Survivals

Requires fuller treatment — the concept currently rests on a single founding source.

Definition

Survivals names the diagnosis Wharton and Codman give the untested features of the modern interior (1898): many of its most popular features "are merely survivals of earlier social conditions, and have been preserved in obedience to that instinct that makes people cling to so many customs the meaning of which is lost." The concept has three components. Social origin: the feature was once functional — it served an earlier social condition — but the condition has passed. Institutional persistence: its survival is maintained by an instinct (not a judgment) for clinging to customs, the same social mechanism that keeps customs alive after their meaning dies. Meaning-loss: what survives is the form without the function — "customs the meaning of which is lost." Survivals are thus the interior's archaeological layer: the room's plan and fittings preserving, as live conventions, the arrangements of a social world no longer present. The concept is the diagnostic half of the double test: where a feature fails the test, the explanation is either survival (social obsolescence) or revival by the archaeologizing-spirit (antiquarian enthusiasm).

Key Thinkers

• Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr — the concept's authors (1898/2006): survivals as the first diagnosis of the modern interior's untested features; the instinct-to-cling as their preservation mechanism; the promise ("as will be shown further on") of case-by-case application in the chapter's elided continuation.

Related Concepts

• the-double-test — the test whose failures survivals explain: the concept is the diagnosis for the test's negative verdict
• archaeologizing-spirit — the twin diagnosis: survivals persist unconsciously by instinct, archaeologized features are revived deliberately — the two failure-modes are distinguished by the agent's awareness
• historiography-of-the-interior — the concept as an 1898 act of interior history: reading the present room as the record of past social conditions, the discipline's earliest such reading
• domestic-interior — the site of the survivals: the home's plan and fittings as the stratum where obsolete social arrangements persist as convention
• tradition — the counter-concept: what the double test condemns as meaningless survival is for tradition-theory the effective-historical medium; the same persistence judged by opposite standards
• habit — the clinging-instinct's sociological relative: custom maintained past its meaning

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — the concept's founding statement: "Often (as will be shown further on) they are merely survivals of earlier social conditions, and have been preserved in obedience to that instinct that makes people cling to so many customs the meaning of which is lost" (p. 387); the replaceability corollary that follows from the diagnosis ("they may in every case be replaced by a more suitable form of treatment without loss to the general effect of house or room," p. 388).

Open Questions

• "As will be shown further on" promises the survivals' enumeration — which features did the full chapter name? (The excerpt breaks off at original p. 15.)
• Wharton and Codman condemn survivals as meaning-lost; tradition-theory (Gadamer, via tradition-vs-innovation) values precisely the transmitted conventions whose origins are no longer consciously held. Is the survival a failure of function or a success of transmission — and is the double test capable of distinguishing the two?
• The concept reads the room archaeologically — the modern interior as a stratigraphy of past social conditions. Does this anticipate Rice's effective-history programme (the interior's emergence as event), or does the condemnation of survivals restore the transhistorical essentialism the effective-history critique targets?
• Is the instinct-to-cling a psychological universal (as the phrase "that instinct" implies) or a class-marker (the provincial householder preserving status-conventions whose social function has moved elsewhere)? Compare the wiki's respectability and habitus material.