Between roots and rhizomes: Towards a post‐phenomenology of home

Abstract

Humanistic and phenomenological scholarship has long tended to regard home as a fundamental place of existential and experiential stability. In recent times, the notion of home has been critically re‐examined, however, and home is now regarded as a more complex and multi‐faceted phenomenon. Drawing on interviews with prospective buyers in two cities of the Czech Republic, I explore the complexity of home and pay particular attention to the internal tensions and paradoxes of home as imagined by people buying a flat in which to make their home. I specifically attempt at opening home as a theme and field for post‐phenomenological inquiry which has so far relatively neglected it despite the rich phenomenological tradition. In analysing the complex and seemingly contradictory imaginary home‐to‐be expressed in the interviews, I employ a Deleuzian notion of territorialisation and argue that it can be used to productively account for the inner paradox of home as both a stable and secure place to put down roots and a rhizomatic place of temporary and transplantable instance of being at home. The paper proposes to infuse phenomenological understanding of home with Deleuzian insights and as such represents an answer to the calls for instilling post‐phenomenological geography with post‐structuralist contributions. This I argue may help geographers to develop post‐phenomenological geography of home while overcoming the limitations of a phenomenological approach. At the same time, it can allow for bringing the emerging post‐phenomenology of home closer to the more established critical geographies of home on both a thematic and theoretical level and open up a space for potential cross‐fertilisation of concepts and ideas.

Anticipating Technology‐Enabled Care at home

“…3.1 | Homes that are: the stability of ontological security As highlighted in section 2, academic scholarship has attended to the plurality of meanings around home: fluid, performed, embodied -emerging from practices rather than an object, attempting to move beyond phenomenological accounts of home (Gibas, 2019), and interrogating their socio-material relations (Lupton, 2018). Such scholarship has challenged the supremacy of ontological security (oneʼs ability to have autonomy and control in order to maintain continuity in their lives) in questioning notions of stability and fixity, just as can be seen in work on futures.…”

“…Together these discussions bring into question the issue of temporality in homes and futures scholarship, encouraging us to consider how notions of stability may change. Although others, such as Gibas (2019), have sought to explore the contradictions between home as place to be rooted and ontological security enacted, while simultaneously being temporary and translatable, scholarship on home more generally has yet to engage with futures scholarship and specific logics of anticipation. Indeed, whose anticipation is an important aspect to consider, and in the next section I move on to explore questions of social distribution and inequalities of technologies by discussing the "being" at the centre of TEC homes.…”

Is post-phenomenology a critical geography? Subjectivity and difference in post-phenomenological geographies

“…Post-phenomenology has recently been articulated and engaged within the discipline by a handful of scholars (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Gibas, 2019; Lea, 2009; Rossetto, 2018, and others) who situate it as a re-evaluation of classical phenomenology through the lenses of science and technology studies (see Ash, 2019) and post-structuralism (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 49; Gibas, 2019: 604; Lea, 2009: 373). Commentators have positioned post-phenomenology as an emerging paradigm that, as of yet, admittedly lacks coherence and a stable reference point (Lea, 2009; Roberts, 2019: 545).…”

“…Lea (2009) identifies another set of engagements for post-phenomenology, including: experience, corporeality, affect, dwelling, and landscape. Others have reworked phenomenological concepts, including ‘home’ (Gibas, 2019) and ‘world’ (McCormack, 2017), to speak to post-phenomenological concerns. There are also some experiments with ‘post-phenomenological methods’ including repeat photography (Rossetto, 2018), mobile methods (Spinney, 2015), and object-oriented and sensory methodologies (e.g.…”

“…Yet engagements with phenomenology have persisted, most notably through the development of non-representational theories (Thrift, 2008). The more recent call for post-phenomenology builds on these reworkings of phenomenology, reconceptualizing it through a poststructuralist lens (Gibas, 2019: 604). Post-phenomenology, then, is the most recent outgrowth of a maturing poststructuralist moment in geography that has turned away from earlier concerns with text and discourse toward theories of practice and embodiment.…”