Getting Back into Place, Second Edition: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
512
Getting Back into Place, Second Edition: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
512Paperback(Second Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253220882 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/29/2009 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Edition description: | Second Edition |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Getting Back into Place
Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
By Edward S. Casey
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 Edward S. CaseyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-22088-2
CHAPTER 1
How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time
PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROLEGOMENA
All existing things are either in place or not without place.
—Archytas, as cited by Simplicius
The power of place will be remarkable.
—Aristotle, Physics, Book 4
Space is a society of named places.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
Nothing could extinguish the fact and claim of estate.
—W. E. H. Stanner, "Aboriginal Territorial Organization"
I
It is sensible, perhaps even irresistible, to assume that human experience begins with space and time and then proceeds to place. Are not space and time universal in scope, and place merely particular? Can place do anything but specify what is already the case in space and time? Or might it be that place is something special, with its own essential structures and modes of experience, even something universal in its own way?
Phenomenology began as a critique of what Husserl called the "natural attitude," that is, what is taken for granted in a culture that has been influenced predominantly by modern science—or, more precisely, by scientism and its many offshoots in materialism, naturalism, psychologism, and so forth. One belief endemic to the natural attitude concerns the way places relate to what is commonly called "space." Once it is assumed (after Newton and Kant) that space is absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori in status, places become the mere apportionings of space, its compartmentalizations.
Indeed, that places are the determinations of an already existing monolith of Space has become an article of scientific faith, so much so that two books in anthropology that bear expressly on place—both quite valuable works in many regards—espouse the view that place is something posterior to space, even made from space. By "space" is meant a neutral, pre-given medium, a tabula rasa onto which the particularities of culture and history come to be inscribed, with place as the presumed result. We find this view, for example, in James F. Weiner's richly suggestive ethnography of the Foi of Papua New Guinea, The Empty Place: "A society's place names schematically image a people's intentional transformation of their habitat from a sheer physical terrain into a pattern of historically experienced and constituted space and time.... The bestowing of place names constitutes Foi existential space out of a blank environment."
The idea of transformation from a "sheer physical terrain" and the making of "existential space"—which is to say, place—out of a "blank environment" entails that to begin with there is some empty and innocent spatial spread, waiting, as it were, for cultural configurations to render it placeful. But when does this "to begin with" exist? And where is it located? Answers to both questions will generate a vicious regress of the kind at stake in Kant's first antinomy: to search for a first moment in either time or space is to incur shipwreck on the shoals of Pure Reason.
Or consider the following claim from Fred R. Myers's otherwise remarkable ethnography of desert aboriginal people of Central Australia, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: "The process by which space becomes 'country', by which a story gets attached to an object, is part of the Pintupi habit of mind that looks behind objects to events and sees in objects a sign of something else." Here we are led to ask, What are these "objects" behind which events lurk and to which stories get attached? The neutrality of the term "object" suggests that the first-order items in the universe are denuded things—denuded of the very "secondary qualities" (in the demeaning term of Galilean-Cartesian-Lockian discourse) that would make them fit subjects of events and stories. We wonder, further, what is this "process by which space becomes 'country,'" by which space is "culturalized," and by which "impersonal geography" becomes "a home, a ngurra."
Myers intimates that all such transformations are a matter of the "projection"—or, alternatively, of the "reproduction"—of determinate social actions and structures. "Country" is the system of significant places as specified by the Dreaming, which represents "a projection into symbolic space of various social processes." And the structure of the Dreaming in turn—a structure isomorphic with the landscape of the country—is "a product of the way Pintupi society reproduces itself in space and time." The phrase "in space and time" is telling: the reproduction is in How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time 319 some preexisting medium. Having no inherent configurations of its own, this presumptively empty medium must be populated after the fact (but the fact of what? what fact?) by processes that impute to empty space the particularities that belong to the Dreaming. Generality, albeit empty, belongs to space; particularity, albeit mythic, belongs to place; and the twain meet only by an appeal to a procedure of superimposition that is invoked ex post facto.
But the Pintupi themselves think otherwise, as Myers himself avers: "To the Pintupi, then, a place itself with its multiple features is logically prior or central." Whom are we to believe? The theorizing anthropologist, the arsenal of his natural attitude bristling with explanatory projectiles that go off into space? Or the aborigine on the ground who finds this ground itself to be a coherent collocation of pre-given places—pre-given at once in his experience and in the Dreaming that sanctions this experience? For the anthropologist, Space comes first; for the native, Place; and the difference is by no means trivial.
It is not, of course, simply a matter of choosing between the anthropologist's vantage point and that of the natives—as if the Pintupi had chosen to participate in a debate on the comparative primacy of space versus place. Nor is any such primacy Myers's own express concern. As an anthropologist in the field, he has the task not to argue for space over against place but to set forth as accurately as possible what being-in-place means to the Pintupi. Just there, however, is the rub: even when treating a culture for which place is manifestly paramount, the anthropologist leans on a concept that obscures what is peculiar to place and that (by an implicit cultural fiat) even implies its secondariness. The anthropologist's theoretical discourse—in which the priority of space over place is virtually axiomatic—runs athwart his descriptive commitment.
The question is not so much whom we are to believe—both anthropologist and natives are trustworthy enough—but what we are to believe. Are we to believe that human experience starts from a mute and blank "space" to which placial modifiers such as "near," "over there," "along that way," and "just here" are added, sooner or later: presumably sooner in perception and later in culture? Or are we to believe that the world comes configured in odd protuberances, in runs, rills, and flats, in fele and do:m, as the Kaluli might put it—all of which are traits of places? (Ironically, in this view flatness and, more generally, "featurelessness" belong to place to begin with.)
I take the second view as just stated to be both more accurate as a description and more valuable as a heuristic in the understanding of place. In doing so, I join not only the Pintupi and the Kaluli but also certain early and late figures in Western thought. Both Archytas and Aristotle proclaimed that place is prior to space, and, more recently, Bachelard and Heidegger have re-embraced the conviction. All four thinkers subscribe to what I have called the Archytian Axiom: "Place is the first of all things." In between the ancients and the postmoderns there was a period of preoccupation with space—as well as with time, conceived of as space's cosmic partner. But how may we retrieve a sense of the priority of place by means other than arguing from authority (as I have just done in citing certain congenial Western thinkers) or arguing against authority (as occurs when modern science is pilloried, which Husserl does in attacking the natural attitude)?
My suggestion is that we can retrieve such a sense by considering what a phenomenological approach to place might tell us. Even if such an approach is not without its own prejudicial commitments and ethnocentric stances, it is an approach that, in its devotion to concrete description, has the advantage of honoring the actual experience of those who practice it. In this regard it rejoins not only the anthropologist in the field but the native on the land: both have no choice but to begin with experience. As Kant insisted, "there can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience."
For Kant, "to begin with" means to be instigated by. Thus he must add the qualification that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." Knowledge of any rigorous sort does not derive from experience. Kant makes this perfectly clear in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, arguably the first theoretical treatise on anthropology in the West: "General knowledge must always precede local knowledge ... [because] without [general knowledge], all acquired knowledge can only be a fragmentary experiment and not a science." This paradigmatic Enlightenment statement sets the stage—indeed, still holds the stage in many ways—for the idea that space precedes place. Space, being the most pervasive of cosmic media, is considered that about which we must have general knowledge, whereas we possess merely local knowledge about place.
But what if things are the other way around? What if the very idea of space is posterior to that of place, perhaps even derived from it? What if local knowledge—which, in Geertz's appropriately pleonastic locution, "presents locally to locals a local turn of mind" —precedes knowledge of space? Could place be general and "space" particular? Phenomenology not only moves us to ask these impertinent anti-Enlightenment questions but also provides reasons for believing that the answers to them are affirmative.
In a phenomenological account, the crux in matters of place is the role of perception. Is it the case, as Kant believes (along with most modern epistemologists), that perception provides those bare starting points called variously "sensations," "sense data," "impressions," and so forth? Or is something else at work in perception that conveys more about place than mere sensory signals can ever effect? It is certainly true—and this is what Kant emphasizes in the idea of "to begin with"—that sensory inputs are the occasions of the perception (eventually the knowledge) of concrete places. These impingements—as connoted in the term Empfindungen, Kant's word for "sensations"—alert us to the fact that we are perceiving, and they convey certain of the very qualities (including the secondary qualities) of the surfaces of what we perceive. But their pointillistic character ill equips them for supplying anything like the sense of being in a place. Yet we do always find ourselves in places. We find ourselves in them, however different the places themselves may be and however differently we construe and exploit them. But how do we grasp this "in" of being in a particular place: this preposition which is quite literally a "preposition" inasmuch as we are always already in a place, never not implaced in one way or another?
