living furniture — study
the armature construct
the apartment has come alive under the auspices and hidden entries it collapses through. there is a string, an armature coarsing furniture, which is the logic of arrangement. then there is another string, a mental string to hold your experience. the single dwelling of the apartment holds the urban body, but the urban body is not held together by the apartment, since it is only a set of images, no longer to be considered a dwelling, certainly not spatial. when both of these work together, they form a skeleton. but the skeleton is already there anyways, because there is a segmentation that has already formed the room for it, where the bones come in, and the bones are crafted by these relations. but the relations between subject and object in furniture don't form the bones, it is only the relation between an assumed space and a guaranteed space. at every moment, there is a space already being used, and another one underneath that exists in its stead, just in case. you are always at one level of the body of the apartment, but never at all once.
the armature skeleton can be decomposed, and every bone revealed, but never in the lived relation. it is truly bones we are speaking about. you are in the center of an open apartment, sometimes closed off in a wooden dome, which is the architectural eidos. the bones are the wood, you are part of a construct, but the eidos is not in the wood, not in the commodity, nor your relations. an armature means an eidos is in-scripted into the syncline, a deeper layer of the object only because it deepens the curve of the object. as the syncline curves down, the truth of the object curves up in the basin, every single unused relation the object activates then comes alive. this relation can happen when every other assumption exists outside of it, not when the internal assumptions have to modify the object. this is because every object can hold its own line, and attach itself to the incline, without having to essentially change, or be only determined by the other objects. a tower is always a watchtower, but you can't always use it as one. a washing machine is always a trampoline, but it rarely becomes one. a clock could mean you are a part of the architecture of the house, but it could also mean you have cybernetically solved the room.
if you live in an apartment, you have solved the room by the necessity of the screen that sits in the center as an interface, even if you haven't connected everything wirelessly yet. but there are wires still, and the string wraps around the apartment, and there is a selvage, the finished edge of woven fabric that prevents unraveling, the border that holds the relations. there is a cleat, and that is the moment a corner becomes alive in an apartment, which happens when corners get rearranged by rearranging objects. but, since the apartment is already modular, objects are already rearranged. at every moment, there is a space already being used, and another space that is prepared to activate underneath. that space holds all the mysteries the house used to hold, the house that originally required the inhabitation or the living subject in it as the string, which happens no more.
contemporaries believe there is no eidos to furniture now, sarah ahmed thinks that the phenomenology in furniture exposes a relationship to objects that works to feed a human infrastructure underneath, poisoning the skeleton. she doesn't, however, think the objects truly can't stand still on their own, but only that they are caught up in a broader process:
the hammer that is too heavy or the table that is too high shows us how the position of the object, and indeed the qualities perceived in an object as given, refer us to the relations between objects and the subjects that make use of them. this does not vacate or empty the object as "just" a vehicle for subjects.
in the armature, the assumed relationship defeats the real one. so yes, a hammer will exist either way. but its use phenomenologically doesn't need to cancel it out to determine our new assumed relationship. this second assumption is the one that creates the armature skeleton, not the first. what is the second assumption? it is the one that turns the hammer into its image, it is not an abstraction, but a realized abstraction that changes the way we think of our relationship to it, not the relationship itself. the skeleton only activates when the old relationships to the hammer return. who is poisoning the skeleton? in husserl there is a visual table and a tactile table, in ahmed the writer is either composed or eliminated by his table, and the access to it is mediated by a hidden labour, the writer's table is in front. in heidegger, the object has an "order-to", distinguishing the table as an object in space from the table as something for writing. for bachelard the attic has a worldly capacity because it can still interact with beings.
but contemporaries have confused acting capacity with the weight of furniture. the weight did not dissapear, it's hidden in the aperture. the apartment doesn't have a tower, there is no staircase, no ladder, no column, no tunnel, no ceiling, and nothing of the like that can allow the apartment to have a tower without switching its fundamental layering first. but the apartment still has an eidos, it's not a sum of its interactions.
there was a wreath of middlemarch ladies accommodated with seats round the large table in the dining-room, where mr. borthrop trumbull was mounted with desk and hammer; but the rows chiefly of masculine faces behind were often varied by incomings and outgoings both from the door and the large bow-window opening on to the lawn.
it's in george eliot that the table is reduced to a simple social drama, a supposed study of of provincial life reveals the objects as primary within the same interface you'd expect a television to enter the frame of in the context of an apartment's living furniture, but not with the same eidos you'd want a tower to have in the phantasmatic realm of the house. in edip cansenver, the table is the social relation itself:
so many days he had wanted to drink a beer! he put on the table the pouring of that beer. he placed there his sleep and his wakefulness; his hunger and his fullness he placed there. now that’s what i call a table! it didn’t complain at all about the load. it wobbled once or twice, then stood firm. the man kept piling things on.
