On House and Home Part 6: the city as home and the architectural uncanny

Anthony Vidler, in his book The Architectural Uncanny, takes Freud’s notions of the uncanny, or unheimlich (unhomely), from the domain of the self and the home, out into the city as a whole. He investigates the notion of the city as home and its more fearful aspects. Vidler refers to the experience of reading a ‘scary’ novel (Hoffman, Poe etc.) in the cosy comfort of one’s own home as a vicarious experience of the dangerous “…only intensified by shifts in media.” (Vidler, P. 3) The contrast between the secure home and the “…fearful invasion of an alien presence…” (P. 3) is a manifestation of the return of the repressed as a replica of the inner self. 

Quoting Benjamin, Vidler identifies the uncanny as “…born out of the rise of the great cities.”  The big city is a ‘post-anthropomorphic’ place. It transgresses human scale and can only be apprehended as an abstract idea from a privileged, panoramic point of view. The only way to “…preserve a sense of individual security…” (Vidler, P. 4) is to conceive of the city as a purely geometrical place from an abstract ‘above.’ It isn’t possible to maintain this sense of security from ground level, where a pervading sense of anxiety and uncertainty prevail in our daily practices. Local customs and localized behaviour become marginalized: custom becomes estranged and uncanny, and subsumed to the panoptic centrality of power, politics, and culture. We move from a transformation of the village, the community, to the post-anthropomorphism of Bemjamin’s great city. In De Certeau’s term the ‘tour’ of the village community becomes the ‘map’ needed to apprehend the city. The “…act of passing by…” (De Certeau, P. 97)is replace by the totalizing surveillance of the panoptic city. Space becomes abstracted from activity. The city becomes ‘other’ as it becomes merely geometric space rather than inhabited space. 

Where the village is clearly created by, and connected to, the individuals and families who comprise the community, the big city has lost this connection to the agency of its inhabitants. The big city has, rather, developed its own agency and agenda, severed from its inhabitants who are now subjects of the city’s agency and not the opposite. So while the village is heimlich the city is distinctly unheimlich. This unhomeliness may be seen as a psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the ‘shock of the modern’ compounded by the events of WWII. (Vidler, P. 9) By extension we can look at our contemporary situation as a response to globalization compounded by the 9/11 attack and other atrocities. The global community has becoming distinctly unheimlich, has become the mirror reflecting our double. We feel an unease at the return of the repressed animosity toward the other and the possibility of our own barbaric impulses surfacing. 

The “…conspicuous austerity…”(Rybczynski, P. 197) of the modernist interior may be seen as an adjunct process that supports the development of the unhomely in domestic spaces. Modernist architecture valorizes the visual while desensorializing architectural space. The needs of the dwelling inhabitant are displaced to make visual, geometric space primary. This seems to be part and parcel of the modernist urge to reduce to essences. Reacting to fin-de-siecle excess and driven by the triumverate of science, technology, and commerce, there is an escalation of the ‘cult of utility’ begun in the Enlightenment, where utilitarian instrumental value becomes the greatest value. We can see the culmination of this in Le Corbusier’s zeal for standardization in architectural production, where the individual must conform to the space of the home (a hermit crab model) as opposed to the individual shaping his/her own space (Bachelard’s bird’s nest model).

So how can the big city become homely? How can we regain the heimlich from the panopticon? De Certeau’s notions of walking in the city may give some indication of possible tactics to regain the homeliness of the village within the big city. Perhaps the homely can be regained, at least partially, by the “…forest of gestures…”(De Certeau, P. 102) of individual spatial practices. De Certeau focusses his attention on ‘ground level’ lived experience.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates, makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place…under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.”(De Certeau, P. 103)

While for Freud, the uncanny is “…to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.” (Vidler, P. 7) for Bachelard and De Certeau “…the memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place.” The unreality of the dream is not necessarily abject, but may be liberating.  The space of the daydream, and the spatial practices of individuals are a move toward recognizing the ‘other.’ “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other.” (De Certeau, P. 110) To daydream is to be subsumed by otherness and to open to the freedom of the imagination to generate meaning. The unhomely may be seen as an impetus to an aesthetic and embodied engagement with our world. “Estrangement from the world…is a moment of art.” (Vidler, P. 8 quoting Benjamin)

Freud’s Haunted House

My presentation notes regarding Freud’s article The Uncanny.

