The Inversion of the House

Humanities and Social Science
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Travel, especially through the eyes of a yearning onlooker like myself, is always a philosophical cross-section—an attempt to discern something greater behind the mundane reality (however speculative that may often be). This time, traversing the dusty arteries of Central Asia, I found myself captivated not by the ornate facades or the intricate flourishes of ritualistic and tourist sites, but by a different, subtler aspect.

​It is what I call the “inversion of the house.”

​The Western commoner typically visualizes their home as a structure positioned at the center of a plot. Modern sensibility even suggests the absence of any significant fencing. Windows face the street. The West—perhaps unexpectedly—is a realm of “facadism” and transparency. The inhabitant essentially declares: “I am clean; you may peer into my windows, for everything here is crystal clear; I am righteous.” It is an architecture of loyalty, where the facade serves as a declaration of conformity to the collective gaze.

​The East approaches the construction of a home differently: the facade is turned inward, toward a private courtyard where pomegranates grow, fountains flow, and birds sing in their cages. Here, the house is a wall, shielding your existence from the outside world with an impenetrable four-sided barrier. Life unfolds there, on the inside. From the outside, there is nothing but an inconspicuous blend of clay and reed.

​This is the sovereign space of the “Hidden Uzbek.”

​While “the balls-less” (to use my own phrasing) roam the streets demanding you take a side and surrender to their meta-narratives, this architecture offers a radical refusal. It is the strength to remain in the system’s blind spot. Outside—dull clay; inside—a sovereign reality where you are not an object of observation, but the sole subject of your own life.

“Pairidaeza” in Avestan, from which the word “paradise” comes. Outside, a desert or a bustling neighborhood; inside, coolness, water, and those very same birds.

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I don’t know if or how it’s related, but old European monasteries were like fortresses. The surrounding terrain was dominated by warlords. Inside the monasteries were the last vestiges of higher learning Europe had left. It was like a crab, protecting a soft heritage.

The cathedrals came after the warlords started calming down. No one lived in the cathedral, because it was the house of God, but it was an all purpose community building. It was built by the community and its spire was a symbol of that particular place. When you walked into the cathedral, you could cast off your particular identity and be with God.

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Yes indeed. I have often admired that orientation. If I could build a place in a city I would do that too. I think a lot of warehouse conversions in industrial Western cities have this style of orientation: indoor courtyards surrounded by walls.

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An open central area was the common design for those archetypal western buildings, the Roman Domus and Villa. It had as much to do with temperature and humidity as with dividing the public from the private. Houses in colder climes centred on the hearth.

We ought take care not to confound the environmental and social needs that drive architecture.

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Good topic. I first became aware of this inversion when I visited the Alhambra in Granada, an Eastern palace in the West. It’s impressive enough from the outside, because of its location and size, but the spectacular architecture is saved for the interior, which is equally awe-inspiring and intimate.

Western palaces tend to be much more showy from the outside.

But at the level of ordinary housing, I’ve noticed it in French towns. The example below might be Mediterranean France but it’s common much further North too. The life goes on inside in courtyards, in private, among the family, and the few windows that face the street are usually shuttered.

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Generally you find this sort of thing all around the Mediterranean, “our sea” as the Romans called it—quintessentially “Western”.

So East-West and Chirstianity-Islam are not going to explain the difference in all cases. But even when this is significant, I think you’re romanticizing the Eastern style. You say it’s a resistance to meta-narratives and a site away from the prying eyes of the state, but I could say it’s a site of extreme surveillance—particularly for women—within the patriarchal domestic setup. A site of hierarchy and domination more than radical refusal.

So the axis, public extroversion versus domestic withdrawal, might be interesting precisely because it doesn’t always align with West vs East, Christianity vs Islam, or meta-narratives vs private sovereignty.

EDIT: I’ve noticed a difference between Britain (and according to American movies set in suburbia, the USA too) and the rest of Europe. British suburban houses often have open front gardens and large living room windows at the front. I’ve very seldom seen anything like that in the rest of Europe. In Russian suburbs and provincial towns, all the gardens are surrounded by high walls or metal panelling, behind which they cook their shashlik with family in private. So maybe this weird open-front thing—it’s weird to me even though I’m British—is an Anglo peculiarity? That would fit with this:

Very Protestant.

