The Promise of Things

Ruth Quibell

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522868791
• eBook ISBN: 9780522870695
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Some of our strongest, most lasting relationships are hidden in plain view—those we have with objects. What do our possessions do for us? And how do they do it? In The Promise of Things, Ruth Quibell explores what our possessions say about us: who we think we are, what we long for and struggle against. It invites us to think about how we use things, what makes them precious, and why we find it so hard to throw these objects away.

Matisse’s Armchair

One can feel the need to gather one’s thoughts before an armchair … it is the tender admiration we lend to a familiar object that gives the object sufficient interest to receive a heart’s overflowing.
Matisse’s letter to his friend Louis Aragon

The poet Louis Aragon, a close friend of Matisse’s, once wondered whether there wasn’t more variety and expression in the armchairs Matisse painted than in the women.

J.A. Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art

Yet Another Chair

One day in the spring of 1942, the French artist Henri Matisse went on one of his trips into town. It might have been his daily constitutional, insisted upon by Lydia, his assistant, nurse and muse. He strolled into an antique shop and there it was, in ‘varnished silver, like enamel’—a striking eighteenth-century baroque chair. ‘I have finally found the object I have wanted for a year,’ Matisse wrote to Louis Aragon. ‘When I saw it … I was completely bowled over by it. It is splendid, I am smitten. With this chair I shall slowly leap up for the summer.’

As cheering as Matisse’s unabashed enthusiasm for this object is, this was no small achievement in the circumstances. Matisse had spent the last year slowly recovering from near-death. The chair was part of his stake in the future; his willingness to actively seize a second chance at life.

What was so special about this chair? Even to today’s eyes, the rocaille armchair is quite extraordinary to look at. It’s a most impractical-looking chair, resembling an open clam, straddled with arabesque flourishes for arms. There are dragon-like faces where the arms meet the seat, and even its squat little legs have an elegance to them. This is not a simple chair for sitting in—it is meant to be looked at. It’s easy to be intrigued by its curious combination of strangeness and obvious chairness.

Given the circumstances, though, there were plenty of reasons why Matisse should not have been buying the chair. France was not in a good way, with the north under military occupation. While Matisse was living in Nice, away from the fighting, everyone he knew was touched by it. His daughter was at risk helping the resistance. His son was briefly conscripted, and Matisse was missing his beloved grandson, Claude, who had been sent to live in safety in America. Matisse himself was a seriously ill and increasingly frail man, estranged from his wife. He was, according to biographer Alastair Sooke, bleakly fatalistic about the war and the future of France. ‘And now, my dear Pierre, what do you think of the collective madness that is ravaging both the Old World and the new one?’ he wrote to his son in 1941. ‘Do you feel, as I do, that there is something foredoomed about it, and that the whole world is bent on destruction?’

Why, then, when he felt such foreboding about the state of the world, was he so excited to find an old chair? Surely he knew that no furniture, however intriguing and exotic, would change the basic facts of his existence. More than this, he had no straightforward need for it: Matisse already had a goodly assortment. ‘There were Voltaires [chairs with a high scrolled back],’ writes journalist Marie-France Boyer, ‘neo-Renaissance chairs in studded wood and leather, high-backed chairs covered in damask.’ Only months before he’d acquired another favourite: ‘the low red and white striped Louis XV bergère,’ which, according to Boyer, had ‘large well stuffed cushions and [was] trimmed with sophisticated piping’. Why did he want yet another chair?

Promises, Promises

Matisse was, seemingly, doing what so many of us do when our world turns to crap: we go window-shopping, or buy something to distract us or lift our mood. In this strand of thinking, the object is the promise of something beyond itself. For some, it might be a hit of happiness or joy from close proximity to beauty or novelty. For others, it might be the confidence, social standing or admiration that comes from possessing an expensive or widely coveted object, such as a rare painting, a powerful car or luxurious fabric. In each case, having the object can shift us up a notch emotionally or socially, in a way we do not believe we could achieve without it, even if the glow is only temporary.

