages Marcovaldo’s bewilderment to underscore the fact that even the necessities of life now require a receipt. Moreover, both the well-heeled and the middle classes don’t shop just for sustenance, they CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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also shop for leisure. Ever the outsider, Marcovaldo finds their behaviors both tantalizing and exotic. Since they had no money, their entertainment as to watch others go shopping; for the more money circulates, the more those without any can hope – sooner or later a bit of it will come into my pockets. But, on the contrary, Marcovaldo’s wages, because they were scant and the family was large, and there were installments and debts to be paid, flowed away the moment he collected them. Anyhow, watching was always lovely, especially if you took a turn around the supermarket.15 To the twenty-first-century shopper, the grocery store would hardly seem the venue of choice for an enjoyable evening out; but we have to remember that self-serve supermarkets were extremely rare in Italy in the 1960s. So for Marcovaldo and his family, the supermarket is a wondrous cabinet of curiosities, too enticing to look away from. Usually they’re content to peer into the windows and watch, but on this particular evening, they decide to go inside. Just this once, they want to experience the rituals of looking, touching, choosing, changing their minds, and doing it all again like everyone else. Husband, wife, and four children each take an “iron basket,” necessary matériel for the battle they are about to engage in with themselves and the store itself. After a faint-hearted warning to his family not to touch anything, Marcovaldo takes off on his own. Surreptitiously picking up dates, spaghetti, coffee, and ketchup, he rationalizes he’s only pretending to shop, but in fact, the experience of pushing the cart, making choices, and seeing the groceries pile up in his cart is irresistible. And not just for him. Everyone in family wants the thrill they imagine that other shoppers must feel. Predictably, Marcovaldo’s wife and his children succumb to the attractions of the store, which even provides a sound track to keep them moving. The children are convinced they’re rich simply because they have gathered enough food for a year, innocent of the millions of lire it would cost to pay for it. “Pushing carts laden like freighters,”16 their paths converge near the checkout aisle, where Marcovaldo makes an abrupt about-face. His terrified family runs after him “as if under enemy fire,”17 haphazardly returning food they never got to taste and at the same time grabbing more as though in a trance from which there was no escape. 232

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The family with their provisions went up and down the escalators, and at every level, on all sides they found themselves facing obligatory routes that led to a check-out cashier, who aimed an adding machine, chattering like a machine gun, at all those who showed signs of leaving.18 Desperate, they find themselves in a part of the market that is under renovation and push their carts through a hole in the wall left by the builders. In the midst of their frenzy, they are startled to find themselves up at a height of seven stories looking down into the mouth of a giant crane. All but criminalized by their longings, they surrender their “supermarket loot” to the giant machine. What they can’t afford to buy is devoured, as one by one they feed their carts into the mouth of the industrial monster. Despite the callous reception that meets Marcovaldo’s attempts to adapt to city life, his enthusiasm is never quashed. He and his family, especially the children, remain vulnerably open hearted. Theirs is what the city’s business leaders would view askance as unproductive sentimentality, a condition Calvino elaborates in another story called “Santa’s Children.” It’s Christmas, and the big companies, till yesterday coldly concerned with calculating gross product and dividends, open their hearts to human affections and smiles. The sole thought of Boards of Directors now is to give joy to their fellow-man, sending gifts accompanied by messages of goodwill both to other companies and to private individuals; every firm feels obliged to buy a great stock of products from a second firm to serve as presents to third firms; and those firms, for their part, buy from yet another firm further stocks of presents for the others.19 One such company, Sbav and Co. has the novel idea of sending men out on bicycles dressed up as Santa Claus to deliver presents to special clients. To insure their recipients are aware of the source of such beneficence, “four balloons . . . with the letters S.B.A.V.”20 were attached to each Santa’s bike. Apparently, corporate anonymity would ruin the spirit of the enterprise. Marcovaldo enlists as a Santa, but refuses the cynicism of the enterprise. He remains convinced that the costume will work its magic, at least on his children. But by the time he gets home, they’ve already seen “the janitor’s CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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brother-in-law,” “the father of the twins across the street,” and “the uncle of Ernestina”21 riding their bikes around the city in the very same getup. It seems that every major company was suiting up pensioners, street vendors, and the otherwise unemployed. Unimpressed by Marcovaldo’s attempt to surprise them, his children go back to their holiday homework, which is to find a little boy or girl who’s poor and make them a present. Flummoxed by the thought there might actually be children poorer than his, Marcovaldo tells them there aren’t any, prompting his youngest son Michelino to ask if that’s why he didn’t bring them any presents. Shamed, Marcovaldo decides to make it up to him by letting him ride along on his deliveries. For his part, Michelino hopes he’ll run into a poor child. As they make their rounds, Marcovaldo’s tips add up. Not enough, however, to get over his disquiet at being greeted like a postman routinely delivering the mail. There is none of the surprise and delight he expected. His most deflating encounter is with a boy named Gianfranco, who is actually bored by Christmas. To occupy himself, Gianfranco keeps a tally of the roving Santas’ presents. Marcovaldo’s bring the tally to three hundred and twelve. By now, Marcovaldo is getting used to these flat receptions but he’s tongue-tied when his son asks him if the little boy is poor, since he clearly lives in a mansion. Moreover, it turns out that the child’s father is the wealthy “president of the Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption.”22 Nevertheless, Michelino is convinced he’s found his “poor child.” He goes home to his brothers, and together they wrap and deliver three presents, which they hope will cheer him up: a hammer, a slingshot, and a box of matches. The boys aren’t disappointed; Gianfranco is thrilled. He smashes everything in sight with the hammer, hits all of the Christmas ornaments with the slingshot, and sets fire to the entire house. Marcovaldo is sure he’s done for. The true Christmas miracle of the story is that he still has a job. It seems the children’s presents were such a success in breaking the rich boy’s tedium that his father, the aforementioned “president of the Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption,” has an epiphany. The “Destructive Gift” is born. Like the “machine gun” cash register in Marcovaldo’s supermarket, the constructive hammer, the shattering slingshot, and incinerating matches encapsulate the logic of consumption. Making, breaking, and burning coalesce in a single violent “gift,” giving us an ingenious portrait of planned obsolence.23 What 234

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Shopping, special issue of Colors 9, Tibor Kalman, December 1994–January 1995 Shopping, issue 9 of Colors: A Magazine about the Rest of the World2 was one of thirteen edited by Tibor Kalman between 1991–1995. It is telling that a jewel-handled gun graces the cover of the issue devoted to what the world buys. Diamonds, gold, and armament come together in one lethal package – the ne plus ultra in creative destruction, second only to the body parts for sale that appear inside the magazine. It seems there is nothing we won’t put a price tag on, even and most especially Christmas, as Marcovaldo discovers in Italo Calvino’s “Santa’s Children.” 2 Colors magazine was underwritten by the Italian clothing

company Benetton, the fact of which raised questions of the sincerity and integrity of socio-political content in a commercially branded publication. I will let the late Kalman’s words speak to that: “We were never under any pressure to do articles about sweaters or Luciano Benetton’s art collection. We did articles about poverty, multiple cultures, things that mattered. The amount of influence our sponsor or advertisers had over our publication was less than in other supposedly ‘independent’ commercial magazine [sic] I’ve worked for. We were free,” Tibor Kalman, “Reputations,” interview by Moira Cullen, Eye 20 (Spring, 1996), http://www.eyemagazine. com/feature/article/reputations-tibor-kalman.

seems an oxymoron – making something new that is sure to break or become outmoded – had its heyday in the Depression as a market stimulus, when people weren’t buying new products fast enough. They were making do with what they had instead. The economists thought they had it wrong, and clearly, their panacea for a slump still holds. Even American presidents repeat their mantra. Instead of “vote often and early,” today it’s “shop often and more.” CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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Saints and philosophers have rejected such advice for centuries, arguing that spending money on redundant things is not just imprudent, it is also unethical. Even if we don’t accept their asceticism – buying a book, for example, is not a necessity, but it is not unduly wasteful – design faces a dilemma. Because it’s predicated on the idea of improvement, design essentially models the behavior of seeking and buying “newer and better” things. It also helps foster the delusion that their accretion is harmless. This is the crux of the problem identified by César Aira: the selfish satisfactions and social costs wrought by obsessive accumulation.

COLLECTING: COSMOLOGIES OF THINGS, THE CONSEQUENCES OF THINGLY APPETITES

Where Calvino writes of those denied access to consumer palaces, César Aira’s “Acts of Charity” looks at the vortex of consumption from inside the palace, where a different kind of denial rules. The story, written in 2013, is about a priest sent to one of the most economically depressed villages in Argentina. This is a man who can’t keep himself from wanting and having, to the point where he has to build a new house. The poverty of his parishioners is part of the story, but only as a rationale for his consuming habits. On arrival, the priest dutifully surveys his parish and is appalled by its miserable living conditions. However, he finds himself faced with a curious crisis of conscience when he thinks about the prospect of alleviating their suffering. He realizes that if he fulfills his mission to help them, it would be the equivalent of using the poor as “stepping-stones to sainthood.”24 Heaven forbid he take advantage of the poor so callously. Moreover, since he knows his own lifetime is finite, and adheres to the oft-repeated belief that the poor will always be with us, the priest decides to redirect his energies. He realizes that a good way to practice charity is to ensure that it will not be discontinued in the future. This is not only a precaution but an act of humility as well, if the person acting charitably in the present deliberately gives up piety points in favor of his successor.25

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He convinces himself that the cleric who will ultimately replace him won’t be able to minister to the ravaged parish if he has to live in the hovel that passes for the local prelate’s residence. So it follows that the first order of business is to make said residence habitable: fix the leaky roof, put up window shutters, do something about the weed-infested yard. Not for himself of course – he accepts his vows of poverty – but for his parishioners who will no doubt emulate his example. Besides, if he ignored the decrepit state of the rectory, surely the next priest would have to divert money meant for the poor to fix it, and who knows what kind of excesses that might lead to. Accordingly, he acts on the principle of preventive medicine to stave off the worst-case scenario: a profligate successor. He hires an architect and orders the best materials to build a house so commodious that it will foreclose any prospects of further self-indulgence. The only hitch lies in accommodating the tastes of a person he hasn’t met, a person who may not even yet be born. The priest discovers that “there’s a lot to cover, if you’re trying to cover it all; where there’s a choice between two possibilities, you have allow for both rather than choosing one.”26 The house must have intimate spaces in the event the next tenant (and his inevitable guests) require privacy; it must also have rooms of an appropriate scale to host official receptions. Accordingly, there is a grand dining room no less than twenty yards long and an octagonal Chinese room for smaller gatherings. The kitchens that serve these spaces are no less considered. The future owner can “choose between two domestic arrangements: one that would suite the relaxed style of a lady who likes to do the cooking herself, and another for the mistress of the house who is happy to let her qualified staff take care of everything.”27 He even considers the very real chance that the as yet unknown incumbent might suffer from disabilities. Thus the priest feels compelled to install a lift modeled on the hydraulic mechanisms, “built for Frederick the Great’s palaces in Potsdam.”28 So far, the priest’s decisions don’t seem completely frivolous because they are largely structural. It is in the interior where things truly get out of hand with more gratuitous purchases. And as it turns out, this is the arena in which priest truly excels, but not without a prick of conscience first.

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Fleur De Lys (and detail), Vik Muniz, 2010 Artist Vik Muniz’s Fleur De Lys wallpaper confounds the beauty of a rococo pattern by constructing its decorative flourishes from trash – nuts, bolts, buttons, old transistor radios, tape cassettes, and other things so worn down as to be unrecognizable. Muniz’s allusion to the waste that underwrites luxury

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is a subversively elegant commentary on material and environmental decay, while César Aira’s story “Acts of Charity” speaks to spiritual corruption and social damage. Both, however, are equally concerned with how the forces of degradation are all too often disguised by malignant beauty.

A doubt begins to surface, or not so much a doubt as the intimation of a danger: that of creating a monster. Reality consists of beings and things in which all possibilities but one have already been set aside. In reality, alternatives do not coexist. And what is he doing if not attempting to bring them into coexistence? There are many ways of defining monstrosity, he thinks, but their common feature is the coexistence of possibilities among which a choice should have been made. And the house that he is building conforms to that description frighteningly well.29 But almost immediately he decides his recriminations are only a thought, and worse, a satanic temptation to abandon his true mission. Such idle speculation stands no chance against reality: “His doubts will be buried, or rather walled up, by the obduracy of matter.”30 What is it about this attraction to inanimate things that continually distracts his attention from the (very animate) rot and infestation, hunger, and illness around him? For our priest, this degradation is not an abstraction. He’s well aware that his parishioners’ shacks are as real as the Carrara marble in entrance to his house. Only by summoning the utmost discipline can he insure that charity has a future. Nothing less than a labor of love is required of him. (Even he can’t call it a penance.) The work of choosing wallpapers, damasks, carvings, and custom-made hangings is necessary to insure each room has a different character and will be responsive to temperaments other than his own. There is always the possibility that subsequent residents might have tastes that lean toward modern lines, say that of Thonet or Jean-Michel Frank; alternatively, they might veer toward the rococo of Chippendale or Louis XV. The priest’s design considerations would seem to have completely devolved into unmitigated decadence were it not for the fact that he also attends to more practical matters: bedding, heaters, cleaning supplies. The project seems infinite. Except,

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it would be an exaggeration to speak of “infinity,” because there’s a limit to what can fit in a house; the house itself is that limit. But, in accordance with his previous reasoning, the asymptotic approach to the center, to the smallest and most central item (the coffee spoon, the adaptor plug), seems never ending. . . . And yet that proliferation has an advantage over the design and building of the structure: it facilitates more flexible variations with which to satisfy the needs of the future inhabitant who is the constant focus of his thoughts.31 The fact that the priest gives the same scrutiny to an adaptor plug as he does to his tasseled velvet drapes belies the oft-cited notion that design is driven primarily by function. This shouldn’t be news. For an adaptor plug to work it has to address our sense of touch; even a stop sign depends on the aesthetic of its color. Yet, the myth that design is distinct from (and immune to deploying) the sensual appeal of the decorative persists, even as consumers like our priest make no such distinctions. While Aira isn’t concerned with such internal design debates, he indirectly makes the case that, no matter a designer’s intent, her work is capable of arousal – an arousal of attention to things that can improve not just one space but all that we set eyes upon. The priest thrives on this momentum. With the palace finished (for the moment), the priest now trains his sights on the grounds, hiring landscape architects to create formal French gardens, “hectares of lawn, copses of exotic trees, bamboo thickets, flower-lined paths that wind among knolls made from earth dug up for the artificial lake.”32 However, even he can’t pretend that living conditions outside his palace walls aren’t in severe decline. But it can’t be helped; there is still so much to do, even though his death is imminent. There is a theater to be built, a kennel to be populated, a tea pavilion to be constructed, not to mention chessboards to be bought in the event his successor likes to play. We never learn if he does like chess or any of his predecessor’s choices. Instead we learn that the new priest is so struck by the care taken on his behalf that he feels duty bound to add more improvements. And if he, too, delays attending to the parish, it is only because “there is so much poverty, he doesn’t know where to start.”33 Aira’s priests may be paralyzed with indecision about helping the poor, but they are decisive consumers, albeit profoundly amoral – gluttony being one 240

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of the seven deadly sins. They are infatuated with the seemingly limitless shapes and styles of everything from doorknobs to drapes. The only commonality among these things is that they are the most expensive and finest of their type. Only the best will do in the sacrifice of “piety points” forever deferred.

mMm Lao She’s short story “Attachment” also entails self-serving sacrifice. However, the collector in question is not a wealthy man, or like Aira’s priests, a man with a wealthy organization funding his appetites. He is an autodidact whose rewards come as much from the particularity of the things he covets as from the gradual awareness that his insights and powers of detection are deepening. “Attachment” looks at the consequences of this heightened sensitivity and the authority we gladly cede to things as we get to know them better. When we meet the story’s protagonist Mr. Zhuang Yiya, he is still an innocent. Yiya enjoys collecting for the satisfaction he finds in his modest discoveries. We are told not to mistake him for an unrefined peddler who’s only in it for the money. Word has it that he’s a person you can count on – “honest and prudent, just like plain folks.”34 He has a wife in the countryside, but he’s rarely there, preferring to keep busy in the city Jinan, where he had worked in the school system. The city’s roadside stands are his favorite haunts; he scours them for choice bits of calligraphy and paintings – fragments, actually, pockmarked by insect holes, smudges, rips, and tears. His battered treasures rarely cost him more than eighty cents. Five dollars would be an extravagance. Nevertheless, he cherishes each of his finds. He reviews them every evening, gives each a number, stamps them with his seal, and places them in a moth-proof cedar chest. To anyone familiar with museum practices, Yiya’s rituals exhibit the symptoms of a nascent curator. Not that he recognizes them as such. Still, he is starting to pay regular visits to bona fide galleries where he’s taken to admiring works well out of his reach. Instead of considering him a nuisance, the dealers appreciate his discernment; his presence attracts other customers. Increasingly, they call upon him to serve as their middleman, someone who finds interesting pieces that they, in turn, can sell. In exchange, Yiya receives an education. He handles famous paintings, carefully unrolling and rolling them when customers wish to view them. In this sense, he resembles Marcovaldo, who can only imitate the actions of shoppers. CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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The difference is that when Yiya performs the rituals of a gallery owner, he is rehearsing to be both a buyer and a seller. His knowledge grows so much during this time that he can consider himself a connoisseur. He’s now willing to spend as much as ten to thirty dollars on a piece for himself as long as it doesn’t duplicate anything already in his possession. Moreover, he does not hesitate to borrow money from his friends or to send his coat to the pawnshop. One has to be audacious to be a connoisseur. Not all of these works have artistic value. In the past, he might not have even looked at some of them, but now he will spend ten to twenty dollars to buy them. Collecting is collecting. A collection could – even should – be detached from artistic value and become a singularly unique obsession and passion.35 His collection has changed character, and now it seems to have changed his, bringing recessive qualities to the fore. Once embarrassed to share his scraps, Yiya now displays his acquisitions proudly, holding forth with people who pack themselves into his room to see them. His private aesthetic rewards play second fiddle to the public acknowledgment he accrues from what he has come to call his collection of “Shandong’s minor artists.” He believes that “there is no other collection like it! Even the Japanese have come for a viewing.”36 Though it is 1937, and tensions between China and Japan are growing daily, Yiya is oblivious to the political ramifications of such attentions. In fact, he revels in his “international” recognition. However, when the Japanese do invade China,37 Yiya finds his international reputation comes at a cost. Everyone around him is panicking. There is an exodus from the city, and he makes a few attempts to leave himself but ultimately chooses to stay. Survival, however, proves to be more than a matter of avoiding enemy fire. It seems that certain Japanese officials, familiar with his reputation, want him to “come out of retirement and serve as head of the Education Bureau!”38 With only minutes to decide whether to collude or let the Japanese take his collection (and in all probability his life), Yiya tearfully agrees to work for the enemy. His choice is preordained. It is impossible for him to abandon the evidence of who he is and who he has become; patriotism – with its root in the Greek patris (allegiance to fatherland) – would condemn him to the role of the 242

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deferential son. However, he doesn’t see his disloyalty as patricide; rather he sees it as a kind of suicide. He sacrifices his citizenship to save a hybrid state of one: a man conjoined with his collection. Such is the power of objects we identify not just as ours but as extensions of ourselves.

nNn The accidental collector is also the subject of “Solid Objects.” Written by Virginia Woolf in 1918, the short story revolves around the consequences of random acts of discovery – not of one type (like Yiya’s paintings) but of modest, disparate things united only by the fact of their selection. It opens with two young men – John and Charles – discussing politics. They are sitting on a beach, idly speculating about their prospects for securing seats in Parliament. While Charles distractedly skims stones over the water, John idly runs his hand through the sand, watching the water pool up in the gullies he’s making, until his fingers wrap themselves around “something hard – a full drop of solid matter.”39 (The proximity of “drop” to “solid” hints at the transformations to come – changes also prefigured by the contrast between Charles’ skimming and John’s digging.) It was a lump of glass . . . impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone. You had only to enclose it in a rim of gold, or pierce it with a wire, and it became a jewel; part of a necklace, or a dull, green light upon a finger. Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay.40 The anonymity of “matter” gives way to glass, and in turn, conjures a daydream more childlike than ministerial. By sheer accident, John has found his kryptonite: not just the glass itself but also its power to transport him to another state of mind. For the time being, however, he’s content to consign the glass (and his more fantastical thoughts) to the shelf and put it to work as a paperweight, as befits a man “standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career [who] has any number of papers to keep in order.”41 Nonetheless, he delights “in the sense of power and benignity”42 that led him to rescue this particular stone, imagining its CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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relief at being chosen from all the others – an act John will repeat countless times as he keeps his eyes peeled to the ground on his way to and from his office. This routine might have continued harmlessly except for a discovery of a different order of object: a piece of patterned china, broken in the shape of a five-pointed starfish. “The colouring was mainly blue, but green strips or spots of some kind overlaid the blue, and lines of crimson gave it a richness and lustre of the most attractive kind. John was determined to possess it.”43 Nothing in his government portfolio could compare with such a specimen, so unique “it looked like a creature from another world – freakish and fantastic as a harlequin. It seemed to be pirouetting through space, winking light like a fitful star.”44

Mediterranean Gifts, Anna Barbara, 2015 Italian architect and designer Anna Barbara filled this necklace with beach glass she collected on the Calabrian shore. Its stones float within their tubing like fish caught in a net. They almost seem to levitate. Each piece of glass has a lost story behind it, having once lived as a bottle, a goblet, or a

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windowpane, before being broken and lost to the sea. Just as Virginia Woolf’s failed Parliamentarian John invents new life for his piece of sea glass, Barbara invents a new life for her found fragments, reincarnating them in a necklace filled with tangible memories of summer.

In mere seconds, matter, color, and form meld with an alchemic force into an object so distracting that John loses all sense of time in extracting it. Indeed, he misses an appointment with his constituents, the first of many he will forget. He now spends the better part of his days combing littered railroad tracks and searching demolition sites hoping to replicate his porcelain find. He doesn’t, but he is astonished at the immense variety of shapes to be found . . . and there was still more cause for wonder and speculation in the differences of qualities and designs. The finest specimens he would bring home and place upon his mantelpiece, where, however, their duty was more and more of an ornamental nature, since papers needing a weight to keep them down became scarcer and scarcer.45 Not surprisingly his run for Parliament fails. He may not have a political career, but he has freedom, albeit an impecunious freedom. Woolf arouses our sympathy for John (a fellow artist) at the same time she warns of the risks involved in becoming isolated, even if surrounded by cherished things. (Her own suffering and suicide are well known.) To wit, John’s next important find is a piece of iron – the negative of the luminous sea-washed glass. It is “so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origins in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon.”46 Now a trinity dominates his mantelpiece: select specimens of glass, porcelain, and iron whose function has shifted from holding down the paperwork of officialdom to escaping it altogether. The fact that each of the three artifacts is incomplete (chipped, broken, dulled) and that each sets a standard of beauty John hopes to surpass in his next finds, underscores the fact his appetites will never be sated. But by the same token, they will ever stagnate. Woolf describes the aging John as a shabby loner, whose belated gift of sight changes his calculations of success. To his old friend Charles, John is dangerously delusional; he has abandoned the social contract that ties achievement to salaried servitude. The implications of exchanging that pact for a vocation of collecting would be especially unsettling to Charles’ Protestant work ethic and its hierarchies and controls.47 Perhaps even more egregiously, John shuns people for things. He is completely preoccupied by “solid objects,” the sea glass, the porcelain fragment, CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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and the black lump of iron – each a thinly disguised marker of birth, midlife, and death, the latter hinting at the fatal effects of collecting when it obscures all else. Conversely, it is also possible to read Woolf’s timeline of things as markers of the maturation of a man and his taste – markers with gaps between them waiting to be filled with more objects as happenstance permits. Regardless, John’s habit of collecting has rendered the clock and the job – the conventional markers of time and its uses – irrelevant, and for that we envy him.

oOo The tangled temporality that nests in collections (and is endemic to collecting when, like John, we lose all track of the hours) is central to Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting.” In this legendary essay, he observes that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which, in a collector, mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. . . . To renew the old world – this is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and this is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than an acquirer of luxury editions.48 Notice the phrase: “renew the old world.” Here, collecting is not a matter of nostalgia, but of an awakening of an object in the present, as present. It presumes that the ideas and images contained in books transcend the date of their authorship. The collector’s epiphanies may be singular in the moment of discovery but they are multiple in their accrual. They flow from an admixture of concentration and coincidence. For all but the most obsessive scavengers who never look up, concentration works like a low frequency hum in the brain, allowing for other pursuits while remaining quietly on alert, ever prepared to act on jolts of recognition. Collecting, like design and other creative acts, is opportunistic. For Benjamin it is also tactical pursuit, requiring maneuvers in strange cities, where, as he writes, “the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most 246

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remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books.”49 The ancillary pleasures of the flaneur aside, the real objective of these forays is liberation. Like conquerors who build museums for the treasures they “rescue” from foreign lands (the Elgin Marbles the most famous), the collector is convinced that a book’s true freedom lies “somewhere on his shelves.”50 Which is not, however, to equate institutional collections with those accrued by individuals, for “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.”51 Here, we move from the gratifications of finding and acquiring, to the nourishment that his acquisitions provide – the opposite of the nagging sense of missing something that dogs the avaricious collector. For one such as Benjamin, ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.52 Here, Benjamin describes the kind of considered relationship to things that reconciles the healthy curiosity that prompts another purchase with the enjoyment of what was purchased before it. This is the virtuous collector’s project. It is also the larger project of design, as it too balances legitimate needs for the new (e.g., designing low-energy refrigerators or more effective access to healthcare) with the recognition that it has done its share in creating the glut of harmful things (e.g., cosmetics, batteries, and plastic bags) that are threatening to make the world as we know it disappear altogether.

