Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3
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Locating the Limits and Possibilities of Place / Jessica Maucione
<1> Theoretical debates regarding space and place, their usefulness and limits, are complicated by the too often presumed "givenness" of the terms [1]. Despite their slippage into one another—conceptually as well as a result of inconsistent or interchangeable use of space and place—many theorists in several disciplines employ spatial or placial metaphors, even as they undertake a discussion of space and/or place. On the other hand, clear designations between space and place frequently prove overly simplistic. For some, space and place are in direct opposition—Yi-Fu Tuan writes, "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other" (3). For others, space is an expression of place or vice versa—Michel de Certeau defines " space [as] a practiced place" (117, original emphasis). According to the latter definition, then, place is dead, static, and transforms into space when animated.
<2> In other contexts, space and place are understood together in opposition to some other entity, typically time. In Space, Place, and Gender, Doreen Massey sets out to salvage place from its association with changelessness, with the mother who stays home (167). As an example, in Space and Place Yi-Fu Tuan describes place or homeland "as mother" who nourishes and therefore, "place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere" (154). Massey draws attention to how often the "characterization of place as home comes from those who have left" and how the homeplace gets "framed around those who […] stayed behind," the former being (traditionally) male and the latter female, so that the mother is "assigned the role of personifying a place which did not change" (167). But she later refers to space too as lacking temporality (aligned with woman as lack) along with the conception of the spatial as devoid of politics because atemporal and lacking in "dislocation" (Massey 257, 251). For Massey, then, the problem with understandings of space and place lies in their association with stasis, and as such with the feminine conceived against the masculine realm of the temporal and of politics.
<3> In order to situate this exploration of the possibilities of place within these debates, I will codify my use of the terms. First, I not only reject a space/place binary, but find that the value of theoretical work in space and place lies in its potential to cut through still operative (however anachronistic) binaries, including male/female, first/third world, self/other, as well as time/space or place. Furthermore, it is important to resist tendencies toward telos, as in the linear trajectory or continuum that posits space as a progenitor of place or place as a moment (a placial expression of a moment) in space's past. Henri Lefebvre's "representations of space" and "abstract space" inform the concept of space that will guide this discussion, as distinct from place which (more tenuously) relates to Lefebvre's "representational spaces" and "absolute space." [2]
<4> In The Production of Space, Lefebvre describes "representations of space" as "conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers" and as the intentional space of the state, therefore the "dominant space in any society" (38-9). "Abstract space" he defines as political, institutional, formal, and quantitative as well, but also homogenizing, repressive, alienating—abstract space "makes a tabula rasa of whatever threatens, of differences" (Lefebvre 285). These two descriptions are useful in determining power's use of space conceptually, as distinct from place as well as spaces plural. Lefebfvre's "representational space," in contrast, is "directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of "inhabitants" and "users," but also of artists in that it is "dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate" (39, original emphasis). "Absolute space," Lefebvre aligns with what is often considered place-dwelling; a site of organic bonds of consanguinity, soil, language; and yet it is "religious and political" and, ultimately, "located nowhere" because its absoluteness renders its existence symbolic (236). My own definition of place is more of a "somewhere" in relation to several "elsewheres." Place coheres according to an (imagined or real) interdependence that requires its inhabitants to live in relation (however tentatively, nevertheless practiced) to one another, to the place, and with awareness of its status as place among places. To the extent that place includes a symbolic realm, its symbols may contribute to cohesion or provide sustenance; but as soon as a place becomes wholly symbolic (and thus unlocatable, nowhere), it ceases to be place and enters into psycho-social spaces that I have no interest here in either celebrating or denouncing.
<5> While it may be tempting to try to carve out a transcendent both/neither category regarding the space/place question, there is greater value in working with literary texts privileging narratives of places as sites—the narratives and the places—of contestation, as counter-narratives and alternative life-ways that carry the potential to disrupt the grand, totalizing narrative of (particularly) American nationalism (and by extension, American globalism) and as humanizing, "minor" locales that present multiple, alternative ways of being American. As such, my approach privileges place, not so much over space per se as over "abstract space" or place-/spacelessness. As my idea of place makes no claims on singularity, it does not take away from the sociopolitical possibilities of postmodern spaces, but imagines the realization of these possibilities more fully, more concretely, and in opposition to the grinding down of differences toward which space moves.