If perception is "primary" (as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty insist), then a significant part of its primariness must be its ability to give to us more than bits of information about the phenomenal and epiphenomenal surfaces of things—and more, too, than a conviction that we are merely in the presence of these surfaces. Beyond what Husserl calls the "hyletic" factor, and Merleau-Ponty "sensing," there must be, as an ingredient in perception from the start, a conveyance of what being in places is all about. Merleau-Ponty considers this conveyance to be depth—a "primordial depth" that, far from being imputed to sensations (as Berkeley, for example, had held), already situates them in a scene of which we ourselves form part. Husserl's way of putting it is that "every experience has its own horizon" and that we continually find ourselves in the midst of perceptual horizons, both the "internal" horizons of particular things (i.e., given by their successive sides) and the "external" horizons that encompass a given scene as a whole.
But precisely as surrounded by depths and horizons, the perceiver finds herself in the midst of an entire teeming place-world rather than in a confusing kaleidoscope of free-floating sensory data. The coherence of perception at the primary level is supplied by the depth and horizons of the very place we occupy as sentient subjects. That is why we can trust this coherence with what Santayana called "animal faith," and Husserl, "primal belief (protodoxa)." We come to the world—we come into it and keep returning to it—already placed there. Places are not added to sensations any more than they are imposed on spaces. Both sensations and spaces are themselves implaced from the very first moment, and at every subsequent moment as well.
There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place, and to be in a place is to be in a position to perceive it. Knowledge of place is not, then, subsequent to perception—as Kant dogmatically assumed—but is ingredient in perception itself. Such knowledge, genuinely local knowledge, is itself experiential in the manner of Erlebnis, "lived experience," rather than of Erfahrung, the already elapsed experience that is the object of analytical or abstract knowledge. (Kant, significantly, speaks only of Erfahrung.) Local knowledge is at one with lived experience if it is indeed true that this knowledge is of the localities in which the knowing subject lives. To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in.
I am not proposing a merely mute level of experience that passively receives simple and senseless data of place. Perception at the primary level is synesthetic—an affair of the whole body sensing and moving. Thanks to its inherent complexity, bodily perceiving is directed at (and is adequate to) things and places that come configured, often in highly complicated ways. Moreover, the configuration and complication are already meaningful and not something internally registered as sensory givens that lack any sense of their own: the sensory is senseful. Nor does the inherent meaningfulness of what we perceive require the infusion of determinate concepts located higher up the epistemic ladder. The perceived possesses a core of immanent sense, a "noematic nucleus" in Husserl's technical term. Because this senseful core is actively grasped, it follows that perception is never entirely a matter of what Kant calls "receptivity," as if the perceiving subject were merely passive. Not only is primary perception inseparable from myriad modes of concrete action, but it is itself "a kind of passivity in activity." To perceive synesthetically is to be actively passive; it is to be absorptive yet constitutive, both at once.
It is also to be constituted: constituted by cultural and social structures that sediment themselves into the deepest level of perception. The primacy of perception does not mean that human sensing and moving are precultural or presocial. No more than perception is built up from atomic sensations is it constructed from brute givens unaffected by cultural practices and social institutions. On the contrary: these practices and institutions pervade every level of perception, from the quite implicit (e.g., tacitly grasped outer horizons) to the extremely explicit (e.g., the thematic thing perceived). The permeation occurs even—indeed, especially—when a given perception is preconceptual and prediscursive. To be not yet articulated in concept or word is not to be nonculturally constituted, much less free from social constraints. Hence, the primacy of perception does not entail the priority of perception to the givens of culture or society, as if the latter were separable contents of our being and experience: these givens become infusions into the infrastructures of perception itself. The primacy of perception is ultimately a primacy of the lived body—a body that, as we shall see in more detail later, is a creature of habitual cultural and social processes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Getting Back into Place by Edward S. Casey. Copyright © 2009 Edward S. Casey. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Being before PlaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction to the Second EditionPart 1. Finding Place1. Implacement2. DisplacementPart 2. The Body in Place3. Directions4. DimensionsPart 3. Built Places5. Two Ways to Dwell6. Building Sites and Cultivating PlacesPart 4. Wild Places7. The Arc of Desolation and the Array of Description8. Going Wild in the LandPart 5. Moving Between Places9. Homeward Bound: Ending (in) the JourneyEpilogue. New Work on Place: Space, Time, and HistoryHow to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of TimeSmooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of PlaceNotesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"In descriptions of unprecedented scope, power, and concision, Casey illuminates brilliantly the vexing question crucial for our survival: What is our place in the domain we inhabit and in wilderness Nature?"
In descriptions of unprecedented scope, power, and concision, Casey illuminates brilliantly the vexing question crucial for our survival: What is our place in the domain we inhabit and in wilderness Nature?