... a particular difficulty: to describe a way of dwelling that does not reduce order to a question of the relationship between things and their plan, between a world and a map. Yet I will have to begin with a plan.1

For the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, physical space (that which is built or perceived physically) and social space (incorporating both the objective model and subjective vision of the social world) are seen as fundamentally derived from each other, with physical space thought of as the “repository of social meaning”.2 Semantic space can be understood as the site of symbolic power that sits between social and physical space. Bourdieu developed the concept habitus to speak about the production and reproduction of subjects over time, through their social and physical engagement with space. The term stems from Bourdieu’s study of the shifting (and enduring) subjectivities of the Algerian people throughout the process of colonisation. Habitus is also referred to as “a sense of place” or the process that defines the relationship between the body and its space.3

Early in his career, Bourdieu stayed on from French military service in Algeria to support the struggle for Algerian self-determination through his ethnographic work. He focused on understanding and representing the people of the Berber region, having fallen in with an orientalist image of the people of the Berber region as a step removed from colonial rule, and so holding a key to a future vision of decolonised Algeria. Due to their lack of a written language, Bourdieu claimed that physical space in Berber culture carries “a greater burden in the accurate transmission of bodily social knowledge.”5 He took particular interest in domestic space, claiming that what appears as no more than routine existence in fact plays a significant role in the creation of social power. He aimed to build a critical representation of space in service of the growing struggle for Algerian independence, and felt that uncovering the Berber’s so-called, “pre-oppressed” socio-spatial relations would make the colonial conditions of the time appear contestable. 

Bourdieu studied how social relations are expressed and enforced spatially. He produced photographs, diagrams and architectural representations, building a multimedia methodology where spatial imagery acts as both evidence of, and touchstone for theoretical texts.6 Bourdieu produced two drawings of the Berber home: one formal and one diagrammatic plan view. I want to examine how his drawings of the Berber Kabyle house tend to undermine both his social-constructivist analyses and subversive intentions. While his writings speak of a world in flux, constructed through adaptable habits of mind and body, his drawings enforce an essentialist, binary notion of gender that cannot be altered spatially, socially or symbolically. Both drawings fall into representational traps, enforcing patriarchal and colonial tropes that support the enclosure of static identities.

Figure 1. Plan of the house

Bourdieu’s drawing uses a double-line to define the thickness of an exterior wall and frame the tools, utensils and space of domestic life, the line’s geometrised corners sharpen that which is in actuality moulded loosely in mud. A dotted line in the shape of a circle is used to show how the central pillar that holds up the roof perforates the imaginary plane from which the plan is cut. We see structures, doorways, fixed objects (shelving, counters, benches, troughs), unfixed objects (chests, jars and pitchers), tools (hand-mill, loom, rifle), resources (wood, fodder), and a fire-pit.

In a lengthy footnote underneath his plan, Bourdieu sets his drawing apart from other depictions of the Berber home by claiming that he is the first to centre on its ‘symbolic’ order, which for him expresses the ‘social truth’ of the Berber’s physical and social constructions. Bourdieu then turns to architectural devices that for him achieve this order, predominantly by dividing the space into binary, gendered oppositions. A waist-height counter top divides the interior in two. The left side shows the stable, a trough for the oxen, water pitchers and other materials and activities that Bourdieu described in his written analysis  as “wet,”  “dark” and reflective of female identity. The right of the drawing is where the front and back doors are situated, dry grain and fabrics are stored on raised platforms and cooking happens over the fire. This is the “dry” and “light,” elevated part of the house Bourdieu associates with masculinity. The honourable male rifle near the door protects the comforting female loom just behind it. The intersection of column (male) and beam (female) enacts a sexual union that holds up the roof overhead. 

Topographical, contextual, situational features, such as the threshold between inside and outside, are missing from Bourdieu’s drawings. We don’t see the two levels of the home, or how they are traversed by lower steps that lead from the ground floor to the upper sleeping level. Nor do we see the multiple perforations in the walls that allow ventilation, light, sound, views and passage to and from the outside. Doors are left as single lines: paper-thin, without swing-space and not to scale. Without any marks representing the spatial devices of relationality and reciprocity it is assumed—in line with historical productions of the masculine as neutral, universal and omnipresent—that men can move anywhere around and beyond the page. The home is (re)produced as an enclosed box: untraversed and undisrupted by women or the elements, and thus unable to allow for dialogue, sociality, emergence, change.

FIGURE 2. The dual space orientation of the house 

The second drawing, or diagram of sorts, which Bourdieu calls ‘The dual space orientation of the house’ works to distill the home’s symbolic functions in relation to geographic and cardinal orientation. The split between the gendered oppositions of the home is denoted clearly by a diagonal line. The dashes erode the starkness of division somewhat while simultaneously pushing this difference towards the farthest corners. The interior, domestic “East” is actually the exterior, geographic’s “WEST”,  differentiated by lower-case and capital annotation. To quote Bourdieu “The weaving-loom wall, which a person entering immediately faces on crossing the threshold, and which is lit directly by the morning sun, is the light of the inside (just as woman is the lamp of the inside),8 that is, the east of the inside symmetrical to the external east, from which it draws its borrowed light”.9 This rotation occurs on all four sides and is represented by an elliptical dashed arrow indicating a semi-rotation about the threshold, which constitutes its axis. In turn showing an active “mirroring” from outside-inwards. The facade of the building reflects the exterior world back into the interior. This is a physical manifestation of Bourdieu’s concept of the world reversed in which walls act as metaphorical mirrors reflecting the outside order back into the confines of the house. In Figure 2. the “mirroring” arrow points only to the inside of the house: an irreversible act. You may enter from the exterior, but you cannot leave from the interior. Mirrored L-shaped arrows emphasise the contradictory cardinal horizons of interior and exterior. For a body in motion, horizons recede and reproduce themselves like frontiers, here they are both enclosed within and just beyond the walls of the house. The space of woman is again enclosed and undermined, oriented towards an inviolable boundary, liberatory horizons just out of reach.

