“Place is the first of all things,” said Aristotle, and influential twentieth-century philosophers, such as Heidegger and Bachelard, agree. Edward Casey has probably done more than anyone else in recent years to explore the history and contemporary relevance of this idea. He complains forcefully at the priority given to space over place in Enlightenment thought, and in the process he challenges the very foundation of Kant’s cosmopolitanism. Kant’s paradigmatic statement that “general knowledge must always precede local knowledge,” says Casey, “sets the stage—indeed, still holds the stage in many ways—for the idea that space precedes place.” In the Kantian view, as we have seen, space is empty, pristine, and innocent, waiting to be divided and compartmentalized into places of distinctive qualities. But, Casey asks, “what if things are the other way round? What if the very idea of space is posterior to that of place, perhaps even derived from it? What if local knowledge . . . precedes knowledge of space?”
The idea that place is foundational and therefore general, and space contingent and particular, is central to phenomenological approaches. Casey, in his learned history of that idea, from the Greeks onward, provides a compelling and impressive genealogy for this line of thought. The turn of the postcolonial critics of liberal cosmopolitanism toward Heidegger then becomes more readily understandable. In effect, they are demanding that “placefulness” take precedence over the emptiness of the pristine space of the “flat earth” presupposed in liberal, neoliberal, and cosmopolitan theory. Casey’s argument for such a turn is powerfully made. “To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in.” Therefore, “local knowledge is at one with the lived experience.” Place, “the privileged site of lived experience and daily life,” is necessarily at the center of our understandings of the world.1 Prioritizing abstract generality, as Kant does, over local knowledge is exactly what Burke and others of his ilk object to. Since Heidegger is, as Mehta puts it, “very Burkean,” the tables can be turned on liberal and cosmopolitan theory by invoking Heidegger as well as Burke.
The problem with Casey’s argument is that he accepts the Cartesian, Newtonian, and Kantian conceptions of absolute space and time as his foil. From that standpoint, place does indeed appear as something subsequently constructed within a space that is empty, fixed, and abstract. Casey’s claim that “place” is where space and time come together only makes sense, furthermore, given the Kantian/Newtonian presumption that space is separable from time. Place takes on a quite different meaning when put in the context of relative space-time and relational spacetime (see chapter 7). Relational spacetime starts with matter and process, and is therefore neither empty nor fixed. Furthermore, space and time are not separable in relational spacetime. Spacetimes and places, from this standpoint, are jointly produced out of matter and of process. For this reason, it proved impossible, as we found in chapter 7, to understand relational spacetime without frequent invocation of actual places like New York’s Ground Zero and the cultural centers whose political role forms the subject of Kohn’s close inquiries.2 The only interesting question—to which we shall return—is in what ways it might be useful to distinguish between place and spacetime.
The undoubted historical hegemony of the absolute view of space and time has, however, given rise to a long oppositional tradition of thinking about place as distinct from space. This oppositional literature deserves critical scrutiny, bearing in mind that place-based theories of nationalism, national socialism, and fascism have frequently been the epicenter for the most vicious assaults upon cosmopolitanism as well as liberalism. Possibly for this reason, liberals and cosmopolitans tend to ignore the problematics of place altogether or to write about it with undue caution. But that is no solution. The problem of place must be negotiated and not ignored. After all, the lack of roots in (and seeming indifference toward) the material and affective circumstances of everyday life in particular places was a persistent focus of criticism of both cosmopolitanism and liberalism. In response to Nussbaum, for example, Gertrude Himmelfarb argued that Nussbaum had obscured “the givens of life” and that “parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community—and nationality” are “not ‘accidental’ attributes of the individual,” but “essential.” A. Escobar likewise rejects neoliberalism and developmentalism on the grounds that they can never hope to realize the human potentialities latent in different social groups living their lives in different places and forging their own distinctive cultures. Edmund Burke as we saw, articulated an even more fundamental argument when he wrote: “I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or obnoxious to mankind.”3 The only valid cosmopolitanism, according to Anthony Appiah, is, therefore, a “rooted” cosmopolitanism. 4
But what on earth is a “rooted” cosmopolitanism rooted in? Can patriotism, nationalism, localism, and doctrines of religious, ethnic, gendered, or racial superiorities all equally well pass muster? If a patriotic cosmopolitanism is perfectly acceptable, then why not a nationalist, theocratic, or even fascist cosmopolitanism? The Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, for example, considered Catholic cosmopolitanism (with its seat of wisdom in the Vatican) one of his grand enemies. The principled rootedness in local culture that Appiah embraces ends up folding his cosmopolitanism (understood as appreciation and respect for diversity) back into the classic liberalism of individual rights via multiculturalism, conveniently ignoring the recalcitrant and class-bound world of political-economic processes of capital accumulation. Appiah thereby ends up being supportive of an elitist neoliberal social order, spiced with dashes of multiculturalism, while ignoring the class and social inequalities that arise out of and continuously deepen under an individualized free market capitalism. In more recent times the patriarchal and paternalistic qualities of many cosmopolitan theories have also been duly noted. For this reason, many who overtly embrace “pure” cosmopolitanism and the different shades of liberalism prefer to accord no explicit role to rootedness. Open that door, and all manner of unsavory characters come rushing in. But the door keeps flying open. Kant, after all, taught anthropology and geography in the hopes of displacing religious, cosmological, and transcendental concepts of the human subject by a scientific and, at the end of the day, a “rooted” understanding of “man” as an anthropological and geographical species being. Nussbaum accepts (with respect to our child-rearing practices, for example) that “to give one’s own sphere special care is justifiable in universalist terms.” More recently, she has argued that nation-state formation is a valid way to aggregate toward a more just global order. If, as Ulf Hannerz remarks, “home is not necessarily a place where cosmopolitanism is in exile,” then we cannot avoid taking our affective identifications with particular places seriously, even as we seek to embrace an open cosmopolitanism.5
If place is defined as that arena in which we, as individuals, live out our daily lives, then there is a banal sense in which local affections and loyalties cannot possibly be seen as inherently opposed to a cosmopolitan or liberal ethic. But, as we have more than once already noted, when it comes to geographical concepts, banality all too often conceals deep problems. The meaning of “place” as a generic concept in relation to cosmopolitanism has therefore lain largely unexamined, at least until recently, leaving the word (and its numerous cognates) to do immense though often hidden work in shaping our representations and conceptual worlds, as well as our practices. Its variegated and sometimes chimerical meanings need, therefore, to be brought into sharper focus. So what might be the role of local loyalties, of the affective social life that circulates in particular places, in relation to cosmopolitan projects? What roles do geographical differentiations and territorial affiliations have to play in all this? How do affective attachments and political loyalties to particular places and territories actually work? What happens when these very real phenomena are inserted into the cosmopolitan calculus or into liberal and neoliberal economic theories?
Ideas of Place, Region, and Territory
Like “space” and “nature”, the idea of “place” turns out to be a multilayered and messy geographical concept. To begin with, we use many generic terms, such as place, region, area, territory, and locality, to identify a distinctive and usually bounded space as if it is a relatively permanent and separable entity endowed with particular and distinctive qualities. A series of cognate descriptive terms, such as city, village, hamlet, state, fiefdom, administrative district, neighborhood, and even community and home and hearth, as well as more technical-sounding determinations, such as ecosystem, microclimate, topographic region, or landscape, effectively describe some distinctive and coherent assemblage of particular phenomena in a bounded space. The metaphorical usages of place are also important—we all know what it means to feel “out of place” or to be “put in our place,” and those metaphorical meanings often flow into physical designations, such as being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” or “on the wrong side of the tracks.” But the saying that “there is no place like home” signals the role that deep emotions (both positive and negative) might play in shaping our conceptions, identities, and actions. The sense of belonging and not belonging (and hence of identity and otherness) is closely intertwined with ideas about place and territory. Place has so many cognates that it seems in itself to require a small indexical dictionary of intersecting meanings.
