Thinking and the

Art of Furniture

Neil Turnbull
Nottingham Trent University, UK

This article argues that furniture has been a source of ontological curiosity and an object of epis-
temological significance for some of the most important and formative modern intellectual tradi-
tions. Drawing on J. J. Gibson’s theory of affordances, the article shows how furniture has afforded
a variety of intellectual meanings and can be seen as something of a worldly context giving shape
and sense to what many modern intellectuals have understood by “the world.” Drawing on analy-
ses of the way in which modern empiricism, rationalism, experimental science, and contemporary
discursive psychology have “wondered” about the nature and significance of furniture, the article
suggests that these intellectual endeavors have taken furniture as the primary disavowed object of
their inquiries, and in so doing they have been tacitly complicit in confining modern intellectual
life to the indoor realm. The article also discusses the extent to which the increasingly technoscien-
tific nature of contemporary furniture poses some profound—and possibly unanswerable—ques-
tions as to how the modern philosopher can make intellectual sense of this indoor world. The ar-
ticle goes on to argue that popular science and science fiction writing are superior to philosophy in
this respect and can be usefully seen as potential heirs to the modern philosophical tradition, and
that if philosophy is to remain interesting and relevant in the present time, it must return to its an-
cient “outdoor” peripatetic roots.

Keywords: furniture; ontology; indoor; domesticity; technoscience

Odd as it may seem at first glance, furniture—broadly defined as a generic term for
the class of currently useable domestic objects1—has played a central role in the de-
velopment of the main traditions of modern philosophy, modern science, and recent
contemporary “social constructivist” science. As the discussion below should hope-
fully demonstrate, ordinary furniture possesses some peculiar and hitherto unnoticed
conceptual powers and liabilities and can—without stretching the case for its intellec-
tual significance too far—be conceived as the basic ontological “stuff ” out of which

space & culture vol. 7 no. 2, may 2004 156-172

DOI: 10.1177/1206331203257284
©2004 Sage Publications
156
 T h i n k i n g a n d t h e A r t o f F u r n i t u r e 157

some of the most important traditions in these modes of inquiry have been fashioned.
Although Bachelard has made similar claims about the ontological significance of fur-
niture—for him it is the “non-I” that protects the “I” (see Bachelard, 1969, p. 5)—my
argument is that furniture is not simply the guarantor of domestic ontological secu-
rity, but can also be seen as a domestic object-class that supports an “ontological cu-
riosity” about the nature of “the mind,” “meaning,” and “the world.” This is not the
only reason, however, for questioning the idea of furniture as the material basis of do-
mestic ontological security. For once the technoscientific dimensions and functional-
ity of contemporary furniture are taken theoretically into account—dimensions that
are manifest in many contemporary furnishings, fittings, and fixtures—then one is
forced to acknowledge that everyday living requires a modest scattering of technosci-
entific insights, a demand that increasingly makes both intellectual and everyday life
an ontologically “complicated business.” As at least one famous physicist has said, once
the domestic sphere is recognized as imbued with the ontologies of technoscience,
then the domestic sphere is made ontologically strange. As he put it:

I am standing on a threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the

first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds
on every inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty
thousand miles a second around the sun—a fraction of a second too early or too late, the
plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet heading
outwards into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles
a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity or substance. To
step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? (Eddington, in
Stebbing, 1937, p. 48)

In what follows, I examine furniture’s powers to invoke ontological curiosity and

show the extent to which much modern intellectual life can be seen as grounded in a
state of wonderment about furniture. I go on to speculatively suggest that the current
crisis in philosophy—as expressed in much postmodern relativistic and deconstruc-
tive thinking—can be linked to changes in the ordinary conception of furniture
brought about by the fusion of traditional furniture with the “theoretical entities” pos-
tulated by technoscience, and that if philosophical thinking is to remain relevant in an
age when furniture increasingly forms a global artificial environment, then it must re-
turn to its ancient “peripatetic” roots.

