‘The House is Past’ (Philosophy of Dwelling series, part 4)

This is for my old friend the Village Scribe, with whom I have been having a great conversation on this blog about home buying and home sizes. I don’t really know what to say, Scribe, except that there may not always be, as it would be comfortable to think there is, a conscientiously correct choice in the matter. There may be no right way to live in a wrong world…

It’s also for my new friend David Richardson (please check out his incredible furniture, linked in my blogroll: Northeast Studio CO., and his very interesting furniture society’s blog). David and I have been talking here at DU about El Cosmico, chic, mockery, and what I would describe as the political aesthetics of nostalgia. And David’s also got me paying attention to furniture, which I say a thing or two about here…

For everyone else, I hope you’ll read around more than you sleep around, and I promise to take your comments to heart, whether you’re lobbing them like landmines or cozying up at the bar for a frothy one.

Uh, hm.

‘The house is past’, Adorno pronounced in ‘Refuge for the Homeless’ (MM), in part because it could no longer look either to the past or to the future.

On the one hand (and possibly with Heidegger and his cabin in the Black Forest in mind, or maybe just thinking about German cities contaminated with the vestiges of extermination), Adorno condemned the nostalgia towards older homes in the traditional style. They are, he said, tainted with ‘the musty pact of family interests’.

On the other hand, modernist design was no escape. Although Benjamin’s Arcades Project had been particularly concerned with the nineteenth century, it did at one point note that in the twentieth century Jugendstil introduced transparency and airiness in its designs, and in doing so ‘put an end to dwelling in the old sense’ .

For Adorno, however, whatever was to be gained by the opening up of the nineteenth century bourgeois interior was mitigated by the fact that modern furnishings (of the sort Adorno would have seen in Southern California, where Bauhaus designs were by then ubiquitous) signalled the intrusion of the production process into private life.

Adorno portrayed the result of architectural modernism’s repudiation of ornament in favor of function, technology (plastics, bent plywood, etc.), and geometrical simplicity as mass-produced habitations designed by experts without relation to the occupant, ‘factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere’.

What do I think? Well, I think Adorno was probably wrong about modernist furnishings. But, fair enough, it seemed to him that wherever one turned ‘the possibility of residence is annihilated’. With the market-utilitarianism of modern houses, Adorno went as far as to regard concentration camps and the bombing of European cities as omens of the annihilation of possibilities for residence in the coming decades.

‘Refuge for the Homeless’ was even more searching than this in its investigation into the predicament of dwelling in the twentieth century. Adorno interrogated the conditions under which private life and home ownership had become an ethical straightjacket for the especially conscientious.

Neither the nostalgia of a Heidegger nor the hip living situations sought by the avant-garde could adequately respond to the quandary. He referred for example to the option of abandoning private life by living in hotels, but he believed this would firstly ‘avoid responsibility’, and secondly that it would act as if enforced conditions (homelessness) were desirable.

Adorno appears to have worried about the bad faith attempt to make something fashionable out of what is in reality bad. This would serve as an affront to those who are ‘the hardest hit’: those who live in ‘slums, in bungalows that by tomorrow may be leaf-huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air’.

Today, Adorno’s worries about the cynicism of chic brings to mind contemporary enclaves like El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas.

Over the past decade Marfa, a dusty West Texas town, has become a hub for artists and cultural connoisseurs, but it is also a place for wealthy developers to capitalize on a trend that romanticizes life in trailers, shacks and the open air of the prairies as an ironic alternative to traditional metropolitan centers of artist activity. El Cosmico was developed by an Austin-based high-end hotel entrepreneur, and it consists of an encirclement of Airstream trailers (in place of hotel rooms) fashioned with expensive modernist furnishings and designs.

Part of me wants to say that this ‘trailer-chic’ approach to tourism for the so-called ‘creative class’ turns the lives of the rural poor into a vacation experience, and smacks of a bad faith response to the predicament of dwelling.

Part of me wants to go there.

And itsn’t that the rub? In a situation where there is no escape, and even the escapes have been made into tourist industries, how does one go about living conscientiously, knowing that every effort to be conscientious will in one way or another become a commodity?

It did not escape Adorno that chic and campy appropriations of otherwise undesirable conditions were sometimes done in the name of those who, like Kafka, depicted them as instances of evil; ‘Even Kafka is becoming a fixture in the sub-let studio’.

In conclusion, Adorno maintained, rather unpopularly, that one could not pretend to have escaped the predicament of dwelling. He reasoned that the posture of escape, though it affords plenty of avant-gardist cache, is misled because the extent of the damage is such that one is entangled in it even more so when one goes on as if it weren’t true.

The classic example of Adorno’s critique here would be those who cleverly see through the illusion of the suburban lifestyle and opt instead to live in factory buildings turned into lofts in city centers everywhere. As if they had escaped the problem of dwelling without walking right into another one, i.e., gentrification.

The often cited conclusion to this collection of dead-ends for dwelling was ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. My feeling is that Adorno’s dead-end conclusion should be the beginning of any worthwhile philosophy of dwelling.

~ by Shane Waggoner on January 13, 2009.