Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash

Part I. Appropriation

Would it be possible to conceive of an architecture of happiness? And, if so, what would such a question mean? Would it mean asking if happiness has some kind of internal structure, or merely if certain types of structures are able to magically bring about happiness? Suppose one of these two statements were true, wouldn’t it inherently mean that the other must also be true? One presupposes the other. But, at what point is the question even legitimate? – in other words, do we have the tools to provide an answer? Since we can’t possibly know the answer yet, we might as well assume that, yes, there is such a thing as an architecture of happiness – with all the ambiguity it implies. In any case, it would suggest that we humans are not simply responsible for taking care of our own happiness, that we must surround ourselves with things, and therefore with structures, and that they will somehow take care of us and our happiness.

By this, we should clarify, we mean happiness not as it is generally defined by so many different aspects of our lives, but as a form of inhabitation as appropriation that partially escapes our own powers, and at the same time, those of architecture, while the part that transcends our powers intersects, strangely and indirectly, with the powers of architecture. This must be the reason why so many authors discussing an architecture of happiness, be it Alain de Botton, who used the phrase for the title of his 2006 book, or earlier, Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre, or more recently Emanuele Coccia, follow an almost therapeutic trajectory, one that we recognize from Stoicism, from a philosophy of life that by definition must involve a pharmacology, that is, life lived as a balancing act between remedy and poison. Despite their great differences, it’s clear to all of these authors that the way we fit into our environment occurs indirectly, via detours, not directly. From the viewpoint of the body and geometry we don’t fit in our house, nor should we. Not-fitting is essential to even the slightest possibility of happiness as a form of appropriation.

When Henri Lefebvre develops his answer to the question of an architecture of happiness in Toward An Architecture of Enjoyment, he does so while explicitly stating that “there is no code for pleasure” and that “there is no architecture or morphology of enjoyment.” While the French philosopher regularly overlays pleasure and happiness (jouissance is as close to sexual pleasure as it is to joy), he is fully aware that it cannot be programmatic in architecture as in the case of a dance hall, a casino, or a Lustpallast. “The space of enjoyment cannot consist of a building, an assembly of rooms, places determined by their

functions, but poses a conceptual question to architecture itself. As we may determine from the word “happiness,” it inherently concerns the way things happen, not so much what happens. Maybe it’s part of happiness that many things occur in kitchens that have nothing to do with cooking, but the mere possibility makes Lefebvre argue for the “transfunctional,” that is, what permeates or links up events rather than determining them. For this, he looks at a “space that is more or less the analog of the total body,” an “ambiguous body” that both “occupies and produces space.”

Slowly, as the book progresses, a kind of porous body begins to emerge, open to the elements of wind, sun, and water, all coming in waves, and appearing simultaneously with the mentioning of open spaces such as the beach, the space of pure imprinting, or a field of snow, the blanketed space of play, or more generally, the landscape, “a genuine space, one of moments, encounters, friendships, festivals, rest, quiet, joy, exaltation, love, sensuality, as well as understanding, enigma, the unknown, and the known, struggle, play.” A playing field or gameboard permeates the spaces of domination and property, enabling us to turn them into spaces of appropriation, a turning by detour – which he often refers to with the Situationist term detounement – and since it operates by analogy, it must be a porous space. Step by step, we begin to discern a thickening or doubling of space, which the Marxist Lefebvre cannot help but describe dialectically, where space is not simply open, but opened up, perforated by another form of space. It’s as if architecture were permeated by a pre-architecture that allows it to be put together as well as taken apart. This would make it a primary, first architecture, not a space of moments, but a space where every instant is suffused with alternatives, where orientation turns into exploration, and where habit coincides with play.

We learn more about this porous, thickened space from Gaston Bacheldel’s Poetics of Space, but in its opposite form, where the house doesn’t seem to open up to itself, but to virtually hide from itself, by hiding spaces within spaces. We can be certain that both Lefebvre and Bacheldel would feel uncomfortable sharing the same argument, since both are pugilistic, dialectical thinkers, but they share not merely a passion for rhythmanalysis or for an architecture of well-being and happiness, they also share a notion of doubled space, though in Lefebvre’s case this doubling is mostly a form of expansion, of adding movement and the rhythms of play, emphasizing the importance of the field and the floor, while in Bacheldel’s case doubling takes on the form of contraction, a doubling of the interior, even of memory (whereas Lefebvre foregrounds actuality) and of storage, fundamentally emphasizing the thickening of the walls. Such a thickening is established by a multitude of pockets, be they large, extra spaces of cellar and attic, in particular the smaller spaces of chests, wardrobes, and drawers. Bacheldel, the anti-Bergsonian, is obsessed with drawers, with storage and stashing. Yet a strange loop connects Lefebvre and Bacheldel: the beach under the house is as much a space of play as the attic, though the beach stresses the role of the body with its gestures and turns, while the attic stresses daydreaming and imagination. And we can hardly deny the dependence of play on imagination, or vice versa. Lefebvre’s porous space becomes a pocketed space in the hands of Bacheldel. Fundamentally, they are of the same order, namely that of spatial appropriation.

