Shortly after the completion of New York's Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966, that building made its network television debut on That Girl, as Marlo Thomas danced between its placards in the climactic scene of the show's opening credits. In 1973 television upstaged architecture once again: A full two months before Philip Johnson proudly presented his IDS Center, Minneapolis's new indoor downtown, in the journal Architectural Forum, the Mary Tyler Moore Show updated the opening credits for the show's fourth season. The outdoor location shots that had once led up to Mary's famous toss of her blue hat were now replaced with a majestic image of Mary reaching the top of the escalator in the IDS Center's Crystal Court: The malling of Minneapolis had been announced ahead of schedule.
While the television camera has frequently directed its gaze at architecture, however, architecture as a discipline—my discipline—has generally proven itself to be incapable of even looking at television. To scholars armed with Frankfurt School theory seeking to recover a "public realm" they feel has been seriously eroded in the postwar era, television watching is escapist behavior, and can only prevent people from engaging one another in face-to-face conversation. In these parables of loss, the rise of television accompanies the decline of our metropolitan centers, effectively atomizing the public in isolated suburban homes. This strain of urban theory gave birth to a televisual phobia that lingers today not only in the academy but in the minds of a well-meaning educated public in general. This mixture of condescension and fear serves to reassure architects and architectural theorists of one of their most cherished received ideas: that space is the absolute precondition for authentic public life, and that those lives which are mediated by television are somehow less authentic and less public than they should be.
As someone whose suburban childhood—the period in which I watched the most TV of my life—coincides almost too well with the historic period that produced this blind spot regarding television, I find myself in the ideal position to refute each and every disparaging claim through my own personal relationship to television. Consider what follows a polemical attempt to take back the '70s from snotty telephobic theorists, as well as from all those academics who've wrongly proclaimed one demise of "public space" or "public life" after another. We've suffered enough.
"Intimate vision is induced in proportion as the public domain is abandoned as empty." —Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man
In 1974, Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man announced the decline of urban public life. Drawing on an archive of ideal public spheres, from Republican Rome to eighteenth-century Paris, the book directs its critique at contemporary New York, the city where public man has most obviously fallen. "Confusion has arisen between public and intimate life," writes Sennett. "People are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning." In the absence of the logic of self-abstraction that formerly governed the public sphere, interpersonal relations have succumbed to "the tyrannies of intimacy"—that is, "we have come to care about institutions and events only when we can discern personalities at work in them or embodying them."
According to Sennett, the postwar popularity of psychoanalysis is to blame. Although it was supposed to enable people "to participate more fully and rationally in a life outside the boundaries of their own desires"—that is, to create good citizens—instead "masses of people are concerned with their single life-histories and particular emotions as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation." This fallen state, in which inward-looking "intimate vision" has replaced the act of looking at the world around oneself, is related to that mythic site that sociologists so often draw upon to sustain their pronouncements: "the city." The equation is direct for Sennett: "the forums for... public life, like the city, are in a state of decay."
"Dead Public Space," the introductory chapter to Sennett's book, locates the architectural analogue to this hermetic psychological state among the postwar "International School skyscrapers" that rose up along New York's Park Avenue after the Second World War:
Walls almost entirely of glass, framed with thin steel supports, allow the inside and the outside of a building to be dissolved to the least point of differentiation; this technology permits the achievement of what S. Giedion calls the ideal of the permeable wall, the ultimate in visibility. But these walls are also hermetic barriers. Lever House was the forerunner of a design concept in which the wall, though permeable, also isolates the activities within the building from the life of the street. In this design concept, the aesthetics of visibility and social isolation merge.
The glass skyscraper becomes a metaphor for the hermetic individual, simultaneously transparent and withdrawn—if it deigns to communicate with you at all, it confesses everything, forging an instant intimate relationship, telling you far more than you ever wanted to know. Private life threatens to erupt—inappropriately—into public life.
Sennett's dystopian historical present is a city of Lever Houses surrounded by physically and psychologically barricaded suburbs whose paranoid inhabitants vainly devote their energies toward a forced ideal of withdrawal from the city. Sennett concludes The Fall of Public Man with barbed irony: "In their nice, neat gardens, people speak of the horrors of London or New York; here in Highgate or Scarsdale one knows one's neighbors; true, not much happens, but life is safe. It is retribalization."