<6> Privileging place is problematic, of course, in that it is entangled in longing and desires that may as easily play out in reactionary as in revolutionary ways. To the degree that "the encroachment of an indifferent sameness of place on a global scale" incites longing for "a diversity of places," as described by Edward S. Casey in The Fate of Place, it also invites various approaches—communal and commercial, progressive and reactionary—to getting at or to these places (xiii). For Casey, "this is not just a matter of nostalgia," but of desire aroused by "increasingly common experiences" (Casey xiii). For others, nostalgia and desire too often work together to perpetuate the experience of place as limit, as context or justification for inward and backward attempts at reclamation of a something lost which never existed. [3]
<7> The latter concern ought to remain at the forefront of theories of place in order to prevent places as alternative realities as well as place-as-concept from becoming counter-productive or obsolete. Thus I will turn to the potential problems with place as presented by contemporary theorists. In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey recognizes a "progressive angle to postmodernism which emphasizes community and locality, place and regional resistances, social movements, respect for otherness" even as he warns that "it is hard to stop the slide into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality in the face of the universalizing force of capital circulation" (Condition 351). But he later takes a more entrenched position against place and "[p]lace-bound politics" which, he says, "appeals even though such a politics is doomed to failure" ("From" 24). Harvey contends that because sentiments regarding place "lend themselves to an interpretation and a politics that is both exclusionary and parochialist, communitarian if not intensely nationalist," that "[p]laces become the sites of incommunicable otherness" defenseless against "the crass and commercial side of postmodernism" ("From" 14). Consumer culture indeed seizes on the marketability of place, especially as space precedes (or is perceived as preceding) place, as in Irit Rogoff's notion that "power produces a space which then gets materialized as place" (22). In terms of identity politics, Liz Bondi cautions that place is in danger of reinstating the essentialism of the "Who am I?" that so often gets reduced to class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, as "Where am I" in which "place takes the place of essence," but "does not banish essentialism" (97-8). Her concern is that "references to 'place', 'position', 'location' and so on covertly appeal to fixed and stable essences […] in so far as [spatial] metaphors import a Cartesian conceptualization of space as an absolute, three-dimensional grid devoid of material content" (Bondi 98). "Geographical metaphors of contemporary politics," she concludes, "must be informed by conceptions of space that recognize place, position, location and so on as created, as produced" (Bondi 99, original emphasis). Bondi's critique, then, supports Harvey's and Rogoff's as well as echoes each in granting space as a condition that gives rise to, or allows the production of, place. [4]
<8> The view of space as a priori in relation to place as a posteriori lies at the crux of what theories that privilege place, or undermine space as such, seek to combat. [5] If space is self-evident or presupposed, place easily becomes incidental and atemporal. Space's privilege becomes its relationship to time—as in Tuan's notion that associates space with movement, place with pause. It follows that "[s]pace is a common symbol of freedom in the Western world," while place can elicit images of confinement (Tuan 54). Space as given—an abstraction like "freedom"-facilitates its use by the powerful to perpetuate structures of power that rely on such abstractions. Which leads already from problems with place, to problems with space: mainly I am concerned here with the particular understanding of space as "the first and the last."
<9> While earlier societies were organized around absolute space, Lefebvre contends that with the Roman Empire "[a]bstraction was introduced—and presupposed—by the Father's dominion over the soil, over possessions, over children, over servants and slaves, and over women" (243). The introduction of the principle of private ownership signals a shift into abstract space as imperial space that "dissolves and incorporates [as well as replaces] such former 'subjects' as the village and the town" (Lefebvre 51-2). This impulse to devour, furthermore, is "backed up by a frightening capacity for violence," a mode of aggression that he argues is "intrinsic to abstraction" (Lefebvre 289). If this seems to imply (in opposition to the view of space as a priori) that place was first, and then space came and destroyed it, Lefebvre qualifies: "what came earlier continues to underpin what follows" and "[n]o space [i.e. place] disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local" (229, 86). In other words, "[a]bstract space is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, its orientation, its 'lens' […] it renders homogenous" (287). More importantly, the contradiction within abstract space between its multiplicity and its intended homogeneity could lead to "differential space"-a potential site for resistance, social transformation, revolution (Lefebvre 52). [6]
<10> Lefebvre's "abstract space" describes the political realization of Neil Smith's and Cindi Katz's "absolute space"—"a conception of space as a field, container, a co-ordinate system of discrete and mutually exclusive locations—the space that is broadly taken for granted in Western societies—our naively assumed sense of space as emptiness" (75). They hold that it is precisely "that thoroughly naturalized absolute conception of space that grew up with capitalism" that "expresses a very specific tyranny of power" (Smith and Katz 76). It is as if, then, Lefebvre's abstract space of empire has undergone a naturalization process that allows it to claim an absoluteness and thus become the absolute space that Smith and Katz relate to late capitalism/neo-imperialism. Elsewhere Smith's work parallels Lefebvre's more closely. In Uneven Development, Smith writes of the "abstraction of space from matter" in terms of a break from earlier ways of being and the Western concept of space as a "product of continual abstraction" (69, 72). According to Lefebvre, Smith, and Katz, then, capitalist or imperial space works to sever individuals and communities from the more tangible, grounding features of habitation.
