Humanising Through Conjecture: Recognition and Social Critique among Houseless People

ABSTRACT

There are aspects of fieldwork which elude our ethnographic toolkit. How can we, for instance, theorise on mental illness and addiction among the houseless without pathologising or medicalising? Based on 3½ years of fieldwork this article argues for a speculative approach that interweaves critical phenomenology, compassionate storytelling and analytical autoethnography. It reflects on a rough sleeper who kept asking me ‘Are you laughing at me?’ thereby revealing a process of mutual de-individualisation and re-individualisation. By producing moments of confrontation where subconscious presumptions no longer work, people issue critique of the routinised violence they are subject to, negotiate their fears and desires and seek recognition. Using micro-moments to investigate larger structural processes and questions of power, identity and belonging, the contribution of speculative anthropology lies in humanising. Combining deep ethnographic insights with projection and conjuncture offers avenues for decentring and for doing and interpreting anthropology compassionately, critically, and equivocally.

KEYWORDS:

• Speculative anthropology
• analytic autoethnography
• critical phenomenology
• social critique
• houselessness

With rushed steps Tilo (50s) – one of my closest research collaborators – and I hurry to reach one of the side-exits of Leipzig’s main station to escape the bulky security guard who is pursuing us because Tilo lid his cigarette metres before the exit. When the sun blinds us upon stepping outside, the tension I had felt slowly leaves my body.

Phew.

I let the relief flow out of my lungs in a deep sigh. Tilo has an open arrest warrant to his name which could have turned this transgression into much more than a harsh warning.

‘Ah well’ says Tilo

One must celebrate every once in a while

waving away my raised eyebrows and jingling the newly won coins in his pocket.

We had visited high schools after recess and had found the schoolyard littered with energy bottles; free money just lying around.¹ I am standing in the sun, typing fieldnotes into my phone, a new galaxy Note10+, when an unhoused station regular staggers towards us a can of beer in one hand, holding his pants up with the other. He can barely walk but fixating the cigarette dangling from Tilo's mouth he puts one foot in front of another and moves towards us in a zig-zag-like-motion. Shortly before reaching Tilo, he loses his balance and falls flat on his face. Beating away our hands which reach for his arms, he fights himself back on his feet. Teetering back and forth, he demands for a cigarette. After Tilo offers him one his attention turns to me. He stares at my phone and my colourful clothes. He moves his face closer until it is millimetres from mine and asks:

Are you laughing at me?

‘No’ I respond and move away.

But he follows. Tilo, now losing his calm, tries to step between us and divert attention unto him by casually asking about the weather. But the man opposite me becomes increasingly frustrated asking repeatedly:

are you laughing at me?

His tone gains provocative at my un-moving face. He commences poking me first with his index finger then with his hand before he starts slapping me over the head:

are you laughing at me?

Are you laughing at me?

Are You Laughing At Me?

ARE YOU LAUGHING AT ME?

I have long stopped responding and am now trying to shield my head against his hands which grow rougher with every time he poses his question:

are you laughing at me?

Still, only every other attempt reaches me, and he has a tough time remaining in an upright position. I do not think about hitting back. I do not feel at risk. I am not alone. I could push him away or call for help. But I do not. My landscape of feeling is one of despair, not for me, but for him. His slaps hurt me, but not as much as his pain strikes me. And I feel something else too: shame. Shame which builds in the silent spaces between his questions. I feel it undulating through me, growing behind my skin, burning, and reddening my face from the inside. I do not say anything because I do not know what to say. I am not laughing at him, but I feel that making this clear is futile. This does not seem to be about me and him as two people meeting but about his emotional lifeworld regarding what both of us represent. The man’s anxiety, anguish and anger are likely directed against my appearance, not my person. And as I silently stand with my discomfort, my shame, and his despair, I let him turn me into the ‘imaged other’ (Carlbom 2003; Ahmed 2014) who is seemingly laughing at him because I do not know what else to give him at that moment.

My silence is part of the ‘affective unsaid’ of my research experience (Saramifar 2015). After years of ethnographic fieldwork, I am no longer a stranger to despair and the varied ways in which it can find release. I carry it too, the anger and dejection at the disconnect between effort and outcome which characterises the lives of many people in capitalist, post-welfare states. And I carry something else. An acute awareness of my own privilege. Privilege which lets me return ‘home’ whenever I want to, privilege which places me securely and safely within mainstream society. It is not even a privilege I have earned myself, but one into which I was born. By parents were not rich. Not at all. But I had something which I have come to appreciate as the luxury of our contemporary society: I had emotional security. I had parents who loved me no matter what and who showed me that. My parents taught me to believe in myself and my value, to cherish myself and demand that others do too. Growing up, I knew that whatever I did, my parents would be there to catch me should things go wrong. This allowed me to begin worrying about things like money and security only much later in life. I could experiment, follow my passions, and realise them. The fact that I was allowed to fail contributed immensely to my success. I could focus on school, free from worrying about anything else. Then on university. Then on finding a job I like.

