Explore the ways in which the phenomenon of homelessness can be construed as both

evidence of an alienated condition but also as a vector of resistance or a possible new form of

unalienated life

The idea of homelessness is considered by many scholars to be the quintessence of

modernity. As both a universal, existential concern and an embodied social condition, the

phenomenon of homelessness circumscribes the meta-concept of alienation affiliated with the rise

of urban capitalism and the psychic ‘modern condition’. Yet despite its existential scope, the

discourses and rationalities of material homelessness have been largely contained within an

unexamined ideological framework, whose integration into modern, capitalist and urban societies

serves to evaluate the phenomena of home and homelessness within particular moral categories.

Whilst this has determined and dictated a degree of social policy and political exclusion which has

served to further alienate the un-housed, it has also enacted modes of resistance which have

reframed this transgression as a refusal to conform on spatial, temporal and ideological grounds.

This existential agitation accounts for the pervasiveness of archetypal homeless figures, whose

pursuit of an un-alienated life in the modern world has influenced ideologies of alternative living,

and continues to call for reflection on the future of home and belonging.

As a near primordial concept, ‘home’ has perhaps lacked sufficient interrogation as an

ideological construct, which has been significant for the semiotics and mobilisation of its antonym-

‘home-less’. As a precondition for the multi-dimensional construction of subjective identities and

social and environmental relationships, ‘home’ carries weighty transcendental and emotional

significance. Its power as an ideological and moral concept largely derives from the work of

Heidegger who conceives of it as a buffer against primal existential anxieties, heightened by the

rapid rise of mobility in modernity.1 The German translation of this phenomenological experience

makes an explicit link between this anxiety and the feeling of ‘homelessness’, - ‘the uncanniness’ of

1 Paul Leslie Thiele, 2001, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics (Princeton University Press), pp.171-2.

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modernity being derived from unheimlich. According to Patricia Anne Murphy, ‘home’ facilitates

‘space’ becoming ‘place’; an integral phenomenological dimension for the interior psychological

flourishing of the authentic being. In this sense, to be deprived of a ‘place’ to call ‘home’, is to

experience a diminished or violated humanity.2

The relationship between home and alienation is inextricably bound to the idea of freedom.

Evaluations and responses are dependent on whether the home is conceived of as ‘castle’ -

liberating in its provision of space for civic autonomy, and as a “membrane” for both emergence into

the public arena, and a retreat into the private realm.3 Alternatively, as exemplified by Sartre’s

writings- where “Hell is other people” - home may be experienced as a ‘prison’ -constraining and

entrapping, both through its physical and static form, and its associations with capital and private

property.4

These alternative views on alienation and autonomy, account for the divergent ways in

which ‘homelessness’ can be envisioned and manipulated as either an alienated state or a force of

resistance, and has led to the variety of perspectives and attitudes to those with this status. Within

the context of contemporary Western capitalism, where homelessness is most commonly

experienced, the home is central to autonomy and thus “civic and moral personality”.5 To lack a

home “is to lack the recognised kind and level of autonomy that a home is uniquely able to provide.”

6 These pervasive functionalist perspectives, label the homeless person as pathologically alienated

from normative societal values, and therefore as “deviant, dysfunctional and abnormal”.7

This emphasis on the personal failures of the individual as opposed to the ideological

dynamics of the social system, is reflected in the reductive and oppositional categorisation of

2 Patricia Anne Murphy, 1999,‘The Rights of the Homeless: An Examination of the Phenomenology of Place’, in John Abarmmo, The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives (Rodopi), p. 61.3 Heather Renee Curry, ‘A Semiotic Phenomenology of Homelessness and the Precarious Community: A Matter of Boundary’, (University of South Florida PhD. thesis) p.30.4 From the play No Exit, Jean-Paul Satre5 David E. Schrader, ‘Home is Where the Heart Is: Homelessness and the Denial of Moral Responsibility’, in Abarmmo, The Ethics of Homelessness, p.63.6 ibid, p.63.7 Megan Ravenhill, 2008. The Culture of Homelessness, (Ashgate), p.27.

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‘homelessness’ in contemporary thought. The precise term ‘homeless’ emerged only in the early

1980s, subsuming a variety of other terms: ‘vagrant’, ‘vagabond’, ‘pauper’, ‘hobo’, ‘tramp’, and

‘itinerant worker’ which had denoted a degree of further complexity to the variety of marginalised

people who had existed since Medieval times.8 Within modern capitalism, the simple polarisation of

being either with, or without a ‘home’ as the ultimate marker of belonging, constructs the modern

homeless as surplus, waste, or in abeyance to the capitalist system.

