Philip Tabor...Striking Home: the Telematic Assault on Identity...Doors 2
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I n v a s i o n s
The economic explanation for the seventeenth-century domestic spending spree is that the Netherlands had no collective economic sink, such as a royal court or princely church, to absorb their inflow of capital: faced with this embarrassment of riches, the Dutch poured their gold into their houses. But there is a psychological explanation which merits attention -- although I apologise in advance for its familiarity and possible offensiveness. It goes like this. The Netherlands, much of which lies below sea level, has a perilously elastic envelope separating the homeland from sea, a condition which has impressed into the individual Dutch soul a paranoiac anxiety to defend an inhabited interior (the self) from a menacing exterior. I'm not saying this is true. But if it is, the literal house, as an emblem of inner personal tranquillity and security, would be well worth throwing money at.
This paranoia, if such it was, was distilled into cultural form by the stupendous pictures of domestic interiors of the time: one thinks especially of Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. It is certainly astonishing how interior these interiors are. Much, perhaps most, painting had placed the action comfortably in the frame, leaving the viewer some distance outside the picture space, looking in. But these Dutch interiors extend to the frame like a photograph, drawing us into their intimacy and security (4).
In these interiors, too, generous windows admit a light as clear and clean as the domestic space they wash. But they offer us little glimpse, if any, of the world outside. It is almost as if the paintings on the wall had supplanted windows in their role as eyes looking out into the external world.
These paintings on the walls might be interior scenes themselves, homely conversational groups, or still lives of earthenware pots and pewter platters. But some were very strange indeed: I refer to those extravagantly labour-intensive still lives by such artists as Pieter Claesz or Willem Kalf (5). These might show a vase of riotous flora, say, or the remnants of a feast--jugs, goblets half-full of wine, a creased tablecloth, a china plate of uneaten food, a spiral of lemon peel.
I have to admit that these give me the creeps. They have the gloss, the high production values, and the lascivious exposure of studio pornography. Their close-up gaze, their in-your-face intimacy, insists that we stroke the silk, taste the meat, smell the flowers--enjoy them bodily as possessions. They resemble television in their close-up intrusiveness, internal luminosity and shallow spatial depth. They also have an immersive vividness which electronic virtual reality only aspires to.
This simile is not too far-fetched. The still life was then a new medium. It hung on the domestic wall like a screen and, as a phenomenon, related to previous, that is scenic, painting as television does to film. The type of glossy still life I refer to was indeed literally tele-vision in that it depicted not home products but porcelain, glassware, fabrics and exotic botanical species newly imported from afar -- from the Levant, say, the East Indies or China. Such still lives were also a sort of shopping channel, in that the cost of the things depicted, their exchange value, was an important part of the picture's message: the painting transformed objects into commodities.
No actual home has all the attributes which define the ideal, the Platonic, Home. But home as an idea is the place of being, not doing -- of ends, not the means to ends. It is a place of familial and moral value -- not of monetary value. It is no place for the instrumental mentality, commerce or business (that is, masculine work). It is, moreover, a place of unmediated authenticity (home truths are truths bluntly and directly told) and therefore perhaps a country uncolonised by the empire of signs (6). At home we can be true to ourselves: there is no need for show.
So these glossy still lives represent a forced opening of a window, a puncturing of the skin protecting home from the outside world, an infection, a pollution of purity by danger, and an assault on homeliness by worldliness. Like the naval maps which also figure in the painted interiors, they represent an invasive penetration of a protected, largely feminine, domain by the external world of men and adventure (7). And, by representing monetary value and, by extension, the instrumental mentality, they symbolise the piping into the Faraday cage of home an untamed and threatening foreign energy.
They are symptoms, in short, of the volatile imbalance, chronicled by Schama, in what he calls the seventeenth-century moral geography of the Dutch mind (8): a psychic unease, a blurring of self-identity, caused by a rocketing increase in available information and power.
