Abstract
Dwelling is a fundamental mode of existence and a key site where contemporary societal crises manifest – from the endangered habitability of the Earth to digital exploitation and mass surveillance, from rising loneliness to the erosion of the public sphere. To grasp these phenomena, a critical theory of dwelling is needed, as the 19th-century paradigm of the bourgeois home continues to shape and amplify them. This article develops such a theory by conceptualizing dwelling as integral to processes of subjectivation, deeply embedded in specific historical, social, and technological contexts. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of bourgeois interiors, Félix Guattari’s machinic and ecosophical thought, Michel Foucault’s investigation of space and biopower, François Béguin’s concept of the ‘domestic world’, and Paul Klee’s dialectic of home, the article critiques the hegemonic model of bourgeois dwelling and offers a framework for reimagining dwelling in light of current existential and ecological threats.
Whoever wants to go through my life must go through my room. (Brasch, 2013: 695)
The Dwelling Question is crucial for understanding contemporary subjectivity and society. As an everyday practice, dwelling mediates the relationship between territory and existence – a relationship that is becoming increasingly precarious. In the face of climate catastrophe, homogenized cities, ongoing colonialism, and surveillance capitalism, life-defining territories are rapidly losing their already fragile self-evidence. They become uncanny/unhomely 1 and groundless (Freud, 1978a; Rebentisch, 2025; Vidler, 1992).
Acknowledging this fragility may unsettle dominant paradigms of the domestic home, challenging the status quo and fostering societal change (Bhabha, 1992; Fisher, 2017; Flusser, 2017). Yet these uncanny/unhomely realities often evade critical attention in the Western world because dwelling, and the reassuring home, tend to appear as a banal habit or an innocent refuge, masking the constructed normality of everyday life. As Vilém Flusser (2002: 101) observes: ‘A home is the foundation of everyone’s consciousness, for it enables us to recognize the world. But it also dulls the senses, for it cannot be recognized, and we barely acknowledge its existence.’ This article makes the supposedly banal modes of dwelling, as well as the home, recognizable as historically situated, techno-social forms that organize the conditions of perception, habit, and subjectivity.
Contemporary instances in which dwelling intensifies the toxic entanglement of territory and existence lie at the heart of today’s most urgent societal concerns. The lockdowns imposed during the coronavirus pandemic exposed the pathology of living primarily within one’s own four walls, with dependence on a handful of digital platforms growing and depression surging, further intensifying loneliness and the shift toward domestic enclosure (Putnam, 2000; Sharkey, 2024; Turkle, 2011). This development has accelerated the long-criticized decline of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989; Sennett, 1978) and has continued to marginalize non-bourgeois ways of life (Negt and Kluge, 1993).
The rise of the home office, smart homes, online shopping, food delivery services, streaming platforms, and social media is transforming the home into a productive space. Digital infrastructures now exploit even the supposedly most intimate moments by tracking and monetizing every millisecond of attention and movement across domains such as advertising, commerce, insurance, healthcare, and governance (Zuboff, 2019). Meanwhile, household consumption in the EU increased by over 26% between 2000 and 2019, fueling ecological catastrophe and rendering regions uninhabitable, displacing millions, and ultimately threatening the habitability of the Earth (European Environment Agency, 2023; IPCC, 2023).
By proposing a critical theory of dwelling, I aim to unmask the underlying disquiet in these aforementioned phenomena. Such a theory will shed light on the historical dynamics and structural undercurrents of domestic life – and help to open new paths for societal transformation. Posing the Dwelling Question means asking: How do subjects constitute themselves through their mode of dwelling, and how does the home, in turn, shape their formation? How does this interplay uphold the status quo?
The Dwelling Question is grounded in the premise that the 19th-century bourgeois paradigm of dwelling continues to haunt contemporary life, reinforcing established norms and shaping processes of subjectivation – both masking and contributing to the crises outlined above. Here, I define ‘bourgeois’ as a way of life that emerged in conjunction with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century and became hegemonic across classes throughout the 20th century: initially in the Western world, and then beyond it through globalization and colonization (Bourdieu, 1984; George, 1999; Reckwitz, 2023: 59–79). A central feature of bourgeois values is the fetishization of home and family life, an ideal that is not merely private or apolitical but which has functioned as a crucial anchor of bourgeois subjectivity and social organization (Brown, 2008; Hobsbawm, 1995: 270–1; Lukacs, 1970).
