The Focality of Maintenance and the Making of Home

In this article, I explore how our engagement with the technological materiality of our homes promotes or disrupts healthy relationships with natural and built environments. I will argue that committing to certain home maintenance practices has the potential to overcome, what Albert Borgmann (1984) calls, “the device paradigm.” I begin by outlining Martin Heidegger’s (1971) fears about modern technologies and how he sees them undermining our relationships with a dynamic, more-than-human world. I use the work of Val Plumwood (1993) to reconceive Heidegger’s technological divide through the lens of pernicious dualisms. I then trace the development of focal practices to focal places, moving from Borgmann to Paul Thompson (2000). Embracing the concept of focal places, I argue that the home is the quintessential focal site where our maintenance practices can create embeddedness in our material environments and overcome dangerous technological patterns of being.