Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual

Author: Georges Teyssot Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; original: "Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual," Assemblage, no. 30, 1996, pp. 44–61; © 1996 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reprinted by permission of MIT Press Journals) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 345–348; excerpt of original pp. 50–53, with the elision marker "(… p 53)" at the essay's cut-off before the notes) Raw file: raw/chapters/teyssot-2006-boredom-and-bedroom.md

Summary

Teyssot's critical-theoretical historical account argues that the mirrored, protective interior of nineteenth-century bourgeois inwardness contains the seeds of its own pathology: psychological disturbance arises from "disease, deprivation, or suppression of the comforting habitual and repetitious nature of everyday life" (editors' headnote, p. 345), and the Biedermeier interior — read through Johann Erdmann Hummel's watercolor Drawing Room in Berlin (c. 1820–25) — produces exactly this disturbance as an "excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346). The essay traces a genealogy of privateness from seventeenth-century prayer (the individual's relation to God) through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intimacy, names Kierkegaard "the first theorist of privateness" (p. 345) — the man for whom reality consisted only of his thinking within his room — and then performs the essay's crucial optical move: in Hummel's painting the reflections multiply until "both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object," and if the windows are mirrors, "perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world" (p. 346). One exists only within Innerlichkeit — inwardness — which, protecting too much, turns into boredom: Adorno's Kierkegaard "the flâneur who promenades in his room" (p. 347), Benjamin's boredom as a warm gray cloth lined with glowing silk, Mallarmé's Igitur dying in "the mirror turned into boredom" (p. 347), and Adorno's window-mirror that "testifies to objectlessness… Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347). Two kinds of experience frame the whole: the dandy's or flâneur's (the man who wastes time in the streets, the city as spectacle) against the philosopher's (the man within the bourgeois intérieur).

A note on the editors' headnote: the headnote states that in Teyssot's account "the world outside the window is clearly distinct from the interior, the inner world of inner consciousness." That is the essay's premise — Hummel's painting "makes a clear division between the interior and the world of things outside the window" (p. 346) — but not its endpoint: the essay's key move dissolves the distinction, as the reflections multiply, windows acquire mirrors' chromatic weight, and "the exterior is a total illusion" (p. 346). The headnote describes the first half of the argument; the argument's productive work is the collapse of the distinctness the headnote states as settled. This source note follows the text, not the headnote.

A note on the title: the excerpt (original pp. 50–53 of 44–61) never mentions "bedroom" explicitly — the room-type lives in the title and, presumably, in the elided portions of the essay. What survives here is the bourgeois intérieur (the Hummel drawing room, Kierkegaard's small apartment, the philosopher's room). See Open Questions.