Geographers, for their part, have traditionally preferred the term region to place and have sometimes sought to define their discipline around the practices of regional geography (Pattison’s “areal tradition” is of this provenance). But, as Raymond Williams notes from a study of literary uses of region, there is a “definite tension” within that word “as between a distinct area and a definite part.” If the latter, then the question that immediately follows is: a part of what? and to what degree the part is subordinate to some whole. Regional, along with provincial, “are terms of relative inferiority in relation to an assumed centre.” Regional studies are therefore frequently considered less important than, if not intellectually inferior to, the more universal and hence more central studies of liberal or cosmopolitan theory (thus typically placing geography as a discipline in an inferior position within the academy compared to, say, economics). Yet regional also “carries implications of a valuably distinctive way of life,” thus making “the distinctive virtues of regions the basis for new forms of identity or degrees of self-government.” The regional or the local is seen as the site of authenticity and lived meaning.6 This was the line of thinking taken by the nineteenth-century French regional geographer, Vidal de la Blache, whose ideas influenced the French Annales school of historians (Fernand Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean lies in this tradition, for example). This is the path taken by all those interested in vernacular architecture, the power of regional traditions, and the role of place-bound collective memories in grounding our sense of the world. Vidal did not consider regions as given, but as a symbiotic practical achievement of long-maturing human cultural endeavors in given environmental settings. Distinctive regions and places are made and not given. It is, perhaps, for this reason that a renowned architect like Aldo Rossi took Vidal de la Blache as a foundational thinker in his approach to urbanization.7
Among geographers, the term region as an object of study carries a different set of connotations than the more subjective and phenomenological connotations of place. Regions can be identified and described empirically, as spatially distinctive collective phenomena including ways of life that have evolved through human social action over time. Regional geography, for many, entails classifying, on a territorial basis, data about the different modes of life encountered around the globe. The Kantian distinction between geography, as the “outer knowledge” of human activities as part of nature (and describable in terms analogous to Linnean classificatory systems), and anthropology, as the “inner subjectivities” of human beings responding to experience, is here put in motion. The main controversy in geography has been over whether regions actually exist as real entities open to discovery through empirical inquiry or whether they are simply convenient ways of classifying geographical differentiations in phenomena. The Kantian distinction between objective and subjective meanings typically breaks down, however, when it comes to understanding political organization. Insofar as those collective ways of life achieve some kind of structured coherence, so a connection emerges between objective, reified territorial forms of social organization and concepts of affective human affiliations of community, body politic, or nation (the latter including Kant’s ideas concerning national character). While regions, states, or nations may appear at one level as mere imagined abstractions, the sense of a territorial bond and of an affective loyalty to it has enormous political significance. At this point the notions of region, state, and nation converge with those of both territory and place, requiring us to reflect somewhat on the complicated histories of both these latter terms.8
The term territory, for example, has a fraught but illustrative history that illuminates problems with the equally fraught concepts of “place” and “region.” Territorializing behavior has long been noted as a feature of the natural world, of course, and primates and human beings are no exceptions, exhibiting both historically and geographically an astonishing range of territorializing behaviors at a variety of scales. Though such behaviors are often interpreted in terms of a logic of competition, they turn out to have a strong collaborative element: signaling a territorial boundary, in the case of robins, for example, signals to other robins that there is no point entering this territory because the food supply there is already spoken for and partially depleted. The naturalness of territorializing behavior (subject to endless studies by biologists and ethnologists) gives rise to the convenient myth of “the territorial imperative,” in which it is claimed that all forms of territorializing behavior are simply an expression of this natural urge.9 The myth is convenient because it naturalizes the very specific forms of territorializing behavior of human beings that arose historically from the seventeenth century on in Europe. The rise of modern state forms, and political claims to state jurisdiction and sovereignty (as exemplified in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648), coupled with the instantiation of a legal and administrative system of private property rights, amounted to an administrative and institutional revolution in and codification of territorializing behaviors, the primary requirement of which was the construction of territorial forms that were unambiguous, fixed, and secure. This last required unique appeal to the absolute theory of space and time and the invention of practices of representation (mapping and cadastral survey) that confirmed the fixity and lack of ambiguity. From this time onward the dominance of the absolute theory of the state and the relegation of relative and relational dimensions to subsidiary roles was politically assured in Western Europe. This mode of territorializing behavior was later extended to much of the rest of the world through colonizing practices. There was, clearly, nothing natural about this particular form of territorialization or its underpinnings in absolute theories of space and time: it was a social construction and a political achievement. The work of establishing a cohesive relational sense of territorialized national identity, for example, is long, painstaking, and always fragile. It took, as A. Paasi points out in the case of Finland, a whole army of cartographers, cultural producers, historians and political workers to achieve a sense of Finnish national identity throughout the nineteenth century. But it has always been ideologically useful, once such work has been accomplished, to “naturalize” the sense of nationhood by appeal to Newtonian and Cartesian conceptions of territory, coupled with a temporal tale of mythological origins and a genealogy of descent. For all his supposed “modifications” of the grounds for understanding space and time, this was the absolute framework that Kant adopted to explicate his cosmopolitan world order of federated republics, each with its own, distinctive territorial sovereignty.
The result has been, as David Delaney summarizes it, that territory became “a device for simplifying and clarifying something else, such as political authority, cultural identity, individual autonomy, or rights”; “in order to have this effect, territory itself has to be taken as a relatively simple and clear phenomenon”—hence attachment to the absolute theory of space and time. The general consequence was not only to presume that there were clear-cut territorial entities, called states, that could act, enter into relations with each other, go to war, negotiate treaties, and the like, but that these entities had some “natural” and unambiguous being in absolute space and time, and even that competition and war between these entities (as opposed to collaboration) was wholly natural and therefore inevitable. This happened because, as Delaney again notes, once territory becomes “reified and rendered relatively simple and unambiguous,” it “does much of our thinking for us and closes off or obscures [relational] questions of power and meaning, ideology and legitimacy, authority and obligation and how worlds of experience are continuously made and remade.”10 To the degree that the idea of “nation” became connected to that of “state,” we actually witness a reversal of Casey’s complaint about the hegemony of spatial thinking over place-based experience. In the case of Israel, for example, a relational idea (Zionism) was made concrete by territorializing practices of settlement and capturing global financial flows in such a way as to reify and absolutize the Israeli state on the ground as well as on the map of the world in 1948. More generally, Kant’s cosmopolitan vision was trumped politically by nationalism , and his vision of an inevitable progression toward perpetual peace between federated republics lost out to geopolitical territorial contestation between naturalized state entities. Many now belatedly realize that this line of thinking falls into what P. Taylor correctly terms “the territorial trap.” 11
By assuming there is nothing ambiguous and insecure about the territoriality of the state, of sovereignty, and of private property, a fictitious world was created that was supposedly unmovable by, say, the complex spatial dynamics of commodity, money, and people exchanges and capital accumulation in relative space-time. It was also supposedly equally immune to the influence of the complex human immaterial relationalities (such as those of sovereignty, loyalties, and the projection of political authority) occurring within relational spacetime. This fixed imagined world becomes the basis for political decision making. For example, once a region is defined and reified politically, it can then become the subject of state economic and social policy with all manner of effects. Once a territory is defined as a state, it can be construed as an active agent, sometimes with disastrous consequences (two world wars, for example, were largely cast in this theoretical frame).
Extensive analysis of the spatio-temporal dynamics of capital accumulation shows, however, a completely different geopolitical dynamic of uneven geographical development, of recurrent “spatial fixes” and persistent processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization from the eighteenth century onward. Marx and Engels recognized this tension between fixity and motion clearly enough in The Communist Manifesto, and by extending this argument to the dynamics of capital accumulation in relative space-time it is possible to show how processes of capital accumulation necessarily internalize a distinctive form of “the territorial imperative” to create a landscape and territorial structures appropriate to its dynamics in a given place and time, only to undermine and completely displace these landscapes and territorial structures at later points in place and time.12 Subsequently given philosophical respectability under the imprimatur of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (an obvious political problem, given the processes of formation of the European Union), this recognition of the fluidity, relationality, and indeterminacy of territoralizing practices and behaviors has steadily displaced the fixed and frozen notions of territories in absolute space and time that formerly dominated.13 Contemporary discontents with the traditional theory of the state, in fields including international relations, anthropology, history, and cosmopolitan and Marxian theory, derive from the realization that the earlier, damaging fictions concerning state, sovereignty, and private property need to be transformed if a saner and more secure global political order is to be constructed. In the language adopted here, this means integrating the concept of territory into the dialectics of absolute, relative, and relational modes of approach to space and time.
In fact, the history of “territory” as a concept provides a beautiful illustration of how absolute, relative, and relational conceptions of space and time get dialectically integrated in particular ways through material social practices (border and boundary building), representations (cartographic practices), and lived meanings (affective loyalties to the territorial unit of the nation-state). While former dominant practices of imposing absolute definitions may be questioned, the frequently pressing political need for unambiguous definitions (of state borders, for example) does not go away: it has, however, to be put into perspective of the continuous processes of capitalist and other modes of production of relative space-time (through financial and commodity flows and migratory movements) and the pervasive relationalities of global political power and contested moral authority. It is intriguing to note, for example, that the “fortress USA” anti-immigrant and antiglobalization mentality that is now seizing hold politically in the United States seriously contradicts longstanding international policies nominally dedicated to encouraging and facilitating the open spatio-temporal dynamics of capital accumulation in a more borderless world. How this sharpening tension will be resolved remains to be seen, but the consequences for the future of the United States and of the global political economy will be far-reaching. As it is, state powers continue to emphasize the absolute territoriality of the concept of citizenship, while many immigrant groups—for example, those from Mexico—live their lives in a relational universe in which the border has no affective meaning, even as it poses an increasingly insurmountable physical barrier.
