Home Is Where The Neurosis Is - A Topography of The Spatial Unconscious

Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious
Author(s): Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 64 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 69-91
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489258
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HOME IS WHERE THE NEUROSIS IS
A TOPOGRAPHY OF THE SPATIAL UNCONSCIOUS
I TysO Lewis li Dan elCho
THE UNHOMELY HOME
The popular understanding of the term uncanny designates the recog-

nition of something familiar in what should be unfamiliar. For exam-
ple, when we meet a stranger who has a striking resemblance to a
loved one-say, one's mother-we remark, "You have an uncanny
resemblance to my mother." This usage is amazingly divergent from
what Sigmund Freud (2003) meant by the uncanny. For Freud, it is
just the opposite: the uncanny is an experience of the unfamiliar in
something that should otherwise be quite familiar. Freud's famous ex-
amples are his thinking he saw a strange man in a window but which
turned out to be his own reflection in a mirror, and his experiencing
a street as new when in reality he had been there just moments
before. What produces this uncanny sensation is the return of some
repressed content that was formerly kept secret. In this essay we will
deploy this precisely Freudian sense of the term in an analysis of the
home. Our argument is this: the home, which is something that should
feel most comfortable and familiar, has increasingly, in late capital-
ism, become a space where the uncanny is experienced. The question
becomes, what repressed content of capitalism itself comes to the fore
in the figure of the "un-homely" home? We contend that the uncanny
home is a symptom of the repressed truth concerning the alienating
results of private ownership.
As a point of orientation (and of departure) we will use Theodor
Adorno's reflections on the home to examine this thesis. Although the
fate of the home has been a central concern for many philosophers in
the twentieth century-including Martin Heidegger's reflections on
Being and dwelling (1993); Gaston Bachelard's topoanalysis of homes,
Cultural Critique 64-Fall 2006-Copyright 2006 Regents of the University of Minnesota

70 TYSON LEWIS AND DANIEL CHO
nests, shells, and other shelters (1964); and Hannah Arendt's anal
of the political state of unhomelessness (1979)-Adorno's topo
phy of modern homes offers a particularly insightful tool for an
ing the current dialectics of the home in late capitalism; for, as Fred
Jameson (1990) has argued, Adorno addresses our own contempor
moment of late capitalism. For Adorno, historical shifts in the style
the home represent a challenge to a bourgeois theory of individu
which is predicated on the division between interior/exterior and
lic/private. Although the home has historically upheld such divis
Adorno's contends that certain economic and social forces consta
subvert them, leading to an unwelcoming home, where individua
is not so much fostered as suppressed. With the postmodern mas
cation, transnational migrations, and the ubiquitous standardiza
of suburban sprawl, the grounds for the modern, bourgeois subj
constitution are no longer safeguarded, and a growing sense of
uncanny nature of the home speaks directly to Adorno's reflecti
In particular, we apply Adorno's topography to cinema and te
vision depictions of the home. Here we use Adorno to read Holl
wood depictions of the home and in turn Hollywood films to r
Adorno in light of our postmodern cultural logic. We have chose
focus on film precisely because film transcodes popular sentim
into allegorical forms (Jameson 1982; Kellner 1995). These allego
forms both reveal and conceal ideological constructions of social
ity, or in this case, of the American home in late capitalism.
While focusing mainly on a diagnostic, and thus descriptive, r
ing of film representations, we must also reflect on Adorno's o
prescriptive remedy for this unhomely condition. Although Ado
is able to pinpoint the uncanny nature of the home and thus eluc
the ongoing internal contradictions of what it means to be at ho
his tentative "solution" to this problem is ultimately a retreat f
reimagining the home beyond the contradictions produced thro
private property. In the end, he is left with a melancholic ethic to "r
main homeless in one's home." As such, Adorno is unwilling to
the (dangerous) leap into the utopian possibilities of a home bey
the fear of collective living that is the result of a binary public/priv
interior/exterior split.
Offering a potent counterfoil to Adorno's retreat into melan
lia, we then turn to the postmodern endorsement of homelessn
HOME IS WHERE THE NEUROSIS IS 71
Perhaps the most obvious proponents of such a view are Gille

and F lix Guattari (1983; 1987), who champion the nomad. T
tain, in an era of high modernism when the home still stood
subject, the notion of a homeless, rhizomatic populace wa
cative. The drifter, the hobo, and the wanderer were all no
homeless subjects whose presence was registered as a distur
the normative symbolic order that was structured around th
tional home. But with the rise of sprawl and the explosion o
lessness into a real epidemic (especially for immigrant popu
forced into exile by sovereign powers), it is not certain whe
nomad can still be as subversive as it once was thought to be
and Guattari's endorsement of the nomad as resistor will have to be
ultimately negated. In short, our project thus maps out new trajec-
tories of the home that challenge Adorno's melancholic ethic while
simultaneously resisting the ludic postmodern nomadism of pure
homelessness.
Arguing for a dialectical synthesis of these two positions, we turn

to Jameson's (1994) comments on "dirty space" as containing a utopian
possibility missed by both Adorno and Deleuze and Guattari. Adapt-
ing the concept of dirty space, we find in the cinematic depiction
of certain science fiction vessels a new type of "dirty home," which
could act as a tentative and anticipatory visual metaphor for collec-
tive living that solves the interminable paradox of the home in late
capitalism. In short, some may want, therefore, to abandon the home
in our late capitalist society, but we will avoid such a stance and argue
instead that if the home were made into a space for collective identity,
then it may serve as a place for political struggle. As such, our paper
will ultimately part ways with Adorno as well as with Deleuze and
Guattari in order to posit an untimely home that speaks to us through
the utopian dimension offered by science fiction (Jameson 2005).
TOPOGRAPHY OF HOMES: TOO FULL OF GHOSTS
For many members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, bourgeois

