The Commuter, Liminal Space
Marx and Engels propose that the lack of ownership that the worker feels toward the products of his labors alienates him from his work:
[I]n his work…he does not affirm but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. (655)
Suburbanization suggests that the disconnect that Marx perceives for the worker applies equally to a rising middle-class with the means to distance themselves from the source of this alienation. As a result, the alienation of ‘life’ from ‘labor’ proposed by Marx translates onto human geography. Benjamin states that “this alienation process culminates in the emergence of the private home” (Arcades 226). By the beginning of the twentieth century, technological advances (especially the car) and aggressive land development combined with industrial-age architectural design made it possible, and desirable, for the worker to translate the psychical distancing he felt toward his work and his fellow man into a real physical distance.
Into the suburbs the (middle-class) worker increasingly retreats in the hope of creating a private space in which to live. The transition from work to ‘home’ must be mediated, and suburban ecology manifests itself as a series of liminal spaces by which the suburbanite moves between the public and private spheres. Benjamin expresses interest in liminal objects; he calls “threshold magic” those objects and devices (slot machines, gumball machines, weighing machines) which take their place at the entrances to locations and provide a dream-like transition from the exterior to the interior. When these objects appear in the domestic interior (in the form of the foyer chair, the collection of family photographs), they are charged with appeasing the “violence” that “grips our hearts even today at each ringing of the doorbell” (Arcades 214). This violence is that which the suburban dweller feels upon any transition into or out of his private sphere. [1] In the suburb, these liminal objects have taken on monumental size and importance; they are represented in the yard and the fence-gate, in the garage and the car and the superhighway.
The rise of the automobile changed the geographical quality of suburban growth. Suburbanization, which had begun in “finger-shaped” extensions along rail and trolley lines, started moving “laterally or perpendicularly” (Jackson 81). The automobile placed long-distance transportational autonomy into the hands of the individual, and the development of infrastructure was handed to the public.[2] This represents the second permutation of decentering. First the movement, effected by mass transportation lines, is straight outward (radial); with the highway systems it turns circumferential. Suburban growth since WWII has the quality of cloud-bursts. In this sense, it follows the mathematical qualities that Benjamin noted in Baudelaire: the suburban imperialism of the Levitt brothers and their heirs “envisioned blank spaces” in potato fields which are “filled in” with mass-produced domesticity (“On Some Motifs” 168).[3]
For the suburban commuter, the car becomes a transitional domicile. In the mounting frustration of the morning rush hour, the psyche makes its transition into the confusion and anonymity of the mass. Morning Zoo programming and Talk Radio provide the appropriate social attunement. The car itself—in its seemingly infinite customizability, in bumper stickers, in the blaring radio—takes on qualities of a Benjaminian interior: those qualities of a mask, a first layer of defense against the encroaching masses. The streets take on mythic significance as the commuter first traverses the winding streets of the suburban neighborhood, then the straight broad avenues, and finally enters into the mass and linear logic of the interstate highway. At each level, his speed increases. At each level, a broader level of literal publicity is inscribed upon the roads by their ownership (by local, then state, and finally federal governments).
In the suburb, the literal public nature of the road achieves its full psychical power: the street is as near as our public life need approach, and the front lawn and garage act as final thresholds before the Temple of Domesticity. Jackson points out the architectural transition that occurs in the home as a result of automobile culture: the parlor, which once acted as “a buffer zone between public and private space” (185), is pushed out and de-authorized in the garage, which is most often “the portion of the structure that projected farthest toward the street” (240). Garages take on an unofficial relationship to the house. They are rarely heated, they have little or no furniture (a key element in the definition of domestic space), and they retain, in addition to the car, many of the other objects of domestic life which bear a relationship to the realm of externality: tools for home improvement, sporting paraphernalia, lawn care equipment.
