I find that lounge seating is really the centerpiece of any home. I believe the official saying in English is “the hearth is the heart of the home,” although really, it all comes down to the couch. I like to think of the couch as the bridge between the public and the private spaces of the home - partons du principe that we’re dealing with smaller, urban apartments or modern American homes that favor one, principle seating area rather than a formal reception room. (In our house, there was the Family Room and the Living Room).
When you walk into someone’s home, you immediately get an idea of the people living in it - like, white furniture everywhere is an obvious sign that no children are present. The contemporary couch, then, occupies a weird space of being basically like a second bed for watching Netflix, and also the place you invite your mother-in-law to sit and have a coffee. And thus, it’s utter importance in Today’s Home. The couch - its design, the way you’re going to fold your body to sit on it - is there to tell you how you’re supposed to exist in this space.
Bourdieu might argue that the placement of objects in a home is responsible for recreating the social behaviors, even physicalities, that led to their very creation. You could take that even further and argue that material objects themselves have power - agency - in creating social life. The idea that material things and social things create each other, in turn, is called sociomateriality.
I’m in the process of moving, so I’ve been thinking a lot about decor and furniture and the way that objects shape our lives. And also, why might my current couch be so hard on my back? So here are two brief anecdotes about some seating arrangements I have known, which also seemed to reinforce with their very materiality some particular sociality - these authoritarian objects that upheld the rules of their domaines, even in the absence of their owners.
1_The Jesuit Couches
I love the Jesuits, loved my Jesuit education, and I call our first subjects the Jesuit Couches because that’s how they were introduced to me, and how they were called around campus. My undergrad school touts itself as the Jesuit University of New York, and at our Manhattan campus, people took Dorothy Day-style social values to heart. But the real “Catholic-y-ness” generally began and ended with a handful of required religion classes and “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam” plaques in the cafeteria.
The exception was the residential housing, which had strict rules for student behavior that felt misplaced, even anachronistic, in a building surrounded by the glittering new condos of the Upper West Side. The security rules, for example, felt less like useful measures and more like reclamations from parents who thought Hell’s Kitchen had retained its name and reputation since 1935.
Even stricter, though, were the rules surrounding heterosexual behavior. And I say heterosexual specifically, because what purpose, I beg you, does a rule like “No Unrelated Opposite-Sex Overnight Guests Without Written Permission” fill when a solid portion of your student body is gender non-conforming and/or queer?
This logic was extended to the furniture provided by university housing, which we were not allowed to modify or replace in any way, and which seemed purposely designed to uphold the heterosexual social order away from the watchful eyes of university staff.
The couches, particularly, were so bad that they were known as the Jesuit Couches. Low wooden three-seaters with scratchy upholstery in a deep crimson-hue reminiscent of the school’s colors (or perhaps the blood of Christ). The backs were so low that even at 19, they gave me a neck-ache. And the kicker - the three seats of the couch weren’t just stitched in the upholstery, they were physical, wooden beams built into the structure of the furniture. So if you tried to position yourself off-center from one of the “official” seats - you couldn’t. It hurt.
On the Jesuit Couches, you couldn’t comfortably lay down, you couldn’t lean over and tuck yourself under your date’s arm. Any kind of physical proximity was off-limits to you - y In a perfectly-illustrative example of the social constituting the mateiral, and the material constiuting the social, the couches they gave us in those apartments were designed to allow as little heterosexual sex as humanly possible.
And I say heterosexual sex because, again, the sociality that the Jesuits had successfully encoded into the materiality of their University-provided furniture seemed constructed in a logic that hadn’t left much room for inventiveness beyond horizontal, two-person, missionary sex. Like every other rule student housing imposed, the breadth and wonder and creativity of human sexuality eventually won.
But by the time I arrived, these couches were already myth: their placement in the dorms wasn’t just cheap furniture or “hostile architecture” - their material form had passed from structure to symbol to mythology, upholding the University’s loyalty to the law of the Lord even in the face of our modern Manhattan lives.
