Decorating Culture

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Xiaobing Tang

This essay makes the connection between consumption and display as a sign of personal success rather than invidious distinction. Literature scholar Xiaobing Tang undertakes a close reading of He Dun's novella Didi nihao (Hello, My Younger Brother) through Jean Baudrillard's 'system of objects,' the sign language of commodities. The text reiterates contemporary China's rapid absorption of the spectacle of desire, a cosmetic revolution in which external and ostentatious signs of modernity indicate consumptive mobilisation. Within this world, the transformed domicile is seen as an emergent form of interiority, which is connected to a new sense of private interior space and the mechanism of interiorisation.

Toward the end of his much acclaimed novella 'Didi nihao' (Hello, My Younger Brother), He Dun, an energetic literary newcomer based in the provincial capital, Changsha, arranges for the hero of his story to enjoy a meaningful moment of peace and contentment.¹ Throughout the narrative, Deng Heping, his period-specific given name meaning 'peace,' is referred to as 'my younger brother' and is continuously cast in the awkward role of a rebellious and estranged family member. Disrespectful of his orthodox, revolutionary father and showing great ingenuity in capitalist entrepreneurship, Heping embodies a post-Cultural Revolution generation that, reaching its adulthood in the early 1980s, appears both familiar and yet ominously uncontainable in Chinese society in the 1990s. The novella begins in 1988, when Heping is twenty-six years old and definitely beyond his formative stages. In that year, because of a series of misdeeds, one of which is to impregnate his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Heping finally manages to enrage 'my father' to such a degree that he is barred from visiting his parents' apartment for good. Incidentally, as the narrator coolly comments, 'my father,' at the same promising age of twenty-six, had also expelled his own land-owning father when he led a brigade of Communist guerrillas and ransacked his estate in 1948.

As the dense and fast-paced narrative winds to a sudden halt, we reach the wet December of 1992 and realize that 'my younger brother' has apparently 'made it.' In hurriedly following the protagonist around, we quickly get absorbed in, even fascinated by, his

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world of objects, desire, money, and action. The novella, together with He Dun's other narratives about contemporary Changsha, indeed offers a raw account of the widespread capitalist drive that has become a concrete passion for this generation of Chinese urban youth. Through all the rough and often sordid ups and downs in his fortunes and emotional life, Heping emerges as a self-made and self-confident hero, inspiring as much envy as admiration from the narrator, his ambivalent but ultimately sympathetic older brother. Even the young man's physique undergoes a significant metamorphosis in the process of assiduous self-fashioning. Gone are the two diseases, fistula and hyperthyroidism, that put him at a disadvantage when he was a constant annoyance to his parents and superiors. Radiating a robust glow, he now proudly rides an expensive Honda motorcycle and is preparing for a second marriage. The woman he loves and whom he will marry on New Year's Day of 1993 was the neglected but beautiful wife of Heping's one-time boss, a local Mafia leader who made his wealth through heroin trafficking and was eventually arrested and condemned. Since Dandan, a successful hairdresser, is now visibly pregnant, they need to get the wedding ceremony out of the way soon. Heping, however, is busier than ever, because he retails materials for building decoration, and 1992 happens to be a year when the entire nation, so chronicles the reserved narrator, is consumed by a craze in 'real estate, construction, gas and water-heater installation.'² To take full advantage of the new fad in home improvement, Heping has to leave his wife-to-be behind and shuttle nonstop, usually by truck, between Changsha and Guangzhou, scrambling for supplies that are now in great shortage. One afternoon, after another bumpy trip, he comes back exhausted, only to find his one-bedroom apartment totally transformed.