During overt fieldwork with unhoused people, we collaboratively decided on the scope and direction of the research and queried whether, if, and how unhoused people can realise fundamental rights to privacy and intimacy even though these rights are tacitly tied to tenancy-protected housing. Between October 2018 and September 2021, I have spent a total of 26 months doing full-time fieldwork. Since then, I visit my collaborators every couple of months, spending between two and three weeks with them. I have interviewed over three hundred unhoused research collaborators and accompanied twenty-seven rough sleepers through their everyday lives. I also studied the deep entanglement of unhoused people’s lives with police, state agents and service providers. This research thus captures affected persons experiences, institutional responses, and legal and policy frameworks.

My collaborators are between their early teens and late seventies. Their backgrounds and stories are vastly diverse. But there is a common denominator. Many did not have that ‘someone’ who is there no matter what, or they had lost that person. They had found themselves alone when they most needed someone with no one there to hold them and help them back on their feet. It is, and this has become abundantly clear to me, emotional pain before anything else which gives the initial push that can cumulate into an avalanche whereby multiple problems come together and eventually render a person unhoused. This does not equal naively assuming that nobody would be unhoused would we only take better care of each other. There will always be people who choose this kind of life and others who fall through the cracks of society’s aid system. But, in our explanations of houselessness we have saddled the horse up the wrong way. Or rather: our explanations start in the middle, not the beginning. Joblessness, we say, can lead to houselessness, debt can, addiction can. What we forget to ask is what triggers joblessness, debt, or addiction. And here, it is ruptures in the social fabric more than anything else.² Take addiction for instance. Quite often the path is not addiction → houselessness, but an emotionally traumatic event which leads people to turn to consumption because they can no longer bear their reality and/or because they find community and a sense of belonging among those people who consume too (see also Hari 2017). A third reason is that making enough money to finance their consumption then structures their everyday and gives them something to do, something to strive for. What is more, many people begin consuming not before but after they become unhoused and many do not do drugs and only drink occasionally, if at all. Who am I then to push someone who is already on the ground which structurally has much more to do with a society which has individualised a social problem rather than tackling it head on than with whatever it is that got him there?

Eventually, Peter, one of the men who meet at the main station daily to drink, listen to music, chill, and beg comes over, grabs the man hard by his arm and shouts in full volume:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You are fucking insane. You know that babe. She is here every day. Luisa, remember? She isn’t laughing at you, you fuckin moron.

The man's glazed eyes flicker with recognition before his legs give in and he sinks to his knees crying uncontrollably. Peter rushes me away, one arm firmly around my shoulder, but I keep turning back to the human being crying uncontrollably on the floor in front of the main station.

Even after I have cleaned my face from a layer of unrecognisable substances which the man’s hands had left on me, washed my clothes, and took a shower I cannot shake this scene. Whilst he was the one attacking me and pushing me, he seemed to simultaneously be the one who felt hurt and threatened. His pained expression, tired and worn and the aguish with which he tried to gain control is now hunting me. His

are you laughing at me

stayed with me. This man, who was too drunk to walk straight, stand in one spot and say a word which was not cut into pieces and reassembled in a wave by the slur of his intoxication, still did not escape the feeling that he was watched and laughed at. But the discomfort and shame I had felt because of his

are you laughing at me

stayed with me as well. It came back in dreams and quiet moments, and I often consciously thought back to it too. Over the coming years, I kept going back to that scene, putting my finger back on the emotions to seek an understanding of what they mean and what they tell. Over the course of my research, I saw this man almost daily. I took extensive notes on his practices, but he never moved past that sentence and none of my other collaborators nor the social workers I engaged with had any information about him. How then, can we include and theorise on people whose ways of being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1979) cannot be captured with our standard ethnographic toolkit? We may, as I argue in this paper turn to speculative, experimental theory in a way whereby we interweave our in-depths ethnographic knowledge with projection and conjuncture so not to pathologise mental illness (Luhrmann 2007; Luhrmann 2008) or medicalise addiction (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009), but to humanise instead. This paper focuses on the above-described encounter between the man and me. Using speculative theory, I weave together analytic autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner 2000; Anderson 2006; Ellis et al. 2011), compassionate storytelling (Ellis 2017) and critical phenomenology (e.g. Mattingly 2019). This focus allows me to explore the ‘moral breakdown’ (Zigon 2007)³ created by the clash of our ways of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1979)⁴ and the ways the world is to us and examine lessons about value, worth, blame, and belonging in our contemporary society, about morality and ethics. Through a microanalysis about grappling with this moment, I attempt to bring into view the immanent fields through which the man, other rough sleepers and myself invent meaning and live by it (Biehl & Locke 2010). This is also why I make visible my own presumptions, positionalities, thoughts, and responses. I thus analyse this moment in our fieldwork to understand how we wrestle with the world but also explore the insights it gives about the influence of larger structural processes and workings of power, about how we treat others and about the state of our society. This I do through an analysis of how other rough sleepers engage with the man and negotiate their fears and desires through this treatment and what critique the man may issue larger society through his approach. I do not pretend to know the man’s inner world nor reduce it to fit one analytical framework. I do not wish to make him a pawn in a theoretical analysis but use the gift he has given me through our encounter to speculate about what this might tell us about humanity, society, and interaction. Additionally, I seek to explore the ambiguity and unsettledness, the inventiveness with which all of us navigate this moment and the frustrations, fears, shames, and critiques that result from it. Consequently, I do not rely on one layer of analysis but explore various interpretations. Finally, I reflect on the possibilities of such a speculative approach for doing and interpreting anthropology compassionately, critically, and equivocally. I argue that if we overcome a desire to smoothen out multiplicity and incommensurability in data collection and analysis and if we theorise micro-encounters using multiple layers we can not only grapple with the intricacies of that moment and those involved. We can also learn something more general about concepts and their effect and about how people create their lifeworld and live in it.

