Turning Homeward: Art, Technology, and Dwelling in Later Heidegger

Abstract

Although homelessness is one of Heidegger’s preoccupations throughout his career, it assumes a specifically technological character in his later writings. According to Heidegger, our unique homelessness is an aftermath of technological disclosure and takes the form of a forced familiarity that disables us from inhabiting our world attentively. In this paper I argue that Heidegger sees the work of art as a disturbance to our familiarity, permitting a free relationship to technology, which Heidegger calls dwelling. In drawing the connections between technology, art, and dwelling, I show that they constitute a dialectic structure in which dwelling is a kind of freedom. My central claim is that, despite its dangers, technology itself prepares us for dwelling in a new way, and that for this reason Heidegger’s vision of dwelling should not be reduced to a reactionary call for a retreat from the technological world.