Technological Furniture: Virtual Domesticity

In an obvious way, the indoor world of ordinary domesticity is primarily a world

of furniture. This is true for modern intellectuals—the philosopher, the social and/or
political theorist or the critic, and the modern scientist—who have typically con-
cerned themselves with nondomestic abstractions as much as it is for, say, the ordinary
domestic cleaner. For the modern intellectual “at work” is typically a person at a desk,
with a personal computer, lamp, and chair, as well as someone who typically depends
upon a kettle for sustenance and perhaps the radio or television for a connection to
the outside world (thus, the domestic life of the modern intellectual is primarily that
of a furniture user; even though this kind of reflexive insight is typically bracketed out
in the name of “inquiry”). The domestic cleaner also “works with” furniture; the
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cleaner being skilled in the use of the furniture used to maintain furniture (what
might be termed “metafurniture”). When seen in this way, the intellectual is simply
skilled in the use of different kinds of furniture: demonstrating the extent to which the
domestic cleaner and the modern intellectual share a common object world. The
modern scientist is also similarly resident in a world of furniture: working at a bench,
again with a chair, lamp, and so on. The difference between the scientist and the do-
mestic cleaner is that the scientist engages with some rather specialized “technical”
furniture—the specialized technical equipment that makes science possible as an ex-
perimental practice.
In the case of the scientist, what might be termed “the furniture of science” has a
more explicitly epistemological role. The oscilloscope, for example, “detects” and “de-
codes” the movement of hidden theoretical entities and provides “data” as informa-
tional grist to the theoretical scientist’s mill. But the table on which the oscilloscope
rests is as much a part of the furniture of science as oscilloscopes and other specialized
equipment are, and in purely practical terms such examples of ordinary furniture are
equally important for successful experimental practice (imagine a scientist attempting
to perform an experiment while sitting on the floor: might some key aspects of ex-
perimental practice be rendered invisible as a consequence?). What this shows is not
only just how much philosophical, scientific, and domestic activities inhabit a com-
mon world but also, more importantly, the extent to which they all presuppose a cer-
tain set of relationships with ordinary furniture. Furniture can be seen as the domes-
tic, and largely tacit, condition of possibility for all three kinds of activity: the
background Heideggerean set of objects existing ready-to-hand (see Heidegger, 1961).
Furniture thus composes “a world” showing the extent to which all three kinds of ac-
tivity can be seen as activities “under confinement” in a furniture-world (and perhaps
we can say that it is the comfort, practicality, and what might be termed interest-bear-
ing nature of modern furniture that has made the Foucauldian “Great Confinement”
of modern living bearable).
However, an obvious objection to this kind of analysis is that the types of furniture
involved in each case do not have the same epistemological and ontological signifi-
cance, and in particular, that the experimental scientist clearly stands in a radically dif-
ferent relationship to the “technical furniture” of the laboratory than the cleaner and
the modern philosopher stand in relation to the “ordinary” domestic furniture of the
home. In some sense, this objection must be upheld: The experimental scientist has an
obvious “theoretical interest” in his or her technical furniture and this is, in extremis,
a very different interest from that of the domestic cleaner (who may only be interested
in furniture for pecuniary gain). However, a moment’s reflection should show that
many of the domestic cleaner’s engagements with furniture are always and already—
in a limited sense—“theoretical” (think of the act of changing a plug: Even here a min-
imal amount of “theoretical knowledge” about current and voltage is necessary for this
task to be completed successfully). Moreover, as the repertoire of the cleaner’s furni-
ture becomes increasingly technical in nature—as more and more of domestic furni-
ture takes on the appearance and functionality of laboratory gadgetry—so the level of
theoretical interest presupposed by the cleaner’s use of furniture will inevitably in-
crease. This phenomenon has been observed in cultural studies of those examples of
ordinary furniture—such as fridge-freezers—that display a high level of technoscien-
tific functionality. As Shove and Southerton have noted in their cultural analysis of the
fridge-freezer, the use of freezers demands knowledge of the principles of what they
term the freezer’s “preservational magic”: of how long frozen food lasts in the freezer,
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what food is possible to freeze, and what food cannot be frozen. In the early stages of
use—especially when such devices are still in their “novelty phase”—this typically re-
quires a minimal knowledge of the scientific principles of freezing (that created a de-
mand for freezer cookery books) (see Shove & Southerton, 2000, pp. 305-306).
There is an important theoretical point to be extracted from this kind of study. It
shows that in many cases of domestic furniture use, the distinction between scientific
theory and ordinary domestic practice has become difficult to draw analytically (thus
rendering the modern domestic sphere a radically counter-Aristotelian space). As or-
dinary furniture becomes more technical in nature, so it begins to take on the episte-
mological significance of the “furniture of science.” As Karin Knorr-Cetina has put it:

As objects in everyday life become high technology devices, some of the properties that
these objects have in expert contexts may carry over into daily life, turning instrument or
commodity into an epistemic everyday thing. (Knorr-Cetina, 1997, p. 24)

What this shows is just how much modern domestic furniture has taken on the char-
acter of “technoscientific equipment”—and the home, that of a minor laboratory of
technical devices—that requires a modicum of theoretical know-how to be used and
enjoyed. One cannot simply assume that the experimental furniture of science is of a
radically different ontological and epistemological order to ordinary technical furni-
ture, and this raises interesting questions not only about the cultural status and extent
of science but also about the intellectual significance of the domestic sphere itself.

Affording the Furniture: Toward an Ontology of Indoor Life

Gibson’s notion of affordance can be usefully deployed as means of giving theoret-

ical shape to this question (and this concept has become increasingly prominent in re-
cent sociological and ergo-phenomenological discussions of the significance of do-
mestic objects) (see Hutchby, 2001; Norman, 2000). In Gibson’s work, the concept of
affordance derives from an attempt to understand the immediate phenomenological
significance of ordinary objects. It has its roots in Kurt Lewin’s phenomenological psy-
chology of objects; a psychology that viewed ordinary objects as possessors of what he
termed Aufforderungscharakter or “invitation character” (suggesting that immediate
object world is always and already pregnant with meaning).2 Gibson follows Lewin in
this regard and defines an affordance as an “invariant” feature of an environment:
what an environment “offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good
or ill” (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). For Gibson, each perceptual layout affords a particular
kind of activity, and so for him the most basic meanings of the world are already per-
ceptually “there”—a theme taken from Heideggerean philosophy—and readily avail-
able to “resonate” with the organism’s needs and wider demands for meaning. Thus,
for him, the environment is primarily a “perceptual field” made up of a rich panoply
of substances, persons, and their multiple and interrelated affordances. As he states:

The different substances in the environment have different affordances for nutrition and
for manufacture. The different objects of the environment have different affordances for
manipulation. The other animals afford, above all, a rich and complex set of interac-
tions. . . . What other persons afford, comprises the whole realm of social significance for
human beings. (Gibson, 1979, p. 128)
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Although Gibson suggests that affordances are significant at the perceptual-motor

