The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics 9781472588678, 9781474272872, 9781472588692

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction – The Intelligence of Place
1. Place and a Kind of Sentience – These Trees in Particular
2. Place and Limit
3. Place and Edge
4. Place and Loss
5. Place and Histories – Writing Other People’s Memories
6. Place and Singularity
7. Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements
8. Place and Atmosphere
9. Place and Architectural Space
10. Place and Connection
11. Place and Sensory Composition
12. Place and Formulation
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Intelligence of Place

Also available from Bloomsbury Architecture in Black, Darell Wayne Fields Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey, edited by Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Donald A. Landes Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, edited by Elizabeth Lanza, Hirut Woldemariam and Robert Blackwood Place, Commonality and Judgment, Andrew Benjamin Semiotic Landscapes, edited by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, edited by Nadir Lahiji

The Intelligence of Place Topographies and Poetics Edited by Jeff Malpas

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Jeff Malpas and Contributors, 2015 Jeff Malpas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8867-8 PB: 978-1-3500-3633-8 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8869-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-8868-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The intelligence of place : topographies and poetics / edited by Jeff Malpas. – 1 [edition]. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-8867-8 (hb) – ISBN 978-1-4725-8868-5 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4725-8869-2 (epdf) 1. Place (Philosophy) I. Malpas, Jeff, editor. B105.P53I58 2015 114–dc23 2015019489

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Contents List of Figures Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction – The Intelligence of Place Jeff Malpas 1 Place and a Kind of Sentience – These Trees in Particular Susan Stewart 2 Place and Limit Massimo Cacciari 3 Place and Edge Edward S. Casey 4 Place and Loss Jessica Dubow 5 Place and Histories – Writing Other People’s Memories Lucy R. Lippard 6 Place and Singularity Jeff Malpas 7 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements Joshua Meyrowitz 8 Place and Atmosphere Juhani Pallasmaa 9 Place and Architectural Space Alberto Pérez-Gómez 10 Place and Connection Edward Relph 11 Place and Sensory Composition Kathleen Stewart 12 Place and Formulation Kenneth White Bibliography Index

vi viii xi 1 11 13 23 39 51 65 93 129 157 177 205 221 253 269

List of Figures 5.1 Procession celebrating the 125th anniversary of La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, in Galisteo, New Mexico, 2009, photo: Tom Martinelli. 5.2 Tom Ward, cutting turf on Kilsallagh bog, July 2013, photo: Deirdre O’Mahony. 5.3 Lewis deSoto, four works from the Tahualtapa Project 1983–8. 5.4 Lewis deSoto, from the Tahualtapa Project 1983–8, ‘Slover Codex’, black-and-white photograph, mylar, ink and silver spray paint. Collection of the Seattle Art Museum. 5.5 Lewis deSoto, ‘Tahualtapa, Hill of the Ravens’, 32’ × 32’, black-and-white photograph, silver spray paint, wood, Plexiglas and black feathers. Collection of the Seattle Art Museum. 5.6 Neighbour Freddy Lujan directs the negotiation of his mobile home to its site in the village of Chacon, NM. 5.7 Artists Used to Live Here, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from Su Friedrich’s 2012 film Gut Renovation. 6.1 Singularity in desolation: Queenstown in Western Tasmania; photo by Ilona Schneider, by permission of the photographer. 6.2 Singularity as touristic destination: Wineglass Bay on Tasmania’s East Coast; photo by Stephen Laird, by permission of the photographer. 6.3 McDonalds restaurant in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi; photo by Simon de Trey-White, by permission of the photographer. 10.1 Special Place, carved into a driftwood log on the beach at Spanish Banks in Vancouver. 10.2 The site in Salt Lake City where in 1847, at the end of the Mormon trek from Illinois, Brigham Young declared: ‘This is the right place.’ 10.3 Place beginnings in Flemingdon Park in Toronto. 10.4 The diverse particularities of a place expressed in a poem carved into a stone slab set in the ground of Island Park in Fargo, North Dakota.

52 54 57

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59 60 61 66

67 70 180

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10.5 A plaque on the wall of a row of social housing on New Street South in Dublin in 2014 (a few streets north of Malpas Place) that needs no explanation. 10.6 Place branding as placemaking at the University of British Columbia. 10.7 An open sense of place acknowledged at Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary in Victoria, British Columbia.

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Contributors Massimo Cacciari is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, Italy. He has been a member of the Italian and European parliaments, and three times mayor of the city of Venice. He is the author of many books and essays, including, in English, The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), and Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Edward S. Casey is distinguished professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook, New York, USA. He is the author of Getting Back into Place (2nd ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), The Fate of Place (2nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), and two other books on place. He is also the author of The World at a Glance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007) and The World on Edge (forthcoming, Bloomington: Indiana University Press) as well as numerous articles on diverse topics. Jessica Dubow is senior lecturer in Cultural Geography at the University of Sheffield, England. She is the author of Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape (Saarbrücken: VDM, 2009), and is presently working on a manuscript on the relationship of geography to philosophy in context of the twentieth-century Jewish European intellectual tradition. She has published widely across a range of journals including: Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, Art History, The Journal of Visual Culture, Comparative Literature and Parallax. Lucy R. Lippard is the author of twenty-three books on contemporary art, cultural criticism and place, including The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society; On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place; Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782; and, most recently, Undermining: A Wild Ride though Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. She lives in Galisteo, New Mexico. Jeff Malpas is distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, and visiting distinguished professor at Latrobe University, in

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Melbourne, Victoria. He is the author of Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Heidegger’s Topology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), and has published extensively on topics ranging across art, architecture, film, geography and philosophy. Joshua Meyrowitz is professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, United States, where he has won the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Scholar-Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts. He is the author of No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press, 1985) and has published scores of articles on media and society in scholarly journals and anthologies, as well as in general-interest publications. Juhani Pallasmaa is an architect and Professor Emeritus at the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. He has taught and lectured extensively in universities around the world, and held several visiting professorships in the United States. He has published numerous essays and forty-five books on architecture, design and arts, including The Embodied Image (2011), The Thinking Hand (2009), and The Eyes of the Skin (1996/2012). Alberto Pérez-Gómez studied architecture and practiced in Mexico City. In 1983 he became director of Carleton University’s School of Architecture (Ottawa, Canada). Since 1987 he has occupied the Bronfman Chair at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, where he founded the History and Theory post-graduate programmes. His books include Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; Hitchcock Award in 1984), Polyphilo (1992), Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997), and Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (2006). Edward Relph is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), a book apparently of widespread and enduring interest because it has been translated into several languages and was reprinted in 2010. His books and articles have explored humanistic geography, phenomenology, urban landscapes and sense of place. His most recent book is Toronto: Transformations in a City and Its Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Kathleen Stewart is professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA. She writes on place, the senses, affect, non-representational

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theory, the ordinary, worlding and ethnographic writing as a form of theory. Her books include A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an `Other’ America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Worldings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, in preparation). Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Her most recent book of poems is Red Rover (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); her most recent book of prose is The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Kenneth White was educated (classics, modern languages, philosophy) in Scotland, Germany and France. He held the chair of Twentieth Century Poetics at Paris-Sorbonne from 1983 to 1996. In 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics. Among other distinctions, he is the recipient of literary prizes such as the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français for his work as a whole. His most recent books in English are Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (essays), The Winds of Vancouver (narrative), Latitudes and Longitudes (poems) published simultaneously in 2013 by Aberdeen University Press.

Acknowledgements The original idea for this volume was that it should be a multi-authored monograph rather than an edited collection, and that its unity should derive, therefore, from the collaboration among different authorial voices rather than the work of a single editorial hand. Such an idea does not fit well with contemporary publishing practice, however, and what has resulted is indeed, in outer appearance at least, much more of a more conventional edited work. Nevertheless, the origins of the work in such a collaborative conception ought to give some sense of the importance of the contributors whose work is gathered within the volume. This is very much a collection, not merely of different essays, but of different authors – of different and distinctive personal and scholarly voices, and also, one might say, of different personal and scholarly places. Thanks are first due, then, to the authors whose work makes up this volume. I am extremely grateful for their having agreed to contribute to this joint project – especially since it is a project that has taken more time and had a few more trials and tribulations than might have been anticipated. Thanks are also due to Colleen Coalter at Bloomsbury, who not only agreed to take on what may well have appeared as somewhat idiosyncratic project that did not fit well into any standard ‘list’, but remained always helpful and supportive no matter the difficulties that arose. In addition, I would like to thank Søren Tinning for bringing Massimo Cacciari’s piece to my attention. Although the only piece that was not written specially for the volume (it originally appeared in Italian in ‘Nomi di luogo: confine’, in Aut Aut 299–300 [2000], pp. 73–79), it nevertheless fits particularly well with the overall structure of the project, dealing with a theme that is especially important in this context (as I have argued elsewhere, boundary or limit is the defining concept in the idea of place), and gives a glimpse into the work of an important figure in architectural and political thought in contemporary Italy. I also have a special debt of gratitude to Susan Stewart. Her poem ‘These Trees in Particular’ (from Susan Stewart, Columbarium, [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2003]) is the first of the contributions below, and stands as the opening to the volume proper. I am very grateful to Susan for offering the poem in lieu of an essay, as well as to the University of Chicago for allowing the poem to be reprinted. Additional thanks are owed to both C. K. Stead and the University of Auckland Press for kindly allowing

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excerpts from Stead’s ‘After the Wedding’ (in C. K. Stead, Between, [Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988, pp. 9–10]) to be included in Chapter 6. The volume includes a number of images and I thank the photographers and artists concerned – Lewis deSoto, Su Friedrich, Stephen Laird, Tom Martinelli, Deirdre O’Mahony, Edward Relph, Ilona Scheider, Sharon Stewart, Simon de Trey-White, and also Leigh Woolley (who provided the cover image) – for permission allowing those images to be reproduced here. Full details regarding the images are contained in the captions in each chapter. The one significant regret I have about the volume – a regret that deserves acknowledgement here – is that it is not more diverse in terms of the voices and places that it encompasses. My aim was not only to draw together some of the key figures currently writing on place today, but also to try to encompass some of the breadth that place, as a concept, itself invokes – and that ought to mean a geographical and cultural breadth as much as merely a breadth of idea. Missing from this volume are other voices from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America, as well as, perhaps most prominently, indigenous voices. For that reason, this volume ought not be seen as attempting to offer any final, complete, or definitive account of place in contemporary thinking – even though my hope is that it will stand as a significant drawing together of key thinkers – but rather as offering various points of entry into a more sustained scholarly engagement with place that will indeed move across disciplines, across geographies and across languages and cultures. In this respect, my final thanks must be of the potential readers of this book – those who not only glance through its pages, but who find it useful in furthering their own work, and so in furthering the thinking of place that is at issue here. Not only is that thinking important for an understanding of place or for our selfunderstanding, but it also seems to me vital to our response to the contemporary world, and so to the future. To be in the world is always to be faced with the need to respond to the place in which we find ourselves. Our contemporary situation is not only a situation in which we seem often not to know how to respond, but in which we no longer even know where we are. As I note in the ‘Introduction’ in this book, the real task before us – a task that encompasses the environmental as well as societal challenges that face us – is essentially a task of reorientation, of finding a place in the world, and at the same time of returning to a genuine sense of the world.

Introduction – The Intelligence of Place Jeff Malpas

To talk of the ‘intelligence’ of place is to refer both to the intelligible character that belongs to place and to the apprehension of that character in our own thinking. To look to the intelligence of place is thus to look both to the character of place and the character of our encounter with place. The two are inevitably and inextricably connected, since we cannot attempt to address the character of place without also addressing the encounter on the basis of which the character of place can even arise as an issue for us, and yet neither can we afford simply to collapse the two. Place is not identical with our thinking of it, and our thinking itself stands always in the shadow of place, even though place itself often remains in shadow. Place is everywhere – ambiguously so, perhaps, in that it is both everywhere (‘all about’) and every where (every place is a ‘where’ and every ‘where’ a place) – but also tautologically, since to speak of ‘where’ is just to speak of place. In its ‘everywhereness’, place can readily appear as ‘commonplace’ – as so familiar as to be an unremarkable part of the everyday comings and goings of the world, as so obvious as to need no explication, and as so ordinary and basic as to be incapable of any exact or precise apprehension. Not only in the character of existence or our immediate experience of it, but also in our thinking about existence and experience, place appears as equally ubiquitous. Even though the place in which such thinking takes place may sometimes perplex us, and may even lead us to suppose (mistakenly I would argue) that thinking can somehow escape the constraints of place,1 still our thinking is essentially determined by where we are, by the contingencies of our own location (and one need not be a reductive materialist to claim that the place in which thinking takes place is indeed identical with the place of location of the body), and what it addresses is essentially given to us in and through the places in which we find ourselves. Moreover, in our very thinking, place, and with it topographic, bodily, and spatial ideas and images seems to be constantly invoked – we think ‘through’ things, we ‘grasp’ ideas, we

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explore the ‘place’ and ‘space’ of ideas, we ‘move between’ concepts or arguments, we find ourselves taken ‘up’ and ‘into’ a way of thought. So ubiquitous is place in thinking that often we do not even recognize it as present – and the very suggestion that there is an essentially topographic character to thinking is likely to be dismissed as merely an incidental feature of language and nothing more (although at that point one might also press on the topographic character of language2). There is an as-yet unwritten history of philosophy that would explore, not the history or ‘fate’ of the idea of place (which Ed Casey has already documented so well and which is largely the history of the displacing of place by an increasingly narrow idea of space), but instead the unremarked history of place as integral to thinking – of thinking, and so of philosophy, as essentially a sort of ‘topographic’ exploration. Such an idea might be said already to be adumbrated in Kant’s designation of Hume (as so also himself) as a ‘geographer of reason’3 and Heidegger’s characterization of thinking itself, and not just the thinking that he undertakes, as a ‘topology of being’.4 Although Aristotle took place to be a key concept in the study of nature,5 the rise of modern natural science also saw the near disappearance of place from scientific discourse – indeed, the reaction against Aristotelianism can be seen as also a reaction against the topocentric ordering of the world that was such an important part of Aristotelian thinking.6 Modern scientific thinking tends to treat place as either a subjective construct or else as reducible to a mere location in space. Understood as mere location – which is essentially the only notion of place remaining within the physical sciences – place is no more than a numerically specifiable point or area within a spatial field; understood as a subjective construct – an approach common across much of the social sciences and even in the humanities – place becomes a mere product of psychological, social, or political structures and processes. Moreover, this scientific neglect of place remains true in spite of the tendency to talk of a spatial turn within the social sciences and humanities. That a turn towards space can itself be construed, as it often is, especially in English-language scholarship, as automatically encompassing a turn to place is itself indicative of how little attention is given to place as such. What the relation is between place and space, and whether or to what extent they are indeed related, cannot simply be assumed. In English, there is good reason to assume a prima facie distinction between them, or, at least, between ‘place’, which retains a broader meaning connected with ideas of ‘locale’, ‘situation’, ‘country’, ‘land’,

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and even ‘home’, and ‘space’, which has tended to move towards a narrower sense restricted to notions of physical extendedness.7 The distinction here is itself complicated, in many English-language discussions, by the introduction of texts from other languages in which terms are translated into English without regard for the different ways in which the distinction between ideas of space and place may originally operate in those languages and texts. One cannot assume, for instance, that a term like espace, in French, can be unambiguously translated into the English ‘space’ nor lieu (or indeed place) into ‘place’.8 One of the consequences of the appearance of works such as Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace or Foucault’s ‘Des espaces autres’ in English as works about space has been to obscure the complexity of what is at issue, in the original works themselves, in terms of both space and place. Moreover, neither of these works addresses the question of what either space or place are – their interest is not, one might say, ontological, but primarily sociological or political – and the spatial and topological ideas at issue are essentially deployed to other ends than the inquiry of space and place as such. The ontological commitments that are present, especially in Lefebvre’s case, are also such as to treat space and place as primarily produced rather than producing. Space and place may thus be central terms in Lefebvre’s analysis, but they are secondary phenomena with respect to the structures that are analysed. The difference between place and space is perhaps most succinctly expressed in terms of the idea of place as that which, through the boundary or limit that belongs to it, also opens up a space – place is thus tied to boundary, as Massimo Cacciari points out in his essay, and space to the openness within the boundary.9 Place and space are therefore distinct, but they are also related, which is why the same term can sometimes be used, depending on the language and the context, to refer to both. The inter-relation of place and space (which I would argue also extends to place and time) means that, although one cannot take a ‘turn’ to space as necessarily encompassing a turn towards place, still any genuine engagement with space ought indeed to imply an engagement with place – and so any genuinely spatial turn ought also to imply a topographic turn. Place, moreover, shows remarkable resistance, moreover, to being overlooked, forgotten, or ignored.10 Consequently, even given the limitations of much of what passes for ‘spatial’ thinking in the contemporary literature, such thinking, in virtue of its very focus on space, nevertheless often retains the potential for place to re-emerge. To some extent, this has indeed been what has occurred in recent years as both space and place have appeared as central terms for theoretical discussion across many different disciplines. Yet precisely

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because of the tendency for space and place to be used in ways that are often quite uncritical of the terms or concepts themselves (ironically so given that they are often taken as terms of ‘critical’ discourse), so the very appearance of space and place often leads back into their forgetting. We seem always, in fact, to be caught between the remembering of place and its forgetting – caught in a constant turning in which place appears and disappears. This means that the thinking of place has to take the form of a returning to place that has always to be repeated – a returning that is never simply accomplished and completed, a returning that never brings us, once and for all, into a fully and enduringly present ‘there’, a returning that never results in our finally and forever finding ourselves simply and unequivocally ‘at home’. The thinking of place remains a demand, a challenge, simply because place is so fundamental – so much an inevitable and inextricable part of things. To understand ourselves and our world we have no choice but to attend to place and to our own being-in-place – to attend, therefore, to the ‘intelligence’ of place both as it belongs to place as well as to our understanding of it, and to the intelligence of place as it pertains to our own being as itself placed. The fundamental character of place in relation to human being is evident in the way in which place, whether expressed in terms of land, earth, or country, figures so prominently in the life and experience of indigenous societies and cultures. It is no less evident, however, in modern forms of life and experience. Indeed, in spite of what is often taken to be the erasure of place in modernity (exemplified by the contemporary rhetoric of the connectivity and mobility, as well as the supposedly homogenizing effects of globalism), place constantly seems to re-emerge – as soon as we look to any sort of encounter or engagement with the world (and this is true of the encounter that is other than human as well as of the human), then place is necessarily at issue. The reason for this is simple: just as any appearance is always an appearance somewhere (as Aristotle says, ‘all suppose that things which exist are somewhere . . . the nonexistent is nowhere’11), so is any encounter, any engagement, also similarly placed. The encounter with the world is never with the world in its entirety, but always and only with the world as it is present here, in this place (which is why Casey suggests we adopt the term ‘place-world’) – one might even say that the place brings forth the encounter, and the encounter, the place. It is against this background that the contributions to this volume ought to be read and reflected upon. They each arise out of this same complex background in which place appears as both central and fundamental, and yet also as often being forgotten, overlooked, and even dismissed. Part of what they aim to do

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is to bring us back to place, but in doing so they also aim to bring us back to a place we never really left – never could leave. In this sense, they are reminders of where we are – are exploration of the places in which we are already placed – rather than offering passage to what is new and faraway. These contributions do not, for the most part, take up the distinction between place and space explicitly or at length – the major exception is Alberto PérezGómez’s treatment of place and architectural space in Chapter 9. Nevertheless, the distinction does operate, to a greater or lesser extent, in the background of every one of the works contained here. What is at issue is indeed place rather than space, even though space (both broadly and more narrowly construed) is itself implicated in place, and may be said to be derived from it.12 The way this inquiry into place is taken up is through the exploration of place as it stands in relation to a specific set of key concepts: sentience, limit, edge, loss, histories, singularity, media, atmosphere, architectural space, connection, sensory composition, and formulation. These are not the only concepts that could guide an inquiry into place, but they are concepts that provide points of entry into the thinking of place for each of the authors whose work appears here. Taken together, and viewed as contributing to a topography or as constituting a set of topographies – where ‘topography’ is taken to be a ‘writing’ of place (with an emphasis on the ‘graphic’), as well as a ‘mapping out’ of the conceptual structure of place13 – these contributions can thereby be seen as indeed offering an account of place in its distinctiveness, and so as both apart from as well as related to a range of concepts, of which space is but one. Perhaps because it is so seemingly ‘evasive’ a concept, as well as so ‘ubiquitous’ and fundamental, place belongs to no single discipline or mode of inquiry. Aristotle does indeed claim that it is an essential concept for the inquiry into nature, but that does not mean that only within the inquiry into nature is place properly thematized or taken up. As a consequence, this volume does not sit within any particular disciplinary framework, nor does it represent an exclusive or exhaustive array of those frameworks or discipline within which place appears as a salient concept. The discussion trespasses upon architecture, anthropology, art, geography, literature, media, philosophy, poetry, and other domains as well. Place is indeed ‘everywhere’ – and nowhere is place not an issue. If one aspect of the overall project that this volume attempts to carry out is indeed a writing or ‘mapping’ of place (though not one that aims at any sort of completeness), then this topographic task is matched by a poetics. Such a poetics may be seen as actually another form of topography, although it can also be seen as having its own character as an attempt, not to ‘map’ place, but to respond to it, to give

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expression to it, perhaps evoke to evoke it – that is, to bring it to some sort of appearance. ‘Topographies’ and ‘poetics’ thus refer to two aspects, though perhaps overlapping aspects, of what this volume aims to offer to its readers – and it is to these that the volume belongs rather than to any specific discipline. In the emphasis on these two aspects, I would add that this also means that the volume is not to be construed either as entirely ‘phenomenological’ or as a work of phenomenology. It often seems to be assumed that work that is indeed oriented towards place in the way this volume is oriented is automatically ‘phenomenological’ in character, and that this also follows from an attentiveness to the experiential and the first-personal. An emphasis on the experiential and the first-personal is not itself sufficient, however, to warrant an approach as phenomenological. Moreover, the way the experiential, or even the first personal, figures in these inquiries is not the same in all cases, nor can all of these inquiries be adequately characterized by such a focus. There is a strong phenomenological presence and orientation evident in several of the essays – most obviously so in the essays by Pérez-Gómez, Pallasmaa, Casey, and Relph. Even there, however, phenomenology is one strand among several, and I would argue that what their contributions represent is a phenomenologically inflected topography, rather than a topographic or topological phenomenology. The emphasis, in other words, is on place, and to some extent on place as that within which phenomenality arises – and so within which arise both experience and the first-personal – rather than on place as phenomenon (although concealed here is a deeper issue as to the extent to which phenomenology is itself a mode of topography). Since the contributions to this volume – though they all converge on a similar topic – are influenced by and derive from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, so they vary considerably in style and approach, as well as length. These differences are perhaps given a stronger rendering as a result of the fact that the authors themselves are so well-established in their own thinking. What is on view here is not merely a set of different ways of entering into the question of place, but also a set of quite distinctive voices that themselves speak from a sustained thinking and writing about the issues at stake (something indicated by the way in which many of the essays make reference to the work of other contributors). These contributions are thus points of entry into the discussion of place, but also points of entries into significant bodies of work – into larger topographic and poetic projects that stand in their own terms. Kenneth White’s essay, for instance, with its own distinctive approach to place, opens into, as it

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also exemplifies and to some extent summarizes, White’s extensive investigations, over many years, in essay, narrative, and poem, that have lead to the multilateral theory-practice of what he calls geopoetics. Ed Casey’s discussion of place and edge is itself the edge that leads back to a larger ‘philosophy of place’ that Casey has developed over several books and many previous essays. Kathleen Stewart’s treatment of place and sensory composition draws upon and feeds back into a large set of prior explorations of our affective attunement to and placing in the world. The same is true for all of the contributors to this volume, and in this respect, the volume can be read as an introduction, not only to place and the thinking of place, but also to the thinking of each of the contributors, and to the topographies and poetics that are embodied in their work as it extends beyond the confines of this collection alone. The fact that these contributions do indeed connect with such larger bodies of work makes it somewhat ridiculous to attempt to summarize their contributions to the volume in any cursory or introductory fashion. The titles of each of their contributions ought to carry a clear enough sense (at least inasmuch as this can be given in advance of the reading of the essays themselves) of the direction in which those contributions move. Since the contributions do indeed offer a set of different points of entry into place, so there is also no obvious conceptual ordering that obtains between them that ought to be followed in their reading – the ‘compositionality’ of place (and so also the ‘topology’) that appears in Kathleen Stewart’s essay could thus be taken to be reflected in the character of the volume itself. As one can enter into a place by any number of routes, so there is no single way into the essays collected here – one can as easily begin with the final chapter as with the first. Some chapters bring a more analytical perspective, some a more personal orientation, and yet, in spite of the different ways in which each is framed and positioned, still there is also significant convergence between them, and they can indeed be taken to form a single ‘composition’. One of the most important points of convergence is in the idea of place as not merely some sort of enclosed container that holds us within, but rather of place as precisely that which, though the manner in which it holds us (and so through its very character as limiting or bounding), also allows us access to that which lies beyond its boundaries – allows us access to the world. In Relph’s essay, this idea is developed through the emphasis on the openness and connectedness of places; the openness of place, and the openness of world, is one of the ways it appears in White’s discussion also; in Casey, the idea is present in terms of the ‘out-going’ character of the edge; in Lippard, it is there in the way place

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connects with other places, and with other persons, with other memories and histories; and in Dubow, it is suggested by the very idea of place as tied to loss and the experience of loss. Similar variations on this idea of place as ‘opening to’ rather than ‘closing from’ appear as central ideas in all of the contributions included here. In Susan Stewart’s ‘These Trees in Particular’, the sense of opening is one that expands beyond the ‘human’, as narrowly understood, to a sense of the essential interconnectedness of the human with that which is other than human. One might find an echo here of Seamus Heaney’s comment, in relation to Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’, that place is both ‘humanized and humanizing’,14 but more directly evident is the sense of the openness of place as that which draws what is other than human (‘these trees in particular’) into the human, and the human into what is other than it, so that the two can no longer entirely be set apart. Place opens, but so place also gathers. Place gives voice to what might be thought silent, and renders silent what otherwise might speak. Just as place is understood as both a potentially expansive and also inclusive notion, so too do almost all of these essays see place as retaining its significance even in the face of the seeming displacement that many also identify as a pervasive feature of modernity. This is especially important for a volume such as this, since so often has place been taken to be a backwardlooking and regressive notion – one that looks only to invoke a long-gone past and that is inextricably tied to a disabling nostalgia for what no longer is. Whether we recognize it or not, even the technologies of mobility and connectivity, even the economic and organizational pressures associated with globalization, operate only in and through specific places. The world is given in and through place no less now than it ever was – the difference is that we may be more prone to forget or to overlook or to neglect this basic ontological and existential fact. This is brought home in a particularly important way in Joshua Meyrowitz’s discussion of place and media, in which the complexities of our contemporary globalized, and yet nonetheless ‘placed’ existence, are explored and delineated. To attend to place, to attend to where we now find ourselves, is not to attend only to the past, but is also to attend to our future. One might well argue that it is in the intelligence of place that all intelligence, and certainly all wisdom, is founded. In that case, it must surely be with the intelligence of place that any genuine engagement with the world, with others, or with our own selves, must begin.

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Notes 1 Hannah Arendt suggests that thinking has no place, although what she actually seems to mean is that thinking finds its place in time – in the space of the ‘moment’. See Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. I (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1971), pp. 197–212. See my discussion of this in ‘“Where are we when we think?”: Hannah Arendt and the Place of Thinking’, Philosophy Today (in press, 2015). 2 See my ‘Poetry, Language, Place’, in Pathways to Heidegger’s Later Thinking, ed. Günter Figal et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 3 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A760/B 788. 4 See Heidegger, ‘Seminar in Le Thor’, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 41. One thinks also of Bachelard’s phenomenological-psychoanalytic project of ‘topoanalysis’ (see Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [Beacon Press, 1969], p. 8), or, more contemporaneously, Kenneth White’s ‘geopoetics’ (see his contribution to this volume – Chapter 12). Heidegger’s talk of ‘topology’ mirrors, though with some differences, my own use here of ‘topography’ (see my discussion in Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006], pp. 33–35). 5 See Aristotle, Physics IV, 208a26, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. Oxford trans. ed. Jonathan Barnes, Vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984 – Bollingen Series LXXI), p. 354. 6 See Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). 7 The distinctions at issue here are indeed conceptual and so are available in any and every language even if they are not always explicit or are made in different ways. 8 French presents a special problem here since not only are there important differences between the way spatial and topographic ideas are expressed in French as against English, but French authors and their writings have also been extremely influential in English-language thinking about space and place over the last forty to fifty years. German, for instance, is closer to English in the way it deals with space and place, but, with the exception of Heidegger, the influence of German authors on the English-language discussion has been much less. It is perhaps worth noting that there has been relatively little cross-cultural engagement, beyond specific linguistic, ethnographic and anthropological explorations, that directly addresses differences in the expression and articulation of the understanding and experience of space and place and their relevance in a broader context.

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9 See also my own discussion in Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 21–43. The relation between place and boundary or limit is also at issue in Ed Casey’s discussion of place and edge, both in his essay here and in his The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). Although I am here treating ‘limit’ and ‘boundary’ as more or less equivalent terms, there are distinctions to be made between them. Casey thus takes ‘limit’ to be the narrower term, and distinguishes it from ‘edge’ and ‘boundary’ (see ‘Edges vs. Limits’ in his The World on Edge). In Kant, ‘limit’ (in German Schranke) and ‘boundary’ (Grenze) also seem to have different senses – see my discussion of this issue in ‘Ground, Unity, and Limit’, in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 20012), pp. 84–85. 10 Even within the sciences, place maintains a certain problematic presence, especially in the biological and environmental sciences (see, e.g. Ian Billick and Mary V. Price [eds], The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010]), and especially so in relation to issues of boundary and limit. The notion of an ecosystem, for instance, can be seen as an essentially topographic or topological notion, and the difficulty of ecosystem identification and definition reflects the difficulty of identification and definition that attends upon place and places. Here it is the character of place as tied to boundary or limit – and of bound and limit as themselves tied to place – that comes to fore. Since such questions extend across all and every form of scientific inquiry, so too can place, in spite of its seeming disappearance, be seen to remain always at issue. 11 Aristotle, Physics IV, 208a30, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 354. 12 For more on the nature of this ‘derivative’ relation between space and place, see my ‘Putting Space in Place: Philosophical Topography and Relational Geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 232–237. 13 Note that ‘topography’ here does not mean the study of the surface of the earth nor merely the in-depth inquiry into the character of particular landscapes (though it has affinities with both). ‘Topography’ is also not to be contrasted with ‘topology’ (as it is in some geographical contexts). Rather it is intended as a mode of inquiry that takes place itself as its focus – see ‘Putting Space in Place’, p. 227. 14 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 145.

1

Place and a Kind of Sentience – These Trees in Particular Susan Stewart

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines – Thoreau, ‘Winter Visitors’, Walden How the pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay – Melville, Moby Dick

Three pine masts lodged in the clay of the pining sailors. You can’t move the trees and expect them to grow. Born with the elm, you will die with it. A beech axle splintered by fury. Ash for the bat and birch for the arrow. An olive in the teeth stops the teeth. Acorns pour down after the drought, up all night from the rat-a-tat-a-tat. You get a straight story from an oak and afterwards, disarming silence. Black yew, black cypress, widow’s weeds will follow.

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Susan Stewart Poplar and willow, weak by the water. Swamp maple, weak at heart. In the shade of the plane tree, they’ll listen to stones all day, provided they tell the truth. If the trees are unfamiliar, you’re the stranger. The chestnut will never come back. Keep your myrrh in a holly cupboard, the laurel wreath on a hook by your door, make the door from the planks of the broken table, and the table from the planks of the broken floor – Dress the fir’s amber wound with the tarbrush. Hang suet and seeds for the waxwing. When you recognize the trees, you must be home.

‘These Trees in Particular’, from Columbarium by Susan Stewart. Copyright © 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

2

Place and Limit Massimo Cacciari Translated by Søren Tinning and Samuel Henk Dames

Limit has many senses. In general, it seems to indicate the ‘line’ along which two domains touch each other: cum-finis.1 The limit distinguishes, therefore, by combining; it establishes a distinction while determining an ad-finitas. As the finis is set (finis probably has the same root of figere) a ‘contact’ is ‘persistently’ determined. But – before elaborating this essential idea, which develops together with our own language – are we to understand ‘limit’ as limen or limes? The limen is the threshold, which the god Limentinus guards, the passage through which one accesses a domain or through which one exits from it. Through the threshold we are received, or otherwise e-liminated. It can direct us to the ‘center’ or open onto the un-limited, to that which does not have form or measure, ‘where’ we fatally disappear.2 Limes, on the other hand, is the path that circumscribes a territory, and that determines its form. Its line can be oblique, certain (limus), or accidental, but it nonetheless balances, in some way, the danger that thresholds, passages and the limen represent. Where does the emphasis lie when we say limit [confine3]: is it on the continuum of the limes – the space of the limit – or on the ‘open gateway’ of the limen? Yet there can be no limit that is not both limen and limes together. The line (lyra) that encloses the city must be well secured; it must represent a finis strong enough to condemn the one who comes to be e-liminated into the de-lirium by it. Delirium comes to the one who does not acknowledge the limit or who cannot be accepted by it. But the limit is never a rigid frontier. This is so, not only because the city must grow (civitas augescens), but because there is no limit that is not ‘interrupted’ by limina, and there is no limit that is not ‘contact’, that does not also establish an ad-finitas. In short, the limit escapes any attempt to determine it univocally, to ‘confine’ it to a single meaning. That which, according to the root of the

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notion, should appear firmly secured (like the herms of the god Terminus at the boundaries of fields), reveals itself, at the end, as indeterminate and ambiguous. And this is so, above all, for those ‘immaterial’ limits that allow the touching of the conscious and the unconscious, memory and oblivion. . . . The difficulty of defining the limit does not, however, do away with the need for it. The limit itself cannot be e-liminated. Our search for a place where we can dwell, a place which a limes can guard, seems a necessary one. We build and construct in response to this need. No ‘nomadism’ can silence it: nomads bring their own place with them – the carpet, in all its symbolic richness.4 They enter onto the carpet as we enter into the house. Likewise, an object, a talisman, can serve as a place that follows the nomad everywhere and defines her Lebensraum. This need cannot be suppressed; yet, to satisfy it is a challenge. We cannot dwell [abitare] (and therefore build), we have no ethos, if we do not draw limits – even if it seems impossible to define these limits rigorously. Perhaps Aristotle’s Physics provides a suggestion that allows us to solve our aporia. The idea of the limit refers, as one can see, to the idea of place; the limit defines a place, even if problematically. But what is a place? According to Aristotle, anyone who concerns themselves with physis, must necessarily seek to understand place. ‘All suppose that things which exist are somewhere (pou)’.5 Entities are characterized by their ‘residing’ in a topos. But to know the nature of topos (its ti esti) is a matter of the greatest difficulty, a search ‘beset with aporias’.6 Although it seems to have extension, topos is neither matter nor body,7 and neither can it be form (since it is evident that bodies do not have their form by virtue of the places where they are located), and neither is it the principle nor the end of movement. Perhaps entities are located in a place like bodies in a vessel? Is the relation between entities and place like the relation between the container and that which it contains?8 But bodies do not ‘bump into’ their place like objects inside a vessel. Container and contained are in fact different in nature, which does not at all seem to be the case for the relation between thing and place. Neither can we assert that place is the interval between container and contained (a diastema serving as metaxy9), because this interval either does not exist at all or it is continuously ‘exceeded’ by the movement of the thing. There remains, then, but one possible way of understanding topos: it is the limit (peras) of the container insofar as it touches the contained im-mediately (without diastemametaxy).10 Place, that is to say, is the extremities themselves, in im-mediate contact, ta eschata.11 This means that it is impossible to define place without referring to body; no topos exists ‘uninhabited’, because its concept entails the eschaton of the entity that persists with it. As a result, topos is not to be conceived

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as a uniform, equivalent, and empty extension; it should never be confused with the idea of a priori space. But how are we to understand the contact between the eschata? Is it possible to conceive it as an immobile line? It has already been shown how the comparison with the vessel does not hold. Entities do not define their limit by colliding with it, as if against an impenetrable wall, separated by abstraction from them. Every entity is certainly contained within its limit, but it is due to its movement that this limit, this extreme or end of the entity, touches upon other extremities. The container is nothing but the eschaton of another body. From time to time, place is defined at the limit [con-fine] of contact between bodies, where each is both the container and the contained, the limiting and the limited. Topos, then, appears as another name for the extreme limit of the entity, the point or the line where it enters into contact with what is other to it, where it ‘offers itself ’ completely to its contact with the other. Yet if this is so, then place is nothing else but the limit, the extreme edge of the entity, that is, its shared end [fine comune] with what is other to it. Place cannot be defined except as the eschaton of the entity, that is, as its limit. The limit is the essence of place. The place is where the thing experiences its own limes, the line that contains it, but which at once, in containing, also sets it in relation. The place is where the thing ‘becomes’ contact and relation. Language itself can ‘think’ this problem: do we not call the fundamental theme of a discourse its topos? Do we not call those places in a tradition, in which it seems to concentrate its ultimate meaning topoi? Is topos not the eschaton or akme of a cultural formation? The German notion Ort originally indicated the point, the extremity, or edge of an object, or the place or region at the furthermost limit of a territory. Place is ‘where’ the place ends, and the place has its end where the entities it contains reach their limit, where they appear in the extremity of their form [figura]. The limit does not, therefore, delimit the place from outside, as something that contains the entities (like a container, a vessel), instead, the limit constitutes the place. Place persists-consists in its limit; it is, so to speak, only conceivable eschatologically. Topos is ‘where’ turned towards its own limit. Topology, hence, cannot be separated from ‘tropology’: to define a place is to describe the movement of the entities ‘contained’ within it at their eschaton, their conversio at their own ultimate limit. Da-sein, Being-here, means Being-for, Being-addressed towards one’s own limit [bordo], being for one’s own end. Topos et tropos convertuntur. The limit is also, however, limit-with [il fine è con-fine] – contact with the other. The extreme limit of an entity, that which to the greatest extent defines

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it, is also shared, that which it has essentially in common with what is other to it. For that reason, no limit can contain the place. No limit can e-liminate the other or exclude it, because it implicates the other in its own essence. That topos is limit means that it is a relational term, or rather: nomen agentis: place is the addressing of the entities towards their own eschaton. Place is given when this addressing finds its end in the pròblema of the other, in the appearing of the other that touches us, and which we can in no way avoid, just as we cannot escape the limit of our own body. Precisely because place is ‘located’ at the limit, no place can be isolated through abstraction. As being-limit the place becomes limen. If the place closed off its own threshold, walled up its confinium, and therefore did not know how to recognize in the other the con-finis – that which in limiting is related, the ad-finis – the place would no longer be a place. Eliminating the limit-contact eliminates the place. The idea that the place can be defined in isolation evidently refers to the image of the vessel, the container, as something separate both from the bodies that dwell in it as well as their movement. But place can only be conceived as the extreme edge of these bodies, eschaton which always subsists, even if its outline continuously changes; eschaton, which is in im-mediate contact with another extremity, on the cusp of other bodies, and is necessarily ventured in its relation with them. Consequently, the clearer one outlines the line of contact, the limit, the more it becomes threshold, that is limen. A body cannot transgress its own limit and exit from itself – rather, it is the limit itself that escapes any rigid determination, it is the contact that refuses any univocal meaning. Bodies do not transgress; it is the limit itself that always transgresses. Transgression is the mode of being the limit, because the limit entails polemos among its characteristics (according to all the possible meanings of polemos) – but the limit will always redefine itself, precisely because bodies cannot transgress their own eschaton. The limit cannot be transgressed since it itself is transgression. This is a difficult and paradoxical situation: we have no other way to respond to that original need to dwell in our own place than to conceive of it at the limit, as limit. The limit is that through which relations and conflicts are generated, through which the place is constantly placed in danger, which is also to say, re-placed on its path. Securing place by attempting to close its limit will not deliver dwelling from danger, it does not constitute a solid ethos, but exactly the opposite. To close a place off does not, in fact, safeguard or defend it, but rather erases it – it violates the nature and the authentic meaning of the place, rather than aiding it. Far from securing dwelling, all attempts to ‘fortify’ place cause

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a mortal blow to it, since a place which defines itself by excluding the other, which does not want the other to touch it, and that claims its limit to be immune from the other, will inevitably transform itself into a prison for those who dwell in it. But the outcome is the same if we exalt the ‘transgression’ implicit in the idea of limit by simply annulling the limit itself. Many rhetoricians of exilic nomadism as well as hollow cosmopolitanisms perfectly represent the other side of the claustrophobia typical of ‘localisms’. In annulling the limit, we annul the idea of the lived body;12 we preclude ourselves from the understanding of place as the extreme limit of our living body – we reify place and prevent any authentic foundation of the possibility of relation. Ontologically, this possibility can only take root in the being-limit of the place, in the being of place ‘where’ the con-fines touch each other. Relation is possible only if the limit is given – otherwise, there will be no relation, but a confusion of indifferent bodies in a homogenous space. Nevertheless, it is exactly this that appears to be the current situation: the creation of one single indifferent space in which closed identities seem to oppose one another; in reality a place that defines itself by eliminating its limen is a place that denies itself and thus becomes a factor or agent of the very process it was meant to oppose. This place idiōtēs,13 which closes within itself the entities that constitute it and whose entities do not know how to manifest themselves at their limit, is completely identical with the idea of an indifferent a priori (not communis!) space. Both represent, in other words, the cancellation of the limit. The idolatries of the local14 are on the one hand the product, and on the other, the natural partners of abstract ‘globalization’. But is it really possible to conceive of a single space ‘inhabited’ by nonplaces,15 by ghosts of place, where no limit can subsist and therefore no relation arise. Can the earth be comprehended without poles? Can it assume the image of a great plane, which is freely traversable in every way – a kind of air space (where, for some, earthly mortals are destined anyway)? Certainly, it has long been known that the epoch in which states operated in well-defined spaces, on seemingly well-designated Schauplätze, the epoch of territorially determined sovereignty, is over for good. But does this imply the empire of a single Leviathan16 uprooted from any earthly foundation and capable of dissolving all polarity into itself? Or could this epoch not, instead, assist the appearance of a new idea of place-and-limit? We can now begin to ask the following: does the ‘spatial crisis’ of the Leviathan ‘disastrously’ contradict the logic of the modern state, or does it rather represent its fulfilment? The contemporary, universal Mobilmachung is

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the end of the systematic elimination of differences in time and place, which was already represented by the ‘transcendental condition’ of the sovereignty of the Leviathan. ‘Globalization’ presupposes the systematic reduction of place to the indifferent idiocy and the absolute sovereignty of a priori space; hence ‘globalization’ presupposes the entire history of the modern state, and it is therefore an occidentalization of the entire planet. The crisis of the Leviathan coincides with its complete ‘success’.17 The state’s destiny, its final destination, therefore, certainly did not consist in defending its limits, let alone in conceiving the idea of the limit along the lines we have here proposed. The modern state moves towards overstepping itself and so it produces ‘closed places’, transforming the limit into frontier – frontiers that are not so much physico-geographical or political-institutional but cultural, economical, and ecological. The immanent logic of ‘globalization’ eliminates limits and multiplies barriers: in fact, if the limit is missing the relation ceases to be – since it can only take place between individualities – and difference can only manifest itself as inequality. How can a global sovereignty – which today displays the economy as its sole rationale – continue to reign if it should emerge as ever more evident that its promise of ‘participation’ in economic well-being cannot be fulfilled? If it should become ever more apparent that the elimination of the limit (conceived as an obstacle, as an element of separation and therefore ignored in its truth), far from producing ‘equality’, produces a global proletariat that is completely uprooted? And if it should become ever more apparent, ever clearer that the elimination of the limit produces divisions? Could the backlash of these aporias of ‘globalization’ perhaps open a new perspective on place-and-limit? Not, however, a reactionary perspective – on the contrary, the limit in the shape of a static container, and place as its ‘idiotic’ content are the negations of limit and the place as such, and are therefore both producer and product of ‘globalization’ at the same time. The idea of place as the ‘where’ that is capable of encompassing entities, in the full expression of their form, in a certain respect takes ‘globalization’ exceptionally seriously: it wants to do so to the very end, to the extreme, because it does not tolerate any limit separated from the eschaton of the lived body. In another respect, this body always constitutes itself ‘at the limit’, it can never transgress itself – it is ‘here’, at its extreme, that it enters into relation with the other, that it overcomes any separateness. This idea ‘trails’ the configuration of ‘globalization’, corroding it from inside its own domain. Who could carry out such an idea? Certainly not the powers that constitute themselves on the basis of religion or the gnosis

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of the One, on equality conceived as the elimination of the non-identical. Could Europe, instead, rethink and reshape itself according to this meaning of limit? It is, in fact, in relation to the problem of its own limit that Europe today addresses the question of its destiny. And what continually emerges from this debate is that it is Europe itself that is a limit – that is that place that has a name, the name of limit.18 Europe must decide in what sense, in what direction, it is to seek its own eschaton. It can no longer ‘remain in itself ’, as was possible for it after the Second World War, compelled by the two giant non-European victors. But that epoch is now over. Europe will define its space and hence itself insofar as it decides its own limit. If it erects a frontier to the East and to the South, and moves towards the West, it will become a part, and nothing else, of the very globalization-occidentalization referred to above. If it moves towards the Orient and, simultaneously, towards the Mediterranean, if it embraces the East and the South, it will be able to be place-and-limit, to be confinis and recognize the confines19 as essential to its own idea. In its decline into the great Occidental ocean it would vanish and nothing more; its decline into the Orient and the Mediterranean could, on the other hand, represent the ‘invention’ of its place.20

Postscript – 2015 Is the idea of Europa as movement towards the cum-finis – as a place characterized by movement towards an eschaton that cannot be categorically determined – to be considered as ou-topos, and, therefore, as having the political value precisely of utopian thought? Or does it even carry in itself a practical force to be translated into action? We can today verify the failure of every attempt to close European space, to eliminate its limina by transforming them into barriers. Such attempts everyday are increasingly frustrated, motivated as they are even by opposite incentives: from the logic of market growth, to the compelling force of streams of migration from the South. On the one hand, in fact, it seems to be simply a matter of following the logic of expansion, but on the other it would appear to be a case of erecting Chinese walls. Any attempt to make the place ‘Europe’ stand firmly in itself already seems a failure. But Europe is pursuing the course of its own destiny without demonstrating any capacity to understand it and even less to deal with it, with already tragic consequences. The less it is possible to ‘contain’ its form, the more its internal, regressive tendencies towards closed spaces multiply – nostalgic idolatries of the ancient form of the

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State, mythologies of identity. The place of Europe threatens to fragment into a mass of dis-identities. At the outset of the modern view of the world, Giordano Bruno conceived of space as infinite and containing infinite worlds, each in relation – a ‘starry friendship’21 – with the others. Every world is place in itself. Place is the movement that each body completes in its relation to others. There is no privileged centre; every place is the Sun. But bodies also necessarily know the vicissitude that brings their destruction. Substance is ‘ingenita et incorruptibilis’, but the form that it assumes in various bodies is necessarily subject to variation, change, and infinite decay. Even Suns die out (or, disappear from our sky). Is the idea of space that excited Bruno irretrievable? Simply a ghostly possibility, which never really worked? Certainly, Europe today is simply un-doing itself in its disparate and contradictory attempt to assemble itself as a container that expands by closing and excluding at the same time. The utopian energy of words such as Bruno’s can, at the least, help us understand the danger, if not also help foster hope.

Notes * This essay was originally published, in a slightly different version, as ‘Nomi di luogo: confine’, in Aut Aut 299–300 (2000): 73–79; the ‘Postscript’ was written in March 2015 specifically for the essay’s publication here. 1 Translators’ note: Cacciari often uses Latin, Greek and German notions. These will, as in the original text, remain untranslated and in italics. He also uses italics for highlighting words in Italian of specific significance. These words will be translated into English, but remain italicized. 2 The un-limited, apeiron, is the original condition for places to appear. It has a role analogous to that of chora, of the ‘room’ (sede, which means seat or location) of all things that have birth – Plato, Timaeus, 52b, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961 – Bollingen Series LXXI). The German Raum – the space in as much as it is, in Heidegger, Freigabe von Orten (i.e. release of places, the space as making-space for places) – carries a similar sense. Within the limits of the present text it is not possible to confront the relation between topos-chora, nor all the problems that its elaboration raises in Heidegger. 3 Translators’ note: Cacciari here emphasizes the confine adding limite, that is, ‘limit’. This has been omitted in the translation here as it is already implied in the translation of confine into ‘limit’.

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4 There are some beautiful passages on the carpet as dwelling place (dimora) in relation to the general phenomenological theme of Lebensraum in S. Bettini, ‘Poetica del tappeto orientale’, Tempo e forma. Scritti 1935–1977, ed. Andrea Cavalletti (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1996). 5 Aristotle, Physics IV, 208a 29, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. Oxford, trans. and ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984 – Bollingen Series LXX). 6 Physics IV, 208a 32–33. 7 Physics IV, 209a 16–17. 8 Physics IV, 209b 28–30. 9 Physics IV, 211b 7–8, for the Greek see Aristotle, Physics Books I–IV, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1953 [Loeb Classical Library]). 10 Physics IV, 212a 6. 11 Physics IV, 211b8. 12 Translators’ note: Cacciari is here using the expression corpo proprio, which most likely refers to Husserl’s Leib or Merleau-Ponty’s corpre propre. 13 Translators’ note: The Greek term idiōtēs (ἰδιώτης) signified a private individual as opposed to a public person, with detrimental implications: someone who was ignorant due to their self-centredness, from being closed off from public life, that is, from the state, or polis (πόλις). 14 Or more precisely, the empty rituals through which one imagines ‘local autonomies’ that do not fight for anything but to be ‘salient spaces’ of the very same ‘globalization’ (from the moment which this, still, ultimately has to ‘find ground’ somewhere . . .). 15 Translators note: Luoghi-non-loughi literally means ‘places-non-places’. The reference here is most likely to Marc Augé and his concept of non-lieu, that is, ‘non place’ – see Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). 16 What political form can ‘globalization’ assume? The form of the Weltstaat prophesized by Jünger? Yet, is the word ‘state’ not already obsolete in the face of the total immanence of the supremacy of technology? On the other hand, can this absolutely new kind of sovereignty avoid having to represent itself politically, can it dominate im-mediately, without representation of itself? 17 In general this is valid in all aspects. The supremacy of technology itself is the fulfillment of the deus artificialis. The connection between the construction of the modern state and technical rationality is constitutive. 18 Translator’s note: The original Italian reads ‘E sempre più emerge da questo dibattito che è l’Europa stessa a esser confine – a essere quel luogo che ha nome, appunto, confine’. The final part of this sentence can be interpreted in two partly

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overlapping ways: one where Europe has the name of limit, or where Europe has a name because it has a limit. We have opted for the first interpretation in order to emphasize the aporia of the limit and thus the aporia of the name of Europe. The second interpretation is more ambivalent, since it could also identify Europe as a non-ambivalent name and hereby entail a non-ambivalent concept of the limit. 19 Translator’s note: Confines here, is left untranslated, and should therefore be understood in its Latin sense. 20 That would entail that ‘globalization’ (if the globe does not allow for the dissolving of the polarities . . .) could define itself through the ‘great spaces’ full of ‘sense’ (Schmitt). Or is the idea of the ‘great spaces’ inevitably connected to the age of imperialism, that is, to the states and wars of the past? 21 ‘Sternen-Freundschaft’ – Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (‘la gaya scienza’), Book IV, Aphorism #279, in Werke in Zwei Bänden, Vol. II (Stuttgart: Deutscher Bücherbund, 1955), p. 163.

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Place and Edge Edward S. Casey

Boundary (horos) is the primary cause of bodies. Iamblichus, cited by Simplicius, In Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quatturo Priores Commentaria; translated in Samuel Sambursky, The Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism, p. 45. That edges belong properly to things is a commonly held view that is as ancient as Socrates, who claimed that an edge is ‘the limit of a solid’.1 On this view – espoused by Iamblichus in the epigraph to this essay – edges (e.g. qua ‘boundaries’) attach to things regarded as solid substances: that is, as threedimensional objects that are material in their constitution. I take this to be tantamount to the literal reification of the edge-world, tying edges down to concrete physical things: an object-obsessed approach to edges. Certainly, some edges do belong to physical objects – as is most clearly the case with rims and frames and gaps. But do all edges inhere in material things? This essay will explore the hypothesis that this is not the case – that there is at least one significant class of edges that do not attach to physical objects as such: those belonging to places. (Another great class of edges accrue to events; but this is another story.2) The fact that edges can belong to different kinds of things should not be taken to mean that edges are merely detachable or free-floating: that a given kind of edge can belong to any kind of thing. Every edge is the edge of something: if not of a discrete material thing, then of non-things such as events and places, even if these latter are turn composed of things with their own edges. And each such sort of edge has its own characteristics and properties. The aim of this essay is to spell out what is distinctive about the

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edges of places. To explore such edges is to learn something not only about a special kind of edge but also something important about places themselves. I. When I am in New York City on 110th St. in the block just west of the Frederick Douglass Memorial, I find myself in a very definite place, peculiar to that part of the city with its own atmosphere, diverse population, and local street scene. Living on this very block myself, I recognize certain rhythms of pedestrian and traffic movement, and even the way the wind courses through the street. I am also familiar with the patterns of sunlight and shadow that fall upon the street in several configurations when the sky is clear. None of the phenomena I have just mentioned – automobile and bodily rhythms, wind and light patterns, population make-up, and the overall atmosphere – is a concrete material thing, and yet each belongs to the place in which I find myself. In this same place, physical things are certainly also present: the human bodies and cars that exhibit the rhythms I feel, the traffic lights and signs, parking meters, street curbs, the buildings that line this visual canyon, and much more. Each of these things certainly has its own edges – even if the exact character differs from thing to thing. The edges of the parking meters and street curbs are blunt in comparison with the sharpness of the edges of street signs and street lights; those of the buildings vary from acute to moulded, depending on the architectural style of the building in question. The edges of the people passing by on the street are also various, ranging from angular to bulbous, and with very diverse fringes (of hair, clothing, hands, shoes). Everywhere I look I see not just things but the edges of those things – and edges of quite variegated kinds. Yet this same place has its own edge, the edge of the place. How is this to be described? It is tempting to do so in terms of urban geography: say, as ‘the southern edge of Harlem on its west side’. This edge so designated is largely a construct of city planners and urban historians – and of mapmakers who depict regions of New York City in coherent cartographic space. Members of each of these three groups of figures are at a certain remove from the place on which their interests converge. The urban historian depends on a certain temporal distance, enough distance to be able to claim that certain groups of people have settled in at given moments in historical time. The city planner, though aware of the pertinent urban past that preoccupies the historian, is intent on projecting a future for this place – how it will fit into a civic space that will improve living conditions for the inhabitants of the various neighbourhoods making up this

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part of Manhattan. The cartographer presents an image of how the city is configured in the present; at the very moment when the map is published. But this convergence between the current reality of the city and its more or less isomorphic representation in a map cannot undo the spatial distance between the cartographic image and the urban reality it purports to represent. The historian, city planner, and cartographer all discuss or depict a given place from a position outside that place – from their offices or studies or libraries. They conceive and depict the edges of this place from another place, another location. Those who inhabit the place itself or who daily traverse its space have a different sense of edges from that of the persons just discussed. They know them from up close – from within their own experience. They know them as belonging to a ‘near sphere’ in Husserl’s term for a space that is as proximal as it is familiar. The edges of the place they know are not manifested primarily by words or images – by history, or plans, or maps – but by the specific experiences the inhabitants themselves undergo daily. The place’s edges are delivered by these experiences rather than by images and words. Such experiences are in turn a function of the lived body and, more particularly, the ‘habitual body’ in Merleau-Ponty’s expression. For they arise from the repeated movements of the place-dweller’s body, from his or her customary walking through the place and the associated looking at it (smelling it, touching it, etc.) as well as from the memorial wake left by these walks and looks. Not just history but historizing is here at stake: the way the lived bodies of inhabitants create their own history in space, their own place in time – and their own edge-world on the basis of both.3 Let me be still more specific by citing my own experiences in the place I have singled out. I live in a building on the south side of 110th St. that is located in the very block to which I have been alluding. For me, this building forms one very particular edge of the street scene as I have described it; this is so in two respects. From inside my apartment, it acts as a threshold from which I view the street below as I look down upon it from time to time. This threshold coincides with my bodily location at or near the windowsill. But when I go down onto the street to do errands, I sense the entire building in which I live as the massive southern edge of the same street. Instead of coinciding with my bodily position, it stands over against my moving body as if it were a wall or, better, a silent sentinel that towers over my bodily motions on the street. This is not a matter of a double edge; one and the same set of edges is at stake throughout, namely, those that define the north façade of the apartment building on whose top floor I reside. But this facade has a double aspect: one as experienced from inside out

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and the other as experienced entirely from the outside. These constitute two ways of being an edge of the place that opens out into Harlem from the south side of 110th St. The building’s facade, however, is not the only edge of this place. There is also the other building across the street, the architectural twin of the building in which I reside, having the same overall dimensions. This building furnishes the northern edge of 110th St. Unlike my own building, I experience it only from the outside and from below – from the street. Its exterior has a certain austerity and is almost forbidding: it seems distinctly other. My own building, in contrast, containing my residence as it does, feels familiar, and its outer edges are at once deepened and softened in comparison with the building across the street to the north. As an integral part of my current life, its external edges seem less formidable, more familiar, and more forgiving than those of the building that is its exact physical counterpart. In this circumstance, I experience a modulation of edge that is especially characteristic of places – a modulation that itself may take many forms, for example, in colour, texture, height, shape, architectural style and so on. Unlike rims, which tend to be repetitive and standard for the physical things of which they are the rims, the edges of places have multiple aspects – even when they are of the same basic type (here, two symmetrical buildings facing each other, each being a slight variation of the other). This multiplicity partly reflects the fact that the edges of places are often difficult to pin down exactly; but it is also a function of the fact that the experience of being in a place is indispensable to the way its edges present themselves. In the case I have just described, the differential modulation of the two sets of edges – those of the building on the south side of 110th St. versus those of the building on the north side – arises mainly from the fact that I reside in one of these buildings and not in the other and thus draw on a very different experiential base when I walk between them. Still other edges are at stake in this one particular place: those of the sidewalk and street under my feet, those of the shops at street level, those even of the sky under which I walk. In the case of sidewalks, for example, edges are experienced as unevennesses in the surfaces on which I walk or which I casually notice around me. They belong entirely to the material from which these surfaces are constructed: asphalt and concrete. These edges are creatures of the material medium that intervenes between my moving body and the earth underneath. In contrast with any edges the earth itself might possess – for example, those of rocks or other hard masses – the edges I feel underfoot on 110th St. are altogether artificial. This artificiality is not just a fact of their generation or history but

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something I actively sense as such, something I know to be the case with my lived body itself. Such corporeal knowing (connaissance du corps, as MerleauPonty might put it) is integral to my experience of the place I am in and thus part of its primary identity for me. Other artificial surfaces and edges abound in this urban place. As my eyes lift off the pavement, they encounter the doors and windows of stores and shops – those of Central Market on the south side of the street, those of Amrita Café, Dorita cleaners, a bicycle rental store, a boutique for the care of nails. The edges in these modest-scale structures are entirely rectilinear rims, and they intercalate closely with each other: the vertical edge of the café on the west is chock-a-block with the edge of the cleaners that stands next to it, and the edges of this latter are contiguous with those of Lila’s nail shop. Everywhere I look, juxtaposition is the order of the day. I find myself in a fabricated world where everything has been crafted by implements or is itself an implement (e.g. the doors on these stores). This is the domain of the ready-to-hand, that is, of things manufactured for practical employment: tools, clothes, sandwiches, cups, bottles. On 110th St., these things are made available at street level, where they are delivered or displayed. In the busy world of local stores and cafés, a tight mosaic of edges reflects even as it supports a commercial life in which accessibility is indispensable. From such a mosaic of intercalation and integumentation, there seems no escape in this dense metropolitan place-world. Nevertheless, escape lies close at hand. All I need to do is to look up – straight up. When I do so, a generous canopy of air and light opens above me. It has an embracing presence of which I am aware even when I am not focusing on it. In particular, I am conscious of its sheer vertical height: it is so high up that nothing exceeds it nor can it be measured as such. It is a striking instance of ‘the Vertical’ in Heidegger’s term for the ultimate dimension that links earth and sky. Despite its sheer height, the sky is also immanent in my experience of the street, integral to it. In its sheer height and deep immanence, the sky would seem to lack edges – to be at the opposite end of the edge spectrum from the apartment buildings and commercial establishments that sport so many salient intersecting edges. But is this so? The sky is certainly not a surface in any usual sense; it is too diaphanous for this, and it has an indefinite depth that defies any metric determination. Even in this nebulous situation, however, we can discern edges; namely, those belonging to clouds and other atmospheric phenomena, and those where the sky’s visual appearance is intercepted by buildings that cut across it at acute angles. These latter edges stand out all the more on a cloudless day; they are an intrinsic feature of the presentation of the sky as seen from below.4 Their

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exact identity seems ambiguous: do such edges belong to the upper parts of the buildings or to the sky itself? In fact, they belong to both: they are instances of edges so intimately shared that we cannot say for sure to which of their bearers they properly belong. We here come upon a quite general structure – let us call it the edge/edge relation – that is by no means confined to the way the sky is profiled against high buildings. Other instances of this relation include edges arising from the occlusion of one object by another: say, those formed by the way a parked car is seen against a building as I walk across the street; or the manner in which the sign of the Esso gas station on the corner of 110th St. and Frederick Douglass Blvd. is set against the bare brick wall of the apartment building adjacent to it on the east. Indeed, virtually everywhere we look, we see congeries of edges that are the outcome of such occlusions; walking in Central Park, just across the street to the east, I observe the way that tree branches cut across the small hills behind them, spontaneously forming a new set of edge/edge relations with each change of position I take. In this common but rarely remarked-upon phenomenon, we see evidence that edges as experienced are not confined to single things or places alone – clinging to them exclusively – but arise in the interface between two or more things or places, and from there ramify throughout entire cityscapes and landscapes. The edge/edge relation takes two major forms. (a) In certain cases, it signifies the sharing of edges – sometimes clearly distinguished as with the chock-a-block edges of stores next to each other on W. 110th St.; sometimes so deeply merged that we cannot tell them apart, as when a table top is made from pieces of the same wood so finely glued together as to be indistinguishable in their edges; and sometimes distinctively different but such that we cannot say to which thing or place the edges belong (e.g. those of sky from those of the buildings profiled against it). (b) Still other edges are not shared in any of these three senses but nevertheless closely collude. In this instance, we can discern two variations: edges that are separately distinguishable but together outline a given physical object (and to this degree belong to it), and edges that interact with the immediate background of the same object, thus spawning edges in this background that do not belong intrinsically to it (e.g. of a building as profiled against a car or of hills in Central Park as seen through tree branches): ‘negative edges’ in that they belong in the first place to another object, as we witness in the edges of shadows. Places are peculiar in that all of their edges take the form of edge/edge relations, whether as sharing or as colluding: every edge of a place is interactive

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rather than intrinsic. There is no edge of any place that does not emerge from the way that place is situated in its own larger environs and that does not reflect in some way the character of the place for which it serves as edge, including the particular things that populate it. With rare exceptions, the edges of a place interact with the environing world in manifold and subtle ways.5 Here we are at an opposite extreme from rims and frames, which are to be considered edges mainly because of their inherence in discrete single objects: for such objects, interactive edges may occur, but if so they are secondary in status. II. But let us return to the original scene on 110th St. I have omitted mention of one other aspect of this particular place. Not only the sky above but the vistas opening at both ends of this street allow it to breathe in a way that being confined inside these buildings cannot. These vistas, one on the east and one on the west, are like glass walls in that I can see through them and can take in contents differing from those found in the immediate street scene itself. This is not to deny that some of these contents are the same as or similar to those situated in the place I began by describing: 110th St. continues in both directions, as do the sidewalks. But something else is conspicuously present in the vista offered by this street: city parks beckon at each end – Central Park in the east, Morningside Park to the west. The distinctively different set of appearances these parks present provide welcome relief from the densely constructed reality of the rest of the street world of 110th St. These appearances exhibit a blend of edges that are more sinuous and supple than any that characterize the buildings, pavements, and streets that make up the rest of this south Harlem scene. Such edges are not as constant as those of constructed things; they change with seasons and display different colours and shapes, textures and volumes than we find in the built world. The diverse edges that structure the comparatively open space of the parks as I look in their direction from the street is such that the two ends of this urban scene are experienced as beckoning to me, offering an exit from an otherwise unrelieved metropolitan street scene. At the same time, the edges of this scene concatenate with the edges of the two parks to form a complex nexus of edges that, despite their many formal differences, are experienced as belonging together to the same urban situation. In the end, different as the sky and park dimensions of this place are from those that characterize the buildings, all these various elements combine as components of the same experienced place. Taken together, they co-inhere. If human beings have any doubt about this, they need only consult the many

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birds (seagulls, herons, hawks, robins, sparrows) that fly freely between all the parts of this place, whether these parts are naturally given or humanly devised. Their agile movements act to stitch the various parts together, constituting one continuous world – as if to complement and complete the way a single glance can sweep through the same scene and grasp it as one coherent place. Most important for our present purposes, however, is the fact that the edges of the two parks exemplify a basic trait of placial edges: their capacity to reach out into their environs in subtle ways while also conveying a sense of their own character and content as places. Such edges are open-textured and porous. Not only do they define or enclose a place; they extend that place into what lies around it – they take it into the circumambient space. III. Several sorts of edge conspire in the making of a single place. To be a place at all is to possess just such a multiplicity of edge-types. This is an important part of what I meant when I just called places ‘open-textured’ – in contrast with sites, which are spaces that are determined in strict terms by the closure effected by imposed or imputed limits, all within the context of homogeneous and isotropic space.6 Where a material thing tends to feature one kind of edge (often, though not exclusively, a rim or a frame of a certain sort), a place characteristically possesses a variety of edges. Moreover, this variety obtains even for a single place – such as the New York street scene I described in the last sections. Even though there are certainly more complicated places than that of W. 110th St. where I live, even this one particular place shows itself to be rife with edges of disparate sorts – so many, in fact, that my description of it could continue indefinitely. A proliferation of edges inheres in any given place, more so than in any given thing in that place: this much we may take as a general rule.7 A place is a peculiarly powerful catchment area of edges, absorbing and exhibiting a vast variety of them – natural and artificial, conspicuous and understated, fully presented or only adumbrated. This reflects the fact that a place has no single definitive edge, no set limit in any strict sense. In contrast, to have a definite edge is a basic feature of sites. But places – and regions, which I construe as collocations of places – are not so restricted. Consider how places which we designate by phrases such as ‘Gramercy Park’ or ‘Battery Park’ – or regions such as ‘Mid-town Manhattan’ or ‘the financial district’ – refuse to be characterized as stopping or starting at a certain precise point, whatever city maps may claim. By the same token, when places and regions intersect, they do so in diffuse ways that defy definite, much less complete, description. South Harlem merges into the Upper West Side across Morningside Park, which acts

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as a buffer zone between these two regions, at once connecting and separating them. Yet no local inhabitant is likely to say that South Harlem extends only to a particular point – say, to Manhattan Ave. but not one yard beyond. In Morningside Park (which abuts Manhattan Ave.), Harlem residents mix with Upper West Side residents and Columbia University students. Such intermediary or liminal spaces abound in cities, even if only in the form of sidewalks. Their existence makes it difficult to establish a strict border between two or more parts of the city. The indefiniteness of the edges of these parts precludes any such determination. City neighbourhoods, for example, are notoriously difficult to specify as to just where they begin or end. In short, the edges of places are more like boundaries than borders. They share with boundaries an inherent openness and vagueness of spatial extent. These two qualities are here present in such elementary phenomena as being able to walk back and forth between different places in a city with comparative freedom – with many opportunities for entries and exits: from South Harlem I can approach Columbia University by any number of streets ranging from 110th St. to 120th St. and across the multiple walkways of Morningside Park. It is as if places or regions come supplied with many points of access while permitting new ones as well, like leaks in a roof that needs repair – in direct contrast with sites, whose very definition and existence depend on the maintenance of tightly contained limits. These limits resemble borders much more than boundaries.8 We are thus presented with a situation of double parallelism when it comes to the presence of edges of places and regions: Places/Regions > Boundaries Sites > Borders But to say that the edges of places or regions are like boundaries, and those of sites like borders is not to say tout court that such edges simply are boundaries and borders without remainder. We must be cautious when it comes to establishing the parallelism of traits. Such parallelism, while striking, does not amount to identity. In fact, we are here talking of two different levels of analysis: on the one hand, edges of places/regions versus those of sites; on the other, two basic kinds of edges namely, borders and boundaries. Edges of places and regions evoke boundaries and those of sites suggest borders; but the relation is not symmetrical: it is not the case that boundaries are always (or only) evocative of places or regions or that borders allude only to sites. The

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reason for this is straightforward; borders and boundaries are not just edges of places but also of many things (e.g. artworks, colours, persons, groups, security walls between nations, etc.) and of events as well (e.g. the creation of an artwork, migration across an international border). The differential factor is not that of comparative abstractness or ideality – as it often is when describing the distinction between boundaries and borders taken as concepts – but that of the respective inherence of edges in that to which they properly belong, whether this be a place, a region, a thing, or an event; or, for that matter, their presence in a primary or secondary quality, an idea or a theory, a melody or a saga. IV. Despite its fuzzy fringes (which facilitate close links to a larger constructed or natural environment), place is still somehow a whole; it is equivalent to this part of the world, this neighbourhood, this street scene, this hotel lobby. It may not have a proper name (my own example of the block on 110th St. as given above has no unequivocal toponym); but it is an integral, intuited something: a place is never sheer vapour, or a mere myth; it is not nothing (nor does it come from nothing). The fact that it comes always with edges means that it cannot be entirely nebulous: edges give a certain shape and force to a place. Indeed, its very identity as a place comes in significant measure from its being distinctively edged. Its edges are not just where a place fades out or ends; even if only rarely definite or of one kind only, together they convey the basic character of the place itself, its physiognomy as well as its ingression into a larger encompassing world. Such edges are not merely the exoskeleton of that place but are an integral part of its very being, essential to its being the place it is. This is no more – but also no less – mysterious than the fact that our personal identity has everything to do with our bodily appearance: an appearance that is itself conveyed by the edges of our flesh: edges that constitute our contour as we present ourselves to others.9 We often recognize these same others by the profiles they assume: by the set of edges they project in their bodily bearing, along with (and as an active part of) their gestures, posture and so on. Often a single glance at their profile allows us to identify them without further inference or a separate remembrance or reflection. Likewise, we instantly identify a place by its characteristic shape: even if much else is obscure in our perception of that place, its edges stand out and allow us to recognize it as just that place. Thanks to the pattern formed by these edges, we find the Gestalt familiar: ‘I must be on upper Broadway now, somewhere around 112th St., close to Le Monde café’, we say to ourselves even as the snow swirls around us. Despite the density of the

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atmosphere, we are still able to discern certain edges, enough of them to figure out where we are: say, the edges of the long green awning that is a familiar mark of that same café. The multivalency of the edges of a place synchronizes with the monovalency of its substantial identity. Otherwise put, the basic identity of a place is presented and maintained through its edges – not despite them (as we might think if we consider edges to be obstructive or trivial) but because of them. Edges constitute the distinctive ‘cut’ of the place they bound. Their manyness gains coherence in the oneness of a self-same and self-subsistent place, while the oneness benefits from the multiplicity of edges that ex-tend it. We encounter here a version of the ancient conundrum of the One and the Many: no One without a Many for that One, no Many without a One for this Many. As may be inferred from Parmenides’s and Plato’s discussion of this conundrum, the One would be stultified – would be formal and fixed – without the intervention of the Many. For its part, the Many would be merely dispersed were it not for the unifying force of the One. There is a lesson here for the relationship between a given place and its edges. Place would verge on the formality and definiteness of site were it not for its many absorptive and expansive edges; without these edges, it could not accommodate the mutations of history or physical processes – mutations that are essential for any place to be an ongoing and vital presence. By the same token, without a continuing core of singularity holding it together, a place dissipates into its environs and loses its identity as this place – with the result that it is no longer distinguishable from other places, as happens so often in suburban sprawl, where tract after tract and house after house mime each other. Singularity disappears into sameness. In such situations, edges are mainly conventional or momentary delimitations (e.g. streets that demarcate blocks from each other but do not serve to establish the distinctive identity of any particular place). Such edges fail to delineate a distinctive core that allows us to differentiate one block from the next. They fail to support a characteristic Gestalt of the sort by which a place gains a unique character through its very vicissitudes – as a singular place over time, despite the many changes to which it is subject. In other words, the indefinite and multiple edges of a place requires the main mass of that place – its heft and bulk – for these edges to be effective in giving shape and outreach to this same place, while the place in turn requires these same edges if it is to be sufficiently pliable to be capable of change of the sort which physical or historical events entail. We have to do here with two co-requisite factors, one bearing on sameness and the other on difference.

