The Intelligence of Place

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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
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8867-8

PB: 978-1-3500-3633-8
ePDF: 978-1-4725-8869-2
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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 vi
Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction – The Intelligence of Place Jeff Malpas 1

1 Place and a Kind of Sentience – These Trees in Particular
Susan Stewart 11
2 Place and Limit Massimo Cacciari 13
3 Place and Edge Edward S. Casey 23
4 Place and Loss Jessica Dubow 39
5 Place and Histories – Writing Other People’s Memories
Lucy R. Lippard 51
6 Place and Singularity Jeff Malpas 65
7 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements Joshua Meyrowitz 93
8 Place and Atmosphere Juhani Pallasmaa 129
9 Place and Architectural Space Alberto Pérez-Gómez 157
10 Place and Connection Edward Relph 177
11 Place and Sensory Composition Kathleen Stewart 205
12 Place and Formulation Kenneth White 221

Bibliography 253
Index 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. 52
5.2 Tom Ward, cutting turf on Kilsallagh bog, July 2013,
photo: Deirdre O’Mahony. 54
5.3 Lewis deSoto, four works from the Tahualtapa Project 1983–8. 57
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. 58
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. 59
5.6 Neighbour Freddy Lujan directs the negotiation of his mobile
home to its site in the village of Chacon, NM. 60
5.7 Artists Used to Live Here, Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
from Su Friedrich’s 2012 film Gut Renovation. 61
6.1 Singularity in desolation: Queenstown in Western Tasmania;
photo by Ilona Schneider, by permission of the photographer. 66
6.2 Singularity as touristic destination: Wineglass Bay on
Tasmania’s East Coast; photo by Stephen Laird,
by permission of the photographer. 67
6.3 McDonalds restaurant in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi;
photo by Simon de Trey-White, by permission of the photographer. 70
10.1 Special Place, carved into a driftwood log on the beach at
Spanish Banks in Vancouver. 180
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.’ 184
10.3 Place beginnings in Flemingdon Park in Toronto. 185
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. 189
 List of Figures vii

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. 194
10.6 Place branding as placemaking at the University of
British Columbia. 195
10.7 An open sense of place acknowledged at Swan Lake
Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary in Victoria, British Columbia. 199
 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
 Contributors ix

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
x Contributors

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
xii Acknowledgements

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 self-
understanding, 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
2 Jeff Malpas

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’,
 Introduction 3

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
4 Jeff Malpas

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
 Introduction 5

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 Pérez-
Gómez’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
6 Jeff Malpas

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
 Introduction 7

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
8 Jeff Malpas

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 backward-
looking 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.
 Introduction 9

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.
10 Jeff Malpas

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.
12 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
14 Massimo Cacciari

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 diastema-
metaxy).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
 Place and Limit 15

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
16 Massimo Cacciari

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
 Place and Limit 17

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 non-
places,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
18 Massimo Cacciari

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
 Place and Limit 19

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
20 Massimo Cacciari

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’.
 Place and Limit 21

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
22 Massimo Cacciari

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.
 3

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 three-
dimensional 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
24 Edward S. Casey

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
 Place and Edge 25

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
26 Edward S. Casey

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
 Place and Edge 27

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 Merleau-
Ponty 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
28 Edward S. Casey

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
 Place and Edge 29

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
30 Edward S. Casey

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
 Place and Edge 31

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
32 Edward S. Casey

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
 Place and Edge 33

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.
34 Edward S. Casey

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
 Place and Edge 35

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.
36 Edward S. Casey

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 non-
growth 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
 Place and Edge 37

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 bodily-
social 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:
38 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.
7 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.
8 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.
9 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).
10 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.
11 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).
12 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
40 Jessica Dubow

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
 Place and Loss 41

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?
42 Jessica Dubow

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
 Place and Loss 43

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.
44 Jessica Dubow

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.
 Place and Loss 45

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
46 Jessica Dubow

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 being-
in-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
 Place and Loss 47

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.
48 Jessica Dubow

11 Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 168.

12 Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 169.
13 Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 173.
14 Phillips, ‘Negative Capabilities’, p. 169.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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 ‘natural-
historical’ 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.
18 Sebald, Rings of Saturn, p. 3.
19 Franz Kafka, Diaries, trans. Joseph Kresh, Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schoken Books, 1964), p. 330.
20 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 82.
21 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.
22 Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, p. 38.
23 Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, p. 22.
24 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
 Place and Loss 49

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.
 5

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,
52 Lucy R. Lippard

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.
 Place and Histories 53

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
54 Lucy R. Lippard

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.
 Place and Histories 55

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 top-
down 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
56 Lucy R. Lippard

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
 Place and Histories 57

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 photo-
graph, 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
58 Lucy R. Lippard

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
 Place and Histories 59

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’
60 Lucy R. Lippard

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.
 Place and Histories 61

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.
62 Lucy R. Lippard

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.
 Place and Histories 63

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.
 6

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).
66 Jeff Malpas

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 desola-
tion, 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
 Place and Singularity 67

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
68 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 69

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
70 Jeff Malpas

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.
 Place and Singularity 71

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
72 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 73

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
74 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 75

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
76 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 77

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.
78 Jeff Malpas

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-too-
common 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
 Place and Singularity 79

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
80 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 81

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.
82 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 83

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.
84 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 85

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.
86 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 87

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.
88 Jeff Malpas

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
 Place and Singularity 89

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.
12 Many of these are the very sorts of places Marc Augé has designated as ‘non-
places’ – 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.
13 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).
14 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.
15 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.
16 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).
17 See Place and Experience, esp. pp. 29–43.
18 Kaiwaka is a small farming town in Northland, New Zealand, located almost 100
kilometres from Auckland.
19 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.
90 Jeff Malpas

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:
 Place and Singularity 91

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.
24 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.
25 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.
26 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.
27 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.
28 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.
29 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.
30 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.
31 Tim Winton, Land’s Edge, text by Tim Winton, photographs by Trish Ainslie and
Roger Garwood (Sydney: Macmillan, 1993), p. 48.
92 Jeff Malpas

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
94 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 95

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 rock-
band 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
96 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 97

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
98 Joshua Meyrowitz

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 place-
knowledge. 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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 99

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 nuclear-
family 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
100 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 101

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
102 Joshua Meyrowitz

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,
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 103

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
104 Joshua Meyrowitz

‘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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 105

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 so-
called ‘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.
106 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 107

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
108 Joshua Meyrowitz

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.
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 109

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 bumper-
level 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
110 Joshua Meyrowitz

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.
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 111

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
112 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 113

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 ‘re-
positioning’ 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 in-
the-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
114 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 115

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 once-
assumed 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 ‘flow-
cation’), 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
116 Joshua Meyrowitz

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, co-
workers, 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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 117

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 high-
speed 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
118 Joshua Meyrowitz

classes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, those who previously had no access to
telephones. Mobile banking is reshaping economies on the micro- and macro-
level (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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 119

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 spatio-
temporal 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 as-
yet undefined, audiences in not-yet determined settings.
120 Joshua Meyrowitz

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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 121

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
122 Joshua Meyrowitz

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 locality-
sharing 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.
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 123

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
124 Joshua Meyrowitz

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?’