Key Claims

The suppression-of-the-habitual thesis (the headnote's frame): psychological disturbance forms the essay's subject, arising "whether from disease, deprivation, or suppression of the comforting habitual and repetitious nature of everyday life" (editors' headnote, p. 345). The habitual is not the enemy of psychic health but its comfort; its suppression is itself pathogenic.
Happiness requires doubling: "Happiness enjoys itself completely only if it doubles its own image in the mirror of reflection. Happiness wants to be both subject and object: the subject of its object and the object of its subject" (p. 345). Happiness is relational — "There is no happiness if one is alone; happiness must be shared, it needs a public" — and where there is no public, "one needs a mirror to reflect the self" (p. 345). The mirror is happiness's minimal architecture.
Kierkegaard as the first theorist of privateness: "living in a small apartment, regarded the subject as the only truth and believed that reality consisted only of his thinking within his room. Anything that happened outside his window, any public representation, was merely an illusion – exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin" (p. 345). Kierkegaard was "perhaps the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit" (p. 345) — inwardness theorized in direct polemical contrast to Hegel's public-philosophical Berlin.
Inwardness's stylistic address is the Biedermeier interior: "This 'inwardness' is usually associated with the interiors of middle-class households, which, from a stylistic point of view, described the Biedermeier period between 1820 and 1850" (p. 345) — Innerlichkeit given a dated, classed, stylistic home.
The window as a genre of painting: in early-nineteenth-century Germany "a genre was developing within painting that represented the space between an interior and what is outside, seen through a window. Within this space is an 'inner world,' the world of the 'inner conscious'" (p. 345) — where "personal feeling and private thinking, moments traditionally identified by idealism as 'reflection'" occur, so that "inner space becomes the space of reflection" (p. 345).
The genealogy of private space: "In the seventeenth century, private space was often defined as the place of the relationship between an individual and God, the place of prayer. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this place was transformed into a space of intimacy. Intimate spaces, then, are those where the individual may have his own reflections and feelings" (pp. 345–346) — privateness migrating from theological to psychological definition.
The exclusion thesis: "Were one homeless or without 'a room of one's own,' one could not belong to this world of reflection" (p. 346) — the Woolfian formula cited two decades before Taylor's room/roam essay: reflection's world has an entry condition, and homelessness is its exclusion.
Hummel's observer-absent interior: in Drawing Room in Berlin "the viewer of the painting looks into a room that looks back at him through a mirror; but he does not appear. One might interpret this absence as an inclusion of the subject in the room. Because he is not represented within the room, it is as if the subject has become part of the room itself" (p. 346) — subjectivity dissolved into the room it surveys.
The mirror–window equivalence (the essay's pivotal move): the manifold reflections multiply until "both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation. And, if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world. Here, the outside world is but a kind of representation. One exists only within this Innerlichkeit, this inwardness" (p. 346). The interior's optical regime turns solipsist by design.
The mirroring principle of German interiors: "It has been written that German interiors are ruled 'by the principle of mirroring and doubling'" (p. 346, quoting Ulrike Brunotte) — mirroring as a national-interior doctrine, not an occasional device.
The fogged mirror — the self's disappearance in its own breath: "Consciousness is recognizing one's image in the mirror; but at the same time, as the individual approaches the self reflected upon the glass, the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears; an attempt is made to wipe the mirror, yet one cannot help breathing. The image is blurred by a covering mist" (p. 346). Self-recognition's instrument is defeated by the recognition's own living body.
Protection's overdose: "This interior refers to happiness, to protection; but it contains as well the seeds of boredom. Perhaps because it protects too much, this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346) — the title's thesis in one sentence: the over-protected interior is the boredom-breeder.
Benjamin's boredom as lining: "Boredom is a warm gray cloth that is padded on its inside with the most glowing, colorful silk lining. Into this cloth we wrap ourselves when we dream. Then we are at home in the arabesques of its lining" (p. 346) — boredom is the interior's fabric: gray outside, arabesque within, the dreamer "at home" in the lining.
The lining of time: "Perhaps it is possible to turn inside-out this lining of time, which is not only the arabesque of the box, but also the design of the carpet, of the wall, and of the reflection between the mirrors and the windows" (p. 346) — the essay's programme: to turn the interior's fabric inside out and expose the time padded within it.
Igitur's mirror: Mallarmé's Igitur "describes a collapse among the past, the present, and the possibility of a future. At the moment of his suicide attempt, as Igitur sees himself in the mirror, past, present, and future merge to form the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death" (p. 347) — boredom as the "pure time" that collapses temporality into one mirrored instant; "As he dies, Igitur searches for himself in vain in 'the mirror turned into boredom'" (p. 347).
Two kinds of experience: the dandy's or flâneur's — "the man who has time to waste. He strolls in the streets, stopping at anything that happens, any event, any accident. The city and the crowd are a huge spectacle for him" — against "that of the philosopher, best personified by Kierkegaard, or the man within the bourgeois intérieur" (p. 347). Boredom's two social figures: the wastrel in the street and the wastrel in the room.
Adorno's promenading flâneur: Kierkegaard is "the flâneur who promenades in his room: 'the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness'" (p. 347) — the flâneur's mode (strolling, spectating) performed within the apartment; the interior as the flâneur's boulevard.
Inwardness and melancholy as domesticity's contours: for Adorno "'inwardness' and 'melancholy' are the constituents, 'the contours of "domesticity," which … constitute[s] the arena of existence'" (p. 347) — domesticity's geometry drawn by innerness and gloom.
The window mirror and objectlessness: "He who looks into the window mirror, however, is a private person, solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production. The window mirror testifies to objectlessness – it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things – and isolated privacy. Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347). The private interior is economically disengaged, populated by semblances, and structurally mournful.

