Whiteness

Definition

Whiteness (in Batchelor's usage) is the mythic, rhetorical status of white in Western/modern culture — as distinct from the empirically verifiable fact of white surfaces. Batchelor: "we are not dealing with something as simple as white things and white surfaces, with white as an empirically verifiable fact or as a colour. Rather, we are in the realm of whiteness. White as myth, as an aesthetic fantasy, a fantasy so strong that it summons up negative hallucinations, so intense that it produces a blindness to colour, even when colour is literally in front of your face." Whiteness is a value-system that attaches white to the "higher values" of the culture: "Heaven is white; that which gets closest to God – the Parthenon, the Idea, Purity, Cleanliness – also sheds its colour." White is "clean, clear, healthy, moral, rational, masterful" — a moral technology (Le Corbusier's Law of Ripolin: "we would perform a moral act: to love purity!… When you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of your own house").

The concept's paradoxical core, via Mark Wigley: the whiteness discourse is self-blinding. Le Corbusier's manifesto building, the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925), "was actually painted in ten different colours," and Le Corbusier "only ever made one white building" — yet "there is 'a self-imposed blindness… shared by almost all of the dominant historiographies… Colour is detached from the master narrative' of architecture." Even colour is conscripted into whiteness: the Purist concession "my house does not seem white unless I have disposed the active forces of colours and values in the appropriate places" — "White must be whiter than white, and to achieve that, colour must be added." The whiteness regime's claim over the interior: "Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness… no action before thought" — white as the precondition of mastery over one's own house.

The whiteness fantasy was period-wide, not idiosyncratic: van Doesburg — "WHITE is the spiritual colour of our times… our era is one of perfection, purity and certitude… WHITE it includes everything… We have superseded both the 'brown' of decadence and classicism and the 'blue' of divisionism… and the spectrum."

Key Thinkers

• David Batchelor — distinguishes whiteness (myth, fantasy, value) from white things; diagnoses the "negative hallucinations" the fantasy produces.
• Le Corbusier — whiteness's chief architect: the crusade for whitewash, the Law of Ripolin, the Parthenon that "is somehow beyond colour."
• Adolf Loos — the evangelical antecedent: streets shining "like white walls," Zion the white city.
• Theo van Doesburg — the De Stijl pole: WHITE as "the spiritual colour of our times" (quoted in the extract; not yet paged — see log).
• Mark Wigley — the discourse's analyst (White Walls, Designer Dresses, 1995): the "self-imposed blindness" of the dominant historiographies; the ten-colour Pavilion (discussed in the source, not paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Chromophobia — the prejudice of which whiteness is the positive ideal: the purging of colour that whiteness crowns.
• Colour Hierarchy — whiteness's rationalized interior logic: colour subordinated to form, "whiter than white" through added colour.
• Tabula Rasa — the Ripolin wall as clean slate: "refusal to allow anything which is not correct, authorised, intended, desired, thought-out: no action before thought."
• Sterility of Perfection — the interior-design twin: the white regime's order in the decorator's world ("a series of foyers leading to nothing"); the same "harsh regime" that "gives a room heart" its heartlessness.
• Ornament vs. Purity — whiteness as the purity position's chromatic wing: "the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments."
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the whiteness interior as sealed inside: "No exchange, no seepage, no spillage. Rather: isolation, confinement."
• The Bathroom — whiteness's practical origin: the room built of "white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene" — the sanitary register beneath the moral rhetoric.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — whiteness as "dignity, repression, and moral standing": "black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale"; the "surgical, virginal" whiteness of the organic realm (bathrooms, kitchens, sheets); and "the formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects."

• Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — whiteness as myth vs white surfaces (p. 35); the Law of Ripolin as moral technology (p. 34); the Wigley paradox of the coloured buildings under the white rhetoric (p. 34); van Doesburg's white spiritual-colour manifesto (p. 34); the Parthenon's whiteness as later storm and later rhetoric (pp. 32–33).

• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the historiographic structure the whiteness myth supports: the interior-exterior schism in which the (white) facade carries the rhetoric while the interior carries colour and tactility.

• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the sociological formulation of the zero-colour moral code: "The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the 'chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing" (p. 38) — whiteness (and its zero-scale kin) as the interior's moral register, two decades before the art-theoretical diagnosis, with the significant addition that the code's content is repression as much as dignity.

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the whiteness myth in its operational, manual-of-style form, independently converging with Batchelor's analysis: Hitchcock and Johnson's International Style "boldly claiming the status of a natural finish for white and off-white tones," with the stucco clause — "white or off-white, even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color" (p. 56) — the fantasy so strong it re-categorizes paint as nature; colour must be "both technically and psychologically permanent" lest "architecture… resemble billboards" (p. 56); the palette as "the palette of architecture in its 'return to basics,' resonating with the environmental, the preindustrial and somewhat paradoxically, with the primitive, known equally well for bright colors" (p. 57); and the gendered anchoring — achromatic surfaces "deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity (or are they authentic by virtue of their masculinity?)" (p. 61). See natural-finishes, chromophobia.

• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — whiteness's institutional form: the white cube gallery's "pollution-free pristine state" (editors, p. 89) — the whiteness myth as display infrastructure, "clean, clear, healthy, moral, rational, masterful" made curatorial fact; and the myth's non-visual corollary — the pristine state is also odour-free, the whiteness regime purging smell as it purges colour ("a threat to inwardness"). See white-cube, olfaction.

• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — whiteness's sanitary genealogy, the register beneath Batchelor's myth: the modern bathroom "emerged at the turn of the century as an overtly industrial ensemble of porcelain-enameled equipment, with white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene" (p. 205); the kitchen that followed emulated "the unforgiving sparkle of the bathroom" (p. 206); and the Victorian alternative it displaced — "the plush fabrics, carved moldings and intricate decorations of Victorian domestic objects were rejected as dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust, giving way to non-porous materials, flush surfaces and rounded edges" (pp. 204–205). Here white is not (first) a moral-aesthetic value but a labour technology: the washable surface as germ-theory's building material, cleanliness as "a fetishized cleanliness" in an economy "dependent on waste" (p. 211). The page's moral reading (Ripolin as moral act) and this sanitary reading are complementary: the bathroom gave whiteness its practical justification, which the manifestos then sublimated into purity rhetoric — "Cleanliness" already in Batchelor's list of the white-adjacent "higher values" (see bathroom, process-of-elimination).

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — whiteness's canonical prehistory, six centuries before Ripolin, posed as a question about intent: "Did Alberti cleanse the room and re-surface it white in order to arrest and mask the fluidity of becoming-interior?" (p. 342). In this reading the whitened room is not (first) moral, sanitary, or mythic but temporal — the surface that stops time, the mask laid over "becoming-interior," paired with the classical apparatus of homogenous part-division ("through partitio, area and proportio") and with ornament defined as what "has the character of something attached" (Alberti quoted). Where Batchelor's whiteness is a fantasy that blinds and Braham's a convention that excises, Taylor's is an arrest: white as the surface-condition of a tradition that "could not write the interior because it lacks determination." The question — posed to Alberti in the conditional — leaves open whether the arrest was deliberate; its structural effect (the fluidity masked) is not. See becoming-interior, ornament-vs-purity, proportion.

• 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).

• source-notes/dresser-2006-repose-decoration

• source-notes/soulillou-2006-ornament-and-order

Open Questions

• Is the whiteness fantasy's blindness a historiographic problem (the master narrative) or an experiential one — do inhabitants of coloured modern buildings experience whiteness regardless?
• Wigley's ten-colour Pavilion: how far down does the colour blindness reach — from historians to editors to photographers (architectural photography's whitening of colour surfaces)?
• Does the contemporary gallery-white wall (and the white interior as neutral background) descend from the same whiteness regime, or from a separate neutralization (see the-neutral)?
• Batchelor's whiteness is a Western value-system — does a global history of modern interiors (e.g., Japanese sukiya white/plaster traditions) confirm or relativize the claim that whiteness is specifically modern and Western in this form?
• Lupton & Miller supply whiteness's sanitary base ("white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene," p. 205): is the myth-critique (Batchelor/Wigley) incomplete without a history of germ theory — whiteness as labour technology before it was aesthetic fantasy — and does the sanitary justification survive the critique (washability is real) or is it the myth's alibi? See bathroom.