In cultural and architectural history and theory, the topic of the home is often approached through a trite private/public dichotomy, emphasizing the walls of the dwelling as a dividing line. Challenging this understanding, this special issue brings together articles that investigate how the boundaries of the home are perceived, imagined, lived, and culturally represented in ways that cut across traditional binary thinking. The contributions do so by taking as their starting point a conceptual continuum ranging from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the imagined, in order to consider how the boundaries of the home are negotiated in contemporary culture, temporally as well as spatially. Focusing on the boundary itself as a permeable membrane that may contain or yield—protect or expose—depending on the given context, the contributions probe the home as it interacts with its surroundings, exploring the ways in which these boundaries are not only materially given but also culturally defined.
The articles in this issue contend that such culturally defined boundaries of the home may materialize in many different ways and are not to be understood solely in architectural terms as pertaining to the built structure of the dwelling. Indeed, in this special issue, the boundary of the home—understood as the demarcating lines that define it as an entity and of which the physical walls of the dwelling are but one manifestation—are often construed in immaterial or metaphorical terms. As we shall see, these boundaries may manifest themselves as entities that are defined in negative terms when invaded by eerie species, characters, or forces—from a perceived “outside” or from the past. However, the walls of a dwelling may also be approached as mediating devices that perform culturally specific connecting procedures, for instance, when a tinted window allows light to penetrate the dwelling but in such a way that, through this very process of mediation, light itself takes on a highly loaded symbolic and cultural meaning. A temporal dimension is included in this broad definition, which envelops both the material and cultural conditioning of the wall. This dimension encompasses the past, for example, in the form of memories or the traces that have been left behind by previous inhabitants and which latently reside in the home. The temporality of the wall is a thus latent cultural constituent that becomes particularly pertinent when it comes to questions of ownership because it emphasizes the physical structure of a house or dwelling as something with a life of its own, which often surpasses the lifespan of any single owner or occupant. We may also think of instances in which the dwelling, precisely defined as real estate in legal and monetary terms, can be understood as value. The very idea of home ownership as a partially speculative opportunity for financial gain or, indeed, the unfortunate opposite—both of which may be seen as instances in which the boundaries of the home are projected into the future. Seen as a whole, the articles that make up this volume thus seek to explore the porous and permeable nature of the walls of the home and investigate instances in which the public world, for example, urban institutions and collective myths, enter, and co-define the home—and vice versa.
The five contributions that comprise this issue all use different entry points to approach the permeability of the dwelling’s walls and the ways in which these are culturally constructed. These include social scientific and cultural theoretical approaches to issues of home ownership, light and darkness, and the changing representations of domesticity in the postwar period in literature and film up until today. The work presented here originates in work done within the framework of the international research network Negotiating (In)Visibilities—A Network for Studies on the Seeable and the Hidden of Contemporary Culture. This network received funding from the Danish Council for Independent Research from 2011 to 2015 and hosted a series of academic conferences, seminars, and cultural outreach events, which has resulted in a number of joint publications, including the edited volume Invisibility Studies: Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture (ed. by Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel, Peter Lang, 2015). Like the book, the contributions to this special issue have been shaped by discussions at several of these meetings, events to which we as authors and editors are very much indebted, and this special issue’s interest in negotiations of the boundaries of the home or dwelling may thus concomitantly be regarded as an interest in different instances of the negotiation of what is considered seeable and hidden in contemporary home culture.
A common point of departure for these five articles is an approach that places the contemporary issue of the negotiation of the walls of the home within a broader cultural or cultural historical perspective. While resolutely contemporary in terms of their points of view, the articles concern both the inclusion of cultural historical lines of questioning dating back to the postwar period as well as the inclusion of non-Western material. Each distinct in its focus and methodology, the articles cover a wide geographical spectrum of scrutinized material, including French, Danish, North American, and Middle Eastern examples. Common sources of reference are classic cultural theoretical and philosophical texts, including the work of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Baudrillard. Ranging from the social anthropologist in the home to the self-observing cultural theorist to the cultural–historical and theoretical analyst of aesthetic representations and cultural contexts, the contributions span several fields of study, bridging methodologies, and forging interdisciplinary dialogue. While the main empirical material of three of the chapters is films, which are approached through cultural analytic and philosophical lines of questioning, two contributions approach the boundaries of the home from anthropological and auto-ethnographic perspectives. Yet, all of the articles circle around the idea of the porosity of what defines the home, e.g. how it may be seen—or challenged—as a bounded entity in physical, spatial, and imaginary terms. Although this porosity seems to be a natural effect of the fact that, even as a material framework, the home is tied to an invisible history of the lives of individuals in a manner that transcends any one occupant, it manifests itself in various ways, for example, through visible traces or spatial forms of organization. This also implies that different cultural practices of the home may contribute to defining our understanding of its lived and imagined edges. When taken as a whole, this special issue demonstrates the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach that grapples with the signs, bodies, and flows of home culture through theoretical, aesthetic, and lived experience.
