Home: Territory and Identity

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

J Macgregor Wise

philosophical

21st century • material

In this text, J Macgregor Wise asserts that home and identity are grounded in the location of one's body and self. The territories of such regions are discussed as milieus impacted by stable bodies and objects in our midst. The effect of these milieus organises the territory known and experienced as 'home', Our possessions signal identity but their presence in the context of history and memory constitute home as an articulation of effect. Unlike other essays which situate making house and home as a form of self-expression, Wise contends that home is established by the act of territorialisation, the accumulation of habitual acts that are shown to be permeable, changeable and socially reinforced.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari relate a story of a child in the dark. The child, 'gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath.'¹ The song is calming, a stability amidst the chaos, the beginning of order. The song marks a space, the repetition of the simple phrases structures that space and creates a milieu. The milieu is 'a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.'² The song begins a home, the establishment of a space of comfort. Home is not an originary place from which identity arises. It is not the place we 'come from;' it is a place we are. Home and territory: territory and identity. This essay is about home and identity, though home and identity are not the same. They are of course inextricably linked, and they are both the product of territorializing forces.

We begin with the tunes that we hum to accompany ourselves, to fill a void, to reassure ourselves. Doing so, we create a milieu. Whistle while you work; whenever I feel afraid I whistle a happy tune. Songbirds mark space, an area of influence, by sound. The bass-heavy rhythm pounding from a car driving by shapes the space of the street, changes the character of that space. Heads turn (toward, away), feelings (repulsion, identification, recognition) arise. The resonant space thus created is a milieu. Milieus cross, 'pass into one another; they are essentially communicating;'³ rhythms blend and clash. The car and its occupants cross from one milieu to the next as they venture down the street; a figure on the sidewalk is enveloped in the bubble of sound, by the milieu, and is then released

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again as the car turns the corner down by the light. The street had its milieus before the car arrived (quiet suburban, congested downtown) which are altered by the arrival of the car and its rhythm, but reassert themselves after it leaves.

But space is marked, and shaped, in other ways as well. It is marked physically, with objects forming borders, walls and fences. Staking a claim, organizing, ordering. The marker (wall, road, line, border, post, sign) is static, dull, and cold. But when lived (encountered, manipulated, touched, voiced, glanced at, practised) it radiates a milieu, a field of force, a shape of space. Space is in continual motion, composed of vectors, speeds. It is 'the simultaneous co-existence of social interrelations at all geographical scales, from the intimacy of the house-hold to the wide space of transglobal connections.'⁴

Beyond the walls and streets of built place and the song of the milieu, we mark out places in many ways to establish places of comfort. A brief list of ways of marking: we may mark space more subtly by placing objects (a coat saves the seat), or by arranging our stuff (to make sure no one sits beside us on the bus or the bench) or even our bodies (posture opens and closes spaces; legs stretched out, newspaper up). Smoke from a cigarette marks space (different types of cigarettes, like clove, inflect the shape of the space, and then there are pipes, cigars, reefers) as do spices and scents. Symbols also mark space from clothing style (preppie, biker, grunge) to words on a t-shirt, but also graffiti, posters, and so on. The very words we use, the language we speak, the accent we speak it in, the ideas we expound on, have an effect on the space about us (attracts or repels others, drawing some together around the same theme, or tune). In and of themselves markers are traces of movement that has passed. 'To live means to leave traces,' as Benjamin once wrote.⁵ And as Ivan Illich put it: 'all living is dwelling, the shape of a dwelling. To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left. The traces of dwellings survive, as do the bones of people.'⁶

As practised, our life-world is flooded by the variant radiance of the milieus. Each milieu opens up onto others; indeed, it is these connections with other milieus beyond the immediate place that give the markers their resonance – 'the identity of place is in part constructed out of positive interrelations with elsewhere.'⁷ An encountered photograph glows with memories (though not necessarily nostalgia) of experience, of history, of family, friends. What creates that glow is the articulation of subject (homemaker) to object (home-marker), caught up in a mutual becoming-home. But that becoming opens up onto other milieus, other markers, other spaces (distant in space and/or time). One's apartment opens up onto a distant living room in a house far away, or onto a beach with those waves. But it not only articulates with a then (memory-space), but nows (that building has been pulled down, he's now living in Phoenix, she's in law school). The milieu opened up to is not just memory, not just the 'real,' but also imagined places (where one has never been, photographs of objects that never existed, at least in that way). And it is

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not just photographs that open up in this way,⁸ but all markers. A small figurine – a Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god – sits on the shelf above my desk. Its milieu-radiance comes from associated meanings (Ganesha helps one overcome obstacles, an empowering reminder while at work), a childhood in New Delhi, my father who purchased the idol, and so on. No space is enclosed, but is always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces.

