Junk for Code

a note on place

These remarks are occasioned by the reference to Jane Jacobs over at City Comforts Blog. Jacobs made a big impression on me with her conception of cities based around vibrant, inner city street life.

Helen Levitt, New York, 1940

My other memory of The Death and Life of Great American Cities is that it is about particular places and so different to the modernist city of a series of engineered traffic flows and the grid of office towers.

Levitt, New York, 1940

'Place' stayed with me all through the long years of a philosophical education. My desire there was to get back into place. But I could find no way out of the modern maze of time and space structured around atoms in a void.

An emphasis on place runs through junk for code. It is informed by a critical regionalism within a bounded Australia on the edge of the Asia Pacific Rim. The emphasis on place is also a response to the abstract universalism of the global market that makes every commodified space the same (identical).

The philosophy behind the idea of place as an opposition to the global market is simple though complex. It holds that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder; the remainder is the non-identical; the remainder is the untruth of identity; and contradiction’ means non-identity. There is so much identity about with the economic categories of the market (they supposedly mirror reality) that we need lots of digging up remainder as excess, negativity and contradiction.

For those interested that's the first few pages of Adorno's Negative Dialectics. (It's a real tough read)

Place emphasizes the particular and the substantive as opposed to the universal and conceptual of the global market. That turns philosophy on its ahead and hits the univeralism of Western culture full on. 'Place' is dismissed as parochical and provincal and so 'place' as a meaningful category is shunned. But the categories of universalism----eg., those of the virtual reality of the internet ---are place blind and obscure the place we inhabit. Virtual reality is everywhere and and a particular somewhere--the inner city of Adelaide---is deemed to be irrelevant. All that matters is the weblog in cyberspace and the links to other weblogs, newspapers, sites etc.

It is in postmodern architecture and ecology that we find an interest and concern for place----eg., the idea of regionalism, both critical and bio. But place is more or less concealed--veiled?---and rarely discussed, even though our bodies have a place we call home. So it is hard to get a grip on it.

Helen Levitt, New York, 1939

Why not go back to the Greeks? Everybody (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger) does it when they are in need of a sign post and some help to unconceal what is veiled.

Some Aristotle then.

Where something is constitutes a very basic category since anyway we go we find place waiting for us. Place is primary for us. We are in a place; we live within places. Places----the inner city or beachscape ---surround our bodies just as a glass surrounds water.

The analogy is imperfect:----a glass can be moved or carried around as in a party but a city or beachscape cannot. But it will do as a first cut at coming to grips with what place is. It foregrounds limit as part of place.

With Aristotle we get the idea of the world is already fully implaced. The limits of place circumlocate particular things and sensible bodies within their immediate environment.

Gary Winogrand, American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas, 1964

Aristotle is our boy.

Let us forget about the geometry and mathematics and focus on our world's inherent shapeful ordering.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 11, 2003 10:23 PM | TrackBack