Foreword to the new series: ‘Philosophy of Dwelling’

In a recent post I promised to explore the commodification of dwelling. In that spirit, and in fact much more ambitiously, I’m going to start a series on the philosophy of dwelling, building on the texts by Adorno and Heidegger that I’ve posted on this blog. To do so I need to say some things by way of a beginning, a starting point.

The Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt, Germany.

The commodification of dwelling. The model for that sort of thing, I mean the folks who really observed it first, is a community of German scholars who, around the same time that the Bauhaus was forming, organized the Institute for Social Research, which (because of its academic association) is now commonly called the ‘Frankfurt School’.

Early members of the Frankfurt School included Theodor Adorno (who I talk about often enough on this blog), Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch and others. And there are also some well-known intellectuals who did not hold posts but were in some way connected to the School, such as Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs.

I’ll reserve further discussion of the Frankfurt School for later posts. What I’d like to do in my next post is to say some things about Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Specifically, I want to say some things about their observations about the relationship between interior decorating and interior life.

Theodor Adorno

But first I need to explain some things about how to read people like Benjamin and Adorno.

The thing that unfamiliar readers need to know and keep in mind is that members of the Frankfurt School all maintained intellectual associations with Marxist theory. Their work was distinctive partly because they departed from orthodox Marxism, both in terms of Marxist thought and in terms of Marxist politics (communism).

But certain aspects of their work retained a bit of that Marxist character, such as the hypothesis of Benjamin and Adorno that interior decorating somehow mirrors the subjectivity of upper and upper-middle class people (the ‘bourgeoisie’), and that bourgeois subjectivity mirrors the material conditions (you might say the ‘well-offness’) of the bourgeoisie. This is all fairly consistent with a Marxist critique of ideology.

Benjamin and Adorno would have assumed that a particular experience of subjectivity, which is to say, of one’s life defined heavily in terms of an ‘interior life’ (corresponding to the form of the novel, for example), bears some relationship to the ‘mode of production’ of that historical moment. So, in the late 1800s, the well-to-do who benefited from Western industrialism, those whom Marx would have called the ‘ruling class’, developed aesthetic categories, styles and trends, most of which featured an enhanced sense of the private or interior life, separate from the messy, dirty, outside world.

Walter Benjamin

A Marxist cultural critic is someone who typically wants to suggest that this regression, aesthetically, into secure and tidy interiors, corresponds to what Marx, again, would have called the ‘ideology’ of the bourgeoisie.

In the next post we can now begin to examine what Benjamin and Adorno had to say about interior decorating and the interior life of the bourgeoisie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is going to be good stuff; you won’t want to miss it. Promise.

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~ by Shane Waggoner on December 22, 2008.