The suburban lawn represents the commoditization of the agrarian ideal put forward by Jefferson and the Romantic poets. Here, finally, nature can be quantified with industrial precision. In the front lawn, the suburbanite attests before the gods his need to regulate his private environment. Sprinkler systems, lawn mowers, and pruning shears act against the short term cycles of weather and growth. Fertilizer schedules regulate even the process of decay. The front lawn has no use value, except insofar as it projects the privacy of the interior up to the edge of the suburban property. Jackson points out that the suburban lawn “serve[s] as a means of transition from the public street to the very private house, as a kind of space that, by the very fact of its having no clearly defined function, mediate[s] between the activities of the outside and the activities of the inside” (58). To the extent that he cares for his lawn, the suburban commuter puts the imprint of his desire for privacy on the public image of his home.
The Home, The Housewife and the Temple of Domesticity
As the domain of privacy is established in ecological and geographic terms through the cordoning off of private space in property ownership, physical distance replaces proximity, and the drapery of the Benjaminian interior—its plush, its velvet-lined container—translates into a scientific arrangement of the physical environment. The organizational aesthetic of a suburban home takes its character from the industrial factory floor, increasingly by way of the corporate office. As in the factory, specific tasks and functions are relegated to specific spaces. Each thing finds its value significantly from the place that we put it. The home becomes a museum to the commodity, every owned object on display and representing through itself some psychical relation within the domestic dream world of the suburbanite. The suburban housewife sits at the helm of this dream as it manifests itself after World War II, navigating its manifestation in physical space and moral worldview.
Gillian Brown, in a study of domestic ideology in the American novel, asserts “the role of domestic ideology in updating and reshaping individualism within nineteenth-century American market society” (476). American individualism, she states, “takes on its peculiarly ‘individualistic’ properties as domesticity inflects it with values of interiority, privacy, and psychology” (476). In the suburbs, the consequences of this domestic ideology shape the fabric of the physical environment. Nearly every room in an average suburban home has its function in the suburban psyche from a pattern of thought which emphasizes a certain interaction between the private individual and a concept of the ‘public sphere’ that extends even into the family and the home.
The female-dominated home springs from collusion between Puritan religious ideals and suburban commodity culture. In her 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catherine Beecher, who had inherited the neo-Calvinist principles of her father, defined the moral superiority of the American woman upon the foundation of the private home:
[T]he home, run by the mother, was to serve as a shelter and a refuge from the turmoil outside. The home, under the nurturing guidance of the housewife, became a religious place--a sacred home promoting loyalty and family support.... [W]omen were morally superior to men, and the proper feminine sphere was providing husband and children an elevated home environment. (Palen 81)
The woman’s domain becomes the moral education of man, and by the 1950s, such morality is tied—in Currier and Ives and The Saturday Evening Post, in advertisements and courses on home economics—to the correctly-constructed environment. Only in the suburbs is such environmental arrangement realized. Only here the appropriate rooms, the appropriate furnishings and equipment, the appropriate proximity to (and distance from) the natural as well as societal world.
The space afforded by increased decentering leads to a drastic stretching of the horizontal axis of the suburban home. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Edward Bok uses The Ladies Home Journal to assert the moral superiority of a home close to the earth (Jackson 186). The agrarian ideal gives to the suburbs ‘the ranch,’ and Bok gives it the ‘living room.’ More space “allowed for distinct zones for different activities, with formal social spaces and private sleeping areas” (Jackson 48). In Levittown, the kitchen moves to the front of the house. The rise of the suburban kitchen in psychological and architectural prominence accompanies its function as a conduit for the introduction of industrial technology. Electricity makes cooking a science in the name of efficiency, and the effort saved by the introduction of the electric stove, the mixer, and the food processor is sold as “leisure time” (Hill 7). The drive for efficiency in the kitchen culminates in the microwave, which does its best work when warming leftovers.
The suburban kitchen, like the garage, takes its design from the utilitarian minimalism of Frank Lloyd Wright. As in the garage, moveable furnishings in the kitchen are kept to a minimum: most if not all of the furniture is built-in, unmovable, pre-determined. The kitchen cabinets and drawers present themselves to the housewife as containers, more blank spaces which she sets about filling up. Utensils proliferate. Efficiency dictates a placing of objects within the cabinetry that allows for an easy retrieval, and the compartmentalizing of the individual environment is further projected: the silverware drawer, the glass cabinet, the refrigerator each take on the quality of a museum to the commodity.[4] Even the knives and dried spices, those things that are daily hidden from public view, spend their time in a perpetual state of potential display.
