Liberation through and from Shelter
Florian Rötzer

Obdach – shelter – is a word that in German is hardly used on its own any more. Most people know it only as part of the word Obdachlosigkeit, homelessness. This is taken to mean a life spent without a roof, out in the open, in unprotected space. A homeless person is also an unhoused person, someone who needs help or who appears as a threat to the housed – who are themselves, in a sense, trapped. The word “unhoused” already indicates that we find it difficult to associate dwelling with flats, and above all with nomadic shelters. Instead, since the beginnings of sedentary life, dwelling has historically been associated with houses, where we live under one roof within four solid walls.

Instead of the German word wohnen, or to dwell, I almost wrote hausenagain. In German, hausen relates to living in a house, but its connotations are negative. It describes, for example, life in a neglected, dilapidated house or people who destroy a house or let it go to ruin or even run riot in it.

Obdach can also make us think of a home. Sigmund Freud noticed that the home, das Heim, paradoxically has uncanny – unheimlich – features. It can be haunted, because Heimlichkeit – at once homeliness and secrecy or seclusion – prevails within it. It allows for a retreat from the public sphere into spaces that guests may enter only with the express permission of those who live there. The inviolability of the home is therefore a fundamental human right. The threshold, the actual separation of inside and outside – or, more accurately, the invention of inside and outside – is at the heart of shelter, which screens off the outside world and other people.

My thesis, which I have already set out in Sein und Wohnen (Being and dwelling),¹ is that when early humans invented the first primitive shelter – most likely made of interwoven branches on solid ground – they created not only spatial interiority for the first time but also psychological inwardness. This interiority made deviance possible – a centrifugal force within the community – and with it the birth of individuality. Before that, early humans lived in public under the constant social control of the horde, exposed to wind, cold, rain, vermin and enemies. They probably slept in nests in trees, like the great apes, fitfully and constantly having to keep their balance so as not to fall. Very few humans are likely to have lived in caves; most will have settled on level ground under a fragile shelter – initially probably for just one night before moving on, later for longer and in a more stable way, which was the beginning of the division between the settled and the nomadic.

Lying on solid ground, in a “womb” that offered at least some protection, and at the same time in the company of others in their respective shelters, early humans were able to rest and dream with fewer disturbances and more REM and deep-sleep phases. The duration of sleep became shorter, while the cognitive processing of experience improved, and the newly gained waking time allowed for more activity and social interaction. The hearths within the shelter also extended activity into the darkness of night and kept dangerous animals and insects at bay. More important, perhaps, is that the increasingly impermeable artificial “caves” built of stone or brick bolstered the certainty of being free from others’ control. Behind closed doors, things can happen that escape outside control and thus cause neither shame nor punishment, let alone expulsion from the community – the means by which social conformity is enforced.

This applies not only to sexual behaviour – which in humans is a permanent, year-round affair – and to the intimate life of the family but more generally to the development and acting out of deviations from normality, which in turn have repercussions for public life. In the private seclusion that arose when early humans invented the first ground-based dwellings, enabling them to remain surrounded by the horde while at the same time shutting themselves off from it, self-aware individuality was presumably hatched – and with it the permanent threat to whatever order governed collective life.

Of course, the public and the private spheres are only poles; the transitions between them are fluid, and people pass freely from one to the other. Total isolation, which can quickly come to resemble a prison, as many discovered during the pandemic, is unbearable. It is more of a game in which the occupant is by no means sovereign, because the collective, with its norms and the normality it demands, is lodged in our heads, thus guaranteeing mutual control over how we love, eat, speak, dress and so on. Nevertheless, artificially created seclusion is a rupture that causes the collective order to tremble and allows deviations from norms of behaviour and of existence.

If shelter can be understood anthropologically as an incubator for deviation, creativity and individuality, then the retreat into seclusion is highly dangerous for a community. A community is a conformity machine that seeks to prevent deviation and diversity whenever possible. Mutual observation, transparency and openness promote conformity; walls that block the gaze and bar entry, by contrast, form the foundation for generators of social diversity. This applies to the shelter provided by an individual dwelling just as much as to a state that seeks to protect or shield itself by creating borders and, increasingly, walls as a means to regulate the free flow of people, data and goods.

