Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey: Giving Voice to Place, Memory, and Imagination 9781472545589

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Acknowledgments It is with great pleasure that we begin by acknowledging the seemingly limitless generosity of Edward S. Casey. Ed has been a mentor and a friend to both of the editors over the years, and we are honored to have had the opportunity to bring together this multivoiced book, a collection that sounds out the depths of the voices in Ed’s own (philosophical and personal) voice, and manifests reverberations of Ed’s voice across the communities he inspires. And what a pleasure it was to solicit Ed’s uniquely humble yet profound voice in the interview format. The places of the these interviews (New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and the virtual place of Video calls) were resummoned through the transcribing process, imagined and remembered through reinscription, playing with the rigid borders of sound recording and the vague boundaries of a disrupted, lived conversation over a year in durée. Thank you, Ed, for your encouragement and support in this project. And indeed, on behalf of all of your students, readers, and interlocutors, thank you for your time and for your voice. Secondly, we must acknowledge the incredible contributions that appear in this book. The authors worked with seemingly impossible deadlines and produced fascinating and original contributions engaging with and inspired by Casey’s rich œuvre. Our appreciation is warmly extended to the contributors: Kent Bloomer, David Carr, Megan Craig, Fred Evans, Eugene Gendlin, Eve Ingalls, Galen A. Johnson, Eva Feder Kittay, Jeff Malpas, David Morris, Thierry Paquot, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Gary Shapiro, Angeliki Sioli, and Tanja Staehler. A special note of appreciation should be added to Thierry Paquot, whose excitement in relation to Casey’s work first gave birth to the idea for a book of this nature through his conversations with Azucena Cruz-Pierre. In addition, this project greatly benefited from the advice of Mary Rawlinson, Anthony Steinbock, and Gail Weiss. We also would like to thank Kathleen Hulley for her significant help editing the endnotes and Works Cited pages, and for compiling the selective Chronological Bibliography of Work of Edward S. Casey. Finally, our appreciation to Ioana Barac, Ricardo Barros, Kent Bloomer, Eve Ingalls, Lily Rosenthal, and Tanja Staehler for their permission to reproduce their various photographs, sketches, and illustrations, and to the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatlichen Museen of Berlin for permission to reproduce Tanja Staehler’s photograph from within their gallery space.

List of Abbreviations of Books by Edward S. Casey EM Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. Saint Paul: Minnesota Press, 2005. FP The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. GBP Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 2nd ed., expanded. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. IMG Imagining. A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. REM Remembering. A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. RP Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. S&S Spirit and Soul. Essays in Philosophical Psychology, 2nd ed., expanded. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2004. WG The World at a Glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Notes on Contributors Editors Azucena Cruz-Pierre received her doctorate in philosophy from Stony Brook University in 2009 and is currently living in Nantes, France, where she continues her philosophic investigation of everyday urban and placial experiences. She is also partaking in a collaboration piece that is a visual and poetic exploration of the concept of “voyage.” Her primary research involves the formation of housing segregation in urban areas and brings together the fields of architecture, urbanism, sociology and philosophy. She has published a chapter in Ecoscapes: Geographical Patternings of Relations (2006) and is currently finishing a manuscript for a volume that is a phenomenological and historical exploration of the impact of urban design on the body. Donald A. Landes is currently Assistant Professor (limited term) of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, prior to which he held a Social Sciences Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Stony Brook University in May 2010. He specializes in twentieth-century continental philosophy and ethics. He is the translator of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2012), and the author of The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Authors Kent Bloomer is the principal and founder of the Bloomer Studio, serving as its chief designer since 1965, and Professor of Architecture at Yale University, where he has taught since 1966. His sculptures have been exhibited by numerous museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Some recent projects include a foliated trellis for the Ronald Reagan National Airport, Washington, DC and large roof sculptures on the Harold Washington Library, Chicago. Bloomer is the co-author of Body, Memory, and Architecture (Yale Press, 1977) and the author of The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture (W. W. Norton, 2000). David Carr is Charles Howard Candler Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Emory University. David Carr received his PhD from Yale University in 1966. He is the author of Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Northwestern University Press, 1974),

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Time, Narrative and History (Indiana University Press, 1986), Interpreting Husserl (Springer, 1987), and The Paradox of Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 1999). Megan Craig is a painter and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She received her doctorate from the New School of Social Research, New York, in 2007. She is the author of Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2010), as well as articles on William James, Emanuel Lévinas, and painting. Fred Evans is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator for the Center of Interpretive and Qualitative Research at Duquesne University. He is the author of The Multi-Voiced Body: A Philosophy of Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (Columbia University Press, 2009), Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (SUNY Press, 1993), and co-editor of Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh (SUNY Press, 2000). His research in continental philosophy concerns psychology, politics, and technology, and his current interests are in political esthetics and cosmopolitanism. Eugene T. Gendlin is an American philosopher and psychologist. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years. He is well known for “Focusing” and “Thinking at the Edge,” two procedures for thinking with the implicit. In addition to numerous articles, his book A Process Model is available at the Gendlin Online Library (www.focusing.org/Gendlin/). Eve Ingalls attended the Skowhegan School of Art and received her BFA and MFA from the Yale University School of Art. She was one of two artists representing the United States at The Holland Paper Biennial 2006, held at the Coda Museum and the Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands. Her sculpture was exhibited at the Art Forum in Kyoto, Japan, in 2007, and at the Schokland Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the Netherlands, in 2003. Her work has also been exhibited throughout the United States and has been reviewed in The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Arts Magazine, De Volkskrant, Beeldende Kunst, De Courant Amsterdam, and La Nacion (San Jose, Costa Rica). See: www.eveingalls.com Galen A. Johnson is Honors Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island, Director of the University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities, and the General Secretary of International Merleau-Ponty Circle. He is author of Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy: Island Images Inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1989) and The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (Northwestern University Press, 2010). He is co-editor with Michael B. Smith of Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Northwestern University Press, 1990) and editor of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Northwestern University Press, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2008). Eva Feder Kittay is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, where she has taught since 1979. She writes on issues in ethics and social and political philosophy, and is an expert on metaphor and the philosophy of language. She is

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the author, co-author, and editor of several books, including Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (Routledge, 1998) and The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (edited with Ellen K. Feder, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, a Humbolt Research Fellow, and a Visiting Professor and Researcher at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine (United States), Uppsala University and Umea University (Sweden), Heidelberg University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Germany), and the University of Auckland (Australia). Author of Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (MIT, 2012), Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (MIT Press, 2006). David Morris is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montreal. Author of The Sense of Space (SUNY, 2004), his main interests are phenomenology and existentialism (especially Merleau-Ponty), Hegel and Bergson, with a focus on the philosophy of the body, mind and nature, and philosophy of biology. Some of his most recent publications are on: expression, perception, sense, and reversibility in Merleau-Ponty; animals and humans, in relation to the problem of mind and body; method in Husserl, Bergson, and Peirce; Hegel on the understanding, and Hegel on the logic of measuring the body. Thierry Paquot is a Professor at the Paris Institute of Urbanism (Institut d’urbanisme de Paris, UPEC) at the University of Paris XII, Creteil. He is former editor of the journal Urbanisme, producer of the episodes of “Côté ville” on the France-Culture radio program Métropolitains, member of the Commission of Old Paris, and President of the National Academy of Street Arts (l’Académie Nationale des Arts de la Rue –ANAR). He is the author of over 40 books on topics of philosophy and urbanism. Alberto Pérez-Gómez is Bronfman Chair of Architectural History at McGill University (since 1987), where he founded the History and Theory Post-Professional (Masters and Doctoral) Programs. Pérez-Gómez was born in Mexico City in 1949, where he studied architecture and practiced. He did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded an MA and a PhD by the University of Essex (England). He has taught at universities in Mexico, Houston, Syracuse, Toronto, and at London’s Architectural Association. In 1983 he became Director of Carleton University’s School of Architecture. Pérez-Gómez is also co-editor (with Stephen Parcell) of a book series entitled Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture. Gary Shapiro is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond. His research falls within the areas of post-Kantian continental philosophy, philosophy of art, and American philosophy. Author of Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (University of California Press, 1995), Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (SUNY Press, 1991), and Nietzschean Narratives (Indiana University Press, 1989).

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Angeliki Sioli is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory Program at McGill University’s School of Architecture, where she works under the supervision of Professor Alberto Pérez-Gómez. She holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Thessaly, Greece, a post-professional Master’s degree in Architectural Theory from the National Technical University of Athens, and has worked as an architect on projects that include housing and office buildings, as well as stage sets for dance performances. Her research seeks connections between architecture and literature in the public realm of the twentieth-century European city.

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Introduction Donald A. Landes and Azucena Cruz-Pierre

Nostalgia need not be a matter of regret or of romance, nor is it adequately construed as a forced regression to bare fixation points. It is a unique mode of insight into a world that has become irretrievably past and that arrays itself, as we remember it now, in a plenitude of places. Edward S. Casey, “The World of Nostalgia”1 Throughout his work, Edward S. Casey lends his voice to phenomena on the margins of philosophical thought and reveals them to be absolutely central to our lived experience. Whether it is imagination, memory, place, boundaries, maps, landscapes, edges, or the glance, his engagement with these rich concepts is both restorative and creative—sometimes finding them already at work in the history of philosophy, sometimes establishing them at the heart of the responsible phenomenology being born beneath his stylus, and most oftentimes both. It might be said, then, that Casey’s philosophy is a work of nostalgia for phenomena that were never present and yet never absent from lived experience. For Casey, nostalgia is not dependent on any specific set of recollections, but is rather a mode of memory; it is not a purely fictitious imagining, but is the imaginative production of a world that incorporates “one’s sense of being in a given place”; and finally, it is a question of place insofar as the “world-under-nostalgement” only operates if it is sensed as a “plenum-of-places.” Thus nostalgia, in Casey’s rich sense, is not reducible to a form of simple homesickness for a pure origin—it is a “unique mode of insight.”2 Nostalgia is something that we have not for something that is lost, but rather for something that is present but that exceeds any full grasp, for something we only sense on the margins and only catch sight of in a glance. Embarking on a project of nostalgia is thus an intimidating and humbling affair, and one that Casey undertakes in each of his conceptual journeys. Perhaps, then, this book is an exercise in collective and productive nostalgia, both recovery and creation. It does not simply force a regression to “bare fixation points” in the sense of registering or repeating arguments offered and conclusions obtained, nor does it set up a romantic ideal of past works in their purity. As one hears repeatedly in Casey’s own new prefaces to his earlier books, or in his candid self-critiques in the

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interviews in this book, the fixed points of philosophical books are always snapshots of a longer journey that is still unfolding and that thus demands constant reinterpretation. The interviews and contributions contained in this book return to Casey’s past not in order to find it in its pure origins, nor to present a clearly articulated recollection, but rather to take it up as a past that, as Merleau-Ponty once said, “has never been present,”3 toward a future of a thinking with Casey in the open trajectory of his thought. Merleau-Ponty once suggested that an “objective” reading of a philosopher (for him, it was Husserl) is impossible because the thought of a philosopher is never “a system of neatly defined concepts, of arguments responding to perennial problems, and of conclusions which permanently solve the problems.”4 And yet a “subjective” or arbitrary reading that merely projects the reader’s interpretation across the text is equally to be avoided. For Merleau-Ponty, this places the responsibility upon the reader to take up the “unthought” of the philosopher by gearing into their thought with all of its “reflections, shadows, levels and horizons,” or in other words, precisely that region which makes it a genuine realm of possibilities rather than a set of clearly defined and isolated ideas.5 That is, the thought of a philosopher understood as a place for thinking. Reading a philosopher involves a genuine dialogue and a gearing into their world. Such an endeavor, muses Merleau-Ponty, “will seem foolhardy on the part of someone who has known neither Husserl’s daily conversation nor his teaching,” but it is perhaps even more foolhardy for someone who has known the philosopher in question, given that personal anecdotes threaten to block genuine insight. Yet this is precisely the task assigned to the contributors to this book. For over 40 years, Casey has been a friend and a teacher to many, an interlocutor with and a unique influence upon so many more. Nevertheless, this book is not a set of personal recollections or anecdotes—it is a collection of thoughts from friends and challengers who take up the call to enter into and explore the place of Casey’s thought in the rigorous and open dialogue that characterizes his very style. As Casey says in the first interview included below: “Two criteria are especially important to me in this context: 1) to be as interdisciplinary as possible, whenever pertinent; and 2) to be as dialogical as possible.”6 These two criteria could not have better captured the spirit of this book. Given the promise to “explore the work of Edward S. Casey,” it seems fitting to name that field of exploration itself a “world-under-nostalgement,” insofar as it “is a world filled with places (prototypically, homeplaces) which give it its characteristically multi-layered structure—its sense of being always more than we can contain in a single set of representations.”7 From Imagining to The World at a Glance and beyond, Casey’s work is indeed a plenitude of places, or better, as much a place for philosophy as a philosophy of place.

Part One—Imagination, memory, and place I practiced phenomenology then much as I still practice it now: as an informal, open-ended way of undertaking careful descriptive work in philosophy.

Edward S. Casey, IMG, ix

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Part One of this book is a collection of chapters and interviews oriented toward Casey’s early contributions to phenomenology and philosophical psychology, with a focus on his first four books: Imagining, Remembering, Getting Back into Place, and The Fate of Place. The phenomenological style of Casey’s work is established in the first three of these books, and yet it evolves in important ways. In the opening sentence of Imagining, one can immediately detect what will lead a more mature Casey to identify this text as “a young man’s book”: “The ultimate aim of [Imagining] is to demonstrate that imagination is an autonomous mental act: independent in status and free in its action” (IMG, xix). The author of Imagining is bent upon mastering the phenomenon, labeling its parts, disambiguating its modalities, and literally charting its structure. In order to isolate and identify the fundamental components of imagining, Casey brackets it off from its place in poetry, politics, dreams, and mystical experience. In this way, he establishes the autonomy of imagining and reassesses its secondary status in Western philosophy. Philosophers, who since Plato have been suspicious that images pose a threat to theoretical reflection, fail to recognize the role of images and imagination in their own thought. This belief about the image-free status of their practice has led to an almost universal rejection of imagination from the proper realm of philosophical reflection. In the face of this rejection and debasement of imagination, Casey proposes to vindicate the efforts of its few advocates by demonstrating its worthiness of a “more judicious treatment” (IMG, xx). Nevertheless, the resulting eidetic phenomenology of imagination remains importantly psychical and, as mentioned, bracketed off from place. And yet, even if Casey only becomes more attuned to body and place in his subsequent books, this first book reveals a remarkable phenomenological practice already underway. Throughout these pages, the reader finds a playful tension between two impulses: an impulse to rigorous distinction and an impulse to rich description. For instance, the book begins—and this is the only book by Casey that begins in this way—with a remarkable list of terms and definitions that will be employed throughout his argument (IMG, xxv–xxvi). Following Husserl’s distinction between the noetic and the noematic, Casey defines the “act phase” and the “object phase” of imagining as the two poles of every “complete phenomenon” of imagination. He confesses to self-consciously removing, wherever possible, any use of the reifying formulations “the imagination” or “an imagination.” The adjective “imaginative” is carefully distanced from any positive or honorific connotation, and the adjective “imaginal” is introduced as a technical formulation for concepts such as the “imaginal margin.” “Imaginational” is mentioned simply to be named too awkward for inclusion, and “imaginary” is given a narrow and technical definition to indicate a range of imagined objects, and so on. This impulse to eidetic distinction is again manifest throughout the book in paragraphs devoted to defining terms and in tables offered as complete maps of the imaginative activity. And yet the competing impulse to a rich and open description carries Casey’s prose into detailed accounts of lived experience, exemplified by his first chapter, “Examples and First Approximations,” or in his necessarily open descriptions of concepts that seem to resist his eidetic method, such as the frame and the “imaginal margin” (IMG, 53f).

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In Imagining, Casey thus hones an ability to reveal “the most prominent traits while at the same time attending to the barest nuances” (IMG, x). As his work evolves, I would argue, these two impulses merge into a singular and original style all his own. The creativity of his description becomes the very practice of his phenomenological rigor, and the rigor of his exploration of distinctions loses the hard edge of absolute and pure eidetic definition without ever compromising his eye for nuance. The evolution takes place in the essays following Imagining, in his deepening engagement with depth psychology and the work of James Hillman, and perhaps most definitively in Part Three of Remembering. As he admits, his impulse to distinction began very quickly to meet its match in the richness and “density of human experience” (IMG, xi). Casey began to recognize the irrepressible centrality of body and place, since we “imagine with our bodies and in place, never without the ingredience and the co-operation of both” (IMG, xi). Body memory and place memory reshape his phenomenological approach and propel a reflection that is still unfolding today. So, it was not imagining that led to place and body, but remembering. The nuances of the phenomena revealed to Casey modalities—recognizing, reminiscing, and reminding—that exploded the usual categories of memory and led the phenomenology of memory out beyond the confines of the “mind.” As Casey writes in the prologue to Part Three: “We have been witnessing the emergence of memory from within the encasement of mentalism” (REM, 144). Through the phenomena of body memory and place memory, remembering reveals an “abiding and uncompromising implacement in the world” (REM, 144). It is, then, by turning back to phenomenology’s discovery of the body in the world that Casey’s philosophy gets into place, and opens the reflection that leads to the books on place. In Getting Back into Place, one finds the two impulses of description and distinction in full force. The motivation is the same insofar as “place” is unveiled as a forgotten yet essential component of our lived experience. Just as rational thought excluded imagination and memory from the “proper” domain of philosophical reflection, Casey reveals how the discourses of Space and Time that dominate philosophical officialdom have suffocated the concept of place. “I shall accord to place a position of renewed respect by specifying its power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are (as well as where we are not)” (GBP, xv). The resulting topoanalysis offers precisely what is promised in the book’s subtitle: a renewed understanding of the place-world. The placial and bodily aspects of memory invite a phenomenological description of “embodied implacement” (GBP, xvi), and phenomenology becomes an exploration of the body in built and wild places. Human experience, then, is the ongoing journey between places. In The Fate of Place, Casey tells “the story of how human beings (mainly philosophers) have regarded place as a concept or idea” (FP, xi). The treatise is a phenomenologically informed intellectual history that aims to cement the return of place to the “daylight of philosophical discourse” and to carry forward “the project of regaining recognition of the power of place” (FP, xi). These all-too-brief suggestions about the richness of Casey’s thought and its various early evolutions only begin to do justice to the texts and articles of this period. Nevertheless, they offer a certain introduction for the interviews and chapters of

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Part One of the current book, and it is worth mentioning some details about these fascinating contributions. In the interview that opens the book, I take the opportunity of asking Casey to reflect upon the movements discussed above. Casey recounts the evolution of his thought in relation to both phenomenology and depth psychology, and lays bare how his thought moved from the psyche out into the world of body and place. In our second session, I ask Casey to reflect upon the role of the “marginal” in his early work, which leads him to a fascinating reflection on the continuity of his concern. As he writes, all across Imagining and in particular in the first half of Remembering, “my effort was to give a fairly precise, eidetic, formal analysis . . . But, ‘margin’ was already testing that impulse.”8 The interview then explores the fate of freedom in these evolutions—so central in Imagining but nearly absent in the work on place—and Casey’s fascinating understanding of “witness” in relation to place, events, and mentoring. Shifting to the final session, now in Atlanta, Casey discusses the theme of “exterocentricity” and the role of communication and community, or the commons, in terms of bodies sharing place. The conversation concludes with a reflection on how contemporary French philosophers, who had been influential Casey’s thought, make their first extended appearance in his work at the end of his fourth book and first genuinely “historical” text, The Fate of Place. Turning back to bodies and stylized movements, Casey reassesses his work on place, and identifies its political edge, reminding us of the important links between place and event. The third chapter of this book is the contribution from phenomenologist and philosopher of history David Carr. Taking as his point of departure Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (Places of Memory), Carr embarks upon a fascinating study of the relationship in Casey’s work between memory and place in order suggest the possibilities of a Caseyan contribution to the philosophy of history. Carr traces the journey by which memory (in the practice of history) shifts from a source to an object to a supplement of historical knowledge, and suggests that memory resists its proper role in history so long as we fail to return to the places of memory. Casey’s notion of “place memory,” suggests Carr, is essential for forms of collective memory. In Chapter 4, David Morris explores the subtleties of Casey’s “subliminal phenomenology,” or in other words, the way that Casey’s work manages to reveal what makes room for the very appearance of things but “only in virtue of a non-givenness.”9 Place, he argues, is generative of all that comes to be in place, and yet only because place is never fully present or determined. This reading of Casey’s methodology explains the deep attraction that Casey expresses for “periphenomena,” such as glances and edges. Morris thereby establishes two important contributions made by Casey’s work to phenomenology: (1) it brings phenomena even more “down-to-earth” insofar as the earth is the place of phenomena; (2) it reveals the “non-delimitable” that must be at work in all that is delimited. Through a fascinating reading of Casey’s World at a Glance, Morris concludes that “[p]lace is both beneath and beyond delimitation.”10 In Chapter 5, Jeff Malpas focuses on the relation between place and memory by returning to an ongoing conversation between himself and Casey with regard to the notion of “perdurance,” or the “fixity” that place provides for memory. Malpas agrees with Casey that an “unplaced memory” or “disembodied memory” would be impossible, and as a result any rethinking of memory requires a genuine rethinking of space and

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time, subjectivity and objectivity, and self and world. As he writes: “to genuinely approach the question of memory—of remembering or of remembrance—is also to approach the question of thinking and of place, of thinking as itself remembrance, and of remembrance as itself placing.”11 Suggesting, however, that Casey gives “a certain priority in relation to memory,”12 Malpas argues that the relationship is in fact reciprocal; that is, even if place serves as the foundation of memory, so too does memory serve as the foundation of place. For Malpas, not only does memory begin in place, but place begins in memory as well. For Thierry Paquot, French philosopher of urbanism, the discovery of The Fate of Place was an important influence on his own thinking of the relation between time, space, place, and dwelling. In his chapter (Chapter 6), translated for this book, Paquot traces out the conceptual journeys of the many locutions of place, and applauds Casey’s refusal of a single linear or evolutionary story. Paquot shows how Casey’s disentangling of space and place reveals the “‘dislocated’ subject” as the “contemporary inhabitant of the Earth.”13 By invoking his own engagement with Bachelard and Heidegger, Paquot explores how Casey’s concepts play into contemporary urban and technological themes, and how the digital is reshaping the among and the with of dwelling that makes for new modalities of place and proximity. Eugene Gendlin, psychologist and philosopher noted for his development of the technique of focusing, offers a reflection that explores his own concepts in relation to Caseyan themes in Chapter 7 of this book. He begins by distinguishing between a narrow way of thinking of space as the container of objects and a wider conception that emerges from the very “activity that we are.”14 From this fundamental point of departure, Gendlin winds his way through the intricacies of our theories about our experience in order to begin to uncover our experience itself. Location space fails to account for the order of our lived experience, and we must recognize that processes are not reducible to their part. By introducing concepts such as body-environment, implicit organization, reciprocity, occurring and implying, movable patterns, and more, Gendlin takes up Casey’s themes in order to derive “place” as prior to location space. This establishes us firmly within our living bodies, acting and speaking and thinking within the universe. Kent Bloomer, architect and thinker of place and ornament, opens his chapter (Chapter 8) by suggesting that ornament is beginning to gain a proper place within the visual language of art and architecture. For Bloomer, the multiplicity inherent in Casey’s notion of place draws the visual language back from the neutral void of space and reestablishes the powerful role of ornament as performing and informing objects in place. Bloomer argues that ornament aims to “situate mundane things (like gates, buildings, bowls, and picture frames) within the world-at-large,”15 and it does this by embedding the cosmos within the object. Exploring the role of the grid and superposition, Bloomer shows how ornament “does not produces an alternate entity, a symbol . . . [but] serves to position the immediate and the immense together in the same place.”16 In short, ornament is essential as a possibility for expressing, in a single work of art or architecture, “this-and-that plus now-and-then,” and his chapter concludes by considering just where the place(s) of ornament might emerge in modern buildings and landscape.