society has simultaneously created the social conditions necessary to
produce the notion of the "home" and subverted the possibility of ever
fully actualizing the home as such. Adorno explores the impossibility
72 1 TYSON LEWIS AND DANIEL CHO
of the home in the aphorism entitled "Refuge for the Homeless" from
his book Minima Moralia (1999). Adorno argues that the crisis of pri-
vate life is represented in the problematic of "dwelling" in one's home.
Such a thesis draws upon Freud's (1989a) own comments concerning
the relationship between the structure of the mind and architectural
forms of the home, thus suggesting an intimate, if not codependent,
relationship between external living space and internal psychic space.
In the beginning of the aphorism, Adorno describes the condition of
private life within the standardization and commodification of late
capitalism and U.S. post-World War II urban sprawl. As we search
for a dwelling space, we can no longer, according to Adorno, turn to
the home of our childhood memories. Such homes have "grown in-
tolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of
knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family
interests" (Adorno 1999, 38). The private space of the conjugal family
where the subjectivity of the bourgeois intellectual was cultivated
has become a nostalgic impossibility, contaminated by the remem-
brance of "family interests" or rather family disputes, quarrels, and
betrayals. If the bourgeois traditional home was once a sphere for the
fostering of subjective interiority, it has now been taken over by cob-
webs, becoming an attic for lost dreams and repressed memories.
As such Adorno offers a challenge to Bachelard's romantic notion of
the home as a protective and nurturing dwelling preexisting being
"cast into the world" (Bachelard 1964, 7) and thus into historical
alienation. Bachelard's description is ahistorical at best, representing
precisely the nostalgia that Adorno's historical materialist reading
guards against.
The "intolerable" house to which Adorno alludes is continually
represented in the celluloid imagination of Hollywood haunted house
movies. Classic movies such as Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) visually
depict the uncanny feeling of a haunted mansion with piercing sus-
pense. Here the grand mansion, Manderley, seems to offer a viable
retreat from the hustle and bustle of alienated working life. Yet even
here, the musty ghosts of "intolerable" family interests (now trans-
formed into murder itself) infest the grandiose rooms making the
home decisively unlivable for all but the melancholic housemaid.
More recently, the film The Grudge (2004) indicates a slight shift in
the meaning and the emphasis in the haunted house genre that speaks
to the further crisis in the concept of the home in late capitalism. Her
the ghosts not only haunt, but they have become obsessive-compul
neurotics in the most Freudian sense. In Totem and Taboo (1989b),
Freud explains the easily displaceable nature of a taboo with refer-
ence to obsessional prohibitions. In Freud's analysis, the taboo demon-
strates a great capacity for permutations, especially in relation to the
taboo on touching sacred objects. If certain objects are touched, their
powers (both negative and positive) can be transferred to the indi-
vidual. Basically the taboo is infinitely expandable because repressed
desire must escape a psychic censorship through substitution. Thus,
the prohibition compensates the libido by shifting to objects that the
censorship will not necessarily detect. In The Grudge, the ghosts ex-
hibit similar obsessional characteristics, where a taboo is transferred
to whomever enters the damned house, expanding the curse beyond
the boundaries that separate the private and the public realms. Thus
not only is the house rendered uninhabitable but also the city itself.
Whereas in the past, the living were haunted by the repressed un-
conscious of the home (which more often than not reappeared in the
allegorical form of ghost), now the ghosts themselves suffer from
repressions and neuroses. As such, the ghost in The Grudge is also
attempting to escape the home, which has become a prison of sorts,
a constant reminder of familial murder. Yet in this deterritorializing
move outward into the streets of a Japanese suburb, the ghost bleeds
the intolerable suffering of the home into the city, blurring inside and
outside by breaking down the very boundaries that once confined the
ghost to attics and basements. Where in Rebecca-or perhaps even
more importantly in Poltergeist (see Kellner 1995)-the ghosts are terri-
torialized, spatially confined to the home, in The Grudge, the ghosts are
increasingly rhizomatic and nomadic, expanding out like a new global
pandemic that cannot be stopped. Thus the world as a global home
becomes increasingly intolerable and unhomely, a dwelling space that
even ghosts cannot occupy without necessarily bearing a grudge.
FROM THE MANSION TO THE MUNDANE
The transition from traditional to modern homes is characterized by

an increasing sanitation of all (living) human traces from the home
itself. Adorno (1999) describes these modern homes as "living-ca

manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sties that h
strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relations to t
occupant" (38). In such a space, the hope of an individual existen
is subverted. Here, a little bit of the repressed returns as a priv
sphere hostile to the individual-an empty and depersonalized con
tainer that is measured not to accommodate human proportions
rather to maximize profit. Homes become "goods only to be thr
away like old food cans" (39). The only recourse is that the individ
living within the lie of the modern home is forced to "take an interes
in furniture design or interior decoration" (39). Such hobbies are
attempt to conceal the vacancy and sterility of these homes. "Ar
crafty" sensibility decorates the "living-cases" that are our last sub
tutes for the home. Thus the current obsession with home decoration
(ranging from Martha Stewart's Living to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
and, for a short time, the Straight Girl) merely acts as a fantasy shield,
protecting the home owner from the unbearable reality of the impos-
sibility of being at home in the modern home. The homeyness of dec-
oration attempts to defend against the unhomeyness of the ultimate
failures of the home in postmodern times as these decorations are but
superficial markings that attempt to differentiate and individualize a
home from among its massified neighborhoods. After all, TV shows
like Living and Queer Eye are aimed at suburbanites and apartment
dwellers and not at those who occupy more intimate and traditional
homes.
In the Arcades Project (1999), Walter Benjamin observed how the

