Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Speaking of Place: In Dialogue with Malpas
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
Philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic is author of Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000) and Director of the Division of the Environment at the University of Toronto. ingrid.stefanovic@utoronto.ca. © 2004 Ingrid Leman Stefanovic.
Readers interested in Stefanovic’s comments may also wish to study educator John Cameron’s “Some Implications of Malpas’ Place and Experience for Place Ethics and Education,” which appeared in the winter 2004 issue of EAP [web version available under "selected articles"]. In this commentary, Cameron makes connections between Malpas’ and Stefanovic’s work. We hope to publish in the fall 2004 issue a response to Stefanovic and Cameron from Malpas.
Twenty years ago, landscape architect Grady Clay (1983) argued that place was nothing more than a passing fad within academic circles. More than a decade later, the term was still around, infuriating thinkers such as environment-behavior researcher Amos Rapoport (1994, p. 32), who bitterly reported that “place is never clearly defined and hence vague; when definitions are found, they are illogical.” Despite the controversy and skepticism regarding the longevity and significance of the term, papers and books on the phenomenon of place continue to be published.
From Edward C. Relph’s classic Place and Placelessness (Relph 1976) to J.E. Malpas’ Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Malpas 1999), scholars have wrestled with an evasive but enduring concept that is not unlike St. Augustine’s description of time: When no one asks, we know very well what place is. It is only when we are asked to define the term that a specific definition seems to elude us.
Perhaps there is something in the phenomenon of place that escapes standard delimitations of language. Could it be that we require a new language in order to articulate the notion of place?
Rethinking the Limits of Language
As any good philosopher will tell you, the aim of language is to convey meaning. Techniques of persuasion and critical argumentation depend upon a structure of logic and sound reasoning that help to clearly articulate and justify truth claims.
There is much that is defensible in this general aim to elucidate and clarify what may otherwise remain in a state of confusion, chaos or obscurity. In many ways, just as the divine word was an act of creation, our language helps to elicit order from chaos, reasoned judgment from conflicting realities.
As much as language helps to articulate and clarify concepts, however, its very nature frequently demands that reality be circumscribed within delimited boundaries. Basically, the essence of saying implies that lines be drawn around the meaning of a word: this particular word means this and not that. The structure of logic demands that we be clear about what we mean—and what we do not mean—all of which suggests that definitions of place ideally ought to have fairly legible limits if they are to be rational. Rapoport’s point is that, because such definitions do not exist, the concept of place is fairly meaningless.
On the other hand, it is also part of the structure of language that some words exceed neat definitions. The word “is” is a prime example. To be sure, to define something as existing is to deny its non-existence in the sense of nihil absolutum. However, as Aristotle already knew, different things are in different ways. A table is in a different way than an idea of the table is. Moreover, a lack or a void (such as blindness, for example, defined as a lack of sight) is, even though it is not a positively existing entity. As Heidegger (1962, 1977) has shown, the situation becomes complicated once ontology (the question of the meaning of Being itself) enters the picture.
Many of us prefer the security of neatly prescribed limits but, luckily, the richness of life itself frequently exceeds those tidy boundaries. When we speak of place as ontological, we point to an elusive Ab-grund, a ground without ground, wherein notions of time, space and world arise. Some people may attempt to circumscribe the notion of place in terms of objective limits (a material container of activities) or of subjective foundations (the experience of bioregional belonging.) Attempts to delimit place in either of these dualistic notions, however, fall short of elucidating the ontological significance of place—a fact that, in some measure, Malpas recognizes in his philosophical deliberations on Place and Experience (Malpas 1999).
Malpas’ Reflections on Place
Malpas begins his book by acknowledging how thinkers from Heidegger to Proust to Donald Davidson implicitly point to the primacy of place, while managing, to varying degrees, to avoid the trap of reductionist, dualistic subject/object paradigms. “Something like the Heideggerian thinking of Dasein as place,” writes Malpas, “is what motivates the inquiry in this book.” (ibid., p. 33). More specifically, he explains:
I simply want to establish the idea of place in such a way that it can begin to be seen, neither in terms merely of some narrow sense of spatio-temporal location, nor as some sort of subjective construct but, rather, as that wherein the sort of being that is characteristically human has its ground (ibid.).