The modern era uniquely witnessed the fermentation of both an existential and material

homelessness, with the rapid growth of industrial cities and unprecedented rates of migration and

exile. It was here that the ‘uncanniness’ of homelessness took on a particular resonance, and

became starkly visible in the form of urban deprivation. Melvin Seeman proposed five forms of

alienation which can be seen to encompass the complexity of estrangement in the modern era:

powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement, which were a

subsequent articulation of Heidegger’s ultimate existential concerns.9 The modern city was seen as

the site of the most acute experience of alienation, where the visible site of homelessness - the

refuse of capital -was the symbol of the city’s failure. These perspectives on alienation are crucial to

understanding the role of the dispossessed in urban poverty, and the archetypal power that those

‘without’ have held to certain writers and critics.

Charles Baudelaire’s street literature marked the start of a distinctly modern tradition of

writing about poverty.10 For Baudelaire and later, Walter Benjamin, who both read the urban

complex as the quintessential site of modernity’s estrangement, Marx’s ‘lumpenproletariat’, and the

figure of the ‘beggar’ in particular, demonstrate that the idea of ‘homelessness’ was a unique

product of this modern and urban landscape. Moreover the ‘metasymbol’ of the beggar is seen as a

powerful interpolator, who dispels the myth of The City, and implicates everyone in the suffering.11

8 Frank Gray, 1931. The Tramp: His Meaning and Being (J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, p. 118.9 Melvin Seeman, ‘On the Meaning of Alienation’, 1959. American Sociological Review, 24 (6) pp. 783-791 10 Patrick Greaney, 2007. Untimely Beggar: Poverty and power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (University of Minnesota Press), p. 31.11 Ibid, p. 31.

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The dark presence of homelessness in the city produces and reproduces the ‘uncanniness’ or

unheimlichkeit of modernity within both the homeless person and those who observe in sharing the

cityscape. It is a reductive encounter which “alters the relation from the complexity and

boundlessness of human relations to a fiduciary exchange with limited roles and a beginning and an

end.”12 This moral pressure can be felt in Baudelaire’s darkly satirical poem, ‘Let’s Beat Up the Poor’,

where the exchange of violence between the street beggar and a passing stranger is seen to be the

only way to establish a level of social and existential equity, in this absurd situation of abject

inequality and suffering.

The powerful disjuncture between perceived order and chaos has only increased in

advanced capitalist societies, which have become increasingly designed around commodities and

consumption. Framing the city within Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Gerrard and Ferrugia

argue that “in a city where “public spaces are framed by the imagery of consumer capitalism: of

commodities and the endless possibilities for creating ourselves in the image of capital”,

homelessness is constituted as a dysfunctional “blemish” and “transgresses the normative functions

of streets and public spaces as places to facilitate consumption.”13

It is therefore necessary to recognise the crucial ideological tenets of the modern city in

constraining the phenomenon of homelessness within the logic of capital. However, not only does

the city provide the means to create and maintain homelessness, it also provides the site for the

potential shattering of the myth of The Spectacle. The ‘lamentable site of homelessness’ lays bare

the raw and ugly truth of an unjust society, and can therefore, paradoxically, be an un-alienating

force. This ‘latent power’ which unveils a greater truth, accounts for the both the ”crazy energy” of

the poor described by Baudelaire and the continued attempts to limit or eliminate the presence of

homelessness through the strict control of urban space.14

12 Kathleen Arnold, 2004. Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity (Suny) p. 52.13 Jessica Gerrard and David Farrugia, 2014.‘The ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness and the society of the spectacle’, in Urban Studies, (52:12), pp. 2219–2233, p.2221.14 Greaney, p. 31

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Seeman’s variants of alienation also can be witnessed in the management of public space

and homeless life in the contemporary city. It is here that powerlessness, isolation and normlessness

are acutely rendered, as they are imposed exogenously. The survival of the homeless therefore

depends on the tolerance and understanding of local governments, businesses and other members

of the society. However, in many cities, critics have noted the dominance of punitive legislation and

jurisdiction which forbids camping, begging and sleeping in public parks.15 This is in many ways the

continuation of the historical “struggle for order” that had been the project since the dawn of the

modern state, which, Zygmund Bauman has gone as far to say “originated in the wide-scale control

and regulation of vagrants and others who embodied ambivalence.”16 (My italics)

