Editorial: Home rules

In the past year, I moved country. This is a big thing, yet a good deal of my experience of it was felt through the matter of what I did with actual things – clothes, furniture, gardening tools, partly used boxes of tissues. In the process of moving, some things that felt essential became, in a split second, junk to be disposed of. Other things that were mere background to my life transformed into highly charged possessions unable to be left behind. The 'handling' of my move happened in a haze of emotion and dust, in rooms filled with boxes and garbage bags. Such is the physical and emotional labour of putting oneself and one's things into motion. When one is an academic, moving also means packing and unpacking one's library. There happens to be a minor tradition of writing about this process. Walter Benjamin famously wrote about unpacking his library. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was no ordinary library but one made from the discerning taste and patient labour of a passionate book collector. His essay deliberately looks past the books themselves to the collector. It reflects upon the meaning of collecting, on Benjamin's personal geography of collecting ('the memories of the cities where I found so many things') and on the emotional value of ownership (Benjamin 1968, 67). His essay reminds us of the ways in which humans animate themselves through objects: 'Not that they the collected objects come to live in him: it is he who lives in them' (Benjamin 1968, 67). Almost 30 years later, in an essay that explicitly quotes Benjamin, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha (1996) reflected upon unpacking his library. In that essay he invites us to participate momentarily in 'the dialectical tension of order and disorder' which mark his life: 'What kind of history of oneself and one's times is coded in the collecting of books?'. Bhabha uses the event of unpacking his library to reflect upon the need to see ourselves as 'vernacular cosmopolitans', forever 'starting again' (Bhabha 1996, 199). My library is not full of rare or important books. I am not a 'genuine collector'. But having just moved countries, my experience of unpacking my library did enmesh me in a version of Bhabha's meditation on transnationalism. Teaching a course called 'The Mobile World' on the contemporary logics of migration and mobility (a course which itself travelled with me) was not as helpful as one might expect. Yes, I was typical of the type of skilled migrant who was stitched into (and actively took advantage of) established transnational networks. No, my professional transnationalism was not as geographically promiscuous as someone who might be forever on the move. Yes, I did feel a sense of belonging and it was constituted from a double geography of here and there. No, I did not suffer the kinds of violent displacement, terror and compromised citizenry that many experience. The very fact that I had time to pour over my things, to even imagine moving all my things, marked my move as something shaped by the privilege of a well-resourced and legitimate mobile subject. What things get left behind by the refugee who flees quickly, illegally or in fright? What snap-second decisions are made about the things that matter and those that don't? What agonizing goes on about what cannot be taken on an 'illegal' journey in which one is hidden, where one has to pretend not to be moving at all, or where one has to leave not only one's things but also one's family behind? Under such circumstances do size and weight suddenly cross-tabulate with sentiment to re-order the meaning of one's possessions and make choice possible? The 'migrant experience' is often diagnosed in terms of larger questions of uneven development, push and pull, transnational flows, rights and citizenry. But alongside these global stories lie these other domestic dramas of things. When a book moves because the library it is in moves, it is just a small detour in an already mobile history. Before even arriving on a shelf like mine, the life of a book (as a readable commodity) determines various paths: from author to publisher, publisher to printer, printer to distributor, distributor to library or retailer, and from one of these sites to my bag, my desk, my bookshelf. Along the way there are little eddies. A book is handled then put back on the shelf, it is lugged about, it is lent to a colleague. It is a wider story of book circulation and readership such as this that captures the attention of historian James Secord in his detailed study of the publication, reception and authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) (Secord 2000). Vestiges was an 'evolutionary epic' which ambitiously synthesized theology and the sciences to account for creation (Secord 2000, 1). Vestiges enjoyed what many of us who write into our narrow disciplinary fields might yearn for: a sensational reception. Secord traces many of the journeys that the 40 000 copies of Vestiges took. His history of Vestiges sees it in part as a set of ideas, but also as a dispersed event in which material form (the published book, its format, its price, the journal articles about it) are integral to its meaning as a cultural tracer of its time. Vestiges was a book that everyone wanted something to do with. When I unpacked my library there were few such sensations; most were more ordinary books. Yet they, in their own modest way, carried messages about places visited and the coming and going of trends in ideas. As I handled each book and tried to find appropriate places for them on the new and unfamiliar shelves, I would register, momentarily, the teaching it might be relevant to, the essay it helped write and, if unread, the work I hoped it would one day do for me. Almost every book had a 'place' in this system (even if that place was as 'a dud'). One book, however, could not be so comfortably placed. This is Denis Wood and Robert Beck's Home Rules (1994). This book is far from a sensation, and is more aptly described as obscure (at least in terms of current geographical scholarship). Nonetheless, there are aspects of the book (some of its ideas, things about its authorship) that some might think are sensational. I love this book but, to borrow the words of the person who first recommended it to me, 'I don't know what to do with it'. Home Rules is a book about the rules that exist in the home. In it the authors methodically chart the range of rules that are attached to the various things that constitute the home – walls, doors, floors, light switches, plants, televisions, etc. The authors do this because they are interested in the question 'what is a room?'. The book focuses upon a sitting room in one house (Wood's own house) and the rules documented were collected from the two boys who lived in that house (Wood's own sons) – Randall (then 11) and Chandler (then 9) – as well as from Wood himself and his wife, Ingrid. Children were key to unlocking the room's rules. A child is a newcomer to the world and their presence requires making explicit the rules that are (among adults and things) mostly implicit. As newcomers they need to be taught about how (adults expect them) to be around things, lest they face danger, or they put things of value at risk, or they act inappropriately in relation to an object. In short, the presence of children makes adults explicitly state the rules that are usually part of a more tacitly known performative stabilization of household objects in human lives. Some 228 different rules were collected for the 70 objects into which the room was split. These, for example, are the rules for the stair treads. 'Don't play on the stairs' 'Don't stomp on them'. (Wood and Beck 1994, 75) Much of this book reads like a compendium of facts about things, like an encyclopaedia of a room. Like any depiction in an encyclopaedia, what is shown is not simply the thing. As Barthes reminds us in his essay 'The Plates of the Encyclopedia', such renditions almost always carry the story of things under (human) transformation. In short, what Barthes calls the 'trajectory of the object' (1982, 227). To mention Barthes in relationship to this book is not arbitrary. Barthes'S/Z– that extraordinary book that reads Balzac's novella Sarrasine by way of 561 fragmented divagations – provided the analytical and textual template for Home Rules. Unlike Secord's utterly grounded and contextual history of the multiple readings of Vestiges, Barthes'S/Z is everything that a representation-weary human geography might disdain. It moves beyond the text only in order to serve the task of making plural the meaning of the text, and the meaning it detects is relentlessly poststructural, refusing to return the text to 'a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure' (Barthes 1974, 12). With Home Rules unfolds an extraordinary geography of an ordinary room. Every object bears not simply a set of documented rules, but also a range of analytical and interpretative reflections that are so much more than the rule itself, such as this phenomenological account of the stair tread: We know the stair treads best through our feet. Not that we don't see them, but that even when we cannot see, we use them as though we could. (Wood and Beck 1994, 75) Or this account of the extensive networks that constitute a room: The networks of meaning do not originate in the room; they participate in those of the world, of the universe. This is because a room is an open system . . . the world is tied together with complicated implications of mutual reciprocity at every scale . . . When the moonlight bounces off the coffee table . . . it is not the Bauhaus alone that enters, but the moon . . . With starlight, the room links arms with the cosmos. (Wood and Beck 1994, 116–117) Detecting multi-scaled interconnections is now almost standard for geography, but in the hands of Wood and Beck this gets taken to a provocative scope that manages to take seriously the ways in which, for example, the artefact of an historically and geographically specific design movement (a coffee table) comes to be meaningfully entangled with a moonbeam. A book is always more than the thing itself. It is a set of thoughts presented as artefact. It is likely then that the obscurity of Home Rules has at least something to do with the ideas it contains simply not working for contemporary geography. As Goodchild has observed, thoughts need to 'find an appropriate milieu, a welcoming territory' (1996, 211). It would seem that for all the attention to things within contemporary geography, there is no comfortable home for Home Rules. For example, in a recent special edition of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, dedicated to thinking about new geographies of commodity things, Home Rules found no place. Why should it, after all? The social uses of things that this book charts are not (directly) to do with the making of the commodity object – although the rules around a thing often intensify in response to commodity values (cost, scarcity, taste). Furthermore, the attention to things in place – and the social rules that keep them there – is somewhat out of step with the emphasis in current scholarship on the mobile commodity, although certainly in keeping with the sustained interest in the domestication of global things greatly energized by the work of anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Danny Miller. The scholarship on commodities reminds us that abstract renditions of commodity flows are insufficient for representing the many lives of things, and particularly how they come to be carefully embedded in rooms just like the one that features in Home Rules. As Bridge and Smith note, understanding commodities is now 'an altogether more intimate affair' (2003, 257). This interest in the highly differentiated and differentiating lives of the modern commodity is a style of 'geomaterialism' that thinks about things from within the frame of value and value exchange, in short through the logic of the commodity fetish. But as Castree has usefully noted, geographies of consumption avoid trying to 'recuperate defetishisation', a task which he tantalizing edges towards by way of an entirely different theoretical referent (Castree 2001, 1521). But even if we were to place Home Rules in touch with the relational objects of actor network theory, we might find its accounting of the life of things to be far too social. Perhaps Home Rules' obscurity derives from the thing it explores. The home has never had a natural or self-evident place in geographical scholarship. Conceived of as a morphological type, its spread was something to be mapped by old-style cultural geography. Conceived of as housing – something that is a commodity in a market – it was of interest to geographers concerned with matters of access and allocation. Conceived of as the private sphere, it was a spatial realm that was re-valorized by feminist scholarship. Recent (and not so recent) geographical scholarship has opened out the field of the home to new styles of investigation which take the materiality of the home far more seriously. This scholarship has brought a slightly different form of the domestic into view, yet so far Home Rules has not travelled into this scholarship in any significant way. It would seem, then, that whatever way we look at it, the thoughts in Home Rules are unable to compete successfully for 'the scarce resources of our attention' in the emerging material geographies (Goodchild 1996, 211). Perhaps is it not the thing but the authors. I know little of second author Robert Beck other than what the book cover tells me. But, like most geographers, I am familiar with Denis Wood's work. Trained as a geographer at Clark University, he taught environmental psychology and design at the School of Design at North Carolina State University from the mid 1970s. Wood's enthusiastic and scholarly contribution to the history of geography, and specifically the history of mapping, is widely acknowledged. The Power of Maps (1993) was a minor sensation and has been widely reviewed, routinely used in teaching the history of geographical knowledge and rarely goes without citation in scholarship on the geopolitics of maps. His passion for maps has not limited itself to distanced critiques of their power to subject people and places. He advocates the reforming power of mapping; its ability to act as a technology that can re-authorize a place, such that the minor and the marginalized come into view. This type of passion, scholarship and commitment to community has brought Wood some minor fame. He must be the only geographer to have featured on the massively popular (and populist) North American public radio programme 'This American Life'. He must also be one of the few geographers to have been imprisoned and, as a result of that, lost their permanent academic position. The circumstances of Denis Wood's conviction and incarceration are not mine to tell. These circumstances nonetheless produce a situation where the author occupies a kind of academic obscurity, on the one hand, and dubious notoriety, on the other. Now one of the most 'arresting' features of Vestiges was the lack of an author on the title page: 'More than anything else', Secord concludes, the obscurity of the authorship 'rendered it a sensation' (2000, 17). The ways in which Denis Wood's recent and enforced obscurity has impacted on the reception given to Home Rules is impossible for me to discern. Nonetheless, this obscurity has its effect over the book and my relationship to it, adding to the quandary of what to do with it. Alongside of biography we might look to the logic of the publishing machine for an explanation of the book's relative obscurity. It is this machine that translates a manuscript into the artefact called a book, values it and then sends it on its way by way of various distribution mechanisms. Home Rules is published by a reputable North American university publishing house. Like many other books on the lists of university publishers, it is hard to get and expensive to buy (available usually by special order, and available only in hard back). The impact of publishing machines on the sensations that certain books and ideas do or do not create has been subject to considerable scrutiny within geography. Recent criticisms of the 'cultural turn' suggest that its intellectual 'hegemony' was less to do with any analytical purchase, than a commercial academic publishing machine that opportunistically massaged and marketed to a wider field of cultural studies. According to this kind of accounting, the obscurity of Home Rules could be explained simply by the fact that it is not the kind of geography that sells. Certainly Home Rules does not resemble a 'typical' cultural studies or cultural geographical book. For example, it unfashionably owes as much to Henry Glassie (1975) as it does Pierre Bourdieu (1984). Of course, publishers do not always read their market correctly and there are aspects of Home Rules that make it feel as if it is well before its time. It heralds the current intellectual preoccupation with geographies of things, albeit through a theoretical repertoire that does not immediately connect to terms like 'commodification' or 'identity'. Furthermore, it explores novel convergences between the social sciences and the physical scientific concepts of the field and morphogenesis. Finally, although perhaps being a little too human-centred, it is suggestive of the phenomenological and relational worlds hinted at in the so-called nonrepresentational geographies. Strangely enough for a book about rules, Home Rules does not easily submit to the kinds of intellectual formulations that would allow it to find a comfortable place in my network of research practices and ideas. Its awkward place in my library is, then, not unlike that of the migrant, the refugee, the newcomer, the child, those figures whose tentative place in the world requires the active work of coming to know the appropriate rules of conduct in relation to the things with which one is surrounded. I invite other readers to momentarily relieve this book of its peculiar obscurity, to revel in its imaginative and provocative geographical divagations on a thing called a room, and in so doing activate associations with other existing and emergent material geographies. My thanks to David Livingstone (for the reference to Secord), Cindi Katz (for sharing an interest in Home Rules) and to Gillian Rose (for the image of a refugee and a domestic photograph).