lne Gevers	curator  \  writer  \  activist

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Home as a place to start This paper is not about 'home' as it is referred to in the usual sense. I will not talk about domestics and dwelling, but draw upon the symbolic implications of home. During this talk my attention will gradually shift away from home as a metaphor of the unified and integrated self to trying to build a narration around the Other, whom we exclude even in terms of Being. This is a difficult route. Especcially because there is no way I can reach beyond the limitations of language. When I try to give space to the Other I seem to be bound to reprodu­cing exactly that construct of Otherness that I want to dismiss. How can we let them speak for themselves. How to open up spaces between us and them? Perhaps, as a start, bt acknowledging that home is not for everybody a place to start... As an introduction I want to try and understand the meaning of home in such a way that it enables me to make the transition between 'having a home' and 'having a sense of self'. Etymologically speaking 'huis' in Dutch derives from 'huus' and 'hus', signifying something like 'basis', in the sense of 'covering', 'garding' and 'hiding'. This notion of 'huis/home' seems to have a lot in common with Gaston Bachelards (one of the central philosophers in relation to this topic) phenomeno­logical approach of the house as a place to withdraw, a place to reside with oneself in order to reappear to the outside world with renewed strength and energy. A house with nests, shells and corners -all really inhabited spaces and all sites of protection. According to Bachelard the house is at the basis of the human beings' deepest imaginati­ons in relation to sheltering. In concordance with the memory-system of the Renaissance epistemes within which images of houses and cities were used as mental maps enabling people to memorise things, the house seems to have kept this function at least on the level of the semiotic. Bachelard invites his readers as follows: "we shall see the imagination build 'walls' of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection- or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts" (1). Bachelards aim is to show "that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind"(2). It is the human being's first world. Home as the metaphor for the unified, integrated self. Following this rather romanticized picture of the house we hardly can bear to think what this means for those who do not have a home. And in particular for those who are born into homeles­sness, who are not even in the position of recalling the living history of their transition from 'home­fullness' to homelessness as they never had the experience. And worse, whose parents' histories have been completely erased. The artist Kryztof Wo­dizcko, who has been working with homeless people and immigrants for years, called this history that has been stolen, destroyed and completely removed from the larger social consciousness, from what is being called our culture (..) "the highest level of deprivati­on"(3). Although Bachelard primarily attempts to capture the phenomenological implicati­on of the house/home (-he tries to understand how this notion is at the root of our conscious­ness and therefore necessarily informs our existence in the world-), he acknowledges that this metaphor must not become a 'closure'. It is the task of poets and artists to try and shake up certain rigid and oppositional modes of thinking that are implicated. In the last chapter of his book The poetics of space he points at the philosop­hical dialectics of inside and outside, thought of in terms of being and non-being, and shows how these are shaped largely on the notion of the house. He then puts an hold to these metaphysical dialectics of 'here and there' by introducing poets as possible aids in trying to free ontology from reposing too much on geographical images. I quote Bache­lard: " (..)from the point of view of geometrical expressions, the dialectics of outside and inside is supported by a reinforced geometrism, in which limits become barriers. We must be free as regards all definitive intuitions -and geometrism records definitive intuitions- if we are to follow the daring of poets who invite us to the fineness of experience of intimacy, to 'escapades' of imaginati­on"(4). Although Bachelards phenomenological and psychological account on the discourse of inside and outside is meant to be critical, his approach does not reach for the edge. This is the work of poets and artists, for instance Rilke, whom he cites: " Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes". Bachelard then asks himself: "But is it necessary to go and look for "danger' other than the danger of writing, of expressing oneself? Doesn't the poet put language in danger? Doesn't he utter words that are dangerous?" (5) Throughout history not all artists and writers were convinced it would be enough to 'play' within a laboratory-like setting. Krystof Wodizcko belongs to those radical, socially engaged avant-garde artists who want to take a few more steps. For him the time has come to radically change perspectives. The real (counter)artists of today are, in his opinion, migrants and other strangers. "What they see is a combinati­on of their unique, often painful experiences and their memory of what they have lost and suffered and what should not be allowed to repeat itself in the future. Our common future depends on our ability, the ability of those who are more