TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXVI / 2014 / 1 ////// tematická studie / thematic article /////////////////////// NON-HOME: A THEORETICAL APPROACH TO MIGRANTS' DWELLINGS Abstract: In this article we introduce the notion of non-home as an attempt of meaningful insight into the migrants' dwelling constructed from elements of diff erent provenance (family homes, social housing institutions, etc.), depending on tenants housing experiences, defi nitions (knowledge) and the very materiality of a living space. In developing the idea of a non-home we refer to the theoretical concepts of non-places and heterotopias. Keywords: home; migrants' dwelling; non-home; non-place Ne-domov: Teoretický přístup k bydlení migrant Abstrakt: V tomto článku představujeme pojem ne-domova jako pokus o smyslupný náhled do bydlení migrantů, jenž je zkonstruováno z prvků různé provenience (rodinné domovy, instituce sociálního bydlení apod.) v závislosti na obyvatelských zkušenostech nájemníků, defi nicích (vědění) a samotné materialitě prostoru obydlí. Při rozvíjení myšlenky ne-domova se odvoláváme na teoretické koncepty ne-míst a heterotopií. Klíčová slova: domov; přistěhovalecké obydlí; ne-domov; ne-místo MAGDALENA ŁUKASIUK Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw ul. Nowy Świat 69 00-046 Warszawa, Poland email / mlukasiuk@wp.pl MARCIN JEWDOKIMOW Faculty of Humanities, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw ul. Dewajtis 5, 01-815 Warsaw, Poland email / jewdokimow.marcin@gmail.com 106 Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow Introduction Th e article is a theoretical approach to analyzing specifi c living arrangements of internal migrants. Here we are going neither to discuss the wide theoretical questions of migration processes nor to implement particular theories used to explain this phenomenon. Various contemporary studies1 place migration as a central category of social scrutiny. For us in this text migration is just a promising fi eld of biographical experience off ering both a change of a life situation and a fruitful refl exivity of interviewees. We introduce the notion of non-home as an attempt of meaningful insight into migrants' dwellings. Th is notion captures interrelations between space and knowledge. Basing on our studies of migrants' dwellings we claim that this very phenomenon shows how both space and knowledge are constitutive and interdependent actants in social relations. In order to scrutinize space one is to follow narratives concerning it and, in reverse, study how these very narratives infl uence spatial organization. Relating it to migrant dwelling, dwelling practices depend on a culturally established ideal of home, which is embedded in material construction of house as well as assumed number of family members (social roles), confronted with a refl exive recognition of present living conditions by unrelated tenants. Non-home is not a typical, family housing formation nor it is a lodging or other institutionalized form of housing (e.g. a dorm, a boarding school or barracks). Th is type of housing is not only a contemporary phenomenon – researchers2 from the Chicago School (an Ecological School) explored a form of voluntary and group housing widespread among migrants in the United States of America; Polish sociologists3 approached the phenomenon related to internal migrations. 1 Comp. Arjun APPADURAI, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996; Kay DEAUX, To Be an Immigrant. New York: Russell Sage Foundation 2006; Gudrun HENTGES – Volker HINNENKAMP – Almut ZWENGEL (eds.), Migrationsund Integrationsforschung in der Diskussion. Biografi e, Sprache und Bildung als zentral Bezugspunkte. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft en 2008; Magdalena ŁUKASIUK, Obcy w mieście. Migracja do współczesnej Warszawy. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Akademickie Żak 2007. 2 Milton B. HUNT, "Th e Housing of Non-Family Groups of Men in Chicago." Th e American Journal of Sociology. September 1910, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 145–170. 3 Ludwik KRZYWICKI, „Wiejsko-miejskie grupy robotnicze." In: KRZYWICKI, L., Artykuły i rozprawy 1880–1886. Dzieła tom 2. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe 1958, pp. 227–231. We are very grateful to the Editor for the excellent cooperation and very helpful advices. We also thank the Reviewers for their careful reading and valuable suggestions. 107 Non-home Both American and Polish researchers examined male workers migrants determined by economical factors which defi ned migration as a must, not as a choice. Contemporary economical perspective (together is cheaper) is still relevant but basing on collected data we can insist on introducing a cultural perspective which extended and transgressed the economical one. Our respondents' (being usually in their 20s and 30s) stage of life may be described as a waiting-room before the real life (associated with a family, home, stability and everyday routine) or a conscious decision for staying in the waiting-room. Migrants' dwelling is a phenomenon which transgresses popular housing formations such as family or cohabitation, founded on economic, consumption and cohousing community.4 Contrasting with lodgings, there are no asymmetrical rights. It seems similar to hybrid housing formations (a dorm, barracks or a monastery), which embody features of a family home and public social institutions, but it also diff ers because in migrants' dwellings the features orchestrating housing practices are non-institutionalized: they diff er depending on the migrants' dwellings and their sources come from daily needs of inhabitants. Hence, there is no migrants' housing social discourse or narratives which migrants would apply, no typical housing practices. Migrants' dwellings are bricolages, constructed from elements of diff erent provenance (family homes, social housing institutions, etc.), depending on inhabitants housing experiences and their daily needs. In the Polish migrants' dwelling the inhabitants occupy all rooms by 1, 2 or 3 persons in each one, have a partly shared economic and social life and usually equal rights and obligations concerning household duties. Contemporary migrants' dwelling phenomenon is not only related to migrations but gradually becomes an alternative to a typical middle-class 'normal' pattern5 of housing in various Western countries. Economically speaking, the latest economic crises and growing housing prices push un-related people to inhabit together in the USA. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2009 data shows that in non-family households live 8,1% of males and 6,1% of females (this is not a cohabitation category).6 Culturally 4 Krystyna SLANY, Alternatywne formy życia małżeńsko rodzinnego w ponowoczesnym świecie. Kraków: Nomos 2006, p. 222. 5 Jürgen HASSE, Unbedachtes Wohnen. Lebensformen an verdeckten Rändern der Gesellschaft . Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2009, p. 17. 6 Haya EL NASSER – Paul OVERBERG, "Census: Households Get Fuller." USA Today, Friday October 1st, 2010, p. 3A. 108 speaking, Jürgen Hasse points out a growing number of alternative housing patterns such as post-commune or subdivisions of caravans where people decide to live and intentionally form a community based on shared needs, values (ecology for instance) or creative 'self-presentations'.7 In Germany, the so called Wohngemeinschaft 8 becomes popular not only among students but also working, independent adults who are not related to bohemia or so called creative environments.9 In Poland, analogues of these housing patterns remain unexplored. Our research attempted to fi ll this gap. We focused on relationships between inhabitants of migrants' dwellings, their housing practices and sources of patterns, as well as on how inhabitants interpret, modify and submit to housing space. Th e concept of a "non-home" is a tool to both describe and analyze relationship between migrants and their living space in the context of culture promoting home as a place of living. Th e concept results from our empirical studies. Between 2003 and 2008 we carried out 50 IDIs (supplemented by visual methods) in Poland and Ireland with adults with higher education this made up a ground for the scrutiny. A life scenario of these informants at this point assumes a social stability or at least a need for such stability. Moreover, we intentionally focused on this cohort and not on migrants from lower classes (construction workers, for instance) in order to omit a widespread research agenda assuming that a researcher from a higher class scrutinizes informants from the lower classes (this risky "class-descendant" approach results in many drawbacks, for instance: projection of researcher categories on a living-world of informants or certain "exotization" of the individuals under scrutiny). 7 HASSE, Unbedachtes Wohnen, p. 181. 8 Wohngemeinschaft can be translated as the dwelling community, which in Polish means an institution of common maintenance of multifamily building by the fl ats owners, in turn in German it means common living of unrelated persons in one fl at. Cf. Hartmut HÄUssERMANN – Walter SIEBEL, Soziologie des Wohnens. Eine Einführung in Wandel und Ausdiff erenzierung des Wohnens. 2. Aufl age. Weinheim und München: Juventa Verlag 2000, p. 326 passim. 9 Th e popularity of the form resulted in the institutionalized service off ers such as national internet service for parties subletting the fl at, looking for a fl at and looking for co-tenants: www.wohngemeinschaft .de. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 109 Spatial contexts in housing studies For the last decades of the 20th century the spatial turn has infl uenced humanities and sociological theories10 resulting in putting the spatial turn in the very center of a scrutiny. It is still unclear, who was the fi rst to decree this revolutionary approach in the comprehension and the related advancing of the space to the analysis axis.11 Perhaps its necessity, like the Durkheim's social fact "was hanging in the air", was detectable in the atmosphere or was legible or demanded for explication by many researchers at once. Karl Schlögel perceives this moment as follows: We can conclude on the change of the paradigm that at the moment of its advent or emergence in the circulation, it somehow dissimulates that the new paradigm always existed but most failed to notice. By nature, it is convincing, obvious, logical. It superseded everything artifi cial and invented. Testing period was over. Aft er the accomplishment of the transformation it appears that it should always be like this and should inherently never be diff erent. New interpretation, new key, deprivation of qualities not as such but as the interpretation patterns and linguistic standards. It is characterized by gentleness, ease, the power of interpretation and the obviousness.12 Undoubtedly, one of the progenitors of this change of approach was Michel Foucault. In his essay published in 1984 and elaborated substantially earlier "Of Other Spaces", he defi ned the 19th century as the one focused on temporal dimension, whereas "our era" were recognized as focused around spatial orders, more simultaneous and relation oriented.13 Th e development of aft erthought putting the space as a centre of speculations is evident in today's urban studies or in the resiliently developing area of sociology of architecture. Focus on spatial phenomena resulted also, among others, drawing the researchers' attention to transformations and particular forms of this spatiality and their cultural meaning. 10 Karl SCHLÖGEL, W przestrzeni czas czytamy. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie 2009, p. 56 passim. 11 Magdalena SARYUSZ–WOLSKA, Spotkania czasu z miejscem. Studia o pamięci i miastach. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2011, p. 130 passim; SCHLÖGEL, W przestrzeni, p. 32 passim and 56 passim. 12 SCHLÖGEL, W przestrzeni, p. 56. 13 Michel FOUCAULT, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias." Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, transl. into English by MISKOVIEC J. 1984 [online]. Available at: <http://web.mit. edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf> [cit. 12.03.2014]. Non-home 110 Analyses of housing frequently set as a benchmark home together with its connotations. A home is a concept working in physical, economical, social and emotional registers; it is related to a sphere of social practices and habits. Comprehensive study of the concept transformations might be found elsewhere,14 let us here mark only the most relevant associations of home. First, a home associates with intimacy and privacy which distinct the private and the public spheres. Second, home space, its architecture, is constructed for a family and a home connotes the familiar. Th ird, a home is a place of legitimate sexual intercourse, it implies close bodily relationships between inhabitants. It is worth mentioning 19th century hygiene discourse that interrelated cleanness, health and hygiene with moral living. Fourth, a particular room (an offi ce, kitchen, living-room, etc.) is dedicated to diff erent functionalities and sometimes diff erent authorized users from the group of household members and guests (e.g. the latter ones do not enter the bedroom nor the wardrobe, the kitchen is traditionally a women's domain, etc.). Th e home setup envisages the division of social roles and tasks allocated to particular family members, which supplement each other, maintaining the family-home machinery in operation. Th e notion of the home is undoubtedly connected with particularly comprehended "mine-ness" and comfort resulting not necessarily from the uniqueness of the architecture, equipment and the arrangement (these are usually similar) but rather from the selection made from the available options. Fift h, a home vehicle distributes social roles and obligations ascribed to a particular inhabitant; the roles and obligations are interrelated and interdependent to keep a home machinery working. Sixth, a concept of home entails a specifi c selfness and comfort. Our main challenge in the research was to eff ectively and consciously drift away from the concept of a home in order not to project the home associations (and housing practices related to them) on migrants' dwelling and research agenda; not to see migrants' dwellings as a home. Additionally, our aim was not to deconstruct the concept – a measure close to the one we encounter in case of feministic critics and gender perspective, revealing the patriarchic oppression of home machinery against women or activities 14 Marcin JEWDOKIMOW, Zmiany społecznych praktyk zamieszkiwania. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo UKSW 2011; Hazel EASTHOPE, "A Place Called Home." Housing, Th eory and Society, vol. 21, 2004, no. 3, pp. 128–138; Shelley MALLETT, "Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature." Th e Sociological Review, vol. 52, 2004, no. 1, pp. 62–89; Peter SOMERVILLE, "Homelessness and the Meaning of Home: Roofl essness or Rootlessness." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 16, 1992, no. 4, pp. 529–539. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 111 of artistic nature. Our reference to the concept of home is quite diff erent, forasmuch we do not describe the home – this too obvious statement (for some time not so obvious even for us, though) perfectly puts the judgments exhibited here in relevant order. In other words, we do not intend to crush nor disintegrate the monolith of homeness, which was perfected by our culture during the last few centuries.15 We intend to avoid it instead. Our aim is to take a look at the migration dwelling as a specifi c form of living, without incriminating it with a more or less conscious comparison to the traditional home together with its whole burden of its furnishing. Taking into consideration the spatial turn described below, we would like to transgress the thinking ruts and try to omit the handy, worn-out categories which come by themselves and as a result, to more adequately grasp the substance of the described phenomenon. Th erefore we aim to design possibly autonomous description category covering the migration dwelling in its spatial uniqueness. In our opinion, the best refl ection of this notion is nonhome. We have to admit that for a relatively long period of time we were not able to grasp its substance fully, yet fi nally, with seven years of work, repeated series of scrutnity and the conceptual eff ort allowed us to perfect the notion of non-home which miraculously set the scattered threads in place. Th e most inspiring from the viewpoint of our further deliberations are the attempts to grasp some diff erence – defi ned diff erently by various authors of the spatial characteristics by the non-home notion. A concept of a non-home locates itself closely to notions of non-places discussed by a few authors. Th us, before proposing and defi ning our term, let us review non-places literature. Non-places and heterotopias Th e fi rst of the authors whose theoretical ideas we would like to examine is a French philosopher and historian, Michel de Certeau. According to Michel de Certeau, examples of non-places are proper names of streets, parks, squares or subway stations,16 etc. Th ey are arbitrarily added to places which originally have nothing to do with them. Th e imposed names cover their vision matter of a place. "A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and fl ies high over the city like a foggy geography of meanings 15 Th is monolith, however, is subject to various weakening infl uences. 16 We could as well add the graffi ti, large format advertisements and ambient advertisements. Non-home 112 held in suspension, directing the physical deambulations below."17 So if it is assumed that the place constitutes the (stable, orchestrated, legible, single- -dimensional) confi guration of the architectural, material components, then non-place would have been an imposed semantic order emerging from outer provenance, not derived from it, although with real eff ects. Th e hypothetic, "clean" reading of the architecture (supposing we can imagine something similar on the palimpsest of the city) is superimposed by a multitude of new meanings which are introduced in the comprehension of the inhabitants by the names, then those might indeed infl uence the directions, pace and preferences of the passer-bys (de Certeau picturesquely wrote on "magnetic fi eld of trajectories".18 Th e names "they clothe with a word",19 but what's more profound, "and, by naming, that is, by imposing an injunction proceeding from the other (a story) and by altering functionalist identity by