Furnishing Intuition

Lisa Robertson's essay on "Atget's Interiors" collected in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture at one point draws on lectures by Gertrude Stein.

Atget's neighbor Gertrude Stein said that paragraphs are emotional, sentences are not. We could extend her distinction: A room is emotional; an object is not.
The comparison as it is extended by Robertson continues through some succinct class analysis and then we arrive at the following and we must slow our reading down if we are not to mistake intuitions for institutions.
An item of furniture is a kind of preposition. "By," "with," and "of" are material intuitions. Of is a cupboard. With is a table. By is a chair. Each is a kind of household god. It intuits us.
The play with prepositions although it doesn't specifically mention Tender Buttons reminds one of Stein's book with its divisions of Objects, Food and Rooms.

BTW, Robertson notes that "Habit is emotional, intuition is not."

And so for day 1033
11.10.2009