Home: Territory and Identity

Author: J Macgregor Wise Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; original: "Home: Territory and Identity," Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2000, pp. 295–310; © 2000 Taylor and Francis Ltd, reprinted by permission; excerpts of original pp. 297–301) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 391–396, with the editors' headnote and the essay's own Notes section, p. 396, printed in full; excerpts of the Cultural Studies article's pp. 297–301, with one elision marker — "(… p 301)" — recording where the Intimus reprint cuts the original) Raw file: raw/chapters/wise-2006-home-territory-identity.md

Summary

Wise's essay argues that home is not an originary place from which identity arises but a territory produced by the act of territorialisation — and that identity is likewise a product of territorializing forces, so that "home and territory: territory and identity." The essay opens with Deleuze and Guattari's child in the dark singing under his breath: the song marks a space, its periodic repetition structures that space into a milieu, and the milieu is the first home — a space of comfort made, not found. From there the essay builds its vocabulary in three movements: milieus (spaces shaped by sound, bodies, objects and symbols, crossing and "essentially communicating," radiating outward when their markers are lived); markers (walls and fences, but also a coat saving the seat, posture, cigarette smoke, clothing, accent — traces of movement that has passed, radiating "a field of force" when encountered and practised); and territory (the accretion of milieu effects compounded and made expressive rather than functional — "A territory is an act, territorialization, the expression of a territory"). Home is a collection of milieus organized as an expressive territory, whose markers are not simply inanimate objects but "the presence, habits, and effects of spouses, children, parents, and companions"; what makes home-territories different is "the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space)" and "their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect." Crucially, Wise insists on separating home from the home, house and domus — the latter terms "proper, normative, and may have little to do with comfort" — because home is not authentic or inauthentic, does not exist a priori, and may be a space of violence: home then becoming "the process of coping, comforting, stabilizing oneself, in other words: resistance." The essay's gender-political stake, via Doreen Massey, is to disarticulate home from stasis, nostalgia, privacy and authenticity ("which… are then coded as female") so as not to reproduce "gender inequality by articulating women to enclosed prison-homes while the men wander free" — while admitting, with Illich, that homes are gendered nonetheless.

A note on the editors' headnote: the headnote supplies the reading's frame and its sharpest contrast — "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… 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). It positions the essay against the reader's self-expression essays (the editors' own "Roam of One's Own," Turpin's expression-theory): home is established by territorialisation — habitual, permeable, socially reinforced — not expressed as a self.

A note on the elision: one marked cut — after the domestic-network-terminal passage (original p. 301) — elides the original article's pp. 302–310, the essay's closing nine pages, including presumably the fuller treatment of identity-as-identification, reterritorialisation, and the essay's conclusion (see Open Questions).