The authority over the use of public space systematically reproduces mechanisms of actual

and rhetorical exclusion. Rather than allowing for the space to tackle the complexity and chronicity

of homelessness as ambivalence -outside the dominant paradigm of social control- this serves to

further alienate an already marginalised community. Moreover, this is increasingly embodied and

indiscriminately enforced through “spatial alienation”, whereby the homeless and poor are

increasingly ghettoised into particular areas. 17

A lack of ‘space’ that can become ‘place’, is a “dis-memberment” which effectively neuters

the individual's power to assert their refusal to conform in any other language than that of

criminalised or victimised deviance.18 The ‘anti-social’ behaviours associated with Marx’s

‘lumpenproletariat’- mental illness, unemployment, poverty, disability, and old age, stand relative to

particular norms and values that determine what is ‘social’ and what stands antithetically to ‘social’.

Moreover, as Merton’s deviance theory argues, the way a society is structured forces deviant

behaviour onto members of that society.19 This has severe implications for the space these

behaviours have to develop and express themselves and their experience of ‘alienation’ in their own

15 George J. Demko and Michael C. Jackson, (eds.) 1995. Populations at risk in America : Vulnerable Groups At The End Of The Twentieth Century (Westview Press) p.7916 Tim Creswell, 2013. The Tramp in America (Reaktion Books), p.1117 Wacquant and Ferrugia, p.221918 Scanlon, p.52919 Ravenhill, p.31

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terms. Some have described this denial of adequate space as “existential and psychological violence”

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How the status of homelessness is perceived can thus have significant impact on the

qualitative and valuative authority upon human life. To many, the stark alienation afforded by

experiencing homelessness in repressive urban areas reduces many individuals to the status of bare

life.21 Bare life, as outlined by Agamben, is mere physical or biological existence, which according to

Aristotle, excludes one from participating in community and political life. This is posed in direct

opposition to “the good life”, a term coined by Martin Seligman, which allows people the resources

to enjoy the fruits of the society in which they live. Beyond this is the “meaningful life”, which by

definition is the antithesis of an un-alienated life, affording the additional dimension of making a

contribution to the benefit of one’s society.22

The degree to which individuals believe themselves to be participating in a higher level of

un-alienated existence is highly subjective and not quantifiable. However, the degree to which

different individuals are afforded the space and freedom to assert and explore how they would

design their own meaningful life, very much is. The truncated experience of individuals deprived of

the freedom to meaningfully occupy space or to utilise the membrane between public and private

space, results in the diminished power to construct a meaningful social reality.23 Rhetorical framing,

or “lexicalisation”, as Toft suggests, is central to the partisan articulation of the dominant discourse

of homelessness. This has arguably played a role in perpetuating pathological, and myopic

perspectives on the complex, social issues of homelessness and alienation that should in fact

implicate the wider role of society.

The non-alienating, symbolic potential that ‘the beggar’ presents to Benjamin and

Baudelaire has not been fully realised in society. Inimically, the false consciousness of the city as

20 Abarmmo, The Ethics of Homelessness, p. 61.21 Leonard C. Feldman, 2006, Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy and Political Exclusion (Cornell University Press) p.1622 Seligman, Martin P, 2004, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (Simon & Schuster), p.1423 Murphy, p.60.

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Spectacle subsumes the common-sense human morality and compassion that would affirm a truly

un-alienated life. The presence of homelessness, therefore contrasts with the “urban spaces used to

reproduce middle-class lifestyles and playgrounds for tourists”.24 Insofar as it persists, and one

becomes inured to the suffering of others, it is further evidence of an alienation from true humanity,

and estrangement from an ‘ideal’ self, living in an ‘ideal society’. This was the nature of the

melancholy expressed in much of writings of the radical Marxists, such as Adorno and Arendt, who

shared the despair at the alienating forces of modernity. Especially following the catastrophic events

of the twentieth century, the inevitable perpetuation of the darker side of human nature threatened

to reflect Agamben’s statement that “in Western politics bare life has the peculiar privilege of being

that whose exclusion founds the city of men.”25

The archetype of homelessness, as it has historically existed in Western culture, has

therefore always found its essence in being alienated from society. What is central to the complex

relationship between homelessness and alienation is that alienation can be experienced with both

imposition and volition. It operates as a perpetually oppressive system of socio-economic exclusion,

and as a potential awakening to, and rejection of, the alienating forces of this system. It is this dual

tension that has also generated a spirit of resistance, resulting in a number of alternative positions

on lifestyle that interrogate the very concepts of home and belonging in the pursuit of an un-

alienated existence.