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Once the conundrum of the One and the Many is brought into the realm of historical and material becoming – where the same and the different are always at stake – it applies with surprising aptness to something that was of little direct interest to Parmenides and Plato: the edges of places. V. By emphasizing the complex fate of edges when they are ingredient in a place, I do not mean to overlook one very particular dimension of such edges: their instrumental character. In Heidegger’s nomenclature (already invoked above), they belong to the realm of the useful: a predicate that obtains for the edges of places and not just for things (as Heidegger presumed).10 Consider the way that one street intersects another, forming an ‘instrumental complex’ (as Sartre put it) whose edges are perpendicular to each other: as obtains both on 110th St. in New York and in many suburbs. The actual shapes of such edges need not be formally geometric or strictly grid-like; indeed, slight irregularities may contribute to their greater utility, since these allow for the give-and-take of ordinary usage. A road that rings around a particular place has edges that are rendered less than rigid in their shape by the roadside areas where tires can be changed, telephone calls can be placed, or naps taken by sleepy drivers. Edges of roads, even those designed to be perfectly straight, depart from geometric perfection and lend themselves all the more effectively to multiple instrumental use. Perhaps most often, edges of places act as orientational, guiding us from one place to another: say, from 110th St. into Central Park. Even though it is by means of edges that we often make our way in the surrounding world – thanks to their acting as effective signposts – not every edge of a thing or a place has an explicitly orienting character. Some placial edges are prized for their aesthetic value, as in the decorative hedgerows around gardens. Still others are valued for their determinate objective dimensions – thus for their very indifference to art or work alike. These are edges of places that are valued for their sheer regularity of shape or size: say, the town square in its very squareness. Whatever the instrumental, aesthetic, or objective value of edges of places, these edges remain resolutely part of the place they describe – distinguishable from that place yet indispensable to its existence and identity. VI. We may take it as a basic axiom that edges belong to places, which are as much edged as are things. I shall close with an analysis of this belongingness, which takes two primary forms:11 (i) terminus ad quem (‘end toward which’). From a given place or set of places, edges begin, spreading out from there – not so as to interdigitate with other

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edges in an instrumental fashion (as when the edges of a wrench engage with those of a recalcitrant bolt) but such that the edges of one place are sources for the edges of other places, generative contours for entire place-worlds. I had this phenomenon in mind earlier when I alluded to the way that the two public parks near W. 110th St. seemed to reach out to me as I glimpsed them. But outreach occurs in wholly natural settings as well. Creosote bushes in southern Nevada desert regions grow densely together up to a certain level of elevation and then abruptly terminate. From that discernible line of termination a new area opens out, one that lacks these bushes altogether and is comparatively barren. One place, that marked by thick creosote growth, leads the eye onward to a contiguous place that is bereft of such growth, the clearly discernible edge of the first area opening onto the prospect of the second. Only twenty miles away from this particular scene, a wall on the far west side of Las Vegas marks the limit of local construction; on its other side, a dry gulch is found, and, just beyond that an uncultivated reserve of hills and mountains of intense colouration and extraordinary configuration. An entirely artificial wall – positioned to mark the outer limit of a local subdivision in the sprawling suburbs of West Las Vegas – gives way to a wild landscape, traversed only by a single access road. In this way, the edges of two places – one being wholly natural, the other a matter of concerted building design – manifest the respective character of these places, their status as ‘wild’ or ‘constructed’. Thanks to the contiguity of their edges, they are continuous with each other, even if dramatically different in aspect and appearance. Questions of utility or exactitude, or even of aesthetics, are not here at stake; the most salient feature of the situation is the way in which one kind of place gives way to another through an implicit directionality that moves from a constructed edge outward towards a wild place. The end of one place, in West Las Vegas, leads to the beginning of another place, a wilderness area at the edge of town. (ii) terminus a quo (‘end from which’). A place not only reaches out to another place through its outer edges; it comes to its own edge; indeed, if it did not come to some edge, it would not count as a place, as this or that place in particular. Within the ambit of this edge, the place for which it serves as an edge takes its rise. This same edge terminates, literally de-fines, the place. In this respect, places require edges as much as things do. Insofar as a place (unlike space in early modern physics) is not infinite, it ends in its own edge. Such an edge as a terminus a quo acts to delimit the place of which it is the edge: to determine it as this place, as extending this far and no farther: to it I must come. From being there, at it, any further connection to other places must stem, including the towards-which directionality at stake in edges regarded as terminii ad quem.

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An example of edge as a terminus a quo comes from the same part of the place-world I have just described. A few years ago, I was part of a silent vigil at the Nevada Test Site – a desolate stretch of land devoted to nuclear and other kinds of bomb testing that is pockmocked by nearly 1000 past explosive tests, some above ground and some underneath. The protesting group I joined was allowed to assemble in just one predesignated place, just outside the main entrance to the test site – an entrance ironically named ‘Mercury’.12 As we gathered together in a circle, we were very aware of the place to which we are confined – both by the barbed-wire fence on the east side of where we were located and by the view of the test site that was visible beyond it. The merest glance took one right up to the fence and then through it to the buildings and other structures of the test site. We were looking into the test site from a determinate viewing place. Our conjoint perception got to there from here, where ‘here’ signifies the enclosing edge of a carefully confined stretch of viewing space. The difference between the two-edge situations can be put thus: in the first, that of the terminus ad quem, an edge of a place is a transitional moment by or through which I move from that place to another; in the second, that is, that of the terminus a quo, I have to do with an edge of place from which I encounter another place. Instead of being smoothly transitional (as when my view went into the hills west of Las Vegas), in the case of the test site my look goes to another place despite being confined by the place in which I am located. I get to a second place from within the prohibitive edges of a first place: those of the barbed wire fence. This contrast is complicated by the fact that the same edge can serve in both capacities. The edge of the creosote growth is at once a terminus a quo and a terminus ad quem, for it opens onto an adjoining nongrowth area even as it marks the outermost position of the creosote bushes themselves. The wall at the city limit points beyond towards the natural places outside the city, but it is also a visible perimeter for the city itself. So, too, the fence at the Nevada Test Site opens out onto the buildings of the Test Site of which it marks the outer limit, but it also defines the space designated for protestors. The Janusian character of these various edges tells us something significant about the role of edges in the place-world. The fact that the two modalities (the to-which and from-which) that I have just identified can characterize one and the same edge indicates a special feature of edges belonging to places as well as the intimate ties that exist between the edge-world and the place-world – a close collaboration in which these two worlds are conterminous, even if they never

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completely coincide. It shows that edges of places can be outgoing even as they serve to sculpt a given place. They take us out of the place we are in even as they determine the intrinsic boundaries of that same place. It may not be the case that ‘boundary (horos) is the primary cause of bodies’, but we can conclude that edges are altogether literally of places: deeply shaping them, forcefully directing them, and bringing them into their own delineated and exfoliated being.

Notes 1 Plato, Meno 76a, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961 – Bollingen Series LXXI), p. 359. The exact statement is that ‘shape’, itself a form of edge, ‘is that in which a solid terminates, or, more briefly, it is the limit of a solid’. 2 See my forthcoming book The World on Edge. The present essay draws on insights developed in this book. 3 The ‘lived bodies’ here in question are not sheerly individuated entities but have always already incorporated social mores and structures into them by way of the deep-lying habitus that Pierre Bourdieu has identified as formative of the bodilysocial subject. See his Outline of the Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. ch. 2. 4 I am always seeing the sky from some place underneath, and this is so even when I am situated much higher up myself, on top of a building or on a mountain; only if I were to leave the earth’s atmosphere altogether would the sky cease to present itself as above me. Note that the sky’s immeasurability – key to its ‘mathematical sublimity’ (Kant) – does not remove it from the world of edges: it is another aspect, virtually another dimension, of this world. (I owe this last line of thought to Katherine Wolfe.) 5 These exceptions are precisely those in which a place comes to such an abrupt limit that it is prevented from merging with its surroundings. In an urban setting, this is found in certain parts of lower Manhattan in which one’s sense of being surrounded by buildings is so dense that there seems to be no way out from their formidable presence. Even here, the sky offers a way out – if only by providing a bare splinter of light. Perhaps only a basement or a strictly windowless room as in solitary confinement in prison yields a circumstance of such strict enclosure as to preclude edges that stem from the felt or seen relationship between this place and its surroundings. 6 For the distinction between edges and limits, see ‘Edges vs. Limits’, in The World on Edge. For further discussion of site versus place, see Getting Back into Place:

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7

8

9

10

11

12

Edward S. Casey Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 258–260, 267–270, 362–364. On space as homogeneous and isotropic, see The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press; reprinted, 2013), ch. 5, 6, and 9. Exceptions include a complex machine made of many parts, each having its own different set of distinctive edges: say, Alan Turing’s early computer models. The capacious character of a place supports the coexistence of a considerable number and variety of edges. Regarding the difference between borders and boundaries, see Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.–Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), esp. ch. 1. Our silhouette is an extreme version of this phenomenon, as when a friend ‘picks me out’ from others as I advance toward them in the dark. For a discerning discussion of silhouette, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 7: ‘“People” are silhouettes that are both imprecise and singularized, faint outlines of voices, patterns of comportment, sketches of affects’. On bodily edges, see my essay ‘At the Edge(s) of My Body’, in A Phenomenology Handbook, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), sections 15–18; on ‘usefulness’, see ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), pp. 28–39. I have discussed this distinction in a different way in ‘Do Places Have Edges?’, in Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, ed. S. Daniels, D. DeLyster, J. N. Entrikin and D. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2011). I say ‘ironically’, since Mercury is the Roman name for Hermes, the Greek god who was known for moving swiftly over crossroads marked by herms, the signposts that consist in single phallic stone shafts.

4

Place and Loss Jessica Dubow

All the new thinking is about loss/In this it resembles all the old thinking. Robert Hass, ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ 1. Every person has a place of their own, even if it is unclear where that place is and what forms of attachment it entails. In the simplest sense we inhabit places (sites, positions, settings, and locations) but those places are themselves inhabited by mental happenings (dreams, phantasies, memories, ideations), in which the present is sliced together with other moments of time, whether with a past that is incompletely or vaguely regained or with the imagined locale of a future. Place, as a spatial phenomenon is thus also a temporal one. But the temporality implicit in place is unsecured by the comforts of sequence and chronology. When we speak of place, then, we evoke a condition that is both joyously and distressingly displacing: we not only recollect past events and monitor the present passing but are also figured by times which have been forgotten or resisted and which therefore remain unthinkable. In this sense, place is always composed of things that matter profoundly without ever becoming clear pronouncements; that is, by things that fail to orient us fully to the world. In a short technical paper of 1913, ‘On the beginning of treatment’, Freud insists that at the commencement of any psychoanalytic practice the analyst must enjoin the patient to: ‘Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to a window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing view which you see outside.’1 Here, Freud invokes a passing landscape as a metaphor for the meanderings of the mind and the act of describing it as the means by which the distortions of psychic time might be exposed. The analogy works: to journey by train, after all, is to experience the

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contradiction of a passive mobility, one in which the mind tends to be at once full and empty, sharpened with immediate attention and loosened by distraction. Thus, on a train journey one’s gaze might be drawn to a particular cloud formation and an avenue of dark-leaved trees which to an observer with a particular love of genre painting might be reminiscent of a landscape by Hobemma. One might have seen the original in Amsterdam and even have sent a postcard of it to a friend. But was the card properly addressed? Did the friend ever reply? What might have happened if he had? Like the avenue of trees that grant it, the tonal moods of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting suddenly comes to the future, into a new wished-for time, with which it has no relationship. A glimpse of a parking lot, the cars lined up to form tight and shiny right angles, reminds me of a Lego set which I coveted long ago but which was too expensive to buy. I remember my face pressed up against the shop front window, the shake of my mother’s head and my rage of disappointed frustration that followed. In the here and now, I am thus held in the clasp of various prior selves, of pasts outlived and perhaps no longer valid but which still clamour in the present. The encounter with an actual place – the chance view of that avenue of trees, that parking lot – is more than just a prompt to a reverie and its chain of association. In its condensation of tenses and in the creases between them, place becomes less an aide-mémoire than an index of how memory functions. What it sponsors is not so much the power ‘to remember’ as the fundamental disconcertments of time, the surplus of pasts made proximate but to which full access is now no longer possible. 2. If any recent writer has understood the difficult persistence of time in place, then that writer is W. G. Sebald. In The Rings of Saturn, first published in German in 1995, Sebald develops an account of a journey on foot through the flat expanses of rural Suffolk. Passing from place to place, the text opens up the strange weaves of time which reside in each locality: pasts that we cannot entirely know, courses we cannot reliably follow, presences which, like ghostly scenes, are only half apparent. In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hopes were realised, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be

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something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star.

As if to bar all securities of origin or end, Sebald’s narrative of the journey is in fact a litany of misdirections, deviations, and disengagements. Buildings, towns, abodes are sites that are barred, burnt, abandoned. Landscapes, shorelines and coastlines emerge only to be engulfed by opacity. Unexpected pathways or a simple turn in itinerary occasion a failure of perspective, a perplexity beyond all action, position and force. Even ‘signposts at the forks and crossings of the tracks’ fail to signal, becoming ‘no more than mute arrow[s] facing pointlessly this way or that’.2 As is often the case with Sebald’s writing, what is decisive is not the movement from one cognition to the next but the blind spots that abide there. Thus while The Rings of Saturn identifies locations with painstaking precision – geographies are mapped, bearings are taken – it simultaneously effaces them through some inexplicable defect in point of view. While it designates the past – its dates, events, genealogies – with the assiduousness of an archive, what it witnesses is the inability to access any path that could lead back there. Even as it places its narrator in the situating midst of things, it isolates him in a series of non-encounters, experiences in which nothing and everything happens. Here, indeed, a walk undertaken in order to dispel a certain ‘ailment of the spirit’ doubles back on itself to point to the very ailment that place both marks and misses: some fold in the world of appearances; the nearness of objects and events unknowable, unfathomable, indifferent; the reinstating of losses already incurred. The insistence of this paradox, and its perils, belong to place. ‘Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into a hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began to write these pages.’ 3. In his reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, Heidegger proposes an etymology connecting the figure of ‘The Convalescent’ and that peculiar spatio-temporal condition we know as nostalgia. ‘To convalesce (genesen)’, writes Heidegger, ‘is the same as the Greek néomai, nóstos. This means “to return home”; nostalgia is the longing for home, homesickness. The convalescent is the man who collects himself to return home, that is to turn in, into his own destiny’.3 Is Sebald’s immobile narrator this sort of convalescent? Hospitalised after his long walking tour, might we diagnose him as a nostalgic? Might the cause of his somatic disorder turn on that very state of loss which both poises and unsteadies the idea of place?

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Any response to such questions requires us, of course, to depart from a concept of nostalgia characterized by repatriation – that is, by a return to a historically assignable past or, in a different language, by the subject’s regression within its own history. Indeed, if to ‘history’ is conventionally tied the task of recalling the past and if to ‘place’ is usually attached the identity of the inhabited or remembered site, then Sebald asks us follow the trail of a different sort of time: to annul the continuum that would allow us to restore a lost referent, to obscure the ground cleared and prepared for posterity. If time is conceptualized outside the redemptive framework of lost and found, of recollection and recovery, place itself opens onto the presence of a certain void or invisibility. Here, where the history it corresponds to has lost all (referential) presence, memory labours not to illuminate a particular place but to intensify its encryptions. Here, where there is no past to which a return might be directed – and no surety of what might be found there – the activity of looking backwards, or forwards, to place means to open perception to the muddied and doubtful light of a non-revelation.4 ‘Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has heaped up, the moraines and the deposits are insuperable.’5 Sebald writes thus of a character whose incapacity to recall his childhood home is less a matter of forgetting than of being on the threshold of the obscured and unforeseeable. ‘If I now look back [ . . . ] all I see is a darkened background with a grey smudge in it, a slate pencil drawing [ . . . ] blurred and half-wiped away with a damp rag.’6 Sebald’s narrator or the nostalgic-as-convalescent, in this sense, bears little resemblance to that figure whose future object – even if impossibly distant – is somehow already named and known. Indeed, unlike the strong and healthy sentimentalist for whom an elusive destination may yet be arrived at, and equally unlike the apparently self-sufficient subject able to engage in what Massimo Cacciari calls ‘the “virile” [ . . . ] disavowal of a home or dwelling’,7 here there are no stages leading to the satisfaction of longing or any possibility of assuaging the ache, the algia. Or if there is, then it is not a cure in any salvific sense but rather a captivation – or a readiness to be captivated by – the authenticity and anxiety of the problem. Which is to say, that any return – to recovery, to recognition – must be understood not as the repossession of place but the ability to relinquish it: it is a loss which must itself be incorporated, a homelessness which itself must be ‘brought home’. And so, in a text that brims over with the remnants of the ruined and the erased, with objects left to decay, dissolve and waste away, it is not merely the past but ‘place itself that has met with destruction’.8 Where then can the nostalgic

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or the convalescent, go to look for an ‘answer’ to his ailment? To what might he return except to a conception of time which cannot hope to recover its place precisely because loss is ever-present and already in place? Hospitalized, immobilized, Sebald’s narrator, we may say, is emplaced in just this sense. He suffers – is unable to move, is out-of-place – not because the goal of his journey is unreachable or its starting point too opaque but because there has never been a space or time with any such organizing orientation. This is the state of the nostalgic’s unending convalescence. Cut off from all that can be predicted and disclosed, this is the pain of a perpetual return to the distance of the world, to a state of untimely displacement which we – perhaps nostalgics and convalescents all – are enjoined to inhabit. Tantalizingly close yet indeterminate, visible yet finally opaque, it is place itself that blasts open the time that history conceals, laying bare its impasses and absences and, with this, our inability ever to assume our own historical condition. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that [hospital] room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colourless patch of sky framed against the window.9

4. In an essay that reflects on the nature of the labyrinth and the map, as two spatial forms that, following Keats and Bion, engage a ‘negative capability’,10 the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips draws the distinction between the experience of ‘getting lost’ and the state of ‘being lost’. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire and his figure of the urban dawdler, Phillips presents the child as that subject whose ability to endure – indeed take pleasure in – ‘getting lost’ depends on its fundamental orientation to its object of desire. ‘The Labyrinth’, Phillips suggests, is ‘traditionally, indeed mythically, something built to get lost in – in which the lost object is the exit, in which every destination depends upon the way out’.11 As such, the labyrinth is a space proper to the subject who already inhabits its goal, who knows what it wants or where it wants to be and therefore can afford to be disorientated en route. Indeed, ‘getting lost’, in Phillips’s sense, is not just a capacity – ‘something we [are able to] get’12 – given by the certainty of a past bound to a future, a past that the future is somehow indebted to repeat. In the peculiar twists of psychic desire, ‘getting lost’ in the world is also a form of securing our adjustment to it. It is a way of regulating the excess, moderating the intemperance, of the fantasy of actual arrival.

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Set in place by the origin and therefore knowing where it wants to go, the desiring individual must, in this sense, ‘discover’ or ‘invent’ the ‘experience of getting lost’13 – an experience that at once lives by virtue of its destination and protects it from the danger of a purpose too fully achieved. In contrast, adults – having to some extent given up the object of that original orientation – cannot ‘get lost’ precisely because of the absence of any possible satisfaction or the threat of its surfeit. With ‘no place like home, not even home itself ’,14 adulthood, simply put, is no longer a matter of ‘getting lost’ but of sustaining the uncertainties of being lost. Deprived of a former goal and without any inevitable or unavoidable (re)arrival, it is only the subject without desire that, for Phillips, is required to create another spatial model. At this point, which is also the sharp point of the problem, Phillips introduces the map: not just the bearer of directions but a necessary, though fragile, clue to the renouncement of desire. To consult a map, to seek relief in its clear lines and orientations is thus not to overcome the state of being lost but to re-describe that very predicament. Here, in other words, the map gains ‘significance’ in proportion to what the place it represents loses in presence. Indeed, with home now abandoned, the map becomes not so much a ‘path-finder’ as a kind of ‘placeholder’ – something that envelops a void or an evacuation, something that signifies, may even be significant, yet which carries no meaningful information. As a ‘placeholder’, precisely as a sign of the provisional and incomplete, the map both disavows and divulges the vulnerability of ‘losing and getting lost’.15 5. Given this, we might think Phillips and Sebald together and say that map-reading is not just about the paradoxes of place – the ways it enfolds the differentia of time, the ways it unites the problem of being homeless with the condition of residing there. Map-reading might also be a disguised form of nostalgia or is, perhaps, a practice that speaks to the condition of convalescence. Here, indeed, the map also takes up the idea of return but, since there is no ‘home’, no route can be plotted to get there. Like nostalgia understood as some kind of unpassable opening, an experience in which the immanence of the past confirms only its unavailability, the reading of maps happens in the absence of a certain object of desire – and in response to the complexity of that reality. Like the convalescent, too, as that figure abandoned by diachrony – or, rather, that figure for whom the breach in time is the ailment but one without cure – the map-reader lives within the crisis of displacement and in bearing to belong – or, in Heidegger’s words ‘turn[ing] in’ and ‘collect[ing] himself ’ – there.

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6. It is perhaps odd that Sebald never invokes the image of the map. For all his preoccupation with characters who have gone astray in strange circumstances and whose existences hang in doubt, the map itself is singularly absent. What there are, however, are people who walk – obsessively, patiently, repeatedly, and through distended passages of time such that place itself grows old, grows dim, and becomes immemorial. Like the narrator in The Rings of Saturn they walk from one place to another and in the presence of its after-life: these are places of whitened bones and graveyards, of ash and dust, of accreted silence where ‘deposits’ of the past become mute ‘depositions’, testifying to the event of an anonymous catastrophe.16 As ever, though, so many spectres are not the objects of historical thought. They are the substance of nostalgia: they name that uncanny join where place succumbs to dissolution and dissolution, in turn, informs the matter and materiality of place.17 In short, the experience of place happens in the zone of this jointure: of appearances transformed into apparitions, of present moments that solicit the power of forgetting, of spaces which, in drawing time in, expose disruptions that simultaneously ‘[reach] far back into the past’18 and foreshadow all that is yet to come. Walking from place to place, in a Sebaldian manner, is thus not the progressive covering of terrain but an inhabitation of time that emerges – that takes (its) place – along with the perpetuity of loss. In this sense, the figure of the walker, the journeyer, does not travel to recollect a past but to re-actualize its continual passing and passing away. Indeed if, as psychoanalysis would say, our proposed solutions always tell us more about our injuries than they achieve in terms of repair, then it is only in moving from place to place that the walker is able to register the real depth of his displacement or get the full measure of his distress. In many ways, we might see psychoanalysis (or perhaps the Sebaldian text) as the ‘reading’ of this peripatetia: of a walk from place to place in which displacement is revealed as our authentic worldly condition. 7. While it may be useful to see the relationship between loss and place in philosophical or psychic terms, the figures that Sebald writes about are also people literally without places and places literally without people. Here are outcasts, exiles, immigrants, vagabonds; here are the inhabitants of sanatoria, asylums, necropolises, mausoleums. But if this catalogue of lostness speaks to a general existential question – to what Kafka famously calls our ‘old incapacity’19 to belong in the world – it is also guided by the Nazi Holocaust as that ‘absolute event of history’:20 the singular devastation which left nothing intact, that time which is distinguished not by this or that occurrence but rather by that which

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endures and is left over after all claims have been accounted for and all statements settled. Indeed, while Sebald deals as frequently with the distant pasts of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment and engages with the more recent violence of various colonialisms, it is nonetheless the Holocaust that focuses the problem of time, place, and loss. At issue here, however, is not the usual question of whether an image of corpses in an open field at Bergen–Belsen or an image of the charred remains of the fire-bombed cities of Dresden or Nuremberg is aesthetically possible or impossible, ethically bearable or forbidden. Rather, a particular conception of place is precisely what arises when one insists on the present weight of all that is too unthinkable or unknowable to name, when one asserts that the real historicity of time has less to do with what might be retrieved from a past, than with the way the past itself registers as an absence. This is the function that so many placeless places have in almost all of Sebald’s fiction: railway stations, dead-end corridors, obstructed openings, blind windows, boarding houses, waiting rooms. And the figures that populate these places emerge as a response to this loss of time in time. Like the figure of the nostalgic convalescent, they are travellers whose every point of departure is a doubling-back, who stubbornly move ahead and over huge distances only to beat the same path, turn at the same fork, stumble at the same impasse over and over again. The psychoanalytic name for this, of course, is trauma. Trauma is an excess, a dis-orientation, and a persistence. Since it only appears in the aftermath of an event, it can never itself be properly located or temporalized. As an experience it both demands and thwarts translation, symbolization, and appropriation. In Eric Santner’s terms, trauma involves the ‘torsion’21 of being constrained by a sort of ‘surplus of address over meaning’;22 it is about bearing the weight of a ‘“too much” of pressure’, a burden that is amplified and magnified but ‘unable to be assumed’.23 If this excess, this form of expressivity with no identificatory content, relates to the traumatized subject it is also what is at stake in its precarious beingin-place. Here, following Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, trauma attests, above all, to the indirect referentiality of history: to the fact that an instance of an event and our awareness of it do not necessarily tally, that perceptions are incomplete and truths belated, that the real urgency of our pasts cannot be thought in separation from their implied failure as understandings. 8. This is the ground that Sebald’s walker traverses, even if the activity of his walking depends in its detours and delays on what has not yet, and may never, be fully thought. As we accompany him we are also on the edge, under

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threat, ‘realizing’ – even if only in the posturing of our own interpretative reading – that our own histories are unhooked and untimely; indeed, that they are emplaced precisely where our immediate comprehensions are not. This is not, of course, to collapse ordinary spatial encounters with the experience of the traumatized subject. The point rather is that the peculiar features of trauma – its resistances, its reinstatements– reveal the relation of place to loss in ways that our smooth and static temporal habits usually cover over. With this in mind, the walker in The Rings of Saturn is a particularly intriguing figure in so far as he is neither endowed with a psychologized biography – we do not know his name – nor is he held in by any historical boundary. He is, perhaps, an allegorical figure in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term – a figure carved out by imperfect, inconclusive communications, a kind of rhetorical ‘teacher’ whose only role is to insist on the presence of all that has been lost and forgotten, of all that becomes evident only in connection to another place and in another time.24 In the landscapes he moves us through, in the labyrinths he ‘gets lost’ in and even in the maps he might secretly consult, this anonymous narrator takes us to a place that is always already lost, a place ‘beyond which [we] cannot move, except to return’.25

Notes 1 Sigmund Freud, Selected Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 135. 2 W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 172. 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’, trans. B. Magnus, Review of Metaphysics 20 (1967): 412. 4 On the theme of non-revelation, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 68–70. 5 Sebald, Rings of Saturn, p. 177. 6 Sebald, Rings of Saturn, pp. 177–178. 7 Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans. Rodger Friedman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 142. 8 Jean Starobinski, ‘Rivers, Bells, Nostalgia’, The Hudson Review, 61(4) (2009): 613. 9 Sebald, Rings of Saturn, p. 4. 10 Adam Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities: IV The Lost’, On Balance (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 168–197.

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Jessica Dubow Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 168. Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 169. Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 173. Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 169. Here Phillips plays on the title of Anna Freud’s famous 1967 paper on the process of childhood grief, ‘About Losing and Being Lost’, Selected Writings, ed. Richard Elkins and Ruth Freeman (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 94–105. On the uncanny evidentiary nature of historical experience (i.e. on the relationship between the ‘deposit’ and the ‘deposition’), see Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 97–140. Here, Santner stages a series of brilliant imaginary conversations between Sebald and Walter Benjamin, focusing particularly on the intellectual debt that Sebald owes to Benjamin’s conception of Natural History (Naturgeschichte) as that unnerving point at which historical life loses its viability to acquire that aspect of speechless being that we associate with the materiality of nature. Among the many – and every increasing – works which place Sebald in a Benjaminian frame see my ‘Case Interrupted: Sebald, Benjamin, and the Dialectical Image’, Critical Inquiry, 33(4): 820–836. In Santner’s terms this would be the realm of the ‘undead’ (which he also describes as a realm of ‘spectral materialism’) that appears at those moments when ‘naturalhistorical’ forces come to fracture the symbolic order and thus expose the radical otherness of the human world and its essentially ‘creaturely’ life. In a different, but intriguingly related way, Jeff Malpas and Steve Crowell both discuss nostalgia as an encounter with death in which the self, disjointed in time, returns to its own finitude. See Jeff Malpas, ‘Philosophy’s Nostalgia’, in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2012), pp.161–176, and Steve Crowell, ‘Spectral History: Narrative, Nostalgia, and the Time of the “I”, Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999): 83–104. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, p. 3. Franz Kafka, Diaries, trans. Joseph Kresh, Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken Books, 1964), p. 330. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 82. Eric L. Santner, On The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 39. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, p. 38. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, p. 22. First introduced by Benjamin in this earlier thesis (1928) on The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne [London, Verso, 2003]), what is theoretically at stake in allegory is the extent to which one element, pulled out of its original

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life context and put to work elsewhere, interrupts any ease of passage between a phenomenon and the realm of its idea. As a rhetorical technique, allegories, for Benjamin, are thus especially adapted to represent history insofar as they are essentially doubled, self-opposed and therefore geared to express difficulty. 25 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 93.

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Place and Histories – Writing Other People’s Memories Lucy R. Lippard

Landscape is history made visible. J. B. Jackson Who owns history? Edgar Heap of Birds There are few more fragmented or invisible aspects of place than the history that is written, or embodied, in the land where it was lived. We touch down somewhere, happily or unhappily, and make the best of it within the parameters of our own lives, rarely considering the broader context and the lives of others, next door, across the tracks, up the hill, or in the past. Scholars tend to emphasize their own fields, even in interdisciplinary studies, and integration seems rare. Cartographers concentrate on topography and historians on events. It is only recently that most archaeologists, whose eyes are constantly peeled for traces of the past on the ground, have acknowledged the importance of the cultural landscape beyond artefacts and architecture. As I write about my home turf, I’m looking for the full fabric, a landscape woven of natural, historic, and current events – a continuous present (as Gertrude Stein put it) or history up to the last lived moment. Rebecca Solnit has observed that natural history and human history are rarely seen at the same time: ‘One doesn’t usually write, “Washington crossed the Delaware, a south-flowing river whose animal populations include . . . ”.’1 All landscapes – even those we like to see as ‘wilderness’ – are in fact cultural landscapes, exuding in silence the presence of the past, human and non-human,

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distant and immediate. Once we set out to explore a place, the past comes alive. I sometimes experience a strong sense of unknown history rising up from the ground as I walk. But such exploration is ultimately a collective, layered process, resulting in multiple mental and inscribed maps. As artist Elizabeth Ellsworth of the group ‘Smudge’ has noted, ‘There has been very little history in western culture where the land has been seen as interconnected with other places and other practices – with the “downstream”.’2 That flow, however, is constantly broken not only by topographic interruptions but also by divergent histories. Place, or the cultural landscape, is quietly alive with memories – other people’s memories (Figure 5.1). If you are writing about a place you have called home for only twenty-three years, as I am, your own memories become entangled in other people’s more intimate accounts. It is not easy to explain my obsession with local place to those raised in Galisteo, a rural village of 250 people in north central New Mexico. The micropolitics of such small towns are complex. (As one dicho has it: Pueblo chico, infierno grande: small town, big hell.) Galisteo’s history on the ground – the lines of stones marking early land grant boundaries, acequias (irrigation ditches), and suertes (field strips) – is inextricably combined with family histories, which conflict with each other and with the available documentation. The balance between these sources is precarious. Memories fade and collide. (A historian

Figure 5.1 Procession celebrating the 125th anniversary of La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, in Galisteo, New Mexico, 2009, photo: Tom Martinelli.

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friend working in Brazil is hesitant about exposing some ancient scandals in a currently powerful family; I have the same problem deciding how to expose a break in a well-known local family’s lineage.) I am finding that it is best to see these contradictory sources as multiple truths, parallel rather than conflicting. Michel Foucault wrote that history ‘becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself ’.3 One major source of discontinuity is the fact that history is written by culture. No matter how fascinated we may be, the discovery process is seldom collaborative and too often imposed from outside, or above, ignoring the experiences from inside, below. The more socially powerful the rememberers, the more likely their memories are to become history. I was once yelled at in a supermarket checkout line by a man from the local patron family who thinks he alone owns village history, because I had ‘picked the wrong informant’ – a feisty 90-year-old woman who contradicted his view from the top with hers from la gente. Most good books, I told him, have more than one informant, but my interviews with families he considered of lower rank was seen as a class betrayal. History, I am told, stems from an ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to ask’, bringing questions to the foreground. As I was interviewing descendants of village founders – those who received the original Spanish land grants in 1808–1814 – one old man asked courteously but curiously, ‘why are you so interested in us? Why aren’t you asking about your own family?’ Good question, and something I’ve always intended to do in my ‘old age’ (at age 78, I should probably acknowledge its arrival). Yet given the trajectory of my own multicentred family, it would be mind-boggling and finally superficial to trace it, since I don’t live in any of the ancestral places, except for the American West as a macrocosm. Another elder said kindly, ‘well, when you get old and sick, you may want to go back to your own country.’ For the time being I am in his ‘little country’ – his patria chica, or homeplace. The geographies of friendship and generations of family quarrels are hard to map. Yet restricting senses of place to imposed ideas or merely one’s own memories would be ludicrously narrow. I’m obviously biased, but I believe that a devoted outsider can put a small place in a larger context. Those who have inherited their place from their own ancestors can be just as bad or good at this as anyone else. Most of us, anywhere in the world, are cultural trespassers in locales whose histories are unrelated to us. The Spanish ancestors of those protesting Anglo intrusions appropriated the Galisteo Basin from Pueblo

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peoples. My mantra for years – expounded at length in a 1995 book, The Lure of the Local – has been: take responsibility for your place no matter how long or short a time you live there. So that’s where I’m coming from. Places are a curious combination of lived experience and imagination, memory included. ‘A culture cannot be reduced to an artifact as long as it is being lived’, wrote Raymond Williams.4 (I can’t help but think of the deadening effect of some ‘living history’ museums and sites.) The melancholy adobe ruins in Galisteo, which are often not as old as they look, imply small deaths. Some are lost ancestral homes that have been gutted and remodelled as the village gentrifies (Figure 5.2). I ask myself if history of/in place differs from History with a capital H – the conventional views that end up in textbooks. The answer to this question would be affected by specificity of place itself. Where horizons are defined by vegetation and occupation is dense, there tends to be more legitimized History than in places where both horizons and neighbours are distant. Our contemporary metrocentric societies take non-urban lands at face, or ground, value. Even the residents of agrarian regions often prefer to consider present land use or future development rather than their dimming pasts (which exert power only as ‘tradition’), with the exception of those who have remained in their home places for generations, now few and far between. Irish artist

Figure 5.2 Tom Ward, cutting turf on Kilsallagh bog, July 2013, photo: Deirdre O’Mahony.

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Deirdre O’Mahony, whose work is centred in a rural community, warns about the decontextualization of history, citing ‘the paradigmatic shift presently underway, from the rural as a site of food production to becoming an arena of cultural production’: Debates over the implementation of conservation legislation are often dominated by urban elites well versed in lobbying, who take an aesthetic perspective on landscape . . . Increasingly I hear farmers speak of a sense of cultural estrangement – ‘farming landscape’ is not the same as producing food. So, where does all that place-based knowledge go? Subsidies, arising out of topdown policies, are linked to the care and maintenance of landscapes. These are implemented by scientists [who], although versed in botanical diversity, have little understanding of the interaction between human, social and natural ecosystems that has produced the very places they want to protect.5

Similarly, local history, like genealogy, is often perceived as a harmless hobby, a retirement avocation, suppressing less pleasant discoveries in favour of nostalgic, heart-warming, evasive family stories. Yet in every place I have lived, the often ugly, ongoing, and unacknowledged history of capitalism is inscribed on the land in the form of unleashed and unsustainable growth, abandoned factories, polluting industrial sites, and destroyed neighbourhoods. Sometimes history is vanquished by politics, as in the Middle East, where duelling archaeologies offer rationales for both Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance to the occupation. One way of reading places is to look at the history of their naming. In the southwestern United States, many sites are constantly re-identified according to changing regimes or local power structures. Original names can be perverted or poorly translated from one language to another. Places with no names, or lost names, are even more elusive. A federal Board of Geographic Names makes the decisions: ‘Americans keep naming and renaming the physical world around them, and they keep changing the way they feel about those names.’6 The only ones totally outlawed by the federal board are the racial epithets N__ and J__. I have hiked ‘Negro George Canyon’ outside Moab, Utah. There is no protection of Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, or women. The number of American places named ‘Squaw’ (an insulting term for Indian women) has come under attack in recent years, but no one has objected to the peaked southwestern hills called tetillas (tits). An ‘anonymous Apache’ purportedly said: ‘White man’s names are no good. They don’t give pictures to your mind.’ Indigenous names tend to describe

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topographic features or refer to an event, possibly mythical, that happened there. These pictures and forgotten place names recall narratives buried in the land. Several contemporary photographers (notably Drex Brooks and Joel Sternfeld, one rural, the other urban) have concentrated on currently bland and ordinary places where violent events such as massacres and murders have happened. European conquerors sometimes perverted Native names or redefined them from a religious perspective. Arroyo del Infierno near me was changed by a nineteenth-century cleric to Arroyo de los Angeles, from hell to angels. When the Americans showed up in New Mexico in 1846, names of mountain ranges such as the Sangre de Cristo, Manzano, and Sandia – all inspired by their colours at sunset – remained in Spanish, perhaps because translations were disturbing (Blood of Christ Mountains) or culturally unspecific (Apple and Watermelon mountains). There is a hill near my home with hundreds of images engraved on its rocky summit by pre-European Pueblo peoples. When I first went there it was called Sacred Mountain by amateur archaeologists, then it formally became Petroglyph Hill when the County acquired the site for its Open Space programme. I’ve been told that the hill’s earlier name might be Cerro Lucero, or Cerro Ortiz – known local names probably reflecting past ownership. Of course the Native name given to it by the people who created the rock art has been lost for centuries. The rapid transition of place names was the subject of a 1983–1988 installation of photographs, feathers, cement, marble dust and slabs by Lewis de Soto (Cahuilla/Hispanic). El Cerrito Solo (Tahualtapa Project) – an installation and four photographic collages – reflects four historical chapters and the gradual disappearance of a California site called Tahualtapa, or Hill of the Ravens, sacred to the Cahuilla people before it was renamed El Cerrito Solo (Lone Hillock) by Spanish missionaries (see Figures 5.3, 5.4, 5.5). Marble Mountain was its first descriptive Anglo name, when it became a mine; then it became a cement quarry with an owner’s name – Mt Slover. The artist likes cars and was undisturbed by the mountain’s transformation into a freeway, perceiving it as a natural and cultural ‘revaluation’. ‘The piece is as much about the metamorphoses of perceptions of the mountain as of the mountain’s own metamorphosis.’7 Place names can be key to documenting legal challenges to ownership, but writing the history of a New Mexico place with an emphasis on the landscape becomes increasingly difficult with the passing of those with firsthand memories of theft, chicanery, inaccurate old maps and lost names. (Nineteenth-century

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Figure 5.3 Lewis deSoto, four works from the Tahualtapa Project 1983–8, (moving clockwise from the top left): (a) ‘Tahualtapa, Hill of the Ravens’, 32’× 32’, black-and-white photograph, silver spray paint, wood, Plexiglas, and black feathers; (b) ‘Tahualtapa: Cerrito Solo’, 32’× 32’, black-and-white photograph, silver spray paint, wood, Plexiglas and cement, aggregate, and black feathers; (c) ‘Tahualtapa: Marble Mountain’, 32’× 32’, black-and-white photograph, silver spray paint, wood, Plexiglas, and cut and polished marble; (d) ‘Tahualtapa: Mount Slover’, black-and-white photograph, silver spray paint, wood, Plexiglass, and cement. Collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

Anglo officials burned Spanish and Mexican colonial archives in Santa Fe.) Early New Mexican land grant documents are often vague and extremely localized, making it hard to identify features that have since disappeared, such as trees, cairns, and even chicken coops. ‘Black Mesas’ abound. Cross-cultural redundancy is common factor, as in Cerrillos Hills (Little Hills Hills) or Picacho Peak (Peak Peak). One problematic site in my neighbourhood is loma pardo, or

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Figure 5.4 Lewis deSoto, from the Tahualtapa Project 1983–8, ‘Slover Codex’, black-and-white photograph, mylar, ink and silver spray paint. Collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

dark hill – a boundary marker of the original 9,000-acre Galisteo Grant. As one stands in the valley between hills, ridges, mesas, mountains and volcanic cones, dark hills are ubiquitous; none of the elders still living knew the location of any particular loma pardo. Something as apparently specific as Galisteo Spring, a well-known site on an old trail to Santa Fe, is ambiguous when it fits none of the grant’s boundaries; eponymous ojos, or springs, turn up nearby. Names such as El Puertocito are clearer – a gap between the series of humps forming a volcanic dike north of Galisteo through which the state highway now runs. (The dike is called the hogback, Galisteo Dike, Northern Creston, or Black Mountain for its basalt cliffs.) A similar ‘doorlet’ in another dike a few miles to the south, site of hundreds of striking petroglyphs, is called ‘Comanche Gap’ for the raiding tribe that bedevilled local pueblos in the eighteenth century. (Visiting Comanches recently took advantage of that name to claim authorship of the clearly local Tewa petroglyphs.) Fortified Mesa on a ranch to the east is ringed by a mysterious stone wall of so far untraceable origins. Nearby, three Spanish/Mexican/American land grants overlap, and their boundaries are still disputed. The major landmark on my southwestern horizon, Cerro Pelon (Bald

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Figure 5.5 Lewis deSoto, ‘Tahualtapa, Hill of the Ravens’, 32’ × 32’, black-and-white photograph, silver spray paint, wood, Plexiglas and black feathers. Collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

Hill), is no longer bald, and may be the Cerro Gabaldon (Hawk Hill) of early documents. Again, no one is left in the village who can confirm this, though some octogenarians herded sheep there as boys. Horizons, like the walls of a home, define local place for westerners. Yet Salish artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith notes that it is rare to find realism or even a horizon line in contemporary Native American landscape paintings, where specificity lies in cultural detail: ‘Traditional foods, ceremonies, and art come from the indigenous plants and animals as well as the land itself.’8 Scholar Bruce Bernstein has remarked that background and horizon were simply unnecessary in Native traditions focusing on ‘the creation and continuance of life . . . Native people do not need markers to remind them of where they are’.9 Anishnaabe artist George Morrison, who did paint horizons – including a 1980s series of sixty-one paintings called Horizon, where both land and sky are glowing abstract fields of colour—remarked: ‘I seek the power of the rock, the magic of the water, the religion of the tree, the color of the wind, and the enigma of the horizon.’10 Abstract artists can evoke the aura of history in place. John Yau makes a convincing case for subtle reflections of Irish famine history in Sean Scully’s ‘Landline’ series. Despite the lack of actual horizon in his moody ‘striped’

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paintings, Scully evokes landscape and place: ‘The point is neither to exploit nor sentimentalize this history, and become a parody of what it means to be Irish, as so many have. Scully is an artist who has neither forgotten where he came from nor sensationalized it.’11 In recent decades, contemporary artists have become obsessed by maps as visual glyphs standing for lands known and unknown. Geography has become an uncontested accomplice to artists interested in place. Photographer Trevor Paglen, known for his exploration of the US/NSA secret ‘black sites’, has taught geography, and coined the term ‘experimental geography’. Something is emerging called the ‘New Geography movement’, described as ‘post naturalist’. As David Harvey has pointed out, spatial reorganization signals a shift in social relations, and photographs command particular attention in this context12 (Figure 5.6). Local history is best examined by artists employing ‘new genre’ forms, such as walking a land/cityscape to reveal its secrets to small audiences, the focus of Deveron Arts in Plymouth, England, where ‘The Town is the Venue’. When artists become guides, history is translated into performance art. When Annie Lovejoy

Figure 5.6 Neighbour Freddy Lujan directs the negotiation of his mobile home to its site in the village of Chacon, NM. Manufactured homes are now the affordable housing option rather than hand-and-community-made adobe homes, such as that in the background, once were for Hispanic families of Northern New Mexico, photo: Sharon Stewart.

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organized local fireside events at a trailer campsite in Cornwall, she included the resurrection of lost local skills, such as crab pot making – ‘a slow process that for over three years has involved the regeneration of a local willow coppice originally planted’ to provide the material for crab pots. Her ‘guidebook’ for the area was criticized for (intentionally) resembling ‘retrograde’ handbooks and she has had to address the problem of ‘art being so integrated that it becomes invisible’ (as art). The good news is that such projects open up the possibility for ‘non art’ to be considered in the art context. For instance, Joseph McGill Jr has made it his mission to sleep in every former slave dwelling still standing in the United States, embracing severe discomfort as he re-inhabits the places where his ancestors suffered. In the process he is bringing a lost history back to the surface of places for an amnesiac society, treading a fine line between history and activism. Urban history is reflected less in topography than in the built environment. Only dedicated walkers know the hills and vales of Manhattan Island. I once wrote an essay called ‘Seven Stops in Lower Manhattan’, in which I traced my own history over 35 years of adult life in New York City and the parallel history of gentrification in the area (Figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7 Artists Used to Live Here, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from Su Friedrich’s 2012 film Gut Renovation.

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For her 2012 film Gut Renovation, Su Friedrich grafittied her farewell to Williamsburg, Brooklyn by writing on a wall in the newly gentrified neighbourhood: ‘Artists Used to Live Here’. Benjamin Faga took a more distanced approach in his 2013 Authentic Syracuse installation. He followed the northern New York city from its forest roots and bypassed lived experience in favour of impersonal research, constructing its identity from the Internet as well as historical records and photographs, citing the tourist’s desire for authenticity, and food as indicator of cultural diversity. Artists, says O’Mahony, ‘working durationally in both rural and urban sites, have a key role to play in providing cultural space to re-examine and re-present complex questions, perspectives and voices that are unheard or cannot yet be heard. Given the increasingly precarious food security issues in cities worldwide, cultural agencies and artists need to make the link between culture and agriculture, rural and post urban, artist and agriculturist . . . Cities are not isolated, bordered entities – they are produced by interrelations with local places and producers.’13 In his invitation to participate in this book, Jeff Malpas remarked that ‘all of us take place, in different ways, to be central to life and experience’. All of us writing here, perhaps, but for the most part I am afraid that place is increasingly taken for granted, as more and more people live in cyberspace or fantasy land. Attendance at US National Parks peaked in 1987; now that they can be visited in cyberspace, nature at ground level is in danger of becoming an irrelevant luxury. Even there, reality is challenged. At Yosemite, majestic views of the ‘natural landscape’ are now aesthetically managed by destroying pesky vegetation that hides iconic horizons. With urban domination, ever greater speed and scale characterize the contemporary arts as well. Some are dedicated to figuring out how to scale down instead of endorsing endless growth, how to move slower, as in slow food, and smaller, as in small is beautiful. According to James Lang, ‘The global reach of the modern city is uprooting the last great village cultures . . . Humankind may never be the same.’ 14 All the more reason to pay attention to the histories buried in the places where we find ourselves.

Notes 1 Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1994). 2 Elizabeth Ellsworth quoted in Kris Timken, ‘The New Explorers’, draft manuscript, 2014.

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3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994). 4 Raymond Williams, quoted in Christina Kreps, ‘Museums and Promoting Cross-Cultural Awareness,’ paper presented at ICME conference, Leiden, Holland, 1987. 5 Deirdre O’Mahony, from ‘A Letter to Lucy’, Pallas Projects, Dublin, August–September 2013. 6 Manuel Roig-Franzia, ‘Map Masters Play Name Game with U.S. Locales’, The New Mexican, 7 March 2012. 7 Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). 8 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, personal communication, March 2014. 9 Bruce Bernstein, ‘Philosophies, Histories, Identities’, in Contemporary Masters: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Arts, Volume 1 (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 1999), p. 10. 10 George Morrison, in Edwin L. Wade and Rennard Strickland (eds), Magic Images (Tulsa: Philbrook Art Center, 1981), p. 86. 11 John Yau, ‘Painting Is Permanently Primitive . . .’ , in Sean Scully: Night and Day (New York: Chaim & Read, 2013), n.p. 12 Elizabeth Chaplin reviewing David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, in Sociology and Visual Representation (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 141. 13 Deidre O’Mahony, from ‘A Letter to Lucy’. 14 James Lang, Notes of a Potato Watcher (College Station: Texas A & A University Press, 2001), p. 13.

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Place and Singularity Jeff Malpas

Singularity . . . The state, fact, quality, or condition of being singular . . . A peculiarity or odd trait . . . A point at which a function takes an infinite value . . . Middle English: from Old French singularite, from late Latin singularitas, from singularis ‘alone (of its kind)’ (see singular).1 1. Every place is singular, having a character that is proper to it alone. It is partly this singularity that underlies the often maligned and frequently over-used idea of the ‘sense of place’, the genius loci, the spirit that belongs to a place, and that is embodied, in ancient thinking, in the idea of the presiding deity of the place. The way the singularity of place can be seen to be at work in the idea of a ‘sense of place’ indicates how central the idea of singularity is to the idea of place itself – although whether the idea of the ‘sense’ of place, let alone notions like that of the genius loci, is properly adequate to capture what is at issue in the singularity of place seems questionable (if only because the notion of ‘sense’ is itself highly ambiguous). To understand place is, in large part, to understand the singularity that belongs to place – indeed, without an understanding of singularity, there can be no understanding of place. It is the exploration of this singularity, and so of the implications for place of its singularity, that is my aim here. 2. It might be thought that the singularity of place is most readily appreciated in those extraordinary places in which, when one first enters into their vicinity, the character of the place is so impressed upon one that it provokes a strong and immediate response, whether of pleasure, wonder, or even, perhaps, of shock. The latter is the common reaction of visitors when, to take one example, they first encounter Queenstown, in Tasmania’s West, where the sulphurous fumes of copper mining have resulted in a seemingly desolate landscape largely devoid of vegetation (Figure 6.1).

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Figure 6.1 Singularity in desolation: Queenstown in Western Tasmania; photo by Ilona Schneider, by permission of the photographer. It is worth noting that although the first reaction to this landscape may well be to view it in terms of seeming desolation, Schneider’s own intention is precisely to contest that reading (something more evident in the colour original and in the series of Queenstown images to which the photograph belongs).

Tasmania (in which, as Mark Twain put it, both heaven and hell appear at times to have been brought together2) also holds some of the most beautiful places in the world – places whose images have become the stuff of touristic dream: from Cradle Mountain and Dove Lake in the Cradle Mountain National park to Wineglass Bay on the Freycinet peninsula (Figure 6.2). Such places, whether at the extremes of beauty or desolation, seem to provide striking examples of the singularity of place that is at issue here. I have taken Tasmania as the source for these examples, rather than looking elsewhere to more commonly known or stereotypical instances, partly because Tasmania is the place in which I now live, and so is also a place that is particularly well known to me, but also because it is a place whose singularity, like many places ‘at the edge’, is evident in its own strong sense of identity (Tasmanians tend to view themselves as standing apart from mainland Australia, much like the island itself, even to the extent that they are Tasmanian more than they are Australian),3 as well as in the unique character of its landscapes. Moreover, the experience of the singularity of place in a Tasmanian context – and especially the singularity of the ‘wilderness’ places in Tasmania’s South West – provided

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Figure 6.2 Singularity as touristic destination: Wineglass Bay on Tasmania’s East Coast; photo by Stephen Laird, by permission of the photographer.

the impetus to the founding of the world’s first Green party, and so has a particular significance in the rise of environmental political activism. One might thus suggest that Tasmania itself provides, in its own exceptionality, and the exceptionality of its landscapes, a particularly good example of the singularity of place that is at issue as well as of the way such singularity can be politically and socially affecting and effective. The experience of the singularity of place as it presents itself in the sort of self-evident and immediate way that seems true of the Tasmanian examples I have cited has often been what underpins the treatment of place in many different contexts – artistic, literary, or even philosophical.4 The extraordinary character of the places with which such singularity is associated in such contexts may suggest that the singularity of place is itself something extraordinary – that it is something opposed to the familiar and the everyday – even that the very idea of place refers only to certain superlative places, often to places that are apart from regular human habitation. Experiencing the singularity of place, even just experiencing place, might even be thought to be possible only in the midst of the beautiful, the sublime, the wild or the desolate, or even to require the sort of separation from ordinary life that Thoreau might be seen to have undertaken during the writing of Walden.5 3. The experience of the extraordinary, of beauty, for instance, or of desolation, can have important effects upon us and can indeed provoke us to reflection and

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self-reflection6 – and it may well lead us to think again about the places that appear as beautiful or as desolate. Similarly, the separation from the ordinary and the everyday can also allow the necessary space in which reflection, whether on place or self, can arise. Yet the identification of place with the experience of the extraordinary in place, and the expectation that the encounter with place depends on the separation from the ordinary, can also lead to a loss of place as well as a loss of singularity. Precisely because it is extraordinary, and because its extraordinariness is often taken to be captured in the extraordinariness of what is seen, so the extraordinary place is able, all too readily, to be re-presented in the form simply of the picture or the view. The experience of the singularity of place as given in the extraordinariness of place can thus give rise, or at least to contribute, to what might be thought of as the ‘postcard’ idea of place. The very use of images of Wineglass Bay and Queenstown as illustrations of the extraordinary place, both the beautiful and the desolate, could itself be seen to be in keeping with such an idea (which is not to say that it cannot also be used to contest it).7 On this basis, the paradigmatic experience of place becomes that of the ‘spectator’ or viewer, and the place may itself come to be identified with the ‘view’ – with what may appear as actually an abstraction from the place as such. In this way even the extraordinary place can become generic – submerged in the repeatability of its image, transformed into a set of merely pictorial elements8 – perhaps reduced to a stereotype, to kitsch. The singularity of place is not evident, however, only in the experience of the extraordinary or in those places that are removed from the everyday. Even though their singularity is not always so dramatically or self-evidently brought to our attention, the singularity of place is also a feature of those places that are closest to us, that we know most intimately (and in which we are ourselves most intimately known), and to which our lives are most closely bound. Here the singular character of the places in which we live – our homes, workplaces, neighbourhoods – is itself almost indistinguishable from the singularity that belongs to our own lives, our own selves, our own identities, and this is so precisely because of the close tie, whether explicitly recognized or affirmed, between our lives and the places in which those lives are lived.9 If we frequently overlook the singular character of even the most ordinary of places – including those places that we take to be generic – then this is partly because, for the most part, we attend to place only infrequently, and often only partially. We move in and through places constantly, but seldom do we

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pay attention to their character as places. Even within the ‘place professions’ (as they might provocatively be called), among which I would include architecture and planning, in which explicit attention is supposed to be given to place and to places,10 still this is a highly specialized mode of attentiveness, and it is all too prone to be overtaken by instrumental and pragmatic considerations that frequently lead to the treatment of places in terms of certain stereotypical or standardized forms. Since we so seldom attend directly to place, and even less to the singularity of places, we readily identify the experience of place with the experience of those extraordinary places that make so great an impression on us that they jolt us out of our usual inattentiveness to place – that they force the place to the forefront of our attention. This experience of singularity as given in the extraordinary is also typically given in the immediate experience of or encounter with the place. It arises on those occasions when we self-consciously find ourselves affected by the place and given over to an often strongly felt response – when we experience the extraordinary and recognize it as such. The immediacy of the experience, as well as the power of its effect, reinforces its self-evident and salient character as an experience of the singularity of place – the singularity of the experience of place thus serves to reinforce that experience as an experience of the singularity of place. In contrast, the singularity of the places that we already know is much more likely to pass unnoticed just because it is so close, so familiar, and so much already ‘our own’. We thus tend to ignore or overlook the ordinary places that are embedded in our lives, and in which our lives are themselves embedded, because they are indeed so much a part of us and we so much a part of them – their singularity is thus our singularity. Moreover, whilst the singularity of the extraordinary place seems evident in the immediacy of the experience of or encounter with that place, the singularity of the ordinary place frequently comes to the fore only in our removal from that place. It is often not until we leave the familiar places in which we live that the singularity of those places, the character that belongs to them, and so also to us, becomes evident and is recognized as significant (a process that is itself usually gradual rather than immediate).11 4. Not only is there a singularity that belongs to the most ordinary and familiar of places, however, but even those seemingly genericized places – the shopping mall, the airport, the supermarket, the high-rise tower – whose character might seem otherwise to be erased by the globalized trappings of contemporary

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capitalism and its accompanying technologies,12 nevertheless retain their own singularity and so their own character as places. This point is demonstrated, at one level, by the way in which such generic impositions onto places, although typically viewed as entirely corrosive of the character of those places (and they undoubtedly do have corrosive effects in this regard), nevertheless tend, over time, to be themselves corroded by the character of the place. The attempt to resist such corrosion typically results in the failure of the imposition. The way in which the American fast food industry has penetrated markets outside the United States provides an excellent, if highly specific, demonstration of the limited character of the genericization of place that is at issue here. A McDonalds restaurant in Beijing or Delhi replicates much of what one will find in a McDonalds in Boston, but the restaurants will not be identical, and the differences will be a result both of unintended changes that arise as direct consequences of the different places in which the restaurants are located, and out of deliberate responses to the difference in those places on the part of McDonalds’ own management that are intended to ensure the viability of the business in those places (Figure 6.3). At a more basic level, the resistance of place to genericization and globalization, and so the persistence of place in its singularity, is evident in the simple fact that any and every place retains, in virtue of its character as a place, a distinctiveness

Figure 6.3 McDonalds restaurant in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi; photo by Simon de Trey-White, by permission of the photographer.