Connections

Concepts: aesthetic-boredom (the page's third register: boredom as the interior's own product rather than the space's failure to produce possibilities — Teyssot's over-protective mirrored interiority against Franco's uninhabitable space) · inwardness (the source's central concept: Innerlichkeit, Kierkegaard's privateness, Adorno's constitution of inwardness, the Biedermeier interior's psychology) · bedroom (the title's room-type: the bourgeois intérieur whose elided main text presumably names it) · interiority (the twenty-fourth register: inwardness — interiority as the Biedermeier interior's mirroring excess) · mirror (the fourth regime: mirror-as-window-equivalent, windows acquiring "the same luminosity and chromatic weight"; the fogged mirror; the mirror turned into boredom) · picture-window (the window's other regime: the window that shows no outside because the outside is "but a kind of representation") · biedermeier (the period-and-style address of Innerlichkeit, 1820–1850, middle-class households) · privacy (Kierkegaard's privateness; "isolated privacy"; the genealogy from prayer to intimacy) · habit (the suppression thesis: the "comforting habitual and repetitious nature of everyday life" whose suppression disturbs) · everyday-life (the habitual everyday as the interior's comfort and its casualty) · repetition (the repetitious everyday as comfort — repetition's positive valence beside its order-side) · domestic-interior (the intérieur as subject-doubling machine) · bourgeois-interior (the Biedermeier mirrored interior as the formation's pathological limit-case) · flaneur (the two kinds of experience: the street-flâneur and Adorno's room-flâneur) · inside-outside-dialectic (the dialectic's collapse: windows that are mirrors, an exterior that is illusion) · separate-spheres (the gendered private sphere's philosophical extreme: the solipsist room) · temporality (boredom as "pure time"; the lining of time; the collapse of past/present/future) · uncanny (the self's disappearance in its own breath on the fogged glass) · melancholy (Adorno: "Mirror and mourning hence belong together"; melancholy as domesticity's contour) · trace (the arabesque of the lining, the carpet's design — the interior's surfaces as time's fabric).

Authors: Georges Teyssot — the author · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors framing the selection · Theodor W. Adorno — Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933): the room-flâneur, "pure inwardness," "Mirror and mourning hence belong together" · Walter Benjamin — the arcades notes: boredom as the warm gray cloth with the silk lining (Das Passagen-Werk D2a) · G. W. F. Hegel — the Berlin polemical counterpoint ("exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin"). Cited without pages (see log): Søren Kierkegaard — "the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit" (p. 345); Stéphane Mallarmé — 'Igitur ou la folie d'Elbehnon' and "the mirror turned into boredom" (p. 347); Johann Erdmann Hummel (Drawing Room in Berlin, c. 1820–25), Caspar David Friedrich, Léon Spilliaert (Self-Portrait at the Mirror, 1908), Max Klinger (The Philosopher, 1909, from Of Death), Ulrike Brunotte ("Innerwelten/Inner Worlds," Daidalos 36, 1990).

Debates: Theory of the Everyday — the essay's suppression thesis is a psychological theory of the everyday: the habitual as comfort, its deprivation as disturbance · Critical Theory and Architecture — the Benjamin/Adorno register applied to the interior: the arcades notes' boredom, the Kierkegaard book's inwardness critique, the interior as the culture industry's mirror-chamber · Interior Design vs. Architecture — the interior as the room of reflection: the claim that inner space, not form, is what the discipline's room-type houses · Everyday vs. Iconic Architecture — the anti-spectacle edge: where the flâneur's city is "a huge spectacle," the room's counter-spectacle is the mirror — boredom as the spectacle's interior echo.

Related source notes: Aesthetic Boredom in Everyday Architecture (Franco 2023) — the page's founding register: boredom as absent inhabitability; Teyssot inverts the mechanism (not a space failing to offer possibilities but a space offering too much reflection) · The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the Benjamin boredom register's other interior ("waiting is… the well-varnished interior of boredom") · Berggasse 19 (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the mirror-on-window that redirects the gaze inward: the same optical apparatus Teyssot reads in Hummel, deployed in Freud's study · Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — mirrors substituting for windows in the windowless room: the containment regime Teyssot's window-mirror equivalence completes · Architecture and Interior (Taylor 2001/2006) — the Woolfian "room of one's own" formula Teyssot quotes in 1996 (p. 346), two decades before Taylor's roam essay built a theory on it · From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the Biedermeier interior as the Viennese modern movement's recovered ancestor: Teyssot supplies the psychology the style-recovery left out · The Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the interior as mirror-system: Baudrillard's mirror as one of the atmospheric objects, Teyssot's mirror as the interior's truth-regime · The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the uncanny interior's historiographic frame, of which Teyssot's fogged mirror is a canonical scene.

