In the opening pages of In the Swarm, Byung-Chul Han builds a conceptual framework for thinking about media. “Respect,” says Han, from Latin respectare literally means to look back, while “spectating,” from spectare, implies “a voyeuristic gazing that lacks deferential consideration—that is respect.”1 Modulated by the distance, respect and spectating configure the semantic poles of public space.
As I read these lines I was reminded of something that happened to me as a child every time I visited another apartment in my residential complex. Except for spatial differences such as the position and specific location, all the apartments were identical units that had been rotated or mirrored to fit the architectural plan. As I looked inside them when, for example, the neighbors left the door open while they carried in the shopping, I could not help but marvel at the mirrored world, the same but entirely different, that opened to my gaze. A room where there should be a bathroom, a window where there should be a wall, a corridor going in the wrong direction, the morning light coming in where the afternoon light should. The first time I entered an apartment I used to imagine the location and boundaries of the furniture in my house and overlap them with what I saw at the time, the ornate edges and knots of my neighbors’ Louis XVI imitation furniture protruding above the rounded shapes of my living room sofa, a coat rack that added height to a floor lamp, a dresser, or an organ, in the place of a couple of potted plants.
Without being aware of it, I was superimposing the public and private in my head, and both, between respect and a childlike gaze, coexisted peacefully. My gaze respected these spaces that were observed in a playful spirit, with an admiration and reverence that I lost as I matured. Mine and everyone else’s gaze strayed and with it came a disruption of what we consider public and private.
- Han, In the Swarm, 1. ↩︎
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