Decaying in Public: The Man Is to Blame – or How We Individualise Emotional Suffering

The next day there is a commotion when I return to the station.

‘Do you want me to beat him up?’ asks one of my research collaborators.

‘I'll kill him’ says another.

Their preoccupation is with me. Not with him. He seems to matter only because he caused a scene. His emotional world is not part of the concern of the station regulars.

‘What happened to him’ I ask them? Why is he in such a bad state?

‘Oh, that guy? He’s broken that's it’; they tell me.

And:

he always does this. He is completely paranoid. Always watching everyone around him like they care about him at all. I mean how is he not getting that no one fuckin cares? It’s not the first time, he has pulled this crap. Actually, he is giving us much trouble because he always, always starts shouting at random people or he walks into them or tries to mess them up.

Listening to the rough sleepers voicing their frustrations about the man about whom nobody had any information got me thinking of what it means to live in public amidst a sea of passers-by. The way in which passers-by see through him or do not recognise him at all reduces the man to a body in public. And a decaying body at that. The surfaces of such bodies in public then offer an empty canvas to be filled with assumptions. And indeed, a sense of being watched and judged by others without being known is acutely present among rough sleepers (Casey et al. 2007). This notion of decaying in public, of having one’s feelings, one’s states, ones ‘everything’ hung out for the world to see and potentially judge, impossible to escape from the public views, bias and opinions posed a threat to my unhoused research collaborators. While the act of being ignored can be painful, this still constitutes recognition and is qualitatively different from not being seen, being overlooked or indeed having one’s individuality be disappeared under a biased collective identity which is presumed and brought to live through assumptions and stereotypes about rather than engagement with. By approaching people and asking them whether they laugh at him – a practice the man spends substantial amounts of time doing – he might have invested in becoming the agent of this reduction. By approaching passers-by and asking them ‘are you laughing at me’ he may complicate the possibility that people walk past him without seeing him or try to get past him without any interaction – who disappear him as it were. He might disrupt their ‘invisible making’ by confronting them with their attempts not to see him. Instead of letting others ignore him or see him badly, his actions may be an attempt to call them out on their ignorance or bias. In this way, he may temporarily escape invisibility and a totalised group identity and become an individual. For the moment, the man is then seen, even if he is seen badly. Hence, approaching passers-by and asking them whether they laugh at him may be a desire to confirm his existence, to confirm that he is seen and has not indeed become invisible in a steady stream of people. And it could be a conscious tactic to resist and reshape the meta-narrative about rough sleepers and to do so by calling all those out who keep it alive be it by actively contributing to it or through their ignorance and their silence.

But the way in which other rough sleepers call the man paranoid also makes me think of Lacan (Lacan et al. 2006). Lacan tells us that paranoia is a gaze of yourself unto yourself through the other. Thinking with Lacan we can say that the man’s anger might stem from the fact that he becomes aware of his appearance and positionality by perceiving those around him who have a different appearance and positionality. He might be externalising his inner uneasiness and reinserting it into the stranger passers-by or, in my case, the anthropologist. His imagined reality may be so overwhelming that he is projecting his feeling about how he is perceived on the bodies around him. As a result, every face which turns to him, the eyes which meet with his seem to laugh at him, him the man too drunk to stand straight whilst others buy their morning coffee. His unwashed clothes soiled with urine, faeces and vomit contrast with the assorted styles which pass through the station. Recognising this difference, he might not only feel constantly watched but also laughed at. And while in all the years I saw him nearly every day, nobody ever approached him, he could have still felt under attack by the sheer exposure of his state to the world.

When he was asking and later slapping me, I was the only body amidst the various groups of unhoused station regulars who had had a shower that same day, who had my hair in a clean braid, who wore clothes which were colourful and clearly not donated and who had a type of cell-phone impossible to afford for anyone on benefits. I belonged to a world he had left or been pushed from. Confronted with the difference in appearance, he may have looked at himself through what he thought my eyes see when I look at him. What he interpreted as my judgemental gaze may then be his externalised shame about transgressing normative behaviour and appearance. In Lacan’s sense this would indicate that he was recognising himself in the gaze of me as the Other.

