Material Objects, Identity and the Home: Towards a Relational Housing Research Agenda

Abstract

Although it is understood that the home constitutes one of the ways that individuals articulate a sense of self-identity, housing researchers have largely focussed on the symbolic meaning of home. In our paper, we seek to extend the field of housing studies by exploring the relational effects of the home. Our two key arguments are the following: first, the objects have effects that are independent of our awareness of them, and second, the formation of self is constituted in relation to the material world rather than through a separated interiority. We begin our paper with a number of observations about research on the home and the ways that sociologists and anthropologists have viewed the significance of material objects. In the main part of our paper, we draw upon Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time to illustrate our arguments. In the conclusion, we consider how Proust’s novel might be used as a resource for a more extensive ‘relational’ housing research agenda

Key Words:

• Home
• Identity
• Subjectivity
• Relationality
• Proust

Notes

1. However, of late there are examples of a more broader foci incorporating domestic and environmental spaces see for example: Noble (2002), Blunt and Dowling (2006), Coolen (2006) and King (2008).

2. See Dufty-Jones 2012 for an alternative viewpoint to ours.

3. Proust is a particularly important source in this context for a number of reasons, but pre-eminent among them is the fact that Proust so directly thematizes the issue of the relation between self, memory, and place. Interiority, in Proust, is bound to exteriority in a way that adumbrates and influences much later philosophical thinking (especially such as Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty). One might argue that a similar thematization is also present in the work of Walter Benjamin, see e.g. Benjamin (1999), although the form in which it is appears and is developed is very different – on this and related issues, see Malpas (2012), esp. chapter 11.

4. For a similar discussion see Hoskins (2006, 76).

5. This idea can be found at many places in the philosophical literature – it is evident in Heidegger’s work, for instance, in his analysis of the withdrawal of the tool in its use (see Heidegger 1962).

6. It is somewhat surprising how little of Marcel Proust’s writings has informed contemporary sociology. The work that does reference Proust is mainly in relation to class distinction. For example, Smith (2004) has established a link between Proust and the contribution made by Pierre Bourdieu and more recently Rydgren (2010) has discussed Proust’s observations in terms of cultural capital. Why so little of Proust’s work has been taken up in this regard is an interesting question, although not one that we venture to answer here.

7. For examples of research that incorporates this conceptualisation, see Rose (2003) and Rose and Tolia-Kelly (2012).

8. For a compelling argument setting out the value of literary texts for housing scholarship see Manzi (2005).

9. As Lydia Davis, the translator of the 2003 Penguin edition of Swann’s Way, writes: “the only way to read Proust is to yield, with a patience, equal to his, to his own unhurried manner of telling the story”. (Davis 2003, xvi).

10. Unfortunately, the argument for this latter point cannot adequately be addressed here – see Malpas (2012) for an extended discussion.