I once wrote about a disagreement with a friend, in French, since it was for a class that demanded it and because the argument, it turned out, deserved the precision. The disagreement was about a garage.
He had suggested living in one. Practical, he said: space for tools, space for cars, room for the kind of work that requires a certain spreading out. Reasonable enough as an idea, and eventually I understood what he meant. What I understood at first was something else entirely, because the words landed before the intention did, and the words said ‘precarity’, improvisation forced by circumstance, ultimately someone who has lost their home and installed themselves among rusted tools and oil traces on concrete. An existence conducted in a place of passage rather than a place of permanence. These images arrived immediately and completely and were so wrong for what I actually had in mind that the conversation nearly collapsed under the weight of what we had each, unknowingly, meant.
Because what I have in mind, and particularly what I have wanted for long enough that it no longer feels like wanting so much as knowing, is to live above a garage. Above, not in. The inversion is everything: below is the garage, the workshop, the space dedicated to a very specific category of object that I find worth taking seriously, and above is what I’d call the area-to-live or space-to-be, that is, not a living room or a living space, but an area-to-live, which sounds perhaps redundant and is not at all, because the name insists on something the conventional terms erase: that living is an activity, something that happens, something you do in a place rather than something a place does to you. Together, the garage below and the area-to-live above aren’t two things sharing a structure, they’re instead one thing, the garage-temple, understood as a totality.
There are cars I care about and cars I don’t, and the line between them isn’t price or prestige in any conventional sense. What I find interesting and what I’d want below, in the workshop, as the object worth understanding, are what I tend to think of as paquebots: the Ford Taurus with its 1,500 kilograms of pressed steel navigating asphalt with the inertia of something much larger than itself; the Lexus ES 350, the LS 400, sedans that seem to me to assume what they are without needing to perform it. Machines that ontologically carry, if you hold them right, something like honesty: straight lines, seats that actually envelop a body, suspensions that absorb the imperfections of the road rather than transferring them upward as evidence of sportiness. They are, to my eye, relics of an era when engineering still meant solidity and presence, when a car’s weight was part of its argument rather than a problem to be engineered away. The 1995 Taurus in particular seems to testify to something about an industrial moment — a frank compromise between comfort and volume, a standard calibrated to American expectations of what an automobile should feel and sound and behave like, which was, until recently, genuinely foreign to Brazil in a way that made encountering one feel like handling a different theory of what daily life could be.
To restore something like this, it seems to me, is to insist that certain objects carry weight in more than the physical sense. To disassemble it, to understand its internal mechanics, is to push back quietly, manually, against a market that has made disposability the baseline and adequacy the ceiling. And to do this literally beneath the space where one sleeps and eats is to create what I can only describe as a monastic relationship with the work: not separated from life or sequestered into a professional context, but woven into the daily fabric of it. Deeply poetical, I think, in the structural sense, which is the way the building itself would mean something about the life conducted inside it.
Ideally, the structure would be brutalist. Not as aesthetic preference layered on top, but as consequence: apparent concrete, frank geometry, no ornament and no apology. The same honesty that I find in the full-size sedans, but translated into the language of the building. A structure that reinforces what the whole arrangement already means, that is, that the material is sufficient, the truth of a thing is already enough, and that decoration is an anxiety about whether the thing itself will hold.
My friend didn’t see any of this when he said living in a garage. He saw his version, which was coherent and had its own logic and pointed somewhere entirely different from where I was pointing. We were using the same words to describe projects that, existentially, had almost nothing in common, and neither of us knew it until the conversation revealed the gap, suddenly, the way these gaps tend to reveal themselves: through the specific friction of someone responding, with genuine engagement, to something you did not say.
It was around two in the morning, months later, that something found me on social media. A name, a title, a face with an uncared-for beard and longish hair that reminded me immediately of a certain kind of intellectual I am constitutively drawn to — the kind that seems to have more pressing things to think about than their own appearance. I looked further. The ideas, when I did, were already familiar in the way that something can be familiar before you have encountered it: because you have been living them, every day, without knowing there was a name for the mechanism itself.
