Scenes of detachment: Reconfiguring attachments to work

Geographical theories of attachment have illuminated why progressive change is so difficult to bring about, yet the question of how detachment from dominant ways of life is actually lived and felt remains an open one. This paper develops recent debates on attachment and detachment by examining the detachments that happen in fully-remote working from home among knowledge workers in Australia. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with almost fifty home-based worker households and focusing in on 11 participants who work entirely from home, we extend Anderson’s notion of a ‘scene of attachment’ to theorise ‘scenes of detachment’ as occasions in which attachments to work are felt to loosen, attenuate or fray. Through analyses of three interviews, we identify three modes of detachment that crystallise for our fully remote workers: restorative detachment from work-dominated subjectivities; activist detachment from corporate policies that devalue connective and caring labour; and disillusioned detachment from under-stimulating and isolating work that nevertheless remains structurally necessary. Each mode is a partial and situated reconfiguration of attachment rather than a wholesale refusal of work and is shaped by social difference and structural positioning. Attending to these modes of detachment unsettles totalising assumptions about immutable attachments to work and points towards a geography of partial detachment that foregrounds the transforming nature of contemporary relations to work.