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Part One concludes with a chapter that continues this shift towards art, as Tanja Staehler considers the important intersections between Levinas and Casey on art, and particularly through the relationship between art and Eros in nostalgia, ambiguity, and the concept of the trace. Following Levinas, and drawing rich parallels between Plato’s Symposium and the paintings of Eros by Baglione and Caravaggio, Staehler argues that Eros can be shown as essentially in-between, occupying a “precarious intermediate position,”17 most effectively captured in Caravaggio’s painting. Thus, Eros is a unified but ambiguous phenomenon. This leads Staehler to consider the object of art and Eros, beauty, in relation to the Levinasian understanding of the trace and Casey’s reading of Levinas in relation to nostalgia. In a marvelous conclusion to Part One, especially given where we began just above, Staehler suggests that there is a rich (Caseyan) form of nostalgia that relates us to “a wondrous otherness that is inaccessible, except by way of its traces.”18 Donald A. Landes Montréal, Québec, Canada

Introduction to Parts Two and Three This book on Edward S. Casey’s work was first intended to be a series of interviews with Casey himself, exploring specific aspects of his published works while pushing into his more current research interests. However, in the end, we decided that the best approach would be to allow for the voices of those influenced by Casey’s thinking to also be heard. This approach seemed more in keeping with Casey’s own style of engaging others in discussion and listening to their particular perspective with an openness that one finds reflected in his writings. Since his work has proven relevant both within and outside of philosophy, we sought to include as many different voices as possible, forming a pluri-disciplinary chorus. It is undeniable that Casey’s writings, while firmly planted in philosophy, are nonetheless heavily influenced by his interests in other areas, including art, music, literature, traveling, maps, and psychoanalysis, sometimes expressed only through examples, sometimes taking over entire volumes (as is the case of Earth-Mapping and Representing Place). In this book you will find Casey’s voice intertwining not only with other philosophers, but also the voices of artists, architects, and urbanists. This pluri-vocal, pluri-disciplinary approach reflects the spirit of Casey’s thinking. Though he is deeply emplaced in philosophy and its discourse, at the same time he finds himself situated in other areas of interest (art, music, and literature to name a few), something, in fact, that he encourages everyone to do. What holds these various interests together, giving them a sense of cohesion, is his palette comprised of a series of intensive and historically exhaustive accounts of concepts that he has managed to bring to the fore—capturing their essence, their complexities, and their philosophical import. Included among them are imagination, remembering, place, mapping, representation, glance, edge, and voice. None of the topics chosen by Casey for analysis are arbitrary or haphazard: they fit seamlessly into his larger picture

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey

of what phenomenological accounts of embodied existence must include. Casey is painting a representation of bodily existence in the lived world—not a painting like the minimalist ones that he creates while on an island in Maine, but rather a painting that is epic in proportion and exhaustive in detail, one which is continually in progress as he discovers new elements to add. And so here we encounter the paradox in his writing. While Casey cuts to the depths of complex issues with the skill of a surgeon, there is also the act of glancing that pervades, allowing him to get oriented in the subject matter at its superficial (surface) level before focusing deeper. It is a methodology that reflects his artistic technique as a painter who prefers watercolors and acrylics and whose subjects are often vast expanses of nature, horizons, bodies of water. The medium he chooses requires quick action to capture the essence of the scene that he seeks to represent. This manner of painting conveys the sense that what is being represented was captured in a glance, but, as Casey explains in his work on the glance, the glance is not merely superficial, it also captures the depths of the subject. In her essay included in this book, Megan Craig explores this aspect of Casey’s sensibility as philosopher/artist, and asks: “Is it possible to write like a painter, and how might it sound?”19 One can offer a quick answer: it would sound much like the voice of Edward Casey with its unique locution and style—even his choice of subject matter betrays his painterly interests. Like that of an artist, his eye falls upon those things in the world that typically get ignored, overlooked, understated and he proceeds to deconstruct them before finally setting them out into the world through his own voice. It is not the obscurity or seeming insignificance of the subject that attracts his attention; he is not a collector of rare objects. Rather, it is because he is capable of seeing their potential philosophic worth and how they fit into the larger picture that he is perpetually in the process of composing. Casey admits to preferring the quick and almost instantaneous representations made possible by watercolors, acrylics, and even photography, yet in his own work, he is the equivalent of an oil painter, working laboriously and over a long durée on a tableau that is ever-evolving as he adds shading and detail. This style, Craig claims, is a reflection of Casey’s very distinct philosophical voice, moving between what Deleuze refers to as smooth space and striated space. Craig rightly states that “Casey, like Deleuze and Guattari, seems to prefer the intensity, irregularity, and abandon of smooth space—the wet space of painting,” as opposed to the striated space that we find in cartographic mapping for instance, or, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, in cities.20 Casey’s work plays with these two kinds of space, finding a way to allow for points of intersection and communication between them. Even his life reflects this, as he splits his bodily as well as emotional presence between three places: New York City, Santa Barbara, and Deer Isle in Maine. New York City is a striated space and Deer Isle a smooth space, but Santa Barbara, a city nestled between a mountain range and the Pacific Ocean, could be said to form a third kind of space that is a composite of, or bridge between the other two. Certainly living in multiple places has an effect on his thinking. Readers often find that Casey, while providing extensive and detailed analyses, interweaves them with his more personal or illustrative, painterly descriptions that bring the reader into

Introduction

9

the intimacy of his thinking. Often, there is no clear and distinct mark between the philosophical analysis and these personal accounts in terms of which is supporting which; rather, with the way he presents them, they necessitate each other. This approach is quite different from most philosophical writings, even within phenomenology, which tend to use examples and illustrations, perhaps even personal accounts, merely as decorative frames that are not essential to the overall structure, much like faux neo-Greco-Roman columns. But this is not how Casey functions. By seeking evermore refined conceptions of place, the glance, or the edge, he moves through these concepts, as Craig describes it, engaging them physically, crawling and grappling his way through, getting dirty in the process much like an artist becomes dirty while creating a work of art. That is to say, Casey is aware of the physicality of philosophical reflection, of philosophical expression, in a way similar to that of an artist painting. To do this kind of philosophy requires an openness, and for Casey, it would mean an openness to place, to bodily experience. The second half of this book, divided into two parts, is dedicated to the various trails that have led off from Casey’s core philosophical work on place, memory, and imagination. These core topics, already covered in expansive volumes, consistently resurface, sometimes only hinted at, in his more recent writings on representation, the glance, edges, and voice. One could perhaps say that Casey is performing a kind of philosophical “focusing,” to borrow the term used by Eugene Gendlin for his psychotherapeutic method, as Casey seeks to define and further refine our experiences in place. Part Two of this book brings us face to face with Casey’s writings on representation, mapping, and landscape painting. It begins with a set of interviews with Casey on topics including the instant, representation in works of art, frames and edges, as well as his own personal artistic experience and interests. In the first interview session, Casey discusses his own experiences with art as a painter and as a philosopher, and also discusses the relationship between temporality and painting as it pertains to artistic media and modes of expression. Not surprisingly, his own artistic practice informs his philosophical critique of art and his understanding of artistic modes of representation. Woven throughout Casey’s writings are traces of an aesthetically oriented eye, an artistic sensibility, traces that are brought to the foreground in his analyses of representation, mapping, and landscape art (see Representing Place and Earth-Mapping). One cannot help but sense in each of his phenomenological expeditions that the artist is never far away, even in rigorous and profound philosophical discussions on remembering, place, the glance, and borders. His words themselves are painterly, changing speed, texture, and tone as necessary for depicting what is at hand or what needs to be grasped, and his work is physical. In keeping with his Merleau-Pontian and Heideggerian influences, Casey’s accounts of space and place emphasize the way by which the transformation from space to place involves an act of creation and installation, be it of my body, objects, or memories. Such creative acts are central to his description of the act of representation in a work of art, as in the case of earth art installations which require the re-creation of nature in a place that has been expressly created for this event. In her chapter, Eve Ingalls, to whom Casey dedicates a chapter in Earth-Mapping, reflects on how she achieves this

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey

in her artwork by allowing her body and nature to work together, even if this “event” occurs in an urban setting that is far from the natural setting that initially inspired her. That is to say, she creates a new place in which her representation of nature can be at home by allowing its dynamics, its energy, to shape the piece alongside her bodily participation. Ingalls’s art, like others that Casey highlights in his writings, is dynamic, full of movement and acts of discovery; it challenges borders and puts into question a Cartesian conception of space and representation. Casey pushes Merleau-Ponty’s account of artistic creation, which considers the artwork as a resulting “linguistic” expression, one step further, such that it is no longer merely the artist “speaking” her experience of a thing or idea. Rather, it is a representation of the bodily and psychical chiasmic fusion of earth and artist that is taking place. It is a representation of the creation of place that resembles more a transmutation than a transcription. In terms of landscape art, then, this is the point at which we get a glimpse of the topopoetic, Casey’s term for the “poetic expression of place,” as well as where we encounter the sublime: “In this transformative movement from topography to topopoetry, the sublime arises from the very body of beauty as its porous threshold, its ethereal but powerful partner” (RP, 90). Galen A. Johnson engages with Casey’s account of the sublime in relation to the glance through the work of de Kooning. De Kooning’s landscape paintings, described several times by Casey as sublime, were arrived at through glimpses of the world. Johnson thus asks the question whether it is “paradoxical to speak of glancing at or catching a glimpse of the sublime?”21 How does one capture the sublime? Do we quickly sense it on the surface of a thing, or do we obtain it through gazing at a thing? For Johnson and Casey alike, Abstract Expressionist art provides a means to explore this question as it lends itself to representing the sensational, experiential aspect of a landscape (often derived from a glance). Landscapes, in their unboundedness, lend themselves to glancing and thus to experiences of the sublime. While the glance functions within bounded spaces, it truly excels in places where it is free to roam. What happens however once the unbounded natural sublime gets represented in the form of a painting that is in certain respects bounded? Casey would claim that an artist such as de Kooning paints in such a way as to re-represent this sublime feeling in his paintings, offering a space for the view to contemplate the piece with an unbounded glance. Johnson remains skeptical of whether this glance of the viewer of the work of art is free. He allows for the fact that there must be some kind of freedom to the glance of the viewer, but at the same time he cannot help but wonder if there is not a certain level of direction, what he calls a “logic of looking,” that the painter communicates through the composition of the painting, as he claims is the case with Klee. The second interview session of this section highlights Casey’s work on mapping. In Representing Place (as well as in a few articles written in 2001) we find much of Casey’s thinking on mapping. There, he provokes the reader to consider the relationship between representation in art and representation in mapping, illustrating his point with examples from the Orient and Occident, beginning with Neolithic petroglyphs and ending with nineteenth-century survey and topographic maps. Our conversation in this section delves into mapping that represents the idiolocality of a place, as well as the semiotic and bodily aspects of mapping that occur when we start speaking of things

Introduction

11

like landmarks, self-made maps, and maps that we create with our imagination based on information given to us. What we come to realize is that there is a wide spectrum of mapping practices, each with its own purpose and effects, and, one could add, power. One cannot help but think of modern GPS-type mapping without wondering how it has affected our relationship to the landscape, and even to other individuals. Such mapping provides the user with a given route that is not only Cartesian in spirit but also virtual in the sense that one need not engage with their immediate surroundings in order to navigate through them. Rather, it is sufficient to simply follow the instructions on the screen or those given by the voice coming from the device, leading the mind and eyes even further into the interior of the vehicle. Ultimately, it is the difference between, on the one hand, being located, I am “here” at a fixed point in space, and, on the other hand, being oriented, which I come to through getting my bearings, perhaps by glancing, in a place so that I may then move onward. The effects of the experiential difference between the body being situated at a site and the body being situated in place are taken up in Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Angeliki Sioli’s chapter (Chapter 13), which inquires into how architects can effectively use technology to represent their designs without leaving behind the embodied consciousness that inhabits the planned spaces in a subjective and interactive manner. All too often, architects design structures that estrange us from our built environment, leaving us with a sense of homelessness. This especially becomes a problem when we enter new environments and are expected to adapt to their already-made structures. Airports, an excellent example of this problem, are all too often built in accordance with functionality, and perhaps aesthetics in some cases, but rarely with the idea in mind of the real dimensionality of bodies or how bodies travel. Airports are what Casey would refer to as “non-places,”22 or sites, though they could very well be designed such that they become “interplaces,” places between places. We find an elaboration of this distinction between place and non-place in Casey’s description of Michelle Stuart’s work on the concept of the journey (see Earth-Mapping). In my last interview session with Casey for this section, we explore the “non-place,” “interplace,” and “in-between places” in terms of their relation to his discussion of frame and boundary in Representing Place. There he distinguishes between the frame of a work of art acting as a border, whereby the frame is separate from the work of art and is meant merely to contain it, versus acting as a boundary, in which case the frame works with the work of art by adding to it. It was the rejection of formal framing in artwork, seen in works by artists such as Seurat and Mondrian, that got him interested in the idea of edges and borders. Mondrian’s paintings took us to the edge of, even beyond, the canvas, and this act of transforming the frame of a work of art from a limit to a threshold translated into Casey’s desire to get to the edge and see what is happening there: what does one do with the edge? Does it lead to something else, is it isolating? In Chapter 14, artist Eve Ingalls poses two crucial questions that have informed her own creative process: “Where in the world is art’s edge?” and “How does the edge of an artwork perform in the world?” With her art, Ingalls plays with edges, surfaces, and representations of nature (wilderness), situating and resituating it, thus challenging our perspective of naturalness/wilderness. Realizing that it is impossible to offer any true representation of nature in a work of art, she concerns herself not with representations

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey

of actual landscapes as much as the feelings that a landscape inspires. These feelings get translated into dynamic sculptural works where she seeks to use the edges of the materials as a way to enhance the artwork, to make them dynamic, sourcing the energy and power of the edge. This energy, arising out of a mix of the familiar and the unexpected, allows her to create sculptures that recreate the dynamic, monumental, sublime experience of (wild) nature in a nonnatural setting, often museums or art galleries, in turn prompting another dynamic event to occur between the artwork and the new setting. Edge becomes a place of discovery. It is here that Part Three of this book begins, at the edge. As already seen in a few of Casey’s recent articles and presentations, and will be seen in further scope in two upcoming volumes (Coming Up Against the Wall and The World on Edge), this concept of the edge has taken Casey from gardens and natural settings to artworks and even to political borders. The edge becomes a way for Casey to address the depths of our bodily experiences as our bodies come up against the edge, the location where this place becomes that place, where a difference of place is marked. True to his Merleau-Pontian phenomenological style, he demonstrates that there is no intertwining, no chiasm, without a limit, an edge, a defining feature that marks “this” from “that,” “my body” from “your body,” “here” from “there.” This defining of space, this marking of difference, has always been present in his thinking, though most explicitly in Earth-Mapping and the soon-to-be-published works on edge and on the US–Mexican border (La Frontera). Casey delineates several forms that edges take, which are reflected in each of the contributions and discussions in the final part of this book and are also related to two other major themes from his recent writings, glance and voice. Edges have been a constant presence in Casey’s writings, and the most recent recall his earlier work on imagining and remembering, whereby the edge becomes a frontier, a horizon, a limit that leads to somewhere else beyond. This beyond is unseen, but possible to imagine based on cues from the place in which the individual is currently situated. In his forthcoming phenomenological exploration of edge (The World on Edge), this leads to studies of places such as gardens and architectural edifices, wilderness, and the psyche. Originally intended to be a chapter or two in that volume, his writing on edge and La Frontera evolved into a full volume co-written with Mary Watkins (Coming Up Against the Wall) that exhibits Casey’s recent explorations into the sociopolitical aspects of place, the glance, and the edge. In one of the interview sessions here, we discuss the ways by which attempts to re-represent the US–Mexico border, through, in this instance, artistic reappropriation (e.g. painting a trompe-l’œil on it that offers a realistic account of what lies on the other side), can effectively lead to a transformation of how the wall is perceived, even so far as to figuratively and imaginatively “destroy” it by hinting at its possible permeability, its temporality. The example of La Frontera highlights the delicate yet dynamic balance that maintains the border/boundary distinction by demonstrating that borders thought to be permanent and impermeable are always on the verge of becoming boundaries. Likewise, boundaries can quickly change into borders. Perhaps only a simple change of perspective or a word can effect such a change. In his piece that focuses on the intersection of voice, edge, limit, and place, Fred Evans challenges Casey’s claim that La Frontera is transformed into a boundary through “performative political actions and artistic productions,” suggesting that “this overlooks the pervasiveness of voices and that society is a multivoiced body from the very beginning.”23 That is to say, in

Introduction

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viewing La Frontera as a place already shaped by multiple voices, it was never a border or non-place. In fact, it was opposing voices that led to its creation, voices that, despite being different, even hostilely so at times, nevertheless resound in one another as they participate in the event that is this wall. Casey’s thoughts on the edge voice a clear preference for the vagueness that only something like a boundary or a glance can offer. Vagueness, as he discusses in the interviews from Part One, is a positive property of things. It is something that allows for openness and freedom to occur, for interrelations and movement to take place, for the unexpected to arise; in short, it allows for transformation. This is not to say that there is no need or room for clarification; in fact, vagueness and clarity require each other, the latter contributing contrast that highlights the functioning of the former. Gary Shapiro’s descriptions of parks and gardens in his essay provide examples of how vagueness and clarification function together. In the case of Central Park, which he discusses in reference to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 The Gates installation, there is an external border wall that sets the limit of the park within which winding paths and various landscaping patterns are allowed to play freely, often affording the visitor a sense of discovery and adventure as they move through the park. Even a carefully regimented garden like Versailles provides this feeling. Of course, this is all artificial and carefully planned out, even going so far as to conceal the borders, thus borrowing the scenery that lies beyond them and offering a sensation that the external and internal are seamless. But what gets experienced in this regulated environment is quite different: a sense of discovery and with that freedom. This act of playing with borders is not only for landscape designers and artists; political entities also profit from the power that borders possess—dividing land, people, identities, and cultures. Shapiro’s piece points out that, like Central Park, the UN-guarded Green Line Zone in Cyprus is a “zone of indeterminacy” due to its liminal political state and the fact that on the Turkish side one finds that time has continued but on the Greek side there has been a deliberate halt in time that keeps the landscape forever in the past (the moment of division), transforming the dividing border into a kind of memorial for the Greeks that marks the “loss” of the island. Eva Feder Kittay, in her timely and poignant chapter (Chapter 17), approaches the triad of edge (in this case border), imagining, and remembering, revealing how borders (as that which creates distance) can be transcended through the act of care, thus allowing somebody who is physically situated “here” to also be present in another place. Kittay’s use of the term “care,” especially as highlighted in this chapter, appears to require the act of imagining as well as remembering. In order to maintain the thread that links my presence “here” to that “there,” I must imagine myself with the other, in a situation of caring for the other. This is made possible through the persistence of memory, of remembering those who I left behind, even if such remembering is painful due to the fact that the desire to be (physically) “there,” or to share the same place with them, cannot be fulfilled. I can only “be there” for them through my act of caring. Compounding this particular difficulty for many migrant workers is their confrontation with the idiolocality of the new place, which quite often works against the need to inhabit or emplace oneself in this strange environment. Finding one’s place, or rather finding oneself in place, is not much different than finding one’s voice. In each instance, we find ourselves in a continual state of becoming,

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey

influenced by our individual incorporation, incorporalization, of place and the voices of others resound in our own. Despite being among other bodies and other voices, there is a singularity to our being, to our voice, which depends on the presence of others. In this respect, Casey, in his 2009 American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Presidential Address, emphasizes the need to listen to others, to open ourselves up to allow for the voices of others to resound in us. This does not mean that we need to accept what others are saying, but simply that there is a duty to listen, to allow the voice of the other to be heard. Like place, the glance, memory, and imagination, voice falls into what forms our core identity, resonating deeply within us, participating in the deep self-modulation that inspires Casey’s account of freedom. Such an account of freedom is one that is “hard-won” and is won not at the expense of limiting the freedom of others; to the contrary, it allows for the freedom of others to exist alongside my own, highlighting further the fact that, as Merleau-Ponty so often professed, there is an interlacing that occurs between our bodies and the world, between ourselves and others, and this would include voices. It is from this point of departure that this book sets forth. Azucena Cruz-Pierre Nantes, France

Notes 1 Edward S. Casey, “The World of Nostalgia,” Man and World 20 (1987): 380. 2 Ibid., 379. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 252. 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 5. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 160. 6 Infra, 31. 7 Casey, “The World of Nostalgia,” 379. 8 Infra, 27. 9 Infra, 53. 10 Infra, 61. 11 Infra, 66. 12 Infra, 67. 13 Infra, 76. 14 Infra, 85. 15 Infra, 99. 16 Infra, 107. 17 Infra, 116. 18 Infra, 118. 19 Infra, 148. 20 Infra, 147. 21 Infra, 133. 22 This term, coined by anthropologist Marc Augé, refers to places of transience that are not significant enough to be called “places.” 23 Infra, 219.

Part One

Imagining, Memory, and Place

Figure P1.1  Edward S. Casey. Santa Barbara, California, June 2011. Photo by Lily Rosenthal.

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The Weight of Imagining, Remembering, and Place: The Multiple Origins of Edward S. Casey’s Thought1 Edward S. Casey, interviewed by Donald A. Landes

Casey’s apartment—New York City—October 9, 2011 Donald A. Landes (DAL):  In the opening lines of your preface to the second edition of Imagining, you confide to the reader that you “were led to write this book by an early immersion in the philosophy of art, especially poetry” (IMG, ix). You felt that a careful, specifically phenomenological description of “imagination” was still wanting in philosophical aesthetics. And yet in the very same preface you recognize a limitation of this first book and method, conceding that the gesture of drawing eidetic distinctions was “a losing battle against” the fleeting nature of human experience (IMG, xi). As you write: “Artists or not, we are all irrepressible imaginers in everyday life, where we indulge in imaginative activity persistently and not merely as an occasional divertissement” (IMG, 3). How might you describe the importance of rethinking aesthetic experience for your “doing” of phenomenology? Edward S. Casey (ESC):  Thank you, Don, for a first question that moves us immediately into my ancient past! I was writing a dissertation named “Poetry and Ontology,” and it was really a study of poetic language, taking the lead from Bachelard and Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty also figures in every so often. I was immersed in that literature, reading the poets themselves who figured so centrally— Rilke, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and Wallace Stevens—and who offer tantalizing glances at “imagination.” Stevens said famously: “imagination is the necessary angel.” This led me to think that, despite writing this dissertation, I really didn’t know what imagining amounted to, and particularly as it applied to art. Now, Sartre’s book, L’imaginaire (1940), which I knew well, systematically critiqued psychological studies of imagination, but he took up other aspects that were of lesser interest to me (such as caricature, mimesis, and parody). His treatment of art was notoriously limited to a very short supplementary note at the end, a mere five pages . . . and I

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey thought, well, art deserves much more than this. I was also aware of Eugen Fink’s 1927 dissertation on “image” and the “image world,” and I read part of that for the dissertation. But even this was not yet an eidetics of imagination. So I saw an opening in the phenomenological literature, and my dissertation advisor (William Earle) was insistent that it is very important to do your own phenomenological work. He had heard of a couple of papers of mine, scholarly treatments of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and others. I’ll never forget the time he drew me aside, during a conference at Yale, and said, “You know, this is fine, but I think you should really start writing your own phenomenology of whatever interests you the most.” That was a very influential remark, coming from someone who was a master of phenomenological description. But I never thought I could do that. Thus began a kind of experiment in doing phenomenology in the topic of most moment to me at the time—poetic language, and poetic imagination as making that language possible. Imagining grew directly out of the dissertation, although it was not actually included in the dissertation. Rather than publish the dissertation (as some had suggested), I decided to begin again, from scratch. A few years later, I was awarded a Morse traveling fellowship to go to Oxford, which (in contrast with Paris) offered a neutral space—quiet, removed, with accessible libraries. Since I was writing in libraries in those days, I literally sat down, in the Bodleian Library and, as an act of will, said, “today I start this book.” I started with chapter one, and wrote the entire book systematically in about six or seven months. The result was something methodical, as well as systematic, and looking back on it now I would say that it was a bit too methodical. It was an effort to tie down every loose end, which is why I made that remark in the preface that imagination eludes us, evades us, even as we try to pin it down. Paul Ricœur, at a reception at Stony Brook many years later, amazed me that he had read this book very carefully. He made a telling remark: “You have done the definitive eidetics of imagination,” and he said no more than that. This was of course nice to hear; it was obviously meant as praise. But on the other hand, as I meditated upon this remark, I realized there was more to be done, that eidetic description was only one way to treat it. As you know, the book is very formalistic—structuring imagination into act phase, object phase, modes, etc.—so the effort was to be rather rigorous with imagination. Nevertheless, I did not continue this work, did not take up Ricœur’s implicit challenge. The project was almost hermetically sealed . . . I saw the eidetic task, I went for it, and I basically closed the book. This was very unlike later work of mine—most notably with regard to place—which kept opening new vistas, new projects. I’m still writing about place to this day. Is it because the topic changed? Or is it because my own approach changed? I am now more relaxed, I have lost the pretense of wrapping up a theme and walking away. For this basic reason, I remain somewhat ambivalent toward this first book . . . DAL:  This shift in your approach raises something that was alluded to in my original question. The method you used in your first project was decidedly phenomenological: eidetic reduction, description, and drawing of distinctions in

The Weight of Imagining, Remembering, and Place

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terms of aspects of imagination. Do you consider your later, more open approach to be a “moving away” from phenomenology, or do you consider the subsequent works to be, properly speaking, or improperly speaking, phenomenological? ESC:  In response to this question: I do think I am still “doing phenomenology”; however, I have changed my view about what it is to do phenomenology. I no longer believe that it is centered on an eidetics of the subject, a formal analysis. In my twenties and early thirties, I was more influenced by Husserl than by Heidegger, Sartre, or Dufrenne. I had an immense admiration for Husserl, whom I had studied with Ricœur in Paris and on my own, and I still think he is irreplaceable. I saw myself as moving in Husserl’s footsteps, taking his work into imagination, something he had rarely gotten around to doing in any systematic way. So Imagining was written in the spirit of rigorous phenomenological reduction and eidetic analysis. And that classical sense of phenomenology was, and remains, perfectly valid, and was probably necessary in order to give the subject a respected standing among philosophers at the turn of the 20th century—exemplified by Husserl’s comparatively “hard-edged” approach, epitomized in his 1911 essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” I had a kind of abiding appreciation for his sense of rigor, even if I hardly thought of myself as doing anything scientific or even para-scientific. Yet Husserl had the credentials—after all, he was a major mathematician—so he could pull it off. I no longer place that sense of phenomenology at the core of the discipline. Now my view, and I believe you and many others on today’s scene share this view, is that phenomenology is just a name for what continental philosophy has gone on to do under myriad names and directions. But not anything and everything. Rather, anything that you can call “broadly descriptive”—the key term now being descriptive—or that would not require previous reductions, preparations, methodologies, clearing out of the rubbish of the natural attitude, all those things . . . here I often think of Merleau-Ponty’s claim in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, that “the lesson of the phenomenological reduction is . . .” How do you, Don, translate this celebrated sentence? DAL:  If I recall, I translate it as: “the most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”2 ESC:  Exactly right . . . in my writing, I took Merleau-Ponty’s claim to heart! Meanwhile, I was drawing ever closer to Merleau-Ponty. Teaching him, thinking about him, and moving further away from Husserl over time. If we are tracing out these mentors (or super mentors, or mentors of mentors . . . the real archetypal figures), then the closer I got to Merleau-Ponty, the less concerned I became with classical phenomenological method. That opened a way of doing phenomenology that had more to do with careful attention to features of living experience, but no longer arranged in some synchronic order that could be tabulated, and even gridded as I did at one point in Imagining . . . Phenomenology for me now is description in words—engaged, ongoing, not rigorous but precise, if you will. Anything is fair game for description. The task is not to find a better method, but to direct one’s attention to some area that had been neglected by other phenomenologists, and to try to do careful description of that area. And that explains why I moved to “place,” and more

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey recently to even more neglected areas such as “glance” or “edge.” Opening a curtain upon a neglected domain, that has become a strong motivating force. I really don’t want to go back over old terrain that someone else has thoroughly explored. I’d rather be out there opening new territory. Picking up the narrative of my evolving work: in the wake of Imagining I thought to myself: “why not turn around and do the same thing for remembering”? I thought it perfectly obvious that I must understand memory as paired with imagination—there is a whole tradition, at least since Hobbes, of conceiving of imagination and memory as sister acts. I also realized that although Husserl had done fabulous work on primary memory, he hadn’t really addressed many other modes of remembering. The more I looked into it, the more I discovered these other modes, and got fascinated by them—like remembering “how to do X” . . . and maybe eight or ten others. They were more than primary memory, retention and protention, and yet in his early work Husserl calls a number of acts “recollection” or “secondary memory,” lumping them together. I saw a space for description that fit into my early research paradigm of being rigorous in method by exploring activities that everyone is engaging in all the time, that is, the various ways in which we remember an episodic past. Memory and imagination, then, represented for me two initial parts of a more general phenomenology of the mind or psyche. Sartre had an early project named Psyche, which he abandoned around 1938. Somehow I felt the pull to just pick up that project where he had left off and to continue it. The next two volumes were going to be titled Feeling and Thinking. I was perfectly clear about it and, had you asked me then, I would have said that I had no other choice but to write these four volumes. (Mind you, I might still do something on “feeling,” let’s say I’m holding that open . . . “thinking,” well, we’ll see!) So I plunged into memory in the late 1970s thinking I would polish off this little study much as I had done with Imagining. Well . . . it went on year after year, and I wondered if the topic was too vast . . . I wrote a lot, several volumes worth of material even, but none of it seemed to come together. It was also a period of professional turbulence. I had come up for tenure in 1976 at Yale and I was turned down. I found myself on the open sea of the job market which, although better than today, nevertheless had few positions in phenomenology. I was feeling displaced, to say the least! Getting a job at Stony Brook in 1978 and starting to teach there was an immense relief. My home base could even remain in Connecticut. After getting into the rhythm of the commute across Long Island Sound, things settled down, and my resolve returned to finish the book on memory, which was finally completed in 1985. Eleven years working on that book. This length of time was almost shocking to me, since I had written Imagining in a single year! In fact, in retrospect, this length of time was the best thing that could have happened, since in about 1981 I suddenly realized that I couldn’t complete the project as originally conceived; that what I had done until then (in parallel to the Imagining book—act phase, object phase—following the intentional structure) was only part, and a superficial part at that, of the full phenomenon of

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remembering. So I decided to keep what I had done until then, though condensing it into a few chapters only, and then devoted the second half of the book to other ways by which memory comes into our lives, ways that could no longer be said to be exclusively psychical. The pivotal point was a chapter on “body memory,” which I had started writing on an island off the coast of Sweden, where I had been invited by my friend James Hillman, the psychoanalyst and cultural critic. At Botorp, over the span of just two weeks in 1982, the idea of “body memory” struck me as the key to the emerging volume. As I was writing in this new direction, I began to wonder, “where are remembered bodies located?” This led me to “place memory.” Both of these—“body memory” and “place memory”—refused being contained within rigid receptacles: on the one hand, they cannot be confined within the categories of a straightforward intentional analysis; on the other hand, they are not creatures or contents of the mind or psyche. This was a breakthrough moment for me. I thought: I must change my whole sense of doing phenomenology, of what the proper domain of description is—a domain that is no longer mental activity but being in the world in a larger, more robust sense. I was in effect taking the step that Heidegger had taken and that Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer had subsequently pursued. But I was rediscovering this expansion of the phenomenological field in my own way, through the via media of memory. Writing about place memory in particular made all the difference, and I felt it to be “auto-generative,” as if I had no choice in the matter. It became clear that “memory” would not yield itself to me when I tried to approach it as a purely mental activity. This realization did not occur until this rather dramatic moment on this tiny Swedish island where, in a kind of vision, I was struck by a radically different approach, one I had never before considered. Most previous treatments of memory had been confined to the mind. But I was not alone! Merleau-Ponty had hinted at larger senses of memory, as in the phrase where he speaks of the “Memory of the world” in the Phenomenology. DAL:  Yes, I believe the exact phrase is “immense world-Memory.” It is capitalized, a rare occurrence. ESC:  Yet he says little more about it! Very striking! DAL:  True, it passes by as an off-hand comment. It has to do with how we must entrust our personal memory to the world-Memory, but he doesn’t return to this. In that phrase, he shows how something is happening in memory experience that is beyond the boundaries of my own mental space, and this resonates with how you are describing these body and place modes of memory. ESC:  For years I had been intrigued by Merleau-Ponty’s seemingly casual phrase, asking myself: Is this an empty metaphorical gesture, or does Merleau-Ponty mean something in particular by this? I think that he himself, at that stage, wasn’t prepared to further explore such a cosmic memory. In the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, he again alludes to this notion, quoting himself, and says that there is more here to explore.3 Nevertheless, even if he didn’t actually take up this thread, what mattered to me was his gesture of locating memory “outside” the mind—in the world and, implicitly at least, in the body.