Inhabitation viewed as appropriation reverses the idea that we inhabit space as a given structure, but as something more vague and receding into the background, while appropriation is territorial, an imposition driven by the rhythms of habit accompanied with a far more direct relationship with things. On the one hand, it seems to structure time more than space, in the sense of a habitual rhythm of activities focused on the self and its ways. On the other hand, these ways depend on the relationship with things that are being drawn into that sphere, a thickened sphere that suspends things from their original meaning, that takes them out of context and absorbs them in a new, very personal sphere. Appropriation, therefore, is a double act, one of opening and drawing in things, and at the same time a closing, a concentration on the self trying to stabilize its rhythms. The former corresponds more with Lefebvre’s openness of the playing field, while the latter applies more to Bacheldel’s focus on the meditative, in inhabitation as the locus of daydreaming and imagination. Yet, as a dialectical opposition the argument is deceptive, since one relies on the other. Their connection lies in the fact that the smallest pockets act as portals that give access to the largest playing fields, like Alice’s tiny door at the bottom of the rabbit hole, or like Lucy who enters the fantasy world of Narnia through the wardrobe in a spare room. Traditionally, these pockets are in architecture denoted with the French word “poché,” a term from the Beaux-Arts period that immediately reveals its meaning since it is the past participle of the verb pocher, as in pocketed, or pouched. What architects are taught to draw as solid by filling the area between different rooms with black ink, suggesting the wall is monolithic, is in fact entirely hollow and void. Poché, the space not between but in the walls, is the domain of services, which in architecture may range from columns and beams, to piping, wiring and ducts, to small spiral

staircases or narrow corridors and secret passages for servants. Yet, in books and movies it is the domain from which the ghosts and the monsters enter the living spaces. Therefore, we should note the important difference between the happy explorations of Lucy and Alice as moves through the mirror or the wardrobe into the poché, while the threatening visitations of ghosts such as in a movie like Poltergeist or the monsters in Alien consist of moving out of the poché, whether coming through the walls or via the air ducts, respectively.

The central chapter of The Poetics of Space, "Drawers, Chests, and Wardrobes," is a eulogy on boxes, trunks, and chests that close so perfectly that the keys need not be kept in the lock and are themselves locked away. "The unconscious is housed. It should be added that it is well and happily housed, in the space of its happiness," he writes earlier on, adding that the house is "imagined as a vertical being." This verticality, structured by the polarity of cellar and attic, spanning the entire structure layered by horizontal spaces that are perforated by the small-scale pocket of drawers, wardrobes, and chests, begins to resemble a self. We should ask ourselves what kind of self we are talking about. Not a self structured by a practical ego trying to cope with a repressed unconscious and a rational superego, but a self that holds itself up against a multitude of adjustments and uncertainties in order to find happiness. What is happiness, then? As it etymologically relates simply to what happens, this question turns into how the self sustains itself amid a multitude of things that happen, of which we may distinguish between two categories, namely (a) things we make happen, and (b) things that happen to us. We can say a great deal about both, more than what we have room for at the moment, but the two will always remain separate categories, except from the standpoint of happiness. From that point of view the two must be connected. As to how, many philosophies of life have attempted an answer, most notably Stoicism, though in our context we should recall Nietzsche's advocacy of goodwill in The Gay Science where he persuasively argues for "brief habits," a rotating system of routines of different lengths replacing one with another. The sickly German philosopher fully appreciated the ambiguous nature of habit. In the famous aphorism 334, "One Must Learn to Love," he proposes a six-step procedure to love things despite their initial strangeness by slowly "getting used" (gewöhnt, literally "habituated") to them. After first willfully tolerating a new and strange piece of music we should slowly let ourselves grow accustomed to it, even to begin to expect it, then to miss it, and later to crave it like an "enraptured lover," to finally want it again and again, an anticipation of his description of beauty a few pages later: "Everything beautiful, twice and thrice!" And how do we mobilize habit to arrive at love? Not through free will but through goodwill (guten Willen), a guiding principle of what he calls "hospitality" – in short, habit's interiority is not the product of withdrawal, but an intimacy that seeks to overcome the critical distance and strangeness of things by synchronizing with their internal rhythms.

Goodwill is nothing more than openness in the form of generosity, which means that it actively tries to establish a connection with things we usually undergo passively, as if we were merely the patients of fortune and misfortune. It literally constructs a detour within the self, a loop or shunt of sorts, that links what we make happen to what happens to us. With free will transforming into goodwill, it actively allows things to happen to you as in the learning how to love. As is well known, Nietzsche's method revived the classical attitude of amor fati, but he did so going beyond Epicurean tranquility, realizing that love linked to beauty – after all, we love what we find beautiful. (And, as we know from Stendhal, beauty is the promise of happiness). His method reveals the shortcomings of Bachelard's project, and of phenomenology in general, which filters things through human consciousness while secretly relying on the unconscious to store what cannot be processed. There is no place for daydreaming in Nietzsche's philosophy, while at the same time he accepts a similar thickening of the self, a self full of gaps that function as openings between him and what might happen to him. (It closely resembles Simone Weil's notion of attente, a form both of waiting and attention that functions as a remedy against malheure, unhappiness or affliction.) In contrast to Bachelard's pocket, the gaps are now full of light, of artifice, what Nietzsche calls style: "To give style" to one's character – a great and rare art! Style is what prevents the German philosopher from developing an unconscious; it's an aesthetic attitude that deals with things beforehand, not a way to embark them afterwards. For him the gameboard is not an escape, but a way to shape his life.

When I fantasize about Nietzsche's house, half of it would consist of poché, which would be physically accessible, creating a new realm to play and shape his life by constantly acquiring, testing, and shaking off habits. A porous, thickened house that consists of two forms of space that can be appropriated without being the neutral open field of snow or sand, nor find poché only in the smallest, leftover spaces, but that by combining the two can be experienced with or explored without being severed from reality.

