The Home and the Work

In one of the more aphoristic and lyrical passages from The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard reminds us: “The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Daydreams have something in common with metaphors because both involve the idea of transport, of going outside of where one is  (of course, with the subconscious assurance that one can trace one’s way back). A house where one lives, temporarily or permanently – a house that has been transformed, in some degree, into a home – suggests the centre from which such transportation is carried out, either physically or mentally or both. A house becomes a home not only when one starts inhabiting it for some duration of time but also, and more importantly, when one makes it the ontological centre of arrivals and departures. A home becomes less home-like when one is away from it for a very long period of time. Conversely, it may also lose its home-like character if one is locked inside it for too long. Home, therefore, constitutes a relation between the interior and the exterior. In case of people who are suffering from severe illness and cannot go out, this relation is maintained by the prospect of visits by friends and relatives.

There is another way in which ‘homeness’ is established: one needs to be able to arrange things in one’s homespace. This may imply anything from occasional rearrangement of furniture in one’s living room; or changing the curtains, or the colour of the walls; or installing or uninstalling new devices in the kitchen or the washroom…all these changes constitute our relation with the space we live in. This is generally true of how the idea of home is evoked in everybody’s imagination regardless of their social standing, gender, religion, etc. The degree of freedom to arrange and re-arrange things inside one’s home, in some sense, is proportional to the intensity with which a person feels ‘at home’. A glance at the etymology of the word ‘home’ reveals that in the old Germanic sense of the word it had the connotation of ‘village’ – a sense which is absent in the way we think of home in an urban context today. It is no longer possible to imagine the words ‘home’ and ‘village’ in synonymous terms. ‘Village’ is suggestive of a kind of continuity that is both spatial and temporal. One is at home in village not only because one is surrounded by the members of his community and the familiar topography, but also because of the sense of history that comes with the recognition that one’s predecessor’s have lived and died there. A single home which has seen the birth and death of several generations of people is quite different from a modern apartment cleansed of death and sometimes, the dying. The latter is becoming increasingly atomized and exclusive. More and more, across the world urban apartments look the same. Structurally they may still look different but there is something similar in the way living space is utilized inside urban apartments today. Whatever the case may be, home is still the space that one finds refuge in after a hard day’s work, after coming back from a different space – the workplace. In fact, daily life is constituted of endless movements through structured and designated spaces. If we take into account a very specific aspect of the definition of home, that is, a place of arrival after daily work is accomplished in the workplace, we consider home to be a place which one inhabits only after working for sustenance has ended for the day, or before it is about to begin. The homeness of home, for a person still in occupation of some kind, manifests itself most intensely in the morning and at night. The distinction between workplace and homeplace is necessary to maintain the homeness of home. We function differently in these two different places: our interactions are different, and so are our physical movements and postures. However, there is a growth, in recent times, in the way the homeplace is invaded by the workplace.

What goes on inside the walls of a home is supposed to have a basic privacy. Doing office-work at home, it goes without saying, is not intrusive or invasive. The invasion has taken place with the advent and regularised use of visual technologies and with the compulsion of carrying out some work in real time and in coordination with others and the need to monitor such coordination. Most people agree that working from home is somehow more stressful than working at office. Why is this so stressful? Apart from the obvious stress that emerges out of having to coordinate with peers, colleagues or clients using technologies – that are, by and large, not sufficient – one important yet unnoticed reason is the sheer ontologically unprecedented experience of being at two places at the same time: a person working from home is both working and staying home, that is, he has to (in most cases) wear office attire and sit in front of the webcam and has to look ‘formal’. He even has to ensure that the portion of his room that is visible to the people he is working with/for is office-like, and that no other person is visible in the frame. A few years ago, Robert Kelly, an associate professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University in Busan, South Korea was doing a live interview on the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, the President of South Korea, for the BBC World News from his home office. Suddenly, his four-year-old daughter gate-crashed and was followed by his nine-month-old. His wife intervened, sliding in to drag the children out while accidentally knocking books off an air-mattress, and closed the door on her knees as she left. The interview resumed, though Kelly was visibly embarrassed. It became the favourite TV moment of the week for BBC. Subsequently, the video went viral giving rise to a plethora of memes. It is important to note that Kelly was operating from a home office, the door of which he usually locks before going live and which he evidently forgot the day the incident happened.

With the global lockdown happening right now, more and more people are having to work from home. Everyone cannot afford to have a home office or a separate space allocated for the purpose of virtual interactions. People who cannot, are resorting to make-shift arrangements, transforming, for example, a part of their living room into a simulated cubicle or their bedroom into a office-like setup where all the bedroom paraphernalia are kept well out of sight. Homes of future may well have separate spaces assigned as office rooms. The nature of our work, the duration of work and how we manage it, the worker-stakeholder interface – all this is too various to generalize but if one is using a computer, a certain uniformity is bestowed upon the diverse range of work that is carried out ‘online’. It involves looking at the computer screen for a long period of time, typing away on the keyboard and sitting in the chair in, more or less, the same way. Online working, either from home or from office, involves the same architectonics and ergonomics.  What working from home adds to this experience is a certain kind of simulation of the real physical space so that the interface of people operating on the virtual domain looks the same in every case. The quadrilateral of the visible space – the space that is real and virtual at the same time – needs to be arranged in a way that a homeplace cannot be arranged. That little quadrilateral space of the computer screen, readily visible to other people, is torn away from the homeplace spatiality. If this mode of working – working from home – becomes popular or necessary to the extent of replacing offline working or working from office, it will necessitate major changes in the way we understand not only ‘work’ but also ‘home’. If and when it happens, homes will have to be equipped with better internet networks and other supplementary technologies that will ensure that there are no drops in internet connection, which, in turn will be based on the strength of hardware and cables involved.

Since the invention of photography, it has had basically two functions: the public and the private. The camera that is involved in the work-from-home setup most of the times has neither of these two functions. It works more like a surveillance device. It is a classic panopticon-like situation where the person monitoring the employee may or may not be watching. The fact that the process of monitoring is, to a great degree, mechanized, adds to the anxiety and stress that one is liable to feel while working from home. Visibility is becoming increasingly associated with one’s identity as a worker, or a producer. There is a tendency on the rise, which is actually exacerbated by the work-from-home scenario, to turn everything into one visual entity or another. The ease and potential harmfulness with which cameras have entered our homes today is probably directly proportional to our lack of privacy and mindfulness.

The ubiquitous nature of cameras and the persistent demands cameras make to visibility are something we will probably get used to soon, if we have not done so already. The main challenge is coping with two selves that constitute the settings governing our work setup today – the real and the virtual. It must be clarified that I am talking here about only those kinds of work that are done or can be done using computation and algorithms. Of course, access to the virtual media is a privilege that most people do not have, most kinds of work cannot be done using a computer, and it is wrong to assume that online work is something that everyone will benefit from. The challenge regarding coping with real and virtual selves has loomed large with greater intensity at the wake of COVID-19. We are slowly getting used to working from home, despite the difficulties involved and the obvious technological shortages. The current period has brought about great changes in the way we think about work and the way we think about home. In fact, there is no area of human life that has not been affected by the pandemic. Most of the changes are probably long-term and irreversible. When things get back to normal, we will have to re-think the whole idea of work and reconfigure it in such a way that the two selves – real and virtual – are not seen as dichotomous entities, one substituting the other. We will have to expand our metaphysics of work and labour to include the notion that we are both real and virtual beings. We need specialized training to orient ourselves to think like that. A space must be created, where working from home using computers is not seen as a substitute to offline, on-site work, but as something that is carried out with different sets of methodologies and different aims in mind. Let us take the example of teaching-learning.

With the technology available, it is possible to have interactive lectures where students participate in the activity of learning virtually and where teachers can ask question, set tasks, invigilate exams, and carry out various other activities that are usually carried out inside a classroom. But what does it mean to have a ‘virtual classroom’? We tend to focus more on ‘virtual’ than ‘classroom’. A classroom is a physical space that cannot be simulated. Neither can the experience of being there physically inside a classroom attending a lecture be substituted with the technology available. The problem lies with the idea that virtual classroom is a substitute for real classroom. When attending a virtual lecture, the students are still in their homes with the familiar homelike environment and activities surrounding them. We would do better, therefore, to approach online teaching as an entirely new model of imparting education that has, of course, a great deal to do with real classroom teaching, but has its own dynamics and methods. As long as we continue to think of online teaching as a substitute for offline teaching, there will be a sense of incompleteness that will plague our virtual endeavours.  I am not yet sure what kind of training is required to develop and implement this new kind of approach.

We are living through an unprecedented time in history. It is an interregnum of sorts. The old order is yet to end and the new one is yet to begin. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift but it is yet to be theorized and intellectualized. With social distancing implemented globally, the social underpinnings of work and labour are changing at the base. When this time is over, we must rethink our notions of space and identity. Space – both real and virtual – will have to be used with caution and flexibility, for a certain kind of ‘liquidity’ will come to permeate our idea of space and adjacency. There will be a greater proliferation of technologies in our lives and homeplaces, perhaps in anticipation of the next great pandemic or a similar situation of calamity. If we do not learn how to control and use the technologies, we are likely to face an ontological disaster resulting from not knowing where we are, of being perpetually torn between our real and virtual selves. It is important to realize, therefore, that we are capable of being flexible and multifaceted. This realization should be individual, to begin with, not collective, faced as we currently are with total uncertainty about the future – not just what the future holds but the very existence of a projected future. With the seeming merger between the homeplace and the workplace, and the social distancing in place, all we can currently do is distant socializing. But at this point in history, it seems to me, it is absolutely necessary to sustain connections with others in whatever form available, for, if we are ever able to recover the older notion of home or come up with a new one, it will invariably be in relation to the  other beings who inhabit this planet in general, and the beings who cohabit our homeplace, in particular.

Avirup