This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009, Number 30.

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Small Pleasures in Huge Webs

The Insights of Recent Cultural Theorists by Verena Andermatt Conley

Pondering the encroachment of the state into peoples lives in his LInvention du quotidien: Arts de fairethe invention of everyday life: the art of doing), Michel de Certeau declared that the cutting down of bushes and trees was like the disappearance of words. For the sake of efficiency, the state (the historian concluded) administrated people so as to leave little or no space for play and enjoyment. Always on the side of invisible citizens, Certeau asserted that these people invent ruses to resist state power and to reintroduce pleasure into everyday life. Theirs is a craft of doing small things walking, talking, cooking, reading. Daily practices, he argued, comprise conscious or unconscious tactics aimed at slowing down a vast system built on strategies of acceleration and efficiency. The state, for Certeau, had the role of putting people in their place, that is, using locational means for the ends of control. When finding themselves pigeonholed, people open small spaces that enable them to think and to invent everyday practices invisible to agents or agencies of control, practices that give

pleasure. Media and consumerism Almost three decades later, the world seems to have gone light-years away from the everyday practices Certeau envisioned. The much-maligned state has lost power to transnational companies (many of whom today would prefer to be harnessed by more governmental control). With the help of the media and advertisement, a strategy of inciting large and immensely common pleasure was ushered in, through which a quotient of effectiveness was coded according to the calculable desire to consume. What critic Jean Baudrillard called a tendency of the world toward acceleration and maximization of profit has become a global dominance. What, in the process, happened to the everyday pleasures Certeau equated with the production of space? In an era of speed, instantaneity, and a generalized production of signs, the state no longer manipulates its subjects; now transnational companies and the media are the agents that reduce them to con-

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sumer-citizens and specimens for analysis. Evermore refined processes of market research anticipate, create, and quantify desire. The global reach of the media results in the imposition of the same imaginary (which psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan associated with desire). With the waning of symbolic structures whose coded forms of exchange and ritual in a space endowed with meaning were often anchored in the soil and whose function, according to Lacan, had been in part to safeguard the world unrestrained consumption leads to the plundering and exhaustion of natural resources and the unmitigated production of waste. In spite of ubiquitous warning signs, many humans still believe in the mastery of nature or simply disregard it altogether. With an accelerated circulation of commodities and increased emphasis on money and profit, the real (that Lacan designated to mean the unknown or what cannot be reduced to a sign) has been obliterated. Jean-Franois Lyotard remarked that the bourgeoisie promoted this obliteration ever since it invented the real in the 17th century. After the 1960s and the arrival of what the philosopher called big money, the world has become a table of ciphers. A painting (Lyotard might have wryly been thinking of one by Malcolm Morley) becomes a check. Houses trade their symbolic value for that of exchange. In such a climate, symbolic pleasures are replaced increasingly by material equivalents, from designer clothes to everlarger and ecologically nightmarish McMansions. The erstwhile Marxist distinction between infrastructure and superstructure has given way to various interchangeable regimes of signs that make use-value and exchange-value indistinguishable. When everything is under the sign of profit, an economic regime infiltrates all others, be they juridical, scientific, or even subjective The consumption of signs and the increased frequentation of what anthropologist Marc Aug calls non-places (airports, shopping malls, tourist areas)places not regulated by symbolic relations but by ATM, frequent flyer, or bank cardstransform people into narcissistic and solitary pleasure-seekers engaged in an ever-intensified accumulation of goods and signs or, short of the latter, images of those goods and signs. Recognition replaces experience, while media events and places without human

