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Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the HabitualAuthor(s): Georges Teyssot and Catherine SeavittSource: Assemblage, No. 30 (Aug., 1996), pp. 44-61Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171457 .

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1. Stills from Jim Jarmusch, Mystery Train, 1989

Translated from the French by Catherine Seavitt

Georges Teyssot is a professor of architecture (history and theory) at Princeton University, School of Architecture.

Assemblage 30: 44-61 @ 1996 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Georges Teyssot Boredom and Bedroom:

The Suppression of the

Habitual

Can there be anything like an "everyday architecture," similar to the notion of "everyday life"? One must first ask, what is everyday life? How does it manifest itself? Does ev-

eryday life have a form or is it formless? Perhaps the best answer is given by Jun, the Japanese tourist who appears in

Jim Jarmusch's 1989 film Mystery Train. Jun photographs only the interiors of the motel rooms in which he sleeps during his tour of the United States. Asked why he takes

pictures of this kind of banal, even trivial, material, rather than of the cities, monuments, and landscapes he visits, he answers that he photographs what he would easily forget: "Those other things are in my memory. The hotel rooms and the airports are the things I'll forget."

A proper example of an "everyday architecture" might be found in one of those nineteenth-century views through a section of Parisian immeubles. One might obtain the same visual effect when overlooking an interior court in a Medi- terranean city or a huge residential building in New York City: especially at dusk, it is as if one were cutting a section

through the building, revealing in each of its apartments the multiple and small events of everyday life. Of course, like Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window of 1954, one guiltily senses that one should not be looking. What appears in the section cut? Some people work, some don't; some people are old, some young; some are noisy, some are quiet; some are wealthy, some poor; some are healthy and some have diseases.

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2-4. Stills from Todd Haynes, Safe, 1995: Carol in her suburban California house realizes her "environmental allergy"; Carol seals herself in a porcelain-lined igloo in the New Mexico desert; Carol stares at herself in the mirror, and, safe at last, declares, "I really love you."

Disease derives from dis, "the contrary of," and ease, from the French aise, or in the plural, les aises, referring in

general to comfort. Prior to its application to maladies or pathological states of health, dis-ease referred to something that was literally uncomfortable. The word comfort in En- glish derives from the French confort, originally referring to moral or psychological comfort. Thus welfare and "feeling well" had an initial moral meaning. It was only during the

eighteenth century that comfort acquired its modern meaning, indicating material and technological circumstances that enabled physical "well-being."

Disease of the Soul

Are there diseases or maladies that belong particularly to houses and apartments, to the places where one lives? It is a question that circulates through Todd Haynes's film Safe of 1995, whose central character, Carol, becomes allergic to her environment. To consider everyday life (when and where one lives), one must consider the two main categories of existence: time and space. One might create dual lists: diseases of time, or "temporal diseases," and diseases of space, "spatial diseases." Anxiety is a disorder of time

perception; this panic is described as a fear of the instant.

Nostalgia, a social disease, a longing for past time, is also a

temporal malady.' Another malady of time, melancholy, the medieval melancholia, was thought to be caused by an overabundance within the body's organs of "black bile," one of the four bodily humors that determined habitual dis-

position. Physiologists since the nineteenth century have described the human body as a kind of thermodynamic motor and have analyzed its dispersion of energy through entropy; this is the notion behind fatigue, both physical and

psychological. Jet lag, a result of the disruption of the body's circadian rhythms, epitomizes the contemporary time disease. Of the spatial diseases, the most obvious is claustrophobia - or, in America, "cabin fever" - which occurs when an individual remains constrained for too long in a constricted space. In counterpart to claustrophobia are claustrophilia, the love of or need for being enclosed and confined, and agoraphobia, the fear of large, open spaces. The malady of homesickness is the spatial correspondent of

46



Teyssot

5. Gustave Caillebotte, The Parquet Floor Planers, 1875

nostalgia. Another form of spatial disease, uncanniness (the Unheimlichkeit) is the perturbing and uneasy feeling de- rived from habitual surroundings that suddenly appear too familiar.

Of all the maladies that thread through a discussion of ev-

eryday architecture, the one that seems most common, and

perhaps least tragic, is boredom, a peculiar state of melan-

choly and sadness bound to the perception of time and

quite close to some of the diseases just described. Its origins probably lie in the medieval acedia, the torpor that afflicts monks in the cloister, the psychological consequence of taedium vitae. Instilled by the dreaded "noontide demon," it appears in the space of the soul, abstract and transparent.2 In modern times, acedia would transform into spleen and ennui. Spleen manifests itself as a shroud outside the body: the black color of melancholic bile emerging to wrap the body in the dress of the dandy, the flaneur, immersed in the crowd of the metropolis. Ennui moves beyond the physical limits of the body, to reveal itself in the intirieur, the interior rooms of domesticity, where intimate space cloaks the body with the uncanny shapes of familiarity.3

The state of the eternal return, the immutable sameness in the seemingly new, the semper idem, can bring forth te- dium. Walter Benjamin addressed this in an important early essay, "Trauerspiel und Tragidie" of 1916, in which he distinguished two "metaphysical" principles of repetition: the cyclic process of eternal recurrence represented by the circle and the repetition of alternation.4 The latter, based on the oscillation of the parts of a clock, is established on basic intervals of duration. It is the monotonous tic-toe that divides hours into minutes, minutes into seconds, chopping duration into small slices. Of course, one never senses this measurement of time as an exact dimension, but rather as a "subjective" perception. Benjamin's premises were reprised and amplified with his 1928 thesis on the German Trauerspiel, the baroque drama whose characters

