Because I've got nothin'.... Here's the thing I'm writing right now. It's a paper for a conference (in three days, but let's not talk about that). I manage to brutalize both Adorno and Martha Stewart at the same time, which is something, right?
I would like to start with an epigraph from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. In the vignette titled “Refuge for the Homeless,” Adorno claims, “The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests….It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (38). Here, Adorno not only characterizes modernity as an alteration in the relationship of the home to the world. He also suggests that the impossibility of dwelling—the failure of home—is produced in part by knowing too much—“a betrayal of knowledge.” The implication is that a house can only function as a home to the extent that its political and emotional economy remains undisclosed. Once we are aware of the “musty pact of family interests” sheltered by the home, then comfort, and hence dwelling, becomes impossible.
Adorno’s argument makes me think about contemporary pop cultural dealings with the domestic, particularly those taking place in queer culture. It seems as though a straightforward and earnest relationship to the domestic is not only unfashionable but also irresponsible. If we want to cultivate domesticity or practice the fine art of home economics, it has to be done ironically. This is practically an injunction: if you are going to do that kind of domesticity—the cake-baking, apron-wearing, highball-drinking kind—you’d better not mean it. Nearly everyone I know loves Martha Stewart, but they claim to do so with irony. You know…they don’t really love her, not with serious intention (although this changed somewhat after her arrest—it became easier to love her in earnest). Instead, they love her because of her overblown, impossible striving for the domestic ideal. Martha Stewart is living camp, and our inevitable failure at being her—her inevitable failure at being herself, in fact—provide us with the space for doing domesticity ironically. The problem is…I don’t really know what this means on the ground…or, in the house, as it were. How does one practice the tasks of quotidian domesticity with irony? The popular domestic irony I’m talking about now seems largely aesthetic. What would it mean to cultivate an emotionally or intellectually ironic domesticity? Is this—whatever “this” looks like—what Adorno had in mind when he suggested that ethically, we’re better off not being at home in our homes?
