Virtual Enclosures
PETER LAMBORN WILSON

American English uses the word `homely' to describe, among other things, a person neither beautiful nor horrendously ugly but ordinary to an extraordinary degree. in common usage it tilts toward the ugliness end of the scale rather then toward beauty; but it never signifies a monstrous fearful ugliness - rather a comfortable ugliness to which one might grow allusionned, till perhaps - if it vanished - one might miss it. I believe it's true to say that our `homely' has a different valence than the German heimlich, which seems to provide a homogenic equivalent, but would in fact prove a faux ami to the unwary translator. `Heimlich' has a touch more of the sublime, of centrality, of deep value, than `homely'. Perhaps the Germans have preserved a stronger sense of the sacred hearth than the `new world' types; I don't know. But it's interesting to note that we have no direct equivalent of unheimlich. `Unhomely' is a possible English locution but in fact possesses very little meaning. Certainly it calls up no Walpurchisnacht imagery, no sense of the `uncanny'. I believe `uncanny' would serve on the best English translation of `unheimlich', but it refers to the unknown (the unkenned), not to the un-homed.

Interestingly enough however the American `homeless' does bear some relation to `unheimlich'. In the American 1920s and 1930s peolple without homes might have been called `vagabonds' or `hoboes' - slightly prejorative terms but also tinged with a bit of romance - now however they are called homeless. They are defined not by what they do or have, but by what they lack. And like all such victimological terminology, which pretends to be clinical and neutral, the word `homeless' has taken on a secret sinister air of fear and condemnation. It has become a code-word for certain political and class values. the homeless are `unheimlich', not so much because they lack a sacret hearth, but because they lack property. In a capitalist society, which is in fact failing, a slipping deeper into dept and debility, the unpropertied may constitute the most alien of all outsiders - the evil poor - who at any moment could go lycanthropic on us and launch the jaquerie.

The word `hearth' contains the word `heart' and `earth'. The earth's heart, the fire place, originally occupies the center of a circular home (tent, tipi, yurt, hut, iglo); its smoke rises like a shaman's ladder up the axis of the home and out the roofhole towards heaven. Every hearth is the center. Outside the circle of light lies the unknown and the uncanny; the original purpose of the home is to contain that light, to shape it.in Celtic culture, after Samhám or Halloween, winter begins, and with winter the hearth becomes not only the symbolic or economic center but the literal center- and it is here and now (at night, in winter, and by the fireside) that the most important tales must be told, the stories that link each individual and family to social time, to religious time, to Time itself. The home and hearth together make up a sort of capsule of light embedded in and moving through the time/space of sacred narrative, like a submarine in the Sea of Story. The telling of tales (very often tales of the uncanny) not only seals and protects the home against the `unheimlich', it also re-creates the hearth as center, indeed as the triumphant center of all culture, of all humanness. The fireside tale generates power -- narrative is the engine of the Year.

Now, the Nomad, too, has a tent and a hearth, ritually re-activated at each campsite- but to the settled agriculturalists, the nomad seems suspiciously uprooted, unhinged, unhomely. On this simple axiom, Ibn Khaldum constructed a whole sociology and an explanantion of history based on a pendulum-like opposition between the forces of homelessness and home. Historical time and historical society are launched by this violence. And despite the 19th/20th century's `closure of the map' and its obsessive opposition to all psychic and historical forms of nomadism, the conflict refuses to be resolved. `Homelessness' is eliminated as noble calling but simultaneously finds a new existence as viral threat within the bounds of civilization. And who's to say there's nothing noble about a virus?

That which has been called `architecture without architects' -- i.e., `primitive' or vernacular arachitecture -- whether nomadic or settled -- always bases itself on the principle of the human body. This may sound simple-minded but I suspect it's worth the risk of your mirth to remind you: like the tent or hut, the human is upright, with a spine (axial pole) and arms (crossbeams), a central `hearth' or source of vital warmth (the stomach or `heart', with breath (like the smoke of the fire), able to contemplate heaven (the smoke-hole), but rooted in Earth (the floor, the tent-pegs). Mouth and eyes are doors and windows, privy is gut, bed is a headful of dreams. In Çatal Hüyük (the `first' city) the bones of the dead were buried beneath the sitting or sleeping platforms on either side of the hearth -- and thereby architecture acquired an unconscious. But the human body contains a mystery even more mysterious than the submerged memory of the dead, and that is consciousness itself. Architecture must embrace the inexplicable and invisible; hence the lares et penates, who are at once both the guardians and the very definition of the homely: the spirits of the the hearth.

