The Intelligence of Place

Topographies and Poetics

Jeff Malpas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781350036338
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472588685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Place has become a widespread concept in contemporary work in the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences. Yet in spite of its centrality, place remains a concept more often deployed than interrogated, and there are relatively few works that focus directly on the concept of place as such. The Intelligence of Place fills this gap, providing an exploration of place from various perspectives, encompassing anthropology, architecture, geography, media, philosophy, and the arts, and as it stands in relation to a range of other concepts.

Drawing together many of the key thinkers currently writing on the topic, The Intelligence of Place offers a unique point of entry into the contemporary thinking of place – into its topographies and poetics – providing new insights into a concept crucial to understanding our world and ourselves.

1

Place and a Kind of Sentience – These Trees in Particular

Susan Stewart

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines –

Thoreau, ‘Winter Visitors’, Walden

How the pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay –

Melville, Moby Dick

Three pine masts lodged in the clay of the pining sailors.

You can’t move the trees and expect them to grow.

Born with the elm, you will die with it.

A beech axle splintered by fury.

Ash for the bat and birch for the arrow.

An olive in the teeth stops the teeth.

Acorns pour down

after the drought, up all night

from the rat-a-tat-a-tat.

You get a straight story from an oak

and afterwards, disarming silence.

Black yew, black cypress,

widow’s weeds will follow.

Poplar and willow, weak by the water.

Swamp maple, weak at heart.

In the shade of the plane tree,

they’ll listen to stones

all day, provided

they tell the truth.

If the trees are unfamiliar, you’re the stranger.

The chestnut will never come back.

Keep your myrrh in a holly cupboard,

the laurel wreath on a hook by your door,

make the door from the planks

of the broken table, and the table

from the planks of the broken floor –

Dress the fir’s amber wound with the tarbrush.

Hang suet and seeds for the waxwing.

When you recognize the trees, you must be home.

‘These Trees in Particular’, from Columbarium by Susan Stewart. Copyright © 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

2

Place and Limit

Massimo Cacciari

Translated by Søren Tinning and Samuel Henk Dames

Limit has many senses. In general, it seems to indicate the ‘line’ along which two domains touch each other: cum-finis.¹ The limit distinguishes, therefore, by combining; it establishes a distinction while determining an ad-finitas. As the finis is set (finis probably has the same root of figere) a ‘contact’ is ‘persistently’ determined. But – before elaborating this essential idea, which develops together with our own language – are we to understand ‘limit’ as limen or limes? The limen is the threshold, which the god Limentinus guards, the passage through which one accesses a domain or through which one exits from it. Through the threshold we are received, or otherwise e-liminated. It can direct us to the ‘center’ or open onto the un-limited, to that which does not have form or measure, ‘where’ we fatally disappear.² Limes, on the other hand, is the path that circumscribes a territory, and that determines its form. Its line can be oblique, certain (limus), or accidental, but it nonetheless balances, in some way, the danger that thresholds, passages and the limen represent. Where does the emphasis lie when we say limit [confine³]: is it on the continuum of the limes – the space of the limit – or on the ‘open gateway’ of the limen? Yet there can be no limit that is not both limen and limes together. The line (lyra) that encloses the city must be well secured; it must represent a finis strong enough to condemn the one who comes to be e-liminated into the de-lirium by it. Delirium comes to the one who does not acknowledge the limit or who cannot be accepted by it. But the limit is never a rigid frontier. This is so, not only because the city must grow (civitas augescens), but because there is no limit that is not ‘interrupted’ by limina, and there is no limit that is not ‘contact’, that does not also establish an ad-finitas. In short, the limit escapes any attempt to determine it univocally, to ‘confine’ it to a single meaning. That which, according to the root of the notion, should appear firmly secured (like the herms of the god Terminus at the boundaries of fields), reveals itself, at the end, as indeterminate and ambiguous. And this is so, above all, for those ‘immaterial’ limits that allow the touching of the conscious and the unconscious, memory and oblivion. . . .

