Home

Jordan Lee

Instead of exiling objects to the natural sciences (with the usual mixed emotions of condescension and fear), philosophy must reawaken its lost talent for unleashing the enfolded forces trapped in the things themselves. (Harman, 2011, p., 1)

Relation is everything. It makes us feel connected to people, to our friends and family, to our pets, to our cities and countries. We relate. No more do we relate than to what we consider home. But all relation, every interaction between objects, is an incomplete relation, a mere drop of understanding in an ocean of unknowingness. Why? Because objects withdraw. Behind the mask of perceived knowing is an ominous presence of the concealed. Behind every relation lurks a shadow casting its darkness over our perception. Relations are always characterised by the hidden. That which you think you know is only a piece of a puzzle of infinite scale. Thus the purpose of this paper is to emphasise the fundamental importance, and yet the ultimately unknowable nature of objects in space. That includes the ‘home’ in as much as it includes tables or humans, or concepts such as ‘nature’ and ‘God’, that transcend spatiotemporal specificity (of which morton has coined hyperobjects). I invite you to journey with me as I explore the peculiar nature of the ‘home,’ through four pictures taken by four of my closest friends, that represent four different aspects of ‘home’. I wish not to make any philosophical conclusions, nor to defend any specific philosophical argument. After all, ‘Philosophia’ translates to “the love of wisdom” however this is not to say that such wisdom is accessible.

So what is home? Home has a multiplicity of meanings. The home extends beyond dwellings (Heidegger, 1971) and the household to a realm of identity, an imaginative and physical space that encompasses our lived experience (Bachelard, 2014) . Just as ‘space’ is transformed into a ‘place’ when it is attached with meaning and becomes experienced (Relph, 1976), the house transforms into the home in the same way. The home is therefore shaped by the encounters that occur within it, between humans and non-humans. Such encounters are mediated through the body: only through the body can we access space. The home itself is embodied. Our bodies do not just operate in space, they haunt and reside in it (Merlau-Ponty, 2013). Yet our bodies function differently in different spaces: whilst the bathroom is a place for washing, the kitchen is a place for cooking. And it is specifically because encounters are tied so deeply to public spaces that the intimate manoeuvring of the home is so important to humans.

The idealised view of the home has come to be understood as an embodied, family dwelling unit (Rybczyński, 1986) separate from the outside world. The photo above depicting a large two storey house with a front lawn and a drive can be seen as the modern representation of this. The striking exterior conveyed a message to me, as an onlooker, that this was someone's home. When passing that house by at street level, I am forced to look up, to admire it and ponder over the possibilities of who lives within its walls. This is, in a sense, the paradoxical nature of the home: on display and yet hidden. An affluent family home was my guess. The SUV, a symbol of the family wealth, the front lawn perhaps a space for children to play, the large hospitable front door that welcomes the many guests passing through.

Although not literally, I had seen this home before. The ideal home. The future home many of us desire. For some cultures, this picture represents almost the epitome of a family home, and yet it is a home in which very few people live. Social and cultural norms have disconnected these spaces (Blockland, 2008). The steps and the front drive have become a symbol of the home, seen as normal or appropriate. But my home has neither of these. There’s a certain irony that an image can create a great sense of home for someone viewing it, and yet not be a place in which they have felt at home. Home in this sense operates beyond how it manifests itself in physical form, it is simultaneously a space, a feeling and a state of being in the world.

Evidently, different people encounter the home and the concept of home very differently. A person with a disability for example, may experience the home pictured above in a different way than I do:  the steps and drive that I saw as homely could serve as a barrier for them (Imrie, 2004). Meanings of home as an embodied encounter are thus, in part, shaped by individual experience. My understanding of home as a place of independence and of privacy is not always so, it can simultaneously be a place of belonging and alienation. Embodiment is therefore crucial to our encounters with the home. We cannot detach our meanings of the home from its relation to our skewed and limited perception.  When we perceive and define home we also define ourselves, thus as I observe this picture I am forced to remember that the homeliness and lack of homeliness in which I see is only one way in which this image can be perceived. Of course, a home cannot be understood solely by its physical exterior. Shelter is only one aspect of a home, for it is the intricacy and meanings that fill the inside that we know of as home.

