The Door in Our Consciousness

The door is an obstacle, not an interface, and was never a means to 
promote contact between inside and outside. Nor did it wish to burden 
anyone, whether insiders or outsiders, with a secret. The door remains in 
the picture by transforming itself throughout subsequent cultures, 
maintaining those characteristics that appeal to it. Its position has 
always been that you cannot get around it. It demanded to be seen, and 
only allowed passage on the condition that it be touched. As an object 
with a vast malicious potential, it forced passersby to observe a 
complicated ritual of gestures and etiquette. Fond of human beings and 
animals, the door loved other objects as well: doorknobs, judas holes, 
locks, chains, keys, mailboxes, door checks, strings, knockers, Christmas 
bouquets, ironwork, metal strips and reinforcements, nameplates, and 
notices like "No evangelists" or "No hawkers - We've got it all" or 
handwritten notes such as "Be back soon" or "Gone to the pub," while in 
its immediate environment it attracted doormats, stoups, hatracks and 
umbrella stands, doorsteps and doorposts, chimes, peepholes, and 
especially other doors, from the screens and bug curtains outside to the 
inner doors of the porch and hallway.

Western Christianity is the ultimate door culture. Its doors are massive, 
large, sacred, and often winged (as in the double door). Where else but 
in the Occident could the revolving door have been invented, having 
already converted bridges into doors (the fortresses' drawbridge)? The 
modern era began when Luther nailed his theses to a door. In the Arab 
world, except for the gate that separated the courtyard and women's 
quarters from the outside world, the door was usually a curtain (later 
copied in the West as kitchen or terrace bead curtains). Under Islam, the 
door found its most individual form in the shape of veils, while in Japan 
it maintained its original and most universal form, that of the sliding 
wall. 

In the West, the door allowed itself to be used as a means to obstruct 
and control currents: city gate, garden fence, church door, entrance hall 
or (emergency) exit, accompanied by the appropriate guards, lions, dogs, 
sextons, doorkeepers, janitors, warders, bouncers, videotists and 
electronicians. This gave the door its dark side: burglars, bailiffs, 
death. Enter the little doors of resistance: the small gates in church 
and fortress walls, the hatches into subterranean tunnels, the 
bookcase-cum-door of Anne Frank and other dwellers at the back of the 
house, the barricaded and barricading doors, the mind-expanding door of 
psychedelics (the Doors of Perception), the cliché's open door, the 
creaking door in horror movies, the bullet-riddled door of the assassin. 
Where there's a door, the West finds its borderline experience. The groom 
carries his bride through the open door so that she may open hers, a 
stork's wreath on the door tells you she has, the bang of the door 
signals the premature end of the affair; finally, the deceased are 
carried to the grave on their own front doors: the last door before the 
gates of heaven.

World War II was the brutal crowbar with which the West forced its entry 
into the world, in order to bring earth under the sign of acceleration as 
the one true universal value. Everything was turned over and had to be 
permissible, debatable. The ideology of contact led to the communication 
ecstacy of an open society. The Eastern bloc soon called it a day, opting 
for an antimediumistic cult of deceleration behind the iron curtain's 
veil. The West decided to take the battle against its self-created secret 
to the bitter end: Everything must be brought to light, from psyche to 
globe. Obstacles were localized as centers of resistance and disarmed 
through freeways, airplanes, high-orbit satellites and incentive social 
measures. This post-Western model of openness declared the door a relic 
of a stage of violence now considered taboo. 

The door was reinterpreted as the medium of currents. Its traditional 
philanthropy was believed to reflect its ancient longing to effect open 
connections. The door was degraded into a connecting part, of the same 
glass used to replace the wall. The door became a window, unmysterious, 
transparent and misunderstood. Armstrong made his giant step by proving 
that he could even open the door to the moon, and humanity stepped out 
live with him. This signaled the end of the Occident, the task of fascism 
had been completed: Lebensraum had become the universe, light, air, 
space. To deny the door is to leave the world.

When public life became saturated with anti-door-like transparency, the 
door decided on the combined strategy of retreating to prejudiced 
positions and launching sudden attacks. The front door witnessed a 
spectacular comeback. On the one hand, it raised early Western culture to 
the status of style with nostalgic bare-faced pomp (the heavy door). On 
the other, it launched a plot together with groups like the neo-social 
squatter's movement, which broke down disused front doors only to place 
them at the magic center of its cult of resistance. The squat door 
demanded oblations in the form of steel plates, garden fences, spring 
matresses, props and beams, reaffirming its former function as a magnet 
for objects. The squat door carried no nameplates and seemed to long for 
anonymity, though its real task was to create and guard a secret. Since 
this met with major objections in the justice and police departments, the 
squat doors were either sawn down and rammed in or socialized as communal 
doors and replaced by the nomenclative prefab of redevelopment.

In public life, the door has embarked on total war. The public door found 
itself stripped of all its attributes: doorhandles and doorsteps 
disappeared, the mailbox was removed, doorbells were replaced by 
closed-circuit TV, electronic buzzer and intercom. The invisible door, 
initially the cause of brutal collisions and accidents, was disarmed by 
converting it into a self-closing entrance. The post-Western door has 
been utterly Japanized and turned into a sliding wall. It is no longer 
seen or touched, there is no room for rites of passage: it opens up 
before it is reached. Robbed of its favorite attributes, it has become 
its own caricature, condemned to a life of one among many media. 

The door wants to be an object, not a means but an end, door per se; 
stoicism. It wants to be open, closed or left ajar. But should it be 
misjudged, it will take revenge, reverting to terrorism and relapsing 
into the forbidden stage of violence. The door has chosen to be on the 
dark side of life. Everywhere at night we witness the return of the door 
as the iron curtain covering the glass fronts of the state of 
transparency. Mocking all the acceleration and unlimited openness, the 
shutters whisk down, cursing the turbulent city with desolation. Not even 
the little light beams that penetrate their tiny plastic windows can 
dispel the new dusk in the streets. Social bylaws to replace the massive 
steel with semi-open constructions and sliding doors hardly make shopping 
any more fun. Shutters are the mirror image of post-Western life: 
Openness without doors is like a desert without an oasis. The price we 
pay for a life without doors is death.
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