Place and Experience

A Philosophical Topography

Jeff Malpas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351967181
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The first edition of Place and Experience established Jeff Malpas as one of the leading philosophers and thinkers of place and space and provided a creative and refreshing alternative to prevailing post-structuralist and postmodern theories of place. It is a foundational and ground-breaking book in its attempt to lay out a sustained and rigorous account of place and its significance.

The main argument of Place and Experience has three strands: first, that human being is inextricably bound to place; second, that place encompasses subjectivity and objectivity, being reducible to neither but foundational to both; and third that place, which is distinct from, but also related to space and time, is methodologically and ontologically fundamental. The development of this argument involves considerations concerning the nature of place and its relation to space and time; the character of that mode of philosophical investigation that is oriented to place and that is referred to as 'philosophical topography'; the nature of subjectivity and objectivity as inter-related concepts that also connect with intersubjectivity; and the way place is tied to memory, identity, and the self. Malpas draws on a rich array of writers and philosophers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Proust, Heidegger and Donald Davidson.

This second edition is revised throughout, including a new chapter on place and technological modernity, especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world, and a new Foreword by Edward Casey. It also includes a new set of additional features, such as illustrations, annotated further reading, and a glossary, which make this second edition more useful to teachers and students alike.

p.23

1 The obscurity of place

If two different authors use the words ‘red,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘disappointed,’ no one doubts that they mean approximately the same thing. . . But in the case of words such as ‘place’ or ‘space,’ whose relationship with psychological experience is less direct, there exists a far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation.

(Albert Einstein, Foreword to Concepts of Space¹)

It is something of a truism to say that what is closest and most familiar to us is often most easily overlooked and forgotten. To some extent, this is true of the concept of place. We tend to take the notion for granted, yet, at the same time, we are constantly engaged with place. Frequently, that engagement comes to the fore: most obviously when we are displaced or disoriented and in the experience of nostalgia or loss, but also in contemplation, when we attend to our own being-somewhere, or when we attend to that somewhere and are overtaken by a ‘sense’ of the place, by our own experience of it, by its very presence. Still, in spite of a familiarity with the notion, there are relatively few treatments of place that take it up as philosophically significant in its own right, and this is indicative, not merely of a certain marginalization or forgetting of place within philosophy, but also of the very obscurity of the notion itself.

Certainly, many discussions of place in the existing literature would seem to indicate that the notion is not at all clearly defined. Concepts of place are often not distinguished from notions of simple physical location, and discussions that seem implicitly to call upon notions of place often refer explicitly only to a narrower concept of space. Some writers emphasize a need to distinguish place from space, as when Elizabeth Grosz talks of certain consequences that follow ‘unless space (as territory which is mappable, explorable) gives way to place (occupation, dwelling, being lived in)’,² or when Edward Casey narrates the obscuring of place by space within the history of philosophy.³ Still, even after the attention that place has received in recent years, it is uncommon to find writers offering any detailed analysis of the concept of place, of the relations between place and concepts of space, or, indeed, of the relations among various spatial concepts themselves.⁴ Even many who are taken as paradigmatical thinkers ‘of place’ typically assume an understanding of place rather than offer any real elucidation of what it might be. In this respect, Doreen Massey’s complaints about the lack of clarity that often attaches to uses of space and of spatial images, and ideas in general, applies as much to the deployment of ‘place’. She writes:

p.24

Many authors rely heavily on the terms ‘space’/‘spatial’, and each assumes that their meaning is clear and uncontested. Yet in fact the meaning which different authors assume (and therefore – in the case of metaphorical usage – the import of the metaphor) varies greatly. Buried in these unacknowledged disagreements is a debate which never surfaces; and it never surfaces because everyone assumes we already know what these terms mean.⁵

That the meaning of the terms space and spatial may be contested is an important suggestion to keep in mind. Certainly, in respect of ‘place’, the term may well be thought so common, and so much a part of our everyday discourse, that its transfer to more theoretical contexts is likely to present an immediate problem.⁶ Moreover, it is not just our everyday familiarity with the concept that can give rise to difficulties, but also the complexity and breadth of meaning that seems to attach to the term itself.

Is Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, for example, really about space – or place? It surely cannot be about the same space of which Newton or Einstein speak – or can it? Michel Foucault claims that ‘the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space’, but he explicates this remark in a way that seems to combine a number of different notions: ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and that intersects with its own skein.’⁷ Here we have references both to the concept of space as a system of locations (‘a network that connects points’) and to spatial notions that involve concepts of locality and position (‘the near and far. . . the side-by-side’), which might suggest connections with broader notions of place.