In the American tradition in particular, the varying archetypes of the homeless figure in

popular literature, music and film crystallise the conflict as being between a sedentary and mobile

sense of self within the context of modernisation. In this extreme moment of industrialisation and

rationalisation, when the fissure between capitalism and autonomy was acutely felt, the deeply

embedded temporal, spatial and ideological tenets of capitalist America became something to

contest.

24 Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (SUNY Press, 1997), p.44.25 Giorgio Agamben as quoted in Feldman, p.16

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The possibility for a resistant and autonomous subculture within the mainstream was

powerfully demonstrated by the Hobo phenomenon in early twentieth century America. Although

the culture was multifarious and resisted integration even within itself, it was in essence a self-

governing subculture set against the Fordist “cult of work” that made man’s “main preoccupation to

use his time for material gain.”26 The Hobo subculture can be seen to counter the core tenets of

capitalist life, and the ambivalence that had been the enemy of governance in Europe and the

United States in their modernising projects - temporality, liminality, transience and alternative

modalities of non-monetary exchange. This alternative perspective also enabled authentic and

intimate social relationships to develop independent from the means of production.

The jungles of ‘Hobohemia’ provide a concrete product of those choosing to distance

themselves both physically and ideologically from the organisation of working life in this period.

These temporary camps were wholly autonomous spaces- ‘places’ for utopian practices of

alternative living. In Hobo Jungles “emerged a new admixture of older forms of exchange, sociability

and culture - material or otherwise- that owed their existence to practices that had served Tramps

well in the pre-war period.”27 Historians of this period highlight the ‘Hobo Code’; a system of ethics

which dealt in reciprocity over exchange and respected the private, psychic domain of each of

individual, arguably the only ‘home’ left to some.28

This dynamic could be seen to explicitly counter the ‘self-estrangement’ aspect of alienation

in advanced capitalism, which as C. Wright Mills claims: “men are estranged from one-another as

each tries to make an instrument of the other”.29 This is in accordance with Kant’s moral philosophy,

which visualised the ideal society as one in which men treat one another never as a means to an end

but always as end in themselves.30 The Hobo Jungles were a ‘place’ in which residents “who, in their

daily actions, asserted a claim to physical property and to social relations that were non-hierarchical,

26 ibid, p. 219.27 Todd McCallum, Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine (Fabriks: Studies in the Working Class) (Athabasca University Press, 2012), p.628 ibid, p.236.29 Seeman, p. 78930 See Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 17981

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non-statist, and non-capitalist, to define them against the commonly accepted norms of modern

life.”31 Resistance to the alienation of the logic of capital, in this sense, was embodied by an

alternative “internal moral economy predicated on mutuality and reciprocity”, arguably the higher

goal of Baudelaire’s protagonist, who saw no other way to achieve this than to ‘beat up the poor.’ 32

In their lived resistance to contemporary society and social norms, the Tramp and the Hobo

were embodied examples of an alternative life, and how this could be achieved by explicitly

countering the central concept of ‘home’ and its perceived bourgeois associations.

The essence of movement as opposed to stasis, is crucial to the enduring myth of the ‘homeless

mind’. As Anderson argues, “only in mobility could there be an existential space for those people

who recognise the irreversible formulation of relations as well as the contradiction of space and time

brought on by the development of capitalism.”33 This resonated particularly strongly in America,

where the national myth of movement and adventure had been stifled by the static and stagnating

cult of domesticity in the 1950s.34 The transcendence offered by mobility and freedom as its

antitheses, found a new life in the spirit of the road in Beat writing of the 1950s, and in many ways

provided the voice for the later emerging counterculture of the 1960s.