Direct Quotes

"Psychological disturbance, whether from disease, deprivation, or suppression of the comforting habitual and repetitious nature of everyday life, forms the subject of Georges Teyssot's essay. In this critical theorised historical account he discusses privateness and inwardness through painterly representation, in which the world outside the window is clearly distinct from the interior, the inner world of inner consciousness. Windows, mirrors and reflections acquire similar status when the mirroring of interior life, as an exaggeration of introspection, turns into boredom." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 345)

"Happiness enjoys itself completely only if it doubles its own image in the mirror of reflection. Happiness wants to be both subject and object: the subject of its object and the object of its subject." (p. 345)

"There is no happiness if one is alone; happiness must be shared, it needs a public. If there is no one else, one needs a mirror to reflect the self." (p. 345)

"The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, living in a small apartment, regarded the subject as the only truth and believed that reality consisted only of his thinking within his room. Anything that happened outside his window, any public representation, was merely an illusion – exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin." (p. 345)

"Kierkegaard was perhaps the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit." (p. 345)

"This 'inwardness' is usually associated with the interiors of middle-class households, which, from a stylistic point of view, described the Biedermeier period between 1820 and 1850." (p. 345)

"During this period in Germany, a genre was developing within painting that represented the space between an interior and what is outside, seen through a window. Within this space is an 'inner world,' the world of the 'inner conscious.'" (p. 345)

"Occurring in this inner world are both personal feeling and private thinking, moments traditionally identified by idealism as 'reflection.' Thus inner space becomes the space of reflection." (p. 345)

"In the seventeenth century, private space was often defined as the place of the relationship between an individual and God, the place of prayer. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this place was transformed into a space of intimacy. Intimate spaces, then, are those where the individual may have his own reflections and feelings." (pp. 345–346)

"Were one homeless or without 'a room of one's own,' one could not belong to this world of reflection." (p. 346)

"Hummel's painting makes a clear division between the interior and the world of things outside the window. The large room is like a box, on one side of which the viewer is situated." (p. 346)

"A mirror centered between the two windows reflects the closed door on the opposite wall, the wall where the observer, or the painter, should be. But the observer is absent." (p. 346)

"The viewer of the painting looks into a room that looks back at him through a mirror; but he does not appear. One might interpret this absence as an inclusion of the subject in the room. Because he is not represented within the room, it is as if the subject has become part of the room itself." (p. 346)

"Both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation." (p. 346)

"And, if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world. Here, the outside world is but a kind of representation. One exists only within this Innerlichkeit, this inwardness." (p. 346)

"It has been written that German interiors are ruled 'by the principle of mirroring and doubling.'" (p. 346, quoting Ulrike Brunotte)

"Consciousness is recognizing one's image in the mirror; but at the same time, as the individual approaches the self reflected upon the glass, the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears; an attempt is made to wipe the mirror, yet one cannot help breathing. The image is blurred by a covering mist." (p. 346)

"This interior refers to happiness, to protection; but it contains as well the seeds of boredom. Perhaps because it protects too much, this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection." (p. 346)

"The refuge of the interior apparently offered an alternative to boredom, as Benjamin described in his notes on the arcades of Paris: 'Boredom is a warm gray cloth that is padded on its inside with the most glowing, colorful silk lining. Into this cloth we wrap ourselves when we dream. Then we are at home in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks gray and bored under it. And then, when he wakes up and wants to tell what he dreamt of, he communicates often only this boredom. For who would be able to turn inside-out in one motion the lining of time?'" (p. 346)

"Perhaps it is possible to turn inside-out this lining of time, which is not only the arabesque of the box, but also the design of the carpet, of the wall, and of the reflection between the mirrors and the windows." (p. 346)

"Here, in one of his most obscure and interesting texts, the poet describes a collapse among the past, the present, and the possibility of a future. At the moment of his suicide attempt, as Igitur sees himself in the mirror, past, present, and future merge to form the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death." (p. 347)

"The understood past of his race which weighs on him in the sensation of finiteness, the hour of the clock precipitating this ennui in heavy, smothering time, and his awaiting of the accomplishment of the future, form pure time, or ennui." (Mallarmé, 'Igitur,' quoted p. 347)

