The Comfort of Things

Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What do we know about ordinary people in our towns and cities, about what really matters to them and how they organize their lives today? This book visits an ordinary street and looks into thirty households. It reveals the aspirations and frustrations, the tragedies and accomplishments that are played out behind the doors. It focuses on the things that matter to these people, which quite often turn out to be material things – their house, the dog, their music, the Christmas decorations. These are the means by which they express who they have become, and relationships to objects turn out to be central to their relationships with other people – children, lovers, brothers and friends.

If this is a typical street in a modern city like London, then what kind of society is this? It's not a community, nor a neighbourhood, nor is it a collection of isolated individuals. It isn't dominated by the family. We assume that social life is corrupted by materialism, made superficial and individualistic by a surfeit of consumer goods, but this is misleading. If the street isn't any of these things, then what is it?

This brilliant and revealing portrayal of a street in modern London, written by one the most prominent anthropologists, shows how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be and focus instead on what we are now becoming. It reveals the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful.

PORTRAIT 1

EMPTY

George’s flat was disorienting not because of anything that was in it, but precisely because it contained nothing at all, beyond the most basic carpet and furniture. Absence of a degree doesn’t particularly disturb. A place can be minimalist, or there can be a single plant or poster that gathers presence precisely through contrast with the lack of any other resting place for the eye. But there is always something: a little china ornament, a postcard from a trip somewhere, an image of a friend or relative, even an old ticket stub or label. What I can barely ever remember encountering is a habitation entirely devoid of any form of decoration. There is a violence to such emptiness. Faced with nothing, one’s gaze is not returned, attention is not circumscribed. There is a loss of shape, discernment and integrity. There is no sense of the person as the other, who defines one’s own boundary and extent. I was trying to concentrate on what he was saying, but I was disturbed by the sheer completeness of this void. I began to feel we simply had to visit the other rooms in his house, his bedroom and his bathroom, in the hope that they would not replicate this chilling absence. But when, during a subsequent visit we did take opportunities to glance around these other rooms, they proved just as empty.

This emptiness in someone’s surroundings, that leaches away one’s own sense of being, was only enhanced by our experience of George himself. Even a space this empty wouldn’t have felt quite so disturbing if it had become filled with the presence of the man. His stories, his attachments and relationships could have re-populated the space, turned this room back into a living-room. But, from the time he started speaking, it was evident that there was no counterbalance between person and place, rather that the flat was the man. It was the way he responded to each thing said to him. Usually when one speaks to another person there is an automatic moment of introspection, a sense that a person has looked inside themselves for the answer, interrogated themselves; so instantly and so obviously that we rarely think of that process. But with George there is the feeling that, at least in the first instance, he seeks to answer each question by interrogating the shape and form of the question itself. He presumes that all questions are formulaic, derived from those bureaucratic situations which have made up the bulk of his encounters with the outside world. Such questions merely seek appropriate answers; they don’t want their time wasted with detailed and irrelevant information about an actual person. They demand an answer that instantly confirms one of the three or six categories of answer that can be used as bureaucratic data.

So George ponders what it is that this question is formulated to obtain. If every animal trap has a highly specific shape designed to catch some particular animal, then what kind of trap is this question, what shape or form should George transform into to satisfy it? He never answers quickly, he ponders. With us there is an additional worry because our questions and conversation tend not to fit his previous experiences. They don’t sound as straightforward as the usual questions of officialdom, but they don’t have that comfortable emptiness of polite English questions designed merely to prevent the impoliteness of silence; questions about the weather or what’s on television. But often, after a while, George shifts from looking anxious to a broad deep smile, and it is clear that he has decided what category of question this is and what the appropriate response should be.

There is a mechanical, impersonal quality in his measured replies that makes one aware of the materiality of sound. He speaks always in complete sentences. He will talk about himself, but it is as though he is describing this external person to another. Two examples may help:

‘I do not have a motorcar. If I had a motorcar someone would vandalise it. In a way I don’t want a car because of this type of thing. I do not want to go outside, and find something’s gone wrong. I don’t want anything of that nature.’

The other refers to the only picture we eventually found on display in the entire flat.

‘No. I’ve not been, but that picture’s of the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. This is an atlas of the world. I’ve always been interested in world-type geography. This is my best atlas, my book of world geography. If you don’t want to look, I understand, but to me geography was one of my favourite subjects when I was at school. This is what I used to look at. If the subject was geography this was one of the books I used to look at.’