detaching themselves from it, they create in the place itself that erosion or nowhere that the law of the other carves out within it".20 Th is apprehension relates to the previously invoked defi nition of an orchestrated and stable place, where the components do not superimpose each other and are composed side by side; therefore the non-place is an infringement of this clear order written in the text of the architecture itself by the duality accomplished in it. Th e duality is also related to non-places by means of narratives on the past and urban legends or reminiscences which refer to the long forgotten times with no physical traces. Th ese legends "haunt urban space like superfl uous or additional inhabitants",21 composing some kind of "suspended symbolic order".22 To some extent they are invoked and activated from the non-existence by the narration which embeds the reminiscing reality in the virtually contemplated, experienced places: "Here, there used to be a bakery. Th at's where old lady Dupuis used to live."23 However it is not completely clear whether de Certeau connects this mechanism with non-places or rather perceives it as the essence of the very places. On the one hand, narratives of the past are structured by the similar rule that organizes proper names – coverage of fi rst-order, literal meanings by the second-order meanings which 17 Michel DE CERTEAU, Th e Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984, p. 105. 18 Ibid., p. 104. 19 Ibid., p. 105. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 106. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 108. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 113 derive from a diff erent order. In the names they emerge from another reality, not connected to a given place, such as the names of heroes or statesmen, adjectives composed from the names of foreign cities or countries, baptizing the streets or squares. In the urban legends the second-order meanings come from the past which is fi nished: "Stories about places are makeshift things. Th ey are composed with theworld's debris."24 But according to de Certeau the coverage is also the very nature of the place „that it is composed by these series of displacements and eff ects among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these moving layers."25 Matthias Däumer, Annette Gerok-Reiter i Friedemann Kreuder tend to interpret both these cases – proper names and urban legends and reminiscing narrations as well – as a feature of non-places in de Certeau's concept. Th e authors criticize de Certeau's notion claiming that the rupture between the place and its semantic layer (or a narrative on the past) is too defi nitive,26 as for instance street names might be not incidental and hence might relate to physical features e.g. the Station Street relates to the train station, the Th eatrical Square is the place where the theatre is located, the Royal Duct connects royal residences etc. Th e tales about the past are much less connected to the places – to summon de Certeau's example: in fact there was a bakery, and old lady Dupuis used to live there indeed. According to them, the nonplaces in the apprehension of de Certeau are not the non-places without any physical relevance but those which originate by connecting the narration to the physical existence of the place and describe this transgressive relocation. Th e decisive criterion is that the non-placeness emerges by narration, which is indeed connected with the physical existence of the place, but it semantically transgresses the place.27 Equally interesting and intellectually prolifi c notion of the non-places was created by a well-known French anthropologist Marc Augé. He puts up the opposition between places in traditional comprehension called here the anthropologic places and the very non-places. "If a place can be defi ned as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which can24 Ibid., p. 107. 25 Ibid., p. 108. 26 Matthias DÄUMER – Annette GEROK-REITER – Friedemann KREUDER, „Einleitung: Das Konzept des Unorts." In: DÄUMER M. – GEROK-REITER A. – KREUDER F. (eds.), Unorte. Spielarten einer verlorenen Verortung. Kulturwissenschaft liche Perspektiven. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2010, p. 13 (9–27). 27 Ibid., p. 13. Non-home 114 not be defi ned as relational or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place."28 According to this way of comprehension, the non-places would be characteristic for the age of hypermodernity which marks our contact with space as well as the derivative of this contact – our condition. A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces in developing, where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fl eeting, the temporary and ephemeral.29 in the author's opinion becomes fragmented hypermodern world and the non-places are its characteristic measure. Augé reasons that any places and non-places are some ideal types and rather seldom exist in their clean form,30 multiplication of non-places and our more intensive contact with them according to their rules engenders irreversible identity transformations. In other words, the man of non-places is someone diff erent than the inhabitant of anthropologic places. Th e name of a non-place labels two complementary albeit separate realities: spaces constituted in relation to certain goals (transport, transit, trade, leisure) and the relations which are maintained by the individuals with those spaces. "As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality."31 Th is way, the non-places are fateful in social consequences, to be more specifi c – are socially counterproductive. Without this feature to build the identity, relations or allowing to take roots in the history separate its users or passengers from each other, locking them up in their own individuality and unsociability. Th ese non-places described by Augé are by far the transit spaces and the means of transport i.e. airports, bus/train stations, motorways, airplanes and trains as well as hotels and supermarkets. Th ey establish 28 Marc AUGÉ, Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London – New York: Verso 1995, p. 77–78. 29 Ibid., p. 78. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 94. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 115 characteristic rules of communication and circulation in those spaces which are designed for the individuals interacting only with the texts originated by such consigners as legal entities or public institutions (airports, airlines, Ministry of Transport, commercial companies, traffi c police, urban government) whose presence is more or less tangible.32 Figuratively one might conclude that the non-places are non-tangible, however they are full of people, and oft en crowded and overfi lled such as trains, refugee camps or jammed roads, there is no connection either inside or between them, excluding the aforementioned government traffi c rules or quasi-individualizing information on neighboring touristic attractions superseding the interaction with themselves. For non-places belong to nobody, i.e. no one identifi es with them and does not treat them as a mean of selfidentifi cation, except maybe the service personnel for whom they constitute just a workplace. As pointed out by Ewa Rewers, discussing the fi gure of the airport, one of the non-places: "cosmopolitan, random wave of passengers does not constitute a new society and the airport is not a human habitat."33 Non-places do not create the identity in the form of group connection of individuals to the society. Because of this lack of common potential, no one takes pictures of the non-places. Th ey do not possess this identity attractor present in the case of pyramids, gothic castles or landscapes. Unless someone is interested in their technological aesthetics, which occurs rather seldom. People taking pictures of themselves at the airport do not take the picture of the airport, they catch the emotional moment of departure or arrival of friends or relatives; duty gates, queues for handing the luggage or duty-free shops are not being taken pictures of. As we already mentioned, Augé sets the opposition of the non-place and the anthropologic place; the latter category may obviously include home in its traditional comprehension. He writes: "thus we can contrast the realities of transit (transit camps or passengers in transit) with those of residence or dwelling."34 So in this conceptual framework the non-places connected with living could be defi ned as those related to temporary residence, usually short-term and usually treated as such; in general they are equipped with professional administration governing such a non-place. Following the author's notion we mean refugee camps, hotels, hostels, sobering-up stations, 32 Ibid., p. 96. 33 Ewa REWERS, Post-polis. Wstęp do fi lozofi i ponowoczesnego miasta. Kraków: Universitas 2005, p. 159. 34 AUGÉ, Non-places, p. 107. Non-home 116 deportation centers, children-bays etc. Th e further part of our article will be focused on consideration how far and where the Augé concept might relate to migrants' dwellings or some of their parts. If it proves adequate, the clear opposition between the transit world and the residential world shall be rethought. Th e third category which we would like to invoke in the context of nonplace is the category of Foucault's heterotopias. Th is is all the more justifi ed as we already mentioned in the beginning – the very author as one of the fi rst XX century thinkers declared shift ing the weigh in constituting the notion of modern human condition from temporal to spatial realm which, in his opinion, evolved into an axis bonding our life.35 Following the Matthias Däumer, Annette Gerok-Reiter and Friedemann Kreuder "a heterotopia is then a subcategory of non-place characterized by the subsequent factors: fi rst – it is dependent on particular cultural coding of a given place and second – it acquires its existence by changing the plane of comprehension from the fundamental one to the culturally conscious one."36 For Foucault himself, the heterotopia is, next to the utopia, a particular form of space escaping from evident defi nition and evokes the need of particular inspection. So as the "utopias are sites with no real place."37 which "present the society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces,"38 then the heterotopias are referred to by the author as the virtually existing areas, usually secluded and delimited with regard to the "normal" space, nevertheless ordained with diff erent rules than the space. As Foucault says there are probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, the kind of eff ectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely diff erent from all the sites that they refl ect and speak about, I shall call them – by way of contrast to utopias – heterotopias.39 35 FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces, p. 2. 36 DÄUMER – GEROK-REITER – KREUDER, Einleitung: Das Konzept des Unorts, p. 15. 37 FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces, p. 3. 38 Ibid., p. 3. 39 Ibid., p. 3–4. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 117 Referring to the example of theatre, cinema and above all the garden – traditional Persian garden engineered according to the strictly developed, symbolic notion – the French philosopher perceives that the "heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible."40 Th is semantic abundance, sometimes – as in the theatre – marked with silently shared conventionality or quasi-reality is accompanied by particular temporal reality. Th e existence in the heterotopia is connected with particular form of departure beyond the standard timeline, adjournment of the time and surrender to a diff erent temporal order. Foucault calls it heterochrony and substantiates: Heterotopias are most oft en linked to slices in time –which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. Th e heterotopia begin to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute brake with their traditional time.41 Contrary to the approach presented by Marc Augé who perceived his imagined a non-place as a particular spatial characteristic of hypermodernity developing together with it, in Foucault's opinion, the heterotopias existed always, in every culture and every society, they might, however, have a diff erent form and be able to evolve in time.42 Th e only regularity drawn by the author in this context is the gradual disappearance of heterotopias