<11> This in turn indicates space's volatile relationship with time, as well as place. In Lefebvre's absolute space, "time was not separated from space; rather it oriented space" in that rituals performed in absolute space punctuated time (267). [7] But he appears to describe this orientation as a characteristic of a lost civilization. It follows that when place is not time stopped or a temporary product of space in contemporary thought, it is often conceived of as an entity in an earlier stage in the process of becoming space. The latter is the capitalist version of space and serves multinational capitalist/neo-imperialist aims. American neo-imperialism acquires a rhetorical naturalization by way of inevitability—suggested by the terms pre-capitalist and capitalist-of capitalism's (often collapsed rhetorically with "democracy's") spread. This move assigns a telos to place with its absorption into space as its teleological end. But as Smith points out in American Imperialism, clearly "there is nothing inevitable about the global geographies that accompanied and facilitated U.S. hegemony" (24). Abstract space draws postcolonial emergent nations into its system of power without sacrificing its rhetorical promotion of the very—freedom implied in the term postcolonialism. Smith reports, for example, that Roosevelt "saw no contradiction between […] declarations of sovereignty and self-government on the one side and a paternalistic appeal that the 'minor children among the peoples of the world' be placed under the 'trusteeship' of the 'adult nations' on the other" (American 351). Roosevelt's view thus characterizes American power as inevitable (perhaps burdensome) and presents an adult-child relationship between the "first" and "third" world that corresponds to (neo-imperialist) space's relationship with place.
<12> As per usual, this imperial paradigm embraced by the "first world" serves political ends as well as plays into global consumer culture. Amy Kaplan argues in The Anarchy of Empire that "underlying the dream of imperial expansion is the nightmare of its own success, a nightmare in which movement outward into the world threatens to incorporate the foreign and dismantle the domestic sphere of the nation" (12). Thus the "foreign" "third" world's relegation to childhood in relation to the paternal "first" world keeps difference and its threats at bay. In that "modernism always posits a progressive development that erases the past" (C. Kaplan 59), this paternal rhetoric transports the linearity associated with modernism into the postmodern era. The commercialization of place that grows out of this, then, involves the marketing of pastness integrated with place. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan explains that "[t]he 'vanishing' native, the 'lost' ideal culture, the end of 'pristine' experiences: all these tropes of the modern era reflect the conviction that modernity destroys or cannot salvage the traditional or nonmodern aspects of the past;" so that only "[o]nce the destabilizing or resisting elements of culture are fixed as 'vanishing,' 'endangered,' and local' [may they] be visited" (59). Thus (primarily European and American) tourism. This converts the sense of timelessness as a "quality of distant places" that feeds the "belief that exotic peoples have no history" (Tuan 122), into an interpretation of place as an expression of a former historical moment-an arrangement that allows movement in space to become seemingly equal to movement in time.
<13> In a macrocosmic version of the scenario in which the homeplace becomes associated with the past or stasis, the tourist industry works with multinational corporations to provide an experience of backward time travel afforded by place. Lefebvre contends that "neo-capitalism and neo-imperialism share hegemony over a subordinated space split into two kinds of regions: regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of production (of consumer goods), and regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of the consumption of space" (353). One of the most obvious examples of this (and one that relates to current trends in literary studies to map out transatlantic and global contexts) is Western tourism in the Mediterranean. While the "transformation of the Mediterranean into a leisure-oriented space for industrialized Europe" (58) enshrines "both the illusion of transparency and the illusion of naturalness," the "seemingly nonproductive" places of the region are yet "centralized, organized, hierarchized, symbolized and programmed" by and in service of the multinational tour-operators (Lefebvre 58-9). Under the current neo-capitalist/-imperialist regime, then, the arbiters of space manipulate place by commercializing it and then attempting to hide that commercialization. [8] This involves a continuation, however implicit, of the rhetoric of racial inequality as well. Put another way, this is the contemporary answer to Antonio Gramsci's Southern Question which recognizes in the logic of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism the belief that "Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi-barbarians or out and out barbarians by natural destiny" so that "if the South is underdeveloped it is not the fault of the capitalist system, or any other historical cause, but of the nature that has made Southerners lazy, incapable," and so on (20). Thus the Mediterranean as Europe's (and by extension America's) past-becomes holiday spot as past-time in a way that echoes Roosevelt's infantilization of the "third world."
<14> The question of whether it is possible to rescue place from the trap of neo-capitalist, neo-colonial, neo-imperial commercialization is perhaps the most important to inquiries into the use or value of place in contemporary theory. Theoretical works built upon place ultimately rest upon the conviction that specific places somehow escape or survive the fragmenting effects of industrialization and global capitalism "intact-and not merely in the folkloric sense, not as relics, not as stage management for tourists, not as consumption of the cultural past, but indeed as immediate practical 'reality'" (Lefebvre 123). This further gives rise to a question of scale. It does not benefit my argument in favor of place to impose size guidelines. Place, typically associated with "the village" (which is still in existence) may occur at urban or global levels as well. Fredric Jameson argues that "[d]isalienation in the traditional city […] involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories" (51). Beyond the city, environmentalists posit place as a way of thinking: they ask us to inhabit the earth not as empty or endless space, but as place, and therefore with cognizance of the vulnerabilities and responsibilities place implies. Likewise, Massey advocates "a global sense of the local" as a way to break out of the more confining aspects of place (155). Conceiving of place on these variant scales helps prevent theories on place from being locked into nostalgia for irretrievable or unreachable ways of being. Regarding the contemporary era, Jameson concludes that "[t]he political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale" (54). While I am wary of some of the language employed in parts of Jameson's Postmodernism (allusions to conquest, cartography, etc.), it does propose a politics that begins to overcome the dichotomy of space/place even as it recognizes the importance of both. Furthermore, this local-global conception signifies heterogeneity if only through the impossibility/impracticability of homogeneity.
<15> The survival of place depends at least as much on practices committed to inclusion as to exclusion. While the community belonging to a place may need to exclude permanent marks or representatives of the structures which threaten its existence, it is maintained according to a certain flexibility that permits incorporation of "others" or otherness into the fabric of the place. While I have drawn upon Lefebvre's notion that abstract space has homogeneity as its goal, place is only useful and sustainable as long as it does not share this objective—which at the level of place may lead to a politics of ethnic or racial purity among other exclusionary practices. In addition to the obvious political problems with the latter, it is also dysfunctional as a practice—as Toni Morrison's historical novel, Paradise, shows in terms of a mid-twentieth-century all black community in Oklahoma. Place, and the community that it makes possible, remains politically viable only in so far as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and all marks of otherness are not subjected to erasure nor to a begrudging or selective homogeneity, but incorporated into the heterogeneity that place, in its sustainable form, is.
<16> My own theoretical move away from the "imagined community" that is the nation as well as the imagined hospitality of places which have been designated holiday escapes from a contemporary moment or space (in terms of present/past, developed/underdeveloped, adult/child, and other power-based and power-serving binaries) leads me to endorse a different kind of hospitality. Place coheres according to the permeability of its boundaries. As such, place in its best possible form recognizes what Jacques Derrida deems a "duty to hospitality." In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida puts forward a new "cosmopolitics" that would transform urban locations into "cities of refuge" dedicated to offering the "right to asylum" to all displaced peoples (Derrida 16). Although this sounds utopian, On Cosmopolitanism does not claim to posit an ideal, ungraspable cultural reality; rather, "one cannot speak of cultivating an ethic of hospitality. Hospitality is culture itself" and "ethics is hospitality" according to Derrida (16-7). This notion extends the concept of interdependence I have associated with place. Being a member of a local community or belonging to a place, in Derrida's sense, depends on the community's commitment to incorporating arrivals—offering place to the displaced. Social responsibility of this kind can be abused or become abusive, but it also speaks to the possibility of place to serve as a site of humility and reciprocity. In the same way that fear of the other can translate into fear of being/becoming the other [9], so the displaced come to represent the possibility of all people's displacement. A shared cognizance of this particular vulnerability may lead to the conception, perhaps actualization, of place as a site of multiple and fragmentary subjectivities in functional relations with one another and their surroundings.
<17> This conception of place allows for movement, but does not celebrate "mobility" as innately good. It is important first to recognize the ways in which place can become confinement. Feminist discourses address this issue in terms of the cultural conceit of the vulnerability of the female body that renders staying in one's "proper" place synonymous with safety. Gillian Rose writes that "[s]pace [the 'empty' street, for example] almost becomes like an enemy itself" (Rose 143). But place in this scenario is no less an enemy. Rose points to "a desire to make ourselves absent from space" that can lead women to "participate in our own erasure" (143). The experience of being erased as such is akin to being "placed"—again, in terms of a propriety engendered by patriarchal and hegemonic systems.
<18> Mobility—the experience of being unplaced—warrants critique as well. Mobility, in its often revered form, is class privilege. The two kinds of gated communities that arise in America after the second World War—those designed to keep people in (another example of place as confinement), and those designed to keep the same (undesirables) out-lend physical form to this concept. Who and what moves as a result of mobility afforded by late capitalism's shrinking world? Two of Don DeLillo's novels answer this question on both counts: the who is the neo-cosmopolitan white male heterosexual multinational corporate officers of The Names (1982) and the what is capital, as that which is moved by a relatively stationary multinational corporate officer in Cosmopolis (2003). At the macrocosmic level, then, mobility awards a form of freedom that defies freedom to others, that restrains the movement of the disenfranchised and expands the domain of those in power.
<19> But in addition to this sociopolitical understanding of mobility, there is also the psychosocial form that warrants much attention from postmodernists. The urge or freedom to remake oneself is often expressed in movement across and through different spaces (which are also constantly being 'remade' according to similar desires). Postmodernism/ity extends the Bildungsroman's requirement that its protagonist leave home in order to find himself to require or impose seemingly constant motion in order to come to terms with a fragmented and/or multiple subjectivity. [10] Paul Auster's City of Glass exemplifies this approach to navigating the postmodern condition: the protagonist's primary activity is walking the streets of New York. He stays in motion and in solitude not to know himself, but to lose himself, not to experience New York, but to experience placelessness (the city as nowhere). This is the expression of the protagonist's (ultimately if not futile, then contradictory) attempt to escape, or perhaps just bear, a tragic past. But the reversal of the Bildungsroman—the proposition of a connection between staying home and personal growth—offers another approach to negotiating postmodern conditions. In contrast to the traditional Bildungsroman (as well as women's narratives of confinement in relation to familial or ethnic enclaves), for example, Tina DeRosa's Paper Fish—a 1980 novel that resurrects Chicago's Little Italy of the 1940s and '50s—presents a protagonist whose self-discovery hinges upon her ability to define herself within her family and community. DeRosa's novel speaks to the inaccuracy of reducing place to confinement, mobility to freedom by describing an experience of place that exposes the limits of American constructs of individualism and self-containment. It recognizes the harm that may arise out of the local community's impulse for self-preservation and its tenuous hold on an inside/outside binary; but the more insidious violence comes from outside—the flattening forces of the state in the form of urban renewal. The fact that experiences of place that achieve some level of interdependent collectivity pose a potential threat to state power hints at the possibility that staying in a place, or maintaining a dynamic relationship to a place, might be counter-hegemonic. The idea, furthermore, that care of the self is inextricable from some form of loyalty to others and to shared surroundings is, arguably, the foundation of all revolutionary ideas and actions. Although "staying put" may in some cases serve a hierarchical structure or agenda, there are instances in which staying can signal nonconformity to or a rejection of individualism and other constituents of the politics of domination and exploitation.
<20> American nationalism and internationalism alike, therefore, rest upon a "placelessness" that provides an endless frontier-space. In Smith's words, the "emptiness of the continent was the 'crucial founding fiction'" while "internationalism was the fruition of American nationalism, a global manifest destiny underpinned by growing economic dominance" (American 9, 455). Imperialism impinges on the discreteness of places, in one way, by folding them into its abstract space. Massey denies that homogenization is a characteristic of globalization in that "[t]he spanning of the globe by economic relations has led to new forms and patterns of inequality" (160); however, these inequalities are increasingly measured with the same instruments, conditioned under the same rubric (i.e. exchange value trumps use value on a global scale). Furthermore, neo-imperialism's economy-based (rather than directly land-based) extension of influence goes beyond a denial of place and arrives at a denial of space, too. According to Smith, "the 'universalizing tendency of capital' represents an inherent drive toward spacelessness, in other words toward an equalization of conditions and levels of production" (Uneven 94). The supposedly spaceless manifestation of the global market thus compels a form of "cooperation" that proves more menacing even than the proliferation of McDonald's around the world. In that the "contention of a spaceless globalization" takes for granted the obsolescence of space and place, it also "occlude[s] alternative political futures" and "depoliticize[s] history, albeit the history of the present and near future" (American 23). It is useful, then, to combat America's neo-imperial "antispatial imagination" not only with attention to places, but also spaces (American 15).
