1st Oct. 2024
duvet laundry cycle
My original plan was to wash the duvet every fortnight. But in practice, the gaps between washes kept getting longer. A year ago, I adjusted the plan to once a month, but even that didn't stick. Now I wash it every six to eight weeks—roughly every month and a half to two months.
There are many reasons why I keep putting off washing the duvet. Most of them are excuses, of course. Still, if I try to sort out what's an excuse and what's a real reason, it might help stop the washing cycle from stretching out even further. The first reason that comes to mind is that I have too much to do—part-time work, my own work, and housework—so washing the duvet gets pushed down the list. That said, I don't feel as though I'm living any more diligently than I was two years ago. My mind has just become busier. And as the gaps between duvet washes have grown longer, it feels as though my pace of work has slowed along with them. Maybe the duvet-washing cycle has slowed simply because I've become someone who can't get things done as quickly as I used to. I also wondered whether it's because I've become less bothered by feeling grimy. But from the point where I've been using the duvet for more than three weeks, I start to feel a vague discomfort and an imaginary itch, so it doesn't seem like I've become unfazed about these things. It feels more like I'm simply putting up with it.
And there's one more thing that really is just an excuse: washing the duvet feels like a big job. Big enough that I'm treating it as a problem and writing something like a self-reproach over it. It's a hassle to take the duvet cover off, and I hate being unable to go out while the washing machine is running, stuck at home waiting. I also find it unpleasant to sit there waiting for it to dry, and to worry about how I'm meant to sleep if it isn't dry by this evening. And the thing I dislike most of all is putting the duvet cover back on.
My bed is a single. But the duvet is one I bought before I moved, back when I was using a small double, so it's slightly too big to lay neatly on a single bed. No matter how I place it, it's impossible to spread the duvet cover out fully, so I have to stuff the duvet in while it's folded in half and then folded in half again. Once I'm in there with it, wrestling inside the cover, my hair gets completely tangled, my forearms start to sting with static, and sweat begins to bead on my upper lip. And as for the duvet corners, I have no idea where they are. The spot where I've pinned the duvet down, thinking it's a corner, turns out to be a crumpled section instead. Even if I somehow get one side sorted, the other side comes undone again. After repeating this a few times, it isn't just my upper lip anymore—fine beads of sweat start to gather all over. When I think about that sweat being absorbed back into the duvet I've just washed, I start to wonder whether washing it was the right idea at all, and I feel sorry for the duvet cover, and sorry for myself. After a long tussle with it, I do up the buttons on the duvet cover. Then, the duvet is twisted half a turn in the middle.
This situation cannot be explained except by saying it's the plot of someone acting out of malice. If it isn't that, then it's closer to an uncontrollable natural disaster. And if this unpleasantness really is a kind of natural disaster that I have to endure every time I wash the duvet, then it wouldn't be fair to call my hesitation about doing it "just an excuse". Come to think of it, I've experienced a similar sort of viciousness before. One example is the printer. I may even have written it down when I was in the middle of trying to "collaborate" with it. Each time I connect it, the Wi-Fi signal goes unanswered; the colours and ink lines refuse to behave; and the print placement is uneven in a way that makes crop marks meaningless. The whole process—coaxing it and calming it down until it finally works—leaves me with the sense that I'm negotiating: trying to fit the printer to me, and myself to the printer, for the sake of some purpose, or sometimes for the sake of an outcome that has no purpose at all. I've felt that same sensation in collaboration between people, too. And that was why I began to think I might be able to see using a printer as a form of collaboration.
However, now I know that this is neither negotiation nor collaboration. Collaboration is an action in which people share a purpose and produce a shared outcome, but objects don't have things like purposiveness or a future orientation. When certain objects seem to show something similar, it's only because a purpose that cannot be erased—mine, or the maker's, as a subject—has been laid onto that object, or projected into it. The instinctive purposiveness that beings capable of being subjects possess—in other words, will—is not something that can simply be lost. Because of whether or not will is present, subjects and objects cannot have their agency assessed by the same measure. And because the measures differ, it can't even be decided whether a shared purpose is something they can possess. So, strictly speaking, the reason I got angry when I was using the printer wasn't that it wouldn't do what I told it to; it was that the will I had conferred on the printer didn't satisfy me. And the reason putting the duvet cover on takes courage isn't because the duvet cover has created a natural disaster, but because I don't have enough courage to endure myself feeling that unpleasantness.
In order to try having a shared purpose with objects, I tried, at times, to make things into subjects, or to make myself into an object. But that attempt only went as far as appearing to challenge the subject—object dichotomy; it amounted to making the use of things "look like" collaboration. Even if both the duvet and I sit together on a list of things required for sleep, or even if sleeping is an act realised through an exchange of actions between me and the duvet, that is still no more than an attempt to deny that I am using the duvet—to see it differently. The shift in perspective in the earlier projects affected only the thought system of the person trying to change their perspective. It didn't change the event that was actually taking place: my use of an object. So now I know well how arrogant it is to say that I achieve sleep through collaboration with the duvet.
I know that the duvet cover, the duvet, the detergent, the washing machine, and the drying rack are all made by people. So I also know, now, that these things carry their makers' intentions, and that whatever agency they have arises from those intentions. And when it comes to doing the washing, I know perfectly well that the duvet cover is washed and dried by me, and that the duvet is put back into the cover only by me. What I do on my own—or what I do with objects—is an event that occurs through collaboration between me and people I don't even know, and objects merely act as intermediaries between me and them.
And yet I've experienced the unpleasantness of using objects as the same kind of unpleasantness I feel in collaboration with people. And it isn＊t only unpleasantness. The way my body changes as it adjusts to an object; the attachment and sense of comradeship I feel towards it; the sense of achieve-ment; the guilt I feel when something goes wrong with it—these feelings sometimes come to me with a density I don't quite feel towards other people. They are feelings I can't have in the part-time workplace, where I deal with different people face to face. And I can't have them within the cooperative relationships formed for an exhibition, either. This intensity is why I came to hold on to the hope that I might be able to live with objects and collaborate with them, and why I don't want to face the maker's agency—or subjectivity—embedded in things.