* * *
© 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
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 125

Systems’, in Media Cultures, ed. William Uricchio and Susanne Kinnebrock

(Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006), pp. 153–186.
6 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.
7 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-syria-
air-war-heats-afghanistan-amid-drawdown/to9wunctlsgw8LV1dJ0XtL/story.html.
Accessed 25 January 2015.
8 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.
9 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.
10 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/iraq-
violence/. 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.
11 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’.
12 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.
126 Joshua Meyrowitz

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).
 Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements 127

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.
128 Joshua Meyrowitz

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).
 8

Place and Atmosphere

Juhani Pallasmaa

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
130 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 131

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
132 Juhani Pallasmaa

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 ‘quasi-
places’, 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.
 Place and Atmosphere 133

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.
134 Juhani Pallasmaa

In addition to environmental atmospheres, there are cultural, social, work-

place, 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 non-
material 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
 Place and Atmosphere 135

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
136 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 137

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
138 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 139

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
140 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 141

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
142 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 143

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
144 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 145

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
146 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 147

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
148 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 149

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
150 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 151

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 bio-
historical 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).
152 Juhani Pallasmaa

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.
 Place and Atmosphere 153

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).
154 Juhani Pallasmaa

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
 Place and Atmosphere 155

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).
68 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.
69 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 142.
70 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 22–36.
71 Zeki, Inner Vision, p. 142.
72 Michael Arbib, ‘(Why) Should Architects Care about Neuroscience?’, Architecture
and Neuroscience, (Helsinki: Tapio Wirkkala – Rut Bryk Foundation, 2013),
pp. 42–76.
73 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 40.
74 McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 47.
75 McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 49.
76 McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 60.
77 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
158 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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
 Place and Architectural Space 159

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 first-
century 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
160 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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
 Place and Architectural Space 161

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
162 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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
 Place and Architectural Space 163

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.
164 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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
 Place and Architectural Space 165

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
166 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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,
 Place and Architectural Space 167

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 late-
modernity. His argument against geocentrism, imagining the earth occupying a
168 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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-into-
work’ 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
 Place and Architectural Space 169

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
170 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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 seventeenth-
century 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.
 Place and Architectural Space 171

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
172 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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
 Place and Architectural Space 173

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 twentieth-
century 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
174 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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.
 Place and Architectural Space 175

12 Homer, Iliad, 16.68 (Boston: Harvard University Press/Loeb, 1914).

13 Homer, Iliad, 23.521.
14 Aristotle, Physics 193a, pp. 34–35.
15 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.
16 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.
17 Plato, Timaeus 49, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965), p. 67.
18 Timaeus, pp. 50–51. My emphasis.
19 Timaeus, pp. 51–52.
20 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1965), Vol. 1,
p. 124.
21 John Dee, The Mathematical Praeface to the Elements of Euclid (London: John Day,
1570).
22 See, for example, Alexandre Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement (London:
Chapman and Hall), chapters 1–4.
23 Cited by Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 372.
24 Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity And Essays on Magic (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87.
25 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.
26 Kuriyama, Expressiveness, pp. 126–127.
27 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.
28 Vesely, ‘Architectonics’, p. 30.
29 Aristotle, Physics, IV, 4, 212a, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1996), pp. 87–88.
30 See Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective
Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 330–340.
31 Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des Cinq Espèces de Colonnes (Paris: J.-B.
Coignard, 1683).
32 Quoted by George Steiner, After Babel (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press,
1989), p. 128.
176 Alberto Pérez-Gómez

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.
 10

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, memory-
filled, 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
178 Edward Relph

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
 Place and Connection 179

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
180 Edward Relph

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.
 Place and Connection 181

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 pre-
eminent 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
182 Edward Relph

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
 Place and Connection 183

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,
184 Edward Relph

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.’
 Place and Connection 185

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
186 Edward Relph

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
 Place and Connection 187

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?
188 Edward Relph

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.
 Place and Connection 189

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
190 Edward Relph

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
 Place and Connection 191

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 short-
cuts 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.
192 Edward Relph

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
 Place and Connection 193

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
194 Edward Relph

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,
 Place and Connection 195

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 ‘re-
embedding’ 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
196 Edward Relph

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
 Place and Connection 197

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
198 Edward Relph

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 non-
place, 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
 Place and Connection 199

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.
200 Edward Relph

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.
 Place and Connection 201

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.
3 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.
4 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/
5 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.
6 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2006), p. 28.
7 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 53.
8 Robert Coles, Uprooted Children (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 120–121.
9 Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 48–49.
10 Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth: a Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 187.
11 Andrew Benjamin, Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and
the Ancient Greeks (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 4.
12 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture
(New York: Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 11–18.
13 Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), p. xii.
14 Eric Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 2–3.
15 Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, pp. 47–48.
16 Robert Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of Place (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1994).
17 Yi-Fu Tuan and Martha Strawn, Religion: From Place to Placelessness (Chicago, IL:
The Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2010), p. 30.
18 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).
19 Marc Fried, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities of Place’, Journal of Environmental
Psychology, 20 (2000): 202–203.
20 Elena Liotta, On Soul and Earth: The Psychic Value of Place (London: Routledge,
2009), p. 3.
202 Edward Relph

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.
 Place and Connection 203

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.
204 Edward Relph

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
206 Kathleen Stewart

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
 Place and Sensory Composition 207

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, half-
willingly 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
208 Kathleen Stewart

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 open-
mouthed 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
 Place and Sensory Composition 209

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
210 Kathleen Stewart

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
 Place and Sensory Composition 211

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-bodies-
affects. 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-and-
whiteness 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
212 Kathleen Stewart

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
 Place and Sensory Composition 213

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
214 Kathleen Stewart

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,
 Place and Sensory Composition 215

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 still-
raw 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
216 Kathleen Stewart

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
 Place and Sensory Composition 217

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
218 Kathleen Stewart

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-in-
a-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
 Place and Sensory Composition 219

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
222 Kenneth White

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
 Place and Formulation 223

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
224 Kenneth White

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
 Place and Formulation 225

a centralized, concentrational way. The loc antedated the tré and plou of later
ecclesiastic parishes. And the accent was on isolation, on ‘deserts’, especially sea-
deserts (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,
226 Kenneth White

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,
 Place and Formulation 227

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, ‘half-
formulated 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
228 Kenneth White

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, over-
interpreting. 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
 Place and Formulation 229

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 long-
embedded 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
230 Kenneth White

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 Far-
Eastern 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
 Place and Formulation 231

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
232 Kenneth White

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 universe-
multiverse.
And here we’re getting on to the basic ground and into the ground-tone of
geopoetics.
 Place and Formulation 233

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
234 Kenneth White

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
 Place and Formulation 235

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
236 Kenneth White

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 The presence in it of many white phenomena: crashing waves, the wings of
seabirds, shells and quartz, birch bark.
l 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’.
l The fact that the place of greatest concentration in traditional Celtic culture
was called ‘the white land’: finn mag in Gaelic, gwenved in Brythonic.
l 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’.
l It was an uncoded place.
l 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
 Place and Formulation 237

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
238 Kenneth White

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
 Place and Formulation 239

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
240 Kenneth White

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.
 Place and Formulation 241

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).
242 Kenneth White

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 space-
place.
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).
 Place and Formulation 243

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 cinquante-
huit 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
244 Kenneth White

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 forty-
page 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
 Place and Formulation 245

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.
29 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.
30 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.
31 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).
32 In his book La présence et l’absence (Paris: Casterman, 1980).
33 In La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 2000 [1974]).
34 Whether in L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), or Les Mots et les Choses
(Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
35 Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986).
36 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,
246 Kenneth White

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 post-
romantic ‘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.
 Place and Formulation 247

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
248 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).
56 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.
57 The edition I use is a bilingual Russian-French edition – La Steppe (Paris: Aubier-
Flammarion, 1974). The letter I refer to is contained in the Introduction.
58 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).
59 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.
60 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).
61 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
 Place and Formulation 249

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’.
62 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).
63 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.
64 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.
65 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
250 Kenneth White