invention of steel and the use of glass ushered in the modernist archi-
tectural aesthetic, which made use of these materials to establish the
clear boundary between interiors and exteriors. But Benjamin did not
mention other technologies, those that infiltrated and transformed
what Henri Lefebvre (1991) termed "everyday life." Here, Adorno is
helpful, as he saw how the home was becoming a utilitarian box laden
with technological gadgets and gizmos, which all hold grave impli-
cations for those who live inside. In the aphorism entitled "Do Not
Knock," Adorno argues that everyday objects found within the modern
home are "making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men"
(40). The world of material things impinges on the interior devel-
opment of subjects that are forced to interact with new automated
technologies. For instance, the frustrations surrounding the

hinged door offer a distilled and pedestrian crystallization of
lectic of enlightenment itself. Adorno argues that, due to tech
advancements, "the ability is lost, for example to close a door
and discretely, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators
be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by them
imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking
them, not shielding the interior of the house which receive
(40). Doors in the modern home naturalize "bad manners," d
from movement "all hesitation, deliberation, civility," leadi
"withering of experience" (40). The functionalism of the hom
to increase leisure time and convenience-transforms into a dark
and dangerous adversary to the bourgeois individual. Thus "the

movements machines demand of their users already have the violent,
hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment" (40). The
mechanical, functional innards of the modern home revolt against
the home itself, transforming the interior space for contemplation and
individual development into the unconscious materialization of Fas-
cist dehumanization. "The law of pure functionality" attacks not only
the subject but also the very concept of the home, which is no longer
a refuge from but rather an extension of what Jiirgen Habermas would
refer to as rational subsystems into the life world. While technophiles
might see such technological innovations as ushering in a new age of
convenience, sanitation, and security, Adorno remains fixed on what
will be lost in the process, and the excess of violence that hides be-
hind these unhomely gadgets.
In science fiction novels and films we can begin to see the resid-
ual effects of Adorno's warnings, shot back at us from the dystopian
future. As Dale Bailey (1999) argues, Ray Bradbury's short story
"There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) and Stanley Kubrick's film 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968) represent a new form of haunted house fic-
tion where the dead are replaced by what Bailey calls "technological
ghosts" (111). In 2001, HAL 9000, the onboard computer programmed
to operate the space ship as its human occupants tend to other respon-
sibilities, eventually goes berserk. HAL itself can no longer maintain
the necessary control and, in the end, the ship and HAL are destroyed.
The space ship-here read as the quintessential paradigm of the ster-
ile, sanitized, and dehumanized modern home Adorno describes-
becomes a critical representation of the uncanny nature of the t

nological home that maintains strict divisions between inside and
side at the cost of annihilating organic life altogether. As such,
becomes a pivotal text concerning the role of technology in the h
articulating what Jameson (1995) has referred to as "the technol
cal sublime" (37) of postmodernism as a central factor in further
coupling the concept of home from safe habitation.
It is not certain that the human occupant can live alongside
automated companions, which further bifurcates the home. In a r
book, Taming HAL (2004), Asaf Degani investigates the inter
between human and machine and notes how often the encounters
between these two are met with frustration and conflict (just think of
the "12:00" incessantly blinking on your DVD player). Degani's exam-
ple is, of course, how HAL turns on Dave in 2001, but he uses that
conflict as a model with which to draw comparisons to our own rela-
tionships to various technologies, ranging from the everyday to ad-
vanced navigational onboard computers. These conflicts make the
technology that surrounds us feel not so much like the limbs of our
prosthetic Godhood, as Freud (1961) imagined them to be, but more
like our warring partners. Whereas the home was once the safe refuge
for the subject from the outside world, and whereas technologies such
as the radio and TV were once meant to facilitate this insulation with
its entertainment, now the home itself is just as much of a ruckus as

the city outside, and it is the house that sets itself against the fragile
ego of the bourgeois subject.
The repressed memories of Oedipal strife do not haunt subur-
ban, technologized tract homes. Rather, the opposite is induced: the
loss of the Oedipal complex itself. With the withering of the father
and the invasion of interior space by technologies, Adorno fears the
loss of the very family mechanism that insured the critical capacity
and relative autonomy composing the progressive possibilities within
bourgeois subjectivity. If, as Odysseus learned in his voyage, the sub-
ject is a subject predicated on a renunciation (a lack), then Adorno's
critique of the modern tract home is precisely due the fear of a lack
of a lack brought about through direct socialization. The result of
such immediacy is for Adorno the loss of individuality itself and the
rise of fascism. The fears revolving around the loss of individuality
once cultivated and sustained by the interiority of the home are ar