What creates the territory is an accretion of milieu effects. Each milieu affects the space, bends it, inflects it, shapes it. Compound these effects, but then make these effects expressive rather than functional.⁹ The resultant space is the territory. Territories are more bounded; milieu markers are arranged to close off the spaces (even while they themselves open up onto others), to inflect a more common character on that space. ‘An open system integrates closure “as one of its local conditions” (closure enables, without preceding, “the outside”): and closure and openness are two phases in a single process.’¹⁰ Territories are not milieus. ‘A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus.’¹¹ A territory is an act, territorialization, the expression of a territory. The car with its rhythm, discussed earlier, creates a territory when the space it moves through does not just react to it, but when the car and its music expresses something. Though some objects are unique in the resonance they provide (the only photograph of a great-grandparent, a cherished childhood toy), what is most important for the milieu is the effect of the object rather than the object itself, the effects on the space. In terms of territory, what is important is how the object expresses (e.g. a home). So one might rid oneself of all one’s possessions each time one moves, but might recreate a similar space, a similar home, with a similar feel (a sense of light, of leisure, of tension) in the next place, drawing around oneself an expressive space from a variety of markers and milieus. One makes oneself at home (and, indeed, is often asked to do just that).

My office in early morning reflected sunlight: most wall-space is covered in over-laden bookshelves, what’s free is papered with calendars and posters from old conferences. The surface of my desk is well-hidden under rather random-seeming stacks of papers. I settle into my chair and turn on the computer, log on to email – a link from this space to a broader world (often to spaces of colleagues in offices much like mine). The shelf above my desk is cluttered with photographs, two Hindu idols, a Darth Vader action figure (facing off against figures of Scully and Mulder), a Batman PEZ dispenser, a dried rose.

Home, likewise, is a collection of milieus, and as such is the organization of markers (objects) and the formation of space. But home, more than this, is a territory, an expression. Home can be a collection of objects, furniture, and so on that one carries with one from move to move. Home is the feeling that comes when the final objects are unpacked and arranged and the space seems complete (or even when one stares at

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unpacked boxes imagining). The markers of home, however, are not simply inanimate objects (a place with stuff), but the presence, habits, and effects of spouses, children, parents, and companions. One can be at home simply in the presence of a significant other. What makes home-territories different from other territories is on the one hand the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space), and on the other their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Homes, we feel, are ours:

It was not the space itself, not the house, but the way of inhabiting it that made it a home … 12

The process of homemaking is a cultural one. The resonance of milieus and territories are cultural in that the specific expression of an object or space will be differentially inflected based on culture. Culture is meaning-making, and so the meaning effects of the aggregate of what I am calling one's markers (one's personal effects) reflect (though not reflect, rather inflect or create) cultures. Cultures are ways of territorializing, the ways one makes oneself at home. ('Culture is judged by its operations, not by the possession of products'13). Personal objects open up onto culture (and open up culturally), we draw on that culture when we mark space with that object (or idea or symbol). A business suit articulates one into a particular culture, a rock poster into another. Culture is the expression of an aggregate of texts, objects, words and ideas, their effects, meanings and uses. One culture differs from another by territorializing differently. Though cultures can share objects and ideas, they arrange and inflect these differently (e.g. different cultures may use the same ingredients, but produce much different food). However, cultures cannot be reduced to a symbolic, or meaning-specific, plane alone; cultures are expressions, they exist only in their expressions (and their repetition, which we will address below). A characteristic cultural space (the feel of a Russian apartment, a Greek Villa, a Korean temple, a stuffy academic office) may not have 'meaning' per se, but it is cultural and has the effect of shaping space and therefore the experience of that space. Culture is a complex aggregate of meanings, complexly articulated to an equally complex aggregate of texts (thought broadly), and both in turn complexly articulated to yet another complex aggregate of practices.14 Though one's spaces are singular iterations of more broad cultural spaces (or modes), a culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations.