The overriding message Malpas wishes to argue for is succinctly summarized when he notes that place “cannot be reduced to any one of the elements situated within its compass, but must instead be understood as a structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. Indeed, these elements are themselves only established in relation to each other and so only within the topographical structure of place” (p. 163).
The ontological primacy of place has been advanced not only by Heidegger and Malpas but also by other thinkers such as Edward Casey (1996) and Robert Mugerauer (1994), who struggle to point to the primordial significance of implacement while avoiding the metaphysical traps of dichotomizing, separating, and reducing the notion of place to either a subjective or objective entity.
There is a story that, one evening, Heidegger was with distinguished guests, reflecting on phenomenological issues. At the end, he turned to his wife and asked her how he had done. According to one of these guests, she replied, “Again, Martin, you have been too metaphysical!” He agreed, saying that the struggle to avoid metaphysical reductionism is a continuing one for all of us.
To be sure, as Heidegger himself knew, it is an enormous challenge to avoid reifying being-in-the-world. The tendency of our language to name and delimit concepts within bounded rationality means that, in the end, we can only be marginally successful at capturing the full richness of such a term as place. Malpas wants to remain true to this vision of implacement as the ontological condition of experience but, like Heidegger, he has difficulty sometimes avoiding the very dualism that he hopes to escape.
Consider some of these quotations from Malpas’ Place and Experience. Place, he tells us, “is not founded on subjectivity, but is rather that on which subjectivity is founded” (p. 35). While Malpas does not explicitly put it in so many words, I find it difficult to envision place in such a description as anything other than an objective foundation for subjectivity—“that on which subjectivity is founded.”
Perhaps the problem is that Malpas continues to rely upon the language of subjectivity and objectivity throughout his book. There was a reason that Heidegger eventually abandoned these metaphysical constructions altogether, finding them to be ontologically restrictive. Malpas wishes to show the belonging of experience and place, but his language sometimes risks distorting his message.
“The grasp of subjective space cannot be completely independent of the grasp of space as objective,” he writes (p. 99). While true in many ways, it is also the case that continuing to rely upon notions of subjectivity and objectivity implies an underlying metaphysical dualism. “The idea of subjectivity,” Malpas explains, “provides no [independent] ground, since subjectivity is to be understood as established only through forms of agency and activity that themselves call upon forms of both subjective and objective spatiality” (p. 137). If “something like Heideggerian thinking” is driving Malpas’ project, one wishes that he could try to convey his message here, without relapsing into what Heidegger himself characterized as dualistic, epistemological constructs.
An Ontology of Implacement
My comments here may sound far more harsh than I intend them to be. Malpas’ book is certainly a valiant attempt to explore the ontological meaning of place while also dealing with the nitty-gritty topics of human agency and self-identity. The phenomenon of place has made its way into a range of writings, from the geographical to the psychological and, in many ways, the conversation requires more serious philosophical deliberation, such as Malpas offers here.
But Malpas himself recognizes an important point: “in many of the most basic respects, our dependence on place is something that always remains implicit or else can only be explicated with great difficulty” (p. 177). The challenge still remains to find new ways to describe the ontology of implacement without lapsing either into the comfort (but ultimately, arbitrary speculation) of metaphysics or into vague, poetic, musings that provide little guidance or direction.
Which way to go? My view is that there is still more to Heidegger’s reflections on language than we think–but that is the subject for another paper!
References
Casey, Edward, 1996. Getting Back into Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Clay, Grady, 1983. Sense and Nonsense of Place, Landscape Architecture, 32, 110-113.
Heidegger, Martin, 1962. Being and Time. NY: Harper & Row, 1962
_____, 1977. Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. NY: Harper & Row.
Malpas, J. E., 1999. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mugerauer, Robert, 1994. Interpretations on Behalf of Place. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Rapoport, Amos, 1994. A Critical Look at the Concept ‘Place’, National Geographic Journal of India, 40, 31-45.
Relph, Edward C., 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
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