ABSTRACT
The Melbourne conference, Building Dwelling Drifting, that originally gave rise to this essay substituted the word ‘drifting’ for ‘thinking’ – a wily substitution, I think, since the word ‘drifting’ updates (arrogant word) the Dasein to take account of a world in which Heidegger’s philosophical concept of identity as Being1 has fully yielded to the drift that, as Heidegger taught us, was drifting inside it all along; a world where plural beings find their identities-throughdifference inside incessant streams of cultural displacement and migrancy by means of ‘interstitial perspectives’ as Homi Bhabha calls it (1994: 1-2),2 and ‘middle passages’ (1994: 4-5). The word ‘drifting’ also flows back and forth into the words ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ in a way that underwrites the temporality of those acts, the continuous emergent quality of their organization in cultures, and the impossibility of stopping them in one place in spite of long-standing beliefs that buildings are the firm, inflexible, ground for flexible acts of dwelling.