"We are all strangers, yet we manage each time to make a home for ourselves. To build a form of happiness," writes Emanuele Coccia in his recent Philosophy of the Home – subtitled Domestic Space and Happiness – which becomes his central argument: "homes do not exist per se. Only homemaking exists." He quickly relates this to the Stoic philosophy of oikeiosis, "a magnificent word that means appropriation (in the double sense of making something one's own and of making oneself part of something else)." Indeed, through homemaking and home decoration a thickening takes place by surrounding us with a curtain of objects – to borrow André Leroi-Gourhan's phrase – because (a) "the home in terms of form – its ground, roof, and walls – is really, by definition, uninhabitable," and (b) "we occupy only things." Only things enable us to erect the whole scaffolding of artifice and style, virtually building a home within the house. The house itself doesn't fit, but this could be remedied by "transforming the home into a suit." The question remains as to the nature of the space between us and the suit, and between the suit and the house. One would think that the three layers of skin, clothing, and walls are arranged in that order, which might be the case physically, but not conceptually. Funnily enough, Coccia has included his own chapter entitled "Wardrobes," which does not deal with the closet's hidden nature, but with the fact that it houses clothes, which allows us, again via a detour, to become part of the costume drama of appropriation. In short, homemaking follows the dress code of inhabitation, but the dress is conjured out of a porous, thickened wall, which would seem trivial at first, if it weren't so exemplary of the general trajectory things follow at home.

Things constantly appear and disappear at home, jumping up one moment like hungry pets and retreating the next like discreet lackeys. Things flicker. This thickened zone between presence and absence means everything in the context of happiness. More than the Stoic oikeiosis involves a form of Aristotle's celebrated notion of eudaimonia, often translated as happiness or flourishing, but more precisely meaning well-spiritedness, that is, literally being guided and guarded by tutelary spirits (the daimon, meaning demon, can be either friendly or hostile). And here the inhabiting switches to enabling: the house can only be accessed via a thickened sphere, the thickened wall that houses the "ghosts and spectres" of things. All objects in the home become subjects." writes Coccia, who elsewhere in the book models these animated objects after his late twin brother Matteo: things are our doubles, a shockingly apt description of our relationship with the things we love, and which includes household appliances and all other technical objects. "Technology has filled objects with spirit" only because the necessary thickening of space is a matter of doubling, of surrounding ourselves with the pole consists of a series of rings, bulges and scrolls, then another chair, but lower, and a table with a tiny sailboat on top, and a tiny horse, another tiny vase, and another tea set, a bowl, and a massive

Part II. Stuff

We're looking into a large double-height room, seemingly floating halfway, seeing as much of the floor as of the ceiling, and as much of the wall on the left as the wall on the right. It's hard to count the things we see, which is strange because things don't overlap – in fact, they seem to fill the whole scene like the single surface of a wall – yet at the same time many things seem to be made of other things, and so many things are placed on top of other things. Just look at the tea stand in the lower left corner, which consists of four tiers, each filled with tiny things, tiny vases, tiny cups, a teapot and muffins, and a handful of sweets. Next to the stand we see a chair upholstered in blue-green velvet engraved with small swirls, then a globe standing on the floor, a golden floor lamp whose pole consists of a series of rings, bulges and scrolls, then another chair, but lower, and a table with a tiny sailboat on top, and a tiny horse, another tiny vase, and another tea set, a bowl, and a massive

blue-marble clock set on a white embroidered cloth. On the right, an enormous plant stand, so high it almost reaches to the full height of the room, made up of multiple geometric figures, diamond-shaped, oval-shaped, and vase-shaped, which act as medallions for images of, again, a sailboat, a sunset, and a portrait, piling up until two twisting palm leaves at the top emerge from the acrobatic structure. Then, behind – I say “behind,” but when describing the drawing it would be better to say “above,” as if one row of stones fits over another row of stones – this arrangement of things we find more things with, starting again on the left, a white Roman chair with a cat on it and an ashtray beside it, a red sofa strewn with a pillow and lace doilies, partly standing on a large Persian carpet and a white polar bear rug, on which stands a small Moroccan octagonal table that stands next to another Moroccan table, but now square, with a vase filled with flowers, in front of a fireplace with a screen, and with a breast made of small columns, volutes and a frieze forming the mantelpiece with lamps on both sides and the large golden mantel clock in the center with a semi-angelute arm on top holding a sword next to an unidentifiable jubilant figure, standing in front of the wall that holds a large oval mirror with small paintings on either side, again depicting sailboats. Behind – that is, above – the red sofa stands another golden floor lamp, next to two chairs with high backs, with an ashtray stand and a plant stand with a vase on top, and a small table with a candle, placed against the back wall, which is covered along the bottom by wood paneling that holds a painting of a swan, and which is simply whitewashed along the top and holds a large painting of a sunset, accompanied by smaller paintings of things that we cannot identify. To the left of the scene we see a staircase, the only object depicted with foreshortened perspective, bordered by a railing with a geometrically patterned blanket hanging over it. The staircase leads to a landing, again accompanied by a wall with a mirror with a painting on either side, two small wall shelves with small vases, and two plant stands, each with a large vase filled with palm leaves. Below the mirror there is a small sofa and above it a double candlestick. The landing leads to a second set of stairs, only a small part of which can be seen. A large crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling, which is bordered by a frieze covered with ribbons and meanders.