Place, as opposed to territory, is usually defined as the preeminent field of phenomenological experience and inquiry (topics kept at bay in the absolute theory of territory formation and thereby confined to derivative characteristics, such as loyalty to some preformed territorial entity). This phenomenological foundation, as Casey might claim, is what distinguishes his theory of place from contamination by notions (however important in their own right) of territory and region. The latter, while clearly objects of affective loyalties, require, he might claim, quite different methodological approaches from that given by phenomenology if they are to be properly understood. But the distinctions among place, territory, and region are far more porous than Casey and others in the Heideggerian tradition commonly allow. The grounds for regarding these concepts as mutually exclusive are shallow, and there are many points of overlap between them. This becomes particularly evident when we examine another concept, such as landscape. The anthropologist Keith Basso, for example, in his study of the Western Apache, aligns his thinking with that of Casey and Heidegger. He shows how “geographical features have served the people for centuries as indispensable mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of their history.” The permanence of places in the landscape, coupled with stories told about those places, provides a means to perpetuate a cultural identity: “Apaches view the landscape as the repository of distilled wisdom, a stern but benevolent keeper of tradition, an ever-vigilant ally in the efforts of individuals and whole communities to put into practice a set of standards for social living that are uniquely and distinctively their own. In the world that the Western Apache have constituted for themselves, features of the landscape have become symbols of and for this way of living, the symbols of a culture and the enduring moral character of its people.”14
We here encounter, in the symbolic dimension, a dialectic between the social and environmental aspects of experience in place and mental attachments to a territorialized landscape. The Apache’s inhabited and constructed realm within that territory is invested with moral value. By comprehending their relationships to the physical world in a particular way, the Apache engage in a moral act of imagination that constitutes an understanding of themselves. Losing access to the land (territory) under these conditions is equivalent to being dispossessed of one’s identity. Processes of modernization, capital accumulation, and spatial integration are profoundly disruptive of such particular territorialized markers of cultural identity. “As places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed, and the movements of this process—inwards towards facets of the self, outward towards aspects of the external world, alternately both together—cannot be known in advance.” What and how the self knows is a social affair: “deliberately and otherwise, people are forever presenting each other with culturally mediated [relational] images of where and how they dwell. In large ways and small, they are forever performing acts that reproduce and express their own sense of place—and also, inextricably, their own understandings of who and what they are.” Hence the perpetual question that strangers often ask: “Where are you from?” It is the inextricable quality of this connection that here resonates so strongly. In making places (such as a home), we make ourselves, and as we remake ourselves, so we perpetually reshape the places we are in, materially, conceptually as well as in how we live within them. This implies that places are not, cannot be, fixed and stable, but are subject to perpetual transformations as conceptions, material practices, and lived experiences change. The dialectic that Basso here invokes is in principle just as compatible with Lefebvre’s approach to spatiality as with Heidegger’s. But Basso unfortunately looks to the latter for theoretical guidance. He comes dangerously close to replicating Mehta’s views on the locale as the singular terrain upon which moral judgment can be founded. So although Basso’s descriptions, assembled out of closely observed ethnographic work, fit easily into the matrix of spatio-temporal meanings set out in chapter 7, he is unable to capitalize on the way absolute, relative, and relational meanings dialectically intertwine through spatial material practices, conceptualizations, and, above all, through the evidently achieved lived sense of moral worth and cultural identity. As Moore observes, Basso’s sense of place is “cordoned off from translocal knowledge, experience and the multiple spatialities that shape the landscapes of the US Southwest.” The result is that place is deemed to have a settled single sense, while “culture becomes a shared system of meaning devoid of situated struggles.”15 Basso’s failure to incorporate a Lefebvrian moment of critique and of contestation into his otherwise compelling account poses, therefore, a whole series of difficult problems.
The Relationality of Place
The meaning of a place, both individual and collective, is both powerfully present (absolute) and unstable (relational), dependent on the context in which the place and the human agent are situated. “Cultural practices, social relations, and political economic processes meld with the materiality of milieu, producing place,” writes Moore. “Just as multiple spatialities coexist in a single moment within place, so also are experiences of place differentiated across diverse subject positions.” The novelist Don DeLillo recounts an interesting example of the tension between absolute and relational meanings in his book The Names. Though located in Athens, the narrator long avoided visiting the Acropolis. Seen from afar, the “somber rock” appeared daunting. “The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s what we have rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion . . . a white fire of such clarity and precision.” But when he finally climbs the rock, he is surprised. “We approach hypnotically, walking on the smooth stones, not watching where we step. It would take a wrenching effort to take our eyes from it. . . . The marble seems to drip with honey, the pale autumnal hue produced by iron oxide in the stone.” His sense of the place shifts dramatically: “I walk to the east face of the temple, so much space and openness, lost walls, pediments, roof, a grief for what has escaped containment. And this is what I mainly learned up there, that the Parthenon was not a thing to study but to feel. It wasn’t aloof, rational, timeless, pure. I couldn’t locate the serenity of the place, the logic and steady sense. It wasn’t a relic species of dead Greece but part of the living city below it. This was a surprise. I’d thought it was a separate thing, the sacred height, intact in its Doric order. I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embodied in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice that we know as our own.”16
The objective measure (the Kantian exactitudes in absolute space and time) here collides with relational spatio-temporal meaning, but it does so around a particular place. DeLillo makes contact with a wider common flow of the sort that Raymond Williams, as we saw in chapter 7, experienced walking the Black Mountains. This is the way relational spacetime is lived (as Lefebvre would put it) in place, rather than materially experienced and conceptualized in abstraction. Is there, then, something inherent in the qualities of places that brings us to such wider understandings—and, if so, exactly what is it?
It is hard to probe very long in the extensive literature on place without encountering the relationalities of memory and identity. Writes Michel de Certeau, “connecting history to place is the condition of possibility for any social analysis.” In his Poetics of Space, G. Bachelard puts it this way: “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home. [Here] memory and imagination remain associated, each one working for their mutual deepening. In the order of values, they both constitute a community of memory and image. Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. . . . The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. . . . Without it, man would be a dispersed being.”17
But is this sense of place confined to the house as home? And what happens to us over time as we move from one house to another, making and finding a different kind of home in each? And can this mode of thinking be extended to “homeland,” or what the Germans refer to as Heimat? The latter word, says Edgar Reitz, director of the 1984 film of that name (arguably one of the most important cultural productions of the 1980s), “is always linked to strong feelings, mostly remembrances and longing.” It is, comment D. Morley and K. Robbins, “about conserving the ‘fundamentals’ of culture and identity” and “sustaining cultural boundaries and boundedness.”18 As such, it appears to point solely to an exclusionary politics of a place-bound nationalism, regionalism, and communitarianism, precisely because memories built around places cannot easily be shared with outsiders. The exclusions here are troubling; the threat of exclusionary nationalisms and local fascisms looms large. But memory of the past is also about hope for the future. “There is,” says Mary Gordon, “a link between hope and memory. Remembering nothing one cannot hope for anything. And so time means nothing.”19 The preservation or construction of a sense of place is then an active moment in the passage from memory to hope, from past to future. This is, one suspects, why so many people locate the possibility of politics in actual places. Places are sites of collective memories that hold out the prospects for different futures. “Critical regionalism,” as it is called in architecture, invoking as it so often does vernacular traditions and icons of place, is considered a basis for a politics of resistance to the homogenizing force of commodity flows and monetization. “Militant particularism,” of the sort I have often advocated, seizes upon the qualities of place, reanimates the local bond between the environmental and the social, reactivates collective memories, and seeks to bend the social processes constructing spacetime to a radically different universal purpose. “Imagination,” says Bachelard, “separates us from the past as well as from reality: it faces the future.” Imagined places, the utopian thoughts and desires of countless peoples, have consequently played a vital role in animating politics.20
History and memory in places are quite distinct from one another.21 History typically establishes a secure narration in absolute time. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was,’” writes Benjamin. C. Boyer explains it this way: “memory, as opposed to history, responds more than it records, it bursts upon the scene in an unexpected manner, demanding an alteration of established traditions. Operating only in fragments, memory is an art that connects disparate events; it is formed on the tactics of surprise, ruptures, and over-turnings that reveal its true power.” Memory of this sort is not only the great destabilizer. “Memory springing from the natural chains of tradition should be like an epiphany, flashing up in ephemeral moments of crisis, searching to exhibit at that particular time the way of the world in order to direct one’s pathway toward the future.22 Time future is fragmentarily illuminated by memory constructed out of time past. Dominant powers therefore go to great lengths to control, coopt, corrupt, stage, deflate, and manage the memory of key events (such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) by converting them into historical narratives and monumentalizing them in absolute spaces. Keeping the sense of the event alive, saving it from this sort of monumentalization and incorporation into standard history, is, Badiou suggests, crucial to any form of radical politics. If, as Balzac has it, “hope is memory that desires,” then it is not hope that guides memory but free-floating memories that generate hope when animated by desire. Though desire in the now is the active agent and the catalyst, memory and event are the key resources and place is “the anchor of memory and meaning.”23
The worlds of myth, of religion, of collective memory, and of national or regional identity focus on distinctive places (shrines, places of worship, icons, stories, festivals) symbolic of distinctive beliefs, values, imaginaries, and social-institutional practices. These are mobilized in political causes. Many traditional institutions, such as those of church and nation, depend crucially upon the existence of a whole network of symbolic places to secure their power and express their social meaning. What Basso discovered for the Western Apache is a common enough occurrence: wisdom is often supposed to sit in particular places (Mecca, the Vatican, the Federal Reserve Bank). But to suppose that wisdom, as opposed to particular meanings and cultural identifications, actually sits in such places is to suppose too much. What kind of wisdom, after all, sits in Guantanamo Bay, Auschwitz, My Lai, or the Gulag? And while particular meanings and cultural identifications may indeed derive from our relationality to such places, these are not by any means the kinds of meanings and identifications that we might welcome, let alone wish to treat as iconic of our moral sense. Basso assumes without warrant that it is indeed wisdom rather than repressions that sit in the places his informant narrates and that the moral authority that derives from the landscape is comforting rather than confining. Here, however, Heidegger’s shadow looms large. For what Heidegger in effect proposes is an essentialist theory of place as dwelling that is a unique source of authentic and real meaning (hence of all real wisdom).