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey An article I wrote around this time was titled “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty” (Man and World, 1984). This essay built an explicit bridge to Merleau-Ponty, since I here pursued how he was in effect describing body memory under the heading of “habit body,” and this with an implicit reference to Bergson and “habit memory.” I had been carefully studying Bergson’s Matter and Memory, sensing that there was something very important in this early book, even if I found Bergson more allusive than Merleau-Ponty! My essay acted for me as a kind of validation in the midst of writing my own book on memory. This confirmed that I wasn’t altogether a lone wolf, caught up in a crazy Swedish dream. Merleau-Ponty had adumbrated the territory ahead, in his own way. For myself, this was a “coming out,” a moment of debut, in which I gained a genuinely different sense of what it is to do phenomenology, to write it, and to teach it. All of this came from the very stalemate in which I had become stuck in the first five years of writing Remembering. As if to confirm Hillman’s remark to me that fallow years are as important as productive ones when it comes to writing. In short, if you get stuck, this can be a very good thing. I felt that I was really stalled. Notice those words: stasis, stuck, stalled: all probably from sta . . . the Indo-European root for “stand” . . . so I recommend getting stuck! But you have to persist. I think that is one of my few philosophical virtues: my persistence. It is the same thing now with edge. It has taken me a long time to get my thoughts together, and they are still not fully together. But I have decided that even though my years are now more advanced, I shall not fret over this fact. Hillman also says that every writer has to find his/her own length, the unit of discourse that suits the writer (essays, short books, long books) and this may take a long time to discover, sometimes a lifetime. DAL:  We have been discussing phenomenology, but you have alluded several times to Hillman, and one of your other main influences is your study and formation in psychology, psychoanalysis, and depth psychology. At a first glance, it would seem that there is a certain tension between these two pursuits, phenomenology and psychology. You have written that these two are “at odds” with each other; that philosophy is at pains to separate spirit from soul, whereas psychology is about their fusion or unification (S&S, preface). How do archetypal psychology and psychoanalysis figure into your own thinking? Is your work a bridge between them? ESC:  That is, indeed, another chapter of my life, and one that is important to this story. I became immersed in psychoanalysis at precisely the time of meandering through the maze of memory. I had actually been in personal analysis for two years prior to the publication of Imagining, and then I decided to go into clinical training in New Haven at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute, a wonderful place that was cutting edge in Freudian analysis. I even ended up doing some teaching there; I taught Lacan, whose seminars I had followed in my Paris years . . . I was deeply convinced by Freud, particularly by his dream analysis, which I thought was indisputably one of the great books written in the Western world. (I am still convinced that this is so.) I wrote about it, although I didn’t publish much

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in this area, except for the essay “Freud’s Critical Theory of Reality,” one of my first publications. I kept my psychoanalytic interests rather reserved, tied to my personal analysis; I only abandoned the idea of going into clinical work in the mid-1980s. I decided this wasn’t something I wanted to do; it was something that I wasn’t quite fit to do. I met James Hillman when he gave the Terry Lectures at Yale, the famous lecture series, in fall 1973. He showed how psychoanalysis could have much broader vistas than I had imagined—cultural vistas, ethical insights, and links to philosophy. I decided I would spend some time and get immersed in “archetypal psychology.” That is Hillman’s term for an approach whose origin is found in Jung, but which is actually quite critical of Jung. Almost 14 years later, I published a volume called Spirit and Soul, which contains essays inspired by the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis (both classical and archetypal). The title of this book points to the complex but important relationship between these two “fields” or, better, ways of reflecting on the human condition. I argued that psychoanalysis deals with the soul, the afflictions or sufferings of the soul (symptoms, neuroses, psychoses, etc.): this is the great work of Breuer, Freud, Erwin Straus, Jung, Hillman, Loewald, and many others. Spirit is a term I take from Hegel’s use of Geist, which for me indicates the tendency, the desire, the wish to make sense of soul and of life, human being in the world. This would include phenomenology, and any form of philosophical work— Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Husserl—that investigated the domains of spirit. The essays in that volume work on both sides of the divide between the two undertakings, and I speculate about their relation both in the original and the new preface, examining the unholy marriage or strange alliance between these two deep tendencies, each of which in my view is indispensable for our understanding of our being in the world. This does distinguish me from some phenomenologists in the sense that I do believe a depth-psychological dimension, a soul-dimension, is critical to our work even if we must be very careful not to move into a form of subjectivism or spiritualism. In all of this, the other person to mention is Jacques Lacan, who was a deep influence on me. I attended his lectures in my Paris years, and even got to know him to some degree . . . as much as you can ever get to know a character like Lacan! I was instrumental in his only visit to America, in 1975. I have written about him and still teach him, guarding some space in my inner self for his work; I still find his work challenging and extraordinary even if baffling in many ways. He is a kind of twilight figure for me, forever on the horizon, someone who certainly knew enough philosophy to demand this attention, and who was a close friend of Merleau-Ponty’s. DAL:  Spirit and Soul attempts to connect phenomenology and psychoanalysis. But in terms of content, it offers a genuine upward/downward movement between body and soul and spirit. Remembering is a kind of downward movement, while imagining would be an upward one, and perhaps this constitutes your “bridge.” And yet, in all of these, you incorporate an outward movement. The vertical movement

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey is not simply within some ideal realm; rather, it is a vertical movement taking place in the world. This took you out into the world, and into place, did it not? ESC:  Very interesting. Here you understand me better than I have understood myself. I was indeed working on a kind of vertical axis in all of the early works we have been discussing today. We might even festoon these works on a kind of scale: imagination being a kind of purely ethereal, almost formal moment—thus allied with remembering as pure recollection, which belongs to the realm of clarity and mind. But as body or place memory, remembering begins to bog down or, to invoke one of your favorite terms, to acquire “weight,” or gravity. More generally, we could say spirit will always constitute the upper pole, which attracts all that flies upward; whereas soul tends to move downward, to have its own “weight,” a “psychical weight,” and to be affiliated with body, to be allied with the soul/body relation that Descartes and Merleau-Ponty agonized over. This relation we cannot avoid; even if body and soul are rigidly separated as in Descartes or totally intertwined as in Merleau-Ponty, they still have to be considered as circulating around this lower pole. We can put imagining and memory, then, somewhere in between the poles of spirit and soul. Imagining belongs more to the pole of spirit, since it deals with “pure possibility” in my nomenclature. Memory, weighed down with the density of the past, is drawn to soul—thanks mainly to the thickness of temporality—being affiliated with soul and body by its many modes of passive synthesis. Whereas “place” (and I would argue “glance” and “edge” as well) is lateral in its deep directionality; it moves us out into the world. The root of the word “place” in English is plat, which means flat or broad, so to have a place you have to have a kind of clearing. Place is, then, implicitly horizonal, spread out upon the surface of the Earth. Phenomenologically considered, there must be a certain kind of spacing, an extending outward. Not in a strictly Heideggerian ontological fashion of “clearing” as Lichtung, but rather as “giving room” (Raumgeben in Heidegger’s term). Place entails moving back or out into the world. Hillman’s work, which often seems to run in parallel with mine (I would like to think we have influenced each other in certain ways), also took depth psychology for the first time resolutely out into the world. Mary Watkins had a lot to do with this, for she too was thinking along these lines early in her teaching and writing. I think all three of us were thinking that depth psychology itself had become too ensconced, self-enclosed, which is the kind of critique you might make of Western philosophy à la Merleau, even if he doesn’t use that terminology. Indeed, his very notion of being-in-and-toward-the-world (être au monde) is an insistent way of springing out from Cartesian self-enclosure, putting us back into the world around us, the milieu. I was struck at how many times he uses this term, milieu, on my last reading of Phenomenology of Perception, now allowed to shine through in your new translation! This sidewise and outward movement first emerged in my thinking and writing in the early 1980s and quickly found support in the work of fellow Merleau-Pontians as well as archetypal psychologists. And Hillman concurrently made much of this—out of the clinic, out of the therapeutic session, back into the world of real-life problems—most notably in his remarkable text “Anima Mundi” (“Soul of the World”). Watkins’ pioneering work on a depth psychology of nuclear disaster

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stemmed from this same period of time. She boldly pursued, in practice as well as in theory, the depth-psychological dimensions of concrete political and social action in the world. The world became the proper place of psychology, not the consoling room. I would now argue that the same is true of philosophy, which needs to move out of the armchair and into the surrounding world of actual issues. Hillman caused quite a stir in the psychology world itself, and in this respect it ran parallel to developments in the middle and later stages of phenomenology, with Merleau-Ponty as the great pioneer. In fact, when Merleau-Ponty attempts to retrieve and redeem Freud, for instance in chapter 5 of Part One of Phenomenology of Perception, it is in the spirit of suggesting that Freud’s opus is really telling us a much larger tale about our being-in-the-world, and is not reducible to the dynamics of repressed impulses or the fatalism of deep drives. Your lucid translation of the Phenomenology allows one to realize that Merleau was interpreting Freud as if he were a proto-Merleau-Pontian—not reducing the magnitude of Freud’s originality, but rather pointing to a certain common space shared between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. I have a strong belief that philosophers should have one foot solidly in some other field. It might be art, sociology, or anthropology, but in my case it has been most consistently psychology. I regard such interdisciplinarity as an ethical responsibility; as philosophers, we are responsible not just for solving our own problems or teaching our own paradigms. Philosophy needs different points of view, and this requires some training (in my case, this meant completing a clinical program in psychoanalysis). The breadth that results is essential—being in effect a kind of double vision—even if we cannot say just how the other field will interface with philosophy or where it will lead.

Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP)— Sheraton Society Hill Hotel, Philadelphia—October 20, 2011 DAL:  One of the striking insights from your reflections on imagination is the notion of world-frame or imaginal margin, and indeed the “margin” again reappears in important ways in Remembering. By nature, these margins are indeterminate, unlimited, or at least unbounded, and somehow free of all explicit content, though not empty; and yet the margin shapes in determinate ways what it borders. How might you characterize this notion of the marginal, and how do imaginal and rememorative margins differ? ESC:  In Imagining, “world-frame” was really an effort to talk about space and time as more or less formal factors or dimensions, which is why I put them under the heading of frame as part of what I called the “imaginative presentation” and its equivalent in remembering, the “memorial presentation.” I wanted to provide a certain place for this framing factor, but not solely within the subject, as in Kant. Rather, I wanted to make sure that the frame is situated in what Merleau-Ponty would call “the phenomenal field” itself. And by “frame” I don’t mean a factor that you actually experience as a discrete item. The frame sets up, makes possible, the

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey very presentation that does have determinate content, or “specific content” as I called it. Imaginal or memorial margins are ways by which the content becomes less than definite, less than particular by degrees and in different modalities, such as one can see with varying sensory modalities. Different sensory modalities would literally modalize the content as it trails off into the margins of a given imaginative or memorial presentation. In fact, thanks to your question, I suddenly realize that this early concern of mine with margins was a premonition of my current preoccupation with edges, and particularly with what I call “boundaries,” which are indeterminate fringes or limits. I no longer call them margins, but I now realize—this is something I hadn’t thought of before this minute, though it shows continuity of concern over more than three decades—that my current approach begins with margins or edges first, and then moves in from them, toward everything else: phenomenal content, political issue, historical happening. In the 1970s, I felt that it was an obligation upon the phenomenologist to account for factors that, however indeterminate, nevertheless create for content an “aura” or a “halo.” In fact, I use several metaphors in my books on imagination and memory in order to show how we do not just have particularity or specificity of the content, as the English empiricists claimed. The margin considerably complicates, subtilizes, renders vague any such imputed determinacy. My interest in vagueness as a positive property continues to this day, and indeed, the conclusion to my new book on “edge” is all about vagueness, suggesting that we must restore vagueness to philosophical prominence. I suspect that my early treatment of frame and margin were the first steps in this direction. I also wanted to come up with a term that was not the same as Husserl’s “horizon.” This notion was, I felt, bound to perceptual situations, designed and used for understanding perception by both Husserl and those following him, including Merleau-Ponty. Horizon is, of course, perfectly appropriate for perception, but I wasn’t writing about perception. (This didn’t happen until I wrote The World at a Glance.) I was trying to figure out what the mental or psychical equivalent of perceptual horizons would be. So I essentially stumbled upon this term, “margins,” for which by definition one cannot give a determinate account. I think that I was fascinated with the idea that you put very well in saying that they are “unbounded,” they go on, they don’t just end at some determinate limit, they are never arrested. Here we rejoin the work of Eugene Gendlin—I mentioned him last night during my address4—the great psychologist who created the incredibly powerful concept that he calls the dot dot dot or the to be continued. DAL:  Following this out, it seems that you are perhaps correcting my term here, which was “unbounded,” since the margins are not “unbounded” as in purely open or free, but rather are that place of the “trailing-off ” ESC:  Yes, that’s exactly right, the “trailing-off . . .”—I like that. Now we have several things on the table. Perceptual horizons in Husserl, and their transformation in the psychical sphere; but also the remarkable work of Gendlin, who says it is important in psychotherapy (and in life!) not to have abrupt breaks or definite conclusions,

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but rather a sense for the to-be-continued. So margins or the trailing-off would be nothing but the imaginative and memorial equivalent of the und so weiter. In my early phenomenological descriptions, I thought this was very important to emphasize, at least more so than had been done by previous writers. Many writers, of course, touch upon this. William James, above all, since he is always already there whenever one heads in a certain direction in phenomenology. But neither he nor others fully thematized it. In those years, my effort was to give a fairly precise, eidetic, formal analysis, to the furthest extent possible. But “margin” was already testing that impulse, pushing it to the limit. And then in the memory book, the work on body memory and place memory in effect deconstructed the very idea that memory is primarily psychical. I turned around on myself halfway through, realizing that an eidetic, formal analysis is not going to work for these other, nonpsychical kinds of memory. Thanks to your question, I now suspect that the phenomena of margin and frame provided a first pivot that allowed me to move in quite a different direction, out from mind through body to place. Now, you asked about the difference between the imaginal and the memorial margin. I think that the imaginal margin would be shot through with possibility, a term that I was very much focused upon in Imagining. So the imaginal margin would have a certain lightness, a sense of being purely or merely possible. By contrast, the memorial margin would have its own density, weight, historicity—it could weigh heavy, as one might say. This helps to explain why we say that we are “haunted” by certain memories. Without their hovering margins, memories might not be so heavy by their content, by their detail. They give to memories their nonspecific gravity. But this is a very odd gravitational force or weight; it cannot be measured by any consistent metric. So, the imaginal margin gives an ethereal quality to acts of imagining: they are the place where the imaginative presentation vanishes into thin air. The memorial margin would weigh down rather than lighten up; it would add a very particular kind of avoirdupois to an already heavy mnemonic content, and thus act more as ballast to this content. But both remain allied in their resistance to detailed description: they possess what James calls “the value of the vague.” DAL:  Another theme that is striking in the first two books is the emphasis on freedom and spontaneity. You include a reflection on freedom, and even identify the overarching goal as the effort to establish the autonomy of imagination. What happens to the notion of freedom, or spontaneity, or autonomy, as your work makes its transition to place? If “the places of landscape—placescapes—provide a circumambience, a setting, for archetypes as well as for structures of presentation” (S&S, xx), is place a source of freedom or a resistance to it? ESC:  Well, a provocative question indeed! One could write a book in answering that question. What happens to freedom, and what should happen to freedom? First, in the early works this topic was one of the obsessions I received from Sartre, whose work on imagining deeply affected me, even as I tried to supplement it or depart from it. I was basically convinced by Sartre that consciousness and freedom are co-extensive, and so it seemed to me unarguable that imagining was the freest

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey mental activity we have. Not entirely free, but largely free in its creative possibilities. Of course, if you are excessively imagining, in a way that is overdetermined, then it is no longer “free.” There are limits, but still, in its spontaneous enactment (as I called it), there are virtually no limits. (I go into this in the later part of the book, where I recognize empirical limits, which are distinct from any limits on “imaginative autonomy.”) Nevertheless, I was pushing the theme and the thesis of freedom to the limit with imagination. Memory was more sobering. I set out to write that book, as I’ve said, in direct parallel to the imagining book. But what would the parallel or analogue to freedom be in remembering? Looking back, I would think that in remembering, freedom becomes restricted to the voluntary search for certain memories. So, (a) there is the search, while (b) within a memory there is some degree of freedom of clarification of detail, focus, reviewing, or comparing memories. But I would put this more under the heading of a voluntaristic than a pure freedom, in the strong Sartrean or Kantian sense (I refer to Kant’s term “pure practical reason,” which is allied with noumenally based freedom). So, I think that freedom is there, but in a constricted manner, not just by the past and not just by a certain obligation to be faithful to it, but also by something about the way the past weighs upon us (again, your term of weight is apt), in a fashion that doesn’t inhibit or prohibit freedom. It gives it very definite bounds that are not present with imagining. And then, as you go through memory, as I did, into issues of place and space, because that is where the book really takes you, the modes of freedom become ever more constricted. In relation to landscape in particular—as a major mode of place—freedom becomes merely the choice of means of representation: again, a matter of voluntarism. I am here thinking especially of landscape as spectacle, that traditional understanding of landscape that I started with in the memory book, but criticized extensively in Representing Place. So we might say that we have three waves of restriction on freedom: from imaginative to memorial to placial. But the restriction is not limited to means of representation, a much-maligned term these days. Let’s call it the “conveyance” of landscape in its topopoetic essence, in which the subject possesses very little autonomy. Perhaps even none, vis-à-vis a landscape, which is always arrayed before and around the subject, as something toujours déjà là. You cannot really control it; more likely, it controls you. In the process, your freedom is considerably curtailed. So, the first mode of placial freedom would be how I choose to represent it, or not to represent it, as a place that is passed through, undergone. Secondly, I would say that the exact form of movement that I make with my body, in the landscape, involves a particular form of corporeal freedom—a freedom enacted within the limits of whatever the landscape tells me is possible for such movement. Move this way to come to the precipice. But I cannot, unless I wish to dispose of myself, go further. So in addition to the anxiety of vertigo that Sartre discusses when we stand on the edge of the precipice, the landscape suddenly imposes very severe material limits, including those that occur in terms of visibility, atmosphere, and even actual weather. Suddenly we are in the midst of an imbroglio of over- and

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sub-determining factors. Even so, as a body in place, I retain a certain leeway, wiggle-room, elbowroom . . . DAL:  Spielraum . . . ESC:  Spielraum! But, notice that it is either bodily, or it is representational. “Representational” would include written accounts as well as pictorial views. There are many ways to describe the beautiful landscape of Southern France, and I could choose to represent it to you in images or words differently than I do to my next friend. Same landscape, but now told in a different key. Neither of these two modalities of landscape representation is autonomous; the very idea of autonomy has to go. It is already highly attenuated in matters of memory, which realizes at best what I call a “thick autonomy,” in contrast with the “thin autonomy” of imagining. Once we get to dealing with place by an activity such as representation of landscape in words or images, the very recourse to autonomy is inappropriate. Here I would rather speak of heteronomy, because the landscape now is the predominate factor and I, the subject, am nothing but the witness, the walker, the doer, the artist; these are secondary to the givenness of the landscape, one might say. So that is why, in the books on place I wrote in the period 1993–2007, there is no discussion of, nor even any allusion to, the question of freedom. Our conversation allows me to spell out why that had to happen, about which I am silent in the four books on place. DAL:  You just made use of a term that you employed last night while describing your own relationship to a certain event, the founding of SPEP. You described yourself as a “founding witness” to the event. It seems, then, that such a witness is the one who sustains the event, and yet is not in any way free to determine it. The event takes place in the presence of the founding witness, even if this in no way implies a form of autonomy on the part of this witness. ESC:  Yes, that’s right. The idea of “witness” (of which “founding witness” is a special subtype) could be developed here. An event happens through the person, in his or her presence, but not by this person. Such a witness would not be merely an “eye-witness.” The witness can simply be in attendance, eyes closed, experiencing the wind and the weather. There are small degrees of choice, les petits choix. If I find myself (like you) in Montréal in the winter, well, how many layers of clothing might I wish to wear, precisely in order to witness the city comfortably and for sufficient time? Interesting indeed is the role of freedom in relation to being a witness; this role is ever more restrictive, though perhaps never extinguished. When I use the term “overdetermined,” I don’t actually mean that it would eliminate all voluntary action. There would always be space for some species of that, within the multiplex of concomitant causalities. To make some small difference, this is the Stoic point— which Sartre picks up, since being in prison (as he was in his famous example) at least you have freedom of thought. Wherever you are, whatever the material conditions, human beings are ingenious at finding paths to freedom, or Les chemins de la liberté in the title of Sartre’s celebrated trilogy. So freedom is never entirely eliminated, until one finally goes into a coma or a traumatized state wherein all voluntary movement is suspended.

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey DAL:  This notion of suspension, then, seems to include not just actual movement, but rather the presence of possibility, insofar as that final stage of coma or trauma is one when there is no more possibility? ESC:  Right, I think so. But the possibility now is no longer confined to the “pure possibility” of imagination. The most pertinent possibility is now located within a certain range—guided, dictated by certain material conditions that have to be recognized as part of the situation. DAL:  I reframed my next question after hearing your address last night. I had planned to ask about certain influences on your work, and in the address you introduced a very nice notion of “secondary mentoring.” If I understood correctly, this is beyond the sustained or direct mentoring that takes place between a student and a teacher. Secondary mentoring is an “intense event” or “encounter” that takes place when a young thinker is deeply affected by the encounter, even if that encounter is singular and fleeting. The more established thinker leaves (often unknowingly or unintentionally) a shaping influence on the philosophical trajectory, on the possibilities and questions of the younger, something you experienced in your encounter with Erwin Straus. Can secondary mentoring also capture one’s encounter with texts and thinkers that we read? Or would this be a different kind, a tertiary mentoring? Given the language I am developing around “weight,” I am tempted to say something like: the events of mentoring are weights in our personal history that will shape the trajectory of how we will take up our past toward the open future and into new questions and new situations. The names that weigh upon your thought are clear when one flips through your many texts: Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Freud, Hillman, Whitehead, and this list goes on, to be continued . . . So, I wonder how you yourself might characterize your trajectory along these lines, navigating secondary and tertiary mentors, if you accept that friendly addition. ESC:  Well, first just to acknowledge your very nice addition here to my reflection on mentoring: tertiary mentoring is an excellent term for influences that come from intense reading. I was, last night, focusing upon the early meetings of SPEP, which led to my emphasis on actual face-to-face situations or encounters. But there is a very important place for further mentoring through texts. And often there is a combination. Hillman, for instance, I know personally as a close friend. But at first it was through a series of lectures that I attended, which bowled me over, a secondary mentoring event; later I came to read his books carefully, and in this way he became a tertiary mentor. The same is in fact true with Straus. And then, eventually, one or both modes of mentoring will be internalized into one’s own writing, and sometimes even textually specified according to the conventions of our mode of scholarship, naming them, giving them their fair due. If you are asking, however, about figures, it would be a more complex question. I’m not sure how to answer, and I feel that it would be a different answer tomorrow, and again the next day. Nevertheless, I think there are some obvious ones. To simplify, and only alluding here to the most major figures, I would name Kant (even though I have rarely published on Kant, I was reading him a lot at your age, studying him closely; after this, I encountered him mainly through the

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pedagogical domain), Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Those four are probably the primary influences, with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty taking the lead among these four. And were I forced to choose even further, probably I would say Merleau-Ponty, simply because no matter what I am thinking about, I find that he has already been there. He is a constant, welcome guide. He would be a tertiary mentor, one I never met. But I was going to study with him! He was still alive when I first formulated my plans to head to France. Sadly, of course, he was no longer with us by the time I got there. (Nor was Bachelard, a second person with whom I hoped to study in Paris.) Beyond that first cluster, there is a second set: James Hillman; Keith Basso (an anthropologist whose work on place was very important to me); and then in philosophy a whole host of names would rush in: William Earle (my brilliant, mercurial dissertation advisor), Mikel Dufrenne (as more of a personal mentor and someone I translated, although he perhaps left less of a direct trace on my thought); Paul Ricœur (more as a teacher than as a thinker); here the list simply gets very long and would include Jankélévitch, Wittgenstein, James, Dewey, Peirce . . . In fact, the American Pragmatists were very important to my formation in philosophy. I studied them very carefully as an undergraduate, thanks to Richard Bernstein. As influences, they are really in a class by themselves. I very much appreciated and was impressed by how much they were working out of truly original modes of thinking. (Tom Thomsons of philosophy, you might say!) I keep coming back to them, in teaching and writing. Particularly James and Peirce. Oh my, the list continues. I would include here also the theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, a personal friend who subsequently became a philosophical influence. Whitehead came into my consciousness through Catherine Keller, who convinced me that I must read him. Keller convinced me that he is highly original, and I completely agree. He became a large influence, up there with Peirce and James. Almost “American”! In fact, he pursued his genuine metaphysical work only after going to Harvard, after coming to America. So, that would be the roundup, at least off the top of my head! DAL:  When you sit down to write, how do you understand their presence in your work? And in fact, these influences come from such varied locations that they are, in a sense, only in fact “together” through your bringing them to bear on a single trajectory that is genuinely your own. ESC:  Indeed, and a key point is very little of this is pursued intentionally, with the benefit of forethought. It is rather like a kind of conversation that I create, among such authors and with myself as an implicit interlocutor. This is not undertaken as a thought experiment. I am not really invoking their real or imagined presence. Rather, their ideas come to the fore. Suddenly Basso and Whitehead become pertinent, even though they have no relationship with each other outside of my putting them momentarily into conversation. Two criteria are especially important to me in this context: (1) to be as interdisciplinary as possible, wherever pertinent; and (2) to be as dialogical as possible; here I take seriously what Fred Evans calls “multiple voices,” or “the multivoiced body.” It is never enough to have a monovocal discourse, which always has the danger of becoming what Fred calls an “oracle”—

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey “telling-the-truth” with self-appointed authority, claiming a direct access to the truth. I steer away from such monovocalism, consciously, and employ a strategy of invoking and listening to these other voices, bringing them into the conversation, however unlikely a group it might be. Where this conversation will go is not entirely predictable. This is an aspect of my thinking that I haven’t given much thought to, but your question certainly draws this out. I am led to think more about circles of influence: inner circles, outer layers. Depending on the topic, some of those who influence me would jump from one circle to another, or be left out of account altogether. DAL:  Porous circles, then? ESC:  Yes, porous and shifting! This helps me to understand why some readers have thought fit to say that I have an “unusual range” of references for a philosopher. Though I do not set out consciously to do this, I do believe there is a responsibility of the writer to bring in as many voices as possible from among those whose thought bears on the topic at hand, even if these voices are coming from the leftfield of non-philosophy or non-phenomenology. DAL:  As well as with thinkers who may not specifically address the topic, yet who become essential to a certain way of thinking about it? ESC:  Yes, and Whitehead is especially instructive here, since he has concepts that are effective precisely as bridge concepts. Such as “concrescence,” which in effect replaces traditional models of causality in a much more subtle way that can be extended to many situations or themes that Whitehead himself never intended. So I do believe in the philosophical author’s responsibility to have this dialogue, or rather, multilogue, and also to ensure that this conversation is going somewhere— that the key figures are not cited merely as authorities, or merely because they have something to say on the topic. Rather, I cite them because they contribute directly to the conversation I am having in my head and on the page, and because, hopefully, I can better specify my own thought in their midst. In some cases, if the thinker has said the definitive thing—and Merleau-Ponty often has the last word—I just have to acknowledge it. What he says about the body in my view cannot be said better. Or at least I can’t say it better. Of course, this is not always the case, otherwise we’d have no reason to write. Philosophical writing entails a mixture of incomplete conversations and honest admissions that one cannot formulate a given point better than a given thinker—all while attempting to say it in one’s own way and, if one is lucky, articulating an altogether new point. My own effort has been to take Merleau-Ponty and other admired thinkers into regions where he/she did not say much—as with “place,” which was not a particular preoccupation of his. This allows me to transcribe and transmogrify what Merleau-Ponty might have said, or surely would have said, on the topic I’m writing about. This is a central way in which the voices of other authors enter into my writing. Not so much by my citing them, as joining and moving on with them into a new domain, as if exploring it together for the first time. I don’t think I can be completely without guides of any sort: which is doubtless a residue of my rather rigorous early training in philosophy and the demands of scholarship.