The word commonly used to describe this tacit expectation that possessions will transform or satisfy us is ‘materialism’. In ordinary usage, though, materialistic people are often described as having weak characters: they are portrayed as covetous, greedy, possessive and undisciplined. It is for this reason that many of us are quick to disclaim our attachments to possessions. Yet, material consumption remains common, sustained by the implicit belief that the goods we own will improve us and our lives, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Georges Perec, in his novel Things, gives a sense of how the pursuit of new possessions works. ‘Everything was new,’ Perec writes of the couple central to his novel:

Their sensibilities, their tastes and their position propelled them towards things they had never known. They paid attention to the way others dressed; they noticed the furniture, the knick-knacks and the ties displayed in shop windows; they mused on estate agents’ advertisements … Nothing, ever, had equipped them for such new concerns. They discovered them enthusiastically, with a kind of freshness, and were bemused by having spent so long in ignorance. They felt no surprise, or almost none, at the fact that they thought about almost nothing else.

It is not necessarily the objects themselves that are the problem, but the assumptions that guide their pursuit. Critics of materialistic values argue that the hungry acquisition of things is individually destructive and founded upon a socially pathological ideology. Journalist George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian, describes materialism as a ‘general social affliction’ based on a ‘dreadful mistake we are making allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing’. This type of materialism depends upon us believing that human life is compensated, transformed or improved by the ownership of more and better goods.

Implicit in this is the sense that we are in some way incomplete and lacking. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that materialism is so appealing because the solidity of objects offers what our mortal bodies and minds inherently lack. ‘Our addiction to materialism,’ he explains, ‘is in large part due to a paradoxical need to transform the precariousness of consciousness into the solidity of things.’ Similarly, as our human bodies are ‘not large, beautiful, or permanent enough to satisfy our sense of self’ we seek out ways to extend their power, reach and expression through objects. Moreover, as philosopher Crispin Sartwell speculates, new and novel objects and experiences help to reset and re-energise our perception, especially when we tire of the world around us. ‘It is a sad and necessary truth about people,’ he argues, ‘that the things we experience often become commonplace.’

Driven by inherent lack and need for refreshment, there can be no natural cut-off point beyond which all our material needs are met. While we might run up against the reality of financial constraints, even these are no limit to wanting more, and can be transcended with the availability of easy credit. ‘If consumption were indeed tied to the realm of needs,’ argues sociologist Jean Baudrillard, ‘some sort of progress towards satisfaction would presumably occur. We know very well, however, that nothing of the kind happens: people simply want to consume more and more.’

The push and pull of the material world is something many, myself included, struggle with—the Country Road clothes of my teens, the glazed pottery bowls of my twenties, the storage containers of my late thirties. While the practices suggested in popular decluttering books regularly pepper small talk, understanding this push and pull of things requires more than either a practical quick fix or its dismissal as a trivial First World issue. When we already have enough things to meet our needs, what else keeps us seeking out more?

This is not just a rhetorical question to goad us into thinking. There do seem to be real differences among people in how much they need to consume and how attached they are to the objects they own. Those who place a strong value on material goods as indicators of achievement and status are the perfect complement to the capitalist system of production, providing it with buyers with unending, voracious appetites that can never be satisfied. Without them, ‘peak stuff’ would most likely have been reached long ago. ‘Materialism,’ as George Monbiot explains, ‘forces us into comparison with the possessions of others … There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment.’ For this reason, researchers have dubbed this strand of materialism ‘terminal materialism’.