If we focus not so much on how he reacted to my presence but on the fact that he actively approached me and challenged me – that he sought me out – another interpretation is possible. His walking up to and questioning me might have been due to a sense of uncanny which I caused because I represented something familiar which he had repressed and which I now forced on him by being near him (Bowman 2007). Ahmed shows us that ‘the figure of the stranger is familiar. A stranger is someone we recognise (as a stranger) rather than someone we do not recognise’ (Ahmed 2014). Hence, the man may be approaching others and questioning whether they are laughing at him with the desire to recognise himself against their presumed laughter. Through seeking proximity to housed people he may seek to confront himself with himself and with a life which might have been his but no longer is. His reaction however, the incessant asking, escalation and eventual breakdown suggests that he no longer recognises himself against this presumed laughter and that the inability to do so breaks him. His approaching of passers-by who either do not notice him or walk around him with quite a bit of distance, his questioning them, urging a reaction from them, might then be a consequence of his desire to recognise himself (whatever that ‘self’ entails) and to be recognised.

Society’s Inhumanity Laughs at You

It is possible, of course, that the focus must on me, not him. In that case, the ‘moral breakdown’ (Zigon 2007) of the man may have been an indication of misrecognition or the recognition of a lack. He may have recognised the inhumanity in me as a representative of the housed Other who does not care about his suffering. An Other who has created an explanatory framework which makes the man not society responsible for his fate and for the possibility of change or improvement. Here then, the signifier and signified of his desire for recognition and for me to recognise the problems I embody do not match. Consequently, he may displace his anger at the state of the world and his role and place within it onto me and others. Through this projection, such persons could be imagined as representatives of housed society which would allow the man to assume that I was laughing at him and that under my unmoving visage lay worlds of judgement. Here, the man becomes a representative of the ‘subaltern who cannot speak’ not because she has no voice, but because her voice is not heard, her suffering not recognised, and her critique not considered (Spivak 2003).

This is a consequence of the explanatory framework many post-welfare societies have created for houselessness. ‘No one has to live on the streets in Germany’ is a popular slogan. What lays behind it is the assumption that we have created a society with a well-functioning safety net where all those who need help will be helped and where no one who accepts help is left behind. However, in this explanatory framework houselessness becomes a symptom of personal failure in multiple ways. By becoming unhoused, one fails as a neoliberal being for being unable to live a housed, employed and socially secure life marked by constant self-improvement and control (not needing to be helped) (Schneider 2021). Second, one needs support and must tap into society’s safety net which is held together by all those who are in control, e.g. one becomes both personally responsible for one’s situation and a burden to others (needing to be helped, needing others to help). And finally, if one remains on the streets one has clearly failed to tap into the safety net, one has been unsuccessful in accepting help and moving beyond the need to be helped and so one is no longer deserving of help (activation principle); one becomes the ‘dangerous underclass’ of post-welfare society which poses a threat to the welfare of others (see also De Giorgi 2006). This is then not interpreted as an indication of systemic failures, but due to personal failure or, to put it in the words of an interviewee who works for the city of Leipzig:

Anyone who is still on the streets wants to be there. Otherwise, they would accept the help that we offer, change their lives for the better and get off it already.

Hence, one’s situation becomes a deserved consequence of one’s inability to be in control, accept help and move beyond help. This moves the conversation around houselessness entirely away from questions of structure, power, and politics. Instead, it becomes one of personal successes and failures. And since this is the hegemonic discourse shaping houselessness, this discourse weighs not only on housed people, but on unhoused individuals too. Many spend a great amount of time portraying that they fulfil the neoliberal aid criteria around control, help and development.

Neoliberal Competition: You Are to Blame for How We Are Treated

The man poses a threat to the recognition of other rough sleepers as specific kinds of rough sleepers which also affects the image of their collective identity. In his book ‘Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition’ Taylor et al. (1992) inquire what is at stake when people demand recognition of their group identities by public institutions. He outlines two different forms of liberal government: one which protects no group but ensures equal rights and protections of all citizens and one which focuses on a particular culture while protecting basic rights and welfare of those who do not belong to that group. Germany focuses on housed and employed people while seeking to protect basic rights and welfare of unhoused people. However, due to this focus, unhoused people are pushed to the margins of society’s priorities. This position is reinforced by the principles on which the aid system fusses. Germany’s aid system rests on an activation principle whereby those in need receive assistance but only if they themselves take responsibility for their circumstances and work actively on improving them (Schneider 2021, 2022). Rather than focusing on prevention by providing an adequate supply of affordable housing and assisting those at risk of losing their home, existing policy reacts after people become unhoused (Schneider 2022). Germany attempts to move people off the streets and into shelters and temporary accommodations but does not offer quick rehousing. Instead, it places high barriers around transitioning to independent housing again because independent housing is not understood as the secure basis from which to address those issues which have rendered a person unhoused in the first place,⁵ but as a reward for having solved them (Henley 2019). This approach often fails, as the demands that are put upon unhoused people within this ‘staircase’ model are too high to be met. Unhoused people are taken care of within the institutional framework of ‘learning how to live independently’ only if they actively seek support: then various service providers accompany them before they can transition to independent housing. For unhoused people, this means demonstrating the will to move towards normative ways of living in tenancy-protected accommodation alongside evidence for addressing and overcoming social problem. An unhoused person who is transgressing these expectations contributes towards upholding the stereotypes of unhoused people as lazy bums. Since unhoused people are not treated as unique individuals but as a group in need of assistance, such transgressors then become a threat towards the image of the whole group and may face stigma and exclusion as a result.

