Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived

4 Outside Community

105 4 Outside Community We’re just totally different human beings really, fuck . . . —Josie As Josie so bluntly summarized, the lack of access to spacefull and timefull place indelibly marked young homeless people as alien. Feeling “abnormal,” estranged, unable to dwell in place and time in the often doubled contexts of trauma and transience, young people routinely experienced social displacement. Their embeddedness in family, neighborhood , and community was splintered by painful body and place memory, and they were caught out in every way, with reading, with knowledge of basic food groups, with forms of formal interaction and communication. They struggled with health, self-presentation, and hygiene; they wore the clothes discarded by the fashionable. Their days did not revolve around expected forms of education, work, or recreation but around street networks and black market survival. As “just totally different human beings,” young people suffered social disjuncture in intimate, embodied detail. Bourdieu usefully addresses such bodily disqualifications from social place, making clear the links between spatial and social displacement and between social and personal discourses of abnormality (see also Stephenson 2006, 168). Homelessness, as a process of dramatic separation from the key sites that inform the occupation of a recognized social position, represents for Bourdieu (1999b, 124) the extreme of social exclusion. As Bourdieu (2000, 222) argues, to exist outside of the sites, particularly of 106 | Beside One’s Self the home and of employment, that ensure the development and maintenance of socially recognized ways of being in the world, of social “function ,” is to risk “social death” (Stephenson 2006, 167), to risk exclusion from humanity itself—an exclusion Josie confirmed. For Bourdieu (2000, 241), “There is no worse dispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in the symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognised social being, in a word, to humanity.” Without the sociocultural dispositions that enable investment in the “game of life,” the displaced remain “excluded from the game, dispossessed of the vital illusion of having a function or mission, of having to be or do something” (ibid., 222). For as Bourdieu explains, it is through inhabiting particular geographic places, which are at once social and cultural places, that the subject learns habitual ways of being and is disposed in ways appropriately matched to his or her social context. Through being in place and thus subject to sociocultural habitus and generative bodily schema, the subject develops “bodily knowledge” (ibid., 128), a range of bodily skills, postures, behaviors, and competencies that enable practical incorporation into social life. Through habitus, the subject experiences an adjusted bodily coincidence with his immediate social world: “He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of habitus” (ibid., 143). For the displaced, however, for those forced to occupy “sites of social relegation,” for those suffering the “destiny effect from belonging to a stigmatised group” (Bourdieu 1999a, 64), for “people without a future” as Bourdieu (2000, 221) so confrontingly describes, the inability to claim valued corporeal, geographic and social space is felt and lived as a terrible “discordance” (ibid., 159). The inability to embody and mobilize a desirable habitus or set of normative social attributes condemns the destitute and dispossessed to feeling “‘out on a limb,’ displaced, out of place and ill at ease” (ibid., 157). The habitus of the destitute inculcates an acute awareness of the bodily and behavioral “mismatches” that prevent social participation and investment (ibid., 159, 212) and that result in “personal suffering” and “self-despair” (Bourdieu 1999a, 64). Josie, for example, very painfully described her complete identification with drugs: “They are me,” she said, “they are what I do . . . that’s Outside Community | 107 what I am.” Heroin, Josie’s “game of life,” gave her something to do but offered neither a route to social recognition nor to personal happiness: I don’t feel I have a purpose . . . I don’t feel like I’ve got a purpose and that’s why I use heroin because I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t feel I’m good at doing anything else. Not that I’m good at being a heroin addict, but that’s all I know what to do with myself . . . It’s my way . . . what I do . . . You’re a social worker, I’m a heroin addict. And indeed, Josie’s despair and self-loathing were such that she...