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To make explicit what my last post implied: a more accurate way of framing this distinction might be Protestants versus the Rest of the World, rather than West vesus East. Catholic France has more in common with Uzbekistan than it does with Welwyn Garden City.

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As I wrote at the beginning, this essay is more literary (in the continental sense) than analytical. I enjoy this style of both reading and writing: “understanding through feeling,” so I would like to point out that I do not claim to be analytical. Therefore, the text does not lay claim to “truth,” but it does lay claim to an “idea.”

When speaking about the life I described, one must, of course, keep in mind the climate, social aspects, and political structure of “Eastern despotisms.”

In the Islamic (Sufi) tradition, there is a concept called “malamati”—behavior deserving of censure. In the Christian tradition, something similar is the “holy fool.”

This is a tradition of behavior in which a person appears “strange” or “eccentric” outwardly, in public, but remains righteous and pure before God. It’s like “reverse Pharisaism”: the Pharisee washes only the outside of his cup, while the Malamati washes only the inside.

Thus, righteousness is achieved through inner adherence, not external attributes.

If you try to strip this tradition of its religious mysticism, you get the image of the “secret Uzbek” with his life inside out.

The result is an image of a person who is neither good nor bad, but somehow beyond all that: beyond morality. This behavioral tactic is very common here in Central Asia. The average Westerner seems somewhat confused when they find themselves in the East: for them, it’s a world of mysteries and secrets, a world of the hidden. When you meet someone, you find yourself confronted with a “person inside out”—incomprehensible, unlike you, and you always don’t know what to expect.

You also mentioned women and their rights. I once witnessed a dialogue where a Western woman questioned an Eastern woman and insisted that she wasn’t obligated to wear a headscarf, that it was archaic and a relic of a society where only men were considered subjects. But the Eastern woman answered: I wear a headscarf and submit to my husband because I want to, because I entrust my subjectivity to my husband, and if this headscarf is so repulsive to you, then take off your dresses completely and walk naked through the streets; where are your tales of “freedom”?

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This is a very interesting topic and can give rise to much nice reflection. I do think that you are maybe romanticising the ‘East’, a bit too much, but to put the opposition sharply I think that is ok. I agree with Jamal and Banno that there are various degrees right to how ‘the house’ is constructed, inward or outward. The Dutch situation is similar to the English one, so maybe it does have to do with protestantism.

It is also interesting to assess what it does more, as you also do in your posts. Is the internal world totally free to decorate and does this sovereignty apply to ‘the household’ or to the ‘head of the house’? I find your example of the Eastern headscarf not the most felicitous one. It may be that subjectivity is freely given, but that makes me wonder why it is always the woman that surrenders hers while a man will never say that he surrenders his (even though in the confines of private conversation things may well be different). That points to an inbalance if control in mastery over the world.

One might also look at the inversion through the lens of time. Banno’s Domus comes to mind. As society become more panoptic have we allowed the gaze to be turned inward into the house? The house used to be quite sacred, free from state intervention, but now we are encouraged to ‘open up’ more and more. So is society moving toward the ‘inverted house’? The ideal of the glass penthouse comes to mind. We are getting more alergic to private spaces and so everything must be opened up. In this case the opposition is not east / west. but disciplined versus less disciplined societies, in the Foucauldian sense of discipline. Again, great topic, thanks @Astorre!

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I suggest that the issue is a lot more complex than how you describe. Many factors enter into architectural decisions from the functionality, cost, aesthetic, safety, building codes, tradition, etc..

The placement of windows for example, I believe comes from a tradition of functionality. They provide light and warmth from the sun, but in the dark, heat escapes through them. They have both negative and positive impact to be considered. And this is not to mention seeing in or seeing out, which could also be judged as negative or positive. Priorities need to be determined. In the northern hemisphere windows are often concentrated on the south side of the building, and scarce on the north side. Also, any side which has a building close by, would negate the positive impact.