(Paris: Gallimard, 1969); and of course Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache

(Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959), Gesamtausgabe, Vol 12.
66 See Kenneth White, The Cold Wind of Dawn (London, Jonathan Cape, 1966).
67 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 Merleau-
Ponty 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.
68 Helen Waddel, The Wandering Scholars. See in particular the chapter The Ordo
vagorum’.
69 Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1953).
70 Roger Caillois, Esthétique généralisée (Paris, Gallimard, 1962); Le Champ des signes
(Paris, Hermann, 1978).
71 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 ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ context and went, as Zarathustra said, into ‘the great solitude’, from which I
emerged, laterally and with latitude, only recently.
72 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
 Place and Formulation 251

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 ‘Arab street’ in Western media 105

Archeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) 234
Aalto, Alvar 141, 142, 149 Archipelagus, Der (Hölderlin) 241n. 3
Ablinger, Peter 232 architecture 5, 51, 69, 88n. 10, 95, 117, 143
‘About Losing and Being Lost’ as art of space 172–4
(A. Freud) 48n. 15 atmosphere and 131–5, 138, 141, 149, 151
abstraction 15, 16, 68, 160, 188, 212 in classical Greece 158, 159
architectural 149 communication architecture 111
left brain hemisphere and 150 as erotic experience 171
Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos 119 location-related particularities of 120
activity, place and 115 mirror neuron theory 149
ad-finis 16 Modernist 129
ad-finitas 13 mood and multi-sensory experience
Adventure of Ideas (Whitehead) 231–2 of 130–1
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The (TV sense of reality and 145
series, 1952–66) 95 space concepts of 157, 160
‘Aesthetic Education of Humanity, The’ as space for dance 164–5
(Schiller) 231 Arendt, Hannah 9n. 1
aesthetics 35, 166, 172, 231–2, 248n. 59 Aristotelianism 2
Afghanistan war 100–1 Aristotle 2, 5, 162, 165, 226, 234
‘After the Wedding’ (Stead) 74–6, 78, 79, ‘chain of Being’ of 160
87, 90nn. 20–1 on nature as immanent force 168
earth–sky interaction and 84 nous poïetikos of 235
interiorized place and 83 on place 14, 169
poetic images and language of 80–1 on somewhereness of existent things 4
agency 88–9n. 11, 210, 214, 216 art 5, 129, 138, 147, 197
airports 69, 123, 190 chora and 165, 167, 168
A la limite du pays fertile (Boulez) 232 erotic distance in artistic meaning 171
Albers, Joseph 138 ‘understanding’ of artistic images 148–50
allegory 48–9n. 24 whiteness as start from zero 232, 248n. 59
Alzheimer’s disease 177, 178, 200 Artaud, Antonin 233, 237
American Childhood, An (Dillard) 205 Ash Wednesday Supper (Bruno) 167
Anaxagoras 167 Asplund, Gunnar 141, 149
Anaximander 158–9 asylum seekers 192
Anholt, Simon 194–5 atmosphere 5, 131–5, 172, 218
animals 59, 165, 178, 231 in the arts 138, 140–2
Anishnaabe people 59 atmospheric intelligence 150
anthropology 5, 9n. 8, 117, 188, 240 biological ground of atmospheric
Antonioni, Michelangelo 138 experience 136–37 ecological
apeiron (the un-limited) 13, 20n. 2, 159 perspective and 151
Appadurai, Arjun 190 imagination and 138–40
270 Index

Au-delà du structuralisme (Lefebvre) 231 Blair, Carole 184

Augé, Marc 21n. 15, 89n. 12, 190 Bloch, Ernst 90n. 21
Augustine, St 225 Blumer, Herbert 98
Augustus Caesar 223 Bodmer, Frederick 239
Australia, body, the 53, 96, 169, 219
as ‘mainland’ 83, 91n. 27 boundary and 23
western coast connection to the sea 85, distortion of sexuality and 146, 154n. 64
91n. 30 experience of place-dweller and 25
Austro-Hungarian empire 97 ‘flesh of the world’ 147, 155n. 68
authenticity 62, 78 limit of 16
Authentic Syracuse (Faga) 62 lived body 17, 37n. 3
automobile culture 95, 207 matter and 167
axonometry 173 topologies of 90n. 20
Boehme, Jakob 237, 249n. 64
Bachelard, Gaston 146, 233 Böhme, Gernot 137
Bacon, Francis 239 Book of Odes (Confucian classic) 231
Barad, Karen 212 borders 31–2
Barbaro, Daniele 160 Borrow, George 239
Baroque painting and architecture Boston Marathon bombing, media
168, 169 coverage of 101, 125n. 10
Barragan, Luis 141 Boulez, Pierre 232
barriers 19 boundaries 10nn. 9–10, 31–2, 37, 122, 183
Barthes, Roland 240, 241 of colours in paintings 138
Bastide, Jean-François de 171 locking of doors and windows 96
Baudelaire, Charles 43, 247n. 50 permeable 111–12, 120
Baudrillard, Jean 245n. 30 of Spanish land grants in New
Bauhaus 129 Mexico 52, 58
Bauman, Zygmunt 117 boundedness 84, 85, 199
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 166 Bourdieu, Pierre 37n. 3
beauty 67, 174 brain,
Becoming 163, 164, 165, 166 hemispheres of 150
Being 164, 165, 166, 225–6 memory of place and 177–8
Being and Time (Heidegger) 228 Brancusi, Constantin 141
being-in-a-world 218 branding, of places 194–5, 195, 203n. 48
being-in-place 4, 181 Breillat, Catherine 139
being-limit 16, 17 Breton, André 233
Belli, Sylvio 160 Brook, Peter 139–40
belonging 75, 157, 192, 199, 212 Brooks, Drex 56
edges and 34–7 Bruno, Giordano 20, 166–8
‘empathic insideness’ and 136 built environment 61, 99, 158, 191
peripheral perception and 148 see also architecture
Benjamin, Andrew 181
Benjamin, Walter 43, 47, 48n. 16, Cacciari, Massimo 3, 42
48–9n. 24 Cage, John 232
Bernstein, Bruce 59 Cahuilla people 56
Bewitched (TV series, 1964–72) 96 Caillois, Roger 240, 248n. 55
biology 236–7, 250n. 67 Call me Ishmael (Olson) 235
bio-psychology 137 cameras, placement and movement
birds 30, 214–15, 236 of 103–6, 109, 110
‘black sites,’ of NSA/CIA 60 capitalism 55, 70
 Index 271

