Process of Elimination

Definition

The process of elimination is Ellen Lupton and J Abbott Miller's master concept for the converging eliminations of modern American design: "By the phrase process of elimination we refer to the overlapping patterns of biological digestion, economic consumption, and aesthetic simplification" (1992/2006, p. 204). Three eliminations — food to waste, purchase to discard, ornament to smoothness — are one pattern: the modern bathroom "became a laboratory for the management of biological waste"; the kitchen "became a site not only for preparing food but for directing household consumption at large"; and design's Victorian fabrics and carvings "were rejected as dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust, giving way to non-porous materials, flush surfaces and rounded edges" (p. 204). "This 'process of elimination' found its most extreme expression in the streamline styling of the 1930s" (p. 205): the style that served "the new ideals of bodily hygiene and the manufacturing policy of planned obsolescence" and that "collapsed the natural and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, into an aesthetic of waste" (p. 204).

The concept's economic face is the elision built into the word itself: "to consume is to devour, to eat in a voracious, gluttonous manner. To 'consume' an object is to destroy it in the process of implementing it, as fire 'consumes' a forest… To consume is to ingest and expel, to take in and lay waste. It is a process of elimination" (p. 207). Its psychoanalytic face is Ernest Jones's pair of adult reactions to anal eroticism — the fastidious "withholding" expressed in "modern design's imperative for cleanliness and enclosure," and the productive "giving out" in which "waste becomes the material of art" (pp. 210–211). Its terminus is the essay's closing formula: "Streamlining conflates the life of the product with the life of the body, compacting into one form the processes of elimination: biological, economic, and stylistic" (p. 211). The concept also names a deceptively shared rhetorical device: Elsie de Wolfe decorated "by a process of elimination" (1913, p. 85; see simplicity) — the domestic clearing that is the aesthetic-simplification strand of the same pattern, eleven years before streamlining and in a different idiom (comfort and dignity rather than hygiene).

Key Thinkers

• Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the concept's authors: the triple-elimination definition, the excretory aesthetic it explains, and the Freud/Jones/Ferenczi mechanism beneath it (1992/2006).
• Christine Frederick — the concept's economic theorist from inside consumer culture: "creative waste" as "the housewife's moral obligation rhythmically to buy and discard products"; waste "not merely as an incidental by-product… but as a generative, necessary force" (not yet paged — see log).
• Ernest Jones — the concept's psychoanalytic source ("Anal-Erotic Character Traits," 1918): the two reactions to excrement structuring modern design's cleanliness-imperative and its waste-productivity (not yet paged — see log).
• Sigmund Freud — the developmental map the concept mobilizes: the sexual zones moving "from mouth to anus to genitals," the body "an open, relational field to be mapped and remapped into regions of desire" (via Lupton & Miller, p. 208).
• Elsie de Wolfe — the aesthetic-simplification strand's prior author: decoration "by a process of elimination" (1913; see simplicity).

Related Concepts

• streamlining — the concept's style: the 1930s extreme expression of all three eliminations; the "excretory aesthetic" their overlap yields.
• creative-waste — the concept's economic doctrine: waste revalued as production; "production… inside the process of consumption."
• bathroom — the biological elimination's architecture: "a laboratory for the management of biological waste"; the fixture that fixed bodily care in place.
• kitchen — the economic elimination's architecture: "the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for vegetable parings, empty packages, outmoded appliances"; the "continuous kitchen" as the flow's unbroken machine.
• consumerism — the concept's economic ground: the "consumer economy" of 1890–1940 whose linguistic evidence ('consumption' as devouring) the concept tracks.
• obsolescence — the concept's planned form: "a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion" as the economy's pictured health.
• simplicity — the concept's aesthetic strand, independently stated: de Wolfe's decoration-by-elimination as the clearing of the room; the shared phrase across two unrelated lineages (decorator and design historian).
• design-reform — the concept's reform face: Victorian plush and carving eliminated not (only) as taste-errors but as "dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust."
• modernism — the concept's period-frame: the "more anonymous modernism of the bathroom and kitchen" as modernism's domestic prehistory.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the founding source: the triple-elimination definition (p. 204); the bathroom/kitchen as the twin organs ("twin temples to the processes of elimination," p. 209); Calkins's "use up" doctrine and the etymology of consumption (p. 207); the Jones two-reaction mechanism (pp. 210–211); the closing compaction ("biological, economic, and stylistic," p. 211).
• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the phrase's domestic-pedigree witness: "It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination" (p. 85) — the same elimination-operation in the decorator's comfort idiom, see simplicity.

Open Questions

• Is the process of elimination a historical claim (about 1890–1940 America) or a structural one (any consumer society organizes digestion, discard and simplification together)? The essay's evidence is historical; its mechanism (desire "in excess of" need) is structural. Which claim does the wiki's consumerism cluster commit to?
• The concept links three eliminations by analogy, but does the analogy have a causal direction? Did hygienic simplification (germ theory) drive the throwaway economy, did the economy's replacement-cycle exploit hygiene, or are both effects of a single body-economy metaphor ("the economy itself as a 'body,'" p. 206)?
• De Wolfe's "process of elimination" (1913) clears the room of junk to free "the architectural spaces"; Lupton & Miller's (1992) eliminates ornament as germ-control and objects as obsolescence. Is the shared phrase coincidence, or is de Wolfe's comfort-elimination the classed, leisured form of the same disciplinary elimination the bathroom/kitchen regime administered?
• If "the modern obsession with dirt affirms filth even as it seeks to eradicate it" (p. 210), is elimination self-defeating by definition — every eliminated trace made newly visible — and what would a design that neither eliminates nor affirms waste look like? (Spuybroek's "stuff and trash" register — see Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash — is the wiki's nearest existing candidate.)