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PLACE AND EXPERIENCEA Philosophical Topography

While the sense of place is a familiar theme in poetry and art,philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place andthe human relation to place. In Place and Experience, J. E. Malpasseeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature andsignicance of place as a complex but unitary structure that en-compasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectiv-ity. Drawing on a range of sources from Proust andWordsworth toDavidson, Strawson and Heidegger, he argues that the signicanceof place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as inthe grounding of experience in place, and that this binding to placeis not a contingent feature of human existence, but derives from thevery nature of human thought, experience and identity as estab-lished in and through place.

J. E. Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University ofTasmania. His publications include Donald Davidson and the Mirror ofMeaning (Cambridge University Press, ), Death and Philosophy(edited with R. C. Solomon, Routledge, ), and articles inscholarly journals.

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PLACE AND EXPERIENCEA Philosophical Topography

J . E. MALPAS

University of Tasmania

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, AustraliaRuiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, SpainDock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

First published in printed format

ISBN 0-521-64217-5 hardbackISBN 0-511-03647-7 eBook

J.E. Malpas 2004

1999

(Adobe Reader)

Contents

Acknowledgments page vii

Introduction: the inuence of place

The obscurity of place

The structure of spatiality

Holism, content and self

Unity, locality and agency

Agency and objectivity

Self and the space of others

The unity and complexity of place

Place, past and person

Conclusion: the place of philosophy

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

There are a number of people to whom I am greatly indebted, in variousways, in the writing of this book. First and foremost, I owe a special debtto Julian Young with whom I have enjoyed, particularly over recenttimes, an especially fruitful philosophical dialogue, and whose friendshipI have valued over many years. I am also extremely grateful to SueAshford, who has been an invaluable source of critical comment, adviceand support throughout the writing of this book. In addition, thanks aredue to Dougal Blyth, Peta Bowden, Andrew Brennan, Marcia Cavell,Donald Davidson, Hubert Dreyfus, Robyn Ferrell, Felicity Haynes,Onora ONeill, Charles Spinosa and Reinhard Steiner, who have allcontributed in a variety of ways to the work that appears here. A crucialfactor in making this book possible was the award, by the AustralianResearchCouncil, of a large research grant for the years and an award which not only freed me from some of my teaching for thisperiod, but also allowed me to escape, if only temporarily, from some ofthe destructive madness (only slightly disguised by talk of quality, e-ciency and accountability) that has gripped the Australian academicscene over the last few years. The nal revision and preparation of thetypescript was undertaken during the rst few months of a period as aHumboldt Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. Althoughdeveloped here in a rather dierent form, the material included in thisbook draws on a number ofmy previous publications, and I would like tothank the editors of the journals in which that work appeared (particular-ly Dermot Moran and Andrew Light) for the opportunity to publish, inpreliminary form, some of the ideas developed at greater length here.Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my family my wifeMargaret, and our two sons, Jonathan and Nicholas for providing mewith the place in which this book could be written. I dedicate the book tothatplace, and to the circle of both family and friends, only someofwhomI have been able to name above, who are there brought together.

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Introduction: the inuence of place

Is it some inuence, as a vapour which exhales from the ground, orsomething in the gales which blow there, or in all things therebrought agreeably to my spirit . . . ?

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, July

We are all familiar with the eect of human thought and activity onthe landscapes in which human beings dwell. Human beings changethe land around them in a way and on a scale matched, for the mostpart, by no other animal. The land around us is a reection, not onlyof our practical and technological capacities, but also of our cultureand society of our very needs, our hopes, our preoccupations anddreams. This fact is itself worthy of greater notice and attention thanperhaps it is sometimes given (it is a theme to which I shall return), yetthe human relation to the land, and to the environing world in gen-eral, is clearly not a relation characterised by an inuence running injust one direction. There are obvious ways, of course, in which theenvironment determines our activities and our thoughts we buildhere rather than there because of the greater suitability of the site; thepresence of a river forces us to construct a bridge to carry the roadacross; we plant apples rather than mangoes because the climate istoo cold but there are other much less straightforward and perhapsmore pervasive ways in which our relation to landscape and environ-ment is indeed one of our own aectivity as much as of our ability toeect.The relation of person to place is a recurrent theme in Wordsworths

poetry. One of his Poems on the Naming of Places recounts the story ofa shepherd, Michael, who dwelt Upon the Forest-side in GrasmereVale and to whom a straggling heap of unhewn stones stands as a

1 Henry David Thoreau, Journal Vol : , The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. RobertSattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson and William Rossi (Princeton University Press, ), p. .

mute memorial. Of Michaels own relation to the countryside in whichhe dwells Wordsworth tells us:

. . . grossly that man errs, who should supposeThat the green Valleys, and the Streams and Rocks,Were things indierent to the Shepherds thoughts.

The point here is not to direct attention to the shepherds own inuenceon his surroundings, but rather to the eect of those surroundings onMichael himself. Wordsworths concern is to make plain, as SeamusHeaney puts it, how theWestmorelandmountains were . . . muchmorethan a picturesque backdrop for his shepherds existence, how they wererather companionable and inuential in the strict sense of the wordinuential things owed in from them toMichaels psychic life. ThisLakeDistrict was not inanimate stone but active nature, humanized andhumanizing. Not only is Michaels own identity bound up with thehills and valleys of the district in which he lives, and which themselvestake on an almost personal character, but Heaney seems to suggest thatit is the shepherds very humanity that is bound in this way nature isboth humanized and humanizing. As Wordsworth himself writes ofMichael and his relation to the countryside in which he lived: theseelds, these hills . . . were his living Being, even more Than his ownBlood.

The idea that human identity is somehow tied to location is not, ofcourse, peculiar to Wordsworth, nor even to romantic nature poetry. Itis an idea that has both a long ancestry over the centuries and a widecurrency across cultures. Aboriginal Australians have a conception ofhuman life, and of all life, as inextricably bound up with the land. As

2 WilliamWordsworth, Michael: A Pastoral Poem, from Poems on the Naming of Places, LyricalBallads, in Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, ), p. .

3 Seamus Heaney, The Sense of Place, Preoccupations: Selected Prose (London: Faber &Faber, ), p. . Heaneys own poetry has also, of course, been strongly characterised by asense of place a sense both topographic and historical in its sensitivities and almost archae-ological in its preoccupation with history as something buried in the very soil at our feet. On thesense of place in Heaneys poetry, see, for instance, some of the essays in Harold Bloom (ed.),Seamus Heaney (New Haven: Chelsea House, ), as well as Heaneys own discussions of thesematters in Preoccupations and, of course, the treatment of such matters in his own poems, especiallyin volumes such as Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, ). On Wordsworths poetry ofplace, see especially Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition(London: Routledge, ); also Georey Hartman, Wordsworth, Inscriptions and RomanticNature Poetry and Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci, in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, ); and John Kerrigan, Wordsworth and theSonnet: Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Essays in Criticism, (), .

4 Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, p. .

Introduction

Fred Myers writes: For the Pintupi [an Aboriginal people of theWestern Desert region of Australia] individuals come from the coun-try, and this relationship provides a primary basis for owning a sacredsite and for living in the area. Tony Swain elucidates this relationbetween individual and land further through an explanation of Aborig-inal beliefs concerning conception: The mother does not contribute tothe ontological substance of the child, but rather carries a life whoseessence belongs, and belongs alone, to a site. The childs core identity isdetermined by his or her place of derivation. The details vary; thelocation might be directly linked with feeling the child enter the wombor, alternatively, dreams or foodstus may provide clues as to the sitefrom which the spirit derived . . . Life is annexation of place. A childsidentity is thus derived, on this account, from a particular place andthereby also from a particular spiritual and totemic ancestry. So im-portant is this tie of person to place that for Aboriginal peoples the landaround them everywhere is lled with marks of individual and ances-tral origins and is dense with story and myth. In traditional terms, then,for an Aboriginal person to be removed from that country to which heor she belongs is for them to be deprived of their very substance, and inpast times such removal particularly when it involved imprisonment frequently led to sickness and death.While such Aboriginal Australian views of the relation between

persons and place may seem rather extreme or even peculiar to non-Aboriginal eyes, such views have clear correlates elsewhere. Across theTasman, in New Zealand, Maori beliefs also emphasise connection to

5 Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,), p. . It is signicant that loss of connection with the land is one of the signicantafter-eects of the forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from theirfamilies (an institutionalised practice throughout Australia from the colonial period right up untilthe nineteen-seventies) that is noted in the report of the recent national inquiry into the stolengeneration. As one submission put it, Separation has broken or disrupted not only the links thatAboriginals have with other Aboriginals, but, importantly, the spiritual connection we shouldhave had with our country, our land. It is vital to our healing process that these bonds bere-established or re-armed (National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and TorresStrait Islander Children from their Families [Australia], Bringing Them Home: Report of the NationalInquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney:Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, )).