Carceri [The Prisons] (Piranesi) 170, 171, cognition 41, 137, 142, 143, 144, 157
176n. 34 Cold War 105
carpet, as nomadic dwelling-place 14, Cold Wind of Dawn, The (White) 250n. 71
21n. 4 Coles, Robert 181
Carroll, Lewis 172, 176n. 34 Comanche people 58
Carson, Anne 161 communications, electronic 179, 189, 196,
cartography 24–5, 51 197
Casey, Ed 2, 6, 10n. 9, 180, 181, 195 computers 38n. 7, 94
on philosophy of place 7 Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism, The
on place-world 4 (Sambursky) 23
Cause, Principle and Unity (Bruno) 166 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 172
Cendrars, Blaise 250n. 67 con-finis 16, 17
Centre for Architecture and the Built connection 5
Environment (CABE) 194 connectivity, technologies of 8
Cézanne, Paul 147 consciousness, embodied 157,
Champs des signes, Le [‘The field of signs’] 158, 165–6
(Caillois) 240 conservatism 82
chaos 163–4 Copernicus, Nicolaus 167
Chekhov, Anton 235 Cops (TV series) 103
children, Le Corbusier 129–30
media exposure of 99–100 Corstorphine, in Edinburgh 188
nature and place as sensory experience cosmopolitanisms 17, 119
for 184, 186 country 2, 4, 53
Chirico, Giorgio de 176n. 34 Cowichan Bay (Vancouver Island) 196
chora, Platonic 20n. 2, 159, 160, 162–3, Crowell, Steve 48n. 17
169, 175n. 25 culture 54, 96, 113, 164, 184, 230, 242n. 7
dance (choreography) and 164–5 agriculture and 62
mimesis and 163–4 focal point of 231
‘mystery of language’ and 170 history written by 53
space as 173 location-related particularities of 120
as ‘thick limit’ 161 in space 233
topos distinct from 162, 165 cum-finis 13, 19
transformed in early modernity 165–8
‘Christian’ (‘Cross & Bible’) doors 95–6 Daedalus 159
Christianity 224–5, 227–8, 229, 231 Daidolos (journal) 137
cities 111, 114, 187, 188 dance 164–5
destroyed in war 46 Danielewski, Mark 176n. 34
‘enemy’ 109 Da-sein (Being-here) 15
global 196 dating websites 121, 123–4
global reach of 62 Davidson, Donald 89n. 15
Greek polis 161, 181 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
liminal spaces in 31 (Gibbon) 246n. 39
megacities 179 Decline of the West (Spengler) 246n. 39
mill cities of New England 209 deconstruction 229
place branding of 194 Dee, John 165
placemaking and 193 Deleuze, Gilles 230, 233
class differences 117–18, 209 De l’origine du langage (Renan) 239
Clifford, James 117 DeNiro, Robert 109
‘cloud’ storage 128n. 31 depth, dimension of 170
Cobb, Edith 184 depth of field, in lens focus 106
272 Index

Deroy, L. 188 of objects and places 23

Derrida, Jacques 229 open-textured 30
Descartes, René 169, 175n. 25, 226, 228, 234 out-going character of 7
‘Des espaces autres’ (Foucault) 3 proliferation or variety of 30, 38n. 7
desire 43, 44, 164, 168, 169, 218 as shared end (fine comune) with other 15
desolation, singularity in 66, 67 sharing of 28
de Soto, Lewis 56, 57 in urban geography of New York 24–35,
deterritorialization 127n. 28 37n. 5
Deveron Arts 60 Egypt, papyrus as medium for
Dewey, John 132, 134, 135, 136 writing 159
Dexter (TV series) 107 Ehrenzweig, Anton 138, 154–5n. 67
diachrony 44 Einstein, Albert 237
diasporas 117, 127n. 23, 191 Eisenstein, Sergei 171
Dickenson, Greg 184 El Cerrito Solo (Tahualtapa Project)
difference 33 (de Soto) 56, 57, 58, 59
digital media 100, 111, 112–13, 114, 118 Elements (Euclid) 159
boundaries of location and 119 Eliot, T. S. 140–1
‘friends’ and 113, 115, 120 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 52
local space reimagined by 121 emotions 125n. 10, 130, 168, 172, 222
Dillard, Annie 205, 213 artworks and 149
Diotropic (Descartes) 169 emotive power of music 141
Direct Provision system, in Ireland 192 film and 139
disconnection 192 history and 53
‘disembedding’ 190, 195 right brain hemisphere and 150
disorientation 123 unconscious 143, 144
Dogville (film, 2003) 139 Empedocles 158
Donne, John 250n. 67 enclosure 84
Doughty, Charles 250n. 67 English language 2–3, 9n. 8, 65
Douglas, Michael 109 ‘archaization’ of 250n. 67
dreams 39, 90n. 21, 167, 212 German terms translated into 173,
Dreyfus, Hubert 174 244n. 28
dualism 162, 169, 175n. 25 Enlightenment, European 46, 112, 166
Dubow, Jessica 8 epistemology 175n. 25
Duino Elegies (Rilke) 227, 243n. 18 Erinnerung (Heideggerian concept) 226,
Duns Scotus, John 225 228
eros 168, 170
earth 4, 84–5, 250n. 67 eschaton/eschata 14–16, 18, 19
Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, The essentialism 240–1
(Cobb) 184 Esthétique généralisée [‘Generalised
ecosystems 10n. 10, 55 aesthetics’] (Caillois) 240
edges 5, 10n. 9, 210, 219 E.T. The Extraterrestrial (movie) 110
definitions of 23, 37n. 1 ethnic cleansing 183
edge/edge relation 28 ethnicities, in New England 209
edge-knowledge 222 Etruscan language 240
experience of 25 Euclid 159–60
forms of belonging to places 34–6 Europe 94, 172, 187
instrumental use of 34 architecture in 157, 174n. 2, 190
interactive 29 Cold War in 105
modulation of 26 European conquerors of Americas 56, 98
of natural landscapes 26 as expanding container 20
 Index 273

identity and 20 form 168, 211

landscape painting in 138 architectural 129, 130
limit and 19, 22n. 18 matter and 160, 162
nomads in 235 formula/formulation 5, 221, 222, 226,
‘spiritual history’ of 158 241n. 1
television in 101 Foucault, Michel 3, 229, 230, 233,
events, edges of 23 245nn. 29, 31
existence 1, 8, 34 ‘heterotopology’ of 234
existentialism 226, 241 on history and discontinuity 53
experience 1, 76, 133, 188 Foursquare app 121
edges and 25, 26, 28 freedom, mobility and 187–8
of environment 184 French language 3, 9n. 8
gap between word and experience 164 Freud, Anna 48n. 15
geography dissociated from 197 Freud, Sigmund 39, 46, 143
journalism of 100–1 Fried, Marc 183
limitations of 170 Friedrich, Su 62
location-based 121 friends/friendship 107, 114, 116
media technologies and 96, 98, 114, experience and 134
115, 119 ‘friends’ in digital media 113, 115, 120
multi-sensory 130–1, 142 geographies of 53
physically bounded 123 knowing people as form of agency 216
of self 135 migration and 117
senses and 172 technologies of mobility and 118
singularity and 67, 68, 69 Fullilove, Mindy 192
space of lived experience 167
spatial 135–6, 140, 158–9 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 89n. 15
unifying character of 134 Galicia, in Austro-Hungarian
Experience of Place, The (Hiss) 131, 182 empire 97
Experience of Thought, The Galileo Galilei 166, 167, 228, 234
(Heidegger) 228 Galisteo (New Mexico), village of 52,
exteriority 84, 85, 87 52–4, 58
Eyes on the Prize (TV documentary Galli Bibiena 170, 171
series) 108 gardens 34, 211
Geertz, Clifford 188
Faga, Benjamin 62 Geminus 160–1
fast food industry 70 General Account of Bonding, A [De Vinculis
Fate of Place, The (Casey) 195 in genere] (Bruno) 167
Father Knows Best (TV series, Génie de l’Architecture, Le (Le Camus de
1954–1960) 95 Mezières) 171
Febvre, Lucien 131 genius loci (spirit of place) 65, 78, 88n. 7,
Fellini, Federico 138 134, 181, 198, 222
Ficino, Marsilio 167 decline of 223
films 138–9 stages in destiny of 224
first-personal, the 6 geography 5, 60, 191, 222
Flemingdon Park (Toronto) 185 changing connections with geographical
flesh, reality as 168, 175n. 25 places 179–81
Fonda, Jane, in North Vietnam 104, 126n. 13 communication geography 111
food 62, 134 experience dissociated from 197
fast food industry 70 of nowhere in particular 189
rural areas as sites of food production 55 geology 222, 236
274 Index