level—and so, for him, “to perceive an affordance is not to classify an object” (Gibson,
1979, p. 134)—at other times he suggests that objects afford broader and more obvi-
ously conceptual and cultural meanings. Thus, he claims that the affordances always
and already latent in the environment show the extent to which “the ‘values’ and
‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived” (Gibson, 1979, p.
127). More generally, for Gibson “the possibilities of the environment and the way of
life of the animal go together inseparably” (Gibson, 1979, p. 143). And it is this latter
notion of an object “affording”—in the case of humans—cultural meanings and val-
ues that can help elaborate, at the level of theory, the intellectual significances inher-
ing within both traditional and more contemporary—“late-modern”—furniture. For
furniture—especially as it becomes more technological in character; perhaps we can
talk here of the emergence of “technofurniture” in the context of late-modern postwar
domesticity—amounts to a radically new perceptual environment affording epistemo-
logically significant and ontologically pragmatic meanings. Furniture evokes a percep-
tual curiosity about its own true nature as well as that of its perceiver.
The claim that furniture affords more than an array of practical and survival-ori-
entated significances—chairs for sitting-on, shelves for putting-things-on, and so
on—is discussed and developed more fully later in the article. However, for the mo-
ment, this point can be clarified by means of a simple example. Consider the example
of a simple copper wire. In perceptual-motor terms, it may afford “bending-into-
shape” (such that its most immediate practical affordance is related to its potential as
a construction material). But, in certain domestic contexts when we see copper wire,
we also “see” that it also affords “conducting” electricity.3 Thus, one object, the copper
wire, affords two radically different kinds of significances: one phenomenologically
manifest and perceptual-motor, the other phenomenologically latent and techno-the-
oretical. Here we can see the way technoscience has furnished the domestic world with
a nonmanifest “invisible furniture”—what Attfield has termed “modernity’s ‘wild
things’ that escape ‘the order of visual aesthetic categorisation’” (Attfield, 2000, p. 75).
Thus, modern furniture is much more than a mere commodity, and the Benjamin-
ian analysis of furniture that views furniture as affording a simple set of exchange val-
ues—where furniture is critically exposed as a “deadly” material symbol of bourgeois
competitiveness, or, in Benjamin’s terms, “the soulless luxuriance of the furnishings
becomes true comfort only in the presence of a dead body” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 49)—
reveals only part of furniture’s wider cultural significance. For what is ignored in these
accounts is that technological sophistications of contemporary furniture bring many
traditional and philosophically orthodox conceptions of the world into question. This
point has been developed by recent critical social theorists such as Christopher Lasch
(see Lasch, 1984) for whom technoscientific furniture—in the guise of televisions,
home computers, and telephones and in their capacity as vehicles for the transmission
of ephemeral images—is seen as the material substratum sustaining a “fantastic” vir-
tual domesticity that undermines the obvious sense of “solid reality” afforded by more
traditional kinds of furniture (Lasch, 1984, p. 31). However, pace Lasch, the virtuality
of contemporary domesticity does not simply and straightforwardly suggest as quasi-
psychotic loss of contact with “ordinary domestic reality.” Modern technofurniture’s
affordance of abstract theoretical and other intellectual meanings seems to augment
rather than diminish the traditional ontologies of the domestic sphere (and thus tech-
nofurniture is not simply a vehicle for a capitalistic colonization of the domestic life-
world). Every day, domesticity absorbs and adapts to the devices that Lasch claims un-
 T h i n k i n g a n d t h e A r t o f F u r n i t u r e 161

dermine domestic realities: assimilating them so that they become “part of the furni-
ture.” As technoscience becomes part of the domestic world, it constitutes the domes-
tic sphere as a technological world that can be, and is, “made” a secure and significant
place by domestic actions and discourses.
However, it must be conceded that as traditional furniture is rendered increasingly
technological, it brings in its wake what may seem like a new occulted ontology: the
hidden “wild” levels populated by fundamentally unperceivable “theoretical ob-
jects”—“electric charges,” “electric capacities,” and “magnetic resonances,” and so
on—that are presupposed by, and latent within, the ordinary functionality of these de-
vices. This point was first raised by the physicist Arthur Eddington in his reflections
on how quantum mechanics poses a challenge to our everyday conception of furni-
ture. For him, once it is recognized that our furniture affords a theoretical significance,
our everyday notion of furniture is radically transformed along with the cognitive
content and significance of our ordinary domestic world. For him, the modern intel-
lectual sitting at the desk is no longer simply “at his desk” in any obvious and familiar
sense. As he states:

I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my two chairs
and two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me—two ta-
bles, two chairs, two pens. . . . One of them has been familiar to me from the earliest years.
It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I de-
scribe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is sub-
stantial. Table No2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel
so familiar with it. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that
emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their com-
bined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. It supports my
writing paper as satisfactorily as table No1; for when I lay the paper on it, the little elec-
tric particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper
is maintained in a shuttle cock fashion at nearly steady level. If I lean upon this table, I
shall not go through; or to be strictly accurate, the chance of my scientific elbow going
through my scientific table is so excessively small that it can be neglected in practical
life. . . . There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space—
space pervaded it is true by fields of force, but these are assigned to the categories of in-
fluences not things. (Eddington, 1935/1983, pp. xi ff)

What Eddington’s discussion shows is the extent to which technoscience has ren-
dered the world of traditional domesticity ontologically unheimlich. The technoscien-
tific levels of ordinary domestic furniture call into question what Hannah Arendt
termed its “thing-character” (see Arendt, 1958, p. 95), effectively transforming the
everyday world from a world primarily of things to a world of “influences” where the
reality “domestic world” can never be taken as it naively appears to be. Eddington’s—
somewhat humorous—depiction of ordinary everyday objects as disintegrating upon
exposure to the technoscientific gaze brings into sharp relief the difficulty in elabo-
rating how both theoretical and more ordinary domestic “things” might be articulated
into a single ontological scheme (capable of making sense of their unity at the level of
ordinary everyday practice). For what this example shows is that the ontology of
technoscience, prima facie, seems of a radically different order to the ontology of the
world as it ordinarily appears to an ordinary domestic observer (as philosophers such
as Wilfred Sellars have pointed out; see his chapter “Philosophy and the Scientific Im-
age of Man” in Sellars, 1963). In Eddington’s view, when conceived technoscientifi-
162 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 4

cally, the objects of the everyday realm are seen as ontologically divided in that they
present themselves as self-evident functional unities that have been ontologically ren-
dered asunder (when this divided reality emerges as a problem at the level of everyday
decision making, typically when the technoscientific furniture has “broken down” in
some way, it is usually overcome by the purchasing of particular specialized “expert-
ise” dedicated to “solving” the—typically theoretical—problem at hand).
However, modern technofurniture is rarely understood by its domestic users as a
“magic box” of occult influences. This is because all modern individuals possess at
least a modicum of understanding about how these devices work (even if only in
terms of electric signals, transmitters, and receivers, and so on). Moreover, techno-
science does not completely occult the world of everyday domesticity, as its theoreti-
cal and practical affordances are often synthesized by means of the domestic imagina-
tion into an experience of single domestic world. This can be most clearly discerned
when observing the behavior experience of consumers of technoscientific objects such
as hi-fis. Here, basic theoretical physics is interwoven with knowledge of ordinary in-
strumental functionality giving rise to a technoscientific aestheticization of the do-
mestic space. As Poster puts it:

For many audiophiles what began as a simple quest for musical enjoyment in the home
soon becomes an extensive, multifarious quest for a perfect stereo system. More and
more time, care and money is invested in the medium of sound reproduction; more and
more effort is expended to control the listening environment. Even the electricity com-
ing into the house is suspect as a possible source of distortion: a “line conditioner” must
be installed “to decontaminate” the electric current and regulate the voltage more pre-
cisely than the company delivering that electricity thinks necessary. As much as possible,
the listening room is isolated from the exterior world, reducing the decibel level to am-
bient street noise. In some cases, the foundation of the room is reinforced and the walls
are altered by the installation of a combination of reflective and dampening materials to
achieve perfect acoustic properties. (Poster, 1990, p. 10)

Thus, the “crisis of reality” brought about by the fusion of technoscience and ordi-
nary furniture is resolved aesthetically at the level of everyday cultural experience. By
re-imagining the theoretical and technical objects of contemporary technoscience into
an experience of the domestic sublime—the “house beautiful”—the multiple and
contradictory affordances of modern furniture are sublated into a highly aestheticized
virtual domestic space. However, the modern intellectual has not been content with
this state of affairs (as the discussion of Benjamin and Lasch clearly shows). This is be-
cause furniture does not simply afford a set of practical or theoretical affordances. As
was suggested in the above discussion, it has also afforded a philosophical significance
showing that furniture is something that affords “contemplating about.” In particular,
furniture, especially in modern philosophical contexts, has afforded a meditation on
the nature of the subject of furniture—the individual person sitting-on-the-chair and
so forth—and this subject’s relationship to the “objective world” that furniture is seen
as somehow “supporting.” Once these intellectual affordances are taken into account,
the ontological self-sufficiency of domestic spaces is destabilized by furniture’s philo-
sophical affordances. For as an object becomes an object of contemplation, the fur-
nished “not-I” ceases to protect the “I” but allows for a peculiar kind of reflective ques-
tioning of the “I,” the “not-I,” and the relationship between them.
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Turning the Tables: Contemplating the Furniture of the Philosophers

Furniture has not been an explicit theme in modern philosophical thought. But
modern philosophy has been—in an implicit way—directly concerned with furniture,
especially how its sensuous consequences can be seen as affording epistemological
claims about the nature of the world and human cognition. This is because modern
philosophy, unlike its classical peripatetic ancestor, has primarily been “indoor philos-
ophy”: a point that has been made by observers of the modern philosophical culture
who point out that “no philosophers can fail to be aware of the fact that his researches
do not require him to leave his study” (Lazerowitz & Ambrose, 1984, p. 78). The world
of the modern philosopher is thus primarily circumscribed around the domestic
sphere and its environs: and many modern philosophical reflections—although they
claim an a priori universality for their intellectual products—can be shown to pertain
only to the particularities of modern domesticity. As Bouwsma has put it:

The traveller goes far away. He visits, and he tells about what others have not seen. He
tells us about what is covered by great distances, about what is hidden from the eyes that
stay at home. Let us say that the traveller describes the hidden, and that this is also what
the philosopher does. But the hidden is now obviously of a different sort; for whereas
sailors sail the sea, the philosopher stays at home. (Bouwsma, 1969, p. 47)

In fine, the modern philosopher—unlike his largely itinerant Greek ancestor—is

confined to the domestic sphere, and it should be of no surprise then that much mod-
ern philosophy is reflection on the relationship between the solitary mind and its fur-
nished surroundings (an intellectual activity that has become known as epistemol-
ogy). This can be seen clearly in the writings of the early empiricists such as Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume. References to the veridicality of perceptions of furniture abound
in the works of these philosophers, suggesting a connection between modern empiri-
cism and a particular way of experiencing furniture. Taking Berkeleyean philosophy as
an example, furniture can be seen as functioning as a “cultural given” upon which the
certain foundational knowledge sought by him—and other Enlightenment philoso-
phers—was seen as resting in the security of philosophical “self-evidence” (and in so
doing, the idea that when we perceive the world we actually “see tables” was dismissed
as a residual medievalism). As he states:

The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see it and feel it; and if I were out of my study
I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There is an odour,
that is it was smelled; there was a sound, that is to say, it was heard; a colour or a figure,
and it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all I can understand by these and the like
expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without
any relation to their being perceived seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi,
nor should it be possible they should have any existence of the minds or thinking things
which perceive them. (Berkeley, 1988, p. 54)