Part of the complication in dealing with both of these texts is the fact that they appear here in translation, but the French presents a particular point of difficulty. The term translated as ‘space’ is éspace. Yet although the French term is indeed etymologically linked to the English (as the very form of the words suggests), éspace carries connotations of place that are not so obvious in the English ‘space’, at the same time as the French lacks any other term that matches, in its breadth of meaning, the English ‘place’.⁸ In French, then, there is no simple separation of terms that can be used to mark the distinction of space from place – and this becomes a significant issue given the influence of French thought, and translated French texts, in the English discussion of space and place (it also creates a problem when English discussions are read back into the French). The problems of translation do not mean, however, that the issue of place is absent from French thought (as the work of both Bachelard and Foucault, to say nothing of Proust, Vidal de la Blanche, and many others demonstrates), but rather that the manner of its articulation is different from the manner of its articulation in English.

p.25

Discussions of place become more complicated as one looks across different languages, but even if one looks to English alone, perhaps especially if one looks to English, ‘place’ appears as a complex term – a complexity that belies the simplicity that might seem to follow from the common and seemingly familiar nature of the word. ‘Place’ carries a variety of senses and stands in close relation to other terms that cover a very broad range of concepts. The Oxford English Dictionary says of the noun ‘place’ that ‘the senses are. . . very numerous and difficult to arrange’,⁹ and its entry extends over some five pages. But in broad terms, one can find five main senses: (i) a definite but open space, particularly a bounded, open space within a city or town; (ii) a more generalized sense of space, extension, dimensionality or ‘room’ (often, though not always, set in contrast to time); (iii) location or position within some order (whether spatial or another kind of ordering, hierarchical or not); (iv) a particular locale or environment that has a character of its own; and (v) an abode or that within which something exists or dwells.¹⁰

Clearly, this summary, while it captures most, does not capture all of the shades of meaning that ‘place’ can carry. Equally clear is the fact that these five broad senses of ‘place’ are by no means completely independent but overlap and interconnect in various ways. Yet, while some of the notions associated with ‘place’ are indeed closely connected, others stand in sharp contrast. There is, in particular, a quite definite opposition between the idea of place as merely a location – a point that may be specified using, for instance, a grid reference on a map – and the idea of place as a particular locale or that ‘within which’ someone or something resides. One cannot, after all, reside within a grid reference. Place, understood in terms of locale or abode, requires a certain openness, a certain dimensionality, a certain ‘room’. Indeed, from the brief summary above, one of the points to be noted is that the concept of place cannot be severed from notions of spatiality and extension – notions themselves at work in the ideas of openness, dimensionality, and room. From an etymological perspective, ‘place’ (along with related terms in other European languages such as the German Platz, Italian piazza, and the French place) derives from the classical Latin platea, meaning a ‘broad way’ or ‘open space’, and from the Greek plateia, also meaning ‘broad way’.¹¹ A central feature of the idea of place (even if not in all senses of the term) would seem to be that of a certain bounded space or dimension – or perhaps better, a bounded openness or opening. Yet, while the concept of place brings with it notions of openness and spatiality, it is not exhausted by such notions. A place in which one can reside is indeed a place that provides a space for such residing – it ‘gives space’ to the possibility of residence – and yet a place in which one can reside must be more than just a ‘space’ alone.

p.26

What then is to be said about ‘space’? If the English ‘place’ is an awkward term to clarify, ‘space’ might be thought to be rather more straightforward (Massey’s concerns notwithstanding). Indeed, there is a much narrower range of meanings associated with the term ‘space’ than with ‘place’. ‘Space’ is often taken to designate only the realm of atemporal physical extension – the realm within which we make sense of the notions of volume, size and shape, of length, breadth, and height, of distance and position, as those notions apply to physical objects. In a broader sense – and perhaps a more basic sense, in as much as it appears to underlie and unify a variety of different uses of the term – ‘space’ can be taken to mean simply ‘room’ or extension, whether physical or non-physical (as it is used a number of times in the discussion above). ‘Space’ thus seems to be tied, first and foremost, to a quite general notion of dimensionality, and so has a range of quite common uses, not restricted to purely physical extension or location (as a glance at any good-sized dictionary will indicate), in accord with this. The origin of the English ‘space’ (and the French éspace), can be traced back to the Latin spatium, which was sometimes used to translate the Greek terms stadion¹² – a standard of length¹³ – and conceptually, though not etymologically, it also connects with distema, which is most literally ‘distance’, but also ‘magnitude’ or ‘interval’. Since ‘space’ can be taken to mean interval or dimension, the term can be used to refer to temporal duration as well as atemporal physical extension. One can thus talk of a ‘space’ of time, or a ‘space’ in one’s schedule, to mean an interval of time. In German, the word for time is simply combined with that for space – Zeit with Raum – to arrive at a single term for such a stretch or span of time, a ‘time-space’, Zeitraum.¹⁴

Although the English terms ‘place’ and ‘space’ are etymologically connected to the Greek, discussions of place and space in Greek sources employ entirely different terms that, a little like French, do not clearly separate place from space. The most directly relevant terms are topos and chora. Contemporary discussions of place and related concepts, including space, sometimes draw quite heavily upon these Greek terms and the ideas associated with them. Recent and contemporary discussions within feminism and deconstruction, for instance, have focused on chora – discussions that advance quite particular readings of the ways, not only in which chora is deployed within Greek philosophy, specifically in Plato’s Timaeus, but also in which notions of place and location have been deployed within Western thought and c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Place and Experience
• Praise for this Book
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Influence of Place
• 1 The Obscurity of Place
• 2 The Structure of Spatiality
• 3 Holism, Content, and Self
• 4 Unity, Locality, and Agency
• 5 Agency and Objectivity
• 6 Self and the Space of Others
• 7 The Unity and Complexity of Place
• 8 Place, Past, and Person
• 9 Place and World
• Conclusion: Topography and the Place of Philosophy
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index