6 Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers (Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Swain notes that insome areas the emphasis on place-identity has been overlain by a turn to a patrilineal principle,but this, he argues, is largely a result of contact with non-Aboriginal peoples (see A Place forStrangers, pp. ). It should also be noted that the Aboriginal view of conception in terms of theinuence of place need not imply an ignorance on the part of Aboriginal peoples of the role ofsexual intercourse in reproduction (although it has often been taken as such), but can be seenrather as an assertion of the even more fundamental role to be accorded to the inuence of place.

The inuence of place

place and to the land as constitutive of identity. As Te Rangi Hiroaexplains, In the course of time the principal tribes with their subtribescame to occupy denite areas with xed boundaries. The love of theirown territory developed to an absorbing degree, for tribal history waswritten over its hills and vales, its rivers, streams, and lakes, and uponits clis and shores. The earth and caves held the bones of theirillustrious dead, and dirges and laments teemed with references to thelove lavished upon the natural features of their home lands. And,while the idea is often expressed in very dierent ways in dierentcultures and traditions, the basic notion of a tie between place andhuman identity is quite widespread, not only among pre-modern cul-tures from Australia to the Americas, but also within contemporaryculture. Within the latter context it often appears in terms of a preoc-cupation with genealogy, and so with the tracing of family ties back toparticular locations, as well as in the sense of loss or dislocation that isso often noted as a feature of contemporary life.

While it is not an exclusively European or Western notion, thathuman identity is somehow inseparably bound up with human locationis nevertheless an idea that has been especially taken up in Westernculture, particularly in its art and literature, over the last two to threehundred years. There is no dearth of examples here, but one especiallysignicant literary instantiation of this preoccupation with place andlocality is Marcel Prousts Remembrance of Things Past. One should not

7 Quoted in Countless Signs: The New Zealand Landscape in Literature, compiled by TrudieMcNaughton(Auckland: ReedMethuen, ), pp. . See also H.-K. Yoon,Maori Mind, Maori Land, Essays onthe Cultural Geography of the Maori People from an Outsiders Perspective (Berne: Peter Lang, ). Theconnection with the land, and the invocation of place or locale, is an important element in muchMaori writing in English over the last twenty years or so see, for instance, the work of WitiIhimaera in novels such as Tangi (Auckland: Heinemann, ).

8 See, for instance, Mark Nuttalls discussion of such ideas as they arise within a very dierentcultural and physical environment in Place, Identity and Landscape in North-WestGreenland,in Gavin D. Flood (ed.),Mapping Invisible Worlds, Cosmos, Yearbook of the Traditional Cosmol-ogy Society (Edinburgh University Press, ), pp. . Yi-Fu Tuan provides a usefuloverview of ideas of attachment to place and landscape across a variety of cultures in Geopiety: ATheme in Mans Attachment to Nature and to Place, in David Lowenthal and Martyn J.Bowden (eds.), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, ), pp. .

9 In his Returning to Nothing: TheMeaning of Lost Places (Cambridge University Press, ), Peter Readdoes an excellent job of documenting the way in which place and locality are central componentsin the self-identity of many contemporary Australians from a variety of backgrounds.

10 I refer to Prousts work using the English title under which I suspect it is best known to Englishreaders, although the literal translation of the original French title of the work, A la recherche dutemps perdu, is in search of lost time. A more recent English translation uses the latter title see InSearch of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrie & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright(London: Chatto and Windus, ).

Introduction

allow oneself to be deceived by the apparent focus on time or on thepast that is suggested by the title of the work (whether the originalFrench A la recherche du temps perdu or the title under which it isperhaps most familiar in English). Prousts work is as much about placeand space as it is about the past or about time (a point to which I shallreturn) and Proust treats the relation between persons and their loca-tions in a manner that is particularly striking. In Prousts work, personsand places intermingle with one another in such a way that places takeon the individuality of persons, while persons are themselves individ-uated and characterised by their relation to place; persons come to beseen, to use a phrase from Lawrence Durrell, almost as functions of alandscape in some cases, even of a particular room or setting. Infact, the narrator of Prousts novel, Marcel, grasps his own life, and thetime in which it is lived, only through his recovery of the places inrelation to which that life has been constituted. Remembrance of ThingsPast is thus an invocation and exploration of a multitude of places and,through those places, of the persons who appear with them. AsGeorges Poulet writes: Infallibly, then, with Proust, in reality as indream, persons and places are united. The Proustian imaginationwould not know how to conceive beings otherwise than in placingthem against a local background that plays for them the part of foil andmirror.

The idea that the self is be discovered through an investigation of theplaces it inhabits is the central idea in Gaston Bachelards The Poetics ofSpace and Bachelard talks of both the love of place topophilia andof the investigation of places topoanalysis as essential notions inany phenomenological/psychoanalytic study of memory, self andmind. In Bachelard, the life of the mind is given form in the placesand spaces in which human beings dwell and those places themselvesshape and inuence human memories, feelings and thoughts. In thisway, the spaces of inner and outer of mind and world are trans-formed one into the other as inner space is externalised and outerspace brought within. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty seems to express

11 See Georges Poulet, Proustian Space, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, ), pp. .

12 See Landscape and Character, Spirit of Place. Mediterranean Writings (London: Faber & Faber,), p. .

13 Georges Poulet, Proustian Space, p. .14 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, ), p. .

Elsewhere Bachelard quotes from the work of Noel Arnaud: Je suis lespace ou` je suis I amthe space where I am (ibid., p. ).


an idea found in Bachelard, as well as in his own work, when he writesthat The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself andat the same time suggests a breakdown in the very dichotomy that isinvoked. The stu of our inner lives is thus to be found in the exteriorspaces or places in which we dwell, while those same spaces and placesare themselves incorporated within us. Prousts Remembrance of ThingsPast can be seen as a special exercise in the exploration of such places,and thus as an exercise in something like the topoanalysis described byBachelard although it is an analysis of place that looks, not only tothe intimacy of the enclosed spaces of cupboard, room and home, butalso to the larger space of the garden, the village, the city, the plain, thesea and the sky. And, like Bachelard, Proust presents such topoanalysisas an exploration of our own selves as well as an exploration of lovethrough an exploration of place in Proust we nd topophilia writlarge.Proust is perhaps unusual in his almost explicit thematising of the

relation between persons and places, but the same basic idea of humanlife as essentially a life of location, of self-identity as a matter of identityfound in place, and of places themselves as somehow suused with thehuman, is common to the work of poets and novelists from all partsof the globe and in relation to all manner of landscapes and localities:from Patrick White to Toni Morrison; from William Faulkner toSalman Rushdie. Wordsworth regarded poetry itself as having its ori-gins in memorial inscription in epitaphs and in the naming of pla-ces and the novel seems to have its beginnings in a fascination withthe exploration of places and to be, in some respects, an outgrowth ofthe travelogue. Indeed, in Herman Melville, whose own works canoften be seen as instances of the literary preoccupation with place andlocale, we nd the claim that nearly all literature, in one sense, ismade up of guide-books. And thus, as Prousts great work is an

15 The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ),p. .

16 SeeGeoreyHartman, Wordsworth, Inscriptions andRomanticNature Poetry. A greatmany,perhaps the vast majority, of Wordsworths own poems can be viewed as instances of just suchmemorialisation.

17 See, for instance, Percy Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington, Kentucky:University Press of Kentucky, ).

18 Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York: Doubleday, ), p. . The comment appears ina chapter in which the narrator discovers the unreliability of an old, but cherished, guide toLiverpool. Guide-books, he tells us, are the least reliable books in all literature; and nearly allliterature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books.