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that marks it out as different from any and every other place. Such difference is not simply a numerical difference (indeed it is not clear what mere numerical difference could mean here) since it is a difference embedded, first of all, in the way any and every place both nests other places within it,13 and in the way any and every place is also nested within other places. The MacDonalds restaurant in Beijing is thus nested within a complex of other places that already marks it out from the restaurant in Delhi, and even from the other McDonalds restaurant around the corner; and if the places nested within any particular McDonalds may be thought to be the same since they are built to much the same plan, still they will grow, as the larger place will also grow, into different histories and narratives, become entangled with different individuals, different actions and events, different and often accidental configurations of use and re-use, wear and repair, dust and debris, atmosphere, odour, texture and sound. The idea that the singularity of a place is lost simply through the imposition of a generic or globalized ‘form’ suggests an over-estimation of the power of that form and the ability to impose it (an overestimation, even, of the human capacity to shape places to human ends and conceptions), but also, perhaps, a tendency to think of places in a way that looks to their most obvious, as well as most ‘superficial’, features, and to neglect the character of even the most mundane of places as encompassing an inexhaustible richness of elements if only one cares to attend closely enough. For the most part, however, such closeness of attention is absent, and the singularity of the place is indeed all-too-readily lost in the generic form by which it is represented or that is imposed upon it. 5. One might say that even the most ordinary or seemingly generic of places, in the singularity that nonetheless belongs to it, is also extraordinary – and it is this extraordinariness that itself becomes evident when one attends to the richness that is given in the mundane place no less than in the apparently exceptional. Yet although the singularity that belongs to any and every place may indeed be evident in the extraordinariness of the ordinary, and in the inexhaustible richness that every place encompasses, still the singularity of place cannot simply be identical with such extraordinariness or richness – in fact, one probably ought to say that the latter are consequences of singularity rather than constituting it or providing the means to explain it. In what, then, does the singularity of place consist? In what does place consist such that it can be singular? How is the singularity of place apprehended, understood, ‘known’? It might seem, however, that there is an obvious answer to the questions at issue here that already lies before us: the singularity of place is given in the sense

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of place, and it is precisely in terms of its ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ that a place is known and apprehended. Such an answer fits with the notion, mentioned at the outset, that the idea of the sense of place is itself an expression of the singularity of place. Moreover, the appeal to the idea of the sense of place might be thought to explain the apparent difficulty that appears here as well as resolve it. No matter the context, sense and meaning can never be specified in any absolute fashion – even the sense or meaning of a word relies on a prior understanding of language as a whole, and there can be no final or complete definition of any word taken alone nor of any group of words taken together (not even of any sentence). Moreover, the ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ of a place, especially, is not something ‘objective’, and what it encompasses is more than can be given in language anyway. One might even be tempted to say that the sense of place has a content that is not open to conceptualization, that it is ‘non-conceptual’, to use a term popular in some contemporary philosophical circles. Commonplace though the idea of the sense of place may be (and that it is indeed commonplace is evident from even a cursory glance at much of the existing literature that draws on notions of the ‘sense of place’), it is not clear, however, that it offers any genuine elucidation or resolution of the matters at issue – and especially not in relation to the understanding place considered in its singularity. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this is simply the fact that that the singularity of place does indeed seem to underlie the idea of a sense of place – whatever else it may be, the sense of a place must itself be singular, or carry a sense of singularity, and we can ask what that might be and in what it might consist just as we can ask it of place itself. Appeal to the ‘sense’ of place alone, then, cannot dispel the obscurity that appears to attach to the singularity at issue, since that singularity is a singularity of sense just as much as it is a singularity of place. The ideas of ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ as applied in this context also seem to lack any clear elucidation in their own terms. We can offer some plausible accounts of what sense or meaning might be, or at least of the structure into which they fit, when it comes to sense or meaning in language, but when it comes to sense of place, and to a context that is so often to be asserted to be more than just linguistic, then it seems much less obvious how sense and meaning are to be understood – the more broadly the notions of sense and meaning are deployed, the less clear it is what they might themselves mean.14 Just as there is a problem as to how to understand the ‘sense’ of place, then, so there is also a problem of how to understand the ‘place’ of sense – and so no appeal to ‘sense’ or to ‘meaning’ is likely, taken on its own, to elucidate the question of the singularity of place. It may well be that the problem of ‘place’ and of ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ are

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connected – that sense or meaning is itself to be understood only on the basis of an analysis of place15 – although if this is so, then it will be partly because language and place are themselves essentially connected, rather than standing apart from one another.16 There is one further issue that should also be noted. The very idea of the sense of place, and especially the tendency to treat the sense of place as not ‘objective’, brings with it the idea that the sense of place is itself something ‘subjective’. Ideas of sense and meaning are often construed as ‘projections’ or even as ‘constructions’ that derive either from individual subjects or from the inter-subjective engagement of subjects or the structures within which such engagement is determined (‘the social’, ‘the political’, ‘the economic’). Since the very idea of a sense of place often seems to imply a view of place as nothing but its sense, so place seems open to construal as itself a projection or construction (when place is distinguished as apart from the sense of place, it is simply inasmuch as place is identified with a mere spatial location – as a space or part of space rather than a place as such). Such a construal threatens to undermine the idea that what is at issue here is indeed a sense of place, and especially to undermine the supposed singularity that belongs to place. Any such sense, and any such singularity, will be derivative of something else, just as, on such an account, place seems to become derivative also. One might ask what singularity place itself can have if it is indeed merely a projection of the subject or a construction of the social – and the answer, surely, is that it cannot possess any singularity of its own. This does not imply that place must be understood as objective if it is properly to be understood as singular (objectivity itself belongs, along with subjectivity, to a particular framing of the world that gives little or no room to place), but it does mean that if the singularity of place is to be adequately addressed, then place must be understood in its own terms, and not as derivative of anything else – neither as merely derivative of subjects nor, indeed, of objects, and this is even though every place stands in an important relation to both subjectivity and objectivity.17 Appeal to the idea of the sense of place alone cannot explain or resolve the question as to the difficulty to which the idea of the singularity of place gives rise – it cannot provide an adequate answer to the question as to how that singularity should be understood, to the question as to that in which place consists, or to the question as to how place, in its singularity, can be known or apprehended. Moreover, if the idea of the sense of place is still seen as having some relevance to the understanding of place – if it is indeed a genuine expression of the singularity of place – then the question as to the nature of place and our

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knowledge of it, must be seen to be a question that attaches to the sense of place also. Understanding the sense of place requires that we first understand place and, with it, the singularity of place. 6. That we are familiar with places, with the different character of places (their ‘senses’ if one wishes to use that notion), and with different characterizations of places seems to be both a fundamental and an everyday feature of our lives. Ordinarily, of course, such familiarity usually remains implicit and unthematized – just as we tend not to attend directly to place, so we tend not to attend to the manner in which place is given to us, to the manner in which place is known or to the content of that knowing. Even when we make appeal to the idea of the sense of place, leaving aside the other difficulties associated with that notion, we often do so in ways that do little to give real content to the ‘sense’ or the place at issue. Yet accounts of place or characterizations of places are certainly not hard to find. Literature and art provides us with innumerable of such characterizations – characterizations that often seem to have great power and immediacy in evoking the places that they address. Here, for instance (crossing from Tasmania to New Zealand) is C. K. Stead, remembering the Kawaika farm18 on which he used to holiday when young, in his poem ‘After the Wedding’: wooden verandah hot dry garden sheltered by macrocarpa dogs panting in shade, my face black from the summer burn-off ... In sleep I still trace those tracks below gum trees skirting the swamp through bush to that pool of pools where the small brown fish suspend themselves in shafts of light My feet sink midstream in heaped silt clouding the flow

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Water had cut its way through black rock greened with moss down to that glassy stillness overhung with trees

In the rock cleft a deep hole water-worn and cold and dark – I caught the eel that lived there its sinuous spirit.19

It might be disputed that what Stead gives us here is indeed a genuine characterization of a place or that it penetrates to the genuine character of the place it addresses – to the singularity of that place.20 Yet although any judgement of this will depend on the manner in which we are affected by, and respond to, the poem, still it seems reasonable to suppose, at the very least, that the poem does capture something of the Kawaika farm, or Stead’s experience of it, that is significant and does indeed relate to its character as a place (one might argue, in fact, that if it does not do this then it cannot be counted as having any success as a poem). That being so, what does an account such as this tell us about what place itself might be, about the nature of the singularity that surely belongs to it, or about the manner in which such place, such singularity, is apprehended and even ‘known’? On a cursory reading, it may seem as if what Stead presents in these lines is a characterization of a place, and the places that belong with it, in terms simply of an enumeration of features and events – in terms of a set of characteristic elements that belong to the place and places described. Those places, the place that is the Kawaika farm, the more intimate and mysterious place that encloses Stead’s ‘pool of pools’, might be thought to be just the sum of the features sketched. Yet Stead’s account is not, and makes no pretence at being, an enumeration of all the features of the place at issue. It takes up only some features, and those features, although undoubtedly significant, are surely not exhaustive of the place. Many of the features to which Stead draws attention could be seen as characteristic, especially when taken together, of a certain ‘Australasian’ mode of place (one that might encompass Tasmania and New Zealand) – not just the macrocarpa, but the wooden verandah, the bush, the gum trees, the summer heat – and so as belonging to many different places, and not only the single place described by Stead. Yet it would surely be mistaken to say that the features that appear

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in the poem are therefore generic – the singularity of the place also extends to the singularity of what appears within the place. In saying this, however, it seems as if we cannot take that singularity as deriving merely from the features themselves, but already resides in the place or, perhaps, in the very placedness of those features. Such considerations may be thought to cast doubt on whether an account of place such as that which Stead gives us in ‘After the Wedding’ can help us in resolving the question of the singularity of place. Inasmuch as Stead’s account does indeed re-present the singularity of place, so it also re-presents the question of that singularity. The questions that have already arisen concerning the nature of the singularity that belongs to place, and the manner in which that singularity is given to us, apply as much to any specific presentation of place, poetic or otherwise, as they do to the idea of the sense of place or to place as such. This does not mean, however, that Stead’s poem has nothing to offer in trying to unravel the issues that are at stake here. Indeed, part of what is intriguing about the poem, especially when read in its entirety, is that it can indeed be read as a certain sort of exploration of the singularity of place as it occurs in relation to a specific place and places, and of the singularity of the place as it stands in relation to the singularity of a life. 7. The place and places that are the focus of Stead’s account in ‘After the Wedding’ are not obviously extraordinary. Their character is closer to that of the ordinary and familiar places that are part of our everyday experience (even though they can also be seen to take on an extraordinary character), and that most often become salient as places when we are removed or apart from them. In the case of the place and places in Stead’s poem, this removal is a function both of the fact that our own encounter with those places is mediated by Stead’s own experience of them (as further mediated by his poetic engagement with them) and that those places belong to the past (Stead’s own relation to those places is thus one that itself involves removal). As is true of any engagement with place that occurs at a remove from that place, Stead’s account in ‘After the Wedding’ is given in recollection (and explicitly so: referring to the summer the poem evokes, Stead comments that ‘in recollection summer is forever/renewing itself even in the thickest leafmould shade’ – capturing something of the character of certain forms of childhood memory in particular21). Perhaps all explicit and genuine attentiveness to place has this recollective character – especially given the character of place as itself a repository of memory (places hold memories), and memory as a repository

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of place (memories also hold places),22 all the more so given our ordinary inattentiveness to place. To remember is always to find oneself returned somewhere, to be brought back to a place, even if only dimly grasped. The place and the memory are thus bound together, and the remembering is a recollecting of the place through a recollecting of oneself in that place. Even the immediate experience of place as given in the extraordinary might be seen as recollective just inasmuch as such an experience forces us to attend to the fact of our being already and always in place – it fails to be recollective, fails to be attentive to the place, when that experience remains only an experience of extraordinariness, rather than being an experience of the place, and so of our own placedness, on the basis of which the extraordinary appears. It is the place, and our placing in it, that comes prior to any experience of what is given in or through that place and placing, whether of the extraordinary or the ordinary. To recollect and to remember is to be turned back to a place, and back to oneself as present in that place, and so all memory – all genuine memory that is – can be said to be both placed and of place, and also to be essentially related to the self.23 The character of recollection as a turning back to place, and to place as given in one’s own being in that place, is itself indicative of the way in which place and self are themselves entangled – of the ‘topological’ character of the self. The turning back to place and to self, especially as give in recollection, typically has the character of a turn inwards – and the inwardness or interiority that appears here can be said to belong to both place and to the self. Place is that which contains, and in containing so it allows space in which what is given within the place can appear – but that appearing, whatever else it might be, is an appearing within. Indeed, as the self – one’s own life – is always given in and through place, so the self, and the life, also has the character of a being within. The very idea of a life may be said to depend on the idea of a certain interiority that belongs to it – an interiority that can itself be understood as derived from the placed character of a life, from the placed character of the self, from the very character of a life and a self as essentially embodied – where embodiment is itself a mode of placing. The interiority of the self is not, however, identical with the interiority of place – the interiority of the self is given within, and is founded upon, the interiority of place, but the interiority of place is no more reducible to the interiority of any one life than it is reducible to the interiority that is given in the many places that any one place contains and that it opens into.

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In Stead’s poem the ‘interiority’ or ‘inwardness’ that belongs to place can be seen to be expressed in the description of the pool that takes up a central part of the poem and on which the lines quoted above are largely concentrated. It is surely no coincidence that it is in the pool, at the very heart of the place, that Stead catches the ‘sinuous spirit’ – the eel that lives in the deepness of the rock cleft – that seems itself to be an invocation, if not quite of the genius loci (though a sense of this is surely not entirely absent), then of the secret interiority, the mystery, that belongs to the place in its inwardness. As Stead’s pool is hidden – along the track, overhung by trees, its depths lost in darkness and the accumulation of silt – so too is the interiority of place hidden, is itself a form of hiddenness, obscured by our own tendency to look outwards to what appears before us rather than to ourselves or to that in which both we and what appears are held together, by our tendency to focus on the generic and the instrumental. Similarly, our own interiority, our own life and our own self, is never completely transparent to us – what and who we are is something that always remains in question, always remains open to determination – as well as being itself easily forgotten in the face of the multiple distractions that surround us. An important implication of this is that although place does indeed draw us inward, that inward turning is misunderstood if it is taken as a turning into some otherwise hidden ground in which our identity, and the identity of the place (or the memory that belongs with both), is permanently fixed.24 Even the turning inward of place is a turning into what is open – is itself an opening. The all-toocommon invocation of place, or some variant on ‘place’, as the basis for forms of exclusion and intolerance, and correlatively, as that in which can be found some form of ‘authenticity’, some purified identity, that over-rides all else, is itself a misconstrual of the nature of place and of our own being in relation to place. We find ourselves in place, and only there, and yet in finding ourselves we discover that we are given only as a singularity, in the singularity of place, and as such a singularity, are possessed of an identity that is always to be worked out, never completed, always, indeed in question. If it is in the interiority of place that the identity and singularity of place is to be found, then so too is our own identity to be found there – but that means that it is not found in any feature or list of features, nor in any enumeration of such features, but rather in the opening that is our own placedness. Unlike space, which has no interiority, no ‘inwardness’, place can be said to be itself determined as place by the interiority that belongs to it. That interiority is also a form of openness and opening – as every interior is such – and it is thus that the interiority of place can be said to be what enables the appearing

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of things within it. The singularity of place can be said, to a large extent, to be given in such interiority. What is singular about the place – the character that belongs to the place and to that place alone – is the character of its openness and its opening. It is, moreover, through the interiority that belongs to it, and so through the way that interiority is itself an opening and an openness, that the Kawaika farm in Stead’s poem can open up in such a way as to allow us access to the place and to the other places – as well as to the things, events, and persons – that belong to the place. One cannot grasp the interiority of the place, however, without one’s own interiority also being at issue. To grasp the interiority of the place is to find one’s interiority, one’s own self, as given, even if only partially, within that place – which means being able to relate oneself to the place and the place to oneself. The fact that the access to place always depends on the relating of the place to oneself does not imply that the grasp of place is therefore merely ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’. It is personal, but inasmuch as it is indeed a grasp of the place, so it is also more than personal; it may be said to be ‘subjective’, but inasmuch as it extends beyond the subject, so it involves more than the subject alone. The language of Stead’s poem is itself highly personal, one might even say that is highly ‘subjective’, but that is as it should be: the poem is about a recollecting of place, and so about a certain returning to place, a situating or re-situating of the self. 8. If the singularity of a place is given though the interiority that belongs to it, then to grasp that singularity, to apprehend or know it, is indeed to find oneself within it – we exteriorize ourselves in the interiority of the place at the same time as the interiority of the place is interiorized in us. To be within a place is to find oneself affected by that place, to be oriented to its currents and directions; in the fullest sense, it is to be capable of acting within it and moving through it; it is to gain a feeling for the patterns and rhythms of the place, of its own movements, of the density of the spaces within it, of the possibilities that it enables and the demands that it imposes. In the immediate engagement with place all of these elements come into play, and yet because that engagement is so immediate, those elements typically remain implicit, part of the very structure of our interiorization in that place, and so also part of our own interiority, but nonetheless remaining, for the most part, peripheral to our awareness. It is only in recollection that we are sufficiently distanced from the immediacy of place (distanced, that is, from the immediacy of the place in which our recollective reflection is itself placed) that the place, its

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interiority, and so also its singularity, can come to the fore, and so only then are we able to attend to that interiority, to our own interiority as given within the place, and so to the singularity of both place and self. Such recollection can occur in any reflective moment, but it occurs in poetry and art, and in certain other forms of contemplative thinking and making, in ways that also allow such recollection to have more than just a momentary significance or a merely personal relevance or accessibility – in ways that allow it to be both elucidated and communicated. Although this does not mean that it always occurs as poetry, but it does mean that it is always in some sense ‘poetic’ – always a form of bringing to appearance what is otherwise hidden – and it always occurs in a relation to language (which is why it is mistaken to say of it that it is ‘non-conceptual’ or ‘non-linguistic’). Attending to the singularity of place is something achieved through the reflective attention that language makes possible even when the medium used to articulate or communicate such attentiveness, and that to which it is directed, may not involve words in their immediacy – when what is immediately presented is, instead, a set of movements, a piece of music or a collage of sound, a set of figures or images, a complex of shapes, colours, and lines. In the explicitly poetic recollection that is exemplified by Stead’s ‘After the Wedding’, it is indeed words that function as the primary means employed, and by means of which a place is made present to us. Through the careful description of the interiority of the place as given through the inter-relatedness of the elements within it, and as they might be related to our own interiority, we are brought to the place and the place brought is brought to us. One might say that this is achieved through a set of ‘images’ to which the place is not reduced (they do not function in the fashion of mere ‘postcards’), but which, taken together, enable the place to be re-composed and re-encountered. Moreover, these images are not directly given, but arise out of our encounter with the language of Stead’s poem. Evoked in poetry, those images (given life by our own imaginative interiority) function as points of entry into the place, and they do so precisely in virtue of their sensuous quality – through the manner in which they situate us by the evocation of something tangible, heard, felt, or seen (here the ‘image’ is understood as just the presentation of something grasped imaginatively, rather than as something merely ‘visualised’), and so also through the way in which they allow the place into our own interiority. Stead’s poem works through such ‘images’, and those images allow us into the place, open the place to us; give us entry to the openness of the place itself.25

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The language of Stead’s poem is a language that takes us into the place through the concreteness of the imagery it invokes; through the felt character of the place as that is infused into our own feeling, our own imagining, our own remembering; through the sense of movement and encounter that the poem communicates. As Stead situates himself in the place of the poem, so he also situates us, moves us, orients us: on a verandah; in the sheltered heat of a garden; along a track traced through bush; towards a pool where fish suspend themselves in light, feet sink into stream and silt; rock is cut by water, and an eel lived and was caught. In this way we become, as readers of the poem, also vicarious participants in the place, and as such we are drawn into its own interiority, and so into its own character as a place, into its singularity. At this point, it might be thought that what implicitly re-emerges into the thinking of the singularity of place is the very idea that was earlier rejected as inadequate to providing an elucidation of such singularity, namely, the idea of a ‘sense of place’. If we are now returned to that idea, however, it is not because the understanding of the interiority of place is already given in the idea of the sense of place, but because interiority itself provides a way of elucidating what is at issue in the idea of the ‘sense of place’, as well as in the idea of place and of the singularity of place. Just as the idea of the sense of place cannot provide an elucidation of the singularity of place, since, as was pointed out earlier, the singularity at issue belongs to sense as well as place, neither can the idea of a sense of place provide any elucidation of the interiority of place, since the idea of a sense of place itself depends upon that very idea. Significantly, the interiority that appears here – the ‘sense of place’ if one wishes to use that phrase – that is evoked in and through Stead’s poem, is not an interiority that stands outside of language, but rather one that is articulated and evoked by means of language. Understanding the relation between place and language requires the recognition that just as the place is not understood or apprehended by becoming acquainted with all and every one of its features – to do so would not only be impossible, but would itself be disorienting and displacing26 – so too the linguistic engagement with a place is not about somehow re-presenting the place in its entirety. This would be to misunderstand both language and place. In speaking, and especially in speaking of place, we engage in a sort of situating or orienting of things and of ourselves (speaking is an ‘interiorizing’ as well as an ‘exteriorizing’). In this regard, given the fundamental role language plays here, one might even say that language is orientation, that it is situation, and that as such it is also a fundamental mode of relating.

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The impenetrability that often seems to belong to place – its opacity, its density – is not a function of the separation of place from language, but in part derives from the character of place as already presupposed by language, and so by any attempt to speak or to listen. If language is a mode of orientation or placing, then it is also itself placed. No speaking can ever properly address that out of which it speaks, in the midst of which it is heard, into which such speaking is cast. In speaking we thus encounter the interiority of place, although most often without recognizing it, as that which enables speaking. Moreover, since the inward turning that belongs to the interiority of place never resolves into any final completion – the interiority of place constantly opens before us, but into an openness characterized by opacity as much as transparency – so there is always more to say about any and every place. This plurality of saying reflects the plurality that is found within the inward turn of place, and so the seeming density and impenetrability of place cannot be said to imply any lack or limit on the part of language. Rather than there being nothing that can be said about place, no means of capturing place in language, almost exactly the opposite is true. There is no need to forsake language, then, in order to understand the singularity of place. Place has a singularity that is distinct from language, but this means only that the singularity of place itself is not a matter merely of anything said about it, and it remains the case that only in and through the saying (and the many different modes of attentiveness that it makes possible) can that singularity be brought to recognition. 9. In the manner in which it draws us inward, in the character of its singularity as itself tied to its interiority, place can sometimes appear as thereby bringing with it such a sense of enclosedness, even of introversion, as to appear stifling and oppressive, as giving rise to a problematic narrowing of mind and of action. Place is thus taken to imply ‘provincialism’, ‘parochialism’, ‘insularity’ – or else as underlying forms of nationalist bigotry and political conservatism. There is no doubt that the inward turning character of place, which is itself tied to the inward-turned character of our mode of placed being in the world, has a role to play in the development of such attitudes and dispositions. Moreover, in some places, those attitudes and dispositions may be more strongly manifest than in others, and that seems likely to be, in part, a function of the character of those places. Thus island cultures, to take a particularly salient example (at least in my own case) often have a stronger sense of self-identity than ‘mainland’ cultures, and that can bring with it a fierce sense of independence which often gives rise to extremes of attitude and disposition – both to political radicalism

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and to political conservatism, to an openness to the world as well a closing off from it – as well as a sort of brooding, obsessive introversion. The tortured histories of many islands is itself a function of the way they seem to intensify the forces at work within them – such histories serving to reinforce as well as to express a sense of self-identity (sometimes of self-contestation) and so also, perhaps, the sense of interiority, and singularity, that already belongs to those islands as places. It is precisely this heightened experience of place, and the heightened sense of singularity as a place, that is so strikingly evident in Tasmania, and that is not merely a function of the extremity of the places found within it, or of the landscapes it presents. As an island, Tasmania does indeed appear as self-evidently a place, and is experienced as such, in a way that other parts of Australia (the ‘mainland’) do not.27 Not only those places that are islands in the geographical sense, however, but any place that is physically or culturally separated from other places will tend to exhibit a heightened sense of its character as a place, of its interiority, of its singularity. Indeed, this seems to be the case with the Kawaika farm described by Stead, and especially of the interiorized place, the pool, that is situated within it and that is so important in Stead’s poem. Here the interiority of the place is heightened by the character of the place as separated from other places by its rural setting and also by the way the place seems to belong, at least in Stead’s presentation of it, to summer – and to summers past – thereby being set off by a season and time as much as by anything purely geographic. In a world that is routinely described as increasingly ‘connected’ and in which every place seems drawn into a global network of places, it might seem as if the experience of place in its interiority – and so, perhaps, in its singularity – is also increasingly less evident and less powerfully felt or recognized. Yet the fact that we may be even less attentive to where as well as who we are in a world so full of distractions – so much given over to immersion in the generic – does not mean that the real character of place has itself altered. Just as the McDonald’s restaurant in Delhi retains its own character as a place, in spite of the genericization that it seems to embody, and so retains its own singularity, its own interiority, so the phenomenon of globalization does not erase the interiority or singularity of place. Indeed, the very phenomenon of ‘connectedness’ can perhaps itself be understood only on the basis of an understanding of place in its interiority and singularity, since it is indeed through such interiority and singularity that connection is made possible – it is only through being in some place that I have access to any place.

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What this shows, moreover, is that the interiority of place does not exist as a pure interiority apart from any exteriority. The idea of interiority brings with it the idea of bound (here understood as distinct from mere limit or curtailment) – interiority arises only within bounds – and so interiority arises only through the differentiation between places and the differentiation within each place, such differentiation itself coming to appearance in and through interiority. Boundedness is what underpins both forms of differentiation that appear here – the differentiation that opens up into interiority and the differentiation that also opens up into exteriority.28 Although the investigation into the singularity of place tends towards a focus on interiority, such interiority necessarily brings exteriority with it, even if sometimes only implicitly, since both interiority and exteriority depend upon and implicate the other inasmuch as each is grounded in the same boundedness by which place is constituted. On the one hand, place draws us inwards, into its own singularity and interiority, on the other, it projects us outwards to the other places with which it is necessarily entangled, and so towards a plurality that itself belongs to singularity. This means that the sense of enclosedness that is associated with place – and that derives from its very interiority – can never be absolute, but is always an enclosedness, a sheltering, that opens up those other places that are also given both within the place as within which the place itself is given. The experience of place is always of this interiority and exteriority, singularity and plurality, familiarity and strangeness, as they arise together. Every place is thus a place of shelter and of setting out, a place of enclosure and of openness, a home and also a foreign land. Within the phenomenal structure of place – that is, within the broad framework that can be found in any place as it appears to us – this interplay of interiority and exteriority, of familiarity and strangeness, of a double movement inwards and outwards, is perhaps most clearly evident in the interplay of earth, that on which we stand, and sky, that which arches above us. To the extent that the lines taken from Stead’s poem carry a strong sense of interiority so it might also be said to tend closer to the earth – to trees, swamp, stream, rock, perhaps we might also add, to life and death, and the finitude of human life – and earth is explicitly invoked by Stead in the poem’s final stanza, ‘We marry to be nearer the earth’, he writes. Yet inasmuch as every place arises the between of earth and sky, so every place has, as part of its very phenomenality, a sense of both the interior and the exterior, the closed and the open, the finite and the infinite. This is as true of the places evoked in Stead’s poem as of any other – and if earth is almost tangibly present in the poem, the sky is certainly not absent either.29

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The interplay of earth and sky, their joining in place, takes on an especially powerful form, however, in the experience of the sea – and perhaps this is partly, too, why the island experience, which is an experience of land and ofsea, can be so important as an experience of place. Belonging wholly to neither earth nor sky, the sea connects to sky at the horizon, and in the own susceptibility of its surface to the impositions of wind and rain; it connects to earth at its edges and its depths, at coastline and sea-floor, in the tidal flow that brings land and sea together, and in the way in which its own body and surface allows bodies and vessels to be supported in and upon it. In its bringing to salience of the horizon, as well as of the liminality that belongs to the interface of land and sea, so the sea stands as a clear marker of the boundedness of place, thereby also turning us back to the interiority of place. Yet although it is indeed bounding and enclosing, the sea, because it is tied to boundedness – and in virtue of the character of the bound as never merely curtailing, but as itself connecting – so the sea stands as a marker also of the opening of place to other places, of place in its exteriority. Writing from the western edge of the Australian continent where the connection to the sea has always been prominent,30 Tim Winton speaks of his own place in a way that evokes just this sense of openness and exteriority even as it exists alongside and in relation to interiority: My week is shaped by weather and tide. In shops and on verandahs the state of the sea will give me conversations where they mightn’t otherwise exist. I live the split shift life I learned at the mouth of the Greenough River: outside in the mornings, inside when the breeze comes in. I work indoors and am mostly fiddling away at interior things, but several times each day I catch myself looking outward, squinting for something on the horizon. From my fibro house I see the dunes that I seem never to have been without. I fish and dive and the sea is still rich as my memory of it. I am small and I know it and am grateful to have it spelled out to me week after week by the shifting sea and the endless land at my back. Gifts and signs wash ashore on the hard white beach, and I stoop with my kids, some days, and pick them up and hold them to the light.31

Singularity: ‘the state, fact, quality, or condition of being singular’, but also ‘a point at which a function takes an infinite value’. One might say that both these senses apply to the singularity of place: any and every place is singular, and so alone of its kind, but any and every place is also a singularity, and so that which unfolds into an infinity, into a world. Place, in its singularity, is that in which the world begins.

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10. Although almost at the end of these inquiries, there is still one possible difficulty or complication that needs briefly to be considered. It might well be objected that the very attempt to provide an elucidation of the singularity of place in the way it is undertaken here is mistaken – a confusion, a mere phantom of thought, brought on by a set of false or misleading assumptions. It may even be said that the question concerning the nature of singularity is an instance of what Gilbert Ryle famously called a ‘category mistake’32 – like asking, in this case, still to see the wood after having already seen the trees – and that this is the reason for its apparent strangeness and its difficulty. Either there really is nothing that can or ought to be said to elucidate singularity, or, if there is, it really is nothing more than a matter of pointing to a feature or collection of features in which such singularity surely does consist. If there is a ‘category mistake’ here, however, it is not in the denial that place is to be identified with any feature or list of features, but in the supposition that place could be so identified from the very beginning. In this respect, the problem that place and its singularity presents is not like the problem of the relation between an entity and its constituent parts – between the wood, for instance, and the trees that make it up. The features of a place are thus not ‘parts’ of a place, nor is the singularity of a place, the character that belongs to the place alone, to be found in any set of such ‘parts’ (the same point can be made in relation to things: places are not made up of such things as their parts even though every place gives place to things and only in place does any thing appear).33 Much of this simply follows from the nature of singularity, and so also of the singularity of place. That which is singular is never fully encompassed by any feature or features, since any such features will be part of what is particular about the place (as any individual feature may itself be particular in this way), but not of what constitutes the singularity of the place, and so will never properly address the place in its singularity.34 The singularity that belongs to place thus does not reside in any particular feature or property of place, nor in any feature or property in its particularity; it is not something to be construed as constituted out of the non-singular, and neither is it decomposable into, or capable of being composed out of, other singularities. The place Stead presents to us is not simply identical with some set of features nor does his evocation of the place operate simply by providing any list of such features. Singularity is not without some sort of elucidation. But that elucidation essentially consists in showing how singularity and place are themselves inextricably tied together. This not only means that the singularity of place is

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elucidated only, as in Stead’s poem, or in Winton’s prose, through a certain sort of bringing us into place, and so into the interiority of the place (which itself opens up to the exteriority of other places and of the world), but that singularity itself turns out to be a form of placing. To be singular is to be placed, and the singularity of anything is bound to its own placedness, in which one might say its very existence is grounded – and to be singular is also, one might add, to include and to belong to a plurality. Properly understood, then, the singularity of place does not belong either to the extraordinary or the ordinary taken alone, or to place merely as remembered or experienced, but instead belongs to place as such. To repeat: every place is singular, having a character that is proper to it alone. As the singularity at issue belongs to the very character of place, so one might say that place ‘is’ singularity and singularity ‘is’ place. It is not that places are singular because of certain specific features or properties that they possess – because they are especially beautiful, wondrous, or shocking, or because they carry a specific sense of familiarity or personal connection – and nor is it the case that they could thus lose their singularity through the loss of those features or properties. Only in place does singularity ever arise, and only as singular do places themselves appear.

Notes 1 Oxford Dictionaries, online, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ singularity – accessed 2 February 2015. 2 In a frequently quoted remark, Twain wrote of Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, that ‘it was . . . a sort of bringing together of heaven and hell together’, from Following the Equator (1897), as reprinted, in edited form, in The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain’s Adventures in Australia, ed. Don Watson (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006), p. 178. 3 Henry Reynolds writes of a distinctive ‘island patriotism’ in Tasmania that goes back to the nineteenth century – see Reynolds, A History of Tasmania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4 Although Tasmania does indeed offer many examples of place as extraordinary, it also offers a more nuanced understanding of place that is evident in Illona Schneider’s work, for instance, as well as in the work of a range of other Tasmanian artists, writers and thinkers – see, for instance, Pete Hay, Vandiemonian Essays (Hobart: Walleah Press, 2002). In Tasmania, place turns out to be more complicated than the common touristic presentation might suggest.

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5 See Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854). 6 See, for instance, Elaine Scarry’s discussion in On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7 Alberto Pérez-Gómez has argued explicitly against the tendency to reduce the place to its image. Beginning with the idea of the genius loci as it appears in the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz, Pérez-Gómez writes of how the spirit of place at issue in Norberg-Schulz’s work ‘is transmitted to the reader through black and white (and only later colour) photography, carefully framed and edited’, and then goes on to ask (in a way that touches on some of the issues also at stake here), ‘how is this “spirit of place” given? Is it the embodiment of a tradition hermetic to the alien? Is it objective, like a picture? Do we have to transform our self-understanding, and our understanding of perception in order to “get it”? Or is it merely obvious, transparent in its representation, like the photographs in Genius Loci seem to suggest?’ – see Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘The Place Is Not a Postcard: The Problem with Genius Loci’, in An Eye for Place: Christian Norberg-Schulz: Architect, Historian and Editor, ed. Gro Lauvlandet, Karl Otto Ellefsen, and Mari Hvattum (Oslo: Akademisk Publisering, 2009), pp. 26–34, and especially p. 27. 8 There is much more that can be said about the relation between place and picture, and about the nature of the image. That the idea of place as picture is problematic (as Pérez-Gómez argues) does not mean, for instance, that the picture cannot also be a powerful means of gaining access to place or of representing place. For more on the issues that are at stake here, see my ‘Place and the Problem of Landscape’, in The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 3–26; on the more specific question of the image, ‘Heidegger in Benjamin’s City’, in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), pp. 225–236, and also ‘Heidegger, Language, Place’, in Pathways to Heidegger’s Later Thinking, ed. Günter Figal et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 9 On the intimate relation between places and the lives lived in those places, see my Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10 Often this is so, but not always – architecture and planning are not unanimously understood as professions oriented to place, what it might mean to be so oriented is contentious, and the language of place can also easily degenerate (often does degenerate) into little than a set of empty slogans or bland platitudes. 11 It is here that the experience of nostalgia or ‘homesickness’ (for this is what nostalgia originally and properly is) originates: in an experience of the difference between the place in which one now finds oneself and the place of one’s familiar

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life; in what is as much a disjunction of the self as it is also a disjunction of places. Since the displacement that is operative here is not merely spatial, but also always temporal, so nostalgia and homesickness themselves manifest in terms of an estrangement that is similarly spatial and temporal together. For more on the relation between nostalgia and place see my ‘Philosophy’s Nostalgia’, in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, pp. 161–176. Many of these are the very sorts of places Marc Augé has designated as ‘nonplaces’ – see Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). Augé’s position need not be seen as in conflict with that set out here – the non-places to which Augé refers are those specific kinds of places that are typical of a certain extreme mode of contemporary modernity. Not only are such places contained within the place, so that they are, as it were, ‘parts’ of the larger place, but the place also ‘contains’ other places in a different sense, namely, through containing references and connections to those places. In an age of electronic mediation and communication, those references are connections are both explicit and multiple. Significantly, however, the way another place is brought here via, for instance, television or computer screen is not such that the character of this place is thereby lost or effaced. Instead, the inter-referentiality and inter-connection of places itself becomes an element that is absorbed into the character of those places (since the identity of places is always indeterminate, however, whether the mediated connection of one place to other places changes the character of the place is not a question to which there is a single answer). This is not to say that sense and meaning cannot be deployed in such broad fashion, but only that such usage does not itself shed light on what sense and meaning might be such that they can indeed be deployed so broadly. That this might be so seems to me to follow both from the analysis of language and meaning to be found in Donald Davidson’s work and also from hermeneutic considerations that can be drawn from Heidegger and Gadamer. See my ‘Heidegger, Language, Place’, and ‘The Beckoning of Language: Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Transformation of Thinking’, in Hermeneutic Heidegger, ed. Ingo Farin and Michael Bowler (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015). See Place and Experience, esp. pp. 29–43. Kaiwaka is a small farming town in Northland, New Zealand, located almost 100 kilometres from Auckland. C. K. Stead, ‘After the Wedding’, in Between (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), pp. 9–10. The place described here is one to which Stead returns elsewhere in his work – see, for instance, ‘The Kin of Place’, also in Between, pp. 62–63, and The End of the Century at the End of the World (London: Harvill Press, 1992), pp. 115–116.

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20 Readings of the poem may also be offered that treat the poem in terms that seem not to emphasize the topological and topographic – one can easily envisage, for instance, a reading that is psychoanalytic in character or that stresses the poem’s sexual overtones (the latter clearly invoked by the poem itself, and all the more so given its title). Yet the availability of such readings would not demonstrate that place was not at issue here. A topological reading is not invalidated simply by the availability of other readings, but, additionally (and more importantly), even psychoanalytic readings or readings that look to uncover sexualized imagery and ideas, whether of Stead’s poem or of any other work, cannot be assumed to be independent of the topological. Indeed, I would argue that psychoanalytic ideas and analyses, for instance, are themselves topological, and are expressive of, as well as based in, quite specific topologies – topologies of the body, as well as of the mind (which does not stand apart from the body here), and so in the experience of the body’s own interiorities and exteriorities, their intersection and their affectivities. The same is more generally true, I would argue, for many ideas and images of sexuality. 21 Ernst Bloch famously connects the idea of the utopic, understood as itself an expression of hope, to the remembrance of childhood – ‘Once [we have] established [our] own domain in real democracy, without depersonalization and alienation, something arises in the world which all men have glimpsed in childhood: a place and a state in which no one has yet been. And the name of this something is home [Heimat]’ – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), v.3, p. 1376. The idea that in recollection ‘summer is forever’ may be seen to capture something similar – a sense in which recollection is itself tied to the invocation of hope, of home and of a youthful past (Stead himself refers to ‘Eden’ later in the poem – ‘Eden won’t ask you back/you must make your way in dreams . . . ‘ perhaps reinforcing a sense of a lost utopia and past hope). Both Bloch and Stead, however, seem well aware of the complexities that attach to this aspect of recollection – to the ‘summer’ it brings with it. If nostalgia is present here, then it is by no means a simple desire for return, but involves a more complex sense of both hope and loss – see, once again, my discussion of nostalgia itself in ‘Philosophy’s Nostalgia’. 22 On the relation between place and memory, see my discussion in ‘The Remembrance of Place’, in The Voice of Place: Essays and Interviews Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey, ed. Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Don Landes (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 63–72; see also my ‘Building Memory’, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts 13 (2012): 11–21. 23 Although the recollection of facts is often facilitated by the ‘placing’ of such facts (something indicated by the classical ‘art of memory’ and the ‘method of loci’ through which it operates – see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory [Chicago, IL:

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University of Chicago Press, 1966]), the mere recall of facts in their generality is a rather different form of memory than the personal memory at issue here and may well be regarded as actually a derivative form of memory. Just as memory is held in place and place in memory, so both place and memory, share the same indeterminacy and opacity, and as the self is tied to both, so the self is equally indeterminate and opaque. On the indeterminacy of place and memory, see my discussion in ‘The Remembrance of Place’, in The Voice of Place: Essays and Interviews Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey, ed. Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Don Landes (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 63–72. Here a larger set of issues are opened up concerning the real character of the image (issues already gestured towards in note 8 above), as well as the sensuous or ‘imagistic’ character of the poetic and of artworks more generally – on this see also my ‘The Working of Art’, in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, pp. 237–250. Being situated is a matter of having a sense of the ordering of a place, through its relation to one’s own sense of ordering, not of ‘knowing’ the place in the entirety of its details – typically, in fact, the experience of being lost is an experience of being presented with too many of the details of a place all at once, of losing a sense of what is salient about the place – of seeming, perhaps, to see too much of it. The loss of a sense of its ordering may even lead to a sense of bodily disorientation – of something like a sort of topological vertigo. Although, if one looks to other island places within Australia (Norfolk Island, for instance, located nearly 1,500 kilometres east of the Australian mainland and also historically connected with Tasmania), one also finds strong senses of self-identity, and so of place, that are often equally distinctive. On the centrality of bound to place, see (among other works) ‘Self, Other, Thing: Triangulation and Topography in Post-Kantian Philosophy’, Philosophy Today, 59 (2015): 103–126; and ‘Putting Space in Place: Relational Geography and Philosophical Topography’, Planning and Environment D: Space and Society, 30 (2012): 226–242. Images of sky, and especially of the night sky – moon, stars, darkness, the morepork (a species of owl) – are more prominent as the poem progresses. Even though the state comprises one-third of the Australian continent, the population of Western Australia is concentrated in a relatively small area in the southwest of the state (an area that includes the capital city of Perth). Since that area is bounded by deserts to the east and north, and by oceans to the west and south (with Perth itself being over 2,500 kilometres from any other large Australian city), it has something of the character of an island – thus Winton faces the sea with the ‘endless land’ at his back – although with its own peculiarities. Tim Winton, Land’s Edge, text by Tim Winton, photographs by Trish Ainslie and Roger Garwood (Sydney: Macmillan, 1993), p. 48.

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32 See Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), p. 16. 33 One might even go so far as to say that places do not, as places, have ‘parts’ at all, or, at least, inasmuch as they do have parts, those parts are always and only other places. So a garden may be a single and singular place and yet also include other places within it – the overgrown orchard away from the house, the lawn on which games are played, the shady corner filled with ferns – and even a small garden can exhibit a similar character once one looks, in its corners and crannies, for places at a scale commensurate with its size. The same is also true for a neighbourhood or a street, a region or city, a building or the rooms within it – if these places have parts, those parts are themselves places. The singularity of the place is also not identical with the singularity that is to be found in all or any places it may contain. This is so even though each of those places, contained and containing, also implicates the other, and each may even contribute to the singularity of the other. They way they do so, however, is through the way they contribute to the place, since the identity of a place is tied to its relatedness to other places, rather than through their own singularity being a component in the singularity of the other. The singularity of any containing place cannot be decomposed into the singularity of the places it contains nor can the singularity of those contained places be derived from the singularity of any containing place. 34 What emerges here is actually the distinction between singularity and particularity. To be particular is to be an instance of something more general – so we talk of this apple in particular rather than apples in general. Consequently a particular is precisely not that which has a character that is proper to it alone, but a character that is proper to its kind. Although the terms are properly distinct, it is nevertheless not uncommon for particularity to be used in a way that is ambiguous between genuine singularity and mere particularity. In Place and Experience, for instance, I frequently talk of the ‘particularity’ of place (although usually conjoining the idea of particularity with concreteness and immediacy) when it is singularity that is really at issue. The tendency for singularity and particularity often to be conflated is an understandable consequence of the fact that, for the most part, what is singular is particular, and what is particular is also singular.

7

Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements Joshua Meyrowitz

In touch with my place It’s late one night. I’m on the ground floor of my home in Durham, New Hampshire, near the southeastern corner of this New England state, which sits north of Massachusetts, and which – except for its 17 miles of coastline – is tucked in between Maine and Vermont and runs with them up to the Canadian border. I’m walking from the small 1960s-era kitchen at the back of the house down the oak-floored hallway towards the front entranceway that we added in the late 1990s. I reach out with my left hand and grab the top end of the banister railing, a solid oak rounded turnout, for the stairs that lead to the second floor and the sleeping rooms above. I feel the mastery of my sense of place as my left palm finds its banister target. I am, after all, walking in complete darkness, fostered by the late hour and by having my eyes closed. It’s an almost nightly ritual. With slight guidance from my left hand’s gentle hold on solid wood, I pivot to face the stairs and walk up them assuredly, my mind slipping further into the neutrality that attracts sleep. Without my consciously counting steps and without any visual cues, my legs know their way, automatically stopping their climbing movements at the top of the stairs, as my body turns sharply right into the master bedroom dressing area. I deftly reach out in the blackness to grab the edge of the open dressing-area door, giving it just the right amount of thrust so that the door closes gently behind me with its latch bolt almost silently slipping into the opening in the jamb strike, avoiding a bang that might give me a jolt or wake sleeping family members. And then, after a few steps more, I turn right again into the bedroom, assisted by my slightly outstretched right hand confirming that I am passing through the opening and not about to walk into a wall or a closet. I lie down, adjusting the feather pillows and the lightweight, yet

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warm down-feather comforter. I am indeed comforted by the lusciously familiar place that calls forth no reflection or analysis, and invites slumber.1 I don’t remember exactly when or why this habit began, walking through my abode late at night with my eyes closed. I may have started it as a teen while still living in my parents’ house in Queens, one of the boroughs of New York City. It may have grown partly out of a childhood fear of losing my eyesight from an imagined accident, illness, or old age and not wanting to be helpless as a result. The habit has probably persisted partly because of how difficult it is for me to quiet my night-person’s mind, with my mental and physical energy peaking when most people’s (including my family members’) energy is crashing. Yet, the routine is also an attempt to halt the visual and aural stimulation that comes from typical late-night computer use and TV viewing. Those mediated experiences partially remove me from my local, physical place and connect me intellectually and emotionally to other, non-local people and places. My contacts in Europe and the Middle East are up and emailing or texting me before I turn off or stop checking my various ‘devices’. I certainly feel empowered by the ability to scan through dozens of television stations and Internet images and websites, and I relish being able to reach out and connect with distant others by email, text messages, or Skype. Yet, I also like to know at the end of my day that I am literally in touch with a familiar, relatively fixed and bounded setting, whose feel, sounds, and smells give me direct clues to when things are as they should be or when something (such as a loose floor tile, a leaking faucet, or a malfunctioning boiler) needs attention. I don’t want to be like the increasing numbers of passersby on city streets or the students I see on most university campuses who are so focused on their smartphones that they are seemingly oblivious to their surroundings and bump into objects, each other, and sometimes me. I like to think that even with my eyes closed, I can avoid the sort of mishap that befell Cathy Cruz Marrero, who unintentionally, and to her great embarrassment, became an Internet sensation in January 2011 when a surveillance-camera video of her falling into a shopping-mall fountain while she was texting on her smartphone went viral.2 Yet, I also realize that no matter how silent, dark, and media-free I try to make my pre-sleep environment, my experience of place remains, in a sense, media-saturated. As I walk, eyes closed, around my house I sometimes get flashes of scenes from various old movies about a blind woman being stalked in her home by a killer, or I recall a television programme about Helen Keller and her eventual mastery of space (and much more) in spite of being deaf and blind. In a sense, mediated Helen walks with me in the night. Additionally, I often think of the rooms and spaces I pass through in terms of various media

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images and artefacts. When my family found and purchased our Durham, New Hampshire, house in 1994, we loved the location, nestled in a wooded area with a brook flowing around the house, the last dwelling on what a car-centric culture mis-labelled as a ‘dead-end’ street. In fact, we live on a through street for walkers, bike-riders, and skateboarders who can pass through the granite boulders that block motorized vehicles and continue a few hundred feet on a narrow paved path through a marsh to downtown stores, banks, and restaurants across the street from the university where I teach. Yet, wonderful location aside, the house when we bought it looked like the sound-stage for a 1960s US television situation comedy and a monument to the worst era of American architecture. It had none of the charm and grandeur of the nineteenth-century ‘New Englander’ that was our home for the previous fourteen years, though in a less convenient location in an old mill town 11 miles away (where coming from a particular cultural background with local roots several generations deep offered a better prospect than we had for ‘insider’ status). In our new house, we could picture the family from Leave It to Beaver (which aired in the United States from 1957 to 1963, with later reruns) sitting in the small kitchen with its chrome ceiling fixture with two round fluorescent tube bulbs (the right lighting for black and white photography and equally simple morality). We could almost hear teen rock ‘n’ roll idol Ricky Nelson from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (which originally aired from 1952 to 1966, and featured the real-life Nelson family) playing his electric guitar in one of our low-ceilinged upstairs bedrooms with their flat, hollow, and soulless doors. In my own family’s life adventure in this newly acquired house, limited budgets and idiosyncratic priorities led us to an unusual renovation: we left the kitchens and baths mostly as they were with some new paint and wallpaper (and, eventually, new light fixtures), but added family space, home-office space, a new front entry, and an adjacent mudroom. Most daringly, we ripped off the low-angled roof (in the middle of a New Hampshire winter, no less!) to transform a claustrophobia-inducing crawl space above the bedrooms into a full-dormered walk-up attic for storage (and perhaps future teen rockband practice). We transformed the front staircase from something that the three children in the iconic family situation comedy Father’s Knows Best (1954 to 1960, plus years of reruns) would stand on (usually in size order) to something that evoked images of a more traditional New England home for our own children. Similarly, we replaced all the ugly flat, hollow doors in the house with more traditional frame and panel ‘Christian’ doors, sometimes called ‘Cross & Bible’ doors, because the upper part of the frame resembles

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a cross and the lower side-by-side panels can be imagined as an open holy book. (This was no bow to a specific religion, but to historic Americana dating back at least to the 1700s. In any case, there are not, to my knowledge, any Star of David & Torah doors nor any Crescent & Koran doors, in the sense of integral construction, since the symbols of those religions do not match well the demands of basic right-angle carpentry.) Yet, we continue to refer to the peculiar star-like patterns on the 1960s Formica bathroom sink cabinets as our Bewitched décor (after the opening graphic of the 1964–1972 television sitcom in which a gentle witch marries a mortal man and tries to adjust to suburban American life, but wiggles her nose to make magical things occur). In short, while I protect the physical boundaries of my home by locking the doors and windows at night, and while I turn off media technologies at a late hour to attempt to be in direct touch with media-free, place-based experience, media permeate those boundaries in a variety of ways. To discuss further the influence of mediated experiences on place feelings, we need to consider the diverse senses of place, as explored in this volume’s chapters. Yet we also need to consider what we mean by ‘media’. By some definitions, almost anything could be considered a medium—the air, language, culture, bodies, relationships, even my house. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will use ‘media’ in the typical popular conception of the term, that is, as the various impersonal technologies used for communication, such as books, newspapers, magazines, radio, wired and mobile telephones, television, and the Internet. Yet even this list of seemingly familiar items requires some additional analysis to consider various influences on our senses of place because such media can be looked at as at least three different sorts of things. First, media are conveyors of messages, or ‘content’ (including content representing places), which is often studied apart from the specific nature of the media that deliver the content to us. Second, each medium is a type of non-verbal ‘language’ that has a particular ‘grammar’ (i.e. a particular set of production variables), which can be manipulated by producers, often outside of audience awareness, to shape aspects of our para-spatial engagement with the settings and actions portrayed through media content. And third, each medium (or each type of media) functions as a particular interactional setting, or environment, that encourages some forms of experience of physical place and discourages others. That is, media differ from one another in terms of their overall ‘architectural’ or ‘geographical’ qualities that transcend specific content choices and apart from the manipulation of production variables within each medium. Moreover, recent electronic/digital generations of media technologies impinge on, confront, and complicate traditional experiences of places in new ways. Mediated interactions

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increasingly substitute for location-bound exchanges. Yet in other ways, media also reshape – and on some dimensions, strengthen – our connections to particular places (hence, the double meaning of mediated ‘re-placement’). I will discuss how these three aspects of media – media content, media grammar, and media environments – can influence our senses of place.3

Media content and place Media messages are the most obvious aspects of media, and therefore ‘content’ tends to be the most studied facet of media. Media content includes words, images, sounds, stories, themes, genres, characters, actions, portrayed settings, and so on. Our media are of course saturated with descriptions and images of place. In turn, our minds are saturated with media-inspired conceptions of various locations (which are then fed back into professional and amateur media productions depicting various types of places). As I described earlier, my thoughts about my own movements through my home are influenced by images from media. The mental pictures I have of myself in my typical settings are based on both direct and mediated, concrete and abstract visions of places that I have experienced since childhood – New York City, suburban America, the ‘free world’, historic New England, and so forth. I think of ‘my’ deep place history as tied to the pasts of the United States, New York City, and New England – histories that I’ve experienced so richly through media of all kinds (including school textbooks) – even though my actual family history should have me thinking of my relationship to places such as Vobolnik and Utena, Lithuania, where my father lived until he was 20, or of Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire from which my Philadelphia-born mother’s family emigrated. Yet I have never set foot in Lithuania, and the ‘real’ familial connections to that location have not been reinforced very much through visual mediated experiences. Galicia’s role in my sense of place in the world is even thinner, in part because it no longer exists as a politically bounded entity, and also because my mother never told me exactly ‘where’ in current place-labels our ancestors lived. (Were ‘we’ from what is now Poland? Ukraine? Austria?) I couldn’t imagine where to ‘return’ to even if I tried to ‘go back’. My Lithuanian-born father, in turn, would have wished that I thought of my primary place-history as centred in Jerusalem, as he did for himself – and where (after fifty-seven years of living in the United States) he did indeed move in the last few years of his life – but for which I have a complex set of feelings for a variety of reasons, including having seen too many disturbing media images from that

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location. Thus, in the absence of intense forms of anti-Semitism in the United States (the rise of which could conceivably lead me to flee ‘home’ to Israel), I somehow think of my Jewish-American identity as tied in part to the Christian Pilgrims, who sailed in 1620 on the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, in what is now Massachusetts. (The fact that the Pilgrims were fleeing from religious persecution and imagined themselves to be re-enacting the Jews’ biblical exodus from Egypt makes my sense of connection to their history a little less odd.) Yes, I think often of the disastrous impact that European settlement and conquest had on the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and I certainly appreciate the multiple levels of irony in a July 2013 New Yorker cartoon by David Sipress in which natives lounging near the water say to arriving Pilgrims, ‘I’m sorry, but this beach is for residents only’). Yet I think of the tragedies that befell (and befall) the natives in terms of guilt over what ‘we’ did (and continue to do) to ‘them’. Thus, ‘my place’ in the world derives from a mix of direct experience and observation, second-hand reports from family and teachers and others, and from media experiences of place that feed into and supplement the other forms of placeknowledge. Conversely, the lack of potential identities and senses of place on my part are connected to the absence of certain direct and mediated experiences. The variety of feelings and thoughts I have when I walk down a Manhattan street, or pass farms and woodlands on my way from my home to shopping areas or to the gym, or how I feel when I travel to other parts of the United States and the larger world, are stimulated both by the physical settings I am in at any given moment as well as by thousands of flickering, barely conscious images of similar settings from news reports, novels, movies, television programmes, and online surfing. It is the mix of live and mediated experiences in all these settings that evoke moment-to-moment feelings of adventure, boredom, escape, romance, comfort, danger, artistic enrichment, intellectual stimulation, and so on. The images of place offered by media can be both enlightening and distorting. As George Gerbner and his colleagues documented over many decades, those who watch a great deal of television significantly overestimate the amount of violence that exists in their communities, countries, and the world. This, they claim, is the result of the over-representation of violence in both news and entertainment. The resulting ‘mean world view’ among heavy viewers indicates a potent impact of mediated images on experience of real space. Gerbner et al. claim that the resulting perceptions lead many people to be fearful about leaving home, fearful when walking on streets that are often safer than they imagine, and willing to accept curtailment of civil liberties in their own country and more

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use of military force overseas – all in the name of ‘protection’ from an imagined set of dangerous people and places.4 Similarly, war propaganda – which is often similar in theme across different media – encourages citizens to endorse or participate in shooting at, bombing, strafing, and burning of ‘enemies’ and their dwellings and invading and occupying their territories.5 The real-life costs are high in dollars, death, trauma, and destruction elsewhere, as well as in the decline in domestic infrastructure from relative neglect. Media content also plays a role in the construction and reconstruction of the built environment, as when I had my house-renovation architect design a home-office space for me that is unlike any space I’ve ever seen directly, but have admired in movies and television programmes. Similarly, many small towns now ‘restore’ their main streets to something that is actually closer to movie sets and TV images of small towns than to the actual historical settings of those particular towns as documented in local archives of old photographs, paintings, and architectural drawings, and in the memories of local ‘old timers’. Old-timer wisdom is displaced by media in other ways as well. With nuclearfamily homes now much more common in the developed world than extended, multi-generational households, media often supplement or replace some of the traditional functions of ‘elders’ in guiding children and young adults to future place-based situations. Most young children in mediated societies now grow up knowing what courtship rituals and romantic settings look like, how university campuses and classrooms are generally structured, how confirmation and bar or bat mitzvah rituals are staged, what being arrested typically entails, what a modern battle scene looks like, how ‘good neighbourhoods’ and ‘bad neighbourhoods’ differ visually, what a job interview tends to involve, what the place-feelings are at weddings versus funerals (in both the dominant and various subcultures), how the same people behave differently in different settings, and so forth. Mediated anticipatory socialization guides many of our actions and feelings when we arrive at similar ‘live’ scenes and passages in our own lives. Such influences of media were evident even in the early film era when adolescents reported learning about various mannerisms, gestures, styles of dress, and how to engage in romantic kissing and touching from movies. As Herbert Blumer wrote in his summary of one of the Payne Fund Studies of 1929 to 1932 (based on data gathered from questionnaires, interviews, and ‘motion picture autobiographies’ of 1800 informants) ‘many people carry, so to speak, a movie world in their heads’.6 When the Payne Fund studies were conducted, however, ‘regular’ movie attendance for children and youth meant, on average, fewer than two movies

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a month for 5–8-year-olds and only one movie a week for youths 9–19. Now it is common in most industrialized countries for children, aged 2 and up, to watch television or engage (as receivers and creators/senders) with digital media for many hours each day of their lives. The balance of ‘live’ and mediated experiences has shifted, which enhances the role of media content (about place and just about everything else) as part of the substance of our life experiences, but which also suggests a structural shift in interactional settings (beyond content influence) discussed further below in the third conception of media influences. Before getting to that dimension of media influence, however, I want to address the impact of production variables in various media because massive experience with media does not necessarily lead to awareness of the existence of these variables, let alone to an understanding of their impact on conceptions of place.