geometry 131, 141, 157, 170–1, 238 Heaney, Seamus 8, 140

Euclidean 159–60 Heap of Birds, Edgar 51
harmony as cosmic geometry 173 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 226, 231
non-euclidean pangeometry 237 Heidegger, Martin 9n. 8, 34, 44, 89n. 15,
res extensa and 169 157, 199, 251n. 72
topos (place) and 165 Black Forest as pilgrimage site for 225
writing and 159 on convalescence and nostalgia 41
geopoetics 7, 9n. 4, 231, 232, 233, 235 on errancy and thinking 229,
Gerbner, George 98 243–4n. 27
German language 9n. 8 on journey of the Stranger 229,
Gibbon, Edward 246n. 39 244–5n. 28
Giddens, Anthony 190, 195, 196 place in philosophy of being 180
globalism 4, 234 on poets and topology of being 226–8,
globalization 8, 17, 21n. 14, 22n. 20, 196 243n. 14
everyday life permeated by 190 on rootedness 181, 182, 190
history of modern state and 18 on ‘setting-into-work’ of truth 168
interiority of place and 83 on space and the human condition 135
political forms of 21n. 16 on topology 2, 9n. 4
resistance of place to 70–1 on ‘the Vertical’ 27
global positioning systems (GPS) 121, Heraclitus 237
123, 158 Hermes/Mercury (god) 38n. 12, 164
glossolalia 237 Heroic Frenzies, The (Bruno) 168
gnomon 159 Hesiod 161
Godfather, The (movie series) 107 Hestia (goddess) 164
Gogol, Nikolai 235 Hiss, Tony 131, 182
Google Earth 121 history 5, 25, 33, 42
Gorki, Maxim 235 acceleration of 190
Gothic Cathedral, The (Simpson) 174n. 2 decontextualization of 55
Great Depression era, photographs from 107 discontinuity in being and 53
Greece, classical 181 landscape and 51
Greek philosophy 158–9, 221 natural history in relation to 51
grid cells, in brain 177, 178 Nazi Holocaust as ‘absolute event of ’ 45
Griffero, Tonino 137 as performance art 60
Gropius, Walter 129 specificity of place and 54
Guattari, Félix 218 time concealed by 43
Guillaume, Gustave 241, 250n. 72 Hölderlin, Friedrich 221–2, 227, 229,
Gut Renovation (Su Friedrich film, 241n. 3, 242n. 4, 250n. 67
2012) 61, 62 Holocaust 45–6, 183
home 3, 4, 12, 84, 97, 213, 234
habitat 234 ancestral 54
habits 211 childhood home 42, 90n. 21
habitus 37n. 3 ethnic identity and 98
Hallin, Daniel 100 experience of getting lost and 44
Hampton, Henry 108 homelessness 42, 44, 190, 192
Harrison, Robert Pogue 135 home-office space 95, 99
Harvey, David 60, 196, 198–9 as ‘little country’ 53
Hasparren (France), town of 222 media technologies and 104, 111, 114,
Hass, Robert 39 115, 117, 122–4, 127n. 23
Hasse, Jürgen 137 memories and 52
Hayden, Dolores 193 migration and 118
health clinics 190 mobile homes 60
 Index 275

in New England 93, 95 In lieblicher Blaüe [In the Lovely Blueness]

nostalgia and 41, 88–9n. 11 (Hölderlin) 242n. 4
protected boundaries of 96 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 131
‘rootedness’ and 181, 182 insideness 127n. 12, 131–2, 136
second homes in countryside 186 intelligence of place 1, 4, 8
singularity and 68 intentional communities 196
walls of 59 intentionality 146
war and 100, 101, 105 interiority 77–84, 85, 87, 147
women’s relation to 187 Internet 62, 94, 96, 102, 111, 117, 200
Hommage to the Square paintings dissociation of geography from
(Albers) 138 experience and 197
Horizon (Morrison) 59 everyday life permeated by 190
horizons 54, 59–60, 62, 85, 208 as location-eroding medium 123
Hough, Michael 178 ‘Into the White World’ [Approches du
House of Leaves (Danielewski) 176n. 34 monde blanc] (White) 236, 248n. 58
Hrabal, Bohumil 145 Introduction to Metaphysics
Hugo, Victor 225 (Heidegger) 226
humanism 230, 240 Iran 109
humanities 2 Iraq, media coverage of war in 101,
Humboldt, Wlhelm von 251n. 72 125n. 10
Hume, David 2, 247n. 55 Irish famine 59
humidity 130, 133 island cultures 82–3, 91n. 27, 217–18
Husserl, Edmund 21n. 12, 25, 157,
158, 173 Jackson, J. B. 51, 187–8
Jakobson, Roman 247n. 50
Iamblichus 23 James, Henry 223
ichnographia (plan) 159 Jespersen, Otto 239
ideations 39 Jewish Museum, in Berlin 176n. 34
identity 20, 33 Johnson, Mark 137, 144
diminished experimentation with 119
edges and 34 Kafka, Franz 45
Jewish-American 98 Kant, Immanuel 2, 10n. 9, 226
language and 240 Keller, Helen 94
memory and 78 Kern, Stephen 197
place branding and 194 kitsch 68, 132
singularity and 66 Klee, Paul 131, 232
idiōtēs (private individual) 17, 21n. 13 Kleinman, Sharon 197
Iliad (Homeric epic) 161 Kogl, Alexandra 196
imaginary, the 230 Korea, North 105, 109
imagination 133, 138–40, 144, 145–6, Korzybski, Alfred 251n. 72
182, 232 Kraus, Karl 249n. 65
imagined communities 122 Kreutzer, Conradin 181
immediacy 69, 74, 79, 80, 92n. 34 Kuma, Kengo 141, 149
imperialism 22n. 20
In Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quatturo labyrinth 43
Priores Commentaria 23 ‘Labyrinth, The’ (Phillips) 43
indigenous cultures 4, 55–6, 98 land 2, 4
mapping/counter-mapping by 118, ‘Landline’ series (Scully) 59–60
127n. 27 landscapes 39–40, 41, 55, 178
response to displacement 192 acoustic (soundscapes) 130
industrialization 112 aesthetic management of 62
276 Index