The matter of “facade” is interesting, but you cast it in a contradictory light. The nature of a facade is to be a front of pretense. So “facade” and “transparency” are contrary, unless the transparency is a pretense. Then what you say, “I am clean; you may peer into my windows,” is just a facade, a pretense. If “facade” was not a pretense, the word would have no use because the front which you put up for others to see, would not be a front put up at all, there would just be the authentic you, without facade. So any type of facade is a pretense, and not a true transparency to the person’s authentic life.

In western society, “privacy” is a relatively modern concept, developed from German idealism. Prior to Kant, who provided principles for individuality, the subject was understood as an inseparable part of the state. In speculation, this movement toward privacy may have been a consequence of the Inquisition.

See how it’s a facade (pretense)? The protestant says you can see into my house, and I’m doing no protestant things in here. But behind the interior walls is a different story.

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My small suburban cottage is open, with large windows along the East side; these are to allow morning light, yet they face towards the road. They are double glazed and blinded, the area between house and road purposely gardened so as to be viewed from the house, not the road. My family can admit the world or block it away as the mood changes.

The neighbours instead have a large double garage and wall, hiding from the outside.

Architectural style also involves social cohesion. I’m not afeared of what is outside my house - a comfortable middle class neighbourhood, a rare and precious thing indeed.

Astorre, a thought provoking topic indeed. Perhaps a literary style needs a bit of analysis to maintain coherence. Comfort, expense and context might be more significant to architectural style than one’s more existential needs.

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@Banno @Jamal @Tom_Storm @Tobias @Frank @Meta_U

I’m glad you liked this topic. I’d like to point out right away that the opening text is more of a sculpted bowl of raw clay, which may or may not be hardened in the kiln of this forum and turned into some kind of pottery.

Thank you for your comments, which helped me see new layers to the phenomena described.

During my trip, I also had the opportunity to visit one of these courtyards, in the home of a dynasty that makes clay pottery. I’ll post a link to their website here (I hope you don’t consider this an advertisement). https://ceramic.uz/

After visiting, I was able to experience that very world from the inside: for many generations, men have been working there, passing on their art from father to son, from master to apprentice. They told the story of their courtyard and their family, where the outside world always remained outside, and they merely monitored the demand for this or that type of pottery painting in their workshops.

As you probably know, Uzbekistan was part of the USSR. And this circumstance didn’t stop them from continuing (sometimes in secret from the authorities) to produce their wares. This was prohibited in the USSR: private production was frowned upon, and such earnings could become grounds for prosecution. And yet, here in this courtyard, life itself continued, regardless of the flags you were forced to hang on the facade.

Family life and what was happening inside seemed to be separate from what was happening outside. This wasn’t the usual rebellion, with street strikes; it was simply the erasure of one’s family and one’s everyday life.

I really liked your question: what degree of freedom do you have to decorate your courtyard from the inside? Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to understand this. But I also saw for myself the domineering behavior of women inside, who didn’t really consider men. A man is a full-fledged representative for external contacts, nothing more. There’s no pathos left inside; it’s a world of its own.

There’s a wonderful song called “Secret Uzbek” by the band “Akvarium.” If you understand Russian, I recommend listening to it, or at least reading the lyrics in translation:

“Words are just words, and everything we knew was buried under the sand yesterday.”
An existential nihilism is evident here: old narratives (geopolitics, ideology, “truth”) are being nullified. The only way to preserve sanity is to “go underground” of the spirit. “Secret Uzbek” offers us a different way of being in the world: in our own world, inaccessible to the outside eye. “Secret Uzbek” is outside the agenda, outside the system, outside time, outside ideology—whatever its name (liberalism, communism, despotism).

Of course, what is said here is idealized, twisted to illuminate and clarify. “To make clear” in Turkic languages sounds like “Anyktau” (that is, to clarify), while in European languages it is “to determine” to set limits, to establish boundaries (from the Latin Definitio).

