Chindogu
example · Japanese culture ·
retold in 3 talks
Describes Japanese inventions like rain glasses with windshield wipers or inverted umbrellas that function but are commercially useless, offering a way to undermine capitalism from within.
As told 2
“The fashion of producing objects which function but function in such a crazy useless way that you cannot commercialize them.”Slavoj Žižek, "'Unbehagen in der Natur': On Thinking the End of Nature"2022-11-02 · 2:25:59
“The rule is the following one: you should construct a small practical object which is feasible... but it must be so ridiculous that you are you should be sure that it will not be commercialized.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
kibbutz1Metropolitan Opera House1Starbucks1New Labour1Michael Hammond1Paul Klee1Schoenberg / Webern1Morgan Family1
alongside works
Every retelling 2
Slavoj Žižek, "'Unbehagen in der Natur': On Thinking the End of Nature"2022-11-02 · 2:25:59
Describes Japanese inventions like rain glasses with windshield wipers or inverted umbrellas that function but are commercially useless, offering a way to undermine capitalism from within., illustrating Chindogu
A collection of functional but ridiculous objects (e.g., glasses with wipers, butter as lipstick) designed specifically so they cannot be commercialized. Žižek suggests this logic could apply to using interstitial spaces in buildings for avant-garde art, keeping them non-commercializable., illustrating exaptation,democratic exclusivism