"As he dies, Igitur searches for himself in vain in 'the mirror turned into boredom.'" (p. 347)

"Two kinds of experience have been defined: First is that of the dandy or flâneur, the man who has time to waste. He strolls in the streets, stopping at anything that happens, any event, any accident. The city and the crowd are a huge spectacle for him. Second, on the other side, is that of the philosopher, best personified by Kierkegaard, or the man within the bourgeois intérieur." (p. 347)

"Theodor Adorno called Kierkegaard the flâneur who promenades in his room: 'the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness.'" (p. 347)

"For the philosopher, 'inwardness' and 'melancholy' are the constituents, 'the contours of "domesticity," which … constitute[s] the arena of existence.'" (p. 347)

"He who looks into the window mirror, however, is a private person, solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production. The window mirror testifies to objectlessness – it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things – and isolated privacy. Mirror and mourning hence belong together." (Adorno, quoted p. 347)

"In Adorno's reading of Kierkegaard, one finds this remarkable connection between the mirror and the notion of boredom." (p. 347)

Open Questions

Where is the bedroom? The excerpt (original pp. 50–53 of Assemblage 30, pp. 44–61) never names the bedroom — the title's room-type presumably appears in the elided portions. What is the bedroom's argument in the missing text, and does the excerpt's bourgeois intérieur (drawing room, small apartment, philosopher's room) stand in for it, or is the bedroom a distinct argument (sleep, the bed, the most private room of the inward interior)?
The elision at "(… p 53)": the excerpt breaks off mid-argument after "the remarkable connection between the mirror and the notion of boredom" (p. 347). Where does the essay go from the mirror–boredom connection — to the bedroom, to the habitual's suppression, or elsewhere? The original's pp. 53–61 would settle it.
Two boredom theories: Teyssot's over-protected interior ("because it protects too much… an excess of interior life," p. 346) and Franco's under-offering space (aesthetic-boredom: "boredom due primarily to the absence of inhabitability") are opposite mechanisms — can one concept hold both, or is boredom here two emotions sharing a name (the interior's excess vs. the space's failure)?
The mirror–window equivalence's scope: is the Hummel reading a claim about Biedermeier-German painting only (the Brunotte principle: "the principle of mirroring and doubling," p. 346), or about the modern interior's optics generally? The Intimus editors' framing ("Windows, mirrors and reflections acquire similar status") universalizes what the text grounds in one watercolor.
The habit suppression's mechanism: the headnote names "suppression of the comforting habitual and repetitious nature of everyday life" as a cause of disturbance, but the excerpt's body argues the opposite mechanism — too much interiority (over-protection) breeds boredom. Is the habitual suppressed by deprivation or by excess, and does the essay (beyond the excerpt) reconcile the two?
Adorno's window mirror: "The window mirror testifies to objectlessness – it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things – and isolated privacy" (p. 347). Is "the window mirror" a mirror hung like a window (Fuss & Sanders's mirror-on-window) or a window acting as a mirror (Teyssot's Hummel reading) — and does the ambiguity matter for whether the interior's semblance-economy is an optical trick or an economic diagnosis (the "separation from the economic processes of production")?
The Woolf formula's prehistory: "Were one homeless or without 'a room of one's own,' one could not belong to this world of reflection" (p. 346) — Teyssot quotes Woolf's formula in 1996 as a class condition (homelessness excludes from reflection), not a gender one. Does the wiki's Woolf line (Taylor's roam essay) miss this material-economic register, and what does the pairing do to the voluntariness criterion ("confined of our own accord")?
Boredom as pure time: Igitur's mirror collapses past, present and future into "the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death" (p. 347). Is boredom the ordinary experience of the habitual's repetition (the everyday's time) or its pathological limit (time without difference)? The two theories of the everyday — Lefebvre's cyclical, Bachelard's intimate — would price this differently.
Brunotte's principle: "German interiors are ruled 'by the principle of mirroring and doubling'" (p. 346, citing Ulrike Brunotte, 'Innerwelten/Inner Worlds,' Daidalos 36, June 1990). Is the mirroring principle a national style-doctrine, a period-psychology, or the wiki's doubleness (Rice's Two-fold Room) in its Biedermeier costume — and does Teyssot's own later doubled house (transparency/opacity, cited by Brooker) extend it?