lated in the current postmodern fascination with the occult an
bie movies. Whereas the traditional home was the canvas on which
one could (ideally) express one's individuality, the tract home resists
such gestures; moreover, the Home Owners Association phenomenon
makes individuality impossible, as most HOAs are given the charge
of maintaining neighborhood uniformity. No wonder the HOA has
been the subject of the recent occult television genre. From the X-Files
to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the HOA has been represented as the center
of occult activity. Visual culture seems to designate something utterly
demonic in the standardization of living spaces inherent in late capi-
talism. We propose that this "demonic" quality is none other than the
privileging of the homes' uniformity over the individuality of the
modern subject. Furthermore, in the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead
(2004), the first depiction of a zombie attack is importantly in the home
itself. Here the child zombie kills the father figure and the wife is left
to fend for herself. As she speeds off from her now-contaminated
suburban home, the camera pans out from her street to a devastating
depiction of the suburban utopia in flames and chaos. Society, con-
structed and maintained by the middle-class, patriarchal suburban
household, is fully disrupted by the depersonalized, primal horde of
the zombie masses as an allegorical depiction of the fascist possibili-
ties inherent in late capitalism. The terror of the zombie is thus terror
of the loss of the individuality fostered in the modern suburban tract
home turned back on itself in a form of violence. Thus the split nature
of middle-class subjectivity becomes externalized into an epic drama
between the human (as the kernel of individual autonomy) and zom-
bie (as the always already massified and empty substrate of this indi-
viduality). Importantly, this threat does not come as an invasion from
the outside but is rather a constitutive element born within the cur-
rent suburban social order itself. Perhaps the occult and zombie gen-
res best articulate what is at stake in the home in late capitalism,
namely, that what forms the primary adversary to our identity as
individuals is capital itself, whose ever-increasing need for expansion
has now turned on the bourgeois ego by ending the age of individual
homes. The contingency of subjectivity returns, and the home is no
longer capable of repressing this fact.
EMBALMED AT HOME
Besides the traditional home and the modern home, two other possi-
bilities exist for Adorno. He momentarily pauses to contemplate the
symbolic logic of the period house as an alternative to the modern
home. Yet "anyone seeking refuge in a genuine, but purchased, period-
style house, embalms himself alive" (38). The period house is nothing
but a frozen moment in time that denies historical movement. As
such, it drips with nostalgia for the prefabricated "good old days"
that exist nowhere but in our ossified imaginations. It is in the las
instance a retreat from the perpetual movement, disruption, and con
volution of modern social reality into an idealized world of the past.
Thus, it is escapism that results in the calcification of life itself, a
mummification of the soul of the subject. Movies such as Cold Creek
Manor (2003) articulate in broadly campy terms the return of the re-
pressed truth concerning period-style homes in the particular cultura
logic of postmodern pastiche (Jameson 1995). In Cold Creek Manor, a
rich city family decides to move to the countryside to escape the "dan-
gers" of modern living. Their rural dream home is an ancient farm-
house, which speaks to family togetherness, unity with the earth, an
"simple living." Yet their dream quickly turns into a nightmare as th
former owner returns to terrorize the family and drive them from his
home. In the end, the traumatic truth of the period home as an unliv
able and empty escapist fantasy is once again repressed by a Holly-
wood ending where the former owner is killed and the house rendere
livable. We could also add the slew of fixer-upper television programs
running on the air. In the typical episode of Generation Restoration,
homeowner walks us through some once-dilapidated period home to
show off all the small details that had to be recreated to return the
home to its original era's condition. The homeowner's attempt to

recover and remake the home into a relic of the historical moment in
which it was first constructed in fact dehistoricizes the home, as the
restoration obliterates the marks and damages history left on it, thus
subverting the homeowner's very effort to bring the past to life. Such
films and shows, while dripping with clich6s, do in fact give voice to
Adorno's aphoristic claims. To return to the nostalgic past and deny
the possibilities of the present is to threaten to "embalm" the self in
romantic nostalgia for a time that never existed.
THE GRAND HOTEL ABYSS
Lastly, Adorno argues that the hotel or rented room is another possi-
ble substitute for the home. Whether intended to be used as a tem-
porary getaway from one's own home or to be a permanent alterative

to the home itself, the hotel, for Adorno, offers some relief from the
burden of home ownership. Adorno writes, "The attempt to evade
responsibility for one's residence by moving into a hotel or furnished
room, makes the enforced conditions of emigration a wisely chosen
norm" (38-39). The hotel then promises to relieve us of the home's
most troubling aspect, namely, the fact of its existence as property. As
property, the home must be cared for, maintained, and upheld. The
roof over our heads often seems like little compensation for the amount
of labor involved in its upkeep. The hotel enters the scene as the per-
fect solution: shelter without the hassle of ownership.
Of the many things that could be said of the hotel, we should
mention here two. First, the ownership we attempt to escape often
returns, like the repressed itself, as the hotel's most disconcerting
aspect. We need only recall the terrible memory of finding a stain on
the hotel bed's sheets: whatever it is that left that stain, I know it was
not mine. Thus the fact that we do not own the hotel room is also its
most dissatisfying aspect. The hotel traps the bourgeois subject within
a miserable double bind in which ownership presents the best and
worst aspect of the home.
The second is related to the problem of ownership-that is, the
collective. Perhaps, most troubling is that, since the hotel room can-
not be owned by a single individual, it is inhabited by a multiplicity
of people both simultaneously and linearly. Although setting up in
the hotel means resigning one's self to some kind of permanent home-
lessness-or, as Adorno has it, making emigration a norm-it is not
the homeless aspect itself that bothers the bourgeois subject but that
this homelessness opens onto the loss of privacy. In a film like Planes,
Trains, and Automobiles (1987), in which Neal Page (Steve Martin) is
abandoned far away from home and must therefore go through a series
of trials and difficulties on his seemingly endless journey home for
Thanksgiving, the plot's tension is only created when Page shares a
hotel room with Del Griffith (John Candy). From this fateful decision
on, Griffith becomes an unwanted traveling companion. Worse than
being temporarily displaced is to be so with an uninvited fellow