of crisis and increase in the importance of heterotopias of deviation,43 which is not, however, the subject of our paper. Other works of this researcher reecho here which can be perceived as the analyses of the very heterotopias of deviation in the form of a clinic, prison or psychiatric hospital. However, the most momentous examples called upon here by Foucault such as the cemetery, the brothel or colony do not succumb to this temporal regularity which itself is not too important for the author either. Matthias Däumer, Annette Gerok-Reiter and Friedemann Kreuder attempt to reconstruct the nature of heterotopia based exactly on the example of the cemetery. On one hand it is a specifi c place located in the city and on the other hand – also a sacred space of contact with the death, so in this case we have a necessity to change the coding of the comprehension according to the religious key. Th e authors write "admittedly, we shall conclude on the 40 Ibid., p. 6. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 1. 43 Ibid., p. 5. Non-home 118 lack of independence from physical data, aft er all, the cemetery operates as a cemetery only in its physical boundaries; the deciding point here indeed is the transgression (accentuation by MŁ, MJ)".44 Non-place in this meaning is created here by cultural seclusion of some area and simultaneous change in the option of its comprehension (Wahrnehmungsoption). On the strictly secular plane of comprehension, a cemetery is nothing more than the place, simply an area planted with trees: only by the historically conditioned cultural knowledge change of the comprehension plane to the transcendent-religious one, the place receives its non-placed characteristics.45 Based on all three notions invoked here, the authors of the work entitled Unorte. Spielarten einer verlorenen Verortung46 attempt to investigate the substance, the deepest nature of the non-place, such communized characteristics which orders many thinkers in various theories to isolate some areas from others and describe them as special ones. One can of course pose many doubts to such practice. Th e most important one is the danger, and in particular the necessity to reduce, delete the nuances to the benefi t of similarities, any common points, even if these similarities would occupy only incidental positions in the analyzed notions, anyhow not always the key positions. Leaving those – justifi ed – doubts on the side, let's take a closer look at what constitutes a non-place, according to the aforementioned researchers. In their opinion it is possible to distinguish some general rule for creating the non-places present in every referenced theory, however with preserving diff erent distribution of accents and diff erent theoretical surrounding, if we may put it this way. Däumer, Gerok-Reiter and Kreuder prove: Th e starting point is undoubtedly physically indicatable place. However, this place is always dismissed to oblivion by transgressive displacement, beset anew or defi ned using separation and demarcation so as a result it is not appearing as a place nor as a space, but the very – depending on specifi c prerequisites – non-place.47 Th e eff ect of such key transgress performed on a physically existing place is an ontological hybrid (Zwitter) of specifi c nature for which the non-place can be taken.48 44 DÄUMER – GEROK-REITER – KREUDER, Einleitung: Das Konzept des Unorts, p. 15. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 18. 48 Ibid., p. 22. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 119 Understandings of contradicted space Aft er this review of examples – by all means incomplete and selective – for engineering the spatial contradicted categories we will attempt to summarize the above deliberations so that we could be able to proceed using the drawn conclusions to the aft erthoughts on our pivotal notion of non-home. It appears that the most interesting are those forms of contradicted space which (what is implied by their noun form) refer to the very nature of the contradicted phenomenon. In fact one might conclude that they emerge only by contradicting some characteristics but at the same time they introduce new information or additional contexts, transgressing the clear contradiction itself. What and how it is being contradicted in them? We believe that it is possible to work on three planes. Th e fi rst one relates to the particular characteristics of the place itself such as the semantic duality or even semantic multiplication. Let's leave aside the deliberation whether the source of this abundance is included in the limits of the very non-place or whether it comes from the outside and is somewhat added, contributed to it. It might be – as was shown by the aforementioned examples the law of the other one (in proprietary names) or the palimpsest of the past – in such case we will be experiencing the duality or the existence of diff erent, superimposed and non-compatible places in one, as desired by Michel Foucault. Th e eff ect is the aforementioned ontological hybrid, in which we encounter the non-convergence between the physical existence and the meanings resulting from it and the culturally determined method of its comprehension which provides additional and actually decisive code. As we believe, in case of defi nition of non-home, the valid thought would be the one how this cultural determination emerges and where its source and its semantic potential come from. Another plane which opens in this analysis of spatial contradicted category is the process of its particular creation, therefore the non-placement. Th is area includes for example the refl ections on specifi c places which were transposed into the state of non-placement, e.g. by changing their user's contact context. Let's take as an example the French familistere which evolved from the complex of dwellings into some kind of a museum of the notion of proletarian habitation. Th e non-placement may also be the process of implementing additional, separate meanings or discourses into organized, semantically developed and hitherto synonymous place. Th e theme can be investigated also on the macro level, where the non-placement is the destiny of a growing number of places (e.g. more and more unifi ed train