A cultural historian, Romanist, and film scholar, Carsten Meiner contributes an article entitled “The Ghost of Grandeur: Homes in French cinema from Truffaut to Haneke,” building a historical trajectory through a series of classic French films from 1959 to the present. Meiner focuses on the uses of the home in order to trace an ongoing negotiation of the relationship between individuals and the notion of French national grandeur. Through the series of films discussed here, Meiner looks at the home as a site that connects symbols of grandeur and the individuals living within them, problematizing the feeling of not being at home in grandeur as a national myth. He argues that the ways in which the home and its breakdown are represented in these films opens the potential for a critical engagement with French nationalism and what it means to live in France. The article thus engages with issues of boundaries, containment, and their possible breakdown on a scale that potentially extends outward from the confinements of the home to the very borders of the nation-state.
Moving from France to the Middle East, in his article entitled “Ecstatic Things: The Power of Light in Shaping Bedouin Homes,” social anthropologist Mikkel Bille looks at domestic architecture in southern Jordan and the ways in which light serves as a medium in its own right in Bedouin culture. Focusing on green-tinted windows and the cultural use of light, Bille argues that objects such as tinted windows become part of the orchestration of domestic boundaries. Bille argues that objects transcend their own tangibility—what he calls “ecstatic things”—imposing themselves on other objects to shape a particular presence of the world. This presence of the world is conceptualized through the notion of atmosphere, which accounts for a way of perceiving the world as a co-presence of subjective emotions, cultural ideals, and material phenomena. Although tangible walls can be seen to uphold boundaries between the interior and the exterior, these boundaries can also be permeated by ecstatic objects that aim to safeguard, for instance, hospitality practices, as is the case in the fieldwork on which this article is based.
Whereas, the boundaries in Bille’s fieldwork are predominantly spatial in character, the boundaries of the home with which cultural historian and theorist Henrik Reeh grapples in his contribution entitled “Unpacking Traces of Lived Life” are predominantly temporally defined. Reeh looks at the appropriation of other peoples’ homes as a material world, an appropriation that inevitably occurs when one buys a furnished summerhouse. As time passes, a particular and highly charged fusion between the life of the new owners and that of the original inhabitants comes to pervade this domestic setting. Reeh thereby also investigates central cultural meanings attached to the idea of the second home. Reeh uses the writing of French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard as a vehicle for connecting the particular phenomenon of summerhouses to the general issue of housing practices in modernity. Employing an embedded auto-ethnographic approach, the empirical material consists of one particular summerhouse in Denmark. Here, the author reflects upon his own initial process of appropriation of this house and its inventory through a process of documentation in a series of photographs, which are discussed in the article. In this contribution, the porosity of the boundaries of the dwelling is thus granted a spatio-temporal quality.
This understanding similarly pertains to the contribution “‘I’ve Changed My Mind; I Don’t Want to Go Home”: Porosity of Home, Mind, and City in the Science-Fiction Narrative Total Recall’. From the perspectives of architectural analysis and cultural theory, Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel investigate the porosity of the boundary of the home—and even the body—when considering the impact that the technology-pervaded world of the dystopian, American science fiction film Total Recall has on our understanding of the architectural fabric and its boundary-setting capabilities. With a starting point in seminal cultural theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Jean Baudrillard, the two authors trace the story from the 1966 novel by Philip K. Dick to the 1990 film to the recent 2012 remake, exploring how the home is portrayed as a (highly unsettled and permeable) container in the different versions of this narrative. This allows for a consideration of the changed and changing understandings of cultural conceptions of the boundaries between body, home, and city in the period from 1960 to today. This contribution discusses what happens when the integrity of these entities as containers is called into question.
Lastly, Jens Bjering takes another recent Hollywood production, The Company Men (2010), as starting point for thinking about the nature of debt and the way in which indebtedness is engrained in building, living, and thinking of houses and homes in the contemporary Western housing economy. Bjering turns to German philosopher Martin Heidegger to explore the interrelations between houses, debt, and subjectivity, each of which represent a specific mode of visibility. The boundaries of the home here become permeable insofar as debt may be considered an immaterial and intangible form of containment of the home in the face of its owner, a form that binds together the temporal and the spatial aspects of dwelling. Debt and speculation are everyday phenomena for people around the globe, phenomena that reach into the past as well as the future, making the walls of the home porous. This speaks to the importance of revisiting our understanding of the house and home as an object that is currently—and ever more so in the face of the 2008 financial crisis—taking on a newly fragile position in contemporary culture with regards to both the individual and the collective, thereby emphasizing the topicality of the issues with which this special issue grapples.
The editors would like to thank the Danish Council for Independent Research for the generous funding for the research network Negotiating (In)Visibilities—A Network for Studies on the Seeable and the Hidden of Contemporary Culture, which created the framework for the work and collaboration presented here. We also wish to thank Jan Geisbusch, Editorial Administrator for Home Cultures for his enthusiasm and support. We all are indebted to Rachel Malkin for her, as always, incredibly supportive and meticulous help with language in the article-editing process, and as editors, we would like to thank the contributing authors for their extraordinary patience and hard work.