PpP Benjamin’s collection is as much made up of his stories of collecting as it is of the stories that the books themselves tell, not just in their contents but in their bindings, illustrations, paper, and their letterforms. It is this rich narrative quality that keeps each object alive long after its acquisition. In contrast, Perec’s novel Things: A Story of the Sixties speaks to collecting impulses that are not grounded CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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in renewable narratives, those object-stories that thrive in retelling and repeated handling. The protagonists of Things are more interested in wholesale replacement. In this, they are products of their times. The deprivations of World War II are receding. After years of disruption, a collective desire to settle down unleashes a massive demand for consumer goods. Prosperity, however, remains uneven, and is an especially frustrating state of affairs for an educated young couple in Paris. Unable to afford more than their two-room “flatlet,” Sylvie and Jérôme could renovate – remove a partition, paint the walls, rearrange their furnishings – but the thought is too exhausting. Moreover, they are hostage to their tastes. No half measures for them. Even something as pedestrian as a bookcase was held to inflexible standards, it “would be light oak or it would not be.”53 In their exacting searches for just the right thing, or one that is acceptably close, the couple and their friends become denizens of the city’s flea markets, crossing all of Paris to see an armchair they’d been told was just perfect. And since they knew their classics they would sometimes even hesitate to put on some new garment, as it seemed so important to them, for it to look its best, that it should first have been worn three times.54 Their efforts belie an insecurity that borders on superstition. The problem is that (like Yiya) they weren’t born rich. Instead, they are “condemned to conquest.” They exalt over their rare hard-won victories – the perfect leather suitcase or right kind of side table. But more than things qua things, they seek the patina that signifies inherited wealth. They become habitués of village markets and Parisian stalls, and as they do, they constantly recalibrate their tastes. Sophistication is a moving target. Perec’s critique of this particular strain of aspiration becomes even more pointed when Sylvie and Jérôme take up work in the nascent field of marketing. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Perec himself, at one point, worked in marketing.55) The variable hours and the peripatetic nature of the work seem ideal; and conducting consumer surveys gets them out and about, giving them even more opportunities to scour the countryside for desirable things.

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For four years and maybe more they explored and interviewed and analysed. Why are pure-suction vacuum cleaners selling so poorly? What do people of modest origin think of chicory? Do you like readymade mashed potato, and if so, why? Because it’s light? Because it’s creamy? Because it’s easy to make – just open it up and there you are?56 This kind of work makes no intellectual demands and is reasonably wellpaid. Best of all, it won’t disrupt their true vocation: the acquisition of the easy grace and confidence that flows from their painstaking choices. In fact, their marketing gigs support their ambition. After years of making do, Jérôme can now afford American Van Heusen shirts and Sylvie can indulge in silk blouses from Doucet. Even so, they continue to live poised for the future – a future free of the financial constraints that deny them their rightful due. It seems an injustice to have to forgo things they appreciate so exquisitely. It’s as though they’ve been sentenced to live in a kind of consumer purgatory. So they dream. And for a time they are relatively happy within their cocoon of like-minded friends with likeminded tastes. The one thing they cannot gain purchase on is time. Approaching thirty, Sylvie and Jérôme are increasingly aware that living so contingently is denying them peace of mind. It’s an unsettling thought and a threat to their conviction that freedom – the freedom to taste the world’s riches – was antithetical to working conventional hours. But since marketing firms prefer age in the office and youth in its street-walking pollsters, they compromise, and “put down roots in a temporary soil”57 – she as a filing clerk and he as a decoder of questionnaires. Now holding steady jobs, they resent the responsibilities they’ve taken on. There were bills for gas, electricity and the telephone that had to be paid. Every day they had to eat. They had to have clothes, they had to redecorate, change the sheets, take the washing to the laundry, get shirts ironed, buy shoes, catch the train, buy furniture.58 They were encumbered by the infrastructure that supported their, admittedly still marginally, prosperous existence. Sustaining it robbed them of the carefree hours they thought were their due. Effectively shackled, Sylvie and Jérôme were ready to fight for their freedom, but they “did not quite believe you CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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could go into battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner under which they would have enlisted most readily.”59 The couple isn’t mollified by bureaucratic salves like early retirement plans or longer paid holidays. “They wanted superabundance – Garrard turntables, empty beaches for their eyes only, round-the-world trips, grand hotels.”60 And they wanted it now. They fantasized about stealing and sudden windfalls. In their dreams there were apartments where “some rooms were all rock, others all jungle; in others, the sea broke in waves; and in others, peacocks paraded.”61 Frustrated by work and haunted by a future that remained stubbornly out of reach, they make a drastic purge. In the consumer equivalent of a psychotic break, they leave France for Tunisia. Sylvie secures a teaching post in the remote town of Sfax – a far cry from Tunis where they’d hoped to land jobs. (Jérôme never finds employment.) Unsurprisingly, Sfax is completely alien to them and they to it, even its European quarter, where “they would cast vague glances at hideous window-displays: flimsy furniture, wrought-iron standard lamps, electric blankets, school exercise books, evening dress, ladies’ shoes, bottled gas canisters.”62 They haven’t quite cured themselves of the habit of window-shopping, but here it offers no frisson. They feel like they are living in a vacuum. After five years in country, they husband all the energy they had been putting into their complaints and spur themselves back to Paris, having changed not at all. It only takes a short time for the couple to feel the constraints of money once again and make a move they never would have considered before. Sylvie and Jérôme accept offers for lucrative executive posts in a marketing agency in Bordeaux. This is where they will have their chesterfield settee, huge light-filled rooms, rustic tables, fine china, silver cutlery, and lace napkins – all the while, in denial that “continuous acquisition, while ever holding the promise of realized desire and value, is based on endless disappointment.”63 Unquestionably, design, defined narrowly as style, was a critical factor in their meticulously curated lives. They wouldn’t call it that, but what else makes one settee stand out among others? Designers also played their part in helping less discriminating shoppers choose breakfast cereals, shaving creams, cars, and cigarettes, all in the name of happier lives. In fact, without their contributions, Sylvie and Jérôme would not have had a basis for the questions they put to the consumers they surveyed. How would one describe a preference if everything looked the same as it did last year, or for that matter, last month? 250

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HOARDING: THE STUFF OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL SURVIVAL

Design is even a factor when, to outsiders at least, everything does look the same, as is the case with the most obsessive of accumulators: hoarders. Where collectors pride themselves on being selective, no matter how indecipherable their criteria, there are others for whom excess is necessary to base requirements, and only they can see the distinctions in the excess that is theirs alone. Barry Yourgrau is quite particular on that point in his autobiographical book of 2015: Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act. However, before we learn about the designerly qualities of the things that clog his modest apartment, we learn about the distinctions within this tribe of object extremists.

Pull, Mary Mattingly, 2013 Artist Mary Mattingly binds her possessions in what she calls “boulders” to illustrate the degree to which our material accumulations seem all but immovable. Similarly, Barry Yourgrau’s “mess” is a millstone around his neck, threatening to drown him and his relationship with the woman who loves him but can no longer visit the storage bin he calls his apartment. (There is nowhere to sit.) Neither the writer nor the artist, however, is without sympathy for the contents of

their material prisons. Yourgrau never entirely discards his most-loved possessions; instead, he keeps them in a digital warehouse. Mattingly doesn’t segregate the loved from the less-loved, but she does recognize that all objects of consumption are not equal and that her worldly goods are a mix of the necessary and the needless. Unlike Yourgrau, she bundles them indiscriminately as, in a sense, we all do.

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To begin with, Yourgrau points out that the stereotype of the disturbed hoarder is too simplistic. He, for one, is a self-confessed clutter-bug, whose home is part souvenir stand and part emergency supply room. Even true hoarders are not all alike. Their methods can range from the random to the fanatically precise. Some are “characterized by excessive orderliness; opposites, in fact, of messy characters.”64 Yourgrau is somewhere in between organized (every stash has its rationale) and messy (the sheer volume of things in his apartment obscures those rationales). His issue is that he’s unable to part with things. Interestingly, those with such strong attachments generally operate outside of the commodity system. They collect evidence of its workings, but they don’t participate in its transactions. Hoarders’ things are not for sale. In Yourgrau’s case, this is particularly ironic, since high on the list of the (many) things he’s reluctant to give up is the ordinary shopping bag, countless numbers of which are stashed in every room in his apartment. Although the flimsy sacks are sure signs that something’s been bought, they don’t make Yourgrau a consumer. He is emphatic about this: I was almost a teetotaler about consumerism. I hate shopping per se. I did have this thing for postcards, and tourist calendars, and cheap old tacky paperbacks (not forgetting plastic bags, though in a different way). But never by the yard, credit card whoopily flashing. All my clutter probably would be gaveled for less than $500 – were dollars the index.65 The point is not to purchase but to identify with things and the “the almost sacramental personalness they could possess.”66 An object’s value is determined by emotional investment: the anxiety of running out of things, the reassurance of a touchstone, the delight of recognition – feelings that most of us recognize. The difference is that for hoarders (and apparently clutter bugs, too) once a thing is chosen, it’s always revered – and, for Yourgrau, even the most trivial objects are precious. This doesn’t mean, however, that he scavenges blindly. (Few hoarders do.) Even shopping bags have hierarchies – for example, a hotel shopping bag from Le Meurice in Paris.

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Just consider it: an on-the-go debonair lad “starred” on it, illustrated in cool retro-fifties style, his trench coat and tousled hair snappy against a background of palest creamy mint above the hotel’s crest with its twin sleek, seated greyhounds. A gray cord handle draped gracefully over the bag’s side.67 These are the words of an aesthete. But this aesthete, unlike most, doesn’t close his eyes (or his closets) to things of a lowlier provenance. He offers them refuge. This is not because Yourgrau subscribes to an ethos of object-democracy – all things are not created equal. Instead, he’s driven by a curiosity about the world and an attempt to deep-freeze what he knows of it. For all intents and purposes, he’s living in a one-to-one map of his life. The trigger for a collector, compulsive or not, is sometimes a matter of documentation, like a bookmark in time. Sand collected from a beach in Hawaii looks just like sand from Florida; the only thing to distinguish the two are the memories we assign to them. In any case, for all but granular purists, the salient factor is the place it came from, not the sand itself. Yourgrau keeps a grotty teastained mug not for its intrinsic beauty but because it reminds him of a trip he and his girlfriend once took to Andalusia. On the other hand, the acquisitive impulse can equally be stirred by an act of recognition. Once stamped by the attentions of a designer – via a logo, a shape, an intended use, or a particular choice of materials – objects live a double life. The character of type on a page, the quality of light on a screen, the cut of a piece of clothing, or the arrangement of a room – any of these can stop a moment in time. Indeed, we learn of a man who collects packaging specifically to watch how design changes over time; each wrapper is as much a time capsule as it is a micro-history of packaging design. For Yourgrau, however, design is more personal; it is an appeal to his taste. When he looks at his shopping bag from Le Meurice, he not only remembers Paris, he also recognizes the qualities of the sack’s lux design – its colors, its logo, and fabric handle – the combination of which still delights him. Even a trip to a housewares store is an opportunity for an aesthetic reverie, this one about color. He buys a “sweetly orange, cheap plastic bucket,” which he complements with purple rubber gloves, plus a brush he chooses “simply for its fierce red bristles.”68 Admittedly, this excursion is not on a par with Paris, but it is a memorable CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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milestone in sweeping things up and out of an apartment choking on its contents – an occasion worth celebrating with brand new cleaning supplies. Here again, we feel the double-edge sword of design. The “cheap and cheerful” bucket and brush make the prospect of the job less onerous; they also conjure up the genies of “novelty and its twin, disposal.”69 Though Yourgrau has spent his life resisting novelty, here he joins the ranks of quotidian consumers. But it is a necessary lapse if he is to thin his belongings and keep his partner – she’s made it a non-negotiable condition of their relationship. Undisciplined attachments to all manner of objects have made disposal his grail. He reaches it with the help of therapists, fellow sufferers, fear of building superintendents, the persistent goads of loved ones, and importantly, his camera where the most painful de-acquisitions are salvaged in digital bytes. The book Mess itself, of course, is a literary storage unit.70 Writing it was as much a part of the cleaning process as any broom.

QqQ In Paul Auster’s 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things, hoarding isn’t aberrant; it is a requirement for survival. Set in a vaguely distant future, sometime after an apocalyptic event or events, the plot is set in a ravaged, isolated city. Here, the very idea of surfeit is a thing of the past. Gone are the Walmarts and Pradas, and pretty much everything in between. Even so, consumption doesn’t entirely disappear; it just operates in the crudest kinds of trade and barter. In the Country of Last Things explores our twofold dependence on things as literal lifelines (here we come closer to the elemental definition of consumption as eating) and things as the genesis of stories (things that sustain us emotionally and intellectually). Both are critical when everything is falling apart. Here, a house will be there “one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today.”71 We learn about this precarious state of affairs from a young woman named Anna Blume. She has come in search of her brother, a journalist who hasn’t been heard from in years. Anna finds that everyone is hungry, that crime is rife, and people are so frail that they bind themselves together so as not to blow away. Suicide is rampant.

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Is This Your Future?, Dunne & Raby, 2004 People have been using organic waste as fuel for centuries, most notably in the form of peat. More recently, some have diverted human excrement from waste systems into compost that is converted to fuel. But few have actually used such an immediate collecting strategy as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose in this installation, which appeared in the context of an exhibition on dwindling fossil fuel resources at the Energy Gallery of the London Science Museum. Based on a series of “what if” questions, this

scenario proposes that human feces become so valuable as to be collected in a storage container that also packed a school lunch. Dunne and Raby not only anticipate a likely shortage, they also frame a solution and position it within the etiquette of normal activities. Paul Auster does the same in In the Country of Last Things, but without the social niceties. In his world, saving human waste is not a courtesy but the difference between life and death.

Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains. . . . Every day in the streets you hear explosions, as if somewhere far from you a building were falling down or the sidewalk caving in. But you never see it happen.72 No one has a credible explanation for how things got this way and no one wants to talk about it. An epidemic, an environmental disaster, or an infrastructure collapse: all or none may be responsible for the city’s quarantine. (Given that no one will speak of it, I am strongly tempted to say that the likeliest explanation is the catastrophic effects of global warming – effects that, in reality, have met with varying degrees of denial and silence since 1979.73) In this world, people only know that things and places don’t work as they did before. Newspapers are in high demand, though not for their content. Stuffed inside shoes, pant legs, and jackets, paper is vital insulation from the cold. People line up to get their “paper meals” as much to stay warm as to disguise their thinness. You can be starving to death but the padding will make you look obese. This is the “story” that newspapers are now reduced to telling. And somehow it eases the distress of starving if you just look fat, regardless of the fact that everyone knows you’re not. CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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Commodities are so scarce that people have to turn to their own bodies to supplement the lack. The sacred and the profane are plundered equally now that cadavers and excrement have become the city’s most important products. Corpses and shit are as prized as oil and coal, and in more plentiful supply. The Fecalists who collect them enjoy the status that comes with preserving public order; there would be plagues without them. They’re given housing on a par with that of the police, who, in turn, can arrest anyone who dumps waste on the street. Those foolish enough to do it twice risk the death penalty. However, good jobs like the Fecalists’ are nearly impossible to get. The next best option is scavenging, a dubious occupation with its own peculiar rankings. With staples, luxuries, and everything in between disappearing, procurement becomes paramount, both to the system and the strange things that feed it. All scavengers fall into one of two basic categories: garbage collectors and object hunters. The first group is considerably larger than the second, and if one works hard, diligently sticking to it twelve or fourteen hours a day, there is an even chance of making a living. . . . To get work as a garbage collector you must first obtain a permit from one of the brokers – for which you must pay a monthly fee, sometimes as much as fifty percent of your earnings.74 Failure to produce a permit can mean deportation to a labor camp. Apart from that, the biggest obstacle is staying strong enough to work in the first place. The more you collect the more you can afford to eat. A garbage collector also has to be strong enough to protect the most essential tool of the trade: a shopping cart. Especially attractive to thieves, the carts are secured to their owner by dog leashes, ropes, and chains, otherwise known as “umbilical cords.” Cut off from his cart, no garbage collector can survive. The other type of scavengers are object hunters. They look for salvage not waste, and scrounge for things and materials that can somehow be used again. The conversion process – from barely identifiable scraps to reasonably convincing merchandise – is done by Resurrection Agents, who sell their reconditioned wares in markets scattered throughout the city. These are no mere middlemen; “they are among the richest and most powerful people around, rivaled only by the garbage brokers themselves.”75 256

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Anna goes in for object hunting. She’s found that a surprising amount of stuff still lingers, noticing that “it takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than you would think.”76 It turns out that object hunting is much harder than garbage collecting and getting more so by the day since very little gets thrown away in the first place. “A frayed T-shirt, a pair of torn underpants, the brim of a hat – all these things are now saved, to be patched together into a new set of clothes.”77 Anna struggles but has the stamina of youth on her side. She quickly adjusts to spending her days with her eyes trained on the ground, searching for flotsam and jetsam that have potential, passing over things that have none. She realizes that, at a certain point, things disintegrate into muck, or dust, or scraps, and what you have is something new, some particle or agglomeration of matter that cannot be identified. It is a clump, a mote, a fragment of the world that has no place: a cipher of it-ness. As an object hunter, you must rescue things before they reach this state of absolute decay. . . . You hover somewhere in between, on the lookout for things that still retain a semblance of their original shape – even if their usefulness is gone.78 Neither recycling nor repair are relevant in a city where things are so degraded. What is necessary is an ability to imagine that an object could be otherwise. (Include the circumstances around an object and this is a fair definition of why we design: to make things and situations otherwise.) Being able to detect the hidden possibilities in the neglected requires a sixth sense. Or more to the point, an ability to see the embryo of a story in things otherwise overlooked. Anna meets someone with just that talent when she finds herself offered the greatest gift of all: a room and a job at Woburn House, a mansion converted into a refuge. Anna orients new arrivals and assists the shelter’s supplier Boris Stepanovich. Boris shows up several times a week with things like soap, towels, equipment, and food. He is sometimes paid in cash but more often in odds and ends from the estate, a motely assortment of once-valuable things that it seems only he can sell. The objects he traffics in are indispensable, but only as pretexts for stories that he tailors to his customers. A broken teacup, for example, is given an aristocratic Franco-Russian provenance.

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My dear good man . . . . Take a careful look at this teacup. Hold it in your hand, if you wish. Close your eyes, put it to your lips, and imagine yourself drinking tea from it – just as I did thirty-one years ago, in the drawing rooms of Countess Oblomov . . . the most ravishing woman in Minsk. . . . The Countess overwhelmed me with her generosity – not only of her person, which would have been . . . more than enough! – but of the gifts she brought with her.”79 When the con is successful (and it usually is), Boris has sold the Countess, not the demitasse. However, without the cracked cup itself, the tale would hold no water, much less tea – if it ever could. Boris may be a master flatterer but his embellishments depend on the specificity of things, and in that they have more than the ring of truth. Until arriving at Woburn House, Anna has only experienced the meanest offerings of an object world reduced to a skeletal condition. Boris reminds Anna

Salvation, Boym Partners Inc, 2000–2002 The Salvation project grew out of a challenge. Constantin Boym and Laurene Leon Boym of Boym Partners Inc set everyone in their studio the task of finding ceramics under five cents in flea markets and junk shops and making something of them. The results were charmingly idiosyncratic totems of plates, cups, saucers, and bowls. They each offer

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a new story – as table centerpieces or curious conversation pieces – without disowning their original practical forms. The transformation is much like that conducted by Boris Stepanovich, who makes broken teacups whole by providing a narrative that is both plausible and outlandish.

that even subsistence requires stories, and that bodies can shrivel away from lack of hope. The act of fabricating (in every sense of the word) is an act of faith in the future, and with it, the idea of renewal. A hat on Boris’s head allows him commune with fictional ancestors – a derby conjures Sir Charles, a fez, Uncle Abduhl. Another hat concentrates his mind and allows him to converse in French. With equal measures of elegance and absurdity, he recognizes the essence of the hat: a thing of style and a thing of purpose, neither mutually exclusive.

RrR Boris has effectively gone shopping in his closet and found things that have fallen out of the cycles of consumption but not out of possibilities. Today, we might consider him the ideal consumer. His goods require no factories, they create no toxic waste, and they don’t increase global temperatures. Then again, he is living in the apocalyptic condition that scientists have warned – to no avail – awaits us when the planet heats up even more. This is the same condition foreshadowed early on in this chapter with Zola’s ominous characterization of goods rolling into the Paradise, “with the resounding noise of a flood tide.”80 That said, the words “flood tide” don’t make Zola a proto-environmentalist, nor, for that matter, does the cautionary tone of the other authors considered here. Their stories are more about the attractions of objects and the rapaciousness with which their characters consume them, or might like to, as in the case of Marcovaldo in the supermarket. And though it is possible to read his family’s unceremonious grocery dump as a reference to landfills, it is more likely that Calvino used the earthmover’s maw as a metaphor for what it means to devour. (Only Auster deals with the excretions that follow the feast.) Like Aira, She, and even Yourgrau, whose apartment was inches from being a personal landfill, Calvino is far more concerned with the social effects of accumulation. Woolf and Perec delve into the psychological affects that objects may have, whether modest or costly. By indirection, they point to the fact that when things are not differentiated from each other, we pay them less mind – and often underestimate the degree to which we depend on them. But once we become aware of their peculiarities and how they seem to complement our own, we gladly concede power to objects and places. In the most extreme cases, they become sacred repositories for the self. CONSUMING: SHOPPING, COLLECTING, HOARDING

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It seems only Benjamin comes through intact. He, unlike Perec’s Sylvie and Jérôme, had confined his pursuit to one domain and didn’t have such rigidly predetermined parameters. He found his books by both chance and conscious research. Moreover, in contrast to the priest’s palace and Yiya’s paintings, his books made no demands on others. Woolf’s failed Parliamentarian experiences something of the same fulfillment that Benjamin enjoys. However, his criteria are so deeply personal, and his finds so eccentric, that they make him deeply anti-social. John makes up stories about the sea glass, the porcelain, and the iron lump, but he has no one to tell them to. And like Yourgrau, he didn’t buy his treasures nor could he sell them. When the social nature of consumption disappears, objects consume not only space but also psyches. Things that might otherwise offer shared pleasures can make us un-generous. Sensing that those things and pleasures are forever out of reach can be cause for implacable dissatisfaction. To twist the language of consumption, we need to have purchase on, and investment in, that which we choose to consume. In the best case, the purchase is made by recognition, the investment is made by care. Otherwise, we consume in the most impoverished way. Things just pass through, they are not absorbed, and their design is all but irrelevant. Today, this is increasingly the case because of the sheer volume of goods produced. The design project that begs for attention, now, is the reconfiguration of consumption as an exchange, not as a finite transaction. Clive Dilnot offers one possible approach in an essay that postulates design as a gift and the designer as the “giver,” writing, once the giver does so move, the process of choosing the gift/designing the object becomes a double process of confirmation and affirmation. The act of thinking of the other in this way confirms and affirms both the relationship with the other and our own work.81 For the classical formulation of cyclical production and consumption, we might well substitute “confirmation” and “affirmation.” On this point, Dilnot offers us no less an authority on the economies of things than Karl Marx. Marx, in an early commentary, wrote that if such a process were possible, “I would know myself to be confirmed in your thought as well as in your love.”82

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1 Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: Harper Collins, 2016), 677. 2 Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1963), 96. Hadrian, whose full name is Publius Aelius Hadrianus, was born in 76 AD and died in 138 AD. He ruled as Emperor of Rome from 117 AD to 138 AD. 3 Twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter used the phrase “Creative Destruction” to describe the dynamic of capitalism writing, “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development . . . incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism” (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [New York: Harper, (1942) 1975], 83). Because “design” is generally thought to have become a practice in its own right with the advent of industrial production and the concomitant rise of capitalism, it is often valued only in market terms, but “creative destruction” goes beyond economics, to include environmental ecologies and social ecologies as well. 4 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 136. 5 Le Bon Marché, the model for Zola’s Paradise, was founded in Paris in 1838 and became a full-fledged department store when entrepreneur Aristide Boucicaut became the single owner in 1852. Still in operation today, it is considered the oldest, continuously operating modern department store.

