Inhabitation as more-than-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar

Abstract

This essay is a response to Michele Lancione’s Housing Futures Essay, which was recently published in this journal. Bleak urban futures and the obscure perspective on housing calls for renewed attention across several disciplines, approaches and geographies. Michele Lancione pleaded to study ‘radical housing’ within everyday practices of dwelling for those living at the margins, where the latter are understood as the site where ‘a politics of life’ emerges from uncanny, uninhabitable places - with explicit reference to the work of Abdoumaliq Simone. Assuming the importance of dwelling and its immanence, can the political dimension ascribed by Lancione to the radical housing approach, be complemented with the affirmative politics of Esposito and Braidotti and Agamben’s forms-of-life? Starting from these questions, this paper aims to engage with Lancione’s dwelling as difference and offer complementary readings suggesting the rubric of ‘inhabitation’ as the result of affirmative daily strategies of learning, navigating and governing the city. By expanding the notion of dwelling to include intersecting forms of caring, repairing and imagining the future, we will substantiate the concept we refer to as ‘inhabiting’ as a relational practice occurring in marginal and fragile environments, constituted by multiple incremental and transformative acts with the ultimate purpose to hold and resist marginalisation.

Keywords:

• dwelling
• inhabitation
• ontology
• affirmative politics
• housing futures

Acknowledgment

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for the engagement with our thoughts and the very important comments made in the process. We also wish to thank Michele Lancione for allowing us to engage with his thoughts and radical call and for the provocative comments given to the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 O'Brien (2020) hits the core of this complex discussion saying that “Heidegger is, without question, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century […] The idea then that one should simply strike Heidegger’s name from the canon and ignore his work betrays a profound ignorance of the magnitude of Heidegger’s intellectual achievements, not least since it presumes that many of the most important intellectual figures from the second half of the twentieth century right through to today, who acknowledge a major intellectual debt to Heidegger, were either too blind or too stupid to notice that Heidegger’s philosophy is simply the abstruse mysticism of a charlatan or the work of a dangerous Nazi hack” (p.10)

2 Di Cesare (2014) argues that Heidegger’s antisemitism is ontological rather than race-based: “that Jews would be relentlessly devoted to the task of uprooting all beings from being. The stereotype of the wandering Jew here reaches ontological proportions, spreading their homelessness to all they encounter in an ontological uprooting of beings from being” (Mitchell & Trawny, 2017).

3 The human being is certainly at the centre; yet, in a non-domineering position, as the main human function is to care for the other. Caring for is the relational function of being and dwelling. I dwell hence I care. Dungey concludes that “modes of caring are ontologically constitutive of who we are” (2007:241) and this constitutes the ethical (and political) dimension of Heidegger’s being.

4 Gier (1980) reconstructs the concept of Lebensformen around four interconnected levels: “(1) a biological level from which (2) unique human activities like pretending, grieving, etc. are then expressed in (3) various cultural styles that in turn have their formal ground in a (4) general socio-linguistic framework (Wittgenstein's Weltbild)” (p. 245).

5 Questioning the non-representational theory he uses the register of inhabitation to not simply as a liberation but as “experimenting with styles of inhabiting, styles that manage to re-cover and re-cognize without covering over everything (inventing itself as a final vocabulary), or imagining that cognition is a matter only for human minds and human minds alone” (Hinchliffe 2002:208). Drawing from Haraway and Grosz’s material semiotics illustrates that weaving practices are all important to the politics of inhabitation […] to enliven understandings of the importance of non-human and human acts in the making of worlds (and the spatialities that are implied in those activities” (p. 217)

6 The three forms-of-(care, repair, imagine) are tightly intertwined and conducive to one another. Care and repair are increasingly discussed in the same scholarship (Jackson, 2014; Mattern, 2018; Graziano and Trogal, 2019 to name but few). Millington (2019) argues that “‍Repair can also be a care practice, especially if we understand the infrastructures that surround us to be interlinked in complex, intimate ways with broader dynamics of social reproduction.”