'Today the ideal home remains a site of illusory ease, a space that can be wiped clean of the residues of living…'
In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.
Living Rooms blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world.
In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?
Possessions and labor
“As Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish reveals, the objects we covet are valuable because they are made by human labour. To make the labour of production visible in the object, as Ruskin and Morris hoped to do, is an act of subversion, it reminds us that the product should remain in the gift of its producer, and not the capitalist who exploits them.”