Often, when he has finished speaking, he will ask: ‘Does this satisfy you?’ Or before saying anything else, he will first ask: ‘Can I just say something?’ Often, instead of elaborating, he will think for a while and then simply say, ‘I think the answer to that is no’, or ‘I think I shall answer yes to that question’. He seems anxious that the answer given is complete, that no one is muddled, that any additional information could complicate things.

This way of speaking is matched by the deliberate precision in his appearance. A seventy-five-year-old for whom dressing has the aura of an obligatory routine. The black creased and ironed trousers, the clean knitted jersey, the striped socks matched to the slippers. One can imagine him dressing incredibly slowly and carefully, moving up his shirt from one button to the next, putting on his tie with great care, perhaps several times over, until it was just right. This is a man for whom putting on the second sock would be an entirely separate activity from putting on the first sock.

The immediate temptation is to classify George as lacking something in himself. As being slow on the uptake, or whatever the appropriate medical term would have been. Actually that phrase, ‘slow on the uptake’, seems to fit his manner perfectly. But, as we listen to him carefully, I increasingly feel that this would be wrong. As George’s story unfolds, something else emerges: that there is nothing innately slow about George, but rather he has become what we encounter as a result of all that has, or more importantly has not, happened to him. There is something else not going on here. Just putting a label on him would be to substitute effect for cause.

Notwithstanding the emptiness of his own surroundings, George remembers places that had their own decoration. His grandmother had ‘proper’ pictures on the wall, ones that, he reckons, were worth something. His father had pictures of birds – ‘English type birds, not foreign birds’. He remembers his grandmother’s house as a big house. He had no siblings. What he seems to have had from the beginning was a sense of tyranny, of being completely under the control of an authority. All later authority became a copy of the original and most total exemplification of authority, which was his parents. It appears that every time he might have been allowed to do something or go somewhere, or become somebody, his parents prevented it and he was powerless to do other than their will. When the war broke out he was supposed to be sent away from home, but his mother desperately tried to fight this. When she failed and he had to leave, he became sick immediately, to the extent that the officials relented and he returned to spend the war in London with his mother. Similarly, although he passed his examinations such that he could have stayed on at school, his parents took him out of school and refused to allow him to continue. He worked from 16 to 18 and then passed a test to go into the navy, but this was countermanded by his father, who sent him to the army. These references to his ability to pass examinations and tests don’t seem to suggest any intrinsic slowness of thought.

George describes such events without any evident rancour or bitterness, but in his typical slow descriptive monologue. But he seems entirely aware of the constant unfairness and constraints in his life, an example being the impact of his parents. At one time he was in the army. He never saw active service, something he attributed to his parents: ‘No I never left the British Isles. That’s another thing. My father and mother have always said “You are not to go outside the borders of the British Isles”.’ In fact when he was twenty-one he did eventually go on a trip organised by his evening class to Sweden, but that was the nearest point he ever seems to have come to an actual revolt against his parents’ wishes. He never again went abroad. At one point he noted ‘my father was even worse than my mother’.

School clearly made quite an impression on George as a social environment outside his home. He still thinks of much of life in terms of subjects that are taught at school, such as geography. He has clear memories of his time at school, wearing short trousers, serving in the church. Teachers seem to have captured something of his parents’ authoritarian role. In turn, this sense of authority was transferred to his encounters with employers, and now increasingly with bureaucrats. After the war he obtained work as a clerk in a large company. He worked there until he was fifty-five, when he was retired under protest, since he wanted to continue at least to sixty. He continued to look for employment, turning up regularly at the employment exchange, but this was to be his last job. He has been in this enforced retirement for twenty-one years. The decades at work seem to occupy very little space in his life. Yet one could easily imagine him in one of those black and white newsreels which show an Edwardian vista of offices with rows and rows and rows of identical looking men filling in identical looking ledgers. In meeting George, it felt as though one was meeting the last of those clerks.

