10th Jan. 2025
rolling the duvet to put on the cover
About ten months ago, I searched YouTube for "how to put on a duvet cover", thinking that if I knew an easier method, I might be able to enjoy washing the duvet a little more. I found one that seemed genuinely new—though people who clean often, or who do it for a living, may already know it. The idea is to turn the duvet cover inside out and spread it out on the floor or on the mattress, lay the duvet on top, and then roll the duvet and the cover up together from the end opposite the opening. Once it is rolled all the way, the two open ends of the cover are turned over the roll to wrap it, and then the roll is simply unrolled again. Done this way, the duvet cover can be put on and straightened out with much less trouble.
If I use this method, I don't have to face the situation of flailing around inside the duvet cover, suffering from static and sweat. And beyond that, I don't even need to pay attention to the duvet cover turning inside out when I take it off before washing. So did learning this method actually make me wash the duvet more often, or stop the interval from getting longer? As I said earlier, it didn't. If washing the duvet had become something I did with a happy mind, I wouldn't be making this whingeing record in the first place. With this new method, I was able to free myself from the elements I had thought were what made me not want to do the duvet washing. And yet, if I still don't want to do it, then those elements are unlikely to have been the fundamental reason. They are more likely to have been excuses, or secondary reasons.
Perhaps putting the duvet cover on has already lodged itself deep in my mind as something associated with nothing but unpleasant feeling.
drying the duvet
If the problem is not only putting the duvet cover on, then the reason has to be looked for in the whole process of washing the duvet. Running the washing machine and hanging the duvet on the drying rack are not especially difficult. I do laundry two or three times a week, so washing itself has long since settled into a routine. But the main difference between washing the duvet and ordinary laundry is that, while waiting for it to dry, there is the worry about how I can sleep if there is no duvet to sleep under tonight. With ordinary laundry, even if the weather is overcast or the house is damp, it is usually clear that everything will be dry by the following afternoon, so there is less to worry about. But with the duvet, even if it is washed early in the morning, it often does not dry by night. So the whole process requires more factors to be considered than ordinary laundry does. If ordinary laundry is a set of problems to be solved between me, the washing machine, the detergent, and the clothes, then duvet washing requires, in addition, negotiation with the weather, the boiler, and my hormones. So, unlike ordinary laundry, washing the duvet can be seen as a large project with a striking number of participants. Which is to say: it is work in which more friction is almost inevitable.
By comparing it with ordinary laundry, I arrived at the hypothesis that one reason I don't want to wash the duvet may be that duvet washing is, relatively speaking, a large project. From here, the cause can be narrowed down in two directions. The first is to consider whether the cause lies with one particular participant in the duvet-washing process. The second is to consider whether it lies in the scale of the participants involved.
duvet laundry supplies
Both duvet washing and ordinary laundry involve the same elements: the involvement of the washing machine, the detergent, the laundry, and myself. Duvet washing, unlike ordinary laundry, also involves the weather, the boiler, and hormones. There will be other participants I have not considered, but here I will deal only with these. (And I'll exclude myself as well. I've been talking about myself the whole time.)
Washing machine
When it comes to the washing machine's participation, there doesn't seem to be much difference between doing ordinary laundry and washing the duvet. There are minor differences in the movements involved in putting things in and taking them out, but the main points are the same: having to stay at home until the cycle ends, putting up with the noise, and loosening the laundry when it comes out in a clump. If anything, the inconvenience the washing machine creates is greater with ordinary laundry, simply because it involves bending down repeatedly.
Detergent
Like the washing machine, it isn't a factor that creates any major problems. I use liquid detergent, and often spill it on the side of the bottle or on the floor; wiping that up is an unpleasant experience.
Laundry
With ordinary laundry, it is visible as it gradually piles up in the laundry basket or the washing machine. The more it accumulates, the more it produces a prompt to act—an anxiety that it needs to be washed. With duvet washing, the laundry is not left sitting in a basket or in the machine. The duvet is on the bed every day, and used every day. So the signal that it needs washing is not delivered through a stimulus as direct as the laundry basket. Instead, the trigger is my own laziness in realising that the interval I had set has already passed, or it is the smell that gradually begins to appear. But because the duvet is used every day, the olfactory stimulus does not arrive as dramatically as the visual stimulus of ordinary laundry.
Among the participants in laundry, it is the laundry itself that shows the most marked difference in duvet washing. Sometimes an action that is not dramatic at all produces a far more dramatic result—like realising that the smell in the kitchen is not coming from the pile of washing-up, but from a tomato rotting in the back corner of a cupboard. If action becomes inevitable once a certain stimulus has accumulated to 10, then ordinary laundry, or washing-up, can be said to deliver a stimulus of 2 each day. The duvet, by contrast, is like that rotten tomato: it delivers a stimulus of 0.2. Its behaviour, which is no different from yesterday’s, suddenly registers as an 8 or 9, and only then does the problem become apparent. Perhaps it is this sudden transformation of the duvet into “laundry” that I find burdensome.