Against this background, the article supplements Engels’ (1975, 1978) critique of the dire housing conditions experienced by the working class under industrial capitalism – an analysis that became widely known as ‘The Housing Question’. However, despite his critique of family structures, Engels (1990) showed little interest in how bourgeois dwelling itself establishes and perpetuates the status quo. The article also offers a corrective to significant yet largely uncritical investigations which obscure the social, political, and technological foundations of dwelling (Bachelard, 1994; Heidegger, 1971; Ingold, 2000; Levinas, 1979; Tuan, 2001). 2
In contrast, this article takes a socio-critical and materialist approach to dwelling, viewing it as a means by which subjects constitute themselves in dynamic interplay with their environment, reflecting the norms of Western modernity. The Dwelling Question outlined here is informed by insights from feminist discourse (Colomina, 1992; Fortunati, 2025; Hayden, 1982; Tyler May, 2008), the Frankfurt School (Adorno, 1989; Fromm, 1978; Horkheimer, 2002), Foucault (2007), Bauman (2000), and Deleuze (1992), who have shown how, in a ‘liquid’ and ‘gaslike’ manner, every pore of life – subjectivity, habit, affect, gender – is saturated by societal and technological forces, whether biopolitics, patriarchy, or the culture industry, consequently bourgeois ideology and the voracious need for surplus value. Thus, the walls of a house are not merely physical boundaries but are permeated by flows of power, desire, capital, and communication.
I begin by demonstrating how Walter Benjamin offered a crucial analysis of the bourgeois home. He referred to dwelling as his ‘favorite topic’, recognizing that the bourgeois interior – its phantasmagorias and its mode of dwelling – shapes specific habits, perceptions and sensations, chaining people to the present and making social change nearly impossible (Benjamin, 1999a: 479).
I then specify the bourgeois-domestic process of subjectivation, drawing on Félix Guattari and Paul Klee, as a dwelling machine. While the term is well-known as a modernist building practice (Gropius, 1922; Le Corbusier, 1986), here it serves as a theoretical tool to explore the production of subjectivity within the domestic sphere. In Guattari (and Deleuze), the concept of desiring machines describes how the subject both produces itself and emerges as the ever-changing result of its interactions with the environment. I conceive dwelling machines in this sense, focusing on the interplay between dwellers, their domestic world, and societal reality. 3
Alongside Michel Foucault and François Béguin, I demonstrate how such dwelling machines produced the bourgeois home, the modern concept of the ‘domestic world’, and the bourgeois subject itself. Industrialization spurred urbanization, and new production methods for consumer goods like furniture and home appliances, as well as infrastructure such as gas, water supply, and electricity, led to the mass production of what continues to be perceived as an individual and private domain. This established a reciprocal dependence between the domestic world and its inhabitants, forming part of the biopolitics of a societal and economic system that created, shaped, and maintained workforces (Perrot, 1990; Prost and Vincent, 1991; Reulecke, 1997).
The bourgeois paradox of the domestic world – in which subject and interior are both socially constituted as separate entities, yet inextricably intertwined – reveals the dialectic of home. Paul Klee’s work provides a crucial lens here: in his paintings and writings, he develops an understanding of houses and dwelling that simultaneously embraces and resists the influence of the immediate environment, seeking a dynamic equilibrium of becoming. This dialectical approach will be complemented by a thinking of multiplicities:
In the final section, I show that Guattari’s expanded notion of ecology – ecosophy – provides a crucial perspective on the urgent question of the habitability of the Earth, increasingly addressed in the context of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, 2021; Latour, 2017), Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), and the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016). Guattari aligns himself with the long-standing tradition of critical thought concerning the impact of the built environment and urban life on subjectivation and social formations (Harvey, 2009; Jacobs, 1992; Lefebvre, 1996). What distinguishes his approach is his extensive framework which interlinks subjectivity, architecture, dwelling, ecology, and Marxist critique (Bernhard, 2025a). The Dwelling Question is at the very heart of his ecosophy, in which he advocates for a reimagined city and new forms of subjectivity that enable modes of dwelling that are attuned to the ongoing habitability of the Earth.
Phantasmagorias of the Interior
Walter Benjamin seeks to uncover the phantasmagorias of the 19th century that haunted his era, and which continue to haunt us. Accordingly, it is only by sublating hegemonic societal dreams that we can truly comprehend and transform the present. As the arcades and world exhibitions often cited in this context, the ‘phantasmagorias of the interior’ are central to Benjamin’s (1999b: 14, 19, 220) Arcades Project, where he describes the 19th century as ‘addicted to dwelling’. For him, these phantasmagorias mask the domestic world as a supposedly normal reality, obscuring its entanglement with the societal present. In a letter responding to Benjamin’s (1994: 502) exposé for The Arcades Project, Theodor W. Adorno aptly summarizes this critical endeavor: ‘The intérieur must be made transparent as social function and its self-containedness must be exposed as illusion.’ To this day, these very phantasmagorias of the interior continue to blur the power of home surveillance or ubiquitous capitalist exploitation through digital devices: what happens in one’s home cannot be toxic.
