Unhomely Experiences: A Phenomenological Approach to the Unsettling of Homes through Infrastructural Devices

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – II

Abstract

Taking a genuinely phenomenological approach, this contribution will explore the unsettling of home experiences through infrastructural “devices”—here understood as flexible, context-independent, simple or sophisticated technologies and micro-interventions—in three parts: A first phenomenologically-grounded part will examine the notion of “home” as a shelter of intimacy, integration, and imagination; “home” as a site of gathering, privilege, and rootedness; as well as “home” as the ontological horizon of body-, language- and self-formation (Bachelard 1958, Heidegger 1971, Merleau-Ponty 1974). Addressing some of the limits of these earlier conceptualizations (Young 2005, Dolezal 2017), a second part will particularly focus on people’s postcolonial condition as “unhomely.” In Homi Bhabha’s terms (1992), the “unhomely” is characterized by the blurring between “world” and “home” that can lead to traumatic ambivalences, or to what AbdouMaliq Simone most recently phrased as “a politics of making home on the run” (2019: 28). In a third step, I will demonstrate how the postcolonial making or unmaking of “home” is currently reconfigured and further unsettled through “devices,” such as prepaid meters, portable loos, solar panels, water filtration devices, and humanitarian design shelters (von Schnitzler 2016, Redfield 2016, Scott-Smith 2017). These “devices” often times function preventively or interventively as secondary layers on top of already existing or still absent modern infrastructure. A strong emphasis in my discussion will be laid on how devices are not only indicative, but minimally responsive to the “End of the World” (Tsing 2015, Morton 2013, Jackson 2011), or more so to the ‘End of the Home.’

Author

• Laurin Baumgardt, Rice University