The Exterior as Interieur : Benjamin's Optical Detective

Here is a riddle for you unheimlicher bird.
What is so strange it feels like home?

—Susan Mitchell, "Bird, a Memoir," in Erotikon: Poems

Benjamin's arcades need to be grasped as a topographical fantasy, something like those phantom objects André Breton glimpsed in dreams that caused him to haunt the flea markets and arcades of Paris to find their equivalents—the "Cinderella Ashtray" or the "Nosferatu Necktie"—objects that, like a dream, combined seemingly irreconcilable aspects. ¹ The arcade, Benjamin frequently reminds us, is an exterior space conceived as an intérieur. A one-line entry in The Arcades Project summons up topographical contradictions like a Möbius strip: "Arcades are houses or passages having no outside—like the dream." ² By their very nature of enclosing an alleyway, or, rather, forcing a passage through a block of buildings, the arcades present a contradictory and ambiguous space that allows an interpenetration—not only of spaces, but of ways of inhabiting and using space. "More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses" (AP, d°,1). Thus the arcade embodies the fundamental dreamlike experience of the flaneur as the city "opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room" (AP, e°,1).

The exterior as interior becomes a crucial emblem for Benjamin's analysis of the nineteenth century, because this ambiguous spatial interpenetration responds to an essential division on which the experience of the bourgeois society is founded, the creation of the interior as a radical separation from the exterior, as a home in which the bourgeois can dwell and dream undisturbed by the noise, activity, and threats of the street, the space of the masses and of production, a private individual divorced from the community. A cocoon of consumption, the intérieur becomes "not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his etui" (AP, 20). Encased within an upholstered environment, the inhabitant of the intérieur is cushioned, like the railway passenger for whose comfort Wolfgang Schivelbusch claims the modern shock-absorbing techniques of upholstered furniture were first designed. ³ But what collision is being warded off by such protection? This new interior betrays signs of the previous violence of demarcation by which the intérieur and its privileges were claimed—as Benjamin observes, pieces of furniture retain the characteristics of fortifications (AP, 214–15). The "unconscious retention of a posture of struggle and defense" (AP, I2,3) that Benjamin quotes Adolf Behne as finding in the bourgeois furniture arrangement belies any taking for granted the success of this exclusion. In spite of attempts to fashion an impermeable cloistered space, a summons from without, Benjamin claims, such as an insistently ringing doorbell, cannot be exorcised simply by being ignored (AP, I1a,4).

Through a defensive posture, the intérieur constitutes itself as a space cut off from the world, but this process of private appropriation relies not only on separation and insulation but also on disguise and illusion, as the optics of interior space take on the complexity of the phantasmagoria. As Benjamin says, "The space disguises itself" (AP, I2,6). Ultimately the interior cannot withstand the exterior; it can only transform the nature of its looming invasion optically. While the aural summons of the ringing doorbell may not be successfully ignored, the inhabitant of the interior can still optically dominate the exterior through a "window mirror," a device Theodor Adorno describes as "a characteristic furnishing of the spacious nineteenth-century apartment." A carefully positioned mirror, also known as "a spy," it reflects who, or what, waits outside (Figure 1). As an optical device of the intérieur, the window mirror, in Adorno's words, allows the exterior to enter the room "only [as] the semblance of things." ⁴ This control of semblance defines the intérieur as much as does the defensively conceived furniture...