6 Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16. 7 Coincidentally, Zola published The Ladies’ Paradise the same year Karl Marx published Das Kapital, theorizing, among other things, the discrepancy between the value accorded to labor and materials and the value accorded to the products of labor under capitalism; in other words, use value and exchange value. 8 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 104. 9 Apart from noting the obvious allusion to an urban imitation of nature staged with yardage, it’s also worth pointing out that natural resources themselves were now being consumed at a rate that exceeded the spending power stimulated by the department store. “Growing cities needed bigger reservoirs, aqueducts and ever more distant sources. Wells and water-carriers gave way to piped supply” (Trentmann, Empire of Things, 177). 10 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 334–5. 11 Even today, there is a common misperception that places like shopping malls, and even parks, are public spaces. The former clearly are not, even though, for example, they are used by seniors who walk their halls for exercise and not to shop. The owners of such malls have the right to make restrictions, such as the ones made in 2005 at the Bluewater shopping center in Kent, England, banning hooded tops and baseball caps to deter anti-social behaviors. The status of a park can also be ambiguous, as in the case of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, the main gathering place for the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Protestors assembled in the publicly accessible park, only to face the paradox that it is, in fact, a privately-owned public space controlled by Brookfield Properties.

12 Ibid., 248. 13 Ibid., 116. 14 Ibid., 249. 15 Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983), 85. 16 Ibid., 87. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 88. 19 Ibid., 112. 20 Ibid., 113. 21 Ibid., 114. 22 Ibid., 118. 23 Planned obsolescence was the self-conscious strategy of designing and manufacturing products, not to last, but to be replaced either because they would go out of fashion or simply fall apart due to shoddy construction. 24 César Aira, “Acts of Charity,” in The Musical Brain: And Other Stories, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2015), 290. 25 Ibid., 290. 26 Ibid., 293. 27 Ibid., 296. 28 Ibid., 297. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 298. 31 Ibid., 306. 32 Ibid., 312. 33 Ibid., 326. 34 Lao She, “Attachment,” trans. Sarah Wei-ming Chen, in Blades of Grass: The Stories of Lao She (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 211. 35 Ibid., 215.

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36 Ibid., 218.

49 Ibid., 366.

37 The Republic of China invaded the Empire of Japan on July 7, 1937, initiating what is sometimes referred to as the Second SinoJapanese War. This conflict was absorbed in the broader scope of World War II after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. It ended with the unconditional surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 to the United Nations.

50 Ibid., 367.

38 Ibid., 224. 39 Virginia Woolf, “Solid Objects,” in A Haunted House: And Other Short Stories (New York: Harcourt, 1921), 80. 40 Ibid., 80–1.

52 Ibid. 53 Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 30. 54 Ibid., 31. 55 Ben Highmore, introduction to Georges Perec, “Approaches to What? [1973],” trans. John Sturrock, in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (New York: Routledge, 2001), 176. 56 Perec, Things, 37–38. 57 Ibid., 66.

41 Ibid. 82.

58 Ibid.

42 Ibid., 81.

59 Ibid., 77.

43 Ibid., 83.

60 Ibid.

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 84.

61 Ibid., 91. 62 Ibid., 107.

46 Ibid. 47 In her 2007 essay entitled “Socialism in Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf and the Political Aesthetics of the 1880s,” Ruth Livesey discusses the nature of Woolf’s commitment to a modernist autonomy – a state of being that she equated with freedom and political agency, by contrast with her socialist and communally-oriented contemporaries such as George Bernard Shaw (“Socialism in Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf and the Political Aesthetics of the 1880s,” From Decadent to Modernist: And Other Essays, special issue of The Yearbook of English Studies 37:1 [2007], 126–144). 48 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting [1931],” trans. Harry Zohn, in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 364–5.

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51 Ibid., 369.

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63 Tony Fry, “Whither Design/ Whether History,” in Clive Dilnot, Tony Fry, and Susan C. Stewart, Design and the Question of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 41. 64 Barry Yourgrau, Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 10. 65 Ibid., 46–47. 66 Ibid., 47. 67 Ibid., 57. 68 Ibid. 159. 69 Trentmann, Empire of Things, 37. 70 It’s interesting to note that the first self-storage facilities originated in Texas in the late 1960s (Tom Vanderbilt, “Self Storage Nation: Americans are Storing More Stuff Than Ever,” Slate, July 18, 2005, http://www.slate.com/articles/ arts/culturebox/2005/07/selfstorage_nation.html).

71 Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 1. 72 Ibid., 21–22. 73 Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” The New York Times Magazine 11 (2018), https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html. Note, this article is the first of a two-part series that documents the denial of the effects of climate change in the United States from 1979 to the present. 74 Auster, In the Country of Last Things, 31. 75 Ibid., 33. 76 Ibid., 28 77 Ibid., 34. 78 Ibid., 35–6. 79 Ibid., 149–50. 80 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 334–5. 81 Clive Dilnot, “The Gift,” Design Issues 9:2 (1993), 62. 82 Karl Marx, Notebooks, appendix to Pariser Manuskripte, 180; translated in Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm & Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986), 63–4; quoted in Dilnot, “The Gift,” 62.

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DermalAbyss, Katia Vega, Xin Liu, and Viirj Kan, Nick Barry (MIT); Ali Yetisen and Nan Jian (Harvard), 2017 Replacing ink with biosensors (liquids that change color in response to alterations in the bloodstream), students from MIT and Harvard have developed a tattoo that responds to fluctuations of glucose and pH in the bloodstream. The group says: “The pH sensor changes between purple and pink, the glucose sensor shifts between blue and brown; the sodium and a second pH sensor fluoresce at a higher intensity under UV light.”1 By making the body’s biochemistry visible to the average eye, and not just to medical specialists, the tattoo reveals the onset of systemic changes before they

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can be felt. The tattoo makes the skin a visual medium, sensitive to more than touch, enabling it to communicate, just as it does with sunburn. The difference here is that the stimuli are internal not external. 1 Alice Morby, “MIT Researchers Develop Tattoo Inks that Could Act as Health Trackers,” Dezeen, June 1, 2017, https:// www.dezeen.com/2017/06/01/mit-researchers-tattooinks-act-health-trackers-design-technology/.

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Senses: Perceptions, Vibrations, Visions Design could be said to be a process of making sense of the world through forms and systems. It is also a process and a means of making the world knowable through appeals to our senses. But making sense and sensing are odd bedfellows. The former is aligned with reason and credibility, while the latter tilts toward the irrational and unverifiable. This deep-seated polarity serves us poorly, yielding a host of prejudices, the most common of which may be the equation of the senses and sensitivity with weakness. We’d be much better served by considering sensory information as not divorced from reason but as a part of reasoning, conducted not apart from but with and within variable atmospheres of touch, sight, smell, taste, and sound.1 At the risk of overworking the word, this may be just common sense. After all, we navigate situations every day by intuiting what might have happened, or what will happen next, from the body language of people and the body languages of things such as a chair’s invitation to sit. It is true that our malleable bodies communicate far more directly than those of objects and places that can’t wrinkle their brows or stiffen their backs. However, as we will find in this chapter, there are those among us who are particularly receptive to the sensory nature of things and are fluent in their dialects. The sensitivity of these fictional protagonists is variously presented as a gift or an affliction, and frequently a combination of both. They reflect an ambivalence between, on the one hand, a view of the sensory as too romantic, temporary, and fragile to be trusted, and on the other hand, a conviction that the senses are inseparable from ideas, which are not innate but instead flow from perception. The effects of these two (admittedly, broadly sketched) positions continue to be felt today. The uncanny, precursory qualities of sensory phenomena are still thought to be dubious indices of reality. (Emphasis on “thought.”) The difference now is that this elusive and suspect dimension of experience has been attracting 265

serious investigation in fields from philosophy to neurology, with findings expressed in both speculative theory and clinical data. That said, it doesn’t require library or laboratory research to recognize that things that actively engage one or more of the senses – in their inception and their use – are quite likely to be the things we cherish and remember most. We need only conjure the purr of a petrol-perfumed Italian Vespa or the reassuring feel and faded colors of a much-used woolen blanket – or meet them in a novel or a poem. These may be over-familiar examples; but, along with countless other object experiences, they offer useful models of sense behavior for the more adventurous design provocations being put forward today.2 Having said this, it still remains the case that while design can trigger the senses with devices like electronic signals, push buttons, and atomizers, not to mention the basic elements of texture and color, it cannot predetermine how we will be affected by objects and places once we encounter them. Literature, however, can and does in its scenarios. Novels and poetry can reveal the kinds of sensory knowledge deployed by those who make things, and it can describe the senses those things arouse. Most critically, it offers insight into the consequences of those arousals.

VISCERAL PERCEPTIONS: MAGNIFIED ORDERS AND EXAGGERATED DISORDERS

In her poem “The Map,” Elizabeth Bishop supplies the sensory data that lies beneath the cartographer’s disciplined lines. She extracts movement from a landscape by extending the map’s (necessarily) delimited frame. Her words give it the third dimension of space and a fourth dimension as well – the shifts in light and color that only happen over time.

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The Map Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains – the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause. These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods. Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves’ own conformation: and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation, profiles investigate the sea, where land is. Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? – What suits the character or the native waters best. Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West. More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.3

Bishop restores the sensuousness of the transition between land and water denied by the artifice of the map, and pays homage to the cartographer’s absent hand when she translates nautical miles to the space “between thumb and finger.” Her poem is like a legend that deciphers the code of a map, though SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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pointedly not quite so succinct, since it not only restores but also adds depth to the knowledge we gloss over in pursuit of sheer information. This is not to disparage the shorthand of graphic translation – a map scaled one-to-one is no longer a map. Instead, through the artifice of another medium – in this case, poetry – Bishop enhances its reading and reminds us of the sacrifices to veracity entailed in making images, entailed in the act of seeing. Admittedly, we wouldn’t be able to proceed in the world if our sensebrains didn’t operate selectively. In addition to the neurological distress of sensory overload, there are social factors that tell us not to scrutinize the existing order too closely, lest we disrupt the everyday rhythms that govern life as most of us know it. As Vladimir Nabokov warns his reader in Transparent Things, A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.4 The “tension film” is where most of us stop; it is where we’ve been taught to stop if we are to retain our sanity and to appear sane to others. And unless they are completely unfettered by external requirements, designers are not exempt from Nabokov’s caution. He reserves that exemption for artists like himself and other socially borderline personalities. (No doubt some designers would argue that they, too, qualify because their work is purely propositional; but even they usually have to operate within academic and philanthropic contexts.) Unlike Nabokov’s special class of visionaries, no matter how much designers question first principles, most of them operate under constraints. To differing degrees, they are enforced by materials and clients and their self-defined (or adopted) aesthetics. For much of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, these constraints have been imbricated in an economy of subtraction seen, on the one hand, in venal cost cutting, and on the other, in a minimalist style divorced from any idea of humility or doing more with less. One consequence of this reductive perspective has been an undue emphasis on the visual, and more to the point, a superficial notion of sight, where visual attributes predetermine meaning instead of opening it up. (Think of glass-clad 268

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skyscrapers that announce their modernity but perform poorly in terms of the most up-to-date energy-saving standards.) In effect, this “economy of subtraction” has resulted in a withdrawal from the senses. And although there have been attempts to redress the neglect of sound, touch, smell, and taste in design, until fairly recently those efforts have operated largely on the fringe, relegated to galleries and museums.5 Consequently, as Nabokov warns, we’ve become “inexperienced” with the fullness of things. Moreover, in a culture that values fast results, we’ve become inexperienced with experience unless it’s packaged and branded for easy digestion in themed and narrative environments. The intentions behind such designed spaces are largely benign; the goal is orientation, whether in a bank, a resort, or a grocery store. The risk is that when designers frame and shape experiences by scripting our choices, the unscripted, serendipitous possibilities of experience are discouraged.

SsS However, for all the merits of getting lost, we begin our exploration of the senses with the disorientation that comes from too much sensory information. This is the literature of characters who are especially attentive to the sensual properties of things and whose aptitudes are seen as deeply eccentric, or worse, as a sign that they are unwell – even though it is also possible that they are simply better attuned to the range of signals transmitted by things that most of us have trained our brains to ignore. Consider Ireneo Funes, the protagonist of Jorge Luis Borges’ 1942 short story “Funes the Memorious.” The first thing we learn about Funes is that he’s a loner who has an uncanny ability to know the time as accurately as if he were a clock himself. After a fall from a horse leaves him paralyzed, he acquires an even more fantastic facility – a relentless memory. Funes can forget nothing. But instead of being overwhelmed, he tells the narrator that “before that rainy afternoon when the blue-gray horse threw him, he had been what all humans are: blind, deaf, addlebrained, absent-minded.”6 Funes’ body may be atrophying (in fact, he dies two years later of lung congestion) but his perceptions are acute. More to the point, they are infallibly accurate, making it impossible for him to accept common terms like “dog” or “tree” since he knows how light, sound, and movement change things and SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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Thin Black Lines, Akihiro Ito, Nendo, 2010 Akihiro Ito of the Japanese studio Nendo plays with the signals our brains must unscramble in order to recognize this as a chair. Ito’s design breaks the relationship of front, back, and side, moving alternately between the becoming and the collapse of form.2 Viewed from different angles, it can appear three- or two-dimensional, putting its identity as a chair into question and giving us the pleasure of piecing

it back together. Similarly, Jorge Luis Borges’ protagonist Ireneo Funes sees objects not as static, name-able things, but as constantly morphing entities. 2 Rose Etherington, “Thin Black Lines by Nendo,” Dezeen, September 7, 2010, https://www.dezeen.com/2010/09/07/ thin-black-lines-by-nendo/.

distort them. The world is infinitely mobile and motile, making it impossible for him to think or dwell on any one thing. Funes could only accrue experiences and remember them in infinite detail. As the narrator explains: We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Río Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.7 270

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What is striking is that Funes has no wish to live differently. The narrator calls him “hapless” but Funes doesn’t think of himself as afflicted. In fact, he devises a mnemonic system of his own, giving numerals names like “whale,” “gas,” and “railroad.” He creates a shorthand to deal with everything he holds within his mind. Of course, it’s absurd to everyone but Funes. But in fact, what he is doing is not unlike the work of design, in that design creates boundaries (e.g., with objects like vessels) and devises systems (e.g., with traffic signs to navigate places like cities). It organizes an otherwise borderless world. That Funes resorts to creating his own hermetic method of differentiating one thing from another speaks to the need to design different media of communication – not to develop alphabets or letterforms per se or the books and news sites they fill, but to connect the perceiver with the qualities of the perceived. Without those connections – made variously with sound, sight, touch, and so on – we would be left shuffling aimlessly around in the proverbial dark. That Funes himself lives in a darkened room is telling. It is the only condition in which he can contend with his surplus of sensibility. For all intents and purposes he is confined to his bed – the very idea of remembering so many sensations is as incapacitating as Funes’ fall from his horse. This is precisely Borges’ point: the price of knowing too much is paralysis. Confronted by such a prospect, Borges’ narrator can only marvel at the sheer quantity of information accrued; he (and the reader) has no access to Funes’ sensory experiences. One is left feeling not so much horror as the sense that Funes lives in a benign but aberrant state – “the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.”8

tTt By contrast, J.-K. Huysmans would have us feel revolted, or at the very least put off, by the sensitivities of the protagonist of Against Nature, Duc Jean des Esseintes. Des Esseintes is a man whose overweening responses to colors, sounds, tastes, and odors compel him to acts of excess. Effete is too mild a word for his aesthetic proclivities. Introduced in the opening pages of the novel as the progeny of inbred French aristocrats, who are, by definition, susceptible to physical and psychological disorders, Des Esseintes is already compromised in the reader’s mind. After the debaucheries of a dissolute youth, Des Esseintes has become SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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immune to all but the most contrived forms of stimulation, which he alone can orchestrate to his satisfaction in the seclusion of his country villa. He prefers artifice – in other words, design – to nature. He chooses colors for his home according to their appearance under nighttime illumination; he deliberately chooses plants that look as fake as possible. Des Esseintes takes deep satisfaction in his conjecture that his flora are “reduced to copying the membranes of animals’ organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin.”9 After a reverie on the syphilitic appearance of his caladiums, Des Esseintes muses that nature cannot produce “such depraved, unhealthy species alone and unaided; she supplies the raw materials . . . which man rears, shapes, paints and carves afterwards to suit his fancy.”10 Roused by grotesque distortions in nature, Des Esseintes is also enthralled to the power of elaborately manufactured odors “at once repugnant and delightful.”11 (One of his concoctions blended the “delicious scent of jonquil with the filthy stench of gutta-percha and coal tar.”12) To animate a life lived largely indoors, he creates a composite scent designed to conjure “the natural appearance of laughing, sweating, rollicking pleasures out in the sun,”13 speculating that “out of this fabulous counterfeit of the countryside a sensible form of medical treatment could be developed.”14 For Des Esseintes, nature is diseased and only human invention can cure it. It’s worth noting that this conviction is not far from the central principle that governed design for centuries and to a large extent still does; namely, that the work of design is to preserve a human-centric world and free us from the vagaries of nature by sheltering us from storms or changing the temperature indoors.15 For Des Esseintes, however, nature wasn’t so much a threat as a limitation. Nature, he used to say, has had her day . . . . In fact, there is not a single one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and sublime, that human ingenuity cannot manufacture; no moonlit Forest of Fontainebleau that cannot be reproduced by stage scenery under floodlighting; no cascade that cannot be imitated to perfection by hydraulic engineering; no rock that papier-mâché cannot counterfeit; no flower that carefully chosen taffeta and delicately coloured paper cannot match!16 Des Esseintes sees no reason why the stuff of sensations can’t be fabricated, and he sees no reason why nature itself can’t be redesigned and put to service of his appetites.

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In the best known chapter of the novel, Des Esseintes decides to temper the iridescent colors of his new carpet by placing a dark object on it, in this case, a tortoise. He expects the terrapin to roam to and fro across it, changing the aesthetic of the rug as it moves. But the contrast between the reptile’s dull brown shell and the garish carpet proves to be deeply unappealing, so Des Esseintes sets about to bring their colors into closer range. He has the tortoise’s shell gilded and studded with gems arranged in elaborate floral patterns that complement the carpet’s oriental patterns.

Alba, the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) Bunny, Eduardo Kac, 2000. Artist and designer Eduardo Kac describes his GFP Bunny project as a “complex social event that starts with the creation of a chimerical animal that does not exist in nature.”3 Technically, Alba is an albino rabbit that glows green by virtue of a transgenic implant of a green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. This type of trans-species design might well have appealed to J.-K. Huysmans’s Des Esseintes in that the rabbit has been re-engineered to glow different colors depending on the intensity of light. While Des Esseintes’s jewel-studded turtle and Kac’s glowing rabbit share a heightened visual presence, the larger goals of the two manipulations would seem to be quite different. Kac designed his rabbit to provoke questions about our power relations with animals; whereas, the anti-social Des

Esseintes cares nothing for the fate of other species apart from their use as aesthetic stimulants. Alba is well cared for; the turtle is effectively murdered. 3 Eduardo Kac, “GFP Bunny,” in Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art, ed. Peter Tomaz Dobrila and Aleksandra Kostic (Maribor, Slovenia: Kibla, 2000), 101. Here, Kac also talks about the history of species manipulation, suggesting that human interventions are not as unusual as we might think. Moreover, he points out that changes in animals’ genetic makeups often are naturally occurring mutations, suggesting that we need to think of such changes in terms of degrees of violence.

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Des Esseintes is so stimulated by the sight of his bejeweled tortoise that he experiences a rare craving for food, only to find after sating his appetite that his tortoise isn’t moving. It has died under the weight of its carapace. Deprived of oxygen, the tortoise suffers the fate of Des Esseintes’s efforts to attune his environs to his rarified tastes. The animal is killed not so much by Des Esseintes’s excess as it is by his attempts to control its every manifestation. The result is a sensory suffocation. We have seen the cost of heightened perceptions when they are singular in experience and unable to be shared, as in the case of Funes, or deliberately withheld, as in the case of Des Esseintes, who despises his fellow creatures. Their perceptions of the world exist in a vacuum, and their freakishness is never submitted to the judgments of others. But what of those who have no choice but to exercise their extraordinary perceptual talents in public? They may not live in a state of isolation like Funes and Des Esseintes but they’re still considered freakish, and most certainly, viewed askance.