eler. We thus get the scene in which both men need to share a
bed at a hotel, which obviously looks uncomfortable. Or, in Ho
Alone (1990)-another cautionary tale about the burden of h
ownership-Kate McAllister (Catherine O'Hara), Kevin's (Mac
Culkin) mother, must shack up with an annoyingly cheerful tra
polka bandleader (played, once again, by John Candy) as she atte
to return to her son. But, perhaps, the darkest consequences of c
tive hotel living are depicted in Identity (2003). In this film, ten mo
characters who find themselves coincidentally trapped at a roa
hotel are being killed off one by one. Of course, the entire ho
emerges when the characters realize they all share biographical d
which then pushes them to find out whose personal baggage is
ing their individual deaths. Here, the problem of collective liv
that the life of the individual subject is put in jeopardy not beca
a personal problem per se but rather because of someone else's
past. The characters are dying because of something they have no ow
ership of and therefore no control over. From the reactionary
spective of the bourgeoisie, collective living often means being
responsible for someone else's problems.
"HOME SWEET HOME?" OR ADORNO'S ETHICAL QUESTION
In sum, the traditional house is haunted by ghosts; the modern house

is a prefabricated and "leaky" container invaded by threatening tech-
nologies; the period house is a fossil, preserved in the formaldehyde
of our nostalgically fermenting dreams; and the hotel reveals a per-
manent state of displacement. As such, each modality of "home"
signals a particular disruption in habitation and the escalating un-
homeyness of the home. The traditional house perpetuates familial
haunting; the modern home signals the permeability between the pub-
lic and the private and the loss of Oedipalization; the period house
retreats into the fantastical past; and the hotel solidifies the uncanny
feeling of homelessness or estrangement. In all cases, the contradic-
tions within the concept of home are somehow displaced, but through
the displacement itself we are continually reminded of a significant
lack underlying our relationship to home. Although all the h

modalities differ widely in some aspects, they all indicate th
home is no longer capable of safeguarding our egos from dire
mersion in society itself, which thus thrusts us into an estrang
tion with the home. Private property has been the bedrock o
subjectivities insofar as the home is concerned, and now, iron
with its accelerated mode of sprawling development, late capi
has punished this reliance. An effect of this punishment has be
the home seems now to be a useless cultural artifact that no
contains any semblance of a political motive; it has been sanit
politics.
So what is to be done? Adorno speculates, "The best mode of con-
duct, in the face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended
one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one's own
needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as to
something still socially substantial and individually appropriate" (39).
Interiority can no longer be fostered within the privacy of the tradi-
tional home but rather must find its residence in liminality itself,
within the cracks and fissures of the crumbling foundations of the
bourgeois home. The only recourse is to live a humbled existence
within the gap that separates and unites homelessness and home.
Here a modicum of freedom in subjective interiority can be salvaged.
Thus Adorno's ethical maxim: "It is part of morality not to be at home
in one's home" (39).
Yet the current state of homelessness is not simply the subversion
of an authentic private sphere of the home but rather reveals the truth
of the concept of home. Horkheimer and Adorno touch upon the
inherent paradox of the home in this passage from Dialectic of Enlight-
enment: "If the fixed order of property implicit in settlement is the
source of human alienation, in which all homesickness and longing
spring from a lost primal state, at the same time it is toward settle-
ment and fixed property, on which alone the concept of homeland is
based, that all longing and homesickness are directed" (61). The para-
dox of the home, or in this case, the homeland, is that the home (as we
have claimed earlier) is predicated on the notion of private property,
on ownership of land. But the paradox is this: we are ultimately alien-
ated precisely because of private property in the first place, and yet we
turn to the home to end the homesickness induced by such al

Inherent in the concept of the home is the state of homelessn
has only now become an overarching social symptom. Rather
treat from this condition and return to the myth of the home t
proxy (the traditional, the period, or the modern home), Ador
cates homelessness within one's home as a possible solutio
like Odysseus, the modern subject must realize that the hom
state of having escaped" (61).
As such, Adorno ends his great lament with a melancholic ton
the always already lost prospect of being at home in one's ho
the melancholic, he cannot mourn the loss of the home but
incorporates its absence into his psyche. The dialectic of mela
here becomes apparent: On the one hand, as Freud claimed,
cholia provides a seat of critical agency, allowing Adorno to
those aspects of techno-rational subsystems that invade the li
of the home. On the other hand, this melancholia prevents
from exploring new concepts of habitation that could provid
pected potentials for cultivating a sense of interior subjectivity b
the confines of the traditional home and its attending imm
paradox.
Adorno's melancholia finds him in a double bind: he adds, "But
the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for
things which necessarily turns against people too; and the antithesis,
no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad con-
science to keep what they have" (39). Homelessness in one's home-
or, in other words, living detachedly in one's home-degenerates
into either a senseless destructiveness or a secret longing to reclaim
one's property. Both of these antipodal positions are at work in the
film adaptation House of Sand and Fog (2003). Here, Kathy (Jennifer
Connelly), evicted from her home-due to her lack of vigilance in
maintaining her mortgage, another duty of ownership-fights to re-
claim what she believes is rightfully hers. When her quest ultimately
results in the murder-suicide of the family living there, she renounces
having ever owned the home. The passionate attachment to property
is loosened only after the senseless destruction of human life. The House
of Sand and Fog illustrates the impossibility of maintaining the needle-
point balance of being homeless in one's home. It is, for the bourgeois
subject, quite simply, an impossibility.
THE THOUSAND PLATEAUS, OR "SCHIZOBURBIA"
The current antithesis of Adorno's homeless melancholia and mod-
ernist sense of alienation is the radical postmodern theory of Deleuze

