The environmental crisis we are living through has colored the thinking of ecology with reactive hues. We grow worried about dwelling when it is on the verge of expelling us altogether from its midst. Not only in ecological discourses and practices but also in politics and civil society (particularly, virtual civil society fomented by the global communication networks), reaction is rampant. Sometimes it takes the form of an ongoing emergency, which forces politicians to occupy themselves almost exclusively with putting out the fires of crises (whether financial, diplomatic, or of other sorts) without pausing for a moment to reflect on what would be desirable in and of itself, namely the good-old commonwealth. At other—more innocuous—times, reaction prompts online users to press buttons in order to register their “likes” for sundry matters and companies, to repost, “share,” identify with people they are unacquainted with. We dwell reactively, responding in the first instance to a vague premonition of having lost the security of planetary, social, physical, and psychic dwellings.
The point is neither to react out of some meta- or hyper-nihilistic despair nor to postulate the necessity of pure action, reviving the metaphysical ideal of a virile and autonomous subjectivity. Rather, our task is to think and to act on the hither side of the action/reaction pairing. Now, we will not live up to this challenge unless we elaborate a conception of energy, of putting-to-work, or activation that is, as much as possible, free of the metaphysical deadweight this term carries from Aristotle’s philosophy, or, more precisely, from its subsequent misreadings. To be effective, “alternative energy” must combine the insistence on new sources I prefer to term elemental and the unorthodox thinking about what energy is or does. In this endeavor, the dwelling will be more than an isolated example among others; indeed, it will be the crux of energy’s post-metaphysical configuration.
Energy is not the usual association that comes to mind when we think of dwelling. We might, of course, feel disconcerted about how to heat or cool our houses or where the electricity to power the lights and appliances they contain derives from. But when it comes to energetic pursuits, these are supposed to happen outside its walls, while, within, the subject comes to repose, to rest, to gather new strength, to take care of bodily needs, and prepare for tomorrow’s struggles. Perhaps the only investment of energy into a dwelling is the act of its appropriation—not just in the sense of purchasing a house and furnishing it according to one’s taste but also in the more rudimentary sense of making it one’s own.
Outside the familial abode, below and above its “level,” the energy of dwelling is that of appropriation. It pertains to the individuation of a psyche we claim as our own in the face of the anonymous and ineliminable forces of the unconscious, on the one hand, and to laying proprietary claims to the earth, both as a territory and as the planetary home we seize as our (illegitimate) possession, on the other. In its more recent, less domineering versions, Western philosophy from Hegel through Heidegger to Levinas and Derrida turns its attention to how the logic of appropriation is entwined with expropriation, the indeterminacy and universal abstraction of the word “my” or “mine,” and the priority of receptivity and hospitality over the commandeering of a dwelling in the form of a resource. Missing from all these correctives is an alternative notion of energy they nevertheless presuppose. Levinas probably comes closest to such a notion when he writes of a “hyperbolic passivity,” the “passivity more passive still than the passivity conjoined with action.”¹
So, what could the energy of dwelling be? In the West, a dwelling is equated to the delimitation of interiority, or, in simpler terms, a container. What it contains is the will of the one who appropriates it, as well as the bodies of those it receives into itself. It is also meant to be a mechanism of containment preventing the vast, overwhelming elements and foreign agents from entering inside. This is the work to which dwellings are put in our cultures: their activation or energy. In a deconstructive twist, they may even turn inside out, opening unto exteriority, or indeterminately and endlessly oscillate between exteriority and interiority. But, for all that, they will essentially remain containers, holding their contents or spilling them out, sealed as much as possible and yet leaking on all sides. (It was not for nothing that the outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel has recently remarked on how she associates her country with well-insulated, energy-efficient windows).
Although deconstruction anticipates the end of dwelling figured as a container, it does not lead us across the threshold of this metaphysical figuration. The energy of the dwelling is quite different if the latter does not serve the purpose of containing anything, either preventing the unauthorized beings and forces from entering or receiving its rightful inhabitants. This other putting-to-work would make of the dwelling a point of intersection or a passage, where interactions between and with the elements would come to pass. To some extent, the Chinese practice of feng shui strives to facilitate the encounter of and with the elements. Translated as wind-water, it creates a propitious environment for cultivating the harmony of elemental forces and the inhabitants, even as it attends to the constitutive role of external energy within the house.
One doesn’t need to “believe” in the efficacy of feng shui schools and techniques to appreciate the difference between the energy of dwelling they hone and the Western, metaphysical pendulum of appropriation/expropriation. Dwelling as taking care not to impede the flows of elements has little to do with dwelling as the circumscription—through fences or walls, separation barriers and security perimeters—of a domain with the view to staving off exteriority and keeping the outside outside. Whereas gatekeeping consumes inordinate quanta of energy in operations that cannot help but suffuse the entire dwelling with its negative charge, the positive energy of dwelling that balances elemental flows is no longer opposed to the dynamics of nomadism. To look for a freedom from the gated community, emblematic of the heteronormative regime of private property, one need not abscond into the utopia of a purely itinerant existence. Decoupled from the entwined logic of appropriation and expropriation, the dwelling becomes in and as itself nomadic, its inhabitants no longer obliged to abandon it in order to experience the exhilarating freedom from property relations. They merely let the nomadic dwelling to articulate or disarticulate, organize or disorganize itself, with an eye to the outside that dictates the law.
This last observation brings us to the fraught pairing of ecology and economy. The two kinds of the energy of dwelling I’ve identified correspond to the economic imposition of form delimiting a container for tenancy and the ecological fold of outside forces traversing the lived and living space of habitation. Conceivably, there will remain a minimal drive to claim one’s property within the confines of a human “dwelling.” But this double-edged drive will be, at the same time, tempered by persistent reminders that dwelling is more a matter of elemental encounters than of confines; more of putting freedom to work than of guarding a room of one’s own from incursions by others; more of adjustment, justice, and propitiation than of appropriation/expropriation.
Once our idea of energy is imaginatively reconfigured, ecological thought will carry in itself, as itself, a message regarding the possibility of dwelling otherwise, conveying among other things, that dwelling is not a purely economic business. It will energize the anamnesis of freedom beyond the liberty to dispose of the world (including inanimate objects, plants, and animals) at will or in accord with the laws of private property. At the very least, the ecological mitigation of negative economic energy will recalibrate the dwelling by allowing it to be a place of passage and a resting station, an articulation of elemental forces and a form of life. It will motivate the waning, diminution, minimization of “our” dwelling’s separation from the outside, chipping at the walls that the laws of economy have constructed. It will, in a word, reduce the negative energetic charge of metaphysics. And that is already not nothing.
Notes
1 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 115.