Introduction

examination of the human through humanised and humanisingplace, so also in White and Morrison, in Faulkner and Rushdie, inHeaney and Wordsworth, the exploration of character and event, oflife and love, of culture and idea is one and the same with the explora-tion, and often the rediscovery, of landscape, countryside and place.It might be thought that the idea of human life and identity as

established in some special relation to landscape, and place is really justa sort of literary conceit part of the creative and imaginative tech-nique of the novelist or poet rather than having anything to do with thecharacter of human being as such. Similarly, more generalised concep-tions of human identity as tied to human locality, whether amongstAboriginal peoples or others, might be thought to provide evidence ofno more than a certain commonplace feature of human psychology atendency that is perhaps grounded in biology or evolutionary history,but which may be a purely contingent feature of human charactervarying as culture and society vary. For my own part I nd such viewsof the contingency of the connection to place highly implausible. Andthis is not just because of some personal experience of my own regard-ing the felt power of the human attachment to place nor of the emo-tional impact that a particular landscape or locality may bring with it.The idea that human identity is somehow tied to locality in a quitefundamental way seems to be given support, though sometimes in anindirect fashion, by a great many purely philosophical considerations aswell as by recent work in other more empirical disciplines. Some ofthese considerations will form the basis for the discussion in the chap-ters to come, but it is important for now to see the way in which suchconsiderations provide, at the very least, a prima facie case for takingthe sorts of ideas found, perhaps in somewhat embellished form, inwriters such as Proust and Wordsworth, as well as in Aboriginal tradi-tion and elsewhere, very seriously indeed.Gaston Bachelard, to whom I referred above, is, of course, one

important philosopher who has treated extensively of the role of placeand space in the understanding of human life and mind, but he iscertainly not alone in his concern with the signicance of such concepts.Within the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, the idea ofthe inseparability of persons from the places they inhabit is an especiallyimportant theme in the work of Martin Heidegger. Although Heideg-gers Being and Time provides a somewhat problematic analysis of therole of spatiality, and so also of place, in the structure of human


existence (or properly of Dasein), still Heideggers fundamental concep-tion of human existence as being-in-the-world implies the impossibil-ity of properly understanding human being in a way that would treat itas only contingently related to its surroundings and to the concretestructures of activity in which it is engaged. Heideggers thinking in theperiod after Being and Time provides an even stronger emphasis onconcepts of place and locality so much so that Heidegger presents theidea of place or site (Heidegger most often refers to topos in the Greekor Ort in the German) as the central concept in his later thinking.Merleau-Pontys analyses of embodiment and spatiality in The Phenom-enology of Perception, while in some respects more inclined towards tradi-tional phenomenology than Heideggers work and so in some respectsperhaps more Cartesian and Husserlian in spirit, nevertheless providesanother important instance in which the central role of locality, es-pecially as this arises through embodiment, is given philosophicalgrounding. For Merleau-Ponty, human thought and experience is es-sentially grounded in the corporeal and the concrete, and is thereforealso intimately connected with the environing world in its particularityand immediacy.In Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it is not merely human identity

that is tied to place or locality, but the very possibility of being thesort of creature that can engage with a world (and, more particularly,with the objects and events within it), that can think about that world,and that can nd itself in the world. The idea of a close connectionbetween human being-in-the-world and spatiality, locality and em-bodiment, that can be discerned (though in dierent ways and withdiering emphases) in the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,reappears in the work of many more recent thinkers working in anumber of dierent elds. Sometimes that inuence is to be seen in theexplicit thematisation of notions of place and locality. This is especiallyso in relation to the Heideggerian inuence on architectural theory, inthe work of writers such as Karsten Harries and Christian Norberg-

19 See my Heideggers Topology of Being, in preparation.20 In the Le Thor seminar, held in , Heidegger characterises the nal stage of his thinking as

preoccupied with the question of the place, or of the locality of Being [Ortschaft des Seins] whence the name Topologie des Seins Martin Heidegger, Seminare, Gesamtausgabe, vol. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, ), p. . A more detailed analysis and exploration of the conceptof place in Heideggers thought is also undertaken in my Heideggers Topology of Being.

21 See especially Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,).

Introduction

Schulz, and also on geographical thinking, particularly within theframework of so-called humanistic geography, and environmental-ism. And even aside from the inuence of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, ideas of place and locality have become almost commonplacein much contemporary work in social sciences and the humanities including work in areas such as theology. Nor do Heidegger andMerleau-Ponty possess a monopoly on the deployment of place as thefocus for philosophical inquiry. Edward Casey, in his The Fate of Place,recounts a story that encompasses both the relative decline in theattention given to place over much of the history of philosophy, and22 See, for instance, Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling (New York: Rizzoli, ).23 See especially the work of Anne Buttimer and David Seamon as exemplied, for instance, in

Buttimer and Seamon (eds.),TheHumanExperience of Space and Place (London:CroomHelm, ).Heideggerian inuences aside, there is, of course, a long tradition in geographical writing thatemphasises the determining eect of physical environment on human life, particularly as it aectslarge-scale social and historical developments. The work of Friedrich Ratzel was especiallyinuential in the development of ideas of geographical determinism from the late nineteenthcentury and into the twentieth (see his Anthropogeographie (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachf., ) ). Extreme forms of geographical determinism were sometimes a feature of the race theoriesthat gained wide currency, especially in Germany, during the s and s (see, for instance,LudwigFerdinandClauss,Die nordische Seele: Eine Einfuhrung in die Rassenseelenkunde (Munich: )).Its sometime association with racist ideologies aside, geographical determinism, other than in themost anodyne form, is no longer a strong force in contemporary thought (though see JaredDiamond,Guns,Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (NewYork:W.W.Norton&Co., )for a more recent attempt to understand the role of environment and geography in large-scalehistorical processes and in the dierential development of cultures). An approach that has seen arenewed inuence amongst some contemporary geographers, and that bases geographicalinquiry in concepts of region and locality, is exemplied in the work of the French geographerPaul Vidal de la Blanche (see, for instance, Vidal de la Blanche, Principles of Human Geography,trans.M. T. Bingham (NewYork: HenryHolt, ) and also Vincent Berdoulays brief accountof the Vidalian legacy in Place, Meaning and Discourse in French Language Geography, inJohnA. Agnew and James S. Duncan (eds.),The Power of Place [Boston:UnwinHyman, ], pp.). Vidal de la Blanches approach was also inuential, through the work of such as LucienFebvre, on the Annales school of French historiography (see Febvre, A Geographical Introduction toHistory, produced in collaborationwith Lionel Bataillon, trans. E.G.Mountford and J. H. Paxton(London:Kegan Paul, Trench,Trubner&Co., ) Febvre is contemptuous of Ratzel, but fullof praise for Vidal de la Blanche). As John Agnew points out, however, the current emphasisgiven to spatial and topographic notions, in geography and social science, is much less derivedfrom the regions-based approach of such as Vidal de la Blanche and ismore part of a general turntowards spatialised conceptions of social organisation and political power see John A. Agnew,The Devaluation of Place in Social Science, in John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (eds.), ThePower of Place, pp. . For an overview of geographical thought since see R. J. Johnston,Geography and Geographers (New York: Edward Arnold, , th edn) and for an excellent generalsurvey of ideas concerning the relation between culture and environment from ancient times upuntil the eighteenth century see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley:University of California Press, ) ).

24 See David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (eds.), Dwelling, Place and Environment (New York:Columbia University Press, ), for a cross-section of the various ways in which Heideggersinuence has been felt in both geographical and environmentalist circles.

25 See, for instance, Georey R. Lilburne, A Sense of Place: A Christian Theology of the Land (Nashville:Abingdon Press, ).


the re-emergence of place as a signicant notion in the work of Bach-elard, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as in Derrida, Deleuze,Guattari and Irigaray.