and Guattari (1987). This comparison is most acute in relation to their
competing versions of home and family. For Adorno the family might
in fact have been an "agent" of the state (in the last instance), but it was
also a semiautonomous set of relations for individual self-cultivation.
The home-as the social space that defines the coordinates of the
Oedipal drama-was for Adorno the necessary architectural unit of
the family shielding the child from direct socialization.
Whereas Adorno fears the subsumption of the home by the on-
slaught of functionalism and Fascist technologies, Deleuze and Guat-
tari argue that the home is itself inherently Fascist and cannot function
as a mediator. In this sense the home and the family are purely repres-
sive instruments. To combat the territorialization of desire by the
home, schizoanalysis exposes strategies of containment of desire as
a revolutionary force and locates lines of flight where desire can
escape Oedipalization. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) write, "Oedi-
pus arrives: it is born in the capitalist system of the application of
first-order social images to the private familial images of the second
order.... It is our intimate colonial formation that corresponds to the
form of social sovereignty. We are all little colonies and it is Oedipus
that colonizes us" (265). In this sense the dialectical position taken by
Adorno in relation to Oedipus and the formation of the subject is
rejected for a more vicious attack on the family and the home. "The
family's mission ... is to produce neurotics by means of its Oedipal-
ization, its system of impasses, its delegated psychic repression, with-
out which social repression would never find docile and resigned
subjects, and would not succeed in choking off the flow's lines of
escape" (361). As opposed to Adorno's melancholic, "uncommitted,"
and "suspended" subject, Deleuze and Guattari demolish the subject
as a haunted house full of ghosts. The home and the ego are both stri-
ated spaces blocking the mobility of desire. Desire is in turn locked
into the dark closet of Oedipalized subjectivity as a dirty little secret.
As opposed to bourgeois subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari em-
brace the schizo-subject. Inside the schizo are multiplicities that conjoin
temporarily to form assemblages but can never fully be territorialized
into ego formations. The self becomes a "body without organs,"

organ without organization (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 30). Bec
the schizo is nothing more than a multiplicity of multiplicities, the
sion between private and public disappears and the internal wor
hallucination merges effortlessly with external reality. Thus, the fa
and home are limit cases against which the schizo-subject must f
all costs. The political goal is no longer to sustain a fragile ego r
ing uncomfortably in the home but to smash the ego altogether
thus free internal desiring machines from the guilt of the incest ta
and the theatre of representations inaugurated by psychoanalys
Because there is nothing to lament, Deleuze and Guattari exp
the home in one orgasmic stroke of the war machine and embra
rhizomatic flow of the nomadic horde. Here homelessness is an ideal
state of pure movement outward, and Deleuze and Guattari present

the reader with the postarchitectural world of the nomad. The nomadic
tribe is also a body without organs whose function is to "occupy and
hold a smooth space" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 410). The striated
space of the home is a "sedentary space" marked by the limits of the
State. The nomad cruises across the sedentary space attempting to
deterritorialize its grid of specification and delineation, yet the space
itself always counterattacks with a further reterritorialization of the
nomadic vector. Thus the nomad pulsates toward a smooth space
such as the desert or, in our age of techno-capitalism, the Internet. In
both cases, the nomad does not build structures of permanence--and
thus pure movement, pure velocity, and pure becoming are its ethical
demands.
The nomad rushes toward the plateau. The plateau becomes the
privileged geographical and spatial feature of the nomadic imagina-
tion. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the plateau is "any multi-
plicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground
stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome.... Each plateau
can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau"
(1987, 22). In other words, the plateau does not constrict desire but
creates a field of infinite possibilities for its dispersal and intensifi-
cation. The plateau is not about repression, sacrifice, or boundaries
between public and private but is about a sustained engagement with
the continual movement of nomadic existence. Adorno's ethical maxim
to remain homeless in one's home seems at this point to be nothing
more than a bourgeois retreat from the threshold of the plateau. In f

Deleuze and Guattari would see Adorno's ethics not as a solution but
as part of the problem. For them Adorno represents the fear of collec-
tivism and symptoms of repression.
Thus we have two positions. On the one hand Adorno stands
squarely in the gap that separates and conjoins the home and home-
lessness (or perhaps the modern and the postmodern). He insists on
the ethical dimension of remaining in this gap and thus sustaining the
tension that exists in the position. On the other hand, Deleuze and
Guattari argue for a complete destruction of the home and valorization
of the state of homelessness. If there is a model of "being at home" for
these anticartographers of postmodern space, it would most assuredly
be the romantic notion of the American hobo or the rebel biker. Thus,
while Adorno values the lone, isolated individualism of monadic
bourgeois subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari value the exhilaration
of movement. Yet underlying this difference is a startling similarity:
Adorno and Deleuze and Guattari all demonstrate a significant lack
of imagination. Adorno enumerates the various permutations of the
home yet cannot posit a possible alternative. He is unable to imagine
a home outside of the foundational paradox upon which the tradi-
tional home, the period-style home, the hotel room, and the modern
home are constructed: the alienation induced by private property.
Deleuze and Guattari assume the futility of constructing a home as a
habitation inevitably leading toward territorialization and Oedipal-
ization. Thus they avoid the question all together. Yet this avoidance
results in a schizo-nomadic notion of anarchism that does not leave
room for a viable social politics.