As is so characteristic of him, the drawing by Saul Steinberg, usually titled “Gingerbread House” because it accompanies an article in a May 1946 issue of House at Garden of the same title, shows his obsession with domestic style of drawing.24 Though surely intended sarcastically by the editor, the title quite fittingly describes what Salvador Dali many years earlier had called “edible architecture,”25 namely an interior made up of sweetened things, with detail added to detail. Something strange is going on in this beautiful drawing; it doesn’t so much show things and walls, but they seem to merge, as if the things in the room gather into stuff, stretched out onto a single vertical plane – yes, the plane of the drawing, but also a plane that fundamentally explains the collapse of space into a thickened state, thickened by inhabitation as appropriation. There is absolutely no depth of space here in the traditional sense, no structure or perspective; everything hovers and seems to be scattered in space, while in the plane of the drawing it all magically comes together in this act of thickening between wall and things. And not only does this happen between things, it also happens to the things themselves; each thing is made up of other things, either by stacking or by extending – after all, we are speaking of appropriation as an act of decoration and home decoration. Things are stacked and extended. The whole space acts as a plenum, like an aquarium; in their scattered state things seem to swirl and float, liberated by their colors and mobilized by their fin-like extensions and their acrobatic maneuvers. It is as if the power of space has been completely carried over to the things themselves.

How do we live with things? Or rather, as Coccia so tantalizingly phrased it, how do we occupy things? We do receive a clue from Steinberg’s doodling, which fits so well with the sensation of floating, namely in the form of abstinentness or that diminished state of consciousness so closely associated with inhabitation. It’s the whole reason why we learn so little about architecture when visiting its works, and why we feel so uncomfortable when we visit someone unannounced and see the towels still lying on the table, the newspaper on the floor, a coat hanging over a chair, or the crumpled cushions – the things that go unseen during inhabitation suddenly become visible – the same reason why we quickly try to clean up when people call on us to visit. The verb “to visit” is derived from videre, “to see,” which is the exact opposite of what happens during inhabitation as appropriation, a form of living that turns everything around it invisible, what in German is so well indicated by the connection between wohnen (to inhabit) and gewöhnen (to get used to). Getting used to things means letting them occupy us, literally taking them in, as Dali suggested. We don’t really understand anything of architecture when visiting a building, because it lies in the nature of architecture to disappear during the

act of appropriation. Things start to flicker between absence and presence, constantly retreating and resurfacing from that thickened sphere.

The magic of Steinberg's drawing is that he understands this flicker by drawing things as surrounded by the vibrating aura that Walter Benjamin called ornamentale Umzirkung.26 best translated with "radiant contour," by which he meant ornament as a way of accessing the interior of ourselves. (It’s truly mind-boggling, to say the least, that precisely his experiments with hashish provided him with the famous term “aura,” which became so central to his analysis of artworks and their production.)27 The way we are intimate with things, the way we love them and find them beautiful, is not by constantly looking at them but by living with them and getting used to them. Not-seeing things, talking while sitting next to the wallpaper, walking over the figures in the carpet, sitting against patterned cushions, eating from painted plates, using shiny knives, in short, living-with is a web of activities that draws a veil over things – yet that veil is as much theirs, as we learn from Ruskin’s term “wall-veil,” or even Semper’s “wall-dress.”28 But while things remain unseen they take care of us, which we can only reciprocate by taking care of them in turn. One unvisual, the other visual. The care structure of a household is precisely what holds up the scaffolding of the appropriative sphere, and from our side this means cleaning things, polishing surfaces, watering plants, feeding pets, painting walls, repairing broken things; the constant restoring of the workings and shine of things is as fundamental as the habitual not-seeing. There is a constant back and forth going on between seen and unseen, of us and things flickering at alternating frequencies. The house is this half-the-rear, half-not-there place where we live with the ghost of ourselves imprinted on the things around us. There is real magic in the old rings left by coffee cups on the table, or the imprint of our bodies that we leave on our beds and pillows each morning.

This flickering zone sometimes overdetermines things as objects and sometimes underdetermines them as stuff, with the former giving things their exact contours of use and visibility, while the latter makes things wander, as if finding a semantic blind spot that allows them to glow, a zone far closer to a state of disorder, even entropy. This clear line between one state and the other is precisely what Steinberg’s drawing illustrates so well, what looks like complete order from the viewpoint of appropriation and like complete disorder from that of space. It’s like throwing things in the air and seeing them scatter, whereas from one specific point of view they all fit into a single image. Yet one slight shift of our viewpoint and the whole picture falls apart, turning stuff into a mess. This whole semantic range of object, thing, stuff, mess, and even trash or waste will be the subject of the next section, but for now it is essential for us to understand what exactly enables this. What makes them to scatter? What exactly are we inhabiting when we inhabit? Another drawing by Saul Steinberg may help us answer these questions:

The drawing shows a rooming house (it says “No Vacancy” next to the door) part of the facade of which has been removed, allowing you to see the interior of some twenty-two rooms. The mere inventory – and it could never be exhaustive – of the items of furniture has something truly vertiginous: three bathrooms, five fireplaces, six candelabras, one piano, ten adult individuals of the male sex, ten adult individuals of the female sex, six young children, two dogs, two cats, a bear on wheels, a small horse on wheels, a toy train, a doll in a pram, six rats or mice, a fair number of cockoaches, thirty-eight pictures, an african mask, twenty-nine lights, ten beds, a child’s cot, three divans, four kitchenettes, seven rooms with parapet flooring, three with tiles, one carpet, two bedside rugs, eight pedestal tables, five coffee tables, two kitchen tables only, five small bookcases, one bookshell, two clocks only, five chests, two pairs of shoes, thirteen chairs, a leather briefcase, a dressing gown, one suit, one jacket, a hat, a trash bin, and loads of small stuff.