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I’m really enjoying this thread and value your contributions. I feel that I sometimes come across as too adversarial in my replies. But that is not intentional, it’s more about my trying to explain something and it comes out that way. I want to explain how the historical cultural development in Britain has resulted in the form the house takes and how it plays a role in the social structures of the population. It might come across as though I’m angry, or overly critical of the leaders, or rulers in my country. Or pitying the ordinary people as though they are hapless pawns in the games of the elites. But what I am trying to do is shine a light on how we as a society have been shaped over the last millennium and how that has shaped our lived environment and social structures. I might paint a bleak picture, but I see a society broken and subjugated for many hundreds of years of domination by the ruling classes. A society of refugees, in their own country, with a rigid class system in which any kind of upward mobility for the lower classes was a struggle and the social gains they achieved shaped the way housing for the unprivileged developed.

To mirror this strict class structure a rigid aesthetic of architecture and housing types was developed. Which was stratified into many different levels of privilege, or success and working classes and the poor. So that the social status of the inhabitant was obvious by the form of the housing and it’s location.

Alongside this was a class code in which those in the lower classes were excluded by a complex coding system that encompassed every aspect of life. Such that people from the different ends of the system couldn’t conceive of the way of life of the other and that if by chance they strayed into the world of the other they would experience a culture shock similar to travelling to a far away land.

These structures were so strong in Britain that any analysis of the differing forms of housing, why it is the way it is and what that says about the inhabitants must take into consideration the class system of those inhabitants and the way the elites controlled the society.

Just to illustrate here are three examples of houses from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Blenheim Palace.

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A middle class London Town house.
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A Glasgow slum.
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Actually I could easily add another 30 levels of social stratification and housing types to this.

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The ceramics are delightful.

In the Other Place, I set out a thread based on the Greek “ἰδιώτης”, which apparently had nothing to do with stupidity, but with those private persons who did not become involved in politics. In Athens, civic duty was virtuous, and so the term became derogatory. The idiotēs closed themselves off from the commonwealth.

Greek houses were usually around a courtyard, again for collecting water and cooling the rooms. There is some debate as to whether they were divided on the basis of gender, with separate quarters for men and women, or divided in terms of public and private space, the women usually found in the latter, giving the appearance of such a gender divide.

The Greeks and Romans did not go to work in a separate space, an office or other building specifically for that task. Rather, business was conducted in a public space within the house. Now that seems to be the case in the family you visited. Given that the business and private lives of the household take place at the same location, there is a need to demarcate private and public spaces, not found in other societal structures.

We ought to avoid applying “ἰδιώτης” to Uzbeks and the East by recognising the very different roles of their houses compared to the typical Western suburban home.

We ought also be cautious in inferring too much from too little evidence—the generic flaw in literary accounts that lack analysis.

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I absolutely agree with you about the need to be cautious in drawing conclusions. You could visit 10 such courtyards, and I could visit 10 others, and we would discover completely different aspects. Therefore, I tried to avoid cognitive errors in judgment (false generalizations), relying on my own feelings and an attempt to understand how this is given to me, how it appears to me before any experience. At the same time, you will surely agree with the overall impression of the hiddenness of existence that reigns behind these walls, behind the women’s headscarves, behind the enigmatic faces of ordinary people who seem to express nothing. It also reminds me of the idea of ​​a Russian nesting doll: shell after shell after shell.

As I said above, I did not set out to draw strict conclusions, but to convey a feeling. This is also a kind of method of cognition (not at all precise for an analyst).

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Oh, the picture you paint is a strong one. How folk see that picture is another thing. Consider if you will a “western” chauvinist taking your comments to heart, and on your account placing the blame for what they might perceive as a lack of economic progress in part on a form of “idiocy” on display in the inversion you describe, on the failure of Uzbeks to take command of their common wealth, but to focus instead on “Pairidaeza”. I’m certainly not advocating such a view, just pointing out the way this inversion, without proper analytics, might be misused.

Would that I could visit Uzbekistan.

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When I questioned your claim about the radical refusal of meta-narratives, I had—stupidly—completely forgotten about the situation of Central Asia under the USSR. It makes more sense now. I was blinded by my inference that you were merely drawing a distinction between Eastern tradition and Western liberalism, as I think you have done before.

However, I want to stand by the underlying point:

I won’t disavow my scepticism towards patriarchal culture, but that wasn’t really my point. My point was to emphasize complexity: the courtyards may be sites of patriarchal domination, and comfort and security and happiness for women, and the radical refusal of meta-narratives. These aren’t mutually exclusive; the architecture contains all of them at once.

