23rd Apr. 2025
the attachment duvet
A duvet is made by people. Even without knowing exactly who made it or how it was made, it is easy enough to imagine that it was made by people. For that reason, human-made things are less mysterious than natural things. And among them, the duvet belongs to the least mysterious category. Non-artificial objects have long been treated as the work of strange powers, or as bearers of strange powers of their own. In reality, most non-artificial things are difficult for humans to control, and even those that can be controlled have been controllable for a far shorter period than the time during which they remained. That is why non-artificial things still retain a certain enchantment. This becomes clear if the static produced by a duvet is set beside lightning. Compared with static, lightning somehow seems as though it might have more feeling.
Human-made things made from such enchanted materials were believed to carry the same enchanted powers—and, in some cases, still are. Certain aroma oils, and bracelets and mats made from germanium or amethyst, remain in that category. And there are also objects whose engineering principles are never pursued to the point of full understanding: a fridge, a computer, and artificial intelligence. These, too, are a kind of enchanted object. Their modern enchantment comes from science—science that is not fully understood.
Because enchanted things, including non-artificial ones, are not fully under-stood and cannot be fully controlled, they are often approached emotionally. Among the things that are felt to be impossible to grasp with precision, the one encountered most often is another person. People come with problems. And although language and practice are repeatedly brought to bear in an attempt to resolve those problems, the irritation that arises in the process cannot simply be ignored. This emotional agitation, learned from dealing with people, is reactivated in much the same way when problems arise with non-artificial objects and natural things that do not speak as people do. At times, because there has been experience of resolving human problems through emotional responses, it seems plausible that the same approach might work with those things as well. In other words, the reason for responding emotionally to enchanted participants is that modes of interaction learned in dealing with humans are being applied, almost automatically, to those beings as well.
Compared with objects that retain this kind of enchantment, a duvet is treated as though its making and its makers are too well known. The exact materials used for the filling, the precise way the fabric was woven, the stitching—none of it is actually known in detail. But a duvet is just a duvet, so it is not thought of as enchanted. There is little room, then, for the illusion that a duvet has emotion. The effects the duvet produces are not striking enough to be mistaken for sentiment. Even so, some people use a duvet for so long that it frays to the point where washing it would make it fall apart. They behave as though that cherished duvet cannot be thrown away. So, despite the duvet's lack of enchantment, I began to imagine the following as a way of accounting for why attachment duvets exist.
First, a duvet is something that accompanies a person from birth. The warmth and safety a duvet offers are learned before any knowledge of how it is made. The duvet that protects me was, at one time, part of my body: clothing that was only soft and comforting. The inconvenience including static begins to appear only after becoming an adult—after beginning to wash a duvet myself. Once washing, drying, and putting it back on became my own work, I began to fall into the illusion that I knew the whole process of the duvet. The warmth I had known before was an enchanted kind of magic; the static I learned later, as an adult, was an irritating technical flaw. Perhaps the reason an attachment duvet comes into being is that the magic-like quality and the sense of comradeship felt before adulthood still remains. And on the other hand, after a duvet has been washed dozens of times by one's own hands, it eventually reaches the point where it has to be replaced with a new one.
Another possibility is that a duvet can be recognised as a place one returns to. A duvet is an object. But it is sometimes spoken of as a location—as when the phrase "I want to get back to bed" appears, or when it is said that "outside the duvet is dangerous". A duvet is larger than a body, and capable of enclosing it. As a child, a wardrobe or a desk could become a hideout; the image disappears once those things become movable by one person, and something similar may be at work here. Objects, in general, can be explained in terms of their materials and physical structure. A nail clipper, for instance, can be understood as an object that performs the function of cutting a nail by applying force through metal parts. Under that mode of explanation, an object is an independent unit with a function and a form. A space, by contrast, is recognised less as a composition of materials than in terms of what a gathering of objects does—what roles it performs, or what affects it produces. An office can be described as being made of wood, steel, and rubber, and it can also be described as being made up of a desk, a printer, and a mouse mat. It is a place where desks, chairs, and office supplies sit, and where the conditions for concentration are formed. No single desk produces concentration. The arrangement of objects, and the actions of the person using them, make it possible for the space to be defined as an office. In other words, a space exists as the result of responses that arise from a physical combination of participants (objects and user). The same is true of a duvet. The reason sleep and recovery are possible under a duvet does not lie in the duvet alone. The conditions delivered by the space constituted by the duvet—warmth, or a sense of cosiness—have been repeatedly experienced, and those conditions have been imprinted as feeling, making the duvet into a place to return to.
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A designer cannot fully control a user's actions. For the same reason, the identity of a space—formed together with a user's actions—can become something enchanted, whose workings cannot be perfectly understood.
the duvet cover's anger
The affect of the duvet cover cannot serve as grounds for the proposition that the duvet cover senses anything. For the same reason, it is also difficult to decide, on affect alone, whether putting the duvet cover on counts as collaboration. In this project, with those limits in mind, I wanted to infer—starting from my own feelings (or affects)—whether interaction between humans and non-humans can be interpreted as collaboration. If putting the duvet cover on is viewed as collaboration, it seems possible that the burden of duvet washing could be shared with the duvet.
