The Textilesphere: The Threshold of Everyday Contacts

Abstract

A sense of displacement pervades contemporary life, with the global crisis of forced migration, increasingly modular and distributed families, and remote social interactions replacing familiar ways of being in a space with others. This sentiment, together with the widening application of highly advanced textiles in many areas of the built environment, calls for an appraisal of textiles in relation to notions of home and belonging. Drawing on a range of academic and practitioner literature, brought together under “relational approaches,” this essay puts forward the “textile-sphere” as a new ontological category and a critical device for textiles thinking within this context of societal and technological changes. The textile-sphere is an affective spatiality generated by physical wear as indexical traces of everyday life, emphasizing sustained physical contact as an essential of home. It suggests a new way of thinking about textiles which transcends 2D–3D, human–nonhuman, and material–immaterial dichotomies, focusing, instead, on the flexible relations between surfaces. The textile-sphere is a useful tool for exploring the complexity of contemporary spatiality in relation to various physical and virtual surfaces, and the role textiles can play in interrogating this complexity, letting us contemplate what it means to be “in touch,” to be home.

Keywords:

• touch
• wear
• index
• relation
• home
• material
• affect

Notes

Notes

1 In this article, the word “material” refers to things with physical properties, including concrete stuff such as cloth, wood, table, etc. as well as less concrete stuff like air, smell, sound, etc. The word “immaterial” refers to non-physical phenomena such as mood, atmosphere, or feeling. This essay aims to show that the material–immaterial distinction is not as clear as is often assumed.

2 According to The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner 2006, 307) a “primary relationship” involves “interpersonal relations characterized by emotional intensity, total commitment and mutual satisfaction. In a primary relationship, the total person is involved in the interaction. By contrast, secondary relationships are partial and ephemeral.” In this essay, it mainly refers to relationships between a baby and his/her mothering person(s), between a couple, or between family members.

3 In the gaming world, the word “skins” refers to outfits and accessories for virtual characters and “skinning” means dressing the virtual body or object by mapping textures onto surfaces. This digital clothing has now moved to the world of social media, in which people publish photos of themselves “wearing” a digitally rendered “outfit of the day.” This is being adopted in sampling processes, look-books, and virtual catwalk collections in the fashion industry (Lieber 2019).

4 Küchler (2014, 5) suggests that the heightened state of mobility in Polynesia (inter-island migration as a way of life), Polynesians’ relational thinking, and the modular construction observed in their patchwork, lace, crocheting, and contemporary artworks may be mutually generative.

5 Scholars typically associated with relational approaches include John Dewey, William James, Gabriel Tarde, Alfred North Whitehead, Marilyn Strathern, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, Michael Taussig, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Brian Massumi, Isabelle Stengers, Nigel Thrift, Jane Bennett, and Kathleen Stewart.

6 The constituents of a system are variously theorized as “actants” or “actors” (Latour 2005), “transactants” (Dépelteau 2015), and “interactants” (Burkitt 2016).

7 In relational sociology, there exists no consensus as to whether the nonhuman should be considered an actant or not. For instance, Nick Crossley argues (2018, 482), “Given that sociology is the study of human societies … I do not conceptalise such non-human objects as actors, in the manner of actor–network theory. Rather, I view them as resources, tools, obstacles and/or environments which mediate inter-human interactions and relations. Certain animals may constitute liminal cases, if and where they interact in meaningful ways with human actors.”

8 In “When ANT meets SPIDER,” anthropologist Tim Ingold criticizes the approaches of actor–network theory (ANT) on grounds that it does not take into account the different types of relations among different actors and processes, or the real material consequences of actions (Ingold 2008). Bruno Latour, who developed the theory from the position of science and technology studies (STS), acknowledges that ANT is “a bad tool for differentiating associations [because] it gives a black and white picture” (Latour quoted in Bosco 2006, 380).

9 Plight was first installed at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London (1985). The exhibition I visited was a faithful reproduction of this original installation at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1994).

10 “The Skin Ego is a psychical surface which connects up sensations of various sorts and makes them stand out as forms against the original background formed by the tactile envelope: this is the Skin Ego's function of intersensoriality” (Anzieu 1989, 103. original emphasis).

11 The function of “inscription”: “The Skin Ego is the original parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over, first outlines of an ‘original’ pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin” (Anzieu 1989, 105).

12 In Heidegger’s latent spatial philosophy in Being and Time, which Peter Sloterdijk traces, Da-sein is suggested to have an essentially relational character: “Because Da-sein is always already a completed act of inhabiting, spatiality and existence are inseparable. … the house of Being [is not] a simple cubicle that existing beings enter into and exit out of. Its structure is more akin to a globe of care in which Da-sein has spread in its ex-stasis” (Sloterdijk 2012, 37–38).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yeseung Lee

Yeseung Lee is a lecturer in Design Cultures at De Montfort University. She holds an MA in fashion (distinction) from Central Saint Martins (2003) and a PhD from the Royal College of Art (2013). She has widely practiced in the international fashion industry in both the high-end and mass-produced market (1998–2017). Her research draws on material culture, critical theory, and psychoanalysis as a way of interrogating contemporary fashion with a particular focus on its materiality and praxis. Lee is the author of Seamlessness: Making and (Un)knowing in Fashion Practice (2016) and has published papers on fashion, textiles, skin studies, and luxury studies. Currently, she is editing a volume entitled Surface Apparition: Material Medium Affect (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) that will investigate the contemporary fascination with im/material surfaces in everyday and artistic contexts, attending to how the surface can reveal the relationship between human making and technologies that enable it. [email protected]