Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash

Author: Lars Spuybroek
Year: 2025
Source type: chapter
Raw file: raw/chapters/spuybroek-2025-habit-inhabit-stuff-trash.md

Summary

Spuybroek develops a theory of inhabitation as appropriation across three parts (Appropriation, Stuff, Trash). Drawing on Lefebvre's "porous space" of play and Bachelard's "pocketed space" of drawers and daydreaming, he argues that inhabitation thickens space into a doubled realm — a "poché" — where things flicker between presence and absence. The house is not inhabited as a given structure but appropriated through habitual rhythms and a detour-like relationship with things. An ontological spectrum (object → thing → stuff → mess → trash → waste) structures the life of things at home, where entropy enables reversibility: waste can reverse its fate, and beauty links to its own fading. Hoarding and Marie Kondo's decluttering are diagnosed as symmetrical pathologies of inhabitation — both turn stuff into trash through failed circulation.

Key Claims

• Inhabitation as appropriation reverses the idea that we inhabit space as a given structure; appropriation is territorial, driven by the rhythms of habit, and involves a double act of opening (drawing in things) and closing (concentrating on the self). "Not-fitting is essential to even the slightest possibility of happiness as a form of appropriation."
• Lefebvre's porous space and Bachelard's pocketed space are dialectically linked. Lefebvre's doubling is expansion (the playing field, the beach, movement); Bachelard's is contraction (drawers, the attic, memory, storage). "Lefebvre's porous space becomes a pocketed space in the hands of Bachelard. Fundamentally, they are of the same order, namely that of spatial appropriation."
• Poché — the Beaux-Arts term for the space in the walls — is the architectural name for this thickened, hollow zone. What architects draw as solid is "entirely hollow and void." Poché is the domain of services, ghosts, and monsters; the smallest pockets act as "portals that give access to the largest playing fields."
• Nietzsche's "brief habits" and goodwill offer an alternative to Bachelard's unconscious/daydreaming: style as "an aesthetic attitude that deals with things beforehand, not a way to embark them afterwards." Nietzsche's self is "full of gaps that function as openings between him and what might happen to him" — resembling Simone Weil's attente.
• Coccia's Philosophy of the Home: "homes do not exist per se. Only homemaking exists." Via the Stoic oikeiosis (appropriation), Coccia argues "we occupy only things" and "things are our doubles." The home is "by definition, uninhabitable" in its formal shell; only things enable us to "erect the whole scaffolding of artifice and style."
• Things flicker between presence and absence. The German connection between wohnen (to inhabit) and gewöhnen (to get used to) names how inhabitation turns everything invisible. "It lies in the nature of architecture to disappear during the act of appropriation."
• Steinberg's drawings (Gingerbread House, Art of Living) illustrate the collapse of space into a thickened plenum where "things and walls merge." Perec's Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual extend this via the gameboard: "a gameboard opens things, it is organized by gaps, whereas space is continuously — yet the two coexist."
• The ontological spectrum: object → thing → stuff → mess → trash → waste. Heidegger's distinction between objects (Gegenstand, "what stands against") and things (selbstständig, "standing by themselves") grounds the spectrum. Things converge ontologically with event, issue, and habit; objects "overdetermine a thing by removing its objecthood."
• Entropy enables reversibility. "Reversibility is exactly what enables appropriation; things may fluctuate ontologically, making themselves available to a range of situations, while veering on the edge of formlessness." Waste can reverse its fate — as in evolutionary tinkering (Jacob, Gould) where jawbones become middle-ear bones.
• Beauty links to its own fading. "If beauty is the promise of happiness, how does it keep this promise? — only by linking directly to its own fading, to a state of uncertainty and vagueness. Because it allows play and habit to flip back and forth."
• Hoarding and decluttering are symmetrical pathologies of inhabitation. "While a hoarder turns all stuff into trash through accumulation, Kondo's method also turns all stuff into trash, but through radical discarding." Both are "failed thickening" — a failed circulation of things between house, poché, and gameboard.

Connections

Concepts: Dwelling · Everyday Life · Habitus · Play · Appropriation · Poché · Thing-Ontology
Authors: Henri Lefebvre · Gaston Bachelard · Martin Heidegger · Friedrich Nietzsche · Emanuele Coccia · Georges Perec · Walter Benjamin · Johan Huizinga · Lars Spuybroek
Debates: The Everyday vs. Iconic Architecture · Theories of the Everyday
Related source notes: Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Lefebvre 2014) · Building Dwelling Thinking (Heidegger 1971)

Direct Quotes

"Not-fitting is essential to even the slightest possibility of happiness as a form of appropriation."

"Lefebvre's porous space becomes a pocketed space in the hands of Bachelard. Fundamentally, they are of the same order, namely that of spatial appropriation."

"What architects are taught to draw as solid by filling the area between different rooms with black ink, suggesting the wall is monolithic, is in fact entirely hollow and void."

"The smallest pockets act as portals that give access to the largest playing fields, like Alice's tiny door at the bottom of the rabbit hole, or like Lucy who enters the fantasy world of Narnia through the wardrobe in a spare room."

"Style is what prevents the German philosopher from developing an unconscious; it's an aesthetic attitude that deals with things beforehand, not a way to embark them afterwards." (on Nietzsche)

"We are all strangers, yet we manage each time to make a home for ourselves. To build a form of happiness." (Coccia, p. 21)

"Homes do not exist per se. Only homemaking exists." (Coccia, p. 21)

"We occupy only things." (Coccia, p. 23)

"Things are our doubles." (Coccia)

"It lies in the nature of architecture to disappear during the act of appropriation. Things start to flicker between absence and presence, constantly retreating and resurfacing from that thickened sphere."

"The house is this half-there, half-not-there place where we live with the ghost of ourselves imprinted on the things around us."

"A gameboard opens things, it is organized by gaps, whereas space is continuously — yet the two coexist."

"Things — the very stuff of the real, that is, of thickness — never admit themselves in this dualist position."

"Reversibility is exactly what enables appropriation; things may fluctuate ontologically, making themselves available to a range of situations, while veering on the edge of formlessness and a state of trash."

"A home demands to be lived toward a state of entropy; it is the only way cycles of exchange between the different modes of things can begin."

"While a hoarder turns all stuff into trash through accumulation, Kondo's method also turns all stuff into trash, but through radical discarding."

Open Questions

• Can the ontological spectrum (object → thing → stuff → mess → trash → waste) be operationalized as a critical tool for architectural analysis, or does it remain a poetic taxonomy?
• How does Spuybroek's "thickening" relate to Bourdieu's habitus — is thickening the spatial-phenomenological counterpart to the sociological disposition?
• Is Nietzsche's "style" as an alternative to the unconscious compatible with the phenomenological tradition (Bachelard, Heidegger), or does it break with it fundamentally?
• What is the political economy of stuff — who benefits from the decluttering ideology (Kondo) and who from the hoarding pathology?