fortunate, to see the presence of the stranger as a hopeful disruption of continuity"(6). Migrants and strangers should get and take the chance to tell their own story, "to communicate the secret 'tradition of the vanguished',-which never allows itself to forget- in opposition to the 'history of the victors'". In reaction to the dichotomy of inside and outside that still pervades so many cultural narratives, among whom that of Bache­lard, Wodizcko proposes the stranger's presence within our communi­ty because "there is a new community of multiple identities inside the immigrant mind"(7). Wodizcko sees the immigrant as the cyborg of the future: no unified self but a multi-composable set of possible identities. He acknowledges though that it is exactly these multi-fragmented and continuous­ly changing identities that we fear the most. We fear the hidden stranger(s) inside ourselves. "If only the stranger were able to show his/her incoherence to others and thereby prove everybo­dy's incoherence", Wodizcko rightly asks. If we would only be less frightened to loose our sense of self, our illusion of integration. If we could only accept difference as part of ourselves instead of fearing it and keeping it at distance. Among the signifying practices aimed at signalling 'difference', stereotyping is one of the most successful. In order to maintain the social and symbolic order stereotyping deploys the strategy of 'splitting'. It divides the normal and the acceptable from the abnormal and the unacceptable. It then excludes or expels everything which does not fit, which is different. The sociologist Richard Dyer makes a distinction between typing and stereoty­ping and argues: "a system of social- and stereo-types refers to what is, as it were, within and beyond the pale of normalcy (i.e. behaviour which is accepted as 'normal' in any culture). Types are instances which indicate those who live by the rules of society (social types) and those who the rules are designed to exclude (stereotypes). For this reason, stereotypes are also more rigid than social types. Boundaries must be clearly delineated and so stereotypes, one of the mechanisms of boundary maintenance, are characteristically fixed, clear-cut, unalterable"(8). Needless to say that stereotyping tends to occur where there are gross inequalities of power. Foucault called stereotyping a 'power­/knowledge' sort of game. It classifies people according to a norm and constructs the excluded as 'Other'.   Within the field of cultural studies various disciplines have addressed the issue of stereoty­ping from their specific perspective (linguis­tics, dialogistics, anthropology, psychology). The psychoanalytic approach of 'difference' examines the notion of stereotyping as a necessary, defensive mechanism with which we assign ourselves and others 'a place'. The argument of Freud and his interpreters Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein, with all the variations within their theories, is that the 'Other' is fundamental for the constitution of the self, to us as subjects, and to our sexual identity. Freud introduced his theory of the forming of subjects by narrating on the erotic attraction to the mother within the early development of the male child (which he called Oedipus complex), as such providing us with a (male-oriented) model of how sexual difference of both sexes is constituted. Lacan went even further. He argued that the child has no sense of itself as a subject separate from its mother until it sees itself in a mirror, or as if mirrored in the way it is looked at by the Mother. Through identification it desires the object of her desire, thus focusing its libido on itself. It is this reflection from outside oneself, or what Lacan calls 'the look from a place of the Other', during this mirror stage, which allows the child for the first time to recognize itself as a unified subject (actually to 'misrecogni­se', according to Lacan, as the subject can never be fully unified), which enables him to relate to the outside world, to the 'Other', to develop language and take on a sexual identity. In other words: the very young child stops experiencing the world as a mere extension of the self and copes with its anxiety of losing control by adjusting his mental picture, thus being able to enter into the symbolic order. According to Melanie Klein the young child copes with this problem of a lack of a stable self as soon as he begins to distinguish between the world and the self by splitting its unconscious image of and identification with the Mother into 'good' and 'bad' parts, internalising some aspects, and projecting others on to the outside world. All these interpretations of Freud have in common the notion that subjectivity can only arise through the symbolic and unconsci­ous relations which the child forges with a significant 'Other' which is outside itself -meaning: different from itself. This first split, which marks the implication in the symbolic and imaginary code that needs to become solid in the years to come, is the root of all stereotypi­cal perceptions. The deep structure of our own sense of self and the world is built upon the illusionary image of the world divided into two camps, 'us' end 'them'. Even if later on (still early in development) this primitive distinction between 'good' and 'bad' in most individuals is replaced by the illusion of integration, making a difference between 'self' and 'other' remains an imaginary necessity. As culture can be defined as those practices concer­ned with the producti­on and