changing perceptions of 56 definitions and etymology of 13–14, 20n. 1

cultural landscapes 51–2 as transgression 16–17
as history made visible 51 Ling, Rich 116
modern art 147 Liotta, Elena 183, 192
Native American landscape paintings 59 Lippard, Lucy 7–8, 191
sense of freedom and 187 literature 5, 140–1, 235, 239, 240
sense of place and 179 Lithuania 97
as sensory compositions 213 Lobachevski, Nikolai 237
touristic presentation of 66, 67, 87n. 4 locale 2, 109
Lang, James 62 localisms 17
language 2, 15, 80, 96, 164, 250n. 67 locality 40, 119, 190
‘bird language’ 237, 249n. 64 location 1, 39, 118, 189
chora as ‘mystery of language’ 170 digital changes in experience of 116
grammar of the cosmos and 237 experience and 120
as ‘house of Being’ 228, 251n. 72 media and 97–8, 110
interiority and 81 mobility as para-location 115
left brain hemisphere and 150 relocation 120, 124
as orientation 81, 82 Locus Solus (Roussel) 233
sense of place and 72 Lodoli, Carlo 170
singularity of place and 80, 82 Loom of Language, The (Bodmer) 239
spread of languages 236 Loos, Adolf 172
tone of 134 loss 5, 48, 54
topographic character of 2 Lovejoy, Annie 60–1
topology of 239 Lucretius 169
universal 239–40 Lujan, Freddy 60
Language: Its Nature, Development and Lure of the Local, The (Lippard) 54
Origin (Jespersen) 239
Las Vegas 35, 119 McDonald’s restaurants 70, 70, 71, 83
Latin, as universal language 239–40 McGilchrist, Iain 137, 149, 150
Leave It to Beaver (TV series, McGill, Joseph, Jr 61
1957–63) 95 McLuhan, Marshall 197
Lebenslang [Itinerary] (Rilke) 229 Mahabarata (theatrical performance,
Lebensraum (living space) 14, 21n. 4 1985) 139
Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas 171–2 Malevitch, Kasimir 232
Leçons de linguistique Malpas, Jeff 48n. 17, 62, 180–1, 199–200,
(Guillaume) 250n. 72 204n. 64
Lefebvre, Henri 3, 230, 231, 233, 245n. 31 Mandrou, Robert 131
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 166 maps 25, 30, 43, 44, 123, 222, 242n. 5
Leitner, Bernard 130 in antiquity 159
Leonardo da Vinci 140 artists’ interest in 60
Leopold, Aldo 241n. 3 chorography and 174n. 11
Lermontov, Mikhail 235 inaccurate 56
Lewerentz, Sigurd 141, 149 mapping by indigenous cultures 118,
Libeskind, Daniel 176n. 34 127n. 27
Limen see threshold (limen) mental 52
Limentinus (god) 13 sensory-imaginary mapping 208, 210
liminality 85 Marcuse, Herbert 146
limit 5, 10nn. 9–10, 167, 222 Marrero, Cathy Cruz 94
of contact between bodies (con-fine) 15 Massey, Doreen 117, 127n. 28, 196, 198,
as contact with the other 15–16 199, 204n. 64
 Index 277

Master and His Emissary, The metaphysics 219, 225–9, 231

(McGilchrist) 137, 150 Meyerowitz, Joshua 197
materialism 1, 48n. 17, 228 Meyrowitz, Joshua 8
mathematics 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 222 Michelangelo 149
beauty of living world and 237 migration 117, 127n. 23, 183–5,
nature known through 169 190, 191–2
matter 158, 168 mirror neuron theory 137, 149–50
form and 162, 166 mobility 117, 190–1, 200
limit and 167 class differences and 117–18
nature and 160 freedom of 187–8
nostalgia and 45 as para-location 115
space identified with 169 technologies of 8
topos distinct from 14 Moby Dick (Melville) 11
Mead, George Herbert 118 Modernism 129
meaning 72–3, 89n. 14, 172, 191 modernity 4, 8, 162, 170
Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human chora in early modernity 165–8
Understanding, The (Johnson) 137 erosion of localities and 190
media 5, 8, 94 Moholoy-Nagy, Laszlo 129
electronic 89n. 13, 110, 111, 190 Monet, Claude 138
mediated interactions 96–7 Monge, Gaspard 173
place and media content 97–100 mood 113, 133, 136, 137, 173–4
place and media environments 110–22 emotional content of art and 142
place and media grammar 100–10 multi-sensory experience and 130–1
print media 197 music and 141
social isolation and 113 stimmung 172, 173
turned off at night 96 see also digital tonal mood in paintings 40
media unconscious grasp of 132, 145
‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ (Hass) 39 Moores, Shaun 102, 125nn. 11–12,
Méduse & Cie (Caillois) 248n. 55 126n. 19
Melville, Herman 11, 235 Morrison, George 59
memory 39, 40, 42, 78, 182, 188 Moser, Edvard and Britt 178, 200n. 2
atmosphere and 133 Most Difficult Area, The (White) 250n. 71
childhood 76, 90n. 21 movies, socialization learned from 99
cultural landscapes and 52 Mulon, M. 188
firsthand 56 multi-centredness 191–2, 193, 196, 200
history and 53 music 112, 114, 117, 122
indeterminacy of 91n. 24 atmosphere and 134, 141
place cells in brain and 184 emotive power of 141
as repository of place 76–7 Mersenne’s categories of 232, 247n. 44
self and memory of place 177–8, 201n. 3 music in movies/TV 109, 141
smell sense and 131 in writing 232
topology and 205, 213 myth 164, 219, 221, 222–4, 231
Memory of Place (Trigg) 192
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 21n. 12, 25, 131, nationalism 82
147, 155n. 68, 157, 175n. 25 natural history 48n. 16, 51
on depth as space of eros 169–70 nature 62, 162, 169, 227
on ‘prose of the world’ 250n. 67 anthropomorphized 223
on reality as flesh 175n. 25 as immanent force 168
Mersenne, Marin 232, 247n. 44 materiality of 48n. 16
Messiaen, Olivier 238–9 poetics as property of 240
278 Index

Nazism 45 ‘On the beginning of treatment’

Nelson, Ricky 95 (Freud) 39–40
Neoplatonism 160, 161, 167, 174n. 2 ontology 17, 199
neuroscience 177, 179 open systems 236–7
Nevada Test Site 36 openworlding, poetics of 233–7
New England 205–11 opposites, coincidence of (coincidentia
New Geography movement 60 oppositorum) 167, 168
New Hampshire 93, 95, 113, 120, 122, Orientalism (Saïd) 245–6n. 36
209, 213 orientation 81, 82, 133, 157, 173, 206–7
Newman, Barnett 138 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The
newspapers 101–2, 107, 125n. 12 (Benjamin) 48n. 24
Newton, Isaac 161 ‘Ornament and Crime’ (Loos) 172
New York City 94, 97, 109, 120 ornithology 236, 239
edge in urban geography of 24–35 orthographia (elevation) 159
gentrification in 61, 61 others/otherness 16, 18, 167
subway system 105 edge and 26
New Zealand 74, 75, 89n. 18 exclusion of 17
Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 172, 222, 225, nonhuman 4, 8
226, 241n. 2 topos and 15
Nöe, Alva 137, 158 Ott, Brian 184
nomads/nomadism 14, 17, 229, outsideness 127n. 12, 136
246n. 39
non place (non-lieu) 21n. 15, 89n. 12, Paglen, Trevor 60
190–1, 194 Palladio, Andrea 160
Norberg-Schulz, Christian 88n. 7, Pallasmaa, Juhani 6
181–2, 191 Parmenides 33, 34, 167, 227
No Sense of Place (Meyrowitz) parochialism 82
126nn. 16, 19, 197 particularity 86, 92n. 34, 188–9, 189, 199
nostalgia 8, 19, 55, 221, 228 Parts of Animals (Aristotle) 162
convalescence and 41, 42–3 Paul, St 225
as encounter with death 48n. 17 Paulinus of Nola 224
hope and loss in relation to 90n. 21 Payne Fund Studies (1929–32) 98–9
map-reading and 44 Paz, Octavio 170
repatriation and 42 Pelagius 225
spatio-temporal estrangement and Pelletier, Louise 171
88–9n. 11 perception 133, 135, 136, 157, 238
Novum Organum (Bacon) 239 cultural concepts of space and 158
Nº 26A (Black and White) (Pollock) 232 emotional 168
imaginary vivacity and 140
objectivity 73 imagination and 145–6
O’Brien, Flann 176n. 34 peripheral 147–8, 150
Odland, Bruce 130 unconscious 143
O’Keefe, John 177 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 5, 6, 88n. 7
Öldorp, Andreas 130 Perrault, Claude 170
Olive Kitteredge (Strout) 212–13 Petite Maison, La (Bastide) 171
Olson, Charles 235 Phaedrus (Plato) 168
O’Mahony, Deirdre 55, 62 phantasies 39
One and Many conundrum 33, 34 phenomenology 6, 173
On Soul and Earth (Liotta) 183 Phenomenology of Perception (Zevi) 157
 Index 279