Of course, sometimes the concepts of place and space are taken upas strategic concepts as tools that have a particular political pur-pose behind them rather than as concepts to be investigated in theirown right, and this seems to be true, for instance, of some of the usesto which Deleuze and Guattari have put their idea of nomadism asdeveloped in A Thousand Plateaus as well as of some feminist deploy-ments of notions of corporeality and spatiality. Yet even such strategicuses of place and space provoke the question why those notions inparticular should have quite the strategic eectiveness that they seemto possess. Sometimes, of course, a concept or term is strategicallyimportant simply because of its relation to some other term or concept deconstructive strategies, in particular, look to terms that stand in arelation of binary opposition to one another (as male to female ormind to body) and in which one of the terms is given a privileged rolewhile the other is, in some way, repressed. But, at least in the case ofconcepts of space and place, it seems that the strategic importance ofthose concepts derives, not merely from their role in any set of binaryoppositions or their relation to other sets of concepts, but in large partfrom their indispensibility and ubiquity in human thought, experienceand agency.This is not just to say, for instance, that we usually experience

ourselves, and other things, in relation to places and spaces, but thatthe very structure of the mind is intrinsically tied to locality and spa-tiality. Henri Bergson took note of this point, while in Being and TimeHeidegger attempted to explain it as an instance of the inevitabletendency for Dasein towards fallen-ness the tendency always tounderstand in a way that is forgetful and concealing of the properlytemporal character of its being. Within English-speaking philosophyMark Johnson has investigated the prevalence of modes of thinkingthat are reliant on notions of place and space as part of a more general26 Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp. .27 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian

Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). I hesitate to say that such uses ofspatial and topographic notions draw on metaphorical rather than literal uses of the terms at issuesince, as will be evident in the discussion below, this distinction seems to me to present someproblems here. Of course, there is also much to be found in A Thousand Plateaus that does shedlight on the concepts of space and place aside from any purely strategic use of those concepts.

28 See Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row,), section .

Introduction

thesis concerning the way in which the body, and the structures asso-ciated with it, are actually determinative of patterns of thinking andunderstanding. Thus he writes that as animals we have bodies con-nected to the natural world, such that our consciousness and rational-ity are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with ourenvironment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, and to whatmeaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and becreative.

Johnson provides an example of a philosopher working within Eng-lish-speaking philosophy who nds an important relation of dependenceto obtain, if not quite between place and person, then certainly betweenmind, body and physical locality. And clearly the view that personsmustbe understood in relation to their worldly surroundings is not restrictedto the work of only German and French theorists. While the context isvery dierent, externalist theories of mental content of the sort found inthe work of many American and British philosophers in the work, forinstance, of Tyler Burge also suggest a conception of the person asinseparable from her environment. These theories (which can be seen ashaving their origins in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein) takebeliefs, desires and other attitudes as determined, in large part, by thephysical and social surroundings in which the individual person islocated.In the work of DonaldDavidson, in particular, externalism of this sort

takes on a particularly strong form. Unlike Burge, Davidson is lessconcerned with the social determination of meaning, so much as withthe way in which mental life can only be understood in its relation to anexternal world. One might say that, for Davidson, in the absence ofsuch a world there can be no mental life the mind is itself constitutedprimarily through its interaction and involvement with the objects andevents that surround it. Davidsons externalist approach leads him toreject those standard philosophical dichotomies that, in various ways,

29 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (University of Chicago Press, ) p. xxxviii.30 See, for instance, Tyler Burge, Cartesian Error and the Objectivity of Perception, in Philip

Pettit and JohnMcDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp., and Individualism and Self-Knowledge, Journal of Philosophy, (), . Burgesearlier papers (such as Individualism and theMental, in P. A. French, T. E. Uehling Jr. and H.K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,), ) placed more emphasis on the way mental content is determined by the social,rather than physical, setting. See also Hilary Putnam, The Meaning of Meaning , Mind,Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol . (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. .

31 Davidson discusses the contrast between his version of externalism and that of Burge inEpistemology Externalized, Dialectica, (), .


set up a contrast between the private world of the mind with the publicworld of external objectivity there is no such contrast in Davidsonswork. The rejection of that contrast enables Davidson, in a mannerreminiscent of both Heidegger andWittgenstein, to deny that any sensecan be attached to the sceptics claim that perhaps we are mostly wrongin our beliefs about the world, that perhaps there is no external worldto which we have access. For Davidson, such a claim canmake no sense,since having access to such a world is the primary condition for ourown mental life for our beliefs to fail to be mostly true would be for usto fail even to have beliefs, let alone desires, emotions or anything more.The very idea that there is some problem of access to a world externalto us is itself part of what gives rise to the mistaken problematic on thebasis of which scepticism can arise. We must understand ourselves asalready in the world if we are to be capable of understanding at all.As Marcia Cavell writes, providing a neat summary of many of these

Davidsonian ideas: Without our abilities to move around objects and tosee, both of us, the same physical object from dierent perspectives, tomove our tongues and mouths and to make sounds, to remember thepast in such simple acts as my recognizing this as the same object we sawa moment ago, to enter into countless forms of communal life, therecould be no beginning for those acts of communication that we havesaid are basic both to interpretation and to thought. In her owndiscussion, Cavell also draws on Freudian object-relations theory ac-cording to which individual psychological development is alwayspredicated upon the development of relations with others. Cavell there-by suggests another way in which the capacity for mental life might beconnected with a localised, worldly existence, since without a grasp ofthe places and spaces in which others can be encountered it is arguablewhether there can be any relation to others at all and if no relation toothers, then no relation to self either.

32 See, for instance, The Myth of the Subjective, in Michael Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretationand Confrontation (University of Notre Dame Press, ), pp. .

33 For various presentations of Davidsons arguments on this point, see Davidson, Thought andTalk, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. ; TheMethod of Truth in Metaphysics, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. ; A CoherenceTheory of Truth and Knowledge, in Ernest LePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on thePhilosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), pp. ; Empirical Content, inLePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation, pp. ; Epistemology Externalized, .

34 Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ),p. .

35 This is an issue I consider in Space and Sociality, in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, (), (some of the material from this article is incorporated into chapters twosix). Theissue of intersubjectivity that is alluded to here is specically taken up in chapter six below.

Introduction

Another important source in English-speaking philosophy for ideaslinking mind and self to the environing world is to be found in a line ofthinking that derives largely from Kant. Including the work of PeterStrawson and Gareth Evans, this line of thought is especially con-cerned with the way in which forms of spatial representation are relatedto concepts of self and to the capacity for mental life in general. ThusJohn Campbell has recently argued for a view of the self that tiesself-understanding to a grasp of spatial and causal structures, whileQuassim Cassam, drawing explicitly on Strawsonian ideas, argues forthe view that a grasp of oneself as a thinking creature is also a matter ofgrasping oneself as an embodied, spatially located creature.

The notion that there is an intimate connection between person andplace, and so also between self and environing world, is thus neither apeculiar idiosyncracy to be found in works of literature nor a leftoverfrom pre-modern societies nor does it seem likely to be a merelycontingent feature of human psychology. There is good reason tosuppose that the human relationship to place is a fundamental structurein what makes possible the sort of life that is characteristically human,while also being determining, in some way that requires clarication, ofhuman identity. In that case, it is not surprising that place, and asso-ciated notions of spatiality and embodiment, should have come to suchprominence in so many dierent disciplines and in the work of so manydierent writers and researchers. The ubiquity of place, and the diver-sity of contexts in which it appears, is thus some testament to thesignicance of the notion, but just as the concept of place seems toappear in so many dierent places, so it seems that the concept is alsodispersed and fragmented. How do we match up do we even try tomatch the concept of place as it occurs in the poetry of Wordsworth orHeaney (or, to cite a New Zealand poet closer to my own origins, of

36 See particularly Strawsons Individuals (London: Macmillan, ) and Evans own commentaryon chapter two of that work, Thing Without the Mind, in Evans, Collected Papers (Oxford:Clarendon Press, ), pp. . Although there is a common view of Kant as a philosopherwho completely neglects the embodied, spatialised, located character of human existence, this isnot entirely correct. See, for instance, Hoke Robinson, Kant on Embodiment, in Phillip D.Cummins and Guenter Zoeller (eds.), Minds, Ideas and Objects, North American Kant SocietyStudies in Philosophy (Atascadero, California: Ridgeview Publishing, ), pp. ; andSarah Furness, A Reasonable Geography: An Argument for Embodiment (University of Essex: Ph.D.dissertation, ). The role of embodiment in Kant is also explored in my Constituting theMind: Kant, Davidson and the Unity of Consciousness, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, (), in press a number of the themes taken up in this book appear, although in a slightlydierent form, in this paper.

37 See Campbell, Past, Space and Self (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ).38 Cassam, Self and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ).


James K. Baxter) with the idea of place as it might occur in Heideggeror Bachelard? And how might we connect the emphasis on the self andthe mind as always embedded in and dependent on a particular envi-ronment as the ideamay seem to be suggested in Davidson, for instance,or in Evans, with the emphasis on locality and involvement in Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger or, indeed, in Proust or James Joyce?