relations abound. In the process, people lose their existential territorieswhether mental or physicaland their ties to the world. A new social pyramid replaces that which the bourgeoisie constructed a few centuries ago. It consists of a decisionmaking eliteCEOs, administrators, media leaders, military and government officialsengineering the consumption of those at the bottom. Most humans live outside this pyramid altogether. The question, as Bruno Latour reminds us, concerns less how to recover vanishing existential spaces than how to exist in a networked world with the possibility of quasi-instantaneous connections. But this is also a world of widespread poverty, depleted natural resources, and climate change threatening humans, flora, and fauna. In spite of technological achievements and electronic connections, humans interactions among themselves and with the world are not improving. Moral advances are not accompanying technological innovations, to which the violence and conflict all over the clearly attest. Walter Benjamins conclusion to this 1939 expos, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, which serves as an opening to The Arcades Project and argues that the [19th] century was incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order (26), is echoed today in the voices of many critics. Flix Guattari opens The Three Ecologies with the assertion that the Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planets surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating. Kinship networks tend to be reduced to a bare minimum; domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass-media consumption; family and married life are frequently ossified by a sort of standardization of behavior (27). Almost two decades ago, Gilles Deleuze noted that humans have lost the world. They have been dispossessed. How can they find what has been taken from them again? How can they domesticate the world as oikos (house, family) to produce a shift from the current death-laden predicament toward life? Or reorient the current tendency of the world based on accelera-

tion, the maximization of profit, and the exploitation of resources to find pleasures that would not simply be based on the accumulation of accumulation or its corollary, the belief that bigger is better? Otherin the pyramid To answer this urgent ecological question we can begin by saying that to domesticate our oikos beneficently, not only technical adjustments but also changes in mental, social, and natural ecologies are necessary. New ways of thinking, of relating to oneself, and of being in common are essential. To exchange differently in and with the world and to derive pleasure not solely from signs and material goods, a retraining of sensibilities and other forms of intelligence is needed. While a complete separation between disciplines is difficult, and economists and scientists are equally called on to help carry out changes, these changes are even more the responsibility of those who are directly involved with the production of subjectivities or of semiotics of subjectification, be they in education, architecture, art, fashion, cooking, or other fields. This is not to say that changes cannot come from other people, but rather that it is actively the responsibility of all those engaged in these domains to reorient the dominant media-driven subjectivity with (as Flix Guattari aptly put it) its large and deathladen aggregates, its Sartrean in-itselfs (en soi). They have to help transform them into open, precarious, for-itselfs (pour soi) that make possible novel connections in and with the world and that open to life and to a condition of becoming. To do this, those in positions of responsibility need to drive a wedge into the dominant subjectivity under the hypnotic spell of a sleep-inducing media machine. They have to introduce fragments and open small spaces, to produce what Deleuze called vacuoles, sites from which people can begin to think otherwise. It is no longer a question of devising a large, universal project that would lead to a final change like a Marxist cit des fins, but of engaging in small, ongoing, concrete performances in a variety of disciplines and at different sites. These performances will be diverse, affirmative, and open to becomings. Of importance is the construction of new subjectivities and sensibilities; new

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Otheroutside the pyramid In The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau urged his readers to tread lightly, to take pleasure in a world of fragile beauty, starting from small things in everyday life. In his preface to the English edition, he notes that what four or five years earlier he took for a universal theory in retrospect seemed somewhat parochial and even slightly exotic. His argument referred to smaller and more stable European societies that are now extinct. Accelerated transportation and especially electronic transmissions have led to capital flowing all over the world. Financial flows are paralleled by demographic effluvia moving in all directions in an increasingly multipolar world. Problems created by sheer numbers of people may well have contributed to what Rem Koolhaas described as a sense of panic among Chinese architects faced with constructing housing. Those engaged in other disciplines

Future? Are we dreaming up an ecotopia? No doubt. Yet in spite of ubiquitous violence and strife, it continues to be vital to think on the side of life. Humans must rethink how to take lasting pleasure in an enduring oikos. To begin, it is a question of opening small spaces for new affects and new ways of thinking that will, we can hope, lead to other ways of being in common and that, as Jacques Rancire puts it, will help make of the present a site of possibility.
WORKS CONSULTED Marc Aug. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995. tienne Balibar. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Azouz Begag and Christian Delorme. Quartiers sensibles. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gilles Deleuze. Politics, in Negotiations, 19721990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York:

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relations; other ways of living with ones body; engaging in creative exchange with others. New forms of intelligence that do not equate success with sheer monetary profit and that reorder existing and create new, values are needed to construct areas where attention is placed on topography and on local materials and resources. In an era of high tech, older, local technologiesbe they the collection of rainwater in big Western cities or, in the developing world, a return to pre-colonial ways of irrigationare being reintroduced. At stake is the creation of a sustainable environment where concern is for how and where food is grown and what impact certain plants used in clothing such as cotton grown on arid landmay have on the environment. It is no longer a question of mastering nature by growing vast and poorly adapted plant cultures (like orange groves in the desert), or by building unsustainable McMansions with swimming pools and manicured lawns in the desert, but of constructing smaller, more locally adapted places. This shift creates a new sense of place quite different from that which Certeau criticized almost forty years ago. It is not a place of the proper, administrated by the state, or a nonplace of consumerism but a common space constructed by singular subjects and groups. Paradoxically, in an era of globalization, it becomes important again to think and act locally.

educators, artists, or people in the food and fashion industriesmay feel similarly overwhelmed. With demographic pressures in what Koolhaas called a world of exacerbated differences where the majority of people live outside the new social pyramid altogether in a kind of worldwide slum that is predicted to grow exponentially over the next decadecan we still invoke the everyday when many people cannot have flexible fortunes of any kind? For Certeau, and even more so for Henri Lefebvre, the everyday escaped the reach of the state and the general tendency of a consumer world. For them it functioned as a place of escape and renewal, though both conceded that, with the rise of consumerism, this distinction was becoming less and less valid. In a regime of input and output that Baudrillard asserted could not be altered, the everyday too became the site of uneven development. If small pleasures thus disappeared for those who live under the spell of forced consumption, they hardly ever existed for those living on the outside, in what Paul Virilio calls a worldwide banlieue, and who, even in an era of electronic transmission, remain largely invisible. What, we can ask, happens to populations that are part of a forced mobility, those that find themselves in industrial countries as illegal immigrants, or those even more numerous that occupy war-torn zones in fear, violence, and abject poverty? After World War II and during widespread statelessness, Hannah Arendt (according to tienne Balibar) argued for the importance of citizenship and nationality for a human being to exist minimally. Even in a cosmopolitan world where many humans have multiple national and ethnic ties, the majority are still under the jurisdiction of a state. For mental and physical territories to be constructed, some form of citizenship that does not have to go through blood and soil is necessary. For Certeau, ordinary subjects undermine repressive places by opening spacecreating vectors of passageand engaging mobility. Today, with much and often forced mobility, a return to place (no longer defined as the proper but rather as a site on which to exist and envision mental and physical territories) is of crucial importance for allespecially those living outside the pyramid of power. However, before even gaining access to citizenship, other, more basic

rights have to be guaranteed, such as those of water and minimal hygiene. In addition to people who do not have the right to citizenship, nearly a quarter of all humans lack adequate water and hygiene. Their basic needs have to become rightsa right to rightsso that they can access an everyday with its simple pleasures, talking, including on Facebook, watching a movie on ones computer, playing with ones dog, walking. The sociologist Azouz Begag writes that in quartiers sensiblesneighborhoods at riskin the slums, what is needed, are spaces for strolling (as a flneur) and for irrigating ones thoughts. It is no longer a question of big pleasures afforded by big projects, big houses, big anything. As Arundhati Roy, an Indian novelist-turned-activist, points out, big projects are often dumb and doomed to failure. This human right to basics that gives access to a modicum of pleasure can be extended to fauna and flora whose imperilment and extinction also often comes with large projects.

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Columbia University Press, 1995, 169182 Felix Guattari. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press, 2000 (1989). Rem Koolhaas. Pearl River Delta, in Politics, Poetics: Documenta X, the Book, Catherine David, ed. Kassel: Kantz, 1997, 557589. Bruno Latour. Paris, ville invisible. Paris: La Dcouverte, 1998. www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/paris/english/frames.html. Henri Lefebvre. Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. New York: Verso, 1991. Jean-Franois Lyotard. Les immatriaux. Paris: Beaubourg, 1985. Fred Pearce. When The Rivers Run Dry: Water, the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Jacques Rancire. Conversation with Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey. Artforum (March 2007), 57. Arundhati Roy. The Cost of Living. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Marq de Villiers. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Paul Virilio. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

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