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DAL:  And indeed, if we can shift to place even more fully now, your conviction was that no one had sufficiently explored this notion. You write, elaborating upon Bachelard’s term “topoanalysis”: “I shall accord to place a position of renewed respect by specifying its power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are” (GBP, xv). In other words: being in the world for you now had to be described as being in place or being in the place-world. As you say, if your first two books discussed what is beyond and behind, your third offers us what is around us. Can you expand on this here? ESC:  The short answer is that place came directly from my work on memory, above all, from my realizing that the setting of a memory was far from trivial. Even if we focus on the specific content of a memory of a person or an episode, the setting makes an enormous difference as to what and how we remember. (Note here that we are here back in the vicinity of “margin.”) The more I thought about setting, the more I realized that it is the place of memory, and then I reflected that very few people had talked about place memory, as such. And in both senses: that of the scene of memory, and in the more specialized sense of a memory of places themselves. This realization came with the sudden shock of an unexpected discovery. I thought to myself, this is really unexplored and, even when it is mentioned, is regarded as wholly secondary: the “mere” setting, the bare scenery. I became quite passionate about this discovery. I recall talking to Tom Altizer at the time, telling him that I was about to embark upon a crusade on behalf of place. I took it as my responsibility to rectify the pervasive neglect of “place” in Western thought, at least since the Pre-Socratics, who were ironically the last to give it full force. (This story I was to tell more fully in The Fate of Place.) I came to place, then, from pondering the actual memorial setting, which as far as I could tell no author had taken seriously, probably because there are so many important questions of verification, accuracy, and detail in memory-work that the place of memory gets pushed off into the wings. And yet I was convinced that it was a formative part of what we remember. At this time I gave a talk titled “Keeping the Past in Mind,” but this title proved to be ironic. I really meant to say that you cannot keep the past entirely in mind, because it is also already in place. Or if you wish: place is in it. This was, if I recall, an invited lecture at SPEP in the mid-1980s. This direction was genuinely new and unexpected, disrupting my writing plans (which had called for volumes on “feeling” and “thinking” to succeed my books on imagining and remembering). Little did I know at the time that place would preoccupy me for at least 20 years—and still does today. Place thus had the feel of a vein that had not been mined, and I enjoyed this as a genuinely new topic of phenomenological description. (Only later did I learn that Husserl, in his last years, had begun such a description, as had Heidegger in his most mature writings.) Another way of putting this is to say that I was becoming ever more “exterocentric” to the sheer subjectivity that harbors acts of imagining and many forms of remembering. It takes an act of de-subjectification to regard place as primus inter pares, first among equals. In the end, I am really just one subject among others, one thing among others, one animal among others. With place, I am

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey part of a larger scene that includes things, animals, and other human subjects. This new descriptive work was thus in effect a de-personalizing of my earlier work, a trans-personal endeavor, because the subject (to join back to our earlier discussion) has very little freedom vis-à-vis place. She has some freedom to shape it, to navigate it, to become oriented in it, to remember it, but not much more than this. And all of the imagining and remembering that I do in in a given place becomes secondary insofar as it is a response to that place. This is only the bare beginning of an answer to the question of how place came to occupy center stage in my evolving work. Other parts of the answer would include my own sensitivity to place on the one hand—a mainly autobiographical matter— and on the other hand, my fascination with the understanding of space and time in the wake of Kant and Husserl.

American Philosophical Association (APA)—Marriott Marquis, Atlanta—December 27, 2012 DAL:  When we left off, we had just discussed a shift in your work from the personal toward an increasing exterocentricity, of getting back into place by getting “out” into place. This involves discovering the subject always already in communication with others and with the world, whether passively or actively. If we are to communicate, by which I mean to “share” a world, this involves being able to inhabit a common place. How do you understand the role of communication and community, the commons, as bodies sharing place? ESC:  The issue of community is insufficiently explored in my earlier work on place, including linguistic community and communication, but I have come back to this recently through the notion of the commons. For instance, in my recent work on Occupy Wall Street, or again in my work on the social and political aspects of edge. I have been circulating around the notion of the commons, based especially on that great essay by Gary Snyder called “The Place, the Region, and the Commons,” which I love to teach whenever I am edging toward environmental thought. So, having now done some serious thinking about commons, I realize that I neglected the whole idea of public place, of place-making-in-public, and my work since the early 2000s has in some ways tried to compensate for that. One example would be my discussions of the role of public memorialization, commemorative action, and monuments discussed in essays on 9/11. One of these essays focuses upon people in an actual commons—Union Square Park. I was there the day after 9/11. I lingered there at length, and reflected upon this later when I was asked to speak on this topic. That catapulted me toward the notion of a place holding people together with common concerns. Part of the adhesive force is normally human discourse—people talking. But at Union Square Park, at that fateful moment, people were for the most part silent; very few spoke any words out loud. Those there were stunned. 14th Street is close to Ground Zero, and the Square on 14th Street was as close as you could get to the scene of devastation. Nevertheless,

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there was a lot of communion and community, if not verbal communication, going on. And that got me to thinking about the importance of parks as public spaces. I’ve also written on Central Park, which is a great commons with a long and complex history. Different populations come and go, and yet in every case the Park brings people together. Again, this does not necessarily require communicating in actual words; given the diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, those present are often not able to communicate in any direct or unambiguous way with each other. I have long been skeptical of the idea of communication. One of my earliest articles was “Expression and Communication in Art” (1971), in which I criticized the communication model as tied closely to the idea of transmitting a quantifiable or codifiable message. I remain philosophically and temperamentally averse to almost any form of this model. In Habermas’s work, for instance, I worry that there is a notion of an ideal speech act as a form of rational communication. So, either I would move away from communication toward expression, as you yourself do, Don, in your current work, or (as I have done more recently) toward the preverbal, tacit, ways by which people empathize, understand, connect, including bodily actions or gestures, even bodies merely moving in public space, in accordance with certain deep patterns. Erving Goffman on patterns of conduct in everyday life (and asylums and prisons) and Ray Birdwhistell on the “kinesics” of body language are key influences on me here. These strike me as the adequate, or “scientific” (here sociological and anthropological) analogues to a phenomenology of place, sounding out the lived body and its tacit expressions. Or again, Richard Sennett’s book Flesh and Stone, which is a brilliant reconstruction of the Ancient agora in Athens from the perspective of a body-based analysis. This literature is very important to consider alongside the idea of place as commons. So, your question leads me to recognize that my effort at supplementing communicational-rational paradigms has been fairly concerted, even if never explicitly formulated. And this awareness of the public dimension of place is probably a result of real-life events—9/11, living on Central Park, and having had the good fortune to linger at and reflect upon the agora in Athens. The blind spot was, of course, inherited from the classical philosophical traditions that I treat in The Fate of Place. In that book, I was responding to a literature in which people were talking about the experience of space and place as if it were wholly individual, not shared. Perhaps this was a blind spot endemic in a generation of phenomenologists who were not actually connecting deeply, or fully, with social and political issues. Perhaps this was nothing but, alas, a sublimated form of Lockean individualism. In any case, this blind spot lay unexamined on my part. I begin to address it in the new preface to Getting Back into Place (2nd ed., 2009). I think my new work on national borders, which ineluctably involve social and political, cultural and historical dimensions, has awakened me from this sleep, again very much thanks to the influence of Mary Watkins, who has attuned me to how people are in place, together, or else not allowed to share the same space because of a wall that divides them. This new direction, currently culminating in the co-authored book Up Against the Wall, which Mary and I are just finishing, is in effect an extended

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey meditation on the commons, especially its degeneration and neglect under late capitalist, neoliberal regimes in this country and around the world. We have begun to lose our way in place—by losing both the reality and the vision of shared and expressive public places for which the only apt term is “the commons.” DAL:  Yet you mention the silent communication of being in Union Square Park the day after 9/11. Or again, in Central Park—which has pathways and plateaus, fields and a petting zoo—bodies moving through and around theses places, communicating with them and with each other. Jogging bodies, strolling bodies, playing bodies, lingering bodies—together they are creating the place through their glances and tacit communications. The gestures of those on the playing field create it as the place of the game, and this is enough to make it impermissible to stroll across the infield of a baseball diamond, even if normally this is the fastest route home. Gestures create and sustain this place, articulating its zones and regions. So, if we can leave aside the linguistic, then what is the role of this form of communication between bodies, structuring places together? ESC:  I think I would focus on body movement for what you are discussing: body movements along pathways, being essential to the pathways themselves, following them in part, but also creating new ones. In Central Park, not everyone follows the demarcated paths. I live across from the north end of the park where it is actually a little wild, surprisingly wild, and new paths spring up all the time. They are not formally instituted, but rather simply permitted by the Park authorities. Such phenomena are why I give a lot of valence to body movement in place. By sheer body movement through an existing place, a new sense of the place is created and new dimensions are obtained. Parks and other public spaces encourage customary and ritualized movements, but they also make possible departures from custom, as we can see in festivals or protests . . . Howard Zinn, in the days of the Vietnam protests, insisted that our bodies need to move on the streets. Minor infractions or traffic disruptions are irrelevant when we are protesting major war crimes. Our bodies need to move fairly freely to express themselves in these public spaces, including the places afforded by the streets of major cities. The otherwise anonymous, motorized street scene is transformed into a commons of connective, pre-discursive, relations. There is talking going on, but the body movements themselves in certain spaces constitute the act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience puts bodies on the spot, moves them to the edge and over, trespasses the established borders. Sometimes this seems theatrical (and even orchestrated), but people also spontaneously step across lines and refuse to stay in place. These bodies are communicating in the ways you suggest, by being together in a common space. Heraclitus uses the phrase koinos kosmos, literally “common world,” which he distinguishes from idios kosmos, “dream space.” This latter is always idiosyncratic and never shared, and even a retelling is not a complete sharing of the experience. The haunting phrase of koinos kosmos, coming down to us from Presocratic philosophy, echoes throughout the West and doubtless other parts of the world as well. So the question really becomes how to broaden the notion of place— out, around, and across, extending finally into what I like to call a place-world. We

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surely can’t go very far in these directions before we meet other people, no matter how remote our location. And so we are here at the far extreme from Aristotle’s notion of place as a sealed container. You could really write a political history of thought in terms of place models, place thinking, and in my recent work I have been trying to reanalyze events in spatial and edge terms. Standing toe-to-toe with police officers, the importance of curbs and sidewalks, the importance of people taking to the sidewalks and the streets. DAL:  How do you understand body movement here? It seems to me that place is related not simply to movement, but to something like “stylized” movement, movement according to a certain pattern. Crossing a line, standing toe-to-toe with a police officer, or standing silently in a park with thousands of people—each of these is a stylized movement. The park becomes a place in the rich sense when bodies move through it in a stylized way; it becomes the place “of ” this protest, this vigil, etc. ESC:  Let’s take a related example: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s famous The Gates (2005), the installation in Central Park of several years ago. I came back from Santa Barbara to visit the installation, and it was bitterly cold. But the welcoming presence of the gates brought people to assume the shape of a certain formal procession, and this could certainly be called “stylized.” But this doesn’t mean that the gait of the movement was prescribed, even if it did bring a certain form or coherence to people’s movement through the park. When I was there, people were walking together shoulder to shoulder. It was a beautiful case of spontaneous community action, of walking together through a commons. It wasn’t a political protest, and there was no desperate need or overriding motive behind the bodily movements. Rather, the structures of the gates shaped people’s movements in place. There was no message being communicated, even if everyone walking there was tempted to try to divine the meaning of the installation. In fact, the meaning was in the collective movement of the bodies in, through, and as place. To me, this was an event of place-making. But what was your experience of this extraordinary circumstance? DAL:  I remember being struck at how the gates were, for the most part, along the path. This emphasized for me the quotidian movement of Central Park, making it explicit. Perhaps this is, indeed, an apt example, since this seems to be a very Caseyan move: to take something ordinary, a simple stroll through the park, and to show the rich layers at work. For me, The Gates manifested precisely that tacit power possessed by the borders of any pathway, and how our bodies quietly respond to the weight of edges and expectations. ESC:  Now that is quite a nice description. In other words, the gates accentuated and enhanced our understanding of the directedness of the pathways that we otherwise take for granted, that we think of as merely “convenient” ways of avoiding the mud or the grass. Perhaps Christo and Jeanne-Claude were indeed calling attention to a public path as path. So in that respect they were, in effect, doing a bit of phenomenology—manifesting the essence of path by accentuating its pathwayness, and leaving open its raison d’être, thereby underlining the openness of any path.

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey This raises the question of landscape aesthetics, the work begun in Getting Back into Place and continued in Representing Place in Landscape Painting and Maps and in its companion volume Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. The concept of landscape is for me a nontrivial notion, and by no means confined to painting or photography, much less to art history. “Landscape” is itself a critical generic name of a kind of place, one of the great place signifiers. It combines land (or earth) with scape (or scope). Landscapes afford panoramic, sweeping views, but nevertheless they are of the earth. This oxymoronic term is rich, and has much potential for reflection. I even argue in the two books just mentioned that landscape has an allure that portraiture and still life do not. A professor at Stony Brook once did a study that showed that people (at least Americans, who provided the sample population), when left to their own devices, have a pronounced preference for choosing landscape paintings over still lifes and portraits to decorate their walls. I believe this points to a deep longing for landscape, a return to the earth through image. “Landscape” (Landschaft, paysage, paisaje) remains a rich term for speculation, and that is why I devoted the last two books in the place series to landscape painting, photography, and mapping. Indeed, another thing you can do to and with landscape is to map it. DAL:  Can you elaborate on your distinction between kinds of mapping, between “scientific” mapping and a lived sense of mapping? ESC:  I distinguish between cartography in a strict sense, what you just called “scientific,” which appears with colonialism and the great cartographers of the 17th Century—the emergence of cartographic mapping was not incidentally synchronous with early modern science and early modern philosophy. Along with this development appeared world maps (mappae mundi), as well as the effort to complicate maps, to diversify them. Only really in the past fifty to seventy years did maps begin to be considered works of art in the West, as worthy of aesthetic consideration in their own right. Of course, the Japanese and the Chinese had long known this dimension, so we in the West are (as so often) about 4000 years behind these developments in east and south Asia! Trying to work out the ambiguous but rich relationship between landscape experience, landscape representation, and mapping, along with the relationship between image and word in mapping: these are some of the matters I explore in Representing Place through a running comparison between landscape paintings and maps, arguing that in the end these two modes of representing landscape join forces more often than not. Earth-Mapping emerged directly from Representing Place. It began as a final chapter that had to be removed from the first book, already a long book, but that stood on its own as a short work that focused on earth art (which includes both paintings inspired by earth motifs and “earth works” in the sense of the movement that first arose in the 1960s). I was especially interested in how earth works actually do something unique vis-à-vis place. An earthwork is situated in a place and reconfigures it: digging in it, building on it, sometimes permanently, sometimes transiently (the latter with special emphasis in Andy Goldsworthy’s work). In any case, reconfiguring a place or a whole landscape is an important new genre in art,

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and perhaps new in world art. I developed this composite notion as an alternative to cartographic mapping in the form of a distinctive earth-mapping. Earth-mapping I claim to be a promising way of respecting place, creating place from place as a special way of finding one’s way in place, thus of navigation and orientation in that place. It implicates bodily movement in major ways, and it appeals to touch and smell as much as to sight. DAL:  In Getting Back into Place, you pursue objects of description that are literally trans-personal: I am thinking in particular of your descriptions of built places and wild places. The interplay of their structural features provides “place” for embodiment, without yet being a fate. How might you now characterize the intertwining importance of built and wild places? And how does our very navigating of them and between them—through our embodied gestures—contribute in return to their constitution? Are there wild places without stylized and cultured bodies? ESC:  Taking your last question first—there is always a trace of stylization and enculturation. Even if you are backpacking in the untamed wild, even where the paths are non-existent or not visible, there is still an insistent corporeality of hiking, climbing, or talking to your companion. One is never completely part of the “wild,” but rather we are in the wild. We do not become wild, insofar as that would mean becoming speechless, entirely without history or culture, etc. All of this, as you suggest, can be placed under the rich heading of style, and even at the limit there is a style of being-in-the-wild. Despite deep cultural differences—the Nepalese trekkers hike very differently than Sir Edmund Hillary in the Himalayas—they can still cooperate and work together as a climbing team, their styles connect, even in the most wild or remote places. So, the term “cultivation,” which I tend to use for the transformation of a wild place into a minimal civilized space, carries through right into walking in the wild. I contrast the wild with built places in that original distinction as two epicenters of what happens to bodies in place. Either we construct the immediate world by artificial means—a simple hut, say Heidegger’s Hütte, or an elaborate hotel such as the one we are currently in, an architectural landmark designed by Portman, famous for its massive atrium structure. This hotel is totally constructed, built over—and yet here we are talking, connecting in this commodious hotel room. We know each other, but we have never been in this room before, neither in this hotel, nor in downtown Atlanta. We immediately take up and come to inhabit a fairly comfortable way of being here together, the medium of which is our conversation. We are able to plunge into our ongoing interviews, even in this rather strange, completely constructed, totally artificial built place. So despite the differences between built and wild places, I would say that the bodies that traverse them and inhabit them draw them together as their experiential basso profundo. Human bodies, animal bodies in other contexts, are really the carriers of custom and habit. “Habit body” (Merleau-Ponty’s term, itself a modification of Bergson’s “habit memory”) sustains us in unfamiliar settings, right up to the limit of place-phobia. In this particular place, one could easily become

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey acrophobic. If you look over the edge, it is quite daunting. I have been on the ridge of a razorback mountain in Montana, but here Portman recreates a sophisticated equivalent of a mountainous precipice. And yet it is thanks to our bodies, our own lived habit bodies, yours and mine, with our own histories, that we navigate more or less well in this place and are not overcome by vertigo. Despite the initial plausibility of the distinction between wild and built places, I now think it was too dichotomous. I am also now skeptical of my having named the two modes of built place Hermetic and Hestial, invoking the compulsory heterosexuality that underlies those paired deities. I fell back upon classical dualist thinking, male/female, and a whole gender critique needs be made of that way of proceeding. DAL:  At the end of Getting Back into Place, you conclude with a chapter tantalizingly called “Homeward bound: Ending (in) the Journey.” And indeed, the book reads as a conceptual journey through our experience of place and ends with the apt discussion of how getting back into place is in fact the ongoing journey of coming-home. But your journey continues in The Fate of Place less through our experience of place than through the concept of place in the history of Western thought. In other words, in The Fate of Place you move to the story of place. Why did the story of place need to be told? And what is at stake in the shift to philosophical history? ESC:  As you mentioned before, the first book is a fully engaged phenomenological analysis of place as lived, even if I was no longer calling it “phenomenology.” Nevertheless, it remains an effort to describe what it is like to be in place. Although it draws important testimony from anthropology and other fields, it is about very specific ways of being in place, oriented in a place, lost in a place, etc. Normally I do not teach my current preoccupations, but when I was invited to Emory University (right here in Atlanta) for a semester, I was asked to teach on my own research. So, for the first and last time, I did just this: I taught a seminar on the history of concepts of place. The idea to work this material into a book arose entirely from the enthusiasm of the seminar participants, who enjoyed reading the history of philosophy in a different way. The Fate of Place, then, became a complementary book to Getting Back into Place. It is history, conceptual history, narrative—styles that I had never written in before, or since! It was a completely anomalous effort on my part, stemming from my teaching experience in this particular setting. It very much wrote itself, and was complete in six months or less. I wanted to tell the history of place because it had never been told before, and because I felt that Western histories of Space and Time exhibited a deafness to the placial dimensions of experience. The hegemonic oppressiveness of Space/Time derives directly from Kant, though it has crucial earlier roots. I was interested in telling a kind of counter-history of things that were certainly recognized by the early Greeks, particularly by the Pre-Socratics, and then were progressively forgotten. Plato’s Timaeus was a transitional text that combined place and space in its concept of chôra—shortly after which Aristotle fully confined place qua topos to being a strict container. And then place just disappeared entirely from the Western corpus,

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down to the Renaissance. This is a genuinely curious tale—a concept is recognized, then suppressed, and then returns again a thousand years later. I surprised myself by getting fully immersed in the scholarship, then drawing back to (as you rightly say) tell a story. But it wasn’t just a story; it is also a moral tale: place needs to be continually re-recognized, since there is a powerful temptation in Western thought to conceal or dissolve place in dominant scientific, logical, rational notions that crowd it out. As something we take for granted, and because its own extent is often indefinite, place figures in Western thought as an intrinsically vague concept—which in my vocabulary is a very good thing, but in the thinking of many philosophers is deplorable. There was also a sort of political edge to all this; that is, in my promoting a vagrant concept, something not worth serious attention by “rigorous” philosophers. This connects up to your earlier question from our first session about the margin, the indeterminate; both margin and place call for a “logic of the vague” in Peirce’s term. As such, place was bound to be a renegade, rebarbative concept—a thorn in the flesh of official, hegemonic state philosophy and “royal science” in Deleuze and Guattari’s term. DAL:  So why the “fate” of place, and not the “plight” of place. Is place “fated” or destined to be left aside to the rigor of space and time, or is the story of place’s plight itself already an opening for a “renascence of place even on the most recalcitrant terrain” (FP, xv)? ESC:  The “fate” of place is that it is so often forgotten or suppressed. It attracts a kind of inherent oblivion, and there are doubtless other concepts like this that we could discuss. And yet place resurfaces even in Kant, not to mention Pascal. So mine was an effort to promote a different destiny, if we can distinguish here between fate as the result of hegemonic forces of officialdom, and destiny as the incontournable, that which you simply can’t get around, that can’t be ignored, that keeps demanding acknowledgement. You can try to suppress place, but it returns calling for attention. Ironically, philosophers meet in public places—we’re in this hotel room, in Atlanta, in this place. The American Philosophical Association has brought us back together. This is easily downplayed as the merely convenient, the instrumental; yet there is always something more interesting going on than merely a meeting place. The place where we actually meet is highly structured, has its own history, this building is unique, and our history of meeting in different places informs our meeting in this place. Although in the book I don’t make this distinction between fate and destiny, I would like to add it into the discussion tonight. “Fate” is something I see as a burden, an incubus on the back of place, whose “destiny” is to nevertheless find ways to be expressed and recognized—if not in philosophy, then in other fields: poetry, sociology, history, etc. Anthropology is another locus where place emerges as indispensable, perhaps because of the crucial element of fieldwork in that discipline. DAL:  The question began with your notion of coming-home. In Getting Back into Place we find a manner of coming home to an experience of place, whereas in The

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey Fate of Place we find the concept of place itself coming home to its proper location in our understanding of our world? ESC:  Very nice point—even if I am now suspicious of my move to home-place at the end of Getting Back into Place. I am now convinced that there is a certain kind of Odyssean nostalgia in the very notion of coming-home. I am not sure I had fully taken into account Lévinas’s critique of Odysseus’s returning to his home place as the beginning of the end of Western thought (as he presents it in that small text La trace de l’autre). So I am concerned that the last chapter of my first book on place implies that you need to find a literal home place, a domestic space, in which you are comfortable, well-supported, etc. That may be true empirically, we may all be seeking that, but underlining this fails to reach any deeper level. But I am sympathetic to your suggestion that the concept of place is a kind of home-place for philosophical thought, though one that remains very hard to discover or rediscover. It had been covered over, sometimes by intention, sometimes by neglect. In this respect, The Fate of Place represents progress, a more sophisticated point of view. In that book I was no longer headed towards anything comparable to a literal home-place. But a conceptual home-place: we’ll have to think about what this means! That is a very intriguing thought. The place of home is taken over by the very idea of place itself. DAL:  The Fate of Place also marks the arrival in your published work of the voices of certain contemporary French thinkers: Derrida, Foucault, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Irigaray. You had resisted this emerging tradition in your earlier work, not because of a lack of sympathy, but because of a sense that your questions still called for phenomenological description. Why does The Fate of Place come to adopt these voices? Does this result from the shift to history in this book? How might you characterize this shift in your relation to post-1968 French thought? ESC:  This is a question that has never been posed to me before. In the book, I wasn’t so much wanting to complete the story as to find an opportunity to integrate the thought of those thinkers who I so much admire, including Irigaray, who is very important in that last chapter, with Nancy and Derrida and the others. I sought to give in my own work a location for their work, which I had not previously been able to acknowledge adequately. Though I had taught their work, I had resisted writing about them, not wanting to become a curator of contemporary French thought. Others were already doing that work and doing it very well. That work sometimes verges on biography, or an interpretation of their thought. So I really was not drawn to that route. It was very tempting with Derrida, however, and in many respects I admired him the most and was closest to him personally. But I resisted becoming an expert in Derrida, or any of these figures. I was rather looking for ways of creatively appropriating them for some other purpose. And I think this book provided an opportunity to do that, to give them a place within an evolving narrative that really wasn’t their narrative. They were only incidentally concerned about place, yet they had all gotten around sooner or later to talking about place, particularly in locutions such as avoir lieu (“to take place”).