As someone who grew up in New Jersey, where life was safe, we knew our neighbors (not very well, though) and nothing ever happened—I know a thing or two about the retribalization. My distinctly suburban childhood happened to coincide with a distinctly urban TV program developed by the Children's Television Workshop for the Public Broadcasting System. Sesame Street premiered on PBS in 1969 with a cast of inner-city adults, children, and pastel-colored—that is, simultaneously racially mixed and racially abstract—muppets. Patterned on pedagogical experiments that sought to incorporate the urban landscape into inner-city education, the program emphasized the everyday bonds of community life with songs like "The People in Your Neighborhood":
Who are the people in your neighborhood,
In your neighborhood, in your neighborhood?
Who are the people in your neighborhood?
They're the people that you meet each day!
For a variety of reasons, not least of which being the fact that I was already queer, it would have been impossible for me to form the kinds of intimate relations with people in public spaces that Sennett writes about. The important thing is, I was still able to meet people each day—on the screen.
Every weekday morning throughout the summer I would await the train ride that brings That Girl into Manhattan, superimposes her face on its skyline, and delivers her to the glass and steel architecture and neon Broadway lights that are taken in through her wide eyes and gaping mouth. This was my introduction to New York as much as it was hers. New York without That Girl was inconceivable to me—this was an intimate relationship, a visual relationship, moreover a televisual relationship. Sennett would say of my experience that these intimate (tele)visions inhibited proper interpersonal relations—stunted my growth as a public man and kept me out of public spaces in the bargain. But what, exactly, is "public space," anyway?
The Fall of Public Man, which quickly attained canonic status as a classic of urban theory, played a significant role in introducing Frankfurt School theory—Sennett references Jurgen Habermas and Helmut Plessner, and was clearly influenced by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse—to architecture scholars. Significantly, the discipline was already listening to another Frankfurt School theorist, Hannah Arendt, on the topic of "the space of appearance," a concept from her influential book The Human Condition.
Two years prior to the publication of The Fall of Public Man, architecture critic Kenneth Frampton delivered an essay, in Arendt's presence, entitled "The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition." In the talk, which was first published in 1979, Frampton noted that for Arendt, the space of appearance is an always shifting site contingent upon situations and speech acts:
Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.
Frampton establishes that the Oxford English Dictionary's two definitions of architecture—the first being "the art or science of constructing edifices for human use" and the second "the action and process of building"—parallel Arendt's distinction between "work" ("by definition static, public, and permanent") and "labor" ("inherently processal, private, and impermanent"). He then turns to the root of the word "edifice":
The fact that the dictionary asserts that the word "edifice" may be used to refer to "a large and stately building such as a church, a palace, or a fortress" serves to support the work connotations of the first definition, since these building types, as the "representation" of spiritual and temporal power, have always been, at least until recent times, both public and permanent. Furthermore, the word "edifice" relates directly to the verb "to edify," which not only carries within itself the meaning "to build" but also "to educate," "to strengthen," and "to instruct"—connotations that allude directly to the political restraint of the public realm. Again the Latin root of this verb—aedificare, from aedes, a "building," or, even more originally, a "hearth," and ficare, "to make"—has latent within it the public connotation of the hearth as the aboriginal "public" space of appearance.
Frampton sought, in 1972, to trouble a facile distinction between public and private by locating the "aboriginal" site of public discourse—"space of appearance"—within the home. His argument acquires a moralizing dimension, however, as it zooms from aboriginal public space to the present:
This aspect persists even today in the domestic realm, where surely no place is more a forum in the contemporary home than the hearth or its surrogate, the television set, which as an illusory public substitute tends to inhibit or usurp the spontaneous emergence of "public" discourse within the private domain.
For Sennett, the city is the proper space of public discourse, but the retreat to the (suburban) home has destroyed that possibility. For Frampton, on the other hand, the home is a potential site for the spontaneous regeneration of public discourse—but the latent potential of that site has been destroyed by television, the "illusory public substitute," the bad object.