The living room grows out of a synthesis of the drawing room and the study that effects a demolition of certain separations in household relationships. The dynamics of the nuclear family are etched onto existence by architecture:
[T]he removal of compartmentalizing walls meant that families could now pursue individual activities in common familial space....The social rationale was that open spaces promoted familial togetherness....Better designed houses would produce healthier children and a happier more cohesive family. (Palen 156-57)
By the 1950s, periodical publications aimed at the housewife reinforce the image of family togetherness, as well as her specific role—moral and economic—in “bringing it off:” Meals should be well rounded, prepared in a sanitary manner, and eaten with the family in a central dining room. Leisure time, likewise, is best spent in close physical proximity to the nuclear family. In anticipation of their capacity as public spaces, the housewife defines communal rooms through “arrangement.” The seating arrangement at dinner projects a certain relationship dynamic onto the furnishings. In the living room, the space between objects and people takes on added significance in seating—the sofa, the loveseat, the high-back recliner.
With the rise of television, the ‘family room’ and the ‘den’[5] leave living rooms and dining rooms largely empty. Their continued existence is justified in the suburban psyche by an increased formality. Furniture is chosen and placed for visual effect, for what Benjamin terms “exhibition value” (“Work of Art” 25). The dining room sideboard harbors a collection of mass-produced objects, designated as fine china, placed just so, and then closed up and rarely thought of. As Scott Donaldson notes, the impracticality of the space—its real fragility and transience—is exposed in the suburban parent’s demand that her children “never touch anything;” in these rooms especially, “[t]he objects become the home” (74). In the Temple of Domesticity, the formal living room and dining room are alters to potential social interaction.[6]
The word economy itself has as its root the Greek oikos, meaning “house.” The suburban home represents the connection between this root and the more common broader application of the term. While the home represents for the commuter a refuge from the industrial realm, in the mythos of the suburban housewife those qualities most important to survival in that realm are cultivated. The organizational structures which characterize the corporate economy project themselves into the domestic economy. Organizational aesthetics take the lead in defining interior spaces. Homes are divided through architecture into rooms; rooms are given roles through furnishings; furnishings play the organizational role of providing a ‘container’ for the myriad domestic objects on display in the suburban museum.
Benjamin finds that both architecture and “possession and having” are “allied with the tactile” (Arcades 206). In the suburbs these realms are brought into direct contact as the suburban home wraps its inhabitants in the feel of those things they own.
The Adolescent, The Mall
The concept of adolescence as we understand it today is largely a product of the post-World War II era. The “Baby Boom” brought issues of childhood, child rearing, and child psychology quickly to the fore, and a veritable cottage industry sprang up in the interest of shaping this debate.[7] That this new discussion of “growing up” (it surely was not the first) differed so markedly from any previous discussion might be traced in part to the fact that, due to two world wars, the previous two generations had in many ways missed the opportunity to experience adolescence. Writing in 1958, Ihab Hassan suggests that the last unified image of the American adolescent available before the lost generation might well have been the figure of Huckleberry Finn, a character not yet tainted by the modern feeling of fracture and alienation. In the intervening years, American writers mapped a sense of the nations “loss of innocence” onto the figure of the adolescent, so that by the time veterans and their wives started streaming into the suburbs, idyllic rebellion had been transposed upon modern commodity culture: Huckleberry Finn became Holden Caulfield (Hassan 312-13).
The suburban adolescent occupies a position in ambiguous tension between the mythological realm of childhood and the realm of adult responsibility. In the adolescent, the geographical middle-ground of the suburb maps itself onto individual psychology. He feels himself at once pulled by the various opposing forces at play—agrarianism vs. urbanism, domesticity vs. public responsibility—but he is made uneasy by his recognition of the commoditized nature of any available choice. The adolescent increasingly feels his experience co-opted by modern capitalist culture. Modernity’s interest in development—manifest in Freudian psychology, technological progress, the bildungsroman—has created a situation in which to attempt an individual experience of “growing up” cannot be viewed by the adolescent except as an act of rebellion. Adolescence, in this respect, becomes a key locus of resistance to the established order. For the first generation of suburban adolescents, this rebellion found its voice in the political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, with the veritable triumph of the commodity within the available social and personal spheres, adolescent resistance has in effect gone underground, expressing itself as a certain detached irony.
