Peter King - Living Alone, Living Together: Two Essays on the Use of Housing
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Living Alone, Living Together: Two Essays on the Use of Housing: summary, description and annotation
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This book, from social theorist Peter King, considers how a dwelling can protect and promote both our anxieties and our relationships. Dwelling magnifies our anxieties and allows us to reject the world, yet it is also what we need to form long and lasting relationships.
The first essay considers the one truly private space we have: inside our heads. This is the most intimate place we have, yet we are singularly unable to control it or even to know it. This leads to a discussion on anxiety and depression and how the solitude offered by private space the head and the home allows for anxiety to take over an individual. But it is also suggested that it is only through the privacy of a dwelling, and the intimacies that can develop here, that anxiety can be assuaged.
The second essay is based on the premise that our relationships come out of our private dwelling. We need the protected intimacy, the inclusion and exclusion of private dwelling in order to flourish and to grow, and if we are to live together in a fully committed manner we depend on this enclosed and excluding space.
Peter King builds up a new picture of dwelling from first principles. Both essays use a non-traditional literature to explore being alone and being with others, rather than relying on the social science literature, and offer a distinct and original contribution to the housing studies literature.
Peter King is a writer and thinker on housing. He is currently Reader in Social Thought at De Montfort University.
The first essay considers the one truly private space we have: inside our heads. This is the most intimate place we have, yet we are singularly unable to control it or even to know it. This leads to a discussion on anxiety and depression and how the solitude offered by private space the head and the home allows for anxiety to take over an individual. But it is also suggested that it is only through the privacy of a dwelling, and the intimacies that can develop here, that anxiety can be assuaged.
The second essay is based on the premise that our relationships come out of our private dwelling. We need the protected intimacy, the inclusion and exclusion of private dwelling in order to flourish and to grow, and if we are to live together in a fully committed manner we depend on this enclosed and excluding space.
Peter King builds up a new picture of dwelling from first principles. Both essays use a non-traditional literature to explore being alone and being with others, rather than relying on the social science literature, and offer a distinct and original contribution to the housing studies literature.
Peter King is a writer and thinker on housing. He is currently Reader in Social Thought at De Montfort University.
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LIVING ALONE, LIVING TOGETHER
Two Essays on the Use of Housing
LIVING ALONE, LIVING TOGETHER
Two Essays on the Use of Housing
BY
PETER KING
Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
United Kingdom North America Japan
India Malaysia China
India Malaysia China
Emerald Publishing Limited
Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK
First edition 2017
Copyright 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited
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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78743-068-6 (Print)
ISBN: 978-1-78743-067-9 (Online)
ISBN: 978-1-78743-140-9 (Epub)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book, more than any other I have written, has depended on the kindness, steadfastness and love of other people. In revealing something of myself I have felt the need to seek the support of others for validation of this work. This book is about relationships and the (temporary) desire or need to withdraw from them. I therefore must acknowledge the massive debt I owe to my wife, B, and my two daughters, Helen and Rachel. They all feature in this work and have had the good grace to support me in writing it. B is a woman of tremendous strength and patience who deserves more than to live with a curmudgeon such as myself. My daughters have grown up surprising well despite their father. I thank them for continuing to endure, as well as to mock when they think I deserve it.
I am also very grateful to Jen McCall and her colleagues at Emerald Publishing for taking on such an eccentric work as this. Thanks also must go to the two anonymous reviewers who commented on an earlier draft of the book. As a result I think it is much improved and some of the grievous errors have been avoided.
Finally, I owe a tremendous amount to Roderick Evan, for opening up a pathway towards making sense of the dark and rather forbidding places I have at times been caught in. Because of him I have found a means of identifying and articulating what, for me, had been frustratingly elusive.
INTRODUCTION
A dwelling is a tool,1 and policy is merely the subsidiary process that helps provide those tools. Housing is something that we use. We can focus on policies and on quantities; we can argue over white papers, spending targets and population projections, but what matters is how housing is used by those currently occupying it.2 It is perhaps only natural that the predominant focus is on the material aspects of policies, quantities and standards: these are easy to see and to measure. We can contain these and so readily explain them. Reducing housing to quantities allows us to compartmentalise problems and posit easy solutions.3 But, in doing so, we actually forget what housing is for. We can look at numbers built and their cost and feel that we have achieved something if there is some movement in these figures. Yet what matters just as much is how these dwellings are used. By this I dont mean that they are simply occupied that square pegs are put into square holes but in what ways do individual households take a dwelling and mould it to their purposes. In other words, how does a dwelling allow us to live? This, after all, is why we need a dwelling and why we attach any meaning to it.
As soon as we accept the importance of use, we also have to acknowledge that much of that use is both singular and private. It is not open to public scrutiny and would become impossible were it so observed. It literally does go on behind closed doors. Accordingly, it cannot be readily measured and quantified, and so we find it hard to generalise. All we have to go on are our own experiences and what others tell us of theirs. Yet, just because something is hard to see and even harder to measure does not mean it has no significance. Indeed, the significance of our dwelling to us is precisely because our use of it cannot be seen. We have, then, to find ways of looking inside that is not obtrusive, but which can still help us to capture the meaningfulness of our use of dwelling. Much of my work has been an attempt to find such a means,4 and what I present here is my latest attempt.
This book consists primarily of two long chapters that present apparently contrasting views on the use of our dwelling. I say apparently because, while they appear to be opposites on living alone and living together they are actually complementary. To my mind they sit beside each other quite well. Like the poles of a magnet, which supposedly repel each other, they are actually connected and part of the same entity. Both chapters are concerned with how we are able to use private space. They are both based on a similar introspective method. Taken together they provide a more complete picture of how we can use our dwelling.
We live privately and have space that we say is ours. But much of this space is actually shared with a small number of others who we live with either through choice or accident of birth. We can relate to this space in an intensely subjective manner, and we know that others do too, and this is simply because we have direct corroboration we can see how they behave. Much of the meaning that we derive from that space comes from who we share it with, but also because that sharing remains within private bounds.
But there is one place that we cannot share in any direct manner, namely the space inside our head. We can certainly describe our feelings to others and let them know what is going on in our headspace. Others may accept what we say as authentic and real. But ultimately that is because of what they know of us from the outside. They can have no knowledge of the actual inner space and instead have to rely on our facility with language and our ability to describe what we experience and feel. It is then incumbent on them to process what we say using their own headspace, allowing for how it is then sorted and filtered. We must accept the mediated nature of our description but we can seek to minimise it. We can try to reduce the level of mediation to the barest minimum and describe what is inside our own head and so leave the smallest amount for external interpretation. The listener or reader must still take much on trust, but they can test it against their own inner space with the minimum of iterations. This then is not a scientific approach and it has no pretensions to be so. All we can offer are a series of descriptions of particular head states.
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