II Structures of Atmosphere

The term `interior design' sums up the organizational aspect of the domestic environment, but it does not cover the entire system of the modern living space, which is based on a counterpoint between DESIGN and ATMOSPHERE. In the discourse of advertising the technical need for design is always accompanied by the cultural need for atmosphere. The two structure a single practice; they are two aspects of a single functional system, And both mobilize the values of play and of calculation -- calculation of function in the case of design, calculation of materials, forms and space in the case of atmosphere. [19]

Atmospheric Values: Colour

Traditional Colour

In the traditional system colours have psychological and moral overtones. A person will `like' a particular colour, or have `their' colour. Colour may be dictated by an event, a ceremony, or a social role; alternatively, it may be the characteristic
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of a particular material -- wood, leather, canvas or paper. Above all it remains circumscribed by form; it does not seek contact with other colours, and it is not a free value. Tradition confines colours to its own parochial meanings and draws the strictest of boundary-lines about them. Even in the freer ceremonial of fashion, colours generally derive their significance from outside themselves: they are simply metaphors for fixed cultural meanings. At the most impoverished level, the symbolism of colours gets lost in mere psychological resonance: red is passionate and aggressive, blue a sign of calm, yellow optimistic, and so on; and by this point the language of colours is little different from the languages of flowers, dreams or the signs of the Zodiac.

The traditional treatment of colour negates colour as such, rejects it as a complete value. Indeed, the bourgeois interior reduces it for the most part to discreet `tints' and `shades'. Grey, mauve, garnet, beige -- all the shades assigned to velours, woollens and satins, to the profusion of fabrics, curtains, carpets and hangings, as also to heavier materials and `period' forms, imply a moral refusal of both colour and space. But especially of colour, which is deemed too spectacular, and a threat to inwardness. The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the `chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being: [20] black, white, grey -- whatever registers zero on the colour scale -- is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing.

`Natural' Colour

Colours would not celebrate their release from this anathema until very late. It would be generations before cars and typewriters came in anything but black, and even longer before refrigerators and washbasins broke with their universal whiteness. It was painting that liberated colour, but it still took a very long time for the effects to register in everyday life. The advent of bright red armchairs, sky-blue
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settees, black tables, multicoloured kitchens, living-rooms in two or three different tones, contrasting inside walls, blue or pink façades (not to mention mauve and black underwear) suggests a liberation stemming from the overthrow of a global order. This liberation, moreover, was contemporary with that of the functional object (with the introduction of synthetic materials, which were polymorphous, and of non-traditional objects, which were polyfunctional). The transition, however, did not go smoothly. Colour that loudly announced itself as such soon began to be perceived as over-aggressive, and before long it was excluded from model forms, whether in clothing or in furnishing, in favour of a somewhat relieved return to discreet tones. There is a kind of obscenity of colour which modernity, after exalting it briefly as it did the explosion of form, seems to end up apprehending in much the same way as it apprehends pure functionality: labour should not be discernible anywhere -- neither should instinct be allowed to show its face. The dropping of sharp contrasts and the return to `natural' colours as opposed to the violence of `affected' colours reflects this compromise solution at the level of model objects. At the level of serially produced objects, by contrast, bright colour is always apprehended as a sign of emancipation -- in fact it often compensates for the absence of more fundamental qualities (particularly a lack of space). The discrimination here is obvious: associated with primary values, with functional objects and synthetic materials, bright, `vulgar' colours always tend to predominate in the serial interior. They thus partake of the same anonymity as the functional object: having once represented something approaching a liberation, both have now become signs that are merely traps, raising the banner of freedom but delivering none to direct experience.

Furthermore -- and this is their paradox -- such straightforward and `natural' colours turn out to be neither. They turn out to be nothing but an impossible echo of the state of nature, which explains why they are so aggressive, why they are so naïve -- and why they so very quickly take refuge in an order which, for all that it is no longer the old moral order with its complete rejection of colour, is nevertheless a puritanical order of compromise with nature. This is the order, or reign, of pastels. Clothing, cars, showers, household appliances, plastic surfaces -- nowhere here, it seems, is the `honest' colour that painting once liberated as a
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living force now to be found. Instead we encounter only the pastels, which aspire to be living colours but are in fact merely signs for them, complete with a dash of moralism.

All the same, even though these two compromises, the flight into black and white and the flight into pastels, ultimately voice the same disavowal of pure colour as the direct expression of instinctual life, they do not do so in accordance with the same system. The first is systematized by reference to an unequivocally moral and anti-natural black/white paradigm, whereas the pastel solution answers to a system with a larger register founded not on opposition to nature but on naturalness. Nor do the two systems have the same function. Black (or grey) retains the meaning of distinction, of culture, as opposed to the whole range of vulgar colours. [21] As for white, it remains largely pre-eminent in the `organic' realm: bathrooms, kitchens, sheets, linen -- anything that is bound up with the body and its immediate extensions has for generations been the domain of white, a surgical, virginal colour which distances the body from the dangers of intimacy and tends to neutralize the drives. It is also in this unavoidable area of hygiene and down-to-earth tasks that the use of synthetic materials, such as light metals, formica, nylon, plastiflex, aluminium, and so forth, has experienced its most rapid growth and achieved a dominant position. Of course the lightness and practical utility of these materials have much to do with their success, but the very convenience they offer does not merely lighten the burden of work, it also helps to drain value from this whole basic area. The fluid, simplified lines of our refrigerators or similar machines, with their plastic or artificial lightweight material, operate likewise as a kind of `whiteness' -- as a non-stressed indicator of the presence of these objects that bespeaks the radical omission from our consciousness of the responsibilities they imply, and of bodily functions in general, which are never innocent. Little by little colour is making inroads here, too, but resistance to this development is very deeply felt. In any case, even if kitchens are blue or yellow, even if bathrooms are
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pink (or even black -- a `snobbish' black as a reaction to the former `moral' white), we may still justifiably ask to what nature such colours allude. For even if they do not turn pastel, they do connote a kind of nature, one that has its own history: the `nature' of leisure time and holidays.

It is not `real' nature which suddenly transfigures the atmosphere of daily life, but holidays -- that simulacrum of nature, the reverse side of everyday routine, thriving not on nature but on the Idea of Nature. It is holidays that serve as a model here, holidays whose colours devolve into the primary everyday realm. And it was indeed in the fake natural environment of holidays, with its caravan, tents and camping gear, experienced as a model and as a zone of freedom, that the tendency towards bright colours, to plasticity, to the ephemeral practicality of labour-saving gadgets, and so on, first came to the fore. We began by transplanting our little house into Nature, only to end up bringing the values of leisure and the idea of Nature back home with us. There has been a sort of flight of objects into the sphere of leisure: freedom and the absence of responsibilities are thus inscribed both in colours and in the transitory and insignificant character of materials and forms.

`Functional' Colour

Thus, after a few brief episodes of violent liberation (notably in the world of art, with, in the end, but mild impact upon everyday life -- except, of course, for the spheres of advertising and commerce, where colour's power to corrupt enjoys full rein), colour was immediately taken back in hand by a system in which nature no longer plays any part except as naturalness -- as a mere connotation of nature behind whose screen instinctual values continue to be subtly disavowed. Nevertheless, the very abstractness of these now `free' colours means that they are at last able to play an active role. It is towards this third stage that colour is at present orientating itself so far as model objects are concerned: a stage characterized by colour as an atmospheric value. Certainly an `atmospheric' interplay of this kind is already prefigured in the colours associated with leisure, but these colours still refer too clearly to a system directly experienced, namely holidays and the primary level of everyday life; consequently they are subject to external constraints. In the fully
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fledged system of atmosphere, by contrast, colours obey no principle but that of their own interaction; no longer constrained in any way whether by ethical considerations or by nature, they answer to one imperative only -- the gauging of atmosphere.