Key Claims

The anti-originary thesis (the essay's ground): "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" (p. 391). Home is a becoming, not a provenance — the decisive contrast with every "home as origin" or "home as self-expression" account.
The child in the dark (the founding scene): Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's child, "gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 311, quoted p. 391). "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" (p. 391) — the refrain as home's first mechanism: comfort produced by sonic marking and periodic repetition.
The milieu defined: "The milieu is 'a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component'" (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313, quoted p. 391). Space-making by repetition is home's elementary operation.
Milieus cross and communicate: "Milieus cross, 'pass into one another; they are essentially communicating;' rhythms blend and clash" (p. 391, D&G quoted). The car's bass rhythm "shapes the space of the street, changes the character of that space," envelops the passer-by "in the bubble of sound," and is released as the car turns the corner — while the street's pre-existing milieus (quiet suburban, congested downtown) "reassert themselves after it leaves" (pp. 391–392). Milieus are rhythmic, transient, and layered over occupied space.
Space as social interrelation at all scales: "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'" (Doreen Massey, quoted, p. 392) — the household's intimacy as one scale of a single continuous field, not a separate sphere.
The marker's double life: "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" (p. 392). The wall is not the boundary's truth; the lived marker is — a theory of the boundary as radiator rather than container.
The taxonomy of subtle marking: marking is done by placing objects ("a coat saves the seat"), arranging stuff ("to make sure no one sits beside us on the bus or the bench"), bodies ("posture opens and closes spaces; legs stretched out, newspaper up"), smoke and scent ("different types of cigarettes, like clove, inflect the shape of the space"), symbols ("from clothing style (preppie, biker, grunge) to words on a t-shirt, but also graffiti, posters"), and language ("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") (p. 392). Space-marking needs no walls: the everyday body and its effects are the minimal territory-drawing apparatus.
Markers as traces: "In and of themselves markers are traces of movement that has passed. 'To live means to leave traces,' as Benjamin once wrote" (p. 392), and Illich's corollary: "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" (quoted, p. 392). The marker and the trace are one: home is what dwelling deposits and what later dwelling inhabits.
The identity of place is elsewhere-derived: "the identity of place is in part constructed out of positive interrelations with elsewhere" (Massey, quoted, p. 392). Each milieu "opens up onto others" — the apartment opens onto "a distant living room in a house far away, or onto a beach with those waves," onto a then (memory-space) but also nows ("that building has been pulled down, he's now living in Phoenix, she's in law school") and "imagined places (where one has never been, photographs of objects that never existed, at least in that way)" (pp. 392–393).
No space is enclosed: "No space is enclosed, but is always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces" (p. 393). The interior's closure is local, provisional, and enabling — "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" (Meaghan Morris, quoted, p. 393).
The example of the marker's radiance: "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" (p. 393) — the object's effect constituted by meanings, biography and kinship, not by the object itself; the essay's own office (bookshelves, calendars, photographs, "two Hindu idols, a Darth Vader action figure… a Batman PEZ dispenser, a dried rose") as the marker-field in first person (p. 393).
Territory as expressive accretion: "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). And in Deleuze and Guattari's formula: "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" (quoted, p. 393).
Territory is an act: "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" (p. 393). Territory is verb-like: not a bounded place but a performed expression.
The effect of the object outranks the object: "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)" (p. 393). The wiki's third theory of the domestic object: not the concrete symbol (Csikszentmihalyi), not the sign-value (Baudrillard), but the milieu-effect.
The recreated 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)" (p. 393). Home is portable as effect, not as inventory — the reterritorialization that Wise's movers perform each time.
Home as collection, territory and expression: "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" (p. 393); "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 unpacked boxes imagining)" (pp. 393–394).
Home's markers are persons: "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" (p. 394) — home decoupled from the house altogether: a territory whose markers can walk.
The two differentiae of home-territories: "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" (p. 394). Temporalization plus affective identification — not ownership, function, or furniture — is what home adds to territory.
Boym's inhabitation thesis (quoted): "It was not the space itself, not the house, but the way of inhabiting it that made it a home …" (Svetlana Boym, quoted, p. 394) — the essay's epigraph-in-practice: the way of inhabiting, not the container.
Cultures are ways of territorializing: "The process of homemaking is a cultural one… Cultures are ways of territorializing, the ways one makes oneself at home. ('Culture is judged by its operations, not by the possession of products')" (de Certeau & Giard quoted, p. 394). "One culture differs from another by territorializing differently" — same objects, different arrangements and inflections ("different cultures may use the same ingredients, but produce much different food") — and the cultural aggregate is triple: "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" (p. 394). Cultures "exist only in their expressions (and their repetition)" — "a culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations" (p. 394).
Home vs the home, house, domus: "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 concept-page distinction this ingest adds to the wiki: home as process/comfort-effect vs the home as proper and normative.
The dark side of the home: "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 as coping-process without authenticity-guarantee — the wiki's strongest anti-nostalgic definition of home.
The Foucauldian negotiation: "The relation between home and the home is always being negotiated, similar to what Foucault once called 'the little tactics of the habitat'" (quoted via Daphne Spain, p. 395).
The gender-political programme: disarticulating home from "stasis, nostalgia, privacy, and authenticity (which, as Doreen Massey has argued, are then coded as female), and present[ing] 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 body-space co-shaping ("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," quoted p. 395), and the admission 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… to ground it in the specificity of forces" (p. 395).
The Rybczynski critique: Witold Rybczynski's 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. 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" (p. 395) — the essentialist home-history as the essay's foil, parallel to the Rice critique of Praz/Thornton/Gere.
Home as resistance and as network: "Home can be a site of resistance, a leverage point against normative structurations of space, especially as the home becomes a domestic network terminal (Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin) and the idea of homework further expands beyond unpaid gendered labour and the extension of education after school hours" (p. 395). Home's leverage-value grows as telematics re-route work, education and domestic labour through the dwelling.
The editors' counter-positioning (headnote): "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" (editors' headnote, p. 391) — home as territorialization against home as self-expression, the reader's two theories of homemaking now both on the page.