This Heideggerian move is marked, for example, in the concept of genius loci. Every place is construed to have an “essence” or a “guardian spirit” that not only gives it its special qualities but also calls forth human behaviors that acknowledge and ultimately reveal those essential qualities. The “existential purpose” of building, architecture, and urban design, says C. Norberg-Schulz, is “to uncover the meanings potentially present in the given environment.” This does not mean that places cannot change. “To protect and conserve the genius loci in fact means to concretize its essence in ever new historical contexts.” Human action perpetually uncovers new possibilities and potentialities, even as it articulates respect for the place’s distinctive character. To respect the genius loci “means to determine the identity of the place and to interpret it in ever new ways. Only then may we talk about a living tradition which makes change meaningful by relating it to a set of locally founded parameters.”24 Freedom is here understood not as arbitrary play, but as creative dialogue between the inherent qualities of places and human aspirations and actions. In this interpretation, the theme of relationality is central. Buildings and places gather together social, symbolic, psychological, biological, and physical meanings so as to constitute the genius loci. In so doing they create a particular relational identity from which we draw meaning and definitions of self.
There are clear dangers in this mode of argumentation, not least because the road can all too easily lead toward an exclusionary, place-based fascism. But it does not always do so, and herein lies a conundrum that cries out for critical engagement. To begin with, the genius loci concept is vague. If, as Aldo Rossi, for one, insists, the history of our built environment “is always the history of the architecture of ruling classes,” and if “monuments” (key elements of memory and identity in urban contexts) are constituted symbolically through various forms of collective activities (not necessarily those of the ruling classes), then the fluidity of meaning that Norberg-Shulz necessarily admits to the concept of place can be taken in a more constructivist vein to mean the exploration of possibilities from radically different political and cultural standpoints. Whose identity and which collectivity of class, belief, or gender, for example, is to dominate particular practices of place construction? And if collective memory is located in places, and if that collective memory is vital to the perpetuation of some repressive social order (or to the visualization of some hoped-for alternative in the future), then all essentialist formulations of the genius loci fall away to be replaced by a contested terrain of competing definitions.
This is exactly the move that A. Loukaki makes in her study of competing treatments and visions of the Acropolis over time.25 Discursive controversies among architects, archaeologists, and art historians over how to understand the genius loci here fade before the political power struggle coursing through Greek history. And that contest, as Loukaki shows, is not simply about the proper interpretation of the past, the authenticity of this or that collective memory, but also about all hopes for the future. To release a different imaginary concerning the past is to release a different imaginary as to future possibilities. The genius loci, the marked qualities of any place, is open to contestation, both theoretically (as to its meaning) and concretely (as to how to make a particular place). The absence of active political controversy is usually a sign of the domination of some hegemonic power. What makes the site of the Acropolis so interesting is not only the competing claims based on class, national sentiments, and locale, but also the competing claims of outside powers (such as those of Germany, Britain, and the United States). Each power seeks to appropriate the Acropolis for its own particular purpose as a symbol of the origins of Western civilization, rather than to respect it as a living monument embedded in the history of Greek geopolitical and political-economic struggles. The Acropolis “belongs” simultaneously to radically divergent imagined communities. And the question of to whom it “truly” belongs has no direct theoretical answer: it is determined through political contestation and struggle and, hence, is an unstable determination. A seemingly dead monument is, as Delillo notes, alive with meaning.
The Heideggerian Moment
Behind much of this looms the imposing figure of Heidegger. Some account of his thought is unavoidable, since this is the fount of so much anticosmopolitan thinking. “Place,” said Heidegger (echoing Aristotle), “is the locale of the truth of Being.” But this locale does not exist outside of a particular world of space-relations: “All distances in time and space are shrinking. . . . Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance. What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on radio, can remain far from us. What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near to us. . . . Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness. . . . What is it that unsettles and thus terrifes? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent.”26
Heidegger fears the loss of identity, the loss of contact with the real sensory world that occurs as the space-time coordinates of social life become unstable through the spread of market relations and rational calculation. “The object-character of technological dominion spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely,” he complains. As a result, “the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as the will to will, trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers.”27 In attacking the material forces of liberal capitalism and the cosmopolitan spirit of commerce, Heidegger is attacking the very processes that Adam Smith and Kant welcomed as progressive. For Heidegger, the terror produced by the formation of the world market and the consequent dramatic and rapid shifts in space-time relations is omnipresent. Physical nearness no longer brings with it understanding or an ability to appreciate or even appropriate a “thing” (, for that matter, relate to another person) properly. Heidegger therefore rejects the world market and seeks to uncover the truths of human existence phenomenologically in place. The concept to which he appeals is that of “dwelling.” He most famously illustrates this with a description of a Black Forest farmhouse:
Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It places the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead’—for that is what they call a coffin there; the Totenbaum—and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.28
Dwelling is the capacity to achieve a spiritual unity (come to terms, for example, with the genius loci) between humans and things. From this it follows that “only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.” Indeed, commercially constructed buildings “may even deny dwelling its own nature when they are pursued and acquired purely for their own sake.” Although there is a narrow sense of homelessness that can perhaps be alleviated simply by building shelter, there is a much deeper crisis of homelessness to be found in the modern world; many people have lost their roots, their connection to homeland. Even those who physically stay in place may become homeless (rootless) through the inroads of modern means of communication, such as radio and television. “The rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core.” If we lose the capacity to dwell, Heidegger argues, then we lose our roots and find ourselves cut off from all sources of spiritual nourishment. The impoverishment of existence is incalculable. Heidegger believes that genuine works of art can only flourish when rooted in a native soil. “We are plants which—whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not—must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and bear fruit.” Deprived of such roots, art is reduced to a meaningless caricature (so much for modernist internationalism). Universal moral judgments are likewise judged empty and inauthentic unless they are similarly rooted. This is the view that Mehta echoes when he points to the way human beings “inherit a mass of predispositions from an unfathomable past bounded by the variations of time and place” and notes that this defines the “integrity and self-understanding from which alone life can be, and is, richly experienced—indeed, from which alone moral action is possible.”29
Place construction, from this perspective, must be about the recovery of roots and the recovery of the art of dwelling. The myth of an unfathomable past here becomes the problematic key to Heidegger’s theory. He focuses on the way in which places “are constructed in our memories and affections through repeated encounters and complex associations.” He emphasizes how “place experiences are necessarily time-deepened and memory-qualified.” He creates “a new way to speak about and care for our human nature and environment,” so that “love of place and the earth are scarcely sentimental extras to be indulged only when all technical and material problems have been resolved. They are part of being in the world and prior, therefore, to all technical matters.” 30 Heidegger reverses the priority traditionally given to space over place in the Kantian scheme of things. Spaces “receive their being from locations and not from space,” or, as Casey puts it, “space and time are contained in places rather than places in them.”31 The active production and making of space therefore occurs through building and dwelling. The inspiration that H. Lefebvre drew from Heidegger in constructing his theory of the production of space then becomes clear. Lefebvre, however, transforms the Heideggerian concept of “dwelling” into “habiting,” in order to free it of mythical and metaphysical presumptions. He likewise transforms Heidegger’s fears of the frantic shrinking of distances into a constructive critique of what he calls the “abstract space” of capitalism and the state, and introduces a class element into the counter-politics of production of alternative spaces.32 What for Heidegger leads to withdrawal into the phenomeonology of place generates in Lefebvre the spirit of a counter-attack to produce alternative and more humane spaces and places. Lefebvre takes up the relational theory of space and place, and gives it a more explicit political meaning.