Media grammar and place The content of media messages combines with production variables in media to contribute to and affirm our senses of place in specific settings and in the world at large. The word-content of a newspaper headline such as ‘US Intensifies Afghan Airstrikes: Targets Militants as Drawdown of Troops Nears,’ for example, allows an American reader to unconsciously experience the described bombing as being done by fellow Americans against nameless and faceless others. It is as if we imagine looking out of our house windows and visually zooming across the thousands of miles into the cockpits of ‘our’ bombing airplanes (soon, we are assured, to be drawn back home to us). Accompanying sentences reinforce the distance between ‘our’ position as the droppers of bombs and the locations of those others ‘receiving’ the bombs: ‘According to the latest Pentagon statistics, US combat aircraft dropped more bombs on Taliban and other militant targets in August than it had in any single month in two years – and nearly triple the monthly average since January’7. Although the specifics of such news stories vary from day to day, this genre of reporting (typically relying on ‘official sources’ of our government) is a common feature of US newspapers such as the prestigious New York Times. American mainstream journalism rarely offers details of the settings and experiences of those injured, directly or indirectly, by US actions. Such more personal reporting treatment (what media scholar Daniel Hallin calls the ‘journalism of experience’ or the use of ‘place as setting’8) is typically reserved

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for Americans or US allies who are victims of violence, or even the threat of violence. Thus, New York Times reporter David Rohde’s ‘Held by the Taliban’ account of his 2008 kidnapping in Afghanistan (he escaped seven months later) laid out place details rarely included in accounts of negative experiences that result from United States or US ally actions: The car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage. Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside – reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see – and feared we would be dead within minutes.9

Similarly, the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013 included specifics of what people on the scene, including those injured, saw, heard, and felt, thus putting the news audience in the scene to experience the horror (but also to bear witness to the brave rescue efforts and emotional connections born of tragedy). In contrast, reports on the larger number of casualties in bomb attacks on the same day in Iraq (a country which had not experienced such car bomb attacks before the US invasion) were more abstract, as in CNN.com reporting: ‘A series of bomb blasts across Iraq on Monday killed at least 42 people and wounded more than 257 others, police said.’10 These common patterns of media content are usually supported and enhanced by media production variables in news, documentaries, and entertainment. With visual imagery, the selective ‘placing’ of the viewer is even more powerful. During the United States’ ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Baghdad in March 2003, for example, American television news was filled with images from a distance of the Iraqi capital being bombed. In contrast, very few images reached American homes of bodies of men, women, and children being pulled from the rubble caused by US bombs. (Such images were much more common on Arab and European television.) Moreover, the Pentagon’s programme to ‘embed’ war correspondents with the troops (while also threatening the safety of independent, unembedded journalists) assured that most American war news footage would be photographed from the ‘correct’ perspective. Similar visual variables operate in the still photographs in newspapers and magazines. Yet other production variables related very specifically to typography operate more subtly in these print media. Newspapers and news magazines rely

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on their physical layout (such as a fixed typeface, standard size of fonts for the news stories, a repeating pattern of organization of the parts of the paper, etc.) as well as standard ‘codes of deviation’ to mark the claimed relative significance of stories (such as where on the first or other pages of a newspaper a story is placed, what sort of mosaic of news stories and ads is presented, how the size of the headlines varies, etc.). These standard formats (and the typical variations within a format), give regular readers a sense of comfort and familiarity. Newspapers become, as Shaun Moores notes, a recognizable ‘place’ of their own for regular readers, a terrain that they can easily navigate to find their way around in it.11 Ironically, then, newspapers and magazines, which explicitly focus on what is ‘news,’ actually typically convey what is ‘olds’; that is, readers are presented with consistent genres of media news content, the same basic daily layout, and the same general narratives about ‘here’ and ‘there’, about ‘us’ and ‘them’ – only with new examples that usually reinforce the same old stories (such as that those killed by US bombs and drones are almost always ‘militants’ or ‘terrorists’).12 A dramatic change in a newspaper or magazine format may result in disorientation for long-term readers. And the demise of a favourite print newspaper or magazine (increasingly common in the Internet era) may lead to a profound sense of mourning over the disappearance of a regular at-home companion. These changes can be as unsettling for many people as having their favourite reading chair moved to a different part of the house – or removed from the home. Spatial orientation is a key component of most movies and TV programmes. It is typical for opening scenes to begin with ‘establishing shots’ that show us the larger place-setting for the specific actions that are to follow – a city skyline, farmlands, the main street of a small town, the exterior of a school building, and so on. Additionally, the shot structure of movies and TV programmes often simulate, in rapid and condensed form, what our own travel to a location would look like. We may see, for example, what the main character sees of a city from an airplane window, then we are there to pick up her checked baggage with her, we join her in a taxi to a busy city street, glance up at a tall office building as she exits the taxi, ride up the elevator with her, and move rapidly down a hallway passing through a door into a meeting as the others already there look at us. Where we are placed in that meeting also creates a simulated physical and mental ‘position’ for us. One can always ask while watching a movie or TV scene, ‘Who would I be if I were able to witness what I am seeing and hearing without the intervening medium?’ The answers to such questions throughout a media production tell us if we are being encouraged to align with management or the striking workers,

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with the police or the gangsters, with the trial defence or the prosecution, with the teachers or the students, with the prisoners or the guards, and so on. Moreover, shot structure signals for us who the main character or characters are to start with: They are usually the first people we see in prolonged close-ups (images in which the face dominates). As in unmediated interactions, proximity simulated through media fosters a sense of connection. People in movies or TV programmes who are seen only in long shots (full body or more distant shots) tend to be thought of in terms of their social roles in a scene (generic shoppers, store clerks, police officers, soldiers, etc.), while those seen in closer shots tend to be experienced as particular individuals (who also happen to be playing various social roles). Positioning of the camera literally adds another dimension. When we see a court judge from a low angle from in front of the bench, we are likely to think of the judge’s power over those who stand before her (including, in a sense, us as viewers). When we see the judge from a level angle from behind the bench (either ‘at her side’ or ‘over her shoulder’), we are more likely to experience empathy for the tough decisions that the judge needs to make (and possibly about the challenges of balancing the demands of multiple social roles – if we’ve been allowed, through prior scenes, into other spaces of her life, such as the sphere in which she is raising two children and/or caring for an elderly parent). Camera placement creates a phantom role for the viewer. Every time a door closes in a movie or TV scene, the viewer is given a place (and a ‘side’) to be on. The overall pattern of scenes in a production, combined with the content, guides us in a particular scene toward feeling like a ‘teammate’ of those portrayed or like a ‘spy’. In the popular American syndicated programme Cops, the viewer rides in the patrol car with police officers, runs along with them in chase of suspects in inner-city neighbourhoods. One can imagine how different such programmes would be if the viewers were instead placed (via camera locations) among those on the streets and in the dwellings of residents and then experienced armed and aggressive police swooping down on them or crashing through doors and advancing towards the camera. The various manipulations of shot structure in film and video also give us, as viewers, a general orientation to commonly portrayed settings in media – courtrooms, schools, prisons, inner cities, battlefields, and so on – and our potential senses of place in (or alienation from) them. As one might predict, typical war movies (and war-themed video games) entail highly manipulated use of such media grammar variables. The viewer (or game player) is usually placed among the ‘good guys’ – in ‘our’ foxhole or with

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‘our’ troops taking cover behind a wall. The ‘enemy’ fires at us. In many war movies, the face details of the ‘enemy’ soldiers are partially or fully hidden. (The exception is usually for the evil leader, or leaders, on the enemy side, typically as preview for a final confrontation in which each prime evil figure is vanquished, often in a spectacular manner.) Sometimes enemy soldiers are masked (as in the Star Wars movies). More often, lighting and shot structure obscure facial features. Remarkably, even hand-to-hand combat scenes are often carefully structured to mute the experience of ‘them’ as distinct human beings. The rare exceptions tend to be anti-war movies, which are more likely to show both sides as human, leading to the view of the slaughter (which is typically glorified in standard war movies) as inhumane and barbaric. Even as someone highly aware of the manipulative power of content narratives and production variables, I find that as I’m watching a movie I often feel the ‘right’ things about my ‘side’ and my place in the world. I am with the ‘good guys’ and against the ‘terrorists’. These are comforting feelings, even though they trouble my thinking. It’s not pleasant to have ‘unsettling’ experiences that make us feel as if we are on the ‘wrong side’. Such discomfort can come, of course, from watching movies made by official ‘enemies’, which is roughly equivalent to the discomfort some sports fans feel if they are in the bleachers with the ‘other’ team’s fans. Similarly, it is very rare for US mainstream news stations to show us conflicts from the perspective of ‘the enemy’. Although such coverage would match the claimed news ideals of objective, neutral, and ‘balanced coverage’, this type of reporting is typically processed (and attacked) as ‘biased’ and ‘Anti-American’. Actress Jane Fonda is still maligned as a traitor by many people in the United States for her 1972 visit to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and particularly for her briefly sitting in an anti-aircraft gunner’s seat on the last day of her trip.13 In the rare news programmes that do show us point-of-view scenes from ‘enemy’ territory, the footage is often shown in a frame within a frame and with some sort of label that distances the viewer from identifying with what and who is shown. In short, even when news and entertainment movies seemingly take us far from home, they usually leave us rooting for the ‘home team’. Major shifts in world politics can result in parallel shifts in the way that media content and grammar portray ‘them’ versus ‘us’ places. I remember, as I was growing up, seeing many images of the Soviet Union in magazines, movies, and television programmes. Those images conveyed a clear sense of the Soviet people as distinct from ‘us’. Although ‘they’ were presented as an existential threat to ‘us’, I was comforted in knowing my/our place was distinct from their place. It was

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not until the end of the Cold War that I became fully aware of how those images of the ‘enemy’ were typically shaped and limited in terms of both media content and production variables. The Cold-War era images tended to show dark, cloudy days of dreary Soviet streets (media content), but they also tended to be photographed using ‘long’ or telephoto lenses (media grammar). Long lenses compress foreground and background (as when a baseball pitcher appears to be just a few feet away from a baseball batter, who is actually more than 20 yards away). Through such lens use, people in the Soviet Union appeared flattened and crushed together, lacking individual depth and personal identity. Such images reinforced Western verbal propaganda about the evils of communism. Then, it was as if the end of the Cold War suddenly brought the sun (content) to the streets of Russia and Eastern Europe for the first time and gave citizens in those places breathing room for individual identity and idiosyncrasy (through media grammar use of ‘normal’ and ‘wide-angle’ lenses, which seem to offer more personal space). I also saw for the first time the magnificent Moscow subway system (media content that was previously largely censored by my country’s socalled ‘free’ media) and level close-ups (grammar) of smiling faces (content) that made me identify more with people in Russia (while also growing ashamed of the relative squalor of ‘my’ New York City subway system). Sadly, similar propaganda regarding current official enemies of the United States persists. Western media images of the sentiments on the ‘Arab street,’ particularly during anti-Western protests, often use long, compressing lenses to dehumanize the ‘strangers/ enemies’. These are usually combined with shaking cameras that convey danger and instability (in contrast to the typical, tripod-steadied medium shot images of our leaders and US allies abroad, conveying calm leadership and stability). Those people said to be threatening to our ‘homeland security’ are often shown either as an intimidating mass seen at a distance or as particular menacing individuals shown in medium close-ups, often from a slightly low angle that makes them seem large, close, powerful, and threatening. (Of course, when Western media rely on showing videos they have not produced, such as those posted online by jihadists or other official enemies, there is less control over the basic shooting variables, but then labelling and the distancing technique of a frame-within-a frame are commonly used.) I hope that within the lifetime of my grandchildren, other official enemies of the United States, such as the North Koreans – who are typically shown in mass telephoto-lens shots of ‘flat’, marching-in-lock-step soldiers – will gain human depth and individuality as media production variables follow some hoped-for future warming of relations between the governments of the United States and other peoples.

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Television and film grammar variables can engage us, or distance us, from in-place actions with rather simple choices of camera placement and movement. The more the camera itself moves through space, for example, the more we, the viewers, feel ‘with’ the action rather than merely watching it from a distance. If the whole camera ‘trucks’ along with a car moving or with a running person, we feel as if we are driving or running alongside the vehicle or runner. We feel more identified with the action than if the camera is in one spot and it merely pivots to ‘pan’ left or right to follow a car or runner passing by us. Similarly, when the whole camera rolls (or ‘dollies’) in or out, as opposed to the camera lens zooming in or out, we feel more as if we are ‘with’ the action and actors. The same is true for a camera that fully moves up or down (‘pedestals’ up or down) rather than merely ‘tilting’ up or down. The use of the more restricted camera movements in each of the above pairs leaves the viewer more as an uninvolved ‘observer’ than as a ‘para-participant’ in the action and the movement through space. The same techniques are used in video games to selectively engage and disengage us with certain people and places. Thus, while visual media often give us the illusion of freedom in how we process scenes and what we pay attention to, we are almost always given a largely pre-determined point of view; we perceive an already constructed perception of actions in space. Other variables such as changes in lens focus (or changes in the depth of the focus, called ‘depth of field’) align us with certain actions and movements through places. Viewers are more likely to identify with the characters and with the movements through space that are in focus. ‘Follow focus’ techniques, for example, keep the main characters in focus as they move through a scene. A sudden change in focus (‘rack focus’) may suddenly reveal another person (such as a stalker or a guardian) or object (such as a gun or a bouquet of flowers) that signals whether the viewer’s vicarious movement through space is one of security or danger. Variations in use of video/film lighting and shadows create a sense of whether places are happy and playful or dark and dangerous. (The same is true of lighting/shadows on faces, where ‘good guys’ are often shown with nicely and evenly lit faces, while evil characters are literally and metaphorically shown as shadowy.) In many movies, content and grammar function in tandem. In those instances, we are brought close through production variables to the people who are ‘good’ in their actions and words. Yet often there is tension between content and grammar. Whom we feel to be ‘with’ physically, psychologically, and emotionally in audio-visual media is often shaped at least as much by the shot structure and microphone pickup patterns as by the content. In some

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productions, we identify with the police and in some movies we identify with the criminals. Celebrated examples of the latter include The Godfather movies, where, through shot structure, the viewer becomes a semi-member of the mafia family (e.g. sitting at the dinner table), and the TV series Dexter, where ‘viewer placement’, both visually and aurally (we hear Dexter’s inner thoughts) encourages us to root for a serial killer. In some movies, we identify with the sweet characters and in other movies we are encouraged through shot structure and audio variables to identify with the scoundrels. It is no surprise that many avid watchers of movies and TV programmes and players of video games are unaware of the complexity of media grammar variables. While the producers of media are typically pleased to receive comments on the effectiveness of the content of their media (e.g. the words, themes, actions, and plots in their work), they are often less comfortable with receiving feedback on their utilizing effective grammar variables, such as when the selective use of close-ups and long shots encourages viewers to identify with one side in a war movie versus the other (but also to get much more upset about the slight injuries to a few particular soldiers than about the brutal killing of other soldiers who may be on the same ‘side’). Such techniques, when exposed, seem more manipulative than ‘creative’. Similarly, publishers, editors, and reporters of ‘prestige newspapers’ welcome praise of reporting content, but might get upset by the observation that the standard type font and layout of the newspaper (as well as format choices for particular stories) make the articles seem more credible (though not necessarily more true!) than the articles in a tabloid publication. The audiences for media may not always welcome analysis of grammar variables either, because it undermines the foundations of their thoughts and feelings. It was oddly upsetting for many Americans, for example, when recent Internet postings of rarely seen Farm Security Administration colour photographs from the 1930s and early 1940s revealed how much of the decades-long impact of perhaps the most famous set of photographs in American history – the same agency’s familiar photographs of the Great Depression – was tied to their being in black and white. What citizens took to be the stark reality of an era was exposed as related in part to the choice of film stock! Indeed, even those who produce media may not always be conscious of all their selection of variables, following instead what ‘feels right’. I have argued elsewhere that this ‘feel right’ rule may operate because shot structure in TV and film is not simply an arbitrary media code, but in many ways follows our unconscious use of interpersonal distances in unmediated interaction, as when we stand closer to friends and lovers and family members than we do

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to work associates or strangers. Similarly, a low-angle shot (which ‘looks up’ to a character) adds a sense of power to the person portrayed, partly because we have all seen, as children, our parents, teachers, and other adults in real-life equivalents to a low-angle shot.14 Media grammar variables become more visible when one compares different treatments of similar content. Such a comparison occurred when the researchers working on the production of the award-winning public-television documentary series Eyes on the Prize reviewed hundreds of hours of news footage on the African-American Civil-Rights movement. They found that in the news coverage of the early demonstrations, the camera placement gave viewers an outside, passive-observer view, showing black demonstrators as they were confronted by white racists. But, after a while, the news cameras moved behind the protest leaders, and looked outward towards hostile white officers of the law, in effect having the viewers join in the protests and be threatened by the forces of racism. Similarly, the images of white officials’ hands trying to block camera lenses or of white supremacists pushing or beating camera operators or of fresh spit splattered on the camera lens functioned as simulated attacks on the viewers. With the rise of the Black Power movement, however, the cameras (and viewers) again shifted to the outside. And with the 1967 inner-city riots, the cameras (and viewers) moved to behind police lines, aligned with authority. As Eyes on the Prize producer Henry Hampton summarized: ‘Millions of viewers have taken their racial lessons from the position of the lens’.15 Even more subtle than camera position is the use of microphone pickup patterns and placement, which can create a sense of spatial depth and varying emotional distances. In entertainment movies, TV programming, and video games, we may see characters in long shots, but be brought close aurally by hearing what they are saying to each other. Radio personalities sometimes have ‘sidekicks’ who shout comments ‘from the background’, creating a feeling of playful camaraderie in a soundscape that conveys a sense of ‘hanging out together’ in a social space. Similarly, in typical newscasts, we may hear a politician’s speech ‘close-up’ (because the politician is close to the microphone) and hear hecklers in the background (because they are further from the microphone). Yet if we were at the scene, the hecklers might be right beside us in the crowd (and, in some cases, we might be aligned with their complaints!) while the politician would be at a distance. This analysis explains the power of smartphone cameras in the hands of members of the public, in that the resulting videos, when posted online or used by professional news organizations, not only show us ‘what happened’, but provide images and sounds from a different social position.

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The number and the type of shot and sound changes often reflect preconceived cultural perceptions of different locations. City scenes in both documentaries and fictional movies are often constructed with a kind of nervous energy that simulates the way we conceive of rushed urban life – quick cuts, perspective changes, camera movement, sudden loud and overlapping noises. (Somewhat paradoxically, however, slow-motion shots are sometimes used for urban scenes, as if to suggest that so much is happening every second that it needs to be slowed down to grasp it.) In contrast, rural areas are often portrayed with longer, steadier shots and often with dissolves between scenes to suggest a slow passage of time in the countryside. Background music style and tempo often match these different conceptions of locale. (There are of course exceptions, such as when rural settings are used in horror movies.) We can imagine how odd it would be to have the shots and background music we usually take for granted in one setting routinely applied to the other, such as watching a movie about quiet farm life shot with rapid cuts, shaking cameras, multiple perspective changes, and lively jazz music, or seeing a movie about London or New York with very long, steady shots, drawn-out dissolves, and quiet, slow-paced music. While the portrayal of ‘enemy’ cities (e.g. Pyongyang, North Korea, or Tehran, Iran) typically remains fairly constant and one-dimensional in our media, the portrayal of our own cities is often more variable and complex. New York City, for example, is sometimes portrayed (through both media content and media grammar) as a paradise of leisure and consumption and sometimes as a hellhole. In the movie classic Taxi Driver (directed by Martin Scorsese from Paul Schrader’s screenplay), the main character Travis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) describes New York as an ‘open sewer’. This negative image is reinforced partly through the content of selected (mostly night-time) settings and depressing actions and characters (child and adult prostitutes, pimps, pornography, guns, infidelity, and murder). Yet the negativity is also conveyed through the dark lighting, low-to-the-ground camera perspectives, and bumperlevel shots of steam rising up through sewers, as if hell is indeed just below the surface of the dark pavement. Sometimes the portrayal of a locale shifts during a movie. In Oliver Stone’s classic movie about greed, Wall Street, New York is seen primarily from inside limousines or high above street level from the vantage point of luxury apartments and corporate offices and meeting rooms atop skyscrapers. But when the up-and-coming stockbroker, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen) learns that his mentor, Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas), has betrayed him by planning to sell off the assets of the airline that Fox’s father works for, the

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suddenly disillusioned Bud finds himself at street level, leaning against a lonely tree with the tall buildings seemingly closing in on him. This ‘closing in’ effect, which seems to defy the laws of physics, is accomplished by a ‘dolly-zoom’ effect, a combination of two camera techniques: the camera lens zooms in from a wide angle to a telephoto (thereby compressing foreground and background and seemingly bringing the buildings in the background closer to the actor) while the whole camera dollies out to avoid our seeing only a tight close-up of a small part of the character’s face.) The same basic technique, but in reverse, is used at the start of the classic Steven Spielberg movie, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, where the literal otherworldliness of the movie’s theme is previewed when a valley seems to pull away from a cliff as investigators use instruments to search for the alien. In this case, the camera lens zooms out to a wide angle (stretching the apparent distance of the background valley away from the foreground of the cliff ), as the camera simultaneously dollies in to maintain the same general framing of the foregrounded cliff, again obscuring the two-component technique and creating a surreal experience of space. The techniques described here are but a small sample of the production variables functioning to shape perceptions of place in media. Yet I think they are sufficient to illustrate that when we attend to media, production choices lead us to experience places through selected perspectives that literally focus and defocus our attention on certain aspects of locales as we vicariously ‘travel’ through them with selected others experienced in partial and selected ways and as para-participants in selected actions in portrayed spaces. Such media grammar variables, then, add another, much-less conscious dimension to the ‘media worlds’ we carry in our heads. In many cases, the production variables re-situate us in familiar mental territory.

Media environments and place Although media content and media production variables have a large impact on our perception of locations and of our place in the world, as outlined above, the most significant influence of media on our senses of place, particularly in our electronic/digital era, may lie elsewhere. Indeed, as explained in this section, the notion of ‘elsewhere’ is key to understanding the influence of electronic media on our senses of place because, regardless of where we are at any moment, we are increasingly aware of, in touch with, and touched by elsewheres.

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Media are more than conveyors of messages and more than unique languages with specific production grammars. Media are also types of behavioural and experiential settings.16 Media have what could be called a ‘communication architecture’ or, more broadly, a ‘communication geography’. For better or worse, the geography of electronic media is different from the geography of print media. Electronic media break that age-old connection between where we are physically and what and whom we can experience with our own eyes and ears. They also reconfigure the places and distances from which others can see, hear, and interact with us. The electronic piercing of many once-assumed spatial limits fundamentally transforms our senses of place. Each book is an object that must be physically transported from one location to another. To enter our homes or workplaces, a specific book has to reach the outer boundaries of our places and then be carried in through an open door or window or mail slot. When a book’s content is welcome enough to be allowed in and kept, the book must be placed somewhere within our spaces, whether on proud display on a living room coffee table or hidden in shame under a mattress. In contrast, electronic media such as radio, television, and the Internet are like new doorways to our homes, workplaces, and other settings. With their use, a wide variety of welcome and unwelcome content moves across vast distances at enormous speed and seeps through outer and inner walls, occupying our places (and minds) in ways that those living in pre-electronic eras would associate with the spirit world. Until very recently in human history, any person one saw close-up as they spoke was someone likely to be a ‘local’ person, a member of one’s household, workplace, or community. Since television’s global spread in the second half of the twentieth century, however, hundreds of millions of people have seen the faces, bodies, actions, and settings of distant others. Flipping through TV channels has taken viewers into a variety of psychological, intellectual, and emotional spaces that have no necessary direct association with where each viewer is, ‘who’ they are (in terms of age, gender, race, religion, social status, etc.), or what other people are physically co-present. In addition to such influxes of outer experience, many newer forms of digital media afford even more finely simulated virtual ‘travel’ to distant locales that includes interaction (often ‘live’ exchanges) with non-present people. Overall, we live in an age of increasingly permeable boundaries. Digital media have fostered a network of complex social, political, and economic connections that show little ‘respect’ for territorial ‘edges’. The boundaries around homes, cities, regions, and nation-states have become more fluid, more

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porous. Moreover, when edges and boundaries change, so do conceptions of, and experiences in, each core. Of course, the increased porosity of human spheres affects different people around the planet very differently, based on country, region, class, race, and relative power. Some of us get the technological wonders, while others get the toxic e-waste. But in one way or another, whether for good or bad, the dilution of the connection between location and experience affects a much higher proportion of people on the planet than prior significant cultural shifts, such as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, and probably even industrialization. Individual communications and cultural artefacts that can be converted into bits of data (thereby losing most of the physical attributes that hinder transporting them) – including words, music, still and moving images, and money – now flow with fantastic speed and ease around the globe. At the same time, ‘hardstuffs’ (things with mass and weight that must pass through territory) – foods, pharmaceuticals, waste, weapons, tools, technologies, and people – also move more quickly across distances and through borders. Such movement is facilitated not only by the increase in rapid air travel, but also because transnational economic processes have expanded spatially and tightened temporally through digital communications. Goods and markets can be matched closely, and the movement of component parts (and also labourers) from multiple regions can be coordinated digitally to facilitate ‘just-in-time delivery’ for product assembly. With digitization, the distinctions between different types of objects and different types of activity in different types of spaces are also becoming more fluid. At some points in their lives, my parents made use of a number of tools that they had to buy, rent, or borrow and interact with in particular locations in a house, office, or other settings: telegraphs, typewriters, telephones, dictation machines, still and movie cameras, alarm clocks, slide rules (and later calculators), compasses, levels, maps, record players, fax machines, radios, and TV sets. I now hold all of these ‘devices’, and quite a few more, in the palm of one hand, all encased in a 5-ounce smartphone that I carry with me almost everywhere I go. Activities are temporally blending and increasingly ‘dis-placed’. There is a narrowing in the once-vast gulf between different types of objects, between amateur and professional equipment, between products and services, and even between the technical sophistication of many children’s toys and adult work tools.17 There is a blurring in where and how tasks are accomplished and in how we define the differences between various types of work (and workers) as well as the lines between work and play. With digitally connected branches (or

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tightly integrated affiliates) in many different locations, a single corporation may be operating what were once thought of as very different types of businesses. And an individual in any ‘connected’ place can engage in many different sorts of labour and amusement within a single period of a single day. It is increasingly difficult in mediatized societies to isolate people informationally by traditional categories of age, gender, and levels of authority. Even when different ‘types’ of people remain situated in different physical settings and face other restrictions, they learn about things happening to other people in other places, and they learn about the ways that other people in other places view them and their locations. Year-by-year (aka, reading-level by reading-level) isolation of school children from each other and from adults, for example, holds less sway in a culture awash in images and clickable links. In general, there is a blurring in what different types of people know about each other and relative to each other. These changes in information flow do not lead to simple homogenization and certainly not to social harmony. Rather, behaviours are becoming broadly more similar across traditional categories combined with greater fragmentation within categories and greater manifestations (and celebrations) of individual idiosyncrasy. Most of those seeing media images of restricted roles and mobility for people like themselves do not simply imitate or accept what is portrayed in media content as their destined roles. Instead, they demand to integrate the spheres of the culture from which they have been barred, leading to a multitude of ‘liberation’ and ‘integration’ struggles for ‘repositioning’ in society.18 Considering how recently digital-media capabilities have arisen, it is striking that, at least in the technologically endowed classes, we already take them nearly for granted. With a rather basic computer and Internet connection, I can sit at home in Durham, New Hampshire, take a short break from typing this paragraph, and ‘check in’ on my network of ‘friends’ and their contacts on a social media site. I can instantly reach the digital ‘inbox’ of almost anyone I know in the world with text, audio, photos, or a short video. I can send such communication to a few or many contacts simultaneously, or I can post an inthe-moment thought on one, a few, or a multitude of social media and other websites that could potentially reach hundreds of people I know, as well as an indeterminate mass of ‘friends of friends’ or strangers. Such communications and postings routinely lead to multiple forms of (sometimes almost instant) feedback, ‘likes,’ re-tweets, and queries. With some coordination of schedules, I can FaceTime or Skype with almost any acquaintance, colleague, relative, or lover – a mode of interaction which, for all but the lover, permits a good deal of

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what we might do when physically co-present as well as some things (even with the lover!) we might not think to do while co-present. I can play an online video game (or engage in an online debate) with anyone in the world who chooses to join in the game (or the debate), creating a group activity that could not occur anywhere else but where we digitally engage in it. Within seconds, I can find various online answers to almost any question, from basic household cleaning tips to highly technical issues, without relying on ‘local experts’ who might know (or who might know someone who knows). Individually, of course, we each need to be somewhere, even as we interact with images, sound, and people not co-present. And yet the meaning of local space is nevertheless reshaped. The spread of personal mobile communication devices small enough to fit in a pocket has a major impact on where we are when ‘at home’ and seemingly ‘with’ family members (who may be on their own devices that connect them to other places and non-present people) as well as exactly ‘where’ we are socially when in public space. With a smartphone in hand in most cities and many rural locations, one can reach and be reached by almost anyone one knows who has access to similar technologies, regardless of where or how far away from each other those communicating over the devices are. Of course, ‘live’ physical interaction remains a primary form of human experience (and, indeed, many digital exchanges are focused on the micro-coordination of upcoming co-presence or on sharing pictures or reports of experiences in specific locations with a close network of family and friends). Yet, many of the once-fundamental differences between being in one place versus another place are diluted by digital mobile media. One need only look at the eyes and facial expressions of those in shared space in numerous contexts (walking down the street, driving, riding in public transport, shopping in a supermarket, visiting a museum, sitting at a restaurant table alone or with others, etc.) to realize that the users of the digital devices are no longer fully ‘in’ their physical settings in terms of mood and consciousness. When using their devices for speaking, texting, emailing, video-viewing, or web-surfing, most users exhibit much of the demeanour associated with the people and contexts these devices connect them with. We now live with a ‘duality’ of social place (or what Paddy Scannell calls a ‘doubling’ of place), where our behaviour is shaped by both the local physical setting and the new ‘space’ created by the data-flows of digital connections.19 Moreover, the digital-flow space is often further splintered into multiple streams of communication (overlapping texts, email messages, phone calls, a TV or music source playing in the background, etc.), so that it is now common to feel as if one is in a multitude of social spaces at the same

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moment. We are increasingly juggling and prioritizing among communication options and demands. Places are much more than static, diagrammable spaces. Places have long been defined functionally in terms of social status and activity – who typically does what in a kitchen versus a bedroom, an office, or a classroom. The latest technologies redefine places and the identities of those in them. Many onceassumed connections between occurrences and locations – as expressed in the phrase ‘take place’ as a synonym for ‘happen’ – are torn asunder. In the absence of a better word, we have functionally redefined ‘place’ to include mediated social spheres that cannot be defined by latitudes and longitudes or captured in a photograph. Indeed, all our place-based vocabulary becomes ambiguous as the notion of ‘presence’ is extended even to unidirectional mediated experiences (such as those who felt present at Princess Diana’s funeral from watching it on TV) and, more so, to bi-directional or multi-directional video conferencing. Additionally, even the sports fans who travel to a game are ‘there’ in a new way: Because the view of the action is so much better on television than for live attendees, giant video screens are often set up above the field so that those in the stadium can see the closer images (and instant replays, multiple angles, slow motion, etc.) that viewers in distant homes and bars are watching. Additionally, now that access to others persists even when people are in the midst of travel from one location to another, being ‘on the move’ is no longer as much of a ‘between,’ or liminal, state of being – a time of disconnection from other people, places, tools, and tasks. I can have a long, ‘stable’ conversation with a friend who is bicycling in Barcelona while I am driving on highways from Boston to Baltimore. Mobility has become a newly functional, connected – yet also flexible and fluid – para-location (or what might be called a ‘flowcation’), as well as a state of being and communicating. Lest anyone confuse my descriptions of now-basic (for many of us) technical capabilities with celebration of these possibilities, I want to make clear that all these options for reaching others (and the resulting flow of communications one receives from others), while at times exhilarating and empowering, are, at many other times, overwhelming, literally unsettling. There are fewer and fewer ‘down times’ and spatial/temporal ‘retreats’. One is expected to be easily accessible to, and ‘in reach’ of anyone one knows, including a widening circle of online ‘friends’ whom one may barely know (or whom one may have once known well enough in the past to want to keep the relationship in the past!). It is more difficult to maintain uninterrupted interactions with those friends, family, neighbours, and colleagues who are physically present. The basic human

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connections that arise from ‘seeing each other see each other’ are now spread over a broader but shallower territory. People within a household or other location increasingly compete with screens and distant others for basic human eye gaze from those who are physically present. It is not easy to resist looking at the just-in text or email message, regardless of what else is going on or who else is there. It is difficult to distance ourselves from our digital tools to thwart those entities that spy on our digital footsteps for commercial or political purposes. It is challenging to pause long enough from using our mobile devices to consider the working conditions and lives of those who assemble (and disassemble) them. Digital changes in experiences of locations have both positive and negative implications. The pressure to be available – always and everywhere – by mobile devices can feel like being tied by a leash to family members, one’s boss, coworkers, or clients. And, yet, the same devices, as Rich Ling argues, foster ‘bounded solidarity’ with those one cares about the most.20 Additionally, mobile devices offer reassurance through the ability to keep an eye on (and even act on) the security of one’s primary spaces when away from home or office (through video and audio monitoring, as well as remote control of temperature, lights, and locks). Also, if a mobile phone remains dormant (no emergency texts or calls), it suggests that all is well with those we care most about, and we can sink more deeply into local physical interactions without wondering (as was the case not that long ago) where a nearby pay phone can be located to ‘check in’ and to ‘check up’ on others. The weakened connection between where we are physically and where we are communicationally means that our physical locations play a more superficial role in our broader social profile, group identities, and self-perception. We may move from place to place and keep the same ‘contacts’. Indeed, even our ‘addresses’ (such as those that end in ‘gmail.com’) remain unchanged regardless of whether we live in the same house for decades, move to another part of the country or world, are on vacation, at work, visiting friends, out in public space, or wherever. In that sense, at least, local place matters less in our lives. Yet, for the same reasons, we may now actually feel a stronger individual and idiosyncratic connection to particular places because we can choose to live and work and relax in them for reasons that stand apart from some of the interactional possibilities and limitations that used to matter more. With a global web of information, every ‘connected’ place (including a ‘mobile place’) becomes a kind of communicational ‘centre’ for those in it. Those of us with such digital access can choose our physical locations (or switch among them) based on one or a few features that attract or enchant us: what we find to be the surface beauty of

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the topography or architecture, appealing weather, the choice of restaurants, the pace of life, transportation options, available leisure activities and recreation, the smell of the air, a charming city name, and even the availability of highspeed Internet and range and quality of TV channels – factors often researched online. Paradoxically, increasingly explicit expressions of ‘love of place’ may now actually signal a decline of traditional attachments to place, which were once so fundamental as to be unconscious and unspoken (unless they were disrupted). Chosen locations now become the metaphorical backdrops for our broader, place-unspecified communications – and often literally the visual backdrops for Skype and other video interactions. With the diminished link between where we are and what we do and whom we interact with, those in the middle and upper classes can travel – and relocate – more frequently from place to place with minimal disruptions in their communicational worlds.21 Of course, physical mobility is differentially accessible and differentially desirable. Media developments described here do not magically erase power inequities; in many cases, they make them worse. There are differences between those who are free to roam and those who are more restricted in place or who are forced to migrate. Not everyone, as Doreen Massey emphasizes, is a ‘jet setter’, and there are vast differences between what Zygmunt Bauman terms the ‘tourists’ and the ‘vagabonds’.22 Digital flows of information that empower some of us also enable increasingly powerful transnational entities to micromanage the movements and labour of migrant workers, often creating inhumane conditions of one sort or another. At the same time, however, the experience of migration has also been digitally transformed in that those leaving one region, country, or culture increasingly find that they can maintain contact with family members and friends ‘left behind’ and continue to attend to the music, movies, even live-streaming radio programmes of their places of origin, as if they were still ‘at home’.23 James Clifford describes the experience of ‘travelling cultures’ and suggests that anthropologists need to rethink their notion of ‘field work’ as situated in bounded territory of ‘other cultures’, considering instead the distances of furthest travel of members of those cultures, the nature of diasporas, and multiple forms of overlapping cultural experiences and ‘translations’.24 Similarly, John Urry argues that physical and communicational ‘mobilities’ of multiple kinds are now so basic to human life that sociology needs to reconceptualize its core focus to move away from the bounded notions of ‘societies’.25 Moreover, digital and mobile technologies are no longer the province only of the middle classes and the wealthy. In this century, mobile devices, which do not require expensive wired infrastructure, have been spreading rapidly through the lower

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classes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, those who previously had no access to telephones. Mobile banking is reshaping economies on the micro- and macrolevel (as when a migrant worker’s salary is instantly accessible to his family back home). Mobile phone calls and text messages are increasingly used among the poor for checking on prices, job opportunities, natural disasters, and health issues, as well as for routine contact between family members and friends.26 Additionally, many indigenous peoples are now using geospatial mapping technologies to claim and to try to protect their ancestral lands and resources from theft and exploitation.27 Of course, even in an age of high-speed travel and communication, most people on the planet spend most of their time in one general locality. Yet that does not diminish the impact of porous informational boundaries that bring a world of ‘elsewhere’ artefacts and perspectives to people wherever they are – goods and services, entertainment and advertising, news and gossip, political and charity appeals, professional and amateur pornography, business proposals and sexual propositions, terrorist threats and online petitions to ‘sign’. We increasingly live in ‘glocalities’, local settings that ‘are unique in many ways, and yet . . . also influenced in many other ways by global trends and global consciousness’.28 Through electronic media we gain many external perspectives from which to judge ourselves and our localities. Social-psychologist George Herbert Mead famously argued that the ‘self ’ does not rest inside our bodies, but in our imaginings of how others (the ‘generalized other’ and ‘significant others’) imagine us. We see ourselves as social objects.29 Digital media vastly extend the scale and scope of potential self mirrors beyond our in-place interactions. We have a ‘mediated generalized other’ (and even ‘mediated significant others’ formed through para-social interaction with media figures) that overlays local reflections of self. In addition, one could argue that we now similarly gain a new sense of local place by imagining how people in other places, in general, perceive our locations. What I call the ‘generalized elsewhere’ is increasingly shaped by media flows.30 We imagine our locations – and ourselves in them – as they might be seen from afar. We imaginatively watch others watch us watching them. In a sense, then, all connectivity media function as types of psycho-social ‘remote sensing’ and ‘global positioning’ systems. These extended dynamics of self-perception and place-perception are manifest in teen and adult sociability in online sites, in corporate PR, in environmental activism (which is founded on awareness of global consequences of local action), and in sophisticated social media postings by terrorist organizations. Those who embrace various forms of

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global cosmopolitanism and those who actively reject it, share an awareness of a global reflecting pool. Through mediated experiences we are both pulled out of places and re-situated in them. Digital media help many people slip beyond the boundaries of location and override the negative self-mirrors of those physically around them. Gays who are being bullied by schoolmates, for example, have found solace and psychological safety in online gay support groups, just as those who are anti-war in a pro-war community (or vice versa) find political solidarity online. In both these examples, distance-bridging media allow people to maintain a sustainable tie to a locality when they might otherwise feel they have to flee. The link between specific places and specific behaviour is also being redefined by the massive spread of digital forms of surveillance, including state, corporate, peer-to-peer, and self-surveillance (where individuals record themselves or invite others to record them). In one sense, in-place behaviours in a wide range of settings are being documented and ‘fixed’ in significantly stronger ways. (Just imagine having such video artefacts of micro-level behaviours in multiple settings for the figures that fill our history books!) But the more significant trend is that behaviour that occurs in one place and time no longer stays in that spatiotemporal context (even in Las Vegas). Behaviour suited to one social setting (or life stage) is now increasingly judged by the standards of other settings (and later life stages). This trend can be very confining, such as when benign playfulness in once-bounded private interactions is judged to be ‘immature’, ‘unbecoming’, or ‘unprofessional’. This risk encourages self-censorship and a flattening of creativity and diminished experimentation in identity and human interactions. At the same time, such technologies can rightfully expose (and, ideally, discourage) outrageous behaviour (as in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos). The trend is also towards more transparency regarding official actions taken in citizens’ names, as in the push for US police to wear bodycams to document their interactions with members of the public, to videotape full interrogation sessions (not just a final confession, which may have been induced through coercion and deception), and to broadcast and record government meetings (which, though technically ‘public’ in the past, rarely drew many members of the public into the room). For both better and worse, in-place behaviour is being transformed by being projected (or possibly projected) onto a broader stage. Place-specific norms and ethical standards are growing fuzzier. People are increasingly acting on the assumption that excerpts from streams of behaviours in one place and time may later be re-played for analysis (and for praise or blame) by non-present, and asyet undefined, audiences in not-yet determined settings.

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Even at their level of greatest dislocative impact, however, media do not dislodge us from physical places. Media dilute the connection between location and experience, but they do not eliminate it. Boundaries are more permeable and fluid, but still functioning. Location-related particularities of weather, topography, culture, language, architecture, class, air quality, and political systems persist. They attract us to, and repel us from locations. Physical distance and travel time still matter a great deal. Where in non-digital space I live determines where I have to register my car, what taxes I pay, whether and how well the roads are paved and plowed, what foods are most available, what places I can reach on foot or by bicycle or public transport or car, whether I have to bring my own garbage to the town dump or it gets picked up from the end of my driveway, the nature and quality of the area schools, how well the local government represents my interests, the laws that govern my behaviour and house-renovation options, whether local resources benefit me and my neighbours or enrich distant others, and what territorial boundaries I am free to cross with or without particular sorts of documents and identification. Except for those people with virtual workplaces, we need to live within commuting distance of our work locations. And we all hunger to be close to the people we want to hug and be hugged by. Proximity and distance still matter. Indeed, one of the reasons that my then girlfriend (later, my wife) and I chose, some decades ago, to relocate from New York City to New Hampshire over other job and relocation options was that the 300 miles between the two locations gave us some distance from our parents (for a sense of adult independence), but left us within relatively easy driving distance to see them and other family members and friends. Being able to move at our own pace through all the intervening territory, at ground level (in contrast to air travel), was important to us, as was what seemed so special about our new location – a university close to farms, fields, mountains, and not that far from the cities of Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine. Similarly, at this moment, I’m happy to be sitting in my comfortable desk chair at my familiar desk, positioned to be able to see down the upstairs hallway of my house and stay aware of others’ comings and goings or glance out the window to the brook that runs through my backyard. Nevertheless, local living is increasingly shaped by new local and global information flows. It would be impossible for me to bring all my digital ‘friends’ and colleagues into one shared space (and they – who generally know distinct parts of me, and vice versa – would be unlikely to get along with each other). Moreover, fewer and fewer people are willing to settle for associations only with

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those who have settled near them. Beyond human associations, many of the things I use on a daily basis are not things that I hold in my hands or store in my house or office. Like a hunter and gatherer, refitted for the information age, I rely on being able to find and ‘keep’ quite a bit of what I need, when I need it, in the larger digital landscape.31 Digital media both take us out of local space and bring us back to it in new ways. They make us aware of all the things we never could have known about local territory without such media. Before Google Earth, we did not know what our local space looked like from satellites circling the earth. Before Foursquare (and its 2014 offshoot, Swarm) and other similar ‘apps’, we couldn’t monitor the movements of friends in our general area or get ongoing personalized tips of where to eat or go locally for entertainment. Before apps such as uCIC (a recent launch that may or may not survive), we didn’t know what sorts of questions people elsewhere had about our specific locations and hoped that we could answer. Before sites such as Tinder or Match.com, we did not know as much about which people within a selected distance from us might find our faces and ‘profiles’ appealing enough to meet for a date or consider for a long-term relationship. Before apps such as Yik Yak, we did not know the thoughts that people within a 1.5–10-mile radius cared to share anonymously with other locals. Before YouTube and similar sites, we did not know how people elsewhere would celebrate, mock, or critique our local video-recorded happenings. Of course, most of these mediated streams of information can also be employed to explore more distant locales, making other locations and the people in them less mysterious. These media make it easier to imagine (or enact) travel to other locations. Indeed, with 360° street views for much of the developed world, we can now ‘pre-travel’, reducing the anxiety (but also quite a bit of the adventure) of travel. For many people, virtual travel replaces or supplements embodied movements through space (as suggested in many of the user reviews of Google Earth). We can go on more virtual ‘trips’ than could fit in an embodied life of travel. In real travel, global positioning systems (GPS), when they function as intended, blur much of the distinction between tourists and insiders, though without local history and context (‘where the old mill used to be’). We also lose a good deal of the consciousness of the paths and turns and discoveries that come from trying to become familiar with unfamiliar terrain. Traditional location-based experience is bypassed in both directions. It is fragmented within locality and stretched beyond it. We find sub-communities within our traditional territories, and we connect with distant others and

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global flows of information. I know more about some distant tragedies than about many of the struggles of people a few miles away. Connections leap across local territory as neo-feudal communities – based on transient ‘vows’ of digital communicational allegiance – are created, maintained, and reshaped by whoever joins them online from wherever. Such bonds are forged over shared tastes in music, movies, TV shows, politics, funny pet videos, celebrity fandom, technical expertise, political activism, and on and on. Social media become the ‘place’ where travel-restricted teens create sociability and experiment with public identities.32 Progressive non-governmental organizations operate across national borders to fight for universal standards of human rights, peace, justice, and environmental protection, while profit-maximizing stateless corporations also override national boundaries, often in an attempt to subvert local, regional, and national environmental and labour-protection regulations. A mediatized society highlights the ‘imagined’ characteristics of traditional place-bound experience. ‘Local community’ has always been a shared fiction. No one living in a pre-electronic city ever walked or saw every inch of ground or every corner of local buildings or interacted with all their localitysharing neighbours. Imaginings of places were based on selective familiarity with a terrain and its inhabitants defined by a variety of natural and socially constructed features, boundaries, and narratives – historical, political, linguistic, and legal. Such imaginings are susceptible to major transformation through mediated information flows. To the extent that we’ve always lived in ‘imagined communities’,33 new patterns of association through media create newly imagined and re-imagined communities and societies and a newly imagined sense of living in some particular place on the whole planet. When we are digitally connected, we are – regardless of specific location – in a new centre of potential global engagement, but often combined with a sense of monitoring the global action from the margins. In a twist of the conventional formulation, many of us now ‘act globally, but live glocally’.

Away from home and back again As much as I enjoy travelling in simulated digital modes, and as much as I like to be in touch with the concrete physicality of my Durham, New Hampshire, home – its walls, its doors, it windows, its garden and bubbling brook – I also love to travel through space to new and familiar places in the United States and abroad. The initial disorientation is part of the adventure.

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When I am in a distant location, I work to establish some familiarity with local place: the way to stores and restaurants and cultural sites, how the public transport functions, some road knowledge if I plan to drive a rental car, how I get back to the airport to return home. After a few nights in the same location, my body can often find its way around my hotel room or my host’s home without relying much on sight. The opaqueness of a strange city’s layout becomes slowly more familiar with the help of guide books, maps, a GPS, online information and reviews, and locals offering tips and directions. When I am far from home, having access via Internet and mobile phone networks to my ‘usual’ set of digital contacts is both comforting and disorienting, sometimes almost annoying, because the familiar email routines take away time and focus from ‘being away’ and embedding myself in a new place worthy of discovery time. Large differences between my home time zone and my away time zone, of course, can add additional disorientation. When I return from travels of any length, my typically familiar home and possessions can feel foreign. My staircase steps, it often turns out, are not geometrically identical in depth and height to those I became accustomed to in the place I visited. My night-time ritual of ‘blind navigation’ may falter, with my bumping into a door jamb instead of passing through the opening, or my legs misremembering the number of steps up or down stairs. If I used a rental car while on a trip of any length, my own car of many years feels odd, as if my hands and feet are malfunctioning. After a few days back home, however, I return to being in close synchrony with my place. Yet, paradoxically, I would not feel completely ‘at home’ here in my local and familiar place without being connected to location-eroding media such as the television, mobile phone, and Internet. Thus, we come again to the multiple meanings of my title about mediated ‘re-placements’. Media place us and re-place us, situate us and re-situate us. Media content and grammar portrayals of places (as in crime news) can seem more real than a walk down the street outside, and media become the sites for an increasing number of our interactions, often substituting for physically bounded interactions in particular locations. Yet, media also re-affirm our connections to particular settings, as many of us gain more freedom to choose places to live, work, and have fun, apart from the traditional constraints of communication and association once inherent in being in one location versus another. Physically bounded experience also continues to offer us a potential refuge from digitally boundless interaction. Often we want the best of both. More and more people may use online dating sites to find romance and love, but for those looking for

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long-term relationships, a key datum-point on a person-of-interest’s profile is the answer to the question: ‘Are you willing to re-locate?’ *

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*

© 2015 Joshua Meyrowitz I thank Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, Peter Schmidt, and Renée H. Carpenter for their comments and suggestions on the manuscript and Shaun Moores for his writings that have engaged with and challenged some of my ideas. Portions of the research for this chapter were supported by a fellowship from the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire.

Notes 1 My reflections on this night-time ritual were stimulated by Shaun Moores’s ‘sympathetic critique’ of my No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), as detailed in his book, Media, Place and Mobility (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Moores draws on Yi-Fu Tuan’s argument (and terminology) that ‘When space becomes thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place’. See Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 73, as discussed in Moores, Media, Place and Mobility, p. 28 and throughout. Other parts of this chapter can also be thought of as part of a ‘conversation’ with Moores, which he began with his book. 2 For samples of the ‘fountain lady’ surveillance footage and the ways that it was edited and put to music by various people, see CNN’s Jeanne Moos’s report on the incident at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WudLUvhjHI. Accessed 26 February 2015. 3 For a more detailed discussion of these three different conceptions of media, see Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘Multiple Media Literacies’, Journal of Communication, 48(1) (1998): 96–108. 4 See, for example, George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, ‘Growing Up with Television: The Cultivation Processes’, in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research , 2nd edition, ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), pp. 43–68. 5 See, for example, Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘Web of Lies’, In These Times, 1 September 2003, pp. 18–20; and Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘American Homogenization and Fragmentation: The Influence of New Information Systems and Disinformation

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Systems’, in Media Cultures, ed. William Uricchio and Susanne Kinnebrock (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006), pp. 153–186. See Chapter 10, ‘Schemes of Life’, in Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 141–191. The quote is on p. 142. A pdf of the volume is available online: http://www.scienzepostmoderne.org/OpereComplete/ BlumerHerbertrMoviesAndConduct.pdf. Accessed 27 February 2015. Bryan Bender, ‘US Intensifies Afghan Airstrikes: Targets Militants as Drawdown of Troops Nears’, The Boston Globe, 8 October 2014, A1, A11. The online headline is slightly different, ‘US Intensifies Afghan Airstrikes as Drawdown Nears’, http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/10/07/with-focus-iraq-and-syriaair-war-heats-afghanistan-amid-drawdown/to9wunctlsgw8LV1dJ0XtL/story.html. Accessed 25 January 2015. Daniel Hallin, ‘Cartography, Community, and the Cold War’, in Reading the News, ed. Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 109–145. David Rohde, ‘Held by the Taliban’, The New York Times, 18 October 2009, A1, A18. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/world/asia/18hostage.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 27 February 2015. Mohammed Tawfeeq, ‘Deadly Wave of Bombings across Iraq Ahead of Elections’, CNN.com, 16 April 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/15/world/meast/iraqviolence/. Accessed 27 February 2015. Contrast this abstract report with a New York Times special feature identifying every person seen in an NBC television image at the moment of the Boston Marathon bombings and having them recount what they saw, heard, and felt. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/22/ sports/boston-moment.html. Accessed 27 February 2015. As might be expected, The Boston Globe had, over many months, extensive ‘place-as-setting’ coverage of the bombings and the heart-breaking experiences of victims, their family members, rescuers, and health-care workers. The ‘best examples’ of these reports are so powerful that I feared that using a sample here would overwhelm many readers’ emotions and haunt their dreams, as well as distract them from reading the rest of the chapter. See Moores, Media, Place and Mobility, p. 32, where he ties the daily newspaper experience into Tuan’s emphasis on the importance of ‘repetition and return’. In Media, Place and Mobility, p. 32, Moores mentions how what is ‘new’ in each day’s newspaper is typically overshadowed by the comforting consistency of layout and the regular reader’s familiarity with the styles of particular journalists. The consistency in news ‘narratives’ about the United States in the world has been documented in the now-extensive literature on critical analysis of news, with one classic text being Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002). My ‘American Homogenization and Fragmentation’ chapter, cited earlier, offers a small contribution to this literature.

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13 Although Jane Fonda continues to defend the purpose of her trip to North Vietnam (to try to discourage President Nixon from ordering the bombing of dikes that would likely have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians), she acknowledges the profound ‘mistake’ she made in sitting in the anti-aircraft gunner’s chair. See http://www.janefonda.com/the-truth-about-my-trip-to-hanoi/ for details rarely reported in the mainstream media. Accessed 27 February 2015. 14 For an analysis of ‘para-proxemics’, see Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘Television and Interpersonal Behavior: Codes of Perception and Response’, in Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, ed. Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 56–76. 15 Henry Hampton, ‘The Camera Lens as Two-Edged Sword’, The New York Times, 15 January 1989, Section 2, pp. 29, 39. 16 In No Sense of Place, p. 16, I coined the term ‘medium theory’ to describe this focus on the characteristics of media settings (as contrasted with focus on media content or media production variables). For more details on this approach, see Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘Medium Theory: An Alternative to the Dominant Paradigm of Media Effects’, in The Sage Handbook of Media Processes and Effects, ed. Robin L. Nabi and Mary Beth Oliver (Thousand Oak, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), pp. 517–530. 17 I discuss these trends in more detail in Joshua Meyrowitz, The Changing Global Landscape (Atlanta, GA: Quest Publications, 1991). https://www.academia. edu/10630701/_The_Changing_Global_Landscape. Accessed 20 April 2015. 18 For more on viewer resistance to accepting roles as portrayed on television, see Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, and Joshua Meyrowitz and John Maguire, ‘Media, Place, and Multiculturalism’, Society, 30(5) (July/August 1993): 41–48. 19 Paddy Scannell discusses the ‘doubling of place’ in his Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 172, and writes of the ‘magic’, via media, of being in two places at once (p. 91). In his Media, Place and Mobility, Shaun Moores expresses preference for Scannell’s ‘doubling’ concept over some of my formulations in No Sense of Place, such as my argument on p. 38 that the situation two friends are ‘in’ when speaking on the telephone with each other ‘is only marginally related to their respective physical locations’. Moores’s notion of the ‘pluralising’ of place (p. 6) may be even a better match for the current multiplicity of communication options and demands. For a brief discussion of how the new digital duality of social space may ‘violate two sets of rules at the same instant’, see my ‘Global Nomads in the Digital Veldt’, in Mobile Democracy: Essays on Society, Self and Politics, ed. Kristóf Nyíri (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003), p. 96. 20 Rich Ling, New Tech, New Ties (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

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21 These new ways of being ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of places at the same time (in terms of communication possibilities, consciousness of place and emotional ties) complicate Edward Relph’s insightful analyses of different forms of ‘outsideness’ and ‘insideness’. See his Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976), pp. 49–55. 22 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 23 See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) for his description of how the traditional experience of forced or voluntary migration is newly juxtaposed with the ‘rapid flow of mass-mediated images’ leading to ‘a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities’. Media experiences from ‘home’ create ‘diasporic public spheres’ for ‘deterritorialized’ migrants (p. 4). 24 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 25 John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societes: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000). 26 See, for example, Jenny C. Aker and Isaac M. Mbiti, ‘Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(3) (2010): 207–232. 27 Mac Chapin, Zachary Lamb, and Bill Threlkeld, ‘Mapping Indigenous Lands’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 34(2005): 619–638. Since mapping was once almost exclusively the technology of empire and exploitation, the indigenous efforts are often referred to as ‘counter-mapping’. See also the Aboriginal Mapping Network’s web site at: http://www.nativemaps.org/?q=top_menu/1/85/21. Accessed 28 February 2015. I thank Gaetano Mazzuca for alerting me to this web site and other ‘participatory spatial technologies’. 28 Meyrowitz, The Changing Global Landscape. p. 6. See also Doreen Massey on ‘a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ in her Space, Place, and Gender, p. 155, and John Tomlinson’s analyses of ‘deterritorialization’, the ‘dis-placement’ that global modernity brings to those who stay local, and his review of others’ related work in his Globalization and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 29 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1934). 30 Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘The Generalized Elsewhere’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6(3) (September 1989): 326–334.

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31 For more on ‘hunters and gatherers of an information age’, see Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘Global Nomads in the Digital Veldt’. With ‘cloud’ storage options, such as Dropbox or more privacy-attuned Spideroak, users can store data ‘out there’ and retrieve it almost instantly on a variety of digital devices anywhere in the world. 32 danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 33 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).

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Domineering vision The characteristics and qualities of architectural entities, spaces, and places are usually described and analyzed in geometric and formal terms. In fact, forms, formal qualities, and their relationships have been the predominant interest of Modernism, as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s famous credo: ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of the masses brought together in light.’1 The suppression of other sense modalities and materiality, along with the preference for an overall whiteness, have evidently served the purposes of emphasizing visual plasticity and formal counterpoint. Modernist art and architecture valued and revered vision as the primary sense of experience to the point of fetishism. Le Corbusier’s many exclamations, such as: ‘Architecture is a plastic thing. I mean by “plastic” what is seen and measured by the eyes’2; ‘I exist in life only if I can see’3; and ‘I am and I remain an impenitent visual – everything is in the visual’,4 underline this vision-centred attitude. Declarations by other leading modernist architects reveal that the obsession with vision was not Le Corbusier’s alone. ‘He [the designer] has to adapt knowledge of the scientific facts of optics and thus obtain a theoretical ground that will guide the hand giving shape, and create an objective basis’,5 Walter Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus School, claimed. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, one of the reformers of artistic thinking at the Bauhaus, supports the primacy of vision equally enthusiastically: ‘The hygiene of the optical, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through’.6 We can also detect a distinct moral attitude in the exclamations of the Modernist architects on vision. In Le Corbusier’s words, whiteness serves ‘the eye of truth’,7 and thus mediates moral and objective values. Surprising moral

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implications of whiteness are anticipated in his suggestion: ‘Whiteness is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of great people’.8 As the modernist interest centred on form and focused vision, the role of unfocused, peripheral vision, and shapeless atmospheres or moods were not recognized. This conscious limitation gave the Gestalt laws a dominant position in the theories of the processes of vision, as well as the appreciation of architectural form.

Mood and multi-sensory experience The Western architectural tradition has undoubtedly been dominated by vision, but the sonic and acoustic qualities of place and space are equally significant atmospheric factors. The acoustic properties of space give rise to either pleasant or negative moods, but some scholars on sonic surroundings, such as composer-writer R. Murray Schaeffer, assume that man’s earliest spaces, built for ritual and cult purposes, were actually planned especially for acoustic purposes. Some sonic artists such as Schaeffer, Bernard Leitner, Andreas Öldorp and Bruce Odland, have recently designed atmospheric works through which the experiential character and tuning of the place is deliberately changed through introducing specific tonal ‘soundscapes’, to use the notion of Schaeffer. An unpleasant acoustic landscape, say, the space underneath an elevated highway intersection, can be made agreeable by introducing harmonizing sonic elements in the existing aggressive soundscape. Also other sensory realms, spaces of odour, temperature, humidity and movement of the air, as well as the counterpoint of shadow and light, create their own atmospheres, which may well be experientially stronger than those of vision. Even the number of the human senses is debatable ; Steinerian philosophy posits twelve senses,9 while a recent book The Sixth Sense Reader categorizes thirty-three sensory systems through which we relate ourselves to environments.10 In the commercial world today, the multi-sensory control of atmospheres and moods is frequently more conscious than in architecture. This deliberate control has often turned into a forceful manipulation of the sensory experiences and emotions of the consumer. Yet, architects seem to be still constricted within the primary sense of modernity, vision. Our experiences of the world are inherently fragmented. Research has recently established that visual sensory inputs enter in two waves, the first one feeds

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unconscious systems of perception, the second mediates neural information to the conscious system, some 20–40 milliseconds later. Besides, form, colour and movement are also perceived separately, again at 30–40 millisecond distances. But our sensory reality is essentially multi-sensory. In The Experience of Place, Tony Hiss uses the notion ‘simultaneous perception’11 of the perceptual mode we use in experiencing our surroundings. Paul Klee writes about dispersed attention, the ‘polyphonic’ structure of artistic works, and ‘multi-dimensional attention’, when describing this essential sensory multiplicity.12 However, this is also the way we normally observe, with all the senses at once. As Merleau-Ponty notes: ‘My perception is [ . . . ] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.’13 In real-life experiences, other senses have frequently a more significant role than vision. The odour of a space can be either overwhelmingly enticing or repulsive. Smells are connected with our primal levels of memory and they can thus evoke especially strong recollections of places and events, as Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time suggests.14 The industrial culture is predominantly a culture of vision, but historically vision acquired its dominant role rather late, regardless of the fact that already Greek thinking assigned vision its hegemonic role among the senses. ‘The sixteenth century did not see first: it heard and smelled, it sniffed the air and caught sounds. It was only later that it seriously and actively became engaged in geometry [ . . . ] It was then that vision was unleashed in the world of beauty as well’, Lucien Febvre argues.15 Robert Mandrou makes a parallel argument: ‘The hierarchy [of the senses] was not the same [as in the twentieth century] because the eye, which rules today, found itself in third place, behind hearing and touch, and far after them. The eye that organizes, classifies, and orders was not a favoured organ of a time that preferred hearing.’16 The ears, nose, and skin (experiences of temperature, moisture, wind) can create atmospheric experiences that are as domineering as any visually defined situations.

The significance of atmosphere It is evident that the experiential quality of a space or a place is not merely a visual perceptual quality, and in fact, focused vision makes us outsiders in relation to what we are seeing in focus. The sense of insideness in a space or place calls for unfocused, peripheral, enveloping, and enfolding perceptions

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and interactions of various sense experiences. Atmosphere is a kind of a virtual, experiential, and multi-sensory place, which usually has shapeless, indefinable and ephemeral boundaries, and experiential qualities. An atmosphere can also have dynamically changing characteristics and varying durations such as weather, natural illumination, or musical atmospheres. Atmospheres could thus be regarded as limit cases of ‘placeness’, or as ‘quasiplaces’, and experiences of distinct location and spatial situation. Atmosphere defines a specific location or place with distinct experiential qualities and emotive suggestions. The biased orientation towards focused vision and clear form has regrettably guided the architect’s conscious interest away from the phenomena of atmosphere, ambience, mood, and tuning as essential experiential realities and qualities. Architects have tended to regard atmospheres as something romantic, entertaining or, perhaps, even kitsch, something that has its place in restaurant and shop decoration and window displays, but not in serious architecture. The judgement of environmental character is a complex, multi-sensory fusion of numerous factors, which are, however, immediately and synthetically grasped as an overall atmosphere or feeling. ‘I enter a building, see a room, and – in the fraction of a second – have this feeling about it’, Peter Zumthor, one of the architects, who have acknowledged the importance of architectural atmospheres, confesses.17 Zumthor’s interest in atmospheres is especially noteworthy as his architecture can hardly be associated with any romantic or entertaining aspirations. This immediate grasping of the atmosphere and mood takes place mostly unconsciously. John Dewey, the visionary American philosopher (1859–1952), who already, eight decades ago, understood the immediate, embodied, emotive, and largely subconscious essence of experience, describes the nature of such existential encounters as follows: The total overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in a seizure by a sudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of entrance into a cathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass and majestic proportions fuse in one indistinguishable whole. We say with truth that a painting strikes us. There is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about.18

We can be similarly struck by a setting, place or space, and the sheer presence and the feeling that it exudes can have an overpowering impact on our mental state, emotive tuning and actions. The ambience can be solemn, calming, energizing or invigorating, for example, or alienating, boring, restless, or frustrating.

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Individual buildings also tune our senses and moods; altogether architecture provides specific perceptual, emotive, and cognitive frames and horizons of experience and understanding. All buildings, monumental or commonplace, ritual or utilitarian, create atmospheres through which we experience the world and ourselves. This unconscious orientation and articulation of mood is often the most significant effect of a space or building. I believe that non-architects sense primarily the atmosphere of a place or building, whereas a formal attention implies a distinct intellectual and theoretical position. Atmospheres are not necessarily a consequence of conscious design intention; the pleasurable atmospheres of vernacular settings are usually unintentional consequences of specific traditional building practices. Even the multifarious and diffuse components of weather create distinct emotive states and moods at a glance. It is also evident that the experience of weather has a diffuse and peripheral character, instead of consisting of focused images with clear boundaries or gestalt. Weather is a complex experience with a strong qualitative tuning, similar to a landscape, urban or architectural space. These are all enfolding and embracing experiences that encircle us, and in which we are insiders and participants, not mere onlookers. Atmosphere is the fused, over-all, and enfolding inside experience of a place or space.

Sensing atmospheres An atmospheric perception involves judgements beyond the five Aristotelian senses, such as sensations of orientation, motion, duration, continuity, scale, density, intimacy, temperature, humidity, air movement, and the dynamics of illumination. Indeed, the judgement of the character of a space calls for our entire embodied and existential sense, our sense of being, and it is perceived in a diffuse and peripheral manner rather than through precise, focused and conscious observation. This complex assessment also includes the dimension of time as atmospheres can be dynamically changing, and all experiences imply duration, and they fuse perception, memory, and imagination. All live experiences glide along a temporal axis between memorizing, perceiving, and imagining. Moreover, each space and place is always an invitation to and suggestion for distinct acts: spaces and true architectural experiences are inherently verbs and promises; floor is an invitation to stand up and move around, the door to enter and exit, the window to look out, and the stair to ascend or descend and so on.

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In addition to environmental atmospheres, there are cultural, social, workplace, family, and other interpersonal atmospheres, which all have similarly enfolding characters; atmospheres truly touch us. The atmosphere of a social situation can be supportive or discouraging, liberating or stifling, inspiring or dull, whereas an experience of place or architecture can evoke a sense of optimism and hope, for instance. We can even speak of specific atmospheres in the scales of cultural, regional or national entities. Most countries, have their identifiable atmospheres deriving from the characteristic landscapes, typical weather, architectural traditions, conventions of dressing and behaviour, food culture, tone of language, and so on. Powerful atmospheric experiences can actually feel like the intimate embracing touch of a veil or of a lover, and they address directly our sense of being rather than any one of the Aristotelian senses separately. Genius loci, the Spirit of Place, is a similarly ephemeral, unfocused, and nonmaterial experiential character, that is closely related with atmosphere ; we can, indeed, speak of the atmosphere and ‘spirit’ of a place, which give the place its unique experiential identity and character. Genius loci is usually attached to the permanent material, formal, and dimensional aspects of the place. Yet, a place can have dynamically changing atmospheres; a great theatre hall, for instance, has its own, more or less permanent ambience, and the changing imaginative atmospheres of the performances, and these two sets of atmospheres interact. John Dewey explains the unifying character of experience as a specific quality: An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rapture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it.19

In another context the philosopher re-emphasizes the integrating power of this experiential quality: ‘The quality of the whole permeates, affects, and controls every detail’.20 This, in my view, is also the character of the experience of placeness; the specific and unique quality of the place permeates and fuses every detail in the experience of an identifiable wholeness. Great works of art from poems to paintings, novels to buildings, and music to films, are also steeped in their unique and unifying atmospheres. Yet, this entity is often difficult to describe conceptually or verbally, due to its merged complexity, diffuse and shapeless

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character, and lack of focus. Owing to the strong Western tradition of focused rationality, we are unprepared to confront and understand diffuse, unfocused, peripheral, emotive, and emergent phenomena. Additionally, experience is fused with our experience of self, and the embracing place or atmosphere turns into an interior experience; it is lived rather than viewed, or understood. Yet, great paintings, novels, and films create similar interiorizing entities and feelings, and it is probably this capacity of artists to evoke the sensation of true lived reality and sense of interiority that gives rise to their greatness.