To label a space 'home' in and of itself territorializes that space depending on cultural and social norms (though never absolutely). For instance, to use the term 'home' as I have throughout may strike one as odd in the regions of the world that this essay is most likely to circulate, because of strong articulations of the term to gender, passivity, leisure (gendered, again), both household and sexual labour, and so on. Home, as I am using it, is the creation of a space of comfort (a never-ending process), often in opposition to those

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very forces (Deleuze and Guattari cite a housewife whistling while she labours at home; it is the whistling and comfort-effect that is home, not the house necessarily). Indeed, much in the same way as it is essential to differentiate between nation and state and not conflate the two, it is crucial that we separate the ideas of home and the home, home and house, home and domus. The latter terms in these pairs of contrasts are proper, normative, and may have little to do with comfort. Indeed, the home may be a space of violence and pain; home then becomes the process of coping, comforting, stabilizing oneself, in other words: resistance. But home can also mean a process of rationalization or submission, a break with the reality of the situation, self-delusion, or falling under the delusions of others. Home is not authentic or inauthentic, it does not exist a priori, naturally or inevitably. It is not individualistic. The relation between home and the home is always being negotiated, similar to what Foucault once called 'the little tactics of the habitat.'¹⁵ It is crucial because only then can we begin to disarticulate the idea of home from ideas of stasis, nostalgia, privacy, and authenticity (which, as Doreen Massey has argued, are then coded as female), and present a more open and dynamic concept that does not tie identity to static place or reproduce gender inequality by articulating women to enclosed prison-homes while the men wander free, wistfully nostalgic for the gal they left behind.¹⁶ This is not to argue that homes are not gendered, they are. As Ivan Illich has put it:

Gender shapes bodies as they shape space and are in turn shaped by its arrangements. And the body in action, with its movements and rhythms, its gestures and cadences, shapes the home, the home as something more than a shelter, a tent, or a house.¹⁷

One cannot deny that the car-space and office-space described at the opening of this essay are gendered male; the important point is not to universalize that experience – I mean to do just the opposite, to ground it in the specificity of forces. This is why it is so important to differentiate between home as I have been describing it and the home or house; home is a becoming within an always already territorialized space (the home, the house, the domestic). Witold Rybczynski, for example, in his book Home: A Short History of an Idea, focuses much more on the changing nature of The Home (or at least, the Western European home) than on the territorializing process itself.¹⁸ His chapter titles clearly set out the normative (and gendered) dimensions of the home: nostalgia, intimacy and privacy, domesticity, commodity and delight, ease, light and air, efficiency, style and substance, austerity, and comfort and wellbeing. Home can be a site of resistance, a leverage point against normative structurations of space, especially as the home becomes a domestic network terminal¹⁹ and the idea of homework further expands beyond unpaid gendered labour and the extension of education after school hours. (… p 301)

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Notes

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1987, p 311.

2 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p 313.

3 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p 313.

4 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1994, p 168.

5 Quoted in Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1994, p 150.

6 Ivan Illich, Gender, Pantheon (New York), 1982, pp 1, 19.

7 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, p 169.

8 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans Richard Howard, Hill and Wang (New York), 1981.

9 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p 315.

10 Meaghan Morris, 'Crazy Talk is Not Enough', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol 14 no 4, 1996, p 393, following from Brian Massumi, 'Becoming Deleuzian', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol 14 no 4, 1996, pp 395-406.

11 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p 314.

12 Boym, Common Places, p 166.

13 Michel De Certeau and Luce Giard, 'Envoi: A Practical Science of the Singular', M De Certeau, L Giard and P Mayol (ed.), The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2: Living and Cooking, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1998, p 254.

14 This culture-assemblage is by way of Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans D Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1991, but see J Macgregor Wise, Exploring Technology and Social Space, Sage (Thousand Oaks, CA), 1997, p 79.

15 Quoted in Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill), 1992, p 1.

16 Massey, Space, Place and Gender; Meaghan Morris, 'At Henry Parkes Motel', Cultural Studies, vol 2 no 1, 1988, pp 1-47.

17 Illich, Gender, pp 118-19.

18 Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Viking (New York), 1986.

19 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places, Routledge (New York), 1996.

J Macgregor Wise, 'Home: Territory and Identity', Cultural Studies, vol 14 no 2, 2000, pp 295-310.

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