What this Berkeleyean analysis of furniture shows is that furniture can be seen as a
domestic ontological condition of possibility for the forms of reflection, meditation,
and contemplation that have become known as modern epistemology. More specifi-
cally, in Berkeley’s philosophical writings, we can see how furniture’s contemplative af-
fordances were used to articulate a new sensation-based epistemology and idealist
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metaphysics. In fact, Berkeley’s work exemplifies the extent to which the atomistic/re-
ductive ontologies of empiricism emerge out of particular reflective experiences of
furniture: experiences that allow furniture to be conceived as a bearer of discrete sen-
sations. This “reflective experience” is an experience of something felt, seen, heard, and
smelled, and this manner of experiencing furniture allows the empiricist philosopher
to experience it as subjectively fashioned out of “bundles of discrete sensation” (that
he or she takes to be the foundational “subjective atoms” out of which authentic
4
knowledge of the objective world is built). It is perhaps for this reason that the em-
piricist’s reflections suggest that human experience is made up of discrete “faculties”
of sensation (and thus furniture, as it is generally first seen, then felt, and only rarely
heard, supports a hierarchical epistemology of “the faculties,” with “vision” at the top).
Whereas empiricist philosophers have tended to take furniture as the—albeit dis-
avowed—ontological ground for their “sense-experiential” epistemologies, modern
rationalist philosophers have generally offered critiques of the empiricists’ “theories of
the furnished given.” The modern rationalist’s suspicions of furniture’s epistemic
worth can be clearly seen in Descartes’s attempt to construct an epistemology beyond
what, for him, were seen as the poisoned epistemologies of ordinary everyday object-
relations. In the first meditation, Descartes’s investigation into the nature of knowl-
edge begins with a reflective questioning of the epistemic certainty that was typically
afforded by ordinary seventeenth century furniture (in his case, fireplaces). For
Descartes, it is because ordinary furniture can be manipulated by outside forces that
makes it a potential source of error and illusion. Thus, to find his “Archimedean” epis-
temological first principle of knowledge, Descartes began his philosophical medita-
tions by doubting the veridicality of his ordinary perceptions of furniture, and his
“method of doubt” was premised upon the belief that he has merely been taught by
nature—and not reason—that “various other bodies exist in the vicinity of my body,
and that some of these are to be sought out and others avoided” (Descartes, 1996, p.
56). Thus, for him, ordinary furniture cannot provide the philosopher with any secure
sense of epistemological foundation, because they may—logically—be the product of
forces of epistemological evil, especially the evil designs of malin genie who could have
furnished the world in order to deceive. Thus, Cartesian rationalism begins its episte-
mological inquiries from the “mad” assumption that any taken-for-granted concep-
tion of furniture as indicative of an “out there” reality is nothing but a “chimera of the
mind,” and in so doing he de-furnished the world—by bracketing out its furniture—
in a fit of rationalist pique that enthroned the subject as the only viable source of epis-
temic certainty.
For the founders of modern empiricism, furniture is the object through which the
modern epistemologist derives an idea of “justified belief.” And there is clearly some-
thing to the empiricist’s philosophical reflections: for which of us who have sunk into
a well-placed cozy settee could skeptically deny that we have access to the “reality of
the external world”? For the more epistemologically austere modern rationalist
philosopher, however, the manifest sensuousness of furniture is less epistemologically
comforting and more epistemologically seductive, tricking those who contemplate its
finer affordances into believing that its immediate sensuous enjoyment provides intu-
itive grounds for knowledge of the world “out there.” For the modern rationalist, the
secure and comfortable familiarity of furniture is liable to distract thinking: perhaps
by luring it into a kind of intellectual torpor—a life of Nietzschean “miserable ease”—
 T h i n k i n g a n d t h e A r t o f F u r n i t u r e 165

that obstructs the rational inquirer’s pursuit of truth and undermines the possibility
of knowledge.
Furniture has also been the starting point for more contemporary philosophical
endeavors. In fact, meditations on furniture continue to play a part in twentieth cen-
tury empiricism: especially “positivistic” philosophies of science and language (and it
is at this point in the evolution of modern philosophical discourse that we see the
emergence of furniture as a philosophical metaconcept, deployed to redefine tradi-
tional ontological questions about what “there is,” as questions about what constitutes
the “furniture of the universe”; see Bunge, 1977). In general, twentieth century em-
piricists have attempted to steer a course between empiricism’s epistemological affir-
mative and rationalism’s skeptical ways of conceiving furniture. In Bertrand Russell’s
logical empiricist philosophy, for example—and also some contemporary social con-
structivist critics of science (see below)—we can see a rejection of the claims of those
traditional empiricists who advocate an uncritical acceptance of the epistemological
value of ordinary ways of experiencing furniture. For him, any uncritical belief in fur-
niture’s epistemological affordances characterizes the attitude of the naively realistic
“normal observer” who takes for granted that his or her ordinary perceptions of fur-
niture give insight into its true nature and—ipso facto—the nature of the “external
world itself.” In Russell’s view, the ordinary naive realist, in claiming that ordinary per-
ceptions of furniture are self-evidently perceptions of an “out-there reality,” forgets
that his or her own perceptions of furniture—perceptions that he or she takes as epis-
temologically sacrosanct—are really only perceptions of objects from a certain “logi-
cal point of view.” Hence, according to Russell, it is evident that “the real table, if there
is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is
immediately known” (Russell, 1980, p. 4). Thus, in contrast to Berkeley and Descartes,
Russell allows for a degree of “open-endedness” to the epistemological significance of
furniture. Furniture is still the ontological ground for his empiricist epistemology, but
in his case, it is recognized that furniture affords a complex set of epistemological and
ontological significances (and thus for Russell, there is no simple and direct route
from the experience of furniture to knowledge of the world per se). In fact, in Russel-
lian empiricism, furniture suffers a further decomposition. Eager to square empiri-
cism with the newly emergent theoretical sciences—with their postulation of unob-
servable theoretical entities—Russellian furniture is transformed from a thing into a
logical-theoretical construct inferred out of the atomic particularities of sense-experi-
ence. Russell’s attempt to decompose furniture into a set of theoretical constructs can
also be seen in other philosophies influenced by twentieth century positivist
thought—such as Wilfred Sellars’s scientific realism—where ordinary sensation-based
conceptions of furniture are dismissed because furniture—such as chairs—are “really
a system of imperceptible particles which ‘appears’. . . as a colour solid” (Sellars, 1963,
p. 29). In general terms, for these empiricist philosophers, furniture affords a reflective
space of ontological possibilities. Russell makes this point well when he writes:

Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has
become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one thing that we know about it, is
that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete
liberty to conjecture. Lebiniz tells us it is a community of souls; Berkeley tells us that it is
an idea in the mind; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us that it is a vast collec-
tion of electric charges in violent motion. (Russell, 1980, p. 6)
166 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 4

Furniture continues to be an evocative philosophical object in some twentieth cen-

tury variations of Cartesian rationalism, especially for those—such as Merleau-Ponty—
concerned with the metaphysics of ordinary perception. Merleau-Ponty follows
Berkeley and Descartes in claiming that contemplation of ordinary domestic furni-
ture—in his case tables—sets up the fundamental conundrum of modern philosophy:
the relationship between “subject” and “object.” Thus, for him, “as sure as it is that I
see my table, that my vision terminates in it . . . as soon as I attend to it this conviction
is just as strongly contested, by the very fact that this vision is mine” (Merleau-Ponty,
1968, p. 4; original emphasis). However, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, philosophical med-
itations on the intellectual affordances of ordinary furniture show clearly that the fun-
damental of the subject of furniture is one of embodiment. As he states:

I must acknowledge that the table before me stands in a singular relation with my eyes
and my body: I see it only if it is within their radius of action; above it there is the dark
mass of my forehead, beneath it the more indecisive contour of my cheeks—both of
these visible at the limit and capable of hiding the table, as if my vision of the world it-
self were formed from a certain point of the world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 7)

It is clearly tempting at this point to follow Benjamin and make a critical point
against the modern philosopher’s obsession with furniture: that it exposes modern
philosophy as an intellectually idle product of the musings of a bourgeois voluptuary.
However, the modern philosopher’s concern with furniture begs a deeper set of ques-
tions. Might furniture—as one of the ontological conditions of possibility for modern
philosophy itself—be more usefully seen as the horizon of the modern philosopher’s
vision? Might modern philosophy thus be of a radically different kind to those ancient
philosophies of the agora? Might modern philosophy—as philosophia supellex, a phi-
losophy that understands the world as primarily a furnished one—be founded on a
profound agoraphobia? And might modern philosophy’s peculiar antinaturalist meta-
physics—that reaches its zenith in Kantian transcendental idealism—be seen as a di-
rect consequence of this?

Furniture, Science, and the Social Construction of Reality

It is not only the intellectual orientations of the modern philosopher that can be
seen as arising out of a set of reflections upon and about furniture. Modern science
can also be seen not only to have played a significant role in producing and maintain-
ing domestic furniture but also—in experimental settings—to have manipulated and
reflected upon ordinary furniture for its own theoretical ends (such that, as with the
modern philosopher, the experimental scientist can be seen as someone whose intel-
lections emerge out of furniture’s epistemological affordances). Many early attempts
at experimentation can be seen to have involved manipulations of ordinary furniture
in order to quantify, “rearrange,” and generally “cognitively penetrate” into their deep-
est recesses in order to reveal the “hidden furniture within”—a furniture that institu-
tionalized science, oddly, takes to be the furniture of universe, “furniture in-itself.” In
fact, much early experimental science can be seen as an intellectual game between the
experimental scientist and furniture. It is relatively easy to show from a mere cursory
examination of the historical record of experimental science the extent to which the
early experimental scientist “played with furniture,” refashioning it into new and more
 T h i n k i n g a n d t h e A r t o f F u r n i t u r e 167

epistemologically affordant devices. The early scientist used these affordances to forge
a new intellectual context that allowed the way such devices “move” to be described in
general mathematical terms (something that modern scientists, again oddly, have re-
ferred to as “laws of nature”). Galileo’s theories of mechanical motion, for example,
began from “experimenting” with pendulums, feathers, ramps sloping down from
chairs, and the like (see Galileo, 1914, p. 10 ff., for an account of how a primitive “fire
escape” acted as experimental equipment affording the “laws of mechanics”). Fara-
day’s theories of combustion were also largely derived from careful observation of or-
dinary furniture, in this case, the observation of the burning of candles (see Faraday,
1995). In his view, burning candles are objects that not only allow us to model more
natural processes of combustion but also afford a direct and general microtheoretical
understanding of the nature of combustion itself. As he states:

In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going very similar to that of a
candle, and I must try to make that plain to you. For it is not merely true in a poetical
sense. The candle combines with parts of the air forming carbonic acid and evolves heat;
so in the lungs there is the curious, wondrous change taking place. (Faraday, 1995, p. 89)

What these examples show is that some of the leading figures in early science con-
ceived of furniture as an object that afforded an epistemic orientation to another kind
of “microfurniture”: the elemental objects and forces somewhere within ordinary fur-
niture. This scientific conception of furniture as ontologically multileveled, although
a radical ontological claim at the time, is now a domestic doxa; clearly showing the ex-
tent to which furniture’s epistemological affordances are now fully part of the domes-
tic environment and readily taken up in forms of domestic living.
Many modern philosophers overlook the interwovenness of the epistemological af-
fordances of technoscience with more traditional everyday affordances (such that
everyday domesticity is the bearer of multiple epistemological affordances). In so do-
ing, they overlook the fact that for late-modern domestics, it is not technoscience or
ordinary phenomenology, theory or practice, abstract concept or concrete thing, but
both one and the other. This raises some difficult questions for the modern philoso-
pher. For how is it possible to philosophize in a stereotypically “modern” way—where
the “ultimate” question is, What is the nature and significance of the representational
powers of the subject—when modern science has rendered the ordinary “unitary
thing” conception of furniture that sustained this kind of philosophical endeavor ob-
solete? How is the philosopher to make sense of the modern philosophical problem of
what constitutes “the subject” and “the world” when the removal of furniture’s episte-
mological self-evidence has radically undermined the ontological integrity of the
philosopher’s most immediate world?
These questions can be avoided if furniture is seen as the bearer of only discursive
affordances. This has been the approach adopted by contemporary “social construc-
tivist” theorists in the social sciences. Social constructionists generally reject philo-
sophical approaches, in favor of what might be termed “ordinary-language microsoci-
ology”—a position that also tends to be hostile to modern technoscience’s
microtheoretical accounts of the world (see Edwards, Ashmore, & Potter, 1995). In-
terestingly, social constructionists also have a lot to say about furniture. Although they
deny that furniture has any philosophical significance, social constructivists tend—
like Descartes and Russell—to be “furniture skeptics” as they generally contest the idea
that our knowledge and experience of furniture provides grounds for asserting any-
168 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 4

thing about the world as it “really is.” As with Russell, their particular targets are those
naively realist epistemologies that attempt to prove the “reality of the external world”
by appealing to some intuitive idea or effect of furniture. Thus, according to Edwards
et al., just as Dr. Johnson attempted to refute Berkeleyean idealism by kicking a stone,
so more contemporary naive realists often bang tables and kick chairs in order to
prove that everyday reality is much more “solid” than a social construction. For them,
there is no furniture, only “furniture arguments” (or perhaps better, “arguments over
furniture”). As they put it:

No matter what the debate, whatever its content or its medium, there is likely to be some
furniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles and abstractions,
cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity, we do so in chairs and
in rooms, at desks and tables. . . . The appeal of these things is that they are external to
the talk, available to show that it just is talk, that there is another world beyond, that there
are limits to the flexibility of descriptions. . . . Furniture argument invokes the objective
world as given, as distinct from the processes of representation; as directly apprehended,
independent of any particular description. (Edwards et al., 1995, p. 26)

For these constructivist critics of furniture, domestic furniture carries no episte-

mological affordances but is something socially “produced” out of discursively cir-
cumscribed social contexts that surround “it” (whatever “it” is). Hence, they claim that
the reality of furniture is “not so much an out there reality, but rather the workings of
consensual common sense” (Edwards et al., 1995, p. 30)—showing the extent to which
their work is in the same spirit as modern “rationalist” philosophical discourse, albeit
amended so as to include wider microsociological factors. In fact, in this case, the so-
cial context of furniture has taken on the powers of the Cartesian malin genie: radi-
cally undermining all claims that the experience of furniture is an index of the reality
of furniture itself. However, they open their argument with a rather telling claim:
“Wherever there is debate, there is likely to be some furniture around.” In making this
claim, they recognize that the modern intellectual discusses his or her theoretical ab-
stractions sitting at tables and chairs. Thus, clearly, furniture remains an object of im-
mediate concern for them. Thus, is not the case that their claims remain reflections
upon furniture’s epistemological affordances, that, for them, furniture affords not just
“sitting-on,” but “thinking-about”? Moreover, are these not claims that reality is min-
imally composed of at least one kind of thing—furniture?
There is an ontology of intellectual life buried within both the philosophical and
constructivist view of furniture: that contemporary academic debate is largely an in-
door affair that requires furniture both as a physical prop and as an intellectual object
upon which to reflect and frame particular kinds of intellectual argument. What this
shows is that although social constructionist social science masquerades as an onto-
logical thesis—that reality is socially constructed—it is really only an epistemological
thesis that masquerades as a skepticism about worldly reality (see Edley, 2001). Hence,
all social constructionist social science really claims is that our conceptions of the world
are made in language and are thus socially acquired (a claim that is probably trivially
true). Seen in terms of Gibson’s theory of affordances, it is rather banal to claim that
furniture affords a discursive/rhetorical meaning (not only because furniture, as an
object, obviously affords naming but also because furniture affords other more prag-
matic meanings, as we sometimes kick/throw/hit furniture in order to communicate
something to another person). As such, then, social constructivism leaves the world of
furniture it inhabits in a somewhat Wittgensteinian vein, exactly as it is (thus collaps-
 T h i n k i n g a n d t h e A r t o f F u r n i t u r e 169

ing, in final analysis, into an ontological position not very far from the very “naive re-
alism” that it strives to overcome).
Like their modern rationalist philosophical ancestors, in disavowing the intellectual
affordances of furniture, social constructivists continue to treat it as an object of in-
tellectual significance (and read psychoanalytically, this would clearly be evidence for
some kind of defensive machinery at work here: Could it be that the indoor realities
of the contemporary Western intellectual have become in some way “unbearable”?).
As such, social constructivists remain intellectually trapped inside a world of furni-
ture: a world whose ontological significance and coherence is simultaneously denied
and affirmed (and one way around this problem, much vaunted by the constructivists,
is to view this world relativistically, as nothing more than a temporary discursive
housing, in effect escaping one intellectual prison for another). They remain reflex-
ively unaware that furniture, like language itself, is part of the background of worldly
conditions of possibility for the modern intellectual’s particular and peculiar forms of
thinking and acting (although, in my view, furniture is, ontologically, the more pri-
mordial of the two. Even nondiscursive creatures, such as birds, build and use furni-
ture-nests).
In an overall way, social constructivists such as Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter take
the ordinary meaning of furniture for granted in their own intellectual endeavors, and
in this respect, they are part of the great modern “indoor” intellectual tradition. How-
ever, as social constructionists clearly spend a lot of their working time sitting on
chairs, writing at desks, putting books on shelves, turning on lights, setting up new
computer equipment, and so on, they simply cannot ignore the worldly conditions
that make their particular discursive products possible. The “reality crises” that social
constructionists theoretically articulate—and to some extent politically celebrate—are
the result of a desire to view these worldly conditions as primarily “theoretical condi-
tions”: and it is for this reason that social constructivist social science stands in the
same relationship to the indoor world as its erstwhile antagonists from the so-called
natural sciences. Thus, the constructivist is still faced with Eddington’s two tables
problem, only in their case, the dilemma is whether the “real table” is the one sat on or
the one conversed about, a dilemma that they “resolve” by giving up on the very idea
that there is a world “out there” at all!

The Art of Furniture (Or Opening the Windows and the Doors)

There is something psychologically uncomfortable involved in the claim that ordi-

5
nary furniture has a purely abstract and theoretical counterpart and that in the con-
text of ordinary domestic living, these are synthesized into an experience of a single
domestic world. This world presents itself to the modern philosopher—and his heir
the social constructionist social scientist—as something “ontologically problematic.”
Thus, from the point of view of the modern intellectual, the “ontological complex” of
concrete manifest domesticity and its hidden “theoretical” aspects delineate the world
as it really is. But what does this complexity tell us about both modern domesticity
and modern intellectual life? Might the unfathomable complexity of the world—as
suggested in much of current “postmodern” thinking—stem from reflections upon an
increasingly technoscientifically augmented domestic world that resists any single,
unifying intellectual vision? Moreover, might modern intellectual life suffer from the
same debilitating limitations as modern domesticity? Might we not talk about the fun-
170 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 4

damental privatism and ontological conservatism of modern intellectual life in exactly