This liberally copied description by Georges Perec from his 1974 Species of Spaces,29 which depicts Saul Steinberg’s well-known 1945 drawing from “The Art of Living.”30 complements the other drawing in such a way they might explain each other. And let’s directly make clear that description” and “depicts” are the wrong words – Perec is doing no such thing. Whereas in the “Gingerbread House” we had to introduce the artist’s eye, following his hand as it delineated each object one by one, here we require an inventory, a listing, and with good reason. It is impossible to describe Steinberg’s Art of Living drawing in the same way we described the Gingerbread House drawing, simply because what was metaphorical in the latter – the coused arrangement of objects that made the crowded interior look like a vertical wall – is no longer meta-physical in the case of the former, because this image shows an actual vertical structure, which strictly speaking is not an image but rather an X-ray or a diagram, or what Perec considered a gameboard, perhaps even a drawing board. Steinberg’s cut-away diagram, as medical in origin as architectural, visualizes

something that cannot be shown. In Perec’s eyes it visualizes innumerable possibilities, options, and choices, which is much closer to the viewpoint of a plan, a horizontal overview, than to a vertical section. It’s a double reversal in opposite directions that makes the two drawings communicate so well. We are not merely speaking of a concrete representation of an interior versus an abstract diagram of multiple interiors, no, the former acts as an abstract structure, while the latter acts as if we could look into all interiors at once. The question of how architecture leaves room for appropriation lies precisely in the difference – the gap – between interiors, plural, and the interior, singular. Between possible choices and choices made, between the gameboard and the game played, between a first architecture and a second architecture. Whatever architecture we’re speaking of, it needs to be doubled – thickened – since we can only inhabit the space between the two. Inhabitation, then, is more than distributing habits in space; it’s also play, the trying and breaking with habits, which is a matter of a very different type of space, namely the space of the possible itself.

The novel Perec imagined in Species of Spaces to be based on Steinberg’s drawing not much later became Life: A User’s Manual and it’s through this novel we get a glimpse of what Steinberg’s drawings and what inhabitation mean. Perec, like Italo Calvino, was a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “Workshop of Potential Literature”) which experimented with highly choreographed techniques of writing based on game playing. As play is inherently an activity that explores possibilities, the game offers specific rules to such exploration, a doubling that is rooted in the ambiguity of the gameboard, namely the coexistence of its openness and slipperiness on the one hand and its tessellation and articulation on the other. In terms of Lefebvre and Bacheard: the gameboard is both beach and drawers. And that’s exactly what Perec makes use of. The 700-page book takes a ten-bay wide chunk from an eight-story high Parisian apartment block that, by including the roof and basement, can be divided into a 10-by-10 grid, is superimposed on the different apartments and their inhabitants, some of whom occupy only a single square, some a double one, all the way to the more luxurious apartments that take up five squares. Evidently, this is not the place to expound on the content of the book as it involves a huge number of characters that all play different roles in a plot that turns diabolically against itself. As Perec rightly observed from looking at Steinberg’s drawing, the mere contemplation of a momentary section taken over the lives of the inhabitants directly generates a sense of storytelling.

which so fundamentally differs from what architects call program, the layout of space according to activities and habits. An architectural program never offers the potential to fantasize about people’s lives and how the articulation of space might generate stories, while a gameboard has the opposite effect. Why? Because a gameboard things open, it is organized by gaps, whereas space is continuously – yet the two coexist, as Perec shows by overlaying the vertical section of the apartment block with a horizontal gameboard, which helps us understand not only the connection between Steinberg’s drawings, but inhabitation in general.

Inhabitants live vertically, not only in Bachelard’s sense of a polarity between cellar and attic, but even in the most geometrically horizontal of all possible houses, namely by the thickening of the walls to access an open realm of possibility and exploration, and vice versa. We live by detours, by access to the horizontal gameboard – just visit IKEA, with its hundreds of missing-wall interiors (like film sets where one wall is left out so the cameras can film the action) laid out on a floor the size of a football field, or Home Depot, with its infinite aisles, and you get a sense of what such a game entails. That Perec’s game is organized by the Knight’s Tour, allowing each of the hundred squares to be accessed only once – except for no. 66 at the bottom left corner of the board, resulting in a book of ninety-nine chapters – is essential; we can only leap from one interior to another via the abstract space of the board, not via space. Perec’s use of the knight’s horse to jump across the board through detourments underscores the nature of the gap: forward is sideways, and sideways is forward. The same system of jumps and detours was used by Perec to describe the interiors, each consisting of forty-two elements generated by a sheer infinite number of combinations of things, be they pieces of furniture, feelings, sex, age, clothing, occupations, or colors. We constantly sense the tension between each interior and the gameboard, where the verticality of the former can only be produced through the horizontality of the latter. It’s not simply a matter of a universal system creating a unique combination of parts, but reversely, that uniqueness adopting all the structural properties of a system and the system all the looseness of individuality.

