Now that teleconferencing has become a part of my everyday routine, the one thing I can’t help but notice is the inside of people’s homes. Or rather, the little bit that the camera offers a view of; glimpses of curtains and tables and windows and coffee mugs that I have now begun to see as a synecdoche for people’s private lives.
Here, there is a resplendent lapis lazuli wall in the home of a person known in public life for a predilection for beige; there you see toys lying around in the home of someone you thought lacking in all manner of joy; everywhere you see signs of individuals as persons and not merely what the corporations call “Key Resource People”.
I must confess to some voyeuristic pleasure, but that’s not all. For when I think about it, such brief moments also inspire in me the same kind of thrill I used to feel as a child when invited to my friends’ homes or on the rare occasions when teachers hosted us as a special treat. You felt included, welcomed, embraced, as if the admittance to an inside also signified a moment of trust and belief, an invitation into lives otherwise only available as inaccessible edifices.
People’s homes say things about them. The choices they make are performances of self. Anthropologist Daniel Miller speaks about this access to selfhood that things provide — what he calls, “the comfort of things” — even as such access testifies simultaneously to “the sadness of lives”. Marxists have spoken often of the ways in which relations between people have now become relations between things, condemning us all to an inescapable alienation from life and self.
More hopeful, really
However, my glimpses into people’s homes sometimes tell me something perhaps a bit more hopeful.
For as long as I can remember, the inside of my home has been to me both an area of refuge and one of continuity with who I imagined myself to be. Even if limited by student budgets, and second-hand linen, I curated things — keepsakes, pictures, glassware, charms, rugs — intended to signify to myself the heft I was gathering as I moved through life. I daydreamed about my curatorial faculties featuring on the cover of Better Homes (better than what, we don’t know) and obsessed over that perfectly tucked bedcover, otherwise alarmingly called a hospital corner.
Over the years though, I have let go of apprehensions of disorder and embraced (mildly) the aesthetic of the carefully careless home. I have also realised that what I call my aesthetic is merely what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss termed bricolage, a making do with whatever is at hand, a devious use of existing material in new ways. And such deviousness is of particular use in a virtual world. Be it in the halving of the body into the camera-ready face and the home-appropriate shorts, or the segmentation of the home into the well-lit, Instagrammable corner and the cluttered everywhere else. We dress up for that meeting and that discussion, ironing only half a dress and leaving feet happily bereft of footwear. We mute our voices and faces at will, appearing and disappearing like so many stars in a cloudy sky.
Seen and unseen
The divide between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the seen and the unseen, characteristic of all of modern life, is now shrinking. And in this shrinking space, we are free to enjoy our artifices knowing fully well that they are such. In such a scenario, it is not that the divide breaks down but that it loses power. No longer need we pretend that people who work do not have rich, inner, private lives that they must subsume to the project of work and money. No longer need we expect our public faces to be flawless and invulnerable to climate, despair and disease. We can be all of the above and then some. We wink at each other’s carefully coiffured faces on the screen, and bear testimony to children, dogs, families, and household activity in the background.
This brief interlude of glimpses into our variously bedecked homes, I venture, may well give us the capacity to recognise, include, and revel in the fullness of our carelessly careful lives.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.