On our first visit it was probably clear we were searching around for material things to talk about, and so when we returned he had carefully gone through his possessions and finally found in a drawer a postcard from a lady in Spain. There was a story attached. He had been asked:

‘Would I be willing to meet her at the airport and take her to the house where she was going to live. I’d never met her before. I said how can I recognise a lady at the airport like that? I was told I was to go to an address in Fulham where the lady was going to live. I’d never been to the road before. So when the day came I was told to go to London airport and sit on the chair outside the entrance to number 4. I had to find number 4 and sit in the chair and wait for the lady to come up and speak to me. I wouldn’t recognise her. She was supposed to come up and speak to me. I sat there for hours. I was wondering if the whole thing had been cancelled when suddenly a young lady came up and spoke to me, told me what her name was and said now are you going to take me to the house in Fulham? So I took her.’

It seemed as though any request to take responsibility for an action was quite exceptional. That he had been singled out, taken from a row of desks and asked as an individual to do something. One could still feel his fear of that responsibility. Almost the only memories that stand out from that period are the deaths of his parents, and the responsibilities he had for the funerals. It sounded as though the terrifying prospect of having to deal with the funerals was as memorable as the deaths themselves. Maybe George had then, or has now, some form of mental retardation. But what I sensed was more a fear of having to act as an agent of his own fate. His account suggested that, for some reason, his parents used him, their only child, to give themselves a singular experience of total authority. An authority that sucked out his core, the basis for any expression of his own will, leaving him ever after dependent upon authority, teachers, employers and always also a dependency upon the officialdom of the state. The flat was empty, completely empty, because its occupant had no independent capacity to place something decorative or ornamental within it.

In order to be in range of his work, George went to live at a YMCA, which provided care for him in the way his own home had. He really couldn’t imagine staying anywhere else. But, finally, at the age of thirty-three, it was clear that he no longer counted as ‘young’, and he was told he would have to move out. The manager helped him find another hostel, which lasted around five years, after which he was moved to the hostel he had stayed in right until the time he was moved to his present flat. Just a year before we met him, this hostel was closed down. He simply assumed he would be moved to yet another hostel. He was told to apply for one. As he put it. ‘And I filled in four different forms, transfer forms, and they altered them. They were checked by members of staff. And I ended up nowhere.’ As often when George talks, there is that terrible sadness in his particular phrasing that makes it completely clear that George knows that on every such occasion he could only ever have been considered as an afterthought. He watched as each occupant left for a new place. He talks about them being taken away in a motor-car. The last one left in a minicab. No one thought to give him a forwarding address, so there would be no way he could keep in touch with any of them in the future. Finally there was no one left but him. Even then, no one seems to have been concerned with George. It was only the caretaker/support worker who was confronted with the fact that he had to be dealt with when she wanted to take a holiday. At that point she informed him that he would be moved to the flat he now occupies. ‘But I did not want to live alone by myself. But these people, all these experts, said this was the only suitable and available place for me. So here I am.’

A van was supposed to pick him up at midday. It broke down. He waited. Eventually at 3.00 p.m. another van came for him. They packed up his things. Not even the support worker came with him to this new flat – just the two removal men. They brought him and moved his possessions, first to the pavement, then to the flat itself. The sofa couldn’t go up the stairs. It had to be brought in by ladder through the window. It was George’s first ever sofa. Even if he had no ornaments, he still needed basic carpet and furnishing. But no one had given thought to this. All the good furnishings went somewhere else. Finally there were a few seconds and leftovers remaining, and he was asked to select from these – which is exactly what he has in his flat today. They came from the lounge of his hostel. His sofa matched another one there, and he requested both, but he was turned down.

So, for the first time in his life at the age of seventy-five, George found himself alone in a flat of his own, without any company at all. Even worse for George was that, for the very first time, he was expected to learn to look after himself. That was excessively hard for him, as he puts it:

‘I don’t like shopping. I had to pull myself together and do it for myself otherwise I’d have no food to start with. So I pulled myself together and do all my own shopping. I do all my shopping myself. Nobody does cooking for me. That’s my worst subject. Whether I like it or not I’ve had to get on with it, I’ve had to learn how to do it.’

This phrase, that cooking is ‘my worst subject’, comes up many times in George’s conversation.