2_ No Couch At All: The Winston’s House
The next couch we’ll talk about isn’t a couch at all, but rather the deliberate absence of a couch, the intentional and reflected choice to not own a couch. In high school, I was friends with a boy we’ll call Aiden Winston and his older brother Greg. What I understood, back then, was that Aiden and Greg were two really great kids and that they had Older Parents who were already really into trike-bikes and bird-watching by the time their kids were in high school.
So the first time I went over to their house, I was surprised to find that they didn’t own a couch. I was significantly less surprised by what they had opted for instead: four single-seat, ergonomic leather recliners - the kind with cupholders and weird bumps in the center, for back support. You would go over to watch a movie, and the first four people to arrive in the room would get seats. We’d try to go two to a seat, but you just couldn’t - the padding was too stiff, too imposing. Their living room wasn’t very large, but each chair was somehow a solid three feet from the others. If you wanted to share popcorn, you had to sit on the floor.
I do remember that I was very confused. In that very normative way of thinking common to teenagers, I was all about the loungers, but I couldn’t grasp the absence of any communal seating. I remember asking Aiden about it - “How do you guys watch a movie in there?” and Aiden replying, “Do you cuddle up with your parents when you watch a movie?” We were fifteen, so the answer was no, but like, “Do you not have a kitchen table, then? Why not just have TV trays?”
I don’t think this choice would’ve marked me quite in the way that it did had I not already understood Aiden’s family life as loving, but very solitary. I considered him one of my closest friends, but our relationship mostly consisted of getting heated arguments about atheism and libertarianism over Instant Messenger. I knew he spent a lot of time alone in his room.
Our families had different values. While my Unitarian parents were really into social justice and talking about our feelings, I knew his preferred rugged individualism and hard skepticism. (I grew up to be in qualitative research and Aiden is, I think, in data science, so even if we don’t agree politically, I’m proud to say we each stuck to our respective epistemologies).
To me, those lounge chairs were the material reflection of the Winston family values - individual comfort, even optimization, at the expense of conviviality and warmth. I remember them vividly, with their authoritarian padding that molded your body to it and not the other way around: “This is the right way for your back,” the chairs seemed to say, “Now shut up and enjoy.” In the Winston house, it was hard to feel warm and cozy, but the heated massage settings on the loungers worked to make up for that.
I find that lounge seating is really the centerpiece of any home. I believe the official saying in English is “the hearth is the heart of the home,” although really, it all comes down to the couch. I like to think of the couch as the bridge between the public and the private spaces of the home - partons du principe that we’re dealing with smaller, urban apartments or modern American homes that favor one, principle seating area rather than a formal reception room. (In our house, there was the Family Room and the Living Room).
When you walk into someone’s home, you immediately get an idea of the people living in it - like, white furniture everywhere is an obvious sign that no children are present. The contemporary couch, then, occupies a weird space of being basically like a second bed for watching Netflix, and also the place you invite your mother-in-law to sit and have a coffee. And thus, it’s utter importance in Today’s Home. The couch - its design, the way you’re going to fold your body to sit on it - is there to tell you how you’re supposed to exist in this space.
Bourdieu might argue that the placement of objects in a home is responsible for recreating the social behaviors, even physicalities, that led to their very creation. You could take that even further and argue that material objects themselves have power - agency - in creating social life. The idea that material things and social things create each other, in turn, is called sociomateriality.
I’m in the process of moving, so I’ve been thinking a lot about decor and furniture and the way that objects shape our lives. And also, why might my current couch be so hard on my back? So here are two brief anecdotes about some seating arrangements I have known, which also seemed to reinforce with their very materiality some particular sociality - these authoritarian objects that upheld the rules of their domaines, even in the absence of their owners.
1_The Jesuit Couches
I love the Jesuits, loved my Jesuit education, and I call our first subjects the Jesuit Couches because that’s how they were introduced to me, and how they were called around campus. My undergrad school touts itself as the Jesuit University of New York, and at our Manhattan campus, people took Dorothy Day-style social values to heart. But the real “Catholic-y-ness” generally began and ended with a handful of required religion classes and “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam” plaques in the cafeteria.