6. Caillebotte, The Man at the Window, 1876

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lament their destiny on Earth and await their liberation from life and release into Heaven.5 It is the sublimating work of the negative that is being enacted and reenacted.6

In the later Passagen-Werk, Benjamin's ideas of sadness (Trauer) and melancholy underwent a mutation. This created a necessary transposition, whereby the analysis of sadness in the Renaissance and baroque periods becomes a

theory of boredom or ennui (Langeweile, literally "long while"), the life of which extends throughout the nineteenth century. In his notes, Benjamin alluded to a histori- cal-materialist interpretation of this state: "factory work as economic support for the ideological boredom of the upper classes."' The boredom supported by the repetitive work of industrial production corresponds to that of the new boule- vards of Paris of the Second Empire and the Third Repub- lic: "These big streets, these big quays, these big buildings, these big sewers, their physiognomy badly copied or poorly imagined. ... They exhale boredom."8 One thinks of the

many paintings of Gustave Caillebotte, Paris on a Rainy Day of 1877 or the famous Bridge of Europe or The Man at the Window of 1876. To escape this ennui, this "disease of the soul," present in the Parisian salons since the eighteenth century, one resorted to games and diversions:9 posing as a

dandy and distracting oneself by immersion in the crowd, as

epitomized by Charles Baudelaire and his "painter of modern life," Constantin Guys."' According to Benjamin, "the idleness of the flaneur is a demonstration against the division of labor";" here, "demonstration" is to be understood in its political sense. Boredom, then, creates the conditions for the frenetic dedication to games that Benjamin would

compare to the repetitive actions of industrial labor. And it was this comparison that would lead him to an interesting theory of shock, the foundation of a new metropolitan perception.12

Sensory Deprivation

Ennui, it has been said, is a "domestic demon." This re- mark by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer reveals that within the space of the house and the time of everyday life, something happens that has to do with ennui: boredom be- longs to a sort of demonology, or actually, a "eudaemonics,"

in an Aristotelian sense." Another philosopher, Vladimir

Jankelevitch, has made a study of what he distinguishes as "adventure," "seriousness," and "ennui."'4 Life is absorbing when it is condensed, that is, when time passes very quickly. The most interesting moments in one's life are related to

beginnings: embarking on an adventure, whether in relation to a love affair or a voyage, one experiences the advent of the future within the present. Hence, one lives a condensation of duration: everything seems to collapse into an instant. At another level, someone who is serious considers the possibility of a future by extending the present time forward. He organizes his own activity according to a "project" and projects (literally, throws himself forward) into the future. It is this that a serious person does when "designing," "projecting," a family, a house, or any other building. Someone who is bored, however, lives exclusively in the

present: he is totally immersed in the interval of duration. For him, the future is too far away to be interesting or to offer any possibility of hope. Thus ennui is neither directed toward the past, as in nostalgia, nor to the future, as in the adventure, but to an exclusive present.

Jankl1Ivitch has likewise established a distinction between

anxiety and ennui. The anxious person waits with fear for the deadline of the instant. Each instance of life, at any moment, carries for the anxious some sort of danger. By contrast, the bored person, the ennuyd, exists between two instants; his is the state of mind defined as the unhappiness of being too happy. This form of ennui, "from plenty," is the "sickness of happy people," the "rotten fruit of civiliza- tion and pleasure," according to Emile Tardieu's L'Ennui: Etude psychologique of 1903.15 Ennui was also for Tardieu a "disease of nothingness," a condemnation by the "sense of the nothingness of life." The poet Giacomo Leopardi has described ennui, in Italian la noia, as "figlia delle nullitA, madre del nulla": daughter of null things, mother of the void.16 The notion of ennui was invented to explain this perception of a void, a void usually recognized in the circumstances of everyday life. It appears as a pure possibility and is characterized as an indifference to form. Indeed, boredom denies any form: it induces the uniform, the shapeless. At the same time, it is also multiform: a mishap, the effect of the "misshapen." Boredom may dictate a kind of polymor-

48



Teyssot

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8. MihSly Munkbcsy, Interior in Paris, 1877

phism, an excess of ornament; or, as in the nineteenth-cen-

tury bourgeois apartment, it may induce effects of exagger- ated polychromy.

Ennui must also be understood in a kind of paradoxical cau-

sality, for it is not very clear what produces what. There seem to be general causes: inaction or idleness, solitude or loneli- ness, monotony or dullness, fatigue or weariness. But do

these, in fact, generate ennui? Jankel1vitch suggests that ennui produces these effects, which then reestablish ennui itself, in a cycle of cause and effect. One might conclude that ennui isolates the bored, homogenizing things around him and increasing his disposition to inertia. Inaction, solitude, monotony, fatigue: borne out of ennui, they reinforce ennui.