TANGIBLE VIBRATIONS: THE KNOWLEDGE OF TOUCH AND SOUND

Such are the circumstances in which Lila Mae Watson must operate. The heroine of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist, Lila Mae is suspect from the start. In this only mildly surreal parable of race and technological knowledge, set roughly in the mid-twentieth century, Lila Mae is an elevator inspector with three exceptional qualities. She’s a woman, she’s African-American, and she is a member of a renegade group of elevator inspectors called the Intuitionists (not incidentally, a patently feminine moniker). Unlike the novel’s Empiricist inspectors, the Intuitionists rely on aural and spatial sensations to determine the safety of the new “vertical transport machines” in their charge. In aligning herself with radicals disparaged as “juju heads, witch doctors, [and] Harry Houdini’s,”17 Lila Mae’s otherness is trice compounded. With each new assignment, she braces herself for undisguised skepticism and outright ridicule. However, these indignities do not affect her professional demeanor or her methods, which become apparent during an inspection of an Arbo elevator in lower Manhattan. The first thing she notices is the Arbo’s oversized door, designed to give passengers an illusion of space to 274

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diminish claustrophobia and assuage any fears about the safety of riding in a box that’s suspended on rope in a void. (One suspects that the early décor of elevator interiors – elaborate wood paneling, velvet covered seating – was similarly driven by the same insecurities. Instead of entering a cage or a metal box, passengers would walk into something more akin to a furnished foyer; and in many luxury buildings, they still do.) But Lila Mae finds no such amenities on this inspection. The elevator in question is in a building at 125 Walker Street. The building is saturated with stale cooking smells and its hallways are unevenly lit by cracked ceiling lights – all generators of less than salubrious sensations. Instead of a uniformed doorman, there is a super who directs her to the Arbo. Ignoring his pointed question about why it is she who is doing the inspection, Lila Mae enters the elevator’s confines. She leans against the dorsal wall of the elevator and listens. 125 Walker is only twelve floors high, and the vibration of the idling drive doesn’t diminish that much as it swims through the gritty loop of the diverting pulley . . . . Lila Mae can feel the idling in her back.18 It is hardly surprising that an inspector, regardless of school of thought, would register this level of movement. What is extraordinary is Lila Mae’s translation of the experience. This elevator’s vibrations are resolving themselves in her mind as an aqua-blue cone. . . . The elevator moves upward in the well, toward the grunting in the machine room, and Lila Mae turns that into a picture, too. The ascension is a red spike circling around the blue cone, which doubles in size and wobbles as the elevator starts climbing.19 The movements of the elevator appear to her in a sequence of geometric patterns –octagons, cubes, parallelograms – whose movements indicate a serious problem. Much to the building superintendent’s chagrin, she cites the elevator for a faulty overspeed governor. (The governor triggers the safety mounted on the car when it travels too fast). Without even having seen it, she can tell that it “catches every six meters or so.”20 Lila Mae’s assessment isn’t made on the basis of what she expects to see. Instead, she perceives it as a series of impressions, affecting her senses, her entire body, in the given moment of the elevator’s ascent. True, these impressions take SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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Nóize, Estudio Guto Requena, 2012 | Giraffe, Lina Bo Bardi, Marcelo Ferraz, and Marcelo Suzuki, c. 1986 With their Nóize chair, the Brazilian designers of Estudio Guto Requena transformed the Giraffe chair designed by Lina Bo Bardi, Marcelo Ferraz, and Marcelo Suzuki through an infusion of 3D printing with audio files collected at the Grajau, Tiradentes, and Santa Ifigênia areas in downtown São Paulo. City voices, suburban noises, and the resonance of concrete were used to deconstruct a Brazilian design icon

into a piece that reifies the design process into solid form. It is as though the atmosphere that the chair’s original designers experienced in São Paulo has been allowed to permeate their chair, just as the atmosphere around the elevators in Colson Whitehead’s novel allows his protagonist Lila Mae to read them through their vibrations.

visual form, but they have nothing to do with the elevator as we know it. Lila Mae approaches her work as an act of translation. This is not unlike the phenomenological process that the philosopher James Dodd describes as “asking questions oriented according to a broader horizon of what we sense and see.”21 Usually, when most of us see an elevator, we see a metal container. Dodd would argue that what we really “see” is a preconception that obscures a richer understanding of the elevator as a box and a series of vibrations in space. Our familiarity with the object itself has the effect of blocking its “broader horizon.” And for the most part, when we do experience the elevator as a machine that moves through space causing a few shudders, shakes, and jolts, we dismiss those sensations as part and parcel of an elevator ride, thus hardly worthy of note. (For most of us, it takes extreme conditions to rely on more than sight, as when we are forced to use our senses of touch and sound to maneuver during a blackout.) 276

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Not so here. Lila Mae doesn’t dismiss sensations as superfluous, or as a last resort for understanding what’s going on. She believes that “at its core, Intuitionism is about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis. ‘Separate the elevator from elevatorness,’ right?”22 But she soon discovers that this is not just a matter of approaching the elevator from another perspective – not even an approach that has the endorsement of her fellow Intuitionists. This would be to accept received wisdom and not expand it – upwardly, if you will. Lila Mae’s quest to transcend a “horizontal thinking”23 – one bound by conventional notions of elevators and those who fix them, namely herself – requires an understanding of verticality that exceeds accepted prejudices. If it wasn’t clear already that the elevator is a metaphor for race relations, it becomes plain when Lila Mae learns that the greatest theoretician of the elevator – the by-now deceased James Fulton – was black. Apparently, Fulton’s two achievements had been to pass as white and to conceive of the perfect means of ascendance. (In white America, the two were coterminous.) The historical Fulton’s “folly” here is not the purchase of Alaska, but an elusive black box containing a blueprint for an elevator constructed not from a human point of view but from an elevator’s.24 The problem is, the plans are lost. Lila Mae becomes embroiled in a fierce contest between the Intuitionists and the Empiricists to find the lost blueprints and secure their power to shape the vertical cities of the future. The politics of the elevator guild’s history and factions are the plot conceit that allows Whitehead, through the character of Lila Mae, to pursue the theme of the “pernicious visible.”25 By which he means, the visible elevator, whose optics override any perceptions of it as a series of sounds and vibrations, and the visible difference of Lila Mae’s skin color and gender, which obscures and all but negates her. Ironically, only Lila Mae could “see” Fulton’s “nigresence.”26 Everyone else would describe him as white. This is not to conflate machines and persons – as the bigots around Lila Mae constantly do, but rather to call attention to how received notions and reflexive behaviors limit our encounters with things and people. Lila Mae aspires to open up the nature of “encounter” – a more encompassing word than “sight” – so that in the words of Fulton “the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.”27 Whitehead surely means “the medium of passage” to be understood as SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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the envelope of a person’s skin. However, the same ambition – to “disintegrate” preconceptions – is not unrelated to the work of design. In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, anthropologist Tim Ingold, paraphrasing design philosopher Vilém Flusser, writes that “‘an “object” is what gets in the way’: standing before us as a fait accompli, complete in itself, it blocks our path.”28 In place of the object, Ingold suggests an understanding of things not as closed but as porous, woven surfaces that one can find a way through to gain a more “interstitial ‘feel’ of a world.”29 In the context of The Intuitionist, we can extrapolate this to an understanding of elevators and people with a perceptiveness that relies on more than appearance. The point would be to open ourselves more fully to the experience of things and people – an openness that is rejected by the white men of the novel, all “slaves to what they could see.”30 Had Whitehead not chosen the elevator as his metaphorical device, framing the difference between seeing and insight as a matter of racial prejudice and as a concern of design would make no sense. It only works, and just barely at that, because racism reduces people to objects and objects reduced to mere surface can never be fully understood for what they are. (A notable exception might be membranes like the finest of textiles that are entities onto themselves; however, even they are meaningless when isolated from context.)

uUu By now it is abundantly evident that the characters of The Intuitionist cannot see Lila Mae because they rely on a limited notion of sight. They hold on to a power that comes from refusal; whereas Lila Mae draws power to herself by virtue of her more fulsome embrace of the senses. In another tale of sensory dependence and independence, Italo Calvino reverses this situation – in more ways than one – in his 1984 short story “A King Listens.” Instead of a consummate outsider like Lila Mae, the tale revolves around the figure of a royal personage. Moreover, his particular sensory aptitude – a highly developed attention to sound – is not a gift. It is a survival skill and a condition of his isolation, which, unlike Lila Mae’s, is self-imposed. This is a king who is hostage to his throne. Not only is he unable to move lest his crown slip off, he is also duty bound to hold his scepter in his right hand 278

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I want to Become Architecture: Brick, Allan Wexler with Ellen Wexler, 2008 With I want to Become Architecture: Brick, artist Allan Wexler cast his own body into a wall of bricks to create an intimate form of architecture in the guise of a chair. Not so dissimilarly, Italo Calvino uses the body of a paranoid king, who is unwilling to budge from his throne, to transform architecture into an instrument. He cannot see who is doing what to whom in his palace but he can translate their intentions

from the reverberations of their movements. Additionally, both Calvino’s throne and Wexler’s chair are designed for one particular body; they are tailored as if to encase, if not entrap, their sitters. In trying to contain them, both are reminders of the body’s parasitical relationship to the objects and environments built around it.

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at all times. In fact, there is nowhere to set it down “no tables beside the throne, or shelves, or stands to hold, say, a glass, an ashtray, a telephone.”31 His left hand is free to scratch an itch or signal any one of the many courtiers ready to satisfy his needs. He has no reason to leave his throne and every reason to remain there. Should he be careless enough to get up and leave, there is no guarantee that someone else won’t be sitting on it when he returns. His power is literally locked in place. But the price of his power is that he has to rule without the insight that comes from being able to observe, first-hand, what goes on in his kingdom and his castle. Virtually blind and bored to tears, this monarch can only rely on his hearing. He tells time by the regular sequence of sounds emanating from the palace. He can surmise that his reign is safe by the tattoo of hob-nailed boots that accompanies the changing of the guard and the predictable crunch of gravel made by his tanks in the courtyard. The sounds of the royal complex not only clock the hours but also the days. The castle’s noises constitute a sonic calendar, whose rhythms are punctuated by public viewings when its chambers are open to the prying eyes of tourists. The king, whose private rooms are most definitely not on the tour, charts his days by the belching of their tour buses, the prattle of their guides, and the babble of foreign tongues exclaiming over all that he cannot see himself. The king becomes increasingly aware that his power is compromised by the fact that he can’t see them and they cannot see him. He can only depend on his auditory intuition and would be glad of a bit of empirical knowledge. In short, the king is becoming afraid. He doesn’t fear the guards, who, after all, only respond to orders, nor the tour guides who profit quite handsomely from his isolation. The real threat comes from those who are closest to him. As in all royal households, trouble brews in the inner sanctums. These are the spaces with the most to divulge. So it is that, unable to startle a minister or surprise a courtesan with an unexpected appearance, our stationary king relies on a hearing aid made of stone. His “palace is all whorls, lobes: it is a great ear, whose anatomy and architecture trade names and functions: pavilions, ducts, shells, labyrinths.”32 Acoustic architects and engineers naturally think of buildings as collections of sounds. But beyond these aurally-gifted (and trained) professionals, few of us are likely to navigate solely by sound unless we are blind, or blinded by solitary confinement. The latter is the king’s condition – the condition that 280

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undermines his supposedly sovereign powers. He can only surmise his surroundings. Calvino’s omniscient narrator counsels him: While your palace remains unknown to you and unknowable, you can try to reconstruct it bit by bit, locating every shuffle, every cough at a point in space imagining walls around each acoustical sign, ceilings, pavements, giving form to the void in which sounds spread and to the obstacles they encounter, allowing the sounds themselves to prompt the images. A silvery tinkle is not simply a spoon that has fallen from the saucer where it was balanced, but is also a corner of a table covered with a linen cloth.33 Conjuring a spoon, a saucer, a table, and a cloth all from a set of vibrations (i.e., sound waves) requires an exercise in poetic imagination of which the king has no shortage, observing that “from the faintest clue you can derive an augury of your fate.”34 But here the interpretation of noise, no matter how sonorous, also induces a state of paranoia. (Sounds that are only heard by one person are the stuff of terror.) So while the king finds regular rhythms comforting, he is also leery of sounds when they’re too predictable. They may be disguising the movements of usurpers within the patterns of normalcy. The most uncanny affect of all this listening is that his “person is spread out through this dark, alien residence that speaks to [him] . . . in riddles.”35 The king’s dependency on only one sense has become a curse. In concentrating on what his palace seemed to be saying, he has lost the ability to listen and unravel the “riddles.” He recovers – some might say he comes to his senses – only after a woman’s voice urges him to go outside, where the dogs are barking, the birds wake, the colors return on the world’s surface, things reoccupy space, living beings again give signs of life. . . . Somewhere, in a fold of the earth, the city is reawakening, with a slamming, a hammering, a creaking that grows louder. Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs…36 Now, he not only sees sounds; he is also able to respond to the things, the city, and the people who make them. The king no longer listens solely to and SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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for himself, but for the mutual recognition (and potential for love) that can come from listening to each other – not to mention the rewards of being attentive to things for reasons apart from mere self-interest. Instead of using the senses defensively as the king did, Calvino would have us actively engage them in search of possibilities, which, for him, lie most especially in cities – each in its own way a fabrication of sensory density.

Vvv For all the commonsensical wisdom that life is at its fullest when the senses work together, we remain preoccupied with their distinctions. Perhaps it is because the acuity of our senses isn’t equally rationed, but rather exists in an uneven equilibrium. They can be unbalanced temporarily as when a blast briefly deafens the ears, or more permanently as with congenital blindness or a propensity to near-sightedness. Either way, design can restore some measure of symmetry (e.g., with hearing aids and eyeglasses) or alternatively, reconfigure the environment (e.g., with audible traffic crossing signals) in recognition of our unevenly sensate natures. One thing often overlooked is the role of the brain in the operation of the senses. For example, when people lose their hearing, and words become increasingly hard to decipher, it is partly because the brain has become unaccustomed to certain sounds and can longer assemble them into sense. These conversations between the brain and our sensory appendages usually go unheard and unobserved. José Saramago’s novel The Cave is a notable exception. Saramago is interested in the amalgam of thinking and making – for our purposes, the design process – particularly in relation to touch. (This is a provocative premise given that the novel was written 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst and the analog was supposed to disappear into the digital ether.) Pointedly, The Cave begins with hands. Two kinds: a potter’s, whose are large and strong, and a security guard’s, whose are more or less average, though one of his hands has a scar that runs from the base of the thumb to the base of the little finger. The security guard’s hand would be unremarkable if it weren’t for the fact that the scar effectively draws a line between the finer digits of touch and the broad palm of the hand, foreshadowing the novel’s arguments about imperfectly manipulated materials and highly managed products. It also quite possibly hints at the generational divide in the novel’s debate about the efficacy of the artificial. 282

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The potter is Cipriano Algor; the security guard is his son-in-law Marçal Gacho. We meet them while they’re driving together to the hyper-modern Center where Cipriano sells his pottery and Marçal works. The latter aspires to be a resident guard there because the job would come with a subsidized apartment for his wife Marta and his father-in-law Cipriano, even though Cipriano, who has spent his sixty-four years in the countryside, has no interest in moving. The Cave is a contemporary variant on Plato’s eponymous critique of artifice and artifacts that constitute poor copies of original form. In Plato’s view, only the philosopher can penetrate the veneer of the copy (be it an image or an object)

The Human Trace, Arkadiusz Szwed with Ewa Klekot, 2017 The Human Trace tableware grew out of a “People from the Porcelain Factory” project, organized by anthropologist-curator Ewa Klekot and ceramist Arkadiusz Szwed. The fingerprint pattern glaze reveals how much handwork is involved in factory-produced ceramics – in this case, in Ćmielów, Poland, the site of an eighteenth-century porcelain factory. To produce the marks, workers on the production line wore gloves with fingertips dipped in cobalt blue

salts. Instead of eliminating any traces of the hand, as most manufacturers do, these pieces emphatically declare its presence. As such, they offer a counterpoint to strict and sterile notions of modernity that the protagonist of José Saramago’s The Cave confronts in trying to sell his pottery to those who value signs of smooth expedience over any indications of care or touch.

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and understand true form, which exists solely in ideas. Here, however, Saramago seems to suggest that these two realms (the material and the abstract) can be bridged by someone who works and thinks with his hands: a potter. The entire novel hinges on the fact that Cipriano must come to terms with a local expression of artifice. For him, this manufactured reality (as opposed to a crafted reality) is not a metaphor but a very real condition of existence – one that threatens his survival. It appears the Center no longer wants his earthenware. Instead, its buyers want plastic dishes that look like pottery, despite the fact that, as Cipriano muses, you can’t copy the sound of it or the weight, and then there’s the relationship between sight and touch which I read about somewhere or other, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.37 Faced with the prospect of leaving kiln and countryside for a forced retirement in the Center, Cipriano gets a reprieve when his daughter proposes another line of products: ceramic figurines. As compelling as the idea of producing miniature people is, given that Marta is pregnant, it is the actual making of the statuettes that demands their, and our, attention. Even though the properties of clay are familiar, fashioning a body, no matter how small, requires different sensitivities and “a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man.”38 Despite the exploratory nature of their new enterprise, Cipriano and Marta haven’t set out to produce one-off experiments but figures that can be replicated. After consulting an old encyclopedia, they settle on six archetypes: jester, clown, nurse, Inuit, Assyrian, mandarin. Their body types, apart from minor alterations of color and costume, almost duplicate each other. Such concessions to the economy of production are mitigated, however, by the handling each figure requires. Within this intimate setting, we see an accommodation between what designer David Pye termed the “workmanship of risk,” which has no predetermined result in mind, and the “workmanship of certainty,” which operates under conditions of mass production and quality control.39 Clearly, it is the latter that has come to dominate contemporary commodity culture. Saramago locates this predictable regularity and obsession with monitoring outcomes in the architecture of the Center. With ten of its 284

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fifty-eight floors concealed below ground, it is “a gigantic quadrangular edifice, with no windows on its smooth, featureless façade.”40 The design of the complex calls attention to the arrogance of an inflexible adherence to dogma – here in a debased form of modernism – that precludes any material (or behavioral) nuance. Even opening a window for fresh air is impossible. The Center is intentionally designed to limit what people can do. It is designed to shut down curiosity by eliminating anything unexpected from its self-contained environment. This is sensory deprivation as politics. Glass elevators rise up forty-eight stories, giving views of an exhausting array of shops, restaurants, cinemas, and every conceivable form of entertainment.41 Everything is scripted. Here, unlike cities formed unevenly over time, variety is merely simulated. The Center is actually closer to an airport. (In fact, airports are often, and usually disingenuously, compared to cities because their planners have endowed them with winding boulevards and a multitude of commercial distractions.) But like most airports, the Center is little more than a glorified shopping mall. However, even that claim is deceptive. The seemingly innocuous, albeit sanitized, complex takes on an insidious character when a visitor, taking one of many elevators, reaches the upper floors that house a warren of residential spaces. The apartments have little or no natural light (an inducement to go “outside,” in other words, into the attractions of the Center) and no shortage of guards, cameras, and sensors (which keep everyone in check when they are actually inside). This is where Cipriano’s son-in-law wants them to live, and where they will ultimately live – but not before the potter and his daughter make one last attempt to support the family in the countryside on the hoped-for profits from their figurines. In Saramago’s fable, the satisfactions of the craftsman’s labor are the foil to the Center’s contrived amusements. The act of making ceramic bodies (of any sort) requires trial and error and offers only conditional success. In a culture largely dominated by rationalism, most of us are hard-wired to think our way out of problems, but the potter’s process, this particular design process, is of another order. With a meandering prose that mirrors the combination of direction and indirection required, Saramago describes a different relation of head to hand:

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Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. . . . The brain has never been curious enough to ask itself why the end result . . . bears so little resemblance to its instructions to the hands.42 The brain may not ask “why,” but it notices, usually via our eyes, that things haven’t gone according to plan. However, if we are to be truly perceptive, we need to rely on more than optics. Perception, which allows us to approach the “why” of the matter, is a more encompassing phenomenon. Indeed, the German philosopher Gernot Böhme argues that “perception is basically the manner in which one is bodily present for something or someone or one’s bodily state in an environment.”43 Likewise, in Cipriano’s world, perceptions are shaped by how a potter’s body (inclusive of his brain) responds to the properties of materials – materials that can only be fully understood by touching them. As Saramago’s omniscient narrator points out: Anything in the brain-in-our-head that appears to have an instinctive, magical, or supernatural quality – whatever that may mean – is taught to it by the small brains in our fingers. In order for the brain-in-our-head to know what a stone is, the fingers first have to touch it.44 The potter’s task is to work with knowledge gleaned in two different time frames and from two different sources. It involves both his considerable experience working with kilns and clay, in other words his past; and the unpredictable behavior of clay in the present moment of manipulation. Discovering, belatedly, that he must use the technique of slip casting to make the tiny statuettes, Cipriano notes with dismay that, “you learn that in pottery kindergarten, it’s absolutely basic to the craft.”45 The problem isn’t that he doesn’t know how to slip cast, but that he doesn’t have the ingredients to achieve the desired viscosity. He improvises with his daughter’s help. She tells him: 286

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Plunge your hand deep into the casting slip, then take it out and let the slip run off your open hand, if it forms a membrane between the fingers like a duck’s webbed foot then the viscosity is right, Like a duck’s webbed foot, Yes, like a duck’s foot.46 Through a combination of gestures that both respond to and alter the raw clay, refinements are made and the arduous process of prototyping is rewarded. Now the six figures can be cast, enabling the Algors to deliver their offspring to the Center. Their satisfaction, however, never goes further than this early technical success because, just as they are about to start production, the order for the figurines is cancelled. The results of the Center’s market testing were damning: according to the head of the buying department, their most likely use for modern consumers would be for target practice. None of those surveyed, even older, less trend-conscious buyers, was able to see or touch a single figurine; they made their decisions based on marketing materials. In the end, the Center made its decision blindly. So did its customers. In light of Saramago’s obvious disdain for marketing, it’s worth noting that designers will soon be able to offer people more than mere images of things. There are developments in the technology of touch that may have an impact on remote forms of purchasing like the Center’s brochures (or more likely, online shopping). In his 2016 essay “Feel Me,” Adam Gopnik points out: now, in addition to sounds and images, textures can be transmitted virtually too, by using a sensing stylus connected to a touch-based camera. The technology sends pattern vibrations to the fingers – creating sensations that correspond to the feelings of touching velvet or burlap, and not just touching but pressing with varying degrees of intensity.47 Even so, remote touch will have a different quality than its direct counterpart, just as video images differ from what is actually seen. Thus, one could argue that acts of sensing are expanding not diminishing. Saramago’s novel, however, suggests a different, and decidedly, dystopian possibility. He describes a future in which distance technologies make our unmediated transmissions from brain-to-body (and body-to-brain) not only less desirable but also obsolete. SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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Needless to say, the technologies described by Gopnik didn’t exist when The Cave was written. Within its pages, disruption isn’t provoked by artificially manipulated neurons but by an artificial environment. The change happens when the family, including the reluctant potter, moves into the Center where Marçal has finally been awarded an apartment. Cipriano passes the time experiencing ersatz weather – artificial rain and snow – claiming to enjoy these “natural sensations.” 48 Meanwhile, Marçal is told that a cave (here, a dubiously natural phenomenon) has been discovered below floor zero five. Cipriano follows him there and discovers the classical scenario of three men and three women, chained to a bench facing a wall, all with empty eye sockets. Father and sonin-law are no strangers to Plato’s fiction, but they cannot accept that what they see isn’t real, as disconcerting as it is. Cipriano concludes that “perhaps what really doesn’t exist is what we call nonexistence.”49 While he rejects what for his generation and Saramago’s is an ersatz reality, he admits that it may be the next generation’s reality because it is all that will “exist.” Most likely, his daughter, son-in-law, and their child, won’t find the Center’s simulations – the dinosaur skeletons seen through palm groves and the Great Wall of China – to be as alien or sterile as Cipriano does. His own prejudices aside, Saramago thus leaves the question open as to the validity of sensations generated artificially – a question much more pointed since he wrote The Cave. Today, scientists are able to reconfigure neural pathways to leapfrog over the limitations of the appendages we think of as our sensors – our flesh, eyes, tongues, noses, and ears. Manipulations of the brain can, for example, partially restore a person’s vision, or at least their sense of light and dark. True, the results are compromised – hardly twenty-twenty vision – but that doesn’t change the essential fact that we can learn to sense by virtue of direct access to our neural networks. These sensations maybe triggered by the brain (instead of, say, the hand) but we still recognize and feel them. In these scenarios, the pathways of perception are rearranged by intervention in another manifestation of design.

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EPHEMERAL VISIONS: EMBODIED SEEING, UNSTABLE SIGHT

For most of us the very act of reading is also an intervention – intervention in the sense of a sensory trigger – not through a physical implant, but the artifice of prose. At the very least, we visualize what we read, often so explicitly that watching a film of a book can be off-putting because it contradicts the firmly held views of our sensory imagination. It is not surprising that given this tendency to equate books with their narratives, the haptic experience of handling one is usually thought to be of a second order. (This perception is further reinforced by the use of electronic readers. Though, e-books may yet offer other kinds of sensory experiences as designers explore ways to overcome the disembodiment of knowledge with interactive texts.50) In his preface to photographer Abelardo Morell’s A Book of Books, Nicholson Baker describes the tension between reading and experiencing a book as an “inter-dimensional ambiguity.”51 Baker dispels the notion that a page in a book is only a “flat and code-bearing plane.”52 He restores scale and heft to the bibliographic “volume,” calling our attention to the thinness of its paper, the thickness of its segmented chapters, and the tunnel created by the arch of its spine. The book’s third dimension is not only a provocation to touch, but also to listen. With Baker, we become attentive to the “soft, radish-slicing sound” of turning pages and, at the same time, “the fluent cajoling voice” of the words they carry, the words that ferry us to other spaces.53

wWw Of course, one can only have a voice if one has a body. As we know, the tangible body of the story came into being with the eclipse of oral traditions and came of age with the invention of the printing press and the book. The fact is, though, that it would be far more accurate to say that stories have bodies. They are made up of letterforms, shaped as much by the chisels, brushes, threads, metal plates, and electronic pulses that bring them into being as they are by the languages and dialects they are written in. These bodies are proportioned, scaled, weighted, and cloaked by their designers – typographers and calligraphers, alike – who animate them with personalities ranging from introvert to extrovert. SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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“Watermelon” in Aravrit Typeface, Liron Lavi Turkenich, 2017 Orhan Pamuk’s letters seem to suffer from their split personalities, but Liron Lavi Turkenich’s typeface – a hybrid of Arabic and Hebrew scripts – finds compatibility, if not exactly peace. Each half letter is chosen according to a word’s spelling in its native script. For example, the word “language” is “Safa” in Hebrew and “Lura” in Arabic, so the Hebrew character for “s” would be conjoined with the Arabic character for “l.” With this experimental writing system which accommodates any typeface, Turkenich says

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“each person can read fluently the language they feel most comfortable with without compromising on grammar or vocabulary, but also without ignoring the other, who is always present.”5 5 Nina Azzarello, “Aravit Typeface’s 638 Hybrid Letters Unite Hebrew and Arabic,” Designboom, August 28, 2014, http://www.designboom.com/design/aravrit-typefaceshybrid-letters-unite-hebrew-arabic-08-28-2014/.