Phillips, Adam 43, 44, 48n. 15 placelessness 186

philosophy 5, 7, 166, 180, 229, 241 placemaking 183, 193–4, 194, 194–5, 195,
of atmospheres 137 195–6
of being 180 Places: Identity, Image and Reputation
of embodied consciousness 157 (Anholt) 194–5
Greek philosophy 158, 221 Places of Public Memory (Dickenson,
history of 2, 158, 226 Blair, Ott, eds) 184
human senses and 130 place-world 4, 36
loss of Latin language and 239 Plato 33, 34, 159, 168, 234, 241
poetry and 226, 228, 233 on chora 163–4
of sensations 172 concept of space 161–2
photography 107 Demiurge of 161, 168
physics 35, 161, 165, 166, 250n. 67 metaphysics and 225, 226
Physics (Aristotle) 14, 160, 169, 234 Playtime (film, 1967) 139
pilgrimage 225 poetics 5, 6, 7, 166, 233–7
Pilgrims 98 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard) 233
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 170–1 poetry 5, 80, 166, 167, 250n. 67
place, metaphysics and 226–9
autobiography of 185–7 as property of nature 240
as cultural landscape 52 Romantic 172
‘doubling’ of 114, 126n. 19 Pollock, Jackson 138, 147, 232
edge and 23–37 Pont-Levis (Breton) 233
as eschaton of the entity 15 pornography 109, 118
‘everywhereness’ of 1 Posidonius 160
forgotten or overlooked 4 positions 39
of ideas 2 postmodernism 231
image of 68, 88n. 8 Pozzo, Andrea 169
immediacy of 79 Proclus 161
immigrants and beginnings of 183–4, Production de l’espace, La (Lefebvre) 3
184, 184–5, 185 Project for Public Spaces 193, 194
limit and 13–20 proportions, theory of 170
maintenance of 193, 194 Prose du Transsibérien (Cendrars) 250n. 67
memory and 40, 177–8 Proust, Marcel 131
naming of places 55–9, 188–9 provincialism 82
pathologies of attachment to 182–3 psychoanalysis 39, 43, 45, 46, 90n. 20
phantasmagoric 189–91 psychology, ecological 137
place beyond place 198, 199, 200 Pueblo peoples 53–4, 56
‘postcard’ idea of 68 Pythagoras 159
recognition of 142–3
return to 213–19 Queenstown, Tasmania 65, 66, 68
sacralization of 224–5
shape of 32 Rabelais, François 237, 249n. 64
space in relation to 2, 3–4 radio 96, 108, 111, 117, 197, 238
time in relation to 3 Rauschenberg, Robert 232
writing of 5–6 see also sense of place recognition 42, 81, 142–3, 150, 213
Place and Experience (Malpas) 92n. 34 re-embedding 195–6, 198, 200
place-and-limit 17 refugees 192
place cells, in brain 177–8, 184 regions 31
‘placedness’ 181, 182 Reinhardt, Ad 232
280 Index

religion 18, 95–6, 219, 221, 231 Sebald, W. G. 40–3, 44, 45, 46, 48n. 16
sacralization of place 224–5 Segalen, Victor 226, 243n. 15
transcendental language and 238 self,
Relph, Edward 6, 7, 136 interiority of 77, 79
Renaissance, European 46, 112, 160, 161, memory of place and 177–8
165, 230 sense of place 65, 71–4, 81, 178–9
Renan, Ernest 239 changing connections with geographical
Renoir, Jean 138 places 179–80, 180, 180–1
representation 21n. 16, 88n. 7, 169 freedom of mobility and 187–8
architectural 172 openness and 198–9, 199, 199–200
digital 158 passage of time and 191
isomorphic 25 sensory composition 5, 7, 207–8, 211–13,
primordiality outside of 232 218
Republic (Plato) 234 sentience 5, 210
Reynolds, Henry 87n. 3 settings 39
rhizomes, places connected by 196 ‘Seven Stops in Lower Manhattan’
Rilke, Rainer Maria 227, 229 (Lippard) 61
Rimbaud, Arthur 221, 222, 241n. 1 Sextus Empiricus 246n. 39
Rings of Saturn, The (Sebald) 40–1, 45, 47 sexuality 146
roads 34, 188 shamans 231, 249n. 64
Rohde, David 101 Sheen, Charlie 109
Roman Empire 222–3, 240 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 236
rootedness 181–2, 190 Shibley, Robert 193
Rothko, Mark 138 shopping malls 69
Roussel, Raymond 233 sight, sense of see vision
Ruskin, John 138, 172 silhouette 38n. 9
Russia 235–6 Simplicius 23
Ryle, Gilbert 86 Simpson, Otto von 174n. 2
singularity 5, 33, 86–7
Saïd, Edward 245–6n. 36 definition of 65, 85
Salt Lake City, Mormon trek site in 184 extraordinary contexts of 67–8, 87
Sambursky, Sam 23 genericized places and 69–70, 70, 70–1
sameness 33 interiority and 77–85
Santner, Eric L. 46, 48nn. 16–17 of ordinary places 68–9, 87
Sartre, Jean-Paul 147, 244n. 27 particularity distinct from 86, 92n. 34
Scannell, Paddy 114, 126n. 19 sense of place and 65, 71–4, 81
Scarry, Elaine 140, 145 sensory singularities 211–13
Schaeffer, R. Murray 130 strong response to 65, 69
Schiller, Johann von 231 Sipress, David 98
Schmarzow, August 172–3, 176n. 41 sites 31, 39
Schmitz, Herman 137 situatedness 91n. 26
Schneekloth, Lynda 193 situation 2, 132, 134, 135, 136, 223, 229
Schneider, Ilona 66 (fig. cap.), 87n. 4 atmosphere and 141
Schrader, Paul 109 particularity and 188
science 2, 10n. 10, 160, 166, 168, 197, 226 Sixth Sense Reader, The
Scorsese, Martin 109 (Howes, ed.) 130
Scotic movement 240 Six White Paintings (Rauschenberg) 232
Scully, Sean 59–60 sky,
sea, connection to 85, 91n. 30 edges and 27–8, 37nn. 4–5
seasons 29, 83, 191, 208, 217 interplay with earth 84–5
 Index 281