The bibliography of boredom is immense. One should, however, mention one of the first theories of ennui, presented in an aesthetic treatise of 1715, Traite du beau by Jean-Pierre de Crousaz. A Calvinist from Lausanne, who wrote extensively about science, he thought of beauty as an effect of various sensorial incitements:

Sentiments are, in effect, what determine our happiness and our unhappiness. Born as we are to feel, the more intense are our sentiments - provided they are not painful - the more is our state perfect and proper to the fulfillment of our purpose. Thus we all like to be occupied with strong sentiments. Of all emotional states, it is ennui that we find most unbearable, and, despite our natural repugnance for hardship, the most laborious tasks cease to repel us as soon as they become necessary to draw us out of ennui. Yet there are three principal qualities that give those objects which possess them the power to occupy us with intense sentiments. These three qualities are grandeur, novelty, and diversity.17

In what has been called an "aesthesis," a doctrine of intense sensation, Crousaz suggested that the essential merit of the beautiful is to offer man an escape from ennui.'" One discov- ers an intriguing continuity between the eighteenth-century

aesthesis and the theory of stimuli used in contemporary cosmonautics. To combat the "sensorial hunger" deplored by the cosmonaut Yury Gagarin and the space psychologist L b dev, the senses are artificially stimulated: "for long missions ..., we send the cosmonauts smells, and tapes of noises that constitute their familiar terrestrial environment: sounds of birds ..., of wind in the trees ..., of running water.""9 One might also recall that, for twentieth-century physiologists and engineers, the notion of comfort is tied to the body's alleged preference for a state untroubled by external disturbance: the zero degree of corporeal excitation. In this view, comfort equals the absence of external stimulation - a sort of sensory weightlessness resembling the "sensory deprivation" promoted in the United States as a relaxation technique. This state is defined as "well-being." One attains this homogenous "ideal" through the use of technological apparatuses that guarantee climate control (aeration, ventila- tion, heating, humidity), energy management, and network connection (lighting, electronics, telecommunications).20

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ennui would become a favorite subject of psychology and sociology. The

psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel, in "On the Psychology of Boredom" of 1934, defined boredom as the self-evident

"unpleasurable experience of a lack of impulse."2 Basing his

diagnosis on the "classical" distinction between the "pathological" and the "innocent" (equivalent to the "normal"), Fenichel attempted to establish the following distinction: "The first type of boredom is the orgiastically impotent individual who is in a state of longing because he is unable to enjoy pleasure. The second type is the 'Sunday neurotic' mentioned above [Sandor Ferenczi's symptom of one who is bored on Sundays or during vacations]. We believe that in both cases boredom has a physiological foundation, namely, that of the damning up of the libido.""22 American behavioralist scientists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

49



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would look for "theoretical models for enjoyment" in various

games or sports, including "Chess, Rock Climbing, Rock

Dancing."23 And the American sociologist Orrin E. Klapp would attempt to establish, with the help of "science," the connection between boredom and the phenomenon of en-

tropy in information theory: to show "how communication could fail to deliver information (surprise), from extremes either of redundancy or variety. One cannot be surprised if

things are all the same or all different. Entropy, as loss of

meaning, always lurks at both ends of the continuum from banality to noise."24 Redundancy and variety alike spell boredom.

In Jank616vitch's opinion, ennui is neither an economic nor a medical nor a sociopsychological phenomenon: to attribute

physiological or psychological causes to boredom would be like trying to cure nostalgia with pills. Ennui is to be bored by variety, not monotony. Ennui is to be bored by rest, not weariness. Ennui is to be bored by idleness, not work. Ennui is to be bored by happiness, not sadness. Probably the best

representation in literature of an ennuy6 is the dressing-gown existence of Ivan Goncharov's character in the novel of 1859 that bears his name, Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov, who could not rise from his bed and dress.25 One might say that ennui is a disease of luxury, a luxurious disease. Its nature is paradoxical, equivocal, contradictory, ambiguous. It has been suggested that ennui is the opposite of masochism, since it consists not of the pleasure of suffering, but rather, of the pain of enjoy- ing. Ennui is a failure of happiness, the result of a decay, a slovenliness of the instant in the interval of duration. Happi- ness is lived and experienced in the flash of an instant; it is a

high condensation of time. Any attempt to maintain this instant of happiness within the flow of duration creates a confusion between the instant and the interval. This confusion induces a strong disappointment that may, in turn, engender ennui. Thus when one proposes a stabilization of pleasure - as in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many philosophers did through theories of utilitarianism and

positivism26 - one only provokes ennui.

The Mirror of Inner Space

Happiness enjoys itself completely only if it doubles its own

image in the mirror of reflection. Happiness wants to be both subject and object: the subject of its object and the object of its subject. There is no happiness if one is alone; happiness must be shared, it needs a public. If there is no one else, one needs a mirror to reflect the self. The nine-

teenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, liv-

ing in a small apartment, regarded the subject as the only truth and believed that reality consisted only of his thinking within his room. Anything that happened outside his win-

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dow, any public representation, was merely an illusion - exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin. Kierkegaard was perhaps the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit. This "inwardness" is usually associated with the interiors of middle-class households, which, from a stylistic point of view, described the Biedermeier period between 1820 and 1850.