Now, to the participants involved only in washing the duvet.
Weather
As mentioned earlier, the key to washing the duvet is washing it and drying it on the same day. For that, it needs to be done on a day that isn’t too damp, and, if possible, on a day with sun. The weather is an independent factor that neither the duvet cover nor I can intervene in, and at the same time it is a participant with a higher power of control, limiting what the duvet cover and I can do. The weather does not change because I am in a bad mood, or because I have too much to do. But it is often the case that my mood worsens, or my tasks pile up, because of the weather. Likewise, how I wash the duvet cover, how long it takes to dry, and how much stamina it takes to put it back on all vary depending on the weather.
The non-cooperation of wholly unintentional participants is, for intentional participants, a movement that cannot be understood, and a task to be dealt with. In particular, when an unintentional participant vastly outstrips the capacities of an intentional one—as with the weather—its actions cannot be controlled. Even so, intentional participants have, at times, gone to war in order to control wholly unintentional ones, and at other times have pleaded. In the end, intentional participants have no choice but to comply with wholly unintentional ones, and that compliance is a humiliation: a bending of one’s will, an admission of being controlled. To comply, in particular, with a participant that seems less intelligent than oneself is an even deeper disgrace. That disgrace still exists. Perhaps what I call inconvenience is only an excuse—a way of softening the humiliation I feel in relation to the weather.
Boiler
The boiler is one of the things made in order to overcome the weather and regain control over everyday life. When the sky is overcast but putting off washing the duvet is no longer an option, it is possible to turn the boiler up and dry the room out. So on winter evenings, when the days are short and the duvet still hasn’t dried, I often leave the boiler on high. But on nights like that the room becomes so dry that static builds up badly, and it is irritating—when I am putting the duvet cover on, and even when I lie down to sleep. And on days that are truly damp, the boiler is useless. It can’t beat the weather. In summer, too—especially during the rainy season—turning the boiler on is something I hesitate to do.
I once lived in a house where the gas worked on credit topped up at the post office. At the time, I would sometimes forget to top it up and end up unable to use the boiler for a day or two. Unless it is the middle of winter, the boiler sits below electricity or running water in the hierarchy of what a home needs. Electricity and water can still be used even after the credit has run out, thanks to emergency mode. Gas cannot, and that is what gave rise to the thought. And looking back, it may be a little bleak to say it, but life is still possible after a cold shower, and the night can still be got through with a thick duvet or an electric blanket. So at times I think that perhaps the boiler is not, after all, an essential element of everyday life.
Even so, when the gas is cut off, it feels deeply wretched. It is a wretched-ness different from the weather’s caprice. The boiler is usually a docile thing, clearly under control, but one day it suddenly becomes something beyond control. At times like that, phone calls have to be made because of the boiler, trips to the post office have to be made, and showers have to be taken while shivering with cold.
This is a slightly different topic, but in Korea a comparison between the central heating used in apartment blocks built in the 1980s and 1990s and today’s individual heating can serve as an example for describing the forms that transfers of power have taken alongside technological development. From 1980, Seoul began to install city gas in stages, in step with the development of Gangnam, and apartment blocks built at the time used central heating. Partly this was because installation and running costs were economical, but the convenience of mass provision under rapid urbanisation was also a major reason. There is also the view that this was possible because, until then, community-first thinking tended to prevail among citizens, and there was no marked resistance to systems designed around collective efficiency. By contrast, the spread of individual heating may have been realised in part through the reduced cost of expansion made possible by technological advances, but it is likely that a large part of it also lay in the rising importance of individual choice and the growing aversion to centrally controlled arrangements. The idea took hold that it was right to use as much as one wished and pay accordingly, and a society that guarantees this came to be regarded as the more rational kind of society.
So I live in a society where I can use the boiler only to the extent that I have paid for it, but where there is no neighbour who will help when I cannot pay. Having the boiler cut off when payment has not been made, and turning the temperature down to economise, are what is expected in this city. And for that reason, even washing the duvet on a rainy day, within an individual-heating system, is something that can be done only when financial capacity allows. The boiler shows that the city no longer protects the individual as a member of a community in the way it once did, and that the individual, too, wants to be free of that protection. It shows that dwelling is being realised in the form of a contract pursued for mutual profit between the person and the city. In other words, when washing the duvet, the boiler reveals my social role within it.
Hormones
Strictly speaking, it isn’t hormones I mean, but shifts in emotion that I can’t keep under control—when irritation is too strong, or sadness, or when it feels impossible to move. On days when it really feels as though the duvet has to be washed, but fatigue makes it impossible to get up early, I split into two: the self that feels grimy, and the self that is tired. In that moment, the tiredness that stops me moving is registered as shame and suffocation, and there is a desire to treat that feeling as one external factor
among others—something that is not quite me.
