Empty Adirondack Chairs as Contemporary U.S. Myth (a Barthesian blog post)
Though perhaps not totemic of residents of the United States today (and thus not quite like wine to the French in 1957), here I suggest to you that the empty Adirondack chairs now populating our front lawns are part of the “comfort blanket of myth” in which we choose to wrap ourselves. Our Adirondack chairs support a complex mythology, I argue here — a mythology that is riddled by paradox and yet which, nevertheless, encourages us to un-see the social alienation and economic inequality that continue to characterize our nation.
Just like our presidential slogans, our front lawn Adirondacks recall an imagined past, one that is filled with big houses, financial stability, strong senses of community, and easy afternoons (or early evenings) on the porch. In this imagined past, we talk and gossip and narrate and share and belong, and in so doing, we construct and even trust local forms of knowledge. Knowledge gained from life replaces knowledge purchased from a university. (Might this particular longing mark the beginnings of a return to less expensive forms of knowledge making and sharing?) Dangerously, though, our Adirondacks fail to recall key elements of the past. They pretend to index a world in which we are all the same, ignoring the too oft insidiousness of gossip, ignoring the racisms and classisms that marked the era of front porch chats, ignoring the real plights of real immigrants, past and present.
Adirondack chairs are, quite literally, empty signifiers, though not in the manner Claude Lévi-Straus intended. An informal counting of instances in which a human is spotted occupying a front lawn Adirondack chair today suggests (to they/she/he who chooses to count) that these chairs, once meant for sitting, are now (almost) entirely aesthetic. In their potential to hold bodies, in their multiplicity (it is always in sets of two or more that we see Adirondack chairs), and in their positioning (angled toward one another), Adirondack chairs say to the world and to us: we converse with our families and our neighbors. We are not alienated from one another, they say. And they tell us we are friendly — invested in social connectivity. The emptiness of our Adirondack chairs, meanwhile, tells the world and tells us that these are lies.
Related, Adirondack chairs are firmly fixed on private property and yet accessible to the public gaze. Placed as they are at the fronts of our houses, visible to passersby in the public spaces of the sidewalk and the street, Adirondack chairs say to the world and to us: we invite whoever happens to be near, whoever happens to use our sidewalks and our streets, into our conversations. But once again, the emptiness of our Adirondacks belies the myth within them. Empty lawn chairs merely reaffirm our individualized commitments to believing that which we already believe and to befriending only those who share, already, our beliefs.
“We rest; we have time to rest,” is another statement made by our front lawn, Adirondack chairs. Like long distance luxury vacations in the Cold War era, our Adirondacks help us to tell the world that our (neoliberal, faux laissez faire) capitalism is better than theirs, for our economy “frees” us. Just as our global travel once showed the world we were free to spend and to move, Adirondack chairs now tell the world we are free (and safe, and perhaps even, prefer) to chill on our own, electronically fenced, front lawns.
Unwittingly, however, here again, our bluff is easily called. For our chairs are fictional artifacts of after-dinner lounging — they are “fake news.” Though they mean to say, “we rest; we have time to rest; we are free, we have free time,” their emptiness says instead that our real earnings are failing to keep up with rising costs of living, that our purchasing power is down, and as a result, that our work days (since 1948) consistently and perhaps predictably (if you read a lot of Karl Marx) grow longer. We have a severe shortage of rest in the U.S. today is what our empty, front lawn, Adirondack chairs are actually signifying.
“Very engaging myths which are however not innocent” is how Roland Barthes described the French mythology of wine in his 1957 Mythologies, and here I tell you that our empty Adirondack chairs, likewise, are not innocent. We pretend we rebel against the alienation of modernity, of industrialization. We pretend to privilege community over rugged individualism. We pretend we are inclusive while we continue to exclude. Our Adirondacks are the “empty vessels” (again: quite literally, empty). Their implicit doctrine today: that ours is a “great” America — as we continue to fracture and grow apart, as we remain caught in a downward spiral leading to poverty, to permanent precarity, and to really, really long work days.
