Counterprivates: An Appeal to Rethink Suburban Interiority

Abstract

Ordinary memory knows it so well that it sings, in all languages, o f the sweetness o f one's "home, sweet home."Yet, the enclosed garden where the body hides its pains and joys is not a "forbidden city."If it does not want to become a synonym for a terrible house arrest, separated from the living, the private space must know how to open itself up to the flow o f people coming in and out, to be the passage way for a continual circulation, where objects, people, words, and ideas cross paths; for life is also about mobility, impatience for change, and relation to a plurality o f others.Only a dead language no longer changes; only the absence o f all residents respects the immovable order o f things.Life maintains and displaces; it wears out, breaks, and reworks; it creates new configurations o f beings and objects across the everyday practices o f the living, always similar and different.Private space is this ideal city in which all the passersby have beloved faces, whose streets are familiar and safe, whose interior architecture is changeable almost at will.-Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, The Practice o f Everyday Life, vol. 2 Home Sweet Home While imaginations of dwelling cannot but proliferate unpredictably, these pages begin with a more paranoid tale about "privates"-the oft-imagined private domain Jessica Blaustein is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches and writes at the intersections o f American literature, architecture, urban studies, and critical theory.Her current research focuses on anti-sedentarist theories of subject and community formation, and she is preparing a book manuscript about alternative practices of privacy in the early twentieth century United States.

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