Spatial experience as an exchange We tend to think of space and place as something outside of ourselves, as external contexts for human existence and events of life. Yet, space and self, forum and collective, place and I, are fused and inseparable, as the notions of space and place only arise through experience. Similarly, the aesthetic dimension actualizes in the very experience of the phenomenon or artistic work. John Dewey famously presents this argument: By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet it has aesthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being [ . . . ] Art is always the product in experience of an interaction of human beings with their environment. Architecture is a notable instance of the reciprocity of the results in this interaction [ . . . ] the reshaping of subsequent experience by architectural works is more direct and more extensive than in the case of any other art save perhaps literature.21

Martin Heidegger links space indivisibly with the human condition: ‘When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over and above them space.’22 Spatial experience is a kind of an exchange. As I enter a space, the space enters me, and the experience is essentially a fusion of the object and the subject. The American literary scholar, Robert Pogue Harrison, writes poetically: ‘In the fusion of place and soul, the soul is as much of a container of place as place is a container of soul, both are susceptible to the same forces of destruction.’23 Atmosphere is similarly an exchange between the material and immaterial properties of the place or situation, on the one hand, and the imaginative realm of human perception and mind, on the other. Yet, an atmosphere does not consist

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of physical ‘things’ or facts; it is a human experiential entity, or an imaginative ‘creation’. A musical piece is an experiential atmospheric entity without factual or unambiguous physical and formal features. Yet, it has an experiential interior space and specific tuning, whereas Edward Relph’s notion ‘empathic insideness’, gives rise to a sense of belonging. Relph uses the notions of ‘placelessness’ and ‘existential outsideness’24 of spatial situations that do not project an atmospheric gestalt, a coherent experiential meaning and sense of interiority. Transitional spaces, such as airports, exemplify non-places, that do not have the capacity of envoking a sense of rootedness or belonging, or any kind of domesticity or homeness. Also the atmospheres of human interactions seem to have their own dynamics, which are usually beyond conscious control. A minute emotional dissonance can easily shatter a friendly encounter. In accordance with Dewey’s suggestion above, we grasp, paradoxically, the atmosphere of a place before we identify its details or understand it intellectually. In fact, we may be completely unable to say anything meaningful about the characteristics of a place or a situation, yet we have a firm image, emotive attitude, and recall of it. In the same way, although we do not consciously analyse or understand the interaction of meteorological factors, we grasp the essence of weather at a glance, and it conditions our mood and intentions. As we enter a new city, we grasp its overall character without having consciously identified or analysed any of its countless material, geometric, dimensional, and sensory properties. Dewey even extends processes that advance from an initial, but temporary grasp of the whole towards details, all the way to the processes of thinking: ‘All thought in every subject begins with just such an unanalysed whole. When the subject matter is reasonably familiar, relevant distinctions speedily offer themselves, and sheer qualitativeness may not remain long enough to be readily recalled.’25 Recent research in the neurosciences provides support to the assumption that contrary to our inherited belief, perceptions and understanding advance from entities down to details.

The biological ground of atmospheric experience The capacity to grasp entities must be an intuitive and emotive capacity that is biologically derived through evolutionary programming, and largely unconsciously and instinctively determined. ‘We perceive atmospheres through our emotional sensibility – a form of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to help us survive’, Peter Zumthor suggests.26

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The sciences of bio-psychology and ecological psychology actually study such evolutionary causalities in human instinctual behaviour and cognition.27 It is evident that we are genetically and culturally conditioned to seek or avoid certain types of habitats, situations, and atmospheres. Our perceptual and cognitive systems have evidently developed to enable us to survive in the types of settings and atmospheres that we humans have occupied during hundreds of thousands of years. Our shared pleasure in being in the shadow of large trees, looking onto a sun-lit open field, for instance, is explained on the basis of such evolutionary programming – this specific type of setting demonstrates the polar notions of ‘refuge’ and ‘prospect’, which have been applied to explain the pre-reflective pleasurable feel of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, for instance.28 Although atmosphere and mood seem to be overarching qualities of our environments and spaces, these qualities have not been much observed, analysed or theorized in architecture or planning. As I have already suggested, the exclusive interest in focused vision and geometric and formal entities is a major reason for this surprisingly strong bias. Gernot Böhme, is one of the pioneering thinkers in the philosophy of atmospheres, along with Herman Schmitz.29 Today, in addition to these pioneering scholars, a few German, French and Italian scholars, such as Jürgen Hasse, Jean-Paul Thibault and Tonino Griffero, are actively studying in the nature of atmospheres.30 The special issue of Daidalos 68/1998, guest-edited by Mark Wigley, is another noteworthy publication on architectural atmospheres.31 Also some of the recent philosophical studies, relying on neurological evidence, such as Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body, – Aesthetics of Human Understanding,32 and neurological surveys as Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,33 significantly valorize the power of emotive atmospheres. Current neurological findings and theories on mirror neurons suggest further, that we may internalize external situations and experiences through embodied simulation and project emotive meanings unto them. The mirror neuron theory is a promising scientific opening into the workings of artistic and poetic imagery and imagination, and the unconscious ways through which we emotionally communicate with our surroundings, including architecture and other artistic works.34 These developments are parallel with today’s increasing interest in the fundamental role of embodiment in human life from perception and experience to identity and the processes of remembering, thinking and imagining. Suggestions by philosophers such as Alva Nöe, that human consciousness may not at all be located within the brain, but could rather arise from our relationship with the world, also give an added value to our settings, places and atmospheres.35

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Atmospheres in the arts Atmosphere seems to be a more conscious objective in literary, cinematic and theatrical thinking than in architecture. Even the imagery of paintings is integrated by an overall atmosphere or feeling; more than any conceptual or narrative features. The most important unifying factor in painting is usually its specific atmosphere of illumination and colour; this observation applies equally to abstract art. In fact, there is an entire painterly approach, as exemplified by J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet, which can be called ‘atmospheric painting’, in the two meanings of the notion, atmosphere being both the subject matter and the expressive means of these paintings. The formal and geometric structural ingredients in the works of these artists are deliberately suppressed for the benefit of an embracing and shapeless atmosphere, suggestive of distinct temperature, moisture, illumination, and subtle movements of the air. ‘Atmosphere is my style’, Turner confessed to John Ruskin.36 The role of atmosphere is also central in the nineteenth-century American landscape painting as well as the Northern landscape tradition in Europe. The overpowering scale and drama of natural and weather phenomena in these paintings usually creates an experience of the sublime. The American colour field painters of the second half of the twentieth century also suppressed form and boundaries similarly and utilized large canvases to create an intense presence and immersive interaction of colour. The ‘strength’ and ‘clarity’ of great artistic works are usually pointed out and praised by critics, but there is an opposite approach to painterly qualities through a distinct ‘vagueness’ and ‘weakness’ of boundaries and images, and a deliberate fusion of themes into a singular atmosphere or feeling of inclusive spatiality, as in the paintings of Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. As Anton Ehrenzweig points out, even Joseph Albers’s serial paintings of nested coloured squares, all entitled Hommage to the Square, are actually based on a fundamental formal ‘weakness’ of the layered squares, which weakens the effect of boundaries and permits maximum interaction between the various colour surfaces; the colours merge with each other, as the boundaries are too ‘weak’ to hold the individual colours within their assigned shapes.37

Atmosphere and imagination Great films, such as the films by Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, are steeped in their characteristic atmospheric continuums. These films feel as if they were set in

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a unifying emotive liquid that stains every scene, place, character, and detail. The story moves from one setting and narrative sequence to the next, but it maintains its inner character and continuity, its ambience, through all the changes of the scenes and narratives. Also the art form of theatre relies heavily on atmospheres, which support the integrity, continuity, and reality sense of the story regardless of the often abstracted and vaguely hinted scenographic features of places or spaces. The set projects the sense of place, which is then imaginatively completed and detailed by the viewer; here an immaterial ambience creates the experience of a material place through emotive suggestion. The ambience can be so suggestive and dominating that only very few and vague cues of the setting are needed, as in Lars von Trier’s film Dogville (2003), in which houses and rooms are indicated by mere chalk lines on a dark floor, yet, the drama takes a full grip of the spectator’s imagination and emotions. The settings of the cinematic events are imagined instead of seen by the viewer. This is essentially filmed theatre, in which the actors maintain a strong sense of themselves instead of turning fully into the characters they are playing, as in the case of cinema. When commenting on her cinematic intentions, Catherine Breillat points out: The work of the director is a way of hypnotizing; the viewer has to be made to believe to see even that which he is not seeing. A woman complained of the excessively exaggerated bloodiness of the final scene of my film Parfait amour, ending in a murder of passion. But all that blood was only in her own head. It is not shown on the screen at all.38

This statement again emphasizes the imaginative power of artistic atmospheres. Certain film and theatre directors have actually rebelled against the sterile tidiness and perfection of contemporary architecture. In cinema, contemporary architecture has often been depicted as residences and headquarters of international terrorists and criminals, or it has been ridiculed as in Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967).39 Andrey Tarkovsky’s settings are scenes of erosion, patina and decay. Theatre director Peter Brook moved the performances of his plays into dilapidated theatre spaces, or outside of theatre institutions altogether, to the Mercat de los Flors in Barcelona, the Hundman Quarry in Perth, and the Callet Quarry in Boulbon. Ultimately, Brook’s original nine-hour performance of Mahabharata (1985), the Indian epic, was performed in a desert. The director motivates the performance spaces he created in the abandoned and vandalized Bouffles-du-Nord theatre in Paris: A good space can’t be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food for imagination. The Bouffles has the magic and the poetry of a ruin, and anyone

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who has allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin, knows strongly how the imagination is let loose.40

Following the ancient Chinese instruction, Leonardo advised artists to stare at a crumbling wall to gain inspiration. ‘When you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to device some scene you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes [ . . . ] or, again you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, or an endless variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn forms. And these appear on such walls promiscuously, like the sound of bells in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.’41 The immersive nature of atmosphere guides and stimulates our imagination and feelings. After the modern ideal of a continuous present tense, the temporal dimension envoked by erosion and wear, as well as the narrative of time articulated by the language of materials, have become popular means of poetic expression in contemporary visual arts.

Vivacity and reality sense Elaine Scarry, the literary scholar, suggests that great writers from Homer, Flaubert and Rilke to today’s master writers, such as Seamus Heaney, have intuited, by means of words, how the brain perceives images. She explains the vividness of a profound literary text as follows: In order to achieve the ‘vivacity’ of the material world, the verbal arts must somehow also imitate its ‘persistence’ and, most crucially, its quality of ‘givenness’. It seems almost certainly the case that it is the ‘instructional’ character of the verbal arts that fulfils this mimetic requirement for ‘givenness’.42

‘Imaginary vivacity comes about by reproducing the deep structure of perception’, she concludes.43 Atmospheric experience, also, seems to arise from a deep structure of human perception and consciousness. It is evident, that also a piece of architecture needs to evoke ‘the deep structure’ of spatial experience. A profound space cannot be merely a formal fabrication – generated by human imagination or a computerized process – it has to arise from and resonate with an existentially meaningful experiential ground and interaction. A meaningful new piece of architecture has to echo the traditions of building, which arise from the genetic, neural, and cultural ground of building. This is also the essential message of T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ (1919) on the

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prerequisites of the profoundly new in literature.44 Constantin Brancusi, the master sculptor, also calls for a lifelike ‘vivacity’ in his powerful instruction: ‘Art must give suddenly, all at once, the shock of life, the sensation of breathing’.45 It is this shock of life that gives places and atmospheres their magical power and sense of an enchanted reality. Music of the various art forms is particularly atmospheric, and has a forceful impact on our emotions and moods regardless of how little or much we intellectually understand musical structures. Owing to the atmospheric and emotive power of music, mechanized muzak is commonly used in public spaces, shopping malls, and even elevators to create a desired mood and emotional state. Also in cinema, the role of music is often seminal for the mood and sense of drama; watching a film without its sound track usually makes it appear disturbingly lifeless – the atmospheres of the events have been sterilized. Music creates atmospheric interior spaces, ephemeral and dynamic experiential fields, and conditions of being, rather than distant shapes, or objects. Atmosphere emphasizes a sustained being in a situation, rather than a singular moment of perception or impact. Music seems to arise from inside the listener as much as from the outside source. The fact that music can move us to tears reveals the emotive power of art as well as of our innate capacity to simulate and internalize abstract structures, or more precisely, the capacity of our emotions to mirror and echo abstractly symbolic structures. It seems evident that emotions are not in our minds, as they are suspended between the external situation and our inner consciousness. Artists seem to be more aware of the seminal role of ambience than architects, who think more in terms of the ‘pure’ qualities of form, geometry, and space. Among architects, atmospheres are judged as something romantic and shallowly entertaining. Besides, the serious Western architectural tradition is entirely based on regarding architecture as a material and geometric object experienced through focused vision. Standard architectural images seek clarity rather than ephemerality and obscurity. However, there are other architectural traditions, such as the Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditional architectures, that rest strongly on atmospheres. Yet, regardless of the prevailing formal tendencies, there are also examples of ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’ architectures in Western modernity, that aim deliberately at evoking feelings and atmospheres.46 Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, and Luis Barragan, in the past century, as well as Peter Zumthor, Wang Shu, and Kengo Kuma today, come to mind as especially atmospheric architects. It is interesting that these architects have also written about the

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multi-sensory atmospheric nature of experience. ‘Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance (Italics by Wright) from the ‘atmosphere’ of things they live in and with’, Frank Lloyd Wright points out.47 Alvar Aalto does not directly use the word atmosphere, but writes about the significance of mood: When we visit a medieval church, look at an old manor house, or contemplate a hundred-year-old vernacular building, we find that there is something that reaches out to us, a mood [ . . . ]. I am led to believe that most people, but especially artists, principally grasp the emotional content in a work of art. This is especially manifest in the case of old architecture. We encounter there a mood so intense and downright intoxicating that in most cases we don’t pay a great deal of attention to individual parts or details, if we notice them at all.48

When describing his creative process in the essay ‘The Trout and the Mountain Stream’ (1948), Alvar Aalto confesses the significance of intuitive feeling: ‘Led by my instincts I draw, not architectural syntheses, but sometimes even childish compositions, and via this route I eventually arrive at an abstract basis to the main concept, a kind of universal substance (Italics JP) with whose help the numerous quarrelling sub-problems [of the design task] can be brought into harmony.’49 Aalto’s intriguing notion ‘universal substance’ seems to refer to a unifying atmosphere or intuitive feeling rather than any conceptual, intellectual or formal ideas.

Recognition of place and space The instant recognition of the inherent nature of place and atmosphere is akin to the instant reading of the creature-like identities and essences in the biological world. Animals instantly recognize other creatures crucial for their survival, either pray or threat. With our specialized neurons, we humans identify individual faces among thousands of nearly equal facial configurations, and recognize the emotive meaning of each one on the basis of minute muscular expressions. A space or a place is a kind of a diffusely felt multi-sensory image, an experiential ‘creature’ or ‘face’, a singular experience, that fuses with our existential experience and cognition. Once we have assessed a space inviting and pleasant, or uninviting and depressing, we can hardly alter that first-hand judgement. We become attached to certain settings and remain alienated in other kinds of settings, and both intuitive choices

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are equally difficult to analyse verbally or alter as experiential realities. Even our daughter’s little dog (a Lancashire heeler) remembers the place of her pain in the complexity of the city, where a veterinarian gave her injections years ago. Whenever we tend to turn to that street, she pulls us to another direction. This little example suggests that the fusion of place with specific existential meanings has a strong existential significance, and consequently, a high degree of recognizability. The existential value of the diffuse but comprehensive grasping of the ambience of a spatial entity, place, or an entire landscape, can be understood from the point of biological survival. It has evidently given an evolutionary advantage to be instantly able to identify or remember a scene of potential danger from a setting of safety and nourishment. Such judgements cannot be consciously deducted from details; they have to be instantaneously grasped as an intuitive reading based on a ‘polyphonic’ grasp of the ambience. Interestingly, this multisensory, intuitive, and vague perception and cognition has also been identified as one of the characteristics for the creative mind.50 I suggest that the elementarist idea of perception, imagery, and thought is questionable, if not altogether wrong. An elementarist approach in conceiving architecture as an additive entity of definable and pre-conceived ‘facts’ or ‘elements’, is surely equally misguided.

Unconscious perception, emotion and creative thought Against the common understanding, also creative search is based on vague, polyphonic, and mostly unconscious ways of perception and thought, instead of conscious, focused and unambiguous attention.51 Unconscious and unfocused creative scanning grasps complex entities and processes, without conscious understanding of any of their ingredients, much in the way that we grasp the entities of atmospheres. Artistic and architectural entities are similarly scanned. No doubt, we have unexpected synthesizing capacities that we are not usually aware of, and besides, which we do not regard as areas of special intelligence or existential value. The biased focus on rationality and its significance in human mental life, seems to be the major reason behind this unfortunate rejection. It is surprising, indeed, that more than a century after Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary discoveries, the prevailing pedagogic philosophies and practices continue to undervalue the entire

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universe of unconscious and embodied processes. Also architectural education continues to emphasize conscious intentionality along with focused imagery over the pre-reflective, embodied and emotive ground of architectural experience. Colin St John Wilson, the architect of the British Library in London, gives an impressive description of the deep meanings of the artistic and architectural language: It is as if I am being manipulated by some subliminal code, not to be translated into words, which acts directly on the nervous system and imagination, at the same time stirring intimations of meaning with vivid spatial experience as though they were one thing. It is my belief that the code acts so directly and vividly upon us because it is strangely familiar; it is in fact the first language we ever learned, long before words, and which is now recalled to us through art, which alone holds the key to revive it.52

We have traditionally underestimated the roles and cognitive capacities of emotions in comparison with our conceptual, intellectual and verbal understanding. Yet, emotional reactions are often the most comprehensive and synthetic judgements that we can produce, although we are hardly able to identify the constituents of these assessments. When we fear or love someone or something, there is not much scope or need for rationalization. Our distinctions between pleasant and unpleasant spaces, places, and atmospheres is equally definite and finite. Mark Johnson assigns emotions a crucial role in thinking: ‘There is no cognition without emotion, even though we are often unaware of the emotional aspects of our thinking’,53 and ‘Emotions are a fundamental part of human meaning’.54 In this philosopher’s view, emotions are the source of primordial meaning: ‘Emotions are not second-rate cognitions; rather they are affective patterns of our encounter with our world, by which we take the meaning of things at a primordial level’.55 He points out that ‘Emotions are processes of organism-environment interaction’.56 He suggests further that situations are the locus of emotions, not minds or brains.57 This last statement suggests that atmospheres are also ‘the locus of emotion’, which idea helps to understand the socially unifying role of atmospheres, such as weather or a rock concert. Atmospheric sensitivity and intelligence are crucial in all artistic works as they enable the artist to sense the emotive integrity of his/her work. Through an ‘empathic imagination’, the artist is able to identify and project the emotion that his/her work will evoke in others.58

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Space and imagination: Vivacity and givenness Our innate capacity to grasp comprehensive atmospheres and moods is akin to our capacity to imaginatively project the emotively suggestive settings of an entire novel, as we read it. When reading a great novel, we keep imaginatively constructing all the settings and situations of the story at the suggestion of the words of the author, and we move effortlessly and seamlessly from one setting to the next, as if they pre-existed as physical realities prior to our act of reading. Indeed, the settings seem to be there ready for us to enter, as we move from one scene of the text to the next. Remarkably, we do not experience these imaginary spaces and places as pictures, but in their full spatiality and atmosphere. Yet, they are entirely products of our imagination initiated by the words of the writer. The sensory imagery evoked by literature seems to be a kind of an imaginative atmosphere. The same fullness applies to our dreams; dreams are not pictures, they are spaces, or spatially and imaginatively lived experiences. The processes of literary imagination are discussed by Elaine Scarry. She explains the vividness of a profound literary text as follows: In order to achieve the ‘vivacity’ of the material world, the verbal arts must somehow also imitate its ‘persistence’ and, most crucially, its quality of ‘givenness’. It seems almost certainly the case that it is the ‘instructional’ character of the verbal arts that fulfils this mimetic requirement for ‘givenness’.59

Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech writer, also points out the concreteness of our literary imagination: ‘When I read, I don’t really read: I pop up a beautiful sentence in my mouth and suck it like liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing my brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.’60 Also architecture calls for a deepened sense of materiality, gravity and reality, not an air of entertainment or fantasy. The power of architecture is in its ability to strengthen the experience of the real, and even its imaginative dimension arises from this strengthened and re-sensitized sense of reality. Architecture is not fantasy, it is intensified reality. Experiencing, memorizing, and imagining spatial settings, situations, and events, engage our imaginative capacities; even the acts of experiencing and memorizing are embodied acts, in which lived imagery envokes an imaginative reality that feels like an actual experience. Neurological studies have revealed that the acts of perception and imagining take place in the same areas of the

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brain and, consequently, these acts are closely related.61 Even perception calls for imagination, as percepts are not automatic products of our sensory mechanisms; perceptions are essentially creations and products of intentionality and imagination. We could not even see light without our mental ‘inner light’ and formative visual imagination, as Arthur Zajonc argues.62 Atmosphere is an epic experiential dimension or prediction, as we automatically read behavioural and social aspects – either existent, potential or imaginary– into the atmospheric image. We also read a temporal layering or narrative into the setting, and we appreciate emotionally the layering of temporal traces, as well as images of past life in our settings. We evidently like to be connected with signs of life instead of being isolated in hermetic and artificial conditions. Don’t we seek historically dense settings because they connect us experientially and imaginatively with past life, and we feel safe and enriched to be part of that temporal continuum? Traces of life support images of safety and they generate further images of continued life. We do not judge environments merely by our senses, we also test and evaluate them through our imagination. Comforting and inviting settings inspire our unconscious imagery, daydreams and fantasies. As Gaston Bachelard argues, ‘[T]he chief benefit of the house [is that] the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace . . . [T]he house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.’63 Herbert Marcuse, the social psychologist, also acknowledges the connection between the atmospheres of settings and our fantasies as he makes the thought-provoking suggestion that the alarming increase of sexual violence and distorted sexuality today could be a consequence of the fact that our modern settings do not stimulate and support erotic fantasies.64 More often than not the atmospheres of contemporary cityscapes and dwellings lack sensuous and erotic air.

Perspectival space and peripheral vision The all-encompassing and instantaneous perception of atmospheres calls for a specific manner of perception – unconscious and unfocused peripheral perception. This fragmented perception of the world is actually our normal perceptual reality, although we believe that we perceive everything with precision and focus. Our image of the world, arising from perceptual fragments, is held together by constant active scanning by the senses, movement, and a creative

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fusion and interpretation of inherently dissociated percepts through comparison and memory. The historic development of the representational techniques depicting space and form is closely tied to the development of architecture itself. The perspectival understanding of space emphasizes an architecture of focused vision, whereas the quest to liberate the eye from its perspectival fixation enables the conception of multi-perspectival, simultaneous, and atmospheric space. Perspectival space leaves us as outside observers, whereas multi-perspectival and atmospheric space, and peripheral vision, enclose and enfold us in their embrace. An unfocused and dimmed gaze is also the painter’s way of looking at his emerging work. The dimming of vision permits the work to be encountered as a singular painterly entity without disturbing details. This is the perceptual and psychological essence of Impressionist, Cubist, and Abstract Expressionist spaces; we are pulled into the space and made to experience it as an embodied sensation and a ‘thick’ quasi-material atmosphere. The special reality of a Cézanne landscape, Jackson Pollock painting, as well as of engaging architecture and cityscapes, derives from the way these experiential situations engage our perceptual and psychological mechanisms. As Merleau-Ponty argues, ‘We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to the work.’65 All great works of art always contain more than their apparent subject matter, because they are entire worlds and microcosms. All great works are endless in their imagery. As Jean-Paul Sartre tells us: ‘If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows which are open on the whole world.’66 While the hectic eye of the camera captures a momentary situation, a passing condition of light, or an isolated, framed and focused fragment, the real experience of architectural reality depends fundamentally on peripheral and anticipating vision; the mere experience of interiority implies peripheral perception. The perceptual realm that we sense beyond the sphere of focused vision is as important as the focused image that can be frozen by the camera. In fact, there is medical evidence that peripheral and unconscious perception is more important for our perceptual and mental system than focused perception.67 Finally, we do not really experience architecture through our vision; we encounter it through our existential sense in ‘the flesh of the world’, to use a notion of Merleau-Ponty.68 The work and the viewer are of the same ‘flesh’. This assumption suggests that one reason why contemporary spaces often alienate us – compared with historical and natural settings, which elicit powerful emotional engagement – has to do with the poverty of stimuli in the field of peripheral vision, and the consequent weakness of the enfolding atmospheric

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quality. Focused vision makes us mere outside observers; whereas peripheral perception transforms retinal images into a spatial and bodily involvement and gives rise to the sense of an engaging atmosphere, belonging, and personal participation. Peripheral perception is the perceptual mode through which we also grasp atmospheres. The importance of the senses of hearing, smell, and touch (temperature, moisture, air movement) for the atmospheric perception arises from their essence as non-directional and embracing experiences. The crucial role of peripheral and unconscious perception also explains why a photographic image is usually a pale and unreliable witness of true architectural quality. What lies outside of the focused frame, and even behind the observer, has as much significance as what is consciously and selectively viewed. As neurological understanding suggests, meaning is always contextually grounded, and we merge with our surroundings, through unconscious and peripheral perceptions.

‘Understanding’ the artistic image We have been taught to conceive, observe and evaluate architectural spaces and settings primarily as formal and aesthetic entities. Yet, the diffuse overall ambience is often more decisive and powerful in determining our attitude to the setting or place. Even buildings and details that hardly possess any noteworthy aesthetic values, often manage to create a sensorially rich and pleasant atmosphere. Vernacular settings and traditional towns are frequently examples of pleasant atmospheres that often arise from aesthetically rather uninteresting units. Such urban atmospheres are most often created by specific materiality, scale, rhythm, colour, or formal theme with variations. Materials, colour, rhythm and illumination are strongly atmospheric, probably because of their embodied, haptic and enveloping nature. On the contrary, form and formal cohesion seem to have a closing and externalizing effect, instead of an emotional and embracing impact. In architectural education we are usually advised to develop our designs from elementary aspects towards larger entities, but as I have suggested, our perceptions and experiential judgements seem to advance in the reverse manner, from the entity down to details. When experiencing a work of art, the whole gives meaning to the parts, not the other way round. It is evident that we need to grasp and conceive complete poetic images and atmospheres instead of singular formal elements, and in fact, there are hardly any ‘elements’ in the world

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of artistic expression; there are only complete poetic images, intertwined with distinct emotive charges and orientations. As I have pointed out already, this view of the primacy of the whole is supported by current findings in the neurosciences: ‘According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in the light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts.’, McGilchrist asserts.69 We are mentally and emotionally affected by works of art before we understand them; or, indeed, we usually do not ‘understand’ them at all. I would argue, that the greater the artistic work is, the less we understand it intellectually. A distinct mental short-circuiting between the lived and embodied emotive encounter and intellectual ‘understanding’ is a constitutive characteristic of the artistic image. This is also the view of Semir Zeki, neurobiologist, studying the neurological ground of artistic images and effects. He regards a high degree of ambiguity, such as the unfinished imagery of Michelangelo’s slave sculptures, or the ambivalent human narratives of Vermeer’s paintings, as essential contributors to the greatness of these works.70 In reference to the great capacity of profound artists to evoke, manipulate, and direct emotions, Zeki makes the surprising argument: ‘Most painters are also neurologists . . . : they are those who have experimented upon and, without ever realising it, understood something about the organisation of the visual brain, though with the techniques that are unique to them.’71 Profound architects also grasp intuitively how material and spatial configurations and situations affect our expectations, behaviour and moods. Regardless of the general tendency towards formal abstraction, there are examples of ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’ architecture, that aims to merge with its setting and to evoke distinct atmospheres. Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund, and Sigurd Lewerentz, as well as Peter Zumthor and Kengo Kuma today, come to mind as especially atmospheric architects. A great composer is capable of orchestrating musical structures to give rise to and guide the dynamic emotional experience, that evokes a sense of enjoyment, meaning, and dignity. An artistically sensitive architect can similarly orchestrate and choreograph spatial and formal sequences that evoke experiences of embodied and metaphoric significance and existential value. The mirror neuron theory suggests how such subtle and meaningful interactions with space and place may arise from our neural system. The neurons specialized for facial recognition are another indication of the extreme refinement and precision of our neural systems. As we are able to ‘read’ the emotive states of

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thousands of other humans with surprising subtlety, it may not be so mysterious that we also grasp unexpected subtleties of places and atmospheres. May be, we have specialized neurons for atmospheric perception. Such specialized neural functions have already been identified in the ‘space cells’ of rats, through which they grasp their location in space.72

Atmospheric intelligence: A capacity of the right hemisphere Recent studies on the differentiation of the human brain hemispheres have established that regardless of their essential interaction, the hemispheres have different and complementary functions; the left hemisphere is oriented towards the processing of detailed observation and information, whereas the right hemisphere is dominantly engaged in peripheral experiences and the perception of entities. Besides, the right hemisphere is also oriented towards emotional processes, while the left deals with concepts, abstractions and language. It seems that the recognition of atmospheric entities takes place in a peripheral and subconscious manner primarily through the right hemisphere. In his challenging and thorough book on ‘the divided brain’, Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist assigns the task of peripheral perception and the integration of the multifarious aspects of experience to the right hemisphere: The right hemisphere alone attends to the peripheral field of vision from which new experience tends to come; only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of our awareness, regardless of the side . . . So it is no surprise that phenomenologically it is the right hemisphere that is attuned to the apprehension of anything new.73

The right hemisphere, with its greater integration power, is constantly searching for patterns in things. In fact its understanding is based on complex pattern recognition.74 McGilchrist also locates contextual understanding, the recognition of configurational entities, and emotional judgement in the right hemisphere: ‘Anything that requires indirect interpretation, which is not explicit or literal, that in other words requires contextual understanding, depends on the right frontal lobe for its meaning to be conveyed or received.’75 ‘What the right hemisphere crucially appears to be able to do [here] is to see the “configurational” aspects of the whole.’76 ‘It is the right hemisphere which gives emotional value to what is seen.’77

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The ecological perpsective Today’s urgent call for an ecologically sustainable architecture also suggests a non-autonomous, fragile, collaborative, and intentionally atmospheric architecture, adapted to the precise conditions of topography, soil, climate, vegetation, as well as the cultural traditions of the region. The potentials of atmosphere, weak gestalt, and adaptive fragility will undoubtedly be explored in the near future in the search for an architecture that will acknowledge the conditions and principles of the ecological reality as well as of our own biohistorical nature. I suggest that in the near future we may well become more interested in atmospheres than individually expressive forms. Understanding atmospheres will most likely teach us about the secret power of architecture and how it can influence entire societies, but at the same time, enable us to define our own individual existential foothold. Our capacity to grasp qualitative atmospheric entities of complex environmental situations, without a detailed recording and evaluation of their parts and ingredients, could well be named our sixth sense, and it is likely to be our most important sense in terms of our existence, survival and emotional lives.

Notes 1 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927), p. 31. 2 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 191. 3 Le Corbusier, Precisions (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 7. 4 Pierre-Alain Crosset, ‘Eyes Which See’, Casabella, 531–522 (1987): 115. 5 Walter Gropius, Architektur (Frankfurt and Hamburg: Fischer, 1956), pp. 15–25. 6 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 96. 7 Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 76. 8 Le Corbusier, L’art decoratif dáujourd´hui (Paris: Edition G.Grès et Cie, 1925), p. 192. 9 Albert Soesman, Our Twelve Senses (Stroud, UK: Hawthorne Press, 1977). 10 David Howes (ed.), The Sixth Sense Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2009), p. 24. 11 Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Random House, 1991).

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12 Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye (1964), as quoted in Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Frogmore, UK: Paladin, 1970), p. 39. 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 48. 14 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (London: The Random House Group Limited, 1996). 15 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes – The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 34. 16 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 34–35. 17 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres – Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects (Basel–Boston–Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2006), p. 13. 18 As quoted in Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Evanston, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 75. 19 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: The Berkley Publishing Group (1934), 1980), p. 37. 20 John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 73. 21 John Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 4 and 231. 22 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1997), p. 334. 23 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 130. 24 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976), pp. 51 and 54. 25 John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 75. 26 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres – Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects, p. 13. 27 See, Grant Hildebrand, The Origins of Architectural Pleasure (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999); and Grant Hildebrand, The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1992). 28 See, Hildebrand, Wright Space, and Edward O. Wilson, ‘The Right Place’, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 103–118. 29 Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre (Berlin: Surkamp Verlag, 1995); and Gernot Böhme, Architektur und Atmosphäre (Bonn: Wilhelm Fink GmbH & Co Verlags-KG, 2006); and Herman Schmitz, System der Philosophie, Bd.III: Der Raum, 2, Teil: Der Gefühlsraum, 1969. 30 Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 31 Mark Wigley (ed.), Constructing Atmospheres, Daidalos 68 (Berlin: Bertelsmann, 1998), produced in cooperation with Bauhaus Dessau Foundation Symposium held on 19 June 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau.

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32 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 33 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 184. 34 Vittorio Gallese, Valentina Cuccio, ‘The Paradigmatic Body: Embodied Simulation, Intersubjectivity, the Bodily Self and Language’, in Open Mind, ed. T. Metginger and J. M. Windt (Frankfurt: Mind Group, in press). 35 Alva Nöe, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wan, 2010). 36 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres – Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects, title page. 37 See Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, pp. 169–170. 38 Tarmo Poussu, ‘Catherine Breillat, elokuvajuhlien ohjaajavieras: Teen elokuvia seksistä, mutta inhoan erotiikkaa ‘(Catherine Breillat, Director Guest of the film festival: ‘I make films of sex, but I detest erotics’) (Helsinki: Ilta-Sanomat, 23 September 1996), A22. 39 Steven Leet, cinema seminar at the Washington University in St Louis, 2008. 40 Andrew Todd and Jean-Guy Lecat, The Open Circle: Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments (New York: Ralgrave MacMillan, 2003), p. 25. 41 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New – Art and the Century of Change (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 225. 42 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 30. 43 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming. 44 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, new edition (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1964). 45 Constantin Brancusi, as quoted in Eric Shanes, Constantin Brancusi (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), p. 67. 46 For ‘weak’, or ‘fragile’ architecture, see Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Hapticity and Time: Notes on Fragile Architecture’, Juhani Pallasmaa: Encounters, Architectural Essays, ed. Peter MacKeith (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishers, 2005), pp. 320–333. 47 Frank Lloyd Wright, Dr Sarah Robinson’s information in a letter to the author, 20 January 2012. 48 Alvar Aalto, ‘Motifs from Times Past’, Sketches Alvar Aalto, ed. Göran Schildt (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1978), p. 1. 49 Alvar Aalto, ‘Trout and the Mountain Stream’, pp. 108. 50 For vagueness, see Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘In Praise of Vagueness: Diffuse Perception and Uncertain Thought’, Juhani Pallasmaa: Encounters 2, pp. 223–236. 51 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception (London: Sheldon Press [1953], 1975).

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52 Colin St John Wilson, ‘Architecture – Public Good and Private Necessity’, RIBA Journal, 86 (March, 1979): 107–115. 53 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 9. 54 Johnson, Meaning of the Body, p. 67. 55 Johnson, Meaning of the Body, p. 18. 56 Johnson, Meaning of the Body, p. 66. 57 Johnson, Meaning of the Body, p. 18. 58 For empathic imagination see Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Empathic Imagination: Formal and Experiential Projection’, Architectural Design, 84(5) (September/October, 2014): 80–85. 59 Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, p. 30. 60 Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (San Diego-New York-London: Harcourt, 1990), p. 1. 61 Ilpo Kojo, ‘Mielikuvat ovat aivoille todellisia’ (Images are real to the brain) Helsingin Sanomat, 16 March 1996. The article refers to the research at Harvard University by a group of researchers under the supervision of Stephen Rosslyn in the mid-1990s. 62 Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. 63 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 6. 64 Herbert Marcuse, The One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 73: ‘A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure – which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body – has been rigidly reduced. Consequently the ‘universe’ of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.’ 65 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as quoted in Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 409. 66 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘What Is literature?’, Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London and New York. Routledge, 2001), p. 272. 67 Anton Ehrenzweig offers the medical case of hemianopia as a proof for the priority of peripheral vision in the psychic condition of our mechanism of sight. In a case of this rare illness, one half of the visual field turns blind, while the other retains vision. In some cases of the illness, the field of vision later reorganizes itself into a new complete circular field of vision with a new focus of sharp vision in the centre and an unfocused field around. As the new focus is formed, the reorganization implies that parts of the former peripheral field of inaccurate vision acquire visual acuity, and even more significantly, the area of former focused vision gives up its capacity for sharp vision as it transforms into a part of the new

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unfocused peripheral field. Ehrenzweig notes: ‘These case histories prove, if proof is needed, that an overwhelming psychological need exists that requires us to have the large part of the visual field in a vague medley of images’ (Ehrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, p. 284). Merleau-Ponty describes the notion of the flesh in his essay ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992): ‘My body is made of the same flesh as the world [ . . . ] this flesh is shared by the world’ (p. 248); and, ‘The flesh of the world or my own is [ . . . ] a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself ’ (p. 146). See, Richard Kearney, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 73–90. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 142. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 22–36. Zeki, Inner Vision, p. 142. Michael Arbib, ‘(Why) Should Architects Care about Neuroscience?’, Architecture and Neuroscience, (Helsinki: Tapio Wirkkala – Rut Bryk Foundation, 2013), pp. 42–76. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 40. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 47. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 49. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 60. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 62.

9

Place and Architectural Space Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Modern and contemporary architects have often assumed that the sites they build upon have few if any given qualities. The presumption is that the external world is essentially an isotropic geometric space, a three-dimensional matrix of Cartesian origins. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the assumption is that space is easily represented through the geometric systems of descriptive geometry and axonometric, which translates into the digital space of the computer screen. Meanings have to be created from scratch through formal manipulations while with this modus operandi the qualities of materials are also easily disregarded these days. Whenever context is invoked as an argument for design decisions, it is mostly through merely visual attributes, imagining the site as a picture that provides some formal cues. The deep emotional and narrative aspects of a site that articulate the place in a particular natural or cultural milieu, and may in fact be crucial for the appropriateness of a given project to its intended uses – at best a ‘focalized action’ or event, using Heidegger’s terms, that may bring people together significantly and thus allow for a sense of orientation and belonging – even when (rarely) acknowledged, are marginalized in view of a desire to produce fashionable innovations. Traditional accounts of architecture often imply that architects have always manipulated ‘space concepts’. This position, famously articulated for the history of European architecture by Italian historian Bruno Zevi,1 has been implicit in most modern historical accounts.2 The philosophy of embodied consciousness in the late writings of Edmund Husserl’s, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, as well as more recent and neurobiological ‘enactive’ accounts of perception and cognition, are helpful in understanding the complexity of this problem.3 Space is not something object-like (geometrical), but is also not

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nothing. We can obviously perceive the qualities of places; it may be obvious, if we pay attention, that the ‘spaces’ of Paris and those of Melbourne, for example, are indeed qualitatively different. We do think different thoughts in different places: location affects us, as does more generally the external environment. If consciousness, as cognitive scientist Alva Noë has argued, is not something that stops at the skull but is also in the world, the importance of the environment cannot be overemphasized. Our pathologies (our sense of despair or nihilism), are in fact exacerbated by an environment that becomes increasingly void of qualities, appearing less significant, reduced to a set of coordinates in a GPS device, for instance. In other words, while the qualities of space are directly accessible through our senses and our emotional consciousness, the technological world tends to go in the opposite direction, and our cultural concepts of space actually impact on our perceptions. Such is the complexity of the problem for the architect; one that can be much better understood if we properly identify its genesis and development within the ‘spiritual history of Europe’ (to use Husserl’s characterization of the tradition which today results in our global technological world-view). Pondering upon this narrative arise appropriate alternatives to operate within the contemporary modes of (mostly digital) representation and thus hopefully produce more eloquent – poetic and just – built environments. * * * Prior to Greek philosophy and classical literature, the spaces between things were not acknowledged. Writing in the late sixth-century bce, Empedocles still believed that breath, identified with Eros, was present everywhere and accounted for the diverse combinations of the four elements in all natural phenomena. Through breath, everything in the universe is capable of touching everything else. Wings and breath moved both Eros and words, in an inescapable bond.4 In architecture, one might argue, buildings were perceived as natural features; the pyramid was a sacred mountain and the Mycenaean tholos was a sacred cave, places attuned to significant human actions in the form of ritual. Indeed, prior to Anaximander’s work in the sixth-century bce, geometry did not exist in the sense that is familiar to us. Spatiality was not grasped independently of temporality; time (and other material qualities of the environment, such as weight) was often used for spatial measurement. Anaximander introduced the first stable spatial structure into lived experience with his notion of arche, understanding the source of all things in a primary, indefinite substance with qualities ‘other’ than those of matter in the world of experience (fire, earth, air

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or water). He qualified this originative substance as apeiron, spatially indefinite (implying unlimited extent and duration). Not surprisingly, Anaximander was reported to have introduced the gnomon into Greece (one of the Vitruvian architectural objects), and to have produced one of the earliest maps of the known world.5 The artificiality of architectural ‘ideas’ (the word Vitruvius used in the firstcentury bce to characterize the products of the architect’s work, today identified with drawings or images), in the form of ichnographia (plan) and orthographia (elevation), were without doubt associated with a kind of writing that became prevalent in Greek culture around Plato’s time: alphabetic phonetic writing that objectified the spoken word transforming it into a visual artefact for the first time in human history, also associated with the emergence of concept of image – eikon – as re-presentation. I will argue that such architectural ‘writing’ both posited and occupied ‘another’ space, one kindred to Plato’s chora, a word the philosopher used deliberately to differentiate it from topos: ‘place’. Architectural ‘writing’ was simply not present in previous cultures. In Greek architecture, space makes the edges of place visible, like in Greek alphabetic writing vowels made the consonants audible. Space also becomes the physical interval between the work and the new observer/participant, and between the architect and his work of techne-poiesis-mimesis. It is interesting to reflect on the connections between writing and geometry. Pythagoras is reported to have obtained great pleasure from tracing letters, ‘forming each stroke with a geometrical rhythm of angles and curves and straight lines’.6 In contrast to the Egyptians who always used a brush, Greek letters were written with a reed pen, and after the fifth century, papyrus was the accepted medium. The pen, truly analogous to a cutting instrument, was crucial to trace the fine lines of the new letters, all ruled by sharp edges and based on geometry. Furthermore, there is an obvious connection between constructing letters for epigraphic inscriptions over geometrical guidelines and making architectural ‘drawings’, both were inscribed in stone and evoked the perfection of mathematical ideas. In Greek theatre the dancing chorus usually left traces on the sand floor of the orchestra: a veritable ichnographia reminiscent of the labyrinth. A dancing platform and the labyrinth were the archetypal works of architecture attributed to Daedalus, himself the first mythical architect, during his stay in Crete. The Platonic chora evolved from this consciousness. Some years after Plato, in his Elements (ca. late fourth- to early third-century bce) Euclid uses the term chorion, referring to an area enclosed by the perimeter of a specific geometric

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figure. Contrary to many modern misunderstandings, this ‘Euclidean space’ is an abstraction, and has little to do with physical space; it is certainly not the same as modern Cartesian space. Soon after Plato, Aristotle gave renewed priority to the world of experience and thus denied the existence of Anaximander’s originating substance. With this denial, he also put into question the reality of space as an existing empty substance:7 Aristotle’s ‘chain of Being’ remained normative for philosophers until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. Western architecture gained a partial self-conscious awareness of the geometric structure of space only during the Renaissance through a renewed interest in Euclid’s work and the invention of perspectiva artificialis. This is perhaps most explicit in the theoretical formulations of Andrea Palladio (1570), who influenced by mathematicians Sylvio Belli and Daniele Barbaro, sought the ‘harmonic experience’ of buildings by relating the proportions of sequences of rooms. In his Physics, discussing optical phenomena, Aristotle had struggled to understand the ‘intermediate’ reality of geometry. He observed that the geometer worked with naturally occurring lines ‘but not as they occur in nature,’ while optics deals with mathematical lines ‘but as they occur in nature rather than as purely mathematical entities’. Since nature (physis) ambiguously refers to both form and matter, it must be understood from two points of view.8 This is the sort of arithmetic and geometry that serves the mimetic intention of traditional architecture, including Palladio’s, bounding a human situation and thus establishing places for communication that recognize nature as the goal for the sake of which the rest exists.9 In Stoicism mathematical truth was directly related to empirical truth. Stoic doctrine claimed that the only things that truly exist are material bodies. This meant that even the soul and the divine must be corporeal, potentially excluding any mediating space such as the Platonic chora. It is possible (though it has never been proven) that Vitruvius, who famously inaugurated the Western tradition of architectural theory, took some of his ideas from the mathematician Geminus, a Stoic philosopher from the island of Rhodes, himself a pupil of the learned Posidonius, who were the only members of the Stoic school known for their interest in the mathematical heritage of the Greeks. Evoking the precision and permanence of the divine mathematical realm in the mortal, ever-changing world, architecture was the substance and space of dreams: the main characteristic, as I will explain below, of the Platonic chora. In fact, both Pythagorean and later Neoplatonic mathematicians would insist that the soul produces the mathematical sciences by looking not to its infinite capacity for developing forms, but rather introspectively ‘to the species within the compass of the Limit’.10 The separation that Geminus posited between

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intelligible mathematics and perceptual mathematics was carried forward in the Neoplatonic reformulations of Proclus, who was influential in the Renaissance recovery of the classical tradition of architecture, with its renewed emphasis on mental images as generators. For Neoplatonism the knowledge of mathematics issued from the soul was a gateway to all knowledge and blessedness. Bounded space is the underlying subject of architecture. It is the space for political and religious action and for theatrical performance, where drama produces katharsis and festival time occurs. It is limited space: In architecture, the creation of limits is crucial and cannot be reduced to material walls. Beyond the city wall of the Greek polis was a regional zone known as chora,11 a ‘thick limit’ that was believed to be protected by specific divinities. This regional chora is a quasi-homophone of the central choros or dance-platform that mediated between the spectators in the amphitheatre and the actors on the skene in a dramatic performance. In the Iliad, chore (the Ionian form of chora) is a liminal space, like the narrow shoreline on which the Achaeans were left to fight12 or the space between a horse and a chariot.13 Once the Dionysian rituals were transformed into drama, this liminal space became architectural; it connected the spectators to the dramatic action impacting them emotionally while also separating them from it, allowing for intellectual reflection and orientation within their cultural orders and in relation to the natural world pervaded by divine forces. Following Anne Carson and Bruno Snell, elsewhere I have characterized this archetypal Western cultural space as fundamentally erotic, connecting and separating, essentially ‘bittersweet’. Erotic space is not an a priori concept, nor an objectified geometric or topological reality. It is both the physical space of architecture at the inception of the Western tradition and the linguistic space of a metaphor, the electrified ‘void’ between two terms that are brought together but kept apart. There is a fundamental analogy between erotic space and Plato’s concept of space in Timaeus. It has often been observed that Timaeus marks the origin of our Western scientific tradition, and even foreshadows the geometric concept of space that would underlie classical physics and the technological world after the eighteenth century. Timaeus is the first systematic explanation of the universe and its origin, departing from the cosmogonic myths of Hesiod. Turning his gaze to the heavens and contemplating its orderly motion, Plato imagined a geometrical universe that would inspire subsequent cosmological orders in the Western world until Newton. Plato’s Demiurge based the world on a perfect geometric prototype; so human poets, craftsmen, and architects would embody similar mathematical proportions in their artefacts. By harmoniously taking

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measure of time and space, and by framing institutions within a universal order, humans could propitiate tyche/fortuna (destiny) and lead a virtuous life. Despite subsequent misreadings, Plato’s articulation of reality was not a simple duality of Immutable Being (the ideal realm of heavenly motions) and Becoming (the concrete realm of mortal life). His first, unshakable observation was that the two realms were autonomous: there is nothing purely ideal in our mortal realm, which is always undergoing change. As Aristotle would write a few years later, the physical realm is not compatible with mathematics, yet both he and Plato believed that these two realms were related in some way. Aristotle’s interpretation of forms, as things that the eye could see, helped carry the transcendental speculations of Timaeus into the natural sciences. As I suggested, through Stoicism, this would become the source of mainstream architectural theory, as evident in Vitruvius. Aristotle wondered about the organization of the world we experience and observed perfection in living creatures. He often used eidos (idea) and morphe (form) interchangeably.14 In his Parts of Animals, Aristotle acknowledges the disgust one experiences when the human body is dissected, but insists that blood, flesh, and bones are not what anatomy is about. The anatomist does not focus on the immediately sensible stuff of the body, but instead seeks Nature’s purposive design (theoria).15 In architecture the first book of Vitruvius’s treatise identifies the theoria of the physician with that of the architect, and thus suggests that this purposiveness is what the visible body of architecture signifies.16 At the same time, form remained distinct from matter, with an ambiguous relationship that has been studied by many historians of philosophy. This tension was also evident in architectural theory until instrumental thought became dominant in modernity. The very notion of a relationship between eidos and morphe, combined with Plato’s ‘impatience’, led to considerable confusion, particularly after Galilean science proposed that the celestial realm and the physical realm were homogeneous, thus clearing the way for modern, quantitative physics. Plato, however, revised his initial ‘dualism’, starting in Timaeus 48–49. Observing the relationship between the ideal object and a specific object in front of him that its name connotes, Plato decided that reality could not be articulated as a mere duality: there is both a link and a distance between the ‘ideal’ word and what it means. This ‘opaque’ relationship coincides with the space/time of human experience. Plato’s third term, chora, is distinct from both the ideal realm of Being and the natural realm of becoming. Plato introduces it in distinction to both ‘pure’ geometric space, and topos, the natural place of differentiated bodies

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in becoming. This word had been used before. In Homeric literature it appears in several forms that refer mainly to place: as a masculine form it was associated to combat, and as a feminine form it was associated with dance. Plato, however, gave it a wholly original sense. Chora is properly human space, the space of human experience that appears in perception – which is always an action. It is the space of human communication that is inherently bounded and ambiguous. As Plato acknowledged, chora can be grasped only with great difficulty; it is like the substance of our dreams, and we may conceive it only indirectly, through spurious reasoning. Yet, without it, we simply cannot account for reality. There is a profound affinity between the erotic space of the lyric poets and this Platonic term in Timaeus: like love, chora grounds all relationships and makes knowledge possible. ‘In general terms, it is the receptacle and, as it were, the nurse of all becoming and change.’17 However, Plato’s concept encompasses even more. He compares the receptacle to a mass of neutral plastic substance and speculates on the fundamental substance that underlies all creation, of which fire, earth, water, and air are only qualities. He then proceeds to associate chora with the primordial material of the craftsman (the prima materia of the Demiurge). The prima materia has no definite character of its own, but is the ultimate reality of things. Plato associates it with semen, composed of ‘smooth and unwrapped triangles’. Genetic misconceptions aside, this prima materia is androgynous, a receptacle of all ‘visible and sensible things’ that is itself ‘invisible and formless, all-embracing, possessed in a most puzzling way of intelligibility, yet very hard to grasp’ (my emphasis).18 Thus Plato concludes that there must be three components of reality: first, ‘the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible . . . imperceptible to sight or the other senses, the object of thought’ (Being); second, ‘that which bears the same name as the form and resembles it, but is sensible, has come into existence, is in constant motion . . . and is apprehended by opinion with the aid of sensation’ (Becoming); and third, chora, ‘which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be, and which is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so is hard to believe in – we look at it indeed in a kind of dream and say that everything that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space, and that what is nowhere in heaven or earth is nothing at all’.19 Plato then identifies this receptacle with the space of chaos, ‘a kind of shaking implement’ that separates the four basic elements out of itself to constitute the world as we know it.

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Linked etymologically to the Indo-European chasho, chaos is understood as a primordial gap or abyss, as well as a primordial substance. Plato thus describes chora as nothing less than the space of human creation and participation, the orienting hyphen between natural place and cosmic place. It is a distinct reality at the crossing, the chiasma, of Being and Becoming. It enables the creation of human artefacts through techné and is also disclosed by them. Chora is also the underlying substance of human crafts. It contradicts the common distinction between contained space and material container, which dates from only the nineteenth century and has contributed to misleading separations among the arts. Most importantly, it points to an invisible ground that exists beyond the duality of Being and Becoming and which permits the creation of language and culture. The problem, as Plato emphasizes, is that its presence can be grasped only indirectly, through ‘bastard reasoning’. As I have suggested, before Plato there seems to have been no awareness of this third realm mediating a dichotomy. Indeed, this absence characterizes the world of Greek myths. In this primarily oral, thoroughly unified world, space and movement were articulated through the paired qualities of the goddess Hestia and the god Hermes. Indeed, of the six major divine couples that appear on the base of the great statue of Zeus at Olympia, only Hermes and Hestia are not related by genealogy or blood.20 This is a paradoxical pair that represents the space of desire but remains unaffected by it. Together, they interweave realities of space and movement, centre and path, immutability and change. While Hestia represents femininity, domesticity, the earth, darkness, centrality, and stability (i.e. qualities of interior space), Hermes represents masculinity, mobility, thresholds, openness, and contact with the outside world, the light, and the sky (i.e. qualities of external spaces of action). This pre-philosophical space– time could not be grasped as an abstract concept. It was a concrete experience of the world as a living ‘Thou’ rather than as a scientific or philosophical ‘it’. It is difficult for us to imagine a personified, wilful, and unpredictable external reality that needs constant propitiation through human actions to ensure the survival of the world from one instant to the next. Nevertheless, this is precisely the world of myth and ritual. The receptacle chora, a homophone of the dance platform in the theatre, takes its shape through mimesis from Being and Becoming. Thus, we may start to understand the nature of significant architectural space in the Western tradition. It encompasses diverse characteristics: it is at once the material building and the space, its ground and its lighting, the truth unveiled by art, and the gap between word and experience. It is a space for both contemplation and participation: a

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space of recognition. It is my contention that the ever-present ‘origin’ of Western architecture exists in this understanding of architecture as a space for the dance, for the poetic motility that distinguishes human beings from other animals, for the narrative language of ‘choreography’. * * * The classical architect, well into the late-Renaissance, ‘inscribes’ (grapheien) geometry into topos (place). By doing this he never denied the qualities already present and recognized in the experience of places; in fact the place as recognized and named is already a central part of the architecture’s meaning, of its appropriate presence, conducive to culturally attuned rituals (today we would say, atmospheres). Thus the topographic site of a temple, regardless of style, articulated by mythological stories and cultural habits, is already eloquent and emotionally charged as soon as it is delimited and the temenos is made visible. The inscription of geometric limits makes the place into a cultural space, into a realm conducive to situations where the mystery of the coupling of Being and Becoming (words and objects —‘ideas,’ i.e. words objectified ‘as if written’, and objects in their ephemeral presence, could be made present). Chora could be disclosed by art and architecture, and until the end of the Renaissance remained distinct from topos, Aristotle’s natural place. Topos, the realm ‘under the moon’, was the site of most things human with reference to the predominant presence of a living, more-than-human world. In Aristotelian physics movement was not a ‘state’; Becoming, a property of life, implied movement and change. Indeed, objects changed their being when they moved, an ontological difference existed between rest and movement. Within this common understanding of reality, chora could still operate as both a separation and a link, a space of contemplation that was a mode of participation. The ideal was elsewhere, and yet present, in a vertical structure, here and now. Many Renaissance architects remarked in their treatises that the physical point or line which we can trace with our drawing instruments were not the ideal point or line in our minds. For John Dee, for example, the operations of Euclidean geometry take place ‘betwene thinges supernaturall and natural’, they are ‘thinges immaterial and neverthelesse, by material things able somewhat to be signified’.21 All this changed with the advent of modernity, when the ambiguity and complexity of chora as a ‘third term’ explaining the holistic understanding of human reality in embodied consciousness became practically incomprehensible

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as it seemed to be ‘substituted’ by its reduction to one of two terms – the ideal modern geometric space – a bastard consequence of Platonic theory. A key figure in this transformation was Galileo Galilei, whose imaginary experiments on motion led to the laws of inertia that were eventually taken up by Newton. 22 Inertia implies that motion and rest could be conceived as ‘states’ incapable of affecting being. Despite his traditional sources and unquestionable theological motivations, Galileo imagined a physics that differed greatly from Aristotle’s. In Galileo’s world the ontological difference between the supra-lunar heavens and the sub-lunar world was obliterated. The universe became a homogeneous, geometrical void in which bodies, both celestial and terrestrial, were objectified and described using the same mathematical laws. When Galileo brought ideal geometric space from the heavens down to the earth, implying that this was nothing less than God’s mental space, this implicitly questioned both the primary reality of qualitative places and the legitimacy of erotic space, of chora as the site of human truths, and presented humans with an irreconcilable dichotomy. As mathematics became authoritative, linguistic and artistic works were eventually confined to the hazy realm of subjectivity. By the late seventeenth century, Leibniz could declare poetry and poetics an inferior form of knowledge to science (gnoseologia inferior), best known through Baumgarten as aesthetics.23 In philosophical terms, Galileo’s new concept of reality allowed for the eventual reduction of Being to the purely ontic – that is, to a re-presented world of objects. Thus, his natural philosophy created the conditions for the instrumental and technological culture that would proliferate in the Western world after the Enlightenment. A second crucial, yet less well understood major protagonist in the transformation of chora in early modernity was Giordano Bruno Nolano. Bruno was accused of heresy and burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600. Like Galileo, Bruno unified celestial and terrestrial physics and put forward a coherent argument against Aristotle, but there are very important differences between them: especially in Bruno’s concept of space as it emerges in Cause, Principle and Unity (1584). Unlike traditional cosmologies that emphasized ontological difference, Bruno’s vision incorporated Being and Becoming within the One. In his view, there is nothing outside the realm of human experience, but human experience is much more than what appears to our senses. Bruno believed that there is no matter without form, and that forms (ideas) do not exist in a separate realm, apart from matter. There is no world of pure bodiless essences. The divine is not totally distinct from the human; on the contrary, divinity is present in everything,

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including us. This enables humans to become powerful magicians. Bruno shared this belief with some of his Renaissance predecessors but his cosmology made it more feasible. Retrospectively, from our technological world in which humans have become all-powerful, we can understand the potential dangers associated with this awareness. For Bruno, it entailed the development of an acute sense of ethics that was posited as a necessary love for the Other. In his essay A General Account of Bonding (De Vinculis in genere, 1588), Bruno discussed the power of seduction and love in all areas of human culture, even the possibility of psychic and mass manipulation. Bruno’s universe was thoroughly animated. Like Copernicus, he thought that the world moved. Unlike Galileo, however, Bruno’s universe is paradoxical, incomprehensible in logical terms and closed to mathematical reason. In his Ash Wednesday Supper (1583) he carefully portrays a world without mathematics and impenetrable to perspective. He describes our participation in a dark infinite universe, like a penumbra, in-between light and shadow. For Bruno the earth moves because it is alive and motility is a property of the flesh. Even objects that seem inanimate share a spiritual substance. Many of his concepts resemble those of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Anaxagoras and Parmenides. Despite the apparent differences in matter, there is an underlying prima materia, a ‘quality’ and not a ‘thing’, and that is also space. The space of lived experience is a coincidence of opposites; this is its original truth often concealed behind appearances: ‘The universe is one, infinite and immobile. I say that the absolute possibility is one, that the act is one; the form, or soul, is one, the matter or body, is one, the thing is one, being is one . . . It is not matter, because it is not configured or configurable, nor it is limited or limitable. It is not form, because it neither informs nor figures anything else, given that it is all, that it is maximum, that it is one, that it is universal. It is neither measurable nor a measure. It is limit such that it is not limit, form such that it is not form, matter such that it is not matter’ (my emphasis).24 Without further engaging Bruno’s difficult language, we can detect a wish to eliminate a reality that consists of three distinct terms, as Plato had conceived it. Bruno also questioned the differentiated hierarchies of Being that had been constructed so carefully by Neoplatonic philosophers such as Ficino. Curiously, the space of dreams, art and poetry that was chora seems to be understood by Bruno as ‘all that is’. Denying an essential difference between what is present and what is not, between the ideal and the real, Bruno’s conceptual space could potentially transform into the universal, infinite, and isotropic continuum of latemodernity. His argument against geocentrism, imagining the earth occupying a

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generalized location in an infinite universe, has been often characterized as a step towards modern science. However, Bruno’s dark and shadowy space is not a mathematical entity and it abhors the void. Since the universe is thoroughly animated, humanity is moved by eros, by the basic forces of desire such as sympathy and antipathy. In The Heroic Frenzies (1585) Bruno concludes with a vision of the kingdom of God and paradise in which the human realm is transformed into the divine. This vision is the result of man’s capacity to love; eros, which is at its origins, is for Bruno intrinsic to humanity. Only the human lover, whose linguistic imagination has the capacity to conceive infinity, comes to realize the coincidence between knowledge and love. Echoing Plato’s original reflections in Symposium and Phaedrus, the lover is transformed into the object of love. Desire operates inside the One, but it is not driven by it. Eros is therefore understood as desire for unity, for an alternative mode of being that explains real change in the universe. Bruno claimed that his vision liberates us from the fear of imaginary cruel divinities that look down onto a sublunary world from beyond the sphere of the stars. It is however not through the light of rational science but only through the revelation of coincidentia oppositorum, the very province of art and poetry, that humans may come to terms with the universe’s unfathomable mystery. Thus Bruno envisions the important role of art and architecture as the ‘setting-intowork’ of truth (to use Heidegger’s much later formulation), an open possibility for both Baroque and modern art; a ‘setting-into-work’ in the primary universe of embodied, emotional perception that must acknowledge its debt to natural and cultural emplacements, celebrating their rich qualitative distinctions. Bruno’s interpretation of lived space also points to the eventual phenomenological understanding of reality as flesh.25 * * * Plato’s demiurge, the maker of the cosmos, was replaced when Aristotle conceived Nature as an immanent force. Living bodies, in particular, were shaped by this force, enabling Aristotle to believe that the perfection of creatures might be evident to our eyes, to the theorizing gaze of the dissector. For Aristotle, particularly in his biology, idea (eidos) became often interchangeable with form (morphe), and was inseparable from matter. Stoicism took this notion further, elaborating Aristotle’s reinterpretation of ‘forms,’ as something that the eye could directly see. In architecture, the circle could become potentially interchangeable with a tholos, for example, the

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circular temple in which the Greeks celebrated a feminine deity, or with any other circular structure.26 Lucretius writes in the first century before Christ: ‘Nothing can act or be acted upon without body, nor can anything create space except the void and emptiness. Therefore, beside void and bodies, there can be no third nature of itself in the sum of things.’27 As Dalibor Vesely points out, it was under the influence of this radicalized and, in a certain way, distorted Aristotelian understanding of corporeality that Vitruvian theory came into existence.28 The reality of erotic embodiment as the primary mediation, chora, thus became absent from the explicit theory of architecture at the origins of the Western tradition. Aristotle had identified space with place in his Physics, understood as the position of a body among others, ‘the [invisible] limit of the containing body, by which the container makes contact with what it contains’.29 Like most else in the physical world, place was qualitative and not mathematical. Rejecting the idea of the void, Aristotle basically identified space with matter, like Plato’s chora in Timaeus, but without the rich ambivalence of Plato’s concept. This interpretation prevailed in the Western philosophical tradition well into the seventeenth century. It entered Descartes’s dualistic articulation of reality, and was then equated with a geometric ‘entity’: res extensa. Descartes insisted that since nature ‘abhors a vacuum’, space and matter are co-substantial and knowable only through mathematics. In Baroque painting and architecture, however, it is the geometric gap, imbued with metaphysical light, which became the primary subject of representation. The paintings of Georges de la Tour and Andrea Pozzo’s Jesuit church interiors bounded by quadrattura frescoes are prime examples. Descartes himself seemed uninterested in painting. In his Dioptric he praised copper engravings because they conveyed the objective form of things with precision. For him, colour was secondary. Only line drawing could represent his concept of linear extension as the reality of existing things. Descartes was obsessed with constructing vision according to a conceptual model rather than through perception. Disembodied vision, appearing at the geometrical point of the pineal gland, was understood as the transparent organ of mathematical thought. Descartes must be held responsible for the thinning and objectification of space. To him, space was an autonomous geometric entity, independent of points of view. The embodied experience of chora was replaced by an objective, mathematical space that Descartes believed would bring us closer to a divine and human understanding. Like the body, desires and feeling were for Descartes merely a source of error and disorientation. As suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when perspectiva artificialis was consecrated as

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the prime epistemological model, depth – the bitter-sweet space of eros – lost its status as the first dimension and became merely one of ‘three dimensions’, equivalent to length and width.30 The cultural understanding of place (topos) as primary was questioned by a culturally pervasive concept of geometric – Cartesian – space, a substitution implicit already (and for the first time in architecture) in the late seventeenthcentury theories of Claude Perrault.31 This became clear in Perrault’s unprecedented legitimization of the theory of proportions through purely instrumental arguments, and in his denial of ‘optical correction’ as a necessary technique to acknowledge for the limitations of human experience: vision, in his theories, is already recognized as hegemonic, the architect designs in a perspective world and the inhabitant/spectator participates without difficulty from this world of precision. Almost immediately architects felt the need to seek for alternative modes of production. In fact, it is a well-known historical fact that during the turn of the seventeenth- to the eighteenth century, architects seeking to grasp the possibilities of a significant spatial experience drew from linguistic (historical and narrative) rather than cosmic analogies for their theories of expression. Whether self-consciously or not, they recollected the function of the Platonic chora as the place of the ‘mystery of language’, to use Merleau-Ponty’s words, which is its simultaneous transformation in contrary directions.32 Plato had recognized in Timaeus that the appearance and designation of cultural space enabled words to refer at once to the singular and the universal: contrary to naïve modern interpretations, the ‘ideal’ in Plato was never truly ‘outside’ human, embodied experience. This also points to the unique capacity of architecture to signify order discursively and emotionally, and its reluctance to be reduced to a univocal sign. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s remarkable architectural visions grew out of this new cultural constellation that required, as Octavio Paz has suggested for modernity, a critique of the dominant culture as part of a poetic work. Piranesi, the famous disciple of Carlo Lodoli, the Venetian advocate of Giambattista Vico, sought erotic meaning in his constructed spaces through historical reference. His tactics to engage the poetic image in architecture are especially evident in his series of etchings titled Carceri (The Prisons).33 Piranesi produced a first series of prints showing various imaginary spaces, based on the two-point perspective method of the Galli Bibienas (perspectiva per angolo). The spaces include complex theatrical constructions of masonry and wood and frightening machines of torture. Although these spaces are threatening, they are still rational, derived from a geometry of plans and elevations.