Enjoy!

freuds-haunted-house

Further Reflections on Freud

The class noted that Freud was a very ideological writer: he had a clear theory or frame regarding culture and humanity.The question arose: what does psychoanalysis accomplish?

Exception was taken to Freud’s statement that the “…masses are lazy and unintelligent….” (P 8 Debate went back and forth between Freud’s view and considering whether people would do more work than necessary for subsistence if they weren’t coerced to do so. This brought to mind the question of what do we consider ‘work?’ My initial feeling was that people would eventually get bored of ‘relaxing’ and begin working on projects of some sort: building things, making music or other art, inventing tools and machines to make work easier etc. Many felt that that didn’t qualify as work: that I was describing leisure activities. This could be a possible functioning definition of work I suppose, although somehow it still smacks of something artificial. But, if we strictly define work as that which is required for subsistence then perhaps it’ll go. Cultures have in most (or even all?) cases developed art forms and other such ‘leisure’ activities, even when under the utmost duress regarding their subsistence and welfare. Perhaps there is something very fundamental to subsistence in so called leisure activities!? 

Freud states that civilization renounces or inhibits our instincts. For this to work (ie for us to go along with having our instincts inhibited) we need some form of compensation to ensure that we behave appropriately for the society.  In chapter II Freud rejects the essentially Marxist premise that civilization and the compensation it offers is based solely on the acquisition of wealth and its distribution. He suggests that compensation comes from “…the mental assets of civilization.” (P 12) Freud’s take on what those base instincts consist in is fairly pessimistic: incest, cannibalism and murder. This is why civilization is necessary: to inhibit these instincts in people. Civilization coerces people into repressing those base instincts. This process of coercion becomes gradually internalized to the super-ego. The super-ego is each individual’s ultimate editor and keeps the base instincts in check.  Freud does make a slight nod to Marx in recognizing the role of the distribution of wealth in civilization when he states “If, however, a culture has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion-and this is the case in all present-day cultures-it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. ” (P 15)

 

But, going back to what compensations are offered by civilization for us to willingly supress our more unsavoury base instincts. Freud says that at the simplest level, civilization offers us the security of collective living and the possibility of creativity. Creativity can be expressed or developed in the arena of religious ideas, ideals, artistic creations and morals: what Freud refers to as the “…psychical inventory of a civilization.” (P 17) The more we ‘buy in’ to the satisfactions offered by these areas the more robust our super-ego and therefore the more robust and secure the associated cultural unit. Freud distinguishes art as being fundamentally elitist as it “…remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting work…” and considers religion as illusory. (P 17)

Freud’s Future of an Illusion

This constitutes one of Freud’s major critiques of religion in general and European forms of Christianity in particular. Freud conducts an investigation of sorts to answer the question: “In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie?” (P 18). Freud suggests that the role of religion is similar to that of civilization in general and comes down to protecting us from nature. He suggests that by humanizing nature we are removing nature from the realm of impersonal forces which can’t be dealt with. By humanizing them and attributing ‘passions’ to nature we can now view nature as having a will. This is an interesting connection with Carolyn Merchant’s thought regarding the power of paradigms of nature in shaping our behaviour. (See The Death of Nature).We are now at the mercy of nature, which means that nature may be benevolent and ‘spare’ us death and destruction, it could also be wrathful and Evil in causing death and destruction. Freud says that we have an “…infantile prototype…” (P 21) for this: the model of a small child in relation to a parent. We look to our parent for both mercy and protection and, as well, an assurance of a good future. Freud suggests that religion provides us a “…store of ideas…born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable…” (P 23) Freud also suggests here that the ‘soul’ or the ‘spiritual’ has become increasingly disembodied by religion’s positing of the eternal and the possibility of transcendence. Perhaps religion attempts dealing with ‘the ineffable’ in this way. (This needs further investigation and fleshing out).