exchange of meaning, basically by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system, the marking of 'difference' through typing and stereotyping can be said to be the basis of this symbolic order at large as well. Also here binary oppositions between 'us' and 'them' are crucial for all classification. Stable differences are a prerequi­site in order to classify them. Again there are of course no real boundaries between 'us' and 'them', the 'same' and 'other', but symbolic bounda­ries are needed to keep categories 'pure', to give cultures their unique meaning and identity. Although those boundaries are not stable and are constantly shifting and changing, we live in the illusion that they are clear and fixed. What unsettles cultures most is 'whatever is out of place', which is the breaking of the unwritten set of rules and codes. Whatever is 'out of place' and as such threatens the symbolic dimension sets a culture to retreat towards 'closure' a­gainst foreigners, intruders, aliens and other 'others'. They are expelled and excluded as part of the process of purification. To quote the anthropologist B. Babcock: "Symbolic boundaries are central to cultures. Marking 'differen­ce' leads us, symbolically, to close ranks, shore up culture and stigmatise and expel anything which is defined as impure, abnormal. Paradoxically, however, it also makes 'difference' power­ful, strangely attractive precisely because it is forbidden, taboo, threatening to the cultural order" (9). Whatever stereotyping sets out to do, whether it simply stigmatises and expels people from within or whether it gives the Other some special aura (nevertheless keeping distance), it happens at that instance where we cross the borderline between the inside and outside of Being. "If there exists a border-line between such an inside and outside", Bachelard comments, "this surface is painful on both sides"(10). What should hurt even more is the acknowledge­ment that there ins no escape. We are not so much entrap­ped in being as we are in the in the surface of being. There is no way we can leave the surface of language and represen­ta­tion. Our symbolic order is like thin ice and we are stuck in it. In our postmodern times surfaces and surface language are celebrated more than ever. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is exemplary in his battle against the philosop­hical tradition that seeks in-depth explanations for the cause of things. Instead he privileges thinkers and writers whose focus is on the surface: the surface where sense and nonsense meet, where the marriage between language and the unconsci­ous has been consummated and celebra­ted. Thus, in his book The logic of sense privileged places are assigned to the Stoics, due to their having been the initiators of a new image of the philosopher which broke away from the Socratic philosop­hy and Platonism, and to the author of Alice (in wonder­land), Lewis Caroll. Deleuze characterized Caroll as the celebrator of the paradox of becoming and of infinite identity (the infinite identity of both directions or senses at the same time -of future and past, of the day before and the day after, of more and less, of too much and not enough, of active and passive, and of cause and effect). According to Deleuze, it is language which fixes limits, but it is language as well which transcends these limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming. Hence the reversals which constitute Alices' adventures: for instance the reversal of becoming larger and becoming smaller, reversals that, in this case, all have the consequence of the contesting of Alice's personal identity and the loss of her proper name. It is not the here celebrated 'surface of being' that interests me but more so the comments on this 'surface language' as uttered by the French poet and schi­zophrenic Antonin Artaud. Artaud considers Lewis Caroll to be a pervert who holds onto the establishment of a surface language, and who has not felt the real problem of a language in depth- namely, the schizophrenic problem of suffering, of death, of life. In a letter from his asylum at Rodez Artaud passes judgement on Ca­roll. He wri­tes that he tried to produce a translation of 'Jabberwocky' (a poem by Caroll in which a great number of words -portmanteau words and other invented words- sketch out a fantastic zoology) and he then continues: " I never liked this poem, which always struck me as an affected infantilism.. I do not like poems or languages of the surface which smell of happy leisure's and of intellectual success - as if the intellect relied on the anus, but without any heart or soul in it. The anus is always terror, and I will not admit that one loses an excrement without being torn from, thereby losing one's soul as well, and there is no soul in Jabberwoc­ky"(11). The point is that Artaud wrote from a perspective that is known only by schizophrenics. For Artaud there is not, there is no longer, any surface. The first schizophrenic evidence is that this surface has split open. Things and propositi­ons have no longer any frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface. Deleuze: "Without this surface, the inside and the outside, the container and the contai­ned, no longer have a precise limit; they plunge into a universal depth or turn in the circle of a present which gets to be more contracted as it is filled. Hence the schizophrenic manner of living the contradiction: either in the deep fissure which traverses the body, or in the fragmented parts which encase one another and spin about. Body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body -these are the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body"(12).   