The parallel between the seventeenth-century experience and our own is obvious. The second half of our century has seen, in the advanced economies, a huge and quite sudden enlargement of personal access to information and power. Starting with the phone, electronic media have cracked the dykes of home and admitted into it all that was traditionally excluded: impurity, worldliness, business, disrespect and instrumentality. Joshua Meyrowitz, for instance, has recorded in detail how the media, especially television, has changed American home life by breaching former barriers between community and privacy, subservience and authority, male and female, childhood and adulthood, leisure and work, and so on (9).
Meyrowitz's study concentrated on the social effects. But quite as significant are the subjective inner responses, perhaps unconscious, to electronic media. Jean Baudrillard sees the media as an invasive virus, robbing life and meaning from the mental home constructed by humanity. [T]his electronic encephalization, he asserts, this miniaturisation of circuits and of energy, this transistorization of the environment condemn to futility, to obsolescence and almost to obscenity, all that once constituted the stage of our lives.... [T]he presence of television, he continues, transforms our habitat into a kind of archaic, closed-off cell, into a vestige of human relations whose survival is highly questionable (10).
At the common-sense level, this apocalyptic rhetoric seems unjustified and hysterical: we should be able to take a few electronic gizmos into our homes without blubbing about it. But deeper within our collective wetware, which software designers ignore at their cost, it is not all sunshine, even in Silicon Valley. Today, as in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, an informational wave beats against the hull and causes the cargo to shift uneasily below decks.
Although published in 1919, a much-studied essay by Freud throws light on our current situation (11). Its title, translated into English, is The Uncanny: the uneasy dread evoked by undefined and unlocated menace. In the original German it is Das Unheimliche, literally the unhomely.
One example of the uncanny/unhomely which Freud cites are doubts whether an apparently animate object is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object [like an automaton] might not be in fact animate (12). Machines threaten the home because, as we have seen, the home is about ends themselves, not means to ends--whereas technology is by definition instrumental. In our electronic era, moreover, it is clear that the machines with which we crowd today's habitat are indeed lifeless but, growing ever more responsive and interactive, increasingly resemble pets--beasts which are domesticated (significant verb) into a category half-human, half-object (13). And just as mechanical devices increasingly seem to be extensions of our body, so our mental attention seems increasingly monopolised and penetrated by media, particularly interactive media. Our collective imagination is haunted or exhilarated by the notion that in our home we copulate with machines, are becoming cyborgs, half-meat, half-metal: Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop (14).
Freud also instances as typically uncanny the feeling that your self is divided, when you meet your double, for example--or, conversely, when two selves appear oddly unified, as in cases of apparent telepathy (15). The uncanny emerges, too, when statistical probability is violated, when for example everything repeatedly goes right for you so that the causal barrier, which normally divides the external world from inner thoughts and desires, threatens to disappear (16). In our electronic era, again, those who spend a large proportion of their conscious life on the Net or navigating informatic space may be prey, if only fleetingly and unconsciously, to feelings that barriers of identity are dissolving between selfhood and otherhood; that the mechanisms of resistance and causality, which had assured us we were separate from the outside world, no longer operate; that we float in a space outside the self.
According to Freud, then, some experiences (in our case, electronically induced) evoke feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, disembodiment and decentredness which, at their most extreme, are forms of clinical madness. Involuntarily and unconsciously they revive that infantile mental state before the inner and external worlds could be distinguished (17). What was long suppressed knocks like a risen corpse at the door of adult consciousness. The uncanny, the Unheimliche, erupts into our mental home and our self is sucked out through the breach to dissolve itself into the outside world.
Even if we discount the general Freudian thesis that the child is father to the man, and that suppression breeds disease, we can still recognise in this essay the syndrome of what might be called the telematic uncanny. Electronic media have partly eroded not only social boundaries which previously divided individuals and families from society as a whole, but also some boundaries of the self which previously defined individual identity. Films are a good guide to collective angst, and several, TRON and Poltergeist for instance, depict people being sucked through a monitor or TV screen into a world in where they are no longer at home (18).
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