Why do we return to oikology?
Firstly, because we believe that the where of the human and nonhuman
existence has a fundamental meaning in ponderings on the
dilemmas of the humanities. Oikology is a thinking that conjoins oikos
and logos by emphasizing a specific correspondence between the two,
as well as that which makes them different and separate. Language and
practice of oikos and logos are not the same, thence a concept of home
– developed by oikological thinking – would always be a home in translation.
The centre of gravity of the oikological thinking ineluctably lies
“a little further,” “always further on and on.” We are the ones who have
left their home; the ones who have experienced the comforts and failures
of rootedness and uprootedness. We are the ones who are gazing
from the distance to make something clearer, yet also felt strongly as
dearth, a break, a fall. Home – our own, as surroundings, region, community,
maybe even Europe, and eventually the world – will be forever
marked with this flaw and, perhaps, even the dark. Secondly, pondering
upon the where restores to us the meanings once lost and concealed by
the resemblance of places, while locality – along with its experiential
dimension – restores placement to the human and thus makes one
responsible for words and deeds. Place, which oikology keeps finding
anew, is entangled with being out of the way, in the motion of distancing
oneself from the centre and the hasty knowledge/power. It is a return
to experiencing that which is close and distant at the same time. We
recognise home in a place off the way, off the world, off the discourses,
off the official cultural tract, off the launched mobility of people and
things, yet also off the propaganda of stability and familiarity. Oikology
invites us to loosen functional thinking and hasty household practices.
Thirdly, oikology touches upon philosophy, literature, anthropology, maybe even politics, for it assumes that “home” is as much given to
us as continually constructed. Hence it is assigned to us in order that
we can face this challenge; it leads to our appreciation of the entanglement
of home, place, city, wander and source. An encounter with the
city, a spiritual dimension of a place, return to the source, a crack of the
post-industrial space and weaving the motion with the permanence of
things, as well as quest for the household lore in a particular space-time
(Silesia, Europe, the world). Place comes to be out of an individual experience
of the commonly available spaces and their critical reading. This
critical impulse is indispensable, for the rhetoric of “home” practised
in politics presents it as a set of commonplace, unquestioned, thus, in
its own way, inconspicuous frames, where our life is located. Oikology
makes an attempt to show how unapparent these frames are. Therefore,
fourthly, oikology attempts to show how entangled the circumstances
where our identity is being constructed in a place really are. Home is
not viewed here as a permanent, tangible localisation, but it is an experience
to gain, which cannot be neglected in any discussions on the
human being. Oikology (the Silesian oikology included) thus leaves the
human – be it the wandering or the settled one – with a chastising and
alarming question to answer: Are you really so convinced that home
has let you go into the world so easily? Has your home gone so easily
from you, or so blithely let you go