This is precisely what happened to the man. One station regular explained that –

he [the man] is a fuckin disgrace to all of us. He is the reason why we cannot sleep in Sparkasse [a bank] anymore because the police think we will piss in it or shit in the corner. It’s because of fuckers like him that everybody thinks we hobos have lost control of our lives, that we are dirty parasites.

Of course, nobody knew whether the man had ever in fact slept in a Sparkasse. When I asked, other rough sleepers had laughed this question away with the words ‘that guy, he sleeps wherever he falls over’. But he became the recipient of all those negative emotions which resulted from instances where those who shared such frustrations felt rough sleepers had contributed to their own negative image or to policies which limited their agency. They did for instance make him responsible for the fact that since 2017, classic music is played at the main station to deter rough sleepers from staying there (Höck 2018).

Had he just behaved himself, then they would have let us stay there. But its drunkards like him that make them [city politicians] think that all rough sleepers should leave the main station because otherwise it will be a disgusting image for people who arrive in Leipzig.

They also made him (or people like him) responsible for the fact that the police had erected fences around the main station heating vents thereby preventing rough sleepers to sleep on them during winter; and for the armrests which now separate individual seating spots on benches so that people can no longer lie down and sleep on them.⁶ Hence, the man who rejects the script of appropriate unhoused behaviour nourishes the fear in other unhoused people that they too will be summarily categorised as equally ‘out of line’ and hence that no assistance or understanding will be granted to them and that they will become the focus of heightened and negative policing. And indeed, ethnographic work on houselessness has outlined tactics of spatial injustice, segregation and exclusion by states, public officials, and legal enforcers against houseless people.⁷ Interestingly, most rough sleepers did not blame street-level bureaucrats (e.g. police, city administration, social workers etc.) for how they are treated because as I was told:

They are just doing their jobs.

They did, however, blame those rough sleepers who as they put it

have become hobos in their heads

for conforming to stereotypes of unhoused people as ‘pathetic losers’ (Höjdestrand 2009: 15; see also Parsell 2018) and for thereby, in the words of Carlbom (2003), turning ‘imagined others’ into ‘real others’. One rough sleeper explained it to me in the following way:

You have those who are on the streets, but who still have it together in their heads. They know how to behave themselves. They would never just take a dump where they are sleeping or soil themselves. And then there are those who in their heads are the last bum.

Another added that:

These hobos have lost control of all things. They are not even realising what they are doing anymore. When Mutsch [a female elderly rough sleeper] and I used to beg in front of x supermarket, we never had an issue. We cleaned up after ourselves and were neither aggressive nor annoying. I mean, we want something from these people [housed people] so the least we can do is be friendly and forthcoming. But one day of people like him [the man] in front who shout at shoppers or aggressively ask them for money, and you can bet that the next day the police will make sure that no one begs there anymore. Shouting at people is totally unacceptable.

And a third said:

Everyone says people on the streets are dirty and out of control. So long we are not like that at all, what they are is a bunch of liars. But if some of us are, it suddenly becomes true for all of us and it no longer matters if some of us are not.

The man became the carrier of all that is wrong. So, not only might he have recognised himself as the Other, but he also became the Other among people who shared his fate. His hygiene and demeanour were a provocation for other rough sleepers who felt that it was due to people like him that they were not recognised as part of society but instead seen badly and potentially treated badly as rough sleepers who neglect hygiene, basic niceties, and socially acceptable behaviour. Ahmed suggests that ‘the work of emotion involves the “sticking” of signs to bodies: for example, when others become “hateful,” then actions of “hate” are directed against them’ (2014: 13). Through essentialising difference, we produce imagined others. But the emotions that result from this imagining process, be it love, hat, rejection or disgust become attached to real people. Ahmed also shows how we group certain signs together. To give an example, those bodies who might be housed could be the ones who look clean. Those people who might be housed might be the ones who behave orderly. Those bodies who could be unhoused are the ones who might look unwashed. Those people who are unhoused might be the ones who behave badly. ‘Such associations’ says Ahmed ‘stick precisely insofar as they resist literalisation’ (2014: 76). So, if unhoused individuals receive signs such as dirty, lazy, drunkard, mad, mental … they begin sticking to them. Because of this negative imagination and the resulting stereotypes, rough sleepers seek to separate themselves from these imaginaries – free themselves of the signs that have been stuck on them – by creating further essentialising distinctions between themselves (who should not have these signs stuck to them) and others (who should). Such emotional labour then reinforces specific kinds of politics (like the principles of social assistance described above) and those affected by them create new distinctions; a ripple effect which escalates the production of difference. However, this is not just a response to how unhoused individuals are classified by mainstream society. It is also an active form of alliance building and of the formation of belonging. Rough sleepers who create distinctions between themselves as unhoused and others as hobos, not just create a difference between different ways of being without housing, but also an identification with housed society. Here, I was told that:

‘We’ are liked housed people just without a house. Otherwise ‘we’ are the same. ‘They’ are the last bums. They are different in every respect.

Immobilising the Man Within

The fact that the man was ‘treated badly’ as a transgressor isolated him. This isolation set him apart from most other rough sleepers I met and got to know who were embedded in unhoused communities (Costa Santos 2017; Schneider 2022). Such communities make it easier to gather the wherewithal of life and offer a sense of belonging. The man did not have such a community. He was almost always alone. Even though he spent his days in front of the main station and thus at an extremely populated place which was frequented both by rough sleepers and by housed people, he was avoided by everyone. Those unhoused people who drank or begged near him never invite him to join. They kept a distance.

In the months after the ‘are you laughing at me’ incident, I noticed countless times how the man approached one or other group of rough sleepers and offered them his hand. Not only did no one take it. No, people actively turned their backs on him or asked him to ‘piss off'.

I learned that rough sleepers decide very carefully whose hand to shake, whom to greet with a nod and whom not to greet at all which reveals yet another social codex of hierarchical differentiation. The heavy drinkers in front of the main station belonged to the group whose hand was almost never shaken. During my first week of research, the following scene had occurred. I had stood in front of the main station with Björn, who would become a close collaborator and friend. Ziggi, one of the drinking station regulars walked directly up to us. He introduced himself by putting his hand out to offer a handshake, but Björn simply nodded at him. Ziggi then moved on to offer me his hand and I shock it. His hand was bandaged, brown and soaked with what looked like yellow puss. After he left, Björn handed me a small bottle with hand sanitiser and said with a wink:

I got this thing this morning extra for you. Knew you would make loads of newbie mistakes. Lesson one: never shake someone’s hand if you don’t know where they have been. Only once you really know people then you can start doing it with a few selected folk. Spending your days on the streets, you don’t know when next you can wash your hands with water and soap.

However, while the decision to shake somebody’s hand was carefully evaluated, I rarely met people who were actively turned away by more than one group. One of the things which touched me the most during my research was that most rough sleepers were more than ready to integrate people into their groups. Whether someone had frequent bursts of anger, multiple personalities, severe mental-health-issues, various addictions … whatever it may be, nobody had to be alone. The man did. Whenever he looked to join a group of rough sleepers, he was asked to ‘piss off’. On the other hand, however, they did have an eye for his presence. If he began walking towards passers-by who entered the main station or staggered towards the crosswalk which would take him away from the station and into the park, they walked in front of him, stood there with about one metre of distance, asked him where he was going and told him to turn back. The fact that he was told to ‘piss off’ whenever he came close but was kept close at the same time is remarkable: he was confined within.

In his book ‘Immunitas’ Esposito (2011) explains how communities might deal with threats in similar ways than bodies deal with viruses: through containment within and immobilisation. The man had nowhere else to go. By excluding him but simultaneously confining him within the group of rough sleepers who frequent the main station, they tried to ensure that he poses no threat to them anymore. The other station regulars did not look to expulse the man from belonging to the group of rough sleepers. They did however isolate him within and make him the target for their anger and frustrations. So long they had him, they stood out as the good rough sleepers for he was the bad one.

However, so long he was told to ‘piss off’ he was at least seen by the other rough sleepers, he was noticed as having a presence. This enabled him to keep approaching them, but it also constantly confirmed his exclusion. This might have enhanced his high sensitivity to those around him. That they told him to piss off but never attacked him may also be an act of kindness. Peter was clear that –

usually, we will polish your face if you fuck up like that. But that guy, he isn’t even half a chicken. Only meat, bones, urine, and alc. I don’t want to beat him up. There is nothing on this man anymore. So, ‘shut up, piss off and make no more problems for us’.

The same double logic of protecting themselves but also protecting him, of using him but also letting him use them underlay their reasons for not allowing him to venture off too far. One said:

Well, if we do not watch out, he will go and attack others and then we might no longer be tolerated here at the station. This guy, he could also so easily be arrested if you let him do his thing for a moment and a guy like that will not do well inside [prison or psych ward]. He might also just get lost because he has no idea where he is … he might just keep walking then fall over and never find back. I mean he is ill somehow. We are tired of him, but we let him do his thing … well kind off … and just watch out that he is not becoming a problem for him and us.