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One could go back as far as Sartre to look at the term situation, if one was to do a thorough history here. But this would take another kind of book, comparable to Martin Jay’s magisterial Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993). He did a whole book on an emerging concept that no one else had fully thematized; so, if I were a different type of author I might have written a study of the emergence of “place” in contemporary French thought. Instead, I sought to discern a decentered moment of happy convergence, which is not the same as strict agreement, but a matter of a matrix of accord, loosely considered. I was very pleased when Derrida told me he had read that last chapter and said that I had captured an important but neglected sub-current of contemporary philosophy. Of course, he was a very generous person! So I seized the occasion to indicate my admiration and investment in these contemporary thinkers, while also being able to weave them into the fabric of the history of place—even if none of them ever set out to rediscover, much less to resurrect place. The closest they came in terms of a more dominant theme would be their various reflections on event, événement, especially in the case of Lyotard and Derrida and Nancy. In the last chapter I do try to draw a parallel between event and place, since each is spatiotemporal, each is a complex amalgam of space and time, but also something else on a different level. I would rather employ the term place; they would rather use event. “Event” I see as a parallel of place, another route around the hegemony of Space/Time. Indeed, territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, in Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestively placial terms, are really events that are spatiotemporal. I am delighted you caught me doing something there that I hadn’t been able to do elsewhere in my writing. It was something that suddenly seemed right in the sequence of the unfolding book. Their inclusion amounts to a very odd mix of current thinkers placed in the company of Philoponus and other fairly obscure philosophers. Odd bedfellows, but the story of place is very diverse, and keeps reappearing in the strangest of contexts. Besides, this shift to contemporary French thought gave the book a lighter note to end on, since the penultimate chapter is a heavy reflection on Heidegger. The felicitous style of the French thinkers, their allégresse, here counterbalances the gravitas of Denken and Andenken. So, here we reach a pausing point, but let’s not call it a stopping point. It is a caesura in our ongoing conversation, which I look forward to continuing in other times, other places . . .

Notes 1 This is an edited transcript of an interview spanning three sessions, which took place on: October 9, 2011, in New York City; October 20, 2011, in Philadelphia; and December 27, 2012, in Atlanta, Georgia. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), lxxvii.

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3 See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 194. 4 A version of this address from October 19, 2011, at SPEP appears as: Edward S. Casey, “Random Reflections of a Founding Witness,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 93–101.

3

Place, Memory, and History David Carr

In 1984 Gallimard published the first volume of a remarkable work called Les Lieux de mémoire, “under the direction of Pierre Nora.” The first part bore the title “La République.” The second part, taking up three volumes, was called “La Nation” and was published in 1986. The third part, published in 1992, and also comprising three volumes, was called “Les France.” This immense work contains contributions by more than 40 authors, including some of the best-known French historians.1 I thought of this book recently when I turned again to Ed Casey’s work, in order to write this chapter, partly because the title chosen by Nora unites two of Casey’s well-known concerns: place and memory. (I would translate the French title places or perhaps sites of memory, rather than “realms of memory,” as the English translation has it.) Casey’s two books, Remembering (1987) and Getting Back into Place (1993), are separated by only a few years in the life of this prodigious thinker, but very little is said about the relation between them or their topics. In Getting Back, Remembering is mentioned, along with the earlier Imagining, only as one of a series of books that look “at everyday phenomena that have been passed over or systematically misconstrued” (GBP, xvi), and there is little discussion of remembering, and few references to the earlier book. Casey is not one of those authors who are always quoting their own work. The only real reference, if you can call it that, is found in a remarkable section of Remembering called “Place Memory.” As I reread it, I could almost see the idea of Casey’s next book forming in the author’s mind—in fact, the expression getting back into place occurs there (REM, 195). This section also contains a discussion of nostalgia, which returns implicitly (though the word is not used much) at the end of Getting Back, where the topic is “homeward bound.” I conclude, then, that more needs to be said about the relation of place and memory, and this is where I turn to Nora and others for help. I have to admit that my interest in Nora’s collection, and in other recent work on memory, is related to my long-standing focus on the philosophy of history. Like Nora and his collaborators, many authors writing about memory recently are historians or philosophers of history. The philosophy of history is one of the few topics Ed Casey has not dealt with much in his work. But I wonder if history and the philosophy of history might not profit

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by an infusion of Casey’s wisdom on these topics; and I wonder as well if the relation between place and memory, if it is neglected in Casey’s work, might not profit by a detour through the philosophy of history. So I want to try to bring the two discussions together. How does memory enter into the discussion of history? The former might initially be said to be a mental faculty, the latter the record of past events. Clearly, what the two share is that they are both primarily related to the past. Both might be said to have the function of preserving for the present what is past. But then a wide divergence opens up. An individual person can truly remember only what that person has experienced—at least, that is the way we usually use the term. A very small part of the past thus is available to any individual through memory. History, by contrast, wants to venture beyond individual experience and often before the lifetimes of any contemporaries. Historians may make use of memories recorded in the testimonies of individuals, but their interest is usually not in the individuals themselves but in what they record. And here, of course, they know that memory is notoriously fallible and skewed by bias, so they do not take these testimonies at face value. They evaluate them critically, and compare them with other testimonies and other documentary evidence of the events they relate. Historians aim at an objective account of what really happened; memory is variable and subjective. But subjective accounts may be useful in arriving at the objective. Here, then, we have one account of the relation between history and memory: memory serves but is subservient to history. French historiography in recent times has led beyond this: The leaders of the Annales school, notably Fernand Braudel, thought that the true objects of history were the deep-lying and slow-moving economic, demographic and geographic changes that made up the “longue durée.”2 Individual actions, and also individual testimony, which traditionally occupied historians, were only surface perturbations on the slow-moving and deep-flowing river of history, which always exceeds the scope of individuals’ memories. Hence they have little value for historians, who are better advised to attend to quantifiable and statistical changes available by other means. Here memory disappears altogether from the historian’s concern. A later development that emerged from the Annales school was called the history of “mentalités.” Here testimony and the memory of individuals could be examined in their own right, their developments and changes traced by a “history of memory.”3 Thus memory, rather than a source for history, becomes an object for history, or what Jan Assmann calls “mnemohistory”: the history not of what happened but of how events were remembered by those that came later.4 But with this development something important is happening to the concept of memory itself. Assmann describes his mnemohistory as the history of “cultural memory,”5 treating memory as something larger than what goes on in individuals’ minds. Not only individuals but also cultures and communities have memories; thanks to their adherence to groups, individuals share memories that lie beyond the scope of their own experience. This notion of “collective memory” was first articulated in detail, in the 1930s, by the great French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, and the idea is so compelling that it has been taken up by many theorists under his influence.6

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But Halbwachs’s work brings with it yet another version of the relation between history and memory. For Halbwachs, modern historical “science,” disseminated through our schoolbooks, had reduced the past to a lifeless array of dates, facts, and numbers. The “objective” past is one that no longer matters to us and thus has been cut off from our experience. It is no longer our past. It is only through the collective memory that we have a direct and vital relation to the past. Memory is thus no longer a source for history or an object of history but is now an alternative, a corrective, or a supplement to history as it is practiced in our schools and universities. As Paul Ricœur says, Halbwachs can be seen as reproaching the founders of the Annales school, in his own day, such as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.7 It is almost as if he sets up a countercurrent in French historiography that finally surfaces, many years later, in the work of Nora and his collaborators in Les Lieux de mémoire. This is indeed the sentiment expressed by Nora in the introduction to his collective work. Here’s how he describes the origin of his project: “The rapid disappearance of our national memory seemed to me to call for an inventory of the places where it [our national memory] was effectively incarnated and which, through the will of men or the work of centuries, have remained its most striking symbols: festivals, emblems, monuments and commemorations, but also elegies, dictionaries and museums.”8 He speaks of the “acceleration of history” leading to the loss of “what was still experienced [vécu] in the warmth of tradition, in the muteness of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral.” Places are the residue of this lost memory. “There are places [lieux] of memory because there is no longer a milieux of memory.”9 Citing Halbwachs, he sees history as critical and even destructive of memory, and portrays it as at least partly responsible for the loss of memory which is the premise of his project.10 The American historian Gordon Wood cites Nora with approval,11 and quotes David Lowenthal and Bernard Baylin, British and American respectively, expressing similar sentiments. We have already mentioned the important work of Jan Assmann, who is German. So these views are by no means confined to France. And the irony here is that the writers expressing these doubts about history, including the many collaborators in Nora’s massive project, are almost all professional historians. And a further irony is that many of Nora’s authors (e.g. Duby, Le Goff, Le Roy Ladurie) are identified with the Annales school. All this critical self-doubt is coming from the historians themselves. The moral of the story is that all the knowledge we have about the past is getting in the way of a direct connection to the past, and that this can be provided only by memory. But our memory is fading, and can be restored if we return to the “places” of memory. But what are these “places” of memory and how do they help? Nora refers to places in which national memory is “incarnated” and which remain its “striking symbols.” The list of “places” he provides in the passage quoted above (monuments, museums) also includes items we would not consider “places” in the literal sense (emblems, dictionaries), and indeed many chapters of his collection as it unfolds are devoted to things we might consider symbols, but not strictly speaking places: the tricolor flag, the Marseillaise, the Larousse dictionary, even historical works and the Annales school itself. This may be a reason the translators chose “realms” rather than “places.” There is a broader sense of place that occurs in the term “commonplace” as topos and the

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etymology of the term “topic.” But on the whole the authors devote themselves to buildings, geographical sites, territories. One irony, in a collection announced as a kind of antidote to the excesses of historiography, is that many of the essays are standard examples of history-writing about a particular topic. What is lacking is a clear sense of what the connection is between place and memory, and an account of how returning to these places can aid in the recovery of a memory that Nora thinks is being lost. What is needed is a bit of philosophy, of the phenomenological sort, about memory and place. This is where Casey’s work can help, starting indeed with the discussion of “place memory” that I mentioned before. Early in the chapter he mentions the well-known mnemonic device called the “method of loci,” sometimes referred to as the “memory palace” (REM, 182–83). The method is to imagine a space like a room or a desk with shelves or compartments in which we “place” the things we want to remember. To retrieve a memory, we return to the imagined space to find the item where we placed it. What this shows is that our memory of place is very strong, stronger that the memory of individual items, even if the place in this case is only imagined. We know that often, searching for a passage in a book, we remember exactly where it was on the page when we read it. But the connections between place and memory go far beyond the search for lost memories. Casey goes on, in this chapter, to the many ways in which memory is intimately tied to place. He points out how often our memory “is either of a place itself (e.g. of one’s childhood home) or of an event or person in a place” (REM, 183) and how rare it is that we remember a person or event without its place. Why are memory and place so intimately connected? This brings Casey back to the lived body (REM, 189), which had played a central role earlier in the book with the author’s attempts to pursue “memory beyond mind” (REM, 144ff.), that is, to liberate it from the paradigm of the mental recollection. Bodily memories in the form of habits, know-how, capacities and orientations, are all described in rich detail, and the lived body links memory and place because it is itself at once in place, and, in the phenomenological sense, the origin of place. It is the “absolute here” which we never leave, no matter how much we move around, and as such it anchors the “there” of everything we encounter spread out around us in space. If all experience is bodily, then memory, in its relation to past experience, will be bodily as well. The present has both a spatial and a temporal sense, and just as the bodily here is the zero-point of orientation in space, the now is the zero-point of orientation in relation to past and future. We are always in the now, just as we are always here, even though the date and content of the now are always changing. If memory is a fundamental dimension of human existence, then it shares in the bodily character of all experience; that is, it is itself bodily, in the sense that it is of the body itself, either explicitly or implicitly, when we remember what we have experienced in a bodily way. It is interesting to note that after writing about body memory and place memory, Casey moves on to “commemoration” (REM, 216ff.) This phenomenon is linked to the previous sections because: (1) commemoration is clearly an act of remembrance—we assemble to remember the war dead, for example; (2) it almost always involves movement and bodily activity, often ritualized activity, such as prayers, a song played by the band, or taps on the trumpet; and (3) it is so typically tied to a place—a grave,

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a battlefield, a monument on the town green, in Casey’s first example (REM, 216). But most importantly, it adds a new element: the participation of others. “Commemorating is an essentially interpersonal action. It is undertaken not only in relation to others and for them but also with them in a common action of communalizing” (REM, 225). With this consideration we arrive in the zone of that phenomenon we spoke of before: collective memory. And what is often characteristic of collective memory is that is a memory of that which no one present experienced directly. It may not have started out that way. Think of the commemoration held on the battlefield at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, just four months after the battle itself. Its purpose was to dedicate a cemetery to those who died in the battle, and it was here that Lincoln pronounced his famous speech. The dead were probably literally and personally remembered by many who were present that day. But as the years pass they too take their leave, one by one, and the task of remembering is passed on by them to others who share in a memory that corresponds to no one’s direct experience. Commemoration, we recall, is one of those “places of memory” that Nora mentions in the preface to his first volume. Casey’s reflections on “place memory” add considerably to the understanding of what Nora and his colleagues are talking about, but they do it from a philosophical and indeed phenomenological perspective: instead of talking about the “places” themselves, Casey’s focus is on the subjective experience, in particular the forms of memory, that are connected with them. And as we have seen, Casey adds depth to the idea underlying Nora’s approach, namely that of collective memory. So far we have seen the value of Casey’s work in providing a philosophical dimension to the connection between place and memory. It does this, in the earlier work (i.e. Remembering), starting from the perspective of memory. What happens now, when Casey’s perspective changes, and place becomes his focus? If the earlier work devotes considerable discussion to “place memory,” shouldn’t Getting Back into Place have something to say about “memory places?” But no such heading turns up in the table of contents. We’ve noted the (perhaps curious?) fact that Getting Back makes almost no reference to the earlier work and seemingly even to the phenomenon to which it was devoted, that is, remembering. No effort, it seems, is devoted to integrating the findings of the earlier work into the later. But this is, I think, an appearance that proves to be deceptive. It seems to me that the connection to memory is, at least implicitly, pervasive in the later work, indeed so pervasive that it need not be singled out for special treatment. The connection to memory can be found in the very notion of place itself, and indeed in the title: getting back. Let me explain what I mean. Before he launches into his full-fledged phenomenology of place, Casey must dispose of two adversaries: Time and Space. The homogenous Euclidian and then Cartesian notion of space was taken over by the scientists as the basis for modern physics; in the twentieth century it is amalgamated into “space-time” as the universal matrix of all being (GBP, xiv). Such is the pervasive influence of modern science that these terms are thought to tell us all we need to know about places and locations. By contrast, the great philosophers of modern times, from Kant to Husserl and Bergson to Heidegger, do not concede everything to science, but try to understand it from a

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philosophical perspective. But they are practically unanimous, according to Casey, in granting time priority over space and in understanding Being in terms of Time.12 The very idea of place must be articulated and defended against a pervasive philosophical and scientific attitude that would see it, if it is noticed at all, as a subjective derivative of “real” space which in turn is understood in terms of time. Casey is the first to admit that his work builds on a phenomenological background, extending from Husserl to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which emphasizes “lived,” perceived, and bodily space and demonstrates its priority over Euclidian space. But the notion of place pushes this development an important step farther. When he quotes J. J. Gibson saying “we do not live in ‘space’” (GBP, xiii), he could have added: we don’t just live in lived or bodily space either, with its left and right, its up and down, its here and there. The lived world of space, or the world of lived space, is a world of places. The dimensions of the lived world derive their significance not just from their relation to the lived body, its movement and its activity, but also by constituting places that give meaning to our movement and our activity. Place is thicker and richer than the notion of location in lived space, and anchors it. Now I would like to argue that one of the things that constitutes the thickness and richness of place is that it has a temporal dimension that is entirely its own. Phenomenologists, after all, have developed the idea not only of lived space, but also of lived time, and lived time is contrasted, as in its treatment of space, with the abstract and “objective” time of thought. This concept of lived time, indeed, is involved in Casey’s treatment of memory. And his treatment of place displays this temporal dimension at almost every turn. “Displacement,” journeying from one place to another, building and dwelling, and of course, finally, returning home—every one of these has a temporal dimension. Consider that one passage in his book where Casey makes reference to his earlier work on imagination and memory: “Just as imagination takes us forward into the realm of the purely possible—into what might be—so memory brings us back into the domain of the actual and the already elapsed: to what has been. Place ushers us into what already is: namely, the environing subsoil of our embodiment” (GBP, xvii). To me this “already” is the word that reveals the temporal dimension of place. The place-world is not a frozen present. We are born into a world of places already there. We can be homesteaders who found a new place for ourselves and our children, but, as Casey points out, we always come from someplace, just as the homestead now becomes the place from which the children will henceforth come. We can be displaced and rootless because there is already some place we have left behind or been expelled from. And if we “can’t go home again,” it is because of the passage of time. Because Casey’s notion of place is dynamic and not static, because it relates to origins and destinations, it is as thoroughly temporal as it is spatial. If we add to this the pervasively intersubjective character of his entire treatment of place—how could it be otherwise?—we begin to come close to the idea of places of memory and of the collective memory connected to them. It is significant that Nora, in his effort to get beyond history as mere representation of and knowledge about the past, has recourse not just to memory but to places of memory. It is in the places we encounter, which have significance not just for us as individuals but for us as communities, that memory can truly become collective. Places

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make this possible. And Casey’s rich and detailed treatment of place shows how this is so. Places, as he understands and describes them, have a temporal and memorial dimension which is part of what makes them places and not just spaces and locations in space. And this temporal and memorial dimension is also a historical dimension. It constitutes our direct encounter with history. This may sound strange: if we identify history with the past, and the past is gone, how can we encounter it directly? But the world of places we inhabit encounters us with a significance that escapes our own experience. The landscape, with its paths and roads, is older than we are. The same can be said for large parts of the urban world of buildings, parks, and streets. Thanks to this we experience history, and only because we experience it first can we ask questions which then lead to testimony, inference, critical methods, and ultimately the representation of the past that constitutes our historical knowledge. I hope to have shown here that Casey’s work on memory and place can enrich the historical concern with place and memory that we find in the work of Nora and others. At the same time, Casey’s work can itself be enriched, I believe, by recognizing and exploiting the historical dimension that is implicit in it.

Notes 1 Pierre Nora, ed. Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997). 2 Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969). 3 See Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 4 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 5 Ibid., 15. 6 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 7 Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 396. 8 Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, 15. 9 Ibid., 23. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Gordon S. Wood, “No Thanks for the Memories,” in New York Review of Books 58, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2011): 41f. 12 See, GBP, 7ff.

4

Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology: On Edging Things Back into Place David Morris

External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish. Edmund Husserl1 The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth. Maurice Merleau-Ponty2 In this chapter I suggest how Casey opens some radical implications for phenomenology, by showing that place is what first of all grants room for the appearance of things—but only in virtue of a non-givenness. That is, place undergirds determinate things only in being something “less” than fully delimited or determinate, something less than space would be as an already given dimension. Place is thus kin to Bergson’s durée as openly generative becoming, in contrast to time as already fixed dimension. In showing us how determinate phenomena are conditioned by place as less than given, and in complementary work on “periphenomena” (see, e.g. WG, 438–48), such as glances and edges, Casey reveals what I call a subliminal dimension of phenomena: a way in which periphenomena and thence phenomena appear as delimited only by edging into what is less than delimitable. This subliminal dimension is phenomenologically paradoxical. It cannot appear as such, precisely because it is less than delimitable, vagrant with respect to classical conditions of appearance. Yet this vagrant “less than” precisely appears as subliminal within and to delimited appearances, versus being something ideal or behind appearances. Casey thus makes a twofold contribution to phenomenology. First, he goes even further than Merleau-Ponty in bringing phenomena “down to earth,” by showing how their determinacy is “grounded” in this-here earth-place. Second, he shows how this determinate delimitation involves something subliminal, something non-delimitable and non-given that is nonetheless given within places. Casey’s contribution is

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obviously complementary to themes of non-givenness in other phenomenologists, and to Heidegger’s turn from temporality to place and Abgrund (abyss, lack of ground).3 But Casey is innovative in his approach and way of displacing non-givenness from temporality into place. To wit, if Bergson shows that we have to wait for the sugar to dissolve, Casey shows that we have to unendingly get back with things into place for them to show themselves. If it is the narrator’s inner effort in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu that exemplifies a Bergsonian waiting for things, then it is Finnegans Wake, with its endless outer circulation through the Dublin landscape/dreamscape that exemplifies Casey’s effort of getting things back into place—and also a kind of vagabond spirit in Casey that runs pell-mell in their wake, to glimpse them edgewise in their “plurabilities.” (Finnegans Wake is a touchstone of The World at a Glance.) By putting himself in the wake of things and of place as less than already delimited, Casey suggests what I call a subliminal phenomenology, that, as discussed below, permutes phenomenology’s method and topic. What I offer here is my own synthesis of things learnt from Casey, through sketches that gradually lay out the phenomenological and methodological stakes, and then work into the nexus of things, places and periphenomena to build my case. My synthesis stems in particular from study of Casey’s place work; chapters 3 and 4 in WG, as distinguishing the glance and the gaze and correlative differences in the determinacy of their object (see esp. 139–47); and the discussion of the “logic of the lesser” in the concluding thoughts of The World at a Glance, but also in draft chapters of the forthcoming The World on Edge. Before I begin, two quick clarifications. First, when I talk about the non-givenness of place, I do not mean that place is not given at all. Far from it, place is most evidently given—but it is given as place precisely by not being fully given as to its determinacy. Place thus contrasts with space, which is precisely and in principle constituted as a fully determinate network of locations already capable of locating things in advance. To give an analogy, we readily grasp the mistake in speaking of time as if it is, in the sense of being a thing that could already be fully given. Time, or better, durée, is precisely in the making, time is never fully now. Similarly, Casey shows that place is never fully here. Place is what grants there being a determinate here or there, but place does so in being given on the go, in inherently leading itself out in what I call procession. Place thus manifests a determinate here precisely in being “less than” fully here—something that Casey teaches us, particularly in his “logic of the lesser.” Second, because points about non-givenness are inherently difficult, yet a bit more familiar to us as they erupt in durée, I often work with the above analogy between durée and place. But this is not meant to give durée either parity with or priority over place. Casey is displacing temporality from its privileged position in traditional philosophy by showing us the priority of place. (Indeed, without place we could not notice movement or time.) Nonetheless, the analogy helps.

Getting back with the things themselves—In place Phenomenology famously calls on philosophy to go back to the things themselves. Yet Husserl’s own effort to do so eventually reveals things as at once exceeding us yet being

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less than we took them to be. Consider perceiving something quite mundane, this lemon sitting on the counter. It looks to be given right over there. But, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, to perceive a lemon is to attend upon a thing present only in inexhaustibly turning up new aspects. A lemon shows up as truly being a lemon only insofar as its showings could possibly reveal, say, a fake, foam lemon; it is there only in the temporal incompleteness of ongoingly showing up as not otherwise than a lemon. Or consider Hollis Frampton’s film Lemon (1969), in which a lemon shows up in slowly rotating in and out of an eclipsing shadow that its surface casts over itself when lit. Lemon helps us notice a place-based (vs. temporal) incompletion of things, namely how the very skin through which things show up inherently obscures or edges out their showing up all at once in place. A thing’s givenness as determinately this or that thus rests on: what is otherwise (its turning up as not fake, etc., in temporality); and otherwhere (its turning up through other aspects now eclipsed, in place). Thus Husserl’s point that by its very nature “[e]xternal perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that . . . it is not in a position to accomplish.” Perception claims to get things in the flesh, to grasp their pith and marrow. Yet in perception the delimited, determinate givenness of objects arises only out of what, as otherwise and otherwhere, is not fully delimited or determinate. This is one of phenomenology’s great discoveries. Even greater is phenomenology’s insight that this is not a defect in things but a transcendental, that is, inherently unsurpassable, condition of their appearance. This upends Descartes’s argument that since appearance is inherently and unendingly incomplete, the real identity of something such as a candle could only be given in an idea, which alone can fully comprehend a thing’s determinacy once and for all. It also marks a turning point in a certain history of philosophy, from a claim that what is truly real must rest in something more than what is now given (e.g. in Platonist or Cartesian ideas that exceed appearances), to the discovery that what gives our sense of reality is something less than and in what now appears given. Indeed, phenomenology radically reconfigures classic philosophical problems of appearance and reality. For the Cartesian, the real conditions of something cannot appear, since appearance cannot bear the full-blown determinacy and certainty that Cartesian truth demands. The phenomenologist, on the contrary, has the radically empirical project of finding the real conditions of things in appearance, and finds that these conditions do appear. But these conditions appear only by being something peculiarly less than the full determinacy or certainty that philosophy had previously sought. The paradoxical and difficult point here is that the condition of appearance is not a given thing, substance, essence, idea, etc., but a kind of non-givenness given right within the given. In phenomenology, this non-givenness classically turns out to be temporality. But Casey shows us how the determinate appearance of things turns on place as a generative non-givenness. If Bergson’s first move is to rise above the turn of experience, to get out of the lockstep of clock time and into the durée of things, Casey’s first move is to get back into the place in which we first encounter things. And for Casey this means getting out of our lock on things as being determinately all over there, a point we’ll come back to and that comes to the fore for Casey in periphenomena. Altogether, Casey’s way of getting back with the things in place has ontological and

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methodological consequences, since it subverts the givenness of things, by leading into what I called the subliminal dimension. This connection between place, things, philosophical method, and something bigger than us is more or less explicit in Casey’s article “Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop” (1997). The article is avowedly about the need to do phenomenology together with other people in workshops, in sympathy. But there he writes (drawing on Heidegger on region and place) that “where a workshop, including a workshop in phenomenology, takes place is not indifferent to what is accomplished in that workshop. The place or region is not the mere setting—which could in principle be found anywhere—but part of the process and the product of being in a workshop.”4 Now Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others would already acknowledge that phenomenology’s method of getting back to things takes guidance from and is thence passive to things. This is what opens room for a temporal non-givenness in their phenomenology: getting back to things under the guidance of things takes time. Casey is adding that getting back to things under their guidance takes place. Phenomenology is not just a working together with things or with people, but with place, in a sort of sympathetic wandering that is placial kin to a Bergsonian intuition of durée. On this front, Casey’s contribution is radical precisely because it shows how non-givenness comes from outside: while we could think that the non-givenness of temporality springs from a sort of insufficiency or passivity internal to the subject, we cannot think this with place. The non-givenness of place indicates a kind of passivity or sympathy that we have, even as reflecting philosophers, with something much bigger than us. Hence my image above of Casey’s phenomenology as methodologically vagabond or subliminal in its edgewise, peripheral approach to things, from their periphery and in their wake (vs. a more traditional head-long approach to abstract things in their essence).5 To understand how this is so, and how a sympathy with places puts us in the wake of something subliminal, I now conduct a brief, Casey-informed study of the way that the identity of places, and things in places, involves something less than determinate delimitation, showing how this issue comes to the fore for Casey in periphenomena such as the glance and the edge.