But Heidegger also laments the loss of an intimate and authentic relation to nature. This has inspired a tradition of place-based environmentalist politics. “By reviving a sense of place,” Heideggerians say, “we may be able to reactivate the care of the environment.” A “reawakened sense of beauty of local places may fuel a deeply spiritual concern for the preservation of the ecological diversity and uniqueness of each place.” This faith is not only found in the theological literature. It is also strongly evident in bioregionalist, communitarian, and anarcho-socialist forms of ecological politics. Place is, therefore, the preferred terrain of much environmental politics.33 Some of the fiercest movements of opposition to liberal and neoliberal capitalism arise out of struggles to preserve valued environmental qualities (not only natural but also built environments) in particular places.
There are, however, difficulties with these arguments. Heidegger’s prescriptions are notoriously abstract and vague. For example, what might the conditions of “authentic dwelling” be in a highly industrialized, modernist, and capitalist world? We cannot turn back to the Black Forest farmhouse (even Heidegger recognized that), but what else might we turn to? Nostalgia for some imagined past is no panacea. The issue of authenticity (rootedness) of the experience of place (and nature in place) is a peculiarly modern preoccupation. “A truly rooted community,” notes Yi-Fu Tuan, “may have shrines and monuments, but it is unlikely to have museums and societies for the preservation of the past.”34 The conscious effort to evoke an “authentic” sense of place and of the past is a very contemporary preoccupation. It even becomes a selling point for developers and community boosters, a source of monopoly rent for capitalist entrepreneurs promising to deliver authentic community and a harmonious relation to nature. Heidegger’s own formulations seem to be predicated upon an opposition to a world of commodification, modernization, globalization, and time-space compression (though some believe they were more explicitly directed toward a critique of the largely U.S.–inspired modernist reconstruction of West Germany after 1945). He provides no examples of what it might really mean to dwell authentically in our actual contemporary conditions of existence, and herein lies an acute danger. The quest for authenticity is, it turns out, itself a modern value, and it stands to be subverted by the market provision of constructed authenticity, invented traditions, and a commercialized heritage culture. This was the ultimate fate of Wordsworth’s romanticism as he shifted from writing poems romanticizing closeness to nature in his beloved Lake District, to writing commercial tour guides to this place.35 The final victory of capitalist modernity is not the disappearance of the nonmodern world, but its artificial preservation and reconstruction, as much in Heideggerian theory as in actual cultural practices.
But the problems run far deeper than this. Who, for example, are these “mortals” who, along with earth and heaven and divinities, enter into the “simple oneness of things”? Heidegger’s conception of species being (he never uses the term) is strictly limited to a person, whose only existence is given over to the search for authenticity and personal self-realization through learning to dwell in harmony with the earth, heaven, and divinities. Cultural variation (along with all language and art) is an output and not an input into that quest. To read a work in the Heideggerian mold is to encounter a world of no prior class distinctions, no hierarchical structures of social power, no complex bodies politic and social institutions, and, of course, no market valuations and coordinations, no military-industrial technologies, and certainly no dynamics of capital accumulation through uneven geographical development. Actually existing materialist history and geography, including an earth that has been radically transformed, if not ravaged, by human action over millennia, is washed away in the make-believe Heideggerian universe that withdraws from the practicalities of daily life in order to offer a critique of where we now are in terms of our social, cultural, and natural relations. Heideggerianism trades upon the undoubted capacity of human beings to sense moments of harmony, peace, and spiritual serenity, if not sublime joy, in particular places at particular times and to develop deep attachments to the places where they live, but it then goes on to suppose that this is all that is relevant to people’s lives. The problem, of course, is that if the market system, along with monetary valuations, contemporary technologies (organizational as well as materialist), and capital accumulation, were all to disappear tomorrow, and if all the bankers of the world suddenly committed themselves to the Heideggerian project, then most of those capable of reading this book and many more besides would die of starvation within a few weeks. The Heideggerian conception of “mortals” is every bit as abstract and as rootless as that of the liberal subject, though with radically different ambitions: not to achieve self-realization through the accumulation of property, wealth, and power, but to do so through learning to dwell.
The supposed connection between ecological sentiments and place likewise deserves critical scrutiny. The penchant for regarding place as a privileged if not exclusive locus of ecological sensitivity rests on the human body as “the measure of all things” in an unmediated and very direct way. Sensory interaction between the body and its environs can certainly carry with it a wide range of psychic as well as social insights and meanings. But the intimacy of many place-based accounts—Thoreau’s famous and influential exploration of Walden being the classic example—yields only limited knowledge of ecological processes operating at a small scale. This is insufficient to understand broader socio-ecological processes (global warming or stratospheric ozone depletions cannot be directly detected by phenomenological means). Insofar as “alienation from nature” is thought to be (and there is a huge gap between being thought to be and actually being so) a widespread phenomenon in contemporary society, then the temptation is to treat specific places (increasingly preserved as wilderness, for example) as the loci of a supposedly unalienated direct sensory interaction with nature (ecotourism trades on this). The result is to fetishize both nature and the human body, the Self and the realms of human sensation, as special places, as the locus of all being in the world. And while there are ways, such as those proposed in the “deep ecology” of Arne Naess, to turn this into a global and universal standpoint, the leap of faith from personal experience to empathy with the whole of nature is colossal. Yet this is the leap of faith—often recounted as an epiphany—that many deep ecologists and environmental ethicists make. But there are deep reasons to be skeptical of the omniscient view, adopted even by the nineteenth-century anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus, that “humanity is nature becoming conscious of itself” and that we, and only we, can realize the deep harmonies of nature’s plan through wise interventions.36
Heidegger’s claim (and note that this is a claim and not a proven fact of life) that the authenticity of dwelling and of rootedness is being destroyed by the spread of technology, rationalism, mass production, and mass values has been influential with many of those concerned to articulate a critical understanding of place under capitalism. Ted Relph, for example, holds that place is being systematically destroyed, rendered inauthentic or even “placeless” by the sheer organizational power and depth of penetration of the market and of capital. Unfortunately, this line of thinking cannot avoid descending into a pervasive elitism. Some people can claim the status of authenticity by virtue of their capacity to dwell in real places, it is said, while the rest of us—the majority—live empty and soulless lives in a “placeless” world. The mark of this kind of elitism, of course, is that it has nothing necessarily to do with class in the capitalist or even traditional sense and can even take opposition to capitalist modernity and market valuations as its political stance. The virtue of authenticity is more often than not accorded to those living simple lives close to the land, capable of absorbing the wisdom that, according to Basso, supposedly sits in places. The response is a politics of place construction that is then held up as the way forward to the promised land of an authentic existence and of an unalienated relation to nature and to others. “The only political vision that offers any hope of salvation,” writes Kirkpatrick Sale, “is one based on an understanding of, a rootedness in, a deep commitment to, and a resacralization of, place.” In his popular Geography of Nowhere, R. Kunstler likewise lambastes capitalist developers and their all-too-easily duped clients for permitting an urbanization process that embraces the crass shopping mall and a suburbanite culture that is soulless, faceless, and therefore “placeless.”37 But unfortunately, Kunstler looks no further for an alternative than the “new urbanism” preached by developer architects (such as Duany), with its equally false concept of a “community of living” and an ersatz “closeness to nature” (landscaped design) as an antidote. Placefulness becomes a construction of profitable enterprise.