What Does the Man Offer Us? A Window into a Decaying Public, Questioning Routinised Violence and Mutual De- and Re-Individualisation

The man’s question stayed with me for years and began an ongoing reflection. The discomfort stayed with me too. And maybe that is exactly what it was supposed to do. Maybe that is the critique that the man issued. A critique against me and what I stand for. A critique against mainstream society and the values we have created and how we create notions about those people we deem worthy and in control and those we deem laughable. The smallest unit of analysis, individuals, helps us speculate about how the man experiences his world, how he perceives those around him and is in turn perceived by them. If we consider a meta level, we can appreciate the same incident as an emotional reaction not to a despair at decaying in public but instead as a sign of a decaying public. The man may have become aware of how he is carrying all the decay of the nation by being confronted with someone – like me – who lives within mainstream society. He might have realised that his decay is the decay of everyone else, the decay of a community of care which has been swallowed whole by a society which individualises and responsibilises. This awareness produces a certain loneliness and separation. Indeed, to those who follow neoliberal logics of individualisation and rendering responsible, the man’s situation is a consequence of his own actions rather than that of a society which has lost the ability to take care of its suffering tissues. Consequently, most housed people will not recognise what the man sees because they are too drenched in the privileges of being securely placed within tenancy-protected housing, a privilege which becomes marked onto their bodies (Csordas 1994). This markedness and the resulting appearance and approach possibly pushed the anger of the man. He might have realised that I, and other housed people like me, are part of his grotesque decay even if I do not smell it on myself for the continuums of violence of poverty and marginalisation have seemingly washed my hands of it and dirtied his. Simultaneously, this would mean he understands how lonely he is with his perspective.

Tactically, the ‘are you laughing at me’ incident shows a process of mutual de-individualisation and re-individualisation whereby people escape a totalising group identity and re-individualise themselves by de-individualising others. In her work on the destabilisation of concepts, Mattingly builds on Arendt and writes that ‘every day life is governed by opinions or “unexamined prejudgments”’ (2003: 174) about others and the world that make us vulnerable to tolerating or even reinforcing harm (Mattingly 2019: 423). Indeed, ‘one of the most disturbing and insidious features of prejudgements is that they come with a veneer of certainty’ (2003: 168). These prejudgements lead us to take the status quo for granted. They can thus damage our ability ‘to make thoughtful judgments’ (2003). The man shows us how our presumptions are entwined with our role and place in the world. They are so deeply engrained, so normative, that we have lost the ability to reflect on them until we encounter something or someone who disrupts us. In the moral breakdown (Zigon 2007) which follows situations where our subconscious assumptions no longer work, where something shakes us, we become aware that what we assume to be ‘natural’ is in fact constructed. It is here where we are challenged and must regain our bearings; and it is here where we can begin imagining alternatives. The man’s approaching and questioning others offered such moments for myself, possibly himself, other rough sleepers, and society at large. The man is end-individualised by society who see him not as a person but as an unhoused person and thus as part of a group whom they have created totalising perceptions about. In so doing, they disappear him. The same process occurs between him and other unhoused people who use him to create notions about belonging and unbelonging too. He is subsumed under a negative imaginary which allows other unhoused people to position themselves in contrast to him for self-elevation. And the man himself, seems to approach housed persons not as individuals either but as parts of a society which looks down on him, and thus as part of the problem. For instance, by de-individualising me he forcefully makes me feel through the problematic way in which I as a representative of housed society see him and de-individualise him and in turn, this may allow him to re-individualise himself. Moreover, by confronting me he made me a gift: that of a forced reflection. The man brought me face to face with my prejudgements. He made me aware of how habitual it is to ignore or unsee pain around me. He made me realise that this pain is not just the responsibility of someone or something else but that, through my everyday (in)actions, I help create it. And he made me aware of how habitual and how subconscious my place in the world is to me; how I naturally put myself at the centre and how this shapes my outlook and perspective, my normativity. His question seems to point to the prejudices of people, and he so makes visible the harm they do to him. By flipping the prejudice around he gives us a glimpse into how it feels. He lets us see the dark underbelly of ignorance. By problematising our ‘unexamined prejudgements’ he forces us to examine them. Thinking with Hannah Arendt, this can be interpreted as an ethical and political process of questioning society’s received wisdoms (Arendt 2003: 167). The man’s actions complicate the assumption that he is passively bearing his predicament. His question moves into focus and unsettles several assumptions and categories around how we classify housed and unhoused, value and worth. Simultaneously, however, his continued existence around the main station and the fact that he does not move past this sentence makes uncertain the possibility of sustained change through this calling out. This calls into question whether such a decay can be endured. We cannot know whether he is anticipating another chance at life or trying to bring to life a new politics of care against de-individualising, classifying, stereotyping, confining ‘norm’; whether he is voicing frustrations, acting out his pain or whether something else is at play. Yet, the process he engaged me and others in offers avenues for perceiving and engaging with each other differently; of decentring. He exposes violence, disgust, and despair but also a potential for a becoming and for a new ethics of care.