Places, edges, and the glance: Subliminal delimitation To frame my study, let me note that across his career, Casey separates out key terms such as place versus space; glance versus gaze; landscape versus geography; horizon, surface or edge versus object.6 While the former terms in each pair have typically been overlooked in philosophy because they have something less than classical clarity and distinctness, Casey precisely shows how this lack of delimitation is crucial and productive: the pairs in fact intermingle, such that the former term in each pair has a primacy in engendering or enabling the latter. Further, in showing this, Casey thereby reveals an affinity between place, glance, landscape, horizon, and edge as generative terms involving non-givenness. This affinity stands in contrast to the affinity between the gaze, space, geography, and objects, as involving full givenness. (These contrasting affinities are quite apparent in the study of the glance vs. the gaze, and their respective

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“objects,” in The World at a Glance, chapters 3 and 4.) What I want to show is that the affinity of place, glances, and edges turns on the subliminal. I will work into this point through the glance. Husserl shows us how we find, on philosophical reflection, that perception’s claim to getting determinate objects in the flesh (the determinate lemon as something more than is now given in the profile now given us) in fact turns on horizons that are less than determinate. Horizons at once undermine and undergird determinacy and so pose a reflective challenge to philosophies of presence/givenness. Casey gets us to notice how this turn from determinate objects to indeterminate horizons, from the more to the less, is at work within experience itself, prior to reflection—once we notice the difference between gazing and glancing. This detection of horizonality as manifest right within experience (and not just on reflection) is what helps Casey relocate non-givenness within experience and ultimately place. Indeed, Casey’s innovation (I think) is showing how experience is itself sensitive to horizonality. This is innovative because horizonality, as a peculiar kind of vanishing that never shows up in delimitable terms, would seem to elude sensing and appearance. Nonetheless, Casey shows how this sort of vanishing horizonality shows up for my glance, but not my gaze. We will see that this is because glancing opens onto the non-givenness of place. In more technical terms, Casey’s innovation is attending to phenomenologically peculiar periphenomena, such as the glance or edge, that in themselves manifest a non-givenness that would otherwise be beneath our notice, and thus be grasped only through reflection. But the glance notices what is beneath notice, something subliminal, that in fact also “stands beneath” (supports) our encounter with things noticed. I will now lay out this point about the gaze versus the glance, linking it to place and the subliminal, via issues of periphenomena.7 My gaze presumes to get the lemon as object, all there in the flesh. My glance, however, as ongoingly alighting on various surfaces of the lemon, and glancing off them to other surfaces, already and of itself “gets” that the lemon is not all given as an object. We can notice this right in the feeling of gazing versus glancing, and this will help us see how place is an underlying issue. My gaze establishes its own firm footing, its own platform from which to gaze (or at least it presumes it is doing so). In gazing I can thus lose the feeling of a myself who is over here and connected with things in a bodily way. (This is especially so in a contemplative gaze.) In glancing, though, I myself feel my glance glancing off one thing/place to another, and thus feel myself being over here in a bodily way, oriented by surfaces and places over there. This is particularly noticeable when my glancing falls through and loses its footing, when I can’t make sense of things in a glance. This makes me feel disoriented—but disoriented as being in this-here place and as unable to find my way around (vs. being altogether unoriented, without any context). My glancing, then, puts me in place, and puts me in relation to things in their place; it is openly oriented by things in places, and is also thereby ready to be disoriented, to not get the lemon in a glance. My glance is not prejudiced toward the object-being of the lemon as all given, whereas my gaze precisely presumes and looks for just this sort of abstract object-being. Further, where my gaze seeks to lock down what it looks at as an already given object, my glance precisely is an openness to something more, something I keep glancing around for—yet I encounter that something more precisely in being involved

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with and open to something less than fully given, in my glance alighting on surfaces that keep on leading to more. My glance, then, is sensitive to things not being all given, to something less than fully given in what is given. How does this work? Where does this generative “less than” come from? How can I be sensitive to something less than the given in the given? I contend that place is fundamental here. Consider Casey’s contrast between the gaze as having a determinate object (which object the gaze perceives as having its own inner depths), and glancing as a genius for sensing surfaces (without perceiving them in their depths). Now go and see whether you can gaze upon place itself as an object in depth. I contend that you cannot. You may gaze upon a landmark, or a building or thing in a place, or perhaps a small and subtended place, or a large place if you are looking at it from a very great distance. But you cannot gaze upon place itself. When you get part of a place in view as an object with its own depth, it is precisely lost to you as place itself. For example, from my window I can gaze upon Mont Royal as a famous geographical formation and landmark in Montreal, or I can glance at it as a place that is part of a larger place. (The latter actually happens much more often and spontaneously when catching site of Mont Royal at the end of a cross-street, vs. looking from my window.) In gazing, I place the mountain as a big lump or bump that sits in a particular spot within Montreal’s geography, whereas in glancing I am placed and pulled into a landscape that invites and undergirds my movement and opens places for things and determinate places to appear. Several things are going on here, that lead one into the other. First, place works as a ground in which figures can appear. To do this work, it cannot itself appear as a determinate figure. Second, when a place appears as a determinate figure, it is all too delimited to be place itself. Most of all, this is because a place that appears as a determinate figure is delimited as outside of you and you outside of it—the mountain as an object all over there, not as an open mountainscape continuous with here. Consider that an horizon would no longer be an horizon if you could actually arrive at it as a determinate object—it would lose its horizon-being. Now place is supposed to be that inside of which you and things appear as alongside one another. (In this one respect, place is like Kantian space.) But if place is delimited as over there, as one of the things that is alongside and outside you, then it is no longer place. If you can get out of it, it’s not place itself that you’re involved with; it’s just a part of place. (Just as if you can stop it, or not be part of it, it’s not temporality itself you’re involved with, but a moment in/of time.) Third, this means that place is place by leading from within, by being its own criterion for its identity. What I am getting at here is an intensity of place analogous to the intensity of Bergsonian durée. You cannot properly determine the identity of a place by measuring it against some outside standard. Mont Royal just is Mont Royal, as irreplaceable and unique in its place as your birth or this moment of decision are in durée. A moment of decision is not properly identified, as to its decisiveness, by the clock, even if such a clock time measure does indicate the moment when it uniquely happened. What properly identifies the decision is all the events coiling up and unleashing into the decision, which, if it is really and properly a decision, changes the way durée goes for you. Similarly, a place is not properly identified by

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where it happens to be according to geographical coordinates, even if that can indicate where it uniquely is. What properly identifies a place is the way it leads into and out of other places, as part of place itself. What properly identifies Mont Royal is not its geographical location, but the landscape or terrain that it itself is, the way this sets up certain rhythms of unfolding of places into one another. Durée, Bergson urges, is not properly determined by breaking it down into bits that are laid outside and alongside one another (i.e. extensively) but in terms of a durational intensity in which temporal moments interweave in an unfolding whole. Similarly, Casey shows us, and I am urging, that place is not properly determined by breaking it down into geographical locations, bits or parts laid outside and alongside one another (this procedure turns it into space) but in terms of what I call an inner processional intensity, that is, in places leading into one another in an unfolding place-whole. It is that processional dynamic of parts of place leading to one another that catches our bodily glance (see e.g. WG, 141–42), and that is cut off by the gaze that wants to place things as over there, beyond us, without being caught in the procession of place. It is this processional dynamic, which you feel in proceeding through place, that is missed and retrieved when you long for and return to a place you used to live. Fourth, this means that place as a whole cannot be delimited or rendered determinate once and for all. It is determinate, but only by way of its inner, processional intensity. That is, place is determinate only by harboring an inner dynamic that subverts determination and delimitation, by spilling over limits. Or, better, it appears determinate for us only to the extent that we can get out of this procession, or have it go very slowly. (Places thus manifest their determinacy in relation to the timescales of processional movement. This becomes noticeable for the mariner or diver who proceeds through liquid environments with their own movement; a place of safe-harbor can get blown away in a storm. On land, this point is not usually noticed. But an earthquake can shake up a place’s identity, rendering it unrecognizable; conversely, taking time to live in a place can bring out its identity.) This issue of place being determinate only by way of a kind of halt in an inescapable procession is what Casey gets us to notice in edges. And edges are where Casey most of all detects the generative logic of the “less in the more,” “the more in the less.” In The World on Edge, Casey argues that in edges we find “less in more” and “more in less” because edges are determinately the edges they are only in “running out,” in going forward by way of not going any further, by not overstepping the limit they show themselves to be. If you moved the edge of the garden just a little bit forward, it would not be that edge anymore. The garden edge edges by not edging forward any further, by running out as edge. The edge is thus otherwhere than where it shows itself to be: its determinacy is not located in the edge itself, it is rather dis-located, or de-localized; it is what I called processional. An analogy with durée will again help: the determinate conclusiveness of the symphony’s concluding note does not quite happen in the moment when the note sounds, but is rather born out of and arises within the coiling movement of the symphony as a whole. Similarly with edges. They are born out of a dynamic such that they cannot be delimited as all there where they look to be. They are something less than the determinate hard-edge they present to our gaze. But it is only in being precisely less than that, by not fully fleshing out all that they could

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be, that they are something more, namely a bounding that determinately demarcates things. In other words, edges are what they are only in playing off the processional dynamic of place as inherently leading into further place, and in calling a halt within this dynamic. This is what happens in the garden edge. At the start we noticed, on reflection, that a lemon too, in obscuring itself in its very showing and not showing up all at once, is in fact otherwhere than where it shows itself to be. What’s interesting about edges is that if you look at them carefully enough, as Casey does, they themselves thematize this otherwhereness of their showing. They themselves show that they are delimited in virtue of where they do not go. Thus when we, with Casey, notice the edge of things, versus the things they are edges of, when we notice the periphenomena and not just the phenomena, what we are led to notice is this ontological peculiarity of delimitation, in virtue of which edges, and thence things too, are delimited only by being less than delimited, only by teetering into something else. This is precisely what catches our glance: the way the surface or edge of something verges into something else, the way one place verges into another. The gaze, in contrast, precisely has to overlook these edge dynamics to place the thing (or a place) as all there and delimited. When you gaze on the garden or mountain as an object all there, it encompasses and includes its edges as its definitive limits; when you just glance around at the garden or mountain as places in which to go, your glance very often skips over or through these edges; and when your effort to gaze at the mountain can’t find its defining edges, you lose sight of it as an object. We sometimes talk of an edgy character, someone kind of nervous and fidgety, not at one with themselves, and thus hard to bring into firm resolve. They’re not quite there, where they are, yet they are the edgy character that they are precisely through this kind of back and forth between themselves and other things. Casey’s study of glancing, edges, and things in place lets us notice how things like mountains are edgy in this sense: determinately what they are precisely and only through an edginess that moves back and forth across them and place itself as a larger dynamic. What we are noticing here is how all things receive their delimitation through a dynamic that is not in the end or at bottom delimitable, for the sort of delimitation or edging that arises in place always entails a halt in a processional overstepping that in fact leads to some further place. Put otherwise, determining a moment in time entails an already enduring and undelimitable durée in which that moment intensively figures as the moment it is. Determining a delimited thing in place entails an already proceeding place in which that thing figures as the thing it is, with its edges. But that already proceeding place can never itself be made determinate. Edges are a sort of phenomenological exemplification of this dynamic, because they are condensed out of it. This dynamic itself, though, can never appear as such, because it is a dynamic of what cannot be delimited, it is a dynamic of something too big and indefinite to appear, a dynamic that could appear only if we could get outside of it and delimit it from us—but this is precisely what we cannot do, for the dynamic in question is the dynamic of delimitation as such, a dynamic endogenous to delimitation. It is a condition of appearance that cannot itself appear, a processionality of place recessionally at work in all things. This is why I call it subliminal: a dynamic at work in every delimitation of place and thing, but a dynamic that cannot itself be delimited, and so cannot itself

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appear, insofar as appearance is determinate appearance. But, on the other hand, this dynamic figures in every appearance, as its subliminal condition, and this is what edges indicate and glances tumble onto. Casey’s phenomenology is thus subliminal in its method because it approaches things peripherally: it wanders about so as to let things catch our glance before we have objectified things with our gaze; this lets us catch hold of periphenomena that can reveal, within the phenomena themselves, telltales of a nonappearing non-givenness that nonetheless appears and is given in each and every phenomenon. And Casey’s phenomenology is subliminal in its topic, since what it reveals is that the condition of appearance of delimited things is place as not itself susceptible of full delimitation, since such delimitation always, inherently, and endogenously proceeds into further moves of delimitation. Casey shows us how there is no bottom to place, as there is no end to time. Place is both beneath and beyond delimitation.

Notes 1 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, 2001), 39 [HUA XI 3.5]. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. and trans. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 13. 3 For a succinct introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy of Abgrund and its significance, see John Sallis, “Grounders of the Abyss,” in Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott, Susan M. Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); for Heidegger on place, see FP and Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 4 Edward S. Casey, “Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop,” Human Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 172, my emphasis. 5 In making this point, I am noting something discussed by Kleinberg-Levin, namely the way that Casey’s phenomenology is driven by the particularities and details of things, and the way it multiplies versus essentializes phenomena. See David Kleinberg-Levin, “A Review of The World at a Glance,” Hyperion IV, no. 1 (2009): 131–40. 6 Likely we could add soul versus spirit to this series. 7 This discussion is drawn from WG, chapters 3 and 4.

5

The Remembrance of Place Jeff Malpas

Remembrance is placement into being itself.

Martin Heidegger1

There is a long tradition, one that goes back to at least to Plato, that takes thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, to be essentially a form of remembrance. Yet as remembrance, thinking is also understood as a return, a coming-back, a placing or re-placing—with the caveat that it is a placing back into that which we never really leave.2 This tradition is particularly strong among thinkers within the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions. As it stands firmly within a phenomenological tradition, so Ed Casey’s work exhibits this same entanglement of thinking with remembering and with placing. Part of what is especially noteworthy about Casey’s work, however, is that it also thematizes this very entanglement. For me, Casey’s work has been inspirational in exemplifying a mode of philosophical thinking that is attentive to place and memory, while also providing one of the pioneering explorations of those same concepts—an exploration that continues to move into and explore new territories. In this essay, I want to return to an issue that opened up between Casey and myself some years ago, in an exchange over my book, Place and Experience, that focused in part on what Casey then called the “perdurance” of place,3 and that seems itself closely connected to an argument advanced by Casey in Remembering to the effect that place imparts a “fixity” to memory that memory would not otherwise possess. Casey’s response to my own work in that exchange was, as it has always been, while not uncritical, extremely generous, and I am very appreciative of the contact I have had with Casey over the years. The issue to which I want to return here, then, does not represent a point of deep division between us, but emerges as significant only because of what unites us, especially our common concern for place, and for memory. In Remembering, Casey asks: “Isn’t memory a matter of the past? Is it not primarily a temporal phenomenon? How can we think of it otherwise after Kant and Husserl— not to mention Aristotle, who said straightforwardly that ‘memory is of the past’?” (REM, 181) Casey’s response is that if remembering were indeed a purely temporal

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phenomenon, then “[i]t would remain largely disembodied” (REM, 182). We might also ask, however, what it could mean for memory to be purely temporal—could we even make sense of such an idea? My own view, and one that I have argued for elsewhere, is that memory—or at least those forms of memory that involve some personal as opposed to generic content (although one might say that such “generic” memory, understood as the mere retention of information or image, is memory only in an impoverished sense4)—cannot be understood independently of the place in which the memory is located. As such, memory always stands in relation to the temporal and the spatial, which are themselves held together in place. Memory that was disembodied, that was therefore unplaced, would be no memory at all. The argument for this conclusion is one that I have advanced in detail elsewhere and space does not permit me to recapitulate that argument here.5 It depends, however, on understanding memory, and all our thinking and feeling, as embedded in a topology that constitutes itself as a dynamic and complex unity, the elements of which are shaped through their interaction and interrelation. The operation of memory is itself a matter of the constant unfolding of remembrance in a way that is interdependent with the unfolding of thought and action, and of self and world within this topological unity.6 It is important to note that the topology that is at work here cannot be understood in purely temporal or spatial terms alone. As a happening of place it is a temporalizing of time and a spatializing of space (a way of putting things that originally appears in Heidegger7) that cannot be reduced to time or space alone, nor to any simply conjoining of these understood as otherwise independent elements. Nor can this happening of place be construed as a subjective happening, or as objective either, since it is that on which the very distinction between subject and object depends. The topology that is evident here embodies and expresses the necessary interdependence and interrelation that obtains between spatiality and temporality, as well as between subject and object, between self and other, between self and world.8 Although memory is often understood in ways that obscure, especially through the focus on the temporal, the topology in which memory is embedded, the investigation of memory can also enable that topology to be brought to the fore in an exemplary fashion. In Remembering, Casey follows just such a trail from memory to place. The route he follows is one that is heavily dependent on the markings laid out by the phenomenological tradition, but it is one that looks specifically to the phenomenon of embodiment for its direction (see REM, 182). The notion of embodiment that Casey deploys, however, is essentially one that ties embodiment to emplacement. To be embodied is, ipso facto, to be emplaced, and it is the role of place, rather than of the body alone (whatever that might be), to which Casey draws attention. Indeed, in the account that Casey lays out of the history of Western philosophical thinking about place in The Fate of Place, it is the focus on the body that provides one of the key means by which place reappears, and that there operates as a counter to the priority given to space (or at least to space understood as homogenous extension), just as, when it comes to memory, it also operates as a counter to the priority accorded to time. That the importance of place to memory has been forgotten in the face of a philosophical preoccupation with the temporal dimensions of memory is partly a consequence of the way memory itself has been understood. Yet it cannot be treated as

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a result only of a failure to attend to the placed character of memory as such. Indeed, it also derives, perhaps more fundamentally, from a more general and pervasive philosophical tendency to give priority to temporality in the understanding of the world, and especially in the understanding of the human. Indeed, inasmuch as the focus on the human has often come to take the form of a focus on the subject, so the subject has also come to be understood in temporal terms. So strong is this tendency that a recent history of “continental” thought, John McCumber’s Time and Philosophy, takes time as its primary focus, and this can be said merely to reflect the modern preoccupation with the twin themes of subjectivity and temporality.9 Such “temporalism” is a feature of modern thought even among those thinkers who might otherwise be thought to attend specifically to the placed character of existence. Thus Heidegger’s Being and Time is, as Heidegger himself acknowledged, rendered problematic partly by its attempt to make time the foundation even for space (and some residue of that temporalism remains in Heidegger’s thinking almost to the very end), as well as by the subjectivist tendency that itself seems embedded in Heidegger’s own understanding of time and space within that work. Indeed, the centrality of Being and Time in twentieth-century European thought is in part due to the way it represents the culmination of a certain temporalist trajectory in thinking, at the same time as it is also positioned within the development of Heideggerian topology in which it is place that comes increasingly to prominence.10 In the face of such temporalism, there is a strong tendency, particularly when it comes to the discussion of memory, to counter the overemphasis on time by instead emphasizing space—as both Casey and I have sometimes done. Yet strictly speaking, unless one is careful here, such a countermove threatens to remain within, and even to reinforce, the same problematic dichotomy on which temporalism is itself based. This is one reason why place, as that in which time and space, as well as subjectivity and objectivity, are held together, is such a central concept here. Moreover, the rise of a temporal prejudice in thinking is itself a consequence of the demise of place, and the separation out of the notion of place from discrete concepts of space and time (there is no doubt that it also has close connections to eschatological concerns), just as it is also associated with a tendency to give diminished attention to the singularity of existence and so to its associated embodiment. In this respect, I would argue that the rise of space that Casey charts in The Fate of Place is also accompanied by a rise in the concept of time—so that what we see is indeed the relative disappearance of place as a result of its dissolution into its temporal and spatial aspects—although it is the rise of a concept of time that is itself constantly threatened by the overarching dominance of a particular conceptualization of space. If, within the history of Western thought, time comes increasingly to be associated with a distinct notion of subjectivity, then so also is space increasingly associated with an equally distinct notion of objectivity, and it is the objective that often exercises the greater influence. The separating out of space and time is thus parallel to the separating of subject from object, with the consequence that both pairs of terms, rather than being viewed as co-relative, appear as apart from, although potentially threatened by the other. The different tendencies in thinking to which the bifurcation of place into time and space thus gives rise to obvious tensions—tensions that can be seen to run throughout much

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of modern and contemporary thought. While the thinking of subjectivity seems to lead inexorably towards the primacy of temporality, there is also a tendency for temporality to fall under the sway of spatiality, and so under the sway of an objectivized mode of understanding. Thus, within modern thought, one finds both a shift toward the assertion of the temporal over and against the spatial at the same time as one also encounters the rise of an all-encompassing notion of spatiality. Almost certainly, these tensions are inevitable once one separates out notions of time and space, and so also of the co-related notions of subjectivity and objectivity, from the more primordial concept of place. Equally inevitable would seem to be the tendency for these tensions often to be resolved in favor of the dominance of spatiality as it is conjoined with objectivity. Nowhere is the dominance of an objectivized spatiality more evident than in modern physical theory in which time increasingly appears as merely another dimension additional to the spatial dimensions.11 The so-called continuum theory of space-time does not establish the proper belonging together of the temporal with the spatial (which is one reason why space-time is quite distinct from the time-space that figures in Heidegger’s middle and later thinking12), but rather the incorporation of the temporal into a mode of the spatial. Essentially time becomes another form of objectivized extension.13 Any genuine rethinking of memory cannot be pursued other than in connection with the rethinking of place—the rethinking of the one is intimately bound up with the rethinking of the other. It is thus that Casey’s exploration of memory in Remembering leads him in the direction, not just of body, but also of place itself, and why too the detailed investigations of place that have followed in works like Getting Back into Place, The Fate of Place, The World at a Glance and elsewhere seem not only to take the form of a remembering, but also to move always within the same neighborhood, so that the investigation of place is never far removed from the investigation of remembering. Yet given the history of Western philosophical thought that lies in the background, which Casey himself partly uncovers in The Fate of Place, the rethinking of memory and place that is required here cannot be pursued independently of the rethinking of time and space, as well as of subjectivity and objectivity. If Casey does not always, in his own investigations, directly thematize the rethinking of these latter concepts (although the possibility of a thinking of space differently is certainly a theme that appears in The Fate of Place), this is only because these are already largely taken up in the rethinking of place itself, and in Casey’s close attentiveness to the phenomena at issue (the lack of any direct thematization may also be said to follow from Casey’s more phenomenologically descriptive approach). The way the question of memory does indeed open up into the question of place, and thereby also into questions of space and time, subject and object, self and world, is testimony to the philosophical significance that attaches to memory. The rethinking of memory is not just a rethinking of some particular capacity or mode of engagement; instead, genuinely to approach the question of memory—of remembering or of remembrance—is also to approach the question of thinking and of place, of thinking as itself remembrance, and of remembrance as itself placing. Both Casey and I are in fundamental agreement about the basic account of the relation memory and place that I have sketched out above. Yet Casey also seems, at least in Remembering, to maintain a certain ordering of the relation between memory and

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place that is absent from my own account. Specifically, Casey argues that the stability that appears to belong to memories—a stability that is at the heart of the possibility of remembering—derives from the way memories are contained spatially, which means, the way memories are held in place. In fact, it is this line of reasoning that seems to underpin Casey’s claim—and the claim itself is one with which I concur—that memory and remembering cannot be primarily temporal in character. Time, argues Casey, is essentially dispersive, whereas it is space, and properly place, which also means our bodily emplacement, that gathers and holds memory—and so Casey concludes that “[i]f memories are motionless, this is the work of the places in which they come to inhere so deeply” (REM, 215). Here place seems to have a certain priority in relation to memory—memory, one might say, begins in place. The considerations that lead Casey to this conclusion are deeply bound up with his rethinking of place (indeed, it is a notable feature of Casey’s exploration of memory in Remembering that place seems to emerge of its own accord into the center of his account), and his recognition of the centrality of place, not only to memory, but also to human existence as such. They derive from Casey’s own phenomenological investigations, and are reinforced by consideration, among other things, of the ancient tradition of the “art of memory.” The ars memorative takes memory to be closely associated with place, and uses this as the basis for a technique of remembering that operates through the connecting of what is to be remembered to specific things or locations that are housed within a larger architectural structure—within a theatre or palace of memory.14 Here, it seems, is a neat exemplification and demonstration of the powerful connection of memory to place, and more than this, of the way place does indeed serve to fix memories and to enable remembering. The “priority” of place in relation to memory that seems to become apparent here (and I use the term “priority” here with some caution since it is not a way of putting things that appears in Casey) leads to a similar priority being accorded to place in relation to time. If time contains an essential mobility within it, such that it constantly disperses, then “by its very immobility—through the stolid concreteness of things set within pathways and horizons—place acts to contain time itself,” and Casey adds “This is not to trivialize time but to make it into a dimension of space through the active influence of place” (REM, 214). Here place takes on a solidity, a relative permanency even, that seems directly counterposed to the apparent fluidity of time. Elsewhere, in a discussion of my work, this emphasis on place as acting to “contain time” appears in a slightly different, but nevertheless related way, in terms of what Casey refers to as the perduring, or “relatively persistent,” character of place,15 in contrast to my own tendency to talk of the “fragility” of place.16 In referring to place as “fragile,” my point was not to deny that places may indeed appear as perduring, but rather to emphasize the character of human selves as possessed of an essential fragility in virtue of their necessary entanglement with place. In Place and Experience, the use of the term “fragility” was also intended to evoke a set of ethical considerations: that which is fragile is also that which can only be sustained through care and attentive concern, and its fragility may even be said to underpin its significance and worth. The fragility that I argue attaches to human selves or persons, and not solely to human lives, is a fragility that reflects the fragility of place, but, once again, this is not in the sense that places

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lack any capacity to endure. Indeed, the enduring of place does not itself occur merely through the standing firm against change or loss, and certainly not through any simple resistance to time. The enduring of place occurs though the constant and dynamic unfolding of place itself, and this enduring is also compatible with place’s essential fragility. Such fragility is a consequence of the complex and dynamic relationality that is constitutive of place, just as it is also constitutive of the human. The fragility of place means that place too requires our care and concern—not only in the sense demanded by contemporary environmentalism (although that is not absent), but also in the sense in which the “happening” of place (which is also the happening of time) is something to which we contribute just as we are also shaped by it, and in which our own being is thereby at issue. It is noteworthy that, in the passage I quoted above, Casey indicates that his emphasis on the “perduringness” of place is “doubtless as a result of having come to the topic itself from an earlier treatment of ‘place memory.’”17 The idea that places “fix” memory through bringing time into the domain of space, and so of place, can certainly be seen as another form of the idea that places perdure, and one might argue that a concern with how memory might be fixed in the face of the dispersing tendency of time could indeed lead to a conception of place as perduring, and so as providing the requisite fixing of memory. On this reading, the effectiveness as a mnemonic technique of the practice of associating what is to be remembered with a specific location within a larger locational structure—the technique associated with the ars memorativa—could be seen to itself derive from the character of places as having this capacity to resist the fluid and mobile character of temporality. Yet in this latter case, the supposed power of place to resist the temporal, and so to give a secure foundation to memory, is surely cast in question by the fact that the places—the specific locations and the larger locational frame that encompasses them—that are deployed by practitioners of the ars memorative need not themselves have any existence other than as remembered.18 What the ars memorative and the method of loci may thus be taken to show is not so much the character of place as a foundation for memory, but rather the way place and memory are essentially intertwined (and are both relationally articulated). A similar point can be made in relation to the supposedly perduring character of place. The perdurance of place can be said to depend on the perduring character of memory that allows us to grasp a place as the same. Moreover, as in the case of the ars memorative, this does not show that place is therefore any less significant in relation to memory, but quite the opposite—memory and place are shown to be even more closely linked than might be suggested by the idea of place as somehow the foundation for memory: to remember is to re-emplace oneself, or to be so re-emplaced19—and perhaps the reverse also holds, perhaps to be emplaced is also to remember. In some respects, Casey’s emphasis on place as perduring and as what gives fixity and stability to memory can be seen as itself arising out of a reaction against the temporalist prejudice that I discussed above. As such, it can also be read as depending upon an opposition between the supposed mobility and fluidity of time and the relative fixity and stability of space, and so also of place. The way Casey maintains place as the key concept here means that his account avoids the mistake of simply countering the temporal with the spatial, and yet the nature of that account also seems implicitly to set

