Home

Definition

Home, in the wiki's Deleuzian register, is a territory produced by the act of territorialisation — not a place identity comes from but "a place we are." The concept's fullest statement in the wiki is J Macgregor Wise's essay: "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… they are both the product of territorializing forces" (p. 391). Home is "a collection of milieus… the organization of markers (objects) and the formation of space. But home, more than this, is a territory, an expression" (p. 393): "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. The resultant space is the territory" (p. 393). The editors' headnote condenses the thesis against the reader's other essays: "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" (p. 391). Home's defining content is the comfort-effect — "the creation of a space of comfort (a never-ending process)"; "it is the whistling and comfort-effect that is home, not the house necessarily" (pp. 394–395, via Deleuze & Guattari's whistling housewife) — and its distinguishing differentiae are temporal ("the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space)") and affective ("a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Homes, we feel, are ours") (p. 394).

The home/house/domus separation is the concept's load-bearing distinction. "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" (p. 395). 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" (p. 395). Home is "a becoming within an always already territorialized space (the home, the house, the domestic)" (p. 395) — the relation always negotiated, per Foucault's "little tactics of the habitat." Boym's formula carries the distinction: "It was not the space itself, not the house, but the way of inhabiting it that made it a home" (quoted p. 394).

The concept stands in two relations to the wiki's dwelling-cluster: to dwelling as the Deleuzian alternative to the Heideggerian fourfold (dwelling as located, originary ground vs home as portable, processual becoming), and to domestic-interior as the site-concept the distinction corrects — the home's markers 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" (p. 394). It also contrasts with the origin-bound home of displacement studies (Hadjiyanni's homes of cherished traditions left behind): Wise's home is portable as effect, not as origin — "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" (p. 393).

The concept's gender-political edge is constitutive: the home/house separation exists "only then… 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" (p. 395). Yet "This is not to argue that homes are not gendered, they are" — with Illich's co-shaping thesis: "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" (quoted p. 395).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Wise ingest to hold home-as-territorialization against the wiki's dwelling, refuge and domestic-interior pages (see log).

Key Thinkers

• J Macgregor Wise — the concept's theorist in this wiki: home as territorialization, "a place we are"; the home/house/domus separation; the coping/resistance double and its delusion-risk; home as "a site of resistance, a leverage point against normative structurations of space" as the home becomes "a domestic network terminal" (2000/2006).
• Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari, not yet paged — see log) — the theoretical source: the child in the dark singing ("the song marks a space… structures that space and creates a milieu," quoted p. 391); the milieu definition; "A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily" (quoted p. 393); the whistling housewife ("it is the whistling and comfort-effect that is home, not the house necessarily," pp. 394–395).
• Walter Benjamin — the trace-foundation of the home's markers: "To live means to leave traces" (quoted p. 392, via Boym) — home as what dwelling deposits and later dwelling inhabits.
• Ivan Illich — the dwelling-trace formula and the gendered co-shaping: "all living is dwelling, the shape of a dwelling. To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left" (quoted p. 392); "Gender shapes bodies as they shape space and are in turn shaped by its arrangements" (quoted p. 395). Not yet paged (see log).
• Svetlana Boym — the inhabiting-thesis source: "It was not the space itself, not the house, but the way of inhabiting it that made it a home" (quoted p. 394). Not yet paged (see log).
• Doreen Massey — the identity-of-place thesis and the gender-politics: "the identity of place is in part constructed out of positive interrelations with elsewhere" (quoted p. 392); the female-coding of stasis, nostalgia, privacy, authenticity (quoted p. 395).