We may recoil at the apparent oddity of these juxtapositions anoddity perhaps all the more strongly felt within the context of contem-porary English-speaking philosophy. Yet if we are to take writers likeWordsworth andHeaney seriously in their assertions of the place-boundcharacter of human life and thought, and if we are even to begin toadmit some recognition, in our own experience, of the presence ofsomething of the Aboriginal feeling for the intimacy of the connection toland and to locality, then we cannot avoid trying to understand thatwhich might provide the ground for such notions. We cannot avoidtrying to think through the diversity of issues that surround the idea ofplace, and our belonging to it, in some sort of unitary fashion. It is justsuch a project of trying to understand place that is the project, perhapsthe overly ambitious project, which I intend to pursue in the followingpages. Although I will draw on a variety of sources to some of which Ihave already alluded my aim will not be simply to present the idea ofplace as it might appear in dierent and juxtaposed ways in literature,psychology, geography, philosophy and so forth. Instead I will aim to setout a way of thinking about place that, while mindful of the complexityand ambiguity of the concept, explicates its relation to other concepts,including those of space, time and self, and that also provides someelucidation and explanation of what might be called Prousts Principle(it could equally be Wordsworths) of the place-bound identity of per-sons. Moreover, it is not just persons who are tied to place; a centraltheme in the conceptual explorations undertaken in the following pages39 See, for instance, Baxters In Fires of No Return. Poems (London: Oxford University Press, ).

Baxters poetry reveals a deep sense of place and of the land many of his poems are tied tospecic places, and, like Wordsworth, his poems often have the almost explicit character ofepitaph or memorial. As Baxters vision is often quite dark, so he views the relation to the land asencompassing both tragedy and joy:

For us the land is matrix and destroyerResentful, darkly knownBy sunset omens, low words heard in branches(from Poem in the Matukituki Valley, In Fires of No Return, p. ).

40 Joyces own concern with locality and place is evident in Ulysses both in the idea of the novel asa journey that somehow mirrors that of the original hero, and in its preoccupation with the cityof Dublin.

Introduction

is that the very possibility of the appearance of things of objects, of self,and of others is possible only within the all-embracing compass ofplace. It is, indeed, in and through place that the world presents itself.The way in which human identity might be tied to place is thus

merely indicative of the fundamental character of our engagement withthe world of all our encounters with persons and things as alwaystaking place in place. The inquiry undertaken here is thus concerned,not merely with the nature of human self-conception and self-identity,but with a certain sort of fundamental ontological inquiry into place asthat in which, to use the Heideggerian phrase, human being-in-the-world is grounded (since the inquiry is indeed ontological in this sense,so I do not attempt any real investigation of, for instance, the vexedquestion of the politics of place that seems to dominate so muchdiscussion of these issues in many areas of the literature). In this respect,of course, the project undertaken here is a thoroughly philosophical one,and one that draws heavily on arguments and concepts derived from thework of philosophers such as Kant, Strawson, Davidson andHeidegger.Yet, although the project is indeed philosophical in its orientation, it isno less a project that aims to have relevance to work outside of philos-ophy and to speak to non-philosophers as well as those within thediscipline. For this reason, the book draws upon and combines a varietyof sources from both inside and outside philosophy and from a range ofphilosophical traditions.The most detailed philosophical work, at least so far as argument and

analysis is concerned, takes place in chapters three to six. It is thematerial in these chapters that is most important to substantiating thebooks basic claims, since these chapters set out an account of certainfundamental concepts of spatiality and agency, subjectivity and objec-tivity, on the basis of which the signicance of place its signicance inrelation, for instance, to those questions of human identity that wereraised at the outset can be approached (though the reader should bewarned that this discussion, especially in chapter ve, is also the mostphilosophically dicult part of the book). The adoption of an explicitlyphilosophical approach, and the orientation of the work towards under-standing place and locality in relation to person, self and experience,means that, to a large extent, the book is as much a foray into thephilosophy of mind or philosophical anthropology as of any newlyconceived philosophy of place. Indeed, supposing that the fundamen-tal thesis of the book is correct, and there is no possibility of understand-ing human existence and especially human thought and experience


other than through an understanding of place and locality, it followsthat the inquiry into the mind or the self will be identical with theinquiry into place. If I can, in this context, be permitted to make use ofthe term experience in a quite general and non-technical i.e., non-empiricist fashion to refer to human existence as it comprises capacitiesto think, to feel, to grasp, to act and so on (and this is the sense in which Iintend the term throughout my inquiry), then this book may be seen tohave a double focus: rst, on the possibility of experience, in the broadsense indicated, and so on place as the frame within which experience(along with conceptions of self-identity) is to be understood; second, onthe concept of place and the elaboration of that concept through anunderstanding of its role in relation to such experience.Naturally, all of this assumes rather than demonstrates the possibility

of providing an integrated account of the philosophical signicance ofplace. That demonstration cannot, however, be given independently ofthe investigation that is undertaken in the book as a whole and that is setout in the pages that follow. Only through an exploration of the notionof place will the signicance of place itself come to light. Yet even tobegin such an exploration requires a place from which to set out andsome idea of the territory to be covered. This is especially signicantgiven the dispersed treatment of place across so many disciplines andgenres and also, as will become evident below, because of the relativelack of attention that has been accorded to place, as Edward Caseymakes clear, within much of the history of philosophy.The task of clarifying the terms, concepts and approaches that are

relevant to the discussion is a crucial task (although it is also particularlydicult) for a work such as this. And although this task is, of course, onethat inevitably extends to the book as a whole, it is most explicitly anddirectly addressed in chapter one. There I attempt some exploration ofthe concepts of place and space as they have arisen within the Westernphilosophical tradition in particular, as a preliminary to the moredetailed discussions that follow. Chapter two continues this explorationof concepts by looking more closely at the notion of space and, inparticular, the distinction between subjective and objective conceptionsof space. The analysis of these notions provides the basis for furtherclarication of the concept of place, while also orienting the inquirytowards an analysis of the idea of subjectivity along with associatedideas concerning content and agency that underlies the concept ofsubjective space and which is the main focus for chapters three andfour. Chapter ve draws together some of the various threads that have

Introduction

been spun through the preceding three chapters to examine the way inwhich concepts of agency (already introduced in the previous chapter),spatiality and objectivity are interconnected. Chapter six develops theargument concerning the idea of objectivity further and in particularconnection with the notion of intersubjectivity. Here, not only is therelation between objectivity and intersubjectivity explored, but so too isthe connection between those dierent senses of subjectivity that involveself and other. The crucial role of spatiality in relation to the possibilityof social life and of language and conceptuality is also a focus fordiscussion in this chapter. It is the complex unity of place itself that is themore explicit focus of chapter seven, although here the topic is taken up,less through abstract analysis, as through literary and poetic example in particular the example to be found in the work of Marcel Proust.Chapter seven recapitulates and connects many of the themes of thepreceding discussion in the course of an elaboration of the ways in whichspace and time combine within the single structure that is place. Chap-ter eight returns explicitly to the issue with which I began the discussionhere the question of the relation between place and human identity attempting to clarify in just what sense persons and places might be tiedtogether and what this might mean for our sense of ourselves. That thisissue is taken up once again, in any detailed way, only in the nal stagesof the discussion is indicative of the way in which its treatment isnecessarily dependent on the analysis of the more general structure ofplace that goes before. The conclusion touches briey on a number ofissues, including the question of the politics of place, but its centralfocus is the question of the signicance of the concept of place, not onlyfor the understanding of experience and subjectivity, but for our con-ception of philosophy and of the project of understanding.The question of philosophy and the nature of philosophical inquiry is

an important, if not always explicit, issue throughout the followingpages. In a sentence which precedes the passage I quoted above,MarciaCavell writes that Philosophy begins in the only place it can, here, in themidst of things . . . This is something to which I shall return later; forthe moment, however, it is worth reecting on the possibility that in the

41 To some extent, the arguments developed in chapters two to ve parallel ideas also to be found,though in dierent form, inQuassimCassams Self andWorld concerning the essential role playedby notions of objectivity, unity and identity in the possibility of self-consciousness. In thediscussion here, the focus on objectivity is central to chapter ve, while the structure ofsubjectivity, and its characteristic unity and identity, is dealt with in chapters two, three, andfour.