The exception was the residential housing, which had strict rules for student behavior that felt misplaced, even anachronistic, in a building surrounded by the glittering new condos of the Upper West Side. The security rules, for example, felt less like useful measures and more like reclamations from parents who thought Hell’s Kitchen had retained its name and reputation since 1935.
Even stricter, though, were the rules surrounding heterosexual behavior. And I say heterosexual specifically, because what purpose, I beg you, does a rule like “No Unrelated Opposite-Sex Overnight Guests Without Written Permission” fill when a solid portion of your student body is gender non-conforming and/or queer?
This logic was extended to the furniture provided by university housing, which we were not allowed to modify or replace in any way, and which seemed purposely designed to uphold the heterosexual social order away from the watchful eyes of university staff.
The couches, particularly, were so bad that they were known as the Jesuit Couches. Low wooden three-seaters with scratchy upholstery in a deep crimson-hue reminiscent of the school’s colors (or perhaps the blood of Christ). The backs were so low that even at 19, they gave me a neck-ache. And the kicker - the three seats of the couch weren’t just stitched in the upholstery, they were physical, wooden beams built into the structure of the furniture. So if you tried to position yourself off-center from one of the “official” seats - you couldn’t. It hurt.
(I want to be clear that on an individual level, this makes absolute sense - we are in a global crisis, I am not at all suggesting that we should make conscious efforts to “look good for the Internet” or that putting on any clothes at all right now isn’t an accomplishment. Also, there have been really interesting discussions on Twitter lately about what “camera-ready” implies for feminine-presenting persons, which I think is an apt angle of discussion.)
When we “wear clothing online” - meaning when we share images of ourselves, dressed - garment and body alike undergo a transformative, translative process that flattens 3D, textural entities (that’s you and your clothes) into intangible, 2D images. The very material “stuff” that makes up your clothing transforms - those sweatpants you’re wearing aren’t made of cotton, they’re made of bits. During that transformation process, something interesting happens: you stop being yourself and you start being a version of you that’s specifically imagined to be legible through a digital medium, in a digital context.
So basically, our clothing still has a whole lot of presence and meaning, even “just” in its digital form. And most importantly, it still has materiality - so if “wool sweaters” can stand for “cozy” because wool keeps us warm, clothing that’s made of bits also has specific material properties that can stand for things and allow us to convey messages to the people looking at it. And because those messages are being read in a digital context, their meaning changes.
On the Jesuit Couches, you couldn’t comfortably lay down, you couldn’t lean over and tuck yourself under your date’s arm. Any kind of physical proximity was off-limits to you - y In a perfectly-illustrative example of the social constituting the mateiral, and the material constiuting the social, the couches they gave us in those apartments were designed to allow as little heterosexual sex as humanly possible.
And I say heterosexual sex because, again, the sociality that the Jesuits had successfully encoded into the materiality of their University-provided furniture seemed constructed in a logic that hadn’t left much room for inventiveness beyond horizontal, two-person, missionary sex. Like every other rule student housing imposed, the breadth and wonder and creativity of human sexuality eventually won.
But by the time I arrived, these couches were already myth: their placement in the dorms wasn’t just cheap furniture or “hostile architecture” - their material form had passed from structure to symbol to mythology, upholding the University’s loyalty to the law of the Lord even in the face of our modern Manhattan lives.
2_ No Couch At All: The Winston’s House
The next couch we’ll talk about isn’t a couch at all, but rather the deliberate absence of a couch, the intentional and reflected choice to not own a couch. In high school, I was friends with a boy we’ll call Aiden Winston and his older brother Greg. What I understood, back then, was that Aiden and Greg were two really great kids and that they had Older Parents who were already really into trike-bikes and bird-watching by the time their kids were in high school.
So the first time I went over to their house, I was surprised to find that they didn’t own a couch. I was significantly less surprised by what they had opted for instead: four single-seat, ergonomic leather recliners - the kind with cupholders and weird bumps in the center, for back support. You would go over to watch a movie, and the first four people to arrive in the room would get seats. We’d try to go two to a seat, but you just couldn’t - the padding was too stiff, too imposing. Their living room wasn’t very large, but each chair was somehow a solid three feet from the others. If you wanted to share popcorn, you had to sit on the floor.
