Philip Tabor...Striking Home: the Telematic Assault on Identity...Doors 2
S t r i k i n g H o m e :
T h e T e l e m a t i c A s s a u l t
o n I d e n t i t y
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Home, as a subjective construct, is a metaphor and externsion of the self
and body. But its conceptual envelope is expandable to include any appropriated
zone, geographic or mental. Invasions of the home, however home is defined, are
experienced as threats to subjective identity; art depicting domestic
architectural space invaded by new and alien influences suggests the resulting
unease. Studies of the telematic invasion of home have stressed social
consequences. But for designers in the telematic field, the psychic,
metaphorical implications may be more significant; telepresence and
interactivity may evoke the Freudian uncanny--intimations of automatism,
omniscience and disembodiment as threats to personal identity. Responses to
invasion are: (1) Lying back and enjoying it--cyberpunk etc., (2) Strengthening
the walls of home--cocooning, and (3) Letting the walls fall, but
building new ones further out--the Modernist project. Electronic utopianism,
despite its nomadic rhetoric, follows strategy (3). A view out is needed by
every home, but not primarily for instrumental purposes. The medieval
metaphysics of light suggests that we may overstress the importance of
information transfer in telematic experience.
Certain ideas seem to crystallise with particular and lasting intensity in certain countries. As far as the idea of home is concerned, the Netherlands are the home of the home--which of course is why it is so appropriate to hold this conference here (1).
The crystallisation of the Dutch idea of home might be dated to the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed an unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into domestic space. Simon Schama, whose thesis on the psychology of the Dutch Golden Age I borrow to introduce this talk, quotes a contemporary: in Amsterdam, and in some of the great cities of that small province ... the generality of those that build there, lay out a greater proportion of their estates on the houses they dwell in than any people upon the earth (2).
H o m e
A common post-Freudian speculation is that the infant is born unable to distinguish between itself and the world at large, and that its mental life is therefore non-spatial and decentred. But there comes a time, the so-called mirror stage, when the child develops the view that fundamentally the world is divided into two categories: he or she is Number One, Number Two is the world out there. Subject is distinguished from object, the self from the other. Significantly, this self/other dualism is experienced as spatial, indeed, as the simplest geometric relationship: enclosure.
Recent research casts doubt on the theory that a new-born infant cannot distinguish between itself and the outside world, or that its inner life is non-spatial (3). After all, it has just had the greatest topological shock it will ever suffer, having burst from the foetal sac into the glare of exteriority. But, whether the self/other distinction happens before or after birth, the idea remains that the personal world has a basic spatiality, centred on the self, and that it comprises (i) an interior, where the self resides, and (ii) an exterior.
Separating the inside from the outside is a conceptual boundary, a picture-frame, an envelope, a skin. The primary metaphor is that the self's interior is the human body. This conceptual membrane is elastic. It can expand to enclose within the metaphorical interior: clothing, a car, a room of one's own, a house, a country, or perhaps some non-physical zone of personal operation. A house identified as the self is called home, a country identified as the self is called homeland. Home is a surrogate for, and extension of, the self and the body. A sense of home, however you define it, is as important to self-identity as the persistence of personal memory.
The idea of the building as a body has recurred in architectural theory since Roman times. Burglary of a home often causes more distress than the objective loss deserves, because it is experienced metaphorically as an assault on, a penetration of, the owner's body. A child draws his home: its windows are eyes, its door a mouth.
Unlike the house, in short, home is a subjective construct, a metaphor of the self and body. But its conceptual envelope is expandable to include any appropriated zone, geographical or mental. In the rest of this talk the word home always has this generic psychological meaning, although it may sometimes simultaneously refer also to the physical house or dwelling.
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