Indeed, in a sense we are no longer dealing with colours per se but with more abstract values. The combination, matching and contrast of tones are the real issues when it comes to the relationship between colour and atmosphere. Blue can go with green -- all colours are capable of combination -- but only certain blues with certain greens; furthermore, it is not so much a question of blue and green as one of hot and cold. At the same time, colour is no longer a way of emphasizing each object by setting it off from the decor; colours are now contrasting ranges of shades, their value has less and Jess to do with their sensory qualities, they are often dissociated from their form, and it is their tonal differences that give a room its `rhythm'. Just as modular furniture loses its specific functions so much that at the logical extreme its value resides solely in the positioning of each movable element, so likewise colours lose their unique value, and become relative to each other and to the whole. This is what is meant by describing them as `functional'.

Consider the following descriptions from a practical guide to interior decoration:

The framework of the seats has been painted in the same shade as the walls, while the shade chosen for the upholstery echoes that of the hangings. There is harmony between the cold tones, off-white and blue, but certain touches supply the necessary warm response: the gold frame of the Louis XVI mirror, the light-coloured wood of the table, the parquet floor, and the bright red of the carpets. Red here constitutes a sort of upward movement -- the red of the carpet, the red of the seats, the red of the cushions -- to which is opposed a downward movement in the blues of hangings, settees and chairs. [22]

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A plain matte white background interrupted by great blue surfaces (on the ceiling). White and blue are repeated in the arrangement of the decor: a white marble table, a screen partition. ... A warm touch is supplied by the bright red doors of a low storage unit. In fact we find ourselves in a space handled entirely in plain colours, devoid of any nuances of tone or of any softness (all the softness having taken refuge in the picture on the left), albeit balanced by large areas of white. [23] Here is another example: The little indoor tropical garden is not just protected but also lent rhythm by a slab of black enamelled glass/ (Notice that black and white in these descriptions retain nothing of their traditional value; they have escaped from the white-black polarity and taken on a tactical value within the extended range of all colours.) When one considers the advice to `choose a particular colour because your wall is large or small, because it contains such and such a number of doors, because your furniture is antique or modern, or designed in a European or an exotic tradition, or for some other precise reason', [24] it becomes clear that the third stage we have been discussing is indeed characterized by an objectivity of colour; strictly speaking, colour is now one more or less complex factor among others -- just one element of a solution. Once again, this is what makes colour `functional' -- that is to say, reduced to an abstract conceptual instrument of calculation.

Hot and Cold

So far as colours are concerned, `atmosphere' depends upon a calculated balance between hot and cold tones. This is a fundamental distinction which -- along with a few others (components/seats, [25] design/atmosphere) -- helps to endow the discursive system of furnishing with a high degree of coherence, and thus makes it into a determining category of the overall system of objects. (We shall see that
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this coherence is perhaps merely that of a manifest discourse beneath which a latent discourse is continually deploying its contradictions.) To get back to the warmth of warm tones: this is clearly not a warmth grounded in confidence, intimacy or affection, nor an organic warmth emanating from colours or substances. Warmth of that kind once had its own density and required no opposing cold tones to define it negatively. Nowadays, on the other hand, both warm and cold tones are required to interact, in each ensemble, with structure and form. When we read that `The warmth of its materials lends intimacy to this well-designed bureau', or when we are told of `doors of matte oiled Brazilian rosewood traversed by chrome-plated handles and chairs covered in a buff leatherette that blends them perfectly into this austere and warm ensemble7, we find that warmth is always contrasted with rigour, organization, structure, or something of the sort, and that every `value' is defined by this contrast between two poles. `Functional' warmth is thus a warmth that no longer issues forth from a warm substance, nor from a harmonious juxtaposition of particular objects, but instead arises from the systematic oscillation or abstract synchrony of a perpetual `warm-and-cold' which in reality continually defers any real `warm' feeling. This is a purely signified warmth -- hence one which, by definition, is never realized: a warmth characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source.

Atmospheric Values: Materials

Natural Wood/Cultural Wood

The same sort of analysis applies to materials -- to wood, for example, so sought after today for nostalgic reasons. Wood draws its substance from the earth, it lives and breathes and `labours'. It has its latent warmth; it does not merely reflect, like glass, but burns from within. Time is embedded in its very fibres, which makes it the perfect container, because every content is something we want to rescue from time. Wood has its own odour, it ages, it even has parasites, and so on. In short, it is a material that has being. Think of the notion of `solid oak' -- a living idea for each of us, evoking as it does the succession of generations, massive furniture and ancestral family homes. The question we must ask, however, is
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whether this `warmth' of wood (or likewise the `warmth' of freestone, natural leather, unbleached linen, beaten copper, or any of the elements of the material and maternal dream that now feeds a high-priced nostalgia) still has any meaning.

By now functional substitutes for virtually all organic and natural materials have been found in the shape of plastic and polymorphous substances: wool, cotton, silk and linen are thus all susceptible of replacement by nylon and its countless variants, while wood, stone and metal are giving way to concrete and polystyrene. [26] There can be no question of rejecting this tendency and simply dreaming of the ideal warm and human substance of the objects of former times. The distinction between natural and synthetic substances, just like that between traditional colours and bright colours, is strictly a value judgement. Objectively, substances are simply what they are: there is no such thing as a true or a false, a natural or an artificial substance. How could concrete be somehow less `authentic' than stone? We apprehend old synthetic materials such as paper as altogether natural -- indeed, glass is one of the richest substances we can conceive of. In the end, the inherited nobility of a given material can exist only for a cultural ideology analogous to that of the aristocratic myth itself in the social world -- and even that cultural prejudice is vulnerable to the passage of time.

The point is to understand, apart from the vast horizons opened up on the practical level by these new substances, just how they have changed the `meaning' of the materials we use.

Just as the shift to shades (warm, cold or intermediate) means that colours are stripped of their moral and symbolic status in favour of an abstract quality which makes their systematization and interplay possible, so likewise the manufacture of synthetics means that materials lose their symbolic naturalness and become
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polymorphous, so achieving a higher degree of abstractness which makes possible a universal play of associations among materials, and hence too a transcendence of the formal antithesis between natural and artificial materials. There is thus no longer any difference `in nature' between a Thermoglass partition and a wooden one, between rough concrete and leather: whether they embody `warm' or `cold' values, they all now have exactly the same status as component materials. These materials, though disparate in themselves, are nevertheless homogeneous as cultural signs, and thus susceptible of organization into a coherent system. Their abstractness makes it possible to combine them at will. [27]

The Logic of Atmosphere

This `discourse of atmosphere' concerning colours, substance, volume, space, and so on mobilizes all these elements simultaneously in a great systematic reorganization: it is because furniture now comprises movable elements in a decentralized space, and because it has a correspondingly lighter structure based on assembly and veneers, that there is a case for more `abstract' woods -- teak, mahogany, rosewood or certain Scandinavian woods. [28] And it so happens that the colours of these woods are not traditional either, but lighter or darker variations, often varnished, lacquered, or left deliberately unfinished; the main point, though, is that the colour in question, like the wood itself, is always abstract -- an object of mental manipulation along with everything else. The entire modern environment is thus
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transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely atmosphere, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element. That used to be true for the inconsistent and subjective system of tastes and colours, of de gustibus non est disputandum, but under the present system the success of the whole occurs in the context of the constraints of abstraction and association.