Related Concepts

• milieu — home's elementary medium: "a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component"; the home as "a collection of milieus" organized into an expressive territory.
• territory — the concept's parent: territory as act ("an accretion of milieu effects… expressive rather than functional"); the home-territory as territory's affectively claimed, temporally lived case ("Homes, we feel, are ours").
• dwelling — the concept's phenomenological rival and partial ally: Illich's "all living is dwelling" links them; the fourfold's located ground is what the de-origined home dissolves.
• domestic-interior — the concept's site and its limit: the home-territory's markers exceed the room's objects (the presence and habits of companions); the home is "a becoming within an always already territorialized space."
• habit — home's building operation: "the accumulation of habitual acts that are shown to be permeable, changeable and socially reinforced."
• deterritorialisation — home's mobility: the re-created home as reterritorialization — "a similar feel… in the next place."
• comfort — home's content: "the creation of a space of comfort (a never-ending process)"; the comfort-effect as what makes the territory home.
• refuge — the home/house distinction as the refuge-prison dialectic's resolution: the home may be violence; home as coping-resistance; against "enclosed prison-homes."
• trace — the marker-trace continuum: "markers are traces of movement that has passed."
• boundaries — marking without walls: the coat, the posture, the smoke as subtle territorial markers.
• milieu · territory · Practiced Place — the mechanism triad: milieus radiate from lived markers; territory compounds them expressively; the home is the lived, temporalized, affectively claimed case.
• Gender and the Interior — the concept's political horizon: the female-coding of home-values and the prison-home articulation the home/house separation is designed to break.
• Identity of the Interior — the disciplinary homonym: the discipline's identity-question vs the person's identification ("a process of identification, of articulation of affect") this page theorizes.
• Home-Ownership Democracy — the concept's political-economic register: home as security-asset ("bricks and mortar" invulnerability; "steadily rising property values"; Cameron's "keys in their hand") — the arrangement that fuses home, property and identity, and that the home/house/domus separation is designed to disarticulate.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the concept's source: the anti-originary thesis, the comfort-effect, the person-markers, the home/house/domus separation, the coping/resistance double, the recreated "similar feel," the Rybczynski foil, and the domestic-network resistance claim (pp. 391–395).
• Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — the concept's sociological deepening from the everyday cluster: "'Home' is not simply house, roof, family. There are people who have houses and families but no 'homes'" — familiarity necessary but insufficient; "the feeling of confidence: 'home' protects us"; "the intensity and density of human relationships — the 'warmth' of the home" (p. 239) — home as a relational achievement over the house, beside Wise's comfort-effect and person-markers.
• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the origin-bound home against Wise's de-origined one: "the constraints faced by many in creating a supportive home environment, one where individuals and families can practice cherished traditions, from cooking favorite foods to hosting friends and relatives and passing down to the next generation long-standing religious rituals"; the foreclosure — "people may find themselves without the choice to appropriate their homes to support their way of life" (bounded-choices). Where Wise's home is portable as effect, Hadjiyanni's is practised where bodies and rituals actually are — the wiki's two accounts of home when lives move.
• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the interview record of the home as "constant renegotiation… to resolve the tension between identity and social role" (editors) — the socially reinforced, changeable home beside Wise's territorialization.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the room-of-one's-own as home's Woolfian form ("this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited," p. 341) — the self-expression theory Wise's territorialization thesis is positioned against; the refuge-prison dialectic the home/house separation reworks.
• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the claimed home: Heping "throwing himself onto the comfortable bed" and appraising the transformed apartment "This feels just like staying in a four-star hotel" (pp. 329–330) — the home as sign-constituted (vs Wise's history-and-memory-constituted) limit-case.
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the planned-suburb register, and the concept's mode distinction: two ways the same estate becomes home. The elective mode — the architect-resident's identification with the design and "the political idea behind it," an "ideological and politically motivated version of what Savage et al. (2005) calls 'elective belonging'" (p. 547; see elective-belonging). The accumulated mode — belonging built over residence time through place-based social capital in micro-places: "to be able to pop into a neighbour" as "one of the reasons for staying here" (p. 547; see social-capital, micro-places). The register also supplies home's unintended-marker case, kin to Wise's marker-trace continuum: with the façades so homogeneous "some children had problems finding their way home" — "In order to make him recognize where he was supposed to enter, we sat his snow-sleigh on the outside" (p. 546). Home as what the marker achieves where design's aura stays 'hidden' (see practiced-place, habit).
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the charter register: the Aladdin 1919 epigraph that gives the book its title distinction — "Did you ever really consider the wonderful difference in the meaning of the words house and home? A house is a structure to live in. Home—the dearest place on earth—is that structure that is a part of you… It is a refuge from the trials and struggles of the outer world. It is a visible expression of yourself, your tastes and character" (p. 11) — home as the house plus its accumulated family life, refuge and self-expression; the Jeffersonian ground ("the American Dream to own land—land upon which a home could be sited… undeniably part of the market forces shaping the planning and design of new home communities today," pp. 20–21); and the design programme the distinction licenses — entries that "symbolize the warmth and hospitality found inside the home" (p. 84), community design that maximizes "the potential for residents to develop a sense of belonging and connection to their home, neighborhood, and community" (p. 78). Where Wise disarticulates home from house, Wentling's production practice names exactly what must be added to the house to make the home — the wiki's refuge/domestic registers given their builder-side specification (see dwelling, porch, domestic-interior).
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the childhood house and the ordinary street as the origin of an architectural sensibility (pp. 110–14); the home as symbol of family and hearth (Wright's fireplaces, p. 28); and the erosion of the private house's public obligation in the modern suburb (pp. 15–16, 170–71).
• source-notes/cochrane-colenutt-field-2015-living-on-the-edge

Open Questions

• Is home a place, a process, or an effect? Wise holds all three: the territory (place-like), the territorializing act (process), the comfort-effect (affective output). The headnote's formula — "home is established by the act of territorialisation, the accumulation of habitual acts" — makes the process primary. Can a design discipline operate on the process (designing conditions for habitual accretion), or only on its markers while the act remains the occupant's?
• Does the home/house distinction survive the gendered household? Wise's separation is designed to unhook home from the female-coded values (stasis, nostalgia, privacy, authenticity) — but Illich's co-shaping thesis ("the body in action… shapes the home") shows the home-territory itself is gendered. Is the distinction a political tool (breaking the prison-home articulation), an analytic one (separating comfort-effect from proper dwelling), or both — and at what cost?
• Home's portability vs Hadjiyanni's displacement: "One makes oneself at home" each move — but Hadjiyanni's refugees and divided families show the conditions under which the making fails ("without the choice to appropriate their homes"). Is Wise's recreated "similar feel" a universal capacity or a privilege? See bounded-choices, transbodied-space.
• The delusion problem: Wise allows home to be "a process of rationalization or submission, a break with the reality of the situation, self-delusion, or falling under the delusions of others" — with no criterion to distinguish coping-resistance from submission. Is the distinction the home-theorist's blind spot (the process cannot judge itself), or is the demand for a criterion itself the "authenticity" thinking Wise sets out to disarticulate?
• What does the domestic network terminal do to home? The elided pp. 302–310 presumably develop it: as work, education and surveillance route through the dwelling, does home's resistance-leverage grow (Wise's claim) or does the network terminal colonize the comfort-effect (compare Maycroft's work-framed everyday, work-leisure-distinction)?