And yet spirits are deemed uncanny, and so are dreams, in which spirits may `appear'. So the home contains a homeopathic dose of the `unheimlich'; the home is also a dreamscape. The shaman may suddenly reveal or activate these occult properties, perhaps by climbing the tentpole and flying out the smoke hole, or by some other performance which creates a link between the known time/space of the hearth and the unknown forces of the darkness beyond. Home as ritual space becomes a nexus of the seen and unseen -- a liminal space, as Victor Turner would say -- a threshold. Home can also become dreamlike when one is out of it, just as one is `out of the body' when one dreams. Away from home one may become `homesick', and although this precise term apparently first emerged only as late as the European `Dark Ages', surely it may be considered to denote a universal experience-at least amongst settled agriculturalists. Homesickness includes more complex symptoms than mere nostalgia or the alienation of the unwilling wanderer; it shows its positive aspects in the kind of reveries about houses and about fire analyzed so brilliantly by Gaston Bachelard. We may in fact feel nostalgia for a home we have never seen, or perhaps even for an `impossible' home. Hope and home are related; architecture contains that which Bloch and Benjamin called the `utopian trace'. Popular psychology provides us with a game in which we are asked to describe a house, or an `ideal' house; on the basis of our description, the questioner reads our character or analyzes our personality. The heart is where the home is.

Fully conscious utopian architecture might be said to consist of two categories: one, the `Platonic', based on mathematics, foreshadows the machine; the other, based again on the human body, represents the principle of desire; Plato, More, Campanella, Owen -- these visionaries subordinated human complexity to a system (gridwork, cosmic mandala, etc.) in which chaotic desire must give way to orderly function -- and in this sense utopia provides an inadvertant blueprint for the modern city, or for its mirror image, the urban dystopia. The other kind of utopian architecture, however, builds on the liberation of desire and scales itself to the pleasures of body and imagination. Thoreau's cabin by Walden Pond, for instance, represents the utopian architecture of the true philosophical anarchist who wishes neither to be ruled nor to rule; and not coincidentally, this ideal has become virtually indistinguishable from the organic and vernacular tradition we discussed at the beginning of this paper. In the wake of the popularity of Thoreau's book, it's interesting to note that myriad imitations of the little cottage appeared all over America, some with added touches of bourgeois ostentation (such as a bit of carpenter-gothic stencilling) that would have made poor Thoreau puke. The cabin at Walden Pond belongs to an American obsession (which the Dutch seem to share) for tiny individualistic utopias. Even the early Methodist Camp meetings, which were certainly group structures centered around a single large `tabernacle' (or circus-sized `revival tent'), nevertheless still preserved the individual or nuclear-family scale by housing all the campers in tents. Season by season, the tents were improved, first acquiring gimcrack-baroque false fronts of painted timber, then finally mutating into numerous tiny Victorian cottages (examples can still be seen at Ocean Grove, New Jersey). The secular version of this summer utopia was the Chautaugua, that marvellous amalgam of `self-improvement' and fun - fine examples survive in Chautaugua, New York (the prototype) and in Boulder, Colorado. The modern descendant of Thoreau's cottage is the vacation cabin; the modern version of Chautaugua is Club Med.

Charles Fourier's utopian architecture bases itself on desire, but not on individual isolation. For Fourier, desire constituted the only possible principle of human society- either by its denial (as in Civilization) or by its realization in Utopia (or `Harmony' as he called it). To be fully realized, human passions require other human passions. If everyone did exactly what they want, he believed, a perfectly ordered socity would arise spontaneously from the intermeshing and synergistic enhancement of all desires. Thus the banquet and the orgy become the models for organization and the beehive the model for architecture. Like De Sade, Fourier's ideal setting was a great palace in the countryside -- not for a few gloomy deists with whips, however, but for precisely 1620 happy libertines. Now since Fourier believed that stars and planets are living beings with sexual passions on a cosmic scale, he prodicted that once we overthrow Civilization and replace it with Harmony, the luminaries of the solar system will move closer to Earth, attracted (literally sexually attracted) by our newfound brilliance and erotic exudations. The Phalanstery (or unitary harmonian architecture) therefore already bases itself on this sensual clustering of `stars', and the two side-wings of the palace reach toward the Sun like the raised arms of a worshipper. Despite its grandeur the Phalanstery is `scaled to human size'; in fact Fourier viewed the Phalanx (all 1620 members) as a single body.

During the `Industrial Revolution' and the Victorian era architecture adopted certain utopian concepts to its own social purposes. The factory began to emerge as the central prototype of all built space. Owen's New Lanark provided a model for the slum clearance project as a focus for the rationalization of work rather than the liberation of the worker. And if Thoreau's cabin was perverted into the bourgeois vacation cottage, we may say that Fourier's Phalanstery became the Victorian asylum or prison; and the modern suburb -- hell with manicured lawns -- can be seen as a perversion of Ebenezer Howard's New Garden City ideal, and so on...

