Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Place-Making




I've not been much interested in some of the standard ways we track place [and we could insert here whole volumes of crusty material, or more interesting histories, like Edward Casey's The Fate of Place], certainly not in place as yet one more quadrant of "the grid."  And I can't simply say 'place is the subjective version of objective real space,' because that falsifies reality, shifts us merely to the barren ground of the long, harsh ontology of the modern West.  None of that.

More, that place itself an unstable phenomenon, an occurrence and continual re-occurrence, that involves not only the physical items in our view, nor merely the elements of power, nor just the various plants and animals and rocks and other folks.  But all of those together.  I think I'll borrow from one of my own documents in progress, some book of poetry, some interminable thesis-thing:


I’ve wanted to test out how place-experience ‘informs’ new place, but that isn’t strong enough, suggests too much graceful observation as we glide along in our hover cars.  Not ‘sensibility,’ not memory exactly, but what is crucially involved in place-making—that is, how we use our experience, all of it, to actively and actually shape the places we tread, at every moment.  The and actually is important.  I’m not a believer in a reality that waits for us to draw grids across it, nor a reality that is independent of our observation.  Nor one that we control.  Not magic, and not stability.
That is, place-making itself is the “apparatus” that we are constantly involved in.  (I steal liberally from Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, whose title I already appropriate and misshape.)  That is, there is no solid ground beneath us, or around us, or ahead or behind us.  With each little shimmer of the universe, we participate in creating place.  No, we aren’t wizards, conjuring up that bit of land we need in the middle of a stormy sea, nor can we whip up a pocket universe to save us from the ravages of demonic invasion.  Not exactly.  We don’t have such power.  But we do participate in that process, along with all the other agents that share this universe with us—so that all our experience, knowledge, biochemistry, fleshy history, even our imagination, these all shape that process, ever so slightly, at every moment.  Nothing detached, nothing innocent.  Ecology and ethics in every breath, every step.
Perhaps I can say this efficiently:  we live in a universe that is very real—not illusion, not human construct or category—a universe which simply isn’t solid or fixed.  Not even time or space exists in any stable form, nor any part ever in isolation.  This invites us to re-imagine who and what we are, in terms of biology and geology.  Quantum physics is certainly in the background, in my naive understanding of it, but I want mostly to work at the scale of human/other bodies and our collective place-making.  This, against the background of the Anthropocene, the grand catastrophe we in these generations will not outlive.
Do investigate Karen Barad--a nice look at "apparatus" here, or a useful interview.

  



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All of this a long way to get to the essential problem--I haven't stayed in the U.S. for Christmas yet this century, avoiding this most gruesome holiday at all costs, whether it's wandering the old city of Taipei or trudging through the slush in Quebec City, or, or.....

         

But this year, with my expensive new eyes (ah, some gruesome moments there), I can't/shouldn't afford to travel.  So if I can't afford to leave this country in the traditional way, planes, trains, automobiles, Korean sub, hot air balloon, and there's no "Beam me up" option, well...

Not that Hallsville isn't swell, but...  


Next post.

later, bob

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