ENCLOSURE

Making passable thresholds into impassable walls that divide domestic relations into static identities is an active work of enclosure that consolidates patriarchal and colonial power at multiple scales, from “body” to “territory”. Bourdieu’s mirror facade also functions as an act of enclosure, failing to acknowledge that the Berber home is a relational space within a communal context: in Algeria it is the public spaces like courtyards, wells, and bazaars that do the work of enclosure, with homes acting merely as “intervals” in between. Bourdieu did, in his writing, recognise the garden, the courtyard and the communal fountain as essential components of domestic life. He also acknowledged that women were emerging into public space and actively reworking the thresholds between public and private, bodies and buildings, oppressed and oppressor in service of political emancipation. But Bourdieu’s drawings don’t reflect these observations, obfuscating the way gender was shifting and evolving, relying instead on a static, symbolic account of the male-female binary and its relationship to domestic space. While he sought to unpack the oppressive politics of enclosure in colonial terms, he was unable to bring this analysis to the subject of gender. In  Caliban and the Witch; Women, the Body and Primitive Acculmulation, Silvia Federici succeeds in showing how both capitalism and colonialism rest on rigid(ified), spatialised divisions of labour that invisibilise and devalue the reproductive work done by gendered and racialised others; she does this by drawing parallels between the enclosure of land and the proletarianisation of the worker.10 By overlooking colonised bodies in his commitment to colonised communities, Bourdieu undermines his broader commitments to the primacy of relation over essence. Slippages of this kind endure in the way spatial thought and representation has developed since the 1960s.

STASIS

The discord between the drawn plans of the Kabyle house and the temporality Bourdieu describes in his writing is precisely where we see the limits of ‘the still’ plan in its potential to capture life in transformative terms.  In Figure 1. Bourdieu enforces the sedentary nature of domestic objects by arranging them in an unknown but singular moment in time with no trace of the cycles of reproductive labour in which such objects are enmeshed. Jars of grain do not move, the loom isnt worked, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ areas do not bleed into each other. The objects, their symbols and the ways they interconnect are rendered as if immutable. What is missing here is the dialectical nature of the objects themselves — the jar-as-full is merely the postponement of its emptiness.11 How a jar gets full or an area gets wet, is due to how they are moved, used or laboured-with, or how the air changes. Bourdieu rightly represents the objects that correspond to the gender division of labour, but he encloses identities within them; it is the doing-with the objects, not the objects themselves, that (re)produces identities and roles. Though he claimed to capture this temporal flux through the notion of habitus, the drawings don’t represent the symbolic as produced and reproduced in time through multiple movements and interconnected forces. In failing to evoke the doing of them or the doing with them, Bourdieu cements the symbolic identities of things. In failing to represent objects and people as relationally (re)produced, Bourdieu’s representational analysis forecloses the possibility of altering social relations, objects, spaces and identities. 

If it is through relations, each tightly bound to temporality, situation and embodiment, that physical, social and symbolic space is reproduced or disrupted, how might we draw these relations? As the active mediator between material and immaterial forces, labour itself is the hinge on which these things turn. In studying the labour of spaces as well as the spaces of labour, I am reading labour as a practice that produces subjectivity. Labour is also what has been invisibilised, and therefore kept uncontestable, in the course of patriarchal and colonial history. How can we begin to represent labour spatially, as a contestable gesture in the production of spaces, subjects and relations?

RE-DRAWING

Bourdieu’s original drawing, in all its formal enforcements, becomes the base layer for a redrawing. I chose to meet what had been imposed, and disrupt that, to burst and bleed and breath it to life, building on techniques of annotation and redaction that correspond to both design representation and decolonial thought.12 Lines are extended beyond the ‘single-dwelling’ crop, freeing the Berber home from its isolation in a contextless ‘middle’ and situating it in the corner of a courtyard. The enclosing wall is perforated for water and air. Objects that lean against the wall or hang off it are made visible. 

Paint for water, pastel for clay, chalk for air; mud walls collect together in a gradient that meets the floor. 

This redrawing expresses the cyclical timescale; equal weight is given to dormant and active objects, to moments of work and to moments of rest. Objects that move through use are shown in multiple locations, dotted line traces their being pulled-out and put-back. Replenishable resources like fodder and firewood are given the same visibility as furniture. Water jugs, which move between inside and out, between full and empty, follow the same logic but in three specific locations. The first jug is nestled in the interior for regular consumption, the second corresponds to cyclical irrigation by sitting at the edge of  the garden, and the third actively engages with the periphery of the home by catching water run-off from an inclined roof that drains into the courtyard. 

Generating both objects and their movements is the line of labour. This line often follows the movement of objects, but also works with and through them, on and around the spot like an aura. As a repeated, reworked line, it mimics the retracing of steps, sorts and sweeps. More frequent labours are more densely populated, revealing the gendering of domestic work. 

A friend said it looks like the trace of a violent scene. There is a kind of grotesque forensics involved in the visibilisation of hidden flows and forces, material or otherwise. Maybe this is why it’s red. Both violence and reproduction —  the resistant, contestable consequence of enclosure.

***

This work is part of Doubled and Divided, a micro-issue on space and the built environment, edited by Lakshmi Luthra and Florence Uniacke.