Smart Houses: From Managing the House at a Distance to the Management of Life Itself Name: Liliana Bounegru Student number: 5904552 Email:
[email protected] Supervisor: Richard Rogers Second reader: Edward Shanken Institution: University of Amsterdam Department: Media Studies New Media (MA) Date: 23 rd of August 2009 1 Abstract The smart house has been around for more than a century as a technological vision of future domestic spaces, always falling short of materialization. However, smart homes underwent a revival in the late 1990s until the present. This thesis takes as its object of study the “arrangements of power” which underlie the contemporary smart homes in pre-production in academic research laboratories in the United States, as well as the mode of domesticity and subjectivity which they engender, with a particular focus on smart homes for the elderly. By applying on three case studies of smart house prototypes notions which appear in the work of late Foucault, and from which a recent subfield of cultural studies, namely governmentality studies emerges, I discuss the role of smart houses as potential technologies of government in the neoliberal political rationality of governing at a distance. The contemporary smart homes shift focus from automating physical activities of the inhabitants to disciplining their minds by becoming advisory or persuasive agents in order to make individuals self-governing and self- sufficient from the domestic space. In smart houses for the elderly, the posthuman mode of domesticity engendered by managing everyday domestic life with intelligent agents, takes the management of life itself as its focus.