Whether or not you care for teak, for example, you are obliged to acknowledge that its use is consistent with the organization of component elements, that its shade is consistent with a plane surface, hence also with a particular `rhythm' of space, etc., etc. -- and that this is indeed the law of the system. There is nothing at all -- not antiques, not rustic furniture in solid wood, not even precious or craft objects -- that cannot be incorporated into the interactions of the system, thus attesting to the boundless possibilities of such abstract integration. The current proliferation of such objects does not constitute a contradiction in the system: [29] they enter the system precisely as the most `modern' materials and colours, and as atmospheric elements. Only a traditional and fundamentally naive view would find inconsistency in the encounter, on a teak-veneered chest, of a futuristic cube in raw metal and the rotten wood of a sixteenth-century carving. The point is, though, that the consistency here is not the natural consistency of a unified taste but the consistency of a cultural system of signs. Not even a `Provençal' room, not even an authentic Louis XVI drawing-room, can attest to anything beyond a vain nostalgic desire to escape from the modern cultural system: both are just as far removed from the `style' they ape as any formica-topped table or any black-metal and leatherette tubular chair. An exposed ceiling beam is every bit as abstract as a chrome-plated tube or an Emauglas partition. What nostalgia paints as an authentic whole object is still nothing but a combining variant, as is indeed signalled by the language used in speaking of provincial or period `ensembles'. The word `ensemble', closely related to `atmosphere', serves to reintroduce any conceivable element, whatever subjective associations it may carry, into the logic of the system. That this system is affected
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by ideological connotations and latent motives is indisputable, and we shall return to this question later. But it is incontestable, too, that its logic, which is that of a combination of signs, is irreversible and limitless. No object can escape this logic, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity.

A Model Material: Glass

One material sums up the idea of atmosphere and may be thought of as embodying a universal function in the modern environment. That material is glass. Advertising calls it `the material of the future' -- a future which, as we all know, will itself be `transparent'. Glass is thus both the material used and the ideal to be achieved, both end and means. So much for metaphysics. Psychologically speaking, glass in its practical, as in its imaginary uses has many merits. It is the ideal modern recipient: it does not `pick up the taste', it does not change over time as a function of its content, as do wood and metal, nor does it shroud that content in mystery. Glass eliminates all confusion in short order, and does not conduct heat. Fundamentally it is less a recipient than an isolator -- the miracle of a rigid fluid -- a content that is also a container, and hence the basis of a transparency between the two: a kind of transcendence which, as we have seen, is the first priority in the creation of atmosphere. Moreover, glass implies a symbolism of access to a secondary state of consciousness, and at the same time it is ranked symbolically at zero level on the scale of materials. Its symbolism is one of solidification -- hence of abstractness. This abstractness opens the door to the abstractness of the inner world: the crystal of madness; to the abstractness of the future: the clairvoyant's crystal ball; and to the abstractness of nature: the other worlds to which the eye gains entry via microscope or telescope. And certainly, with its indestructibility, immunity to decay, colourlessness, odourlessness, and so on, glass exists at a sort of zero level of matter: glass is to matter as a vacuum is to air. We have already noted the operation of the values of play and calculation, combined with abstraction, apropos of the system of atmosphere. Above all, though, glass is the most effective conceivable material expression of the fundamental ambiguity of `atmosphere': the fact that it is at once proximity and distance, intimacy and the refusal of intimacy, communication and non-communication.
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communication. Whether as packaging, window or partition, glass is the basis of a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch. The message is universal and abstract. A shop window is at once magical and frustrating -- the strategy of advertising in epitome. The transparency of jars containing food products implies a formal satisfaction, a kind of visual collusion, yet basically the relationship is one of exclusion. Glass works exactly like atmosphere in that it allows nothing but the sign of its content to emerge, in that it interposes itself in its transparency just as the system of atmosphere does in its abstract consistency, between the materiality of things and the materiality of needs. Not to mention glass's cardinal virtue, which is of a moral order: its purity, reliability and objectivity, along with all those connotations of hygiene and prophylaxis which make it truly the material of the future -- a future, after all, that is to be one of disavowal of the body, and of the primary and organic functions, in the name of a radiant and functional objectivity (of which hygiene is the moral version for the body).

Live in a garden in close intimacy with nature -- experience the charm of every season totally, without giving up the comforts of a modern living space. This is the new heaven on earth, the grace bestowed by houses with picture windows.

Glass tile or block set in concrete makes it possible to construct translucent walls, partitions, arches and ceilings that are as strong as if they were built of stone. Such `transpartitions' allow the passage of light, which is thus able freely to permeate the whole house. But, since the glass used is not see-through, the privacy of each room is preserved.

Clearly the age-old symbolism of the `house of glass' is still with us, even though in the modern version it has lost much of its sublime aspect. The distinction accorded transcendence has given way to that accorded atmosphere (just as in the case of mirrors). Glass facilitates faster communication between inside and outside, yet at the same time it sets up an invisible but material caesura which prevents such communication from becoming a real opening onto the world. Indeed, the modern `house of
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glass' does not open onto the outside at all; instead it is the outside world, nature, landscape, that penetrates, thanks to glass and its abstractness, into the intimate or private realm inside, and there `plays freely' as a component of atmosphere. The whole world thus becomes integrated as spectacle into the domestic universe. [30]

The Man of Relationship and Atmosphere

From the foregoing account of colours and materials we may already draw a number of conclusions. The systematic alternation between hot and cold is fundamentally a defining trait of the concept of `atmosphere' itself, for atmosphere is always both warmth and distance.

The `atmospheric' interior is designed to permit the same alternation between warmth and non-warmth, between intimacy and distance, to operate not only between the objects that comprise it but also between the human beings who live in it. Friend or relative, family or customer -- some relationship is always required, but it is supposed to remain mobile and `functional'; in other words, the aim is that relating should be possible at every instant, but its subjective aspects should no longer be problematic, and the various relationships should therefore be freely
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interchangeable. Such is the nature of functional relationships, from which desire is (in theory) absent having been neutralized for the sake of atmosphere. [31] This, however, is where ambiguity begins. [32]

Seats

This ambiguity is attested to by the objects that best express the relationship of atmosphere: seats, which we see continually alternating in the system of modern furnishing with modular components. These antithetical kinds of objects concretize the opposition between the concepts of interior design and atmosphere (although they do not constitute the sole underpinnings of that opposition).

The minimal function of the countless seats that fill the furnishing and home-decorating magazines is unquestionably to permit people to sit down: to sit down to rest, or sit down at a table to eat. But chairs no longer gravitate towards a table; these days seats take on their own meaning, while tables -- typically low coffee tables -- are subordinate to them. This meaning, moreover, refers not to the posture of the body but to the position of interlocutors relative to each other. The general arrangement of the seating and slight changes in people's positions in the course of an evening may be said, for example, to constitute a discourse in themselves. Modern seating -- pouf or settee, wall-sofa or easy chair -- invariably lays the stress on sociability and conversation, promoting a sort of all-purpose position, appropriate to the modern social human being, which de-emphasizes everything in the sitting posture that suggests confrontation. No more beds for lying in, no more chairs for sitting at [33] -- instead, `functional' seats which treat all positions, and
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hence all human relationships, as a free synthesis. All moral overtones are gone: one no longer sits opposite anyone. It is impossible to become angry in such seats, or to argue, or to seek to persuade. They dictate a relaxed social interaction which makes no demands, which is open-ended but above all open to play. From their depths one is no longer obliged to meet another person's gaze or to look directly at them: these seats are so designed that one's eyes are entitled simply to look people over in a general way for their positioning and depth combine to keep everyone's eye level `naturally' at half the usual altitude -- at an ill-defined elevation which is also that of the flow of words. Seats of this kind may well respond to a basic current concern, namely the wish never to be alone -- but never to be face to face with another person either. The body is invited to relax, but it is above all the gaze, with all its perils, that must be put out to grass. Even as modern society frees us in large measure from the promiscuity of primary functions, it exacerbates the promiscuity of secondary ones, especially that of the gaze and its tragic dimension. Accordingly just as primary demands are veiled, so likewise every effort is made to relieve social intercourse of all its rough edges, contradictoriness and, ultimately, obscenity -- what is obscene here being the direct play of aggression and desire in the gaze.

