Domestic Becoming

In this passage, Deleuze and Guattari describe a painting by Paul Klee (Twittering Machine, 1922) in which several stick figures bob and whirl with open mouths, perched on lines that might resemble a musical score (Figure 1). The background is littered with chaotic ink splotches, and the figures’ bodies seem ready to disintegrate into geometrical segments. But the musical element suggests some kind of tenuous stabilization. The figures are singing a refrain, and as the melody returns to itself, a home emerges ‘in the heart of chaos’.

Figure 1. Klee, Paul (1879–1940), Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine), 1922. Oil transfer drawing, watercolor and ink on paper with gouache and ink borders on board, 25 1/4 × 19 in (64.1 × 48.3 cm). Purchase. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York. Reproduced with the kind permission of ARS and Art Resource.

The soothing, predictable valences of ‘home’ are somehow crossed with a movement of formal and somatic dissolution, and, as the text goes on to remark, this paradoxical composition of opposites does not neutralize either extreme. Klee's image of home does not domesticate or exclude chaos, and chaos does not shatter the home's fragile stability.Footnote ⁵

The difficulty with the notion of domestic chaos goes beyond the normative cultural associations of the home as a place of tranquility—it is easy enough to imagine or remember homes as places of interpersonal, financial, or decorative chaos. The deeper issue is that, in the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, chaos is a notion that seems incompatible with the essentially routinized nature of the domestic. Chaos is repetition without identity or ground. Like the figure of khaos in Hesiod's Theogony, it is a primordial, generative power that gives rise to unprecedented novelties.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, the problem implies that the concept of home has bifurcated; we are actually dealing with two kinds of home, two kinds of stable, fixed points. There is a revealing remark to this effect in the passage cited above: ‘Now we are at home. But home does not preexist’. The adversative ‘but’ acknowledges that there is a certain notion of the home as a preexisting space—stocked with things, people, and memories—that constrains in advance the lives of its residents along fixed domestic pathways.Footnote ⁷ By not preexisting, the home assembled in Klee's refrain must be radically provisional, a partial delimiting of chaos whose full articulation is held in suspense.Footnote ⁸

This distinction, between the home that preexists and a home that does not, returns in other guises. In a subsequent chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’, Deleuze and Guattari revisit the idea of the home, this time while discussing the weaving techniques of nomadic societies:

The chapter's arguments about the character of nomadic crochet, embroidery, and felt exceed our purposes here; the important point is that the home can distribute people and artifacts (including fabric) in fundamentally different relations to the space around them. The nomadic quality of a home is not determined by its capacity for movement per se, that is, its translation from one place to another. The operative concept, rather, is intensity:

The distinction between speed and movement, intensity and extensity, finds a place in the constellation of ideas that recur throughout Deleuze's (and Guattari's) oeuvre.Footnote ¹¹ In Difference and Repetition, for instance, Deleuze famously distinguishes the empirical differences between distinct beings from Difference as such, a pure element of change that does not depend on the prior self-identity of the beings that change or differ.Footnote ¹² Movement amounts to an empirical difference in the location of an object in space and time, but speed causes a being to differ from itself and from its own spatial orientation. The passage quoted above raises the possibility that a nomadic home could be entirely immobile, as long as this immobility coexists with a latent capacity for sudden motion or change, an intensive speed whose direction and outcome are unforeseeable.

The ontological status of the home is thus ambivalent: it can designate the provisional, intensive dwelling of the nomad, or the fixed dwelling of a sedentary society whose movements are striated and predetermined. Immobility could exist in either setting, and likewise could assume a truly sedentary value or contain the latent potentiality for unmapped transformations. The question for us is how these terms are linked to each other and how to navigate their unmarked boundaries.

Home in Hesiod

To address this question, I turn to a text that apparently promotes a conservative vision of the sedentary home as a site of social and economic stability—but that also, quietly and intermittently, explores the possibilities of a nomadic alternative. In his Works and Days, Hesiod instructs his audience how to plow, sow, and harvest; how to prepare for the winter cold; how to avoid bad luck; and, in general, how to manage a prosperous household. Some of the technical instructions are too cursory and fragmentary to be of real use, and they seem to be intended to promote a broader ethical commitment to private property and self-sufficiency.Footnote ¹³ The text is an eclectic mix of anecdote, aphorism, parable, and mythology loosely framed by an episode in Hesiod's (possibly fictional or conventionalFootnote ¹⁴) biography in which his unscrupulous and lazy brother, Perses, conspires with civil authorities to seize a portion of Hesiod's inheritance.Footnote ¹⁵ Hesiod chastises his brother and exhorts him to change his life. Although it is ostensibly aimed at Perses, Hesiod's protreptic often appears to have a more indefinite addressee, a generic propertied farmer in need of ethical instruction.

The Hesiodic farmer does not exactly farm.Footnote ¹⁶ He instructs slaves, wage laborers, and women when and where to work and appropriates their surplus production. Oikos (‘home’, ‘household’) designates this space of economic production under the farmer's command and is thus the institution with which Works and Days is most centrally concerned.Footnote ¹⁷ Alongside the extended household of laborers, the residents of an oikos include the farmer-patriarch, his family, and his heirs. The two functions of the oikos—economic production and familial reproduction—are in ample evidence in Works and Days, but the economic function is arguably more prominent.Footnote ¹⁸ The home is depicted first and foremost as a place where the farmer's subordinates work and where the farmer himself accumulates property.Footnote ¹⁹

On first inspection, Hesiod's concept of the oikos seems entirely congruent with representations in Homer. The latter, likewise, juxtapose the oikos with the space outside of it, a space of politics, rivalry, and business; and in very broad terms Homeric epic prioritizes the oikos socially and ethically over the nascent collective institutions beyond it.Footnote ²⁰ The contrast is reinforced by an ideology of sexual difference: women live and work inside the home, whereas the place for men is the communal zone outside of and between oikoi.Footnote ²¹ Hesiod's representation of the oikos conforms to this pattern, but his distinctiveness and usefulness as a thinker of the domestic stems precisely from the ways in which he radicalizes its form. If in Homer, for instance, the oikos is the ‘basic social unit’,Footnote ²² it is also fundamentally porous and connected to other oikoi by relations of alliance, rivalry, and interdependence. But for Hesiod, the ‘outside’ as a whole becomes an object of studied avoidance while the household's centripetal, isolating attraction becomes correspondingly more intense: ‘it is better at home, since the outside is dangerous’ (οἴκοι βέλτερον εἶναι, ἐπεὶ βλαβερὸν τὸ θύρηφιν, Op. 365).Footnote ²³ As we will see, the gendered associations of the domestic interior do play an important role in Works and Days, but they are complicated by Hesiod's insistence that men, like women, should avoid the outside as much as possible. By drastically restricting the commerce between the inside and outside of the oikos, Hesiod directs bodies, activities, and movements toward the stationary confines of the home.

From this perspective, an oikos in Works and Days is a home that ‘preexists’ (to recall the language of A Thousand Plateaus): as an economic and social institution, its precise functions and potentialities are already given in advance of the lives of its inhabitants. It would be hasty, however, to assign a univocal sense to any term in Works and Days, a text that is programmatically invested in the problem of ambiguous dyads. Hesiod discusses two kinds of Strife, two plows for the farmer, two alternative logoi about human decline.Footnote ²⁴ Is there a second sense of oikos, a home that does not preexist but that comprises only a ‘center in the heart of chaos’?

Running alongside Hesiod's programmatic valorization of the oikos is a series of obscure images that he does not explicitly relate to his didactic mission. These images are concentrated in the ‘winter section’ (Op. 493–563), the second season in Hesiod's farming calendar. Nineteenth-century editors generally considered the section to be an interpolation because it seems to break from the didacticism of the surrounding poem.Footnote ²⁵ The winter section is richly descriptive but offers few concrete instructions. As Stephanie Nelson remarks, ‘the description stands out as exceptional among Hesiod's vignettes. It occupies nearly a fourth of the farming section, ranges over the whole extent of the farmer's world, and gives us nothing to do.’Footnote ²⁶ The reason for this is clear enough: it is almost impossible to obey the imperative to work when the north wind is scouring the landscape and bare survival is of greater concern than economic productivity.Footnote ²⁷ The club-house and the market are always places of idleness, but during the winter the entire space beyond the walls of the oikos becomes workless.

Within this inactive world, we encounter a series of enigmatic figures afflicted by hunger and cold. The most obvious way of interpreting these images of hardship is as negative exempla for the proprietor: one must maintain a functioning oikos or risk economic and corporeal destitution. But the winter section is not a gallery of horrors; it is celebrated by commentators as the most aesthetically appealing passage in Works and Days.Footnote ²⁸ In it, bodies assume new forms and take on new relations to their environment that cannot be easily assimilated to the ethical imaginary that dominates the other sections of the text.

Hesiod opens the section by advising farmers to make adequate preparations for winter (Op. 493–503) and then depicts the violence of the north wind and its effects on humans and animals. The sequence culminates with an image of the wind barred from a warm home inhabited by a virgin girl and her mother; their abode is juxtaposed opaquely with a cold home inhabited by ‘the boneless one’:

The scene seems initially to complement Hesiod's general valorization of the household: the first oikos (523) serves as a kind of hermetic vessel that excludes dangerous forces (the north wind) and contains an unsullied object of desire.Footnote ²⁹ The virgin girl is one of the possessions that the proprietor accumulates in his household, along with the land, capital, slaves, and women that fall under his patriarchal command. The virgin is seen from a distance, or at least seen by the immaterial presence of the narrator's eye, which can peer into the inmost recesses of the home. Not even the wind can pass through the walls of the house or through the skin of the maiden, but the gaze of the poet-voyeur can touch everything. The oikos thus becomes a site of sexualized fantasies of order and security. The girl's desirability is correlated precisely with her place in a fixed biographical narrative. That she does not yet know about sex implies that she will know soon, because the story of her life conforms to a narrative trajectory: now a virgin, she is stationed beside the mother whose role she will assume after the initiation of marriage. The ordered course of this story is vouchsafed by the hermetic security of the oikos, which excludes the errant chaos of the outside and fixes the movement of its inhabitants along preexistent courses.Footnote ³⁰

At verse 525, this conventional opposition is complicated by the appearance of a second kind of home, ‘the fireless oikos’ of the boneless one. Though it is expressly designated as an oikos, this shelter lacks many of the hallmarks of Hesiod's normative domesticity: it is a place of hunger, cold, and anonymity. The very being of the enigmatic figure who dwells there is indeterminate. The anosteos has resisted the efforts of philologists, ancient and modern, to definitively fix its identity. The name may be a kenning for an animal, perhaps an octopus, which was thought in antiquity to eat its own arms.Footnote ³¹ But the sexual overtones of the previous scene (‘the works of golden Aphrodite’) and evidence that pous and tendein can have lewd connotations have led some scholars to suggest that the boneless one is a penis.Footnote ³² It has also been interpreted as a cuttlefish, a snail, or a dog.Footnote ³³ In all likelihood the word is intentionally indeterminate and riddling. Without bones, the figure assumes a plasticity that refuses organic definition; it can be identified only by the privation of a definite property.Footnote ³⁴

The puzzle of the anosteos—what kind of being it is, how it leads its life—is equally a puzzle concerning the nature of the being's oikos. Despite its cold and poverty, the space is in other respects a prototypical Hesiodic home. It allows its strange inhabitant to avoid the cold season outside and to remain stationed within (ἔνδοθι οἴκου, 523); through this posture of aversive immobility, the anosteos implicitly obeys Hesiod's injunction that the farmer shun τὸ θύρηφιν, ‘the outside’. Immobility seems to serve two distinct functions in this passage, just as it does in Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of sedentary and nomad forms of immobility: the virgin girl's stationary posture, seated beside her mother, reflects her studious observance of domestic routine, but for the anosteos—who gnaws its own foot and cannot ‘set in motion’—immobility serves no preexisting social function and is evidently the symptom of an intense convolution of forces.

It will be useful at this point to articulate more precisely how the oikos is related to Hesiod's didactic project in spatial terms, and especially in terms of immobility. In his seminar on ethics and psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan remarked that moral experience involves ‘not only an articulated law but also a direction, a trajectory, in a word, a good that [a person] appeals to, thereby engendering an ideal of conduct’.Footnote ³⁵ Lacan uses the vocabulary of space (‘a direction, a trajectory’) to conceptualize the unitary disposition that ethical prescriptions are supposed to effect. The term ēthos has a well-known polysemy that illustrates this idea: an ēthos is a way of life or disposition and also a space for living in or an abode; or more synthetically, it is a way of arranging in space the activities that make up a life.Footnote ³⁶ Pietro Pucci describes the spatiality of ethics in a chapter on Hesiod's conception of dikē:

Pucci pinpoints the inner spatial logic of Hesiod's discourse. The crucial notion is separation: dikē is a procedure for separating individuals who have entered into a public dispute and for returning them to their private domains. In this privacy, the farmer can establish a buffer zone, an insulative interval, around the set of things denoted by Pucci's apt expression, τὰ ἑαυτοῦ, ‘one's own’, which includes property (khrēmata, kteana), food and sustenance (bios), dependent persons (dmōes, gunē, tekna), and the body of the proprietor.

All of these private substances are threatened by ‘the outside’ (τὸ θύρηφιν), which is precisely the space beyond the oikos that belongs to no single proprietor and that is filled with their mutual dealings, collaborations, extortions, and violence, as well as the inhuman violence of nature (wind, rain, and disease). To protect this private domain, proprietors are advised to avoid various public spaces outside of the home: the agorē, where litigants submit their disputes to communal judgment; the thōkos, a shared lodging where neighbors can stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer (493, 574); and the leskhē, a club-house used for public deliberations and as an informal meeting space (493, 501).Footnote ³⁸ The appropriate response is to ‘pass them by’ (πὰρ δ’ ἴθι χαλκεῖον θῶκον καὶ ἐπαλέα λέσχην, 493), to extricate oneself from the space of the common and attend to the private domain of ‘one's own’.Footnote ³⁹

Even as the proprietor confines himself to the space of the home, the very act of separation implicitly structures the communal space outside. The oikos is the domain left over to the diligent farmer once he has left alone the existing order of things, especially the distribution of property among neighbors and the distribution of patrimony among sons.Footnote ⁴⁰ Each oikos is fixed in place not only by its material immobility but by its (ideally) inviolable external boundaries with other private domains. This is a kind of home that preexists and that conserves the preexisting consistency of the social landscape around it. Such a space is what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘sedentary’, ‘striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures’, and opposed to the smooth, unmarked ‘nomad space’ in which the distribution of things and people is endlessly displaced.Footnote ⁴¹

The brief account in this section has viewed the Hesiodic oikos from its exterior, according to its place in the socioeconomic order that encompasses it. The ethics of domestic separation aims to create, outside of the oikos, a striated landscape of private domains, rendered collectively stable by the aversion of each toward all.Footnote ⁴² Inside of the oikos, Hesiod's subjects find a stable shelter to support the scrupulous management of agricultural work. As long as this work is in progress, the home remains for Hesiod a strictly functional and predictable space. But during the winter season, as we have seen, agricultural work becomes impossible, and the tendency of the oikos to isolate and confine its inhabitants is vastly intensified. In the following section, I examine how the interior of the oikos inflects the lives and bodies of its inhabitants and of the anosteos in particular.

Figurality

One of Deleuze's most involved explorations of the home is his monograph on the painter Francis Bacon.Footnote ⁴³ Bacon's work favors domestic settings: figures in bed clutch each other or lie alone; figures converse in a living room, crouch on toilets, sit alone in drawing rooms, stare into mirrors, or plunge into wash basins. These spaces are domestic in the most minimal sense. They are barely articulated, sometimes admitting just a light fixture or a hanging bulb, a solitary chair, or a window blind. They contain the bare marks of domesticity without, after all, constituting anything like a sedentary home, or a ‘home that preexists’.Footnote ⁴⁴ There is no material accumulation in this kind of space, no intimate artifacts that would personalize it and link it to its owner through implied narratives of acquisition and use.

Bacon almost invariably depicts human figures in his paintings, but their somatic forms are pushed to the limits of the recognizably human. They tend to be faceless, spasmodic, and melted like plastic—traits that invest them with an inscrutable but deeply compelling kind of affectivity (Figures 2, 3).Footnote ⁴⁵ For Deleuze, the affects that these figures express belong as much to the painted canvas as to the human body. They disclose an order of pure sensation that has escaped the constraints of the body's organic coherence and of painting's representational conventions. In this respect, Deleuze deploys a crucial distinction between the figural and the figurative. Figures in a painting enter into a figurative relation when they are construed as characters in a story and assigned conventional motives, desires, and interrelations. These ‘givens’, or representational clichés imposed on a painting by its viewers, interfere with the immediate, affective potency of the painting itself. One solution, exemplified by abstract expressionism, is to ban figures entirely and reserve the canvas as a space for nonfigurative shapes and colors. Bacon's approach, however, is to retain figures but to subtract them from the contexture of representational givens, to rescue the figural immediacy of figures from the figurative accretions that encumber them.

Figure 2. Bacon, Francis (1909–92), Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1963 [CR 63-01]. Oil on canvas (198 × 145 cm). © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Reproduced with the kind permission of DACS/ArtImage and the Estate of Francis Bacon.

Figure 3. Bacon, Francis (1909–92), Self-Portrait, 1973 [CR 73-10]. Oil on canvas (198 × 147.5 cm). © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Reproduced with the kind permission of DACS/ArtImage and the Estate of Francis Bacon.

To achieve this effect, Bacon deploys a variety of techniques. ‘Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Isolation is already a tendency implicit in the construction of domestic spaces, as the Hesiodic oikos makes abundantly clear. In Bacon's paintings the tendency is pushed to its farthest limit. Bacon's figures are usually solitary, and even when they appear in sets of two or three each figure seems estranged from the others, atomic ‘facts’ rather than parts of a narrative whole.Footnote ⁴⁷

Deleuze's reading of Bacon offers us a way of thinking about how the space of a home can reconfigure the formal features of domesticity (interiority, immobility) in a manner that escapes the social and narrative ‘givens’ imputed to the home and to figures who inhabit it. The oikoi in Works and Days are populated by givens—directives and assumptions about the function of households and their place in Hesiodic society. With the advent of the anosteos, however, Hesiod briefly engages in a speculative reconfiguration and displacement of the terms that organize his ethical project. Like Bacon's painterly figurations, anosteos is subjected to an intensified form of domestic isolation. The ordinary Hesiodic proprietor enjoys his home as an enclosed space for private satisfactions, including food and sex.Footnote ⁴⁸ This kind of enjoyment implies at least a minimal commerce between the inhabitants of an oikos, whose interdependency implies a whole social order with its hierarchies, behavioral scripts, and preexistent narratives. The boneless one, however, is as solitary as the figures in Bacon's paintings and similarly cut off from the figurative ‘givens’ of social existence. This isolation allows (or requires) that the appetites of the boneless one turn drastically inward. The figure gnaws on its own body rather than seek to produce sustenance by venturing out into the surrounding nomos. If commentators are right to associate anosteos with male genitalia, then the act of autophagy could have masturbatory connotations.Footnote ⁴⁹ All of the subject's external relations have become intransitive, folded back to its own body.

The tendency toward figural isolation in Bacon's paintings is redoubled by the dynamic interplay of forces over the surface of the canvas. Many of the paintings (including those shown in Figures 2, 3) follow a formula: a figure, usually a human body, is stationed in the middle of a round area enclosed by a contour. Outside of the contour is an unarticulated zone of pure color that Deleuze calls ‘material structure’. These three elements (figure, contour, structure) constitute a kind of non-narrative drama. The structure is a buzzing, molecular flux, a force of chaos that presses on the contour, as though trying to reclaim and dissolve the tormented figure inside. The figure, in turn, contorts itself in a ghastly effort to escape its own organic form and slip into the formless structure beyond the contour. Two movements, from structure to figure and from figure to structure, constitute a rhythm that pulses spasmodically over the scene.Footnote ⁵⁰ This dynamic has nothing to do with characters, narratives, or spectacle, and the paintings resist interpretation along these lines. Bacon litters some of his later works with what Deleuze calls asignifying traits—newspapers with scrambled text, arrows that point at nothing—as though to stymie any effort to link together isolated elements of the canvas into a cogent story.

In sedentary homes, as we have seen, movement and stillness are regulated by the division between the home and its outside. Each Hesiodic oikos owes its existence to its place in the striated landscape of oikoi, and the centripetal orientation of each farmer with respect to his oikos guarantees that he can retreat from the outside spaces occupied by his neighbors and by natural forces. Within the home, movement comes to rest in the space's tranquil confines.Footnote ⁵¹ Bacon's figures are also confined within domestic spaces, but their immobility is unsettled by the interplay of forces between the figure, contour, and structure. Such figures do not have a well-defined orientation in space, refusing either to stand in a particular location or to move between an origin and a destination:

The figure's paradoxical composition of motion and stillness (like ‘speed’ in A Thousand Plateaus) compromises the orderly delineation between the inside and outside of the home: perhaps the material structure outside will break into the round area that contains the figure, or perhaps the figure will manage to escape its own body and pass into the chaos outside.Footnote ⁵³ Both outcomes, or neither, are suspended in the violent configuration of bodies and space in the Baconian home.

A similar configuration complicates the apparent immobility of the anosteos. The figure appears to be fixed in place: first because it is using its foot for food rather than locomotion, and second because the space outside is too dimly lit ‘for setting out’ (οὐ γάρ οἱ ἠέλιος δείκνυ νομὸν ὁρμηθῆναι, Op. 526).Footnote ⁵⁴ But this domestic confinement has a spasmodic intensity. The figure is evidently beset by intense hunger, but it cannot seek external sources of food under the dim winter sun: an effort to escape meets a countervailing force of confinement, and the impasse creates a static displacement, an intensive difference, that contorts the body of the boneless one much like the contrary pressures that rend Baconian figures.

The apparent immobility of the anosteos, then, belies a kind of indefinite, coiled potential for motion. Hesiod implies that if it were not winter and if the sun were ‘pointing’ the way, the anosteos would set off into the pastureland (νομὸν ὁρμηθῆναι), into the nomos beyond the settled zone of arable farming.Footnote ⁵⁵ In their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari repurpose nomos, the etymological source of ‘nomad’, as the very principle of dynamic, unforeseeable distribution over an open space. Commenting on the original meaning of nomos, they remark,

If the opposition between nomos and polis is overstated in certain respects,Footnote ⁵⁷ it does capture an essential tension in early Greek thought, and especially in Hesiod's poetics. In Homer and Hesiod nomos designates hinterlands in which flocks and herds were grazed for various purposes.Footnote ⁵⁸ As pastoral common land, the nomos is beyond the scope of Hesiod's didactic project, which is concerned almost exclusively with arable farming on private estates. Hesiod's disinterest in pastoralism in Works and Days may betray a deeper ideological hostility that surfaces in the proem of Theogony.Footnote ⁵⁹ In early Greek representations more generally, there is a tendency to depict pastoralists and the non-agrarian inhabitants of the hinterlands as socially abject and uncivilized, verging in some cases on animality and monstrosity.Footnote ⁶⁰ The boneless one is truly at home in the itinerant space of the nomos, a space without fixed distributions of land and property or fixed distinctions between humans and animals. It is all the more striking, then, that—although nomos is regarded in certain respects as inimical to the agrarian regime of the oikos—the anosteos occupies both domains, an oikos from which to ‘set off’ into the nomos (Op. 526). This is evidently a very singular kind of home, not a barrier that excludes the outside, but a provisional shelter for its inhabitant, who contorts and strains itself toward some unforeseeable flight into the hinterlands.