The aim of The Fate of Place is to thrust the very idea of place, so deeply dormant in modern Western thinking, once more into the daylight of philosophical discourse. This will be done in four parts. In Part I, I shall first examine mythical and religious narratives of creation—with an eye to discerning the primordiality of place at the beginning of things. I will then focus on Plato’s quasi-mythical cosmology in the Timaeus, as well as on Aristotle’s detailed treatment of place in the Physics. In Part II I follow the sinuous but fascinating thread that leads from Hellenistic and Neoplatonic thought to medieval and Renaissance consideration, and in Part III I take a close look at early modern theories of place and space, ranging from Gassendi to Kant. This sets the stage for the final part, which explores a recrudescence of concern with place—no longer subordinate to Space or Time—in an array of late modern and postmodern thinkers.
An earlier volume of mine, Getting Back into Place, described concrete, multiplex, experiential aspects of the place-world.2 The present book carries forward the project of regaining recognition of the power of place. But it does so in a very different way: by delineating doctrines of place as these have emerged at critical moments of Western rumination as to the nature of place and space. My purpose here is to set forth what these doctrines actually say—and, just as often, do not say. I shall trace out, not the history of place per se, that is, its ingrediency in the actualities of art or architecture, geography or world history, but the story of how human beings (mainly philosophers) have regarded place as a concept or idea. This is an essay, therefore, in intellectual history and, more specifically, in the history of philosophical thinking about place. Merely to realize how much intelligent and insightful thought has been accorded to place in the course of Western philosophy is to begin to reappreciate its unsuspected importance as well as its fuller compass.
II
The present historical moment is a propitious one for assessing the fate of place. This is so even though there is precious little talk of place in philosophy—or, for that matter, in psychology or sociology, literary theory or religious studies. It is true that in architecture, anthropology, and ecology there is a burgeoning interest in place, but this interest leaves place itself an unclarified notion. This is an extraordinary circumstance, one that combines magnitude of promise with dearth of realization. As this book will amply demonstrate, place has shown itself capable of inspiring complicated and variegated discussions. Even if it is by no means univocal, “place” is not an incoherent concept that falls apart on close analysis, nor is it flawed in some fundamental manner, easily reducible to some other term, or merely trivial in its consequences. And yet in our own time we have come to pass over place as a thought-worthy notion. In part, this has to do with the ascendancy of site-specific models of space stemming from the early modern era. It also reflects the continuing miasma of temporocentrism that draws much of the complex and subtle structure of place into its nebulous embrace.
At work as well in the obscuration of place is the universalism inherent in Western culture from the beginning. This universalism is most starkly evident in the search for ideas, usually labeled “essences,” that obtain everywhere and for which a particular somewhere, a given place, is presumably irrelevant. Is it accidental that the obsession with space as something infinite and ubiquitous coincided with the spread of Christianity, a religion with universalist aspirations? Philoponus, a committed Christian, was arguably the first philosopher in the West to entertain the idea of an absolute space that is not merely a void. Thomas Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a leading theorist of such space in the fourteenth century: for him, God’s immensity is coextensive not only with the known universe but also with the infinite empty space in which it is set. By the next century, the Age of Exploration had begun, an era in which the domination of native peoples was accomplished by their deplacialization: the systematic destruction of regional landscapes that served as the concrete settings for local culture.
In our own century, investigations of ethics and politics continue to be universalist in aspiration—to the detriment of place, considered merely parochial in scope. Treatments of logic and language often are still more place-blind, as if speaking and thinking were wholly unaffected by the locality in which they occur. On the eve of World War I, Russell and Whitehead composed Principia Mathematica, which explored the universal logical foundations of pure mathematics with unmistakable allusion to Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Whitehead and Russell’s epoch-making book appeared during the very years when de Saussure was lecturing on a systematic “general linguistics” that sought to provide synchronic principles for all known languages irrespective of their diachronic and local differences. Herder and Humboldt, early-nineteenth-century philosophers of language, knew better; but the success of de Saussure, followed by that of Jakobson and the Prague school, and later (in a quite different vein) by Chomskian linguistics, reinstalled a formalist universalism at the heart of the theory of language.
Other reasons for the shunning of place as a crucial concept are less pointedly logical or linguistic, yet even more momentous. These include the cataclysmic events of world wars, which have acted to undermine any secure sense of abiding place (in fact, to destroy it altogether in the case of a radical anti-place such as Auschwitz); the forced migrations of entire peoples, along with continual drifting on the part of many individuals, suggesting that the world is nothing but a scene of endless displacement; the massive spread of electronic technology, which makes irrelevant where you are so long as you can link up with other users of the same technology. Each of these phenomena is truly “cosmic,” that is, literally worldwide, and each exhibits a dromocentrism that amounts to temporocentrism writ large: not just time but speeded-up time (dromos connotes “running,” “race,” “racecourse”) is of the essence of the era.3 It is as if the acceleration discovered by Galileo to be inherent in falling bodies has come to pervade the earth (conceived as a single scene of communication), rendering the planet a “global village” not in a positive sense but as a placeless place indeed.
In view of these various theoretical, cultural, and historical tendencies, the prospects for a renewed interest in place might appear to be bleak indeed. And yet something is astir that calls for a return to reflective thought about place. One sign of this auspicious stirring is found in the fact that Bergson, James, and Husserl, all apostles of temporocentrism, accorded careful attention to space and place in lesser-known but important writings that were overshadowed by their own more celebrated analyses of lived time. Similarly, Heidegger, an outspoken temporocentrist in his early work, affirmed the significance of place when he pondered the destiny of modern technological culture.
Still more saliently, certain devastating phenomena of this century bring with them, by aftershock as it were, a revitalized sensitivity to place. Precisely in its capacity to eliminate all perceptible places from a given region, the prospect of nuclear annihilation heightens awareness of the unreplaceability of these places, their singular configuration and unrepeatable history. Much the same is true for any disruptive event that disturbs the placidity of cities and neighborhoods. Perhaps most crucially, the encroachment of an indifferent sameness-of-place on a global scale—to the point where at times you cannot be sure which city you are in, given the overwhelming architectural and commercial uniformity of many cities—makes the human subject long for a diversity of places, that is, difference-of-place, that has been lost in a worldwide monoculture based on Western (and, more specifically, American) economic and political paradigms. This is not just a matter of nostalgia. An active desire for the particularity