In Place

Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 5. No. 1 (May 2012)

Available at www.humansandnature.org

            When the ideas of outstanding philosophers and novelists converge, we should pay attention. In books like Getting Back into Place and The Fate of Place, the American philosopher Edward Casey has written powerfully on the difference between the concept of place and the concept of space. Using a different vocabulary, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera presents essentially the same idea in the passage from his novel, Immortality: “A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it, has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. . . . Road and highway: these are also two different conceptions of beauty.” Kundera meditates on the distinction between a “highway” and a “road.” A highway is a meaningless line between two points. A road overflows with meaning, association, and invitation.

Kundera locates both highway and road in what he calls “space,” which is devalued by the former and brought to life by the latter. But he could have used Casey’s terminology without missing a beat and said that highways are in spaces, while roads are of places. The concept of space is essentially an abstract and geometrical one; it is the zone of pure thought where highways dwell, and the mind has no time to spare for meandering or sightseeing on its journey to some precisely specifiable point. A place, on the other hand, is a tangled bank and a winding path; it is a location of roads and side trips and unexpected turnings.

What is significant about places is not so much their physical dimensions as their imaginative possibilities. They are not occupied, like spaces, as a container of height and width and depth. They are dwelt within by living things; and through memory, myth, and meaning inanimate things can be alive in place as well. Places are the surroundings of Walden Pond and Tinturn Abbey. They are made such by the perceptions and sensibilities of Thoreau and Wordsworth and you, me, and everyone who lives a life somewhere, as opposed to nowhere or anywhere.

Did I just say that living is enough to make a space a place? Or is it a certain quality and kind of living? Does the concept of place have particular values and ideals built into its very meaning perhaps? Like Schrödinger’s cat in a box, which can be dead and alive at the same time, can somewhere be both a space and a place, depending on what happens there and the spirit in which it happens? When people talk about the project of “place making,” how casual or how deep a statement are they making? Those of us who aspire to transform what now are abstract spaces into more richly indwelt places would do well to attend to the value-laden nature of our enterprise and to be as clairvoyant as possible about what those values are.

Here is a story that might nudge us in that direction. On Friday, January 12, 2007, during the morning rush hour, the virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito for nearly an hour in the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, DC,. He played many pieces, some simple and some complex, on his instrument, which had been made by Stradivari in 1713 and is named the Gibson ex Huberman. It has a checkered history: stolen twice in the twentieth century from its previous owner, Bronislaw Huberman, it has its own tale to tell of disappearance, mystery, and reemergence. Even in the tunnels of the subway station, the sound quality was excellent. A Bell performance is something that normally countless people pay hundreds of dollars each for a ticket to hear. That day it was free—although, busker that he was, he put his open case on the floor to accept tips.

While Bell played, 1,700 people walked past (observers from the Washington Post were videotaping the scene and counting). They hurried by, on the highway from point A to point B. Only a handful tossed a bill or some coins into his case, and just seven people stopped to listen for a time. There was never a crowd; a place of connectivity never formed (Cf. Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html).

What shall we make of this? What does it tell us about place? To me it is a reminder that place functions to give us a stability of expectations. This experiment contrived by a writer for the Washington Post is perhaps a little too easy because of the radical contrast and anomaly it presented to the people in the station. On one level anyway, the way people behaved is not surprising, and their sense of place has something to do with that. Bell is not the kind of celebrity who is likely to be recognized out of context; indeed, no classical musician is (maybe Pavarotti, with his signature girth, or Leonard Bernstein in his day are the exceptions that prove the rule). Lady Gaga no doubt would have gotten a different reception, as would maybe even Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen (I date myself, I know). Also, it is not unusual to encounter musicians playing in the subway corridors, and the standard behavioral norm is not to attend their performance but to be on one’s way. So the sense in which the Metro is a place—albeit not a very attractive or inviting one—conspired to lead the people to do precisely what they did: to hurry on.

Place in its stability-reinforcing functions does not immunize us from a condition called “face blindness,” or prosopagnosia. People with this condition, like the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, cannot recognize people they know well if they encounter them out of context, in an unfamiliar setting or in the wrong place. A strong sense of place may actually dispose one to a figurative kind of prosopagnosia in that we can become so indwelling in a familiar place that we become quite disoriented when we are thrust into the anomalous situation and the unknown circumstance. I am a Hoosier who moved to New York City, and I know whereof I speak.

On the other hand, the fact that not just face blindness but also aesthetic blindness was displayed that day is harder to fathom. Bell may have blended in, but his music did not. The fact that people were not attentive to what they were actually hearing, that they seemed disabled from hearing what was actually there, is not a manifestation of their residing in a definable place with its settled routines and patterns of conduct. It is surely a manifestation of the way in which surroundings and locations, like a highway or a subway, become abstract spaces of mere transit or some other essentially instrumental and utilitarian preoccupation. This tale then is both about place as settled expectation and the absence of place (place become mere space), which deadens sense and sensibility. It shows the void in our lives that ensues when we close in, turn up our collars, and hurry on, rather than opening out to surprise and joy.

So here are at least two of the many substantive values that seem to me to reside in the concept of place. One is open familiarity. The other is mobile rootedness. You will notice that these are deliberate paradoxes. But they are not, I think, contradictions.

Without the structure of the familiar at all levels—from the sensory to the social, cultural, and religious—our world would be, as William James put it, “one great blooming, buzzing, confusion.” We need to assimilate the novelty, the otherness we encounter to that which is comprehensible to us. We do need to encounter the outsider—the stranger who is displaced or placed elsewhere—on our own terms. But these terms must not be static and frozen, for then they will not truly bespeak a place of living. We must be rooted. Like Antaeus, our strength comes from our connection to the earth. But we must also use our rootedness to move, to create in ourselves the capacity to increase our terms by embracing the terms of others.

This year the Center is beginning a new research project on Frontiers of Ethics: Care and Place, under the auspices of its Ideas of Humans and Nature Program. In moral philosophy, an ethic of care has become a well-developed alternative to other ethical approaches based on utilitarianism, the concept of rights, and distributive justice principles. These latter frameworks seem abstract, formal, and individualistic, whereas an ethic centering on the ideal and the lived experience of caring can express the concreteness of people as mortal, vulnerable, and embodied selves. However, this ethical framework and its characteristic perspective have not been brought fully to bear on questions of ethical responsibilities toward non-human life and ecosystems.

Place is another concept that currently lies at the frontiers of ethical thought. As I alluded to above, its orientation is an emphasis on specific relationships in particular places and landscapes, both natural and social. Most work in moral philosophy and Western ethics is abstract in the sense that it seeks to discover standards of right and wrong that are universally valid and applicable. Paradoxically, moral psychology tells us that ethical thinking and our sense of value are rooted in specificity, not universality—that is to say, in the lived experience of place, with specific natural and social characteristics, landscapes, and cultures.