Part III. Trash

In the middle of the large museum hall, there is a small house, built as an open skeletal structure of wooden sticks. The windows and the door are still in there, but you can’t enter the small structure, because half of the floor is filled with neatly arranged empty bottles and empty soda cans in a rectangle, while the other half is filled with folded paper bags in a large variety of colors. Around the house the museum space looks like it is organized for a yard sale, with a large patchwork of differently sized rectangular sections, some directly on the floor, some on a raised wooden board, others on a piece of cloth. Each section is filled with household items, like the large section with hundreds and hundreds of pairs of worn shoes and slippers, another with dozens of flower pots, one with a huge number of plastic bowls in the brightest colors, and another with mostly rusty pans and buckets. Then, a large section with dozens of boxes that seem to have contained presents, the same for empty food containers, hundreds of plates, then smaller patches with dozens of wristwatches, hundreds of bottles, almost fifty or so flattened toothpaste tubes all laid out in rows, a similar number of empty lighters, burned-out light bulbs, sets of keys, and dozens of sets of short planks tied up with a steel wire, more loose rope and wire rolled up, hundreds of ties, dozens of sunglasses, children’s toys, biscuit tins, hundreds of cups, blankets, kitchen spoons, and what seems to be thousands of pens and markers. Then, a row of television sets, a row of chairs, a row of record players, old radiators, and stacks of yellowed newspapers, stocks of shirts and other clothing items. The floor is around the house is at least twenty times larger than that of the little house in the middle.

It’s immediately clear to all the visitors that the more than 10,000 objects can’t possibly fit in the house, at least not in the usual sense. The story behind the work is prominently communicated: after the sudden death of her husband, the mother of Song Dong, the Chinese artist who created the installation (Waste Not, 2009), began to develop a habit that fell somewhere between extreme thriftiness and hoarding. Though Song did not provide any photos of how the objects were originally stored in his mother’s tiny house – the exact replica of which stands at the center of the exhibition – we can infer from their general condition that things were originally ordered similarly in rows and stacks, yet in the form of a tightly packed volume that would have left her hardly any room to move. Surely, there is personal drama lurking behind the whole scene, but that is not what makes the exhibition so remarkable. It’s much more about the exhibition’s layout – the house and the yard – and about the disruption of the divide between trash and stuff. Indeed, the most dramatic objects are the empty plastic bottles, the empty beverage cans, the flattened plastic toothpaste tubes, the loose bottle caps, and the blackened light bulbs. It seems antithetical that things relied entirely on their functionality for their status as objects would not be discarded and then be exhibited.

In a way stuff always seems to be hidden, even if it linger in plain sight in the background. A significant portion of it is stored close at hand on the shelves in cupboards or in boxes. Other stuff is stowed deeper away, in the garage, the basement, or the attic; sometimes even in a storage facility, which in the US seem to be littered all over the country. Though museums and exhibitions are spaces to be visited – that is, seen, not inhabited – Song’s exhibition is not just about the laying bare of the unseen, or the laying bare of his mother’s tragedy. It’s more about the act of laying things out and the idea of a yard that comes to mind when walking through the space and seeing everything stretched out over the horizontal plane of the floor. With its ancient northern heritage that we recognize from Swedish which pronounces its g’s as the English do their y’s, the word “yard” is directly related to “garden,” similar to the relationship between the English “yellow” and the German gelb. Typically, the word signifies this undefined, open space that surrounds, permeates, and even haunts the house. Yards are sometimes related more to areas of assembly or storage, as in shipyard, and sometimes more like the enclosed space of a garden, as in backyard. We recognize this precisely defined but undetermined, open space immediately from Lefebvre’s playing field and Perec’s gameboard.

Watching the American TV series Hoorders – while writing this, in its sixteenth season – we hear the words “stuff” and “yard” being used constantly, and true hoarders go much further in blurring the distinction between trash and stuff than Song’s mother did. We see houses with rooms that are completely inaccessible, where layers and layers of stuff have been accumulated, often over decades, mixed with rooms that still have vertical stacks of stuff, often going along the way up to the ceiling, leaving small paths that can only be navigated by walking sideways. Unpacking the rooms, which the show’s presenters aim to accomplish through “extreme cleaning” – and what fails more often than not because of the hoarder’s interventions – shows that usually the hoarding started by stacking up things, stacks that slowly began to topple over

and mix in with other collapsed stacks to form piles of stuff that then began to fill the whole of the room, sometimes up to four, five feet high. By that point stuff has become indistinguishable from trash, things are mostly in a derelict state, crumpled, broken, and rusted through – the state we would find things in the trash can or dumpster. Of course, there are tragic psychological reasons for hoarding. However, these reasons do not explain why people start misstating things. The relationship between inhabitants and things shows precisely why the self cannot be separated from the scaffolding it builds upon appropriation.

Earlier, we speculated about the relationship between the house as a space of appropriation, the drawers and all the smaller and larger pockets of poché that may function as portals to the playing field. This is often intangible space of the gameboard, of an architecture that can take the shape of books and movies, of dreams and memories, of future plans and drawings, of demolished or imagined buildings, all the way to the yard-like spaces of Home Depot, Walmart, or IKEA where all interiors look fragmented like that of Antonello da Messina’s St. Jerome in His Study. A yard is synonymous with a junkyard, the space where things can either come alive or perish. What takes place in hoarding really belongs to a broader pathology of inhabitation; in this case to a failed thickening, in the sense of inhabitation where, as Lefebvre and Bachelard suggested, a rhythm analysis might be more helpful than psychoanalysis. A failed circulation of things between house, poché, and gameboard where trash and waste start to clog and interfere. The real question that should occupy us, is how things are capable of travelling this ontological spectrum between trash and stuff, a spectrum significantly larger than the two terms suggest, and what allows things to circulate an infrastructure of meanings.