Connections

Concepts: home (the essay's central concept, now paged on this source: home as territorialization — "a place we are" not "a place we come from" — with the home/house/domus separation, the coping/resistance double, and the comfort-effect definition) · milieu (the essay's founding concept, now paged: "a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component," created by the sung refrain, the car's rhythm, and every lived marker) · Territory (territory as act — "the accretion of milieu effects… expressive rather than functional"; D&G's "bites into them, seizes them bodily" beside Campos's placeless field) · Deterritorialisation (the reterritorialization register: possessions discarded, home recreated with "a similar feel" from new markers) · Habit (the headnote's formula: "the accumulation of habitual acts that are shown to be permeable, changeable and socially reinforced" — habit as home's building operation) · Practiced Place (the marker that "when lived… radiates a milieu" — de Certeau's practiced place given its milieus) · Trace ("markers are traces of movement that has passed"; Benjamin's dictum and Illich's "to dwell means to live the traces that past living has left") · Boundaries (the taxonomy of subtle marking — coat, posture, smoke, symbols — against walls and fences) · The Dialectics of Outside and Inside ("No space is enclosed, but is always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces"; "closure and openness are two phases in a single process") · Dwelling (Illich's "all living is dwelling"; home as becoming vs the home as proper) · Domestic Interior (home-territories' living markers — the presence and habits of companions — against "a place with stuff") · Interiority (identification as "articulation of affect"; "mutual becoming-home" of subject and home-marker) · Memory (the photograph that "glows with memories (though not necessarily nostalgia)," articulating with a then, with nows, and with imagined places) · Repetition (the song's periodic repetition structuring space-time) · Everyday Life (home-making as the everyday's territorial operation; culture judged by operations not products) · Comfort (home as "the creation of a space of comfort (a never-ending process)"; the comfort-effect as home's content) · Refuge (the prison-home problem restated: the home may be violence; home as coping-resistance) · Separate Spheres (the female-coding of stasis/nostalgia/privacy/authenticity; the home as "enclosed prison-homes" pole) · Privacy (privacy among the values coded female and disarticulated from home) · System of Objects · Sign Value (possessions "signal identity," but home is constituted by their history-and-memory effect, not their sign) · Haecceity (the car-with-its-rhythm as the moving individuation; the territory as temporalized living) · Assemblage (culture as triple aggregate of meanings, texts and practices, via Lefebvre) · Life-World ("As practised, our life-world is flooded by the variant radiance of the milieus") · Gender and the Interior (Massey's female-coded values; Illich's body-space co-shaping) · Work/Leisure Distinction (homework expanding "beyond unpaid gendered labour"; the home as "domestic network terminal") · Smooth and Striated Space (space "composed of vectors, speeds").

Authors: J Macgregor Wise — the author (cultural-studies scholar of media and technology; Exploring Technology and Social Space, 1997, cited in the essay's own note 14) · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors framing the selection ("home is established by the act of territorialisation, the accumulation of habitual acts," p. 391) · Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari, not yet paged — see log) — the essay's theoretical source: the child in the dark, the milieu, territory ("A Thousand Plateaus," pp. 311, 313–315, quoted pp. 391, 393) · Walter Benjamin — "To live means to leave traces" (quoted p. 392, via Boym) · Michel de Certeau (with Luce Giard, not yet paged) — "Culture is judged by its operations, not by the possession of products" (quoted p. 394) · Michel Foucault — "the little tactics of the habitat" (quoted p. 395) · Henri Lefebvre — the culture-assemblage's background (The Production of Space, note 14) · Tasoulla Hadjiyanni — the contrast: home tied to origin and cherished traditions (Hadjiyanni's displaced families) against Wise's home as "a place we are," portable as effect (see home) · Doreen Massey — the space thesis ("the simultaneous co-existence of social interrelations at all geographical scales," quoted p. 392) and the gender-political programme ("stasis, nostalgia, privacy, and authenticity… coded as female," quoted p. 395). Cited without pages (see log): Ivan Illich, Svetlana Boym, Witold Rybczynski, Meaghan Morris, Roland Barthes, Daphne Spain, Brian Massumi, Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin.