I do remember that I was very confused. In that very normative way of thinking common to teenagers, I was all about the loungers, but I couldn’t grasp the absence of any communal seating. I remember asking Aiden about it - “How do you guys watch a movie in there?” and Aiden replying, “Do you cuddle up with your parents when you watch a movie?” We were fifteen, so the answer was no, but like, “Do you not have a kitchen table, then? Why not just have TV trays?”
I don’t think this choice would’ve marked me quite in the way that it did had I not already understood Aiden’s family life as loving, but very solitary. I considered him one of my closest friends, but our relationship mostly consisted of getting heated arguments about atheism and libertarianism over Instant Messenger. I knew he spent a lot of time alone in his room.
Our families had different values. While my Unitarian parents were really into social justice and talking about our feelings, I knew his preferred rugged individualism and hard skepticism. (I grew up to be in qualitative research and Aiden is, I think, in data science, so even if we don’t agree politically, I’m proud to say we each stuck to our respective epistemologies).
To me, those lounge chairs were the material reflection of the Winston family values - individual comfort, even optimization, at the expense of conviviality and warmth. I remember them vividly, with their authoritarian padding that molded your body to it and not the other way around: “This is the right way for your back,” the chairs seemed to say, “Now shut up and enjoy.” In the Winston house, it was hard to feel warm and cozy, but the heated massage settings on the loungers worked to make up for that.
Thus, the social significations of “a cashmere sweater” and “a cashmere sweater, peaking out next to a loaf of banana bread in a quarantine Instagram” aren’t the same. The actual, physical object is unchanged. But the placement of its digitized-clone in an online platform context changes the meaning of both garments. They become signifiers not of luxury, but of safety and finding comfort and satisfaction in the home.
The placement of a garment in digital context can even go so far as to affect the social positioning of a given garment. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of mid-market workwear brands (like LOFT) pushing comfort fabrics, like Tencel, which were once more-or-less acceptable in a business casual context. Generally speaking, the softer and more flexible a textile, the less associated it is with masculine-dominated conceptualizations of business authority and formality - which means that they are only recently becoming acceptable workwear garments.
But digitized Tencel has different affordances in digital context - because you can’t really tell, over the best webcam in the world, whether a garment is made of Tencel or some other fabric. In that sense, the fabric has properties of chamelionization and adaptability in a specifically digital context. In other words, this new materiality opens the door to a new social position of acceptable formality in business-wear contexts. I think we’re all crossing our fingers for the same thing to happen with sweatpants. Hah hah.
Generally speaking, I think what we will see is a rise in clothing that works in a digital context. It really and truly would not shock me to see a lot less black in coming seasons, or at least textural black garments, given that the color is notoriously famous for showing little detail in digital context and requiring a significant degree of retouching. It’s not that clothing will become less important, or that pure adornment will no longer be one of the significant use-values of fashion, but rather the specific garments and pathways through which we will convey meaning are prone to change.
If a lot of this implies a certain degree of intentionality on the part of those wearing the clothing, that’s not quite my intention. The significations of clothing are always subject to change given any shift in context, in socialization, in the ways in which we perceive and interact with the material world - pandemic end-of-days or otherwise - and those changes are notoriously dependent and difficult to predict. Further, dressing specifically for Instagram videos in quarantine or whatever seems to harken back to a relatively quaint time when, for two minutes of our lives, there was literally nothing better to do - evidently, that is very much no longer the case.
But I think it’s interesting to consider the ramifications of our new digitized-selves and the brave new world of digital materialities that’s opened before us. People have been expressing versions of themselves online for nearly 50 years, so this isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. Yet quarantine was an interesting exercise in a polar shift - from the devaluation of our physical selves to becoming, completely, “a temporary combination of text and data.” I’ll let others weigh in on the psycho-social effects of that shift - I’m excited about discovering what happens to the world of material things that’s come with us, on the other side of the veil.