The strongest bond within the spectrum is that between things and stuff, which occupy a central position in a range that includes terms such as object, mess, dust, trash, and waste, maybe even more. Heideger taught us to sharply distinguish between objects and things. The former plays the role of the thing as seen, as an obstacle. In German “object” translates as Gegenstand, “what stands against,” always in a relationship that defines us as subjects. Things – the very stuff of the real, that is, of thickness – never admit themselves in this dualist position, though they may act as objects in the sense of “Where are my things?” yet also as habits as in “She’s doing her thing” or as issues as in “We have to discuss things” or events as in “Things are going on.” The categorical range of things with its internal overlaps is fundamental to their powers, since the “thick of things” consists precisely of the ontological convergence of object with event, issue, and habit. This means that an object overdetermines a thing by removing its objecthood. In opposition to objects, things “stand by themselves,” a posture that in Heidegger’s language is denoted as selbstständig, meaning independent or mind-independent, the core definition of realism. We recognize the fundamental position of things in the structure of reality not from the etymology of the word “real,” which is derived from the Latin realis, meaning “to belong to things” (res), but also from that of “existence,” which is derived from the Latin ek-sistere, meaning “to stand forth.”

Things may hover between the visual in the form of an object and the unvisual in the form of stuff, a word that indicates a plurality and therefore points more forcefully at the tendency of things to thicken space. Stuffing means filling, or cramming something into something else, though “stuff” is derived from the French étoffe and the German Stoff, both of which mean fabric. Here we mainly refer to stuff as Becca Rothfeld defines it in her marvelous All Things Are Too Small:

I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling; rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with fact but, more importantly, flush with form; long tomes in too many volumes; sentences that swerve on for pages; clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces; a kitchen crammed with cream, melting butter, sweating cheese. Clothes on the floor, shoes on the bed, blood rusted on the sheets, mud loaming all the carpets, and a table set for a banquet bigger than I could ever host${}^{71}$

– a celebration of stuff, of things on top of or hidden in other things, dangerously nearing the next step in the ontological spectrum.

The notion of a mess is an essential one. It indicates the transition of stuff into a mode of things being uncaused for to the point of being discarded yet not trashed. A mess balances on the subtle distinction between things thrown aside and thrown away. This shifts our argument to entropy, which is generally understood as a state of information that hinders exchange and circulation. However – and here our linear spectrum begins to loop back on itself – it might signify the exact opposite, namely a state that allows for multiple redefinitions. In essence, reversibility is exactly what enables appropriation; things may

fluctuate ontologically, making themselves available to a range of situations, while veering on the edge of formlessness and a state of trash. Entropy is the astronomically large, statistical probability that a system will fall into disorder, which, as physicists explain, provides us with the arrow of time. It is fundamentally connected to the circulation of things, especially because circulation itself is so ambiguous, and therefore interferes with this arrow of time. Words like “dust” and “waste” illustrate this connection even better; things that seem to have diminished in their ontological status might start to glow and return to the state of an object. When things are made of other things the distinction between order and disorder becomes more and more blurred, even so in the case of things broken down all the way to the smallest particles, as with dust,${}^{22}$ which is strongly related to stuff. In German, it is translated as Staub and in Dutch as stof, meaning both “fabric” and “dust,” the ultimate pulverization of matter, so much so it may turn into materia subtilis, matter so fine it is filled with light – the very stuff of the plenum.

Waste, a term used for garbage and excrement, is essential to all types of cycles. First, of course, the ecological cycles of matter and life. More importantly at this moment, the cycles of the seen and unseen – this paradox of inhabitation – of habit and play, which inherently correspond to a waste and spilling of energy. Spilling refers directly to the German Spiel, “game.” An ontology of waste tells us that, at the lowest point of a thing’s existence, it can reverse its fate. Johan Huizinga, the prominent theorist of play, stresses the purest state of a thing by using the Dutch – lijk and the German – lich, derived from Leiche – corpse – and their connection to the English “like,” found both in the word signifying resemblance and the suffix –ly, which turns nouns into adjectives, the inbuilt metaphors of language.${}^{23}$ A wasted thing may turn into anything, as we know from tinkering and toying. Thinking of François Jacob’s famous 1977 article “Evidence and Tinkering,” we could expand our aligning of stuff and inhabitation to the realm of planetary inhabitation, where new animal and vegetal forms are made of earlier forms via transformation. Certainly, everything is made of something, but the latter word implies an essential drop in meaning, as was shown by Stephen Gould (An Earful of Law, 1990) who traced the evolutionary migration of the jawbones in reptiles over the span of a few hundred million years to the middle-ear bones in mammals while losing functionality in between. It’s as if things can be trashed or stored within species to be dug up later. And what about the billions of dead sea creatures whirling down to the ocean floor and slowly turning into the massive deposits of lime-stone, to be used later when building our habitats? Things being spilled and things spilling over, offers them to simultaneously move in two directions: (a) on the level of information, a “semantic drop” toward an absolute zero-degree point, and (b) on the level of visibility reaching the absolute apex of radiance, what Georg Simmel in a text on adornment calls radiation, in the sense of radioactive decay.${}^{24}$ (While objects rely on their contours, things exceed theirs through radiance.)

Isn’t there a necessary tendency toward decadence in things, which fully coincides with their beauty? Isn’t that the same beauty of Nietzsche who, after exclaiming that “the world is brimming with beautiful moments,”${}^{25}$ added that we require “everything beautiful, twice and thrice?” That is, find a beauty that can be part of cycles of coming and going? If beauty is the promise of happiness, how does it keep this promise? – only by linking directly to its own fading, to a state of uncertainty and vagueness. Why? Because it allows play and habit to flip back and forth. And isn’t that the same beauty of Walter Pater exclaiming that we need “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame”${}^{26}$ We need to live the flicker. There is a direct link between a thing spilling over as in ornament – that glowing edge of uselessness – and a thing bleeding out amid other things in an accumulated mess. A home demands to be lived toward a state of entropy; it is the only way cycles of exchange between the different modes of things can begin, in which things allow themselves to be played with and have their wide range of potential explored.