Orhan Pamuk is particularly concerned with the bodies of letters, but less for their structural conceits (for example, whether they have serifs or not) and more for the ways in which letters combine both matter and mattering. His is the elusive terrain occupied by letterforms that vacillate between absence and presence in our awareness. In an essay in the Museum of Modern Art catalogue Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Pamuk assumes the voice of the marks that “speak” his essay. While the conceit of “hearing” the text is the point of personification, it is the tension between sight and thought – between form and meaning – that preoccupies Pamuk. He greets his reader with a confession about his state and state of mind, saying: “Hi! Thank you for reading me. I should be happy to be here, though I can’t help feeling confused.”54 He’s worried about whether he is image or information – and by extension, the nature of his identity. (It’s no coincidence that he speaks from a publication that questions if there is such a thing as “Islamic art.”) Reminiscing about more stable times, he says, “Once upon a time, when I was just a meaning, it never occurred to me that I was also an object, and I didn’t even have a mind; I was nothing more than a humble sign passing between two beautiful minds. . . . [but] there’s no running back to the days when I was just a meaning.”55 Pamuk is ostensibly referring to Arabic calligraphy, once kept to the sides of pages dominated by miniature paintings (which is also the subject of his book My Name is Red, discussed in chapter one). These delicate images were considered to have the monopoly on “form” on the page; they alone contained bodies. Letters and words, or more accurately script, had a role closer to extended captions. The confusion, to which Pamuk refers, arose when Western-style books (with type covering entire pages, sans illustration) became accessible in Turkey. It’s worth noting that rulers of Arabic countries were fearful of the consequences of a literate citizenry and didn’t allow access to printed books until the late eighteenth century. It wasn’t just the dissemination of different ideas that posed a threat, it was, as philosopher Jacques Rancière observes of all graphic design, that: by drawing lines, arranging words or distributing surfaces, one also designs divisions of communal space. It is the way in which, by assembling words or forms, people define not merely various forms of art, but certain configurations of what can be seen and what can be thought, certain forms of inhabiting the material world.56 SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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Pamuk’s argument can be understood as culturally and temporally specific, but like much of his work, this essay is a parable – in this case, a comment on the broader social nature of typography and language today. Anyone who has played with the fonts on their computer quickly realizes that letterforms both identify the writer and, to the degree possible, self-select their respondents. Messages typed in the treacly “curlz” or the aggressively insecure “braggadocio” come with their prejudices declared. Here, Pamuk’s true subject is seeing – seeing as an act of imagining, of agency, and not merely as a process of retinal registration. His appraisal of the capacities of sight comes as a useful counterpoint to the anxiety (specifically in design culture) that there has been too much emphasis on style at the expense of content and context – particularly the socio-political environment in which design operates today. Yet, it is precisely those factors – culture and power – that Pamuk reprises in letterforms. His is an argument against the perception that these marks are purely formal visual exercises. Instead, he presents them in-formed, if we care to truly see them.

xXx Where Pamuk experiences a form of double vision within letters, Arthur Rimbaud finds overlapping sensory emanations. The nineteenth-century symbolist poet is not content to simply add one dimension to a letterform – namely, a body with its attending inferences of sight and touch. In fact, he is less interested in the characters of the alphabet than in their affect. Rimbaud assigns color, sound, and smell to the vowel sounds (i.e., phones in linguistics), which make words comprehensible in Romance languages. Vowels (Voyelles), 1871 A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, I shall speak one day of your hidden origins: A, black fur corset of the dazzling flies Buzzing round every cruel stink,

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Gulfs of darkness. E, candour of vapour and tents, Proud glacial shards; white kings; flicker of umbel; I, purples; spat blood; full lips laughing In anger or bouts of contrite ecstasy; U, gyrations, divine shiver of viridian seas, Peace of cattle-studded pastures, peace of the wrinkles Carved by alchemy on a broad, studious forehead; O, the Last Trumpet with its strange clangour, Silent wastes of Worlds and Angels – traversed; O: Omega, the violet gleam of Those Eyes!57

Lickestra, Emilie Baltz, Carla Diana, and Arone Dyer, 2014 During her residency at the Visible Futures Lab in New York City, Emilie Baltz produced Lickestra – a musical licking performance. Situated at the intersection of food design and industrial design, Lickestra was developed in collaboration with smart object designer Carla Diana and composer Arone Dyer of Buke and Gase. In this exploration of sound, touch, and taste, they created a performance using “a series of conductive ice creams [to] trigger various baselines and tones

when licked. From improvisation to orchestration, eater becomes performer as the primitive act of licking reaches beyond flavor perception to become an instrument for play. Lickestra lasts until all the ice cream is licked.”6 6 “About,” Experiments: Lickestra, Emilie Baltz, accessed September 5, 2018, http://emiliebaltz.com/experiments/ lickestra/

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By today’s standards, the poem’s projection of sense experiences, one over another, may seem overwrought. Yet, for all its metaphorical embroidery, “Vowels” does offer an approximation of synesthesia – a very real neurological phenomenon, whose relevance is being explored today by design studies’ researchers such as Sevi Merter. She writes of “new interaction patterns, metaphors, and ways of design thinking, capable of enhancing creativity and multisensory experiences in the design process.”58 In stimulating one sense to produce another, design can share the experience of synesthesia beyond the realm of written or verbal explanations. The value of such experiences is not unlike the value of Rimbaud’s poem. Both make curiously productive connections between disparate things. They open up new ways of experiencing objects and places that would otherwise be hidden from us by our preconceptions or denied to us by others’ attempts to prepackage them for us.

yYy That sensory experiences exceed conventional measures is by now self-evident. Anyone who has been asked by a nurse or a doctor to assign a numerical value to how they feel after an accident can verify just how poorly numbers and pain correlate. Yet we live in a society where quantification is prized, delineations are preferred, and impermanence is suspected of upsetting the order of things. Perhaps one of the most exquisite rejections of our current appetite for certainty, and one of the wilder defenses of instability, lies in Robert Coover’s carnivalesque novel Pinocchio in Venice. In this reversal of Carlo Collodi’s tale of the boy made flesh, Coover recasts, or more accurately, translates Pinocchio into Pinenut and reincarnates him as an aging Ph.D. We meet Dr. Pinenut on his return to Venice after a successful academic career in the States. Arriving in the city of his youthful misadventures, the professor discovers that his body is slowly petrifying. The late twentieth-century man is gradually becoming a creaking marionette, an ossified version of Geppetto’s wooden bad boy. Coover’s cover story for his particular Pinocchio is that he – Dr. Pinenut – is an art historian of no small stature who has devoted his life’s work to Venice’s Renaissance painters. He is especially dedicated to painters like Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Paolo Veronese, for whom color and atmosphere exceed mass and form. And he is equally enamored with the 294

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city of Venice with its sympathetic geography – a city where solid land gives way to something more diaphanous in the lace and vapors of its canals. Dr. Pinenut cannot help but identify with this way of knowing and seeing, the state of flux that echoes his own. He was himself a product, after all, of his father’s rude art and a transfigured spirit; the title [of his book Art and Spirit] had not come to him by accident. The quest for the abiding forms within life’s ceaseless mutations was his quest, had been since he burnt his feet off; he too, rejecting all theatricality, sought repose in the capricious turbulence . . . . Even his decision to study the Venetians had to do with his own origins. . . . [H]ow could he help, pagan lump of talking wood that he once was, but be drawn to these magicians of the transitional?59 However, the fluctuations of light on canvas are not the only refracted phenomena that Dr. Pinenut encounters. Virtually everything and everyone he meets confronts him with a distortion of his past, most especially the elusive Blue-Haired Fairy. The mother-whore of his own authorial imaginings, she appears throughout the novel in various guises. We meet her as Bluebell, the over-sexed college co-ed, as the New Testament Virgin, and even as the city itself, personified in the truly gruesome “Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition).”60 Yet another illusion among illusions, the monumental Madonna turns out to be Mangiafoco the mask maker, leading the Carnival parade in a sacrilegious costume, like an oversized walking anatomy lesson . . . [with] all her glands and organs . . . dangling from her generous flesh like Christmas ornaments: her spleen, kidneys, liver, brains, bladder, stomach, larynx, pancreas, and all the rest, her lungs worn like water wings, her mammaries like shoulder pads, her intestines looping from her rear like a long spongy tail or a vacuum sweeper hose.61 In the spirit of ambiguity that is the novel’s real-and-unreal subject, the sacred is inflated and deflated by the grotesquely profane. Conjoining the organs of the body with store-bought appendages like water wings, shoulder pads, and SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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a vacuum hose, Coover gives mundane form to Dr. Pinenut’s internal debates – “internal” no longer entirely metaphorical, given his ailing state after being nearly burned to death and roughed up countless times. Through Dr. Pinenut’s vainglorious attempts to stay alive while rotting, we are given a window onto the “it-ness” and “I-ness” that define his existence as a man of wood. He has never been afraid of course to speak of the “soul” or “spirit” (“I-ness” was in effect a word for this), though he has often wondered why men born to real mothers did, and indeed it could be said that his entire Mamma project [his current book] had been really little more than a homiletic account of his idiosyncratic search for the magic formula by which to elevate his soul from vegetative to human form, as though body, far from being a corrupting adversary, were in itself a kind of ultimate fulfillment.62 The sensual, sexual body is always “becoming” a subject – but also a subject that will become an object in death. Playing with the trope of reversibility through the character of Dr. Pinenut, Coover (with far more conviction than Saramago) rejects the Platonic opposition of ideal and real, abstract and corporeal.63 Rather he embraces the elliptical transitions between them as is evident in Dr. Pinenut’s ultimate fate. When the Blue-Haired Fairy finds him all but reduced to splinters by his calamitous encounters, she tells him, “You’re not even worth burning. I’m afraid there’s nothing left to do but send you to the pulping mills to help ease the world paper shortage. . . . We’ll make a book out of you!”64 To which he replies, “But a talking book mamma! A talking book . . . !”65

ZzZ To some it may seem that the linguistic play that gives form and plot to Pinocchio in Venice has little to do with design. They may be right, at least in the narrow sense of the word, except for the fact that when Coover champions uncertainty as Dr. Pinenut’s way of being in the world, he is also describing the fundamental incompleteness that is integral to design, when it is understood as always iterative and never finished until we apprehend it. This is the case, even and perhaps especially, when a place, a structure, or an object is in our possession, for then 296

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we change it again. We integrate the designer’s intended story into stories of our own, but what largely goes unexamined are the means through which we do so. Like Coover’s Dr. Pinenut, design operates in both the solid or real nature of materials, whether pixels, wood, or paint, and in the amorphous sensuality and ideas that they evoke. That said, much of design is oddly weighted toward diminishing our sensitivity to things by virtue of making them operate smoothly. The irony is that to achieve that fluidity of experience and sensation designers must go through a process of re-sensitizing themselves to objects, messages, and places. They unravel and reconfigure materials (as well as the systems they are embedded in) to learn how we experience them in different contexts and could experience them differently. This entails a variety of methods, from direct interactions, to the study of antecedents, to offering counter-intuitive scenarios. In the best-case scenarios, the process also involves attention to larger social and environmental contexts as well as careful, if necessarily incomplete, attention to the consequences of introducing something different into the world. Design is not only non-linear in its methods, it is also multi-modal. This is not to say that the work of designing has no certainties or metrics to gauge the distance between what Saramago calls the “brain-in-the-head” and the “brain-in-the-hand” – particularly in view of the aforementioned advances in tapping into neuronal networks with technology. However, the signal finding of such experiments may not be that we can artificially reroute the affects of external stimuli like light or texture directly to the brain for processing as “seen” or “felt.” The real breakthrough may be in the finding that sensing is social. There is increasing evidence that “consciousness itself is ‘exteriorized’ – that we are alive in relation to others, not in relation to some imagined inner self, that homunculus in our heads.”66 In other words, some researchers are now speculating that when we watch others work with the “brains-in-their-hands,” we can sense what they feel. What was then an intuition is now being confirmed. While we are still on the brink of exercising these new sensory extensions, the design of artificial sense stimulators needs to be carefully assessed. The first incursions outside of research laboratories have been social, but they have also been overtly commercial and certainly not meant to compensate for any physical sensory deficits. Case in point, when retail designers pump fragrances through the vents of shops – the smell of vanilla is especially popular SENSES: PERCEPTIONS, VIBRATIONS, VISIONS

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– they do it to make people relax and shop longer. The goal of increasing sales in store is hardly surprising, but doing it by manipulating consumers with covert ambient scents – which are essentially undetectable, mild forms of sedation – does raise questions of ethics.67 The true opportunity in working with the senses is to make us more alert to the various qualities of our environments, not to make us less aware of them. Even a design act as prosaic as specifying that a building have operable windows can give us the agency to change the temperature and smell of a room. By the same token, closing those same windows can offer revelations of a different sort. Whether after a brief vacation or a lengthy abandonment, walking into a house that’s been closed up affords another kind of knowledge: it contains a concentrated mix of the animate (our own biochemical brew mixed with the pheromones of others) and the inanimate (our material things, designed by someone, somewhere). It is this compound of fragrances that prompted Virginia Woolf to write, “It is always an adventure to enter a new room; for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion.”68 Designers cannot supply the cocktail of sensory information that comes with time, but they do set it in motion. And they do it most conscientiously when they consider all that is known about the attributes of materials they choose to work with, including how they will change when they age. Working with the conscious knowledge of buildings’ and objects’ ultimate mortality means being re-acquainted with the smells of both life and death. It means becoming receptive to the presence of the living and the deceased – a presence that lingers in fibers and atmospheres around things, and in those things themselves, all in varying states of decay. (This sensitivity was largely lost, and not entirely to our advantage, to inventions like air conditioning.69) We have seen how writers can heighten our attention to the satisfactions of the sensory by engendering empathy with their characters’ proclivities, even as debauched as Huysmans’s portrayal of Des Esseintes’s tastes, and especially as intelligent as Saramago’s description of Cipriano’s fingertips. Yet, we still have a very limited vocabulary for the senses. We are like Whitehead’s Lila Mae, who resorts to using the word “elevatorness” to go beyond mere appearances, or Coover’s Dr. Pinenut when he writes of “it-ness” and “I-ness” to describe the materiality of being. Design, when it chooses to, enriches that vocabulary by 298

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making gestures as vivid as words. We – designers and laypersons, alike – would profit from listening to the shapes of Pamuk’s articulate letters and attending to the topography of Baker’s book. Attending to the cues of the senses may not necessarily save a king’s sanity and soul, as Calvino would have it, but it can surely make life in a world that seems to be driven by an urge for predictable sameness a little less sterile.

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1 If we accept this notion of sensory information as a priori then this has serious consequences for design, or, at least, design as it is commonly taught and understood as a generator of experience. Designers would do well to be mindful of the gulf between their work and “experience.” As philosopher James Dodd writes, “any talk of orchestrating or even producing an experience in this sense is suspect in principle. Its very availability involves something other than what can be directly fashioned or produced. If experience proves to be something plastic, expressible, even controllable, it will be in a sense very different from the plasticity of things, since the relevant modes of our access to this plasticity are necessarily phenomenologically distinct” (Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World: Exercises in Philosophical Anthropology [Leiden: Brill, 2017], 94). 2 To cite only two such “adventurous design provocations” (featured in this chapter’s illustrations), I would call the reader’s attention to the Nóize chair by Estudio Guto Requena, which melds sound and visual form; and Lickestra, a project combining taste, touch, and sound, created by Emilie Baltz with Carla Diana and Arone Dyer. 3 Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map [1946]” in The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 3. 4 Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: Random House, 1989), 2. 5 That design having to do with the senses is largely project-based and likely to be categorized as art is evident in much of the work in Madeline Schwartzman’s book See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 4.

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6 Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 63. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 65; emphasis added. 9 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin Books, 1959), 101. 10 Ibid., 102. 11 Ibid., 124. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 128. 15 The difference today is that the cost of such artificial interventions is environmental, whereas for Des Esseintes, they were psychological. 16 Ibid., 36–37. 17 Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 57. 18 Ibid., 5–6. 19 Ibid., 6. 20 Ibid., 7.

24 Whitehead’s fictional ruminations on the elevator’s understanding of itself have since come to be called object-oriented ontology or OOO. For further reflections on this point, see Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology: Or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Though Bogost concedes that “the experiences of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between that black noise and the experiences internal to an object” (100). And even this will only reveal “an experience [the alien phenomenologist] can never fully understand” (ibid.). 25 Whitehead, The Intuitionist, 124. 26 Ibid., 151. 27 Ibid., 222. 28 Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion, 1999), 58; paraphrased in Tim Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 214. 29 Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” 212. 30 Whitehead, The Intuitionist, 239.

21 Dodd, Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World, 53.

31 Italo Calvino, “A King Listens,” in Under the Jaguar Sun, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1988), 33.

22 Whitehead, The Intuitionist, 62.

32 Ibid., 38.

23 Ibid., 151.

33 Ibid., 42. 34 Ibid., 44. 35 Ibid., 43. 36 Ibid., 64. 37 José Saramago, The Cave, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harcourt Books, 2002), 16.

38 Ibid., 56.

48 Saramago, The Cave, 269.

64 Coover, Pinocchio in Venice, 329.

39 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 4–5.

49 Ibid., 293.

65 Ibid.

40 Saramago, The Cave, 7. 41 Frederic Jameson describes American architect John Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel as follows, “The entryways of the Bonaventure are, as it were, lateral and rather backdoor affairs . . . . What I first want to suggest about these curiously unmarked ways in is that they seem to have been imposed by some new category of closure governing the inner space of the hotel itself . . . . [T]he Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd” (Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], 39–40). Surely, Saramago modeled his Center on the genre of hotel that Portman introduced. 42 Saramago, The Cave, 66–7. 43 Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” trans. David Roberts, Thesis Eleven 36:1 (1993), 125. 44 Saramago, The Cave, 67. 45 Ibid., 126. 46 Ibid., 127. 47 Adam Gopnik, “Feel Me: What the New Science of Touch Says about Ourselves,” The New Yorker (May 16, 2016), 62.

50 For more on the possibilities of electronic books, see N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 51 Nicholson Baker, preface to A Book of Books: Photography by Abelardo Morell (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006), 7. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Orhan Pamuk, “The Old Meaning Speaks Out,” in Fereshteh Daftari, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 28. 55 Ibid., 29. 56 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2009), 91.

66 Gopnik, “Feel Me,” 6. 67 For more on ambient scents in retail environments, see Kevin D. Bradford and Debra M. Desrochers, “The Use of Scents to Influence Consumers: The Sense of Using Scents to Make Cents,” Journal of Business Ethics 90:2 (2009), 141–153. 68 Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth: And Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 27. 69 For more on the diminishment of the sense of smell in recent years, see Anna Barbara and Anthony Perliss, Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places through the Sense of Smell (Milan: Skira, 2006).

57 Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels,” in Selected Poems and Letters, trans. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, (London: Penguin, 2004), 95. 58 Sevi Merter, “Synesthetic Approach in the Design Process for Enhanced Creativity and Multisensory Experiences,” The Design Journal: An International Journal for All Aspects of Design 20:sup1 (2017), 4520. 59 Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 115–6. 60 Ibid., 238. 61 Ibid., 239–40. 62 Ibid., 253. 63 Judith Seaboyer, “Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice: An Anatomy of a Talking Book,” in Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, ed. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 237.

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“Excavation with Buttons,” from Still Life, Richard Barnes, 1994 In the opening pages of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard flattens death, equating lifeless bodies with “lamps, suitcases, carpets,” and presumably buttons like those in evidence here. Death reduces a person to yet another piece of earthly furnishings, to pure materiality. As he notes, this is a state of being that we are already more than familiar with since it is the condition of everything around us. Richard Barnes’ photograph echoes that thought, and at the same

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time, it amplifies it. In this image, we see buttons still gleaming with light – buttons that have retained their molecular integrity – unlike the body and the garment they once adorned. The photograph not only verifies Knausgaard’s observation that in death the body enters the realm of things; it also takes the writer’s observation beyond metaphor, with the caveat that this is a realm in which things (our bodies and our objects) don’t live and die equally.

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Mortality: Death, Burial, Resurrection The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death.1 – Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1

It is mildly disconcerting to think of human bodies as fundamentally no different from clouds and carpets, even though Knausgaard’s claim is eminently reasonable. We live with the awareness of death’s finality and we enter the lively realm of things and nature when we die. Even so, this knowledge lies largely in the realm of abstraction, which is why there are countless objects and places designed to make death real. Made for both the living and the dead, reliquaries, shrouds, coffins, cemeteries, and all manner of memento mori give form to the existential dilemma that Knausgaard describes so baldly – that of being in both realms at once. This two-fold consciousness is aroused not just when someone dies, but also, tellingly, when something dies or, more pointedly, when something survives, as when the poet Wisława Szymborska writes in “Museum” that, “The hand has lost out to the glove / The right shoe has defeated the foot.”2 That things exceed us is both comforting and unsettling. Ultimately, however, their triumph over mortal bodies is pyrrhic. The glove and the shoe may hold the shape of those who once wore them, but those shapes are now filled by voids. Just as the architecture of mausoleums creates the illusion that the departed have just moved into a different house, so too museums create the illusion that things have found a second life. (Or is it that they, like the stars, appear to us in the various stages of their half-lives?) In any case, without conscious acts of 303

reclamation, things left behind are emptied of meaning and thus unknowable. They become as alien as the dead who used them. Knausgaard admits as much later in the same novel when he enters the bathroom of his childhood home: I knew no one was there, I knew the flushing water was only flushing water, that the coats were only coats, shoes only shoes, stairs only stairs . . . . This particular evening, however, my unease with it rose again because my grandfather had collapsed here and because Dad had died upstairs in the living room yesterday, so the deadness of these non-beings combined with the deadness of the two of them, of my father and his father.3 At the start of the book, Knausgaard seems to want to demystify death by pointing out that we already live with it in everyday things, but at its end, he acknowledges that there is a disconcerting force to the “combined deadness” of things and people. Perhaps those “carpets” and “clouds” are not so dead after all, and that his earlier observation was simply a deflection from coping with that which to our conscious minds is the most profoundly unknowable state.4 Either way, Knausgaard’s location of the uncanny in the everyday (in the state of being already dead yet always alive) is, to me, far more interesting than, for example, the trope of the haunted house, which comes to us pre-packaged. Spaces like Knausgaard’s bathroom exist in a much more disturbing limbo. The same could be said of clothing that hangs in the closets of the deceased, in shirts that still show the creases made by elbows and pants stretched out by knees. These zombie objects can invite fantasies of resurrection; that is, if one can bear to be in their presence. More often than not, however, the tension trapped in things both dead and alive becomes unbearable. Ironically, it leads us to make and design more things and places, in the hope that they can mediate between the conflict of sensing the presence of two phenomena – life and death – at once. Then again, design is a form of – and gives form to – mediation. It already works in the realm of the in-between: chopsticks and forks get food to the mouth; umbrellas come between the rain and the head; sidewalks separate people from cars. But mediations between the dead and the living operate within a different dynamic. Designing for the activities of daily life involves relationships of relative equals in which forks and mouths (or umbrellas and heads) are mutually dependent. However, in designing for death, the balance of power is 304

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skewed. It’s not that the dead have less power than the living but the reverse. The state of death is so completely incommensurate with our own calendared days that objects associated with it often acquire the force of mystery. For example, the reliquaries that protect saintly remains “not only embody a continuity between that which is no longer and the present, but [they] also exert a form of agency in the sense that a superior force is seen to emanate from them.”5 Even if we discount that “sense” as a product of superstition, these miniature caskets offer a direct connection to the power of death in their displays of bone and desiccated blood. They may not succeed in invoking the immortality of bodies and souls reunited in heaven, but they do a very good job of forcing us to confront our earthly finitude.