Younger Brother languidly pushed open the door and was taken aback. The living room was completely redecorated. What used to be soft green walls were now covered with crimson red wallpaper with brick designs on it; overhead a soft red drop-ceiling of plywood was added. The original paneling of chestnut-colored plywood was now replaced with the same material in pink. 'She moved her Red Hair Salon here,' Younger Brother muttered to himself. The four walls of the bedroom, from bottom to top, were all covered with ash boards, and the floor was parqueted in a basket weave pattern. The furniture was now a luxuriant deluxe set, of a pleasant maroon color. The old white composite set was nowhere to be found. 'She knows how to spend money,' Younger Brother threw himself onto bed and marveled. 'But this is pretty comfy.'³

This newly decorated interior space that Heping enters comes as both a surprise and a reassurance. Everything he sees is new and unfamiliar, but together they win his recognition, almost instantaneously, and are accepted as his own possessions. He immediately claims this showroom as his home by throwing himself onto the comfortable bed. Although Dandan is not there to greet him, the meticulous design loudly bespeaks

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her presence. In fact, her absence conveniently allows him to take a close examination of their new home, of her anticipation for their future life together. Through her choice of objects, materials, and design, Dandan creates a private and concrete space that mirrors their private and concrete desires. It is also at this moment that Heping, the intrepid small-business owner, fully experiences, as if stepping outside himself, the seductive power of consumption and translates the home interior surrounding him into a sign of his social success. Hence his appreciative comment to Dandan when he wakes up hours later: 'This feels just like staying in a four-star hotel.'⁴

In fact, throughout the story, Heping is consistently studied as a conspicuous consumer, for whom consumption is more of a practiced ideology than a satisfaction of whimsical needs. He readily embraces what Jean Baudrillard describes as the 'system of objects' and, with great proficiency, commands the sign language of commodities.⁵ He and his cohorts demonstrate an instinctive grasp of the status symbolism associated with brand names, foreign products, and luxury items. While the cigarettes he smokes continually evolve from domestic to American brands, his footwear also progresses from generic 'pointy and shiny black shoes' to 'Italian-made crocodile skin shoes,' which he is quick to put up on a table as means to convince his friends of his ambition. When the business of his Hongtai Decoration Materials store flourishes, bringing in a net profit of 700,000 Yuan (equivalent to U.S. $85,900), he rewards himself by upgrading his motorcycle from a Chinese-made Nanfang to a Royal Honda, and he makes a point of visiting all his friends and acquaintances on this handsome Honda equipped with twin tailpipes. Yet nothing gives him as deep and complete a gratification as the new domestic setting which he finds at home. For this is effectively the first time that, instead of demonstrating to others what he likes and can afford, he gets to view his own wealth and accomplishment splendidly displayed for his consumption alone. In a sense, he is now invited to read the sign of his own success rather than parade it around as an invidious distinction.

Deliberate display is what this particular scene of interior renovation brings to the foreground. It is also the intended effect of such detailed description. For both the character in the story and the related narrator, the pleasure derived from registering those ornamental details is irrepressible and functions as a driving force behind the narrative. An obsession with the ornament, of which Heping, owner of Hongtai Decoration Materials, is a professional promoter, penetrates the fictional world, both its form and content. Not only does the young hero of the story gradually learn how to distinguish himself through costly designer attire, but the narrator also continually relies on naming various objects and spelling out prices in order to make realistic his representation. Meticulous care is taken in the narrative to specify, yet often in an offhand fashion, whether a fountain pen is from America or a bicycle is just an ordinary domestic Phoenix. The reality effect of novelistic discourse now relies on recognizing the differentiating function that commodities are called upon to serve as everyday objects. All commodities,

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indeed, participate in an ingenious ‘social discourse of objects’ that contributes to what Baudrillard once described as a general ‘mechanism of discrimination and prestige.’⁶ According to the French sociologist, reflecting on the logic of rising consumerism in post-World War II Euro-America, there always exists a ‘political economy of the sign’ in which commodities or objects are consumed not so much for their utility or use value, as for their explicit sign value. Parallel to the signifying operation of all languages, the sign value of objects enforces a logic of differentiation and establishes, through display and conspicuous consumption, a distinctive hierarchy of taste, status, and identity.