The ‘personal’ God of Christianity allows the possibility of recovering “…the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father.” (P 24)Freud suggests that religion is “…prized as the most precious possession of civilization…” (P 25) While this is no doubt true, I find Slavoj Zizek’s short op-ed piece Defenders of the Faith regarding the European legacy of atheism rings most true today.Chapter V opens in an interesting way which brings up issues regarding reality and knowledge. Freud states that:

Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one’s belief. (P 31)          

I found myself considering what else may fit in for ‘religious ideas.’ Scientific ideas, artistic or aesthetic ideas, philosophical ideas, even TV ‘worked’ in some sense when swapped in for ‘religious ideas.’Freud goes on to investigate how we corroborate or trust other forms of knowledge acquisition. His example is geography and he concludes that while all teachings require belief in what they’re asserting, we don’t believe these assertions until the teacher has produced some grounds for truth claims. Freud is very much in line with Thomas Paine’s reasoning in The Age of Reason regarding the inability or unwillingness of religious teachers and texts to provide grounds for belief without circular reasoning (a proposition cannot be a proof of itself etc) or unjustified trust in sources.

Freud continues on and comes to the conclusion that religious belief cannot be proven by reason, and that claims that religion is ‘above’ reason make it impossible to prove or disprove religious feelings to someone who doesn’t have them. He acknowledges that religion still has had, and continues to have a major influence on humankind. So Freud’s big question is what is it about religion that allows this to happen?The strength of religion is tied to the strength of our wishes according to Freud. Religion is based on illusions. Freud does point out that illusions are very different from errors because an illusion may turn out to be true whereas an error cannot. Illusions though, like religion, comes from human wishes. This brings up interesting issues regarding the role of the arts in articulating ideas which may (or may not) be realizable. Is the aesthetic impulse essentially the same as the religious impulse? Are both art and religion attempting to confront, or categorize or situate etc the ineffable? Reason clearly needs grounds for its proofs, and so may only be appropriate for certain areas of inquiry. All areas or issues outside of logic and reason perhaps require other forms of confrontation.

Freud is clearly for scientific inquiry and methodology. So much so that he maintains the objective/subjective polarity, not noticing that science as well as religion impose the structures of our own ‘mental life’ on the world. (P 40) He suggests on p 47 that “…psycho-analysis is a method of research, an impartial instrument…” It seems somehow amazing to me that he could consider psycho-analysis as an impartial instrument. Heisenberg famously suggested that by our very act of observation the system being observed has changed.Freud reaches an interesting conclusion regarding a psycho-analytical view of religion. He states that “religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity…” (P 55) He comes to this conclusion in the midst of the psycho-analysis of culture and suggests that society at large is at that stage of ‘development’ and that we can expect to get beyond this at some point in the same way as a child outgrows his childhood neuroses and becomes an adult. The issue of using analogies has come up before regarding their applicability to different domains. I suppose the jury’s out on this still. It could be a potentially powerful model for viewing society and culture. Freud himself is aware of this. (P 56)

Freud emphasizes the need for education (P 66) and asserts that religion is not the path to becoming educated because “…in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable.” (P 69) For Freud, science must be the basis of education, our basis for gaining knowledge of the outer world. In the final pages of the book he touches on some interesting issues regarding the necessarily anthropomorphic view of science itself. If even science is essentially anthropic then how can we know anything of the outside world? He grants this point and says that

…our mental apparatus has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency; in the second place, it is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investigation…[and] precisely because of the way in which [the ultimate findings of science] are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that organization; finally, the problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest.      

This final point is something that has come up in class discussions before. We’ve several times gone to the perspective of wondering what the constitution of the natural world would be without our being here to perceive it, and each time we’ve rejected that as not only ultimately uninteresting, but unknowable. We ‘know’ through our senses and mental apparatus as well as through our conceptual models and technologies etc. And that is what we are, or maybe should be, most interested in.