42 Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind, p. .


inquiry into the nature and signicance of place, and of the relationbetween place and human experience, what is also at stake is somethingof the nature and possibility of philosophy itself. Certainly, if philosophyis understood, as a long tradition stretching back at least to Socrateswould have it, as essentially concerned with a form of self-examinationand self-knowledge, and if human existence is seen as necessarily tied tothe nature of place, then perhaps the inquiry into place is itself at thevery heart of the philosophical enterprise itself. Perhaps this is also whythe inquiry into place can seem so peculiar and so dicult.Yet it is not merely that this book proposes a view of philosophy

according to which the idea of place poses a special challenge. Themanner in which the book approaches the issues it discusses is one thattakes the idea of place, not merely as setting the focus for the inquiry,nor even as providing an important pathway by which certain otherissues can be taken up, but also as providing an important methodologi-cal model on the basis of which the inquiry is to proceed. The crucialidea in this latter respect is of place as an open region within which avariety of elements are brought to light through their mutual interre-lation and juxtaposition within that region. Thus, rather than under-standing place as a notion that provides a single principle in terms ofwhich everything else is understood, the idea and image of place isdeployed as a model within which the various elements at stake can bedistinguished and assembled so as to allow the construction of a singlecomplex structure. The underlying method of the book is thus essen-tially topographical: just as a place, or more specically a stretch ofcountry, is mapped out through the interrelation of the features withinit, so too, I argue, are the objects of philosophical inquiry properlyunderstood only through the interrelation and inter-connection of dis-tinct, irreducible, but interrelated components.

Introduction


If two dierent authors use the words red, hard, or disap-pointed, no one doubts that they mean approximately the samething . . . But in the case of words such as place or space, whoserelationship with psychological experience is less direct, there existsa far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation.

Albert Einstein, Foreword to Concepts of Space

It is something of a truism to say that that which is closest and mostfamiliar to us is often that which is most easily overlooked and forgotten.Nevertheless, the material that was surveyed in the preceding introduc-tion provides good evidence of the way in which place, familiar andubiquitous though it may be, is seldom entirely neglected. And, whilethere are relatively few philosophical treatments of place that take upthe concept as philosophically signicant in its own right, this is indica-tive, not merely of a certainmarginalisation or forgetting of place withinphilosophy, but of the very opacity of the notion itself.Certainly, many of the discussions of place in the existing literature

suggest that the notion is not at all clearly dened. Concepts of place areoften not distinguished at all from notions of simple physical location,while sometimes discussions that seem implicitly to call upon notions ofplace refer explicitly only to a narrower concept of space. Is BachelardsPoetics of Space, for example, really about place or space? It surely cannotbe about the same space as that of which Newton or Einstein speak orcan it? Michel Foucault claims that The present epoch will perhaps beabove all the epoch of space, but he explicates this remark in a way thatseems to combine a number of dierent notions: We are in the epoch ofsimultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the nearand far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, Ibelieve, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life

1 Foreword to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: the History of Theories of Space in Physics (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, , nd edn), p. xii.

developing through time than that of a network that connects points andthat intersects with its own skein. Here we have references both to theconcept of space as a system of locations (a network that connectspoints) as well as to spatial notions that involve concepts of locality andposition (the near and far . . . the side-by-side) that might suggestconnections with broader notions of place.While some writers are concerned to emphasise a need to distinguish

place from space thus Elizabeth Grosz talks of certain consequencesthat must follow unless space (as territory which is mappable, explor-able) gives way to place (occupation, dwelling, being lived in) andEdward Casey also stresses the distinction of space from place verylittle has been done in the way of any detailed analysis of the concept ofplace itself, of the relations between place and concepts of space, or,indeed, of the relations among various spatial concepts themselves. Inthis respect, Doreen Masseys complaints about the lack of clarity thatoften attaches to uses of space and of spatial images and ideas in generalapplies as much to the deployment of the concept of place. As shewrites, Many authors rely heavily on the terms space/spatial, and

2 Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics, (), .3 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, ), p. .4 See The Fate of Place, passim, and esp. pp. . Sometimes Casey seems to assume rather thanexplicate this distinction and, in The Fate of Place, the interconnection of space and place is notsomething to which he devotes any especially detailed analysis. In a very recent paper Casey doesaddress the issue of the relation between place and space in a direct and intriguing manner thathas some parallels with my own treatment at least inasmuch as it emphasises the necessaryconnection of place with space see Smooth Spaces and Rough-edged Places: the HiddenHistory of Place, Review of Metaphysics, (), ; see also Caseys, Getting Back into Place(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). Caseys own background is strongly phenom-enological and it is perhaps within the phenomenological framework that the most extensiveexplorations of concepts of space and place (though the emphasis is often more on space as such)have been undertaken see especially Elizabeth Stroker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space, trans.AlgisMickunas (Athens,Ohio:OhioUniversity Press, ), and also, of course, Merleau-PontysPhenomenology of Perception.

5 The French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre is another, rather like Foucault, whohas been especially inuential in the development of spatiality as a notion applicable in sociologi-cal and socio-geographical analyses. However, Lefebvres analyses arise, in part, precisely out ofdissatisfaction with what he sees as the indiscriminate employment of spatial concepts see TheProduction of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, )) and Lefebvre singlesout Foucault as a notable oender in this regard see The Production of Space, pp. . Lefebvresapproach is an important inuence on the work of Rob Shields see Places on the Margin: AlternativeGeographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, ). In a way that bears comparison with aspects ofmy own approach, Shields emphasises both the role of spatialisation in the structuring of socialpractices as well as the complex determination of spatialisation itself. Amongst social theoristswho have given attention to the concept of spatiality the work of Pitirim Sorokin should also benoted see Sorokin, Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time (New York: Russell & Russell, ), esp.pp. . Neither Sorokin, nor Shields or Lefebvre, however, attempt the sort of philosophicalanalysis of space and place, or the relations between them, attempted here.

Place and experience

each assumes that their meaning is clear and uncontested. Yet in fact themeaning which dierent authors assume (and therefore in the case ofmetaphorical usage the import of the metaphor) varies greatly. Buriedin these unacknowledged disagreements is a debate which never surfa-ces; and it never surfaces because everyone assumes we already knowwhat these terms mean. That even the meaning of the terms space/spatial may be contested is an important suggestion to keep in mind.Certainly, in respect of place, the term may well be thought so com-monplace and so much a part of our everyday discourse that its transferto more theoretical contexts is likely to present an immediate problem.

Moreover, it is not just our everyday familiarity with the concept thatcan give rise to diculties, but also a complexity and breadth ofmeaning that seems to attach to the term itself.The English place carries a variety of senses and stands in close

relation to a number of terms that cover a very broad range of concepts.In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says of the noun place that thesenses are therefore very numerous and dicult to arrange and theentry for the word extends over some ve pages. In broad terms,however, one can treat the noun form of place as having ve mainsenses: (i) a denite but open space, particularly a bounded, open spacewithin a city or town; (ii) a more generalised sense of space, extension,dimensionality or room (and, understood as identical with a certainconception of space, place may, in this sense, be opposed to time); (iii)location or position within some order (whether it be a spatial or some

6 DoreenMassey, Politics and Space/Time, in Keith and Pile (eds.), Place and the Politics of Identity,pp. ; see also Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, Grounding Metaphor: Towards a spatializedpolitics, in ibid., pp. . While Masseys comments are echoed by other writers, part of herown concern over this matter derives from the view that the indiscriminate use of notions of spaceand spatiality threatens to deprive these notions of any political content, and this she views asproblematic. It is notable that, while Massey argues for clarication of the notion of space as itappears in political and sociological contexts, she also argues for the abandonment of the conceptof place or of a particular concept of place. In regard to the suspicion of place in contemporarygeography and cultural theory, see also David Harvey, From Space to Place and Back Again:Reections on the Condition of Postmodernity, in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, GeorgeRobertson and Lisa Tickner (eds.),Mapping the Futures (London: Routledge, )). Both HarveyandMassey seem often to employ a somewhat simplistic view of place, even while they appear tobe reacting against some of the oversimplications in the work of many humanistic geographers.

7 In this respect, it is interesting to note that, while many English-speaking geographers, inparticular, have adopted place as a theoretical term, the closest corresponding term in French,lieu, is used by French-speaking geographers, as Vincent Berdoulay points out, in an informalsense. As such it is generally not used as a research-inducing concept (Berdoulay, Place,Meaning and Discourse in French Language Geography, in Agnew and Duncan (eds.), ThePower of Place, p. ).