The binary opposition between `components' and `seats' thus amounts to a complete system: modular components are the vehicle of modern man's organizing discourse, while from the depths of his chairs he proffers a discourse of relationship. [34] So `man the interior designer' is always coupled with the `man of relationship and atmosphere', and the two together give us `functional man'.
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Cultural Connotation and Censorship

For seats, then, but also for all other objects, cultural connotation is now as essential a requirement as calculation. In earlier times furniture stated its function. The fundamental nurturing function of the house found unequivocal expression in tables and sideboards that were heavy, round-bellied -- overloaded with connotations of motherhood. Furniture whose function was taboo was flatly withdrawn from view, as in the case of a bed concealed in an alcove. As for the bed in the middle of the room, it was even more eloquent in its embodiment of bourgeois marriage (and not, of course, of sexuality). Today the bed is no more -- in its place we have only couches, divans, settees and banquettes. Some `beds' now disappear into the wall, bowing not to moral stricture but to abstract logic. [35] Tables are low, no longer centrally placed, weightless. The whole kitchen has lost its culinary function and is now a functional laboratory. This is progress, moreover, because the traditional environment, for all its directness, was an environment of moral obsession that bespoke the material difficulty of living. We do have more freedom in the modern interior, but this freedom is accompanied by a subtler formalism and a new moralism: everything here indicates the obligatory shift from eating, sleeping and procreating to smoking, drinking, entertaining, discussing, looking and reading. Visceral functions have given way to functions determined by culture. The sideboard used to hold linen, crockery or food; the functional elements of today house books, knick-knacks, a cocktail bar, or nothing at all. The term `refined' -- which, like `functional', is a catchword of manipulated interior decoration -- sums up this cultural constraint perfectly. Rooms have traded in the symbols of family for signs of social relationship. Once a solemn backdrop for affection, they are
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now an equally ritualistic decor of reception. A close reading of modern house-furnishings reveals that they converse among themselves with an ease in every way comparable to that of the dinner guests, that they mingle and drift apart with the very same freedom, and that they convey the same message: namely, that it is quite possible to live without working.

Of course, culture has always played the ideological role of pacifier, sublimating tensions associated with functional imperatives and answering the need for being to take on recognizable form beyond the material reality and conflicts of the world. Such a form -- which attests, despite everything, to the existence of a purpose, and ensures the direct memory of a fundamental security -- is no doubt even more urgently needed in a technological civilization. It is just that, like the reality it simultaneously reflects and disavows, this form is now being systematized. Systematic technicity calls forth systematic cultural connotation. And this systematic cultural connotation at the level of objects is what lam calling ATMOSPHERE.

Atmospheric Values: Gestural Systems and Forms

When we come, in our continuing analysis of atmospheric values, to the consideration of `functional' forms (variously described as `contoured', `dynamic', etc.), we find that the `stylization' of such forms cannot be disentangled from the stylization of the human gestural systems which correspond to them. The style of such gestural systems always implies the suppression of muscular energy, of labour. Primary7 functions are overwritten by secondary ones, by relationship and calculation, and instinctual drives give way to cultural connotation. All these tendencies are mediated practically and historically, at the level of objects, by the fundamental supersession of the gestural system of effort, by the great shift from a universal gestural system of labour to a universal gestural system of control. This is the turning-point at which a status enjoyed by objects for millennia, their anthropomorphic status, is definitively terminated -- destroyed by the new abstractness of energy sources.
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The Traditional Gestural System: Effort

So long as the energy applied was muscular in character, and hence immediate and contingent, the tool remained embedded in human relations, rich symbolically speaking but not particularly well designed structurally. The adoption of animals as a source of power did not represent a qualitative change: for entire civilizations human and animal power were essentially on a par. The unchanging nature of the energy employed meant that tools, too, underwent little change. Thus the status of the tool or manual object varied hardly at all over the centuries. Man's profound gestural relationship to objects, which epitomizes his integration into the world, into social structures, can be a highly fulfilling one, and this fulfilment is discernible in the beauty -- the `style' -- of the relationship in its reciprocity. It nevertheless constitutes a constraint which, in tandem with the constraints imposed by social structures, stands in the way of real productivity. We cannot but admire scythes, baskets, pitchers or ploughs, amalgams of gestures and forces, of symbols and functions, decorated and stylized by human energy and shaped by the forms of the human body, by the exertions they imply and by the matter they transform; yet the magnificence of such conformities remains subordinate to the limitations of the relationship in question. Man is not free with respect to these objects, nor are these objects free with respect to man. A revolution in energy sources had to occur -- long - range practical control had to become possible, along with the storage and measurement of a newly mobile energy -- before man and object could be drawn into a fresh, objective dialogue, into a conflict-laden dialectic which had never been implicit in the reciprocal goal-directedness of their former constrained relationship. Only then could man embark upon an objective process of socíal development and the object likewise tend in the direction of its own truth, that is, its functionality multiplied by the amount of energy released.

For the real object is the functional object. Revolutions in the field of energy entail the replacement of energy symbiosis and symbolic compliance by the rationality of technology and the (relative) rationality of the reign of production. By the same token, man's relationship to objects becomes subject to a social dialectic which is basically that of the forces of production. What interests us here, however, is the impact of this upheaval on the realm of everyday life.
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The Functional Gestural System: Control

We know from our practical experience how very far the mediation of gestures between man and things has been stretched: household appliances, cars, gadgetry, heating, lighting, communications and transportation systems -- all require no more than minimal energy and action in order to function properly. Often a slight motion of hand or eye suffices; no dexterity is called for -- at the most, reflexes. The domestic world, almost as much as the world of work, is governed by regular gestures of control and remote control. Buttons, levers, handles, pedals (even nothing at all- as when one passes in front of a photo-electric cell) have thus replaced pressure, percussion, impact or balance achieved by means of the body the intensity and distribution of force/ and the abilities of the hand (from which little more than quickness is now asked). A prehension of objects involving the whole body has given way to simple contact (of hand or foot) and simple surveillance (by the eye or, occasionally, by the ear), In other words, only man's `extremities' now have an active part to play in the functional environment.

The liberating abstractness of energy sources is thus accompanied by a concomitant abstractness of human praxis with respect to objects. What is called for here is less a neuromuscular praxis than what Pierre Naville describes as a system of cerebro-sensory vigilance. But such a system cannot be self-sufficient: the total abstractness of remote action must be mitigated by what I refer to as a gestural system of control (by hand, eye, etc.). [36] There is a sense in which this minimal gestural system is essential, for without it all this abstract power would become meaningless. Man has to be reassured about his power by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one. So the gestural system of control must be deemed indispensable -- not to make the system work technically, for more
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advanced technology could (and no doubt will) make it unnecessary, but, rather, to make that system work psychologically.