Benjamin critiques the eclectic, opulent bourgeois interiors of the 19th century. For the first time, industrially produced art prints and furnishings shape the residents’ perception of the world through their mass-produced imaginary worlds. Benjamin highlights the ambivalence of the home as a realm of confined privacy: it is a necessary refuge in the face of overwhelming modernity, serves as a filter and offers protection from the shocks of the big city; it is furnished as a cosy place of self-assurance (Goffman, 1971). Yet, it simultaneously functions as a societal phantasmagoria that maintains the status quo, creating a sense of being with oneself while paradoxically existing solely due to modern urban infrastructures, new modes of production, and emerging consumer products. The cult of the home is a bourgeois mode of dwelling that risks turning into a form of privatized, depoliticized self-entombment – a phenomenon Benjamin (1999c: 542) describes as the ‘étui-man’, where the dwellers merge with the cocoon of domesticity.
This mode of subjectivation is currently gaining momentum under the widely known label of ‘cocooning’: the complexity of contemporary, multiple crises accelerates a fetishization of the home, manifesting in virulent trends such as kitchen and interior optimization, sourdough baking and the careful selection of one’s espresso machine, tradwives and cottagecore, sleep tracking and smart homes. This retreat generates a social climate marked by a decreasing tolerance for ambiguity and an elevation of the supposedly familiar and own as the ultimate standard.
While the bourgeois interiors are furnished, they also furnish the dwellers, serving as a medium that constitutes bourgeois subjectivity. For Benjamin (1999b: 216), dwellings are by no means passive but work actively on the subjectivation of their inhabitants; they have almost seductive abilities: ‘The space disguises itself – puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods.’ The interior is constructed by the bourgeois subject to the same extent that it simultaneously produces the dwellers: ‘the intérieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits – habits that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself’ (Benjamin, 1999d: 734).
Such interventions of pretty active ‘objects’ and environments pervade his work, and in particular his investigation of dwelling. By examining modes of perception such as flânerie, intoxication, childhood or surrealism, he outlines the ‘empathy with inorganic things’, a true sensation of life in modernity, of supposedly inanimate objects that actually talk to dwellers in their homes or pull flâneurs on the street by the sleeve (Benjamin, 1999e, 2003: 32).
In this regard, Benjamin (2006: 50) describes how the once-exotic home telephone, present during his childhood, developed both an attraction and a power over his habits, obliterating his ‘consciousness of time, [his] firm resolve, [and] sense of duty’. As he impishly remarks, young Benjamin was ‘pierced’ by an uncanny/unhomely ‘violence’ [unheimliche Gewalt]: ‘And just as the medium obeys the voice that takes possession of him from beyond the grave, I submitted to the first proposal that came my way through the telephone.’
This episode is part of Berlin Childhood around 1900, where Benjamin incessantly emphasizes the animistic qualities of the home, using banal furnishings, drawers, or toys; here it is the domestic environment that does most of the talking. The interior moves mysteriously when the child is not looking, sends signals in a language that adults, including parents, can no longer sense or understand.
The dwelling actually speaks here, and Benjamin provides early groundwork in this respect. As early as 1916, he argues that although human language achieves an extraordinary level of abstraction, language as such should not be attributed exclusively to humans. Accordingly, the language of things must first be heard before it can be translated into human words and made nameable: It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice [. . .], about a language of technology that is not the specialized language of technicians. [. . .] There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents. (Benjamin, 1996: 62)
Sigmund Freud (1978a, 1978b: 143) – with a lively interest in bourgeois interiors as scenery, mask, or distorted mirror of the inner life – famously poured his insights into the catchy formula, ‘that the ego is not master in its own house’ (Müller, 2019). His concepts of the unconscious and the uncanny/unhomely resonate in Benjamin’s phantasmagoria of the interior: the uncanny/unhomely does not intrude from the outside but dwells within the things, surrounding and inhabiting the dwellers, unfolding its monstrosity through concealment. Here, dwelling not only signifies the self-coffinizing habit of a depoliticized subject (the decent citizen), but also reflects a collective song or dance with the interior that is as conscious as it is unconscious, and from which it is impossible to step out unchanged.
Benjamin (2006: 100) is not interested in mystifying what he calls the child’s ‘magical experience’, nor in nostalgically wishing for its return. Instead, analyzing or even partly recovering a child’s perception – similar to embracing the surrealism of the city, the Surrealists’ way of experiencing the world, the montage in modern film, or the altered states induced by drug use – offers him a way to perceive the true technical nature of modernity that usually remains hidden from adults. The Dwelling Question should be understood as such a Benjaminian call to listen within the domestic world – a call to unmask the uncanny/unhomely that is concealed behind the phantasmagorias of the interior.