One might consider the watercolor Drawing Room in Ber- lin, circa 1820-25, by Johann Erdmann Hummel, a contemporary of Caspar David Friedrich. During this period in Germany, a genre was developing within painting that represented the space between an interior and what is outside, seen through a window. Within this space is an "inner world," the world of the "inner conscious." Occurring in this inner world are both personal feeling and private thinking, moments traditionally identified by idealism as "reflection." Thus inner space becomes the space of reflection. In the seventeenth century, private space was often defined as

the place of the relationship between an individual and God, the place of prayer. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this place was transformed into a space of intimacy. Intimate spaces, then, are those where the individual may have his own reflections and feelings. Were one homeless or without "a room of one's own," one could not belong to this world of reflection.

Hummel's painting makes a clear division between the interior and the world of things outside the window. The large room is like a box, on one side of which the viewer is situated. A mirror centered between the two windows reflects the closed door on the opposite wall, the wall where the observer, or the painter, should be. But the observer is absent. The viewer of the painting looks into a room that looks back at him through a mirror; but he does not appear. One might interpret this absence as an inclusion of the subject in the room. Because he is not represented within the room, it is as if the subject has become part of the room itself. One might also note the manifold reflections within the room: not only

51



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11. Leon Spilliaert, Self-Portrait at the Mirror, 1908

the reflection along the central axis, which emphasizes the general symmetry of its boxlike aspect, but also the reflections that occur among different mirrors. The windows, too, are reflected in the mirrors, by which an important transfor- mation takes place. Both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation. And, if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world. Here, the outside world is but a kind of representation. One exists only within this Innerlichkeit, this inwardness. It has been written that German interiors are ruled "by the principle of mirroring and doubling."27

Consciousness is recognizing one's image in the mirror; but at the same time, as the individual approaches the self reflected upon the glass, the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears; an attempt is made to wipe the mirror, yet one cannot help breathing. The image is blurred by a covering mist. This interior refers to happiness, to protection; but it contains as well the seeds of boredom. Perhaps because it protects too much, this mirrored interi- ority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggera- tion of introspection.

The refuge of the interior apparently offered an alternative to boredom, as Benjamin described in his notes on the ar- cades of Paris: "Boredom is a warm gray cloth that is padded on its inside with the most glowing, colorful silk lining. Into this cloth we wrap ourselves when we dream. Then we are at home in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks gray and bored under it. And then, when he wakes up and

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wants to tell what he dreamt of, he communicates often only this boredom. For who would be able to turn inside- out in one motion the lining of time?"28 Perhaps it is possible to turn inside-out this lining of time, which is not only the arabesque of the box, but also the design of the carpet, of the wall, and of the reflection between the mirrors and the windows.

To understand this relationship between the subject and the mirror, one might examine Leon Spilliaert's washed pastel drawing Self-Portrait at the Mirror of 1908 or observe Max Klinger's etching The Philosopher of 1909, from the series Of Death, illustrating the tense relation among the notions of interior, reflection, and introspection. These im-

ages might, in turn, be associated with the mirror in which Igitur, a literary creation of St phane Mallarme, sees himself. Here, in one of his most obscure and interesting texts,

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the poet describes a collapse among the past, the present, and the possibility of a future. At the moment of his suicide at-

tempt, as Igitur sees himself in the mirror, past, present, and future merge to form the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death: "The understood past of his race which weighs on him in the sensation of finiteness, the hour of the clock precipitating this ennui in heavy, smothering time, and his awaiting of the accomplishment of the future, form pure time, or ennui." As he dies, Igitur searches for himself in vain in "the mirror turned into boredom."29

Two kinds of experience have been defined: First is that of the dandy or flaineur, the man who has time to waste. He strolls in the streets, stopping at anything that happens, any event, any accident. The city and the crowd are a huge spectacle for him. Second, on the other side, is that of the philosopher, best personified by Kierkegaard, or the man within the bourgeois intirieur. Theodor Adorno called Kierkegaard the flaneur who promenades in his room: "the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness."30 For the philosopher, "inwardness" and "melancholy" are the constituents, "the contours of 'domesticity,' which . . . constitute[s] the arena of existence." Adorno continues: "He who looks into the window mirror, however, is a private person, solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production. The window mirror testifies to objectlessness - it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things - and isolated privacy. Mirror and mourning hence belong together."3' In Adorno's reading

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14. David Hockney, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970-71

of Kierkegaard, one finds this remarkable connection between the mirror and the notion of boredom.

Neurotic Households

Within the domestic environment, the themes of boredom, melancholia, and repetition are often intrinsically connected. In an essay of 1938-39 entitled "Central Park," Benjamin wrote: "Neuroses manufacture mass-produced articles in the psychic economy. There it has the form of an obsession. These appear in the household [Haushalt] of the neurotic as the always-the-same in countless numbers." Further, he would add: "the return of everyday constellations."32 Ben- jamin is alluding to the neurotic, or compulsive, renewal of things within the household. Things must always be new and are continuously renewed according to fashion. The need to inhabit is traditionally associated with having habits. In fact, there is an etymological connection between habit and habi- tation. Habitations are actually places for long habits, places where habits may be inscribed in a space that awaits them. But as soon as the condition arises in which everything must be continuously, neurotically renewed, one needs to shorten one's habits. Indeed, one might think that modernity, at least within the domestic environment, has brought about a shortening of habits. Nietzsche, in his time, would say, "I love the short habits.""33 A poet like Baudelaire was already incapable of developing steady habits; for instance, he had numerous

53



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15. Still from David Byrne, True Stories, 1986

addresses in Paris during the course of his life. The same would be true of Benjamin, until his death at the Franco-

Spanish border in 1940.

