Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
|
Edward C. Casey, 1993. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. |
Reviewed by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
With a growing scholarly and popular literature on the topic, it is timely for a philosopher to offer a foundational rethinking of place. Amos Rapoport (1994, p. 4), a venerable critic of the term, bemoans with some credibility the fact that "place is never clearly defined and hence vague; when definitions are found, they are illogical." There is a need to rethink the ontological foundations of place, to ground the subsequent praxis of the design professions.
Does philosopher Edward Casey's Getting Back into Place answer to this need? Immediately in the first chapter, Casey brings to light the ontological roots of the phenomenon of place:
place, by virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists... [P]lace serves as the condition of all existing things...To be is to be in place (pp. 15-16).
Casey laments modern philosophy's forgetting about place, instead giving overwhelming priority to time. In a most thought-provoking chapter, he chronicles the growing modern reliance upon clock time and schedules and mourns the subservience of the notion of place to both time-order and geometric space: "Is there a way out of this double-bind, which we have managed to impose on ourselves so stealthily and yet so destructively?" (p. 11). The way out, for Casey, is through a reconsideration of that most taken-for-granted element of lived experience‑-place.
AN ONTOLOGY OF IMPLACEMENT
The initial chapter on the ontology of implacement is, to my mind, one of the most powerful and persuasive in the book. Casey makes several unique observations, for instance, pointing out how the Hebrew word Makom, the name of God, means Place (p. 17). This conception of God as Place not only is philosophically less problematic than the more common idea of God as person but also captures the meaning of place as existential limit and source of all that is.
In a somewhat unusual move, the author shows how even numbers are platial. Invoking Archytas's Pythagorean observation that "every number is in its proper place," Casey is able to show how the right place in a numerical sequence is its limit. Once again, we see how place implies existential boundary and signifies originary meaning (p. 16). Whether through number or myth, time or mind, place is shown in its ontological signification to be "prior to all things" and as such, the ground even of chaos: "the object or event need not be well formed, regular, or predictable" (p. 13).
DISPLACEMENT AND BEING-AT-HOME
From the ontology of implacement, Casey moves in chapter 2 to the phenomenon of displacement. Here we begin to sense the unique contribution of phenomenology to discussions of place. While places are prior to all things, they are not "pregiven natural absolutes"(p. 31). Just as they are not metaphysical substances‑-objective containers of experience‑-neither are they subjective, epistemological constructs. Lived experience preserves the interplay between the human body and its environment so that "implacement is an ongoing cultural process with an experimental edge" (p. 31).
Being-at-home is not a permanent condition but always invokes the possibility of Unheimlichkeit as well. Being lost at sea or in a snowbound terrain may remind us that such events are not placeless but, rather, are intrinsic to the process of dwelling itself. That this recognition is central to Casey's argument is clear: part V is dedicated to the theme of "Moving Between Places," and his final chapter is entitled "Homeward Bound: Ending (in) the Journey."
Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty's heritage is sensed in this book's pervasive recognition of the power of embodiment in interpretations of place. Casey devotes part II entirely to this theme of "The Body in Place," and, indeed, the volume as a whole rests on the assumption of the lived body and place as "congruent counterparts" (p. 103). We are "bound by body to be in place" (p. 104).
Five dyadic pairs of here-there, near-far, up-down, above-below, and right-left help to focus discussion on the meaning of body-in-place. The observations in this section, while interesting, are not particularly novel if one has read Merleau-Ponty's work. What this section does accomplish, however, is that it secures the ontological foundations of the remainder of the book in its recognition of the belonging of embodiment to implacement.
BUILT AND WILD PLACES
Casey then devotes the central sections of the work to built and wild places (sections III and IV). Distinguishing between two primary modes of dwelling, he describes the dialectical interplay between the "hestial" and the "hermetic." Hestia is the ancient Greek goddess of the hearth. Hestial dwelling aims at centredness, and self-enclosure (p. 133).
Hermes, on the other hand, is the god of roads, of wayfarers and of movement. "As a god of intersections, he is responsible for the disposition of entire regions of public space... Under the sign of Hermes, the con-centric becomes ec-centric" (pp. 137-8). Movement from the hestial to the hermetic explains the parallel progression from domestic curvilinearity to urban rectilinearity.
On the other hand, it is precisely in the reverberation between the two superintending deities‑-between enclosure and openness‑-that the essence of dwelling is grounded. Casey examines gardens as they deconstruct this duality, which is defined exclusively by neither hestial nor hermetic dwelling modes: "We may pause while perambulating a garden, but we do not stay for the night...In an embowered garden, I almost reside, yet I also walk about" (pp. 169-170).
The experience of the garden leaves one "on the edge of dwelling"‑-indicating that the experience of implacement is rarely fixed or uni-dimensional. As an e-vent (in Heidegger's sense of the word), place is never geometrically specifiable. And so "just as the lived body refuses to be reduced to a sheerly physical fact or object, so built places...cannot be confined to their purely physicalist predicates."(pp. 178)
Some of Casey's most moving sections of the book relate to "Wild Places" in part IV. There is much that is original and insightful in his descriptions of the cultural and historical progression of understanding of the wild. On the one hand, wilderness is understood as that place where one loses one's way, becoming bewildered in a starkly "alien world" (Fremdwelt)(p. 229). On the other hand, the very concept of wilderness is a human construct, meaningful only in relation to people. Nature and culture are seen to be interrelated, even in the wild.
CRITIQUE
in the end, however, one cannot help but feel that "nature" prevails in this book, at the expense of built spaces. Wilderness is explored with much greater wisdom and sensitivity than cultivated places, and this is unfortunate. Casey completes part III with only a passing reference to "house-city-region" (p. 181) One comes away with the impression that romantic musings on Thoreau do not take us as far in our awareness of place as a more extensive deconstruction of urbane images might have done.
Similarly, Casey could make more of the phenomenon of time than he does. That clock time has affected our geometric and physicalist determinations of space is clear. However, primordial time as Heidegger has understood it ontologically defines dwelling. This is acknowledged in some way in the final chapters of the book, in the discussion of the intertwining of journey and temporality. One senses that a more attentive listening to the phenomenon of time could have helped to shed light on the essence of harried and hurried contemporary places.
Finally, this book remains for me very much a disciplinary, phenomenological text. Such a volume cannot be all things to all people. But its wordy, meandering style may not appeal to practitioners of place. Casey refers to the book as a journey, and the characterization is apt. There is a vague sense of wandering toward conclusions, which are then superseded by yet broader insights, with a gentle transition to newly emergent themes. In the end, one definitely completes the journey philosophically enriched. Finally, the ontological foundations of place receive their due.
However, by virtue of the presentation style, I worry that only philosophers will be listening. All I can do‑-and I do so with conviction‑-is to urge designers and other practitioners to persevere with this book. At best, it may alter the very foundations of their praxis. At worst, it should persuade the critics that a sound philosophical justification for continuing to research this elusive phenomenon of place does indeed exist.
REFERENCE
Rapoport, Amos, 1994. "A Critical Look at the Concept 'Place'," The National Geographic Journal of India, 40.
|
|