Anarchism and Socialism may have proposed, therefore, but Capitalism has disposed. Capitalism has in fact built the world we actually live in (except perhaps for brief escapes to some Summerland or Temporary Autonomous Zone) and we should now attempt to analyze the modern home as we analyzed the vernacular and the utopian traditions. First and most obviously, then, the hearth has been replaced by television. The central symbolic/economic focus of organic life and shamanic imagination has now become a cold, disembodied source of disinformation and consumerist propaganda. One of the most popular cable channels, amusingly enough, broadcasts nothing but a continuous loop of a cheerful fireplace -- a kind of virtual yule-log, a real video hearth. The ideal American suburban home may to some extent also be seen as centered around another machine, the automobile, in which we have invested so much of our desire (for autonomy, power, freedom) in return for so little satisfaction. The house is actually shaped by these and other machines: the sprawl of the `carport', or the blue TV-penumbra which leaks like radiation from nightime `picture windows', a body of light or sheath of astral luminescence englobing the house, isolating it and defining it. The modern home emerges from a Modernist utopian proposal -- the building as a `machine for living' -- but it has degeneratd into its own dystopian opposite and become a shrine to the life of machines. It is shaped neither on the principle of the individual body and its desires nor on the principle of the convivial group and its bodily passions; the modern house is not even really shaped around the `nuclear family' (which at least can claim some biological reality) but rather on its disappearance. The true American home is built for Society of Divorce, in which the isolation and oedipal misery of the family produces `inner separation', so to speak, or alienation. The childrens' bedrooms will be empty just as soon as they can escape from this purgatory; and eventually even the parents will be sent away to one of those slow mortuaries we jokingly call old peoples' homes. Our domestic architecture already contains all these disappearances, or rather it is `inscribed with the signs' of these break-ups or melt-downs, these terminal emptinesses.

Home in this sense can only be seen as a focus for the disappearance of the body, or rather its virtualization. `When it's steam engine time, it steam engines'; the technology of domestic architecture foreshadows and demands the decorporalization of the social in Cyberspace. Against such intimate oppression -- unrecognized and unspoken -- all one can do is rebel, or move. The average American `moves house' dozens of times. We might call such a life `serial nomadism'.

Ibn Khaldun in fact could of course have predicted the dialectical results of the miserabilist dissolution of all the ideals and pleasures of sedentary life. To give but one example of the re-appearance of nomadism `within the shell' (so to speak) of post-agricultural suburbanism, I'll mention here a phenomenon I find touching and even somewhow rather revolutionary -- the Old (the `retired') escape both home and Home by taking to the road in `recreational vehicles' (RV's) on one last long `vacation' which becomes their life. Three cheers -- or anyway two cheers -- for the `RV lifestyle'.

But what about the `VR Lifestyle'? Virtual Reality (certainly one of the most ironic coinages in an era of PoMo irony at its worst) has now promised to sweep away the bad old post-industrial domestic machines and replace them with a virtual home. VR found one of its earliest commercial applications in architectural rendering: virtual blueprints or `walk-through' designs. Now, instead of replacing the hearth with a TV (and replacing our own reveries-before-the-flickering-flames with Capitalism's ready-made dreams) we can enter into the very Eye of Imagination and construct our very own utopian home. Of course, there'll be no smell (which Fourier believed was the most central of the senses), no taste, and (so far) no feel to these constructs. Only the `abstract' senses of sight and sound will be served. Just as the reality of the experience is only virtual, so is our pleasure. The VR home is literally u-topian or no-where; the body remains absent. Moreover, although other operators may `appear' within our virtual space in various virtual forms, they too remain physically absent. Sci Fi writers have already uncovered these particular ironies and have given us the instant cliche of the body of death disguised by VR as the body of light. In William Gibson's work, for example, the jacked-in hacker is often consumed by starvation and sickness while the VR persona seems to live the life of an angel. I call this process Cybergnosis, the transcendence of the body in pure spirit (or `information'). Cyberspace thus becomes the Gnostic Pleroma, the timeless/spaceless appearance of the Image and the disappearance of all mortal flesh and becoming. Ultimately one `downloads consciousness' like a ghost into the machine, and attains immortality and eternity.

So much for `science fiction', that literature of body-hatred and secular transcendence, that New Gnostic Scripture (e.g., P.K. Dick), in which the body is `meat' and even the brain is mere `wetware' (Rudy Rucker). The economic reality of VR however, seems to be shaping a somewhat different future for us. In this Vita Nuova, our own dreams become the ultimate commodity, the final apotheosis and hypostasis of pure Capital. The commodity-as-object will no longer have to be designed with that `utopian trace' or promise of hope (forever denied) which once attracted us and trapped us in the spiral of Work/Consume/Die -- because now the ultimate commodity will consist of utopia itself as Pure Image (or pure `information'). Like the New Sisyphus, humankind will exist surrounded by images of comfort and food and drink, and will even `consume' those images-but never their reality. And for this we will work, and for this we will pay.