Ennui is a way of being, enmeshed in the everydayness of life. Ennui can be lived; it rarely causes death or personal desperation. Ennui is viable; it may become habitual. In

English etymology, the word malady comes from "male habitus" or "in bad shape." Habitat, habit, habitus, and

malady all belong to the same family of words, which reveals striking connections. Gilles Deleuze has defined habitus as "the passive synthesis of time as living present, the memory of practices in space." He continues: "Habitus resolves repetition in conformity with the contemporary present according to a cycle of custom."34

As a malady of duration, ennui can lead to a lack of hope, to a lack of belief in values. Within a state of boredom, any cri- teria of evaluation disappear. Insofar as perspective refers to

a projection, a projection always toward a future that one wants to build, a world of ennui, a space/time of ennui, is a world without perspective. The British Pop artists, such as David Hockney and Richard Hamilton, offered an interest-

ing iconology of the boring. With his silk screen Interior II of 1964-65, for example, Hamilton described the modern neu- rosis within the interior: the woman in his designed interior seems to be completely dispossessive, to lack "perspective."

In his film True Stories, produced in 1986, David Byrne addressed similar issues. The character of Miss Rollings, "the laziest woman in the world," never gets up from her bed. Like Oblomov, she doesn't need to, for everything is

brought to her: food, sex, entertainment, and so on. She never wears real clothes, only a series of two-dimensional outfits applied to the front surface of her body. Yet everyday she changes these fronts. In English, there is a perfect ana-

gram between bedroom and boredom, which enhances the

tantalizing relationship between milieu, percept, and affect.

54



Teyssot

The lazy woman's bedroom is a space "without perspective," without future. "Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available.""35 It presents the characteristics of any room, perhaps a motel room, and is described by Byrne through its lack of quality. Notice one thing: the observer, who in this case is the camera man, occupies pre- cisely the same position as the observer, or painter, within Hummel's Drawing Room - along the central axis of the room. The camera man, too, is not represented within the frame; once again, the subject is outside of, yet totally inte-

grated within the picture. What is the lazy woman looking at? None other than the observer. Watching the film, one learns she is actually looking at the television, for her television set is situated exactly in front of her. As the television has often been described as the viewer of the interior, an

engaging connection is established between the interior, where one looks at the television, and that which is shown on the television. For instance, within the space of a "sitcom" there is a kind of mirrored symmetry between the televised interior and the viewer's own interior. This is the kind of dissymmetry that Byrne has analyzed in his film: the hybrid, or grotesque, collapse of inside and outside, of

reality and its representation. One might say that these

spaces are no longer three-dimensional, for space loses its

projected dimension. Thus the "lazy lady" wears two-dimensional outfits. Things that she uses for food, for health, for care, are distributed outward in space from a thinking center (the woman) toward surrounding concentric circles. At the same time, the self has ceased to be the privileged center of perspective. Today, just as in the lazy woman's room, the self thinks of itself as a thing between things, as an indifferent body among other bodies.

Shortened Habits

The interior is often described by customary or habitual rituals. Samuel Beckett characterized this fundamental experience of repetition as "the compromise which is made ... between the individual and his proper organic exalta- tion, the guarantee of a dismal invulnerability."36 Habit and

forgetfulness are the two extremes of not-knowing. The habitual, comforting in its guaranteed security of the nearness

16. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

17, 18. Vito Acconci, Multi-Beds: Five Types of Interconnected Single Beds, 1991-92, beds 3 and 4

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assemblage 30

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19. David Ireland, 500 Capp Street, 1985-, interior view in 1988

of things and persons, perverts the gaze. Today, in response to the comfort and repetition of everyday life, many artists and architects are attempting to suppress the habitual. It

may be impossible fully to suppress habits, but, recalling Nietzsche, one may try to shorten them. In a way, this at-

tempt to suppress the habitual informed the work of many American artists of the 1970s and 1980s: from Gordon Matta Clark's Splitting of 1974 to Vito Acconci's The Board Room, also called Where We Are Now (Who Are We Any- way, of 1976 and his Multi-Beds of 1991-92.17

Another example is the house of the artist David Ireland. One might call Ireland a sculptor, but he has also practiced a kind of twelve-year experiment on his own home, at 500

Capp Street in San Francisco.38 Originally built by a Navy captain, it appears from the exterior to be an average nine-

teenth-century townhouse. Inside, however, the artist has been peeling away the layers that constitute the life of the house. Nothing is replaced; everything is left in its original state, but repaired if reparable (the electrical appliances, the

plumbing, the door jambs). The house exists as a kind of

technological ruin; its entire history revealed to the viewer

through a process of dismantling, undoing, scraping, and so forth. To insist on this process, some objects, like the television, are opened up and dismantled. The television works

perfectly, but it has been stripped of its exterior skin. The window mechanism, too, is undone and revealed to the

gaze. The work that Ireland does as a sculptor hangs within the house, "unidentified objects" that take on the appear- ance of housewares.

