TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF DOMESTICITY: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF THE PLACE OF THINGS IN DAILY LIFE Jacques De Visscher, Translated by David Hiroshi

Jager ABSTRACT Source: Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Fall98, Vol. 29 Issue 2, p201, 13p Author(s): Abstract: The diverse things that surround us in our daily life become virtual extensions of our corporeal life. As such, they provide an important mediating role in our relationship to our social and natural environment. This careful descriptive study of household objects attempts to widen our psychological horizons. It also contributes significantly to our understanding of art and architecture.

The diverse things that surround us in our daily life become virtual extensions of our corporeal life. As such, they provide an important mediating role in our relationship to our social and natural environment. This careful descriptive study of household objects attempts to widen our psychological horizons. It also contributes significantly to our understanding of art and architecture. The following passage from George Perecs Les Choses serve as a point of departure for our discussion of the place of things in our daily life. The passage describes the ideal living quarters as envisioned by a young couple of the sixties who dream of a simple and leisurely life. The first door opened on a room, its floor covered by light wall to wall carpeting. A large English bed occupied the far end. To the right, on both sides of the window, two tall narrow bookcases containing some books, pots, necklaces, costume jewelry. On the left, an ancient oak chest, and a small armchair upholstered with pin striped grey silk, seated before a dressing table. A half opened door, leading to the bathroom, would reveal plush bathrobes, swan necked faucets, a large oriental mirror, a pair of English razors and their green leather sheath, assorted flasks, horn handled brushes, sponges. (1965, p. 11) The dwelling space of the house is made up of diverse things that are the cohabitants of the young couple. These things will serve as the tools, utensils, and appliances that support their life and cooperate with their plans. The useful things we encounter in the bedroom or the bathroom, such as the chest or the armchair, exist only by virtue of their link with other things which are also there to be used. In Being and Time, Heidegger wrote that things, such as tools, are never strictly individual entities but always point to other tools. He writes: Taken strictly, there is no such thing as a single, isolated piece of equipment: Ein Zeug ist strenggenommen nie(1962). The bathrobes in the daydream of the young couple: the swan-necked faucets, the large mirror, the flasks, brushes and sponges, all refer back to the daily habits and rituals the young couple would adhere to in their leisurely life. In fact, when we look a little closer at the text, we notice that the objects evoked in the daydream are never alone. The leather sheath refers to the pair of razors and to the act of sheathing and unsheathing in just the same way the sponges refer to the act of sponging. It becomes clear that these useful things form a world together and that they constitute a whole and as such refer to a way of life. Considered strictly as things apart from any relationship to other things, the sponges,

the sheath, the chest, and the window, all lose their sense as useful objects and become mere brute things. Heidegger stresses the fact that: These Things never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves, so as to add up to a sum of reality and fill up a room. What we encounter as closest to us is the room; and we encounter it not as something between four walls in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the arrangement emerges, and it is in this that any individual item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered. (pp. 95-97) Or translated into more colloquial English: We do not first encounter individual objects in a room as naked physical things, to which we subsequently assign functions and then clothe with meaning. Nor do we encounter these objects as abstract locations on a mathematical grid bounded by four walls. Rather, we encounter these objects in the first place as things that form part of the daily life of the inhabitants. We first discover the domestic whole of which the individual household objects form a part and this whole forms the framework within which the individual items make their appearance. (1927, pp. 95-97) It is important to prevent a common mistake here. Heidegger wrote that it is inhabitation that makes the things in a room appear. He rightfully wishes to avoid an objectivism that would substantify the things that appear in a room, and he is correct in insisting on the complex interactions between things that ultimately refer back to a usefulness, to an in order to that surrounds things. But the whole of the things in a room, or their network of interrelations, does not form a closed world. Evidently the particular things in a room and a house express the fact that they belong to a world; they testify to their worldliness. And the world is a human world anchored in human activity. We must therefore keep in mind that each thing (as a concrete thing) is not at first an object-in-itself, but is integrated in a system of cross-references that concerns the why of things. Each of these things, moreover, is a production, in the sense that it has been made by someone. Fabricated things as such make reference to homo faber, to the maker and to the world of work, but they also point to the user. I quote again from Being and Time:. The work is cut to the users figure; he is there along with it as the work emerges.... Thus along with the work, we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Daseins kind of being -for whom the product becomes ready-to-hand; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours. Any work with which one concerns oneself is readyto-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop, but also in the public world. (1927, p. 100) To paraphrase Heidegger in another way: The things we encounter in a house are characterized by their availability and their proximity; they are there for us. The small armchair is there so that the young woman may sit, and the sponges refer to the human body that bathes and washes itself. Things are never alone (Ein Zeug ist strengnommen nie). They tell us a great deal about the daily life of users and consumers. Is it therefore exaggerated to say that things generally age along with those who handle and use them? Daily life leaves its traces on chests and tables, and testifies to a way of life. Genuine furniture should be like genuine thresholds, they should be polished by use and proud of this erosion, wrote Jean

Onimus (1991, p. 111). This should not surprise us. Rather, the opposite should be the case, and we should be astonished if a house and the objects it contains tells us nothing about the inhabitants, leaving us without a clue as to their age or gender or interests. Moreover, a house filled with unused things is not truly a home. There are also rooms where life appears diminished or extinguished. We can feel assailed by Unheimlichkeit, by a disquieting strangeness, when we come upon things in daily life that have lost their substance and their power to refer to the users. These diminished things speak in their faltering ways about absent others, perhaps about a disintegrating community, an abandoned project, an extinguished life. In his story Double Family, Honore De Balzac evokes the dissolution of a couple starting with the description of the household. The wife of the magistrate Granville, named Angelique, is incredibly bigoted and inflexible and has very exact ideas about the spiritual future of her husband who, through her gastronomical cunning, lives a boring, humdrum life without being fully aware of it. It is worth perusing a small meditation by Balzac: If it is true, after the adage, that it is possible to judge a woman upon seeing her front door, the apartment itself would render her in even greater detail. (p. 58) Balzac continues with a fine description: Maybe it was because of the drap tapestries that Madame de Granville had chosen, maybe it was the fact that she had inscribed her essential character on the world of things she had assembled and arranged, but the young magistrate was taken aback by the dryness and cold solemnity which reigned in the apartments: he noticed nothing gracious, everything clashed, nothing entertained or pleased his vision. The same atmosphere of rectitude and pettiness which had reigned in the parlor of Bayeaux was now visible in the new quarters, in the large panels embossed with circles and embellished with those arabesques whose long contoured branches are in such bad taste. Out of his desire to spare his wife, the young man retraced his steps, and examined once more the long entrance hall by which one entered the apartment. The color of the paneling his wife had asked for was too dark, and the deep green velvets which covered the banquettes added to the solemnity of the whole. True, this was not the most important part of the house. But all the same, it cannot be denied that we judge the character of a house by the hallway, in the same way that we judge the character of a man by the first sentence he utters. A hallway is a kind of preface whose function it is to announce, but not to promise anything. (1976, pp. 58-59) This house, like the Granville marriage, has nothing in the end that could be called the fulfillment of promise. As the things themselves have suggested, the couple has no future; the household no longer dreams of fulfillment. By contrast, the couple in Perecs story do nothing but dream, because they have something to dream about. Their life is neither simple nor easy. They have many obligations and must constantly solve the many and varied problems involved in making a living. Unlike their daydream they do not have a cleaning woman who would come by every morning. The oil, wine, and sugar do not get delivered on the fifteenth of every month, and they do not have a large bright kitchen, with blue emblazoned tiles, three earthenware platters gleaming, decorated with yellow arabesques, with cupboards everywhere, a handsome table in white wood in the middle, stools, and benches. On the contrary, they live in a tiny apartment in an old building, almost on the verge of collapse:

The corridors and the stairs were narrow and filthy, sweating with humidity, impregnated with greasy fumes -- Their apartment consisted of a miniscule entrance, a cramped kitchen of which half had been used to accommodate a shower, one room of modest dimensions, which served as library, living room, study, and a place to receive friends -- and an ill defined corner, halfway between the storage room and the corridor, where a small refrigerator had taken root, with a hot plate, a cupboard, a table where they took their meals, and a laundry hamper which also served as a bench. (Perec, p. 64) The young couple can imagine an entirely harmonious life unfolding itself from across the things in their surroundings, a life between walls covered with books, surrounded by tools so perfectly domesticated they would end up believing they had always been destined for them alone, fitted precisely to their bodies and made to order for their life. Yet, the things of daily life -- even things in a dwelling --retain some measure of stubborn resistance; they possess an objective dimension because they also belong to the larger external world with its own social and economic necessities. The young consumers of the sixties would like to be rich, but they are not. Dreaming of a simple, leisurely life, without bitterness or envy, they realize that the actual and concrete things found in their tiny apartment, in their own little world, do not even begin to satisfy their needs and desires. Are these things truly made to fit the contours of their world? Dont they evince a certain hostility toward these poor individuals because they also represent a larger world which does not favor naive and carefree dreamers? In effect, the things that go into making up a dwelling are not just private objects that refer exclusively to their users; they bring with them into the house the worlds of work, of fabrication, of economic exchange, and of social difference. They tell us that life is never simple or easy or entirely harmonious. The abyss between dream and reality is evidence of the profound dissatisfaction which pervades daily life and never quite corresponds to our cultural, intellectual, or social aspirations. It appears evident that it is not things in themselves, things understood as mere objects, that are the cause of dissatisfaction. Rather, we should understand that household things, which are inevitably implicated in our intimate life in various ways, can affect only a psychological or even a spiritual mediation between the existence of their owners and users and the facticity of domestic life. Household things shape our practical experience of space and even of our own spatiality. As a result, the house, household objects, and the familiar spatial patterns formed by these all become physically and mentally inscribed in us. As Jean Onimus has said in his essay on the poetics of domesticity: Our innermost being finds expression in the house to which we feel attached and as if we had made it entirely to order. Our habits and tastes interact with the reflexes developed in response to the particular features of the place. The placement of household objects [I would prefer here the word things], the creaking of a door, the resistance of a window, the location of a switch, etc. The particular distances from one thing to an other, the peculiarities of the locks or the staircase, are all of these realities outside of ourselves? Do these not exist in fact within us, with only the infinitesimal degrees of externality that we attribute to our own body whose wounds we dress and infirmities we know. Familiar space establishes itself by forming within us a network of references which we find back when we return after a long absence and discover that all the required reflexes are still in place. (1991, p. 64)

In such a dwelling, things embody our movements, our tasks, our domestic activities. At least, this is the case as long as our daily life does not become distracted by some strange and inappropriate ambition or when our life becomes overturned by some personal or social upheaval. In these instances familiar things can then all of a sudden appear quite strange to us. We may feel suddenly alienated from our environment and experience the familiar things in our own house as if they were suddenly inhabited by an unapproachable strangeness. I am thinking of such an evocation in the fihn Repulsion by Roman Polanski (1975, pp. 75-128). I am also thinking of Sartres La nausee, which describes the breakup of the protagonist Roquentins lifeworld, a break visible in his progressive dissociation from the things that make up public and communal life. Readers of this story will surely remember the passage about the tram where he loses all sense of familiarity with his surroundings while looking at the bench of the tram. I cite this remarkable passage, which evokes so well the experience of Umheimlichkeit: I placed my hand on the bench, but I pulled it back immediately: it exists. This thing on which I am sitting, on which I place my hand, is called a bench. They have made it for the express purpose of sitting: they took leather, springs, some plush fabric, then went to work, all with the idea of making a seat and when they were finished, that was what they had made. They brought it, here into this box, and the box rolls and jolts at this moment, with its rattling windows, it carries this red thing within itself. I murmur this is a bench almost as an exorcising incantation. But the word rests on my lips; it refuses to leave them and rest on the thing. Instead, it remains what it is, with its read plush, thousands of infintesimal paws in the air, completely rigid, tiny dead paws. This enormous stomach turning in mid air, bleeding, bloated-blistering with its dead paws, a stomach floating in this box, against this grey sky -- this is not a bench. It could just as well be a dead mule, bloated by water and floating downstream, a stomach in the air on a great gray stream, a flooding stream, and I would be sitting on the donkeys stomach with my feet in clear water. Things which are released from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, enormous and its seems idiotic to call them benches or to say whatever we might say about them. I am in the midst of Things-[with capitals] the unnameable. Alone, without words, defenseless, they surround me, beneath, behind, and above me. They ask nothing, they do not impose themselves, they are there. (Sartre, 1981, pp. 148-149) A remarkable passage, in fact, which Sartre probably wrote before his reading of Heidegger. While the couple in Perecs story lose themselves in the fantasies of simple and leisurely life, in the utopian world of advertising, Roquetin, in Sartres Nausea is overwhelmed by the strangeness of unnameable Things, and finds himself in a world in which words and things have lost their communal meaning. Words have lost their capacity to name for him, and things are delivered from their names. This world is no longer the familiar environment where references make manifest the experience of the senses. Things are there, writes Sartre, and no longer express the capacity to form part of a network of things and activities. They crowd Roquentin from all sides, they are beneath him, behind him, above him, but they do not form a world, they no longer address him, they make no demands, they do not impose themselves on him. they are no longer close to him. His is in the situation of a completely solitary man, haunted by nausea, who is no longer able to get in touch with his world. Anguish reigns for him because the familiarity of ordinary daily life has disappeared beneath a crust of strangeness, and Roquentin withdraws into indifference.

For instance, indifference means relinquishing the attempt to situate oneself in respect to things, no longer seeking closeness and losing all ties with a life and a world in common. It means avoiding the public space, the presence of an other, the rhythm of the biographical cycle, the sense of domestic space. In indifference all of daily life escapes us, while we retreat from the world and move toward demundialization and depersonalization, even disembodiment. Household objects have a symbolic function in daily living. They manifest the economic state of inhabitation. We use the word economics here in its original Greek sense of rules of the house. The life of hearth and home, domestic life, assembles and places the household things and creates a whole out of these. These things themselves function in turn as synapses in a nervous network that interconnects all things. Together they play a major role in the process of humanization and inhabitation, and as such they form part of the economic order. This is true even if the world of every day things is threatened at each moment by the in-authenticity of estheticism, by advertising snobbery, by the appeals of a consumer society, or by the loud claims of technology. This bringing together of the things of the domestic sphere in our daily life is not only a fundamental necessity that supports our life, but it is the embodiment of our being-in-the-world. Our life becomes unthinkable apart from the things that make up our daily life, apart from the tools and the works that surround us there. These things are extensions of our corporeality; they make manifest and mediate our existence and provide us with an anchor in the physical world. It is thanks to these things that we are not only in the world, but also of the world. According such importance to the things of every day life is warranted not only from the point of view of phenomenology or philosophical anthropology, but from that of contemporary architecture. The practice of architecture, which is an indispensable form of mediation for all dwelling projects, is threatened today by such forms of alienation that go by the name of functionalism and estheticism, but also by the bureaucracy of technocrats, the objectivist technology of engineers, and the formalism of certain urban planners. Needless to say, it suffers also from an economic vision that responds only to the logic of investments and returns. In the big cities, we have seen enormous edifices arise which are in some respects true monuments of architectural art, but which also stands aloof from the ordinary daily things of a city and from its domestic and neighborly life. One often has the impression that architects and urban planners are forgetful in a double sense of the very subject matter of their art. They seem to pay little attention to the users and the themes of their life. These artisans of urban design are too much intrigued by the abstract possibilities of design and construction to pay much attention to the existing environment in which they build, to the customs, habits, traditions of a society, to the history of a town, the biography of individuals or even of landscapes. Consequently, the buildings that grow out of this abstract tradition cannot function as networks that connect the users of the building to their past or even to their present daily life in the midst of a community. New cities are less and less traditional, and architecture becomes more and more reduced to producing a kind of Urban Cloth that, in the words of Michel Freitag can be cut to any size and then tailored and re-configured at will (1992, p. 56). Contemporary architecture is born, according to this author, out of the same conditions that produced a self-referential and totalitarian urbanism that no longer seeks to express the values of a society by the way

it handles and places the things of daily life, but that wishes produce a society that conforms to a utopian vision. Thus architecture and urbanism become fields of rational projections by a societal technician. It is precisely because this contemporary architecture has freed itself from its traditional task that it is free to ignore all stylistic references to a past and devote itself entirely to the research of technical and economic solutions, and that the utilitarian and functional architecture of the industrial age can devote itself fully to architectonic experimentations with new materials, such as steel, glass, brick, or stratified wood (Freitag, 1992, p. 57). This architecture, which is progressively encroaching on domestic life, becomes more and more objectivist in the sense of being centered more on natural scientific objects and substances than on the things of daily life. These abstract objects and their purely instrumental interactions deprive the home of its thingliness. Let us emphasize here that it is not the materials themselves that are to blame for the use that architecture has made of them, nor should we point to these to explain why our modern cities have such a cold and inhospitable appearance. The relevant factor is rather a rationalistic, technocratic, economic ideology that dehumanizes by objectifying all architectural forms and materials. This project of objectification diminishes the things that make up our homes and cities, hollows them out, and strips them of their cultural and psychological significance. The functions of the house and the city thereby become more and more formalized and over taken by an anonymous collectivity. Private space becomes interchangeable with public space. It seems that the modern city dweller moves easily from one home or location to an other, lives detached from and disinterested in neighbors, and adapts easily to changes in public life. Perhaps this is so. Perhaps this modern, disinterested city dweller adapts so rapidly to living in a variety of the same type of living quarters in different places because they involve so little change in habits and lifestyle. Would modern humanity be more herd-like because we are less protected from outside pressures? Would humanity be at the same time also more open, less jealous of existential differences, and more sociable? We have our reasons to doubt this. We might well ask ourselves, and I am paraphrasing Jean Onimus here (p. 154), whether the modern mutation of the individual dwelling place, understood as a microcosm in which proximity expresses hospitality, and its disintegration into standardized and virtually indistinguishable housing units, does not represent an existential rupture in human history. In mass housing, our daily life is delivered over to the reign of an impersonal them, and it is here that the uprooting of our cultural life appears most pervasive, and where it changes most easily at the whim of economic conditions and successive advertising strategies. We see this tendency we saw very well described very well in Perecs novel about the couple. Is it reasonable to hope that the studio apartments that are so well adapted to transient people and to provisional couples would still furnish a proper framework for human dreams and aspirations? What will become then of the house, this intense center of oneiric, affective, and spiritual life? Will it rejoin the universe of mechanical contraptions and indifferent objects, and will this then lead to a new disenchantment with the world? The foregoing reflection with the help of several literary texts explored the particular dimensions of the things that make up our daily life. Its conclusions serve us as a warning not to succumb to a forgetfulness

which uproots our being and alienates us from a place where we can truly be at home, where we can fully receive others and participate together with them in the cultural world of utensils and works. When we are close to others, the things we encounter in our dwelling can tell us stories that give us a great deal to think about. One must look and listen closely to them because our authenticity is in question.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper was presented at the colloquium Habitation et Humanisation, at the Universite de Quebec a Montreal on April 15, 1997 (Translated from the French by David Hiroshi Jager) REFERENCES de Balzac, H. (1976). Une double famille. In La Comedie humaine II Etudes et moeurs: Scenes de la vie privee. Paris: Gallimard. Freitag, M. (1992). Architecture et societe. Montreal: Editions Saint Martin. Heidegger, M. (1927, 1977). Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer. Onimus, J. (1991). La maison, corps et ame. Essay sur la poesie domestique. Paris: P.U.F. Perec, G. (1965). Les choses. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Polanski, R. (1975). Three film scripts. Knife in the water, repulsion, cul de sac. London: Lorrimer. Sartre, J-P. (1981). La nausee. In Oeuvres romanesques. Paris: Gallimard. ~~~~~~~~ By Jacques De Visscher, Hoger Architectuurinstituut Sint Lucas Brussels & Ghent, Belgium