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place in opposition to the temporal, rather than allowing the temporal aspect of place itself, or better, the topological character of the temporal, to be drawn forth. Memory does not stand apart from place, so that perhaps the very idea of place-memory already has the capacity to mislead in that it suggests that there is a specific form of memory that belongs to place, whereas memory stands essentially in a relation to place, so that all remembering takes place in and through place—and not only those memories that are specifically of particular places. Casey is right to claim that memory cannot be wholly temporal in character, and he is also correct when he argues that if it were, it would be “largely disembodied,” and therefore lacking in orientation. Such a purely temporalized “memory,” if that makes any sense, would also, in lacking any sense of its own placedness, lack any sense of its own subjectivity (which means it would lack any sense of objectivity as well)—which simply underlines the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of making sense of such a notion. Yet it is easy to miss the fact that an exactly analogous point can be said to apply in respect of space (even though the point is clearly evident from the perspective of memory): if one looks to a purely spatial frame, and not only with respect to the purely temporal, there is no perspective or position either. The reason for this is simple: space cannot, on its own, provide any genuine sense of orientation, because orientation presupposes a potential for action (it is not a matter of any merely static positioning), and in the absence of time, neither action nor the potential for it are possible. To take the point a little further, neither can one think embodiment in purely spatial terms. The symmetry that obtains between space and time here applies equally to an idea that seems to lie in the background of Casey’s argument concerning place as fixing memory, namely, that time disperses while space gathers.20 Just as time is necessary for orientation, so one might be led to argue that it is time that gathers, while space disperses. This is, in fact, just how Heidegger views matters in Being and Time where the spatial dispersal of Dasein is overcome through the unifying character of ecstatic temporality.21 In fact, neither time nor space alone has the character of being solely unifying or dispersing, just as mere space does not have the capacity to stabilize nor time alone to orient. In the final chapter of Remembering, Casey notes the character of his analysis as having an apparently “exterocentric” direction—as taking memory outward from the mind into the world. The idea of space and place as giving fixity to memory would seem to be an important instance of this sort of outwardly directed movement. Yet as Casey also notes, such exterocentrism might seem to give rise to a loss in any sense of memory as personal or as one’s “own”—a loss of the way memory connects to the self. In response, and taking a cue from Heidegger, Casey argues that memory is essentially that “in-gathering” by means of which “we finally become ourselves” (REM, 299 and 292)—an in-gathering that not only encompasses the formation of memories (as well as forgetting), but also their interweaving in such a way as to constitute an overarching sense of personal identity (REM, 294–95). What is at issue in Casey’s discussion is a problem familiar from the history of philosophy: how are we to understand the unity of the self? In Casey’s account, place, and so also space, enables memories to be localized, but that localization is external, and so, as Casey acknowledges, seems not to carry any sense of the way memories are personalized, or, as one might also put matters, of the way memories are unified as being “mine.” As set out in the concluding

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chapter of Remembering, Casey’s response seems to depend on taking the self to be unified by memory, through treating memory as essentially unifying, although what is unified is both the self, which is made from memories, and also the memories of which the self is made (since part of what is at issue is the “mineness” of those very memories). The difficulty, however, is that this seems simply to assert the character of memory as unifying rather than to explain it, and to do so, moreover, in the face of an initial question directed at the unity of memory as such—since it is the apparent externalization of memory, and so, in a certain sense, its dispersal in relation to the self as that occurs through its fixing in relation to space and place, that gives rise to the seeming depersonalization of memory. From a temporalist perspective, one might be inclined to argue that the problem that appears here is the inevitable result of the neglect of time in favor of space, and that the issue of the unity of the self and of memory can only be resolved by recognizing the essentially temporal character of both, and also the character of time as that which properly unifies (which is more or less the approach exemplified in Being and Time). Yet as we have already seen, time alone, no more than space, cannot achieve the unity that is required here. The problem is not one to be solved by appeal to either temporal or spatial analyses alone, not even by a spatial analysis that incorporates time into space, and space into place. Nevertheless, place is the key concept that is needed here, and Casey’s discussion does indeed move in the right direction. Casey’s treatment of memory as “in-gathering” is explicitly topological. Thus Casey talks of memory as “a matrix of matrices” that is both formal and material. Its material character is given in “the thick autonomy through which [the] subject realizes its freedom” and its formal character is evident in memory as a “topologically defined network in which items can be allotted locations” (REM, 294). “Matrix” is one of the terms sometimes used as a translation for the Greek term chôra as it appears in Plato’s Timaeus,22 and the term is also variously translated as space, “interval,” or place. Casey’s use of “matrix” reinforces the connection with place such that what might be said to appear here is an account of memory as place, and as a place that also incorporates other places within it. Place exhibits the same material and formal properties, the same depth and open extendedness (the latter being one way of understanding the idea of “a topologically defined network”), that in Casey’s account accrue to memory. On the face of it, however, this approach might still be seen to present problems as a way of dealing with the supposed “exterocentrism” that Casey acknowledges as a potential difficulty, since such “exterocentrism” appears to arise as a result of Casey’s emphasis on precisely the character of memory as tied to space and to place. There is a potential problem if one treats the account of place at issue here as one that is oriented toward the spatial over and against the temporal. Yet the two dimensions that are identified in Casey’s discussion of memory as matrix seem obviously to connect with what are properly the two aspects that belong originally to place, namely, time, which here appears as freedom and depth, and space, which appears as the open domain within with a network of locations is possible. In this way, one might say that memory turns out to be the original interplay of temporality and spatiality within the overarching unity of place (a unity based, it should be noted, in place as essentially bounded 23), which operates both in relation to the internality, also externalized, of the self, and the externality, also

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internalized, of the world. Casey’s treatment of memory as matrix, of memory as place, thus puts into question the very dichotomy that appears to be at work in the idea that Casey’s topological account of memory might be overly “exterocentric,” and that it may thereby lead to a neglect of the “internality” that belongs to the self. The question of the unity of memory and of self, which is also the question of the autonomy of memory, is resolved in Casey’s account by reference to the unity of place itself—the “in-gathering” character of memory is nothing other than the “in-gathering” character of place. This is a conclusion that may be thought to be presaged by Casey’s emphasis, in arguing against the character of memory as only “of the past,” on the need for memory to be embodied, and so for memory to be placed, especially since Casey also seems to see this as operating against the supposedly dispersive character of time. Yet, as we saw in the discussion above, the placed character of memory cannot be understood in terms that privilege the spatial over the temporal. Both place and memory have an essentially temporal and spatial dimension. Moreover, although place encompasses both externality and internality, and memory can be understood as both internalized and externalized, still there is a sense in which memory can be understood as the very internality of place.24 On this basis the self has to be understood as itself a formation of place that occurs within place even as it also constitutes a certain mode of place. It also means that place never appears other than as it is already taken up in memory, even if the memories that attach to any particular place are fragmentary, associative, or recent— only on the basis of memory are we oriented, and only as we are oriented are we placed. We thus find ourselves in the world, which means we only find ourselves at all, in and through memory, and although memory is itself only to be approached in and through place, we cannot approach place independently of memory either. Consequently, if we are to say that memory begins in place, so we must also say that place begins in memory—to remember is to be emplaced, and to be emplaced is, indeed, to remember.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 78. 2 See Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 3 See Edward S. Casey, “J. E. Malpas’s Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Converging and Diverging in/on Place,” Philosophy & Geography 4 (2001): 225–30; and also Jeff Malpas, “Comparing Topographies: Across Paths/Around Place: A Reply to Casey,” Philosophy & Geography 4, no. 2 (2001): 231–38. 4 Casey briefly considers such “generic” memory—see REM, 32–33. 5 See Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 Ibid., chapter three; and also Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, chapter ten. 7 See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), esp. §§267–68 and §§238–42.

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  8 See Malpas, Place and Experience, 40–43.   9 John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (London: Acumen, 2011). 10 See Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 11 See the discussion of some of these issues in Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Whether this approach to time and space is appropriate to physical theory is not at issue here, although there is an underlying issue as to whether physical theory should be taken as ontologically or philosophically primary. 12 Heidegger is himself critical of the prioritization of space over time, but the way this plays out in Being and Time essentially leads Heidegger to assert the primacy of time over space—see Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, chapter three. 13 Although this is not to ignore the fact that there remain disagreements within physical theory about exactly how exactly time is to be understood in relation to space—for instance, do temporally extended things have temporal parts in the way that spatially extended things have spatial parts? 14 See REM, 182–83; see also Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). 15 Casey, “J. E. Malpas’s Place and Experience,” 227–28. 16 Malpas, Place and Experience, 190–93. 17 Casey, “J. E. Malpas’s Place and Experience,” 227. 18 The method of loci may use actual places, but also imagined or fictitious places—see REM, 183. 19 Such “re-emplacing” is not the same as the original “placing” that it recalls. It cannot be so partly because it occurs in the midst our being already placed, and as such, it cannot appear as a place within or upon which we can act, not even in the sense of being able to change our point of view or direction of attention. Particular memories are, in this sense, immobile and fixed, although not because of their tie to place, but rather because of their character as modes of re-emplacement. 20 The supposedly dispersive character of time is something Casey notes in Remembering, near the very beginning of his discussion of “place-memory,” REM, 181–82. 21 See Heidegger’s Topology, 96–146. In Contributions, however, like Casey, Heidegger presents time as dispersing and space as gathering. 22 See Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 48e–49a. 23 The centrality of the connection between place and boundary has become increasingly clear in Casey’s work as well as my own. The problem of unity can be understood as identical with the problem of boundedness, and it is thus that place must be a key notion, whether recognized or not, in any discussion of unity. 24 Although there is often a symmetry that obtains between place and memory, one cannot infer that because memory is the internality of place, then place is the externality of memory. What is true is that memory is externalized in places, but this externalization itself presupposes place, both in the sense of the self as a mode of place, and in the sense of place as encompassing both externality and internality.

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A Philosophy of Place? Thierry Paquot, translated by Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Donald A. Landes

Since the Greeks, “philosophy” has indicated at least two activities, the “good life” and “thinking,” and Plato speaks of philomathia (“the desire to learn”) and invites his students to question the world as well as themselves about their own wonders. How could anyone avoid questioning herself on her “localization,” on the “place” [place] that she occupies, on the “emplacement” that she constructs, on the “spot” that she takes up, on the “distance” she maintains between herself and the other, on the “space” in which her body extends?1 And yet, philosophy books and preparation summaries for the baccalauréat give hardly any weight to the notion of “space,” preferring “time,” “reason,” “truth,” “beauty,” “death,” and so on. Nevertheless, in everyday language, everyone uses the term “space” without really defining it, not hesitating to commit a real quid pro quo . . . we speak of “advertising space,” “public space,” “political,” “acoustic,” “landscape,” and “communication” spaces—there is even a French car named “Espace” [Space]! By reflecting on the polysemy of this word, I began to look for writings that could enlighten it (and myself!); during a trip to the United States in 1997, I bought a copy of Edward S. Casey’s The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. The illustration that adorns its cover is a photograph by René Jacques, “Le banc, Boulevard Pasteur, Paris, 1927.” A splendid photo in black and white of a double-sided bench, fixed to the sidewalk between two trees. It is evident that the boulevard is deserted at this hour, evidently nighttime, with shadows and the light given off by electric streetlamps. No one passing by. Is it meant to express the “fate” of this word in its various senses? A kind of ghostly “space,” indefinite, between two things, which would escape human beings even while conditioning them? If yes, between two “what”? I do not know this author and it is with a lot of curiosity that I plunge myself into his work. The Fate of Place is subtitled: A Philosophical History. Despite being associated with “French Theory,” it is more common in the United States than in France to expect a lively progression through the “long duration” of Western thought from the Greeks to the postmodern. Its demonstrative unwinding constitutes four parts (From Void to Vessel, From Place to Space, The Supremacy of Space, and The Reappearance of Place), covering grosso modo 2,500 years. In the first part, the author examines the cosmogonies, creation narratives of the world, found among the Navajos as well as in

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Mesopotamia, and notices that there are resemblances in the appreciation of the chaos, in the tohu bohu that precedes the creation of the world, particularly in terms of the articulation of Time and Space, knowing however that these two terms do not express the same thing for the Egyptians as they do for the Etruscans. In Greek, there are three words to express the idea of time, aion (“fate,” “eternity”), kairos (“the opportune/ supreme moment”), and chronos (the temporal succession of moments, which becomes “chronology”). It is the same for “space.” There exist various terms that have evolved according to historical periods, for example, chôra indicates “village,” “countryside,” but also “space,” whereas topos is “place [lieu],” which can contain “spaces.” Perhaps it is due to this plurality of sense that Georges Perec proposes to consider space as a “doubt” in his indispensable Espèces d’espaces (1974). In the Middle Ages, this deverbal noun meant “anxiety,” “fear,” before being associated with “uncertainty” and “ambiguity.” Certainly for Perec, in search of the infra-ordinary that is specific to each place [lieu], space turns out to be “changeable,” “hypothetical,” “ambiguous” and why not “floating,” “improbable,” or “assumed.” Assumed as such, we do not get a clear, fixed, and definitive definition of the term, but one that is always evolving, never arrived at. Taking a closer look at dictionaries only amplifies the doubt. Indeed, the entry for “Space” in the Le Robert’s Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, for example, informs us that this term “is of an obscure origin.”2 It says it does not really have a gender (“un” ou “une” espace), and first of all possesses a “temporal character” (like in the expression “in the space of a month”), before indicating a “distance,” an “interval,” or an addition to the specific vocabularies of music and printing. It is not until the seventeenth century that it acquires its scientific meaning (in geometry, physics, and astronomy), which will eventually be reinforced by the theory of relativity, which speaks of “space/time” as indicating “the four-dimensional environment or four variables that are considered necessary for determining a phenomenon.” The Latin word spatium, which was translated into French as “espace,” corresponds to the “race track,” but also to an “extension,” a “distance” (both geographic and temporal). This is the translation of the Greek term chôra that we find in Plato’s Timaeus; but before this, there were other terms close to this idea of space, such as Khàos/kosmos, to apeiron (“the infinite”), to Kenon (“the void”). As for “place” [lieu], it comes from the Latin locus (“place, spot”), which is the translation of the Greek term topos. Just as was the case for “space,” [the Dictionnaire] specifies that the origin of “place” [lieu] is also obscure, which gives rise to the difficulty of explaining the range of its uses: “commonplace,” “highest place” [haut-lieu], the groundless [non-lieu], “locality” [lieu-dit], “seat of government” [chef-lieu], “lieutenant,” “milieu,” without forgetting the “places” [les lieux] of relaxation (let us note there that the plural loci indicates the “genitals”)! In the Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault write in the entry “Espace” that “philosophical reflection on space was altogether poorer than that on its frequently imposed commensurate figure, time.”3 Further on, they clarify: The emergence of the category of space was thus brought about indirectly, as if by a stroke of luck, with most of the great philosophic systems not placing it at their

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center. However, there was indeed a debate on the plurality of approaches, less with the Greeks than in 17th and 18th century philosophy, which was dominated by Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Berkeley, Locke and Kant, who were preocuppied and motivated by the disturbing developments in 20th century physics.4

Thus, in the same period, these terms will carry contradictory and/or complementary senses, according to whether we study them through the lens of the astronomer, the geographer, or the ethnologist. As for Western philosophy, it questions them tirelessly. The major contribution of Casey’s encyclopedic study comes in the refusal of a linear and quasi-evolutionary history of the concepts of “space” and “place” in Western thought—for Casey, all disciplines are mixed. It is not because Aristotle promotes an analysis different from that of Plato that the latter disappears from the philosophic scene. It is this dynamic proper to the geohistory of ideas that Casey valorizes, demonstrating for each “moment” of this history that new theoretical preoccupations impose (the body, the five senses, mobility, male/female relations, sex and gender, new information technologies and telecommunication, economic globalization, migratory flux, etc.) and modify the very conception of the world that previously reigned uncontested, without thereby reducing it to ashes. Proof of this are the returns to Aristotle or Descartes, Spinoza or Bergson, who periodically disrupt the “progressive” logic of the thought and justifies Bachelard, his philosophie de non, his account of the beneficial advancements and turbulences that come along with the critical spirit. These are the “wandering conceptual lines” mapped out by philosophers from different epochs that preoccupy our author, notwithstanding the continuity inscribed in these zigzags that will quickly metamorphize into rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari). The outcome of this contrasted history is given in Casey’s article “Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place” (1997), which summarizes the central thesis of the work.5 What do we read there? Casey argues that there is a fundamental difference between time and space, the first possesses “coherent unities: years, hours, semesters, seasons,” while space “proliferates,” if only by our body which is usually upright (there is thus a front, back, top, and bottom). But Casey specifies: “Space is a doublet composed of itself (whatever that is) and place.”6 This raises the question of distinguishing “space” from “place,” and this, says the author humorously, is “one of the best-kept secrets in philosophy.”7 To discover this mystery it is enough to travel across the history of philosophy with only this concern in mind and to mark out this journey according to the positions of some “major” figures of Western thought whose interpretation of the pair space/place seems striking (Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Nancy). We shall see then to what extent some privilege “space” to the detriment of “place,” others defining space as that which contains place, others imagining the opposite, still others refusing these two notions, saying instead that it is the place [la place] of the individual that becomes decisive, an emplacement reserved and controlled by the State or an indefinite place [lieu]. Just as Foucault argues that the putitively free individual of modern liberal society is a product of the disiplinary technology of power—“the ‘Enlightentment,’ which

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Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines”—so I would argue that the same individual is a creature of lack of location. The modern subject is radically dislocated, someone who does not know the difference between place and space, or even the difference between either of these and the sites to which he or she is confined in the pseudo-voluntarism that thinks that such a subject can go any place. However this global nomadism is a delusion, since to be able to go anywhere is to be located nowhere.8

This “dislocated” subject is the contemporary inhabitant of the Earth, here and there, localized, situated, and at the same time displaced, waiting, indifferent to the place [l’endroit] of her residence; she is in fact torn between a space to which she aspires and a place that society attributes to her, without considering that this place will reveal itself to be a non-place.9 Casey concludes: Rather, space forms a twosome, an uneven doublet, with place, its odd and incongruous other. The twoness is not that of two things, of even of two of a kind, but instead that of two quite variant kinds—which nevertheless coexist in all their disparity and cannot seem to do otherwise. Hence the ongoing saga of the uneasy alliances, the ambivalent togethernesses, of place and space.10

It is thus necessary for us to habituate ourselves to this “disquiet” that is not denied of comfort. Ultimately, we have a thinker like Bachelard who invites us to undertake a topoanalysis and a thinker like Heidegger who explains to us that it is in taking care of places that space comes to be, or not. Space, for the philosopher of material imagination, invades these lived places while, according to the theorist of Dasein, it results from the action of each person. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard observes: In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world.11

In this way, the house protects and prevents the human from being “thrown into the world,” contrary to what we attribute to Heidegger, who speaks of “Being-toward-death,” which is an entirely different thing, but leave this aside. Bachelard makes explicit what he intends by the term topoanalysis: Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability—a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to “suspend” its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.12

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Topoanalysis considers space as the shelter of the moments of our intimate life, that which localizes and spatializes them, keeps them alive, so to speak. For Bachelard, the human being is foremost an imagining being and his or her capacity to imagine consists in the remembrance of places, dreamed or real, that nourish them with images throughout his or her existence. There is no time without this kind of space. With an entirely different vocabulary, and certainly with other intentions, Heidegger considers that “when we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience.”13 Heidegger will return in various texts to dwelling, to what distinguishes “place” and “space,” to language as “the dwelling of being,” and to many other topics in order to clarify the sense of “to inhabit.” I examined the positions of these two philosophers in Demeure terrestre. Enquête vagabonde sur l’habiter (les éditions de l’Imprimeur, 2005), and I came back to this comparison again in the introduction to a collective work, Habiter, le propre de l’humain (La Découverte, 2007), in order to demonstrate that Bachelard thought of the human being foremost as a “world dreamer” who translates into archetypes dreamed images and harmonizes him or herself with their rhythmic vibrations. As for Heidegger, he appreciates the being of the human in the practice of dwelling, that is to say, to be present-in-the-world and with-Others, which leads to the importance he gives to relationships, or more precisely, to communication. It is through language that humans dwell and the world that she creates for herself and others with whom and due to whom it becomes what it is. To understand the places of human existence and the role that space plays, could, in my opinion, follow the path opened up by Bachelard and the one that Heidegger invites us to travel, yet only on condition that time and space are no longer separated, at least from a strictly existential point of view. Indeed, human existence is built upon both, and if time is (relatively) homogeneous and space heterogeneous, it is in combining them, adjusting them, articulating them, that the human being achieves its unity, a unity that is constantly jostled, disequilibrated, and must forever be reconfigured. What has changed since the publication of Bachelard’s and Heidegger’s texts for and in the human condition, and which obligates us to read them differently, and to disrespectfully complete them, concerns the proliferation, the generalization, the globalization of information and telecommunications that confirm the end of geography and the banalization of the instantaneous, of the ubiquity, of real time. Our existential territories are no longer physical and our temporalities change without stopping to register. Each is spatializing and spatialized and also temporalizing and temporalized. Which is why, for Bachelard, it is the necessity of matching topoanalysis with rythmanalysis and, for Heidegger, the necessity of joining with and among by attributing to speaking a determinate place [une place]. The ways of communication, the modalities of circulating information, relational techniques, henceforth delineate particular areas and characterize an era that has its duration, its intervals, and its temporalities. It was not necessary to also adopt a kind of simplistic technological determinism and affirm, for instance, that the printed text produces a certain geography and a certain historical period. For the most part, the means of communication exists alongside each other, or a new one gains ground without completely and definitively eliminating the previous one. We notice more tangled first

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attempts than perfectly rhythmic and delimited inheritances. Certainly, the landline telephone, the typewriter with a ribbon, the record player are now in ecomuseums that depict the lifestyles of our immediate ancestors (of our parents, even ourselves for the oldest of us) and what dominates, digital technology, inscribes itself territorially and historically, transforming space, place, and our perception and experience of time. For some 30 years now we have been in an electronic era and in electronic areas; the plural is necessary here, since these physical and virtual areas are superimposed, combined, structured according to the practices of a few and the kinds of interactions of others. In 1951, at the conference “Entretiens de Darmstadt,” whose theme was “Man and Space,” Martin Heidegger lingers on the sense of three verbs—“to build,” “to dwell,” and “to think”—that are etymologically close in German. He begins by explaining what is debatable in the title of the meeting, since Man and Space are not two separate entities, he notes: “Man’s relation to locales, and through locales to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, thought essentially.”14 For him, “dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things.”15 So, humans, this being thrown toward death, must inscribe their destiny in the act of dwelling, that is to say, in the taking care of the places of their stay on Earth among the things that are already there. A year before this, at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Heidegger gave a paper on the topic of “The Thing,” in which he recalls that the Latin word res “denotes anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns them,” and that the Old-German word thing signifies “the gathering-appropriating.”16 He gives the example of the jug, a highly banal thing, that gathers by offering the water that it contains. He concludes that: “Men alone, as mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as world. Only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing.”17 Does the cell phone, as a thing, gather? Does the Internet make itself a “thing”? These information and communication technologies surely “concern” “man in some way”; still, is it necessary to know in which way? In his letter to Jean Beaufret, Letter on Humanism (1946), Martin Heidegger explains that: Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.18

Heidegger adds: “This dwelling is the essence of ‘being-in-the-world.”19 In 1961, Emmanuel Lévinas published “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” in Information Juive, in which he salutes the courage of the Russian cosmonaut and the power of Soviet science (it is otherwise curious that the theoretician of hospitality and critic of technology offers these homages, but we leave aside this surprising apology for “progress”), in order to above all appreciate the fact of having been able to leave the Place [le Lieu].20 “For one hour,” he remarks, “man existed beyond any horizon (. . .) A man existed in the absolute of homogeneous space.”21 It is this possibility of no longer

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being tied to the Earth, to navigate the cosmos like a wanderer without earthly roots, that enchants Lévinas. To be everywhere at home, without justifying a belongingness to a place, this a-spatialization, is a liberty. Does he really break from Heidegger? Does the latter attach every human to a place? Even though he takes precaution to indicate on several occasions that place is above all a link, a bridge, a relation, a communication, effective or not, at least potentially, possible, which leads us to the importance of language. Contrary to numerous accusations, Heidegger does not reduce the fact of dwelling to a geographic localization but instead to pluri-relational situation that is not necessarily accomplished by each individual. The act of dwelling is always in progress. In 1962, at Combourg, Heidegger offered an audience of professional schoolteachers his critical reading of the work of Norbert Wiener, which had only been translated into German in 1952. His lecture was titled “Traditional Language and Technological Language.”22 In it, he questioned the triumph of automation, “whose characteristic is determined by the ruling and leading technology, cybernetics.”23 He analyses the Greek word technē in order to demonstrate that it is not, originally, “a concept of making, but of knowledge,” and that, since the Modern Period, with the Western deployment of technology, technology has become “a codeterminant in knowing.”24 He certainly regrets the conditions of this origin, long since forgotten, and worries about the inevitable increasing automatization of technology with regard to humans, the technical [technique] obeying above all its dynamic technician who dominates humans without ever associating with them. Perhaps, as Heidegger notes, “modern technology could speak forth a demand the realization of which humans would be unable to bring to a halt or even survey and control as a whole.”25 Is this the case for language? Referring to several definitions, Heidegger underscores the importance of Wilhelm von Humboldt, for whom language is not simply a human activity (the functioning of the speech organs, the formulation of a thought or the representation of reality and of its imagination), but “the expression of this between, between subject and object.”26 With the supremacy of technology, “language is information.”27 In order to better formulate his objection to this terrible declaration of impoverishment, Heidegger takes, as usual, an etymological detour. He also associates the action “to say” with the action “to speak.” Yet, sagan, in Old German, signifies “to show,” or rather “to bring something into appearance” expresses it better. “The structure and performance of large-scale calculative planning rests on the technological-calculative principles of this transformation of language as saying into language as a mere report of signal transmissions.”28 What he observes here is the intrusion of technology in language to the point where it determines, and thus, alters it. He discovers in Wiener’s writing numerous assertions stressing this subordination of human language to technical language, which is presented by the latter as a communicational improvement. Indeed, language becomes less talkative, hesitant and more formatted, coded, universal, it “[carries] out the schema of abstract signal transmissions and yield the corresponding message” and thus, according to Heidegger, attacks “the sole character of language.”29 This latter, in opposition to the “technological language,” is characterized as “natural” or “traditional”; it is the maternal language, the