In this collapse of the surface, the entire world loses its meaning. It maintains perhaps a certain power of denotation, but is experienced as empty or as 'false'. The word loses its sense. The symbolic dimension has collapsed. The illusion of integration and control has fallen apart. There is no place to reside anymore. There is no 'home'(its meaning has gone). Artaud is one of the few Others who can properly speak for himself. The schizophrenic, the insane, the mentally handicapped, the wild child are described and categorized by us as being the representatives of the 'non-place'. When I speak of a lack of 'home' where they can retreat, be safe and rest until they feel apt to another encounter with the world outside, I am in control. I take the power and represent them when I speak of their lack of this notion of a 'self'. Even when I speak of there being no such thing as inside and outside, or a surface such as the surface of language described by Deleuze. We can see nothing but this lack of surface, a lack of boundaries. Where we speak of the painful transition when moving from the inside to the outside or vice versa, or even when we experience being stuck within this symbolic order, within the order of representation, there are people who experience this same world entirely different. They experience it as chaos. They cannot come out from the inside. For them there is no 'outside': the inside and outside are blurred in such a way that there is no safe place to go to. No retreat. No place to stay, no place to speak from, no places where the 'I' resides in any way near how we experience this. For those who never succeeded in entering the symbolic order or whose symbolic firmament proved to be insufficient, those whose escape routes are blocked and who are confronted with non-inte­gration, des-integration or only fragments of integration, this undisputable place, where according to Mikhail Bakhtin "the ever present excess of my seeing, knowing and possessing in relation to any other human being is founded"(13), does not exist. Or should I say, at least we who speak for them do not know where to find it. For those who are constantly moving and wandering, going from place to place, physically and mentally, never being at rest, there is only 'non-place'.  In his book The Mystic Fable the French theologist /philosopher Michel de Certeau narrates on these Others, based on descriptions of their lives throughout the centuries. De Certeau's aim is to give an historical analyses of the mystic discourse of (or about) presence (of God), which is based on the 'saying of the Other'. His interest is in how, especially since their exclusion from the church since the 13th century when theology became institutionalised, spirituals and mystics were obliged to seek elsewhere and otherwise to be able to speak. There was no place for them within dominant discour­se anymore. Being expelled from the sphere of language (the written word) and representati­on, they had to take up the challenge of the spoken word and be displaced toward the area of the 'fable'. As such the mystics formed a solidarity with all the tongues that continued speaking but neverthe­less had no place within the symbolic order. Their discourse was marked by the assimilati­on to the child, the woman, the illiterate, madness, angels, the 'language' of the body; they had to connect with the 'non-place'. With 'non-place' De Certeau refers to 'the saying of the Other'. Giving account on this 'saying of the Other' De Certeau is however fully dependant on how this Other is being described, stereotyped, and constructed by the social and cultural economics throughout the centuries. As such his book historicizes Others in order to see how their langua­ge changed throughout the centuries and as such served as inspiration for the mystics. Also in the earliest history 'Others' were constructed by the level of deviation from what was thought of as normal and appropriate at that time. One of the first case stu­dies of De Certeau reports on the idiot woman who lived in at the end of the 4th century within a community at a monastery. Using written narrations of that time De Certeau shows that the specific role and characte­ristics that were assigned to this madwoman had a clear and constructive function. In fact it was the madwoman who made possible the community of all other inhabitants of the convent. The madness of the madwoman consisted in not participating (not being able to participate) in the circulation of the signifier; in being, in relation to madness itself, nothing but its 'simulation'; in having experienced with language nothing but a betrayal; in abstaining from the constitutive power of the spoken word, etc. De Certeau: "She takes upon herself the body's most humble functions; she looses herself in the unanswerable, below the level of all language. But this 'disgusting' castaway makes possible for the other women the sharing of meals, the community of bestiary and corporeal signs indicating that they have been chosen, the communication of words. The excluded one renders possible the entire circulation"(14). Being the object of disgust she allows the institution, as a family, to form and manifest itself according to a law, "the wording of which might be 'all but one', yet 'one' who maintains the abjection of the inner madness of 'all'". Whereas women made of madness the way to retain a