The work of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio has also tried to address this kind of shortening of the habitual.39 In their 1987 house installation for the Capp Street Project, San Francisco, entitled withDrawing Room, they analyzed and revealed the different codes that constitute the domestic environment, creating a similar process of "undoing" to that of Ireland's. The house is cut according to hidden lines that have meaning only in relation to what is happening within the city. The television is stripped of its structure and skin. The family dining table is raised to an uncomfortably high level, indicated by a dotted line. These artists and architects

56



Teyssot

20. Ireland, stripped television, 1988

work with the traces left by everyday life, the traces of the

previous occupants - nails in the wall where pictures once

hung, remnants of paint that have faded over time, marks of a sagging door on the floor - and they address the signs that

objects inscribe within the domestic environment.

Another project that disrupts notions of the habitual is that of the artists and architects Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Picture Out of Doors. In 1988 the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara sponsored an exhibition entitled Home Show, in which private houses were given over to various artists as sites of experimentation and, for a month during spe- cific hours, opened to the public. In one of these houses, Ericson and Ziegler created a piece by removing all the doors - to rooms, cupboards, drawers, closets - and stack-

ing them in descending height in the living room. A disruption occurred within the house: everything that was normally out of view was revealed. This operation created a new vi- sion, the possibility of a new gaze, that was "inhabitual." The artists observed: "By exposing and making public the most

private parts of a home, one places the invited guest in an uncomfortable voyeuristic position."" Instinctively, the own- ers, David and Pat Farmer, wanted to reorganize the objects on their shelves and in their closets, suddenly realizing that

strangers were going to look at the accumulation of their

belongings: The removal of a cupboard door in a little-used back hall was a heavy assault to our collective ego. The accumulation of unre- lated, unneeded, unwanted items revealed on those dusty shelves was staggering. Furthermore, this massive evidence of procrastina- tion hidden from the world, from ourselves, felt disgraceful. Tak- ing off the bedroom and bathroom doors created a different

21. Ireland, Untitled Objects, 1988

22. Ireland, scraped window in 1990

57



assemblage 30

ell. .. .. ......

x Z? . . . . ....... . .

MR:

.. ........

x .: .......... ......... ... ..... . .... -

..........

23. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, withDrawing Room, 1987

....................

......................

Ni-:

24, 25. Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Picture Out of Doors, 1988, views of living room and of kitchen

sensation altogether. Like the classic dream of appearing nude before an audience of completely clothed viewers, life in spaces wide open to the gaze of non-intimates is fraught with frightening vulnerability. We experienced, therefore, a profound change in our home, involved with our every action, day and night. Yet, the reality of self-exposure became only moderately unsettling. We were more stimulated than embarrassed, more delighted than in- convenienced.41

These works provide possible strategies of suppressing or

"undoing" the habitual; strategies that are not just theoretical, but that present ways of thinking that have led to real

experimentation. It is thinking about comfort that requires a thinking about discomfort; for example, thinking about what it means to be "at ease," not only etymologically but also subjectively. Comfort and easiness can be understood

today only in relation to what is not-homely: the unhomely, which may sometimes be the uncanny. These thoughts could lead to considerations of those who do not have a home, to notions of nomadicism or of homelessness. The

suppression of the habitual is thus a powerful, dangerous moment of knowledge.

58



Teyssot

Notes This paper was first presented at the symposium Turning the House Outside Out, Addressing Domestic

Space, American Institute of Archi- tects, New York Chapter, 1993, and

again in the series Nuevos Modos de Habitar (New modes of inhabiting), Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos, Valencia, Spain, 1995.

1. For interesting correlations

among the notions of the "everyday lifeworld," nostalgia, and repetition, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gi- gantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3-36, esp. 23: "By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruc-

tion," observes Stewart, "the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being, an authentic-

ity which, ironically, it can achieve

only through narrative. Nostalgia is a sadness without an object."

2. These themes were often dis- cussed in one of my graduate semi- nars, "The Domestication of Space: Disembodiment and Displacement of Architecture," at Princeton

University's School of Architecture. For her brilliant suggestions, I would like to thank Catherine Seavitt (Fall 1994). See Reinhard Kuhn, The De- mon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), and Wolf

Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris

Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1992).

3. See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez

(Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1993); esp. the first section, "The Phantasms of Eros," 3-28. On acedia, tristitia, taedium vitae, see 4ff.; for a discussion of

Baudelaire, the dandy, and melan-

choly, see 8 n. 4. Agamben points out that Heidegger uses the filiae acediae, evocative of patristic stud- ies, in his analysis of the quotidian: evagatio mentis becomes escape, diversion, entertainment; verbositas, idle talk; curiositas, curiosity that "searches for that which is new only to jump once more toward that which is yet newer"; instability, the

"impossibility of pausing," the con- stant availability of distraction, 5. On melancholy and its treatment before Sigmund Freud, see 11-28.

4. Walter Benjamin, "Trauerspiel und Trag6die," vol. 2, bk. 1, of Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 133-37.

5. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1990). In German Trauer-

spiel suggests "mournful representation," as distinguished from tragedy. Trauerspiel has as its object history and not myth, even if, given the ba-

roque vanity of every temporal be-

ing, history is for Trauerspiel more "natural history" or "destiny," an al-

legory of the precariousness of every worldly power. On baroque Trauer-

spiel, Calder6n de la Barca's theater, the romantic tragedies of fate

(Schicksaltrag6die), and their reading in Benjamin and Brecht, see "Puppet Play and Trauerspiel," in Rainer Nagele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Uni-

versity Press, 1991), 12ff.