Like so many progressive urban theorists continue to do, Frampton blamed social atomization on cars and television. In his activist reading of The Human Condition, Frampton uses Arendt's analysis to criticize the contemporary American landscape: "Arendt emphasizes, in contrast to our present proliferation of urban sprawl, the spontaneous 'cantonal' attributes of concentration." Citing her assertion that "the living together of people" in the city is the most important material prerequisite for political organization, Frampton claims that "nothing could be further from this than our present generation of motopia and our evident incapacity to create new cities that are physically and politically identifiable as such." Urban planners like Melvin Webber, who rationalized the increasing absence of any space of public appearance by propagating slogans like "community without propinquity," and apolitical architects like Robert Venturi, who dismissed efforts to create new public squares as "piazza compulsion" ("Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square," Venturi had written. "They should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television.") also drew Frampton's ire. As he put it, "These and similar reactionary modes of beholding seem to emphasize the impotence of an urbanized populace who have paradoxically lost the object of their urbanization" [i.e., the city].
As is only appropriate for the intellectual heirs of Adorno and Horkheimer, the writing of progressive urban theorists is full of such cries of loss—loss of the city, loss of a sense of place, loss of a critical role for architects to play in the contemporary American city. My question is: loss for whom? For I count myself among those impotent, urbanized yet de-urbanized subjects—but I never "had" my object of urbanization in the first place. It was always present on my television screen as urban experience.
Obsessed, from earliest childhood, with the sight of fabulous single women traversing the avenues of great American cities on the opening credits to shows like That Girl, I began experiencing an overwhelming urge to be That Girl, the woman who has Lincoln Center all to herself almost the day after it is built. I heard the theme song to the Mary Tyler Moore Show playing in my mind's soundtrack whenever I wandered aimlessly in public. (My father sold ad space for TV Guide, and I grew up thinking it was natural and normal to have four copies of each issue in the household, or one TV Guide per family member. I still recall the shock of entering a friend's home to discover only one TV Guide: How could people live like this?) Contrary to Sennett's diagnosis, these intimate (tele)visions were not inhibiting of proper interpersonal relations, but enabling of a subjectivity that I could barely recognize, a subjectivity that had no recognizable place in the "spaces of appearance" available to me. These intimate visions enacted a process of identification—queer in many senses of the term—that located its objects of desire on the television screen, among other places that are less easy for me to pin down.
Twenty-five years after Sennett isolated the problem of intimate vision, the anxieties that underwrite his diagnosis leap off the page. The title, despite the book's stated commitment to social diversity among abstract public subjects, mourns the passing of the masculine urban subject. As Michael Warner has written, "the ability to abstract oneself in public has always been an unequally available resource," which provides the unmarked subject (the white, the male, the middle-class, the normal) with an unfair advantage. What are we to make of a book announcing the decline of urban public life in 1974 that makes no mention of civil rights, the migration of rural southern blacks to large northern cities, women's liberation, and gay liberation? Twenty-five years later, the liberal bourgeois model of urban civility to which so many of us still pay lip service appears shockingly inadequate.
I might never have come to this conclusion had I not decided to spend Sunday, June 28, 1992, at New York City's annual Gay Pride parade. When I saw Marlo Thomas, one of the parade's grand marshals, being showered with affection by thousands of gay men—her right arm waved a big, continuous, fabulous wave—I suddenly realized that this fantasy of inhabiting the city as That Girl (or Mary, or even Rhoda on my less fabulous days) was hardly private, but always latently public. Sure, you may be part of an atomized, mass-mediated public raised on intimate (tele)visions. But at that moment thousands of people who, like me, had first taken in the city through television—watching That Girl traverse the same streets week after week in the '60s, day after day in reruns in the '70s, night after night on Nick at Nite in the '80s and '90s—fused into one temporary, beautiful... well, community of happy self-proclaimed fags and dykes along Washington Square North. It was a real place, and a very real experience.
But the fact that these fantasies found their expression in an urban public space is not what made them real. For me, this collective coming out proved far more satisfying than my somewhat tortured coming out as a gay man had a few years earlier. It really wasn't just about being queer, or being fabulous, or fabulously queer, or even about taking the city back, but all these things simultaneously. And more. It wasn't just my closet doors bursting open that day, but everyone's. Marlo Thomas represents, for people like me, a televised archive of streets we walked and houses we haunted, as young people searching for ways to be queer that were unavailable to us. We queer children of suburbia found the object of our urbanization—or, better, our space of appearance, which, as Arendt reminds us, "can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere"—on television, the last place that any progressive urbanist would ever think to look.