The home is also a manifestation of our identity. This is often evident when examining the  living room. The arrangements of objects and furniture in this room are expressions of ourselves, conveying a message to us and to those we allow in this space about who we are (Cooper, 1974). The artwork on the wall for example shows the dwellers are cultured, the DVDs on display show a love of film and the magazine shows an interest in pop culture. The sofa is facing the room's centre, away from the tv suggesting a social dimension to this space, a ‘living’ to the room. It is here where we perform for guests consciously and unconsciously expressing and reinforcing our identity (Lauman and House, 1972).

We encounter objects in the living room as if they are part of ourselves. Stuck to us like limbs, an extension of our bodies (Tuan, 1977 ). Take the photographs of children on the mantelpiece. They are not just on display but draw “people, places and times” into the room. They link the past, the present and the future into a stretched domestic space (Rose, 2003). We even refer to our loved ones in photographs as if they were there in the room with us. It is precisely these objects  that extend the geography of the home outwards, transcending time and space. A home is not simply where we live, but how we live, how we encounter objects and attach meaning to them.

Encounters within the home are rooted through cultural practice. For example, as I observe this image and imagine my interactions, my encounters with the objects in this room remain governed by a set of cultural norms (Wood and Beck, 1994). Consider the picture, the sofa is for sitting, the table must be kept clear, shoes must be kept off the carpet. I am aware of these ‘living room’ laws despite never previously being in the room depicted in the picture. Encountering objects and their meanings in their intended cultural context directs us to act appropriately. The behaviour expected in the living room for example is not that expected in the bathroom or the kitchen. Therefore, just as humans can influence the space around us, the home as a space can also be highly influential on the human.

Within this kitchen the oven has a demanding presence (Akrich, 1992) , my eyes are drawn to the black box shape at the back of the room. When viewing the picture, the oven commands acknowledgment. The assumption that objects are merely there reflecting our emotions and memories doesn't feel right to me. It feels to me, as if there is a kind of agency to the objects we live with. This oven has a personality within the room. We have to wait until the oven is ready to eat. The oven determines the type of food we can eat. We must learn to use it properly. It demands a particular behaviour to use it correctly and occupies a specific space. Encountering this space I felt I was encountering more than an assemblage of objects but intimate nonhuman strangers (Hitchings, 2004).

As I look across the room to the fridge I remember a game I used to play as a child. Trying to see the fridge light turn off when the door closes. I used to open and close the fridge hundreds of times in hope to see if the light ever went off.  In order to observe if a fridge light is on, one must open the fridge door. However now the fridge has been altered, the absence or presence of a light within a closed fridge thus remains a mystery. Our access to the real fridge is therefore perpetually limited. Although I cannot access the fridge in itself, there nevertheless is a fridge, in itself. The fridge's appearance is not the fridge's reality. It is this by which onticology understands objects as eternally withdrawn and this by which I assign a degree of agency to seemingly mundane objects.

Of course objects have agency in that they can affect change on the human but also because they exist in a state of independence from human perception. It was here again that I was struck with a kind of ‘personality’. Although a seemingly strange choice of words to describe an oven or a fridge, I was aware of the presence that these objects had. If to have personality is to have a distinctive character, then I see no reason why such objects do not possess a personality. I couldn't help but feel I was looking at things in which I would never fully understand, objects whose existence are not merely to serve me but who exist in as much as I do. When we think of the homeliness of any room or any thing, we correlate our thoughts with our being. That is precisely how we understand the ‘home.’ We often fail to acknowledge anything outside of this correlation. I refuse to believe that reality is a product of human thinking. So why can’t the oven have a personality? Why does it not hold a degree of agency? Why should we not acknowledge and imagine objects as relating and communicating to each other, irrespective and independent of human consciousness? (Harman, 2011).

Although I was focused on what I could see, the image of a kitchen reminded me that our relation to objects within the home is more than visual. My interaction with the kitchen is not limited to  what I can see. Seeing can have the effect of distancing us from objects, we lose a sense of intimacy (Tuan, 1977). I could smell the aromas of a previous meal, I could retaste it as if it were in my mouth. It is memories like this that makes a place a home, “a place where every day is multiplied by all the days before it.” (Stark, 2003).

Comfort is an effective encounter between our bodies and the objects, people and spaces that we negotiate (Johnson, 2017). The university bedroom is supposed to be a place of comfort and relaxation but this picture did not feel like this for me. More than any other room I felt a distancelessness (Heidegger, 1971) from this bedroom. There was no feeling of privacy or protection , but there was also no feeling of overt publicness. The first thing one notices is the window, opening up a view of the public space, allowing light to penetrate. This functions as a constant reminder that the bedroom is not isolated; it always resonates with other spaces (Wise, 2000).