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In a second version of the etchings, however, Piranesi ‘exploded’ this geometry by introducing a new sense of temporality that the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein would later identify with filmic temporality, enabled by montage. The spaces in this second series present a quality of depth different from either Galli Bibiena or subsequent perspective systems with an objectified ‘third’ dimension. Piranesi obsessively darkened his etchings, often adding ink with his fingers. The spaces became highly seductive to the imagination, yet impenetrable to the physical body. It would be impossible to construct such spaces literally, deducing a cohesive three-dimensional geometry from the image. These spaces, in short, are paradoxical.34 Piranesi’s Carceri invite existential orientation by confronting darkness, the very darkness that humans ultimately cannot escape, at a time when Western culture had opted for the exclusive light of reason. Piranesi always insisted on his title as ‘architect’, despite his central métier as a printmaker. Implementing a strategy of delay, his poetic spaces are implicitly critical of a banal objectified architecture in the shadowless light of three-dimensional perspective. Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières’s treatise Le Génie de l’Architecture (1780) presents the possibility of a meaningful architecture as the narrative of a seductive theatrical experience in which a reader/spectator is taken through the rooms of a house, one by one, describing their moods meticulously. The experience is portrayed as one of growing emotional and erotic intensity, modelled after La Petite Maison, a libertine novel by Jean-François de Bastide.35 Bastide’s short novel describes the power of architecture as a tool of seduction. Trémicour, an aristocratic host, and Mélite, his guest who had never taken a lover and spent all her time acquiring good taste and knowledge, agree on a wager for her favours. She is taken through his house, decorated with such character and good taste, that she slowly loses her defences and finally surrenders to him. According to Louise Pelletier, Le Camus’s understanding of architectural meaning draws from this plot and yet takes a distance from the libertine novel. In other lesser known novels and plays, Le Camus was aware of the role that erotic distance played in artistic meaning.36 In his architectural treatise he seems intent on recovering architecture as an erotic experience, related to questions of appropriateness. Rather than describing the orders or the traditional problem of proportions like most architectural treatises before him, Le Camus decided to describe the spatial qualities of a house in great detail, taking the reader through a prolonged delay through countless theatrical thresholds. Never before had an architect felt compelled to recover lost architectural meaning by emphasizing (in a theoretical text) spatial characteristics such as light and shadow, textures, colours, sound and

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smell, the very qualities traditionally understood with the experience of place. Le Camus obviously believed that previous theories of architectural character, based on the codification of the architectural orders, were insufficient. Despite an obvious theatrical and voyeuristic interest (there were even hidden passages in the house for the owner to observe all activities), it could be argued that Le Camus also took a distance from Condillac’s eighteenth-century philosophy of sensations.37 Experience is acquired from the senses, partes extra partes, in the hope of recovering meaning and generating true emotion. By emplotting this process and deliberately choosing narrative as the discourse of theory while rejecting all instrumental applications, moreover, Le Camus recovered synaesthesia as a ground of architectural meaning and with it the possibility of a poetic architecture capable of revealing the qualities of place. Describing space qualitatively in the context of the Enlightenment was indeed an act of resistance that forecasts later interests, still present today, in concepts such as stimmung or atmosphere as a strategy to reconnect architectural design to a sense of place – famously by Peter Zumthor, who himself characterizes his architectural works though this concept by quoting a short sentence in a missive from John Turner to John Ruskin: ‘Atmosphere is my style (1844)’.38 Despite such early insights, during the nineteenth century the space of Western architectural representation was mostly dominated by the triumphant technological interests of European civilization and became a secularized perspective depth, a mathematical entity that was no longer transcendental in the wake of God’s death. Its structure was now fully dictated by optical considerations. In this context, the most insightful contributions to a renewed articulation of chora came from the margins of architecture: for example, Romantic poetry, the poetic philosophy of Nietzsche, the meandering universe of John Ruskin, and the literary works of Lewis Carroll,39 a tradition followed in the twentieth century by Surrealism. The status of aesthetics was both elevated to a religious truth and denigrated as a chimera. Architecture tended to occupy either the transparent space of technology or the inaccessible space of art. In most cases it was conceived either as practical building or as applied ornament that was ultimately irrelevant or even ethically criminal, as Adolf Loos would proclaim a few years later in his article ‘Ornament and Crime’.40 Facing this crisis, August Schmarzow set out to clarify the status of architecture as a fine art. He concluded that architecture, in distinction to painting and sculpture, is ‘the art of space’. Schmarzow published his papers in the early 1890s. Surprisingly to most contemporary architects, this was

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the first time that this ‘obvious truth’ had been asserted in architectural theory.41 Architecture’s raison d’être, according to Schmarzow, was the artistic manipulation of space.42 Although he fell short of defining space as chora, raising this question was a significant accomplishment. His intuitions led him to state positions that were not far from Husserl’s phenomenology. Despite his idealist framework, he realized that space is more than the isotropic entity described by geometricians. In retrospect it is clear that Schmarzow’s insightful declaration was made possible by developments in the earlier part of the century that conceptualized architecture as an instrumental operation in geometric space. Gaspard Monge’s ‘descriptive geometry’ had become the (often implicit) foundation for architectural design (and engineering of course) after the French Revolution. This led to a variety of new concepts and attitudes: attention to style and formal composition, the use of axes and the mécanisme de la composition, the concept of architectural experience as a passive-voyeuristic building tour, theory as design methodology, and history as an evolution of building types. Architecture’s newly discovered ‘essence’ was eventually imagined as axonometric space, which in some quarters (reinforced by computer-aided design) is still characterized as the true modern space. Yet, fuelled by discoveries in cubist painting and cinema, early twentiethcentury architects and artists also realized axonometry’s capacity to work against a prosaic or illusionistic perspective, an insight equally present in surrealist paintings, artefacts and literature. Eventually this led artists and some enlightened architects to embrace insights similar to Schmarzow’s and postulate constructed space as irreducible to a geometric concept, seeking its reconciliation with the given qualities of place.43 Enlisting the insights of phenomenology and its understanding of natural language in search for moving and significant experiences, such artists, architects and writers have constructed spaces through the central concept of stimmung – resonant with harmony in German – but beyond the mathematical interpretations of harmony as a cosmic geometry or proportion in traditional theory, and unfolded instead as ‘harmonic experience’ one that is primarily ‘felt’, a concept that can indeed be best translated as ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ in English.44 Thus, while this is unfortunately hardly the norm, the best of modern and contemporary architecture has managed to create empathic atmospheres conducive to ‘significant action’, at their best offering human beings, always seeking completion, a place to participate in cultural and natural worlds and attain a sense of existential orientation. Moods that characterize human

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actions and give them meaning, Hubert Dreyfus has argued, are both inherent in architectural spaces (made possible through design decisions) and brought about by events which in their externality makes them kindred to Heideggerian divinities.45 Architecture thus may provide at its best the experience of ephemeral wholeness through emotional participation and a space for wonderment and meditation, bringing into convergence beauty and justice: this has been nothing less than its central ethical and cultural role.

Notes 1 B. Zevi, Architecture as Space (New York: Horizon Press, 1974). 2 Even seminal historical books, such as Otto von Simpson’s The Gothic Cathedral, a landmark in interpreting twelfth-century European architecture through the Neoplatonic symbolizations associated with Christianity, tends to see the building as a combination of structure and glass, disregarding both the important implications of stone as a prima materia present in medieval accounts of Genesis and the priority of ritual (lived spatiality and temporality) in the articulation of architecture’s meaning. See O. von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 3 See, for example, E. Thompson, Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) and Out of Our Heads, Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). 4 A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 49. 5 For an account of Anaximander’s theory and its sources, see G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 100–110. 6 Grammatici Graeci, ed. A. Hilgrad, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1901), 1.3.183, quoted by Carson, Eros, p. 56. 7 Grammatici, p. 111. 8 Aristotle, Physics 194a10–26, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 37. 9 Aristotle, Physics, Ibid. 10 Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. J. Morrow (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 30–31. 11 Hence the word ‘chorography’ that designates a regional map in ancient and Renaissance geographic texts.

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Homer, Iliad, 16.68 (Boston: Harvard University Press/Loeb, 1914). Homer, Iliad, 23.521. Aristotle, Physics 193a, pp. 34–35. Aristotle, Parts of Animals 645a, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. Oxford trans., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984 – Bollingen Series LXXI), 2, quoted by Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 127. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. I. D. Rowland and T. N. Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Book 1, chapter 1, pp. 21–24. Plato, Timaeus 49, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 67. Timaeus, pp. 50–51. My emphasis. Timaeus, pp. 51–52. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1965), Vol. 1, p. 124. John Dee, The Mathematical Praeface to the Elements of Euclid (London: John Day, 1570). See, for example, Alexandre Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement (London: Chapman and Hall), chapters 1–4. Cited by Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 372. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity And Essays on Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87. Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the concept of flesh to designate the ‘first’ element of reality, overcoming the dualism inherited by Western epistemology from Descartes. See The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979). Contemporary phenomenologists have pointed out the affinity of this concept to Plato’s chora. Kuriyama, Expressiveness, pp. 126–127. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I, p. 11, quoted by Dalibor Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment,’ in Body and Building, ed. G. Dodds and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 30. Vesely, ‘Architectonics’, p. 30. Aristotle, Physics, IV, 4, 212a, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 87–88. See Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 330–340. Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des Cinq Espèces de Colonnes (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1683). Quoted by George Steiner, After Babel (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 128.

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33 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d’Invenzione (1745, 1761). 34 Thus Piranesi’s Carceri became a precedent for much important art, architecture and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Lewis Carroll’s Alice, to Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman, from Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the labyrinthine corridor in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. 35 Louise Pelletier, Architecture in Words (London: Routledge, 2006) chapters 9, 10. See also Jean-François Bastide, The Little House, trans. R. El-Khoury (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). 36 Pelletier, Architecture in Words, chapters 9, 10. 37 Pelletier, Architecture in Words, chapter 8. 38 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres, Architectural Environments. Surrounding Objects (Boston, MA: Birkhauser, 2006). 39 David Spurr, ‘The Study of Space in Literature: Some Paradigms’, in The Space of English, ed. D. Spurr and C. Tschichold (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005). [unpublished)] 40 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), in Samtliche Schriften (Vienna: Verlag Herold, 1972). 41 Schmarzow’s position about the importance of space in architecture was presented initially in two lectures, at the University of Leipzig (1893) and the Royal Saxonian Academy of Science (1896). His most coherent theoretical synthesis is Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenchaft (1906). 42 See August Schmarzow, ‘Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schopfung’, Zeitschrift fur Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Stuttgart 1914), 9: 66–95. 43 Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation, pp. 298–338. 44 See Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, a Prolegomena to the Interpretation of the Word Stimmung (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). 45 H. Dreyfus, ‘Why the Mood in a Room and the Mood of a Room Should be Important for Architects’, in From the Things Themselves, Architecture and Phenomenology, ed. B. Jacquet and V. Giraud (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2012), pp. 23–37.

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Place and Connection Edward Relph

Without a memory of place, people lose their sense of self With the slow onset of Alzheimer’s disease, sense of place is one of the first faculties to fade away. What neuroscientists call ‘place cells’, and ‘grid cells’ in the brain start to atrophy and sufferers cease to know where things are, where they are, how they got here and how they can get back to where they came from. They lose connection with the world. My first reaction when I learned that neuroscientists were using MRI devices to find out where sense of place is located in the brain was to dismiss their approach as scientific reductionism that shrinks the evanescent, memoryfilled, shared, paradoxical and meaningful experiences of place into dry, inconsequential shreds. I have changed my mind. When John O’Keefe discovered the neurons he named ‘place cells’ in 1971 he did not call them ‘space cells’ because he saw them specifically as the neural basis for distinguishing places from their surroundings. He found that place cells, which are situated in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays an important role in the formation and maintenance of memories, react to sensory inputs from particular places; in effect they store memories of places. The potentially profound implications of this research have been clearly stated by John Zeisel, a neuroscientist who works with Alzheimer’s patients in New York: ‘To remember something you need to know where it happened as well as when it happened. Place is essential to memory; without a memory of place, people lose their sense of self.’1 There is, however, no topographical relationship between the organization of place cells in the hippocampus and the arrangement of the places in the outside environment to which they relate. Place cells are not a map of the world, and neighbouring place cells are as likely to relate to widely separated outside

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locations as adjacent ones. By themselves they are not enough for us to find our way around – for that grid cells are necessary. Grid cells, which were identified in the nearby entorhinal cortex by Edvard and Britt Moser in 2004, assemble a variety of sensory inputs to provide an organizing framework for the otherwise malleable information in place cells. It is the combined neural processes of place and grid cells that compose sense of place, and it appears to be the failure of these processes that leads to Alzheimer’s.2 Place cells were initially identified by implanting electrodes in the brains of freely moving lab animals and recording the firing patterns of electrical impulses as they found their way through mazes. They have since been identified in humans undergoing brain surgery for various unrelated reasons, and therefore immobile but awake, by recording neural reactions to virtual reality games that required them to navigate through landscapes and do tasks at particular locations. The results show that each place we experience, regardless of whether it is our desk, the parking lot of the local supermarket, downtown Toronto, or the Olympic Mountains, has a corresponding cluster of place cells in our brains. Synapses on those grow in strength with repeated experiences of each place, and grid cells establish the relationships between places. Furthermore, it appears that the impressions of places registered in the neurons include the whole scene – shapes, colours, walls, directions, smells, sounds, arrangements of the parts – because associated cells respond even when aspects of a particular place are changed. In short, the neural processes that connect us with places are comprehensive, flexible and adaptable.3

Sense of place and sense of place The term ‘sense of place’ actually has two commonly used meanings. One refers to the human faculty for recognizing and appreciating environments that neuroscientists are now clarifying at a microscopic level. This differs from physiological faculties such as sense of sight or smell because it involves a synthesis of sensory and other experiences. Appropriate synonyms for ‘sense’ in this context might be ‘appreciation’ or ‘understanding,’ words that clearly imply the exercise of critical intelligence. The second meaning refers to what the landscape architect Michael Hough described as ‘characteristic and distinctly identifiable landscapes’. Somewhere with this sense of place, whether a neighbourhood, national park, urban square, or city, is regarded as distinctive because of its scenery, architecture, history or

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ways of life. This rather awkward meaning of the word ‘sense’, which assigns a physiological faculty to inanimate objects, nevertheless is widely used. For example, SoPlace, a group based in Malaysia, organizes ‘world summits’ dedicated to ‘mainstreaming sense of place’ in the twenty-first century by bringing together urbanists, investors, academics, marketers, and community activists from around the world who are committed to making liveable, sustainable, and intelligently made places.4 For all their apparent differences, I think there is no contradiction between these two senses of place. One emphasizes sense, the other emphasizes place and in combination they acknowledge precisely the togetherness of experience and environment that neuroscientists have identified. Sense of place is a faculty in which the distinctive attributes of landscapes are embedded. It connects us with the world and the world with us. In its most prosaic form it allows us to find our way from the kitchen to the living room and back again. At a larger geographical scale it makes it possible for us to distinguish different streets, cities, and regions. At its most extensive level sense of place is a type of intelligence and imagination that informs and is informed by our experiences and understanding of the world.

Changing connections with geographical places Sense of place as a neurological process presumably changes at the slow pace of evolution. This is manifestly not the case for sense of place as a cultural and geographical phenomenon. It is obvious from the landscapes we have inherited that the ways places are made have changed dramatically over time; medieval towns and modern megacities have little in common except their urbanity. Innovations in communications and transportation have transformed how places are made and how they are experienced. Railways, the telegraph, cars, and, most recently, mass air travel, and electronic communications have freed many of us from the constraint of living most of our lives in single village or town. Over the course of the last two centuries, and especially the last fifty years, they have made distant places easily accessible and opened local places to instantaneous influences from far away. Sense of place now, in the early twenty-first century, is not the same as it was even a generation ago. We connect with places in ways unavailable and inconceivable to our grandparents. In an attempt to understand these changes, over the last few years I have investigated as widely as possible the diverse uses to which the idea of place has

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been subjected – in geography and philosophy, business and design, neuroscience and literature, in billboards and banners. This chapter is a survey and synthesis of some of what I have learned about recent changes in sense of place and ways we now connect with or are disconnected from places. I am a geographer interested in why the world looks as it does. By places I mean those fragments of geography that have names, buildings, and distinctive landscapes that register in our memories and to which we have emotional and practical commitments, which is how I think most people understand places most of the time. Not everybody agrees. Indeed, Edward Casey has suggested that geography is a second or third accretion to the experience of place, which he argues has less to do with a patch of ground than the immediate ambience of our bodies. ‘Places are not so much the direct objects of sight or thought or recollection’, he writes, ‘as what we feel with and around, under and above, before and behind our lived bodies’.5 In a similar vein Jeff Malpas, in his comprehensive exegesis of place in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being, argues that the ‘where’ of a thing is not the primary meaning of place; rather it is an ‘open, cleared, gathered “region” . . . in which we find ourselves along with other persons and things’.6

Figure 10.1 Special Place, carved into a driftwood log on the beach at Spanish Banks in Vancouver.

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I have no issue with the arguments of Malpas and Casey as they relate to place as an ontological phenomenon. Together they have hugely advanced understanding of its philosophical importance, subtleties and topologies. However, the places I am interested in are the immediate, palpable, sensed, and constantly changing contexts of everyday life, places such as Stony Brook and Hobart and Toronto, places where we relate to other people, go to work, go on vacation, share travel stories, dig in the garden, explore unfamiliar towns, find our way to new restaurants. In this realm geography is not a second or third accretion. On the contrary, it is in the foreground, and it is through our experiences of geographical places that, in diverse and changeable ways, we are connected with the world and the world with us (Figure 10.1)

Roots, placedness and the decline of Stabilitas Loci There is a common sentiment that deep roots in a place are essential to existence. ‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul’, Simone Weil wrote.7 And Robert Coles, in his study of uprooted children in the United States, proposed that: ‘It is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for some place that is recognized as mine, as yours, as ours.’8 Martin Heidegger, who is widely regarded as the preeminent philosopher of place, made his view of the significance of rootedness explicit in the memorial address he gave in the 1950s at the 175th anniversary of the birth of Swabian composer Conradin Kreutzer. He extolled (in rather chilling language given his previous involvement with National Socialism) the value of ‘roots in a native soil’ and ‘a life-giving homeland in whose ground man may stand rooted’.9 The metaphor of roots is an unfortunate one. ‘Plants have roots’, writes Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘human beings have feet and minds’.10 Andrew Benjamin, in his study of place and commonality in the philosophical and literary traditions of classical Greece, uses the more awkward term ‘placedness’ to describe the sense of being-in-place that was the context of life in a polis.11 Regardless of what word is used, and there is no question that ‘roots’ has greater currency, there is a widespread conviction that stable, rooted connections with places have been seriously attenuated in the relatively recent past. Christian Norberg-Schulz in his phenomenological study of architecture and genius loci emphasized the importance of what he referred to as stabilitas loci – the enduring spirit of place – and argues that since World War II ‘the qualities which traditionally

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distinguished human settlements have been corrupted or got irreparably lost’.12 Tony Hiss in The Experience of Place says that ‘until recently’ place experiences were spoken of as vivid and positive, but ‘these days’ people tell him that their experiences are of loss.13 Eric Walter, who celebrates what he calls ‘the hidden doctrine of place’, (which he ascribes to Plato and involves the experience of place as a whole through feeling, imagination, memory, intellect and senses) claims that for the first time in human history people are building meaningless places. He makes the forlorn plea that we have lost our sense of place and need to return to Plato’s placeways.14 Heidegger believed that rootedness is ‘threatened today at its very core’ and that this ‘springs from the very age into which all of us were born’.15 I do not doubt for a moment that many people have deep attachments with specific places and communities, and that displacement from these places because of urban renewal, war or environmental catastrophes is a profound psychological blow. Indeed there was a time when I wrote about the erosion of place by placeless forces of modernist uniformity and commercialism. But now I see little substantial evidence of a widespread, amorphous process at work that has diminished placedness, rotted roots, and generally undermined society and geography. I have to agree with the criticisms made by Bob Mugerauer that Heidegger assumed only his type of rooted place experience in the Black Forest had integrity, and failed to appreciate different ways of living and experiencing places. Rootedness is only one element in the diverse topographies of sense of place, only one way to connect with the world, and in the present day it is an option rather than a necessity. There are other ways of connecting with places that correspond with current social and technological realities, that offer breadth and openness of experience, and which can mitigate against a tendency of rootedness to resort to stubborn stupidity.16

The latent stupidity of place Being rooted like plants in a native soil or some little place can pose problems. Inward-looking communities, especially small and isolated ones, can be stifling, hide bound in tradition, inbred, and, especially for the young, boring and dull. It is not surprising that getting out of a place is a recurrent theme in popular music and movies. For those seeking opportunities for change and creativity, roots have to be severed. This is not to deny that emotional ties with a place and having a home where we belong, are, in moderation, thoroughly positive

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connections that provide a specific foundation for an intelligent understanding of what is going on in the world. But there is always a lurking potential for moderation to slide into excess, for placed and rooted intelligence to degenerate into unintelligent dismissals of anything different. Yi-Fu Tuan puts this succinctly when he writes: ‘Place-making, by setting up boundaries, gives rise to the polarities of “in” and “out”, “us” and “them.”’17 Being inside is good, outside is bad. This division can lead to what I have called a ‘poisoned sense of place’ that promotes nimbyism, discrimination, and resistance to difference.18 The psychologist Marc Fried, author in the 1960s of a seminal study on the traumatic effects of the uprooting of a poor immigrant community in Boston, has written more recently of the ‘pathologies of place attachment’. He acknowledges that healthy and reasonable attachment to a place are stabilizing forces for all social classes, but in the context of rapid and undesired changes coming from outside these can degenerate into an addiction to continuity that manifests itself as an intense and narrow-minded attachment to place.19 Defence of this attachment can expand into the basis for the types of territorial conflicts, violence and ethnic cleansing that happened in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and during the Holocaust. In other words, unrestrained, rooted place connections can feed the stupidity that stands behind the worst forms of human brutality.

The beginnings hold everything Regardless of whether roots serve as positive or negative connections with place, there seems to be little question that the places we come from and grew up in are locked in our memories and that these inform subsequent place experiences. In her book On Soul and Earth, an account of how individuals respond to migration, the psychoanalyst Elena Liotta describes herself as a privileged migrant. She was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Venezuela, and now lives in Orvieto in Italy where she says she connects with the particular places and daily patterns of life, though without actual identification. She says of herself: ‘I don’t belong to any place and am a citizen of the world.’20 Yet in reflecting on her own life and the lives of the immigrants she counsels she has discovered that: ‘If one knows how to look, the beginnings hold everything.’21 In other words, where we come from echoes through our subconscious and informs our identification with new places. This echo can take many forms. It can span generations. People born and bred in Canada, whose grandparents immigrated from Calabria in Italy,

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still regard themselves as Italian and make pilgrimages back to the probably now abandoned ancestral village to discover their roots. The echo can also be part of a cultural narrative, perhaps most obviously in the preservation of heritage in museums and monuments, and involving what Dickenson, Blair and Ott, in their book Places of Public Memory, refer to as the ‘rhetorical power’ to reinforce a sense of how somewhere began22 (Figure 10.2). Edith Cobb’s remarkable account of The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood reveals one of the major reasons why the places we grew up remain important to us. ‘Experience in childhood’, she wrote, ‘is never formal or abstract. Even the world of nature is not a “scene”, nor even a landscape’. For a child nature and place is ‘sheer sensory experience’ that involves a synthesis of self and world. In due course, she found, children evolve ‘out of nature into culture and experience of environment becomes thought about environment’.23 It is, of course, the case that not everyone’s place beginnings are as bucolic as this suggests; for many people places of childhood are urban, mostly artificial, and possibly disrupted. Nevertheless those early sensory experience of places are lodged deep in place cells and the memories they appear to hold, and they inevitably,

Figure 10.2 The site in Salt Lake City where in 1847, at the end of the Mormon trek from Illinois, Brigham Young declared: ‘This is the right place.’

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Figure 10.3 Place beginnings in Flemingdon Park in Toronto. This is a poor area of the city, where about 70 per cent of the residents are immigrants, and half of those have arrived from another country in the last five years.

if unselfconsciously, form a point of comparison that informs subsequent experiences and assessments of other places. In which context, and given that I am writing about place connections, it is appropriate for me to disclose my own place beginnings (Figure 10.3).

A place autobiography My earliest childhood places were a damp and cold bungalow and a village that was really a scattering of small houses and farms, situated on a hilltop surrounded by woods on the Welsh side of the Wye Valley. We had no family connections there, though my mother had grown up nearby. Tintern, with its ruined Cistercian Abbey, painted by Turner and celebrated in poetry by Wordsworth, was a few miles away. In the opposite direction was the village of Trellech with Neolithic standing stones, evidence of Roman iron mines, and a medieval church. My village had no romantic monuments or indeed recorded history. There were no very old or distinctive buildings. The local church and community hall were made of corrugated sheet metal. There was a shop and village school, but until I was about 10 years old there was no electricity or public water supply – our water came from rain barrels or was carried in pails

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from a local well. If we needed to make a phone call we used the one public call box. The village was not exactly bounded but it was an isolated place. Most people were poor but they coped, grew a lot of their own food, fixed machines, repaired houses, they did what was needed to get by. Children participated in practical and necessary activities such as haymaking, and we roamed for miles on foot and on bicycles and had ample time for the ‘sensory experiences of nature’ associated with playing in the woods. My place connections were utterly disrupted when I was an early teenager and we moved to another village of scattered houses just four miles away. Four miles could have been a hundred. I lost contact with my friends and in fact have never returned except to drive through quickly. We moved to the house my mother had grown up in, which had been built fifty years earlier by her father. She had a deep affection for it and lived there until she died. The long-time villagers acknowledged her as fully-fledged member of the community returning home. I was accepted because of the family association, but my friends and experiences had been left behind and I never felt as though I fully belonged. When I was 18 I had few regrets about leaving to study Geography at a university in London, a journey of 120 miles that in the early 1960s took a whole day. Five years later I moved to Canada and Toronto, where my academic interest in place and placelessness developed. I made regular trips back to my mother’s village, at first alone and then with my new Canadian family, and was able to witness a sort of stop-action sequence of remarkable changes. The new motorway network that shrunk all of Britain reached within a dozen miles of my second village and suddenly made it possible to get to central London or Birmingham in well under three hours. Property values rose and long-time residents happily sold their damp little cottages to retirees from Birmingham, or to surgeons and television executives working in London who wanted second homes in the countryside. The cottages were renovated and doubled or tripled in size; subdivisions with sidewalks and streetlights sprang up on fields where cows and chickens were once kept, the old cider pub down the hill and through the woods from my mother’s house was converted to a Michelin star restaurant. The old names of fields and laneways slid out of common use. The new residents drove to Heathrow to take package holidays in Florida and the Azores. The village shop and then the village school closed, and children now have to be driven to school. Almost all the families I once knew have moved away, a few to villas in Spain or France, others to nearby towns or to where their children live. Only in a very limited sense can this be said to be the same place where I spent the last part of

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my childhood. It is a clear instance of the ways that peoples’ connections with places have been transformed even in the course of my lifetime. I sold the family house when my mother died – it would have been impossible to maintain from the far side of the Atlantic – and my connections with the places where I grew up have almost all been broken. I inherited a field adjacent to the family house that I rent to one of the few remaining original residents; he keeps a few cows and horses on it but works an international lorry driver making deliveries across Europe. The field is a tenuous connection to my place beginnings in my otherwise peripatetic life. The closest relatives I have in Britain are elderly cousins I visit very occasionally. Since I left for London in the 1960s my life has been multi-centred. I have lived for at least six months in fourteen different neighbourhoods in five different cities, in four different countries. I have moved for mostly practical and family reasons – to find better accommodation when I was a student, when I married, when we had children, to live within walking distance of my work, to downsize when our children left, to move closer to our grandchildren. Apart from that one tenuous connection, my life and family are scattered across North America, and my current place commitments are divided between Toronto, Ottawa, Seattle and Victoria.

A sense of places The British sociologist Stephanie Taylor has investigated women’s relationships to home places, and concludes that the ‘born and bred narrative’ of long-term family connections to a home place is a cliché that has been largely replaced by narratives of opportunity and change. Most women she interviewed had chosen instead to participate in the mobility of modern civilization. The sort of intergenerational continuity with a particular place that is frequently regarded as a model for deep place experience, and was important for my mother, has not been part of my life. Perhaps it has something to do with that place disruption when we moved to a different village, but I have never felt deeply rooted. My connections with places have involved a transferable mixture of responsibilities, commitments and pleasures, and in this I do not consider myself in any way unusual.24 J. B. Jackson, one of the great interpreters of American landscapes, once asked rhetorically: ‘Which do we value more, a sense of place or sense of freedom?’ In other words, do we prefer to stay put or to get out and explore the world?

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This is a common contrast in discussions of place, as though the two are clearly distinguishable alternatives. Jackson, who delighted in travelling around America on a Harley Davidson, hedged his answer because he continued: ‘Roads no longer lead to places. They are places.’ This was a trifle disingenuous both because he lived much of his life in Santa Fe, and because roads, with the exception of expressways which usually seem to by-pass everywhere, usually do lead to places. A more pedantic yet more accurate answer is, I think, that freedom associated with mobility and multi-centred lives such as mine has transformed a sense of place into a sense of places.25 Connections with the place where we grew up, or our grandparents came from, may be emotionally important and inform our environmental preferences and social attitudes, but these are increasingly tenuous links. They have been supplemented by experiences, memories, and responsibilities formed in many different settings and cities. Sense of place as the faculty that enables us to find our way around and connect with the world has a broad spectrum that embraces and appreciates the diverse qualities of many particular places.

Place is another word for particularity ‘Place’, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has written, ‘makes a poor abstraction. Separated from its materializations it has little meaning . . . Place is a matter of giving shape to things – exactness, force, intelligibility. No one lives in the world in general’.26 The everyday exactness and intelligibility of places is most apparent in their names, even though these are, toponymists Deroy and Molon suggest, mostly employed like money with little attention to them other than their usefulness. Indeed, some are generically utilitarian, their specificity coming from a shared situation or context – as in ‘I’m going to the supermarket /downtown/the west coast’.27 However most geographical place names arose as descriptions that both denoted and connoted meanings and were comprehensible to the local inhabitants who coined them. They might describe a distinctive landform or recall an association with a person or an event that is no longer immediately obvious. Corstorphine in Edinburgh is derived from croix d’or fin and is where Mary Queen of Scots lost a gold cross.28 Even if we are not familiar with the history of their origins, place names individualize somewhere, and they divide the world into identifiable geographical fragments that can be shared with others, whether for mundane purposes or to convey attachments to somewhere.

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Figure 10.4 The diverse particularities of a place expressed in a poem carved into a stone slab set in the ground of Island Park in Fargo, North Dakota.

Place names function as a sort of shorthand for particularity. They gather together distinctive qualities, aspects and properties of places – location, appearance, memories, images, smells, landmarks, colours, history, weather, sports teams – depending on the experiences and intentions of those talking or thinking about them. There is a broadening of experience, of course, as we travel and learn more about the world, and get the benefit of comparative knowledge of different places. But, except perhaps for eccentric academics devoting themselves to the study of the phenomenon of place, places continue to be experienced first and foremost in their particularity. There are, however, indications that these experiences are not what they once were, that particularity is being undermined, places are losing their distinctive identities, and that the world is slithering towards a disconnected placeless geography of nowhere in particular (Figure 10.4).

Phantasmagoric places The dramatic increase over the past fifty years in electronic communications and travel has enormously intensified the tension that always seems to have existed between a desire to stay put and the urge to explore. It may have

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been the onset of this increase that led Heidegger in the 1950s to comment on what he metaphorically referred to as the ‘homelessness’ of mankind that threatened ‘rootedness . . . at its very core’.29 He wrote this before the rise of mass air travel, the great intercontinental migrations that began in the 1970s, and the development of the Internet and economic globalization that now permeate everyday life everywhere. It is not surprising, therefore, that his prescient concerns have been reinforced by more recent commentators. Arjun Appadurai, for example, speculating in the 1990s about the character of modernity, wondered what locality or place could mean in a world of globally interconnected activities and virtual communities. He saw signs both of a disjuncture between territories and social groups, and of a steady erosion of localities because of electronic media, though he was reasonably hopeful that some type of ‘production of places’ would persist.30 The sociologist Anthony Giddens was more forthright. He claimed that social practices and relations have been subjected to ‘disembedding’, lifted out of local contexts and restructured across space and time. Disembedding, he suggested, makes places increasingly ‘phantasmagoric’ because they are ‘penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them’.31 The phantasmagoric manifestations of disembedding are manifest in the ‘non-places’ that Marc Augé has described – airports, health clinics, motorway service centres, and similar facilities that have little particularity, no history, no cultural connections. and where our role is reduced to that of client, customer or patient. For Augé non-places are an expression what he calls the acceleration of history and the contraction of the planet in this age of supermodernity, and he regards them as an omnipresent characteristic of contemporary life: ‘In one form or another, ranging from the misery of the refugee camp to the cossetted luxury of five star hotels, some experience of non-place is today an essential component of all social existence.’ 32 The language of roots and rootlessness, embedding and disembedding, home and homelessness, place and non-places, suggests that these are straightforward oppositions. However, Augé thinks they ‘interwine and tangle together’, they are like opposed polarities in which neither is completely erased nor totally completed. From this perspective places have always been to some degree phantasmagoric, penetrated by outside influences. The dramatic and distinctive ruins of Tintern Abbey, which were on the fringe of my childhood place experiences, were a specific manifestation of the Gothic architectural style that was used for cathedrals and abbeys throughout medieval Europe. However, there can be no question that recent changes in mobility and communications have

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promoted the proliferation of non-places as a way to make it easier for people to move around. This is the trade-off for more extensive geographical experiences of many different places.33

Multi-centred reconnections Displacement, Lucy R. Lippard suggests, is the norm for many of us, and we make connections with places in passing. She describes modern society as multi-centred, a description that is corroborated both by my own experiences and by the huge increases in mobility and travel that have occurred over the last fifty or sixty years.34 The United Nations reported in 2013 that there were a quarter of a billion international migrants in the world, one third of whom had migrated since 1990.35 Other surveys and censuses show that 400,000 Britons and 200,000 Germans live in Spain, 500,000 Poles live in Britain, 500,000 Italians in Germany, and so on.36 Global diasporas and transnationalism are part of the demographic reality of the present age. In the United States about thirty-five million people change residence every year, and while the great majority of those move locally – within the same county – over seven million move to different states.37 Restlessness is a fundamental aspect of the modern human condition. Rowan Wilken interprets this as a recasting of what Norberg-Schulz called stabilitas loci to mobilitas loci – a shift from stable place experiences to engagement with many places.38 For Lippard those engagements involve responses to the ‘the lure of the local’, a quality of particularity that may reside in some natural feature, the climate, the light, the vegetation, or perhaps in the history and built environment that stirs our memories of other places. 39 The lure of the local can be far less poetic than that suggests, for instance it might be simply where we can find work or a better neighbourhood to live. Whatever the reason for choosing a place, our associations with it and the webs of meaning they entail became increasingly dense as we develop deep knowledge of the local geography, become familiar with roads and shops, learn where shortcuts are, meet people, engage with the community, begin to participate in the choreography of everyday life, experience the weather, become involved in the politics and processes of change. The environmentalist Gary Snyder claimed it took him a year, the full cycle of the seasons, to establish his sense of a place. For others, especially when there is a strong instinctive bond with somewhere, it may take only a few days or weeks.

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When, in due course, we move on to a new school or job, or to retire, our sense of each new place is always informed by experiences of previous places. ‘We carry places with us’, writes Dylan Trigg in Memory of Place.40 Liotta puts it more poetically when she writes that ‘the roots of the soul’ permit survival and the capacity for belonging anywhere in the world. In other words, we transfer our memories and values between places, at each stage adapting and rediscovering them even as we turn to them to find continuity in our lives. This is beautifully captured in an installation in the City of Victoria in Canada that acknowledges the fate of the Songhees First Nation who occupied the land there before the British arrived. It has this script: ‘We Songhees were moved from the place where our ancestors worked, laughed, celebrated and lived. Our daily lives are very different from that of our ancestors . . . Our ways live both with and within us and cannot be displaced.’41

Disconnections The Songhees installation also makes it clear that transferability of sense of place and a multi-centred life are not always matters of choice. In the social topography of place the processes of forced uprooting, homelessness, displacement, and dislocation are types of erosion, sometimes slow and often abrupt, which break connections and can be deeply upsetting. In these cases those who suffer are powerless to prevent what is happening. Fullilove coined the expressive phrase ‘root shock’ to describe the trauma caused when there is a sudden and imposed disconnection from a place.42 For refugees and asylum seekers a detachment from place is likely to drag on, less a matter of shock that of chronic despair. They are frequently caught in transitional accommodations that are for them placeless non-places. A poster for a photo installation in Dublin in 2014 protested the Direct Provision system that operates in Ireland for people seeking international protection, describing it as a short-term accommodation solution, with over 4,000 people trapped in limbo, one third of them children. The poster concluded in capital letters: ‘Direct Provision – No Place to Call Home.’ These asylum seekers are, in almost every sense, homeless – no community, no nation, no house or territory or neighbourhood or town of their own, no guarantee of where they are going next. In 2014 the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that there were more than 50 million refugees and asylum seekers in the world. All of them placeless, and ten million of them stateless.43

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Placemaking, branding and re-embedding With growing mobility, multi-centredness, and forced displacement, it is perhaps not surprising that over recent decades increasing attention has been given to possible ways of reconnecting with places. This is most apparent in the emergence of ideas and practices of placemaking. Placemaking encompasses a range of approaches, some community-based and some involving designers. In 1995 Schneekloth and Shibley, in what I believe was the first book devoted to placemaking, gave it a very broad definition as: The way all of us as human beings transform the places in which we find ourselves into places in which we live. It includes building and tearing buildings down, cultivating the land and planting gardens, cleaning the kitchen and rearranging the office, making neighbourhoods and mowing lawns, taking over buildings and understanding cities.

Placemaking, they argue, is as much about creating relationships between people in places as about the relationships of people to places. 44 This broad definition of placemaking includes the mundane practices of maintenance and caretaking that are part of the everyday demands of living somewhere. These do not require stability or dwelling or roots, and are unlikely to be either aesthetically stimulating or deeply emotional. What they do require is continued responsibility for a place, both in the meaning of responding to its needs and in the meaning of accepting an obligation to it and to those with whom that place is shared (Figure 10.5). Maintenance is not what is usually meant by placemaking. In practice the broad definition has been shrunk to refer mostly to art installations or planning and design approaches that are intended to create somewhere distinctive from an amorphous setting. For Dolores Hayden, one its first proponents, it is a social and political act, and she used it to describe her work in the 1980s helping immigrant communities in Los Angeles to make connections with their new environments.45 The Project for Public Spaces, an American consulting organization, which regards itself as a global clearing house for placemaking, has a community-based urban design perspective: ‘Placemaking’, it says on its website: is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. . .Placemaking is the process through which we collectively shape our public realm to maximize shared value . . . Placemaking involves the planning, design, management and programming of public spaces.46

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Figure 10.5 A plaque on the wall of a row of social housing on New Street South in Dublin in 2014 (a few streets north of Malpas Place) that needs no explanation.

A more top-down approach has been adopted by the Centre for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), a central government agency in Britain, which has defined urban design as ‘the art of making places for people’, with attention to how places work and look, their connections with people and urban forms, lively streets and the overall quality of the public realm. 47 For both the Project for Public Spaces and CABE the intended outcome seems to be the reproduction of selective qualities of pre-modern townscapes, especially ones that are pedestrian-friendly, either as a way to correct the deficiencies of placeless sprawl and the proliferation of non-places, or to create high-density, mixed-use urban nodes. The term placemaking is usually reserved for community-based activities. Place branding, in contrast, is a corporate marketing strategy applied to cities, regions and institutions such as universities in an attempt to capture, advertise and promote their identities. The aim is to attract investors, tourists, and students by creating a packaged and compressed combination of images, slogans and logos that ideally stem from some extant aspects of place identity. Simon Anholt, a business consultant writes in his book Places: Identity, Image and Reputation that: ‘nobody doubts that places have their brand images,

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Figure 10.6 Place branding as placemaking at the University of British Columbia. I have superimposed the photo of one of the campus banners on a construction poster of a rendering for Ponderosa Commons, a new student residence under construction in 2013.

and that those images are critical to the success in the many international competitions that characterize the modern economy’. How well it works, whether it persuades investors to change their minds and whether university students and professors respond to banners on lampposts, is far from clear, but place branding is now an integral part of global capitalism, and unavoidably part of place experiences48 (Figure 10.6). ‘We are surrounded by places’, Edward Casey writes at the beginning of his book The Fate of Place. ‘We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them.’ This presents a scope of work unimaginably greater than any design or branding approach can embrace. I believe that ‘reembedding’ is a far more widespread and varied form than either placemaking or branding, and it is a process that happens with little or no professional assistance. Anthony Giddens defined disembedding as the process in which social relations are lifted out of a local context. Re-embedding is the process by which social relations are inserted into particular places in ways that blend local contexts with distant influences, in which proximity and distance are joined. It is what happens when individuals and communities choose to transplant themselves, yet carry their former places with them and maintain their contacts

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with relatives and colleagues both in those former places and elsewhere. In contemporary mobile, multi-centred societies re-embedding is an ongoing process manifest at large scales in transnationalism and ethnic enclaves in global cities, and at smaller scales whenever families move to find a better house or a neighbourhood. It is a process particularly apparent in intentional communities of those who have shared values and interests, for example gay villages and university towns, and which have as much in common with gay villages and university towns elsewhere as they do with their immediate location.49 Cowichan Bay on the east coast of Vancouver Island is a re-embedded place. It was once a thriving salmon fishing and lumber village but its resource base slipped away and it went into decline. Its fortunes began to improve in 2004 with the opening of an organic bakery, and it has slowly been repopulated and revitalized by newcomers seeking a slow and sustainable way of life. Restaurants serve locally caught fish with locally grown vegetables, there is a whale-watching business, a dragon boat team of breast cancer survivors, and a small maritime museum with beautifully crafted small wooden boats. In 2009 Cowichan Bay was officially registered as the first Città Slow community in North America. It is therefore part of the worldwide network of slow communities that began in Italy in 1999. It has been simultaneously lifted out of its immediate geographical context into a global network and embedded in its local environment.

Distant influences and teletechnologies Re-embedding is a process that underlies our multi-centred society. One of its characteristics is that what may appear at first to be intensely local is, to paraphrase Anthony Giddens, accompanied by distant social and economic influences that penetrate and shape places.50 Geographers, for instance Doreen Massey and David Harvey, have referred to this as space–time compression – the shrinking of the world that is associated with neoliberal globalization, modern mobility, and electronic communications.51 This perspective led Massey to define place as ‘a constellation of trajectories’; in other words places are nodes in networks of social and economic relations that are regional and global in their scope.52 Alexandra Kogl, a political scientist, takes a related view when she describe places as connected by rhizomes that in effect burrow surreptitiously between them, simultaneously linking them and adapting to local conditions.53 The links and networks work that Massey and Kogl describe

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are mostly the flows of capital between financial centres and the global supply chains of consumer goods that ensure most of the same consumer goods are available everywhere. There is, however, compelling evidence, that equally important links are the ones that work through electronic communications to disseminate images and ideas. Stephen Kern has described the enormous change in concepts of space and time that happened between 1880 and 1918, when the stable conventions of the old world about how to experience self, others, and objects were abruptly pushed aside.54 In the new world of space/time those conventions were eroded not only because of new theories in science and art, but also because new forms of communication – trains, cars, the telegraph, telephone, and radio – had the effect of allowing here and there to be anywhere. When Marshall McLuhan speculated in the 1960s about the social impact of different media he concluded that electronic communications, unlike print media which facilitated the outward expansion of empires and business, have the effect of an implosion.55 They turn the world in on itself, creating a global village filled with electronic gossip, they ignore boundaries, upset social hierarchies and allow ‘every place to be a centre’. They compress and rearrange the many different places of the world so that, like place cells in the hippocampus, they no longer seem to correspond to actual geographies. ‘Where one is’, Joshua Meyerowitz suggests in his provocatively titled 1980s book No Sense of Place, ‘has less and less to do with what one knows or experiences’.56 The subsequent inventions of the Internet, mobile devices and social media have reinforced this dissociation of geography and experience. Sharon Kleinman, for example, has recently described the current phase of mobile communications as providing ‘nearly seamless anytime, anyplace connectivity’ in which ‘here and there can be virtually anywhere, and, moreover, both can be moving’. Somebody talking on a mobile phone in public is simultaneously in a street yet distracted, not physically co-present, and communicating directly with someone somewhere else, perhaps thousands of kilometres away on another continent.57 It is tempting to conclude that electronic communications disconnect people from the actual places where they are and connect them with more distant virtual places and self-selected non-place communities. Rowan Wilken in Teletechnologies, Place and Community offers a more nuanced argument. He suggests that these technologies which do things at a distance (tele is the Greek word for ‘afar’), ‘have wrought profound changes in how we think about who we are, where we are, and how we relate to one another’. However, they do not so much displace place, or render it obsolete, as transform ways of thinking about

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places from bits of geography to subtle and intertwined processes that blend our experiences of somewhere specific with virtual experiences of elsewhere. Place, he concludes, both shapes and is shaped by our engagement with teletechnologies.58 Teletechnologies are integral to re-embedding, allowing individuals, businesses and communities to maintain continual connections with distant places. They have been easily incorporated into everyday life. Paul Adams uses the term ‘extensibility’ to describe the way we use electronic communications to engage with the disconnected contexts of a networked world, watch video clips of distant news events, send and receive emails, while at the same time living in and connecting with real places, taking the dog for a walk, buying groceries. For Andrew Blum, the author of popular book on the infrastructure of the Internet, the ‘here’ of his everyday life is full of elements of far-away places. He was living on the edge of a Korean district in Toronto when the World Cup was hosted in Korea, and described his experience watching a TV in a store window showing live broadcasts of games while surrounded by Korean immigrants who were talking on cell phones with friends who were actually in the crowd at the game in Seoul. ‘I may be eager to understand this place’, he wrote, ‘but this place is not explicitly or even primarily about here’. Its genius loci does not come from the earth, he suggested, but arrives on a wire, and it is neither placeless, nor a nonplace, nor exactly virtual. It is, in fact, a blend of all those. The wider world in all its variety is connected with local settings, even as those settings offer openings to that wider world. One of the remarkable aspects of our present age is the seamlessness and normality of this.59

An open sense of place In the early years of the twenty-first century there appears to have been a convergence of thinking about places as openings to the entire world. Doreen Massey, for example, argues from a geographical perspective for a progressive or global sense of place that blends the recognition of local history with an understanding of the wider social and economic relations that impact on particular places. She writes of the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place, the unique coming together of different trajectories – geological, botanical, economic and political – and proposes that this requires an outward-looking ‘politics of place beyond place’ to attend to their possibilities.60 David Harvey, also a geographer, claims that in the context of space–time compression ‘what goes on in a place

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cannot be understood outside of the space relations which support that place, any more than the space relations can be understood independently of what goes on in specific places’. He draws on Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘militant particularism’ – the idea that ideals forged in the solidarities of a specific place can be generalized as a working model for the benefit of all humanity – as a way to bridge the problematic divide between action that is rooted in places and broader social and environmental relations.61 Jeff Malpas approaches place from a philosophical orientation as an ontological phenomenon, and he is critical of Massey and Harvey because they dismiss any suggestion of the importance of dwelling or belonging as being bounded, reactionary and exclusionary. Nevertheless his exploration of place in Heidegger’s thinking leads him to a conclusion that I think bears a family resemblance to Massey’s ideas of throwntogetherness and place beyond place, yet reaches beyond them in the important respect that he sees openness as arising out of boundedness and particularity, not in spite of them.62 ‘Place’, Malpas writes, ‘is that open, cleared yet bounded region in which we find ourselves gathered together with other persons and things, and in which we are opened up to the

Figure 10.7 An open sense of place acknowledged at Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary in Victoria, British Columbia.

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world and the world to us’.63 This is at once an obvious yet profound insight. Obvious, because the idea that specific places are windows to the wider world is not unfamiliar. Profound, because it calls to our attention that this familiarity is a fundamental and complex part of being somewhere, and that connection with a particular place is not a constraint but a resource for intelligent understanding of the world64 (Figure 10.7).

A nice conceit Whatever occurs in a specific place is always implicated in broader geographical and ontological processes. To ignore this is to close the door and shut out the world, which is what happens in Alzheimer’s disease. An open sense of place connects our origins and experiences in particular places with the intelligence that understands how these are effected by and influence what goes on elsewhere in the world. Of course, there is always the possibility that it can be distorted to ferment the worst sorts of human traits, especially when narrow-minded convictions are reinforced by participation in virtual self-selected communities on the Internet. My view is that an open sense of place is a concomitant of modern mobility, multi-centredness, re-embedding and teletechnologies; it promotes shared experiences and an appreciation of diversity. It is increasingly how people everywhere connect with the world. It is also an increasingly urgent necessity for the politics of place beyond place. The emergent world problems of the present century – climate change, persistent poverty in the shadows of excessive wealth, the loss of biodiversity, ragged wars and terrorism, and epidemics of infectious diseases – all have causes and effects on particular lives in particular places yet are spread-eagled around the globe. It is a nice conceit to think that an open sense of place, regardless of whether it is explicitly recognized or called that, might be a necessary condition for mitigating such problems.

Notes 1 John Zeisel, ‘A Sense of Place’, New Scientist, 4 March 2006, pp. 50–51. 2 John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in the Physiology of Medicine for their research on place and grid cells. Their research is summarized, for example, at May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, ‘Crystals of the Brain’, in EMBO Molecular Medicine 2011, http://www.ncbi.

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nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3377059/; and John Kuble, ‘Human Grid Cells’, BrainFacts.Org, 2013, http://blog.brainfacts.org/2013/08/human-grid-cells/#. VGTrPofq0-x. Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012) comes to an insight similar to those of the neuroscientists – that memory resides dynamically in places. Michael Hough, Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 1. SoPlace is a contraction for World Summit for Sense of Place, accessible at http://soplacesummit.com/ Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 313. His comment about geography is in Casey, ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prologema’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), footnote p. 47. Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 28. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 53. Robert Coles, Uprooted Children (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 120–121. Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 48–49. Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth: a Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 187. Andrew Benjamin, Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 4. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 11–18. Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), p. xii. Eric Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 2–3. Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, pp. 47–48. Robert Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of Place (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994). Yi-Fu Tuan and Martha Strawn, Religion: From Place to Placelessness (Chicago, IL: The Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2010), p. 30. See Edward Relph, ‘Sense of Place’, in Ten Geographical Ideas that Have Changed the World, ed. Susan Hanson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). Marc Fried, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities of Place’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20 (2000): 202–203. Elena Liotta, On Soul and Earth: The Psychic Value of Place (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 3.

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21 Liotta, On Soul and Earth, p. 41. 22 Greg Dickenson, Carole Blair and Brian Ott (eds), Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa, AB: University of Alabama Press, 2010). 23 Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 28–29, 58. 24 Stephanie Taylor, Narratives of Identity and Place (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 16. 25 J. B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 190. 26 Clifford Geertz, ‘Afterword’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), p. 259. 27 L. Deroy et M. Mulon, Dictionnaire de Noms de Lieux (Paris: Les Usuels, 1992), p. i. 28 See S. Taylor (ed.), The Uses of Place Names (Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998), p. 1. 29 Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, p. 48. 30 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 179, 189. 31 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 20–26, pp. 18–19. 32 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), p. 119. 33 Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, pp. 79, 107. 34 Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multi-centered Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), esp. pp. 43ff. 35 United Nations, International Migration Report, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2013, p. 1. 36 Ami Sedghi, ‘Europe: Where Do People Live?’ The Guardian, 2012, http://www. theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jan/26/europe-population-who-lives-where. 37 See the reports and tables at United States Census Bureau, ‘Migration/Geographic Mobility Main’, 2014, http://www.census.gov/hhes/migration/. 38 Rowan Wilken, Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (New York : Routledge, 2011), p. 175. 39 Lippard, The Lure of the Local. 40 Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place, p. 11; Elena Liotta, On Soul and Earth: The Psychic Value of Place (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 4. 41 The Songhees installation is on the Craigflower Bridge in Victoria, British Columbia. 42 Mindy Fullilove, Rootshock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It (New York: Ballantine, 2004), p. 10. 43 UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, http://www.unhcr.org/ pages/49c3646c155.html.

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44 Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley, Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities (New York: Wiley, 1995), pp. 1–2. 45 Dolores Hayden, ‘Placemaking, Preservation, and Urban History’, Journal of Architectural Education, 41 (1988): 45–51. 46 Project for Public Spaces, http://www.pps.org/reference/what_is_placemaking/. 47 CABE, By Design: Urban Design in the Planning System – Towards Better Practices (London: Centre for Architecture and Built Environment, 2000), pp. 8, 15. 48 Simon Anholt, Places: Identity, Image and Reputation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4. The Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, created for professionals ‘who want to make places better’, offers courses on town management that includes branding and marketing. 49 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 140. 50 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 21. 51 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 240ff. 52 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), chapter 13. 53 Alexandra Kogl, Strange Places: the Political Potentials and Perils of Everyday Spaces (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 57ff. The idea of rhizomes she takes from G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 54 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 209. 55 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Toronto: Signet Press, 1964), p. 47. 56 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 115. 57 Sharon Kleinman (ed.), ‘Preface’ in Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. xii, 2, 10–11. 58 Rowan Wilken, Teletechnologies, Place, and Community, pp. 1, 209; Paul Adams, The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005). 59 Andrew Blum, ‘Hybrid Place: The Experience of the Local and the Remote’, MA Thesis, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, 2002. Blum is the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Harper Collins, 2012). 60 Massey, Space, Place and Gender; Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 4, 14, chapter 10; Massey, For Space, chapters 12, 13. 61 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 29–34, 350–352.

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62 Jeff Malpas, The Experience of Place: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 170. 63 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World, p. 221. 64 See also Rowan Wilken, Teletechnologies, Place, and Community, pp. 198–201, for a discussion of the similarities between the ideas of Massey and Malpas. He suggests that Malpas goes further than Massey by arguing that it is within the context of place that the very possibility of the social arises.

11

Place and Sensory Composition Kathleen Stewart

When everything else has come and gone from my brain – the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family – when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that. Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, p. 3.

My New England What I know of my New England, I know as a townie in a small town north of Boston. As one of those who were born there before ‘the sticks’ became master-planned fields of McMansions and who lived, therefore, in walking distance to the town centre, the post office, the schools, the churches, and the library. As one who walked. As one who came from two big town clans. My parents were widely known by one-word nicknames (Punky, Dric). I heard the heavily accented voices calling out, suffered the adult stories, got caught daily in the sociality pauses on the side of the road that interrupted play or the path to the library. I was one of those who shared a physical aversion to having the heat on at night (our noses would swell and fill with blood). We apprenticed in laughing and mourning at the state of the world and ourselves in it. We perked up in performances of words and bodies and then, as if in compensation or guilt, we were propelled into retreats of small exhaustions or a flatness. That ‘we’ had the habit of a moody pause at a window. A peering out at a stillness. It bent to memorizing what was becoming of a wide swath of people whose only affinity

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was that of place. It had a loyalty to the expressivity of things. It could see place as a vulnerability and a threshold. We watched the windows and porches with some vigilance. A curtained window, or a front porch slightly cluttered or too bare, was read as the actual matter of a slackening, a form of slowing and loss. We knew when a few pansies stuck in a window box was a failed gesture at spring and when it succeeded. The aesthetically failed porch was not just a sign of a shut-in inside – an unemployed, a depressive, an addict, or a meanness. It was as if the skin of the house itself had become decrepit, as if it no longer prickled with relation to what happened around it, as if the plastic siding, long-ago layered over the wood, was itself necrotic. We felt the bony truth in the mantra that the beach is cold and gray in the winter, and windy in a bad way, that the woods are dark, that isolation is dangerous. If you lived in town you could walk to the library (supermarket, post office, drug store, hardware store, school, church). Thanksgiving and Christmas parties were loud, chaotic, exuberant. And then there would be a walk into the gray neighbourhood (Thanksgiving) or to midnight mass (until the church just cancelled the mass because too many people were falling down drunk or giggling). When my father died my mother worried about him in the cold ground. She didn’t want me to dedicate a bench on a walk in the woods because it was too lonely. Cold. There were suicides found hanging from the trees in the woods around the lake where people walked their dogs; there were rapes there and estranging teenage first times, and years of partying gone unchecked into self-destruction. When someone died we were drawn into the crowd at the wake, a body among others. This was not a community blueprint stamped on us but an obligation to witness en masse the weight of the world as it came down in bald, graphic scenes of how lives ended. It was a stunned co-witnessing. It was intimate and not without friction. Life in this place went on through a dogged endurance or a series of wild trajectories, or, most commonly, a little of both. The world threatened to avalanche. A life’s ups and downs were like periods of being in a groove and then having to dig yourself out of something. You kept going, like a plow horse, one foot in front of the other, clearing a path through what amassed. Or you didn’t. There was also a recklessness and certain regional habituations of what might be called a gestural orientation to life and its problems – a partial, or even flippant, or sacrilegious, way of responding to things. The gestural was a thing on its way to going flat, into the slackening, or, alternatively, a way of veering

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off into a flipped finger at the shitheads of the world. It started in a moment of not quite being on track – a widespread situation that generated any number of gestural expressivities. For one, there was the notoriously bad driving. The problem with the driving was that it was rooted in the situation of off-trackness and therefore was more a gesture than a plan. You drove with your eyes straight ahead, your neck rigid, as if you were incapable of turning your head. You whipped out of blind driveways, around packed rotaries, and into rushing lanes of traffic as if driving on a prayer, as if the game was always already lost – fuck it, I’m going, hope for the best, expect the worst. Driving’s weak agency tipped easily into aggression as one habitual response. This meant a lot of noise on the soundscape and in bodies – the honking horns, the anxious rages, the constant yelling at other drivers. Or, in an equally wild gestural gestation, the embattled cluelessness of driving could just as easily shift into some surprising and intimate surge to redemption that would drop down on bodies and hunks of metal as if from on high. Because there was always something going on, and whatever was going on could fork off into radically divergent paths, we became attuned to gestures – our own and others. Things skidded into view, or languished unattended by clueless others. Micro social events scored over time and space and bodies like a fourth dimension. Place here accreted through a repeated self-reference (we’re from here, I recognize the look in you’re eye . . . ). And yet it took place as a shakenness, an adventure, a return of a familiar surprise. It happened episodically in the precise singularity of the sudden crispness of the air in October, or that gesture. Poised between some kind of acceptance and an impulse to say or do something about whatever was happening, it literally took place as a pause of recognition that might also be an estrangement. Place here was all two-dimensional until it wasn’t. All talk and icon and then the taste of a Macintosh apple. An expressivity had reached a general plane that caught people up, halfwillingly and half-wittingly, in a sensory-aesthetic conundrum of agency and being. Place threw itself together like a fictional gesture at going on with things. You could wave it like a magic wand to lighten the hard lines of the secret self. You could use it to interrupt an impulse or check an excess or to celebrate or excuse the same. It could neutralize something or get something going. Suturing a private aloneness to a public being with others, it could be an irritant, or a pleasure, or a mixed bag. The place itself encompassed beings and materialities, rhythms and energies, in a complex (and loud) sensory composition. The sensory composition of a

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New England touched the timeless granite, the Dunkin’ Donuts sign, the biting air in January. It clung to things, swelled and retracted like a tide. You banked its promise of habit and mood. You rested on the laurels of a beautiful scene. To a townie, place was a thing in itself – a living intensity peaking in a scene or weirdly recombinant, dispersed or flattened or nascent. It could die the slow death of an economic downturn, or go on living through things to the point of ongoing exhaustion or resurge in just about anything. It gave spatiotemporality a body. It had events, properties, actors, stakes, consequences, competencies, sediments, horizons, and velocities.1 Townies recognized one another as a sheer co-presence to events and potentialities. When something happened, you were propelled to an eye contact, maybe even a raised eyebrow for added emphasis. Every day you talked loudly about the weather with people you met on the street, you joked in a openmouthed town accent about the human condition in the way of the world (what are you gonna’ do?), you stuck a few pansies in the window boxes in the spring, you paid at least half-assed homage to the presencing of place in the crisp fall air, the old graveyard, the still-imposing catholic school, or the flurry of decorative American flags everywhere. Place was an injunction to be, see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. But this made it an experiment, a matter of trial and error. It was as if the place itself tossed out rules just to see what would happen. But its rules were far from social facts or blueprints for action; they were more like irritants and dreams that sparked circuits of reaction. If you took your trash to the recycling centre, for example, you had to place things in a dozen different dumpsters for cardboard, green glass, brown glass, clear glass, grades and sizes of plastic containers, grades and types of metal cans, newspapers. Your trash should be clean. Nothing should be left on the pavement next to the dumpsters. There were stairs you had to negotiate to climb up to the platforms built around the dumpsters. There were detailed signs telling you what to do and how to do it but all the instructions only cracked open queries and reactions. There were those who tried to follow the letter of the law. There were those who would swear loudly throughout the exercise as if the world should be listening. There were those who would do a drive-by, shoving bags and boxes of unsorted trash out of the sides of their car and speeding off, car doors flying open on their hinges, as if there was a surveillance system and a police car on alert to pursue them. A townie felt the pull of all such possibilities blowing through a scene. A townie’s town was the tipping point of a world. A hinge opening onto a sensory-imaginary mapping in process. You could feel the town line in your gut

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when you crossed over it. Whiteness, class, and ethnicity hovered over it like a cloud. The line was more than a territory marker or a boundary of privilege and power. It was a material-semiotic residue of the presencing of place. A reverberant chamber of almost hard-wired yet spectral lines of attunement and dispossession. Once, the town lines here were the spokes of a wheel coming out of the mill cities of Lawrence, Haverill, Lowell, Lynn. Immigrant cities. Ethnicities rolled over the lines in historical waves, taking up residence in towns that became Irish, then mixed with Italians, then peppered with French Canadians, Lebanese, Portuguese. An energetics gathered at the lines. Racisms sparked. There were those who came first, those who got their clan tentacles into the ground of the place and grew, those who came a little later, those whose hold was untried. Ethnic figures of people in place circulated: the Black Irish drank, they were dirty washer-women and bricklayers, the Italians had garish pink houses, loud mouths, and huge statues of the virgin Mary in their yards. One of my aunts remembers throwing rocks at a Lebanese woman who was lovely, always upbeat, always a smile, who worked in the mills, who took the bus to the grocery store on her way home every night and then walked up the long steep hill to cook dinner for her six kids. My aunt says it was a shame that the kids tormented her; that was a different time. Later, when the economy shifted, when the textile mills ran away from the unions to resettle in the south, when the cities grew poor, when the new immigrants were recruited en masse from Puerto Rico to work in the shoe factories that remained, the smell of glue overpowering even a mile away, when the Merrimack River came into view as a toxic dump, the town lines came to mark a sudden sensory shift from the smothering gray heat of the city and its tenements to a sensory scene of vivid colour with a breeze. Sensory compositions became injunctions and jump-starts; this is what began to lay down the tracks of place. New England itself had already shifted metaphorically north into a pastoral world of cottage industries and farms attached to new-born dreams of a New Hampshire and a Vermont. The old town centre had already been reconstituted as a vision of pure white colonial houses encircling the town commons.2 On the town lines, the two New Englands now rose up in a split imaginary topography of images, icons, ways of living, and sensory surges of loss and potential, belonging and abjection. In my neighbourhood, you could look down Mass. Ave. to the gray buildings and streets of Lawrence. At the town line there was an explosion of green grass, red maples, and yellow light passing out of houses onto solid

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lawns. There were parks on our side of the line, playgrounds, and a blue, blue lake. There was the aristocratic Academy Hill and small farms with little farm stands. Even the tiny decrepit mill houses on Water Street were contained at worst, picturesque at moments. But the world beyond the town line was more than just a world of categorical difference or a dream-destruction. It was a sheer disorientation, as if the very promise and threat of becoming sentient began and ended on this patch of gray pavement. Being in this place, and of it, was like being an agoraphobe drawn to an edge. There was a habit of stepping out over the edge, a venturing forth into a lost existential territory, a kind of ritual of repeating the refrain of place as an event. Setting out mapless, alone, and unprepared into the world enacted the sharp sensory mapping emergent in an existential drift. You would become lost, trapped in an almost hysterical displaced agency like a hamster on a wheel. But stepping over the line was also an adventure, a literal, sensory venturing out. When you set off to get Pita bread from the Lebanese place or to get your rugs cleaned somewhere you had heard about on South Broadway things happened to a displaced townie. Driving into Boston, twenty miles away, was another story. That was a place beyond the pale. You would be caught in a maze of one-way streets or shunted off onto a highway you might not find your way back from. And where would you park if you did find your way into the city? Boston was the scene of a townie’s abjection. A panic button. If you had to go, you would be counselled to make a dry run in the daylight, on a Sunday morning, to map out your options, see how you managed. Being of a place here was having a nose for the displayed intelligibility of things, their sound, smell, shape, a tactile sensing out of routes and whatever was happening in scenes. It was an imaginal reanimation lodged in an appreciation of how things present themselves with sensation and purpose in a world of entangled promises and threats.3 It was energies surging and dissolute loss. Place moved in eddies, cut things off at a sharp edge, erupted episodically, set off in tendrils. Its recurrence had moods. Its sublime upsurges had colour; its sad slackenings had a stuckness. Its partial and bruised coherence scored over matter and meaning like a musical refrain. It could be a restart button or the reminder of a wall. It could make people shine, or dull them. Place could shore you up but it could also abandon you. As when the supermarket downtown closed, stranding the old people whose plan it had been to age in place, walking the ten minutes to town for groceries. Place was a world that resonated and shook. If you were

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in it, you were in a situation that could unfold, collapse, grow violent or need defending, or rest in scenes of human–non-human beauty. Riding out the events of place called for a certain hardiness. You had to keep your wits about you.