Non-home 120 stations or shopping malls), when the newly developed places are designed as non-places (motorways, airports ...) from the very beginning, or when such non-places acquire pivotal role for human experience. Th e most general plan of aft erthought subdued to this theme returns to some vision of historic changes, to the assumed transition from the modern age to the postmodern or hypermodern age which is characterized by the growth of non-places and their intensifi ed infl uence on human being. Th en the natural point of reference is the modernistic past; it constitutes a subject of comparisons, automatic anticipations or the essence of traditional methods of defi nition which uncover their inappropriateness. We're just one step away from the third plane of developing the nonplaces. Here, the researcher's attention heads for the relation between the non-place and the human being. Th e traditional anticipation in this regard was expressed by Marc Augé in the aforementioned notion of anthropological places which are also equipped with the identity, relations and historical functions. Non-place or the dislocated place can be perceived as the one which is acting diff erently in the context of individual's identity and its social relations and a particular type of identifi cation which is brought by the past. Th e contradiction refers to the traditionally comprehended and socially anticipated function of the place which is expected to defi ne and root us also in particular universe of meanings. Th at's why cutting these connections off means "solitary contractuality"49 for the human being. Space and knowledge. Th e notion of non-home Th e non-home is not a non-place in any of the described meanings. In other words, none of the above discussed notions encompass the characteristics of the non-home accurately, appropriately and completely, nevertheless they may constitute a source of inspiration and valuable theoretical support for us. Th us the need for defi ning the non-home arises anew. Defi nitional approximation of a non-home should probably be started with the statement that non-home is neither a straightforward nor more sophisticated antithesis of home. In other words, the sole negation of everything what creates the category of home does not consist of an accurate nor suffi cient material in order to defi ne the non-home. It is rather a conglomerate of components transferred straight, transferred and inverted from home or redefi ned and acquired from beyond this resource. In purely 49 AUGÉ, Non-places, p. 94. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 121 physical comprehension, a non-home is usually an apartment in a block of fl ats or tenement. Its layout, internal seclusions, sanitary equipment include the notion of the designer or the architect, who designed the space having the family in mind. As Grażyna Woroniecka points out, introducing family as the default occupant at the conceptual stage was an obvious designer's assumption designing the fl ats in order to fulfi ll the offi cially defi ned requirements, in specifi c the tasks ascribed to the family itself.50 So the default tenant, including his practices is built-in into the physical space, containing and conveying its message. Furthermore, the space itself pre-codes the behaviors and actions and even the patterns or values multiplied and preserved by the defi ned tenants. Following the path suggested by theoretic aft erthought of the sociology of architecture one has to notice an everyday, unconscious infl uence of the sole corporeality of the place and inscribed discourses for creating the lives of inhabitants. As Heike Delitz points out "in various societies, there are many diff erent types of developments that connect the individuals to various objects into socio-technological conglomerates".51 Her voice is backed up by Joachim Fischer, who wrote "in their architectural styles, the buildings evoke or block the ways of people's lives."52 Th e space of a non-home is indeed a signifi cant one and an active player. However, at least some of its infl uences and messages which are conveyed are contradicted or neglected and sometimes actively opposed. For the inhabitants of migration dwellings are able to read the space of the rented dwelling, however in some parts they tend to ignore, reformulate or destroy the readout. We are facing here the aforementioned duality: the discourse of home very well known to the inhabitants and even strongly inscribed into their imagination on home and homeness, additionally reinforced by the activity of the sole corporality of the dwelling is superimposed by the sphere of meanings coming from (some) defi nition of current dwelling or to put it more generally – in the life-aff ecting situation. Th is defi nition is not given but at least partially infl icted. In any case we can see the emphasis on the fl uctuation between the prompt discourse of the homeness and the created 50 Grażyna WORONIECKA, "Co znaczy „mieszkać" w świecie ruchu i globalizacji." In: KEMPNY M. – KICIŃSKI, K. – ZAKRZEWSKA, E. (eds.), Od kontestacji do konsumpcji. Szkice o przeobrażeniach współczesnej kultury. Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Stosowanych Nauk Społecznych 2004, p. 322 passim (321–332). 51 Heike DELITZ, "Architektur + Soziologie = Architektursoziologie." In: Architektur der Gesellschaft . APuZ (Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte), 2009, no. 25, p. 13 (11–16). 