8 The Oxford English Dictionary, nd edn, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford:Clarendon Press, ), , p. .


other kind of ordering, hierarchical or not); (iv) a particular locale orenvironment that has a character of its own; and (v) an abode or thatwithin which something exists or within which it dwells.

Clearly this summary, while it captures many, does not capture allthe shades of meaning that place can carry. Equally clear is the factthat these ve broad senses are by no means completely independent ofone another, but overlap and interconnect in various ways. Yet, whilesome of the notions associated with place are closely connected,others stand in sharp contrast to one another. There is, in particular, aquite denite opposition between the idea of place as merely a location,a point that may be specied using, for instance, a grid reference on amap, and the idea of place as a particular locale or as that withinwhich someone or something resides one cannot, after all, residewithin a grid reference. Place understood in terms of locale or aboderequires a certain openness, a certain dimensionality, a certain space.One of the points to be noted from the brief summary above is the wayin which place is not a concept that can be severed from notions ofextension and spatiality. This is evident in the etymology of the term:place (along with related terms in other European languages such asthe German, Platz, French, place, and Italian, piazza) derives fromthe classical Latin platea meaning a broad way or open space andfrom the Greek plateia, also meaning broad way. A central feature ofthe idea of place (even though it may not carry across to all the sensesof the term) would seem to be that of a certain open, if bounded, spaceor region. Yet while the concept of place brings with it notions ofopenness and spatiality, it would seem not to be exhausted by suchnotions. A place in which one can dwell is a place that provides a spacein which dwelling can occur it gives space to the possibility ofdwelling and yet a place to dwell must be more than just a spacealone.What, then, is to be said about space itself ? If the English place is

an awkward term to clarify, space might be thought, Masseys con-cerns notwithstanding, to be rather more straightforward. And certain-

9 All of these senses are included in the entry under place in the Oxford English Dictionary (pp.), although twenty-seven separate senses are actually listed there. The summary given hereis an attempt to capture the most important and most basic meanings of the term.

10 SeeThe Oxford English Dictionary, p. . It should be noted that, for themost part, those Europeanterms (place, piazza etc.) that have a similar etymology to the English place nevertheless lack thebreadth of meaning associated with the English term (see David E. Sopher, The Structuring ofSpace in Place Names and Words for Place, in David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels (eds.),Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems (London: Croom Helm, ), pp. ).


ly this seems correct there is a much narrower range of meaningsassociated with the term space than with place. Indeed, often spaceseems to be taken to designate just the realm of atemporal physicalextension the realm within which we make sense of the notions ofvolume, size and shape, of length, breadth and height, of distance andposition, as those notions apply to physical objects. In a broader sense and perhaps this is also the more basic sense inasmuch as it appears tounderlie and unify a variety of dierent uses of the term space canbe taken to mean simply room or extension, whether physical ornon-physical. In this respect, space seems to be tied, rst and fore-most, to a quite general notion of dimensionality and so space has arange of quite commonplace uses not restricted to purely physicalextension or location (as a glance at any good-sized dictionary willindicate). The origin of the English space (along with the Frenchlespace) can be traced back to the Latin spatium and before that to theGreek stadion. The Greek term designated a standard of length andthe Latin spatium was sometimes used to translate, not only stadion, butalso the Greek term distema which is most literally translated as dis-tance (or else as magnitude or interval). Since space can be takento mean just interval or dimension, the term can be used to refer totemporal duration as well as to atemporal physical extension. One canthus talk of a space of time or a space in ones schedule to meansimply an interval of time German simply combines the term forspace with that for time Raum with Zeit to arrive at a single term forsuch a time-space Zeitraum.Although the English space is traceable to the Greek term stadion,

while place is connected with the Greek term, plateia, discussions ofplace and space in Greek sources do not employ any terms etymologi-cally connected with the English place or space. The most directlyrelevant Greek terms here are topos and chora. Indeed, contemporarydiscussions of place and related notions sometimes draw quite heavilyupon these Greek terms and the ideas associated with them. Chora, forinstance, has become a central term in some contemporary feminist11 SeeThe Oxford English Dictionary, , p. and also A Latin Dictionary (founded on Andrews edn of

Freunds Latin Dictionary), rev. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: ClarendonPress, ), p. .

12 The term was also used to refer to a race-course, an area set aside for some purpose as fordancing or a walk or way in, for instance, a garden see A GreekEnglish Lexicon, compiled byHenry George Liddell and Robert Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, , rev. edn), p. .

13 Heidegger uses Zeitraum to refer to the idea of time and space as a single conjoined structure.SeeWhat is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, ),p. .


discussions discussions that advance quite particular readings of theways, not only in which chora is deployed within Greek philosophy,specically in Platos Timaeus, but of the way in which notions of placeand location have themselves been deployed within Western society inrelation to issues of gender and sexual politics. Yet, although theGreek terms often enter into contemporary discussions of place andspace, still it is important to take heed of the dierences between theseGreek terms and the English place and space. As they appear in thework of Plato and Aristotle, for instance, both topos and chora carryimportant connotations of dimensionality or extendedness (though theycannot be reduced to such notions), while at the same time neither toposnor chora is used other than in relation to particular things forAristotle, topos is always the topos of some body (and so there must beboth a body that is contained and also a body that contains), while evenfor Plato the idea of chora (that which provides a situation for all thingsthat come into being) is always understood in relation to the particu-lars that appear or are received within it. Perhaps one might treat boththese Greek terms as standing in a closer relation to the English placethan to space, but certainly there is no warrant for the frequentassumption that topos and chora can be simply correlated with place

14 See, for instance, Elizabeth Groszs discussion, which draws on the work of Luce Irigaray inparticular (Irigaray has taken up notions of both chora and topos at various places in her work), inSpace, Time and Perversion, pp. .

15 In the Physics, Aristotle denes topos as the rst unchangeable limit of that which surrounds(Aristotle, Physics, , , a, translation as given in Aristotles Physics Books III and IV, trans.Edward Hussey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) ). For a more detailed discussion of Aristotle ontopos see Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ), pp. .Casey also has an extensive discussion of Aristotle, as well as Plato, in The Fate of Place, chapterstwo and three, pp. .

16 Timaeus, b (trans. from F. M. Cornford, Platos Cosmology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,)). The Platonic idea of the chora (often translated as the Receptacle) arises in the courseof Platos consideration of the way in which a thing comes into being or in which one thing canchange into something else. Such a process of becoming requires, according to Plato, threeelements: that which becomes, that which is the model for becoming, and that which is the seator place for such becoming (see Timaeus, c). The third element here is the chora it is the placein which the qualities of the thing that comes into being appear. Since the chora is precisely thatwhich allows qualities to appear, but which does not contribute any qualities of its own to suchappearing, so Plato claims that the chora must itself be completely indeterminate (Timaeus,ab).

17 Salomon Bochner claims that the Greeks understood space only in terms of place as topos seeBochner, Space, Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, ), pp.. Heidegger also claims that The Greeks had no word for space. This is no accident;for they experienced the spatial on the basis not of extension but of place (topos); they experiencedit as cho ra, which signies neither place nor space but that which is occupied by what standsthere (An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press,), p. ).


and space respectively. Nor does recourse to the Greek terms pro-vide any shortcut to understanding the concept of place or its relation tospace.It is obviously important to achieve some clarication of the various

concepts at issue here, but, equally, any such clarication must respectthe necessary interconnection between those notions. Consideration ofthe vocabulary of place and space alone is indicative of the way these arepart of a network in which each term is inextricably embedded. Thus,although there is a strong temptation, particularly if ones focus is on theconcepts of place or locale, to try to develop a set of clearly dierentiatedand independent concepts, and, in particular, to try to develop a notionof place that is clearly separated o from any concept of space (some-thing that oftenmotivates authors to look to the Greek terms rather thanthe English), this temptation is one that ought to be resisted. As I notedabove, place is inextricably bound up with notions of both dimensional-ity or extension and of locale or environing situation. The exploration ofthe concept of place, and its elaboration as a philosophically signicantconcept, must do justice to, and take cognisance of, the complexities of