Signs, like commodities, are at once use value and exchange value. The social hierarchies, the invidious differences, the privileges of caste and culture which they support, are accounted as profit, as personal satisfaction, and lived as “need” (need of social value-generation to which corresponds the “utility” of differential signs and their “consumption”).⁷

Human needs, further observes Baudrillard, are never a natural experience or objective perception, but they always have an ideological genesis from above and in the privileged. In fact, needs are necessarily constructed to provide the alibi or self-evident rationale for any given stage of ‘consummative mobilization,’ which proves to be a central legitimizing process of the late capitalist mode of production.⁸ (… p 535)

‘Nineteen ninety-two was a year of decoration craze in the city of Changsha,’ the narrator of ‘Hello, My Younger Brother’ describes with considerable ambivalence. ‘Many shops were torn down beyond recognition, but overnight they would all be decorated absolutely anew. As if caught in a fierce competition, one store after another rushed to have itself remodeled. Some big department stores may just have had a face-lift in the first half of the year, but soon they would break everything into pieces and start all over.’⁹ Such extensive and rapid restyling no doubt affects the appearance of and life in the city; it helps set off a new visual regime and sign system that directly contributes to the urban spectacle of desire. Tellingly enough, it is the shops and department stores that are most ready to undergo such cosmetic renovation, to present themselves as at the cutting edge of the latest fashion, and, ultimately, to package their commodities with an external, and ostentatious, sign of modernity. Heping’s flourishing business, therefore, can be taken as an index to a culture that demonstrates a new sign-consciousness, one for which the production of difference through sign exchange becomes an instrumental operation. Sign exchange, suggests Baudrillard, is no less than the central logic of a consumer society’s political economy.¹⁰

The enticing spectacle generated by a pervasive consummative mobilization turns out to be, not unlike the neon signs in a concentrated shopping district, an illusion of differentiation that colorfully decorates the stark reality of commodity exchange based on

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the principle of equivalence. The art of design and decoration, therefore, is the quintessential enterprise that at once advertises and disguises the truth of a consumer culture. It is mass production coupled with mass consumption, observes Penny Sparke in her history of design and culture in the twentieth century, that puts 'design in the centre of the picture as it is design that provides the variation that is so essential to modern society.'¹¹ With the alchemy of design, an industrial product is transformed into a deliberate object that signifies its invested difference and, consequently, systematic meaning. It is Bauhaus, the pioneer school of modern industrial design in the 1920s, that, in the words of Baudrillard again, 'institutes this universal semantization of the environment in which everything becomes the object of a calculus of function and of signification. Total functionality, total semiurgy.'¹² When it penetrates into the domestic interior and incorporates personal space into sign exchange, design encounters a situation where commodified difference is dramatized even further: The home interior has to signify a private domain as such, both to its occupant(s) and to a conceivable public. In comparison with the exterior decoration that makes over shop windows, buildings, or the city as a whole, interior design is compelled to address an individual rather than a projected crowd, to speak a more intimate parole with accented variations. It is only logical, then, to anticipate that interior design, as a business and generator of sign value, will cash in on personal preferences, encourage hobbies and idiosyncrasies, and profit from the notion of multiple identities. At the same time, interior design, by instilling a sign-consciousness in our most private and personal sphere, serves to acculturate us to the system of sign-objects – namely, to interiorize the political economy of the sign. At this point, the discourse of interiority gathers not only a legitimizing impetus from the market but also a concreteness that promises to atomize and undermine the metaphysical dimension of the interior. Instead of articulating a spiritual or psychic structure of depth, interiority may now describe a new frontier market for customized products of sorts.

This transmutation of a charged intellectual concept can be best examined in the widespread interest in interior design in contemporary China. Partly due to the new housing policy that requires residents to purchase their apartments from their respective work units, and partly due to the opening of the real estate market, urban Chinese now view their dwellings as their most significant investment. After more than a quarter of a century during which the idea of a private home was systematically erased and interior design was an alien concept, city dwellers now invest a great deal of money and time in decorating and remodeling what they can claim as their own living space. Privatization in this area necessarily gives rise to homeowner awareness different from an aesthetics of austerity bred by publicly subsidized, therefore standard and communal, housing projects. (… p 542)

What complicates the situation greatly, however, is that He Dun's narratives refuse to stop at a triumphant moment where the hero may be seduced into believing that the world of