the same occurs in hua xui:
my aunt is there, and my mother, my cousin, and a feeling of language begins. i wonder about the table in the mind and how it is so lonely there. i wonder what thoughts a table is thinking. is a table an argument or an understanding? when two languages sit down to a table, call it a translation. when only one comes to the table, a branch cries out in the yard ... long like the length of sitting down. on the surface is a loaf of flowers. a slice cut into summer. does the table you imagine go on and on?
the table is an argument in the sense that it extends, and yet we may wonder what it can do mentally as an armature skeleton, will it allow us to think through it the way we would if we wanted to rearrange or reveal it as another object? it is also a piece of wood, and a place to have a conversation, and in ahmed it reveals that when the community gathers, the boys resemble their fathers, and that they are smaller versions of them, and that laughter serves as a conversion engine for communication. the same occurs in jane hirshfield:
like a boardinghouse table: men on one side, women on the other. nobody planned it. plaid shirts next to one another, talking in accents from the midwest. nobody plans to be a ghost. later on, the young people sit in the kitchen. soon enough, they’ll be the ones to stumble excuse me and quickly withdraw. but they don’t know that. no one can ever know that.
the table is a sorting mechanism for social values, but it also turns the subject into a ghost-plan. there is a subscription and a contract under the furniture, and it happens to also sort gender, and this happens to reflect the faces and positions of all who sit near it, there is apparently no escaping the table. even if the table actually is always for something else, or always gets transferred into something else, and ahmed allows it to be something else, and the subject can compromise with it, it still overdetermines social relations. there is never a table that can turn ghostly relations into productive relations. apparently, the syntax of architecture, the fixed rate at which objects convert subjects, must always follow a law where the encoding is fixed to the principle of the concept. or so be it, if it was not for the armature within the furniture, which allows it to escape the relations it imposes without escaping its own eidos, or what it can be, even when reduced to a mere image, or a promise.
in the miller's home possessions, wood resembles permanence in domesticity, wood isn't a symbol in the form of an image warns bachelard, it is the experience, the daydreamer has to force the decision to not be swallowed by the architecture. the architecture either takes you in and surrounds you with its own image, or you can cultivate yourself in it first and begin to experience it. if you want a living furniture, you have to say something first, and you could say, it is that domesticity which creates a frame: as plastic is to absence in the very concept of drinking, so is wood to permanence what in the domestic world counts as an argument. an argument in the new sense is the statement, and in old sense is the shape or thrust of a thing, but in the middle sense, in today's sense - it's what the furniture needs to do to. this we call an armature skeleton.
the armature, furniture's relations when not dependent on the causality of relations as such. relations cannot possibly create an economy of furniture, and phenomenology cannot possibly ground the subject in its image if the subject can escape this image yet not defeat the ideology under it. the modular apartment contains at all points all forms of violence. the modularity is burning with a fire that wants to unleash, with a secret violence, this is the nightdream, the daydream's armature, the fantasy that the washing machine will become a conveyor belt for blood. this violence is only literal because it's trying to be its opposite image, but the relations determine what the modularity turns into. the modularity warps space, introduces new interfaces, sometimes it avoids trying to interact directly with you.
but there is a keelson - an internal keel, the spine inside the spine, that keeps the furniture all rough still. there is no immovable or movable property, there are no elements to a househould. but all the objects don't just seep into one another either. they also don't transform, objects never transform. there is no table in the background, there is no table in the forefront and in the background, a table can't both be the object everyone relates around and the object that remains underdetermined if you so wish. it is precisely the modular object that allows this double-vision, and it can only allow it if it itself is only one amongst many originally traditional objects, the only transformation is the one that deepens the syncline. unlike what baudrillard says, there is only more tradition, never less, and such is the table. the syncline is to the bones of the armeture what the keelson is to the selvage, one is the outer layer of the inner layer, the other is the inner to the outer. the selvage holds to unravelling, the keelson is the layer that unravels when the armature switches layers.
the armature on its own is the wire inside a sculpture, but it's also the wires connecting the table and chair, a stretcher, a horizontal rung keeping the tension of the objects in harmony. but a skeleton of a wire is a double skeleton, thus the armature layer is not an abstraction but the reality of furniture under the regime of architecture. this double skeleton is the basis for all the experiences we tie to construction. if drinking is emptying out a service, and plastic is the universal container for this provided service, a globalistic symbol that also conveys to you the ability to experience the new armature skeleton of the world, then wood is a social substratum for folk people, and in romania, a sign of care is a sign of lending or working with wood. in fact, it is the standard token. it is not a token for trade, but for consideration. a consideration token doesn't cash itself out in the real world, it is manifest as a possibility in space. but living apartments dont have a possible space, and so there is no daydreamer. a wooden dome is not neutral, for gertrude stein a table is a necessary change, a possibility to shake, a physical statement about revision. again, in daniel miller, the revision of furniture is its displacement and re-ordering, and it is called rearrangement. there is for him also a decorating, and this is different. the rearrangement is about how things don't cohere, and the decorating is about how they cohere so much that they lose their armature. as charles rice says "there remains a conceptual consistency structured around doubleness that is not about a progression of decorative styles". decoration must necessarily reveal a violence that isn't the violence of the decor, and also
"in her sitting room a blue velveteen low-backed sofa replaced a set of polished wooden drawers. for this reason, three items, including a hand-woven rug are placed high on the wall to accommodate the drawers. now they look odd and uneven over the blue sofa. some other problems include the present position of her son’s portrait..."
