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In Carl Barks' 1963 comic strip "The Invisible Intruder", the bed becomes the main theme of the story. We get to know how Uncle Scrooge became a creative and successful entrepreneur. Since his parents were too poor to provide a proper sleeping place for their son, Scrooge had to sleep in a cabinet drawer. Therefore, Scrooge's only aim was to buy himself a bed. His capitalist creativity is, as he himself admits, driven by the "desire for a better bed." With the economic growth of his company, his bed becomes bigger too. But in the end, he throws out his enormous mattress because it is too sensitive to the vibrations caused by the money rammer in the money bin; and moreover, the investigation into the cause of the vibrations became far too expensive. Eventually, Scrooge is returning to his childhood bed: the cabinet drawer. What is striking about this story is not the idea that objects of everyday culture play a leading role within a narrative; it is the fact that the usual cultural function of furniture is altered in a significant way. The misapplication of the drawer draws attention to the object of everyday culture as signifier of the everyday experience in capitalist societies. The function of the bed is no longer defined by criteria of good sleep but of economic calculation. The bed thereby becomes an agency within the narrative that questions the stability of the cultural and linguistic semantics of the everyday. In the following, I will press the point that the representation of the bed in literary texts from Homer to Kafka can be read as an implicit linguistic theory of cultural signification.
Menschliches Leben vollzieht sich notwendigerweise mit Hilfe des Gebrauchs von Dingen. Versteht man unter Dingen - in bewusster Umgehung aller definitorischen und philosophischen Abgrenzungsprobleme - alle natürlichen und artifiziellen Entitäten, die unbelebt, sprachlos und mobil sind, dann kann man insgesamt vier Bereiche von Dingen identifizieren, die für menschliche Handlungen zentral sind: 1. der Bereich des Körpers (hierher gehören die Unterbereiche von Wohnen, Kleiden, Essen und Sport mit Dingen wie Möbeln, Essgeschirr und etwa Schlägern und Bällen), 2. Kommunikation und Verkehr (hierher gehören neben Autos, Telefonen und Büchern auch Spiele, Musikinstrumente, Bilder und Kunst), 3. Krieg (Waffen) und 4. schließlich die Arbeit (mit der ganzen Fülle von Instrumenten und Werkzeugen). Selbstverständlich gibt es Mischformen, Steine etwa können zum Wohnen gehören, wenn aus ihnen die Wände der Häuser gebaut werden, zum Krieg, wenn eine Steinschleuder zum Einsatz kommt, oder zur Arbeit, wenn Mauern oder Pyramiden gebaut werden oder einfach alle Werkzeuge aus Stein sind, wie in der Steinzeit.