A possible visual example of both the liberating but also politi-
cally nullifying possibilities of this schizoid-nomadic aesthetic are the
famous string of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone "spaghetti west-
ern" films. In them, the main character (played by Eastwood with
deadpan sincerity), whose only name is "the man with no name," is
the nomad par excellence-a "de-subjectified" war machine wander-
ing aimlessly across the barren plateau of the desert (the favored sur-
face for the nomad). While bringing vigilante justice, he is ultimately
an amoral character ruthlessly disconnected from productive group
politics. He is a deterritorializing force that smashes down any obsta-
cle to his ceaseless momentum. Thus he is a man that is properly
homeless-lacking a home, but more importantly lacking the de

for a home. He is truly feral. If he wanders with company, it is not
much a collective as a temporary, rhizomatic, and opportunistic
The nomad is a figure with great power and allure but also an u
ble element lacking an emotional life. In this sense, the nomad i
introverted modernist subject turned inside out. Whereas Adorn
treats inward into the home, the nomadic Eastwood character as
lone gunman turns outward to wander forever the nameless st
of a desert wasteland.
THE DIRTY HOME AS A UTOPIAN SPACE
Turning to Fredric Jameson, we may begin to imagine a reconstruc-

tion of the concept of home that does not result in melancholia or in
schizophrenia. In The Seeds of Time (1994), Jameson describes the
architectural landscape of postmodernism in relation to dirty realism
The term "dirty realism" was first used by Liane Lefaivre to describ
the architectural styles of Gehry and Koolhaas. Appropriating the
term, Jameson argues that the inaugural debut of dirty realism is
found in cyberpunk and in particular the film Blade Runner (1982). The
architecture envisioned in the film offers a unique counterpoint to
Adorno's spatial and psychic topography. The urbanized setting of
cyberpunk decomposes the sanitized and semiautonomous zone of the
bourgeois home, exploring alternative variations to the classical de-
marcation of spatial relationships. In fact, cyberpunk could be read
as a critique of the division between public and private that separates
the home from the external world. Such divisions never fully recog-
nized those spaces of in-betweenness such as the street or the lobby
or the Internet, where inner and outer dialectically bleed into one
another (spaces championed by postmodernists and postcolonialists
as spaces of innovation and transgression). This liminal space is pre-
cisely the location of cyberpunk. As Jameson writes, "We must think
of the space of dirty realism as a collective built space, in which the
opposition between inside and outside is annulled" (155). Again, quot-
ing Jameson:
Dirty here means the collective as such, the traces of mass, anonymous
living and using. The traditional values of privacy have disappeared,
nor do we any longer approach this collective mass within the stark t
ror of the earlier inner-directed bourgeois individuals, for whom th
multitude threatened a fall, as in naturalism, where collective sp
seemed radically unclean in the anthropological sense. (158)
In such dirty spaces, the anxieties of collective living are amel

In fact, terror at the collapse of the inner sanctum of the bou
individual is reversed into an excitement for the new possibili
collective praxis. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's (2000) co
of the "new city" speaks to Jameson's insistence on the utopian
tials of dirty living. Formed by the multitude, the new city is
of cooperation, community, and hybridization. What separate
Jameson and Hardt and Negri from Deleuze and Guattari is th
insist on the importance of building new spatial habitations in
the multitude has the right "to stay still and enjoy" without
the constant compulsion to move (Hardt and Negri, 400). The
city is, in other words, a form of spatial organization that ma
the transnational flow of the multitude while also providing
topography of living spaces that allow for community to thri
side of melancholia or schizophrenia. Although migrant worke
refugees speak to the movement of the multitude (and thus a
of utopian possibilities beyond the nation-state), the problem
orizing such conditions is precisely the lack of a home tha
states produce. These nomads must be given spaces of rest and
of repose that do not result in obstructions to the expansive de
the multitude but rather points of intersection, cohabitation, a
lective dwelling.
Drawing on Jameson as well as Hardt and Negri, we pr
the figure of the dirty homes as a utopian alternative to both
pressions of the bourgeois home and the excess of a state
homelessness. Such a reconfiguration of the home is not pred
on private property and thus does not contain alienation in i
cept. As such, the impossibility of being at home is properly h
cized as a particular fear of the bourgeois subject. The dirty
is a home that is ironically cleansed of the anxieties toward th
permeability, the present, and the uncanny. As such, the dirt
necessitates a radical "desubjectification" that in itself pro
new uncertainty within the homeowner-the possibility of the
Adorno's silence on the topic of utopian alternatives to the p
of the home speaks to his reluctance to give way on his own subjec-
tivity, to depersonalize himself, to release his iron grip from the mod-
icum of freedom or autonomy he can squeeze from the crevasse in
which he sleeps (and snores). Rather than rehabilitate the notion of
the home, he chooses instead to transform his life into an enacted con-
tradiction (to be homeless in one's home), which then becomes an
"uncommitted" and "suspended" ethical maxim.
Yet the desubjectification called for by dirty living does not neces-
sitate the schizo-aesthetic of Deleuze and Guattari. The dirty home
anchors their nomadic fantasies while at the same time opening up
the concept of home to the flexibility and unexpected coalescence
of rhizomatic and collective flows across its threshold. Rather than
a shield protecting the subject from the outside, the dirty home is
a junction, a gateway, an opening. The dirty home is a permeable
membrane for the collective reorganization of social relations outside
the parameters of private property and Oedipal familial structures.
Thus the truth of the home does not exist in its present form but
rather in the negation of its bourgeois manifestation.
If it is difficult to imagine such habitation, let alone the subjectiv-
ity adequate to the concept of dirty living, it does not mean that the
dirty home is an impossibility. Perhaps in science fiction we can see a
new notion of the dirty home emerging (in a necessarily distorted
and ideologically filtered form). Here we are referring to depictions
of the space vessel as a futuristically mobile living space. Films such
as Joss Whedon's recent Serenity (2005) capture the anti-utopian
utopian possibilities of dirty living. The crew of space ship Serenity is
a motley group of rebel outcasts attempting to live on the fringes of
a new intergalactic sovereign force. After taking onboard two myste-
rious passengers (a young doctor and his psychic sister), the crew is
suddenly faced with an ethical choice: continue to live recklessly on
the fringe of society as an outlaw posse, or take political action to
reveal an insidious conspiracy orchestrated by the government. The
crew decides to fight the forces of interstellar Empire, beginning a
quest that ultimately reveals a futuristic eugenics project gone wrong.
In an attempt to create the perfect, docile, and productive citizenry,
the government fed a new drug to the unsuspecting inhabitants of a
distant moon. On the one hand, the drug paralyzed the citizens' wills
to live (eventually leading to a vegetative state and then to death), and
on the other, it produced a new race of cannibalistic Reavers (psychotic