<21> Just as it is necessary to conceive of place among or beside other places (rather than reduce place to a singular or former entity within space), considering spaces as multiple and multiform can lead to constructive insights into social and cultural realities. Theories that privilege space(s) in terms of multiplicity rather than abstraction work with rather than against theories about place that recognize place's heterogeneity. As feminism and postcolonialism insist on multi-subjectivity, "so does the critical process of geographical spatialization insist on the multi-inhabitation of spaces through bodies, social relations and psychic dynamics" (Rogoff 23). Rogoff's "multi-inhabitation" implies that place is integral to the liberating potentialities of spatial conceptions and practices. Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper instead combine place with an interstitial, alternative space that recalls Homi Bhabha's "'in-between' space" in which "[t]he past-present becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living" (7). For Soja and Hooper, "the distinctions between real and imaginary spaces and places, between spatial metaphors and materialized geographies, dissolve emphatically into what might be described as a 'thirdspace' of political choice" (192). The dissolution proposed by "thirdspace" serves psychological, perhaps psychosocial, and certainly metaphorical constructions of locatedness, as in bell hooks' naming "the margin" the "'space of resistance'" (qtd. in Soja and Hooper 200). The juxtaposition, on the other hand, of spaces and places provides a mode of grounding theoretical work in the sociopolitical realm.
<22> Rhetorical constructions of place prove nearly as important as practical ones. As Michael Keith and Steve Pile argue, "new radical geographies must demystify the manner in which oppressions are naturalized through concepts of space and spatialities and recover progressive articulations of place and the politics of identity" (225). Recovery in this sense refers to the need for a rhetorical, rather than physical, return—based again on the (admittedly tenuous) premise that place, in some form, exists. I contend not only that places endure, but also that theory and art on place potentially offer the most viable imaginaries of collective, political action from the margins. To responsibly inhabit place and recognize in place-based relations the liberating, transformational possibilities of collaborative ways of being is to conduct an initial step toward becoming receptive to and potentially addressing deeply held human desires for belonging and place.
Notes
[1] Neil Smith and Cindi Katz problematize this concept in terms of over- or misuse of spatial metaphor: "the apparent familiarity of space, the givenness of space, its fixity and inertness […] make a spatial grammar […] fertile for metaphoric appropriation" (69).
[2] I have left out Lefebvre's "spatial practice" despite its everydayness that appeals to my sense of place because it sort of reverses my conceptions of place and spaces in that it assumes "the most extreme separation between the places it links together," in such a way that necessitates some cohesiveness but does not really allow for the kind of coherence—or attempt at coherence—that, for my argument, belongs to place.
[3] Anthony Vidler calls this the "paradox of all nostalgia, that consciousness that, despite a yearning for a concrete place and time, the object of desire is neither here nor there, present or absent, now or then" (66).
[4] Although this critique is concerned more with applications of place (or space) through metaphor as determinant of identity than with place itself, it belongs in this discussion because of its concern with the usefulness or not of place in theoretical work.
[5] A semi-reversal of this notion that aligns space with present and future and place with past (to be discussed in further detail later) is equally problematic; and, rather than opposed to the view of space as a priori, it too lends itself to a reductive conception of place as incidental to space.
[6] Lefebvre's "differential space" corresponds to Gillian Rose's feminist "paradoxical space" which, she contends, is necessary "in order to articulate a troubled relation to the hegemonic discourses of masculinism" (159).
[7] This almost sounds like a "primitive," slowed-down version of Harvey's postmodern conception of "time-space compression" that "revolutionize[s] the objective qualities of space and time" (Condition 240). But instead of "annihilating time," Lefebvre's absolute space is a context in which time is incorporated into lived experience.
[8] Lefebvre notes further that "no sooner does the Mediterranean coast become a space offering leisure activities to industrial Europe than industry arrives there" (353). "But," he continues, "nostalgia for towns dedicated to leisure […] continue to haunt the urbanite of the super-industrialized regions. Thus the contradicitions become more acute—and the urbanites continue to clamor for a certain 'quality of space'" (Lefebvre 353).
[9] As Julia Kristeva points out in Strangers to Ourselves, "[l]iving with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other" (13, original emphasis).
[10] The gender exclusive pronoun is purposeful here.
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