Not everyone would agree. Over the past ten or fifteen years, we saw a surge of books on deceleration, the trend so wittily described and castigated by Becca Rothfeld. Among these books, Marie Kondo’s 2014 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has become the proverbial bible. Reading her book, it is evident that deceleration is not merely a form of rehabilitation by learning new habits, but a form of rehab – from “rehabilitate” – in the sense of therapy, with her “clients” often also deciding to lose weight, for divorce, or change jobs. At first glance, her “KonMari Method” seems the very opposite of hoarding, since hoarders adhere to an extreme form of storage, whereas Kondo warns us against any type of storage, which she disparages as a booby trap.${}^{27}$ It quickly becomes clear, however, that decelerating exhibits the same symptoms of a pathology of inhabitation. While a hoarder turns all stuff into trash through accumulation, Kondo’s method also turns all stuff into trash, but through radical discarding. What is tragic in the case of the case of

decluttering. The ruthless crusade to purge things gradually focuses on the ever-smaller things that things are made of, until there’s nothing left:

I pointed to the balled-up socks. “Look at them carefully. This should be a time for them to rest. Do you really think they can get a rest like that?” That’s right. The socks and stockings in your drawer are essentially on holiday ... Then remove all the books from your bookcases. You cannot judge whether or not a book really grabs you when it’s still on the shelf ... Keep only those books that will make you happy just to see them on the shelves, the ones that you really love. That includes books too, if you don’t feel any joy when you hold it in your hand, I would rather you discard it. “I now get rid of all those unread books.” I now keep my collection of books to about thirty volumes at any one time, but in the past, I found it very hard to discard books because I love them ... Realizing what I really wanted to keep was not the book but certain information or specific words it contained. I decided that if I kept only what was necessary I should be able to part with the rest. My idea was to copy then sentences that inspired me into a notebook. Over time, I thought, this would become a personal collection of my favorite words of wisdom. It might be fun to read it over in the future and trace the path my interests had led me. With great excitement, I pulled out a notebook I liked and launched my project. I began by underlining the places I wanted to copy. Then I wrote the title in my notebook and began transcribing. Once I started, however, that this process was far too much work. It takes time to transcribe and if I was going to be able to read those words in the future, my handwriting had to be neat. To copy ten quotations from a single book would take at least half an hour, and that was a low estimate. The thought of doing this for forty books made me dizzy ... I finally decided to rip the relevant page out of the book. Pasting pages into a notebook was also a pain, so I simplified the process by slipping them into a file instead. This only took five minutes per book and I managed to get rid of forty books and keep the words that I liked. I was extremely pleased with the results. Two years after launching this “bulk reduction method,” I had a sudden flash of realization. I had never once looked at the file I created.

1. Alain Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Vintage International, 2006).
2. Heiner Lefevere, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, trans. Robert Bonono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 58.
3. ibid., 152,
4. ibid., 151,
5. ibid.
6. ibid., 149,
7. ibid., 152,
8. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 [1958]).
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 295 from The Goy Science, trans. Joanne Nawoffh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) [1882], 76.
10. ibid., 186; “One must learn to love.” This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as an in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression is necessary to hold it still. Finally come, moment by moment, when we sense that we miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always recounted in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its self and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way – there is no other way, Love, too, must be leamed.”
11. ibid., 183.
12. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 67–82.
13. Nietzsche, The Goy Science, 163.
14. Emanuela Coccia, Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness, trans. Richard Dixon (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 21.
15. ibid., 22.
16. ibid., 23.
17. ibid., 58.
18. ibid.
19. ibid., 23.
20. ibid., 66.
21. ibid., 60.
22. ibid., 62.
23. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 48.
24. House & Garden (Conde Nast Publications Inc.), May 1946, 80–81. Steinberg’s drawing accompanied an article titled “Gingbeen House” by Richardson Wright, the chief editor. The full issue is made available online at www.domesticspaceandhappiness.com/julia. Salvador Dali, “De la beau tendrissite et comestible de Francheture modern style,” in Minstère, Revue artiste et littérie, no. 3/14 (Paris: Éditions Albert Saura), 70, 73.
25. Walter Benjamin, “Protocols of Drug Experiments,” in On Hashish, trans. Howard Eland et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 58.
26. C. Marian Boulanger, Penguin’s Aura, Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 336–75.
27. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin; Library Edition, ed. E. T Cook and Alexander Welderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12); K. X-85–90; Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Hermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 104–4.
28. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Peaces, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 40–43.
29. Saul Steinberg, The Art of Living (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1984), n.p.

Lars Spuybroek

31. Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2024), 39.
32. C.F. Michael Marder, Dust (London: Bloombury, 2016).
33. Johan Huulings, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955 [1938]), 37.
34. Georg Simmel, "Adornment," in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisbee and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 2000 [1908], 209). "Besides its formal stylization, the material means of its social purpose is its brilliance. By virtue of this brilliance, its wearer appaas as the centre of a circle of radiation in which every close-by person, every seeing eye, is caught."
35. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 193.
36. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 188.
37. Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (New York: Speed Press, 2014), 22.
38. Ibid, extracted from pages 81 to 95.