Yet there is also something positive and progressive in what Heidegger has to offer, particularly from the standpoint of critique of the existing order. What many subsequent writers have drawn from him—and this includes Lefebvre—is the possibility of resistance, outright rejection of and active opposition to any simple capitalist, market-based (or modernist) logic of place and space construction. The increasing penetration of technological rationality, commodification and market values, and capital accumulation into social life, together with time-space compression, provokes resistances. The search for some “authentic” sense of community and for an unalienated relation to nature among many radical and ecological movements is one cutting edge of resistance. Place, Escobar argues, is not only the locus of resistance to a globalizing capitalism but, more plausibly, a site from which alternatives can be actively sought and incipiently constructed. This is where the search for the true realm of freedom can begin.38 The key difference between Lefebvre and Escobar, is that the former conceptualizes the problem in terms of the production of space, while the latter construes it in terms of the production of new ways of living in place. And therein lies a difference that has, as we shall see, significant political implications.
Open and Closed Places
Contemporary writers who insist on the priority of place over space typically declare that they do not construe places as exclusionary, as culturally homogeneous “closed boxes” (as Appiah puts it). They position themselves this way, one suspects, because they are all too aware of the dangers of exclusionary nationalisms and local fascisms. The places they envisage are therefore depicted as open and diverse. Place must, Casey declares, be porous toward the outside and diverse to the point of “wildness” on the inside. Why they must be so (as opposed to why we might struggle to make them so) is, however, unclear. Places have to be understood, Casey says, as “both concrete and relational.”39 But this, too, poses the question: relational to what? In effect, he here escapes the logic of closed boxes in absolute space (Foucault’s heterotopias) by invoking a relational idea of place (closer to Lefebvre’s dialectical conception of heterotopia). This is not an unfamiliar ruse. It has suffused much of the thinking about place in recent years. D. Massey, for example, correctly challenges the essentialist Heideggerian idea that place is definable in terms of internal histories, timeless identities, or fixed boundaries. “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple,” she writes, “and the particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counter-position to the other that lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond.’ Places viewed in this way are open and porous.” If there is any uniqueness to place, she says, then it is always hybrid, arising out of “the particular mix of social relations.”40
Such formulations sacrifice much of what the concept of place was originally designed to capture—the unique qualities and character of some segment of the earth’s surface and the coalescence of human activities into some sort of distinctive structured coherence. A. Dirlik, having sympathetically reviewed a plethora of arguments for openness and porosity, comes back in the end to the idea that place must also be understood as concrete and bounded, because the purely relational formulations become too “diaphanous.” Massey, he writes, is “over zealous” in “dissociating place from fixed location.” “Porosity of boundaries is not the same as abolition of boundaries.” If everything is totally open, then “there is nothing special about place after all.” Dirlik here identifies the underlying problem. While it is conventional, he argues, to construe place and space as opposed but interrelated terms, the transformation of place “may be inconceivable without a simultaneous transformation of space, because place and space, while analytically distinct, are nevertheless linked in intimate ways.”41
But how are they linked? The problem, which we encountered at the very outset, is that we cannot understand the concept of place (or region or territory) without understanding space. Casey’s Kantian conception of absolute and empty space underlies his particular theory of place, and it is from this confined conception that he seeks to break free by reversing the charges, as it were. “Rather than being the minion of an absolute space and time, place is the master of their shared matrix,” he writes.42 But, as we also saw in chapter 7, it is impossible to articulate a full understanding of relational spacetime without invoking ideas about place as both “concrete and relational” in the way Casey proposes. This brings us to the crux of the ontological problem. The way in which place is understood shifts as we change our conceptions of space and time. Whitehead, working directly with a relational theory of spacetime, provides the most satisfying answer to what a relational theory of place would look like. He construes “places” as “entities” that achieve relative stability for a time in their bounding and in their internal ordering of processes. Such entities he calls “permanences.” These permanences come to occupy a piece of space in an exclusive way (for a time) and thereby define a place—their place—for a time. The process of place formation (including that of bounding and internal ordering) is, therefore, a process of carving out “permanences” from a flow of processes that simultaneously create a distinctive kind of spatio-temporality.43 Financial flows define new spatio-temporalities but also rest on the creation of distinctive physical markets in places like Wall Street, Chicago, or the City of London. These distinctive places are marked by exclusions: only certain people are allowed on the trading floor of the stock exchange, for example. This “carving out” of distinctive places entails the activities of bounding, of building markers of exclusion such as fences and walls, and of establishing an internal ordering of space relations, but then also involves bringing places into relation to a wider world by making bridges and doors, establishing communication links, projecting images of reputation, and the like. Boundaries and borders, like reputations, are not given but made. But the “permanences”—no matter how solid they may seem—are not eternal. They are always subject to time as “perpetual perishing” (as Whitehead puts it). Places are, in short, always contingent on the relational processes that create, sustain, and dissolve them. The coexistence of “multiple spatialities” in places undermines any simple, unitary sense of place. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the emphasis has to be upon the bounded entity or “permanence,” the distinctive shape, form, and internal ordering a particular place acquires, the attributes and distinctive qualities it evinces, and the consequences that derive for socio-ecological processes that sustain and evolve life within and around that permanence. While it is true, as Moore, for one, insists, that “within one place, social actors become subjected to multiple matrices of power,” and that the qualities of place are perpetually contested, this does not mean that there is no hegemonic configuration of relations through which we experience and define the places we encounter. It is in this spirit that Cindi Katz proposes the construction of “countertopographies” that offer a “multifaceted way of theorizing the connectedness of vastly different places made artifactually discrete by virtue of history and geography but which also reproduce themselves differently amidst the common political-economic and socio-cultural processes they experience.” Construing relations between space and place in this fashion permits, she claims, the analysis of particular issues “in and across place,” at the same time as it inspires the creation of a “different kind of politics, one in which crossing space and ‘jumping scale’ are obligatory rather than overlooked.”44
Place formation is not, furthermore, neutral with respect to the production of spatio-temporality. Cities crystallize out as “permanences” (absolute spaces with an internal ordering) within the flows of trade (relative space-time), but they then become foci of innovative activities and new global imaginaries (relationalities) that transform the spatio-temporal forms and the socio-ecological dynamics going on around them. The Hanseatic League, initially centered on Lubeck, grew into a trading network of well over one hundred emergent cities (each bounded and internally ordered in some way). The activities of the league created a new spatio-temporality to political-economic life from Novgorod to London in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The shifting global network of interurban flows of finance capital in our own era, facilitated by the new information technologies and powered by new kinds of markets (based on financial innovations encompassing securitization and credit and currency derivatives) in distinctive places in New York, Chicago, London, and Frankfurt, has destabilized older spatio-temporalities of political-economic and social life, and created new impulses of urbanization worldwide (in Shanghai, Mumbai, or Sydney). The production of space, in short, proceeds alongside of, as well as through, the production of places. Interplace competition produces in turn new spatio-temporalities.45 Uncovering the dialectical character of this space-place connection is crucial.
This can be systematized by referring back to the matrix of concepts of space and time (see fig. 1 in chapter 7). Places plainly have material, conceptual, and lived dimensions of the sort that Lefebvre describes. They can likewise be considered as absolute (bounded, fixed, and named), relative (interconnected and interactive through myriad flows), and relational (internalizing forces, powers, influences, and meanings from elsewhere). If we ask: what is the place called “Paris”? then the answer will vary according to where we situate ourselves within the different dimensions of this matrix of possibilities. The sheer physicality of Paris is experienced in the absolute spaces of work, reproduction, leisure, and the search for pleasure. These absolute spaces can be represented in innumerable ways (chiefly but not exclusively through cartographies), and an archive of such conceptions (both past and present) can be preserved. We inhabit these absolute spaces in a variety of psychic states (pleasure, fear, lassitude). This may provoke reconceptualizations—as in poetry and literature—followed perhaps by new architectural initiatives (first conceived as cartographic plans) to reengineer the absolute physical spaces of the city in ways more in accord with our felt wants, needs, and desires. In designating the city as an absolute Cartesian space, we fix its administrative cartographic form and set up principles of internal ordering. Its absoluteness may be physically signaled by ramparts, boundaries, and a city wall, while its internal ordering may reflect class, ethnic, and racial divisions, as well as differentiations deriving from divisions of labor.
As an entity in relative space-time, Paris takes on the character of some kind of “permanence,” an evolving receptacle open to the whirling currents of global flows of goods and services, of people, commodities, money, information, cultural values, and capital in motion. The inhabitants of the city engage with these flows through physical, material practices and encounters in particular locations that are themselves always “in process” (under threat, for example, of urban renewal). These relations can be conceptualized in flow charts and diagrams, in data of inputs and outputs, in concepts such as “the metabolism of the city.” We seek ways to represent the city as speed, spectacle, motion, and movement. We live in states of exhilaration or exhaustion, resignation or resistance, as the case may be, as we rush hither and thither within and beyond the city. Reconceptualizing Paris as a city of motion in fantastic works of art may lead to attempts to distill architectural plans to rebuild the permanence of the city in ways that both reflect and animate the flows (this is the kind of architecture that Hadid seeks but invariably fails to produce, as she concretizes her work in absolute spatial terms).
