Karen: she despises the term sustainable. She always thought it meant maintaining. But the root of the word is from Old French then Latin. Tendere = tenuous, thin. Greek tinein = to stretch something. The ur-object of sustainability is an animal skin you stretch to keep its shape.
Sustainability is the anti-sacrifice. Sacrifice burns the entire animal. Sustainability uses part of animal as gift to yourself. To maintain the shape of something. Legal tenet: a statement about doctrine. Keeping a form by stretching thin.
Roberto Esposito: Communitas. A profound critique of communitarianism of e.g. Hardt and Negri. Community is from munis which is also a burden or a debt.
Design and the sharing that Cameron works on. Can those things be brought together.
Clive's work on Elaine Scarry and design object. Figures that have this human form.
Virginia Smith, Funny Little Man, homunculi that populate advertising. Excessive figures. No use value whatsoever. Alessi design kitchenware.
(Me: Eugene Thacker just showed up. Had the best conversation with Nicola Masciandaro during lunch.)
Exogamy. The notion of objects having a soul. Lévi-Strauss says you can place relative values on objects, and one object with the greatest value is woman. Interesting to remind ourselves of that.
Cameron in response: three scenarios. Equally horrific and equally prevalent in design discourse.
(1) Product design students and Twitchell say we are not materialist enough. Personalization. Giving it a story. What a hideous world to be encumbered by stuff as your pet. Lacan seeing a tuna can glinting at him floating in the water. You see all the things that have clocks on them. Tuna cans staring at you as you wander around sleepless.
(2) Taste regime of modernism. Faux minimalism. The secret of modernism is cupboards: hidden stuff. Idea of immaterial existence: “I only have one box...”
(3) The fully serviced life. I own nothing. Everything is in a closed loop of rental returning to its manufacturers. I am a servant and I have my servants.
We bought lots of objects to get away from people. Your washing machine doesn't talk back.
Gender. It's important. The idea of the self-service economy of bartering and gleaning is not new and revolutionary. It's been subsidizing capitalism: unpaid labor of women in the home.
Models (1) to (3) ignore the politics.
Karen: Reproductive politics as worrying about future generations. Or not caring about reproduction. Lee Edelman salutes the fantastic future of the nonhuman. Yuck. What is the third way? Women tend towards option (1). Not accepting (2).
Life After the Human on the History Channel. Premise that humans disappear but nature persists. Problematic. 5 minutes after. 5 days. 5 etc. Up to 1000 years. CGI demonstrating what happens to different artifacts.
Cameron: notion of whole of capitalism as sacrifice. Working to have a weekend and so on.
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