DEATH: DESIGNING ITS INSTRUMENTS AND SITES OF INTERMENT

Of all the ways in which to “see” death, the reliquary may be the tamest, even though the majority of relics are associated with violent deaths. Until the end of legal public hangings in the 1930s and the execrable extra-legal lynchings that went on in the U.S. until 1950, executions were often the occasion for large public gatherings. In such extreme cases, the balance of power shifts to the living, who invoke death prematurely and want no memorials or sacred reliquaries for their victims. Recall Charles Dickens’ Madame Defarge, who sat and knit the fate of those to be guillotined during the French Revolution: “knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads.”6 One could even say that the more potent weapon in A Tale of Two Cities was the pattern of Defarge’s knitted code, which identified the names of people to be killed. Her husband attests to the effectiveness of his wife’s system, with the following boast: “Jacques,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if madame my wife undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a word of it – not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in Madame Defarge. It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives, to erase himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge.”7 MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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Dickens domesticates death by making it a spectacle to watch while knitting – a spectacle choreographed by knitting. We are no less bloodthirsty today, but our gory spectacles are usually viewed from a greater distance. We watch our beheadings and stonings at home, where they are safely contained within the rectangle of a screen – death sentences often announced as they’re being executed on television. Despite the frequency of our exposure to bombings and slayings, or maybe because of our overexposure, we rarely look directly at the weaponry that causes death and even more rarely consider them in terms of design; instead, we tend to focus on the circumstances that provoke it. (The critical and fraught exception is the gun control debate in the U.S. today, where all too many children know just what a gun looks like from first-hand experience.) Ultimately, however, it is not a matter of civil liberties that we continue to abide with these murderous objects but the fear of dying. Of course, few people would knowingly choose to live with murderers, so weapons have to be normalized, as they are through magazines like Gun and Garden and entire lines of clothing designed for carrying concealed weapons. Among all the issues designers are called on to address, the “problems” they are asked to “solve,” none is more fraught and contradictory than designing for death. At best, design compromises on matters of life and death by mitigating the pain of capital punishment, as was the intent of the guillotine in Dickens’ day, or more prosaically, by adding safety features like locks to guns. Still, the fundamental purpose of a deadly weapon seems to be a matter of managing the risk to one life, while taking another. But even that rationale – the rationale of self-defense – fails to take into account the larger politics of designing objects that make otherwise equal lives radically unequal. This existential imbalance, all too rarely spoken of, was taken up by George Nelson in 1960, when he wrote “A Problem of Design: How to Kill People” for a program aired on national television. At the invitation of CBS, the designer, architect, and educator (who also narrated the one-man show) took his viewers back through history to demonstrate how even the most primitive weapons like a mace or a sling shot “transformed conflict between subjects (two equally vulnerable people) into conflict between subjects and objects (people with weapons aiming at otherwise human targets).”8 In addition to critiquing the Cold War arms race, in full swing at the time, Nelson effectively demonstrated 306

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5.56mm M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round, a.k.a., Green Bullet, U.S. Department of Defense, 2010 This “green” bullet was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s online exhibition (2013–2015), curated by Paola Antonelli and Jamer Hunt. Their project is one of the rare critiques of design’s culpability in the production of violence. Though, as Clive Dilnot notes in his commentary on the title Design and Violence, “It is not, one should note, design as violence. The conjunction ‘and’ carefully preserves the separation, and thus the absolution, of design.”1 He, like George Nelson, sees design as the problem. Forty-five years after Nelson’s diagnosis, Dilnot’s indictment of design is unquestionably apt here. The dubious rationale for the “green” bullet is that it “swaps out the traditional lead core for copper, ensuring that bullets do not contaminate the food chain

or water supply – just their intended target.”2 In other words, it is designed to kill people and animals while protecting the ground they are meant to live on. 1 Clive Dilnot, “Green Bullets (U.S. Military),” Design and Violence, Museum of Modern Art, January 29, 2014, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/ designandviolence/green-bullets-u-s-military/. 2 Paola Antonelli and Jamer Hunt, “From the Curators,” Design and Violence, Museum of Modern Art, January 29, 2014, https://www.moma.org/ interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/ green-bullets-u-s-military/.

that, in the case of weaponry, design is not the problem-solving practice that it’s made out to be. It is the problem. While most things (e.g., telephones and telescopes) are designed to bridge the distances between people and phenomena, weapons are designed to alienate us from them. Their job is to safeguard the psychological distance needed to kill, and of course, to kill more efficiently. Unlike mausoleums that can accommodate mourners inside them, or commemorative objects like candles that are designed to sustain memories of the dead, weapons offer no such bridge. They are designed to annihilate, not to commemorate. MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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AaA The efficacy of weaponry also involves another form of efficiency: a rapid response. This is true in all emergencies, whether the offending object is a broken piece of glass or a rifle, but it is particularly so when it is caused by the gunfire of war. Most troops can rely on stocks of medical supplies, but they are just as likely to depend on remedies designed on the fly, as is the case in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The novel is a chronicle of U.S. soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam. There is little mention of weapons, but a great deal is said about unlikely armor. One soldier wears his girlfriend’s panty hose around his neck, hoping their fragile mesh will protect him; another wards off fear by using his father’s Bible as a pillow. And when these talismans fail them, they have to make do with whatever is at hand, as O’Brien makes painfully clear: Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.9 The poncho becomes Lavender’s shroud and the helicopter his hearse. The deployment of a valuable piece of military aircraft to ferry him to a mortuary shows how far we will go to rescue bodies, even when they are beyond resuscitation. Still more poignant is the poncho. It now protects Lavender’s body from one thing only: abandonment in the muddy fields of Vietnam. Regardless of the chaos and the fraught conditions of battle, the soldiers, like the bereaved in countless other conditions and cultures, act on a deep-seated need to wrap and cover their dead. The passage from life to death all but demands a rite of passage done with a measure of dignity. Of course, dignity can be signified with just a bowed head; but it is almost always confirmed by objects and places designed to contend with loss, even if it is only in the ad hoc use of a tarp. The removal of the recently deceased to a graveyard, cemetery, or even, as in this case, a helicopter, is part of a larger primal instinct to protect our 308

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bodies from contamination and assuage our anxiety in confronting the specter of our own eventual demise. More than that, the transference of the body to a space especially prepared to receive it is a long-practiced ritual of respect. To intentionally do otherwise – whether by displaying an enemy’s head on a spike or leaving a lynching victim hanging in plain sight – is to perpetrate a double death. The body is murdered along with the idea that it was ever a person. The power of these displays is not simply a matter of gory spectacle, but in the way it violently blocks the possibility of the consolation that can come from gathering in a sanctioned place. As American historian Thomas W. Laqueur points out: “We are, so the historical and anthropological record suggests, a species that not only lives with its dead but is acutely aware of their foundational importance. And we seem to be the only species to do so.”10

Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, D.C., Maya Lin, 1982 We may or may not be “the only species that . . . lives with its dead” – even Laqueur makes a tentative exception for elephants. (Elephants have been observed mourning one of their own in gatherings that can last for days.) But it is safe to say that we differ from elephants in at least one way: we can choose from wildly divergent ways to live with, adjacent to, or above our dead. However, there are customs (a preference for the figurative, for example) that still prevail, particularly in the case of war memorials. From today’s

vantage point, it is hard to recall the anger provoked by Maya Lin’s proposal when it won the competition for the design of the Vietnam Memorial in 1981. (Its construction was nearly blocked because it was thought to be too abstract.) But visitors to the Memorial have found nothing vague about the 58,318 names chiseled into its slabs. In addition to honoring the dead, the Memorial also honors those whose bodies were never found. Its design cannot show us where they are but it does create a place to mourn them.

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Cemeteries and urn-filled crematoria are designed to allow us to “live with” our dead. (Graveyards, etymologically speaking, are associated with digging and burying the dead; while cemeteries, rooted in koimētē´rion, the Greek word for a place to sleep together, have a more social function.) Their true purpose is not to intern the dead but to confirm that they once lived, particularly as memories of them fade. Today, however, these sites are (literally) conceding ground to more ephemeral practices as more and more people choose cremation and their relatives disperse their ashes as they see fit. Even so, we still seek ways of holding on to the deceased, whether in conventional photo albums or virtual repositories. Indeed, sometimes the pre-deceased do it for us by making videos to be played, for example, at the reading of their wills. In all of these instances, the task of design is to make the dead, in some sense, present. One of the most common traditional ways to sustain illusory presence is to mark the ground where someone lies. In previous centuries, this was often accomplished with what Elizabeth Spencer describes as “a riot of expressions in defiance of the brutal ending that death brings to us all. Angels, cherubs, children, sheep, broken chains, weeping willows, portrait monuments, lyres, wreaths, pointing hands . . . lovingly placed.11 Written as a prelude Eudora Welty’s photographs of churchyards in the American south, Spencer’s words set the stage for Welty’s own ruminations on the graveyard as a kind of resurrection in stone: There was a ringing for each car as it struck its wheels on the cattleguard and rode up into the cemetery. The procession passed between ironwork gates whose kneeling angels and looping vines shone black as licorice. The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other – bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams.12 The metaphor of the crossing is as old as the story of the River Styx. But it isn’t just the means of passage that has changed in The Optimist’s Daughter. Welty’s “bygone citizens” don’t simply “cross over,” they also cross back in dreams. In the meantime, garbed in their “life-sized effigies,” they wait for us 310

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to join them, after which their return journeys will become less frequent. With no one to animate their presence with personal memories, they will become the stuff of imagination. Only the stone angels will be left watching the graveyard tourists who wander among them, seeing them as signs of someone else’s fate. Welty’s words are yet one more reminder that when faced with the non-presence of death we make palpable things – things that stand in for bodies that can no longer be touched. That we do so publicly is a sign that even in the face of death we are social animals. In the grander cemeteries, landscaped grounds allow the living to stroll in earthly arcadia, amidst family plots and tombs. Even those who never marry or have children will find themselves adjacent to others. However, no matter how congenial they are, no matter how many visitors they

Paa Joe, Untitled (Golden African Eagle), 2010 Despite the obvious truth of the aphorism that “you can’t take it with you,” we persist in trying. This golden African eagle coffin, lined with red and green silk, is usually reserved for chiefs in Ghana.3 Known as abebuu adekai, caskets like this one – and caskets very different from this one – are made in the region around Accra. Among the better known artists who design and now exhibit them are: Eric Adjetey Anang, Paa Joe, Daniel Mensah (a.k.a., Hello), and Kudjoe Affutu.4 These “fantasy coffins,” as they are sometimes called, declare the status, the profession, and/or the defining passion of the deceased. And while there are numerous examples of animal coffins, it is striking how many take the form of objects from daily life. Sneakers, flip flops, trucks,

cars, cameras, airplanes, and machine guns, vividly testify to the fact that contemporary life is inseparable from the lives of commodities, in a way that the West would generally rather forget. 3 “The Art of Ghana’s Bespoke Coffins,” The Guardian, November 14, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/gallery/2010/nov/14/ghana-coffins. 4 Kwame Aidoo, “An Introduction to Accra’s Fantasy Coffins,” Culture Trip, May 22, 2017, https://theculturetrip.com/africa/ghana/articles/ an-introduction-to-accras-fantasy-coffins/.

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attract, cemeteries are separate but familiar places whose geography is circumscribed by fences and gates.13 If your body isn’t allowed in, it is either because it is destined for a pauper’s grave or the non-place of the lost and disappeared. Absence always haunts, but even more so when the living don’t know where to look for the dead. The absence of a marker was also a way of punishing the dead. From the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century, English criminals were buried where four roads crossed to confuse their ghosts and prevent them from finding their way home. It seems that even in the afterlife the real estate maxim still holds – location, location, location. Without it, reconciliation is thwarted: an official notification of “missing in action” creates an intolerable

22 July Memorial, Sørbråten Utøya, Norway, Jonas Dahlberg, 2014 Jonas Dahlberg’s proposal to commemorate the massacre of seventy-seven people (most were teenage Labor Youth Party members) by far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik on the Norwegian island Utøya in 2011 might well be the most literal memorial to traumatic death. Had it been built, it would have split the island in two with a gorge. However, the project was never realized on the grounds that the intervention would be a “rape of the landscape” and only compound

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the tragedy. But like James Fenton’s poem “A German Requiem,” Dalhberg’s project refuses to look away, neither from absence, nor the rift in time that the victims and their families were (and are) forced to experience. His was a design that strengthened the pain of loss. Too many people found it hard to live with such a radically frank admission; the poet’s, on the other hand, survives safely on the page.

limbo, just as searches for human remains in disaster sites protract the process of grieving. In circumstances like these, sacred sites give way to the profane. We are left with temporary makeshift shrines and the remnants of places and buildings where life was snuffed.

wWw In his poem “A German Requiem,” James Fenton makes absence palpably present in the voids created by bombs. He stares into the spaces we rush to fill up, so as to avoid any further exposure to, or responsibility for, unsavory truths of politics and war. It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. And with any luck oblivion should discover a ritual. You will find out that you are not alone in the enterprise. Yesterday the very furniture seemed to reproach you. Today you take your place in the Widow’s Shuttle.14 Death is an eternity of absence, which here takes on temporary form in the negative spaces of the city. In the lines of the following stanzas, the reader follows the pro forma rites of passage meant to certify that absence. Here, Fenton unveils the fraudulence of the pact of forgetting, duly ratified by the priest and the mayor, who banish the shameful causes and effects of war, lest someone remember how it all started. How comforting it is, once or twice a year, To get together and forget the old times. As on those special days, ladies and gentlemen, When the boiled shirts gather at the graveside MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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And a leering waistcoat approaches the rostrum. It is like a solemn pact between the survivors. The mayor has signed it on behalf of the freemasonry. The priest has sealed it on behalf of all the rest. Nothing more need be said, and it is better that way – 15 In circumstances like these, things like “boiled shirts” and “a leering waistcoat” take on a tone of insult. The survivors can only console themselves that they Are not ghosts, That they shall go home. The bus is waiting, and on the upper terraces The workmen are dismantling the house of the dead.16 The banality of the bus rides to and from the ceremony undercuts the pomp with which the past is buried, and buried again, when those who survived meet up “once or twice a year.” Fenton goes on to contrast that ritual with burials that took place in the midst of war. For all that they were hastily organized, with the merest semblance of oversight, they are far more poignant and, paradoxically, far more considered. Each body is addressed, quite literally. But when so many had died, so many and at such speed, There were no cities waiting for the victims. They unscrewed the name-plates from the shattered doorways And carried them away with the coffins. So the squares and parks were filled with the eloquence of young cemeteries: The smell of fresh earth, the improvised crosses And all the impossible directions in brass and enamel.17 The brass and enamel name-plates, which will have to do in place of granite and marble, create a spatial disorientation eerily similar to that of the aforementioned crossroad burial sites. Both criminals and wartime victims are consigned to a peculiar kind of purgatory from which there is no way out, but 314

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with one important difference: The crossroads insult the dead while the nameplates show them respect. One imagines that it would take small acts of patience to unscrew them from their “shattered doors” and affix them to coffins. Here, the expedience of wartime burial is tempered by improvised displays of tenderness. As futile as the gesture of restoring names to bodies might be, it is one more instance of the persistence of ritual. However, unlike Welty’s figures of stone that stand patiently waiting for us to visit, their very faces suggesting that communication with the dead might be possible, Fenton’s door plaques do not announce anyone’s presence as they did in peacetime. Instead, they declare an absence that is compounded by the bodies’ consignment to a directionless anywhere.

THE DEATHS OF THINGS

Except for the most stoic, who need no touchstones, we look to things to confirm the fact that the deceased once lived. We depend on objects and places to exceed the limitations of memory and we mourn them when we lose them. Most of us have had the experience of feeling bereft after losing something of tremendous personal value, sentimental or otherwise. This is nothing, however, compared to the pain inflicted in wartime when everything we think of as ours can be destroyed in a moment and all at once. War makes a mockery of “durable goods,” not unlike the way natural disasters do, but with a cruelty that comes from knowing that wars are preventable and events like earthquakes are not. In “The House Murdered,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish deftly inverts the scale of wartime disaster by inventorying the contents of a single home. His recitation is a dense litany of loss and a rare commemoration of ordinary things. In one minute, the whole life of a house ends. The house murdered is also mass murder, even if vacant of its residents. It is a mass grave for the basic elements needed to construct a building for meaning, or for an insignificant poem in a time of war.18 MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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Darwish mourns things, not for themselves, but because it is through things that we cope with the world, that we make our dwellings home. While they live, we can live. When they go permanently missing or are crippled beyond recognition, life is stripped of purpose and dignity, as it is, and has been forever, in countless diasporas. Here, Darwish identifies that loss within a very localized scattering. War may force others to look away, but he stays at the scene, recording the extent of the damage. The house, murdered, is the amputation of things from their relations and from the names of emotions, and it is tragedy’s need to guide eloquence to contemplate the life of a thing. In each thing there’s a being that aches…the memory of fingers, of a scent, of an image. And houses get murdered just as their residents get murdered. And as the memory of things get murdered – wood, stone, glass, iron, cement – they all scatter in fragments like beings. And cotton, silk, linen, notepads, books, all are torn like words whose owners were not given time to speak.19 A disaster of modest proportion, made up of modest bits and pieces is tallied in weight of time and the non-negotiable currency of memory. While there is little or nothing left to redeem, materials – “wood, stone, glass, iron, [and] cement” – actually become weightier; their particulate takes on the status of fractured “beings.” Moreover, things like “cotton, silk, [and] linen” carry a sensual intimacy that negates the impersonality of war and makes it “murder.” The crime is all the more egregious for the inoffensive ordinariness of its casualties: plates, spoons, toys, records, faucets, pipes, door handles, and the fridge, the washer, the vases, jars of olives and pickles, and canned foods, all break as their owners broke. And the two whites, salt and sugar, are pulverized, and also the spices, the matchboxes, the pills and oral contraceptives, elixirs, garlic braids, onions, tomatoes, dried okra, rice and lentils, as happens with the residents. And the lease contract, the marriage and birth certificates, the utility bills, identity cards, passports, love letters, all torn to shreds like the hearts of their owners. And the pictures fly, the toothbrushes, hair combs, make-up accessories, shoes, underwear, sheets, towels, like family secrets hung in public, in ruin. All 316

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these things are the memories of people who were emptied of things, and the memories of things that were emptied of people…all end in one minute. Our things die like us, but they don’t get buried with us!20 Like earthquakes, every war has its after-shocks, and one of the biggest might be the realization that we had so many things to lose in the first place. But even more powerful tremors will follow when we find that there is no marriage license to testify to a marriage, or birth certificate to prove that we exist. Probably most humbling of all is the newfound knowledge that the life and lives of a household can be tallied in “toothbrushes” and “hair combs.” Such items come to us directly from design; likewise the “underwear, sheets, towels” that in war are exposed like so much dirty laundry. Printed leases and passports, also designed to secure our place in the world, have all evaporated. They, like Darwish’s Palestinian compatriots, have been effectively and thoroughly dispossessed. However, for all his specificity in itemizing dead things, Darwish doesn’t mourn their particular qualities as much as he mourns the fact that they died all at once, leaving their owners naked to the world.

bBb Under ordinary circumstances our appliances, clothing, devices, and furnishings die randomly, their deaths spread out over time so the burden of replacing them is merely annoying. These incremental losses of things forgotten or broken in peacetime is the subject of Pablo Neruda’s “Things Breaking,” written in 1959. Things fall apart in our houses, as if jarred by the whim of invisible ravagers: not your hand or mine, . . .

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yet, the crockery smashes, the lamp tumbles over, the flower pots totter one after another crowning the lapsing October with crimson, wan with their surfeit of violets, others holding their emptiness in, circling and circling and circling the winter, till the bowl with its blossoms is gruel, a keepsake in ruins, a luminous dust. And the clockface whose cadences uttered our lifetimes, the secretive thread of the weeks, one after another, yoking the hours to the honey and quietude, the travails and births without end – even the clock plunges downward, the delicate blues of its viscera pulse in the splintering glass and its great heart springs open.21

In this meditation on the accidentally absent, neither blame nor forgiveness is relevant. Neglect didn’t reduce the flower pots to “dust,” only the fatigue of weakened molecular connections. Though it would be a mistake to confuse their transfigurations with weakness when they are, in fact, entering another 318

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state. It is the nature of living that things break and are deposed from the present, no matter how vital they are to our lives. The crockery and the lamp did their jobs; the clock marked the hours of troubles and births. They haven’t been put aside for more stylish models; they are simply broken from wear. Still, they hang around. Their fragmented state and the state of “menace” around them rebuke any thought of warding off mortality. Life grinds on the glasses and powders, wearing us threadbare, smashing to smithereens, pounding the forms; whatever is left of its passing abides like a ship or a reef on the ocean, and perishes there in the circle of breakable hazard ringed by the pitiless menace of waters. Let us gather them, once and for all – the clocks and the platters, cups carved in cold – into a poke with them all and down to the sea with our treasure! There let our furniture smash in the sinister shock of a breaker; let the things that are broken call out like a river and the sea render back to us whole in the might of its crosscurrents22

The threat posed by accident-prone things is exorcised in the sea. True, these ordinary yet beloved objects may be reconfigured by waves that will round their edges and polish their surfaces, but as Neruda reminds us, they will only come back “whole” after they’ve been absorbed into mighty “crosscurrents.” All thought of why or how these once-cherished things were damaged seems incidental to reckoning with the force that abides within their material natures. This MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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they reveal in dying, which happens, not in a moment as we are prone to think, but over time as matter dissipates into energy – ultimately, here, in the currents of the ocean. However, what Neruda doesn’t say, but surely is true, is that the force of their material natures is both fertilizing and poisoning the future. Writing about things like plates and cups, not toxic things like plywood infused with formaldehyde, the poet is more focused on the conversion of things to other states than to their consequences – consequences we delude ourselves into thinking are finite. Today, we would be foolish to think of human deaths as apart from the death of things, since their remains (like the plastic collecting in the self-same oceans of Neruda’s poem) may well be our executioners. Admittedly, this is a decidedly twenty-first century response, though it is one that designers are increasingly likely to have. It is far more likely that Neruda intended his rumination on the fragility of objects to confront us with our own. For most of us, this in itself is a fearsome prospect and why all the broken “clocks and the platters” must be gathered and drowned. Their bodies are, perhaps, not so different from ours in the ways that they age: slowly and unceremoniously wearing down from the effects of wear and tear, and accidents that go unnoticed, except for the poet, who eulogizes the decay that is intrinsic to life.

INDUSTRIAL DEATH

To this point, we’ve looked at the instruments of death, the cemeteries and markers that provide evidence of death (and the reassurance that there once was a life), as well as the mortality of things themselves. Now we turn our attention to the systems and things – the web of products and places that depend on death to survive – that, in fact, would die without it. Unlike other experiences that we repeat in life, the experience of the moment of death cannot be known before it happens. We can plan it, it can be planned for us, and we can have near-death experiences, but we cannot know it. Our comprehension of dying is stymied by a finality that makes it impossible to think through, and with, death. All we can do is design around death’s causes and effects. These, as José Saramago tells it, are both far greater and far more quotidian than we might have thought. In Death at Intervals, he plays on the 320

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fundamental anxiety of not knowing when we will die, by putting death – presumably, the end of days – on a calendar. The novel is set in a country which, like others, is used to its predictable unpredictability; in other words, used to the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its timing. The difference is that in this particular country, a unique series of experiments are being conducted, which we learn about in Saramago’s “true, yet untrue story about death and her vagaries.”23 Note that “death” insists on the lower case “d” to distinguish her work as local and prosaic, and not, for example, like the Black Death, whose violence is of another magnitude. Here, death is a femme fatale in the most literal sense.24 The novel begins when death loses interest in the “usual death” that everyone thinks is “their natural due.”25 She has other ideas about how to organize it, and when she puts them into action, we begin to understand how the act of dying, an otherwise singular and solitary act, is enmeshed in multiple plans and calculations. It becomes clear that death and circumstances around it – even and especially the moment of its arrival – are most definitely designed. It is assisted, managed, and controlled and not just by death, herself. She does, however, precipitate the events that ensue. Her first move is to do nothing; death goes on strike. No one is allowed to die, even the ancient queen mother, who isn’t supposed to last another night. When the clock strikes midnight on this particular New Year’s Eve, the queen mother, along with thousands of her subjects, enters a state of suspension. Death seems to have disappeared, but her absence is felt by everyone. The first problem is space. We tend to think of space as a concern of the living not the dead, but now death gives dying a new proportion. Almost immediately, the citizens of Saramago’s benighted country shift their concern for friends and relatives trapped in limbo to the mounting number of barely-living bodies around them, apparently going nowhere. Anxiety is now so widespread that it falls to the prime minister to calm his increasingly nervous constituents, and more importantly, to ward off any civil unrest that could topple his government. But he is at a loss to explain why there have been no fatal accidents, no deaths by murder, suicide, illness, or old age, no deaths of any kind since January 1. Without a rational explanation, he resorts to the catch-all default: “the will of god.” He is rewarded with a phone call from the cardinal, who, shocked by the prime minister’s explanation, upbraids him for forgetting that death is “the main beam, the cornerstone, the keystone of our holy religion. . . . Without death, prime minister, without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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Reading between the Lines, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, Limburg, Belgium, 2011 This skeletal church designed by Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh is a voided house of prayer. Stripped of pews and parishioners, the project can be construed as a commentary on the waning attractions of traditional religion. But as an idea of church, materialized in 30 tons of steel, it also suggests the church’s unrelenting

hold on earthly power that is satirized by Saramago in Death at Intervals. Yet, this hollow church is startlingly beautiful. In that sense, it is truly a poignant effort to come to terms with the ineffability of death, even that of forms of an institution like the church.

is no church.”26 Any compassion for the almost dead is abruptly sidelined by the more worrisome prospect that without its raison d’être, the church itself will die. Worse, so will any plans to expand. There will be no reason to build more convents, rectories, cloisters, and chapels, or for that matter to design more baptismal fonts, pews, altars, or any of the other ecclesiastical paraphernalia that fill them. The church may be the most powerful institution in the land, but if the current regime is to remain in power, it must also heed grievances of the numerous secular organizations, confraternities, and workers’ associations that are affected just as much. Somewhat predictably, the first formal complaints come from the undertaking business. It is desperate; suddenly there are no customers. In view of the dire threat to their livelihood, the owners of this multi-faceted business decide to look elsewhere for new clients. To that end, they submit a proposal asking the government to mandate 322