Sensory singularities A sensory composition is a crystallization filled with the potentiality of dissolution. Both emergent and concrescent, it is instantly recognizable and unmistakable as some kind of a real, but also essentially retractable, contingent, and of a limited lifespan. It flickers in a moment. It splits into divergent trajectories distributed, tentatively, across a field of subjects-objects-bodiesaffects. Poised between form and formlessness, it exposes reality as a rhythmic alternation. It shimmers and dims. Sometimes, some places, like my New England, can throw together into a compositional coherence like a sand storm in the west, or the water overflowing a riverbank in a valley, or the ad for paint that splashes over the black-andwhiteness of scenes, magically transforming them into the realer-than-real of hyperactive colour. Other places, like my Texas, have little compositional coherence (until they do). But all places have muscle. They live in a state of potentiality with recognizable tendencies and affordances. They press people and things into service, entice qualities out of them, pull them into alignment, stretch them out to a horizon. You keep up with the house painting if that’s the thing. Or you dig in the shallow limestone and dark clay soils, planting and replanting the species that draw hummingbirds or don’t need water or belong here: Mesquite, buckeye, Persimmon, Redbud, Acanthus, Rosemary, Fragrant Sumac, Bearded Iris, Mexican Oregano, Basket Grass, Big Muhly grass. A place thrown together as a sensory composition is an infrastructure of feeling and sociality that slowly comes to pass as common habits and shared reactions in lives and attitudes. It happens to degrees and in singularities that create proliferating multiplicities. It lodges in bodies, characters, and habits. There might be a kind of eye contact, a tendency to warm up to strangers right away, or a reserve that jumps seamlessly into a strangely familial intimacy if certain signs are exchanged. Or you wouldn’t think of disposing of old furniture or lawnmowers by putting them on the street for anyone to pick up. Or that’s exactly what you do any chance you get. If what you’ve put out on the curb doesn’t get taken right away you put a sign on it, ‘free’ or ‘SO free’. You watch to see what happens to it. The person who stops to look at it, who decides, tentatively, to

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take it, will glance to see if you’re looking, maybe call out a question or just pause, stand there waiting to see what will happen, if objections will arise or information or permission or good will might come their way. The composition of place walks the line between some kind of grandiose gesture at belonging and a barely legible series of distinctions to become the small and strangely shared lines of a life. A ‘we’ likes hot food or it doesn’t, it drives badly in some particular way, it talks about certain things and not others. A practice becomes a phenomenon: suddenly, in one town-becoming-city everyone begins to walk and bike places. The singularities of what a composing place is generating become recognizable in the process of deploying them. Odd bits of things become animate. They become energetic performances of being in a world. They present a present with a body and therefore a weight. They entrain dispositions, expectations, and skilled lines of action.4 They unearth characters and scenes, throw up a facial expression or a skin sensation. They generate attunements and disorientations that come of being ‘in’ what is always already a node of condensation that discloses and spits, a splitting series of possibilities that hit a mark in some people at times. Place as a sensory composition is, then, what Karen Barad calls an apparatus – a ‘specific material reconfiguring of the world that does not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigures spacetimematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming’.5 Scoring across stories, photos, literature, film, dream, bodies, put-together and left-behind things, it pulls matter and personhood into a state of expressivity. But it is as much a mistake as an inevitability. It exists as an immanence in some series of events, some circuits of reaction, that might (or might not) be made legible in scenes of intensification and dispersal, in lines of enclosure or abandonment, in residues, accidental side steps, and blockages. So acts of remembering and taking care, accidents and failures, cluelessness and watchfulness become central to the living out of place. Place is a flickering resource or a mistake that burdens. It drags, it buoys. A composite of sensory singularities thrown together through repetition and an excitement of attentions, place is ‘a logic of intensities . . . the logic not only of human subjects . . . but also of . . . faces and landscapes . . . (it) . . . strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution’.6 It makes appearances in gestures, colours, temperatures, moods, and the practices of keeping things up or letting things drop. Like a dream, it lifts into a concrete abstraction that blankets matter, refiguring the disturbances of the self as a way of being in some kind of world. Henry, the husband in Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive Kitteredge, is retired but he remembers how ‘mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were

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his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right . . . and any uneasiness at the way his wife often left their bed to wander through their home in the night’s dark hours . . . receded like a shoreline’.7 Being in and of a sensory composition of place is like scratching on a chalkboard already overcrowded with lines and erasures. More a prism than a structure, more a collective search engine than a grammar, it is a matter of coming into ordinary contact with performativities that may emerge. It is both a game of watching things snap into place, or noting the jump between the representational short-hand of a characterization of place and its singular sensory props, and a dream of becoming the matter through which something literally makes sense and also, simultaneously, becomes literally eccentric.

A return . . . A place that takes place as a sensory composition is not an inert landscape made of dead matter but a composting of bodies, affects and forests, of persons, socialities, and existential ecologies of being in a world. This, I believe is the topology Annie Dillard refers to as that which will remain when all other memory and recognition is gone – ‘the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that’.8 The living remains ungathered in bits and pieces of this and that, the refrains that score ordinary experiences, prompting something (a reaction, a compulsion, a venturing out, a laugh of recognition). The sensory composition of place is one of the ways that experience, and especially the experience of being in some kind of world, becomes an experiment9 – a leaning in to something starting up, a performance of something gestural, an effort to characterize or to become a character moving in the manner of something. I have a dream of going back to my parent’s camp in New Hampshire. My brother owns it now. There’s a river where the canyon used to be. A dozen people of all sizes and shapes are climbing up on each other’s shoulders like cheerleaders in a triangle formation. The guy in the middle holds a towrope behind a speedboat. They take off. A heavy, older, blonde woman falls off the top of the triangle and does a perfect landing in only six inches of water. Six weeks later I’m there, visiting my brother’s place. The trees have grown up, obscuring the view of the canyon, but he is working on clearing them. He’s worried about structural issues; he’s replacing the wooden pilings on which the house sits perched on a steep hill, its underbelly exposed to the winter. He is

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experimenting with cross ties to shore up the pilings and sheets of construction plastic to enclose the exposed pipes. Since he’s rarely there, he doesn’t pay for trash removal. So everyday I find a place to dump a bag of trash: at the beach boardwalk, at the supermarket, at a rest area, a restaurant. Everyday it’s a preoccupation, a risk, a casing-out of places of possibility, a rush in and out, a victory, a guilty fear flying in the face of the signs on every trash can and dumpster announcing that violators will be prosecuted, a dread of getting caught. Taking on the agency of being a local is a belonging and responsibility to act but it is also a risk and a displacement. You don’t want the spotlight turned on you, to be singled out by a mean, punishing world that could show up with a vengeance. The exercise of venturing out with a bag of illegitimate trash is not just a habit of thumbing one’s nose at an order of rules but a way of following an interpersonal rule of bodies that bodies forth the sensation that to pay for trash removal would be absurd, excessive, beyond the pale, and not for people who are from around here. I am bossier in my New England – louder in public, in the groove of an entitled expressivity ‘Hey! Where’s the exit? . . . What is going on with the restrooms? . . . Excuse me, do you know where’s there’s a good sub shop around here?’ I am up for a lark, flying in the face of something, but this propulsion into expressivity is an energetic channel narrowed, and therefore intensified, by social and affective ruts and roadblocks. Suddenly, and without warning, I am talking again about bed bugs and cockroaches and the horror of a heat wave. I feel my sister Peg’s visceral objection to leaving the air conditioner on while there’s a window open. I remember that toasters have to be unplugged when you leave the house. Regional character quirks fill in the breathable air, shore up the outline of laughable topics, and hold off extreme trajectories as if they were sand bags holding off rising waters. But they are themselves excesses of expressivity tamped down to a strange little practice or conviction that has come to be shared and taken up in a central sensory circuit of some sort. We visit Peg on the island. She has gravity, eye contact, playfulness, angst; she’s salt of the earth. She and George have dogs the size of horses. They walk them on the beach in the morning, cutting through the marsh behind a house, waving ‘how ya doin’ to the one who watches for trespassers and would yell at them if they were unknown – ‘get off my property’. Peg and George shove grocery bags into the back pocket of their jeans. Evening walks are adventures. We’re tromping through the marsh to a field where Ashy likes to poop and where there is an expansive view of the inlet. Technically we’re not supposed to be there. We have eyes on the boats out there, on the birds – egrets, osprey,

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great blue herons. Tall marsh grasses turn vermillion in the sun. George perks up when I tell him that Ronn buys doggie bags for dog poop. What? Why? George gets them to double bag his groceries so he’ll have the bags. I agree it’s very strange to buy doggie bags and they’re stupidly expensive too, so froo-froo. But, I say, we have a law in Austin against plastic supermarket bags. Well, ya, George says, duh, that’s happening here too, it’s only a matter of time, that’s why I get them to double bag my stuff. Jesus. I’d never buy them. How much does he pay for them? George is dead serious but I find this funny and I also wonder how long I can go on like this. It’s fun to tweak a regional nerve but I’m starting to want to branch out on my own. We are staying in a hotel where they have an egg-cooking machine you have to figure out. I can barely contain my impatience with this. There’s one dial for temperature and another for time. You lower your eggs into one of two baskets of steaming water. It seems to take forever. I keep opening stillraw eggs and throwing them away with loud sound effects. Others are getting upset that their eggs are getting mixed up with other people’s eggs so they don’t know which is which. Finally I notice that there’s a big sign with operating instructions but it’s not thorough enough to answer all the questions and we’ve all had enough already anyway. It’s as if the rules were never meant to be helpful in the first place, as if someone put this machine here to inflame our desire for our soft-boiled eggs and then frustrate it and blame it all on us. Insult added to injury. What is their (fucking) problem? We’re looking around for them. It’s personal now. It hits the senses and then sparks off in a little rage, a fuck-you shrug, or a redemptive surge to laugh at the arcane lunacy of the human condition. The circuit of reaction that sparks between some dream of an order and the people who come into contact with it as they’re trying to get something done generates heat and spins off in energetic tracks of practicality, resistance, irritation, and humour. The next day we’re staying in a fancy hotel with a chef that cooks breakfast to order from an ornate corner of the dining room that looks like it must have been the coat check station. It has order windows on its two open sides. Tea and coffee are self-served from silver pots and porcelain cups in the hallway. I call out that the tea water isn’t hot. The chef calls back to the guy at the front desk, ‘She unplugged it’. I say ‘I did NOT unplug it’. They ignore me. Ronn says they’re not talking about you. Some other ‘she’. The next morning the pot is gone. I tell the chef. He says now he has the pot in his station. I see it’s a different and very large modern pot. He says it’s hot but just give me a minute to get it to a boil. I see he has only small delicate tea cups back there and I don’t want to go through

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all of this again in five minutes when I need another cup so I hand him a paper cup from the take-out stand still set up in the hall and ask him if he will just fill both the tea cup and the paper cup with water. One bag is enough. So he says would you like a pot. Sure. He brings it to our table. I thank him profusely. But then he doesn’t bring the breakfasts. Other people come in and are served. Finally I go up to him. I scheme what to say. I say, I’m sorry, I might have told you the wrong thing for our order, I just want to make sure I told you over-easy. Could you check the order? He asks my name, he reads his list, I see my name has been crossed off. We mumble back and forth, rearranging ourselves in the light of the crossed-out name. Later, when he brings our breakfast, he’s talking to the guy at the table next to us about a story in the town paper that says there are heroine addicts shooting up in the library. They’re shaking their heads; they can’t understand it. There’s been a brawl on George’s Plum Island. Some young Asian Americans had a house party. Three of them were walking back from the beach. Two white women were in the street crying (and drunk) because their dogs were missing. The Asian-Americans asked if they could they help. The white women accused them of eating their dogs (and later claimed in print that they had said ‘beating’ their dogs). There was a fight. At least one broken leg, some ribs, a reaction from some citizens who thought at first that the white people were the victims. Money was raised for their medical bills. Then it turned out that everyone was charged with assault and battery. Peg and George’s take is that there’s only one cop and he probably had no idea how to untangle the story when he arrived on the scene. We visit one of my aunts. We’re talking about people. Someone who knew my long-dead grandfather thought the world of him (this is a surprise to us since we know him as a mean drunk but no one says anything). There’s news of what happened to that one, how that one looks now. I have no idea who they’re talking about. My cousins know everyone. BJ’s moving back home from two towns over. Maureen cried when they sold their house. It was on Back River Road. Tisha asked her what river that was they were on. The Back. This is funny. It wasn’t that they lived on the back part of the river but that they lived on Back River. No one ever heard of that river. I say we might be looking for a summer place. BJ says he knows a lot of people; he could save us a few bucks instead of going on the open market. Everything requires a loop into circuits of people you know. There is a reckoning of territories known and unknown. Then you shoot at a tendril, a fishing line. Agency in the face of the world is all about knowing people. But the knowing people is as gestural as anything else; you should only go so far. It’s a place to start

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that is also always an effort to get it over with. Get in and get out fast. My cousin Jamie says he made a phone call to get his daughter a summer job waitressing. He told her she wouldn’t like it. She’d be working with 30-year-old bartenders who do this for a living. They would short a little college kid girl on tips. And they did. So she wanted him to get her moved to another place but he said no, he’d made his phone call and that was enough of that. The hours were perfect – twelve to eight. End of story. Back at the lake, we go to check out a place in Alton bay. Big black storm clouds roll in, bringing a sudden night and a strong wind, white caps on the lake. We stand out in it, breathing in the excitement. A group of teenage girls standing on the porch of the ice cream stand yell back and forth to us. We ask a guy standing on the porch of the general store, ‘What’s gonna happen?’ ‘Well, in 10 minutes we’re gonna have a big storm.’ ‘Oh really (ha ha). OK then. So where’s Depot Street? We’re going over there.’ We drive over slowly, spotting the landmarks of the library and the gothic town hall. There’s a guy in a beat-up car with New York plates on our tail; he’s sitting way back from the steering wheel with one arm draped loosely over it, no seat belt, windows open. When we suddenly stop to veer left onto Depot St., he honks loudly for a full five seconds and then speeds by, still leaning way back in his seat. The house is down a long driveway in the woods. It’s a beautiful place by the photographs of it online but I won’t even go down the driveway because it feels dark. The next day we take the old wooden mail boat on its run to deliver mail to the islands. You can mail yourself a postcard from the boat just to get the post stamp. At every stop there are women and children waiting at the dock to meet the boat. The kids have money in sandwich bags to buy the ice cream treats they sell on board. At every stop a group of teenagers gathers and as the boat is pulling away, they climb to the top of high poles and dive into the lake to see it off. One of the islands still has a church. Two have tiny post offices serviced only by the mail boat. Two are YMCA camps with brown cottages from the 1930s. A dozen boys climb onto a docked wooden boat to fish. One has a hand-made pole whittled from a stick. One is wearing big fuzzy slippers. There are stories about the waters and the islands. Fourteen-foot waves have been spotted. Only eight people now winter on the two hundred bridgeless islands. The lake freezes solid by Christmas and breaks up some time in April. A tiny island owned by a well-known Boston lawyer is now lush with plants and trees after his wife planted forty-four species on the then barren land. Shipwreck Island is named after a riverboat that went down there and still sits in 10–15 feet of water; it’s a popular scuba diving spot. A place called ‘the witches’ is a treacherous channel, where dozens of peaked rocks

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rising out of the water are all that remain of a sunken island and where boaters regularly try to run the gauntlet and have to be rescued off the rocks. Story has it that it gets its name from puritan times when a father left his troublesome son on the rocks to teach him a lesson. Governor’s Island, a prerevolutionary land grant for the governor, now has the highest concentration of millionaires in the country and also a very large number of German officers who had once been stationed on a ship in the lake. Another large island has been designated a wilderness area but it hasn’t always been so. The previous owner built an airstrip down the middle. The woman sitting in front of me turns around to speculate that it must have been owned by a movie star wanting privacy. To the husband sitting next to her she throws out gestures of care that only go so far: he could move up a seat to get a better breeze from the window, she grabs the plastic bag he drops so it doesn’t fall into the lake. A world is composed from disjointed pieces. But actively composed.10 Bits of social or historical debris can get something started. A joke or a mystery gets people thinking. A picturesque scene materializes residue as a resonance or a desire. A matter at hand or a relationship requires some care that can become a pact, an economy of living flush with attitude. People might be inspired to venture out by a story line thrown into vague circulation. Or they learn to temper a trajectory they’re already on, tamping it down to a gesture of participation. Place depends on a strangely overfilled and tamped down agency of being-ina-world. A tunnelling, an unsettling, that has become a primary and generative process.11 Strangeness and familiarity crowd in, filling up a cartographic scene of living with odd bits of thisness and turning people into characters at once ornery and vulnerable, hardy and punctured. Place carries, along with the weight of some world, a certain experience of the sublime as both a dissolution and a multiplication.12 It is what Guattari13 would call an existential territory composed of multiple refrains: kinaesthetic, conceptual, material and gestural. It gathers affects, percepts and concepts into rhythms, atmospheres, and refrains.14 All summer there were wedding parties on display. At the hotel in Newburyport, each morning a wedding party would float down to take pictures in the park out front and then walk the three blocks down to the harbour along the brick sidewalk. They were striking, almost shocking, to see in all their colour, flounce, and sparkle. There was also a wedding party at the weirs as we were boarding the mail boat. A bride standing in her dress. Groomsmen clumped in black formality with an air of waiting. Bridesmaids in yellow and lavender

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making their way along the boardwalk. They were surreal, these New England wedding scenes. Place takes place on the edge of the actual and the potential. It’s composition is enacted by and through bodies steeped in an energetic field. The compositional assemblage of bits and pieces, the throwing of things into scenes, generates an expressive consistency. Place is an experiment to make some things in the world more tangible and palpable.15 And in so doing it creates lines of potential, excess, failure, wandering and display.

Notes 1 See Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison, ‘The Promise of Non-Representational Theories’, in Taking Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, ed. Anderson and Harrison (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010). 2 See Joseph Conforti, Imagining New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 3 See Peter Bishop, ‘Residence on Earth: Anima Mundi and a Sense of Geographical “Belonging”’, Cultural Geographies 1 (1994): 59. 4 Anderson and Harrison, ‘The Promise of Non-Representational Theories’. 5 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 142. 6 See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 30. 7 Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteredge (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 3 and 4. 8 Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), p. 3. 9 See Derek McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 10 See Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto’, New Literary History, 14 (2010): pp. 471–490. 11 See John Wylie, ‘The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald’, Cultural Geographies 14 (2007): pp. 171–188. 12 Wylie, ‘Spectral Geographies’, pp. 171–188. 13 See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. 14 See McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies. 15 McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies.

12

Place and Formulation Kenneth White

The place and the formula. Rimbaud 1

Liminary The ultimate relationship of the human being to place has been formulated up to now in terms of myth, religion, or metaphysics, with all kinds of variation turning up within those broad categories. As I see things, something entirely different attempted to find formulation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it began, as so often with the finest conceptions, ‘on dove’s feet’,2 completely outside contemporary cultural, literary and intellectual debates. The figure in question is that of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Something was trying to take place in his mind that went on in a radically different way from the principles that had constituted the foundation of classical Greek thought, principles for which most of what we call philosophy has maintained a nostalgia and of which it has preserved the formulae. Hölderlin lived a tremendous tension between the Greece on which he had been raised and the Hesperica (the West) he saw emerging on the horizon.3 The tension broke him as a human being. But in his work we can see the ongoing displacement. If, in his distress and dilemma, he was tempted himself to have backward recourse to myth and religion, what is interesting, extremely so, is his approach to a new space, the contouring of a new place, which he expressed at the start as an unusual ‘philosophical light’ at his window, and, ultimately, as the possibility of a ‘poetic habitation of the earth’.4

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What was trying to come across, cogitatively, meditatively, in Hölderlin, came across later, explosively, in Nietzsche and Rimbaud. These three, with Whitman and Thoreau in the background, constituted my own starting point. Back of it all, the question: are we able to live at the furthest point of thought, in the radically new emplacement that extreme thought can open? What I intend to do in this essay is run through the accepted, established formulations before extending the itineraries, expanding the view, adding a few more lines to the map.5 The method, erosive, tectonic, rather than simply expository or critical, I’ve employed for this kind of exploration involves information, enformation and exformation. ‘Information’, objective collection, is maybe clear enough: elements of geophysics, geology, geography . . . As to enformation (transference to the ‘inside’), it most emphatically does not mean a subjectivization (an intermingling with emotion, soul-states, moralism, etc.), but, certainly, a disposition, an intellectual ordering (the mathematical connotation of ‘formula’ is not entirely to be neglected). What the third part of the process, exformation, implies is the need, since all information, even enformed, is necessarily partial, to leave the formation open – to, shall we say, chaos and void, the ultimate limit to everything. All of this constitutes what I’ve called edge-knowledge.6 With this general cartography in mind, we can make an initial approach to the new space via that historical-cultural trilogy of myth, religion, and metaphysics.

1. On mythological ground The little town of Hasparren is situated in the Basque country of France, 25 kilometres from Bayonne, on the old Roman crest road that ran from Bayonne to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. In 1704, from under the foundations of its church, was unearthed a stone stela dedicated to ‘the genius of the place’ (genius loci), and bearing an inscription according to which one Verus, a district administrator (flamen, duumvir et quaestor – an accumulation of prestigious civil and religious offices), had obtained from the emperor the formation of a new province, to be called Novempopulania. The nine peoples in question: Acquenses, Boii, Ausci, Vasates, Venarni, Bigerri and so on (we can recognize there modern place names such as Auch, Bigorre . . .), all grouped inside the voluptuous loop of the Garonne river, had apparently protested (not only for reasons of tribal identity but because of a deep

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attachment to the terrestrial powers of their riverine encompassment) at being joined wholesale by Augustus with the Gauls living between the Garonne and the Loire in the newly formed holdall province of Aquitania, one of the three big Roman divisions of Gaul, the other two being, as readers of Julius Caesar will recall, Belgica and Celtica. We’re implicated here in a context combining geographical situation, political administration and local ‘geniality’, a paradigm of which versions will follow relentlessly one on the other throughout the space–time of history, a complex civilizational and cultural equation (confederation policy vs local identity ideology) to which no really satisfying solution has yet been found.7 In this particular instance, the context arose when Augustus, out to found the Roman Empire, divided Italy, first conceptually via a Breviarium, then violently, manu militari, into eleven regions. By so doing, he changed the status of the individual, who, from ‘native’, the inhabitant of a territory, became a ‘citizen’, that is subjected to regular military service, taxation payable to a central, ‘civilized’ focus of power, and various code systems. The result was a peripherization-provincialization of eccentric (ex-centric) regions, a progressive political concentration on the urban mass, democratic on principle, demagogic in practice. More fundamentally, it changed the whole perception of space by obliterating that notion of genius loci. Originally, this was based on a sensation of the forces of nature, more or less anthropomorphized (more and more so as time went on). One need only visualize those altars raised in Southern France to the influence of the Mistral wind, a meteorological force magnified, mythified. The genius loci provided a relationship to the universe, the cosmos. It would not die out entirely. Where it did not totally subside into phantasmal folklore, it would be maintained as a vague ‘spirit of place’, perceived by sensitive travellers (actually more than by inmates) and formulated in various ways. Here’s a thirteenth-century Latin poem of France, evoking the lovely valley of the Loire: ‘From haunted spring, from dales edged with white poplars, the Genius is seen leaving, accompanied by sighs.’8 Here’s Henry James talking about Holland: ‘All these elements of the general spectacle in this entertaining country [ . . . ] make one feel that one is dealing with an original genius.’9 Here’s Wallace Stevens, recognizing that the original mythological formula was no longer applicable, and groping tentatively for a substitute: ‘Here in Connecticut, we never lived in a time when mythology was possible. But if we had, that raises the question of the image’s truth. The image must be of the nature

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of its creator [ . . . ] increased, heightened [ . . . ]. It is he in the substance of his region, wood of his forests and stone out of his fields, or from under his mountains.’10 We have there three stages in the destiny of the ‘genius of place’: its disappearance, its merely literary usage, and the tentative movement towards a prolongation, in different terms.

2. The sacralization of place What took over from the mythological was the religious, the sacral. The distinction may seem tenuous, and there were of course intermediary transitions – in fact, as is well-enough known, the sacral would often implant itself on mythological locations in order to benefit from their power and influence (crosses cut at the top of standing stones, etc.). But the radical difference lies in the reference: the pagan-mythological had its basis in nature, the sacral-religious in an otherworldly transcendentalism, whether this be represented by a heavenly or a saintly figure. Here’s the break occurring down there in Aquitania. Paulinus of Nola, a recent convert, writes to his old friend Ausonius at Bordeaux, still close to the genius loci: ‘Cry not to the muses to bring me back. You call to deaf things and vain, mere names without numen. I no longer seek the word from woods and hills, but from the Word.’11 In the context of public culture, one need only think here of those pilgrimages to sacred sites: Jerusalem, Rome, Chartres, Canterbury, to name only a few, but whose equivalents, in various cultural contexts, can be found all over the world. Those massive pilgrimages have been amply documented and illustrated, and will no doubt continue to be so, until the apocalyptic end of the world, which is the final horizon of this mentality. I want to draw attention here to a more peripheral and discreet phenomenon, a focus and locus characterized by a fine combination of natural and transcendental perceptions and conceptions. I’m referring to those loc (also lok and log) that are to be found scattered all over the landscape of Brittany: Locronan, Lokmikael, Locmaria, Loctudy, Locquirec . . . These loc were originally isolated places, hermitages (a cave, a hut) inhabited by some individual considered as a carrier of the Christian message and the christic word, or as one absorbed in a mystic silence. The first thing to insist on is that, at the beginning, on the organizational plane, the Celto-Christian church was conceived in an archipelagical rather than

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a centralized, concentrational way. The loc antedated the tré and plou of later ecclesiastic parishes. And the accent was on isolation, on ‘deserts’, especially seadeserts (promontories, islands, islets). So much for the constitutional and topographical context. But more interesting still was the thought that, in the best instances, was located there. To qualify it, I use the formula ‘pelagian space’, conveying thereby both an open sea connotation, and a reference to the monk Pelagius (fourth century). What distinguished Pelagius from those pillars of the church, St Paul and St Augustine, was that he had no time in his mindscape for the notion of Original Sin. Not only to his mind was nature, including human nature, not contaminated or devil ridden, it was a necessary basis to be worked at (which is surely the fundamental formula for a living culture). For the Celtic monk (anchorita), who was out also to be a philosopher (philosophus) and who for that had to be learned (instructus), essential living consisted basically on a subtle relationship between the mind and the phenomena of the place, almost an osmosis: that blackbird in the bush is ‘a hermit without a bell’, absolutely there in its thisness, to use a formula (haecceitas) of Duns Scot (thirteenth century) who continued this tradition. The pardons that are made today to such places have lost all memory of this reality and occur simply out of pious habit. Maybe something of the strong pilgrimage sense, desacralized, but no less powerful, subsides still in the mind of those who, ready to trudge through conglomerations of touristic tawdry, make what we might call lay pilgrimages to places in which writer-thinkers have lived particularly intense moments of their existence, finding there poetic-intellectual formulations. I’m thinking of Victor Hugo’s place of exile, the island of Guernsey (one of my own first ‘pilgrimages’), Thoreau’s Walden, Nietzsche’s Engadine, Heidegger’s Black Forest, and so on. But to evoke these figures and places is to indicate an area, a mindscape, beyond mythology and sacrality, that was adumbrated in the preamble of this essay and into which we’ll go, with more depth and detail, via other intermediary stages, in later sections.

3. Hidden locations in the empire of metaphysics Metaphysics, considered since Plato as the purest and most powerful production of thought, is concerned with principles, and the principle of principles is Being. The quest and question of metaphysics is, then, Being, with, as ancillary question, the relationship between Being and beings, or, to put it in another way,

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between the essential and the existant – the relationship of the one to the other, the participation of the one in the other. The formulations of the essence of Being, from Plato to, say, Nietzsche, where the metaphysical sphere begins to break up, have been many, and to list them would be to lay out the table of contents for a history of philosophy: for Plato, it’s Idea; for Aristotle, it’s Energy; for Descartes, it’s Cogitation; for Kant, it’s Enlightened Reason; for Hegel, it’s Synthesis . . . All of these have lead to interesting fields of thought, which are a delight for the curious and agile mind. It’s when we come to Heidegger, however, who starts from the ontological break-up and fragmentary fulminations of Nietzsche, and from the moving meditations of Hölderlin, that something else, something that doesn’t fall into the subsidiary contexts of existentialism or scientistic positivism, tries to take place. Heidegger is less concerned with the ‘essence’ of Being than with the sense of that formula: what it contains, what it conceals, what lies back of it. He’s not asking metaphysical questions, he’s not involved in metaphysical questioning, he’s putting metaphysics itself in question. He’s talking, or trying to talk, from another ground, trying to find a formulation originating in another field of force. In his lectures on Nietzsche,12 he speaks of an Erinnerung. This is more than an aggregative remembering of the history of persons or the history of philosophy, it is an ‘inner-ing’, a going back in with the intention of getting, radically, out. In his search for a ‘topology of being’, which he sees as ‘the task of thought’ at the end of metaphysics,13 Heidegger looks principally to poets. Why? In general terms, because, as he says already in his Introduction to Metaphysics:14 ‘Of the same order as philosophy, there is only poetry.’ Also, because, in addition to exercising a high order of thought, poets manifest an unwonted power of formulation, using at times idiosyncratic language. And, lastly, because in the examples that interest him, their existences, including their mental make-up, were catastrophied long before a similar catastrophe, a similar crisis, was to occur in philosophy. The catastrophe I’m referring to, and the question of topology arising from it, is perhaps most explicitly, propaedeutically, expressed by the French poet and explorer Victor Segalen. On the frontiers of Tibet, after long travelling in the loess country of China, he has this: ‘Where is the ground, where is the site, where is the place – where is the country promised to man? [ . . . ] Where is the unnamed? Where is the foundation? [ . . . ] the place of glory and power, the place of love and knowledge?’15 There are echoes there of the Bible, of Nietzsche,

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a whole congeries of metaphysical preoccupations piled up in panic that reach this conclusion: ‘being confronts a horizon of shipwreck’. This could almost have been an epigraph to Heidegger’s search for a ‘topology of being’. The poets Heidegger principally frequented were Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Marie Rilke and Georg Trakl. The catastrophic break in Hölderlin’s existence and mental world occurred in Bordeaux, where he arrived, in 1802, after a walk in winter through the mountain region of Auvergne: ‘fearsome country, all wilderness and storm’.16 It was already a premonition, a pre-figuration of the landscape–mindscape that would be his after the shattering of his early hellenistic idealism. Back in Germany, ‘after much emotion and commotion of the soul’, he wrote that key-letter to his friend Böhlendorff: The more I study nature’s manifestations here [ . . . ] the more deeply I am moved by them [ . . . ]. Storm [ . . . ] as power and figure among the other forms of the sky; light as a principle, almost a destiny [ . . . ], the coming together in this region of different aspects of nature, so that all the sacred places of the earth can foregather at one place; and the philosophical light at my window [ . . . ]. I think we shall spend no more time commenting on the poetry of the past. The art of poetry is about to change radically. And if we are not quite up to it yet, it’s because, since the Greeks, we’re the first to make a new beginning: trying to speak, originally, out of nature, from the ground we stand on.17

Rilke for his part, in the Duino Elegies,18 describes himself as ‘exposed on the mountains of the heart, under one’s hands stony ground’, saying of humanity in general: ‘We are none too well at home in the interpreted world’, be the interpretations philosophical or scientific. Both Hölderlin and Rilke manage to maintain, with breaks and syncopations, a coherent discourse. By the time we come to Trakl, the context is starker. Wandering in ‘the twilight of humanity’, lost in ‘the madness of the city’, he notes one bleak phenomenon after another: an empty pavement, black rain, a pale sun, ‘twisted birch trees sighing in the wind’, with always, in the background, ‘halfformulated answers to half-clear questions’.19 Heidegger’s approach to the work of these poets is not one of literary criticism, it is hermeneutic. With regard to der ganze Bezug, literally ‘the great relationship’, the largest circle of Rilke’s thinking, he is at pains to point out that this has nothing to do with the ontological sphere of Parmenides, but means ‘being situated in the totality of the Open’.20 Concerning Trakl’s ‘the soul in truth is a strange thing on earth’ (es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden), he rejects the obvious Christian

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interpretation (the spiritual realm separated from the materialism of the world) and the equally obvious platonist interpretation (the separation of the intellect from the senses). In order to get at his own interpretation, he goes back to the Old German sense of fremd, ‘a road leading to’ and arrives at the notion, not of an exile on earth, with nostalgia for some half-forgotten fore-world, or aspirations to some ‘other world’, but of a search for an as-yet unformulated earth-site.21 It’s easy to claim and demonstrate that Heidegger is often over-reading, overinterpreting. It’s much more interesting to see that he’s moving through the work of those poets on the way to a potential development of his own thought. It’s always that formula ‘topology of being’ he has in mind, and he needs substance (a sub-stance) for it. There’s a word in German, Erörterung, that in normal usage means no more than ‘the bringing into discussion’. Etymologizing it, Heidegger reveals in it the word Ort, place. His Erörterung with poets takes over from his Erinnerung in philosophy. And he pushes it as far as he can. ‘The dialogue of philosophy and poetry is long’, he says in his essay on Trakl, ‘and it has hardly begun. We haven’t yet reached the region that needs to be taken into consideration.’ Or again, in his essay on The Experience of Thought: ‘The deeply poetic character of thought is still obscure to us.’22 I said that what Heidegger saw in poetry was a ground, a substance, that made for the fullest habitation of the earth. We can see him here and there trying to get at that ground, that substance, himself, as in those notes on the experience of thought jotted down in and around his house in the Black Forest: ‘When in the depths of the winter night, a strong snowstorm starts blowing round the chalet, covering everything, that is the time for philosophy. That’s when its questioning can become simple and essential.’ It’s possible to say that Heidegger never got through to that essential ‘simplicity’. It’s possible even to say that he never got out of metaphysics, of what he called also onto-theology, at all. His first book, Being and Time,23 had for its main theme a ‘historial experience’, a ‘night of the world’, due to ‘the retiral of the divine’. And traces of onto-theology can be seen throughout his writings and talkings, right up, via the Quadriparti nostalgia and that conception of language as ‘the house of Being’, to the Spiegel interview24 with its ‘only a God can save us’ (which, even taken metaphorically, is, I submit, no useful formulation). Seen later, less as the loss of the sacred, more as the installation and crazy acceleration of the mathematical, then techno-industrial ‘mastery and possession of the earth’ project (Galileo and Descartes), that historial situation was going to get progressively worse, with secondary discourse – psychological, sociological, scientistic – piling up on all sides. If Heidegger stuck to his fundamental tenets

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that a decline can be the occasion of a transition, that his task was to ‘awaken humanity to a possibility the contours of which are obscure and the advent uncertain’,25 if he continued to philosophize in an attempt to get at something more radical, more fundamental, than philosophy itself, the possibility was bound to seem more and more remote, any gesture in that direction being not only ill-understood, but even totally unseen. This perspective is echoed by the post-Heideggerian post-metaphysical Jacques Derrida: ‘Such a gesture is no doubt impossible today, but it should be possible to show the way to it.’ The way, however, was less and less evident. What took its place was a certain ‘heideggerian’ philosophizing (and poeticizing). As the Derrida of deconstruction and differance (that neologism he used for a perpetual delaying) put it: an ‘unceasing reorganization of the forms and the places of our questioning’. 26 When I read Heidegger in the late fifties of the twentieth century, living in a hut on the banks of the Isar, at the extreme edge of the Englischer Garten in Munich (symbolical situation!), it was that notion of ‘a way’ and of wayfaring that I retained. Hölderlin had presented in a poem the priests of Dionysus ‘wandering from land to land in the night’. Rilke in the poem Lebenslang (Itinerary) evokes a series of roads and changes: ‘Towards what climates are we moving in our travels?’ And Trakl speaks of an Auswanderung (an exodus). They are all representatives of what I call intellectual nomadism. Heidegger continues this line: ‘He who wants to really think must spend a long time in errancy’;27 ‘The Stranger in his peregrinations is out ahead, he’s not just wandering about half-lost and resourceless, he’s moving towards a place where he can stay.’28 Before setting out on those obscure paths, before beginning to open up another space, I find it not only useful, but necessary, to analyze what we might call the half-way houses of a certain intelligentsia.

4. The half-way houses Foucault asks29 why it took so long for the question of space and spatialization, place and topology, to be raised and worked at. For the delay, it’s possible, I suggest, to adduce several reasons. First, a longembedded conviction in Western culture (from the installation of Christianity on) that what is significant and important is historical time: time is conceived as a rich and fertile field full of life, whereas space is considered as no more

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than neutral environment, attitudes to it moving from the indifferent to the terrified via the exploitative. Allied to this, a heavy humanism, massively present since the Renaissance, followed by an excessive increase in totally urban living. And finally, the mind can be so wrapped up in itself, involved in discourse either purely philosophical or psycho-sociopolitical, that it doesn’t see30 any more. So much for the delay. As for the work-field, or rather, in the absence of a real work-field, the intellectualist arena that belatedly took shape, and status, there are, I would submit, several blind patches in it. One blind patch is caused by hyperactive critical activity within a restricted space, and a raising of the dust. Congested social space provides an unending series of milieux for commentary and analysis: race, gender, generation, institution . . . Result, a mass of secondary studies, more or less theoretical, more or less statistical,31 applying theory to commonplace and never getting out of the commonplace, just as perpetual critical analysis of power never gets out of the language of empowerment, just as so much psychoanalysis goes on indefinitely. The context is reduced to a rummaging about in holes-in-the-wall and cubby-holes, with no real perspectives or openings at all: a perpetually revolving door. Add to that the fact that if, as aforesaid, the milieux are rife with cobwebbed vocabulary, the critical analysts wind up using it themselves. Talking about ‘the imaginary’, Henri Lefebvre has this:32 ‘This word becomes, becomes again, magical. It fills the empty space of thought, much like “the unconscious” and “culture.”’ The attitude is critical, of course, but the action is still secondary. On a higher plane, just as metaphor can lead to a mass of metaphorization posing as and passing for poetry, so metaphilosophizing can lead to a mass of discourse posing as and passing for thought. Another blind patch, more fundamental, lies in the total ignorance of FarEastern thought. ‘What do we know about Asian spatiality and ideograms?’ asks Lefebvre,33 but never goes to the trouble to find out. Foucault34 felt totally incompetent and left the field alone. In his essay on him,35 Deleuze puts some questions and makes some conjectures for him: ‘If we’re to attain to a life with an “outside force”, how do we know it won’t be a terrifying, unbreathable void’ – which could have been an entry to the radical field of sunyata studies, but wasn’t.36 Without going here into all the aspects of the question (I’ve done that elsewhere, in essays, waybooks and poems), it could be said, in general terms, that a great deal of contemporary thought is concerned with the human condition and various sociohistorical conditionings, but never gets to the notion

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of de-conditioning, which I take to be the ultimate area of the most extreme and interesting Far-Eastern thought.37 To come back a little on Lefebvre, in his book Au-delà du structuralisme, he has this: ‘How to fill in the ethical, aesthetic, cultural void that is so deeply and cruelly present?’38 Not, I’ll say right away, via what we are mostly witness to: a merely sociological conception of ‘culture’, nor by the proliferation of trivialities, nor by vociferous counter-culturing or furtive undergrounding, nor by various self-styled postmodernisms that are nowhere near the questions raised at the end of Toynbee’s A Study of History,39 who there first used the term, and asks himself whether anything like a real culture is at all possible today. He himself has no answer, no proposition other than a vague sanfranciscan religiosity.

5. Tentative outgoings via a radical aesthetics For there to be culture in any real and lasting sense of the word, whether located, as we’ve seen, in myth, religion, or metaphysics, there has to be a focal point of general interest, and from there a common basis. Examples: animals, in paleolithic culture; the image of Virgin and Child in Christianity; the agora in Greek culture; the notion of Centre in Chinese culture. As for poetics, no real or lasting culture can do without it. Again, examples: in first cultures, the songs of the shaman; in Christian culture, psalms and hymns; in Greek culture, the oceanic Homeric epic; in Chinese culture, the Book of Odes, that, in contrast to bureaucratic centrality, carries ‘the wind of the territories’. Before entering specifically the field of poetics, in particular geopoetics, I propose some deambulation and investigation in the more general field of aesthetics. Aesthetics is a difficult word to handle because if the space, the field of investigation, it indicates, is primordial and paramount, the whole sense of the term has been drastically reduced. To some minds it will evoke little more than effete fin-de-siècle artists languishing in velvet-draped divans. That is why before proceeding I want to renew its credentials. My main general references in this field are Schiller’s letters on ‘The Aesthetic Education of Humanity’40 and Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics at Berlin around 1830.41 To which I’ll add Alfred North Whitehead’s remark in his Adventures of Ideas,42 according to which aesthetics is the most propitious

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point of departure for philosophical thought, and this from Wallace Stevens:43 ‘The aesthetic order includes all other orders but is not limited to them.’ My own order of aesthetics is expressed in writing. But since writing, if it’s going to get anywhere by opening up space and indicating place, is a complex process, I prefer not to plunge immediately into its deep end, but to approach it laterally. Since, along with other elements, writing contains both music and image, it’s with recent developments in the aesthetics of music and the visual arts, the one purer, the other more immediate, than writing, that I’ll begin to open the space, both sensorially and intellectually. In his Treatise on Universal harmony,44 Mersenne distinguishes four categories of music: Divine Music (archetypal, transcendental); Created Music (based on the harmonic order that can be found in the various parts of the Earth); World Music (based on place and elements); Human Music (based on the relationship between human beings). Picking up from there, Pierre Boulez comments: ‘To begin with, music was the reflection of a certain divine or natural order, then it tended towards an oscillogram of the individual’s inner world, that is an unstable order.’45 A good deal of the history of music can be accounted for by these broad categories, and it would be a simple matter to list titles. But what interests me are attempts to start again from zero. What takes the place of the archetypal-transcendental is, not a blank, but a whiteness. I’m thinking of John Cage’s 4’33’’, a sound image without notes, a space not of ‘creativeness’ but of fundamental potentiality. And of White/Whiteley by Peter Ablinger, for whom the word ‘white’ is the most captivating of all, white noise containing all frequencies, just as white light contains all colours. What has gone on in music has also gone on in painting. The transition is immediate: Boulez takes the title of a Paul Klee painting as title for the first of his ‘structures for two pianos’: A la limite du pays fertile. At the limits of the ‘fertile’, there is, again, that whiteness, as in Malevitch’s White on White, Robert Rauschenberg’s Six White Paintings, Jackson Pollok’s N° 26A (black and white) and Ad Reinhardt’s Ultimate Paintings. What we have there are attempts to get at the Ultima Thule of art, a primordiality, outside the theatre of representation: ‘the sensation of a world without objects’ (Malevitch), ‘sensorial open fields, ready for new integration’ (Rauschenberg). To get into the deepest aesthetics means to penetrate, beyond image (and imagination), into structure, into a movement beyond emotion, into a live form. This aesthetics has its origin in a profound and acute intelligence of the universemultiverse. And here we’re getting on to the basic ground and into the ground-tone of geopoetics.

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6. The poetics of openworlding After plowing through a mass of psycho-sociology, after moving across dialectics, trialectics and quadrilectics, one is desperate to get out into a larger less congested space. The philosophers whose work I’ve been passing in review are not ignorant of poetics. In his essay on Foucault,46 Deleuze evokes ‘the point where philosophy is of necessity poetry, and strong poetry’, a point never reached by logicians, formalists or interpreters, and after presenting Foucault as ‘discovering and striding over new found land’, he attributes to him at least the prefiguration of an ‘archeological poem’ that might have contained ‘a literary form, a scientific proposition, a common phrase, a piece of schizophrenic unmeaning’. But in fact we see little sign of the ‘point’, and no sign of the poem. What we do find are signs of a more restricted conception. Foucault brings up Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space,47 but that book (Bachelard is sharper elsewhere48) is little more than an anthology of images, domestic at that, with no idea of composite movement. The same Foucault writes a whole book on Raymond Roussel,49 but if at times the author of Locus Solus can achieve a strange aura (I’m thinking of the ‘Isle of Eismark’ in his ‘variable geography’), his art consists mainly of homonyms, paronyms, anagrams, and metagrams. It’s word play rather than world poetics.50 Whereas there were poets in the immediate vicinity of Lefebvre and Foucault speaking in larger terms, and, at times, specifically of space. I’m thinking of André Breton’s text Pont-Levis: ‘An opening on to great spaces where everyone must advance alone, and in silence’.51 And of Antonin Artaud’s lectures at the University of Mexico in 1936: ‘Real culture can only be learnt in space. Culture-in-space means the culture of a mind that never ceases to breathe, to feel alive, in space, and which calls into it all the elements of space as the very objects of its thought.’52 What goes on in the field of poets of this calibre has a higher mental density and greater striking power than what is vehicled not only by most psycho-sociological and philosophical discourse, but also by most poetry. What fundamental poetics, geopoetics, conveys is a strong sense of world: ‘world’ from wer-alt, an age of man, an epoch of culture. Defining culture in an earlier section of this essay, I said a culture needs a central focus. Here, the central focus is earth (geo), as space-place. The most sensitive approach can probably be made via biography, biocosmography. The experience I’ve just referred to began for me very early and has been gradually developed over the years. The space-place in question was 20 square miles on the west coast of Scotland, its extreme areas being a long shore, which was space and rhythm, and the

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high moor, which was space and emptiness. The one deeply bio-logical, the other archeo-logical. Both taking me outside my social identity (the village), and my personal identity (the emanation of various ideological hearths: familial, religious, etc.), into a field of energy. In both these spaces, there would be particular places: this rock, that copse of birches, a beech tree heronry, a waterfall, a high hill crest . . . In the common conception, as aforesaid, space is felt as distant, abstract, cold; place as intimate, warm, concrete, immediate. In crossing space and contacting place, I felt I was in touch with another conception, well aware that it would take me time to grasp it entirely, work it up into coherence and cogency, that is, a logic (more specifically here, a poetic topology). Along with that conception went the notion of a life-strategy. To come back a little to Foucault, in The Archeology of Knowledge,53 he speaks of the ‘great strategics of geopolitics’ and, over against them, heterologically (deeper than ‘counter-culturally’), ‘the little tactics of the habitat’. Foucault’s ‘heterotopology’ I take, again, to be at best half-way house, retiring and protective, even alcovish. The topology I was out for lay outside the dialectics of home and habitat on the one hand, and globalism on the other (a dialectical equation which is not worked at and out by the invention of dainty little vocables such as ‘glocal’). The conceptual basis in my mind was more and more the evocation of place in Aristotle’s Physics: ‘What place is raises a lot of difficulties [ . . . ]. Place is a thing, but it also has power [ . . . ]. If you can talk of place, you must also talk of “a place within the place” and so on.’54 When I started reading philosophy, that meant more to me than Plato’s Republic. Exactly what phusis meant to an ancient Greek thinker (from the verb phuein meaning to produce, to cause to emerge into existence) was vastly different from what we understand by ‘physics’ today. Without being ‘metaphysical’ (the Platonic idea is not localized), who doesn’t feel in the aristotelian formulation a ‘meta-discourse’ on place, certainly something that is not measurable and quantifiable. I saw, and still see, Aristotle as walking on the crest of a watershed with, on the one side, the purely metaphysical discourse of Plato and, on the other, the multiplication of the diverse specialized physical sciences that were to come later, after Galileo and Descartes. There is another dimension in the air, in the cognitive climate, in the meditative atmosphere. It was that dimension I was after on shore and moor. With as yet no complete conception of it. ‘Simply’ (there was a lot of complexity in that simplicity) the sensation of a field of energy (Aristotle’s energeia), a following out of lines, and a gathering of information, in the two senses of the word: acquisition of

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knowledge (both as savoir and connaissance55) and as organizational force. It was this organizational force that was for me the basis of poetics. If poïein in Greek means ‘produce’ (fabricate), in aristotelian it means to cause to upsurge and compose. Aristotle’s nous poïetikos means more than a talent for fabrication, it means world-intelligence, the ability to read reality and make connections (inter-legere). I think I’ve said enough by this time, for those who might be tempted to make a simplistic, reflex-thought interpretation of its two terms ‘geo’ and ‘poetics’, to show that geopoetics is more, and other than, some kind of lyrical geography or geographical lyricism. If geo (earth as space and place) is the central focus here, poetics is understood here as the fundamental dynamics of intelligence and comprehension. When I started looking around for expressions of the space-place thing I had in mind, I had difficulty finding them. There were plenty of references to place in English literature, a whole plethora, but when they weren’t evocations of homely comfort, they spoke of places laden with reminiscence and connotation, the traces left by cultural sedimentation. For what I wanted, I had, in the first instance, to go elsewhere – to the literature of a certain America (Melville, Whitman, Thoreau) and a certain Russia (Gorki, Lermontov, Chekhov). Here’s Charles Olson, who was a Melville scholar before he entered his own territory, in Call me Ishmael: I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here, large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning [ . . . ]. The fulcrum of America is the Plains, half sea half land, a high sun as metal and obdurate as the iron horizon, and a man’s job to square the circle. Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it, Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives.56

As for Russia, I’m thinking here mainly of Chekhov’s The Steppe.57 Other writers had written about this nomadic area of Europe before him, for example Gogol, who made it a place for Cosack adventures. But in Chekhov’s book, almost nothing happens, there are no events. What ‘takes place’ is an augmentation, an enlargement of conscience. It’s a strange work, The Steppe. Chekhov subtitles it modestly: ‘The story of a journey’. But it’s more than that, and in his notes towards its composition, he tries to define it more adequately: ‘My Steppe isn’t a short story, it’s more like an encyclopedia’, he writes in a letter. And he talks about the two dimensions he wants to present, to make present: ‘the smell of

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hay’ (immediate sensorial reality) and ‘the stars in the sky’ (an abstract horizon arising from a certain disposition of elements). In the course of the text, evoking the sheer expanse of the steppe, he uses two Russian philosophical terms, one meaning ‘constitution’, the other ‘extension’. The Steppe is in fact a poem to space, of space, where the principal protagonists (the human characters play secondary roles) are grass swaying in the wind, hovering birds, rain and thunder. The first territory I explored I called: ‘the white world’, and the first theoretical essay I wrote was titled ‘Into the White World’.58 I called this territory ‘White World’ for a whole constellation of reasons: l

l

l

l

l

l

The presence in it of many white phenomena: crashing waves, the wings of seabirds, shells and quartz, birch bark. The fact that the original name of the country I inhabited was Alba, linked to the term albus and alp, let’s say ‘the high white country’. The fact that the place of greatest concentration in traditional Celtic culture was called ‘the white land’: finn mag in Gaelic, gwenved in Brythonic. Because in one of the Far-Eastern texts I was reading I came across the fact that the farthest reach of identity is described as like ‘a white heron in the moonlight’. It was an uncoded place. Last, and least, the fact of my name was a bonus.

Without ever forgetting it, while, like other artists as listed in the previous section, maintaining ‘whiteness’ as background,59 I later put aside the term ‘white world’, when I saw it being interpreted in the terms of idealism (Shelley’s ‘white radiance of eternity’), spirituality or narcissism – so reduced and impoverished has the field of cultural, intellectual and linguistic reference become. What I finally came to speak of was ‘Open World’, and this, again, for several reasons.60 At the base of ‘world’, there is, as already stated and restated from various angles, place. And all places with at least a modicum of naturality are open. A little knowledge is enough to make this evident: hydrography, going from stream to river to ocean; geology, from local formation to similar formations across the world; climatology and meteorology, for the movement of winds across the globe; ornithology, for the migration of birds; not forgetting the spread of languages and the wanderings of populations. Then there is the notion of ‘open system’,61 that began in thermodynamics and was later transported into biology. In thermodynamics (sometimes called energetics) an open system is one that exchanges energy and matter with

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its environment, the whole process leading to an organization of space in linear, non-linear or dissipative structures. Translated into biological terms, ‘open system’ means, not only that the human being is inseparable from its environment, but that human language is not separate from the language of things, the grammar of the cosmos. A mind that grasps this can not only transform itself, by a process of auto-organization, auto-poetics, it can change, at least potentially, the conception of world. The universe we now ‘know’ of is that of the non-euclidean pangeometry of Lobachevski, a world, according to some, expressible only by mathematics. But Einstein himself said mathematics were not enough, they missed out on what he called ‘the beautiful elements of life’. So, while neglecting no knowledge and no thought, the question becomes: how to express a living world, marked by order and disorder, strophe, antistrophe and catastrophe. My way to this has been signposted by provisional formulae such as, in addition to the aforementioned ‘information, enformation, exformation’, ‘space, energy, light’, ‘eros, logos, cosmos’, ‘landscape, mindscape, wordscape’. I have found them operative. As well as a set of neologisms:62 supernihilism, chaoticism, littorality. These were, shall we say ‘keys to the field’. At this point, we touch on the actual wording, the actual writing.

7. The process of wording Koo-lee-ko koo-lee-ko . . .

I’m on an island in the Indian Ocean, starting, as always, from the beginning. Listening here, between Sanskrit and sandscript, shall we say, to the call of a Zenaïda Dove. The formation of words in imitation of natural sounds, onomatopœia, has always been part of my writing. It may seem comic, it may seem downright primitive and grotesque,63 but I think it’s a primal need. Boehme talks of humanity’s loss of ‘the bird language’. A Greek philosopher established in Athens, referring to Heraclitus and other ‘pre-socratics’, evoked ‘the screeching seabirds of Ionia’. Rabelais makes joyous use of this practice. And a modern writer, Antonin Artaud, desperately out to break staid discourse as well as excessive literary style, resorts frequently to glossolalia.64

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But let’s be more seriously semiological about it all. In my early context I experienced three semiological spaces: (1) The Village. Listening to conversations and communication in houses and streets, I had the feeling (I’d be about 10 years old) that nobody understood anybody, that talk was confused and never reached a conclusion (it’s exactly the same sensation I have today when I happen to overhear debates on radio or television, except that it’s worse because the confusion is more widely spread).65 Back then, I’d go to my room, reproduce the conversations, and try to work them out into some kind of clarity. The motivation of this was not that of ‘art’. Aware of the confusions and misunderstandings, I might, in time, have exploited them, made drama out of them. That did not interest me. What I wanted was shape and clarity. (2) The railway signal-cabin in which my father worked. A place of codes, terse messages and laid-out lines, irrespect of which meant disaster. This precision I admired. Just as, at school, I admired mathematics, mainly geometry. But this kind of formation still left me unsatisfied. I would not be, principally, though still referentially, a mathematician or a scientist. (3) The moor back of the village, on the heights. To get to it, I’d cross first the agricultural lands, necessary but still too familiar. Then it would be the forest. I’d spend more time in there, by day or by night, following the tracks of animals, imitating the cries of owls and herons, as I did also on the shore with gulls. Then, it would be the moor. Up there, there was ‘nothing’ – nothing but wind and light, both moving in swift changes. With a spine-chilling brain-lightning sensation of being ‘outside myself ’: an ecstasy. But no loss of perception. Single things here and there: the swift flight of a whaup or a hawk, the quick run of a white hare in winter. In that totally disengaged context, these things took on a powerful, not significance, but presence – a phenomenal presence. It was here that I realized I had no language. No language for this reality. The only ‘transcendental’ language I had at my disposal was religious, biblical. But it had no relevance as such to what I experienced and intuited. So I’d deviate it, using formulations like ‘the lurching church of the elements’. That’s a phrase I used in the first poem I ever wrote to keep: ‘Precentor Seagull’. Precentor – the lone voice entoning a beginning before the congregational choir.66 Gradually, I came to some logical conclusions and some linguistic perspectives. The language would have to be extra-ordinary (but without straining for the extraordinary67), and composite. A work by Messiaen, part of my archives on music and painting, and following on from the little preludic incursions into those fields I did above, summarizes the composite kind

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of composition required. It is titled: ‘Treatise on rhythm, colour – and ornithology.’ At the time when I began ‘looking for a language’ (I’d be about 15), as I walked across the back country and along the shore of my west coast Scottish village, my vademecum was George Borrow’s peripatetic narrative Lavengro (lavengro: romany for ‘word master’), but I was also plunged in weighty volumes in the history of language and the topology of languages such as Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language or Otto Jespersen’s Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. With these books, complemented gradually by a series of grammars and dictionaries, I surveyed with avidity and amazement a whole panorama of language, from the multi-syllabled Indo-European to the mono-syllabic languages of South-East Asia, via the Semitic, the Hamitic, the Uralo-Altaic, stopping for longer scrutinies here and there, for example with Dumézil on the languages of the Caucasus, or Whorf on Hopi (‘whiteness coming down’ – of a spring shower). My aim was not of course to learn them all, or even a dozen or so of them, not an impossible feat, but to understand their way of functioning, see into their logic. I was keen also to move as far back as possible up into origin (there I’m recalling, for example, Renan’s De l’origine du langage of 1883). I had no illusions as to the discovery of some ‘original tongue’, but I was interested in all the attempts to move back up along the way of sounds and signs and intellectual categories. I was also intrigued by the idea of a universal language – not in the sense of a fabricated esperanto or volapuk, but in the sense of a language that, at this or that historical moment, over this or that extensive territory, had played a world rôle. This was of course the case for long centuries with Latin, a Latin I was very much interested in, as well as in its later jazzy declination into French, Italian, Spanish. When, in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon was setting up (via fundamental texts such as The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum what he thought of as an Instauratio Magna), he declared that the loss of Latin was a disaster and that, unless great care was taken, the vernacular languages would wreak havoc not only in literature and philosophy, but in the very workings of the mind. I had a good deal of empathy with this opinion and position. Without going here into any comparative linguistic argumentation, there is the simple fact that to get into Latin and handle it competently requires a good deal of mental effort and discipline, which strengthens and sharpens the intellect, whereas people who use only the language they babbled in during their infancy can continue babbling

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quite contentedly all their lives, convinced that this babbling is the expression of their deep conscience, their national and personal identity, even of their ‘creativity’. I had no nostalgia for the Roman Empire or for its prolongation in Rome, but I was deeply interested in those schools of Provence and Aquitania where the high humanist learning and literature held out, on the edge, in what was more and more an intellectual wasteland, and even more deeply interested in the Scotic movement (I use the word ‘Scotic’ to cover both Irish and Scottish) that, from the seventh century on, was to bring the old learning and literature back – at places such as Luxeuil, Bobbio, St Gall: the Scotic movement that, as Helen Waddell describes it in The Wandering Scholars, had, not only a strong sense of place (coming from its celto-naturalistic background), but ‘the surge of the Atlantic behind it’.68 Keeping always in mind the original surge of energy, as well as the resources of language accumulated over the centuries and across space, I came to semiology and the problematics in which it was involved. In his essay on ‘the historical condition of literary language’, The Zero Degree of Writing, Roland Barthes points to an ‘impasse of literature’. In trying to trace the origin of this (very congested) cul-de-sac, he goes back to the seventeenth century which he sees as marked by ‘the essentialist myth of man’. This ‘essentialist myth’ has left the intellectual forefront, but it still survives, not only in literature but also in the common conscientiousness and in contemporary ‘cultural’ discourse. Never, he concludes, ‘a freedom of expression’, never ‘the freshness of a new state of language’, never ‘the vastitude of the world’.69 In various essays such as Esthétique généralisée (‘Generalised aesthetics’), or Le Champ des signes (‘The field of signs’), Roger Caillois makes a similar point, evoking ‘the proliferation of interchangeable texts that provide no more information on the permanent writing of the world than do the innumerable and repetite funereal inscriptions of Tuscany for the knowledge of Etruscan’.70 Where he looks for a renewal, for a reorganization, is not to literature (philosophical literature included), but to poetry, which he does not consider a literary genre among others, but as something with more gravity and power. Not any poetry, let it be said emphatically, but one that has traces of an anthropology that is not only sociological, or psychological, but archeo-logical, and further out still, a poetry ‘beyond human poetry’, a poetics understood not only as designating a special activity of the mind, but as ‘a general property of nature as a whole’. A ‘world poet’, in a word, is a poet who brings into accordance his own work-movement with the vaster movement of the universe.

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This is difficult territory.71 We’ve already seen how difficult it was for a philosopher as radical as Heidegger to get out of the essentialist context. The fact is, it’s practically impossible in our languages not to use the verb ‘to be’. Maybe what can change, radically, is the sensation we have of it. The linguist Gustave Guillaume72 talks of ‘verbs that go deeper down in thought than other verbs’, the verb ‘to be’ being one of them. If we build up on it an ‘essentialist myth’, as Western philosophy has done since Plato, we get ultimately to the closed space indicted by Barthes, from which the proposed exits, whether existentialist, sociological, technical or logorrheic leave everything to be desired. If we can see it on the other hand as an indefinite synthesis, a place of potential growth, a field still open, we can, perhaps, begin going places and getting somewhere. That was my supposition. It’s at that, as indicated briefly in this essay, developed at length, in several ways, elsewhere, that I’ve worked. For the workers in this field, the work is both outgoing and ongoing.

Notes 1 Rimbaud’s ‘Vagabonds’, Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954, p. 190. The whole phrase runs like this: ‘So we wandered on, drinking cave-wine, eating road biscuit, with me eager to find the place and the formula’ (my translation). In the Ardennes district of France, ‘cave-wine’ was slang for fresh well-water. 2 The reference is to the section ‘The Quietest Hour’ (Die stillste Stunde) in Nietzsche’s second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘It’s the quietest words that herald the storm. Thoughts that come on dove’s feet guide the world’, Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, in Friedrich Nietzsche. Werke in Zwei Bänden, Vol. II (Stuttgart: Deutscher Bücherbund, 1955), p. 401 – the dove in question will turn up again at the end of this essay. 3 The tension comes across most powerfully and beautifully in his poem Der Archipelagus, which begins: ‘Kehren die Kraniche wieder zu dir?’ (Are the cranes coming back to you?) – Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner, 6 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953), Vol. II, p. 107. The cranes may not have returned to Greece, but they’re still in the air. Aldo Leopold, for example, saw them in Wisconsin and remarked significantly on them, if not with the total intensity of Hölderlin, at the time of his A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).