zombies). The lesson seems clear: utopia administered from the to
down transforms into a brutal form of totalitarianism. Yet the film is
not dystopian by any means. Opposed to this nightmare stands the

spaceship Serenity and its crew of resistance fighters. Although the
name Serenity seems to speak of a safe and tranquil dwelling outside
of historical conflict, the politics inside the ship itself are decisively
"dirty" in Jameson's sense of the term. Interpersonal conflicts abound,
as do multiple dissenting opinions, yet in the end, these singularities
are united under a collective project of political struggle. Sanctuary
transforms from escapism and retreat into a form of political praxis
where the space of communal living is a space of activism against in-
justice. Thus serenity is not a state of bliss, a timeless nirvana, but an
active engagement with the complexities of political life as new collec-
tivities attempt to formulate themselves against Empire. These reflec-
tions bear even more weight when we consider that Michel Foucault,
in his analysis of heterotopias, once wrote, "the sailing vessel is the het-
erotopia par excellence. In a civilization without ships the dreams dry
up" (1986, 185). When depictions of vessels such as Serenity are linked
with Hardt and Negri's vision of a new city, heterotopian spaces of
resistance become properly utopian maps of "to-come" collectivity.
To find the distant shore proposed by our concept of the dirty
home we must no longer tie ourselves to the mast as Odysseus did and
sacrifice ourselves in order to become property-owning, bourgeois sub-
jects. Rather than an escape from or a return to, we must construct our
habitation on the fertile soil of the thousand plateaus of the present.
Only then will the home cease to be an unhomely habitation and
become a revolutionary space for collective politics and adventurous
possibilities. As such, the crisis in dwelling, which Adorno addressed
and which Hollywood films allegorically depict, is part of the larger
crisis in political activism. Perhaps there is no more pressing social
problem than the simple yet elusive question, Where do you call home?
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Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious

Author(s): Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho

I TysO Lewis li Dan elCho

THE UNHOMELY HOME

The popular understanding of the term uncanny designates the recog-

Cultural Critique 64-Fall 2006-Copyright 2006 Regents of the University of Minnesota

Perhaps the most obvious proponents of such a view are Gille

Arguing for a dialectical synthesis of these two positions, we turn

TOPOGRAPHY OF HOMES: TOO FULL OF GHOSTS

For many members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, bourgeois

FROM THE MANSION TO THE MUNDANE

The transition from traditional to modern homes is characterized by

itself. Adorno (1999) describes these modern homes as "living-ca

In the Arcades Project (1999), Walter Benjamin observed how the

technologies. For instance, the frustrations surrounding the

and dangerous adversary to the bourgeois individual. Thus "the

becomes a critical representation of the uncanny nature of the t

its entertainment, now the home itself is just as much of a ruckus as

once cultivated and sustained by the interiority of the home are ar

home to its original era's condition. The homeowner's attempt to

THE GRAND HOTEL ABYSS

porary getaway from one's own home or to be a permanent alterative

being temporarily displaced is to be so with an uninvited fellow

"HOME SWEET HOME?" OR ADORNO'S ETHICAL QUESTION

In sum, the traditional house is haunted by ghosts; the modern house

lack underlying our relationship to home. Although all the h

turn to the home to end the homesickness induced by such al

THE THOUSAND PLATEAUS, OR "SCHIZOBURBIA"

The current antithesis of Adorno's homeless melancholia and mod-

ernist sense of alienation is the radical postmodern theory of Deleuze

into ego formations. The self becomes a "body without organs,"

state of pure movement outward, and Deleuze and Guattari present

to remain homeless in one's home seems at this point to be nothing

more than a bourgeois retreat from the threshold of the plateau. In f

room for a viable social politics.

homeless-lacking a home, but more importantly lacking the de

THE DIRTY HOME AS A UTOPIAN SPACE

Turning to Fredric Jameson, we may begin to imagine a reconstruc-

In such dirty spaces, the anxieties of collective living are amel

on the other, it produced a new race of cannibalistic Reavers (psychotic

not dystopian by any means. Opposed to this nightmare stands the

Adorno, Theodor. 1999. Minima Moralia. London: Verso.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

? 2003. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin.

Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Basic Writings. San Fancisco, Calif.: Harper.

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