The other overwhelming presence in the room is the laptop. This serves as another window offering the possibility of wandering amongst the digital world, a ‘phoneur’ (Luke, 2003) encountering virtual realities along the way. A place without distance. Immersed in technology or staring out the window could be when the occupier feels most at home. A space of both connection and isolation.

The university home is a ‘home away from home,’ something temporary. I could feel this. There are still cardboard boxes in the corner, the walls are bare and the room appears empty like the plate on the floor. My encounter with the room evoked the greatest image of home, precisely because it appears so ‘unhomlike’. Home holds a sense of permanence for me and when that sense of permanence and security is absent, the feeling of home diminishes. Perhaps home manifests itself in its absence. Maybe it's when we are not at home that we better understand what home is.

Conclusion

Encounter is more than a meeting between humans. We encounter space, and objects on a daily basis in and around the home. The manoeuvring around this space and the objects within it reinforces our sense of home identity, even if we are not at home. Home is an encounter, a limited relation between us and the objects around us. As humans we are elements but should not be the exclusive elements of philosophical enquiry. Thus, to explore the home means more than to explore the humans within it. The objects that surround us are essential to any notion of home. It is how we encounter the space, the objects, the people within it and how they encounter us that makes a house a home. It is important to remember however that we all encounter the home differently. Although we may share an idea of what a home should look like we all have a different notion of this. Home can be an object of our desires, a physical location or nostalgic memory, but it remains an articulation of a web of relations and encounters of which humans are but one participant.

Bibliography:

Akrich, M. and Latour, B., 1992. A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies.

Bachelard, G., 2014. The poetics of space. Penguin Classics.

Blokland, T., 2008. “You got to remember you live in public housing”: place‐making in an American housing project. Housing, Theory and Society, 25(1), pp.31-46.

Cooper, C., 1974. The house as symbol of the self. The people, place, and space reader, pp.168-172.

Harman, G., 2011. Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Open Court.

Heidegger, M., 1971. Building dwelling thinking. Poetry, language, thought, 154.

Hitchings, R., 2004. At home with someone nonhuman. Home Cultures, 1(2), pp.169-186.

Imrie, R., 2004. Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home. Housing studies, 19(5), pp.745-763.

Johnson, A., 2017. Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(2), pp.274-287.

Lauman, E. and House, J., 1972. Living room styles and social attributes: patterning of

material artifacts in an urban community. The logic of social hierarchies, pp.189-203.

Luke, R., 2003. The Phoneur. Communities of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change, pp.185-204.

Lunt, A. (2005). Cultural geography: Cultural geographies of home. Progress in Human Geography, 29(4), 505-515. doi:http://dx.doi.org.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/10.1191/0309132505ph564pr

Merleau-Ponty, M., 2013. Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.

Moore, A., Carter, B., Hunt, A. and Sheikh, K., 2013. ‘I am closer to this place’—Space, place and notions of home in lived experiences of hospice day care. Health & place, 19, pp.151-158.

Morely, D. and Robins, K., 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media. Electronic Landscapes

Relph, E., 1976. Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited).

Rose, G., 2003. Family photographs and domestic spacings: a case study. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(1), pp.5-18.

Russell Hitchings (2004) At Home with Someone Nonhuman, Home Cultures,1:2, 169-186, DOI: 10.2752/174063104778053554

Rybczynski, W., 2014. Domesticity (1986). In The People, Place, and Space Reader (pp. 185-189). Routledge.

Smith, S.J., 2008. Owner-occupation: at home with a hybrid of money and materials. Environment and Planning A, 40(3), pp.520-535.

Stark, F., 2001. The valleys of the assassins and other Persian travels. Random House Digital, Inc..

Svenaeus, F., 2011. Illness as unhomelike being-in-the-world: Heidegger and the phenomenology of medicine. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 14(3), pp.333-343.

Tuan, Y.F., 1977. Space and place: The perspective of experience. U of Minnesota Press

Wilson, H.F., 2017. On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), pp.451-471.

Wise, J.M., 2000. Home: Territory and identity. Cultural studies, 14(2), pp.295-310.

Wood, D. and Beck, R.J., 1994. Home rules. Johns Hopkins University Press.