George was dumped into his new flat ten days before Christmas. The date was significant. There had been nine people in the hostel during the previous year; two of those went away before Christmas and the remainder stayed on for a Christmas dinner together, surrounded by Christmas decorations. That, at least, had been company. This year, at Christmas, George was alone, just as he had been for the rest of the year. So now we can see why George’s flat remained empty. Because, even supposing that George had had the will, the sense of his own ability to take objects or images and use them to decorate this flat; supposing that he felt the psychological strength to do such a thing – in fact, even if the whole bloody flat was stuffed to the gills with inconsequential paraphernalia – it would still have been a completely empty flat. An emptiness without that at one with the emptiness within himself. This was the other reason there were no decorations. There was just no point.

George has now settled into some sort of routine. He goes out about three times a month into central London. He refers to this as going there on business, for example to pay a tax. These expeditions have become major reference points in his life. He may also go out for a haircut. His one point of social contact is with a meeting of Old Age Pensioners at a church hall he attends from time to time. He simply observes that they are mainly female, that they are all poor, that they are all old, but above all that they are not at all happy. His only other outing has been to his one distant relative with whom he remains in touch, a market gardener. He has been to visit their farm a few times over his life. His description of his most recent visit is typically frustrating. It was clear that on some previous occasion he had been taken to see the breeding pigs on a nearby farm. This made a huge impression upon him and he was desperate to see them again. Throughout the visit he had been waiting and hoping that this experience would be repeated, but, being George, he had never actually asked his hosts or indicated his desire. As a result, although he had been taken to see the cows, he was not on this occasion given the opportunity to re-visit the pigs. The way he talks, in some awe, about the ‘lady pigs’ suggests that maybe an earlier visit was one of the very few occasions when he has directly witnessed any kind of sexual activity. This inability to act for himself in the world is especially evident when it comes to discussion of those things he would most wish to do. One of his prime ambitions is to visit Kew Gardens. He has been there three times, but the last visit was some thirty years before. When we ask where he would most like to live, he can only think of the YMCA.

By far the most important of the outings he does manage for himself is to view Royal pageantry, especially the Trooping of the Colour. He has gone to this ceremony annually for the last twenty-five years. He cannot usually go to the key ceremonies, because these days he finds them too crowded and noisy, and if there is a ticket required, he cannot afford it. So the highlight of his life is most likely to be a rehearsal of the Trooping of the Colour. George is more than simply a royalist. One could imagine the appeal for him of a movement such as fascism, itself an experiment in aesthetics. Fascism attempted to attach to itself individual identity through the participation of each person in its aesthetics. From the Nuremberg rallies to the charisma and oratory of its leaders, fascism spoke directly to every member of that society in a manner that entranced and made them feel like a pixel in a picture – a picture which was beautiful in its completeness and superior to anything that mere individuals could accomplish by themselves.

George had nothing to mediate this direct relationship between himself and the state. The state has become his mother and father, his teacher and his bureaucrat. The constant oppressor who determines his fate and his only resource – the one that feeds him, clothes him, accommodates him and otherwise ignores him in its own sheer unimaginable superiority to him. It would not even condescend to find out about him anything in excess of what it needs to know in order to deal with him. No wonder, then, that, when the state appears in its full majesty, an unbearable but unrefusable beauty, it draws him like a moth to fire. This exquisite, violent, regal glory that constitutes British history before him and will last forever after him, and which justifies the sheer inconsequential lack of his mere being. Why should he matter in front of Her Majesty parading down the Mall? It was his greatest privilege merely to bear witness and be in thrall to this power, this majestic procession of red and gold and bayonets. He needed to be there to justify all that he was and all that he wasn’t.

Not surprisingly, over the years this pure form of authority has started to become an interiorised vision, often reducible to the expression ‘them’. One of the most common ways for George to finish his replies is with the expression ‘we will leave it at that’ with a wry smile. It seems as though on these occasions he knows there is more, he has located something about himself that could have formed part of the response, but sagely he has opted for discretion. Because, on occasion, when something does slip through and he starts to talk beyond the answer, it turns out that this was not the result of introspection but of paranoia. On those occasions he has decided to share with us something of what he knows about ‘them’: the force outside, that which would be displeased to know that we have come to visit him, that which is watching us and him, that which we should be alerted to and careful of. The particular things they don’t like, such as him going to visit some place or the presence of loud music, suggest that ‘they’ began in his head as admonishing statements by hostel staff. Being unanswerable and repressed, they hardened like gallstones into permanent and painful interior voices that can no longer be d...