And for Academia? Speculative Anthropology’s Potential to Grapple with the Excess of Experience and with Multivariety in Theorising

And from his gift I take the responsibility to do the same in my work. For me, the anthropological project is not about eliding the multiplicity and plurivocality of lived experience into clear cut, linear explanations. Rather, I invite people to think along by offering interpretive possibilities. Analysing experiences in multifarity (Zigon and Throop 2014; Mattingly 2019) offers a lens to examine specific life worlds and how they influence and are influenced by structures of power, oppression, and possibility. But also, how we work with theories and concepts and how we apply them to contain and explain experience. To escape this self-imposed straitjacket, I offer not one interpretive framework of this ‘perplexing particular’ (Mattingly 2019) but passionately believe in the value of speculative and experimental theorising and thus of providing multiple, overlapping, sometimes alternating interpretations. Geertz called on researchers to interpret experiences as texts and to analyse them from every angle possible (Geertz 1993). I try to do so with methodologies and theoretical synthesis by including my own positionality, perceptions, and process, micro-encounters on the ground and a multiple theoretical analysis. At the core of this analysis is the attempt to not approach theories or concepts as ‘received wisdom’ either and to ‘critique concepts not merely via other concepts but experientially’ to ‘destabilize’ and ‘defrost’ (Mattingly 2019: 431). I am calling on researchers to confront us with the presumptions and consequences of the broad variety of methods and theories available to us, to engage, even with that which seems elusive or uninterpretable. Undoing a presumed certainty or linearity can leave us perplexed, but the overlapping interpretations can point us in new and worthwhile directions. To do so we must consider micro, meso and macro levels of analysis since typologies are never just the product of power or inequality. They need to be brought to live and continued by people on the ground, who are influenced by them, but can also unsettle and change them. If we want to confront received wisdoms and enhance our knowledge we must question, critique, unsettle, deconstruct, and so make visible the unexamined, unquestioned, the categories, typologies, narratives, approaches, and frameworks we work with. And we must consider various possibilities, interpretations, layers. By using different interpretative frameworks and possibilities of reading and thinking through, I render uncertain any one explanation and render possible each one of the explanations; Such an approach invites us to grapple with what can never be fully grasped, with what will always to a certain extent remain elusive. In this case, it helped to think about how we perceive unhoused people and analyse their ways of being-in-the-world by humanising instead of pathologising or medicalising, but to also think more generally about how we cluster, group, and order the world and those in it.

Ethics Statement

The research complied with ethical standards of the European Union and has been approved by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department Law & Anthropology. Research participants were adults who received complete and accurate information about project goals beforehand and provided active (verbal/written) consent. Where appropriate, unhoused participants’ personal information is pseudonymised to minimise any harm they could incur due to being part of the research and personal data is kept confidential, encrypted, and securely stored. Due to the sensitivity of the material, the copyright remains with the researcher and will not be shared for reuse. During the research, I paid two research collaborators. I did not remunerate other collaborators for participating but did assist them with food, drink, and other necessities.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my research collaborators without whom none of the work I do would be possible. I am grateful to my colleagues for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this manuscript and I also want to thank the editors of Ethnos and the two anonymous reviewers for helping me to further strengthen and refine my argument. Their comments really were a gift and I hope it did them justice. Finally, I wish to thank the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for supporting my fieldwork and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for supporting this publication.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Max Planck Institut für Ethnologie, Department Recht & Ethnology.

Notes

1 In Germany many plastic bottles as well as cans have a deposit. They can be returned to shops and exchanged for cash. Energy bottles have a 25cent deposit.

2 Concomitantly, death, loss, break-ups, depression, and mental-health issues are too often side-lined despite being main triggers for houselessness (see Schneider 2022).

3 Zigon moves our thinking about morality away from a totality ‘of principles and rules’ towards ‘a bodily way of being in the world that is continually shaped and reshaped as one assumes a new and different life, that is, social experiences’ (Zigon 2008: 17). While morality is embodied, ethical thinking allows to reflect critically on one’s morality and thus to shape one’s moral self as well as broader discursive moralities. Moments of ethical reflection become possible when the habitual is disrupted – the moment of moral breakdown – and a person is forced to develop an ethical response. Since the encounter between the man, myself and other unhoused persons is such a moment of breakdown it generates ethical reflections and workings on our moral selves and the composition of our overall moral world.

4 Heidegger’s existential concept of being-in-the-world refers to how we understand others in the world and how we associate the ontological status of others with our own Dasein, how we are being with others and with the world from our unique vantagepoints (Heidegger 1979). This can help us understand that while we can never see the world from the exact way someone else is thrown into it, knowing this incommensurability allows us to seek understanding using a mixture of experience and conjecture about very real possibilities rather than assuming truth or ignoring relations altogether.

5 Which is the case in housing first approaches as for instance Finland practices them (see e.g. Tsemberis 2011).

6 Similar tactics around exclusion and appropriation of public spaces have been analysed in e.g. Berlin, Graz and Zurich (see Krusche et al. 2021).

7 To name just a few, O'Neill (2017) documents how rough sleepers are put on busses and transported out of Bucharest; Höjdestrand (2009) shows us how spatial and social exclusion amidst a lack of regulated space lead both to acts of brutality and violence against unhoused people as well as to their death and disappearance; Fast and Cunningham (2018) analyse how gentrification and poverty management are pushing young houseless people to the margins in Vancouver; Marcus (2006) shows how erasure leads houselessness to be ignored despite soaring numbers in New York and Bergamaschi et al. (2014) analyse how urban policy practices exclude those without housing in Bologna.