Sometime in the last December, in Copenhagen, I was catching up with life and telling a great friend of mine about my most recent living arrangements; he led me towards noticing how recent the concept of room is. In the past, sleeping was done together, beds were shared, and rooms were not really a thing until rather recently in human history.
Then I wonder: how has the notion of private space changed throughout time?
More recently, the book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time devoted a chapter to some adjacent ideas to this, and sheds some light upon the dichotomy between interiority and the public sphere.
Walter Benjamin locates the origins of modern “dwelling” in the early part of the nineteenth century, an era that saw the compartmentalization of social life as people fled rural environs in search of factory jobs located in cities. And just as the factory, with its divisions and its specialized machinery and its assembly lines, divided up and cordoned off individual tasks requisite to the processes of “making,” so did apartments (originally called tenements) enforce new standards of division and alienation within the domestic sphere.
This focus on individualized space led, first, to a concomitant focus on the self and interiority (as seen in the rise of fields like psychology) and, second, to a mania for decorating and outfitting interior spaces. Think of the Victorian parlor, with its busy wallpaper and its knickknacks and its overstuffed furniture and potted ferns: “To live in these interiors,” Benjamin observes, writing in the early part of the twentieth century, “was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From such a cavern, one does not like to stir.”
Benjamin was noticing a connection between interiors, interiority, and a generalized retreat from the public sphere. People no longer gathered publicly to discuss news and politics; they went home to read about news and politics on their own (the first tenements in New York City were constructed in 1840 and The New York Times started publishing in 1851).
The claim is very similar to a thought from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around. We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us. The invention of the printing press itself is a paradigmatic example. Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition. Typography assisted in the growth of the nation-state but thereby made patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion.
How exactly did typography foster the modern idea of individuality – and destroy the medieval sense of community and integration? What was even that medieval sense?
Coming To Our Senses does not necessarily trace that specific part of history, but it deals on the role of mirrors in contemporary society; there might be an intersection, or an overlap, with the transition to individual beds and dwellings.