So I guess my point was that the move of selecting one dimension—the sovereign inner life, the resistance to surveillance, the paradise garden—and treating it as the essential meaning of the practice, is a form of orientalism, a conceptual appropriation, such that the East becomes a source of a pre-formed critical purpose (and this can be done from a Central Asian point of view as well, i.e., it doesn’t require a Western subject).

I shall reach for Adorno. Adorno’s critique of idealism, and “identity-thinking” in general, is that the thinking subject’s concept tends to subsume its object, to always treat the particular as an instance of a more general category, more important and more essential than the particular itself. In other words, the object is subordinated to the idea you want to illustrate.

What gets lost, the nonidentical, is the remainder that doesn’t fit, the aspects of the thing that escape and resist the concept imposed on it. The pottery dynasty is a good example of the nonidentical asserting itself: the details that surprise or don’t quite fit our conceptions.

Now I feel somewhat equipped to address this:

I think it cuts both ways. The best literary art is precise: it is faithful to the particulars, to the nonidentical. Good poetry doesn’t lean on well-known, off-the-shelf metaphors or familiar concepts; it cuts new ones, custom-made to fit the individual things.

But you seem to be doing something different: using vivid particulars to carry conceptual claims (about sovereignty, resistance to meta-narratives, the authenticity of the hidden inner life). I’m not saying this is not literary; I’m saying it’s not the only literary game in town.

The result is we get “the hidden Uzbek,” a conceptual entity, difficult to examine critically precisely because of your chosen literary mode.

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I certainly agree with this line of thinking. And here, as often happens in philosophical circles, we depart from the idea itself and return to epistemology: that’s how I understand it. Indeed. This is quite common: invent an idea (a construct), filter the facts you know through it, discard the inconvenient ones, and highlight the evidence more vividly. Then wrap it all in a romantic veneer, and, voila, we have an “ideology” out of nowhere.

Of course, each of us is guilty of this (consider, for example, your interpretation of the content based on the premise of my early critique of Western metanarratives). Philosophy brings us back down to earth. This is precisely what gives it its immense value.

But returning to me as an author, I try to take this into account when writing my texts. On the other hand, reducing any phenomenon to its indivisible atoms leads to the discovery that, ultimately, at its very foundation, “nothingness” is found. And in order to understand anything at all (in Gadamer’s sense), you have to take a position (even if only temporarily). Invent, construct, or create the very point from which you look.

I think literature has a right to this. Someone has to have a right. Otherwise, when there’s no position, there’s nothing to say, nothing to write, and nothing to be.

I offer my perspective. Some will like it, some will find it alien, and some will perhaps take it as clay from which they can perhaps mold their own cup. And all of this is wonderful! Isn’t it?

For me personally, “otherness” is of primary importance. The right to otherness that I grant to the “other.” They could be an Uzbek from the slums or an American from a glass house. All of this is a way of being. And the “other” has the right to be their own way. (I wrote about this in one of the previous threads)

At the same time, let’s be honest: the level of readers on this forum allows me to avoid mentioning this every time I write (for which I’m grateful to the creators of this forum). Hence this genre.

Next time I have new speculations, I’ll definitely share them, and the reader… Well, that’s their right. My goal is to evoke emotion.

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I’d also like to return to this literary image of the “secret Uzbek,” that is, to the very essence of this idea.

What caught my attention? It’s the idea of ​​non-identity (although I myself identified this idea as “Secret Uzbek”). The idea of ​​being outside of any narrative whatsoever: neither Western nor Eastern. Being outside.

I ask myself: is this possible? Or is this just another construct?

What should be the minimum degree of inclusion in the world? What rules should you actually observe in the courtyard (if you even implement them)?

I’ve come across slogans like “rip out your wires.” But what is the possibility of ripping them out, and isn’t this just another idea?

It seems that the residents of such courtyards themselves somehow know this, without calling it by name. They simply live it somehow, and they live a little differently than we are accustomed to.

Is it possible not to be an object because you are beyond any objectification or identification? It seems the Secret Uzbek has succeeded. (However, this is my opinion.)

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Yes, that makes sense. Now we are in danger of agreeing too much.