Although Benjamin offers a striking critique of the pathology of bourgeois dwelling, he confines himself to a utopian vision of life in a glass house. He imagines that the architecture of the International Style, flooded with light and air, will bring an end to the identificatory function of private spaces. This utopia overlooks the transparency imperative of modern capitalism, which can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and now rendered glaringly evident in the recording and exploitation of nearly every moment of life through digital environments. Benjamin’s glass utopia fails to reckon with the reality of dwelling machines.
Subjectivity through Dwelling Machines
To understand the connection between subjectivity, the bourgeois interior and biopolitics – which the next section explores – it is necessary first to introduce the concept of dwelling machines: the interlocking of dwellers and their domestic worlds. These machines easily evade recognition precisely because dwellers are themselves part of them. When they remain unacknowledged they function as phantasmagorias, obscuring their societal and technological foundations and thereby stabilizing the status quo.
One example may illustrate this dynamic: At the very end of his investigation Home, Witold Rybczynski (1986: 232) calls for a rediscovery of ‘comfort, for without it, our dwellings will indeed be machines instead of homes’. The comfort he romanticizes is itself a phantasmagoria, since the modern notions of home, domesticity, and subject only became possible through domestic machinization. The modern bourgeois domestic world, along with the phantasmagorias of the interior, emerges as a result of the ‘threshold of modernity’ around 1800, which marks the beginning of the growing capitalist necessity of housing millions of people in urban areas (Foucault, 1978: 143). This demand for housing was only met with the advent of dwelling machines, which constituted bourgeois subjectivity – driven by societal norms (bourgeois values of family and privacy), urban infrastructures (gas, electricity, water), new architectural construction methods (iron, steel, concrete), mass media (art prints, newspapers, later telephone, radio, television), and industrially produced appliances (furniture, sanitary supplies).
Félix Guattari’s concept of the ‘machine’ was initially developed as a theoretical tool for his political activism and psychiatric reform; he elaborates it with Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus as a critique of the bourgeois nuclear family (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; Guattari, 2015a). Here, they describe the machinic as an interlocking of heterogeneous components, such as imagination, perception, affect and manifold matter, operating under the sign of generalized social production (Dosse, 2010; Genosko, 2015; Schmidgen, 1997). They refer to the house at several points, but they do not develop a coherent theory of dwelling.
In his later work, Guattari (2015b: 81) explicitly applies his machinic concept to analyze the subjectifying effects of architecture, calling the buildings of the Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu ‘architectural machines’ that produce ‘existential transferences’. With regard to art that decorates nearly all homes, he describes this transference similarly to Benjamin’s exploration of the bourgeois interior as looking back: ‘it is suddenly the photograph that surprises you, which starts to scrutinize you, which interpellates you, penetrates you right to the soul’ (Guattari, 2015c: 55). Therefore, buildings inhere a ‘partial subjectivity; the city, the street, the building, the door, the hallway . . . Each modelise in their part and in global compositions, foyers of subjectivation’ (Guattari, 1992a: 119G2).
Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine (1922) offers a compelling allegory of the machinic production of subjectivity within the domestic world. 4 It depicts four birds on a kind of lyre, fellow sufferers of bourgeois humans: like dwellers in their homes, they are caught within a machinic context. Tone, rhythm, and well-being are not only defined by the body but emerge from the interplay with their environment: from the dynamics of the apparatus and the force that sets it in motion. Yet machinization is not equivalent to mechanization; it is not determinative. The birds seem to resist with a hint of glee, stretching and contorting their beaks in various directions.
Similarly to Guattari, Klee’s machinic understanding is therefore not purely negative. Just as the bourgeois home generates values such as privacy, recreation, personal expression, and deceleration, his investigation of machinic potentials likewise opens onto new possibilities (Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own). As he observes in relation to flight: ‘The swimmer in the air (the flier or glider) must become part of the machine and can, in conjunction with it, give himself up to new kinds of movement’ (Klee, 1961: 313–15).
Another compelling allegory of machinic subjectivation within bourgeois homes is depicted by Klee in Analysis of Various Perversities, the lesser-known counterpart to Twittering Machine from the same year. The dweller, whose head resembles a lampshade, appears to have partially transformed into one: a literal partial subjectivation, or what Benjamin calls the ‘étui-man’. The dweller on the right (apparently a self-portrait) seems more food than aquarist, as a fish swims straight toward him. A complex structure connects the dweller’s extremities; even the head is connected to a synthesizing articulated shaft or turntable. An arrow pointing upward from the head passes just beyond this apparatus, unperceived yet affecting him. He remains unaware of the dwelling machine of which he is a part and thus succumbs to the phantasmagorias of the interior and their comfort. In the next section, I will demonstrate how dwelling machines function in biopolitical terms – offering refuge and comfort, while simultaneously establishing forms of extraction and existential dependencies.
