| Abstract | Coming from the premise that in order to capture the social in action, we have to be able to re-construct or re-assemble reality through parallel histories, I propose to re-examine the notion of modern subjective culture by focusing on a historically specific interaction of human and non-human actors. The main vehicle of comparison utilized for this purpose is the cultural history of psychoanalysis and contemporary furniture design.Specifically, the bent-wood furniture and its emblematic example, the Thonet chair, are used to recover a cultural history of design through bending. By cross-referencing such design practice with the contemporaneous to it moment of psychoanalysis, I propose that the cultural logic of the fin de siècle, viewed through this particular configuration of the human and material cultures, rests on the practice of plasticity; a conditions which, since then, has become an indispensable component of modern individuality and its numerous identity “construction-projects”.
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