18 Some commentators on Aristotle, for instance, treat him as occasionally using the terms in thisway, and it is often assumed that chora names something close to space understood as extensionwhile topos names something more like location. In general, however, as Keimpe Algra notesThe Greek language did not have a terminological distinction matching the conceptualdistinction between place and space (Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, p. , seethe discussion pp. ). Of the two Greek terms at issue here, chora is probably the older andcertainly the more concrete term, meaning, variously: space or room in which a thing is, place,spot, eld, country, land, territory, estate, proper position (within, for instance, a social ormilitary hierarchy) (see Liddell and Scott, A GreekEnglish Lexicon, p. ). Chora may also beconnected with the term choris, which in its adverbial form means separately and in its nounform means a widow or one bereaved, and this may be taken to suggest a connection with theidea of a separated piece of land or allotment such as a piece of land that may be inherited.Toposseems to be originally the more abstract term (though this is clearly a matter of degree toposretains a certain concreteness absent from some contemporary, though otherwise similar,terms). Like chora, however, topos has a variety of senses including: place or position (and in thissense it can be used to designate place or position in a document or a passage in an authorswork, as well as physical location), region, geographical position, site, burial-place, or an elementin rhetoric (see Liddell and Scott, A GreekEnglish Lexicon, p. ). The connection of topos with amore abstract notion of location and of chora with a sense of particular locale is evident in earlygeographical writing and in Ptolemy (see F. Lukermann, The Concept of Location in ClassicalGeography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, (), esp. pp. ). E. V. Walter,who also refers to the Ptolemaic use of the terms chora and topos, emphasises the use of topos tosignify objective location or position and of chora as a more subjective term appearing inemotional statements about places (Walter, Placeways (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina, ), p. Walter notes that Platos use of topos in the Phaedrus represents anexception to this). Walter also points out that, in general, writers were inclined to call a sacredplace a chora instead of a topos (Placeways, p. ), although later, in Hellenistic Greek, topos cameto be employed as the term for a holy place, while chora carried technical and administrativemeanings.


the notion and its necessary implication of concepts of both dimen-sionality and locale. Consequently, as will be evident from the discussionin the chapters that follow, the investigation of place cannot be pursuedbut in conjunction with an investigation of the notion of space.The connection of place with space, while central to any attempt to

understand place, nevertheless presents a problem for the attempt toarrive at such an understanding. For the philosophical history of theconcept of space inWestern thought is a history in which space has beenincreasingly understood in the narrower terms that tie it to physicalextension. This can be seen, in fact, to be reected in the way in whichthe Greek notions of topos and chora have gradually been eclipsed in thehistory of philosophy, so far as thinking of space and place is concerned,by the concept of kenon or void. It is this latter notion, the history ofwhich can be traced from its Greek origins through Medieval andRenaissance thinking and so into the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, that plays the more signicant role in the development ofmodern concepts of space. The concept of void brings with it the idea ofa homogenous and undierentiated realm of pure extension the ideaof a pure realm of containment of the sort that is arrived at, forinstance, when one abstracts the thing from its enclosing surroundingsso that what is left is nothing but an empty but open space and it isprecisely this idea that lies at the heart of thinking about space in thework of Descartes and Newton. Thus, with Newton, we arrive at anunderstanding of space as a single, homogenous and isotropic con-tainer in which all things are located, and even though modern cos-mological physics no longer understands space in the terms developedin Cartesian and Newtonian thinking, still the idea of spatiality asprimarily a matter of physical extendedness remains.

19 See Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, pp. and .20 See Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the

Scientic Revolution (Cambridge University Press, ).21 See Einsteins use of a similar analogy in his Foreword to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, p. xiii).

Of course, for many thinkers, both in the modern era and earlier, such a realm of pure spatialextension, while perhaps thinkable in abstraction from concepts of body, could nevertheless notexist apart from body. Descartes treatment of space and bodily extension as one and the same,and his consequent rejection of the possibility of any actual void or vacuum, is one of theimportant points of dierence between his view of space and that of Newton.

22 See Einsteins brief comments on this in the Foreword to Jammer, Concepts of Space, p. xv and alsohis discussion in The Problem of Space, Ether and the Field in Physics, in Albert Einstein, Ideasand Opinions, trans. Sonja Borgmann (New York: Crown, ), pp. . In fact, the idea ofcontainment probably contains remnants of what is essentially a richer place-based mode ofthinking about space, but which, for precisely this reason, was certain to be superseded withinphysical theory by a more purely physicalist conception.


Parallel with the development of this more rened, and even techni-cal, notion of space is a tendency, in much philosophical thinking, tomake space an increasingly important focus of attention. As MaxJammer notes, Space is the subject, especially in modern philosophy, ofan extensive metaphysical and epistemological literature. From De-scartes to Alexander andWhitehead almost every philosopher has madehis theory of space one of the cornerstones of his system. In contrast,the concept of place as distinct from space (even if not independent of it)has a much more ambiguous position within the history of philosophy particularly within post-Cartesian thought. Indeed, Edward Caseyclaims that:

In the past three centuries in the West the period of modernity place hascome to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph ofthe natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place hasbeen regarded as regressive or trivial. A discourse has emerged whose exclusivefoci are Time and Space. When the two were combined by twentieth centuryphysicists into the amalgam space-time, the overlooking of place was onlycontinued by other means. For an entire epoch, place has been regarded as animpoverished second cousin of Time and Space, those two colossal cosmicpartners that tower over modernity.

This neglect of place is reected, not only in the relative absence of placeas a signicant concept in philosophical discussion, but in a tendencyfor place to be viewed as secondary to and derivative of spatiality. Just asspace has come to be associated with a narrow concept of physicalextension, so too has place come to be viewed as a matter of simple

23 Jammer, Concepts of Space, p. .24 It is interesting to note that the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Paul Edwards (New York:

Macmillan, )) contains a ve-page entry on Space (written by J. J. C. Smart) that focuses ona similar history of the concept to that dealt with in more detailed form by, for instance, MaxJammer, but contains no entry at all on place.

25 Casey, Getting Back into Place, p. xiv.26 Although, as was already suggested in some of the brief discussion of ancient concepts of chora

and topos (both of which can be viewed as giving a much stronger emphasis to notions moreusually associated with place than with the extended, physical space of modernity), one cancertainly take pre-modern discussions as giving a more signicant role to something like aconcept of place and as having a richer conception of what might be involved in spatiality. Onthis, see especially Caseys discussion in The Fate of Place, pp. ixxi, . The neglect of place isnot merely a feature of philosophical theory Heidegger, for instance, views it as directly relatedto the rise of a certain technological attitude towards the world (see The Question ConcerningTechnology, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (NewYork: Harper & Row, ) ). There is an important question to address concerning the natureand structure of place in the face of modern technological and social changes unfortunately, itis too important and too large a question for me to be able to take up in the space available hereand one that I must therefore postpone to another occasion.


location within a larger spatial structure. Place, after all, is not separablefrom some notion of spatiality. Consequently, within a framework inwhich space is not only given a privileged role, but is also understoodwithin the narrower frame of physical extension alone, there will also bea tendency towards a similarly narrow and spatialised understandingof place.This narrowing in the understanding of both space and place is

clearly evident in Descartes. In the Principles of Philosophy, place andspace are explicitly presented as closely related notions neither of whichis to be understood independently of the concept of body. The termsplace [loci] and space [spataii] writes Descartes, do not signifyanything dierent from the body which is said to be in a place; theymerely refer to its size, shape and position relative to other bodies . . .The dierence between the terms place and space is that the formerdesignates more explicitly the position, as opposed to the size or shape,while it is the size or shape that we are concentrating on when we talk ofspace. Although concerned to distinguish his position from that ofDescartes, among others, Newton also views place as closely tied tospace so closely tied, in fact, that, for Newton, place appears asderivative of space. Place is, writes Newton, a part of space which abody takes up. I say a part of space; not the situation, nor the externalsurface of a body. Moreover, while it is seldom explicitly taken up insuch a context (though there are some exceptions), the same under-standing of place as a matter of spatial position or location that isevident in Newton is also a feature of contemporary philosophicaldiscussion. Thus Richard Swinburne writes that A place in the literalsense is wherever a material object is or, it is logically possible, could be. . . a place is identied by describing its spatial relations to materialobjects forming a frame of reference. Space is, it seems, the moregeneral and more basic concept. Place is to be understood simply interms of a particular region of physical space or a location within it itdesignates a region or location that, in its more precise usage, can be

27 Rene Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, : and ; Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adams andPaul Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, J. Vrin, ), -, pp. ; translation fromThe PhilosophicalWritings of Descartes, vol. , trans. John Cottingham,Robert Stootho andDugaldMurdoch (Cambridge University Press, ), and .

28 Newton, Scholium to the Denitions, Sir Isaac Newtons Ma

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