The Bourgeois Paradox within the Domestic World
Michel Foucault (1995: 25, 201, 309) is deeply inspired by Guattari’s machinic thinking when he describes how the ‘“political economy” of the body’ became the hegemonic mode of subjectivity production. Discipline and Punish is permeated with machinic vocabulary, including his analysis of architecture, most notably through Bentham’s Panopticon.
As Foucault (1980b: 148) observes, ‘architecture begins at the end of the eighteenth century to become involved in problems of population, health and the urban question’, deploying ‘space for economico-political ends’ – that is, to establish processes of subjectivation aligned with capitalist imperatives, biopolitics, and the political economy of the body. The ‘compact model of the disciplinary mechanism’, as famously described in Discipline and Punish, is the state-mandated quarantine during the plague: the isolation of residents in their homes (Foucault, 1995: 148).
Foucault (1980b: 149) recognizes that the space of the house ‘gradually [. . .] becomes specified and functional. [. . .] The working-class family is to be fixed’. This fixation would ultimately become the foundation for the cross-class expansion of the bourgeois model of dwelling, cementing a centuries-old suppression of women (Federici, 2004). The bourgeois form of dwelling reinforces gender relations by subjecting women to a machinic mode of subjectivation, which Maria Mies (2014: 57) terms ‘housewifization’: she demonstrates how industrialization led to the dominance of an ‘instrumental object-relation of men to nature and women’, a dominance characterized by the inextricable entanglement of capitalism, patriarchy, ecological destruction, and colonialism. Consequently, the bourgeois life form of the Western world and its mode of dwelling became possible only through the establishment of internal and external colonies and the extraction of their resources and labor (Mies, 2014: 110). This also includes a process of racialization within the bourgeois world itself: the reliance on racialized domestic labor, the ghettoization of racialized populations in urban peripheries, and the struggles faced by BIPOC+ individuals in securing housing contracts – realities that persist to this day (Fitzpatrick et al., 2025).
Ultimately addressing such societal problems, Foucault (1980b: 149) concludes: ‘A whole history remains to be written of spaces – [. . .] from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat [. . .]. Anchorage in a space is an economico-political form which needs to be studied in detail.’
However, Foucault focuses primarily on institutions of normalization such as hospitals, psychiatric clinics, and prisons. Aside from occasional remarks on dwelling in interviews, he pays little attention to everyday domestic life. One notable exception is the largely overlooked yet crucial research project Politiques de l’habitat (1800–1850), which he supervised (Elden, 2016: 82–92; 2017: 173–7; Foucault, 1977). This project is pivotal to the Dwelling Question, as it reveals how the modern bourgeois home emerged from the spirit of biopolitical machinic thinking. 5 It is no coincidence that the rise of modern urban infrastructures, new technological possibilities, and biopolitical regimes in the 18th and especially the 19th century coincides with the proliferation of discourses on architecture as a machine (Béguin, 1977; Foucault et al., 1976; Gleich, 2023).
In Politiques de l’habitat, François Béguin’s essay ‘Savoirs de la ville et de la maison au début du XIXe siècle’ describes how, from the threshold of modernity onward, inhabitants became integral components of dwelling machines. In line with Guattari’s machinic thinking and Foucault’s analysis of biopower, Béguin (1977: 294, 318) explains how processes of subjectivation are shaped by ‘a reorganization of the environment’ – the ‘domestic world’ [l’univers domestique] integrates all operators required for refuge, ‘comfort’ and the ‘domestication of the universe’: Among these operators, architecture of course, but also the art of gardening, the water distribution system at home, the bathroom, the stove, ventilation and lighting techniques, and today, the garage, the telephone, the radio and television, and the entire series of household equipment.
The increasingly technologized domestic world both serves its inhabitants and, at the same time, restructures their habits, sensations, and subjectivity. Drawing on Guattari, Foucault, and Béguin, one could describe dwelling machines as a comprehensive machinization of inhabitants and all operators of domestication, among them architecture, furniture, technical devices, bureaucratic processes, archival systems, home appliances, and urban infrastructures such as water, gas, electricity, or the internet.
It is this domestic machinization of the inhabitants that, over the course of the 19th century, gave rise to the bourgeois subject with its specific habits and territories (the interior), and to the idealized separation of public and private, work and home, production and reproduction, on an unprecedented scale. 6 Yet this very mode of subject formation already contains the impossibility of such rigid separations: a contradiction that has become fully apparent today, in an era of home office, digital exploitation of every moment of life, and pervasive surveillance. Every millisecond spent at home – every gesture, behavior, and flicker of attention – has become valuable for social production.
