20.08.19
The first paragraph of Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity in the Age of Social Media ends with a declarative statement.
We can no longer think of distinct spaces for work, play, private life, and rest
As with all statements of this kind, I wonder this: Who exactly is We? In Colomina’s framing We certainly includes those living in 24/7 culture, young New York City professionals, and perhaps users of social media, though this We seems only to represent those with autonomous control of their labour, and while such autonomy is certainly gained through the networks of social media, not all users hold such privilege. While Colomina focuses on the what and the where of this transformation, I prefer to consider aspects of the who: Whose labour makes this space possible? Who has access and who is excluded? From this perspective it seems that, despite its democratic potential, the digital revolution has created new forms of stratification in society, where those functioning at the apex of the capitalist chain can reply to emails while lounging on high-thread count sheets, oblivious to the labourers creating the conditions for their new domestic workspace.
But, as Colomina asks, how did we get here? How did labour, and specifically privileged labour, shift from the home to the office and back again. Colomina’s historical reference, Walter Benjamin’s famous Louis Phillppe, or the Interior, is certainly referring to a privileged class of worker it’s ponderings; Benjamin’s “private individual” is surely male, white, affluent and of European-descent. Indeed, while Colomina declares “Industrialization brought with it the eight-hour shift,” I would reply that in actuality the Labour movement won such concessions, and that those fighting for them had little access to the differentiated work, life and social spaces of Benjamin’s “private individual.”
I suspect that the differentiation of space under Louis Philippe that Benjamin discusses has more to do with the entry into the European workforce of the aristocratic and upper classes, than any kind of universal experience. While managing the estate, or perhaps a few investments from home would be deemed acceptable, any further participation in a capitalist sphere from home would certainly be deemed tres gauche. In the intervening two centuries, as Colomina aptly depicts, the capitalist project has so successfully recentred human life around the notion of “work” that such separations are hardly necessary anymore. Today even the last remaining bastions of decaying aristocratic systems are said to “work” – the British Monarchy’s “working royals” being perhaps the prime example. The new privileged, and perhaps even more importantly fashionable, worker, who Colomina models after Hefner, Capote or Neutra, invites the tentacles of late-capitalism into the home, and even into the bedroom with little concern that such action will have detrimental social effect.
In Colomina’s depiction Hefner, Capote and Neutra become a curious and antipodal reflection of what is perhaps the ultimate expression of that most fashionable of 19th century European man, the flaneur. The gentleman at leisure becomes the gentlemen at leisure-work, exchanging their lobster on a lead for loungewear. What, or perhaps more poignantly who, is missing from this depiction? Who brings Capote his sherry? Who washes Hefner’s silk pajamas? Who is making Neutra’s son breakfast? Certainly this work cannot be completed from the “high-performance bed”. This underlying armature of supportive labour, the work that makes the high-performance bed possible, much like the underlying labour that supports the digital realm itself, is obscured by the glory of the modern-work-domestic-site or the glow of the screen.