Housing as Habitus

Known throughout the world as the largest and most luxurious of hotel suites, the Royal Penthouse Suite covers a grand 1680 m2 surface area of the hotel's highest floor. It is unique in terms of luxury and comfort and guarantees a maximum security level. The suite is complete with 12 rooms, 12 bathrooms, Billiards, Steinway grand piano, Fitness center, private elevator and private terrace. Moreover it is one of the first suites in Europe to feature a Bang & Olufsen BeoVision 4-103 flat screen and audio installation. (Royal Penthouse)

Entrance through the kitchen from the back porch of the building, the latter room equipped with an old-fashioned and battered coal range, a bare kitchen table, dirty sink, soiled shades, and dingy curtains . . . floor bare of any covering at all. Off the kitchen an equally dirty bedroom with little in it but a bed swathed in dirty sheets and quilts. The room small and crowded, even with its single pieces of furniture. Second bedroom also crowded . . . combined living-room and dining-room barely affords space for standing when the day-bed is opened, since the rest of the space is taken by a dilapidated duofold, a small table, and two chairs. These four rooms house two parents and five children. (Drake, 580)

These two descriptions are so sharply distinct that it is almost difficult to understand that they are both describing living situations. The first for someone who can afford to pay for this kind of room while on vacation and the second of a family that can barely afford a house at all. In the following paper I wish to first lay out descriptions of what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the pure and popular aesthetic, respectively. I then will explain how, through experience, memory, time and reinforcement, habitus is learned with regard to housing. Finally I will take a brief detour to show ways in which the family and the economic class itself reinforces habitus through Goffman’s terms of front and face.

As we saw with Drake’s description above, for lower class housing fulfills a dire necessity, it is a part of the popular aesthetic. Despite the fact that lower class individuals living in Bronzeville during the Depression through to the Second World War were only renting tiny kitchenettes for $8 a week or even as cheap as $8 a week for three rooms, they often lived with a large number of people for “the larger the household the greater the chance that somebody might find a job” (Drake, 581). This obvious lack of finances allows us to see the functional role these kitchenettes fulfilled. There was no understanding of these kitchenettes as art. In fact, quite the opposite, individuals were often living in “squalid, crowded housing conditions” (Drake, 560). As we can see from these circumstances, “it is as if the ‘popular aesthetic’ were based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function” (Bourdieu, 4). This subordination comes with an equal desire for quantity over quality. One particular lower class resident comments on the desire for increased quantity when commenting, “their flats are better than ours, but they pay three and four times as much as we do” (Drake, 579). Those of the popular aesthetic desire more space and privacy, but they simply do not have enough money to pay for the larger spaces.

On the other extreme, those of the pure aesthetic are clearly far from concerned about money. Instead of quantity these individuals are looking to housing as art, form and quality. Even though upper class Bronzeville church buildings in this same time period tended to be small, they were still “very well cared for and artistically decorated” (Drake, 538). By embracing art in structures, indeed embracing architecture, the elite root themselves in “an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world” (Bourdieu, 5). An elective distance away from quantity and towards quality, away from the reality of housing as a necessity, to design as a surreal and more abstract understanding of structures.

This distinction between popular and pure aesthetics is so clear that it forces one to ask the question of how such a difference was formed. As I discussed in the beginning, there are four distinct ways of, in the words of Bourdieu, internalizing habitus. The first way in which we internalize habitus is through experience. Learning habitus through experience of housing is different than learning habitus for a particular kind of art. As Bourdieu explains, taste for artwork is “acquired simply by contact with works of art” (Bourdieu, 4). However, the idea of “contact” with a house is one that is much more complicated than “contact” with a painting, or any other form of art. To come into contact with a house, one must either live or visit the house, as opposed to the viewing of a painting that is much less experiential. Either way one is experiencing the house “in its reality” (Bachelard, 5) more than anything else. The experience of building as art is one which is reserved solely for the elite. This is due to the fact that in order to live or visit an artistically decorated home or structure one has to belong to the elite circles. Thus habitus is inscribed in an individual once they are born, into a family who already owns such a home or has friends who do, often both. Specifically, as Gaston Bachelard explains, it is the experience of our first house which teaches us the most. All other houses we inhabit are simply “variations on a fundamental theme” (Bachelard, 15).

The reason that this first house teaches us the most about the aesthetic of housing for Bachelard, is that it is the first space which we experience, in reality and in memory. It is this memory which is key to habitus in two distinct ways. First of all, memory is how we learn, “by means of thought and dreams” (Bachelard, 5). Secondly, memory allows the aesthetic which we have learned to remain with us. In the words of Bourdieu,

“The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will” (466).

Bachelard explains this in a slightly different way, by showing how our dwelling places themselves stick with us. As Bachelard explains, “it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time" (Bachelard, 6).

Like memory, time also plays a particular role in learning habitus. Only with time can one make enough money to pay for or inherit a home. Inheritance has a special way of teaching habitus, in the act of inheriting a home one inherits habitus along with it, like an heirloom. With the pure aesthetic comes yet another envisioning of time, as leisure time since time itself is a luxury. The more leisure time, the more time one is able to spend daydreaming within the home as well as playing “the games of culture with the playful seriousness” and maintaining “a child’s relation to the world” (Bourdieu, 54). Similarly the less time one has the less one is able to understand this child’s relation to the world through material objects like large homes and the wonders they house.

With time comes the final way of learning habitus, through reinforcement in the family. The family itself works ultimately to evaluate a child’s performance by “reinforcing what is acceptable, [and] discouraging what is not” (Bourdieu 85), in this way the family reinstates the value of a large family home. To take a fictional example, if fifth grade Billy wanted to go to his friend’s house for a playdate, but his friend lived in Bronzeville, Billy’s mother might suggest that Billy not befriend that kind of person. This might happen if, similarly, Billy’s mother went to pick Billy up from his friend’s house after school and saw that his friend lived in a shack. Billy’s mother’s response to a specific house or neighborhood would teach Billy where it was and wasn’t safe to go and socialize. In this way, by the time Billy grew up he would understand through his learned memory of habitus what kind of family he was supposed to marry into and what kind of house he should own.

Once this habitus is inscribed in us through experience and dreams, it is then expected of us by our economic class. Having a nice home allows one to do that which is expected of us by an upper class and in this way “keep up ‘front’” (Drake 668). Goffman describes front as “part of individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance” (1959, 22). Those who observe the performance of a well mannered woman in a fashionable expensive dress out at a fancy restaurant expect that person to have an equally nice artistically decorated home. If they, on the other hand, have a poor dilapidated home then they have not succeeded in keeping up their front. This idea of front is understood by Drake in Bronzeville since one way to determine one’s class is through the involvement and membership one has in particular clubs. These clubs often meet in members’ homes. If one were to lose one’s home one may ultimately lose one’s membership to a particular club and thereby lose face. Face is another term from Erving Goffman which can be understood as an instance when an individual is not keeping up front or when “information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him” (1967 Goffman, 8).

In conclusion, housing is just one of the areas of practice which Bourdieu describes when he states that, “There is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself” (6). As we have seen throughout this paper, ultimately experience, memory and time create the habitus, which is reinforced by language of Goffman in the family as well as the economic class to which one belongs. This reinforced habitus orients itself in the form of two aesthetics, the pure and the popular. This can be seen one final time in the photos below.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958. 

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Drake, St Clair, and Horace R Clayton. Black Metropolis : a Study of Negro life in a Northern City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1967.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1959.

"Royal Penthouse." Hotel President Wilson. Accessed April 25, 2011. http://www.hotelpwilson.com/en/rooms-and-suites/royal-penthouse-suite/.