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Castile soap is an eco-friendly soap made from vegetable oil instead of tallow, which is animal fat. Since castile soap comes from vegetable oil, it’s vegan, cruelty-free, and completely biodegradable.

In addition to making a great foaming hand soap, you can also use castile soap as a dish soap. Fill your sink with 1 part castile soap and 10 parts warm water.

Not only is this solution significantly less expensive than traditional dish soap, but you also don’t have to worry about the soap irritating the skin on your hands and arms when you clean the dishes.

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Biodegradable dish sponges are among the easiest products to go green with. There are some really great Eco-friendly alternatives to sponges that clean just as good, and unlike many traditional sponges, do not need to be replaced every other week and do not retain germs.

Loofahs are a plant that could easily replace the synthetic material in sponges. The rough fibers of the dried loofah make it great for scouring and cleaning the residue from your dishes

These Safix Coconut Scrub Pads are 100% made from coconut fibers bound together with a non-toxic adhesive and contain no plastic whatsoever

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By simply changing the texture of the surfaces we use, or coating them with substances that kill bacteria and viruses more quickly. The ions in copper alloys are both antiviral and antibacterial, able to kill over 99.9% of bacteria within two hours. Copper is even more effective than silver, which requires moisture to activate its antimicrobial properties.

Yet copper isn’t widely used in medical facilities today. It is expensive and harder to clean without causing corrosion, and many people dislike such materials. Not everyone wants to sit on a metallic toilet seat, for instance. This has meant that over time copper has been supplanted by stainless steel and then plastic, which has the advantage of being light and inexpensive.

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Induction stovetops are, by far, the most energy efficient option for cooking. In the water boiling experiment just mentioned, natural gas released 1.16 pounds of CO2, compared to just 0.29 pounds with the induction stove (powered by the electricity grid). And, if you generate your own solar power, induction cooking becomes, in essence, emissions-free. Induction may also be better for indoor air quality because cooking requires less heat overall meaning lower effluent.

Because copper and its alloys exhibit impressive antibacterial, antiviral and anti-fungal properties it’s been used in kitchens and bathrooms. Its perfect for decorating your

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The resulting linen textile is two to three times stronger than cotton and dries at a much faster rate. Because of its porous nature, linen has natural heat and moisture-wicking properties that make it a good conductor of warmth and a popular fabric to use for clothing or bedding in the summer. The natural fibers also hold dye colors better than some other materials, and thus the fabric is available in almost any imaginable color. Linen is also naturally anti-bacterial, which made it a popular choice for bandages for centuries and a favorite for window treatments and accessories such as accent pillows.

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Hladnjak

Some vegetables and fruits shouldn’t be stored together because of the gases from one makes the other go bad

There are certain ways to store herbs and vegetables that can help them last a lot longer and stay fresher

Domestic fridhe power consumption is typically between 100 watts to 250 watts. Over a day, a fridge is likely to use between 1 to 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh).

Upper shelves – Store foods that dobt have a health safety risk like drinks, yogurt and leftovers.

Lower shelves – Store foods with a higher safety risk like eggs, milk and deli meats or cheese

Bottom shelves – Store meats and poultry because it is the coldest area in the fridge

The doors are the warmest section of the fridge, store condiments like bottles and sauces. It is not a good place for anything perishable.

Leave some space behind the fridge for its condenser. Clean your coils regularly (At least twice a year).

Certain fridges have humidity controlers that help vegetables and fruits to stay fresh, when the vent is closed less air is coming in and it holds water vapour in the drawer which is perfect for produce like leafy greens, carrots, green onions, broccoli ect. Vents that are half open are perfect for melonds, tomatoes lemons limes sweet potatoes and oranges while vent open, where more air is coming is great for fuits like grapes, apples, pears, avocados and peppers.

* High humidity: Place here the vegetables that tend to wilt quickly. Carrots, lettuce, spinach, carrots, cauliflower, etc.

* Average humidity: Here are citrus fruits, melons, and tomatoes.

* Low humidity: Fruit and vegetables that tend to break or hit, and rot grapes, apples, pears, etc.

Set refrigerator to 4 degrees – Bacteria grows rapidly between temperatures that are higher.

Allow enough space between foods so that cold air can circulate.