A New Operational Field

Since the energy of objects is abstract, their functionality is limitless: just as there is now scarcely any substance that has no plastic equivalent, so there is no gesture that cannot be replaced by technology. The simplest of mechanisms is liable to replace and subsume a whole set of gestures, concentrating their effectiveness and becoming independent not only of the agent but also of the material acted upon. Form and utility of the tool, raw material, energy applied -- all these factors have changed. Thus the matter dealt with has undergone infinite differentiation -- even to the point of disappearing altogether: that processed by a radio, for example, is information. The transformation of energy has entailed that of both materials and functions, for technology is not content merely to encapsulate earlier gestures, it also invents new operations, and above all splits up the operational field into completely different functions or sets of functions. Man's abstract relationship to his (technical) objects, his `spectacular alienation', is thus less a matter of his gestures having been replaced than of the abstractness of the very way in which functions have been split up, and the impossibility of any analogical apprehension of this splitting-up by reference to earlier gestures. [37] Only an abstract (never an unmediated) intelligence can adapt to the new technical structures; meanwhile, man himself has yet to adapt to the increasingly exclusive use of these higher functions of intelligence and calculation. Resistance here has deep roots, and creates an irreparable delay. Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus
[p. 51]
appropriating his actions. Take the washing machine, for instance. In its form and operation it has no clear relationship to the clothes washed. The whole operation of washing has lost its specificity in space and time; it is a minimal intervention, a timed procedure in which the water itself is no more than an abstract vehicle for detergent chemicals. Functionally speaking, the washing machine belongs, therefore, to a relational field utterly different from that of the old-fashioned washboard or washtub -- a functional field of associations which is no longer coextensive with other objective operations, with the refrigerator, with the television, with the components of interior design, or with the automobile. Traditional tools, by contrast, belonged to a field of practical mediation between the material to be transformed and the person doing the transforming. We have thus moved from the depth of a vertical field to the extension of a horizontal one.

Just as the various parts of an object's mechanism have structure, so the various technical objects tend, independently of man, to become organized by themselves, to refer to one another in the uniformity of their simplified praxis, and thus come to constitute an articulated order, pursuing its own mode of technological development, wherein man's role does not go beyond a mechanical control which may well ultimately be taken over by the machine itself.

Miniaturization

In place of the continuous (but finite) space that gestures create for their purposes around the traditional object, the technical object institutes discontinuous and unlimited extension. The principle that regulates this new extension, this functional dimension, is the requirement that organization be maximized and communication optimized. Consequently, technological progress is now accompanied by an ever stronger tendency towards the miniaturization of technical objects.

Freed now from the need to refer to the human scale, to the `life-size', and ever more taken up by the complexity of messages, mechanisms tend increasingly, on the model of the brain, towards an irreversible concentration of their structures, towards the quintessentially microcosmic. [38] After the Promethean expansion of a
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technology striving to occupy the whole world, the entirety of space, we are now entering the era of a technology that works on the world `in depth', so to speak. The reign of electronics and cybernetics means that efficiency freed from the shackles of gestural space, is henceforward dependent upon a saturation of minimal extension, governing a maximized field, which is without common measure with sensory experience. [39]

Stylization, Manipulability, Envelopment

The stylization of forms is invariably a corollary of the growing autonomy of the functional world and the optimized organization of space in its extension. Forms themselves also become more autonomous as they diverge further and further from a morphology founded on the human body and on the physical effort exerted by that body, yet they continue to allude thereto in one way or another. They organize themselves independently, but their former relationship to primary functions subsists in the abstractness of the sign: this is their connotation. Consider the hand, whose importance for the gestural system of control we have already mentioned. The first aim of all modern objects is manipulability (`manipulable' being virtually synonymous with `functional'). But just what is the nature of the `hand' which thus
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determines the forms of these objects? Certainly no longer the prehensile organ that focuses effort: rather, nothing more than the abstract sign of manipulability, to which buttons, handles, and so on are all the better suited in that the operation concerned no longer calls for manual labour and, indeed, takes place elsewhere. Here we rediscover (though now on the morphological plane) the myth of naturalness of which we spoke above: the human body delegates no more than the signs of its presence to objects whose functioning, in any case, is independent from now on. At the very most it delegates its `extremities', while objects, for their part, are `contoured' in accordance with an abstract morphological meaning. There is a collusion of forms here which no longer refers to man save by way of allusion. [40] It is in this sense only that the object's form `weds' the hand, that Airborne's armchair (of which more later) `weds' the shape of your body: one form adapts to another. The traditional object or tool, by contrast, was not in any way `wedded' to human forms; what it wedded was human physical effort and human gestures -- indeed, the human body imposed itself upon that tool in order to carry out a material task. Today the human body would seem to be present only as the abstract justification for the finished form of the functional object. Functionality is thus no longer the imposition of a real task, but simply the adaptation of one form to another (as of handle to hand) and the consequent supersession or omission of the actual processes of work.

Thus freed from practical functions and from the human gestural system, forms become purely relative with respect both to one another and to the space to which they lend `rhythm'. This is how we now define the `style' of objects: inasmuch as their mechanism is virtual or taken for granted (a few simple gestures evoke its power without making it manifest, while the effective physical embodiment of the object remains indecipherable), it is only their form which is present -- which wraps that mechanism in its perfection and confines it within its contours, cloaking and eliminating an energy that has been made into an abstraction and, as it were, crystallized. As in the development of some animal species, the form is externalized, enclosing the object in a sort of carapace. Fluid, transitive, enveloping, it unifies appearances by transcending the alarming discontinuity of the various
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mechanisms involved and replacing it with a coherent whole. A functional atmosphere implies a continuous closure of line (also of material -- of chrome, enamel or plastic) which restores the unity of a world whose profound equilibrium was formerly guaranteed by human gestures. We are heading towards an absolutism of forms: only the form is called for, only the form is read, and at the deepest level it is the functionality of forms that defines `style'.

The End of the Symbolic Dimension

The fact is that this formal achievement papers over an essential lack; our technological civilization tries to use the universal transitivity of form as a means of compensating for the disappearance of the symbolic relationship associated with the traditional gestural system of work, as a way of making up for the unreality, the symbolic void, of our power. [41]

For gestural mediation is by no means confined to the practical realm, and the energy invested in physical effort is not merely muscular and nervous. Gestures and physical effort are also the vectors of a whole phallic symbolism, as deployed, for example, in such notions as penetration, resistance, moulding or rubbing. The rhythm of the sexual act is the prototype of all rhythmical gestures, and all technological praxis is overdetermined by it. [42] Because they press the whole body into the service of effort and accomplishment, traditional objects and tools acquire something of the deep libidinal cathexis of sexual exchange (as, at another level, do
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dance and ritual). [43] But of course all this is discouraged, demobilized, by the advent of the technical object. Everything once sublimated -- and hence cathected symbolically -- in the gestural system of work is now repressed. No vestige remains in our technical utilities of the theatrical and anarchic outgrowths of the objects of earlier times, which showed their age, and made no secret of the work they did. Spades and pitchers were living phalluses or vaginas in whose `obscenity' the instinctual dynamics of human beings lay open to a symbolic reading. [44] The whole gestural system of work was also obscene, in sharp contrast to the miniaturized and abstract gestural system of control to which it has now been reduced. The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic `whiteness' of our perfect functional objects. Thus the handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes `contouring' -- the term is typical in its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual -- merely manipulable. At that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his power.

