“How some things have gestures, and so modes of behaviour, inscribed in them. Slippers are designed to be slipped into without help from the hand. They are monuments to the hatred of bending down.”
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discretely, yet firmly…. Things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.”
Adorno
“.. the Sartre of the earlier work immediately links the experience of the we-subject to that of manufactured objects. There is, we might say, no personal way of opening a can, of punching a time card, of turning on a faucet: each of these objects has built into it an impersonal directive, a set of instructions as to the way in which ‘anybody’ must use them..”
“.. we apprehend things first and foremost as tools and only thereafter as static objects of contemplation.. Hence things may stand as shorthand for human actions, and such a point of view forms the very basis for the Sartrean evocation of the outside world as a network of frozen imperatives or a ‘hodological’ space, as objects filled with implicit life and feelings swarming about us as so many objective modes through which being is revealed.”
Jameson
The objects around us importune us with practical demands; there is programme of action immanent in things. The car door that asks to be slammed; or, for the child, the cracks in the pavement that ask not to be stepped on and so dictate a new pattern of steps and skips. These inert material things guide, direct, solicit our action, our practical activity. They divert our free activity along pre-determined grooves or behavioural tramlines, which unite us with the serial anonymity of ‘everyone else’.
(For Sartre, They speak to or direct us in this way because of the reserves of human energy or praxis stored up in them: Inert matter, once transformed and re-directed by human praxis in turn stands as an invitation to activity, a set of grooves along which our behaviour runs quiet unreflectively.)
But there are also linguistic equivalents of these material objects, pre-fashioned phrases and ready-to-hand words - such phrases are as it were the verbal equivalent of Adorno's slippers, which prepare and guide our thought in advance. Of course, we have full autonomy in this, in the same sense has one has full autonomy putting on slippers or turning on a tap.
Thus, when I read an article lamenting the presence of ‘theory driven radicals’ in our universities, I immediately recognise this phrase as one such ‘verbal slipper’. For the speaker, the ease with which a phrase such as ‘theory driven radicals’ trips of the tongue doubtless attests to his own verbal facility; in fact, it is merely facile. The ease and fluency resides, as it were outside him, in the pre-formulated efficiency of the machinery of expression.
Cf Sartre: “The inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them, to anticipate the terminology of the Critique, a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thoughts and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and this previous history of the material itself.”
Just as objects direct our action along pre-determined grooves, so language has a counter-finality deflecting our free thought and uniting us with ‘everyone else’, with the pre-agreed doxa of the They.
And it is a salutary reminder that this kind of pre-determined serial activity comes first, and is our default mode of being, and that free thought and action have to be won from this, wrested from it through sheer negation.