when you move furniture around, you do the modern act of daydreaming. in bachelard, the daydreamer requires a shelter, but an apartment offers none - the bed is a flat plane, the other rooms are for operations or for standing, and there are hedges, but there are no closed spaces. you must also integrate, yet there is also no memory recall, you cannot combine experiences with outcomes. sure, you can remember how you moved things in the past, and the armature skeleton will active. but the armature skeleton does not have a transformative function, so you cannot become the being of or in your own image. in apartments, residents are ghost, and so the concept of a living furniture must be about how life comes to pass.
in baudrillard, the objects start to scheme against the subjects, overcoming them, creating trickeries or illusions which lead to displacements. in benjamin, nineteenth-century interior becomes so complete and self-enclosed that life is absorbed into décor, this occurs around the time of the art nouveau. this enclosure is supposed to lead to the modularity baudrillard identifies in the defeat of the daydreaming and traditional subject, and into an inability for furniture to contain reflective weight. yet, in jameson's space of high modernism or the hyperspace, you can already notice that this modularity becomes its own form of totalism rather than serving as an abstraction. the portman's bonaventure hotel has its main entry leading into a second-level shopping mall, from which you must take the elevator down to the lobby, its gardens into the sixth floor of the towers, and its entryways are actually backdoors, from which you must take an additional flight of stairs to take the elevator to the lobby.
abstractions open spaces, whereas spaces themselves close the architectural object into a totality, as opposed to modular units closing in on parts of the object that later reflect the whole. the natural assumption that the apartment then contains a totalizing modularity is wrong. this modularity reflects a higher-order traditionality, a property of the armature skeleton. the daydreamer in bachelard contains the ability to contain the world, high up from the tower, or lower on the ground in the shell, to take himself away from the world. but the tower requires a pre-modern space, which closes the space around the subject. if the modern space closes the subject into it, and the post-modern space closes the space into the object, leaving the subject out, then the armature skeleton allows
"take the table: a crazy jumble of a table with some dreadful metalwork. but our table, our table! can you imagine what that meant? can you imagine what wonderful hours we spent at it? by lamplight! in the evening when i was a little boy i just could not tear myself away from it, and father kept having to imitate the nightwatchman’s horn to make me scuttle off in fright into the nursery."
adolf loos is fighting many things, the photograph, the dissolution of the intimacy of space, the loss of the unique nature behind objects. but one thing he cannot fight against is the economization of the table. it is only the hyperspace that desecrates the exact relations which force it to only ever be able to warp around the fixed threads that weave the social mechanisms of the table. the table as a commodity dome doesn't come to life, as a wooden dome it doesnt domesticate or personalize, as an image it does not ruin the daydream, and most importantly, as social architecture, it does not transform relations or create conditions. instead, the armature enters into a threefold relation, an armature construct. on the one hand, furniture collapses lived experience in an operational zone. if it is modular as in living furniture, it collapses subjectivity around space rather than allowing space to exemplify objectivity. next, it presupposes phenomenological multiplicity or tangibility. the tower is in the apartment, just not present as a tower just yet. it can be unlocked, if enough symbolic and often literal earthquakes occur (the metaphor and the event are coincidentally related in the order of the image, not as separate realities.
a literal earthquake exposes a column and creates a watchtower, a metaphorical earthquake shakes the reorganizing sequence, exposing a secondary order. and on another hand, the relations themselves only give power to the object, even in the image form. an assumed table enters a social order, a table is anything but what it's used for. that way, phenomenologically, you are neither met by the presence of a table as something unaccounted for, neither is it a stable basis for other unaccounted for things. furniture never "blends" into anything else, and accounting is never the order of the subject. in the image, the accounting enters intrusively, in the daydream, the encounter enters temporally, in the skeleton, the encounter enters phantasmatically, or in a second order. in the mirror-side of the apartment, across the world, the dual copy reeks with the abandoned aura of the furniture. the second world carries with it a syncline as well, which much like in the world where the furniture is living, the fold creates an imprint that raises the objects up, that transforms them without transforming the social relations around them. spines fold around one another, creating a secret syntax of furniture.