Abstract

This article analyzes the philosophical concept of dwelling from the perspective of a media pragmatics. Media pragmatics is presented here as a method that discloses the circular relation between rule-bound practices and the material and technological substrates that support them. This method is put into practice through a comparative philosophical interpretation of two “canonical” models of dwelling: the Greek oikos and the bourgeois home. Because dwelling, as Heidegger argued, is an interface mediating between the “lifeworld” and the “world” while also organizing relations within the lifeworld, it serves here as a privileged object for articulating this method.