At Home

Bachelard: “All really inhabited space bears the essence of home” (p. 5). Much remains unsaid in this important claim. Much is already contained in this phrase, chunks of which can be disproved with recourse to empirical experience. After all, it is manifestly not the case that inhabited space is a necessary and sufficient condition for what we would term being “at home.” There are occasions in which unity, harmony, belonging can occur in the glance of an eye, when moving from place to place. Conversely, a prolonged inhabitation of space need not result in the experience of being “at home.” Over a long duration of time, the feeling of being a visitor in one’s “home” is symptomatic of a rupture exceeding temporality, from which no inhabitation can resolve.

“All really inhabited space bears the essence of home.” This formulation must be returned time and again. From whence does the feeling of being “at home” emerge? Anthony Steinbock’s reading of the generative emergence of homeworld/alienworld in Home and Beyond is a good place to begin plotting this emergence. The critical question here is: is familiarity to be identified with normality, and thus home? (p. 175). Steinbock turns to Maurice Natanson, who “notes that what is typical for myself is immediately familiar to me, that is, has its roots in my life in ‘silent familiarity’” (p. 174). Silence is also a mode of inconspicuousness: nothing protrudes in this familiarity, but instead reinforces the bond between silence and typicality. Here, too, others and other things become incorporated into my lifeworld, all serving to place me within a normal context. Husserl writes: “Everyone newly emerging into my circle is apperceived according to my likeness, and now he is called normal when the general prefiguring of the horizon…accords to me in the general structural style” (Ibid.). This is a telling passage. At first sight, it looks as though “normality” gains its normative dimension through the egocentric focus of the “I,” a point that Steinbock is critical of. Things become incorporated through an already perceptive reciprocity. Only then, is the formation of the “alien” (unhomely) possible, given its co-dependence on the normative centre, as Steinbock writes: “The ability to typify is the essential means of human normality to ensure against the existential shock of having to the see the world the way it is” (sic, p. 175). Unfamiliarity is the condition of familiarity, and the dialectic of inside and out (which Bachelard would speak) is the basis upon which the hold of the lifeworld forms. Ultimately, Steinbock will point to an account of being at home that places intersubjectivity central.

In any case, the co-constitution of familiar/unfamiliar and home/alien points to what Steinbock terms “liminal” notions, liminal in the sense of being “mutually delimited” (p. 179). Without venturing into Steinbock’s discussion of “appropriation” and “transgression,” a distinction to Bachelard’s onus on “inhabited space” is already evident in this discussion. We have moved from a static account of home, as figures large in phenomenological architecture. Take Juhani Pallasmaa as an example:

Home is an individualized dwelling, and the means of this subtle personalization seem to be outside our notion of architecture. Dwelling, a house, is the container, the shell for home. The substance of home is secreted, as it were, upon the framework of the dwelling by the dweller.

Home is an expression of personality and family and their very unique patterns of life. Consequently, the essence of home is closer to life itself than to artefact.

Reflection on the essence of home takes us away from the physical properties of a house into the psychic territory of the mind. It engages us with issues of identity and memory, consciousness and the unconscious, biologically motivated behavioural remnants as well as culturally conditioned reactions and values. (Via).

I remember hearing Pallasmaa express similar sentiments in 2007 in Haifa. I looked down, and realised I was clenching my fist in a non-conscious act of resistance. It is a seductive mode of thought that would sooner retreat into a myth of primordiality than contend with the ambiguity joining the indifference of materiality with the human patina applied to that materiality. “At home” must also face its antithesis, its awkward birth in the alien and unhomely. No longer being at home, exile. The home marked by the residue of memory, the rupture of dreams that have been transposed from night to day: a waking alienworld, from which the phrase "I remember" damages the structure of experience. “Because we are home we ‘belong to’ to the alienworld in the process of co-constitution, but again, precisely by not belonging to the alien as being ‘home’” (Steinbock, p. 181). Home implicates alien, and vice-versa, establishing a porousness of borders, from which the question emerges: is it possible to be an alien in one’s “home” without already being “at home” amid that alien environment?