Finally, the relationality of Paris can only be experienced through the materiality of dominant processes and effects. These processes are not only material. We recognize, for example, the importance of the urban spectacle, of the symbols of Paris’s reputation as we walk the streets (the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and other iconic sites or the burned-out hulks of cars that litter the suburbs of discontent). Relationalities are conceptualized in an evocative language of repute that is projected throughout the rest of the world (beckoning to those in search of artistic liberty or political freedoms, to tourists in search of culture and romance, and repelling those appalled by Paris’s oppressive colonial history and the continuing racism so blatantly manifest there). Paris is projected as “the city of light,” as “romance in springtime,” but also as the city of revolutionary excess, of tumbrils and guillotines, and of immigrant discontent and racist oppressions. Paris can be lived as memory, generating sensations of intense pleasure or pain for an Iraqi doctor caught in the bombing of Baghdad. It can be fantasized, from near or from afar, without ever setting foot in the place, as an object of desire or of disdain. It can be reconceptualized in artistic or in literary forms (as Manet did in his paintings and as Charles Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities). As a result of encounters with these conceptualizations, we recognize new iconic sites as we walk the streets, dream new fantasies of an urban utopia. We may even seek to put these fantasies to work in an effort to reengineer the absolute spaces of Paris, as Le Corbusier once sought to do, more to our heart’s desire.
Almost everyone who attempts to theorize place starts at one point within the matrix of spatio-temporal possibilities, only to shift somewhere else when they attempt to unravel the rich complexity of the idea. Casey, having accepted the absolute Kantian definition of space and time at the outset, ends up introducing relationality into his concept of place in order to render it more dynamic. Had he started out with a relational concept of spacetime, he would have created a non-Aristotelian theory of place that resembled that of Whitehead. Instead, he has to liberate place from absolute spatiality by proclaiming it to be porous to the outside and wild on the inside! Norberg-Shulz, having started from what seems like a fixed and essentialist definition of the genius loci, subsequently liberates it from stasis and permanence by, in effect, recognizing with Rossi that even myths can change their meaning and their purchase over time. Heidegger, though “stubbornly local” (as Williams puts it), understands that places and things (like bridges) create spaces, and that places take on their character through relationalities established in space-time. While he refuses the broader common flow given by commerce, communication technologies, and modernity, Heidegger invokes a sense of that wider common flow by appeal to the worlds of myth and religion from which Kant had sought to free the concept of place. Dirlik, having evinced a certain sympathy with Massey’s relative and relational formulations, gently reminds her that uniqueness in the absolute dimension cannot be ignored. Foucault, restlessly trapped in the absolute spaces of his Kantianism, fantasizes a relational escapist vision of liberty and freedom to explore difference and unconstrained otherness behind the prison walls or on the pirate ship. Deleuze, freed from Kantian historicity by the figure of the schizoid personality and from absolute spaces by the Leibnizian relational idea of the fold, nevertheless grounds his key philosophical ruminations concerning deterritorialization and reterritorialization (which can be understood as processes of place-formation) on the isolated and absolutist metaphor of the desert island.46 No one, it seems, can ever occupy only one point in the matrix of spatio-temporalities. Everyone who begins at some point finds herself or himself drawn into an unavoidable dance of the dialectic across the terrain of complementary spatio-temporalities. From this standpoint those who proclaim, with Aristotle, that there is some essentialist theory of place, that “place is the first of all things,” or who hold, with Heidegger, that “place is the locale of the truth of being” (though not of becoming!) are plainly mistaken. The only concept of place that makes sense is one that sees it as a contingent, dynamic, and influential “permanence,” while being integrally contained within the processes that create, sustain, and dissolve all regions, places, and spacetimes into complex configurations.
The Politics of Place
So where does this analysis leave us, with respect to the thesis dear to the hearts of many within the alternative globalization movement: that place is not only the locale of the truth of being but also the key locus of consciousness formation and organization against the predatory and destructive forces of a universalizing and abstracted neoliberal capitalism? The groundwork for an answer to this question was laid in chapter 7, where Margaret Kohn was approvingly cited as saying that “political spaces facilitate change by creating a distinctive place to develop new identities and practices. The political power of place comes from the ability of popular forces to link the social, symbolic, and experiential dimensions of space” into a transformative politics.47 But from Lefebvre we also derived the salutary warning that the heterotopic spaces constructed by anomic groups are likely at some point “to be reclaimed by the dominant praxis” and that the production of space and place is shot through at every moment with the dynamics of indeterminate social struggles whose outcomes depend upon the shifting currents of power relations between social groups. Into this cauldron of social struggles we also must insert the charged fact that much of the envisioning of political alternatives rests either upon a utopian vision of a different kind of yet-to-be-constructed, perfectly harmonious place or upon some version of place-based communitarian theory and praxis as an appropriate and adequate answer to the pursuit of the good life.
To discuss the politics of place is therefore to enter into a terrain of debate that is fraught and frequently marked by misconceptions. It is said, for example, that I think working-class movements are ineluctably confined to place and that I am hostile to place-based politics because it inevitably becomes exclusionary and reactionary.48 What I actually said was that there is a long history of working-class and popular movements successfully commanding places, only to be defeated by bourgeois forces that seem to be more adept at commanding space. This is what happened in Paris in 1848 and 1871, in Seattle in 1918, and in Tucumán in 1968, and we have in recent times seen revolutionary movements in Chile and Nicaragua (and the list goes on and on) that have lost out in this way. The answer, of course, is that working-class and popular movements have to pay more attention to geopolitical and universal strategies (as did the First International and as elements within the World Social Forum are currently doing). If they do not do this, then they are more vulnerable to suppression from the outside. The international labor movement is currently no match for the international powers of finance capital. This imbalance is not inevitable, but progressive movements have to grapple directly with this problem. Place, I have argued, is always a crucial basis for progressive and emancipatory movements. In Spaces of Hope, for example, I took it as a crucial mediating factor in the movement from the foundational moment in which the personal is political through the organization of local solidarities in particular places to a more universal politics of rights and justice.49 The model is parallel to that proposed by the Stoics as well as by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Here is how Nussbaum describes the Stoic position: “They suggest that we think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded with a series of concentric circles. The first one encircles the self, the next takes in the immediate family, then follows the extended family, then, in order, neighbors or local groups, fellow city-dwellers, and fellow countrymen. . . . Outside all these circles is the largest one, humanity as a whole. Our task as citizens of the world will be to ‘draw the circles somehow toward the center,’ . . . making all human beings more like our fellow city-dwellers . . . [as we] give the circle that defines our humanity special attention and respect.”50
All circles must, says Nussbaum, be accorded proper respect. The model that Marx and Engels proposed (possibly drawing upon the Stoics, since Epicurus was the focus of Marx’s dissertation) started with the alienated individual worker, passed through the formation of collective solidarities, first in the factory and then in the city region, then shifted scale to the pursuit of nation-state power, finally ending up with the call for workers of the world to unite around their common humanity.51 All of these “moments” or circles of struggle must be kept in dialectical tension with each other. A universal politics that cannot link back to the way the personal is political or to collective solidarities achieved in particular places would become hollowed out, if not repressive. Furthermore, what makes good political or ecological sense at one scale does not necessarily work well at another. The chronic local smog problem of London (or of the Ohio River Valley) in the 1950s was resolved by building tall smokestack power stations that deposited acid rain all over Scandinavia (or New England). A local solution produced a regional problem. Conversely, decentralization of political power to the local level all too often turns out, under neoliberal rules, to be a superb means to gain or maintain centralized class control and monopoly power. My theory of place-based politics derives from this overall conception.
The foundational point is that there can be no universal politics without an adequate place-based politics. In taking up Raymond Williams’s conception of militant particularism, furthermore, I suggested that local politics is in practice nearly always the grounding for some kind of qualified universalism.52 All politics is, as the old adage has it, local politics. Problems arise when the dialectic between the moments gets lost, when politics gets stuck in the local, such that this becomes an end in itself. At this point the reactionary and exclusionary dangers loom large. And if I have warned too explicitly of such dangers, and thereby offended the sensibilities of those who like to romance the local to death, I have done so because I see far too many examples of local, even neighborhood, fascism and exclusionism, of anti-immigrant and gated-community fervor, of “not in my back yard” politics, and the like. If we do not pay close attention to how something potentially progressive can so easily turn reactionary, then we lose sight of the grander political possibilities that always attach to mobilizing the power of place as a moment in the search for the geography of freedom.