The Abstractness of Power

Man's technical power can thus no longer be mediated, for it has no common measure with the human being and the human body. Nor, by extension, can it any longer be symbolized: functional forms can do no more than connote it. Certainly they overburden it with meaning in their absolute consistency (aerodynamism, manipulability automaticity, etc.), but at the same time they are formal expressions
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of the void that separates us from our power; in a sense they are the ritual that accompanies the miracle-working of the modern world. They are the signs of our power, then, but also testimony to our irresponsibility with respect to that power. It is here, perhaps, that we should seek the reason for the morose technical satisfaction to which initial euphoria over mechanical achievement has so quickly given way, for the peculiar anxiety that takes hold of all beneficiaries of the wonders of the object, of obligatory non-involvement, and of the passively observed spectacle of their own power. The uselessness of habitual gestures and the breakdown of everyday routines founded on movements of the body have a profound psychophysiological impact. Indeed, a genuine revolution has taken place on the everyday plane: objects have now become more complex than human behaviour relative to them. Objects are more and more highly differentiated -- our gestures less and less so. To put it another way: objects are no longer surrounded by the theatre of gesture in which they used to be simply the various roles; instead their emphatic goal-directedness has very nearly turned them into the actors in a global process in which man is merely the role, or the spectator.

There is a moral to be drawn from the following little tale. We are in the eighteenth century. An illusionist well versed in clockwork has devised an automaton. An automaton so perfect, with movements so fluid and natural, that when the illusionist and his creation appear on the stage together, the audience cannot tell which is which. The illusionist then finds himself obliged to make his own gestures mechanical, and -- in what is really the pinnacle of his art -- to alter his own appearance slightly so as to give his show its full meaning; the spectators would eventually chafe if they were left in doubt as to which of the two figures was `real', and the neatest solution is that they should take the man for the machine, and vice versa...

This story provides a good illustration of a familiar fatal relationship to technology even though in the case of modern reality we do not awake to the applause of an audience delighted to have been so thoroughly duped; a good analogy for a society with a technical apparatus so highly perfected that it appears to be a `synthetic' gestural system superior to the traditional system, a sovereign projection of fully realized mental structures. For the time being the human gesture
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is still alone capable of supplying the precision and flexibility demanded by certain tasks, but there is no reason to assume that the unceasing forward march of techne will not eventually achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction. It was already apparent to Lewis Mumford that `the machine leads to a lapse of function which is but one step away from paralysis'. [45] This is no longer a mechanistic hypothesis but reality as directly experienced: the behaviour that technical objects impose is a broken-up sequence of impoverished gestures, of sign-gestures bereft of rhythm. It is rather like what happens to the illusionist of the story who, in response to the perfection of his machine, is led to dismantle and mechanize himself. The coherence of his own structural projection thus relegates man to the inchoate. In the face of the functional object the human being becomes dysfunctional, irrational and subjective: an empty form, open therefore to the mythology of the functional, to projected phantasies stemming from the stupefying efficiency of the outside world.

The Functionalist Myth

For the concrete dynamic of effort has not disappeared completely into the abstraction of the mechanisms and gestures of control. It has been internalized as the mental dynamic of a functionalist myth: the myth of the possibility of a totally functional world of which every present-day technical object is already a sign. The repressed gestural system is thus transformed into myth, projection, transcendence. No sooner do we lose sight of the route taken by energy, feel energy to be intrinsic to the object, become the non-responsible beneficiaries of an absence (or nearabsence) of any need for gesture and physical effort, than we are surely justified in believing -- indeed, are obliged to believe -- in an absolute and limitless functionality, in efficacy as the virtue of signs. Something is revived here of the ancient habit, prevalent in a world of magic, of inferring reality from signs. `Part of
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the feeling of the efficacy of primitive magic has survived in the unconditional belief in progress', writes Gilbert Simondon. [46] This applies not only to technological society in a global sense but also -- confusedly but tenaciously -- to the everyday environment, where the most insignificant of gadgets may be the focal point of a techno-mythological realm of power. The way objects are used in everyday life implies an almost authoritarian set of assumptions about the world. And what the technical object bespeaks, no longer requiring anything more than our formal participation, is a world without effort, an abstract and completely mobile energy, and the total efficacy of sign-gestures. [47]

Functional Form: The Lighter

All this is exemplified in the stylized fluidity of `functional' forms. It is precisely this mental dynamic, this simulacrum of a lost symbolic relationship, that such forms connote in their striving to reinvent a teleology from signs alone. Consider the lighter shaped like a pebble which has been successfully promoted by the advertisers in the last few years. Oblong, elliptical and asymmetrical in form, it is described as `highly functional' -- not that it is better than any other lighter for lighting cigarettes, but because it is `perfectly shaped to fit into the palm of the hand'. `The sea has polished it to the form of the hand': it is in a finished state. Its functionality resides not in its ability to light but in its manipulability. It is as though its form was predisposed by nature (the sea) for manipulation. This new teleonomy constitutes the rhetoric of this object. The connotation here is twofold: though it is an industrial product, this lighter is supposed to have retrieved one of the qualities of the craft object in that its form is an extension of the human gesture and the human body; meanwhile, the allusion to the sea takes us into the realm of a mythical nature itself culturalized as a function of man and perfectly adapted to
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man's every last desire: the sea plays the cultural role of polisher -- an instance of nature's sublime craftsmanship. [48] The action of sea on stone is thus echoed by the hand creating fire; the lighter becomes a miraculous flint, and a prehistoric and craftsmanly purposiveness comes into play in the very practical essence of an industrial object.

Formal Connotation: Tail Fins

There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins. For Vance Packard these perfectly symbolized the American obsession with consumer goods. [49] They have other meanings, too: scarcely had it emancipated itself from the forms of earlier kinds of vehicles than the automobile-object began connoting nothing more than the result so achieved -- that is to say nothing more than itself as a victorious function. We thus witnessed a veritable triumphalism on the part of the object: the car's fins became the sign of victory over space -- and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relationship to that victory (indeed, if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome). Concrete technical mobility was over-signified here as absolute fluidity. Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. They suggested a miraculous automatism, a sort of grace. It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord, after the fashion of a higher organism. The engine was the real efficient principle, the fins the imaginary one. Such interplay between the spontaneous and the transcendent efficacy of the object calls immediately for nature symbols: cars sprout fins and are encased in fuselages -- features that in other contexts are functional; first they appropriate the characteristics of the aeroplane, which is a model object relative to space, then they proceed to borrow directly from nature -- from sharks, birds, and so on.
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These days connotations of the natural have shifted to a different register. Formerly we were treated to a flood of motifs from the vegetable kingdom which, as a way of naturalizing them, submerged objects and even machines in signs of the fruits of the earth. [50] Now, by contrast, we are seeing the emergence of a systematization based on fluidity that seeks connotations no longer in earth or flora,, which are static elements, but instead in air and water, which are fluid ones, as also in the dynamic world of animals. Despite this shift from organic to fluid, however, the modern version of naturalness does still refer to nature: astructural, inessential features such as the tail fin still lend natural connotations to technical objects.

It follows that such connotation is allegorical in character. When a fixed structure is invaded by astructural elements, when the object itself is overwhelmed by a formal detail, the true function is no longer anything but a pretext, and the form does no more than signify the idea of the function. In other words, the form has become allegorical. Tail fins are our modern allegory. We may have no more muses, no more flowers, but we do have fins on our cars and lighters polished by the sea. It is through allegory, moreover, that the discourse of the unconscious makes itself heard. The deep-rooted phantasy of speed finds expression in tail fins, but it does so in an allusive and regressive manner. For while speed has a phallic character, the speed evoked by tail fins is merely formal, fixed, and, as it were, visually edible. Speed so apprehended is no longer the result of an active process but, rather, the result of pleasure taken in speed-in-effigy, so to speak -- the final, passive state of an energy completely degraded to the level of a pure sign, to a level where unconscious desire is forever chewing over an arrested discourse.