“I as another” produced in this way has, historically, been imagined as something negative: a ghost or a demon, a black dog, a shadow. And today, sensations like this—sensations I do not want to recognise as mine—are often described as “hormonal”. If so, does collaboration and compromise also have to take place with the self?
For now, it is better to suspend the question.
It feels as though the whole world is getting in the way of my duvet washing—as if putting it into words turns everything into an excuse. Even so, the participants that feel especially important here are the ones outside my control, or taken to be outside it: the nature of the laundry itself, the weather, and the boiler. These three each infringe my subjectivity over, respectively, the sensory system, action, and choice. They participate in my duvet washing and cause difficulties, each for different reasons and in different ways. But they are not without a shared feature. Like the friction that arises in ordinary collaboration, tension emerges here because of the effort made to negotiate with them.
What differs from ordinary collaboration is that negotiation with these participants is extremely difficult. Coordination between them and me is usually brought to an end by my yielding. So, although there are differences of degree, they often end up remaining not as participants but as factors—or as forces that control me—and are excluded from being objects of cooperation. Like hormones, they are uncomfortable, but have to be accepted as a fact.
project
There is some doubt as to whether the variables above can be treated as participants, but it remains true that more participants are involved in washing the duvet than in ordinary laundry. An increase in participants also sounds like an increase in things that have to be taken into account. Even looking only at the problems raised by the participants involved only in duvet washing, it is clear that there is simply more to coordinate.
From the perspective of an individual participant, however, a situation in which more participants have gathered and there is more to coordinate does not necessarily amount to facing a more difficult project. If the number of matters requiring coordination increases beyond the number of added participants, then an individual's workload has increased; but if the number of added participants exceeds the increase in what must be coordinated, then it can be said that the individual's workload has decreased. In terms of coordination as well, there is the possibility that the need for one participant to take the lead in coordinating with every other participant is reduced. Compared with a one-person company, where a single person must handle administration and planning, production, meetings, and publicity, a larger company allows an individual to specialise in a single task. Through that, an individual's workload and tension can decrease, and responsibility can also become lighter. The same applies to duvet washing: when the weather makes washing impossible, the presence of a boiler can resolve the problem. This is one of the central values of collaboration.
However, not every large-scale collaboration moves in the direction of reducing workload and responsibility in the way described above. Particularly in the early stages of a project that has not yet secured consistency, or in short-term projects, negotiation and coordination take up the greatest share of the work.
To compare: a long-established factory can be seen as a collaborative group that has already secured stability. Factory work involves carrying out tasks that have already been settled at an earlier stage, so there may be few—or no—individuals who need to participate in negotiation and coordination. And because the content of the work is established, it is relatively easy to train new workers, and friction between co-workers can be lower. By contrast, film production, which corresponds more closely to a short-term project, involves negotiation and coordination, and processes of familiarisation, that are far more complex than those in a factory, and these processes occupy a substantial portion of the project period. Setting aside the work of recruiting practitioners, production companies, and investors, there is the need to keep readjusting positions through meetings at every moment. The details vary, but this process continues beyond the end of filming, through editing, publicity, and even after release. And if a problem arises with even one person during production—an actor, a director, a financial manager, a marketer, an investor—finding a replacement can be extremely difficult.
For that reason, it cannot be said that an increase in the scale of collaboration automatically reduces an individual's responsibility and workload; it depends on the project's duration and its fluidity. Compared with ordinary laundry, washing the duvet has more of the character of a short-term project. Ordinary laundry is already such a familiar, everyday activity that unusual situations are unlikely to arise in the course of doing it. The washing machine always works, the detergent is always there, and the stimulus that says laundry needs to be done does not, in itself, generate tension. When washing the duvet, the washing machine and the washing powder are still there. But the other factors are not habitual. The burden felt each time is a reminder that duvet washing is not yet, for me, a familiar activity.
an inexperienced overseer
My lack of experience, as the one overseeing it all, also plays a part. In long-established commercial film production companies, even negotiation and coordination come with guidelines, so the process is simpler than in a new company. They also treat the continued existence of the company—not a single film—as the purpose of collaboration, which gives each project more of a long-term character. If duvet washing were treated not as an end in itself but as a means towards a longer purpose, it might feel easier. Or, even if it never became as effortless as ordinary laundry, some system might have made it more routine. At present there is neither that higher purpose nor that familiarity. So the greater number of participants in duvet washing does not reduce my workload or distribute responsibility; it mainly shows up as new parties to negotiate with. And that raises my anger.
Anger may arise in the process of attempting to collaborate with the duvet cover. But it also arises in the process of trying to overcome what cannot be controlled among the surrounding conditions—what controls my actions—in washing the duvet. If my anger is directed not so much at the duvet cover as at what cannot be controlled, then the purpose of washing the duvet is not to reach a compromise with the duvet cover in order to make it clean. It may instead be to make it through an uncontrollable situation together with the duvet cover. In order to reach an agreement with a more difficult counterpart, a cooperative relationship has first been formed with the duvet cover!