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4 The first of these Hölderlin references is to the programmatic letter he wrote to his friend Böhlendorff in November 1802, in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 6, p. 463 [240]; the second from one of his last poems, In lieblicher Blaüe (In the Lovely Blueness): ‘He may be full of merit, but it’s poetically that man really lives on the earth’ – Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2., p. 372. I’ll come back on these questions later on in this essay. 5 I’m thinking here of Wittgenstein’s remark in the Cambridge Lectures 1932–1935, ed. A. Ambrose and M. McDonald (New York: Prometheus Books), p. 43: ‘One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits.’ 6 For this notion of ‘edge-knowledge’ in my work, see the book On the Atlantic Edge (Dingwall, Scotland: Sandstone Press, 2006), poem-books such as Limites et Marges (Paris: Mercure de France, 2000), essays such as ‘The Atlantic Seaboard: Poetic Topology of the European West’ (in Regionalität, Nationalität und Internationalität in der zeitgenössichen Lyrik, [Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 1992]) and the lecture ‘The Field of Edge-Knowledge’ (Vancouver: Simon Fraser University, 2013), that accompanied the launching of my book The Winds of Vancouver, devoted to the North Pacific edge of America. 7 Politics messes about. Sociology describes the resultant context. What is called ‘culture’ is smoke-screen and distraction. This of course is peremptorily put, and would require development. I’ve done that elsewhere. If, in addition to the rest, there’s an underlying sociopolitical-cultural theory in the present essay, it is that for anything like non-cacophony and coherence, anything like, not, shall we say, the wealth of nations, but the health of nations, the basis has to be relation to spaceplace. 8 I find this in an old notebook of mine devoted to the late Latin lyric, but I no longer have the exact source. Accompanying it, I find this: ‘Ego fui solus in silva et dilexi secreta loca’ (‘I have been alone in the woods, I have loved hidden places’). Helen Waddel, in The Wandering Scholars (London: Constable, 1927) has some very nice pages on this kind of material, quoting from the Latin and early French, as well as from early German and Provençal: ‘L’alba par umet mar atra sol, poy pasa vigil miraclar tenebras’. This alba has all kinds of connotations, of which more later. 9 Henry James, Translatlantic Sketches (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1875). 10 Wallace Stevens, ‘A Mythology Reflects Its Region’, in Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1957). 11 See the chapter ‘Break with Pagan Tradition’, in Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, pp. 1–25. 12 Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961).

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13 Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens [The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968). 14 Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1943). ‘Philosophy and Poetry’ was the theme of the last course (Winter 1944) that Heidegger taught before he was expelled from his university – see Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol 50: Nietzsches Metaphysik (für Wintersemester 1941/42 angekundigt, aber nicht vorgetragen), Einleitung in die Philosophie; Denken und Dichten, ed. P. Jaeger (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990). 15 Victor Segalen, Thibet – worked at from 1917 to 1918, but remaining unfinished. Fragments were published posthumously as Thibet: édition intégrale des cinquantehuit sequences, ed. Michael Taylor (Paris: Mercure de France, 1979). See Kenneth White, Les Finisterres de l’esprit (Paris: Editions Isolato, 2007). 16 Letter to his mother, 28 January 1802, Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 6, p. 460 [238]. 17 Letter to Böhlendorff, 1802, Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 6, p. 463–464 [240]. See Kenneth White, Bordeaux Memories (Bordeaux: William Blake Editions, 1984). For Heidegger on Hölderlin, see Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 4, ed. F. W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981). 18 Written between 1911 and 1922, in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and published in totality (ten elegies) by Insel Verlag, Leipzig, in 1923. 19 Georg Trakl, Gedichte [Poems] (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1913). The quotations are from translations I’ve done over the years. 20 For Heidegger on Rilke, see in particular Heidegger’s essay ‘Wozu Dichter’ (‘Why Poets?’) in Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 5, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 269–320. 21 See Heidegger, ‘Georg Trakl, Eine Erörterung eines Gedichtes’ [1953], in Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. F.-W. Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), pp. 31–78. 22 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Günther Neske Verlag, 1964), p. 23. The original German is: Der Dichtungscharakter des Denkens ist noch verhüllt. 23 Sein und Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927); Engl. edn. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 24 Martin Heidegger, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’, Der Spiegel 30 (23 May 1976): 193–219. 25 Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1969). My immediate reference is to the French translation contained in Martin Heidegger, Questions IV (Paris, Gallimard, 1976), pp. 109–140. 26 Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972). 27 The original German I’m referring to here is ‘Wer gross denkt, muss gross irren’, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, p. 17. The canonical translation of this is ‘He who

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thinks greatly must err greatly’, which of course is not wrong. I’ll admit that my version is more of a paraphrase than a strict translation, but I submit that it can be accepted as a valid proposition, intended to clarify. Might I even go so far as to say I don’t think Heidegger himself would have disapproved. Remember his irate objection to the obvious translation by Sartre of das Sein : l’être. I think I wanted to avoid the connotation of some college course on ‘Great Thinkers’ as well as the banality of : ‘To learn, you have to make mistakes’. This whole question of philology, semantics, formulation, translation, is of course primordial in our business (when I say, familiarly, ‘business’, I’m thinking, a lot less familiarly, of ‘beingness’). 28 This note follows on to the previous note not only chronologically, but cryptologically, it hinges on to that notion of ‘errancy’ and the time involved in it. The original German of the phrase, one of the ten or so key-phrases of Heidegger I’ve had by heart for several decades, is this: ‘Das Fremde wandert voraus. Doch es irrt nicht, bar jeder Bestimmung, ratlos umher. Das Fremde geht suchend auf den Ort zu, wo es als Wanderndes bleiben kann.’ It comes across in the fortypage essay on the poetry of Georg Trakl, ‘Sprache im Gedicht’, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe, 12. I do not know the canonical English translation. Since I have been working over the last many years in the French field, in addition to the original German, my principal ‘foreign’ source is French. Under the title ‘La parole dans l’élément du poème’, Heidegger’s essay on Trakl takes up pp. 39–83 of the French translation of Unterwegs zur Sprache titled Acheminement vers la parole (Paris, Gallimard, 1976). The text is translated by Wolfgang Brokmeier and Jean Beaufret, and the phrase in question occurs, in French, p. 45, as follows : ‘Ce qui est étranger pérégrine en avant. Mais il n’erre pas, dénué de toute destination, désemparé, de par le monde. La quête de l’étranger marche à l’approche du site où, comme pèlerin, il pourra trouver demeure.’ This is pretty close to my own version. What will be noticed is that Beaufret begins with a neuter (‘ce qui est étranger’) before switching to a personal figure : ‘l’étranger’. Whereas I opt straightaway for: ‘The Stranger’. To straighten and clarify this we have to go farther into Heidegger’s essay than I felt necessary in section 3 of this essay. Heidegger’s point of departure for his reflexions is that phrase from a poem by Trakl (‘Springtime of the Soul’) : ‘Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden’, where that ‘ein Fremdes’ is a neuter: ‘a strange thing’. But even in that essay, Heidegger makes reference to and quotes from a good number of other poems (he was probably using the Collected Trakl put out by Otto Müller, Salzburg, in 1948) where ‘the Stranger’, as figure, as bearer of ‘the strange’, is even more frequent, the ‘Stranger’ being equated to ‘the Traveller’. We hear of ‘dark travelling’ (in the poem ‘The Soul of Autumn’, of ‘getting to the gates by paths obscure’ (the poem ‘Winter Evening’) and, even more specifically (in the poem ‘Death Song Seven’) of ‘the white Stranger’. In addition, Trakl often refers to his stranger-traveller simply as Jener (‘that one’), a word that, as Heidegger

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was well aware, goes back to the old German ener: the other, the stranger. As to where the Stranger, der Fremde, is going, Heidegger goes back, as we saw earlier, to the old German sense of fremd, ‘a road’ leading to . . . somewhere. I’d add for my part that the ‘old German’ sense of ‘a road’ is still present in modern Norwegian as fram, meaning ‘towards’, as in the name of Nansen’s schooner : The Fram. Nansen’s ‘somewhere’ was the North Pole. Heidegger’s was more difficult to define and formulate. That is the question. See ‘Des espaces autres’. Foucault’s work notes for this lecture, never composed or developed by him, were published in the journal Architecture Mouvement Continuité, 5 (1984): 46–49, and in English as ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (1986): 22–27. This was a criticism Heidegger levelled at his philosophical colleagues: however much they ‘knew about’ philosophy, they didn’t see his thought. And Baudrillard points out in his essay, Oublier Foucault (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1977) that if production means fabrication, it also means pro-ducere, bringing into view. We’re close here too to the real Wittgenstein, that is, not reduced to logical positivism and other myopic interpretations. Typical of this is Edward Soja’s Thirdspace (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996). Soja is enthusiastic: ‘This all-inclusive simultaneity opens up endless worlds to explore’ (Thirdspace, p. 57). If I have some sympathy for Soja in his search for ‘spaces of resistance’, in what he calls ‘the new cultural politics’, I see much confusion and no opening. I don’t want to insist on the undigested heideggerianism, or the very approximate use he makes of Cartesian formulae: he writes res cogito, and goes on to say that this means ‘thought things . . . ’. Soja’s main merit is that he drew attention, in the ‘anglo-saxon’ sphere, to some aspects of the work of Foucault and, more interestingly, albeit again confusedly, to that of the ‘metaphilosopher’ Lefebvre (see the latter’s Metaphilosophie, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1965). In his book La présence et l’absence (Paris: Casterman, 1980). In La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 2000 [1974]). Whether in L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), or Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986). To avoid any hasty and facile identification with certain enthusiasms of the ‘Sixties’, I have to say here that such Eastern material was no recent importation for me. Thanks to the library of an old naturalist and anarchist in my Scottish village, I was reading sutras and upanishads at the age of fifteen. Later on, I had access to one of the best well-stocked orientalist libraries in Paris. And for years, working and reworking all this material, I ran in Paris a seminar on ‘East-West synthesis’. A vague notion remains hovering in the intellectualist atmosphere that the last word on the subject has been said in Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage,

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1974). This was a (rather facile) criticism of past ideological and literary attitudes. A lot of real ground work had already been done outside this context, and much more has been done since. Not only does Saïd’s book take no account of this work, but it is used as a bulwark against any serious consideration of the field. 37 This is what marks my difference from ‘French theory’, which I appreciate for its acumen and precision. It’s the analysis of an enclosure, elsewhere not even seen as such (like philistinism in nineteenth-century England), but with no real exit. For those thinkers, it goes without saying that the primitive ‘sensory-motor scheme’ (Deleuze’s phrase) is broken, and they have no confidence in phenomenology’s attempt to recover (dis-cover) an originary experience, since for them all sight, all speech, are already enmeshed in a power system. I have no truck with postromantic ‘outsiderness’ and no illusions as to the difficulties of getting out and staying out, and saying that outerness, but I feel this theorization as all too closed. Regarding the Far-Eastern reference, Deleuze’s own attitude could descend to a derogatory dismissal of ‘yoga, tao, zen’. I’m quoting this from the presentation of my work he makes in his Mille Plateaux. I take him up on this, as on other points, in my Dialogue avec Deleuze (Paris: Isolato, 2007). What interests me about Lefebvre is that he stands apart from what we may call ‘the Parisian school’. As he says in Le Temps des Méprises (Paris: Stock, 1975): ‘I’m an Occitan, from the South-West, which makes me both peripheral and world-wide’ (Je suis Occitan, c’est-à-dire périphérique – et mondial). There’s a parallel there to my own position in France – with this difference, that I come from a periphery further outside than Lefebvre’s. 38 Henri Lefebvre, Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1971), p. 29. 39 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford University Press, 1954). Especially Volume 9: The Prospects of the Western Civilization. This was the book, along with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Spengler’s Decline of the West, into which I plunged during my student years in Glasgow when I was laying the ground for what I was to call ‘intellectual nomadism’. Philosophically, I was moving between a fundamental scepticism and an anarchic kind of nihilism. Sextus Empiricus, it will be remembered, distinguished three types of philosopher: those who are convinced they can find, and have found, what they were looking for (Dogmatics); those who say you can never find what you’re looking for and stop looking (Academicians); and those who keep moving about and looking at phenomena (Sceptics) – see Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [Loeb Classical Library], 1933). When I wasn’t hoofing around the streets of Glasgow, I was going for 80-kilometre walks, 40 kilometres from Glasgow to the coast on the Saturday morning, 40 kilometres back up on the Sunday evening. Strange territory, weird atmospheres, wild humours.

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40 Published in the magazine Die Horen, in 1795. My text is contained in Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 10 (Berlin-Leipzig: Knaur, 1906), pp. 3–95. 41 The text I now use for this is the 4-volume Esthétique, translated by S. Jankélévitch, published by Flammarion, Paris, 1979. 42 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, see chapter 17, ‘Beauty’, pp. 252–264. What is at issue here, however, concerns the general movement of Whitehead’s cosmology and not only the treatment of beauty. 43 Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York, Vintage Books, 1982), p. 166. The reference here is to the section ‘Adagia’. 44 Mersenne, Treatise on Universal Harmony, 1636. Mersenne goes into all the aspects of the theory and practice of music, bringing in sounds, movements, modes, consonance and dissonance, composition. 45 Pierre Boulez, Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1963). 46 Foucault (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1986), pp. 28–29. 47 Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). 48 For example, in his Lautréamont (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1939). 49 Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Roussel’s book, Locus Solus, was published in 1914 by A. Lemerre, Paris. 50 This is the kind of poetics that is prevalent in so much Jakobson-inspired work. I recall in particular the little monstrosity of a structuralist demonstration done on Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats ’ contained in the French collection of Jakobson’s essays, Questions de poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). 51 This text, Pont-Levis, is the foreword by Breton to Pierre Mabille’s Le Miroir du merveilleux (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1962). 52 See Kenneth White, Le Monde d’Antonin Artaud (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1989). I translate and quote the epigraph : ‘How has it come about that so much abject trash has been piled up? It’s because the world hasn’t yet been constituted, because man has only a small idea of the world and he wants to stick to it. There was a day when mankind decided to block the idea of world.’ 53 Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir – on these questions, see mainly the ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–28, and the chapter ‘La formation des stratégies’, pp. 85–94. 54 See Aristotle, Physics IV, in Physics Books I–IV, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1953 [Loeb Classical Library]). 55 Both mean knowledge. But savoir (from sapere) is information leading potentially to wisdom (sapience), while connaître (from con-nascere) means being in intelligent living contact with. I’m thinking here of Hume’s remark (Hume Mss, Letters, National Library of Scotland): ‘Matter may contain as much mind as Man.’ An idea that can be substantiated via, for example, François Dagognet’s Une

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Kenneth White Epistémologie de l’espace concret (Paris: Vrin, 1977) and Roger Caillois’s Méduse & Cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), where he speaks, with regard to the man–earth relationship, of ‘signs of reciprocal intelligence’. See what I say in this essay (section 5), on logic and poetic topology, and for example, the poem ‘Finisterra, or the Logic of Lannion Bay’ contained in my book Les Rives du silence (Paris: Mercure de France, 1997). Charles Olson, Call me Ishmael (New York: Reynal & Hitchock, 1947). While I’m on this American reference, into which I’ve gone in greater detail elsewhere (see The Gang of the Kosmos [Marseilles: Wildproject, 2015]), it goes without saying that you don’t need 20,000 square miles of territory to have a sense of space. For example, 20 square miles on the west coast of Scotland, or on a Pyrenean plateau, or in the Monts d’Arrée in Brittany, will amply suffice while being, as sometimes happens in the earlier case, less devastating to the psyche. The edition I use is a bilingual Russian-French edition – La Steppe (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1974). The letter I refer to is contained in the Introduction. I wrote this essay in French, like so much else of my theoretical work, because I felt there simply did not exist then in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ context a space for this kind of thought and work. It was published first, in 1976, in the series of little volumes put out in Paris by Le Nouveau Commerce (the review founded by Paul Valéry) as Approches du monde blanc, and was later taken up again in my book of essays, La Figure du dehors (Paris: Grasset, 1982 – new edition, Marseilles: Editions Le mot et le reste, 2014). I translated it into English (‘Into the White World’) for my book of essays On Scottish Ground (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998). This is the principle of what is called in traditional Japanese art aesthetics the ‘flying white style’, which lets the background white of the paper appear through the painting. While I’m back on the theme of aesthetics, a Chinese principle that attracted me from the start of my explorations in this field was neng tan (Japanese nôtan): how to get the breath of life into a work by the juxtaposition of thick and thin, darkness and light. I learned a lot from the fine feeling for space and the expressivity of line (those raw, hard, brutal strokes) one sees in Sesshu. See Open World, The Collected Poems 1940–2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003). And the essays contained in The Wanderer and His Charts (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004), and Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (Aberdeen: Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, 2013). See Henri Atlan’s essay, ‘L’homme : système ouvert’, in the collective volume edited by Edgar Morin and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, L’Unité de l’homme, invariants biologiques et universaux culturels (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974), pp. 487–490. Evoking the end of ‘human being’, with its accumulations of all-too-human ‘consciousness’ (and I would say, the possible beginning of something else, a more

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expanded intelligence), Atlan quotes Foucault’s image (in the final page of les Mots et les Choses) of ‘a face of sand disappearing at the edge of the tide’. Concerning these neologisms, as well as the idiosyncratic use I’ve made of common or less common words, two lexicons now exist: Dictionnaire de géopoétique by Stephane Bigeard, online, and Lexique fractal de l’œuvre de Kenneth White by Muriel Chazalon (Paris: Editions Isolato, forthcoming). In Plato’s Symposium (see The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961 – Bollingen Series LXXI]) someone says of Socrates that when you hear him talk for the first time you might be inclined to dismiss his discourse as grotesque, because the words and forms he uses to develop his thought are so inhabitual. But when you listen in closely, when you let the whole meaning open out, everything becomes, all of a sudden, deeply satisfying. It could be that both in translation and in tradition Socrates has been over-rationalized, ironed-out. He himself spoke of his daimon. See Henry David Thoreau, in the final chapter of Walden: ‘I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough [ . . . ]. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments. [ . . . ] I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough ever to lay the foundation of a true expression’, Thoreau, Walden, fully annotated edn, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 315. This was the first lesson in writing I ever took to heart. The ‘bird language’ was originally spoken by shamans, gymnosophists and druids, as a communication with the cosmos. It’s this tradition Boehme looks back to. By the time we come to Rabelais, it’s sheer fun. In his Fourth Book (see Rabelais, Œuvres complètes [Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959], p. 693), in a little trip up to the Sea of Ice, he comes across a mass of ‘frozen words’ that, in thawing, suddenly take on sound: ‘Hin, hin, hin, hin, his, ticque, torche, lorgne, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, tracc, trac, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrrr . . . ’ It’s a hilarious Spitzberger Sonata. ‘Nous eusmez du passetemps beaucoup’, says Messire François. Later, such language became part of the gaya scienza, the gai savoir. Later again, it became talk used by those in the know, not to be understood by those outside the trade or the gang: a jargon (the language of the jars, the wild duck). Artaud’s usage is idiosyncratic: ‘Dakentala, dakistekel, ta redabe, de stra muntils, o ept anis, o ept atra’. See the chapter ‘Le corps étranger’, in Le Monde d’Antonin Artaud, pp. 133–152. Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein had, I think, a similar feeling. And by now there’s a whole bibliography on the question. See La Parole malheureuse (‘from linguistic alchemy to philosophical grammar’) by Jacques Bouveresse (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1971); Petite métaphysique de la parole by Brice Parain

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Kenneth White (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); and of course Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959), Gesamtausgabe, Vol 12. See Kenneth White, The Cold Wind of Dawn (London, Jonathan Cape, 1966). At one time or another, I’ve used practically every trick in the book, every grammatical structure or turn of phrase that ever existed, and will still indulge in them for fun, out of sheer exuberance and virtuosity. I was fascinated by the way Hölderlin invented not only words in the sentence but logical structures; interested in Doughty’s attempt to ‘archaize’ English (‘A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus . . . ’ – the beginning of Arabia deserta [New York: Dover, 1979], Vol. 1, p. 39); and in the linguistic energy, the inscaping, stressing and springing of Hopkins. But Doughty becomes quaint, and Hopkins, hysterical. In general, syntactical distorsions, obvious innovations, can actually become a hindrance to openwording, and hence openworlding. I’ve come to think in terms of a ‘prosaic poetics’, not only about the earth, but of the earth. Containing what MerleauPonty called ‘the prose of the world’ (La prose du monde [Paris: Gallimard, 1969]). Prosodically, that entails, along with the ‘strong lines’ of the Metaphysicals (John Donne, etc.), the kind of large sequential line that Blaise Cendrars used in his Prose du Transsibérien (Paris: Editions des hommes nouveaux, 1913), which goes back ultimately to the ‘sequences’ practised in the (Celtic) monastery of St Gall. In brief, a language is not only discoursive, but cursive and coursing, a writing is not only textual but textonic, an open poetics of flying signs, using a wide spectrum of language (other languages intruding now and then into the English like molten granite in the fissures of a rock, or erratic boulders), never separating human language from that of biology and physics: phrase linked to windblow and riverflow, word close to bone and stone. Helen Waddel, The Wandering Scholars. See in particular the chapter The Ordo vagorum’. Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1953). Roger Caillois, Esthétique généralisée (Paris, Gallimard, 1962); Le Champ des signes (Paris, Hermann, 1978). After my first poem-book, The Cold Wind of Dawn (London, Jonathan Cape, 1966), which bore a very nietzschean title, the second was titled The Most Difficult Area (London: Cape Goliard, 1968). After that, I disappeared from the ‘AngloSaxon’ context and went, as Zarathustra said, into ‘the great solitude’, from which I emerged, laterally and with latitude, only recently. Gustave Guillaume’s Leçons de linguistique were published between 1948 and 1992 by Klincksieck, Paris, and the universities of Lille and Quebec. Guillaume’s basic premise, which I share, is that ‘man feels present in the universe and not only face to face with other humans’. See Langue et monde – Grammaire géopoétique

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du paysage contemporain by Catherine Chauche (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). My other main linguistic affinities range from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay on ‘Grammatical forms and their influence on thought’ (in Essays on Language, ed. T. Harden and D. Farrelly [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997], pp. 23–51) to Korzybski’s general semantics, and, of course, Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache (‘On the way to real speech’), which I see as going further than his conception of language as ‘the house of being’. I don’t live in a house of being, I live in a house of tides.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. 4’33” (Cage) 232 Aalto, Alvar 141, 142, 149 Ablinger, Peter 232 ‘About Losing and Being Lost’ (A. Freud) 48n. 15 abstraction 15, 16, 68, 160, 188, 212 architectural 149 left brain hemisphere and 150 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos 119 activity, place and 115 ad-finis 16 ad-finitas 13 Adventure of Ideas (Whitehead) 231–2 Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The (TV series, 1952–66) 95 ‘Aesthetic Education of Humanity, The’ (Schiller) 231 aesthetics 35, 166, 172, 231–2, 248n. 59 Afghanistan war 100–1 ‘After the Wedding’ (Stead) 74–6, 78, 79, 87, 90nn. 20–1 earth–sky interaction and 84 interiorized place and 83 poetic images and language of 80–1 agency 88–9n. 11, 210, 214, 216 airports 69, 123, 190 A la limite du pays fertile (Boulez) 232 Albers, Joseph 138 allegory 48–9n. 24 Alzheimer’s disease 177, 178, 200 American Childhood, An (Dillard) 205 Anaxagoras 167 Anaximander 158–9 Anholt, Simon 194–5 animals 59, 165, 178, 231 Anishnaabe people 59 anthropology 5, 9n. 8, 117, 188, 240 Antonioni, Michelangelo 138 apeiron (the un-limited) 13, 20n. 2, 159 Appadurai, Arjun 190

‘Arab street’ in Western media 105 Archeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) 234 Archipelagus, Der (Hölderlin) 241n. 3 architecture 5, 51, 69, 88n. 10, 95, 117, 143 as art of space 172–4 atmosphere and 131–5, 138, 141, 149, 151 in classical Greece 158, 159 communication architecture 111 as erotic experience 171 location-related particularities of 120 mirror neuron theory 149 Modernist 129 mood and multi-sensory experience of 130–1 sense of reality and 145 space concepts of 157, 160 as space for dance 164–5 Arendt, Hannah 9n. 1 Aristotelianism 2 Aristotle 2, 5, 162, 165, 226, 234 ‘chain of Being’ of 160 on nature as immanent force 168 nous poïetikos of 235 on place 14, 169 on somewhereness of existent things 4 art 5, 129, 138, 147, 197 chora and 165, 167, 168 erotic distance in artistic meaning 171 ‘understanding’ of artistic images 148–50 whiteness as start from zero 232, 248n. 59 Artaud, Antonin 233, 237 Ash Wednesday Supper (Bruno) 167 Asplund, Gunnar 141, 149 asylum seekers 192 atmosphere 5, 131–5, 172, 218 in the arts 138, 140–2 atmospheric intelligence 150 biological ground of atmospheric experience 136–37 ecological perspective and 151 imagination and 138–40

270 Au-delà du structuralisme (Lefebvre) 231 Augé, Marc 21n. 15, 89n. 12, 190 Augustine, St 225 Augustus Caesar 223 Australia, as ‘mainland’ 83, 91n. 27 western coast connection to the sea 85, 91n. 30 Austro-Hungarian empire 97 authenticity 62, 78 Authentic Syracuse (Faga) 62 automobile culture 95, 207 axonometry 173 Bachelard, Gaston 146, 233 Bacon, Francis 239 Barad, Karen 212 Barbaro, Daniele 160 Baroque painting and architecture 168, 169 Barragan, Luis 141 barriers 19 Barthes, Roland 240, 241 Bastide, Jean-François de 171 Baudelaire, Charles 43, 247n. 50 Baudrillard, Jean 245n. 30 Bauhaus 129 Bauman, Zygmunt 117 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 166 beauty 67, 174 Becoming 163, 164, 165, 166 Being 164, 165, 166, 225–6 Being and Time (Heidegger) 228 being-in-a-world 218 being-in-place 4, 181 being-limit 16, 17 Belli, Sylvio 160 belonging 75, 157, 192, 199, 212 edges and 34–7 ‘empathic insideness’ and 136 peripheral perception and 148 Benjamin, Andrew 181 Benjamin, Walter 43, 47, 48n. 16, 48–9n. 24 Bernstein, Bruce 59 Bewitched (TV series, 1964–72) 96 biology 236–7, 250n. 67 bio-psychology 137 birds 30, 214–15, 236 ‘black sites,’ of NSA/CIA 60

Index Blair, Carole 184 Bloch, Ernst 90n. 21 Blumer, Herbert 98 Bodmer, Frederick 239 body, the 53, 96, 169, 219 boundary and 23 distortion of sexuality and 146, 154n. 64 experience of place-dweller and 25 ‘flesh of the world’ 147, 155n. 68 limit of 16 lived body 17, 37n. 3 matter and 167 topologies of 90n. 20 Boehme, Jakob 237, 249n. 64 Böhme, Gernot 137 Book of Odes (Confucian classic) 231 borders 31–2 Borrow, George 239 Boston Marathon bombing, media coverage of 101, 125n. 10 Boulez, Pierre 232 boundaries 10nn. 9–10, 31–2, 37, 122, 183 of colours in paintings 138 locking of doors and windows 96 permeable 111–12, 120 of Spanish land grants in New Mexico 52, 58 boundedness 84, 85, 199 Bourdieu, Pierre 37n. 3 brain, hemispheres of 150 memory of place and 177–8 Brancusi, Constantin 141 branding, of places 194–5, 195, 203n. 48 Breillat, Catherine 139 Breton, André 233 Brook, Peter 139–40 Brooks, Drex 56 Bruno, Giordano 20, 166–8 built environment 61, 99, 158, 191 see also architecture Cacciari, Massimo 3, 42 Cage, John 232 Cahuilla people 56 Caillois, Roger 240, 248n. 55 Call me Ishmael (Olson) 235 cameras, placement and movement of 103–6, 109, 110 capitalism 55, 70

Index Carceri [The Prisons] (Piranesi) 170, 171, 176n. 34 carpet, as nomadic dwelling-place 14, 21n. 4 Carroll, Lewis 172, 176n. 34 Carson, Anne 161 cartography 24–5, 51 Casey, Ed 2, 6, 10n. 9, 180, 181, 195 on philosophy of place 7 on place-world 4 Cause, Principle and Unity (Bruno) 166 Cendrars, Blaise 250n. 67 Centre for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) 194 Cézanne, Paul 147 Champs des signes, Le [‘The field of signs’] (Caillois) 240 chaos 163–4 Chekhov, Anton 235 children, media exposure of 99–100 nature and place as sensory experience for 184, 186 Chirico, Giorgio de 176n. 34 chora, Platonic 20n. 2, 159, 160, 162–3, 169, 175n. 25 dance (choreography) and 164–5 mimesis and 163–4 ‘mystery of language’ and 170 space as 173 as ‘thick limit’ 161 topos distinct from 162, 165 transformed in early modernity 165–8 ‘Christian’ (‘Cross & Bible’) doors 95–6 Christianity 224–5, 227–8, 229, 231 cities 111, 114, 187, 188 destroyed in war 46 ‘enemy’ 109 global 196 global reach of 62 Greek polis 161, 181 liminal spaces in 31 megacities 179 mill cities of New England 209 place branding of 194 placemaking and 193 class differences 117–18, 209 Clifford, James 117 ‘cloud’ storage 128n. 31 Cobb, Edith 184

271

cognition 41, 137, 142, 143, 144, 157 Cold War 105 Cold Wind of Dawn, The (White) 250n. 71 Coles, Robert 181 Comanche people 58 communications, electronic 179, 189, 196, 197 computers 38n. 7, 94 Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism, The (Sambursky) 23 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 172 con-finis 16, 17 connection 5 connectivity, technologies of 8 consciousness, embodied 157, 158, 165–6 conservatism 82 Copernicus, Nicolaus 167 Cops (TV series) 103 Le Corbusier 129–30 Corstorphine, in Edinburgh 188 cosmopolitanisms 17, 119 country 2, 4, 53 Cowichan Bay (Vancouver Island) 196 Crowell, Steve 48n. 17 culture 54, 96, 113, 164, 184, 230, 242n. 7 agriculture and 62 focal point of 231 history written by 53 location-related particularities of 120 in space 233 cum-finis 13, 19 Daedalus 159 Daidolos (journal) 137 dance 164–5 Danielewski, Mark 176n. 34 Da-sein (Being-here) 15 dating websites 121, 123–4 Davidson, Donald 89n. 15 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon) 246n. 39 Decline of the West (Spengler) 246n. 39 deconstruction 229 Dee, John 165 Deleuze, Gilles 230, 233 De l’origine du langage (Renan) 239 DeNiro, Robert 109 depth, dimension of 170 depth of field, in lens focus 106

272

Index

Deroy, L. 188 Derrida, Jacques 229 Descartes, René 169, 175n. 25, 226, 228, 234 ‘Des espaces autres’ (Foucault) 3 desire 43, 44, 164, 168, 169, 218 desolation, singularity in 66, 67 de Soto, Lewis 56, 57 deterritorialization 127n. 28 Deveron Arts 60 Dewey, John 132, 134, 135, 136 Dexter (TV series) 107 diachrony 44 diasporas 117, 127n. 23, 191 Dickenson, Greg 184 difference 33 digital media 100, 111, 112–13, 114, 118 boundaries of location and 119 ‘friends’ and 113, 115, 120 local space reimagined by 121 Dillard, Annie 205, 213 Diotropic (Descartes) 169 Direct Provision system, in Ireland 192 disconnection 192 ‘disembedding’ 190, 195 disorientation 123 Dogville (film, 2003) 139 Donne, John 250n. 67 Doughty, Charles 250n. 67 Douglas, Michael 109 dreams 39, 90n. 21, 167, 212 Dreyfus, Hubert 174 dualism 162, 169, 175n. 25 Dubow, Jessica 8 Duino Elegies (Rilke) 227, 243n. 18 Duns Scotus, John 225 earth 4, 84–5, 250n. 67 Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, The (Cobb) 184 ecosystems 10n. 10, 55 edges 5, 10n. 9, 210, 219 definitions of 23, 37n. 1 edge/edge relation 28 edge-knowledge 222 experience of 25 forms of belonging to places 34–6 instrumental use of 34 interactive 29 modulation of 26 of natural landscapes 26

of objects and places 23 open-textured 30 out-going character of 7 proliferation or variety of 30, 38n. 7 as shared end (fine comune) with other 15 sharing of 28 in urban geography of New York 24–35, 37n. 5 Egypt, papyrus as medium for writing 159 Ehrenzweig, Anton 138, 154–5n. 67 Einstein, Albert 237 Eisenstein, Sergei 171 El Cerrito Solo (Tahualtapa Project) (de Soto) 56, 57, 58, 59 Elements (Euclid) 159 Eliot, T. S. 140–1 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 52 emotions 125n. 10, 130, 168, 172, 222 artworks and 149 emotive power of music 141 film and 139 history and 53 right brain hemisphere and 150 unconscious 143, 144 Empedocles 158 enclosure 84 English language 2–3, 9n. 8, 65 ‘archaization’ of 250n. 67 German terms translated into 173, 244n. 28 Enlightenment, European 46, 112, 166 epistemology 175n. 25 Erinnerung (Heideggerian concept) 226, 228 eros 168, 170 eschaton/eschata 14–16, 18, 19 essentialism 240–1 Esthétique généralisée [‘Generalised aesthetics’] (Caillois) 240 E.T. The Extraterrestrial (movie) 110 ethnic cleansing 183 ethnicities, in New England 209 Etruscan language 240 Euclid 159–60 Europe 94, 172, 187 architecture in 157, 174n. 2, 190 Cold War in 105 European conquerors of Americas 56, 98 as expanding container 20

Index identity and 20 landscape painting in 138 limit and 19, 22n. 18 nomads in 235 ‘spiritual history’ of 158 television in 101 events, edges of 23 existence 1, 8, 34 existentialism 226, 241 experience 1, 76, 133, 188 edges and 25, 26, 28 of environment 184 gap between word and experience 164 geography dissociated from 197 journalism of 100–1 limitations of 170 location-based 121 media technologies and 96, 98, 114, 115, 119 multi-sensory 130–1, 142 physically bounded 123 of self 135 senses and 172 singularity and 67, 68, 69 space of lived experience 167 spatial 135–6, 140, 158–9 unifying character of 134 Experience of Place, The (Hiss) 131, 182 Experience of Thought, The (Heidegger) 228 exteriority 84, 85, 87 Eyes on the Prize (TV documentary series) 108 Faga, Benjamin 62 fast food industry 70 Fate of Place, The (Casey) 195 Father Knows Best (TV series, 1954–1960) 95 Febvre, Lucien 131 Fellini, Federico 138 Ficino, Marsilio 167 films 138–9 first-personal, the 6 Flemingdon Park (Toronto) 185 flesh, reality as 168, 175n. 25 Fonda, Jane, in North Vietnam 104, 126n. 13 food 62, 134 fast food industry 70 rural areas as sites of food production 55

273

form 168, 211 architectural 129, 130 matter and 160, 162 formula/formulation 5, 221, 222, 226, 241n. 1 Foucault, Michel 3, 229, 230, 233, 245nn. 29, 31 ‘heterotopology’ of 234 on history and discontinuity 53 Foursquare app 121 freedom, mobility and 187–8 French language 3, 9n. 8 Freud, Anna 48n. 15 Freud, Sigmund 39, 46, 143 Fried, Marc 183 Friedrich, Su 62 friends/friendship 107, 114, 116 experience and 134 ‘friends’ in digital media 113, 115, 120 geographies of 53 knowing people as form of agency 216 migration and 117 technologies of mobility and 118 Fullilove, Mindy 192 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 89n. 15 Galicia, in Austro-Hungarian empire 97 Galileo Galilei 166, 167, 228, 234 Galisteo (New Mexico), village of 52, 52–4, 58 Galli Bibiena 170, 171 gardens 34, 211 Geertz, Clifford 188 Geminus 160–1 General Account of Bonding, A [De Vinculis in genere] (Bruno) 167 Génie de l’Architecture, Le (Le Camus de Mezières) 171 genius loci (spirit of place) 65, 78, 88n. 7, 134, 181, 198, 222 decline of 223 stages in destiny of 224 geography 5, 60, 191, 222 changing connections with geographical places 179–81 communication geography 111 experience dissociated from 197 of nowhere in particular 189 geology 222, 236

274

Index

geometry 131, 141, 157, 170–1, 238 Euclidean 159–60 harmony as cosmic geometry 173 non-euclidean pangeometry 237 res extensa and 169 topos (place) and 165 writing and 159 geopoetics 7, 9n. 4, 231, 232, 233, 235 Gerbner, George 98 German language 9n. 8 Gibbon, Edward 246n. 39 Giddens, Anthony 190, 195, 196 globalism 4, 234 globalization 8, 17, 21n. 14, 22n. 20, 196 everyday life permeated by 190 history of modern state and 18 interiority of place and 83 political forms of 21n. 16 resistance of place to 70–1 global positioning systems (GPS) 121, 123, 158 glossolalia 237 gnomon 159 Godfather, The (movie series) 107 Gogol, Nikolai 235 Google Earth 121 Gorki, Maxim 235 Gothic Cathedral, The (Simpson) 174n. 2 Great Depression era, photographs from 107 Greece, classical 181 Greek philosophy 158–9, 221 grid cells, in brain 177, 178 Griffero, Tonino 137 Gropius, Walter 129 Guattari, Félix 218 Guillaume, Gustave 241, 250n. 72 Gut Renovation (Su Friedrich film, 2012) 61, 62 habitat 234 habits 211 habitus 37n. 3 Hallin, Daniel 100 Hampton, Henry 108 Harrison, Robert Pogue 135 Harvey, David 60, 196, 198–9 Hasparren (France), town of 222 Hass, Robert 39 Hasse, Jürgen 137 Hayden, Dolores 193 health clinics 190

Heaney, Seamus 8, 140 Heap of Birds, Edgar 51 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 226, 231 Heidegger, Martin 9n. 8, 34, 44, 89n. 15, 157, 199, 251n. 72 Black Forest as pilgrimage site for 225 on convalescence and nostalgia 41 on errancy and thinking 229, 243–4n. 27 on journey of the Stranger 229, 244–5n. 28 place in philosophy of being 180 on poets and topology of being 226–8, 243n. 14 on rootedness 181, 182, 190 on ‘setting-into-work’ of truth 168 on space and the human condition 135 on topology 2, 9n. 4 on ‘the Vertical’ 27 Heraclitus 237 Hermes/Mercury (god) 38n. 12, 164 Heroic Frenzies, The (Bruno) 168 Hesiod 161 Hestia (goddess) 164 Hiss, Tony 131, 182 history 5, 25, 33, 42 acceleration of 190 decontextualization of 55 discontinuity in being and 53 landscape and 51 natural history in relation to 51 Nazi Holocaust as ‘absolute event of ’ 45 as performance art 60 specificity of place and 54 time concealed by 43 Hölderlin, Friedrich 221–2, 227, 229, 241n. 3, 242n. 4, 250n. 67 Holocaust 45–6, 183 home 3, 4, 12, 84, 97, 213, 234 ancestral 54 childhood home 42, 90n. 21 ethnic identity and 98 experience of getting lost and 44 homelessness 42, 44, 190, 192 home-office space 95, 99 as ‘little country’ 53 media technologies and 104, 111, 114, 115, 117, 122–4, 127n. 23 memories and 52 migration and 118 mobile homes 60

Index in New England 93, 95 nostalgia and 41, 88–9n. 11 protected boundaries of 96 ‘rootedness’ and 181, 182 second homes in countryside 186 singularity and 68 walls of 59 war and 100, 101, 105 women’s relation to 187 Hommage to the Square paintings (Albers) 138 Horizon (Morrison) 59 horizons 54, 59–60, 62, 85, 208 Hough, Michael 178 House of Leaves (Danielewski) 176n. 34 Hrabal, Bohumil 145 Hugo, Victor 225 humanism 230, 240 humanities 2 Humboldt, Wlhelm von 251n. 72 Hume, David 2, 247n. 55 humidity 130, 133 Husserl, Edmund 21n. 12, 25, 157, 158, 173 Iamblichus 23 ichnographia (plan) 159 ideations 39 identity 20, 33 diminished experimentation with 119 edges and 34 Jewish-American 98 language and 240 memory and 78 place branding and 194 singularity and 66 idiōtēs (private individual) 17, 21n. 13 Iliad (Homeric epic) 161 imaginary, the 230 imagination 133, 138–40, 144, 145–6, 182, 232 imagined communities 122 immediacy 69, 74, 79, 80, 92n. 34 imperialism 22n. 20 In Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quatturo Priores Commentaria 23 indigenous cultures 4, 55–6, 98 mapping/counter-mapping by 118, 127n. 27 response to displacement 192 industrialization 112

275

In lieblicher Blaüe [In the Lovely Blueness] (Hölderlin) 242n. 4 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 131 insideness 127n. 12, 131–2, 136 intelligence of place 1, 4, 8 intentional communities 196 intentionality 146 interiority 77–84, 85, 87, 147 Internet 62, 94, 96, 102, 111, 117, 200 dissociation of geography from experience and 197 everyday life permeated by 190 as location-eroding medium 123 ‘Into the White World’ [Approches du monde blanc] (White) 236, 248n. 58 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger) 226 Iran 109 Iraq, media coverage of war in 101, 125n. 10 Irish famine 59 island cultures 82–3, 91n. 27, 217–18 Jackson, J. B. 51, 187–8 Jakobson, Roman 247n. 50 James, Henry 223 Jespersen, Otto 239 Jewish Museum, in Berlin 176n. 34 Johnson, Mark 137, 144 Kafka, Franz 45 Kant, Immanuel 2, 10n. 9, 226 Keller, Helen 94 Kern, Stephen 197 kitsch 68, 132 Klee, Paul 131, 232 Kleinman, Sharon 197 Kogl, Alexandra 196 Korea, North 105, 109 Korzybski, Alfred 251n. 72 Kraus, Karl 249n. 65 Kreutzer, Conradin 181 Kuma, Kengo 141, 149 labyrinth 43 ‘Labyrinth, The’ (Phillips) 43 land 2, 4 ‘Landline’ series (Scully) 59–60 landscapes 39–40, 41, 55, 178 acoustic (soundscapes) 130 aesthetic management of 62

276

Index

changing perceptions of 56 cultural landscapes 51–2 as history made visible 51 modern art 147 Native American landscape paintings 59 sense of freedom and 187 sense of place and 179 as sensory compositions 213 touristic presentation of 66, 67, 87n. 4 Lang, James 62 language 2, 15, 80, 96, 164, 250n. 67 ‘bird language’ 237, 249n. 64 chora as ‘mystery of language’ 170 grammar of the cosmos and 237 as ‘house of Being’ 228, 251n. 72 interiority and 81 left brain hemisphere and 150 as orientation 81, 82 sense of place and 72 singularity of place and 80, 82 spread of languages 236 tone of 134 topographic character of 2 topology of 239 universal 239–40 Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (Jespersen) 239 Las Vegas 35, 119 Latin, as universal language 239–40 Leave It to Beaver (TV series, 1957–63) 95 Lebenslang [Itinerary] (Rilke) 229 Lebensraum (living space) 14, 21n. 4 Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas 171–2 Leçons de linguistique (Guillaume) 250n. 72 Lefebvre, Henri 3, 230, 231, 233, 245n. 31 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 166 Leitner, Bernard 130 Leonardo da Vinci 140 Leopold, Aldo 241n. 3 Lermontov, Mikhail 235 Lewerentz, Sigurd 141, 149 Libeskind, Daniel 176n. 34 Limen see threshold (limen) Limentinus (god) 13 liminality 85 limit 5, 10nn. 9–10, 167, 222 of contact between bodies (con-fine) 15 as contact with the other 15–16

definitions and etymology of 13–14, 20n. 1 as transgression 16–17 Ling, Rich 116 Liotta, Elena 183, 192 Lippard, Lucy 7–8, 191 literature 5, 140–1, 235, 239, 240 Lithuania 97 Lobachevski, Nikolai 237 locale 2, 109 localisms 17 locality 40, 119, 190 location 1, 39, 118, 189 digital changes in experience of 116 experience and 120 media and 97–8, 110 mobility as para-location 115 relocation 120, 124 Locus Solus (Roussel) 233 Lodoli, Carlo 170 Loom of Language, The (Bodmer) 239 Loos, Adolf 172 loss 5, 48, 54 Lovejoy, Annie 60–1 Lucretius 169 Lujan, Freddy 60 Lure of the Local, The (Lippard) 54 McDonald’s restaurants 70, 70, 71, 83 McGilchrist, Iain 137, 149, 150 McGill, Joseph, Jr 61 McLuhan, Marshall 197 Mahabarata (theatrical performance, 1985) 139 Malevitch, Kasimir 232 Malpas, Jeff 48n. 17, 62, 180–1, 199–200, 204n. 64 Mandrou, Robert 131 maps 25, 30, 43, 44, 123, 222, 242n. 5 in antiquity 159 artists’ interest in 60 chorography and 174n. 11 inaccurate 56 mapping by indigenous cultures 118, 127n. 27 mental 52 sensory-imaginary mapping 208, 210 Marcuse, Herbert 146 Marrero, Cathy Cruz 94 Massey, Doreen 117, 127n. 28, 196, 198, 199, 204n. 64

Index Master and His Emissary, The (McGilchrist) 137, 150 materialism 1, 48n. 17, 228 mathematics 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 222 beauty of living world and 237 nature known through 169 matter 158, 168 form and 162, 166 limit and 167 nature and 160 nostalgia and 45 space identified with 169 topos distinct from 14 Mead, George Herbert 118 meaning 72–3, 89n. 14, 172, 191 Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding, The (Johnson) 137 media 5, 8, 94 electronic 89n. 13, 110, 111, 190 mediated interactions 96–7 place and media content 97–100 place and media environments 110–22 place and media grammar 100–10 print media 197 social isolation and 113 turned off at night 96 see also digital media ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ (Hass) 39 Méduse & Cie (Caillois) 248n. 55 Melville, Herman 11, 235 memory 39, 40, 42, 78, 182, 188 atmosphere and 133 childhood 76, 90n. 21 cultural landscapes and 52 firsthand 56 history and 53 indeterminacy of 91n. 24 place cells in brain and 184 as repository of place 76–7 self and memory of place 177–8, 201n. 3 smell sense and 131 topology and 205, 213 Memory of Place (Trigg) 192 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 21n. 12, 25, 131, 147, 155n. 68, 157, 175n. 25 on depth as space of eros 169–70 on ‘prose of the world’ 250n. 67 on reality as flesh 175n. 25 Mersenne, Marin 232, 247n. 44 Messiaen, Olivier 238–9

277

metaphysics 219, 225–9, 231 Meyerowitz, Joshua 197 Meyrowitz, Joshua 8 Michelangelo 149 migration 117, 127n. 23, 183–5, 190, 191–2 mirror neuron theory 137, 149–50 mobility 117, 190–1, 200 class differences and 117–18 freedom of 187–8 as para-location 115 technologies of 8 Moby Dick (Melville) 11 Modernism 129 modernity 4, 8, 162, 170 chora in early modernity 165–8 erosion of localities and 190 Moholoy-Nagy, Laszlo 129 Monet, Claude 138 Monge, Gaspard 173 mood 113, 133, 136, 137, 173–4 emotional content of art and 142 multi-sensory experience and 130–1 music and 141 stimmung 172, 173 tonal mood in paintings 40 unconscious grasp of 132, 145 Moores, Shaun 102, 125nn. 11–12, 126n. 19 Morrison, George 59 Moser, Edvard and Britt 178, 200n. 2 Most Difficult Area, The (White) 250n. 71 movies, socialization learned from 99 Mulon, M. 188 multi-centredness 191–2, 193, 196, 200 music 112, 114, 117, 122 atmosphere and 134, 141 emotive power of 141 Mersenne’s categories of 232, 247n. 44 music in movies/TV 109, 141 in writing 232 myth 164, 219, 221, 222–4, 231 nationalism 82 natural history 48n. 16, 51 nature 62, 162, 169, 227 anthropomorphized 223 as immanent force 168 materiality of 48n. 16 poetics as property of 240

278 Nazism 45 Nelson, Ricky 95 Neoplatonism 160, 161, 167, 174n. 2 neuroscience 177, 179 Nevada Test Site 36 New England 205–11 New Geography movement 60 New Hampshire 93, 95, 113, 120, 122, 209, 213 Newman, Barnett 138 newspapers 101–2, 107, 125n. 12 Newton, Isaac 161 New York City 94, 97, 109, 120 edge in urban geography of 24–35 gentrification in 61, 61 subway system 105 New Zealand 74, 75, 89n. 18 Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 172, 222, 225, 226, 241n. 2 Nöe, Alva 137, 158 nomads/nomadism 14, 17, 229, 246n. 39 non place (non-lieu) 21n. 15, 89n. 12, 190–1, 194 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 88n. 7, 181–2, 191 No Sense of Place (Meyrowitz) 126nn. 16, 19, 197 nostalgia 8, 19, 55, 221, 228 convalescence and 41, 42–3 as encounter with death 48n. 17 hope and loss in relation to 90n. 21 map-reading and 44 repatriation and 42 spatio-temporal estrangement and 88–9n. 11 Novum Organum (Bacon) 239 Nº 26A (Black and White) (Pollock) 232 objectivity 73 O’Brien, Flann 176n. 34 Odland, Bruce 130 O’Keefe, John 177 Öldorp, Andreas 130 Olive Kitteredge (Strout) 212–13 Olson, Charles 235 O’Mahony, Deirdre 55, 62 One and Many conundrum 33, 34 On Soul and Earth (Liotta) 183

Index ‘On the beginning of treatment’ (Freud) 39–40 ontology 17, 199 open systems 236–7 openworlding, poetics of 233–7 opposites, coincidence of (coincidentia oppositorum) 167, 168 Orientalism (Saïd) 245–6n. 36 orientation 81, 82, 133, 157, 173, 206–7 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The (Benjamin) 48n. 24 ‘Ornament and Crime’ (Loos) 172 ornithology 236, 239 orthographia (elevation) 159 others/otherness 16, 18, 167 edge and 26 exclusion of 17 nonhuman 4, 8 topos and 15 Ott, Brian 184 outsideness 127n. 12, 136 Paglen, Trevor 60 Palladio, Andrea 160 Pallasmaa, Juhani 6 Parmenides 33, 34, 167, 227 parochialism 82 particularity 86, 92n. 34, 188–9, 189, 199 Parts of Animals (Aristotle) 162 Paul, St 225 Paulinus of Nola 224 Payne Fund Studies (1929–32) 98–9 Paz, Octavio 170 Pelagius 225 Pelletier, Louise 171 perception 133, 135, 136, 157, 238 cultural concepts of space and 158 emotional 168 imaginary vivacity and 140 imagination and 145–6 peripheral 147–8, 150 unconscious 143 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 5, 6, 88n. 7 Perrault, Claude 170 Petite Maison, La (Bastide) 171 Phaedrus (Plato) 168 phantasies 39 phenomenology 6, 173 Phenomenology of Perception (Zevi) 157

Index Phillips, Adam 43, 44, 48n. 15 philosophy 5, 7, 166, 180, 229, 241 of atmospheres 137 of being 180 of embodied consciousness 157 Greek philosophy 158, 221 history of 2, 158, 226 human senses and 130 loss of Latin language and 239 poetry and 226, 228, 233 of sensations 172 photography 107 physics 35, 161, 165, 166, 250n. 67 Physics (Aristotle) 14, 160, 169, 234 pilgrimage 225 Pilgrims 98 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 170–1 place, autobiography of 185–7 as cultural landscape 52 ‘doubling’ of 114, 126n. 19 edge and 23–37 as eschaton of the entity 15 ‘everywhereness’ of 1 forgotten or overlooked 4 of ideas 2 image of 68, 88n. 8 immediacy of 79 immigrants and beginnings of 183–4, 184, 184–5, 185 limit and 13–20 maintenance of 193, 194 memory and 40, 177–8 naming of places 55–9, 188–9 pathologies of attachment to 182–3 phantasmagoric 189–91 place beyond place 198, 199, 200 ‘postcard’ idea of 68 recognition of 142–3 return to 213–19 sacralization of 224–5 shape of 32 space in relation to 2, 3–4 time in relation to 3 writing of 5–6 see also sense of place Place and Experience (Malpas) 92n. 34 place-and-limit 17 place cells, in brain 177–8, 184 ‘placedness’ 181, 182

279

placelessness 186 placemaking 183, 193–4, 194, 194–5, 195, 195–6 Places: Identity, Image and Reputation (Anholt) 194–5 Places of Public Memory (Dickenson, Blair, Ott, eds) 184 place-world 4, 36 Plato 33, 34, 159, 168, 234, 241 on chora 163–4 concept of space 161–2 Demiurge of 161, 168 metaphysics and 225, 226 Playtime (film, 1967) 139 poetics 5, 6, 7, 166, 233–7 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard) 233 poetry 5, 80, 166, 167, 250n. 67 metaphysics and 226–9 as property of nature 240 Romantic 172 Pollock, Jackson 138, 147, 232 Pont-Levis (Breton) 233 pornography 109, 118 Posidonius 160 positions 39 postmodernism 231 Pozzo, Andrea 169 Proclus 161 Production de l’espace, La (Lefebvre) 3 Project for Public Spaces 193, 194 proportions, theory of 170 Prose du Transsibérien (Cendrars) 250n. 67 Proust, Marcel 131 provincialism 82 psychoanalysis 39, 43, 45, 46, 90n. 20 psychology, ecological 137 Pueblo peoples 53–4, 56 Pythagoras 159 Queenstown, Tasmania 65, 66, 68 Rabelais, François 237, 249n. 64 radio 96, 108, 111, 117, 197, 238 Rauschenberg, Robert 232 recognition 42, 81, 142–3, 150, 213 re-embedding 195–6, 198, 200 refugees 192 regions 31 Reinhardt, Ad 232

280 religion 18, 95–6, 219, 221, 231 sacralization of place 224–5 transcendental language and 238 Relph, Edward 6, 7, 136 Renaissance, European 46, 112, 160, 161, 165, 230 Renan, Ernest 239 Renoir, Jean 138 representation 21n. 16, 88n. 7, 169 architectural 172 digital 158 isomorphic 25 primordiality outside of 232 Republic (Plato) 234 Reynolds, Henry 87n. 3 rhizomes, places connected by 196 Rilke, Rainer Maria 227, 229 Rimbaud, Arthur 221, 222, 241n. 1 Rings of Saturn, The (Sebald) 40–1, 45, 47 roads 34, 188 Rohde, David 101 Roman Empire 222–3, 240 rootedness 181–2, 190 Rothko, Mark 138 Roussel, Raymond 233 Ruskin, John 138, 172 Russia 235–6 Ryle, Gilbert 86 Saïd, Edward 245–6n. 36 Salt Lake City, Mormon trek site in 184 Sambursky, Sam 23 sameness 33 Santner, Eric L. 46, 48nn. 16–17 Sartre, Jean-Paul 147, 244n. 27 Scannell, Paddy 114, 126n. 19 Scarry, Elaine 140, 145 Schaeffer, R. Murray 130 Schiller, Johann von 231 Schmarzow, August 172–3, 176n. 41 Schmitz, Herman 137 Schneekloth, Lynda 193 Schneider, Ilona 66 (fig. cap.), 87n. 4 Schrader, Paul 109 science 2, 10n. 10, 160, 166, 168, 197, 226 Scorsese, Martin 109 Scotic movement 240 Scully, Sean 59–60 sea, connection to 85, 91n. 30 seasons 29, 83, 191, 208, 217

Index Sebald, W. G. 40–3, 44, 45, 46, 48n. 16 Segalen, Victor 226, 243n. 15 self, interiority of 77, 79 memory of place and 177–8 sense of place 65, 71–4, 81, 178–9 changing connections with geographical places 179–80, 180, 180–1 freedom of mobility and 187–8 openness and 198–9, 199, 199–200 passage of time and 191 sensory composition 5, 7, 207–8, 211–13, 218 sentience 5, 210 settings 39 ‘Seven Stops in Lower Manhattan’ (Lippard) 61 Sextus Empiricus 246n. 39 sexuality 146 shamans 231, 249n. 64 Sheen, Charlie 109 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 236 Shibley, Robert 193 shopping malls 69 sight, sense of see vision silhouette 38n. 9 Simplicius 23 Simpson, Otto von 174n. 2 singularity 5, 33, 86–7 definition of 65, 85 extraordinary contexts of 67–8, 87 genericized places and 69–70, 70, 70–1 interiority and 77–85 of ordinary places 68–9, 87 particularity distinct from 86, 92n. 34 sense of place and 65, 71–4, 81 sensory singularities 211–13 strong response to 65, 69 Sipress, David 98 sites 31, 39 situatedness 91n. 26 situation 2, 132, 134, 135, 136, 223, 229 atmosphere and 141 particularity and 188 Sixth Sense Reader, The (Howes, ed.) 130 Six White Paintings (Rauschenberg) 232 sky, edges and 27–8, 37nn. 4–5 interplay with earth 84–5

Index Skype 94, 113, 117 slow communities (Città Slow) 196 smartphones 94, 108, 112, 114 smell, sense of 131, 178, 208 Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See 59 Smudge (art group) 52 Snell, Bruno 161 Snyder, Gary 191 social media 113, 118, 122, 197 social sciences 2 social status, place and 115 Socrates 23, 249n. 63 Soja, Edward 245n. 31 Solnit, Rebecca 51 Songhees First Nation, in Canada 192 SoPlace (World Summit for Sense of Place) 179, 201n. 4 soundscapes 130, 207 Soviet Union 104–5 space 3–4, 5, 78, 129 architecture as fine art and 172–4 bounded 161 Cartesian 160, 170 cartographic 24 derived from place 5 erotic 161, 166 external space of action as masculinity 164 familiar space as place 124n. 1 Greek philosophers’ views of 158–60 homogeneous 17, 30 ideal geometric space 166 imagination and 145–6 interior space as femininity 164 isotropic 30, 157 liminal 31, 161 as making-space for places 20n. 2 matter and 169 as neutral environment 229–30 perspectival 146–8, 170 poetics of openworlding and 233–7 a priori 15, 18 public space 114, 116, 141 recognition of 142–3 spatial experience as form of exchange 135–6 spatial orientation in movies and television 102–3 spatial turn in social sciences and humanities 2

281

spatio-temporality 88–9n. 11, 196, 197, 198–9, 208 Spengler, Oswald 246n. 39 Spielberg, Steven 110 stabilitas loci (enduring spirit of place) 181, 191 Star Wars movies 104 state, the 17–20, 21nn. 13, 17 Stead, C. K. 74–6, 78–9, 80–1, 86–7, 89n. 19, 90n. 20 Stein, Gertrude 51 Steppe, The (Chekhov) 235–6 stereotype 68 Sternfeld, Joel 56 Stevens, Wallace 223–4, 232 Stewart, Kathleen 7 Stewart, Susan 8 stimmung (mood, atmosphere) 172, 173 Stoicism 160, 168 Stone, Oliver 109 Strout, Elizabeth 212 Study of History, A (Toynbee) 231, 246n. 39 subjectivity 73, 79, 166 sublime, the 67, 218 suburban sprawl 33, 35 sunyata studies 230 supermarkets 69, 114, 188 Surrealism 172, 173 surveillance 94, 119, 124n. 2, 208 Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary (Victoria, BC, Canada) 199 Swarm app 121 Symposium (Plato) 168, 249n. 63 synaesthesia 172 synchrony 123 ta eschata (extremities in immediate contact) 14 Tahualtapa (Hill of the Ravens) 56, 57, 58, 59 Tarkovsky, Andrei 138 Tasmania 65–6, 66, 67–8, 74, 91n. 27 ‘Australasian’ mode of place and 75 as island culture 83 sense of identity 66, 87n. 3 touristic presentation of landscapes in 66, 67, 87n. 4 taste sense, place and 208 Tati, Jacques 139

282 Tax Driver (movie) 109 Taylor, Stephanie 187 techné 164 technologies 21n. 17, 172 digital and mobile 117 teletechnologies 197–8, 200 telephones 34, 112, 116 lower classes’ access to 118 mobile 96, 116, 123, 197 Teletechnologies, Place and Community (Wilken) 197 television 89n. 13, 94, 95, 96, 98, 198, 238 children’s exposure to 100 community of shared tastes in 122 global spread of 111 Iraq war (2003) covered by 101 as location-eroding medium 123 ‘mean world view’ of heavy watchers 98 ‘presence’ and 115 spatial orientation in 102–3 Terminus (god) 14 terminus ad quem (‘end toward which’) 34–5, 36 terminus a quo (‘end from which’) 35–6 textbooks, as media 97 text messaging 118 theatre 139–40, 164 thermodynamics 236–7 ‘These Trees in Particular’ (Stewart) 8, 11–12 Thibault, Jean-Paul 137 thinking, emotions and 144 place and 1, 9n. 1 sensory composition and 218 ubiquity of place in 2 Third Policeman (O’Brien) 176n. 34 Thirdspace (Soja) 245n. 31 Thoreau, Henry David 11, 67, 222, 225, 235, 249n. 63 threshold (limen) 13, 16, 17, 25, 206 ‘throwntogetherness’ 198, 199 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 41, 241n. 2 Timaeus (Plato) 161, 162, 169, 170 time/temporality 3, 9n. 1, 44, 197, 208 filmic montage and 171 historical time 229 media grammar and 109

Index nostalgia and 88–9n. 11 past registered as absence 46 past selves and 40 sequence and chronology 39 space-time compression 196, 198–9 time zones 123 urban geography and 24 Tintern, Cistercian Abbey at 185, 190 Tomlinson, John 127n. 28 topoanalysis 9n. 4 topographies 6, 7, 10n. 13, 51, 117 ecosystem and 10n. 10 location-related particularities of 120 as writing of place 5 topology 7, 9n. 4, 10n. 13, 15, 90n. 20 of being 2, 226–8 delay in attention to 229 ‘heterotopology’ of Foucault 234 of languages 239 as remainder of memory 205, 213 topos 14–15, 165 Toronto 178, 181, 185, 186, 187, 198 touch sense, place and 93–4, 208 Tour, Georges de la 169 tourism 66, 67, 87n. 4, 194, 225 desire for authenticity and 62 insiders contrasted with 121 towers, high-rise 69 Toynbee, Arnold 231 tradition 54 ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ (Eliot) 140–1 Trakl, Georg 227, 228, 229, 244n. 28 transnationalism 191, 196 trauma 46, 47 travel, technologies of 179 ‘travelling cultures’ 117 ‘Treatise on rhythm, colour — and ornithology’ (Messiaen) 238–9 Treatise on Universal Harmony (Mersenne) 232, 247n. 44 Trier, Lars von 139 Trigg, Dylan 192 ‘Trout and the Mountain Stream, The’ (Aalto) 142 truth 12, 129, 164 aesthetics as religious truth 172 chora and 166 coincidence of opposites and 167 of image 223

Index mathematical 160 multiple truths 53 ‘setting-into-work’ of 167 Tuan, Yi-Fu 124n. 1, 181, 183 Turing, Alan 38n. 7 Turner, J. M. W. 138, 185 Turner, John 172 Twain, Mark 66, 87n. 2 uCIC app 121 Ultimate Paintings (Reinhardt) 232 United Nations 191, 192 United States 97, 98, 122, 125n. 12 Afghanistan war and 100–1 American literature 235 former slave dwellings in 61 immigrant communities in 193 Iraq war (2003) and 101 migration within 191 National Parks 62 official enemies of, in media portrayal 104–5 place names in Southwest 55 racial conflict in 108 uprooted children in 181 Unterwegs zur Sprache [‘On the way to real speech’] (Heidegger) 251n. 72 urban renewal 182 Urry, John 117 vegetation 54, 62 Vermeer, Jan 149 Vesely, Dalibor 169 Vico, Giambattista 170 video games 103, 107, 114 Vietnam War 104, 126n. 13 Vigo, Jean 138 vision (sight) 178, 208 peripheral 147, 154–5n. 67 as primary sense of modernity 130–1 Vitruvius 159, 160, 162 Waddell, Helen 240 Walden (Thoreau) 11, 67, 249n. 63

283

Wall Street (movie) 109–10 Walter, Eric 182 Wandering Scholars, The (Waddell) 240 Wang Shu 141 war 119, 182, 200 propaganda and 99 war movies and video games 103–4, 107 Ward, Tom 54 weather 117, 132, 191, 214, 217 as complex experience 133 interiority and 85 location-related particularities of 120 as topic of conversation 208 Weil, Simone 181 White, Kenneth 6–7, 9n. 4 Whitehead, Alfred North 231, 247n. 42 White on White (Malevitch) 232 White/Whitely (Ablinger) 232 Whitman, Walt 222, 235 Wigley, Mark 137 wilderness 35, 51, 66 Wilken, Rowan 191, 197 Williams, Raymond 54, 199 Wilson, Colin St John 144 Wineglass Bay, Tasmania 66, 67, 68 ‘Winter Visitors’ (Thoreau) 11 Winton, Tim 85, 87, 91n. 30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 222, 245n. 30, 249n. 65 Wordsworth, William 185 World on Edge, The (Casey) 10n. 9 Wright, Frank Lloyd 137, 141, 142, 149 writing 159, 232, 240 Yau, John 59 Yik Yak app 121 YouTube 121 Zajonc, Arthur 146 Zeisel, John 177 Zeki, Semir 149 Zero Degree of Writing, The (Barthes) 240 Zevi, Bruno 157 Zumthor, Peter 132, 136, 141, 149, 172