Thus formal connotation is indeed tantamount to the imposition of a censorship. Behind the functional self-realization of forms, traditional phallic symbolism has fallen apart: on the one hand this system has become abstract, a simulacrum of power (mechanism being concealed or indecipherable); at the same time, regressively and narcissistically, it is content to let itself be enveloped by forms and their `functionality'.
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Form as Camouflage

A clearer picture thus begins to emerge of the way in which forms discourse, and of the orientation of that discourse. Inasmuch as forms are relative to one another, and continually refer to other, homologous forms, they present the aspect of a finished discourse -- the optimal realization of an essence of man and an essence of the world. This discourse is never innocent, however: the articulation of forms among themselves always conceals another, indirect discourse. Thus the form of the lighter relates to the form of the hand, but only by way of the sea, which `has polished it'; and a car's tail fins relate to the distance covered only by way of the aeroplane, the shark, and so on. More precisely it is the idea of the sea, the aeroplane or the shark that mediates. It is the Idea of Nature which, in its myriad forms (animal or vegetable elements, the human body, space itself [51] ), everywhere becomes involved in the articulation of forms. And to the extent that those forms constitute a system and thus re-create a kind of internal purposiveness, their reciprocal connotations are `natural' -- for nature remains the ideal point of reference of all goal-directedness.

`Vulgar' objects -- objects that are nothing more than their function -- embody no such purposiveness. In their case there is no justification for speaking of `atmosphere', merely of environment. For a good while attempts were nevertheless made to endow them with a crude purposiveness: sewing machines were decorated with flowers, and it is not so long since Cocteau and Buffet could be found `dressing up' refrigerators. Alternatively, if it proved impossible to `naturalize' them, their existence would simply be concealed. After a rather brief period during which
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machines and technology flaunted their practical nature in obscene fashion out of sheer pride at their recent emancipation, the modesty that now reigns strives vigorously to veil all the practical functions of things. We are told that `oil heating, once installed, is absolutely invisible'. Or: `Though it is indispensable, the garage is not supposed to catch the eye from anywhere in the garden. So it has been hidden beneath a rockery. Alpine flowers cover its concrete roof, and access to the main house from the garage is via a little door concealed in the rockery.'

Naturalization, concealment, superimposition, décor -- we are surrounded by objects whose form comes into play as a false answer to the self-contradictory manner in which the object is experienced. Recently disparities of décor have given way to subtler solutions. The connotation of nature, however, embedded as it is in the very discourse of forms, is still always present.

The naturalizing tendency spontaneously assumes a burden of moral and psychological meanings. Here the lexicon of advertising is telling. In this discourse a whole battery of emotionally laden words such as `warmth', `intimacy', `radiance' and `honesty' -- a whole rhetoric of `natural' values -- goes hand in hand with the careful calculation of forms and the promotion of `functional style'. All the talk of warmth, honesty or faithfulness bears eloquent witness to the dubiousness of a system in which long-lost traditional values reappear as signs, in exactly the same way as the signs of shark, space or sea appeared in our earlier examples. Clearly one cannot properly speak of `hypocrisy' here. But surely this systematic, homogeneous and functional world, with its colours, materials and forms, which at every moment, though it does not actually negate them, does disavow, deny and omit drives, desires, and all the explosive force of the instinctual life [52] -- surely this, too, is a moral -- even a hyper-moral -- world? Hypocrisy in its modern version consists not in concealing the obscenity of nature but, rather, in being satisfied (or attempting to be satisfied) by the inoffensive naturalness of signs.

II: Structures of Atmosphere

Note from page 30: 11. To the extent that arrangement involves dealing with space, it too may be considered a component of atmosphere.

Note from page 31: 12. `Loud' colours are meant to strike the eye. If you wear a red suit, you are more than naked -- you become a pure object with no inward reality. The fact that women's tailored suits tend to be in bright colours is a reflection of the social status of women as objects.

Note from page 33: 13. Already, however, there are quite a few cars that are simply no longer available in black; apart from mourning or other ceremonial uses, black has almost completely disappeared from American life (except where it is brought back as a combining element).

Note from page 35: 14. Betty Pepys, Le. guide pratique de la decoration, p. 163.

Note from page 36: 15. Ibid, p. 179.

Note from page 36: 16. Ibid., p. 191.

Note from page 36: 17. See below, pp. 44 ff.

Note from page 38: 18. This development at least partially realizes the substantialist myth which, beginning in the sixteenth century, informed the stucco and the worldly demiurgy of the baroque style: the notion that the whole world could be cast from a single ready-made material. This substantialist myth is one aspect of the functionalist myth that I discuss elsewhere, and the equivalent on the material plane of automatism on the functional one. The idea is that a `machine of machines' would replace all human gestures and institute a synthetic universe. It should be borne in mind, however, that the `substantialist' dream is the most primitive and repressive aspect of the myth as a whole, for it continues to enshrine a pre-mechanist alchemy of transubstantiation.

Note from page 39: 19. And this is the difference, for instance, between the `solid oak' of old and the present-day use of teak. Teak is not fundamentally distinct from oak in respect of origin, exoticism or cost; it is its use in the creation of atmosphere which means that it is no longer a primary natural material, dense and warm, but, rather, a mere cultural sign of such warmth, and by virtue of that fact reinstated qua sign, like so many other `noble' materials, in the system of the modern interior: no longer wood-as-material but wood-as-component. And now, instead of the quality of presence, it has atmospheric value.

Note from page 39: 20. Certainly these woods are technically better suited than oak to the needs of veneering and assembling. It must also be said that exoticism plays the same role here as the idea of holidays does in the use of bright colours; it evokes the myth of an escape via `naturalness'. The essential point, however, is that for all these reasons these woods are `secondary' woods, embodying a cultural abstraction that enables them to partake of the logic of the system.

Note from page 40: 21. It does indicate a shortcoming of the system -- but a successfully integrated one. On this point, see the discussion of antiques below.

Note from page 43: 22. The ambiguity of glass becomes especially clear when we shift our focus from living-spaces to consumption and packaging -- areas where its use is ever on the increase. Here too glass has all the desirable qualities: it protects the product against deterioration, letting nothing in but the appraising glance. `To contain the product properly and let it be seen': a perfect definition of the goal of packaging. Mouldable to any form, glass offers unlimited options from the aesthetic point of view. We may confidently expect that before long it will be used to `present' fruit and vegetables, ensuring that they remain as fresh as the morning dew. Very likely it will soon be enclosing even ordinary steaks with its transparent sheath. Invisible yet ubiquitous, it will constitute the ideal analogue of a more beautiful and limpidly clear life. Further, whatever purpose it may serve, glass can never become true refuse because it is without odour. It is a `noble' material. All the same, the consumer is invited to throw it out after using it: `No deposit -- no return'. Glass thus cloaks the purchase in its `indestructible' prestige -- yet must be destroyed immediately. Is there a contradiction here? Not really, because glass is still playing its part as a component of atmosphere, but in this case `atmosphere' has attained its full economic meaning, that of packaging. Glass sells things, it is functional in that sense, but it must also be consumed itself and, indeed, consumed at an accelerated rate. The psychological function of glass (its transparency and purity) is thus totally recuperated and submerged by its economic function. The sublime ends up as a motivation to buy.

Note from page 44: 23. Even sexuality itself in its modern conception is subsumed by the functional relationship. As distinct from sensuality, which is warm and instinctual, sexuality is at once HOT AND COLD-- by virtue of this it ceases to be a passion and becomes nothing but an atmospheric value.

Note from page 44: 24. In the system of objects, as in all directly experienced systems, the major structural antitheses are always in effect more complicated than they seem, for what appears as a structural antithesis from the standpoint of the system may well be simply a consistent rationalization of an underlying conflict.

Note from page 44: 25. Except for chairs at the dining-table -- which are upright and have peasant-like overtones. But this evidences a reflex cultural process.