Vacuum and wipe all door seals for trapped crumbs and other food bits which cause refrigerator to fluctate and food to spoil. Cracked and amages fridhe seals can also raise your electricity bills.

Keeping in pitchers of water or ice packs prevent warm air from heating items when you open the door.

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The neo avant-garde and critical art awareness is set up to be complicated as it received through the very institutions that it often attacks. So how can artists who have become past of art historical institutions themselves claim to critique the institution of art?11 Indeed Ai Weiwei remains a critic of the milieu he’s very much a part of. The inescapability of institutionality has emerged from within the neo avant-garde trajectory and the institutional critique. The recognition of the failure of the avant-garde movements in its inability to sublimate art and to destroy the institution has resulted in the extended framing of art. With each attempt to move around the determined limits of the institute, to redefine art or reintegrate it into everyday life in order to work in the real world the boundaries are further expanded. Ai Weiwei’s works such as Fairytale find in the institutional critique its own paradoxical resolve and so continues the project of the neo avant-garde.

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As Bürger suggests the self-criticism of the historical avant-garde intended the abolition of autonomous art and its integration into the praxis of life failed in both its aims and strategies.8 The neo avant-garde renders the movement legible as art therefore institutionalised it. As discussed above the very institutionalisation that marked this failure became the condition evident in the neo avant-garde and the premise of the institutional critique. Foster argues in The Return of the Real (1996) this becoming-institutional does not doom all art thereafter to so much affectation as Bürger suggests but rather prompts a critique of this process of acculturation.9 In Fairytale, Ai bought 1001 Chinese citizens, many of whom had never before left their villages, to Kassel for the duration of Documenta 12. The living intervention involved matching clothing and luggage, travel equipment including camera and video tapes and joint accommodation in an old textile mill. The visitors where then set free to wander the city for the three month duration of the show. The significance of Fairytale in the avant-gardist trajectory lies in the factualness of the work. The piece was not a conceptual proposition. The Chinese visitors did indeed travel to Kassel and were given not only the opportunity to travel abroad but also to be on the inside of an art spectacle they were simultaneously apart from. Could this be the interfolding of the praxis of life and art the historical avant-gardes sought? The other aspect of the work, which can also be seen as an amenity for the Chinese and also other visitors, involved 1001 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs placed around the mill dorm and Documenta exhibition sites. These chairs immediately became a motif of the project, at once familiar to the Chinese visitors and a physical reminder to the Documenta audience of the presence of the visitors. Due to their varied placement they also offered places for reflection and solidarity as well as discussion. Hence the entire project encouraged new ways to communicate and perhaps more importantly to participate. The work focused on the balance between individualism and group identity much the same as the balance between an individual work of art and its position within the institution. Not unlike Foster argued with the neo avant-garde it prompts new modes of institutional analysis through its causality, temporality and position in the institution.

A large part of this work does however remain invisible as the public could not enter the living areas. Although not for public display these dorms where elaborately set up. White sheets hung from translucent string acted as temporary walls subdividing the space into a series of rooms. Each room contained ten bamboo bunks covered in colourful fabrics. Larger living areas with communal tables provided places where people could eat or drink tea and play cards. Hence the emphasis became on the change of individuals through the changing of their material circumstances (which could also be seen as resonating with Chinese political ideology). However before one gets carried away in the utopian ideal of Fairytale, or indeed before its aura takes the place of the art one must consider its position in a contemporary art institution. The work has a sense of enlightened self-consciousness as though its position in an alternative art space is nonetheless implicated in the nation’s larger art economy. Such a large scale and costly work could never exist outside the institution of art. This is the ironic, inevitable position of many contemporary works as the critical pressure from historical devices permits nothingless. Foster argues the so called failure of the historical avant-garde and the neo avant-garde to destroy the institution of art had enabled the deconstructive testing of this institution through the form of institutional critique. This critique however can be turned on, targeted through the exclusivity not only of art institutions but of critical discourses as well. As a result contemporary artists concerned to develop the institutional analysis of the neo avant-garde have moved away from grand oppositions to subtle displacements or strategic collaborations with different groups10. In this way works such as Fairytale can be seen as a way in which the critique of the avant-garde continues.