We look back on a long history of seclusion. One important fork in the road came when sedentary life replaced nomadism, put down “roots” and – once the necessary resources were available – protected itself with fortifications: houses, cities, fortresses, walls, sewers and so on. Conflicts repeatedly broke out between settled peoples and nomads. There were great migrations and invasions. But it was not only these that frightened the settled: so too did the homeless, the poor and beggars, the displaced, travellers and itinerants (a motley crowd of tramps or vagabonds, mercenaries, merchants, craftsmen, sailors, day labourers and travelling entertainers – mostly men). Now that nomads have largely been integrated into Western societies, and since they, as travellers (tourists, experts, scientists, technicians, NGO workers, digital nomads), belong predominantly to the classes that profit from globalisation, the conflict between settled and nomadic people has filtered through to migrants who, initially without shelter, seek their fortune or protection abroad.

Added to this was technological development, which connected dwellings in cities to the sewers and later to other networks. The Jewish philosopher Vilém Flusser, who worked on a philosophy of groundlessness and uprootedness as a way of life having had to flee the Nazis to survive, showed in vivid terms how – starting with the telephone – holes were knocked into the walls of dwellings to let the public into the private sphere. “The intact house with roof, wall, window and door now exists only in storybooks,” Flusser wrote in a text published in 1998. “Cables, both material and immaterial, have riddled it with holes like an Emmental cheese: on the roof the aerial, through the wall the telephone wire, the television in place of windows, and the garage with the car in place of a door. The intact house has become a ruin, with the wind of communication blowing through its cracks. It is a shabby patchwork.”

For Flusser, the antipode of Martin Heidegger and his obsession with rootedness, the shelter that has been broken open enables a way of dwelling that is not bound to a place as Heimat, as home or homeland. For him, Heimat is not a place but a relationship between people, which can take place locally but also in global cyberspace. Flusser did not make the futile attempt to plug the holes in the shattered shelter but tried instead to embrace the public sphere, which was forcing its way into the ruins. He called this condition “shelterless unhousedness”, while always stressing that liberation from shelter – once protective, now collapsing – can also lead to a dictatorship of surveillance and repression.

Indeed, the internet has brought about a reordering of things. Now, even under one’s own roof, one is hardly safe any longer from the public or from the collective conformity machines. Where individuation was once possible – something that requires time, retreat and leisure, or boredom – we are now exposed to the public around the clock, to a far greater degree than if we were out in public space. The hurricane of data roars through what was once a secluded refuge and levels out differences. To take part in the global public sphere, we no longer have to go out; instead, we go in – into and in front of screens. At the same time, houses and flats are becoming “smart”. More and more digital functions and devices connected to the internet and the home network are moving in with us; when we interact with them, we believe we are commanding a new servant class. Yet they let data leak out and, like Flusser’s cables, create further holes through which the shelter can be hacked and made ever more dependent on the outside world.

We can already sense that the networked house, which has become shelterless and uncanny, will soon have new occupants who take it over. With the arrival of AI agents that control a house and all the devices and robots in it too, that carry out the instructions of the residents and analyse their behaviour, the building, until now made of dead materials, becomes a learning person: one we talk to, take advice from and allow to organise our lives. In Sein und Wohnen I described this as uncanny, because until now we humans have imagined animate buildings as inhabited by spirits or ghosts. An autonomous vehicle, too, becomes a kind of person, and some people even fall in love with the chatbots of the large language models, trusting them more than their fellow human beings. Through daily interaction, AI systems become more human in order to perform better, while humans in turn adapt their own behaviour to them and “robotise” themselves to further optimise the exchange. We are now learning, for example, how to formulate prompts and how to speak to language models and voice assistants like Alexa in order to be understood. Or we organise our lives according to the instructions of health tracker watches that supply all kinds of physiological data and interpret it normatively.

This is a process of co-evolution, exerting a pull into an unknown future while at the same time forcing us, out of a mix of inertia and convenience, into a standardising conformity. The great challenge will be to develop and build new forms of shelter that, through seclusion, allow for new modes of retreat, individuation and deviance. It will be difficult, because societies, driven by fear, are increasingly engaging in predictive policing – that is, using the data they siphon off to detect deviations early and put a stop to them. Given the prevailing trend towards authoritarian systems and the possibilities of AI-assisted digitalisation, the outlook is bleak.

Florian Rötzer is a journalist, editor and author. He lives in Munich.

1. Florian Rötzer, Sein und Wohnen: Philosophische Streifzüge zur Geschichte und Bedeutung des Wohnens, Frankfurt am Main: Westend Verlag, 2020.