Debates: Theories of the Everyday — Wise gives the everyday cluster's home-facet its Deleuzian form: Felski's everyday is built from repetition, home and habit; Wise supplies home and habit's territorialist version (home as habitual accretion; culture judged by operations), a fourth position beside affirm/transform/resist · Power and Space — Foucault's "little tactics of the habitat" as the negotiation between home and the home; the home's gender-coding and its resistance-possibility as the power/knowledge of domestic space.

Related source notes: Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the wiki's first territory page's source: Campos's placeless, reciprocal field of occupation beside Wise's expressive territory of milieu effects — both Deleuzian, both against located hierarchy, differing in scale (the designed interior kit vs the lived marker-field) · Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the editors' self-expression theory of interior (the room "decorated by numerous things self-gathered," becoming-interior) that Wise's territorialization thesis is positioned against — the two essays now the reader's paired theories of what making a room does · The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski 2000) — home as the everyday's spatiality and habit as its modality: Wise gives both the Deleuzian mechanism (territorialization as accumulation of habitual acts) · Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the practiced place beside Wise's lived marker; de Certeau & Giard's "Culture is judged by its operations" quoted by Wise · To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — Benjamin's trace-dictum as house-museum warrant (Downey) and as home's marker-theory (Wise), with Illich's "all living is dwelling" joining the lineage · 'House Beautiful' (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the interview record of home as "constant renegotiation" beside Wise's home as permeable, changeable, socially reinforced territorialization · Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) and Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the object-theory contrast: Baudrillard's sign-system closure and Tang's sign-value interior against Wise's milieu-effect (the object's history and memory, not its sign, constitutes home) · Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — inhabitation as appropriation "territorial, driven by the rhythms of habit" (Spuybroek) against Wise's territorialization by habitual acts — the two Deleuzian-register accounts of habit's spatial work · Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — home as site of cherished traditions practised against displacement, against Wise's de-origining of home; the wiki's two accounts of what home is when lives move · Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — Heller's "'Home' is not simply house, roof, family" (familiarity + confidence + warmth) beside Wise's comfort-effect and person-markers · Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the woman/interior conflation Wise's home/house separation is designed to disarticulate ("articulating women to enclosed prison-homes").

Direct Quotes

"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." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 391)

"The child, 'gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath.'" (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 311, quoted, p. 391)

"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." (p. 391)

"The milieu is 'a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.'" (Deleuze & Guattari, quoted, p. 391; A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313)

"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." (p. 391)

"Milieus cross, 'pass into one another; they are essentially communicating;' rhythms blend and clash." (p. 391; D&G quoted within)

"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." (p. 391)

"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." (p. 392)

"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.'" (Massey, quoted, p. 392)

"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." (p. 392)

"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)." (p. 392)

"In and of themselves markers are traces of movement that has passed. 'To live means to leave traces,' as Benjamin once wrote." (p. 392)

"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.'" (Illich, quoted, p. 392)

"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." (p. 392)

"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)." (pp. 392–393)

"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." (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)

"'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.'" (Morris, quoted, p. 393)

"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." (Deleuze & Guattari, quoted, p. 393; A Thousand Plateaus, p. 314)

"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." (p. 393)

"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)." (p. 393)

"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)." (p. 393)

"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." (p. 393)

"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 unpacked boxes imagining)." (pp. 393–394)

"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." (p. 394)

"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" (p. 394)

"It was not the space itself, not the house, but the way of inhabiting it that made it a home …" (Boym, quoted, p. 394)

