Home: Territory and Identity

Beginning with a story from Deleuze and Guattari of a child in the dark who hums to comfort himself, this essay presents a spatial theory of everyday life through an exploration of the idea of home. The song the child sings brings order out of chaos, a space of comfort amidst fear, in other words, home. Through song, repetition, and other ways of marking we establish personal territories in a search for a place of comfort. This essay explores the nature of these markings, of this territorialization, and how such processes are cultural. Indeed, the essay argues that subjectivity is a product of territorializing, identity is territory. Identity is grounded in habit; the repetition of action and thought establishes home. The essay concludes by returning to the idea of culture on a more general level and how a theory of home and everyday life as territorialization may help better explain how cultures move, adapt, and resist.