Ironic also is the adolescent’s role as the harbinger of commodities to come. Benjamin states:
To each truly new configuration of nature—and, at bottom, technology is just such a configuration—there correspond new “images.” Every childhood discovers these new images in order to incorporate them into the image stock of humanity. (Arcades 390)
It is in the experiences of youth that new technological forms, and their effects on the human sensorium, are internalized. Benjamin perceives that “[b]y the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol” (Arcades 461). In an era when patterns of behavior rely ever more presently on our relationships with and through consumer technology, young people perpetuate the cycle of planned obsolescence that drives technological development even as it further enslaves us to fashion. It is appropriate to this role that the suburban adolescent in search of recreation has few options that do not involve the mall.
Suburban malls (and, to a greater or lesser extent, suburban commercial developments generally) exhibit the same qualities of phantasmagoria that Benjamin noted in the Paris arcades. In many ways, these qualities are magnified owing to the technologies of environmental control available to suburban commercial developers. The Paris arcade represented a dream for the potentials of commodity culture; the mall represents a manifestation of that dream. Furthermore, inasmuch as they make themselves out as a places to lounge, to pass recreational time, to encounter the world as it passes, malls are little more than great museums to an ideal of the city center that has its roots in the arcades.
In The Suburbs, John J. Palen points to the contradictory nature of the suburban mall, stating that “for all their open courtyards, fountains, benches, and play spaces,” malls are “fundamentally different” from traditional city centers in that “[t]hey are private property” (187). Malls attract the middle-class suburbanite in a way that the traditional city center could not: they offer a controlled environment in which to consume culture. In the mall, commodity culture seems to fully embrace Benjamin’s notion of “reception in distraction” (“Work of Art” 40). In the suburban mall, architecture and visual stimuli collude to create a space for perpetual “casual noticing,” characteristic for Benjamin of a tactile internalization which, in a way opposed to that of studied contemplation, lends itself to the formation of habit. However, the revolutionary potential that Benjamin saw in this mode of reception is destroyed in the suburban mall by the sometimes overt but more often subtle, almost invisible, corporate branding of daily experience.
Notes
[1] Benjamin develops this sense of violence further in his essay “The Telephone,” in which he describes the experience of answering a ringing telephone (ostensibly, another method by which the external world imposes itself on the privacy of the home: “When, having mastered my senses with great effort, I arrived to quell the uproar after prolonged fumbling through the gloomy corridor, I tore off the two receives, which were heavy as dumbbells, thrust my head between them, and was inexorably delivered over to the voice that now sounded. There was nothing to allay the violence with which it pierced me. Powerless, I suffered, seeing that it obliterated my consciousness of time, my firm resolve, my sense of duty” (78).
[2] Kenneth Jackson, in Crabgrass Frontier, explores the various forces that led to the national highway system and the assumption of road-building by government. See especially Chapter 9, entitled “The New Age of Automobility.”
[3] It is worth noting in this connection that Benjamin’s observations regarding Baudelaire were in response to the question he posed regarding the poet’s work: “how lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm” (“On Some Motifs” 168). Baudelaire’s propensity for such a visualization is a patently modern one, springing as it does from his sense of alienation.
[4] A 1944 ad for Westinghouse Appliances, reproduced in Daniel Hill’s Advertising to the American Woman 1900-1999 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. p. 50), advertises “The Art of Better Living.” In it are pictured husband and wife standing before an art gallery wall filled with “portraits” of electrical appliances.
[5] Contrasting the names given to specific rooms might give a telling indication of their psychical value. Here, the “den” takes on a more private role (i.e., the lion’s den is fit for few but the lions themselves—so also the family’s) while the “living room” seems to slowly die.
[6] Dan Rosenberg offers another striking image of the living room and dining room. He points out that the living and dining room function further as liminal spaces, as “portals to the external world, like little embassies of external society on the sovereign soil of the domestic sphere.”
[7] For proof of the growing concern, one need look no further than Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Published in 1946, the book has sold over 50 million copies and is listed seventh in Russell Ash’s list of the ten best selling books of all time.
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