The Tramp and The Hobo joined a legacy of ‘lumpen’ heroes of the Bohemian

counterculture.35 To seminal Beat writers such as Kerouac, Pynchon, Snyder and Ginsberg, these

figures embodied and inspired the dominant themes of transience and transcendence by utilising

the transformative experience of the road as a space of radical freedom. The dominant values of

standardisation and rationalisation ran deep into the temporal and spatial practices of contemporary

capitalist culture, and had become thwarted, corrupted and alienating. It was particularly the

31 McCallum,, p. 17.32 ibid, p.7.33 ibid, p. 934 Phillip K. Tompkins, ‘On the Road and Down and Out: Unexpected Consequences a Rhetorical Vision’ and Omar Schwartz (ed.) Transformative Communication Studies: Culture, Hierarchy and the Human Condition (Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2008), p. 72.35 Robert Holton, ‘The Tenement Castle: Keruoac’s Lumpen-Bohemia’, in Hillary Holliday and Robert Holton (eds.) What’s Your Road Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ (Southern Illinois Press, 2009), p.65

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domestic domain and the consumerist trappings it represented, that made the quest of the Hobo so

worthy in the Beat Philosophy. As Tim Creswell has argued, “mobility detaches and un-domesticates

the urban man. He is released from his primary group association, the family, the neighbourhood.

With this independence, comes a loss of loyalty, gaining freedom but the individualism he achieves is

at the cost of his locus.”36

The Beats’ worship of the liminality and temporality embodied in the figure of the Hobo,

represents a spiritual elevation of aspects of social and existential deviance expressed by those

positioning themselves outside societal norms. The Hobos were seen to reject the sense of linear

time that designs and dictates existence around capital, and were seen instead in “dwell in liturgical

time”, with a focus on authentic modes of contingency and spontaneity.37 This powerfully authentic

rhythm of human life gave ‘The Beats’ their distinctive name, taking cues in turn from the spirit of

the jazz beat, and the transcendental call of “the beat of a different drum”.38

Homelessness, within the broad framework discussed, is therefore a position of societal

deviance in which the assessment of autonomy and alienation hinges fundamentally on the

ideological space afforded to those to express their experience of alienation and ‘home’ in their own

terms. The experience of Hobohemia demonstrates the powerful potential for resistance to the

unexamined norms of home within capitalist society which have inevitably delivered an unequal

distribution of the qualities that ‘home’ is intended to provide.

The question of ‘heterotopic space’ delineates the significant differences between the

relatively autonomous and wandering Hobo, and those homeless individuals who can be spiritually

crippled from the lack the opportunity to travel or live autonomously in the modern city. According

to Foucault, who introduced the term, heterotopias, are “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted

utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are

36 Cresswell, p. 2337 Anderson, p. 22538 Tompkins, p. 71.

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simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”.39 What is necessary for the assertion of

autonomy and empowerment within the realm of material homelessness, is the space to be able to

express a meaningful life in one’s own terms. It is this space of power enjoyed by the archetypal

Hobo over the Beggar, which allows for the aspects of alienation put forth by Seeman, to be co-

opted as seeds of resistance. A heterotopic space- or in Marx’s terms, a ‘realm of freedom’-

harnesses the distance that alienation affords to reposition oneself in an ideological place better

suited to a self-directed alternative. This contrasts with simply being enforced or pushed into an

arbitrary ‘othered’ space which may only provide survival at most, rather than ‘place’ to flourish.

This shift in perspective highlights the need for a normative re-assessment in the discussion

of homelessness, whereby the “subjectivity of citizenship” is interrogated rather than being

perceived “as pure and unmarked by difference” whilst difference can be re-framed with agency as

refusal.40 This calls for a broader conception of citizenship closer to the classical notion of the polis,

where human beings were always “at home as political citizens, integrated into the state and

metaphysically one with the cosmos.”41 As Pio Colonello has claimed, there is a need to return to the

“ancient idea of harmony”, where “in the polis, the public domain of politics pertained to political

equality in spite of social difference.”42

This is nowhere better represented than by the Cynic, Diogenes, who in his refusal to

participate in what he saw as a shameful society, opted to live in a barrel in the main square of

Athens, shunning all worldly goods in the favour of an ascetic, authentic and critical life. Faced with a

lack of space in the city to live autonomously, he utilised the space of the barrel as his heterotopic

forum, from where “he maintained a questioning and challenging stance towards the society that

surrounded him.” 43 Bestowing the world with the legacy of true ‘cynicism’ Diogenes and his

39 Michel Foucault, Heterotopias, <http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf> [accessed 12.12.15]40 Arnold, p.52.41 Pio Colonello, ‘Homelessness as Heimatlosigkeit’, in Abarmmo, p. 41.42 ibid, p. 41.43 Scanlon, Christopher, ‘Refusal, social exclusion and the cycle of rejection: A cynical analysis?’, in Critical Social Policy, (28: 2008), p. 530.