In this project, collaboration is premised on a complementary relationship. It has become necessary to recognise that the account so far has leaned too heavily towards my own conditions and feelings. If it ends while remaining fixed on my perspective alone, it will drift away from its original aim—collaborative thinking—and come to an inconclusive close. As an index for testing collaboration, it is necessary to ask whether the satisfaction of working together can be situated within the duvet or the duvet cover, and if so, how it is being expressed. And for that, an investigation of the duvet cover's affect is required as primary material. Just as excuses are made for myself, it is worth examining whether the duvet, too, carries excuses of its own.
The duvet cover does not get angry. But the static it generates can feel like the duvet cover's anger. The static that arises from the duvet cover irritates me. So static is the duvet's affect: something that triggers irritation. And if, here, affect is taken as a metaphor for emotion, then the duvet cover that produces static can be read as angry, and the friction that causes the static can be read as what made it angry. The source of that friction is my action. And so the static arising from the duvet cover is the duvet cover's physical response to my action. That physical response can be received by me as the duvet cover's answer—as anger.
The static response of the duvet cover cannot be called an answer. If not an answer, then can it be called an excuse? When putting the duvet cover on, or washing the duvet, the feeling that makes the satisfaction of working together possible is anger. That anger creates discomfort in carrying the action out. Anger, discomfort and the anti-practical expression that appear as my reflexive response to collaboration take the form of making excuses. An excuse produced at the moment of not wanting to act implies that the action in question should, in fact, have been underway at the very moment the excuse was being made. The excuse, then, becomes evidence of the action's reality.
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An excuse is usually a linguistic act. But it can also be seen as an instrumental act for justification, for evading responsibility, or for managing trust. When I make excuses because I do not want to wash the duvet, I do so in a way that relies on an act of assertion—"For most people, washing the duvet is a nuisance, so it is natural that I do not want to do it either"—in the hope of producing an outcome in which self-trust is not lost. If that is taken as the basic condition of an excuse, then it may not be necessary to treat language as a required condition. If an expression or response, in an anti-practical situation, carries the purpose of preventing a loss of trust, or of justifying a reflexive reaction, then it can be called an excuse.
The phenomenon of plants ceasing growth in winter, the behaviour of animals playing dead in front of a predator, and the way a computer stops operating or enters an error state under overload can all be interpreted as cases in which a participant feigns failure in order to keep a system going. Stopping an action is an avoidant adjustment that occurs because conditions have made it difficult to continue. But from a human perspective, stopping because the environment is unworkable amounts to admitting that one's subjectivity has yielded to the environment. Here, the excuse offers a chance to frame even that yielding as a choice, by emphasising the subjectivity that decided on "not doing". And this is possible when a balance can be found: accepting the difficulty of the situation, while not giving up on the self entirely. In order to find that balance, people attempt to render the stopping or avoidance as justified. Within this trait, an excuse can be limited to a responsive act that follows an avoidant adjustment.
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Then , is the duvet cover really making excuses?
The various physical responses produced by the duvet cover repeatedly create conditions in which I fail to carry out the practice, or postpone it. The duvet's problems—the ones I have gone on about at length, the ones that make me not want to wash it—are precisely this. And these responses of the duvet prompt avoidant adjustment within the group {me, duvet}. Because a delay arises before I go on to do the washing again, both the duvet and I can be said to be within the reach of that avoidant adjustment. But the duvet does not seem to make any responsive act that follows such avoidant adjustment. If a secondary agency that arises on the basis of a prior agency could be found in the duvet, then it might be possible to infer a responsive act. But in the duvet's own responses, apart from its interaction with me, I could not find any such secondary agency. The responsive act, here, could be found only in my own act of writing this text. It is expressed through writing; without writing, it would occur only within me and end there. If so, it is possible to imagine that the same is true of the duvet: that responsive acts may be occurring within it as well, but that it lacks any means of expressing them.
My responsive act arises from the avoidant adjustment between the duvet and me. In other words, if there had been no need to sleep under a duvet, or if the duvet had been easier to wash than expected, there would have been no need for excuses on this scale. The excuses for not putting the duvet cover on do not come into being with me alone; they arise because of the inefficiency between me and the duvet cover.
The duvet cover cannot make excuses. But I, too, cannot make excuses about it on my own. The same is true of anger. Still, the fact that excuses have surfaced here—even through me—forces a clear look at how inefficient the relationship between me and the duvet is. Perhaps the duvet cover's excuses are being expressed through me. The duvet cover may not be able to sense the satisfaction of working together, but it does seem to produce a level of physical resistance comparable to the extent of my reluctance. With that delusion in place, it becomes possible to imagine that, to the extent that I sense discord, the duvet cover is also undergoing an internal friction of similar intensity.