Here, the paradox of bourgeois modernity, as described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, becomes evident in the context of dwelling: Bourgeois modernity produces the enlightened subject with its freedoms, while charging for this emancipation through integration into commodity production. It industrially produces privacy and a sense of individuality through its dwelling machines, while simultaneously generating existential dependencies. Ultimately, it negates the singularity of the subjects it produces, reducing them to their potential for successful functionality according to hegemonic socio-economic imperatives.
Béguin (1977: 323–24) writes in precisely this spirit about dwelling in the 19th century (and indeed, even today): A history characterized, on one side, by an increasingly apparent autonomy of the domestic cell, from which one can capture energy, fluids, messages, and images from the outside and thus live in quasi self-sufficiency; on the other side, by an increasingly pronounced dependence of the inhabitants on the devices that allow them to control their environment, without which they could do nothing, but whose functioning largely escapes their understanding.
It is an uncomfortable awareness resulting from this insight that leads Adorno (2005: 39) to the sharp and brilliant conviction that ‘[w]rong life cannot be lived rightly’ in the context of dwelling, and Foucault (1995: 30) to describe the hegemonic concept of ‘man’ as ‘the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself’. Perhaps not consciously, but certainly not by chance, Foucault follows with these words: ‘A “soul” inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body’ (emphasis added).
Similarly, Benjamin (1999f: 5) describes the ‘new man [. . .], and what evolves in the confrontation with a particular milieu from the second half of the nineteenth century [. . .] is a creature who deserves the name of “furnished man”’. This particular milieu consists to a large extent of the domestic world. While inhabiting a domestic world and being simultaneously inhabited by phantasmagorias, societal flows, and technology, bourgeois dwellers remain unaware of their own constant production and configuration as components of dwelling machines – until they begin to pose the Dwelling Question.
Dialectic of Home
Klee offers one possible line of flight that challenges the bourgeois paradox of the domestic world outlined above; Guattari will return in the next section with another. The dwelling machines of bourgeois modernity produce intertwined entities that are still widely perceived as distinct and separate today: private and public, reproduction and production, subject and society, homely and uncanny/unhomely. Aligned with his deep fascination with dialectics, Klee addresses the problem of overcoming the bourgeois paradigm of dwelling through what might be called a dialectic of home (Klee, 1976: 50; 1979a: 873). His central creative period coincides with a time when the bourgeois home had already taken shape, yet across Europe and North America, cities and domestic life were undergoing profound technological transformations on a vast scale. Klee is intrigued by this reconfiguration of bourgeois dwelling, responding to it both quietly and with irony. 7
Like the Bauhaus, he is searching for a balance between art and technology, fantasy and rationality, spontaneity and structure, and the imaginable and the visible (see The Tightrope Walker, The Sublime Side, and The Bright Side). For him, the recognition of space is easily obscured, since ‘real spaces go beyond our field of vision (we are in them)’ (Klee, 1961: 149, 143) – a dynamic that, as I have shown above, becomes evident in the context of dwelling machines. As Klee himself values the retreat into private life (and remains skeptical of home telephones), he recognizes the human need for stability: ‘[the human being] [. . .] wants his horizontal and vertical fixed; otherwise he will totter and grow dizzy’ (Klee, 1961: 149). Concurrently, Klee (1959: 5) argues that excessive spatial rigidity diminishes one’s ability to perceive the world’s manifold qualities and becomings, which he seeks to render in ceaseless variations, thereby broadening the possibilities of the common field of vision.
In his pocket calendar from 1926, he explicates a dialectic of home (Klee, 1979b: 1030):
I try to attune others to my developmental movement until they themselves will one day hear the voice of the dragon in the tightly closed cube.
Here, Klee questions the bourgeois phantasmagoria of homely autonomy, pointing out the possible danger of the closed cube and its dragon. Indeed, the dragon could be a figure from Benjamin’s writings on the interior, or from the similarly striking exploration of such domestic worlds in Max Ernst’s collage novels Une semaine de bonté (1934) and La femme 100 têtes (1929). Klee’s attempt to make the dragon audible – and his call to listen – can, beyond persuading students and colleagues at the Bauhaus, be seen as a Benjaminian call to sense the highly active space: the language of things (or dragons) must be heard and translated into human words. For Klee, construction and destruction, building and dismantling, inside and outside, house and ruin are interconnected, each containing its opposite within an Unstable Equilibrium (1922) that is always in a state of becoming.
