Week 6: The fridge door as curatorial space: memory, performance, identity

Module 2 — Micropolitics.

Everything so far has happened behind a closed door. This week is about the door itself: the only surface of the appliance that faces the room, and therefore the only part that is curated.

Goffman’s distinction between front stage and back stage lands here almost too neatly. The interior is back stage — the household’s actual consumption, unmanaged, occasionally shameful, and closed. The exterior is front stage: magnets from places somebody went, a child’s drawing, an expired coupon, a wedding invitation, a photograph, the schedule. Every item on it was chosen and left there, and the choosing was done with an audience in mind.

The door is making a claim: this is the kind of family we are. It is addressed to visitors, to the household itself, and to a slightly idealised observer who never actually visits. And it is generally making that claim in direct contradiction to the interior six centimetres behind it, which is the course’s argument in physical form. The door says who we are. The interior says what we actually did.

The door is also an archive, and a badly maintained one — things stay up long after they expire, which makes the exterior a record of a household’s past performances layered on top of each other.

Inherits from week 5: the interior conceals, and concealment does classificatory work. This week is about what the exterior displays instead.

Outline#

• Goffman: front stage, back stage, impression management
• an inventory of the door: what is displayed, and to whom
• the audience that never visits
• the door as a badly curated archive
• interior and exterior read against each other

Reading#

• Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) — excerpts, including the chapter on performances

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial compares your fridge door with your social media feed, so bring both. It also doubles as the workshop for the Fridge Ethnography, due this Friday, before the break.