"For if the chair is a 'successful' object, it will relieve her of the distress of her weight far better than did the [empathetic] dance (or alternatively, far better than a verbalized expression of sympathy). Even if, however, it relieves her distress only to the same degree as the expressive dance, it has two striking advantages over its antecedent action. First, the chair itself memoralizes the dance, endures through time: to produce the same outcome, the dance would have to be repeated each day, thus requiring that the man enter and sustain the aversive intensity of labor (his sharing of the pain) without cessation, and thereby only redistributing, rather than diminishing, the pain itself...
The second advantage of the chair over sympathetic expression is that once it is in existence, the diminution of the woman's problem no longer depends on the goodwill of whatever other human being co-inhabits her world... The general distribution of material objects to a population means that a certain minimum level of objectified human compassion is built into the revised structure of the external world, and does not depend on the day-to-day generosity of other inhabitants which itself cannot be legislated... This is also why a woman imprisoned under a hostile regime in Chile once clung passionately to a white linen handkerchief slipped to her from another country, for she recognized within the object the collective human salute that is implicit in the very manufacture of such objects; just as this same salute has been recognized by many prisoners of torture who mention (often with an intensity of gratitude that may at first sound puzzling) the solitary blanket or freshly white-washed walls one day introduced into their midst by the quiet machinations of the International Red Cross... anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this small way, be well. Thus within the realm of objects, objects-made-for-anyone bear the same relation to objects-made-for-someone that, within the human realm, caritas bears to eros. Whether they reach someone in the extreme conditions of imprisonment or in the benign and ordinary conditions of everyday life, the handkerchief, blanket and bucket of white paint contain with them the wish for well-being: 'Don't cry; be warm, watch now, in a few minutes even these constricting walls will look more spacious.'"
Elaine Scarry _The Body in Pain_ New York: Oxford Uni Press, 1985, pp291-2
On Nov 5, 2013, at 1:10 PM, Eduardo Corte-Real wrote:
> But ... there is redemption in tea kettles, transcendence on ice (skating) and, if we think of it, righteousness is all that matter in a chair.
> Greetings from Florianopolis, Brazil,
> Eduardo Corte-Real
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|