The difficulty of defining the limit does not, however, do away with the need for it. The limit itself cannot be e-liminated. Our search for a place where we can dwell, a place which a limes can guard, seems a necessary one. We build and construct in response to this need. No ‘nomadism’ can silence it: nomads bring their own place with them – the carpet, in all its symbolic richness.⁴ They enter onto the carpet as we enter into the house. Likewise, an object, a talisman, can serve as a place that follows the nomad everywhere and defines her Lebensraum. This need cannot be suppressed; yet, to satisfy it is a challenge. We cannot dwell [abitare] (and therefore build), we have no ethos, if we do not draw limits – even if it seems impossible to define these limits rigorously.

Perhaps Aristotle’s Physics provides a suggestion that allows us to solve our aporia. The idea of the limit refers, as one can see, to the idea of place; the limit defines a place, even if problematically. But what is a place? According to Aristotle, anyone who concerns themselves with physis, must necessarily seek to understand place. ‘All suppose that things which exist are somewhere (pou)’.⁵ Entities are characterized by their ‘residing’ in a topos. But to know the nature of topos (its ti esti) is a matter of the greatest difficulty, a search ‘beset with aporias’.⁶ Although it seems to have extension, topos is neither matter nor body,⁷ and neither can it be form (since it is evident that bodies do not have their form by virtue of the places where they are located), and neither is it the principle nor the end of movement. Perhaps entities are located in a place like bodies in a vessel? Is the relation between entities and place like the relation between the container and that which it contains?⁸ But bodies do not ‘bump into’ their place like objects inside a vessel. Container and contained are in fact different in nature, which does not at all seem to be the case for the relation between thing and place. Neither can we assert that place is the interval between container and contained (a diastema serving as metaxy⁹), because this interval either does not exist at all or it is continuously ‘exceeded’ by the movement of the thing. There remains, then, but one possible way of understanding topos: it is the limit (peras) of the container insofar as it touches the contained im-mediately (without diastema-metaxy).¹⁰ Place, that is to say, is the extremities themselves, in im-mediate contact, ta eschata.¹¹ This means that it is impossible to define place without referring to body; no topos exists ‘uninhabited’, because its concept entails the eschaton of the entity that persists with it. As a result, topos is not to be conceived as a uniform, equivalent, and empty extension; it should never be confused with the idea of a priori space.

But how are we to understand the contact between the eschata? Is it possible to conceive it as an immobile line? It has already been shown how the comparison with the vessel does not hold. Entities do not define their limit by colliding with it, as if against an impenetrable wall, separated by abstraction from them. Every entity is certainly contained within its limit, but it is due to its movement that this limit, this extreme or end of the entity, touches upon other extremities. The container is nothing but the eschaton of another body. From time to time, place is defined at the limit [con-fine] of contact between bodies, where each is both the container and the contained, the limiting and the limited. Topos, then, appears as another name for the extreme limit of the entity, the point or the line where it enters into contact with what is other to it, where it ‘offers itself’ completely to its contact with the other.

Yet if this is so, then place is nothing else but the limit, the extreme edge of the entity, that is, its shared end [fine comune] with what is other to it. Place cannot be defined except as the eschaton of the entity, that is, as its limit. The limit is the essence of place. The place is where the thing experiences its own limes, the line that contains it, but which at once, in containing, also sets it in relation. The place is where the thing ‘becomes’ contact and relation. Language itself can ‘think’ this problem: do we not call the fundamental theme of a discourse its topos? Do we not call those places in a tradition, in which it seems to co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction – The Intelligence of Place  Jeff Malpas
• 1  Place and a Kind of Sentience – These Trees in Particular  Susan Stewart
• 2  Place and Limit  Massimo Cacciari
• 3  Place and Edge  Edward S. Casey
• 4  Place and Loss  Jessica Dubow
• 5  Place and Histories – Writing Other People’s Memories  Lucy R. Lippard
• 6  Place and Singularity  Jeff Malpas
• 7  Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements  Joshua Meyrowitz
• 8  Place and Atmosphere  Juhani Pallasmaa
• 9  Place and Architectural Space  Alberto Pérez-Gómez
• 10  Place and Connection  Edward Relph
• 11  Place and Sensory Composition  Kathleen Stewart
• 12  Place and Formulation  Kenneth White
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright