Introduction

  • In the strict sense, what happens to the object in the technological sphere is essential, whereas what happens to it in the psycological or sociological sphere of needs and practises is inessential.
  • Ultemately, the progression from abstract to concrete means that the technical object will tend towward he state of the system that is compleatly internally consistent and completly unified.
  • It is quite possible to envision a science of structural technology working at this level that would stufy the organization of such technemes into more complex technical objects. The science could be stricly applied, however, only to a limited number of areas, ranging from ….These are precisely the areas where technical pressures maximize structural constraints, where the collective and impersoanal nature of products reduce their effectsof fashion to a minimum.
    • Whereas car makers must contunually explore every consivable variation in the form of their product, while meeting a very few basic technological requirements, aircraft manufacturers are obligated to product technical objects on the basis of simple functional imperitive.
    • Hence, if we want to account for the system of everyday objects, a structural technological analysis is clearly inadequate.
  • For technology, unlike language, does not constitude a stable system.

The functional system, or objective discourse

Structres of Interior Design

  • Human beings and objects are bound together in a certain density, an emotional value - called presense. What gives the houses of our childhood such depth and resonance in memory is clearly this complex structure of interiority,and the objects within it serve for us as boundary markers of the symbolic configuration known as home.
  • In their anthropomorphism the objects that furnish it become household gods, spatial incarnations of the emotional bonds and the permanence of the family group. These gods enjoyed a gentle immortality until the advent of a modern generation which has cast them aside, dispersed them - even, on occasion, reinstated them in an up-to-date nostalgia for whatever is old.
    • As often with gods, furniture too thus gets a second chance to exist, and passes from a naïve utility into a cultural baroque.

The modern object liberated in its function

  • As long as the obect is liberated only in its function, man equally is liberated only as a user of that object.
  • Somewhere between the two, the gap between integrated psycological scace and fragmated functional space, serial objects have their being, wirness to both the one and the other - sometimes within a single interior.

The model interior

  • Modular components
    • The model interior happen at a privilaged level.
    • The models of the home funrnishing avant-garde are organized around the basic distinction between components and seating; the practical that obey the interior design and to the general concepts of atmosphere.
    • The value this relationship takes on is no longer of an instinctive or a psychological but, rather, of a tactical kind. What such objects embody is no longer the secret of a unique relationship but, rather, differences, and moves in a game.
  • Walls and daylight
  • lighting
  • mirrors and portraits
  • clocks and time
    • There is nothing in the world more reassuring.
    • The clock is a mechanical heart that reassures us about our own heart. It is precisely this process of infusion or assimilation of the substance of time, this presence of duration, which is rejected, just like all other returns to inwardness, by a modern order based on externality, spatiality and objective relationships.

Towards a sociology of interior design?

  • Today, value resides neither in appropriation nor in intimacy but in information, in inventiveness, in control, in a continual openness to objective messages - in short, in the syntagmatic calculation which is, strictly speaking, the foundation of the discourse of the modern home-dweller.
  • Advertising widely promotes this new conception of decoration: it is no longer a matter of setting up a theatre of objects or creating an ambience, but of solving a problem, devising the subtlest possible response to a complicated set of conditions, mobilizing a space.

Man the interior designer

  • We are beginning to see what the new model of the home-dweller looks like: ‘man the interior designer’ is neither an owner nor a mere user - rather, he is an active engineer of atmosphere.
  • Instead of consuming objects, he dominates, controls and orders them. He discovers himself in the manipulation and tactical equilibration of a system.
  • Our environment, however, is a directly experienced model of existence, and it is very abstract indeed to apply to it computational and informational models borrowed from the purely technical realm - ‘to your own taste’, ‘to your own measurements’, ‘personalization’, ‘the atmosphere will be yours alone’.
  • Everything has to intercommunicate, everything has to be functional - no more secrets, no more mysteries, everything is organized, therefore everything is clear. Here we have the basis for a character profile of technical civilization: if hypochondria is an obsession with the circulation of substances and the functioning of the primary organs, we might well describe modern man, the cybernetician, as a mental hypochondriac, as someone obsessed with the perfect circulation of messages.

Structres of Atmosphere

Athmospheric Values: Color

  • Traditional color
  • ‘Natural’ color
  • ‘Funtional’ color
  • Hot and Cold

Athmospheric Values: Meterials

  • The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element. But under the present system the success of the whole occurs in the context of the constraints of abstraction and association.
  • The consistency here is not the natural consistency of a unified taste but the consistency of a cultural system of signs.

  • What nostalgia paints as an authentic whole object is still nothing but a combining variant, serves to reintroduce any conceivable element, whatever subjective associations it may carry, into the logic of the system.

  • Natural wood/cultural wood
  • The logic of atmosphere
  • A model material: Glass

The man of relationships and atmosphere

  • Seats
  • Cultural connotation and cencership
    • The term ‘refined’ which, like ‘functional’, is a catchword of manipulated interior decoration - sums up this cultural constraint perfectly. Rooms have traded in the symbols of family for signs of social relationship.
    • And this systematic cultural connotation at the level of objects is what I am calling ATMOSPHERE.

Athmospheric Values: Gestural Systems and Forms

  • intro:
    • All these tendencies are mediated practically and historically, at the level of objects, by the fundamental supersession of the gestural system of effort, by the great shift from a universal gestural system of labour to a universal gestural system of control.
  • The traditional gestural system: Effort
  • The functional gestural system: Control
    • So the gestural system of control must be deemed indispensable - not to make the system work technically, for more advanced technology could (and no doubt will) make it unnecessary, but, rather, to make that system work psychologically.
  • A new operational field
  • Minituarization

Stylization, Manipulapabiliy, Envelopment

  • Functionality is thus no longer the imposition of a real task, but simply the adaptation of one form to another (as of handle to hand) and the consequent supersession or omission of the actual processes of work.
  • We are heading towards an absolutism of forms: only the form is called for, only the form is read, and at the deepest level it is the functionality of forms that defines ‘style’.
  • The end of symbolic dimension
    • Thus the handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes ‘contouring’ - the term is typical in its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual - merely manipulable. At that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his power.
  • The abstrctness of power
    • objects have now become more complex than human behaviour relative to them.
    • Man’s technical power can thus no longer be mediated. Nor, by extension, can it any longer be symbolized: functional forms can do no more than connote it. Certainly they overburden it with meaning in their absolute consistency (aerodynamism, manipulability,automaticity, etc.), but at the same time they are formal expressions of the void that separates us from our power; in a sense they are the ritual that accompanies the miracle-working of the modern world.
    • Objects are more and more highly differentiated - our gestures less and less so.
    • To put it another way: objects are no longer surrounded by the theatre of gesture in which they used to be simply the various roles;instead their emphatic goaldirectedness has very nearly turned them into the actors in a global process in which man is merely the role, or the spectator.
    • If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction.
  • The functional myth
    • ‘Part of the feeing of the efficacy of primitive magic has survived in the unconditional belief in progress’ writes Gilbert Simondon. This applies to a technological society as well as a the everyday environment, where the most insignificant gadgets may be the focal point of the techno-mythological realm of power.
  • functional form: the lighter
    • The action of sea on stone is thus echoed by the hand creating fire; the lighter becomes a miraculous flint, and a prehistoric and craftsmanly purposiveness comes into play in the very practical essence of an industrial object.
  • functional connotation: tail fins
    • The form does no more than signify the idea of the function. In other words, the form has become allegorical.
    • For while speed has a phallic character, the speed evoked by tail fins is merely formal, fixed, and, as it were, visually edible.
    • Behind the functional self-realization of forms, traditional phallic symbolism has fallen apart. At the same time, regressively and narcissistically, it is content to let itelsef envelop by forms and their ‘functionality’.
  • Form as camouflage
    • The articulation of forms among themselves always conceals another, indirect discourse.
    • Thus the form of the lighter relates to the form of the hand, but only by way of the sea, which ‘has polished it’; and a car’s tail fins relate to the distance covered only by way of the aeroplane, the shark, and so on.
    • More precisely, it is the idea of the sea, the aeroplane or the shark that mediates.
    • The extent that those forms constitute a system and thus re-create a kind of internal purposiveness, their reciprocal connotations are ‘natural’ - for nature remains the ideal point of reference of all goal-directedness.
    • Naturalization, concealment, superimposition, décor - we are surrounded by objects whose form comes into play as a false answer to the self-contradictory manner in which the object is experience.
    • Here the lexicon of advertising is telling. In this discourse a whole battery of emotionally laden words such as ‘warmth’, ‘intimacy’, ‘radiance’ and ‘honesty’ - a whole rhetoric of ‘natural’ values - goes hand in hand with thecareful calculation of forms and the promotion of ‘functional style’.

Conclusion: Neturaleness and Functionality

  • It will be clear from the foregoing discussion of the values of interior design and atmosphere that the entire system is founded on the concept of FUNCTIONALITY.
  • Colours, forms, materials, design, space - all are functional.
  • The term evokes all the virtues of modernity, yet it is perfectly ambiguous. With its reference to ‘function’ it suggests that the object fulfils itself in the precision of its relationship to the real world and to human needs.
  • But as our analysis has shown, ‘functional’ in no way qualifies what is adapted to a goal, merely what is adapted to an order or system: functionality is the ability to become integrated into an overall scheme.
  • An object’s functionality is the very thing that enables it to transcend its main ‘function’ in the direction of a secondary one, to play a part, to become a combining element, an adjustable item, within a universal system of signs.
  • The functional system is thus characterized, in a thoroughly ambiguous way, on the one hand by a transcendence of the traditional system under its three aspects - as the primary function of the object, as drives and primary needs, and as a set of symbolic relations between the two - and on the other hand by a simultaneous disavowal of these three mutually reinforcing aspects of the traditional system.
    • The coherence of the functional system of objects depends on the fact that these objects no longer have any value of their own, but merely a universal value as signs.
    • The always transcended presence of Nature. But at the same time the always denied presence of Nature makes the system into a system of disavowal.

Addendum

  • Travel is a necessity and speed is a pleasure.
  • Movement is mearely the search for a response. Security founded on the sense of a world beyond or a world prior to this one is what nourishes car-induced euphoria, which has nothing of an active tonicity about it; rather, it is a passive satisfaction, albeit one accompanied by ever-changing scenery.
  • This ‘dynamic euphoria’ serves as an antithesis to the static joys of family life and immovable property, and opens a parenthesis in social reality.

The non-functional system, or subjective discourse

Marginal objects: Antiques

The metafunctional and dysfunctional system

The socio-ideological system of objects and their consuption

Towards a definiation of consuption