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followers demonstrate the absolute requirement for heterotopic space in which to voice alienation

in one’s own terms, and to gain a sense of dignity, autonomy and empowerment through

homelessness.

This refusal to participate in a constrained democracy, can be seen to have manifested itself

in a different form by Henry David Thoreau in the late 19th century, directly positioned against the

modern city. By experimenting with a “self-imposed homelessness” by living for years in the

Wilderness, he “cultivated a critical distance from Main Street” and “courted a feeling of dislocated

homelessness to counteract tendencies of modern alienation.”44 Thoreau was to Adorno, a heroic

figure, whose unique act of democratic withdrawal exemplified his practice of negative dialectics,

offering up the space for new, heterotopic ‘wish images’ and new possibilities of thinking and

experiencing the world. Thoreau’s journeys illuminated the dialectical tension between the insider’s

belonging and participation in both the private and public spheres and the outsider’s exclusion from

both. In a sympathetic parallel, Adorno claims in ‘Refuge for the Homeless’, that although guilt and

blame should not be attached to those who design, build and live in homes, what they represent is

tainted by the structural inequalities that makes their enjoyment possible.45

The poignancy and verity of ‘refusal’ within the context of homelessness has thus resulted in

various manifestations of homeless life as acts of resistance, when they have been afforded the

space to be experienced heterotopically. This permits a space in which to combat the aspect of

alienation that Seeman termed isolation, whereby “the individual innovates culturally disapproved

means to achieve the goal, that of rebellion. This leads men out of the environing social structure to

envisage and seek, and bring into being a new that is to say, greatly modified social structure.”46 The

ideological and architectural constraints of the modern city as Spectacle, crucially prohibits the

expression of homelessness in the manner in which it seeks to be reframed by critical theory.

However the symbolic power that homeless persons have presented to critical writers and

44 Mariotti, Shannon L., Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation and Modernity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), p. 7145 Bernstein, J.M, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge University Press: 2001), p.54.46 Seeman, p. 785.

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countercultural impulses speaks to the growing appreciation of alternative teleological perspectives

of life, as the modernist project reveals its fissures and failures.

Although often highly romanticised, the existential nature of homeless life formed the core

tenants of much left-wing intellectual and anarchist thought, which perceived and utilised these

characteristics as embodied resistance, reframing ‘vagabondage’ as an ideology. The transience,

liminality, spontaneity and asceticism of homeless life were in many ways the fundamental ideology

of the derive, held in such high cultural regard by Baudelaire, Benjamin, and later, the Situationist

International. For Alan Woods- a founding member- the idea of derive is the ultimate belief in “living

in the moment, a potentially revolutionary, and at least un-alienated, moment.”47 The heroic figure

of the flâneur is based in many ways on the homeless person in the city, although stripped of abject

and crippling poverty, to live in a sense within a heterotopic space of the mind. Brought into being

by Baudelaire and subsequently revered by Benjamin, the mythological character of the flâneur

benefits from those aspects of experience afforded to those living without a fixed abode, who refuse

to work, and most importantly, have the opportunity to experience the world in jetzeit. In adopting

idleness and transience as the heroic virtues of their manifestos, the radical thought of Benjamin

and the Situationists, following that of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Lefargue, came to rely on the broad

ideology of vagabondage in the pursuit of an un-alienated life.48

To combat the variants of alienation he described, Seeman similarly argues for engagement

in intrinsically meaningful satisfactions, as evidenced in simpler societies, “characterised by

spontaneous acts of work and play, which are their own reward.”49 For the Situationists in particular,

an ascetic and immediate life represented a powerful weapon, and they thus reframed the ‘lumpen’

against the traditional Marxist analysis of ‘waste’. A manifesto text reads: “the lumpen-proletariat

embodies a remarkably radical implicit critique of the society at work...The satisfaction of basic

47 Alan Woods, The Map is Not the Territory, (Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 69.48 See Paul Lefargue, ‘The Right to be Lazy’, 1883 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/> [accessed: 30.11.15]49 Seeman, p. 790