Yet, material acquisitions aren’t wholly motivated by ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, conspicuous consumption, or other strains of invidious comparison to peers. Consumer researcher Marsha Richins and colleagues suspect that people who are highly materialistic have a far ‘greater desire to consume than other people’. That is, they not only have heightened interest in, or sensitivity to, the qualities of objects, they also rely on them more. Richins suggests that this underlying difference might be expressed as a desire for more things possibly because materialistic people extract more meaning from possessions, or alternatively lean on objects to provide the meaning in their lives. Certainly, empirical research by Csikszentmihalyi and his colleague Eugene Rochberg-Halton in The Meaning of Things found that highly materialistic, emotionally cooler, families seem to have fewer strong and close relationships that provide alternative sources of meaning, value and self-esteem.

The irony here, though, is that while highly materialistic people are heavily involved in the acquisition of things, they don’t appear to attach deeply to them, or not for long. Their investment is focused on the acquisition side of the ownership equation and often does not endure over time. They anticipate that object ownership will transform their lives, yet their attachments are typically shallow and short-term. Richins, and her colleagues Kim McKeage and Debbie Najjar, found that ‘materialists experience stronger negative feelings after acquisition than do consumers low in materialism’. This phenomena is again well illustrated in Georges Perec’s novel Things. As all the objects Perec’s characters have enthusiastically collected begin to mount up, they lose their lustre. Perec writes, ‘indoors it all began to collapse under the heaps of objects, of furniture, books, plates, papers, empty bottles. A war of attrition began from which they would never emerge victorious.’

In an increasingly materialistic culture, this is not only the experience of hoarders, but is becoming a familiar pattern for people in their ordinary lives. Like Perec’s characters, we’re struggling to keep on top of the things we’ve bought. Beyond blithe indifference or cynical acceptance, how might we do things differently? How can we respond to the failure of materialism’s promise?

A Bulimia of Things

‘Downsizing’, ‘purging’, ‘editing’ are all buzzword cures for getting rid of material excess. These practices are often central to the ethos of advocates of the simple life and minimalists, variously conceived along a spectrum from those who do a regular spring-clean to those who opt for a scorched earth destruction of everything they own. The performance of British artist Michael Landy falls at the latter end of the spectrum. He, quite literally, made a radical break with all he owned.

Landy’s purge was not in the pursuit of a simpler, less materialistic life for himself. It was for art. He called his 2001 art performance Break Down an ‘examination of consumerism’. It entailed first cataloguing the 7227 objects he owned, then destroying them. He fed them along a conveyor belt, where workers specifically employed for the task smashed, cut up, shredded and in other ways pulled apart every object. From Landy’s own art to a Savile Row jacket, from his father’s coat to personal notebooks and letters, everything was pulped. Break Down was a brutal separation of an owner from his things in the most transparent and visceral of ways. There was no concealing what was being done. No slow drip-feed of unwanted clothes to the op shop. No passing on of toys to younger relatives. Nothing but patient, methodical destruction. The image that remains in my mind from watching the performance on YouTube is of stuffing being pulled from a teddy bear.

Landy saw his project as a questioning of consumerism and revealing how we end up with so much. ‘It’s trying to ask,’ he told art historian Julian Stallabrass in an interview before the performance of Break Down, ‘what is it that makes consumerism the strongest ideology of our time? It’s as much an open question as an attack.’ Art critic Sebastian Smee saw Landy’s ‘systematic purge’ as ‘euphorically liberating’. For Smee, the destruction severed the sentimentality that insidiously adheres itself to the ordinary things we own. ‘How brilliant,’ Smee writes, ‘how hilariously theatrical and self-assertive, to catalogue them all and pulverise them in front of an audience of tens of thousands.’ In Landy’s act, Smee sees an age-old liberation founded on destruction: of what has come before, of who we once were.

Another perspective is that such extensive discarding has become almost normal, even if we hide it from ourselves—as I do in the bag I keep in readiness for op-shop donations. We have to be ready to throw away if we are to consume more; we must set aside what consumer researchers call our ‘enduring involvement’ with things. This entails a certain degree of deliberate ignorance or forgetting of the consequences. ‘We have to believe,’ as writer Andrew O’Hagan insightfully puts it in his essay in the London Review of Books, ‘that the litter of commodities melts into air, just as we do, or else we would have to live very differently in the world … We don’t admit it, but the idea of absence is a comfort to the present, for if nothing is away then everything is a deposit.’