Consider, for example, the politics of place-bound communitarian solutions. Distinctive communities are painstakingly built in place by social practices that often include the exercise of authoritarian powers and conformist restrictions. Such places can never remain entirely open, as Dirlik for one ends up acknowledging. An achieved “community” is an enclosed absolute space (irrespective of scale or even frontier definitions), within which certain rules of social engagement prevail. To enter into that bounded space (and the activity of bounding is crucial in itself) is to enter into a space of rules (both tacit and explicit) that one acknowledges, respects, and obeys (either voluntarily or through some sort of compulsion). The construction of “community” entails the production of such a place. The rules are open to subversion or overt challenge (as is the bounding), but this then challenges the very existence of community as a “relative permanence,” which in turn will likely spark defensive resistance on the part of at least some inhabitants. Communities are, therefore, contested terrains. Under contemporary conditions of neoliberal hegemony, they are rarely stable for long.
It is not always easy to define the difference between a progressive communitarian politics of place, and the exclusionary and authoritarian practices of, say, homeowner associations defending their property against speculators, developers, and in-migration of “people of the wrong sort.” Amitai Etzioni, a leading proponent of the new communitarianism, actively supports, for example, the principle of closed and gated communities as a progressive contribution to the organization of social life. For the privileged, community often means securing and enhancing privileges and a way of life already gained. For the underprivileged, it all too often means “controlling their own slum” (but at least it is “their” slum) as a residual space. The communitarian solution goes nowhere in relation to hegemonic neoliberal practices, except to challenge ethical individualism through small-scale collective solidarities that often turn out to be more protective of individual private property rights and values than generative of new kinds of social relations.53
Place formation under neoliberalism is, like the production of space, an active process. It is against this background that prospects for an alternative, place-based resistance to neoliberalism have to be engaged. The circulation and accumulation of capital destabilizes the “permanences” of places and regions, if only because money power destroys all other kinds of community so that it itself becomes the community. Phenomena like urban growth, changing regional divisions of labor, deindustrialization, gentrification, regional class alliance formation, and the like are products of this process. Place-making and the production of uneven geographical development go hand in hand.54 But the circulation and accumulation of capital are not the only process that matters. Consider, for example, the circulation of energy through socio-ecological systems, the circulation of cultural impulses and information, the shifting dynamics of geopolitical power relations, the conflicting identities (nationalist, ethnic, racial, gendered) that arise relationally and clash (often violently) through place formation in absolute space. The contestation over places (the construction of boundaries, barriers, walls, and policed borders) is an omnipresent feature of our world. How people associate and construct collectivities and communities (sometimes but not always within bounded territories) varies enormously, as do the organizational forms (rhizomatic or hierarchical, centralized or decentralized, democratic or authoritarian) and the specific aims (by no means confined to political-economic ends). How power is amassed in, and how it circulates within and between, collectivities and particular territorial forms of political organization also matters, since it is against the background of such processes that alternative possibilities come into being. The very instability of places and the perpetual disruptions of community mean there are always open spaces for oppositional politics to arise and even to flourish. The instability and uncontrollability of relational connections render impossible completely successful repressive totalitarian controls.. A space can always be opened up in which people come together to define ways of relating and of valuing that depart from neoliberal monetized norms.
While mobilizing the “power of place” is a vital aspect of political action, there is always the danger of fetishizing this moment. The politics of localism and parochialism is no answer to the universal repressions of neoliberal exploitation and accumulation by dispossession. And this is so precisely because of the intimate relation between spaces and places. Distinctive places do indeed form key sites for individual encounters through which commonalities and solidarities can be established between individuals, such that counter-hegemonic movements against a dominant order can be articulated. From such sites it is “possible to mobilize participants for political projects” that transcend “parochial concerns while still preserving accountability to the base.” And, over time, the density of enduring social, economic, and political ties in places (from neighborhoods to regions and to states) provides “a pragmatic anchor for political activity.” The problem, of course, is that this anchor can prove a drag upon movement unless it is supplemented by the kind of “inspired” politics that C. Katz envisages, a politics that is prepared to both cross space and jump scales. 55
Even then, it is important to recognize that this process cuts a variety of ways depending upon ideological orientation and particular political objectives. This is the way that Christianity built its base, as did socialism. Reactionary fascism, the BJP in India, and the progressive civil rights movement in the United States all mobilized the power of place as a means to pursue their political agendas. Furthermore, contestation and struggle over who controls the power of place is everywhere apparent. The rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, as in Chile after 1973, was accompanied by a total destruction of the places and spaces in which the left was organized and the substitution of an alternative territorial organization of political control to sustain power. Authoritarian mayors in U.S. cities have traditionally organized places—ward systems—into a territorialized political machine to maintain their position, and they have sought to destroy alternative place-based forms of political organization. All political, social, and religious movements use place-building territorial strategies to achieve their goals. The geographies of freedom and of authoritarian repressions go hand in hand in their resort to territorial strategies of place-building. It is no more possible to escape the logic of territoriality and place-building than it is to escape politics.
Place-based community entails a delicate relation between fluid spatio-temporal processes (both relative and relational) and relatively permanent rules of belonging and association constructed in absolute space (like the those formally imposed by the nation-state). The tangible struggle to define its limits and range (sometimes even territories and borders), and to create and sustain its rules and institutions through collective powers such as constitutional forms, political parties, the churches, the unions, neighborhood organizations, local governments, and the like, has proven central to the pursuit of alternatives to the selfishness of personalized market individualism presupposed in neoliberal and liberal theories. The problem is that although community “in itself” has meaning as part of a broader politics, community “for itself” almost invariably degenerates into regressive exclusions and fragmentations (what some would call negative heterotopias of spatial form). To emphasize that danger is not to propose that all place-based forms of political organizing are inevitably reactionary.
Anarchists, particularly of the social variety, are deeply interested in place construction even as they abjure that particular territorial form of place construction called the state. Murray Bookchin, for example, advocates the creation of “a humanly scaled self-governing municipality freely and confederally associated with other humanly scaled, self governing municipalities.” This “anarchic vision of decentralized communities, united in free confederations or networks for coordinating the communities of a region, reflects the traditional ideals of a participatory democracy in a modern radical context.” Furthermore, “an ecological community would municipalize its economy and join with other municipalities in integrating its resources into a regional confederal system. Land, factories and workshops would be controlled by the popular assemblies of free communities, not by a nation-state or worker producers who might very well develop a proprietory interest in them.”56 Bookchin is proposing a particular form of place construction to displace the nation-state. His formulation actually ranges across the matrix of spatio-temporal forms in interesting ways. His vision of municipal associationism begins at the absolute territorial level with local assemblies of equally endowed individuals, shifts to the relative space-time dimension through the networks of regional assemblies, and expresses relationality through the “common flow” idea that everyone, everywhere, should sense their solidarity with everyone else by living a life of nonhierarchical social relations in municipal associations that cultivate an intimate relation with nature.
The geographical theory of place tells us that Bookchin’s proposals cannot avoid encountering all the paradoxes and contradictions that arise in all forms of place construction (including that of the nation-state). How will the reifications of this anarchist ideal actually work on the ground in absolute space and time? Will the self-governing municipalities be bounded, fenced in, and guarded from outside marauders? What principles of membership/citizenship will apply, and how will the exit and entry of members be regulated (if at all)? How will the power structures that inevitably form at higher scales (the regional confederal assemblies) actually work, and how can the danger that decentralization can assure the perpetuation of hidden forms of centralized power be avoided? “If the whole society were to be organized as a confederation of autonomous municipalities,” Iris Marion Young comments, “what would prevent the development of large-scale inequality and injustice among communities, and thereby the oppression of individuals who do not live in the more privileged and more powerful communities?”57 To this I would add another difficulty: how would a world of 6 billion or more people living in this way protect biodiversity in, say, tropical rainforests? Bookchin is aware of many of these questions and does his best to answer some of them in his numerous writings without, unfortunately, providing altogether convincing answers.
What geographical theory teaches is that all forms of place construction, no matter whether organized by socialists, autonomistas, social anarchists, religious groups, city corporations, developers, or dictators, face similar foundational questions. A geographical theory of place poses these questions head on and so helps us avoid the more egregious blunders of well-intentioned alternative forms of place construction. Place-making according to conscious design, as evidenced, with all its faults, by the utopian tradition, is one of our greatest powers. It is also one of our unavoidable tasks. How it is integrated as a constructive rather than disruptive moment into cosmopolitan projects therefore becomes of crucial significance, a condition of possibility for human emancipation.