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needs remains the best safeguard against alienation...it is here that we back the worker who -

consciously or not - rejects organised work and life.”50

The interrogation and disruption of time and space thus became key tenets of subversive

politics, as well as finding new articulation in the architecture and alternative lifestyles of the

counterculture. Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism manifesto set out the designs for a

future Utopia which would facilitate a civilisation of the derive. The overhaul of fixed “cosmogonies”

of space and time would enable “a new conception of behaviours”, which would subvert social

norms. He writes “the architecture of tomorrow...will be both a means of knowledge and a means of

action.”51

Although explored in a different vein, this was also the goal of many of the countercultural

experiments in alternative living, particularly in California in the 1960’s, exemplified by the design of

the geodesic dome - “the first countercultural architectural form.”52 Buckminster Fuller, who had

developed a radical critique of modern architecture and technology, developed this new dwelling to

enable people to “create their own utopia,” away from the confines of the city.53 Not only the

structure, but the purpose, were ideologically significant to the alternative lifestyle enshrined in the

actuality and the metaphor of the dome - “collectively constructed, self-supporting and made of

many single facets”, often cheaply sourced from the natural environment.54 Moreover, it could be

argued that the design deliberately simulated the nomadic dwellings of non-Western cultures, in

which ‘homelessness’ as experienced in Western cultures, would not exist.

50 Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Totality for Kids’, in Beneath the Paving Stones: The Situationists and the Beach (AK Press, 2001), p. 41.51 Chtcheglov, Ivan, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, <://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/formulary.html> [accessed: 18.12.15]52 Margaret Crawford, ‘Alternative Shelter: Counter Culture Architecture in Northern California, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, Ilene Susan Fort (eds.) Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (University of California Press, 2001), p.16.53 ibid, p. 250.54 ibid, p.258

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In the 1990s, a village of these domes were built in downtown Los Angeles by a non-profit

organisation to aid homeless people living independently from conventional shelters.55 Similar

attempts to create more heterotopic spaces, such as Tent Cities’ and Seattle’s self-managed shelters

have found that particular trends tend to govern the dynamics of interaction, and encourage a

degree of “dignity, security and autonomy under conditions of great duress.” Reflecting the

dynamics of the Hobo Jungles, these are “auto-constructed spaces” which thrive on: security

through community, free sharing of provisions and equitable exchange.56

The precarity that the spectre of homelessness casts across modern life exposes the fragility

of survival, both materially and existentially, and reveals the thin line between order and chaos.

Grappling with alienation is thus both a metaphysical and material battle for which a subjective place

for autonomy is necessary. The discourse of homelessness forces an interrogation of the “sedentary

metaphysics” that have traditionally dictated ‘home’ as the sole protection against ultimate

existential anxiety, rather than permitting individuals to create life and meaning in their own terms.57

The “powerful rhetorical vision” that the archetype of homelessness has provided to radical western

philosophy and politics provides an awareness that it is the journey and not the interpretation that

leads closer to an un-alienated life.58 This refocus on intrinsic meaning, and a sense of ludic

spontaneity can be seen as the thread which binds the archetypal reverence of the ‘beggar’ or

‘homeless wanderer’ and the later development of countercultural literature and politics, “which

made alienation into a shibboleth”.59

Whilst acknowledging that there will always be people within a society who will categorically

refuse to be ‘homed’ in any sense of the word, the dialectic of homelessness requires for its

resolution a similarly embodied and existential concept of ‘home’ that addresses the highly

55 Linda Sargeant Wood, A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II I(OUP, 2010), p.8056 Smith, p. 37.57 Creswell, p. 16.58 Tompkins, p. 7359 Dennis Hume Wrong, The Modern Condition: Essays at Century's End (Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 58.

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subjective dynamics of alienation. A more inclusive “political imagination” is required that provides

an open architecture and citizenship for the homeless and ‘homeless of the mind’.60 In the

postmodern global demographic, which has seen seismic shifts in the structures of inequality,

refugee crises, as well as cosmopolitanism and “existential migration”, the concepts of ‘home’ and

‘homelessness’ have become increasingly international and political in scope, and therefore demand

confrontation. “Homeless people present to the homeful the most radical example of another life,

not in the sense of a life to which we want to aspire, or from which we should take our distance, but

in the sense of a life that is simply other from the one we thoughtlessly, conceitedly take for

granted.”61 The dualism of attraction and repulsion that the archetype of homelessness presents,

embodies the ambivalent and conflicted nature of vicarious liberation and resistance, and as such,

will continue to be a powerful dialectical force in the pursuit of ‘the examined life’.

60 Scanlon, ‘Refusal, social exclusion and the cycle of rejection’, pp.529-30.61 David Kishik, The Manhattan Project: The Theory of a City (Stanford University Press, 2015), p.186.

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