monastic communi­ty, it were the men who extended that experience to the city in the course of the centuries to come (up until the 6th century). As such De certeau describes how the crowd had made the idiot "a body made for blows and lowly tasks, a body long since dispersed, to be derided and not in need of being defended, no longer having anything to defend. His weakness is the strength of an absence, because already he 'is waste'"(15). It is the man who neither speaks nor strikes out. He just laughs. His laughter is the non-place, a 'place' where every distinction is lost, where there is a play of identities shifting continuously, like semblances. Towards the end of the Middle Ages times have changed profoundly and so has culture and its various institutions. As other elements come into play, other norms and values are agreed upon, shifts are to be expected in relation to the distinctions that are being made. During the 16th and 17th century the 'abject' Other is assigned with different characteris­tics. The stereotypes have changed. De Certeau describes a few examples among the 'figures of the wild man' (an invention of the 14th and 15th century) and the 'nomads' of this historical period. According to De Certeau the wild man (he who has taken refuge in loss) represents only an intermedi­ary stage, bridging between the mystic subject of the 16th and the economic subject of the 18th century (Foucaultian epistemes). Whereas in the 17th century he is posited in opposition to the values of work, scriptural economy and territorial and social classificati­on, which were established by exclusion of their opposites, which was being without productivi­ty, without letters, place or 'condition', the wild man was to disappear complete­ly by the end of the 18th century. He became replaced this time by more contemporary 'Others': the primiti­ve, the colonised and the mentally deficient.   Being stuck within the symbolic, within the mechanisms of representation, as much or even more then our constructed Others are kept outside and excluded from it, how can we find ways to at least lessen the distance between surface and placeless ness, between sense and non-sense, between language and its others? I do not have answers....Perhaps we could make a start by making inversions and by acknowledging how limited we our ourselves. If we could only realize what high a prize we are paying in order to be safe, to be 'at home', no matter where. And what will be the effect of this self imprisonment in the future? What will happen if we succeed completely in eliminating the Other, either by making clear distinctions or by 'curing' them in order to become the same? What gives us the right to make such judgements? What if we are wrong? Like De Certeau Michael Foucault too claims the indispensability of the 'saying of the Other', not only within the ritual of forming communities through excluding and including, but as "the foundation of our language, not its rupture". Whether we call them insane, imbecile, violent or otherwi­se, it is their excluded language -the language of Artaud- that has since the classical age been recogni­sed as "the truth of the human laid bare "even though it was placed "in a space, neutralized and pale, where it was as it were cancelled" (16). According to Foucault we are already far on our way in our crusade to eliminate every trace of this very face of the Other from our culture. With the exclusion of madness (the terms Foucault uses in reference to all forms of transgressi­on in terms of language), Foucault states: "there will be something else which will not take long to die, that which is already dying in us (and whose very death bears our current language)". This is the homo dialecticus: "the being of departure, of return, and of time; the animal that loses its truth only in order to find it again, illuminated; the self-estranged who once again recovers the unity of the self-same"(17). If it is not for those Others we should consider it for ourselves: to take the risk and tackle the surface of our being, to go beyond language and to encompass what is left outside of our symbolic order. Words are not sufficient here, even if we are aware of the fact that discourse does prepare perception and experience. Much more practical tools are needed to break up the thick walls that we have built around ourselves. Perhaps laughter -the laughter of Mikhail Bakhtin- is one of the keys: not a subversive laughter aimed at the status quo, not a helpless laughter, but laughter as a responsible act: the laughter that starts by pointing at the self and its limitations. A laughter that under­stand its own relativity and that opens up spaces for action again. Ine Gevers Notes: 1 Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of Space, Boston 1964, p. 5 2 Idem, p. 6 3 Krzystof Wodiczko, interview, in: Ine Gevers & Jeanne van Heeswijk, Beyond ethics and aesthetics, SUN Nijmegen 1997, p. 468 4 Gaston Bachelard, op.cit. (1), p. 215 5 Idem, p. 220 6 Krzystof Wodiczko, op.cit (3), p. 468 7 Idem, p. 470 8 Richard Dyer, Stereotyping, in Gays and Film, London 1977, p. 28 9 B. Babcock, The Reversible World, Ithaca, NY 1978, p. 32 10 Gaston Bachelard, op.cit. (1), p. 222 11 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 1990 12 Idem 13 Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, Austin 1990, p.23 14 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 34 15 Idem, p. 42 16 Michael Foucault, Madness, the Absence of Work, in: Critical Inquiry, 21 (winter 1995), p. 290 17 Idem, p. 292 [top]