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the burial or cremation of all domestic animals that die a natural or accidental death, and that such burials or cremations, regulated and approved, should be carried out by the funerary industry . . . . The document went on, We would draw the government’s attention to the fact that this vital change in the industry cannot be made without considerable financial investment, for it is not the same thing to bury a human being and to carry to its final resting-place a cat or a canary, or indeed a circus elephant or a bathtub crocodile.27 Even with compulsory funerals for pets, hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs are at stake – from the coffin makers to the florists to the funeral directors themselves – and not just in the funeral industry. Equally affected are the hospitals where the as yet-to-be-dead are overflowing into the corridors. The directors and administrators plead their case to the government, resulting in an official directive to the effect that any patient in the troublesome state of suspended life must be returned to his or her family, given that the patient, “even during any brief moments of lucidity, [will] be pretty much indifferent to where he is.”28 The next petition comes from the owners and workers of the homes for the elderly. They raise the point that if the situation continues, all of the “eventide” institutions will be completely full. Their recommendation is to build more care homes, lots more. They also point out that these new facilities, or, “to put it more crudely, cemeteries of the living,”29 need to be large enough to accommodate the ever-growing numbers of the old. Amateur designers in their own right, the caregivers go on to offer the helpful suggestion that perhaps these facilities should be built “in the form of a pentagon, for example, or a tower of Babel or a labyrinth of Knossos.”30 In other words, what is needed is a place where bodies can be left and lost. The insurance companies are also in a state of panic. People start cancelling their policies in droves once they realize it would be “absurd, not to say downright stupid, to continue paying exorbitant premiums.”31 The industry’s response – one of the few that didn’t meet with public derision – was to require that premiums be paid until the age of 80. At this time, the insured would be officially (but not actually) dead and thus able to collect the full amount for which his or her life was insured. Furthermore, if the current situation remains MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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unchanged, the company offers the option to renew the same agreement, including the payout in full, the next time the insured reaches eighty. Taken together, the rhetoric of the undertakers, caregivers, and the insurance companies makes it clear that the “barely-living bodies” in this “true, yet untrue story” are mere commodities. Overstocked, or undersupplied, the almost-dead make up a deficit. They can even put the church out of business, creating a domino effect that could ruin the entire country. It’s worth noting here that Saramago’s “country” – a parody of his native Portugal – is a confederacy of commercial concerns and special interest groups. Meanwhile, every member of this confederacy is doing its best to preserve its particular purchase on death, in spite of the fact that when one of them fails they all do. Despite their vociferous complaints and responses, it isn’t the aforementioned institutions that break the deadlock (an especially apt term in the circumstances) but a poor family from the countryside, “who, for their sins, had not one relative, but two, in that state of suspended life or, as they preferred to call it, arrested death.”32 In the middle of the night, the members of one desperate courageous family carry their sickly patriarch and grievously ill infant, both beyond recovery, across the border to a more fortunate country where death still occurs. They dig the grave and cover its unblessed ground with weeds, hoping it won’t be discovered, especially by the church. Of course, they are found out, and despite the ensuing scandal other equally desperate families do the same. The government objects, not on moral but political grounds. The real fear is that these macabre migratory pilgrimages will alienate neighboring governments. But the illegal burials won’t be stopped. They become so popular that another system is born. What began as an ad hoc movement is now co-opted by another bureaucracy – albeit one that is unsanctioned (but certainly recognized) by church and state. Aptly, it is a branch of the famous underworld organization – the “maphia” – which has the most entrepreneurial approach to the dire circumstances the country is facing. This maphia, spelled with a “ph” to distinguish itself from its traditional competitors, sees opportunity where the church and state see only problems. From here on out, the tactics of the poor become the strategy of the criminally inclined, who transform these surreptitious burials into a business. Though, as such organizations are wont to do, they perform their exorbitantly priced service without even the barest of amenities. They simply bring people 324

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over the border to die without informing families about the location of their loved ones’ unmarked graves. For all its crudeness, the maphia succeeds in bringing the project of body dumping to scale, something the poor were neither equipped for, nor wanted to do. Not only that, but with a bit of experience they improve the design of their service and also protect their liability. Now the maphia would claim that the sufferers they ferried over the border had chosen to die, making their deaths suicides. No one, neither the family, nor the maphia, could then be held culpable, for it is impossible to accuse anyone of murder in a country where no one dies. Deed done, the body would be brought back to his or her native soil for proper burial, soothing the families and, more importantly for the economy, putting the morticians, coffin makers, florists, and not least, the owners of the funeral homes back in business. By virtue of an under-the-table agreement between the maphia and the ministry of the interior, this state of affairs becomes the status quo. That is, until death changes her modus operandi, again. This time she explains herself in a letter, which mysteriously appears on the desk of the director-general of television. She explains that the reason she had interrupted her activities was to give those human beings who so loathe me just a taste of what it would mean to live for ever . . . . [Now] all those people who should be dead . . . will have the candle of their life snuffed out as the last stroke of midnight fades on the air.”33 This meant that sixty-two thousand five hundred and eighty people would be released from their suspended state, simultaneously. And given that death’s work stoppage was over, there would be many more following them with no end in sight. Her announcement brought great relief (if not downright joy) to the funeral directors, the hospital administrators, the eventide managers, the insurance executives, and the clergy. Even the maphia saw gains: With death back in the picture, they were able to set up a lucrative sideline in the practice of euthanasia. What none of these agencies knew, however, was that death’s declaration had left something out. Having suddenly restored the prospect of dying to the living, death decides that a little advance warning might make her reappearance less abrupt. So, she gives everyone who is about to die one week’s advance notice by way of a MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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letter on violet paper sent in an envelope of the same color – deep purple being the traditional color of mourning. Death had thought this would give the soonto-be dead time to get their affairs in order, to get in touch with old friends, to make amends, or to express the depths of their feelings to their loved ones. In fact, her letters backfire and people do the opposite. Some give into orgiastic excesses; some spend all the money they had planned to leave to their families. Some even try to commit suicide under the stress of knowing that no matter how healthy they are, they will die on an appointed day. But suicide, once again, is impossible – this time because death has pre-assigned each person’s moment of expiration. To make matters worse, these letters cannot be destroyed. The unlucky recipients can’t shred or burn the paper and its message; and they certainly can’t shoot the messenger. In any case, death is too preoccupied with the backlog she created over the past seven months to realize the panic she had unleashed. Meanwhile, the legal and social restraints that ordinarily temper the most extreme behaviors are breaking down. When the recipients of the purple envelops realize just how precisely finite their lives will be, they also realize they can’t be held accountable for their actions, no matter how outrageous. The situation is not only calamitous for the soon-to-be-dead, but also for the rest of the yet-tobe-notified, who wake up each morning wondering if a violet letter will appear in the post. Everyone feels like they are living with “the sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over their head.”34 Death, now thoroughly designed by its perpetrator, has not only thrown a wrench into the works of those whose businesses wouldn’t exist without her. More critically, she reveals their cupidity in the face of tragedy. However, even with all the instances of the systemic corruption that has been designed around death, it is important to remember that design is a practice that, ideally, takes the alleviation of discomfort, pain, and suffering to be its own reward. Indeed, this was death’s intent when she redesigned the process of dying. When she put dying on a hiatus, she thought it would make her absence unbearable and change the perception of death as welcomed not feared. When she did the opposite and made her presence predictable, she hoped her offer of an interval for reflection would free people to die without regret. Neither happens. Moreover, she discovers another force that is even stronger than her own when one of her violet letters is repeatedly returned to her, unopened. 326

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The addressee is a cellist, who is so resistant to her summons that death decides she has to investigate. Leaving her scythe to send out the next week’s letters, she takes on human form and leaves her domain to see the man she cannot seem to kill. Even after meeting the cellist, it takes death some time to recognize that she’s never going to deliver his violet letter. The epiphany comes when the cellist plays for her with a transfiguring virtuosity. Together, the music’s timelessness and his ardor bring death out of herself. She starts living and the cellist continues to live. The only thing that dies is her master plan, which, like all master plans, was born with one foot in the grave. Utopias and dystopias cannot withstand the human impulse to look for another way and to reconfigure circumstances that seem to be fixed and given. Which isn’t to say that death’s innovations offer the worst possible design model; a certain amount of vision is a prerequisite of design and surely she had that. The problem wasn’t her vision but its singularity. Even she had to admit that death is a limit that escapes complete control.

RESURRECTION

Death’s embrace of the cellist (and life) will presumably subject her to the same laws of nature that govern the body of her lover. If there were a sequel, we might find the cellist mourning her, with nothing left of death but the clothes she most certainly wore to seduce him. And within those clothes, at least for a time, she would linger. Just as with other mortals, her clothing would have adapted to her body, taking on its scents, angles, and curves. Dresses, sweaters, shoes, and coats allow us to sense the person who wore them; and in death their fibers are particularly potent. They offer a fleeting sense of resurrection as they release the molecular traces of the absent body. This is why it is so hard to clean out the closets of the dead. Haruki Murakami addresses the ordeal of confronting this secondary set of remains after the initial trauma of death in “Tony Takitani” – the title of his short story and the name of his protagonist. Tony is a successful illustrator with an excellent income, who marries in his late thirties, later than most men of his generation. He’d never felt the need for it, until he was caught off guard by a young woman of twenty-two. He doesn’t quite understand why he’s drawn to her. At first, he only knows that the attraction is overwhelming. MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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The next thing that caught his attention was her clothes. . . . She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy.35 When Tony compliments her on the way she dresses, she tells him that she spends most of her money on clothing. She is a woman for whom fashion is central to her very being. This is the first indication that she herself is endangered: endlessly inventive, fashion kills what came before it. Last season’s styles are always superseded by the next. Understandably, at this stage of their courtship, Tony is oblivious to any threat from her all-consuming passion and they marry. Up to now, he had always thought of himself as a loner, but in marriage he finds an unexpected peace and relishes his happiness. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. A strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought that she had suddenly taken ill.36 In a sense she has. She buys an astounding amount of clothing on their honeymoon in Europe. Instead of museums and cathedrals, they see houses of fashion; and when they get back to Japan, she continues to buy expensive clothes. At first, her daily shopping sprees only affect their home: Like many obsessive pursuits, hers requires space. Tony orders customized armoires. He even has “an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet.”37 Only when it can’t hold any more clothes does Tony summon the courage to suggest to his wife that she might not need so many. Somewhat surprisingly, she agrees and locks herself in the house, since she has no self-control. She spends her closeted days “taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror.”38 But it isn’t only the material, its texture, or its drape that she finds satisfying, it is also the fact that it is imbued with her scent and her shape. What for others is an object of fascination – here, a dress – becomes a subject indistinguishable from herself. 328

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It is the endless possibilities posed by this semi-conscious exploration of that self via fashion that make her appetite unsustainable. She dies, not under a pile of dresses, but in a car crash on her way to the fashionable Aoyama district. Perversely, she is killed by the promise of further joy, but not by the forces of consumption. Tony’s wife is more motivated by the frisson of recognition (giving credence to the cliché that this dress is “me” so it must be mine) than by the pleasures of shopping for its own sake, which, for her, is just a means to an end. Even so, Murakami captures the conundrum of design, caught as it is between the virtue of creating choice and the vice of generating too many choices. Aptly, he does it through one of its most ephemeral products: fashion, proving that the product is never the point or at least never the end point. For Tony’s wife, the question is existential. Every new dress is an answer to the question “What if?” as in, “What if this dress offers a new way, another way, of being oneself among others?” The question might seem trivial when talking about a dress, except for the fact that fashion can and does change how we see each other, whether or not we want to admit it. Tony’s wife had internalized this phenomenon so completely that she wasn’t fully knowable as a person. Even Tony, who was bewildered by his wife’s profligacy, comes to think of her dresses as shadowy “samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.”39 After the funeral, Tony finds himself “left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes.”40 He sells her hats and accessories and throws her underthings away, but is stopped by the sheer quantity and overwhelming presence of her dresses. In a strained effort to keep them and her alive, he tries to hire an assistant on the condition that she wears his dead wife’s clothes in the office. The applicant asks to see them and when she does, “the sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal.”41 (Surely, a sign of life.) She starts trying on the clothes; not only are they “flawless,” they fit perfectly. Tony tells her she can wear them like a “uniform” while she works for him. However, at some point in the recruitment process, he discovers that he has underestimated the atmospheric properties of the dresses, which in any case are each so exquisite as to be the opposite of a uniform. Tony, who had once seen them as ordinary objects, begins to perceive the dresses as ephemeral yet suffocating particles that are overwhelmingly animate. MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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hash2ash – everything saved will be lost, Pangenerator, 2018 Commissioned by the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw to create a work about teenage life, the art collective Pangenerator responded by coming up with hash2ash – everything saved will be lost. They chose to examine selfie culture and the “ephemeral nature of technology – in particular, the fear of losing our digital lives to technical failure or old, incompatible file formats.”5 Museum visitors were invited to take selfies, which appeared on a screen, vanished, and were resurrected in pieces of black gravel that appeared at the bottom of the installation. (Computer mapping software tracked the movement of digital particles, creating a one-to-one correspondence of pixels and granules.) Haruki Murakami’s bereft protagonist imagines a similar

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disintegration of his dead wife’s dresses, when he senses the particles of their fibers drifting like pollen around him. The key difference is that Tony Takitani feels he’s suffocating from their closeness in the air, where the particles of selfies are unable to reassemble themselves in anything remotely like an atmosphere. In both cases, however, the selfie and the dresses are ultimately banished, and we are forced to see them go. 5 Gunseli Yalcinkaya, “Digital Installation Seemingly Turns Selfies into Gravel,” Dezeen, February 15, 2018, https://www. dezeen.com/2018/02/15/digital-installation-seemingly-turns-selfies-into-gravel-pengenerator-technology/.

Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him.42 Against the stark reality of her absence, his wife’s dresses and accessories are too present in the odiferous particulate of their materials. They not only refuse to let him grieve, they also serve as a reminder that materials disintegrate far more slowly than the bodies they adorn, a fact that may be the ultimate insult to human vanity. Design only magnifies the snub. Were it not for the siren song of fashion, Tony’s wife would still be alive. Realizing that he is looking at the scene of a murder – each new dress having supplanted the one that came before it, causing his wife to sacrifice herself in pursuit of yet another – Tony does an about-face. Instead of hiring an assistant to wear them like a mannequin, he sells her clothing for a fraction of their value, which in any case was never relevant. Occasionally, however, he visits his wife’s closet as others might visit a grave, staring “at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife’s shadows.”43 And a shadow that has no figure attached to it, only another shadow, is beyond the remit of design.

CcC Design is for the living, perhaps even more especially when its subject is death. So-called green bullets and biodegradable coffins are designed to protect the living earth, and by extension all the creatures that depend on its health. Wellbeing, the current term of art for tipping the scales away from the grave, is a growth industry that rivals those that attend to the dead. Rowing machines, exercise bicycles, and workout gyms are all informed by the aim of aging better and dying better. While it may seem churlish to fault the things that tout benefits of fitness, there are legitimate questions about how it is accomplished. When design gives way to its regulatory instincts, as it does with devices that remind us when to stand, when to walk, and when to move, it becomes more of an enforcer MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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and less a source of reassurance. Again, we look to the poet to show us another, subtler way in which design keeps death at bay. In “Clothes,” Szymborska writes: You take off, we take off, they take off coats, jackets, blouses, double-breasted suits, made of wood, cotton, cotton-polyester, skirts, shirts, underwear, slacks, slips, socks, putting, hanging, tossing them across the backs of chairs, the wings of metal screens;44 The scene is so familiar to most of us at one point or another during our lives that Szymborska doesn’t feel the need to explain where we are. But we aren’t really sure until she describes the metal screens as “wings.” Then we are with her in the doctor’s office, and we know that the situation is grave because there are angels present. This time, however, it would seem that they are guardian angels, alert to their task to keep us safe in the here and now. But even they cannot spare us from the time of anxious “not-knowing.” Of course, “not knowing” is a permanent condition, even if it is one we rarely admit to. When we do confront it, we almost always want to know the prognosis for its continuance, since there are no violet letters to confirm it. Szymborska continues: for now, the doctor says, it’s not too bad, you may get dressed, get rested up, get out of town, take one in case, at bedtime, after lunch, show up in a couple of months, next spring, next year; you see, and you thought, and we were afraid that, and he imagined, and you all believed;45 Szymborska has so far only hinted at how things play their roles in the situation, just as she let us surmise the identity of the place where these “coats, jackets, blouses, [and] double-breasted suits” find themselves “tossed.” It is only in the final lines of the poem that we can discern what purpose they serve.

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it’s time to tie, to fasten with shaking hands shoelaces, buckles, velcro, zippers, snaps, belts, buttons, cuff links, collars, neckties, clasps and to pull out of handbags, pockets, sleeves a crumpled, dotted, flowered, checkered scarf whose usefulness has suddenly been prolonged.46 After being removed with little regard, the generic “skirts, shirts, underwear, slacks, slips, socks” come into focus. The doctor’s tentative reprieve not only sharpens the concentration, as might be expected, but it also refocuses our attention to things that join other things. “Shoelaces, buckles, velcro, zippers, snaps,” and so on, do the work of repairing the rupture between “not-knowing” and knowing things will be okay, at least for the time being. Oddly, because it seems almost an afterthought, the most critical object in this most serious of circumstances is the scarf. Unlike “belts, buttons, [and] cuff links,” it has no practical purpose, even though we are told its “usefulness has suddenly been prolonged.” This scarf is not a neck warmer. Its pattern of dots, flowers, and checks were fashioned by someone. It may not be the work a professional designer but it has been designed nonetheless. In all likelihood, it is not very expensive, and its maker is unknown. But this doesn’t diminish its stature. If the future held only hospital gowns, it is unlikely the poet would get dressed with such meticulous attention to detail. Nor would she add the grace note of the scarf. Its “usefulness” is to confirm she will live for a while longer.

DdD Design can dress death with monuments and makeshift memorials, but we tend to think its larger task is to take care of us during the time while we are safely (if temporarily) removed from thoughts of death and dying. However, it is also the case that design’s ministrations to the living, like Szymborska’s modest scarf, are all compensations and consolations before the fact and knowledge of death. Even so, the work of designing explicitly for death – despite its long history from the pyramids of Egypt to the tombs of unknown soldiers – is a relatively specialized practice. That the tropes of conventional funerary design are fairly predictable is not only a reflection of the institutionalization that Saramago critiques, but also MORTALITY: DEATH, BURIAL, RESURRECTION

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of the behaviors of mourning that tend to oscillate between two extremes. On the one hand, there is the grief that is never fully resolved and the sense that death must be repeatedly confirmed. On the other hand, there is a fatalistic acceptance of the ordinariness of death, whose absence cannot be mitigated. The angelic protectors of Welty’s churchyards may be the most straightforward gestures of refusal of an absolute death. We see this in their nods to an existence in the hereafter, and in the way that their implacable presence makes the cities of the dead more familiar and welcoming to the living. Cemeteries have all the trappings of status and class preserved in names and figures carved into stone. The grandest mausoleums are testaments to legacies of power and prestige; more modest headstones testify to the persistence of the need to be, at least, counted as one among the legions of those who once lived. Still, it is the improvised burials and small signs of remembrance that seem most affecting, whether in soldier’s tarp, or hastily added address plaques. They carry none of the numbness induced by the miles of gray blocks of stone that are packed cheek by jowl in municipal cemeteries. This is not to say that informal memorials are somehow more vital than those that follow convention, just that the informal requires greater ingenuity to be recognized at all. This is because most such burial plots, if we can call them that, are often ephemeral themselves. Over time, they are submerged under centuries of waste and rubble. But all too often, they are erased by deliberate gestures of disrespect, such as when political regimes find it too inconvenient to recognize those who died on “their” land, or when real estate development takes precedence over preserving the burial grounds of indigenous peoples. And let us not forget the roads that have been paved over killing fields, ever since the time that we first thought to design such things as roads. It is tempting to moralize such acts. Perhaps the only consolation for such omissions and desecrations can come from a less self-centered view of things. In this light, we would recognize human deaths as part of a larger pattern of deaths that includes animals, plants, organic material, and the inert things that Darwish and Neruda mourn. We could even take some cold comfort from Knausgaard’s observation that humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water.47 334

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However accurate this observation is in summing up the totality of death, we need not see our redundancy as pointless, but rather part of a richer collection of “forms,” inclusive of the organic and the inorganic, the sentient and the insentient. Some of these forms we make and design, some we find and adapt to, some we admittedly destroy, and some destroy us. We are not alone amidst inexorable tides of creation and destruction. This, however, is a realization of limited comfort; for no matter how we try, most of us cannot conceive of being in a state in which there are no things. It may be why we keep making more of them. Our material eulogies would seem to fulfill a subconscious need to anchor ourselves with material ballast no matter how futile the effort, given that death will claim us all. However, instead of futility, it is possible to see generosity in this process of making – the generosity of one generation to the next. But where once we thought almost exclusively in terms of passing on heirlooms to each other, we now, as Knausgaard and others attest, are beginning to realize there is much more at stake. There is a new understanding of legacy, one that is not solely human-centered. It comes from living with the knowledge that the things we live with – those things we design and those rare things that have not been affected by our human presence – are all actively dying, albeit at different rates.48 Just as we avoid death for as long as we can, we need to avert (and at the very least, be better prepared for) the death of things, be they species of human-made artifacts or species of flora and fauna. This expanded understanding of mortality, in which we are not the only subjects in the world, irrevocably changes the brief of design from one of furnishing surplus to requirements to one of ensuring that “surplus” can be resurrected, in Knausgaard’s words, “over and over again” before it smothers us. Otherwise, designing for death – the difficult and delicate work of honoring lost lives and consoling each other – will become a full-time occupation.

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1 Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1, trans. Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux 2009), 5. 2 Wisława Szymborska, “Museum,” in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1996), 11. “Museum” from VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND. Selected Poems by Wislawa Symborksa, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavangh. Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 Cztelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 3 Knausgaard, My Struggle, 319. 4 All but the most strictly conceptual artists and designers know from experience that there is an innate vitality in the materiality of objects, which Knausgaard first calls dead and later recognizes as spookily present. This awareness of the potency in, and of, “dumb” things has also recently generated a growing literature of things as design theorists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists argue for a less human-centered world. One could argue that Knausgaard arrived at the same place by diminishing the specialness of humans only to find to his embarrassment that the human and non-human exist on the same plane when he’s jarred by the sensations of an empty home. 5 Mélanie van der Hoorn, Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings (Remapping Cultural History) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 183. 6 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 194. 7 Ibid., 179.

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CHAPTER 8

8 Susan Yelavich, “Prescience of Nelson,” symposium review of “George Nelson: Design for Living, American Mid-Century Design and Its Legacy Today,” Constructs: Yale Architecture (Spring 2013), 8. 9 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, [1990] 1998), 3.

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Pablo Neruda, “Things Breaking [1959],” in Five Decades: A Selection (Poems: 1925–1970), trans. and ed. Ben Belitt (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 151–153. 22 Ibid., 153.

10 Thomas W. Laqueur, “The Deep Time of the Dead,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 78:3 (2011), 802–3.

23 José Saramago, Death at Intervals, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (London: Random House, Harville Secker, 2008), 30.

11 Elizabeth Spencer, “An Abundance of Angels,” introduction to Eudora Welty, Country Churchyards (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 13.

24 Notice the pronoun “her.” In Ben Bollig’s review of Death at Intervals, he points out that in Portuguese – Saramago’s native language – death, a morte, is feminine in gender and this gender is preserved in the English translation (Ben Bollig, “Hold the Grim Reaper,” review of Death at Intervals by José Saramago, The Observer, February 10, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/10/ shopping.fiction).

12 Eudora Welty, Country Churchyards (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 41. 13 Cemeteries have also been described and theorized as heterotopic spaces by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Like psychiatric hospitals and brothels, burial grounds are liminal places that serve to house what a culture considers marginalized behaviors and practices, of which spaces associated with dying are exemplary examples. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1 (1986), 22–7. 14 James Fenton, “A German Requiem,” in Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 11. 15 Ibid., 13 16 Ibid., 14. 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Mahmoud Darwish, “The House Murdered,” trans. Fady Joudah, The Progressive: A Voice for Peace, Social Justic, and the Common Good, November 10, 2006, http:// progressive.org/dispatches/ the-house-murdered/.