"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." (p. 394)

"Cultures are ways of territorializing, the ways one makes oneself at home. ('Culture is judged by its operations, not by the possession of products')." (p. 394; de Certeau & Giard quoted within)

"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)." (p. 394)

"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." (p. 394)

"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." (p. 394)

"Home, as I am using it, is the creation of a space of comfort (a never-ending process), often in opposition to those 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)." (pp. 394–395)

"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." (p. 395)

"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." (p. 395)

"The relation between home and the home is always being negotiated, similar to what Foucault once called 'the little tactics of the habitat.'" (Foucault quoted within, p. 395)

"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." (p. 395)

"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." (Illich, quoted, p. 395)

"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." (p. 395)

"home is a becoming within an always already territorialized space (the home, the house, the domestic)." (p. 395)

"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. 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." (p. 395)

"Home can be a site of resistance, a leverage point against normative structurations of space, especially as the home becomes a domestic network terminal and the idea of homework further expands beyond unpaid gendered labour and the extension of education after school hours." (p. 395)

Open Questions

What sits in the "(… p 301)" elision? The cut removes original pp. 302–310 — the essay's final nine of fourteen pages, presumably including the fuller treatment of identity-as-identification, reterritorialization, and the essay's own conclusion (the "homework" telematics argument is cut mid-flow: "Home can be a site of resistance, a leverage point… especially as the home becomes a domestic network terminal and the idea of homework further expands beyond unpaid gendered labour…"). Does the original develop the resistance thesis into a full politics of the domestic network, and does the identity-side of the title ("territory and identity") receive its own treatment there?
Wise's territory vs Campos's territory: Campos's territory is "a defined, but placeless, field of action" — occupation-based, carried by designed interiors; Wise's is the expressive accretion of milieu effects, lived and temporalized. Are these two theories of the same process (occupation as expression) or competing accounts — and can the home-territory's "living of the territory (a temporalization of the space)" be reconciled with the designed kit's "timeline for use and change from location to location"?
The milieu and the non-place: Wise's car and street are milieus, not Augé's non-places — the transient, rhythmic, personally resonant against the impersonal transit space. Is the non-place a milieu that fails to territorialize (no home-territory forms), or a different kind of space altogether? The essay never engages Augé, though Taylor's own Intimus introduction frames the supermodern non-place as interiority's negative.
Is the comfort-effect designable? Wise's home is "the creation of a space of comfort (a never-ending process)" — the whistling housewife's comfort-effect, "not the house necessarily." Can interior architecture design for the comfort-effect (the milieu-radiance of markers, the recreated "sense of light, of leisure, of tension"), or only for its conditions? And what would "making oneself at home" mean as a design brief rather than an occupant's achievement?
Home's dark double: Wise holds together home as resistance and home as "a process of rationalization or submission, a break with the reality of the situation, self-delusion" — without a criterion to tell them apart. Is the distinction recoverable from inside the process (the home-theorist's own delusion risk), or only from outside (whose judgment, on what evidence)? Compare the Glass House's "perpetually self-conscious" occupant and Gilman's imposed rest-cure.
The gender of the example-fields: Wise admits the car-space and office-space "are gendered male" while insisting homes are gendered too — but the essay's home-examples (the whistling housewife via D&G, the Ganesha, the office) remain male-coded first-person. Does the home/house distinction hold in the gendered household (Illich's co-shaping), or does Wise's disarticulation leave the actual gendered home-territory untheorized? See gender-and-the-interior.
The object-theory triangulation: Wise's "what is most important for the milieu is the effect of the object rather than the object itself" sits between Csikszentmihalyi's concrete symbol (the object's meaning-network) and Baudrillard's sign-value (the object's differential signal). Is the milieu-effect a third economy of the object, or the sign-value's affective under-layer — and can the three be tested against the same room?
Culture's iterations: "a culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations" — does this make interior design (the professional patterning of iterations) the culture's reproduction apparatus, or does the profession's normative registers (Rybczynski's chapter-list) distort the aggregate it iterates? Compare Tang's "interior design as a business and generator of sign value."