Was Landy’s destructive performance an assertion of himself—a breaking free from the sentimental hold of the things he owned? Did the destruction of all that was tangibly material liberate his mind from the hold of materialism? Landy had spent three years documenting and preparing himself for the performance, and considerable time to rationalise the surrender of the things he owned. Still, the impact of destroying these objects had a deeper existential impact than he anticipated. When he was interviewed nine years later, by The Independent newspaper, Landy described the unexpected psychological and physical impact. ‘Witnessing your stuff being destroyed in front of 50 000 complete strangers is bizarre. People turned up who I hadn’t seen for years. It felt like I was attending my own funeral and I became obsessed with the thought that I was witnessing my own death.’ His life, in his words, came to ‘a big full stop’ after his public purge. While successfully revealing the enormity of the collections, and the mundane nature of much of what we keep, the performance left him with nothing—a gap that wasn’t necessarily filled by the task of shopping to replace all the things that he’d lost. As an answer to materialism, wholesale purging might better be seen as a briefly cathartic but inarticulate scream, rather than a liberation.

Sensations as Guides

Perhaps, then, we ought to discard more carefully, paying more attention to how we feel about our possessions? While order and rational planning are the central goals of many decluttering guides, feeling is at the heart of Marie Kondo’s bestselling manual The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing and its follow-up Spark Joy. Kondo’s advice is to identify what is ‘truly precious’ to you and discard anything that doesn’t bring you joy. It is an appealingly simple prescription. ‘I can tell by my client’s expression,’ she writes, ‘the way they hold the item, the gleam in their eyes when they touch it, the speed with which they decide. Their response is clearly different for things they like and things they are not sure of.’ (In my experience, though, it is far less clear-cut.)

Kondo uses the feeling of joy to guide uncomplicated, almost mindless action in dealing with possessions. And this has struck a chord with her many fans living in wealthy countries during this time of material abundance. Her admirers range from celebrities to economists, with her books quickly selling over five million copies worldwide. The ‘magic’ of this quick, intuitive response is a circuit-breaker for those who find themselves unable to rationalise their belongings, stuck in indecision, sentimentality or fear. Instead, the notion of ‘sparking joy’ allows us to dispense with things without the burden of conscious effort or reason—to not worry about anything else, such as the responsibility of disposing of things. It is a ‘magic’ of immediacy that one publisher, Susan Bolotin, described in The Wall Street Journal as ‘almost beyond imagination’. It promises a life-changing clean slate from which to start again, and this time get it right. ‘Once you learn to choose your belongings properly,’ Kondo writes, ‘you will be left with only the amount that fits into the space you own.’

Kondo has given us an evocative method to put into practice. Holding the object, for instance, removes it from the visual world—often occupied by the bloodless images of advertising—and re-engages our tactile sense, and allows the object to actively contribute to how we feel. ‘To describe the perception of affect or emotion we commonly use the word “feeling”,’ writes psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. ‘This has connotations of a physical sense. Just as our eyes see the visual world, we feel the emotional world: we sense emotional states in ourselves and others.’ Holding the object focuses our attention, potentially allowing it to be more than something we recognise, but something we perceive. Perception, as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton point out, ‘occurs when we expe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Matisse’s Armchair
• Chapter 2. The Edwardian Wardrobe
• Chapter 3. The Ithaka Stone
• Chapter 4. The Poäng
• Chapter 5. The Velvet Jacket
• Chapter 6. Simone de Beauvoir’s Bicycle
• Chapter 7. The Singer Sewing Machine
• Chapter 8. The Empty Drawer
• Chapter 9. Foucault’s Toolbox
• Acknowledgements