Following Klee, a vibrant ‘Bauhaus’ turned toward becoming must always be at the same time a ‘Bauruine’, facing the outside and its own constant reconfiguration. Habit must always accommodate irritation and improvisation. Accordingly, space and body are active and passive at the same time: the constructive movement, which understands space passively and the body actively, has to be complemented with the spatially active movement, which understands the body passively. Each ‘entity’ contains its opposite, the potential for its own negation. It is precisely this reciprocal relationship that shapes the production of subjectivity, as described by Benjamin, Guattari, Foucault, and Béguin. Klee’s dialectic of home calls for an articulation and constant sublation of seemingly rigid distinctions that permeate and shape the subject, such as:
Ecosophy and the Subjective City
Complementary to Klee’s dialectic of home, Guattari’s ecosophy short-circuits existential oppositions through a thinking of multiplicities. In his later years, Guattari (2000: 91) reframes his manifold interest in dwelling through the lens of ecosophy: ‘The root “eco” is used here in its original Greek sense of oikos, that is, “house, domestic property, habitat, natural milieu”’.
Although the colossal composite ecosophy may appear to offer a comprehensive account of human existence, thought, and the Earth, Guattari’s ecosophy remains an open and ongoing question: How are territory and existence, humans and other life forms, society, technology, and the Earth entangled? And how might these relations and subjectivities be transformed into configurations that are less destructive than the dominant ones?
Guattari is not concerned with a return to nature, as he already recognized the challenges of the Anthropocene long before the term was coined. He argues against an identitarian, ecological thinking that is built on the preservation of essences: ‘What counts in the oikos is not just the walls of the house’ (Guattari, 2011: 38). Accordingly, the protection of nature, plants, and species is inseparable from all the other possible manifold existential territories: the city, values as solidarity, the realms of art or cinema. Therefore, he names the three nested ecologies of the mental, social, and environmental – his ecosophy addresses the questions of subjectivity, society, and nature simultaneously, as they cannot be separated from each other as partial problems.
Ecosophy tackles the endangered habitability of the Earth. Yet dwelling on Earth is neither experienced nor practiced in an abstract, planetary manner. It unfolds through everyday practices that modulate subjectivity, such as inhabiting a home or participating in urban life. Accordingly, we inhabit concrete, heterogeneous territories – among them the apartment, the house, the neighborhood, the city, the region, the nation-state, the continent. Even supposedly abstract territories such as music, art, and literature can be inhabited. Guattari’s ecosophy seeks to bring these territories into resonance with one another.
In this regard, the city as a ‘crossroads-problem’ plays a central role, while providing an escape from the bourgeois home (Guattari, 1992b: 118G1). Situated between the domestic world and the planetary, the city provides a suitable scale for addressing ecological crisis and lived social realities. Guattari (1992b, 2016: 123G6) relates capitalism back to its capitals: the city turns out to be the crucial field for social transformation, as it laid the groundwork for the development of capitalism itself (Braudel, 1972; Duby, 1974).
Guattari does not offer a fully developed concept with his notion of the ‘subjective city’; rather, it resembles an imperative to multiply urban subjectivities and make them audible, to continuously appropriate and reshape the structures of the city. Are urban spaces privatized or freely accessible to all? Does a university lay claim to singular and societal reflection and development, or does it merely serve to prepare subjects for the labor market? Are libraries, hospitals, and schools structured as participatory and social spaces, or do they simply offer consumer services to clients?
Guattari’s (2015d) call for a ‘restoration of the subjective city’ is not nostalgic fantasy but a call for fundamental renewal. His commitment consists in a playful mode of existence that actively shapes its relationship to territory. 8 The enduring resonance of such an appeal is evident in the growing interest in the sustainable (re)configuration of both new and existing urban infrastructures.
Recent examples include the struggle of inhabitants for a subjective city – which David Harvey (2012) calls ‘rebel cities’ – whose diverse interventions for resingularization are gaining momentum; numerous architectural and urban interventions assembled under the project ‘The Great Repair’ by Arch+; and the highly symbolic but ultimately failed attempt to relocate Berlin’s Central and Regional Library into the former Galeries Lafayette luxury department store building. A striking case is the social and ecological reimagining of urban spaces through car-free residential zones within the Superblock model: first successfully implemented in Barcelona and now in variations increasingly embraced across Europe and beyond (e.g. in Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, Paris, Vienna) (Eggimann, 2022; Nieuwenhuijsen et al., 2024).
Such concerns about social renovation were part of Guattari’s lifelong activism, especially within the context of Institutional Psychotherapy. Here, Guattari, Jean Oury, and others explored alternative modes of inhabiting territory, creating spaces that resist the enclosing structures of traditional psychiatric institutions and bourgeois family life, fostering fluid roles – aiming at new modes of life that enable personal and collective transformation (Robcis, 2021; Schmidgen, 2025; Vogman, 2024). It is a telling detail that the clinic of La Borde, where Guattari worked for over three decades, repurposed a former château, assigning a new function to a space designed for authority and thereby opening it to a resingularizing practice: ‘rooms and hallways can take on various new and singular functions. Spaces lose their original human characteristics and can be recreated by the people who are there now’ (Guattari, 2015e: 96).
Conclusion
As Benjamin (1999b: 184) famously stated: ‘That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe’. His investigation of the bourgeois interior excavates how the phantasmagorias of the interior obscure both social reality and the production of subjectivity. One might therefore rephrase the statement as: That people ‘continue to dwell as they do’ is the catastrophe. To overcome these hegemonic forms of dwelling, Benjamin and Klee call for a translation of the phantasmagorias and dragons of the bourgeois interior into human language.
Once the uncanny/unhomely qualities of the bourgeois home – and its role as a mediator between territory and existence – are revealed, the apparent self-evidence of ‘private’ everyday normality, subjectivity, and the societal status quo begins to unravel. This destabilization is a precondition for resisting the transformation into what Benjamin calls the ‘étui-man’ and for opening up possibilities of both personal and collective transformation.
In this light, I have argued for a critical reconsideration of the bourgeois home. The proposed critical theory of dwelling demonstrates how Benjamin, Guattari, Klee, Foucault, and Béguin offer complementary perspectives on dwelling – not merely as a spatial or philosophical matter, but as a nexus of historical, social, technological, and architectural conditions. They challenge the normalized routines of Western societies by exposing the latent politics embedded in domestic life.
The concept of dwelling machines outlined here shows that the bourgeois home and subjectivity emerge from a close combat between dwellers and their domestic world. The private sphere has always been entangled with societal production and biopolitics; indeed, it emerged from it. The bourgeois paradox within the domestic world is that, in order to attain a realm that appears safe, private, homely, and autonomous, the subject must attune itself to hegemonic modes of dwelling and societal production, thereby simultaneously supporting and masking the very foundations of this society.
While Klee’s dialectic of home seeks to sublate ostensibly antithetical states within the domestic world, Guattari’s ecosophy dissolves these oppositions, extending the Dwelling Question to the planetary scale. When home, society, and Earth are perceived as distinct and autonomous, the mutual responsibilities among the three ecologies disintegrate. This reduction turns the ‘outside world’ (i.e. nature, others, entire societies) into reified, exploitable material. So long as the private home is taken for granted, the commodification of behavior, attention, and desire – even in the most intimate spaces – remains open to appropriation by digital capitalism, patriarchy, and biopolitical forces. Unless identification with the bourgeois home is radically reconsidered, its toxic effects on the planet and public sphere, as well as its homogenizing influence on subjectivity, will continue to prevail.
As Guattari (2015d: 111–12) argues, ‘experiments on new ways of dwelling’ are necessary: practices capable of stimulating ‘a general willingness to change’ and ultimately fostering future generations who ‘live, feel and think in ways different from today’. Such transformations are already emerging: co-housing and shared apartment models challenge the socially and ecologically damaging paradigm of the single-family home by bringing together people across different ages, classes, and perspectives, thereby fostering new forms of urban sociality. The growing use of sustainable building materials such as wood, clay, or cork, along with the integration of renewable energy sources, offers new ecological forms of dwelling on Earth. Cooperative housing projects and networks, such as the German Mietshäuser Syndikat (‘apartment-house syndicate’), as well as civic initiatives like Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (which campaigns to expropriate real estate companies owning more than 3,000 apartments in Berlin), defy market-driven housing models based on private ownership. Many more such experiments are yet to come.
A crucial first step toward enabling them lies in posing the Dwelling Question: illuminating the function of dwelling and home as mediators between territory and existence. Responding to this entanglement, Guattari’s ecosophy calls for a proliferation of subjectivities and for the restoration of a subjective city that offers an exit from the entombment of the bourgeois home. His ecosophy urges the cultivation of a sensorium attuned to political and ecological qualities – one capable of perceiving the world’s rich diversity rather than retreating into the anesthetizing comfort of the bourgeois interior and its phantasmagorias, or the ever-updating indifference of algorithmic media environments provided by Big Tech.
Posing the Dwelling Question means uncovering the uncanny/unhomely qualities of our homes. In this light, the nuclear family home, bourgeois interiors, urban infrastructures, and digital environments no longer appear as phantasmagorias, as inevitable or immutable, but as socio-historical constructions – open to negotiation, reinvention, and collective transformation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the six anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I am grateful to Stefanos Geroulanos and Ruth Sonderegger for giving me the opportunity to develop this article at the Remarque Institute, New York University, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. I thank Mathias Schönher and Nicholas Thoburn for their insightful comments on an earlier draft, as well as Lucas Riddle for revising my translation. Above all, I am deeply grateful to Henning Schmidgen for his support and for fostering a dynamic equilibrium of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of direct quotations are my own.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was written with the support of a Bauhaus Doctoral Scholarship from Bauhaus University Weimar and a Research Fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