6. The work of mourning (Freud's Trauersarbeit) recognizes the tragedy, literally a Trauerspiel: the play- ing of the part of a mourner, the mournful play. See Sarah Kofman, Me'lancolie de l'art (Paris: Galil6e, 1985), 86. As an artistic representa-

tion, the lamentation of the ba-

roque drama will take the form of words uttered on the platform, but, from the seventeenth century on- ward, it will mutate into music, into teatro dell'opera, the operatic form. Soren Kierkegaard described a similar transposition: "A poet is an un-

happy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the

sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music"

(Kierkegaard, Either-Or [1843]; quoted by Philip Sandblom, Cre-

ativity and Disease [New York: Marion Boyars, 1992], 24).

7. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen- Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 5, bks. 1 and 2, of the Gesammelte

Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), bk. 1, D2a, 4, 162. See also Siegfried Kracauer, "Boredom" (1924), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar

Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1995), 331-34.

8. Louis Veuillot, Les Odeurs de Paris (Paris, 1914); cited by Ben- jamin, Passagen-Werk, bk. 1, D2, 2, 160.

9. See, for example, Benedetta Craveri, Madame du Deffand e il suo mondo (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1982), 141-53, 338, for a discussion of ennui as a "disease of the soul." One can cite Madame du Deffand's letter to Horace Walpole of 1 May 1771: "Everyone is bored, no one is sufficient to himself, and it is this detestable boredom, by which one is persecuted and which one tries to escape, that sets everything in motion" (143). See also Robert Mauzi, "Les Maladies de l'ime au dix-huitieme siecle," Re- vue des sciences humaines, n.s. 100 (October-December 1960): 459- 93, and idem, L'Ide`e de bonheur

dans la litterature et la pensde frangaises au XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965).

10. See Roger Kempf, Dandies: Baudelaire et cie (Paris: Seuil, 1977), and Charles Baudelaire, "Le Dandy," in Le Peintre de la vie

modeme, in Oeuvres complates (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1177-80.

Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, bk. 1, D5, 3, 168, cites Baudelaire's para- phrase of Guys in Le Peintre: "any man ... who is bored in the midst of the multitude, is an idiot!" See also ibid., D4a, 2, 167, where Benjamin cites Roger Callois, "Paris, mythe moderne," Nouvelle revue frangaise 25, no. 284 (1 May 1937): 695 and 697: "Romanticism leads to a theory of boredom, the modem sentiment of life to a theory of power, or, at least of energy."

11. Ibid., M5, 8, 538.

12. See Ibid., O ["Prostitution, Games], all entries, 612-42. Of particular interest is 012a, 2: "The

significance of time for the intoxica- tion of the gambler has already been evaluated by Gourdon, and

similarly by Anatole France. Both, however, only notice what significance time has for the gambler's pleasure in his easy-come-easy-go profit that multiplies itself a hundred fold through the countless spending possibilities that remain open-ended, and especially through the one real one that multiplies itself a hundred fold as mise en jeu in the imagination. Neither Gourdon nor France, however, notice the significance time has for the operation of gambling itself. The game's entertainment value is indeed quite a different matter. A game is in-

creasingly entertaining the more

abruptly risk manifests itself, and the smaller the number or the shorter the sequence of combina- tions that can be placed during the

59



assemblage 30

course of a game (des coups). In other words: the higher the risk

component the faster the game moves. This condition is decisive where the issue is the determination of that which causes the real 'intoxi- cation' of the gambler. It is based on the peculiarity of gambling to

provoke the presence of mind by re-

vealing in quick sequence constellations that appeal, independent of each other, to a quite new, original reaction of the gambler. This fact is reflected in the habit of the gambler to place the bet, if possible, only at the last moment. This is simulta-

neously the moment in which there is only space left for a purely reflective behavior. This reflective behavior of the gambler excludes the

'interpretation' of chance. Rather, the gambler reacts to chance like the knee reacts to the hammer in the patellar reflex." Of equal interest is 014, 4: "The ideal experience of shock is catastrophe." His ulti- mate account of the theory of shock is found in "Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire," in Gesammelte Schriften, 1: bk. 2, 605-53. See also the critical edition of Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire in Walter Benjamin, Ecrits franqais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1991), 231-45.

13. Arthur Schopenhauer; quoted by Vladimir Jank6lvitch, L'Aventure,

l'ennui, le se'rieux (Paris: Montaigne/ Aubier, 1963), 136. From an etymological point of view, bore, in En-

glish, is a rather mysterious word, arising "after 1750," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The first citation of the noun boredom is from 1864. In English, the use of the French word became fashionable

during the late seventeenth century. Ennui, in French, traced to the twelfth century, derives from the Latin in odio and inodiare, associated with the hatred of life. Ennui in

English is also related to older adap- tations of the French word, such as

"annoyance" or "to annoy." Suppos- edly, ennui was specifically French, just as spleen was assumed to be

typically English.

14. Jankel6vitch, L'Aventure, l'ennui, le se'rieux. For a biographi- cal glance of the French philosopher, see idem, Une vie en toutes lettres (Lettres a2 Louis Beauduc, 1923-1980), ed. Franqoise Schwab

(Paris: Liana Levi, 1995).

15. Emile Tardieu, L'Ennui: Etude

psychologique, 2d ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1913), 136.

16. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldoni, frag. 1815, 13 September 1821. On ennui, see also idem, Pensieri (1845; Milan: Adelphi, 1982), 63-64.

17. Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Traite' du beau, chap. 7, "De l'empire de la beaut6 sur nos sentiments"; cited by Baldine Saint-Girons, Esthetiques du XVIII e sikcle: Le Moddle Frangais (Paris: Philippe Sers Editeur, 1990), 59.

18. The term "aesthesis" (from the French neologism esthe'sique) used by Saint-Girons is taken from

Jean Deprun, La Philosophie de

I'inquie'tude (Paris: Vrin, 1979), chap. 5.

19. Claudette Seze, "Habiter dans les 6toiles," Autrement 10 (January 1994): 62.

20. See Philippe Dard, "Le Destin de la norme," in Du luxe au confort, ed. Jean-Pierre Goubert (n.p.: Belin, 1988), 115-35, esp. 119.

21. Otto Fenichel, "On the Psychol- ogy of Boredom," in The Collected

Papers of Otto Fenichel (New York: Norton, 1953), 292; quoted by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1995), 4-5.

22. Otto Fenichel; quoted by Donald Moss in Documents 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1992): 84. In the same issue, see Geoff Waite, "On the Poli- tics of Boredom," 93-109. See also Patrice Petro, "After Shock: Between Boredom and History," in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 265-84, where the author's interest oscillates between the categories of the boring and the banal. On the banal, see Naomi

Segal, The Banal Object: Theme and Thematics in Proust, Rilke,

Hofmannsthal, and Sartre (London: University of London, 1981).

23. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Be-

yond Boredom and Anxiety (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975).

24. Orrin E. Klapp, Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 82.

25. See Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Knopf, 1992).

26. Between 1776 and 1794, the social theory of collective happiness, or eudaemonism, was developed by Jeremy Bentham, who would define moral obligation by reference to

personal well-being through a life

governed by reason. See John Dinwiddy, Bentham (Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 1989).

27. Ulrike Brunotte, "Innerwelten/ Inner Worlds," Daidalos 36 (June 1990), speaks of "Prinzip der

Spiegelung und Verdoppelung."

28. Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, bk. 1, D2a, 1.

29. Stephane Mallarme, "Igitur ou la folie d'Elbehnon," in Oeuvres

completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1985),

440: "Le pass6 compris de sa race

qui pase sur lui en la sensation de fini, I'heure de la pendule precipitant cet ennui en temps lourd, etouffant, et son attente de

l'accomplissement du futur, forment du temps pur, ou de l'ennui."; English trans. in Grange Woolley, Stiphane Mallarmn, 1824-1898 (New Jersey: Madison, 1942), 161.

30. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1989), chap. 2, "Constitution of Inward- ness," 41.

31. Ibid., 42: "Spiegel und Trauer

geh6ren darum zusammen."

32. Walter Benjamin, "Central Park," New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 37. From a histori- cal point of view, see Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Produc- tions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1993), esp. chap. 7, "House Lives."

33. Friedrich Nietzsche; quoted by Benjamin, "Central Park," 37.

34. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and

Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 7, 94.

35. Wilfred R. Bion; quoted by Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Es-

says on the Unexamined Life (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 71.

36. Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust (Zurich, 1960); quoted by Krista R. Greffrath, "Proust et Benjamin," in Walter Benjamin et Paris, ed. Heinz Wismann (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1986), 115.

60



Teyssot

37. The Multi-Beds were shown by the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, and by the Anne de Villepoix Gallery, Paris. See also the exhibition catalogues Vito Acconci: A Ret-

rospective, 1969 to 1980 (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980); Vito Acconci: Domestic Trap- pings (La Jolla, Calif.: La Jolla Mu- seum of Contemporary Art, 1987); and Vito Acconci (Grenoble: Centre National d'Art Contemporain, and Prato: Centro per l'Arte Contem-

poranea Luigi Pecci, 1991-92).

38. See David Ireland: A Decade Documented, 1978-1988, exhibition

catalogue (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 1988-89).

39. See Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architec- tural Probes, introduction by Georges Teyssot (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994).

40. Home Show, ed. Dore Ashton

(Santa Barbara, Calif.: Contempo- rary Arts Forum, 1988), 17. A se-

quel, Home Show II, was organized by the Contemporary Arts Forum in the spring of this year. Many thanks to Nancy Doll, CAF's director, for

sending their publications.

41. Ibid., 36.

11. Mus6e des Beaux-Arts, Ostende.

12. Museum des bildenden Ktinste, Leipzig.

15. Warner Brothers, 1986.

16. Photograph collection of Salvatore Ala, Milan.

17, 18. Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

19, 20. David Ireland: A Decade Documented, 1978-1988, exhibition

catalogue (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 1988-89).

21, 22. Photographs by Georges Teyssot.

23. Capp Street Project, San Fran- cisco.

24, 25. Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara.

Figure Credits 1. Orion Pictures Corp., 1989.

2-4. The Chemical Films Ltd., 1995.

5. Mus6e d'Orsay, Paris.

6, 7. Private collection.

8. Magyar Nemzeti Galeria, Budapest.

9, 13, 14. The Tate Gallery, London.

10. Museum ffor Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am Main.

61



teysott

Documents

jstor terms

jstor archive

amall use subject

terms conditions of

everyday architecture

notion of everyday life

small events of everyday

jim jarmuschs