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The political intentions of the historical avant-garde movements were to destroy the institution of autonomous art in order to reconnect art and life, but were never able to be truly realised. This can be seen perhaps as due to the social ineffectiveness of culture; through its inability to change society it therefore remains as art. Although the neo avant-garde claims these same goals as the historical avant-garde movement, Bürger believed that the demand art be reintegrated into the praxis of life within existing society can no longer be seriously made after the failure of the primary avant-garde intentions.4 Ai Weiwei’s work can be seen as contesting this statement as he conflates arts use value, which is its necessity, with arts exchange value. Ai’s work can be seen as representing China’s self alienation, in an allegedly Marxist society in which history supposedly proceeds in the meaningful steps of dialectics. Ai explores this enforced amnesia through works largely created from historically charged materials, disfigured and reconfigured to create iconoclastic sculptures and installations. Through recycling material from China’s past Ai directly reflects on the country’s present and future. Hence Ai’s work represents china’s self alienation by merging the praxis of art and life in a localised society. However to be considered as avant-gardist one must reflect on wether his work aims to lead and change society or merely reflect upon it in an ironic and self reflexive critique.

Bürger’s defining argument against the neo avant-garde is that through repetition it institutionalises the avant-garde and therefore negates genuine avant-gardist intentions. However through recycled devices it is exactly this traditional conception of a work of art as complete, self enclosed, self sufficient entity that is called into question. Buchloh argues against Bürger in considering the practice of repetition to be the authentic meaning of the neo avant-garde. Through the investigation of actual conditions of reception and transformation of avant-garde paradigms Buchloh explores whether it might not be precisely the process of repetition which constitutes the ‘meaning’ and ‘authenticity’ of neo avant-garde art.6 In considering the localised, cultural significance of Ai WeiWei’s ceramic series the deconstruction of ‘cultural relics’ begins to remark on the loss of China’s cultural legacy.

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This article re-examines Peter Bürger’s negative assessment of the neo-avant-garde as apolitical, co-opted and toothless. It argues that his conception can be overturned through an analysis of different sources – looking beyond the usual examples of individual artists to instead focus on the role of more politically committed collectives. It declares that, while the collectives analysed in this text do indeed appropriate and develop goals and tactics of the ‘historical avant-garde’ (hence meriting the appellation ‘neo-avant-garde’), they cannot be accused of being co-opted or politically uncommitted due to the ferocity of their critique of, and attack on, art and political institutions.

The historical avant-garde sought to contest bourgeois principles of autonomous art and the role of the artist through the reorganisation of the praxis of life through art. German critic Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) saw avant-garde artists as revolutionary advocates for social change, however in discussing the post war period Bürger dismisses works of the neo avant-garde as trivial repetitions of strategies from the historical avant-garde that unwittingly affirm the institutions of art. Critics writing for October such as Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh recouped the term neo avant-garde from Bürger in reference to a loose grouping of North American and Western European artists of the late 1950s and 60s who reprised and revised such avant-garde devices of the 1910s and 20s. Hal Foster proposes against Bürger that rather than invert the pre war critique of the institution of art, the neo avant-garde works to extend I and therefore produces new aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections and political interventions.

However for contemporary art this critique has shifted. Issues such as globalisation and the demand for art to address localized audiences necessitate a rethinking of the prevailing definitions of avant-garde or critical art, which is generally understood in relation to aesthetics and institutional concerns.2 Can the neo avant-garde be seen as relevant in these conditions? This question perhaps highlights some of the theoretical difficulties of Foster’s thesis. Terms like historical and neo avant-garde may be too general and too exclusive to be used effectively as they suggest theoretical problems of causality and temporality. Critical art such as the neo avant-garde must continually reinvent itself in order to recoup the compromised strategies of its predecessors to avoid cooptation.

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What precedes the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there before the moment of actual birth. It is there in social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals and histories of the parents. Even before the child is born the parents have talked about him or her, chosen a name, mapped out his or her future. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of child-s existence. The baby is bound to its image by words and names, by linguistic representations. The identity of the child will depend on how he or she assumes the words of the parents.

The real is simply that which isn’t symbolized, which is excluded from the symbolic. As Lacan says, the real „is that which resists symbolization in every way possible“

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1) The Real. This concept marks the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others. For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. The primordial animal need for copulation (for example, when animals are in heat) similarly corresponds to this state of nature. There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As far as humans are concerned, however, "the real is impossible," as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality"), although it also drives Lacan's sense of jouissance.