25 Saramago, Death at Intervals, 15. 26 Ibid., 8. 27 Ibid., 15. 28 Ibid., 18. 29 Ibid., 20. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 22. 32 Ibid., 27. 33 Ibid., 91. 34 Ibid., 121. 35 Haruki Murakami, “Tony Takitani,” trans. Jay Rubin, The New Yorker (April 15, 2002), 77. 36 Ibid., 78, 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 79. 39 Ibid., 80.

40 Ibid., 79. 41 Ibid., 80. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 81. 44 Wisława Szymborska, “Clothes,” in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 137. “Clothes” from VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND. Selected Poems by Wislawa Symborksa, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavangh. Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 Cztelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Knausgaard, My Struggle, 441. 48 Conversely, political theorist Jane Bennett addresses the issue of uneven mortality of both the organic (e.g., human, vegetal, microbial) and the inorganic (e.g., mineral, stone, steel) by examining the uneven liveliness of materials. Making the point with the example of metal, she argues that any manipulation of metal depends on its own “protean activeness.” See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 59–60.

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Literary works discussed in order of appearance

INTRODUCTION

BEINGS

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Pen and the Inkwell” Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus Wisława Szymborska,“Museum”

Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel Jorge Luis Borges, “The Golem” Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers: A Novel Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman Primo Levi, “Order on the Cheap,” “The Retirement Fund” Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

CULTURE Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red Charles D’Ambrosio, “Russian Orphanage” Luc Sante, “The Clear Line” Darryl Pinckney, High Cotton Staniłsaw Barańczak, “If China” Dante Alighieri, Paradiso André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir, “Shadow Cities” Dominic Pettman, In Divisible Cities Kōbō Abe, The Box Man

POLITICS Constantine P. Cafavy, “Walls” Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Quadraturin” Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over” José Saramago, “Things” W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed John le Carré, Absolute Friends

338

TECHNOLOGY Danilo Kiš, Gardens, Ashes Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way: Cities of the Plain Franz Kafka, “My Neighbor” John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio” William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence: A Novel Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine: A Novel Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel Tom McCarthy, Satin Island Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy”

DOMESTICITY

SENSES

Lydia Davis, “Housekeeping Observation” Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping: A Novel Natasha Trethewey, “Domestic Work, 1937” Lucia Berlin, “A Manual for Cleaning Women” Magda Szabó, The Door Anne Sexton, “Housewife” Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Cheaper by the Dozen Otto von Busch, A Scar of Belonging: Fragments of Fashion by Gillis Görll, 1901–1975 Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” Raymond Carver, “Why Don’t You Dance?”

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map” Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours) Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist: A Novel Italo Calvino, “A King Listens” José Saramago, The Cave Nicholson Baker, preface to A Book of Books: Photography by Abelardo Morell Orhan Pamuk, “The Old Meaning Speaks Out” Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels” Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”

CONSUMING Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City César Aira, “Acts of Charity” Lao She, “Attachment” Virginia Woolf, “Solid Objects” Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties Barry Yourgrau, Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

MORTALITY Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, bk. 1 Wisława Szymborska, “The Museum” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried Elizabeth Spencer, “An Abundance of Angels” Eudora Welty, Country Churchyards James Fenton, “A German Requiem” Mahmoud Darwish, “The House Murdered” Pablo Neruda, “Things Breaking” José Saramago, Death at Intervals Haruki Murakami, “Tony Takitani” Wisława Szymborska, “Clothes”

339

Index

Abe, Kōbō  18, 64–69, 67 Abloh, Virgil  29, 29 Absolute Friends (Le Carré)  105 Acconci, Vito  16, 16 Aciman, André  24, 60–63 Actor-Network-Theory (ANT)  142n27 “Acts of Charity” (Aira)  236–241 Against Nature (Huysmans)  271–274 Aira, César  28, 236–241 Akan, Erdem  25, 25, 49, 49 Al Adib, Yara  113, 113 Alagić, Adnan  40, 40 Alba, the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) Bunny (Kac)  273, 273 AlterEgo headset (MIT Media Lab)  149, 149 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The (Chabon)  114–115 American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (Beecher and Stowe) 198–200 Andersen, Hans Christian  19 Andrić, Ivo  38–43, 71n8 Antonelli, Paola  13–14, 307 Appiah, Kwame Anthony  50, 72n35 Arendt, Hannah  105n1 Askew Clock (Kalman)  162, 162 Asymmetric Love Number 2 (Wagenknecht)  26, 26 “Attachment” (Lao She)  241–243 Atwood, Margaret  17, 27, 134–138 Auster, Paul  17, 254–259 Austerlitz (Sebald)  91–98, 107n40 Baas, Maarten  89, 89 Baby (Sato)  32 Bachelard, Gaston  184 Baerten, Nik  113, 113 Bakalarz-Duverger, Malgorzata  71n2 Baker, Nicholson  18, 27, 31, 165–168, 289 Baltz, Emilie  293, 293 Barańczak, Stanisław  59 Barbara, Anna  218, 218, 244, 244 Bardi, Lina Bo  276, 276 Barnes, Richard  111, 111, 302, 302 Barry, Nick  264, 264 Bartholl, Aram  144, 144

340

Bauman, Zygmunt  106n24, 226 Bazzicalupo, Matteo  197, 197 Beecher, Catherine  196, 198–200 Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Ingold)  278 Being and Time (Heidegger)  219n2 Benjamin, Walter  28, 246–247 Bennett, Jane  337n48 Berlin, Isaiah  139,143n57 Berlin, Lucia  28, 187–190 Berman, Paul Schiff  110 Bertolotti, Elisa  113, 113 Bey, Jurgen  25, 25 Biancoshock 67, 67 Big Brother in Drag (Magid)  157, 157 Biodegradable bottles (Jónsson)  134, 134 Birkhead, Ellie  29, 29 Bishop, Elizabeth  28, 266–268 Bogost, Ian  300n24 Bollas, Christopher  107n40, 118 Bollig, Ben  336n24 Book of Books, A (Morell)  289 Border Life (Biancoshock)  67, 67 Borges, Jorge Luis  27, 31, 116–117, 269–271 Box Man, The (Abe)  18, 64–69 Boym Partners  60, 60, 258, 258 Bridge on the Drina, The (Andrić)  38–43 Brody, David  219n10 Calderón Salazar, Pablo  113, 113 Calvino, Italo  24, 31, 34, 61–62, 231–236, 278–282 Campanella, Tommaso  95 Canned Form, Study B05/01-077, Intuitive Cartographies, Book 2, Atlas (Martinez)  77, 77 Carey, Ernestine Gilbreth  201–206 Carpenter’s Gothic (Gaddis)  18, 158–161 Carter, W. Craig  115, 115 Carver, Raymond  28, 214–217 Caryatides wallpaper  230, 230 Cavafy, Constantine  24, 78 Cave, The (Saramago)  17, 282–288 cemeteries  310, 336n13 Chabon, Michael  114–115 Cheaper by the Dozen (Gilbreth and Carey)  200–206 Cheever, John  153–158 Child Bollards 108, 108

Cindoruk, Ela  44, 44 City of Words (Acconci Studio)  16, 16 “Clothes” (Szymborska)  332–333 Collodi, Carlo  112–114 Colors: A Magazine about the Rest of the World  235, 235 Cook, Tim  141n5 Coover, Robert  28, 294–296 Cortázar, Julio  24, 86–88 Cuba 106n7 Dahlberg, Jonas  312, 312 D’Ambrosio, Charles  51–54, 56 Dante Alighieri  146–148 Darwish, Mahmoud  31, 315–317 Davis, Lydia  181 Dea (Barbara)  218, 218 Dead Drops (Bartholl)  144, 144 Death at Intervals (Saramago)  320–327, 336n24 de Certeau, Michel  105n2 Deepdesign 197, 197 DermalAbyss (Vega, Liu, Kan, Barry, Yetisen, Jian)  264, 264 Design and Violence (Dilnot)  307 DeVesto, Tom  155, 155 Diana, Carla  293, 293 Dickens, Charles  305–306 Dilnot, Clive  124, 260, 307 “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (Winner)  106n5 Doily necklace (Cindoruk)  44, 44 “Domestic Work, 1937” (Trethewey)  185–186 Door, The (Szabó)  190–195 Drakulić, Slavenka  100–103 Drawing Blood (Lawson)  81, 81 Dreyfus, Hubert  219n2 Drone Strike Investigation: Case 2, The Architecture of Memory 97, 97 Droog Design  104, 104 Du Bois, W. E. B.  72n49 Dunne, Anthony  141n1, 255, 255 Dyer, Arone  293, 293 East Meets West tea glass (Akan)  49, 49 Eatock, Daniel  124, 124 Empathy Bomber Backpack (Grimord)  138, 138 Empire of Things (Trentmann)  223

Enchantress of Florence, The (Rushdie)  98–100 “End and the Beginning, The” (Szymborska)  211–214 “Enormous Radio, The” (Cheever)  153–158 Escif 147, 147 Estudio Guto Requena  276, 276 Examined Life (Taylor)  224 “Excavation with Buttons” (Barnes)  302, 302 Fakeup 102,102 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan)  196 Fenton, James  31, 313–315 Ferraz, Marcelo  276, 276 Festina Lente bridge  40, 40 Fight Club (Fincher)  29 Fincher, David  29 Fleur De Lys (Muniz)  238, 238 Forensic Architecture  97 Foucault, Michel  336n13 Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley) 139–140 Friedan, Betty  196 “Funes the Memorious” (Borges)  269–271 Fydrych, Waldemar “Major”  107n51 Gaddis, William  18, 27, 158–161 Garden, Ashes (Kiš)  145–146 “German Requiem, A” (Fenton)  313–315 Gijs, Pieterjan  322, 322 Gilbreth, Frank B., Jr.  200–206 Gilbreth, Frank Bunker  200–206 Gilbreth, Lillian Moller  200–206 Giraffe (Bardi, Ferraz and Suzuki)  276, 276 “Golem, The” (Borges)  116–117 González, Maria  84, 84 Görll, Gillis  207–209 Green Bullet (Department of Defense)  307, 307 Grimord, Monique  138, 138 Guantánamo Bay  106n7 Halawa, Mateusz  204, 204 Hamer, Bent  202, 202 hash2ash - everything saved will be lost (Pangenerator) 330, 330 Hazzard, Shirley  20, 21 Heidegger, Martin  219n2 Hicklin, Joe  115, 115

341

High Cotton (Pinckney)  56–58 Hippopotamus, Animal Bowls (Jongerius)  193, 193 Holocaust  93, 95, 107n33, 107n54, 126, 142n40 Housekeeping (Robinson)  18, 183–184 “Housekeeping Observation” (Davis)  181 “House Murdered, The” (Darwish)  315–317 “House Taken Over” (Cortázar)  86–88 “Housewife” 195–196 How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Drakulić) 100–105 Hrustić, Amila  40 40 Human Condition, The (Arendt)  105n1 Human Trace, The (Szwed and Klekot)  283, 283 Hunt, Jamer  307 Huysmans, J.-K.  28, 271–274 “If China” (Barańczak)  59 Infinity Burial Suit (Lee)  30, 30 Ingold, Tim  278 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) See Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) In the Country of Last Things (Auster)  17, 254–259 In The Eyes of the Animal (Marshmallow Laser Feast)  129, 129 In the Penal Colony (Kafka)  79–82 Intuitionist, The (Whitehead)  274–278 Invisible Cities (Calvino)  34, 61–62 Is This Your Future? (Dunne & Raby)  255, 255 Ito, Akihiro  270, 270 I Want to Become Architecture: Brick (Wexler and Wexler) 279, 279 Jameson, Frederic  301n41 Japan 73n78 Jian, Nan  264, 264 Joe, Paa  311, 311 Jongerius, Hella  30, 30, 193, 193 Jónsson, Ari  134, 134 Kac, Eduardo  273, 273 Kafka, Franz  24, 79–82, 153 Kalman, Alex  222, 222 Kalman, Tibor  162, 162, 235, 235 Kan, Viirj  264, 264 Keys, El Sueño Americano (The American Dream) (Kiefer) 74, 74

342

Kiefer, Tom  74, 74 “King Listens, A” (Calvino)  278–282 Kiš, Danilo  145–146 Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra Kjøkkenet) (Hamer)  202, 202 Klekot, Ewa  283, 283 Knausgaard, Karl Ove  31, 302–304, 334–335, 336n4 Kokon Furniture (Studio Makkink & Bey)  25, 25 Konarska, Pavel  121, 121 Konarski, Beata  121, 121 Kostovic, Cedomir  57, 57 Kreienbrock, Jörg  220n20 Krzhizhanovsky, Sigizmund  24, 83–86 Ladies’ Paradise, The (Zola)  227–231, 261n7 Lamp (Sato)  32 Lao She  28, 241–243 Laqueur, Thomas W.  309 Latour, Bruno  73n74 Lawson, Ted  81, 81 Le Carré, John  105 Le Corbusier  120, 202, 220n37 Lee, Jae Rhim  30, 30 Levi, Primo  27, 126–130, 142n40 Lévi-Straus, Claude  106n24 Lickestra (Baltz, Diana, Dyer)  293, 293 Lin, Maya  309, 309 Liu, Xin  264, 264 Livesey, Ruth  262n47 Loos, Adolf  82 Madonna Lamps (Konarska and Konarski)  121, 121 Magic Carpet/Home (González)  84, 84 Magid, Jill  157, 157 Makkink, Rianne  25, 25 Małe Instrumenty (Tiny Instruments)  187, 187 Malik, Tashfeen  141n5 Mangiarotti, Raffaella  197, 197 Man of Iron (film)  221n57 “Manual for Cleaning Women, A” (Berlin)  187–190 “Map, The” (Bishop)  266–269 Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City (Calvino)  231–236 Marelli, Ilaria  155, 155 Marshall Project  102, 102 Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF)  129, 129

Martinez, Enrique  77, 77 Mattingly, Mary  251, 251 McCarthy, Tom  27, 172–177, 178n10 McNicholas, Robin  129, 129 Me, Myself and You (NEXT Architects)  104, 104 Mediterranean Gifts (Barbara)  244, 244 Memoirs of Hadrian (Yourcenar)  224 Mengele, Josef  142n40 Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act (Yourgrau)  251–254 Mezzanine, The (Baker)  18, 165–168 Mmuseumm (Kalman)  222, 222 Morell, Abelardo  289 Moses, Robert  78, 106n5 “Moving Four Blocks” (Pettman)  64 Muniz, Vik  238, 238 Murakami, Haruki  31, 327–331 “Museum” (Szymborska)  21, 303 Museum of Innocence, The (Pamuk)  161–164 My Name is Red (Pamuk)  18, 43–50 “My Neighbor” (Kafka)  153 My Struggle (Knausgaard)  302–304 Nabokov, Vladimir  28, 268–269 Nelson, George  306–307 Nendo  32, 210, 210, 270, 270 Neruda, Pablo  317–320 NEXT Architects  104, 104 Nóize (Estudio Guto Requena)  276, 276, 300n2 Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Wenders)  36–37, 71n5 Nussbaum, Martha  106n4 O’Brien, Flann  121–126 O’Brien, Tim  34–35, 308 Occupy Wall Street  261n11 Olcón-Kubicka, Marta  204, 204 One + One: Umbrella and Watering Can (Eatock)  124, 124 On/Off (Escif)  147, 147 Optimist’s Daughter, The (Welty)  310–312 “Order on the Cheap” (Levi)  126–127 Ornament and Crime (Loos)  82 Oryx and Crake (Atwood)  17, 134–138 Out of Egypt (Aciman)  61 Oxman, Neri  115, 115

Ozick, Cynthia  27, 119–121 Palmås, Karl  106n3 Pamuk, Orhan  18, 31, 43–51, 161–164, 178n25, 290–292 Pangenerator 330, 330 Paracelsus 118 “Pen and the Inkwell, The” (Andersen)  19 Perec, Georges  18, 28, 247–250 Pettman, Dominic  64 Pinckney, Darryl  24, 56–58 Pinocchio (Collodi)  112–114 Pinocchio in Venice (Coover)  294–296 Places of Remembrance (Schnock and Stih)  93, 93 Plato 283 Portman, John  301n41 “Problem of Design, A: How to Kill People” (Nelson) 306–307 Proust, Marcel  148–152 Pull (Mattingly)  251, 251 Pulse (Mangiarotti and Bazzicalupo)  197, 197 Purgatorio (Dante)  146–148 Puttermesser Papers, The (Ozick)  119–121 “Quadraturin” (Krzhizhanovsky)  83–86 “Quasi-Quisling: co-design and the assembly of collaborateurs” (Palmås and von Busch)  106n3 Quay, Stephen  26, 26 Quay, Timothy  26, 26 Raby, Fiona  141n1, 255, 255 Racism &… (Kostovic)  57, 57 Reading between the Lines (Vaerenbergh)  322, 322 Receipt Rug (Abloh)  29, 29 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust)  148–152 Rimbaud, Arthur  292–294 Robinson, Marilynne  18, 183–184 Romańczuk, Paweł  187, 187 Roots of Romanticism, The (Berlin)  143n57 Rushdie, Salman  24, 98–100 Rybczynski, Witold  220n30 Safdie, Ben  222, 222 Safdie, Josh  222, 222 Salazar, António  106n25

343

Salvation (Boym Partners Inc.)  258, 258 San Bernardino shootings (2015)  141n5 Sand Glass LED Traffic Light (Tivawong)  166, 166 Sante, Luc  24, 54–56 Saramago, José  17, 24, 88–90, 106n25, 282–288, 297, 320–327, 336n24 Satin Island (McCarthy)  172–177 Sato, Oki  32, 32, 210, 210 Scar of Belonging, A: Fragments of Fashion by Gillis Görll (von Busch)  207–209 Scarry, Elaine  207, 221n47 Schnock, Frieder  93, 93 Schulz, Bruno  26–27, 130–133 Schumpeter, Joseph  261n3 Schwartzman, Madeline  300n5 Sculpt Cupboard (Baas)  89, 89 Sebald, W.G.  24, 91–98, 107n40 Sexton, Anne  195–196 “Shadow Cities” (Aciman)  62 Shelley, Mary  139–140 Shopping, issue of Colors: A Magazine about the Rest of the World 235, 235 Shteyngart, Gary  169–172 Simmel, Georg  38, 71n6–71n7 Simulation of bio-detecting floor (Tucker)  180, 180 Sinan, Mimar  38 Singer, Peter  223–224 Sit Bag Chair (Akan)  25, 25 Sixth Day and Other Tales, The (Levi)  126–130 Smell of Data (Wijnsma)  172, 172 “Socialism in Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf and the Political Aesthetics of the 1880s” (Livesey)  262n47 “Solid Objects” (Woolf)  243–246 “Some Applications of the Mimer” (Levi)  127–130 Spencer, Elizabeth  310 Spreadsheet detail (Halawa and Olcón-Kubicka)  204, 204 Steel, Barney  129, 129 Steiner, George  23 Stih, Renata  93, 93 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  196, 198–200 Straus Park (New York)  62, 63 Street of Crocodiles (Quay and Quay)  26, 26 Street of Crocodiles (Schulz)  26, 130–133 Super Sad True Love Story (Shteyngart)  169–172

344

Suzuki, Marcelo  276, 276 Synthetic Aesthetics (Ginsberg et al)  143n61 Szabó, Magda  28, 190–195 Szwed, Arkadiusz  283, 283 Szymborska, Wisława  21, 210–214, 303, 332–333 Table (Jongerius)  30, 30 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens)  305–306 Talos (Oxman)  115, 115 Tassinari, Virginia  113, 113 Taylor, Astra  224 Taylor, Frederick Winslow  206, 220n42 Taylorism 220n42 “Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard” (McCarthy) 178n10 Ten Books on Architecture (Vitruvius Pollio)  141n17 Thin Black Lines (Ito)  270, 270 “Things” (Saramago)  88–90 Things: A Story of the Sixties (Perec)  18, 247–250 “Things Breaking” (Neruda)  317–320 Things They Carried (O’Brien)  34–35, 308–313 Third Policeman, The (O’Brien)  121–126 Tintin  54, 54–55 Tintin pleure (Tintin weeps) (Sylvain Grand’ Maison)  54, 54 Tivawong, Thanva  166, 166 Tivoli, Audio Giant Model One BT (Marelli and DeVesto) 155, 155 Toilet seat guitar (Romańczuk)  187, 187 “Tony Takitani” (Murakami)  327–331 Transit of Venus, The (Hazzard)  20 Transparent Things (Nabokov)  268, 269 Trentmann, Frank  223 Trethewey, Natasha  28, 185–186 Tucker, Tashia  180, 180 Turkenich, Liron Lavi  290, 290 22 July Memorial (Dahlberg)  312, 312 2x4  230 Unabomber’s Cabin 111, 111 “Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” (Benjamin) 246–247 Untitled (Birkhead)  29, 29 Untitled (Golden African Eagle) (Joe)  311, 311 Upstate Plates: Pataukunk NY (Boym)  60, 60

Van Vaerenbergh, Arnout  322, 322 Vase of Vases (Velčovský)  225, 225 Vega, Katia  264, 264 Velčovský, Maxim  225, 225 Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier)  202 Vietnam War Memorial (Lin)  309, 309 Vitruvius Pollio  141n17 von Busch, Otto  106n3, 207–209 “Vowels” (Rimbaud)  292–294 Wagenknecht, Addie  26, 26 Wajda, Andrzej  221n57 Walls (Cavafy)  78 War and Architecture (Scar Construction) (Woods)  213, 213 “Watermelon” in Aravit Typeface (Turkenich)  290, 290 “Week of Eavesdropping, A” Dear Data (Lupi and Posavec) 176, 176 Welcome to Seraing (Baerten and Tassinari)  113, 113 Welty, Eudora  310–312 Wenders, Wim  24, 36–37, 71n5 Wexler, Allan  279, 279 Wexler, Ellen  279, 279 Whitehead, Colson  28, 274–278, 300n24 “Why Don’t You Dance?” (Carver)  214–217 Wijnsma, Leanne  172, 172 Willadsen, Steen  142n34 Winner, Langdon  106n5 Woods, Lebbeus  213, 213 Woolf, Virginia  28, 243–246, 262n47 Yetisen, Ali  264, 264 Yourcenar, Marguerite  224 Yourgrau, Barry  251–254 Zippppper concept model (Nendo)  210, 210 Zola, Émile  28, 227–231, 261n7

345

Photo Credits

2x4: 230 Acconci Studio ©Maharam: 16 Adnan Alagic, Bojan Kanlic, Amila Hrustic: 40 Erdem Akan, maybedesign: 25, top; 49 Alter Ego, MIT Media Lab: 149 Maarten Baas: 89 Nik Baerten, Panopticon: 113 Carla Diana: 293 Richard Barnes: 111, 302 Aram Bartholl: 144 Biancoshock: 67 Ellie Birkhead: 29, top Boym Partners: 60 Annette Bunch, Getty Images: 102 Luca Casonato: 155 © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York: 2 Jonas Dahlberg Studio: 311 Micha De Ridder: 104 Deepdesign: 197 Carlo Drasci: 124 Filip Dujardin: 322 Escif: 147 Estudio Guto Requena: 276, left Jason Evans: 255 Edmund D. Fountain, The New York Times: 30 Chrystelle Fontaine: 273 Forensic Architecture: 97 Sylvain Grand’Maison: 54 Monique Grimord: 138 Mateusz Halawa: 204 Masayuki Hayashi: 270 Maria Skov Holt: 258 Paa Joe, Jack Bell Gallery, London: 311 Ian Johnson: 93 Hella Jongerius: 30, top; 193 © Nymphenburg Ari Jonsson: 134 Tibor Kalman, courtesy Maira Kalman: 162, 235 Tom Kiefer: 74 Beata Konarska: 121 Cedomir Kostovic: 57 Ted Lawson: 81 Xin Liu: 264 Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec: 176 Jill Magid: 157 Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF): 129

346

Enrique Martinez: 77 Mary Mattingly, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery: 251 Mehmet Mutaf: 44 Mmuseumm: 222 Vik Muniz ©Maharam: 238 Museum of Modern Art New York, Art Resources: 276 Pangenerator: 330 Pgiam, Getty Images: 309 Public Art Fund New York: 84 Oki Sato: 32 Christine Southworth: 187 Studio Makkink & Bey: 25, bottom Yoram Reshef: 115 Francesca Ripamonti: 218, 244 © Arkadiusz Szwed: 283 Thanva Tivawong: 166 Tashia Tucker: 180 Liron Lavi Turkenich: 290 Rui Vieira, Getty Images: 108 Maxim Velčovský: 225 Addie Wagenknecht and bitforms gallery: 26, bottom Allan Wexler: 279 Leanne Wijnsma: 172 © Estate of Lebbeus Woods: 213 Akihiro Yoshido: 210