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his creation answers to his aspiration. A symbolic crumbling always follows. There is always a pause, a suspension of normal goings-on, or even absurd death, that puts in disarray all splendid displays of success, material as well as spiritual. Within his narratives of fast urban life, a specter of the unconsoled is created to haunt the city landscape. In the particular story that we have been examining, a traffic accident kills Dandan and the three-month-old fetus inside her. This occurs the day following Heping's coming home and, as is made clear in the narrative, before the night of passionate lovemaking that she promises him. The much-anticipated evening would have made the remodeled apartment really a part of his intimate being, an extension of his interior world. As it is now, the new home interior stands only as a reminder of the porcelain fragility of the world of objects; more ominously, the death of the unborn child hints at the impossibility for a potentially gratifying everyday life or relationship to reproduce itself. The symbolism of having Dandan thrown off Heping's powerful motorcycle and crushed to death is too strong to ignore. This scene of devastation reaffirms, in a cruel fashion, the need for an interior space to cushion the impact of the outside world. Until this instant Heping shows little concern with his world of fast and fragmented experience, and even less interest in the generally unanswerable questions of causality and meaning. In her gruesome death, Dandan is transformed, literally and figuratively, from an inspiring designer of home interior into the announcer of an injured form of interiority. The last sentence of the novella reverberates to the primal, haunting scream uttered by Dandan, and it is her voice that penetrates deep into He Dun's entire being: 'It was no longer a human cry, but the cracking sound of glass. For a long time, it hovered over the intersection, humming and parading like a phalanx of spotty-legged mosquitoes. One of those mosquitoes quickly took hold of my younger brother's ear, and fastened itself, like a thumb nail, onto his eardrum, permanently …'¹³

The productive question to be asked about He Dun's fast-paced narratives, therefore, is not what alternative there is in an age of no interiority, but what function interiority, now recommended as spiritual resilience at a moment of worldly crisis or breakdown, is called upon to serve. It is by far much thornier to determine, for instance, whether or not those instances of putting one's faith and strength to the test actually interrogate the interiorization of consumer needs. Do the evocations of a transcendental longing at the end actually add to the legitimacy of massive consummative mobilization? Put differently, the question may have to be: What if interiority is served as an alibi in a culture that of necessity decorates and accessorizes everything for recognition? Or, conversely, does the injured form of interiority that Dandan articulates in her death reveal a fundamental structure of interiority – its success in failure? Of greater theoretical relevance could be a general question about the astonishing speed in which 'interiority,' as a central value and practice of Euro-American modernity, gets recycled and appropriated, for all intents and purposes, in contemporary Chinese culture. Is this a necessary process before the notion becomes once again exhausted and ripe for historical inquiry; what does the rapidity of

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its transmutation entail insofar as a legitimating narrative of modern capitalist cultural logic is concerned? Does it suggest that ours is still part of the moment when interiority and its corollaries are conjured globally only to undermine their pertinence? (… p 547)

Notes

1 He Dun, 'Didi nihao' (Hello, My Younger Brother), Shenghuo wuzui (Life is not a crime), Huayi Chubanshe (Beijing), 1995.

2 He Dun, 'Didi nihao', p 354.

3 He Dun, 'Didi nihao', pp 355–6.

4 He Dun, 'Didi nihao', p 356.

5 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans Charles Levin, Telos Press (St Louis), 1981, p 29.

6 Baudrillard, Critique, p 30.

7 Baudrillard, Critique, p 125.

8 Baudrillard, Critique, pp 130–42.

9 He Dun, 'Didi nihao', p 354.

10 In 'The Ideological Genesis of Needs', Baudrillard (Critique, p 75) argues that 'consumption does not arise from an objective need of the consumer, a final intention of the subject towards the object; rather, there is social production, in a system of exchange, of a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious (statuaire) values. The functionality of goods and individual needs only follows on this, adjusting itself to, rationalizing, and in the same stroke repressing these fundamental structural mechanisms.' For a lucid discussion of Baudrillard's development of Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production, see Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1989, especially pp 19–25.

11 Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Allen and Unwin (London), 1986, p xxii.

12 Baudrillard, Critique, p 185.

13 He Dun, 'Didi nihao', p 360.

Xiaobing Tang, 'Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design, Interiority, and Interiorization', Public Culture, vol 10 no 3, 1998, pp 530–48.

(Excerpts pp 532–47)

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