Stuff by Daniel Miller

Author:Daniel Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2011-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

3

Houses: Accommodating Theory

Housing and Power

One of the delights of dialectical theory, alongside its cultivation of extremism, is that it includes within itself clear strictures about what one should do with theory. No one drives you further to the upper reaches of theoretical ambition than Hegel. There you will find ideas about Absolute Reason that can explain even more than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about life, the Universe and the rest of it (though I never found anything in Hegel about the number 42). But to be consistent, dialectical theory must imply that just theory alone, like everything else humanity produces, will always tend to become destructive and follow its own interests, oppressing rather than serving humanity. Unless there is a counter-movement that (to use its own terminology) negates this abstraction and brings it back into the service of our interests and welfare.

This is often the case. Theory, philosophy, modern art, economics and other movements that utilize obscure abstractions can easily degenerate into pretentious obfuscation and become oppressive playgrounds of academic divas and elites used to intimidate as much as to impress. Academics, tempted by the promise of an easy and assured claim to cleverness, create vast circulations of obscure and impressive citations. A scattering of names such as Lacan or Deleuze and Guattari is usually a good sign of such oppressive conceits. It is only through the subsequent processes of maturing and re-grounding theory in its application to everyday lives and languages that such cleverness becomes transformed into understanding and re-directed to a compassionate embrace, rather than an aloof distaste. To make matters worse, the most oppressive use of theory tends to come dressed in the guise of critical or radical political endeavour, a claimed concern with the actually oppressed conditions of our humanity.

So the task now is to take our artistic-looking idealized theory, once white marble, nowadays more angular perspex, and drag it back into the mud and murk of everyday life until it looks a lot less intimidating and more like something we feel at ease with bringing home to the folks. In this chapter the device for bringing theory home is through immersing it in the more general problem of what a home actually is. The aim is literally to domesticate theory, to help us feel at home with these abstractions by showing that the theoretical ideas discussed in the previous chapter can deliver genuine insights into how we ordinarily feel at home in this vast world. So, while less explicit in address to theory, this chapter also starts with issues of objectification and moves on to questions of agency and materiality.

Clothing raised the issue of the superficial, and our discussion proceeded through a substantive analysis of how we dress to demonstrate how clothing and persons mutually constitute each other. To a rather greater degree than clothing, housing implicates contours of power and scale that make such intimate issues as our personal relationships often contingent upon much grander forces. We are thereby confronted with a much broader and deeper context for our analysis.

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