the same way as modern intellectuals have chided the domestic sphere? If so, what
kind of discourse can be used to expose the limitations of the technological furniture-
world of the modern intellectual?
One of the most significant attempts to develop a critique of the new world of
technoscientific domesticity can be found in modern science-fiction writing. In much
science fiction writing, imaginative futuristic projections of what is seen as “possible
furniture” are cast against a background of an imaginatively projected future science
and society (and thus science fiction writing engages with the historicity of the nature
of furniture itself). For example, in Isaac Asimov’s It’s a Beautiful Day (see Asimov,
1961), ordinary “doors” have become technoscientifically empowered “Doors” that
6
transport people from place to place without ever having to go “outdoors.” For Asi-
mov, however, such an indoor world is both limited and limiting, and the technosci-
entific augmentation of ordinary furniture represents a further alienation of human-
ity from the natural world. This kind of analysis shows the extent to which furniture
can constitute a complete and unified sui generis indoor world (where the idea of
“outdoor life” is seen as eccentric and/or dangerous). For writers like Asimov, techno-
scientific furniture creates a hermetically sealed world where the idea that there could
be anything “outside” has been forgotten in the comforts and immediate enjoyments
of the domestic world (a common theme in much modern sci-fi writing).
If much modern philosophy is derived from a meditation on furniture, science fic-
tion can be seen as an “art of furniture.” It addresses the question of the ethical limits
to the “technological sublime” of modern domesticity and expresses a utopian long-
ing for a world no longer enframed by technological furniture. It shows how as furni-
ture becomes increasingly technoscientific in character, the boundary between in-
doors and outdoors is lost; everything becomes part of a vastly expanded and
increasingly virtual and totalizing “inside” (perhaps we can say that the postmodern
experience of virtuality stems from just this sense of loss). What this kind of sci-fi
writing shows is that with the emergence of technoscientific furniture, everything be-
comes furniture: from fridges to Bunsen burners, settees to electrons, cars to carbure-
tors, all objects become part of a routine and familiar—yet massively expanded—do-
mesticated indoor assemblage. Thus, science fiction writing, in being reflexively aware
of the importance of furniture in framing the domestic sphere as a world, brings to the
surface a problem that remains invisible to the modern philosopher: that their preoc-
cupation with furniture prevents them from seeing that furniture is—ontologically
speaking—the modern world. And that to intellectualize beyond—or post—furni-
ture, is to think beyond—or after—modernity.
Hence, it must be stressed that the world of furniture is not the only world, and
there can be—and ought to be—much more to intellectual life than simply a medita-
tion on the epistemological significance of furniture. Critical reflection on the signif-
icance of furniture thinking need be no mere intellectual fancy, as it can be used to de-
velop an immanent critique of the modern intellectual: Trapped at his or her desk, the
modern intellectual is a hyper-scholastic who overlooks the basic ontological fact that
the world is much more than a product of object-affordance but a more expansive and
open world that necessitates an engagement with domesticity’s Others, especially na-
ture and intellectual’s Others in the public sphere. Thus, although furniture is the on-
tological condition of late-modern intellectual privacy—and something that intellec-
tuals are increasingly forced to have quasi-social relationships with—one important
 T h i n k i n g a n d t h e A r t o f F u r n i t u r e 171

task for the contemporary intellectual is to be aware of just how much furniture has
framed the intellectual tradition with which we can understand this world, and how
much of the world lies outside. This is a plea for intellectual life in general—and phi-
losophy in particular—to return to its nomadic and peripatetic outdoor roots (see
Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). If this were achieved, then intellectuals would realize that
there is a world out there to be (re)discovered, and that much modern thinking is
thinking enframed by a world of furniture that it has mistakenly taken for the world
in-itself.

Notes

1. Clearly I am using the terms furnish and furniture in a very broad sense here; much
broader than the now familiar definition of furniture as a generic term for all those functional,
easily recognizable and familiar artifacts that are a pre-requirement for a comfortable life in the
modern indoors. Furniture, in the sense that I use the term here, is the most direct and palpa-
ble everyday example of Heideggerean Zeug—stuff with everyday use. Seen in this Heideggerean
way, furnishing the world becomes a mode of object provision, “a way of providing” the world
with types of practically and effectively necessary objects.
2. Hutchby argues that “affordances are functional and relational aspects which frame, while
not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object” (Hutchby,
2001, p. 444). For Hutchby, Gibson’s theory of affordances appeals because it seems to offer a
“third way” of understanding the nature and significance of technoscientific artifacts: some-
where between technological determinism and sociocultural constructivism.
3. Although this affordance is latent rather than manifest, the direct phenomenological con-
sequences of this latent affordance—the direct illumination of electric light that ensures as a re-
sult of this same “conductivity”—is manifest. This is because, in ordinary domestic contexts,
when we perceive a light switch, we also see its “affordance” for illumination (we can also “see”
this affordance in some of the “wiring” that makes this illumination possible).
4. Domestic furniture consists of objects that typically reside in tightly circumscribed indoor
space. It is this that allows items of furniture to be manipulated with ease: giving rise in turn to
much more “instrumentalized” forms of reflective experience where the object is understood re-
ductively (as simply the sum of its experiential parts). The objects that typically reside out-
doors—especially “natural objects” such as trees and flowers and so on—are less clearly manip-
ulable: allowing for more “holistic” forms of reflection wherein the object is seen as something,
sublimely, in excess of the sum of experiential parts and what can “logically” be inferred out of
them.
5. Cultural psychologists, such as Louis Sass (Sass, 1992), have pointed out the role of what
Sass terms the “truth-taking stare” in “modernist” aesthetic cultures in the early decades of the
last century. Eddington’s scientific chair is clearly a chair “brought close” by a kind of truth-tak-
ing stare that forces awareness of the hidden microscopic dimensions of furniture at the expense
of more manifest dimensions of furniture. For Sass, this is the expression of a new form of “hy-
per-intentionality” that amounts—from the point of view of “normal” everyday cognition—to
essentially a “distracted” form of consciousness.
6. The capitalization here is clearly designed to stress the functional augmentation of ordi-
nary furniture by the incorporation of technoscientific devices.

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Neil Turnbull is a lecturer in social theory at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He com-
pleted his Ph.D. on the history and philosophy of science in 2000 and also published a book on
the history of philosophy as well as book chapters on the philosophy of technology.