This person was Michel Pêcheux, and what he had spent his career describing was, among other things, exactly what had happened between my friend and me in front of that garage. Language, he argued, is not transparent. ‘Meaning’ is not carried inside words like water inside a pipe, neutral and unchanged from speaker to listener, it is produced. Shaped by positions, by the ideological formations that determine what can and must be said from a given place at a given time. Two people can say the same words and produce completely different meanings, not because one of them has misunderstood but because the words are traveling between two different worlds, each of which believes itself to be simply the world, simply reality, simply what things mean.
There is something he identified in this that I find particularly difficult to set aside once you have seen it: the idea that we believe ourselves to be the authors of what we say. That the words are ours, the meanings are ours, the position from which we speak is something we chose. The forgetting of where meaning actually comes from (from outside us, from formations larger than any individual speaker) is not an accident but a structural condition. You cannot operate within language while simultaneously holding at arm’s length the full awareness that language is operating on you. So you forget, and then you have a conversation about a garage, the gap opens, and for a moment you can see it.
What I wrote in French about the garage, I wrote before knowing any of this. I wrote it because I was bothered by something I couldn’t yet fully name — the specific irritation of being misread in a way that felt like more than a simple misunderstanding, like a collision between two entirely different ways of imagining what a life could be organized around. The word garage had done something to the conversation before either of us could get our actual ideas into the room. It had arrived with its connotations intact and unavoidable: precariety, improvisation, the life of someone for whom shelter is functional rather than expressive. And no amount of clarification on either side was going to undo what the word had already deposited, because that’s not how language works, that is, you cannot subtract the connotation and leave only the denotation, clean and surgical. The word is never just the word.
This is, personally, not a specialized insight that applies only to certain rarefied conversations; it is the ordinary condition of speaking. The supermarket I prefer and the one I avoid tell a story about who I imagine myself to be and who I imagine shops there, a story I didn’t write but that I perform every time I choose. The companies I buy from, the clothes I wear and the ones I’d never consider, the words I reach for and the ones I instinctively avoid, all of it is discourse, in the Pêcheux sense, and all of it shaped by formations that predate me and that I navigate as if they were simply my preferences, simply my taste, simply who I am. The illusion is not that I am wrong about these things. It’s that I believe I arrived at them freely, that my choices are mine in a way that could, in principle, be otherwise, when in fact the field of what was available to feel and think and want was prepared before I arrived at it.
What makes this uncomfortable rather than simply interesting is that the insight doesn’t liberate you from the condition it describes. Knowing that meaning comes from outside you does not give you access to some position outside meaning, you keep speaking, keep choosing supermarkets, you just do it, ideally, with a slightly different relationship to your own certainty, yet a little more willing to ask what you forgot, and why, and whose version of things is being made invisible in order for yours to feel obvious.
My friend and I eventually understood each other and the conversation found its footing once we slowed down enough to notice what the words had done to us before we could do anything with them. He wanted his garage, and it was a good idea; I wanted mine, and it was a different idea entirely, and both of us had been speaking as if the word between us was a window rather than a wall.
The text I wrote about it was, I think now, its own act of discourse analysis before I knew what discourse analysis was. In summary, an attempt to hold up the word garage and ask what it had carried into the room that we hadn’t invited; what it had destroyed before we’d had a chance to build anything. Words construct worlds or they destroy them, and sometimes, in the same conversation, they do both at once: destroy the world the other person thought you shared, and in the rubble of that, slowly, a more accurate one becomes possible.
That’s not resolution. It’s not the comfortable conclusion that paying attention to language fixes the problem of language. The problem of language is structural, and Pêcheux is not offering an escape from it, what he does is describe a condition, carefully, without pretending there is a door. But there is something in the naming of it, I think, that matters. Not because the name gives you power over the thing, but because the thing, unnamed, tends to convince you it isn’t there.
The garage-temple, for now, remains a project. The area-to-live above it, the apparent concrete of the walls, the Ford Taurus or Mercury Grand Marquis (yes!) in the workshop below, all of it is waiting on logistics, time and money. But the idea is clear, which means the words have, at least once, managed to build something rather than the opposite. That itself feels worth noting.
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