2) The Imaginary Order. This concept corresponds to the mirror stage (see the Lacan module on psychosexual development) and marks the movement of the subject from primal need to what Lacan terms "demand." As the connection to the mirror stage suggests, the "imaginary" is primarily narcissistic even though it sets the stage for the fantasies of desire. (For Lacan's understanding of desire, see the next module.) Whereas needs can be fulfilled, demands are, by definition, unsatisfiable; in other words, we are already making the movement into the sort of lack that, for Lacan, defines the human subject. Once a child begins to recognize that its body is separate from the world and its mother, it begins to feel anxiety, which is caused by a sense of something lost. The demand of the child, then, is to make the other a part of itself, as it seemed to be in the child's now lost state of nature (the neo-natal months). The child's demand is, therefore, impossible to realize and functions, ultimately, as a reminder of loss and lack. (The difference between "demand" and "desire," which is the function of the symbolic order, is simply the acknowledgement of language, law, and community in the latter; the demand of the imaginary does not proceed beyond a dyadic relation between the self and the object one wants to make a part of oneself.) The mirror stage corresponds to this demand in so far as the child misrecognizes in its mirror image a stable, coherent, whole self, which, however, does not correspond to the real child (and is, therefore, impossible to realize). The image is a fantasy, one that the child sets up in order to compensate for its sense of lack or loss, what Lacan terms an "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego." That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, et cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves in what is, ultimately, a narcissistic relationship. What must be remembered is that for Lacan this imaginary realm continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult and is not merely superceded in the child's movement into the symbolic (despite my suggestion of a straightforward chronology in the last module). Indeed, the imaginary and the symbolic are, according to Lacan, inextricably intertwined and work in tension with the Real.

3) The Symbolic Order (or the "big Other"). Whereas the imaginary is all about equations and identifications, the symbolic is about language and narrative. Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The acceptance of language's rules is aligned with the Oedipus complex, according to Lacan. The symbolic is made possible because of your acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication: "It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law" (Écrits 67). Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you are able to enter into a community of others. The symbolic, through language, is "the pact which links... subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts" (Freud's Papers 230).

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Structuralism: Rather than approaching cultural media individually, it seeks to consider the relationships between them. It proposes that, beneath the cultural media with which we entertain ourselves lies consistent structures which inform how those texts are created as well as meanings we derive from them. It asks us to view culture not as a series of disconnected media but instead, as itself a kind of language. 

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Poststructuralism researches language and all forms such as images and videos and insists on thinking that they are not a perfect form of representing our thoughts as much as we think they are. Instead of perfectly replicating the mind of a viewer or a reader, most modes of communication are prone to misrepresent us or encouraging alternative interpretations of what we were trying to express.

Poststructuralism asks what this means for the practice of analyzing cultural media, and questions whether it is ever possible to arrive at a definitive interpretation of given media. It also asks whether it is possible to attain objective truth in a society that is mostly built from language. Implicit biases surrounding race, gender and other concept present in our linguistics and other communicative systems might shape our understanding of the world. 

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Poststructuralism, movement in literary criticism and philosophy begun in France in the late 1960s. Drawing upon the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (see structuralism), and the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida (see deconstruction), it held that language is not a transparent medium that connects one directly with a “truth” or “reality” outside it but rather a structure or code, whose parts derive their meaning from their contrast with one another and not from any connection with an outside world. Writers associated with the movement include Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault.

I begin by comparing structuralism and poststructuralism to see how structuralist modes of literary and cultural analysis might have informed poststructuralism. Where structuralism recognised that language was a human invention and thus flawed, it tended not to question this fact too much. Poststructuralism, however, is expressly interested in how the flaws and biases in language itself might effect our analysis and interpretation of literary, filmic and other cultural texts.

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Structuralism is a form of literary theory which, inspired by semiotics and the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, emerged in France in the 1950s.

which studies the underlying, unconscious regularities of human expression—that is, the unobservable structures that have observable effects on behaviour, society, and culture. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss derived this theory from structural linguistics, developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to Saussure, any language is structured in the sense that its elements are interrelated in nonarbitrary, regular, rule-bound ways; a competent speaker of the language largely follows these rules without being aware of doing so. The task of the theorist is to detect this underlying structure, including the rules of transformation that connect the structure to the various observed expressions.

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