Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno on the Interior Life and Interior Decorating of the Bourgeoisie

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin described ‘traces’ of something primordial in the European bourgeois apartment, with its cloistered ornamentation and the way its blueprints and furnishings mimicked feudal fortification.

He said, for example, that the trend of arranging sofas and rugs at an angle imitates the posture of combat, preparedness to defend oneself.

Fortification is a kind of isolation, and Benjamin also tied this nineteenth century experience of bourgeois interiors to the primitive sensibilities of regressing to the womb and living in shells and burrows:

‘To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web […] The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person’ .

Benjamin cited Marx, who wrote that ‘humanity is regressing to the state of a cave dweller’, but who also added that, in contrast to the nineteenth century bourgeois experience of cloistered interiors as one of womb-like safety, the basement dwellings that workers rent are ‘hostile dwellings’: ‘Such a dwelling can never feel like home, a place where he might at last exclaim, ‘Here I am at home!’ .

In other words, bourgeois dwelling in the nineteenth century exhibited a kind of regression that Benjamin likened to dream-life – in one sense it concealed the nihilism that, without any awareness, permeated the secluded spaces of the interior, while in another sense it concealed the extent to which its own semblance of a primitive, cave-like environment corresponded to the lived reality of workers.

For both rich and poor in the nineteenth century, dwelling conveyed socio-historical realities as well as the dream-life that emanated from the alienated experience arising from those realities.

A young Adorno made similar observations about nineteenth century dwelling in his (first) book on Kierkegaard. This was an extraordinary little book in its own right. And among Kierkegaard’s readers, few have ever captured the extent to which the interior life permeated his writings like Adorno.

In Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (which Benjamin’s Arcades cited often), Adorno argued that the heart of Kierkegaard’s work concerned the melancholic response of subjectivity to an objectless condition, and that this objectless condition is the melancholic reflection of a vacuous bourgeois reality.

As the Kierkegaardian self was overwhelmed and threatened by an increasingly intrusive world, it retreated into the only place it could find refuge, the interior. The interior of the Kierkegaardian self was marked by its failure in modern life to find itself at home in the world.

In the section titled ‘Intérieur’, Adorno considered Kierkegaardian interiority to be consistent with the ideology of the nineteenth-century bourgeois individual, noting the proliferation of telling objects that litter the pages of Kierkegaard’s texts: bell-ropes, red plush arm chairs, gas-lighting, parlors, living rooms, and other accoutrements of modern dwelling.

Spies, for example, were small mirrors attached to an extending apparatus that could reflect into one’s living room a view of the row of apartments from outside. As Adorno put it: spies reflected exterior semblance into the isolated interior of the bourgeois living space. And he went on to say that Kierkegaard’s melancholic inwardness reflected an exteriority without meaning and substance.

‘The window mirror testifies to objectlessness – it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things […] Mirror and mourning belong together’.

Taken together, Arcades (Benjamin) and Kierkegaard (Adorno) portrayed nineteenth century dwelling as a kind of unwitting self-imprisonment within the emptiness that haunts middle class society. Dwelling came to be about trying to stave off looming sense of meaninglessness.

Apartments were decorated with pictures of far-off places, providing inhabitants with the illusion of contact with an outside world, but one that is in reality thoroughly domesticated. Interior decorating is haunted by an unconscious fantasy to retrieve a lost connection with nature and the world, a primordial wish to be part of a practice, a determinate existence, which the bourgeois subject could only relate to as loss.

Meanwhile, the coziness of the nineteenth century dwelling feigned security from a world that was perceived as an invasive threat. The ruse was that it had already invaded the interior through the inner reflection of pure semblance.

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno co-authored a narrative of dwelling in this era as one that records the non-fulfillment of bourgeois dream-life; the master is not at home in the world, and, retreating to interior spaces, his experience is one of the illusion of coherence, a thin veil for actual alienation.

~ by Shane Waggoner on December 22, 2008.