In this reading of VR, CyberSpace can be seen not only as that `heaven of Glass' (with which the False Angels sought to deceive the sons and daughters of Man) but also as the social abyss, the unspace of our ultimate disappearance. From this point of view the virtual home is nothing but our work station, a set of terminals for the terminal self, for consciousness as pure image-slavery, for the commodification of consciousness itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the gentry concluded that process of enclosure, whereby communally held lands (`commons') -- on which the peasantry depended economically -- were alienated and transformed into `private Property'. Enclosure proved a necessary prior stage to the full emergence of Capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, as we approach the millenium, the only surviving ideology is that of the `Global Market', structured on a virtual economy of electronic networks and abstract `money', in which an elite of `information' specialists services a world of virtual helots, each immiserated soul encapsulated within its own body of light, jacked into the patterns of NAFTA and GATT- the triumphalist utopia of Capital. These virtual enclosures {thanks to Jim Fleming for this felicitous phrase} constitute the final sealing-off of the self -- the ultimate mediation of all desire-and the extinguishing of hope.

But this end can by no means be considerd a foregone conclusion. For one thing, too-late capitalism itself is riddled with innumerable contradictions- cracks in the monolith -- areas of dissonance and contention where genuine utopian or revolutionary desire may still find its object. Thus we may legitimately speak of resistance to virtual enclosure and note some of the alternative models that have been proposed.

I happen to be especially fond of one such model, offered by Bakhtin (in his Rabelaisian studies), that of the `grotesque body'. The word grotesque is related to `grotto', and originally refers to the naturally baroque cavern shapes of stalgmites and stalactites. The cave is our original home and temple, and our fascination with its forms can be traced from the Paleolithic to (for example) the American Midwest, where numerous `naive' or `intuitive' religious artists have transformed the landscape with artificial grottos of concrete and broken glass (such as the marvelous `Wonder Cave' near Wisconsin Rapids, or the Shrine at Dickeyville). Bakhtin saw the grotesque body as a representative form of that `material bodily principle' which for him comprised the spiritual essence of the festal or ludic self. The grotesque body is a homely body, perhaps even an ugly body (Breughelian peasant), defined by its protrusions and openings -- mouth, prick, cunt, asshole -- and the pleasurable excesses centered around these organs. The body is thus seen not as a structure of closures but rather as a permeable membrane or open interface with physical reality. The festival must therefore be seen as the most `appropriate' form of architecture for such a body. The festal produces (or even secretes) its own built forms, which are meant both to contain and to express both desire and pleasure. The tent, the booth, the decorated street, the costumes and floats all serve to define a space for both resistance and for utopian creativity. In this context, I would like to mention the `urbanism' of the situationists as well as the work of contemporary dream architects in creating optimal conditions for the emergence of festal space- the situationist derive or `Drift' (an intentionally aimless group stroll through urban space) can be seen as a form of architectural action, an attempt to reclaim the `Capital' (the City) for autonomous celebration. Related to the Drift are the `psychogeographical' excursions wherein specific sites are chosen for the experiment of re-enchantment, are thus transformed into surreal pilgrimages of insurrectionary consciousness.

The grotesque or festal body might equally well be found `at home' in a cave -- the most immovable and earthly of all hearth sites -- or in a nomadic tent, the most mobile and `spiritual' of all architectural forms. In other words, the grotesque body reconciles the apparent opposites of nomadism and sedentarism. Our Grotesque Architecture, therefore, must consider itself free to realize any desirable aspects of any of the forms we've discussed-the vernacular, the utopian, the wandering, the settled, the festal, the magical.

It may even turn out that the computer and VR tech will play some role in this architecture. I confess I remain undecided about this. On the one hand, VR is `here'- and there's no use holding out for some sort of puritan Luddism, especially if information technology can enhance our utopian efforts in any way. On the other hand, however, VR, `virtual reality', is very definitely not here. There is no `here' here -- VR has no place for the `material bodily principle' or for the sacral quality of the topos, the actual place. VR consists of utopia as Nowhere -- not the place of the creative imagination, but of the mere created image. Before this Image our passivity is complete; it has rendered all action impossible, all realization of desire a mere fantasy. As animate animals we can never be `at home' in Virtual Reality -- and if we are to resist both virtual homelessness and virtual enclosure, we ought perhaps to begin by carrying out a re-imagining of home.