De-realisation

Definition

De-realisation names the experiential condition the bourgeois domestic interior produces: the inhabitant's experience, held in a material space, slips into immaterial registers — the room lived as reverie, image, or psychological scene rather than as bare physical fact. Rice, glossing both Baudelaire and Benjamin: for both, "this doubled experience is held within material and immaterial registers, producing de-realised experiences" (editors' headnote); Benjamin's 1939 exposé "describes it [the bourgeois domestic interior] as a material space which produces de-realised experiences." Baudelaire's "The Twofold Room" supplies the condition's literary form: the daydream room ("A room just like a daydream, a truly spiritual room, in which the air is tinged with rosiness and blue") whose animate coherence — furniture dreaming "like vegetable and mineral things," draperies that "speak an unvoiced language" — collapses at reality's intrusion ("a terrible, heavy thump") into "this hovel, this home of everlasting boredom." De-realisation is therefore episodic as well as structural: the interior is "sealed off from the everyday world only in reverie."

The condition has a practice and a psychology. Its practice is collecting: the collector "delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better – a world in which… things are freed from the drudgery of being useful" — de-realisation performed on things, the commodity-character divested so the object can bear "connoisseur's value." Its psychology is Freud's: the suite-of-rooms unconscious (entrance hall, drawing-room, censor-watchman) extends the interior's doubleness into the mind — the psyche itself de-realised into rooms. Its critical yield is Rice's: the de-realised experience is historically specific to the bourgeois interior's emergence, and Praz's error is to generalize it "as one obtaining across all history."

Key Thinkers

• Charles Rice — the concept's historiographic operator: de-realisation named as the doubled experience's product, read through Benjamin and Baudelaire, and made the test that distinguishes historically specific interior experience from its essentialist generalization (2004/2006).
• Walter Benjamin — the condition's theorist: the interior as "a material space which produces de-realised experiences"; the collector's divestment of the commodity's character as the condition's practice; the traces of inhabitation as its residue.
• Sigmund Freud — the condition's interiorization: the unconscious as a suite of rooms — the psyche modeled on (or modeling) the bourgeois plan; the consulting rooms as the condition's clinical host.

Related Concepts

• Doubleness — the structural condition de-realisation experientially yields: material/immaterial registers held together in one interior.
• Bourgeois Interior — the space that produces the condition: "a material space which produces de-realised experiences."
• The Collector — the condition's practitioner: the resident who de-realizes things by divesting them of their character as commodities.
• Phantasmagoria — the concept's public sibling: the spectacle-space's dreamlike overload, of which the de-realised interior is the domestic chamber.
• Spectacle — the condition's mass-cultural descendant: experience lived as image; the interior's de-realisation generalized to the society of the spectacle.
• Trace — what de-realisation leaves behind: the traces of inhabitation accumulated in the interior's material register.
• The Uncanny — the condition's failure mode: when the immaterial register returns as the frighteningly familiar (the doubled gaze, the toppling walls).
• The Interior View — the condition's image-medium: the genre that fixed the interior's de-realised (artistic-effect) face.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the sign's substitution for the real at room scale: "a purely signified warmth… never realized: a warmth characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source" (p. 39); the pastel "merely a sign" for the living colour; and the collected interior as "islands of legend."
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the concept's defining source: the headnote's "producing de-realised experiences"; Benjamin's exposé (the material space producing them); Baudelaire's twofold room and its collapse; the collector's better world ("things are freed from the drudgery of being useful"); Freud's suite of rooms; and Praz's generalization of the condition "as one obtaining across all history" as the concept's historiographic misuse.
• Benjamin for Architects (Elliott 2011) — the Benjamin corpus's interior register (dwelling, phantasmagoria, the dialectical image) from which the 1939 exposé's de-realisation formula comes; the wiki's fullest secondary account of the arcades' interior.
• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the concept's sociological neighbour: the interior as sign-system in which experience is organized by "atmospheric" values — the de-realisation condition re-described as the modern living space's combinatory logic (the open question: are these one condition?).
• Phantasmagoria and the Architecture of the Contemporary City (Lahiji 2015) — the condition's urban generalization: the hyper-mediated city's anaesthetized subject — de-realisation at the scale of the metropolis rather than the room.
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the condition's practitioner-side counter: the decorator's insistence that rooms carry "the comfort and expression of living" — the refusal of the interior's reduction to image ("They were just furniture") as a de-realisation-critique from within the trade.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is de-realisation a resistance to commodification (Benjamin's collector "divest[ing] things… of their character as commodities") or its completion (the object valued precisely as image — "connoisseur's value" as sign-value)? Compare Baudrillard's sign-system: is the "better world" of freed things the first commodity utopia or its refusal?
• Baudelaire's reverie ends at "a terrible, heavy thump." Is de-realisation then the interior's permanent condition (Benjamin's structural reading) or a reversible state (Baudelaire's episodic one) — and does interior design aim at sustaining the condition, breaking it, or making it survivable?
• Freud's suite of rooms is de-realisation's deepest case: the psyche's plan as interior. But if the psyche models itself on the bourgeois plan, is psychoanalysis a historical formation (Rice's implication via the Oedipus/family claim) — and can its clinical setting (psychoanalytic-setting) claim universality?
• The wiki's spectacle analysis treats the image as late-capitalist. Does the de-realised interior — image-based phenomenon since 1829 — force a re-dating of the spectacle's domestic prehistory, with the interior view as the first mass image of the room?