52 Joachim FISCHER, „Architektur: schweres Kommunikationsmedium der Gesellschaft ." In: Architektur der Gesellschaft . APuZ (Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte), 2009, no. 25, p. 9 (7–10). Non-home 122 on-the-go and processed defi nition of the current situation, which is built from the components of diff erent provenance. Migrants' dwelling is a cause and at the same time an eff ect of the movement of invalidating the idea or discourse of the home. An eff ect, because migration dwelling is a product of social changes which undermine the idea of home. A cause, because it becomes a reference point which by constant, thoughtful relevance to this idea brings it to the movement of frustration. Such a dwelling makes use of the idea of home in the creation of itself, albeit there are no model so mythical "it is the way you live in the migrants' dwelling", it is a product of nonplacement and at the same time a practice of the reconstruction from the available logics and discourses, e.g. gregariousness or economization. We must remember though the sole dwelling, the physical and material being is not only a scenery or even a scenery sending encoded message but together with the inhabitants it becomes a component of this aforementioned "sociotechnological conglomerate". What is the meaning of this? Well, the space of the non-home is defi ned and redefi ned on-the-go, depending on the more or less permanent meanings inscribed in it by its current inhabitants. Subsequent inhabitants install53 themselves in the feeling of temporality and transitiveness. Th eir bodies accommodate to the new living space, and at the same time they practice in weaning. In the subsequent cycles of installation and de-installation they acquire the profi ciency in migration competences. Moreover, conceiving this characteristics from the side of non-home one should note that this fl at was occupied by many inhabitants in diff erent line-ups and set-ups, leaving in its substance and the equipment its habitual beauty. So the fl at itself and its furniture preserves the traces of habitual utilization by the owner and by the subsequent tenants, traces that do not bear any corporal nor emotional meanings but only some – diffi cult to be precisely verbalized – corporal equivalent of noise or chaos. With this respect, the fl at assimilates to the transit space which preserves or accumulates within so many various, personal traces that it turns to the completely non-identifying, "smooth and barren", no man's space. Exactly transitive. 53 We use the verb "to install" because it catches better the strategy of migrants than for example "to adapt" or "to integrate" (comp. Jan E. ZAMOJSKI, "Semantyka migratologiczna, czyli nieco refl eksji nad terminami i pojęciami." In: ZAMOJSKI, J. E. (ed.) Migracje. Historia – kultura. Seria: Migracje i społeczeństwo 7. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton 2002, pp. 274–284. Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow 123 Conclusions As it was noticed by Daniel Miller, „in moving in and maintaining a home we have constantly contend with the pre-given decorative and other ordering schemes of the house"54 – the setup of rooms (one-room fl at forces to its multi-functionality; multi-room fl at forces to division of functions – e.g. bedroom, working room) or the orientation of windows to the geographic directions (obfuscated, northward rooms have to be additionally lighted). Hence Miller concludes that "although we may seek to overthrow these [implied household conditions – MŁ, MJ], more oft en we develop a kind of negotiated compromise between that which is expressed by the house and that which seek to express through the medium of the house."55 Although Miller is aft er something more signifi cant than the mere freedom of individual expression: by writing house he indicates the agency of the material objects, which dimension is usually overlooked in the anthropologic analyses of the material culture and in the broader sense, in social sciences. It was the dimension which Bruno Latour asked for in his essay Where are the missing masses?56 Latour in his ANT (actor-network-theory) acknowledges the equivalent role to humans and non-humans in infl uencing the course of actions. In his recognition, the objects stop to be passive containers of meaning and become active performers, such as an automatic hinge described by Latour. Th e hinge automatically closes the door simplifying life of many people, who, if the hinge wasn't there, would have to close the door themselves. So, the automatic device, as Latour reasons, saves time and money, since it performs the job of closing the door for people. Following this path, authors such as Elizabeth Shove and Dale Southerton57 describe the subjective agency of the fridge-freezer, and Emma Roe58 – the processed carrot in household nutritional practices. Russell Hitchings very picturesquely describes the operation of the freezer which has its needs regarding the setup 54 Daniel MILLER, "Behind Closed Doors." In: MILLER, D. (ed.), Home Possessions. Material Culture behind Closed Doors. Oxford – New York: Berg 2001, p. 11 (1–22). 55 Ibid., p. 11. 56 Bruno LATOUR, "Where Are the Missing Masses: Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts." In: BIJKER, W. – LAW, J. (eds.), Shaping Technology-Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridg, MA: MIT Press 1992, pp. 225–259. 57 Elizabeth SHOVE, Dale SOUTHERTON, "Defrosting the Freezer – From Novelty to Convenience – A Narrative of Normalisation." Journal of Material Culture, vol. 5, 2000, no. 3, pp. 301–319. 58Emma ROE, "Th ings Becoming Food and the Embodied, Material Practices of an Organic Food Consumer." Sociologia Ruralis, vol. 46, 2006, no. 2, pp. 104–121. Non-home 124 and continuous supplies of energy, it demands to be used and prefers some varieties of food above some others.59 Here is where we capture precisely relationships between space and knowledge in a non-home. Cleary objects and house's construction infl uence dwelling practices but also knowledge meanings inscribed in the certain part of a place, in the furniture, in the fi gure of owner as well as meanings connected with the current life situation and the ideal of dwelling, transgressing the material condition of a fl at. In our comprehension, a nonhome is a notion introducing both the discursive and material dimension into the analysis of habitation. A non-home is an epistemological proposition not an empirical concept highlighting mutual relationship between space that produces and restricts narratives on it and knowledge (narratives) that constitute spaces. Implementing the concept of a non-home to empirical scrutiny one is to remember that dwelling is vague, automatic, habitual, embodied and non-discursive and, hence, non-home is neither a straightforward nor more sophisticated antithesis of home. It is rather a point of departure. 59 Russell HITCHINGS, "At Home with Someone Non-human." Home Cultures, vol. 1, 2004, no. 2, p. 180 (169–186). Magdalena Łukasiuk – Marcin Jewdokimow