Doubleness

Definition

Doubleness names the interior's constitutive two-in-one condition: the interior is at once a spatial environment and an image — a physical, three-dimensional room and a picture or representation — and its inhabitation is at once material and immaterial. Rice's formulation (via Baudelaire's "The Twofold Room," 1862): the doubled experience "is held within material and immaterial registers, producing de-realised experiences"; the interior "is not simply architectural, but… borrows on the enclosure provided by architecture to be articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell.' In this sense the interior is also not simply spatial, but is equally an image-based phenomenon." In the 2007 book's later formulation (via Brooker): "Doubleness is manifest in the semantic development that marks the emergence of the interior… The interior thus emerged with significance as a physical, three dimensional space, as well as an image… Significantly, doubleness involves the interdependence between image and space, with neither sense being primary."

The OED's birth-definition of the architectural interior encodes the condition: "The inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also, a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room" — the room and its picture defined together. Doubleness is therefore not a late complication of the interior but its founding structure — and Rice's historiographic problem follows from it: "the interior's spatial and imagistic senses do not map directly onto each other… the imagistic sense of the interior is not simply transparent to its spatial sense," which "presents problems for conventional ways in which the evidence of the interior is gathered."

Key Thinkers

• Charles Rice — the concept's theorist and its historiographic operator: doubleness read through Baudelaire's "The Twofold Room," Benjamin's de-realised interior and Freud's suite of rooms; the non-coincidence of the spatial and imagistic senses as the interior history's constitutive evidence-problem; the emergence of the interior, "in its doubleness, can be cast as an event in the schema of effective history" (2004/2006).
• Walter Benjamin — the material/immaterial register: the 1939 exposé's bourgeois interior as "a material space which produces de-realised experiences"; the collector's divestment of the commodity's character as the doubled experience's practice.
• Sigmund Freud — the psyche's plan as a further doubled condition: the unconscious as "a large entrance hall," consciousness as "a kind of drawing-room," the censor as the threshold-watchman — the interior's doubleness reproduced inside the mind.
• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: Charles Baudelaire, "The Twofold Room" (1862), the concept's literary anchor; Mario Praz, whose history ignores the doubleness by making images transparent to space.)

Related Concepts

• Bourgeois Interior — the formation whose constitutive condition doubleness is: the interior emerged doubled (space and image) in the same nineteenth-century event.
• De-realisation — doubleness's experiential yield: what the material space produces when the immaterial register takes over.
• Representation — doubleness's imagistic pole: representations construct interiors "as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially"; the non-transparency thesis is doubleness's evidentiary form.
• The Interior View — doubleness's historical genre: the nineteenth-century watercolours that took the interior's imagistic sense as their sole object.
• Interiority — the doubled interior's psychic correlate: the inner life housed by the spatial pole and expressed by the imagistic one.
• Dialectics of Appropriation — the rival frame: Brooker's counter-argument that the interior's dualities are dialectical rather than doubled — "Rather than doubled, I would suggest the dialectic is a useful device" — because doubling lacks the element of opposition.
• Trace — the material register's residue: the doubled interior "emerges historically… through an accumulation of traces" whose visibility Praz mistakes for transparent biography.
• Spectacle — the imagistic register's mass-cultural descendant: the interior as image taken as the thing itself.
• Doubling (Butler's Baudrillard) — a separate term despite the shared word: Butler's doubling is the operation of theory on total systems (the statement that repeats the world so exactly that the world "can only be explained for a completely different reason"), not the interior's space-and-image condition; the three doubling-terms of this wiki — doubleness, the-double, doubling — are distinct.
• The Double — the psychoanalytic cousin: the self encountered as image (statue, mirror, death mask) — doubleness performed on the person rather than the room.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the concept's defining source: the OED's doubled birth-definition (room + its picture; "esp. in reference to the artistic effect"); Baudelaire's daydream room and its collapse ("a terrible, heavy thump"); Benjamin's de-realised interior; Freud's suite of rooms; the non-mapping thesis ("the interior's spatial and imagistic senses do not map directly onto each other… not simply transparent to its spatial sense," p. 287); Praz's transparency error as the doubleness-denying historiography; and the emergence cast "as an event in the schema of effective history."
• The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — the concept quoted from The Emergence of the Interior (2007, p. 2) and set to work: Brooker receives the doubled interior but converts it — "Rather than doubled, I would suggest the dialectic is a useful device as it is intrinsic to interior architecture" — making doubleness the concept the dialectics-of-appropriation defines itself against. The wiki's open question: is the doubled/dialectical distinction sustainable, or does every duality oscillate between the descriptions depending on whether it is observed in use or in design?
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the 2007 book's non-transparency thesis as reported ("Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to spatial referents, even if such spatial referents exist; representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially") — doubleness's evidentiary consequence in Hollis's secondary account.
• Inside out (Webb 2018) — doubleness enacted: the ice-core painting that extracts the cone of vision as a solid interior — a representation that does not depict a room but manufactures one, the imagistic sense materialized as the spatial.
• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — doubleness's Baroque prehistory: Pozzo's quadrature joins real and fictitious space so that the painted interior is inhabited — the image-sense and the space-sense fused, two centuries before the OED's definition named them together.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — recorded as a disambiguation: Butler's doubling (1999) is a third, separate term — the operation of theory on total systems, not the interior's constitutive two-in-one; this page's nearest kin is his paradox that "the copy is only able to resemble the original insofar as it is different from it" (p. 14), the representational logic that Baudrillard and Butler share with the interior's non-coincident registers. See doubling, the-double, paradox-of-the-sign.
• source-notes/teyssot-2006-boredom-and-bedroom

Open Questions

• "Neither sense being primary" (Rice 2007, p. 2): can the two registers actually be held co-primary, or does every analysis slide into one (the room's social history; the image's media history)? Is doubleness a description of the interior or an injunction against reduction?
• Brooker converts doubleness into dialectic; Rice keeps it doubled. Is the difference terminological (opposition vs interdependence) or substantive — and does Baudelaire's room, where reverie and reality collide ("a terrible, heavy thump"), side with the dialectical reading?
• The OED definition doubles room and picture "esp. in reference to the artistic effect." Is the interior's artistic effect the third term that mediates the two registers — and is that mediation what decoration (the "literal covering" of the shell) does?
• Freud's suite of rooms is doubleness turned inward (the psyche modeled as a plan). But which direction does the modeling run — does the unconscious borrow the bourgeois plan's rooms, or does the bourgeois interior borrow the psyche's architecture? Rice writes the doubleness as one condition; can it be one condition if its two poles each claim to structure the other?
• If the imagistic sense is not transparent to the spatial sense, is the contemporary image-interior (instagrammability) the condition's completion — the room lived as its image — or the condition's collapse into one register?