Skype 94, 113, 117 spatio-temporality 88–9n. 11, 196, 197,

slow communities (Città Slow) 196 198–9, 208
smartphones 94, 108, 112, 114 Spengler, Oswald 246n. 39
smell, sense of 131, 178, 208 Spielberg, Steven 110
Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See 59 stabilitas loci (enduring spirit of
Smudge (art group) 52 place) 181, 191
Snell, Bruno 161 Star Wars movies 104
Snyder, Gary 191 state, the 17–20, 21nn. 13, 17
social media 113, 118, 122, 197 Stead, C. K. 74–6, 78–9, 80–1, 86–7,
social sciences 2 89n. 19, 90n. 20
social status, place and 115 Stein, Gertrude 51
Socrates 23, 249n. 63 Steppe, The (Chekhov) 235–6
Soja, Edward 245n. 31 stereotype 68
Solnit, Rebecca 51 Sternfeld, Joel 56
Songhees First Nation, in Canada 192 Stevens, Wallace 223–4, 232
SoPlace (World Summit for Sense of Stewart, Kathleen 7
Place) 179, 201n. 4 Stewart, Susan 8
soundscapes 130, 207 stimmung (mood, atmosphere) 172, 173
Soviet Union 104–5 Stoicism 160, 168
space 3–4, 5, 78, 129 Stone, Oliver 109
architecture as fine art and 172–4 Strout, Elizabeth 212
bounded 161 Study of History, A (Toynbee) 231,
Cartesian 160, 170 246n. 39
cartographic 24 subjectivity 73, 79, 166
derived from place 5 sublime, the 67, 218
erotic 161, 166 suburban sprawl 33, 35
external space of action as sunyata studies 230
masculinity 164 supermarkets 69, 114, 188
familiar space as place 124n. 1 Surrealism 172, 173
Greek philosophers’ views of 158–60 surveillance 94, 119, 124n. 2, 208
homogeneous 17, 30 Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature
ideal geometric space 166 Sanctuary (Victoria, BC, Canada) 199
imagination and 145–6 Swarm app 121
interior space as femininity 164 Symposium (Plato) 168, 249n. 63
isotropic 30, 157 synaesthesia 172
liminal 31, 161 synchrony 123
as making-space for places 20n. 2
matter and 169 ta eschata (extremities in immediate
as neutral environment 229–30 contact) 14
perspectival 146–8, 170 Tahualtapa (Hill of the Ravens) 56, 57,
poetics of openworlding and 233–7 58, 59
a priori 15, 18 Tarkovsky, Andrei 138
public space 114, 116, 141 Tasmania 65–6, 66, 67–8, 74, 91n. 27
recognition of 142–3 ‘Australasian’ mode of place and 75
spatial experience as form of as island culture 83
exchange 135–6 sense of identity 66, 87n. 3
spatial orientation in movies and touristic presentation of landscapes
television 102–3 in 66, 67, 87n. 4
spatial turn in social sciences and taste sense, place and 208
humanities 2 Tati, Jacques 139
282 Index

Tax Driver (movie) 109 nostalgia and 88–9n. 11

Taylor, Stephanie 187 past registered as absence 46
techné 164 past selves and 40
technologies 21n. 17, 172 sequence and chronology 39
digital and mobile 117 space-time compression 196, 198–9
teletechnologies 197–8, 200 time zones 123
telephones 34, 112, 116 urban geography and 24
lower classes’ access to 118 Tintern, Cistercian Abbey at 185, 190
mobile 96, 116, 123, 197 Tomlinson, John 127n. 28
Teletechnologies, Place and Community topoanalysis 9n. 4
(Wilken) 197 topographies 6, 7, 10n. 13, 51, 117
television 89n. 13, 94, 95, 96, 98, 198, 238 ecosystem and 10n. 10
children’s exposure to 100 location-related particularities of 120
community of shared tastes in 122 as writing of place 5
global spread of 111 topology 7, 9n. 4, 10n. 13, 15, 90n. 20
Iraq war (2003) covered by 101 of being 2, 226–8
as location-eroding medium 123 delay in attention to 229
‘mean world view’ of heavy ‘heterotopology’ of Foucault 234
watchers 98 of languages 239
‘presence’ and 115 as remainder of memory 205, 213
spatial orientation in 102–3 topos 14–15, 165
Terminus (god) 14 Toronto 178, 181, 185, 186, 187, 198
terminus ad quem (‘end toward touch sense, place and 93–4, 208
which’) 34–5, 36 Tour, Georges de la 169
terminus a quo (‘end from which’) 35–6 tourism 66, 67, 87n. 4, 194, 225
textbooks, as media 97 desire for authenticity and 62
text messaging 118 insiders contrasted with 121
theatre 139–40, 164 towers, high-rise 69
thermodynamics 236–7 Toynbee, Arnold 231
‘These Trees in Particular’ (Stewart) 8, tradition 54
11–12 ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’
Thibault, Jean-Paul 137 (Eliot) 140–1
thinking, Trakl, Georg 227, 228, 229, 244n. 28
emotions and 144 transnationalism 191, 196
place and 1, 9n. 1 trauma 46, 47
sensory composition and 218 travel, technologies of 179
ubiquity of place in 2 ‘travelling cultures’ 117
Third Policeman (O’Brien) 176n. 34 ‘Treatise on rhythm, colour — and
Thirdspace (Soja) 245n. 31 ornithology’ (Messiaen) 238–9
Thoreau, Henry David 11, 67, 222, 225, Treatise on Universal Harmony
235, 249n. 63 (Mersenne) 232, 247n. 44
threshold (limen) 13, 16, 17, 25, 206 Trier, Lars von 139
‘throwntogetherness’ 198, 199 Trigg, Dylan 192
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 41, ‘Trout and the Mountain Stream,
241n. 2 The’ (Aalto) 142
Timaeus (Plato) 161, 162, 169, 170 truth 12, 129, 164
time/temporality 3, 9n. 1, 44, 197, 208 aesthetics as religious truth 172
filmic montage and 171 chora and 166
historical time 229 coincidence of opposites and 167
media grammar and 109 of image 223
 Index 283

mathematical 160 Wall Street (movie) 109–10

multiple truths 53 Walter, Eric 182
‘setting-into-work’ of 167 Wandering Scholars, The (Waddell) 240
Tuan, Yi-Fu 124n. 1, 181, 183 Wang Shu 141
Turing, Alan 38n. 7 war 119, 182, 200
Turner, J. M. W. 138, 185 propaganda and 99
Turner, John 172 war movies and video games 103–4, 107
Twain, Mark 66, 87n. 2 Ward, Tom 54
weather 117, 132, 191, 214, 217
uCIC app 121 as complex experience 133
Ultimate Paintings (Reinhardt) 232 interiority and 85
United Nations 191, 192 location-related particularities of 120
United States 97, 98, 122, 125n. 12 as topic of conversation 208
Afghanistan war and 100–1 Weil, Simone 181
American literature 235 White, Kenneth 6–7, 9n. 4
former slave dwellings in 61 Whitehead, Alfred North 231, 247n. 42
immigrant communities in 193 White on White (Malevitch) 232
Iraq war (2003) and 101 White/Whitely (Ablinger) 232
migration within 191 Whitman, Walt 222, 235
National Parks 62 Wigley, Mark 137
official enemies of, in media wilderness 35, 51, 66
portrayal 104–5 Wilken, Rowan 191, 197
place names in Southwest 55 Williams, Raymond 54, 199
racial conflict in 108 Wilson, Colin St John 144
uprooted children in 181 Wineglass Bay, Tasmania 66, 67, 68
Unterwegs zur Sprache [‘On the way to real ‘Winter Visitors’ (Thoreau) 11
speech’] (Heidegger) 251n. 72 Winton, Tim 85, 87, 91n. 30
urban renewal 182 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 222,
Urry, John 117 245n. 30, 249n. 65
Wordsworth, William 185
vegetation 54, 62 World on Edge, The (Casey) 10n. 9
Vermeer, Jan 149 Wright, Frank Lloyd 137, 141, 142, 149
Vesely, Dalibor 169 writing 159, 232, 240
Vico, Giambattista 170
video games 103, 107, 114 Yau, John 59
Vietnam War 104, 126n. 13 Yik Yak app 121
Vigo, Jean 138 YouTube 121
vision (sight) 178, 208
peripheral 147, 154–5n. 67 Zajonc, Arthur 146
as primary sense of modernity 130–1 Zeisel, John 177
Vitruvius 159, 160, 162 Zeki, Semir 149
Zero Degree of Writing, The (Barthes) 240
Waddell, Helen 240 Zevi, Bruno 157
Walden (Thoreau) 11, 67, 249n. 63 Zumthor, Peter 132, 136, 141, 149, 172