Note from page 45: 26. Or perhaps, after all simply a passive discourse -- for we should not forget that advertising is far less inclined to enjoin the active arrangement of furniture than to stress the passive joys of relaxation. On this point the notion of atmosphere is similarly ambiguous, for it has both active and passive implications. `Functional man' is exhausted from the start. And the millions of leather and Dunlopillo armchairs, each deeper than the last, whose modern virtues of atmosphere and repose fill the pages of the glossy magazines, amount to a sort of massive invitation from our future civilization to resolve all our tensions and bask in a placid seventh-day euphoria. The whole ideology of that civilization -- still far distant, yet imminent in model objects -- is to be found in these images of an idyllic, neo-pastoral modernity in which the inhabitant communes with his atmosphere from the mellow depths of his chair. Having solved the problems of his emotions, his functions and his contradictions, so that all that is left are relationships, a system of relationships whose structure he rediscovers in a system of objects; having infused the space around him with life and `created' a multiplicity of ways to integrate his modules into the room as a whole (much as he himself is integrated into the social whole); having thus put together a world absolved of drives and primary functions but overloaded with social connotations of calculation and prestige -- having done all this, and tired out by his efforts, the modern home-dweller is ready to cosset his ennui by plunging into an easy chair whose form is a perfect match for the form of his body.

Note from page 46: 27. An exception here is an object reintroduced with a new connotation that occludes its earlier obscenity, a case in point being the old free-standing eighteenth-century Spanish bed. (See the discussion of antiques below.)

Note from page 49: 28. To be more exact, it is not simply that the old gestural system of effort has been stretched out into a gestural system of control: it has also been split into a gestural system of control and a gestural system of play. Ignored by modern praxis, but nonetheless freed from its old constraints, the body finds genuine expression in sports and physical leisure activities -- or at any rate, these supply it with a compensatory release, for we may well ask whether the splitting into two of the gestural system of effort institutes any real freedom of the body, or whether it merely establishes a binomial whose second term (in this case, games and sports) does no more than compensate for the first. A parallel might be drawn here with the splitting of time into active time and leisure time.

Note from page 50: 29. The fire is a case in point. Originally the `hearth' filled the combined functions of heating, cooking and lighting. This was the basis of its symbolic complexity. Later, the kitchen stove -- already a kind of appliance-took over the functions of heating and cooking, while retaining a certain symbolic presence. Eventually all three tasks were separated in analytic fashion and assigned to separate specialized appliances whose synthetic aspect lay not in the concrete unity of the hearth but solely in the abstract identity of the energy (gas or electricity) on which they ran. This new environment, based on a completely different division of functions, has no symbolic dimension whatsoever.

Note from page 51: 30. This is the reason for our fascination with miniaturized watches, transistor radios, cameras, and so forth.

Note from page 52: 31. This tendency to miniaturize may seem paradoxical in the context of a civilization of extension, expansion and spatialization. It is a tendency, however, that embodies both the ideal goal of that civilization and a contradiction within it. For our technological civilization is also a civilization of limits imposed on urban life, of a critical scarcity of space. And it is increasingly, by absolute everyday necessity (and not just by structural necessity), a civilization of the `compact'. There is undoubtedly a link between lasers, calculators and micro-technology on the one hand and small cars, multifunctional gadgets, `planned' flats and transistor radios on the other -- but this link is not necessarily structural or logical. The principle of maximum organization which gives rise to technologies of miniaturization has the parallel function of palliating (though not resolving) a chronic shortage of space in everyday life. The two functions are not structurally related; it is simply that both are bound up with each other in the context of a single system. As for the everyday technical object, caught between the two, it is uncertain whether it represents a technological advance (miniaturization) or a degrading of the practical system (shortage of space). (The antagonism between structural technological evolution and the constraints of scarcity which govern the system as directly experienced is discussed later -- see `The Transformations of Technology', pp. 123 ff. below.)

Note from page 53: 32. Just as we saw that in the realm of atmosphere, nature is no more than art allusion.

Note from page 54: 33. The last thing I want to do, however, is romanticize either physical labour or the traditional gestural system. When one contemplates the centuries during which man was obliged to make up with his own strength for the shortcomings of his tools, when one recalls that, long after the day of slaves and serfs, peasants and craftsmen continued to manipulate objects unchanged since the Stone Age, one can only applaud the new abstractness of energy sources and the decline of a gestural system which was, after all, an appurtenance of servitude. The `soulless machinism' of today -- down to and including electric potato-mashers -- is what has made it possible to get beyond the strict equivalence of gesture and product which once used up every moment of every endless day: at long last human gestures can embody a surplus. The consequences on another level, however, are nonetheless very far-reaching.

Note from page 54: 34. See Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l'lmaginaire (second edition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).

Note from page 55: 35. Similarly, it is arguable that the gestural system also facilitates the integration into objects of what Piaget calls paternal and maternal `affective schemata' -- the child's relationships to its primal human milieu: the father and mother themselves appear to the child as tools surrounded by other, secondary, tools.

Note from page 55: 36. Thus the classic maternal house of children's drawings, with its doors and windows, symbolizes both the child itself (a human face) and the body of the mother. Like the disappearance of the old gestural system, the disappearance of this traditional house, complete with storeys, staircase, attic and cellar, signals first and foremost the frustration of a faculty of symbolic recognition: the modern order disappoints us because it stymies any profound involvement any visceral perception of our own body; because we can now recognize therein scarcely any aspect of our bodily organs, of our somatic organization.

Note from page 57: 37. Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934; reprint, San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), p. 344, Page references are to the reprint edition.

Note from page 58: 38. Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958), p. 95.

Note from page 58: 39. This mythology must be distinguished from the ideology of Progress, which, abstract as it may be, is still a hypothesis about structures which is based on actual technological development. The functionalist myth, by contrast, is no more than the presumption, taken on faith from the mere testimony of signs, of the existence of a technological totality. The ideology of Progress is a socio-cultural mediation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the functionalist myth is an anticipatory fantasy.

Note from page 59: 40. Mythologies of the `natural' generally evoke an earlier cultural system as a kind of pseudo-historical reference-point in their regression to a mythical totality. Thus the mythology of pre-industrial craftsmanship implies the myth of a `functional' nature, and vice versa.

Note from page 59: 41. See The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay, 1960).

Note from page 60: 42. Only curves still retain something of these vegetable and maternal overtones, tending to invest objects with the organic sense of containing. The sense, by extension, of natural evolution. They are consequently disappearing or becoming elliptical.

Note from page 61: 43. The fact is that space itself has the connotation of emptiness; instead of space arising from the living interrelationship between forms (as a space with `rhythms'), forms are apprehended, in their relationship to each other, by way of the emptiness which is the formalized sign of space. A room containing space so understood creates a `natural' effect: we say that it is `airy'. This is the temptation of emptiness, as when unadorned walls indicate culture and luxury. An objet d'art may seem more precious when it is surrounded by empty space. `Atmosphere' is thus very often created merely by a formal arrangement which `personalizes' particular objects through the disposition of empty space. In the case of serially produced objects, conversely, a shortage of space destroys atmosphere by depriving objects of the luxury of `breathing'. (Should we perhaps interpret this affectation of emptiness as an echo of a moral order founded on distinction and distance?) Here too, then, we find that a traditional connotation has been reversed, for fullness and substantiality once served to valorize accumulation and naïve ostentation.

Note from page 62: 44. The moral refusal of the instinctual itself signals an instinctual promiscuity. Here, by contrast, there is no more promiscuity: nature in all its forms is simultaneously signified and disavowed at the actual level of the sign.