Study shop

The study, in middle-class Victorian homes, was meant to serve as a masculine retreat from the femininity of the domestic domain. Lined with books and piled with documents, the study was dampened from the din of a bustling home and marked a calm center amid a perceived chaos. Virginia Woolf remembers her father's study as a sacred place at the top of their home on Hyde Park Gate that served as the seat of paternal intellect: "Downstairs there was pure convention: upstairs pure intellect." The study defined itself on the absence of physical labor. It was a space of scholarly pursuits, where the mind rather than the body worked. In contrast to the space outside -- at the height of the Industrial Revolution -- where the laboring body kept the Empire running, the study offered a fantasy image of man as pure mind.

Now that we're all through with manufacturing and physical labor in the work place, tied to a desk pushing papers -- or that's what they tell me at least -- it is the shop rather than the study that fulfills a masculine fantasy. To work with one's hands and create an object from scratch seems to shut out domestic noise as efficiently as books and paper and offers a different kind of retreat from a different kind of laboring world. In an economy in which what is exchanged is no longer money for labor but money for debt -- or debt for debt, something like that -- the specter-ized body finds a home in the home, or in the factory inside the home.

All of which is said not to dissuade *anybody* from entering his/her shop. But just to put some noted malaise into a context -- my context of choice.