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not yet technologized, if you will, that possesses an entirely mental universe.30 In order to avoid all equivocation, Heidegger makes his point of view explicit: The handing down in tradition is not a mere passing on, it is the preservation of what is original, it is the safeguarding of the new possibilities of the already spoken language. The latter itself contains and grants the unspoken.31

With the generalization of technological language, we lose this “granting of the unspoken” that the saying manifests. And that’s not nothing! Existing is this kind of being for which it goes from its being in its being itself, with or without a technological network. But how? Beginning from sensing [sentir]. That is to say, from what I experience, what I feel, and what my body too expresses with or without technological-relational prosthetics. I can be several persons by creating an avatar, by adopting a pseudonym on the net, by multiplying imaginary worlds, but this incredible capacity to play at having so many makeshift identities through technological performances ultimately drives me to establish a backup foundation from which I can go forward, in some way. A Temporary Autonomous Zone (Hakim Bey) or more simply, a place, above all a territorial anchorage, a place that is propitious for the deployment of my disorderly and paradoxical wanderings. We are, for a long time now, in the post-Wiener era: laptop computers, individualized, miniaturized, the extension of net addresses and of the Web, the worldwide popularization of IT, the possibility offered to every (or almost every) inhabitant of the Earth to create a website, to write a blog, to interact with other “cyborgs” multi-networked like oneself, making it easier to connect long distance. A new spatio-temporal universe is developing: geography is no longer an obstacle, I enter into communication with whomever I want at the other end of the world no matter what distance lies between us; time is no longer a constraint: the instantaneous, simultaneous, prerecorded, programmed, allows me to play with hours and temporalities. Nevertheless, I am still human, that is to say, I am spatialized and spatializing (I certainly have an email address or a cell phone number) and since this localization is also a situation in a singular time, I am thus also temporalized and temporalizing. My presence gives the time, in a sense. This emplacement at the heart of my existential geography designs a cartography at once physical and immaterial, real and virtual. In these new anthropological conditions, what can “to dwell” really mean? That I exist. I exist insofar as I encounter. I encounter insofar as I communicate. I communicate insofar as I speak. I speak insofar as I can say. I say what resounds in me. René Char whispers to me: “The words that will arise know of us what we do not know of them.”32 What about “to dwell”? “To dwell” consists in being with and among. With those who share my intentions and my convictions, my struggles and my rebellions, my expectations and my possibilities, my fears and other anxieties. Among those who are together open, who come together revealing a community. With marks a physical presence and among a proximity, an inside. The digital era facilitates the among without, however, fully realizing the with. I am also among the people of Cairo who protest against the dictator, but it is only by going to Tahrir Square (in Arabic this means “Liberation” Square) that I am with

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them. Hence, the information and communication technologies unarguably accelerate the circulation of information and the publicity of messages, to the point of drowning each web surfer in an endless amount of information that is impossible to memorize or verify. Such an abundance nourishes an emotional sentiment. Spontaneously, without reflection, analysis, discussion, I react to such an attack. I share the sympathy born from transmitted and received messages. I commune without believing in it, without being able to grant my esteem, my confidence, but through the rush of emotion. The among reassures me even though the with steadies me. It is because the among must be completed by a with that it requires that I weigh the pros and cons, that I make inquiries, that I reflect, that I exercise my critical spirit. If “to dwell” is to mean being-in-the-world-and-with-others [être-présent-au-monde-et-à-autrui], then the digital era profoundly transforms each of these terms: “present”, “world,” and “other.” As for “being,” there remains a there is, in the sense of there is “being,” like there is “time.” But what becomes of the three constitutive elements of “what it means to dwell” in the digital era? Presence consists in going out in front oneself in order to be attentive and thoughtful in the encounter, in harmony with oneself in the other. The world gathers what it has dispersed to assure the unity between the real and the imaginary; only in this does each individual construct her world, from which she affirms a being-there that is also a being-toward and being-in [être-à]. This attitude of being ready contributes to the realization of this world. Others? It is not only an other similar to myself, whose difference reinforces the guarantee of my own singularity. It is alterity-in-action. It is that which brings about the open, that which opens me, that which opens, that which makes me appear in my revealing myself to others and them to me. The encounter confirms what we reach immediately, or, as Henri Maldiney wrote: It is at this horizon, that only appears in the encounter, that I have some chance of discovering the other, the being of the other, my own being, and in any event, the being of the existing being and also, in a sense, the being of existence. The existing being’s proper dimension, which has both an opening to one’s own being and to the being of the other in the encounter, is thus transpassibility [transpassibilité].33

Finally, the digital era does not destabilize the conditions of the encounter and does not negate the phusis of the Earth. Nevertheless, the digital era upsets each individual’s unwinding of fate, disturbing both her geography and her temporalities by new speeds and new scales, with other kinds of representation and the adoption of a descriptive language [un langage signalétique] that is no longer subjective. Also, “to dwell” in the digital era, comes down to constructing the earthly residence of humans, ideally by combining the with and the among. To speak the language of saying while conversing by means of this technical language, to finally master this bilingualism, without privileging one to the detriment of the other. But technical language benefits from an aura carried by the globalization of information and communication technology, that is to say, yes, the fight is unequal and it is necessary to enrich our language in order not to lose our cultures. Here is to where Edward S. Casey’s words lead us. It is a question of sitting down on the bench (that one in the photograph) on the Boulevard Pasteur in order to

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converse with other passersby or to communicate with an interlocutor at the other end of the world, and then to stroll around the city. The bench becomes a place and, by the connections this place allows, it releases space. Yes, philosophy must also become preoccupied with place.

Notes   1 [TRs: In order to differentiate in English between the author’s use of the French words place and lieu, we have included the French in brackets where necessary.]   2 “Espace,” in Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 1, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1992), 722.   3 Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault, “Espace,” in Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, ed. Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault (Paris: Belin, 2003), 325–33.   4 Ibid.   5 Edward S. Casey, “Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place,” The Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (1997): 267–96. [EDs: A French translation of this article appeared as “Espaces lisses et lieux bruts: L’histoire cachée du lieu,” trans. Dominique Janicaud, Revue de la métaphysique et de la morale, no. 4 (2001): 49–65.]   6 Ibid., 268.   7 Ibid., 270.   8 Ibid., 293–94.   9 In the sense given by Marc Augé in Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992). 10 Casey, “Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places,” 295. 11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 6–7. 12 Ibid., 8. 13 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 358. 14 Ibid., 359. 15 Ibid., 353. 16 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 172. 17 Ibid., 180. 18 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 217. 19 Ibid., 260. 20 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judasim, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 231–34. 21 Ibid., 233. 22 Martin Heidegger, “Traditional Language and Technological Language,” trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research 23 (1998): 129–45. 23 Ibid., 132. 24 Ibid., 135–36. 25 Ibid., 137. 26 Ibid., 139. 27 Ibid.

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Ibid., 140. Ibid. Ibid., 142. Ibid. René Char, “Chants de la Balandrane,” in René Char: Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), 534. 33 Henri Maldiney, Existence: Crise et création (Versanne: Éditions Encre Marine, 2001), 104.

7

The Derivation of Space Eugene T. Gendlin

This article is for Edward Casey. I write in the terms of my own philosophy about place and space as well as many other topics. I contrast two ways of thinking. We need both, and I will show exactly how we can use both. One way of thinking is narrow; the other much wider. Each is a way of thinking about what really exists, but the wider way can explain the narrow one, and can show how the narrow one is derived. I will derive it. The narrow way assumes that everything exists in the space that has things in it. That space seems to be the reality in front of us and all around us. According to the narrow way, only what is in that space really exists. The wider way begins from the activity we are, the process, the happening, not just things that are before and behind us.

Location space The space of located things is familiar. In our Western culture it has seemed to be the original reality, what is “really” there. To exist has meant to fill space in some location. This space extends to the galaxies. Each thing seems located in it. Something that fell off the table must now be down there, even if we don’t find it. The old book is still there, on the shelf where I put it years ago, unless someone moved it. Now I want to look something up in that book. So I go to that shelf. There it is. The located things are there, that’s quite true; but every “there” is a there from here, seen and heard by someone here who points from here to there. The space we are examining is the gap between a here and a there. The space of locations is a spectator’s space. It is perceived but then the bodily process of perceiving is dropped out, so that only the perceived things seem independently real. If that were so, there would also already be the space between them. But the process of perceiving is what is generating the perceptions! They are wrongly considered to exist by themselves.1 The dependence on the perceiving observer has long been well known. But the existence of this space was so thoroughly assumed, that it seemed only a famous problem that space depends on an observer or observers. The mistake really was to

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put the product before the process that is generating the product. We will change this assumption and reverse the priority. Quantum physics is the only science that has rejected the old concepts, although without providing new ones. Using only mathematics and experimental operations, physics finds that the observer-space does not exist. Well, of course it doesn’t! There would have to be only one observer.2 More importantly, we and everything else would exist only in observer space. But we and the things don’t exist only as observed from outside. Sometimes we view ourselves as if we were “really” objects. Many people assume they are just physiological structures in space. But those are cognitive conceptual structures and perceptions which are being generated. The located things don’t exist by themselves. Even in physics the particles don’t exist by themselves. Only their being generated and re-generated can be calculated and predicted. But the location space is still assumed in most other sciences and by most people. Most of our concepts are about structures in space. So we find ourselves falling back into assuming locations even when we don’t want to. But with the wider kind of thinking, we can have a different kind of conceptual structure. Let me examine location space a little further. It is a featureless space and assumes a featureless existence. Something exists if it fills some space. This featureless existence and this space are the same thing. In modern symbolic logic one asserts that a thing exists by saying: “There is an X such that X is . . .” (followed by a statement of what it is). All the content is in the part of the formula that tells the “such that. . . .” The assertion of existence is featureless, nothing but “there is an.” What “is” seems to be what is located. To continue just means is is is. If it continues, it fills successive time positions, now now now. The is is is and the now now now are located positions. There is no organic continuity between them. The continuity of generating a process is dropped out in favor of “relations” between separate things. But relations are not events. When we assume the separate things first, then each seems to exist and fill a space of its own. To exist seems to mean filling a space that has no features. This space is just the gap between the separate things. In the wider order we live, act, and think with an implicit intricacy, not only with what occurs explicitly formed. A process does not reduce to is is is and now now now, although we can derive those from it. A process is not only the formed occurrences that appear before us, not even when they are newly differentiated. It is not a process even if the nows are stretched to include a little past and future (in Husserl’s way). Even with the term “anticipation” we still place ourselves at some position in the is is is. But a process is something more. Terms like “unfolding,” “emergence,” “background,” and “implicit” have become common. But most people still consider them vague ideas with which one cannot go further. I offer a detailed conceptual structure with precise concepts that can connect to an implicit kind of order. These concepts will enable us to derive and go beyond location space, among many results of a wider understanding. I need to introduce three further developments. I will explain them as I go on. Firstly, because bodies are body-environment interaction, therefore new forms are generated immediately in the environment. It is not the case that what happens at a

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later time must be composed of the same units as existed at the earlier time. A different kind of concepts can explain the continuity across novel developments. Secondly, in the living body the seemingly “lower” micro processes have the “higher” perceptual and cognitive processes implicit in them. I will offer precise concepts for how something implicit functions. Thirdly, the empty space derives from patterns, from communicating with seemingly simple motions and just visual and just sound patterns like language, art, and music. You wave to the people coming up the walk and they wave back. They know you are not reaching for something. Humans also make new things by moving just a pattern onto a thing that does not have that pattern from itself. When one moves just a pattern, one ignores everything between, as if it were empty space. But the patterns are not actually simple.

Body-environment interaction: Immediate novelty The concept “body-environment” says that we are always part of the environment, not that we have only perceptions of the environment. This much has recently been widely agreed on. We can go further.

Immediate novelty Merleau-Ponty described a bug whose legs were cut, so that it walked in a new and more complicated fashion. Similarly, I observed an ant on my fuzzy rug, walking in a complicated wiggly way that was obviously quite new to the ant. In these examples we see that a new and more complex process can form immediately. We can explain it. Since the organism is always already part of the environment, the previous organization comes out in a new way in a changed environment. The ant doesn’t gradually develop a new walk, doesn’t first have to walk in its old way—indeed it can’t. Nor does it need random unorganized motions from which to select a new walk. If it walks at all, it will walk in a new way. If there is a change either in the body or in the environment, a newly organized way happens immediately (unless the change has killed the organism). The new walk need not be a lesser part of the old walk. It can be more complex. Now the ant rebalances from side to side as it moves forward. What had been a much simpler walk occurs in this new way because the ant is an interaction with the new environment. Similarly, for example, if we fall into water, our walking turns into much larger thrashings. The point is: Because an organism is environmental, therefore it happens directly into the environment. In a changed environment it can only be different.

The theory of evolution, an example In the old theory of evolution anything new had to be constructed out of existing forms or random accidents. Billions of “mutations” were required for something new but these have not been found. The theory is not universally believed, but it instances an assumption that underlies the usual concepts, that anything new has to be composed

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of already-formed parts. Now we can propose a better theory. In body-environment interaction a change can immediately be newly organized. Of course a new process comes from what existed before, but not from the formed units. A process is a more intricate continuity. We call it “carrying forward.”3 In the wider kind of thinking we include something implicit and the continuity between this and the new occurrings that are being generated. We will see as we go further that the universe exists implicitly as well as implying ever-new occurrings that carry it forward.

Implicit organization We can go another step further: What we mean by “embodied cognition” is not only what occurs, but also a great multiplicity of implicit events that are not separately occurring. The many implicit events imply one further occurring, and enact it if the environment permits. Embodied cognition is more than old or new formed things and parts. It is regenerating the formed things and parts.

Examples of implicit organization To think with unfolding, emerging, implying, and occurring involves a more intricate conceptual structure. Let me discuss some examples: Consider action or behavior. We could act in many ways with each thing. I could move that broken chair or I could carefully try to sit in it again. I could chop it up for firewood, or I could just leave it there. I could take that book down and look up the spot I want to see. In the laboratory we could perform one of many known operations or try out a new one. Each object “affords” us many possible actions, as Gibson said.4 In my way of saying it, we always have many action possibilities. But while the objects are spread out before us, let me point out that action possibilities are implicit, not spread out before us. And every possible action also involves a host of detailed circumstances that are not spread out before us. How do we have this familiar “what we could do”? Shall we say we know it? Yes, but this is an odd “knowing,” not something in our think-space, rather, an innumerable number. Shall we say we feel them? Yes, but it is a nameless “feeling,” so much at once and changing all the while. No common word says how we have our possibilities. Whatever words we use to talk about it will have to mean this familiar way we have them. The implicit possibilities and their circumstances are intricately organized. Every action changes whether and how the others could be done. Some can no longer be done but some are new possibilities. Any single action is a change in other possibilities, but each is a different change in them. Every possibility is a cluster of changed possibilities. An action is not only what occurs, but also a cluster of implicit clusters, an implicit intricacy. Behavior happens in a space, but it is a filled space. Any actual behavior happens in this implicitly organized space.

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The possibilities are not separate next to each other; rather, they are implicit in each other. They are not merged but have a very precise organization. What would actually occur is implied very precisely. This kind of organization is more organized than side-by-side things can ever be. Anything enacted emerges very exactly formed. Language is another example of implicit organization. The several hundred thousand words of our language are fixed, but each has a great many different uses. These happen in phrases and sentences with other words. We have the uses implicitly, and can imply a new one. When we are about to say something, we don’t yet have the words. We have what we want to say—implicitly. Unless we have prepared the words in advance, they come as we speak. We speak directly from what we want to say. The words come grammatically arranged and they usually say pretty much what we wanted. But if we find that we were misunderstood, we go right back to what we implicitly want to say, and let fresh words come to say it.5 We could not act or speak without the implicit intricacy of possibilities and what we want to say. Implicit intricacy is more precise and has more organization than separate units can provide. The conceptual structure I have discussed here can connect with the implicit kind of organization.

Reciprocity: How the analytic retains its power and also develops The narrow way of thinking consists of separate terms with logical relations between them. An analytic layout can help us immensely. Distinctions and separations enable us to do more and more in our lives, as well as to create the ever-changing technology without which seven billion of us couldn’t live on the planet. Analysis creates separate entities before us and relates them clearly. We cannot do without this. An analytic layout carries our whole situation forward. An analysis consists of a fixed set of terms. If we change a term in one spot, we must change it in every other spot. And since all the terms are logically connected, a change in one term necessitates changing the others. An analysis creates logical consistency, a great power that brings logical implications and clarity. But the clarity which an analytic layout brings lies not only in the layout before us. It has an effect in the body as well. It brings an implicit whole-bodied understanding. “Aha!” we say. If we turn from the layout to the implicit understanding which it brought us, new steps of thought may come, which could not have been deduced from the layout itself. From the bodily understanding we may think in a new way. Then there may be new facets to lay out. And if we succeed in an improved layout, it can bring us a new “aha!,” a further implicit understanding which may again give us new facets for a still further layout. Analysis and implicit understanding expand each other reciprocally. I call this “reciprocity.” We can allow analysis and implicit understanding to expand each other by alternating our attention between them. I call this “fresh thinking.”

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Fresh thinking is not at all illogical, since it generates ever-new logic with newly emergent terms. Its continuity differs from the continuity of a single logical analysis. That is the kind of continuity I call “carrying forward.” Carrying forward is the kind of transition that Fodor examined in trying to define how science progresses from year to year.6 He found no logical series across the development, and that led him to reject the old idea that more complex sciences can be reduced to simpler sciences, for example organic chemistry to inorganic chemistry and physics. Fodor showed how science develops ever-new specialties with new terms and characteristics. Where there were three terms, now there are thirteen, all of them different from the earlier three.7 With reciprocity we can employ the powers of both analysis and implicit understanding. Let us not make opposing ideologies of them. They inherently involve and expand each other. We can deliberately adopt the development that Fodor has found, and we can make concepts from this kind of continuity.

How occurring and implying function What occurs is always both explicit and implicit. The implicit happens only in an actual occurring, but the actual occurring changes the implying into a further implying. A whole sequence of occurrences is always implied, but an actual occurring changes the implied sequence. Implying and occurring happen at the same time which they generate. A new occurring generates a new present time. Implying exists only in an actual occurring, but the occurring is a change in the implying. Existence is implicit and implies and enacts the next explicit occurring. So existence can be called an “explicating” process. It does not consist just of is is is units. Occurring does not exist alone. It carries implying forward. The continuity of carrying forward happens within occurring, not only with logical relations between separate terms. But we can generate many separate terms and logical analyses from occurring and implying.

Regenerating the now-functioning past The explicating process generates a more intricate kind of time. Occurring generates time. Because what occurs is new, therefore it has generated a past for itself. The past is now not what it was, not merely moved to a different position. We grow old not because time passes; rather it passes because of the changes which occur. Happening is real and makes time. By generating a new occurring, the organism has generated a past for itself. The past functions implicitly in the present, since the present would not be what it is if the past occurring were different. But how the past now functions depends also on what is now occurring and regenerating the past. It does not now consist just of unchanged events that are merely moved to a different position on a line. The present occurring generates time by generating present events so that they have a (new) past. The new occurring therefore has an implicit record of its past, whether

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or not there is also someone’s conscious memory. The present occurring changes how the past now functions. There is also a future that functions in the present. This future is not what will be present and then past, just not yet. Those are only positions on an observed time line. The future that functions now consists of the real but implicit possibilities and circumstances, as I discuss in A Process Model, Section IV-B.

Three processes implicit in each other Gallagher offers a breakthrough by showing that our bodily micro processes can be directed by our perceptual and cognitive processes.8 Behavior cannot be accounted for by physiology alone. Nerves, muscles, circulation, and digestion can act in accord with cognitive rules. He writes: “When in the context of a game I jump to catch a ball, that action cannot be fully explained by the physiological activity of my body. The pragmatic concern of playing the game [ . . . ] even the rules of the game [ . . . ] may define how I jump.”9 I can offer a further account of this. Organisms, even single cells, are enormously complex even without perception. They happen directly into environmental interaction and did so for millions of years before perception and cognition ever developed. In humans the micro processes still happen directly into the environment, but now they implicitly contain perception and cognition. Only if we clearly understand and distinguish cognition, perception, and micro processes (see my A Process Model IV–VII) can we then also understand exactly how they are implicit in each other and cannot happen separately. Cognition and perception always occur as part of micro processes. For example, we cannot speak unless the muscles of the tongue provide the sound of “d” and “s.” To have human emotions the heart rate has to increase. To perform this, the whole language and all our situations are implicit in the micro processes. The bodily processes are never without implicit perception, thinking, language, music, and art. If we attend directly to something we have implicitly, we can be in a place that is grounded in our much wider actual body-environment interaction, and we can think from there. When we first form concepts from something implicit, we don’t yet know what that something is, so how can we know that what we think at first is not what is implicit? We can know because the implicit stubbornly responds with “no, nothing budges.” It does not carry forward—until at last it does! When that happens we feel the bodily shift. Even then we may not yet have the words. The muscles and the cells know the language. They produce and respond to what we say and think. And they produce and respond to perception. To have something implicit to think from is very reassuring. We don’t have to make something up in some arbitrary way. And it is exciting when we feel traction in response to our words. Suddenly we feel traction where something felt stopped before. Now we can think further into it. Might we end up saying something quite wrong? Yes, and even if not all wrong, anything we say will be partly wrong, and also poorly said. But by attending to

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the implicit version directly, we don’t mean only what we say. We mean this actual implicit. So it is clear: How cognition requires the muscles and circulation is the same fact as how the muscles and circulation can function in accord with cognitive rules, as Gallagher said. With these concepts many old puzzles resolve, for example psychosomatic medicine, intuitive understanding, the complex agriculture of indigenous people, improvisation as in musical ensembles,10 and many others. It requires the concept of an implicit intricacy that implies and enacts one occurring.

Movable patterns Humans live in an environment that includes our human way of making things by moving patterns from one thing to another. Of course there are very complex patterns throughout nature. Plants also seem to have patterns. They turn to the sun and their roots grow toward the water. And animals also have patterns. How is the human way with patterns different? For humans the patterns have come loose. We can move just visual or just sound patterns, or rather, they seem to be just patterns when we move them. Animals imply their objects in all the sense modalities even if they only hear or only see just them (as discussed in the section on “Separate Senses” in my A Process Model [1997] Section VIIA, p. 138). We make artificial things by creating purely visual patterns and moving them. We put our furniture patterns onto the wood. We put the round shape on clay. Wood and clay don’t have those patterns from themselves. “Making” is moving a pattern and imposing it on things that don’t have that pattern from themselves. To move a pattern onto something, we ignore that thing’s own patterns and everything that lies between us and that thing. When we move a pattern, the space between here and there seems empty. That empty space is made by moving patterns. Then that space can seem to surround and precede everything else. Humans do a lot of living just with patterns. We handle our situations mostly with the sound patterns of speaking. We are deeply affected by the sound patterns of music. Our gestures are patterns. For example, when we wave to the people coming up the walk, we are not acting with an object up there in the air. The others recognize the gesture and respond back. Gestures are more complex than behavior although they appear to be simple patterns. The human body responds to just patterns. If you stick your tongue out at a newborn infant, the infant’s tongue will come out as well. Neurologists say the infant “imitates” you, but that notion misses something. The neurological structures involved are called “mirror neurons.” Seeing someone do something rouses our own neurons that would be involved if we did it. But the notion of “mirroring” is insufficient. I say the infant is responding to you. Moving just patterns is a special kind of behavior, more exactly, not behavior at all. A simple sound or motion carries the body forward and changes the situation. This

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is a special development that begins with a few animals. A certain simple move or sound can elicit a whole-bodied change, for example getting ready for fighting or for sexual intercourse. In some species of social monkeys each male turns his back when a superior monkey comes by. If he fails to turn, or if he bares his teeth, both monkeys’ bodies change drastically and get ready to fight. What appears like a simple motion changes the body and shifts the whole context. We humans develop this much further. We generate long sequences of such patterned moves and sounds. These are complex bodily changes and shifts in the situation. We generate version upon version of our inter-human action context. This is speaking and thinking, as well as music and art. Our use of just patterns is part of an implicitly intricate body-environment process, but the patterns seem simple, and as if we move them in empty space. For example, behavior is called “motility.” The link between perception and action is called “motor coupling.” But actions are not just motions. Motions only change locations from here to there. The simple motion and its simple space are actually a complex product. One cannot account for action in terms of motion. Patterns and their motions don’t happen alone. They are developed in and with the earlier processes. They don’t consist just of the repeatable patterns. Yes, patterns are inherently repeatable. A “same” pattern can happen in many locations. Patterns are the origin of “universals,” generalities, abstractions. A patterned thing can be the same each time, like minted pennies. Then the pennies can be differentiated only by a location. This penny here is the one we observed over there before. Only spatial location differentiates “particulars” that have no features, only the same pure pattern. So we see that empty location space is a sophisticated creation. It is not the antecedent reality. In our science we study organisms by plotting them on our patterns. We study what they really are, but we do it by mapping them on our conceptual grids and with findings on our instruments. This produces enormously valuable information, but on our patterns. What the patterns picture enables us to intervene, improve, and cure. But the patterns give us only a graph, a map, a picture that is presented before us. What is actually going on is implicitly much more and different in kind. Of course we need the patterns and this kind of science. We can employ both the patterns and the implicit in their precise reciprocal effects.

Being in the universe: Concepts applicable to the universe Let us begin with our own ongoing. We are environmental interaction in the universe. Rather than assuming that human experience is not real, not part of the universe, that we are aliens where we live, we can begin from our living process. Then this “we” can immediately include the other animals, the plants, the microorganisms, and everything else that exists. They are all generative happenings. We have been developing many precise concepts that let us think further. We keep them linked to the familiar implicit version to which we can attend directly. Thereby we always mean this which is implicit, not only what we say.

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With the new concepts we need not try to understand ourselves and everything else only as spatial structures. We need not try to think that we “really” are only what space concepts can say. How we are is not possible within those concepts. If we begin from how we are, we can see that what Casey (GBP, FP) calls “getting back into place” is prior, much more original than location space, and also where we live after everything, and where we want to be able to perceive, act, and think from. Since we exist, we can be certain that how we are is not impossible. But this question goes further. The concepts that apply to the universe cannot be limited to structures in space. Since some of the universe is us, the concepts of it must be such as can account for people, animals, and all other organisms. We are not just located in the universe; we are part of it. We may be very special but it is capable of being us. We do not need to conceptualize the universe as having the nature of a single logical analysis. Rather, we can liken it to the sequence of analyses that develop in reciprocity with the implicit. The concept of that kind of sequence gives us a wider understanding of the universe. Therefore its basic nature is not limited to spatial structures and units. The universe can be thought of as existing implicitly and explicating itself by occurring. We can take it as an implicit intricacy, a multiplicity of precisely organized factors and strands that are not separate, but always imply one next happening. It used to be assumed that “the body” is the thing that will be left when I die. But that is not the body. That will be a dead body. This “body” is alive. I argue that we “know” what a living body is because we act and speak and think from one of those.

Notes 1 The process was long thought to be “transparent,” just an “-of ” of the things. Only the content of consciousness was considered real. 2 Of course we do need one space so we can find each other in one world, and we use the sun as a fixed point. 3 See Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model (New York: The Focusing Institute, 1997), 40, as well as Gendlin, “Implicit Precision,” in Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Action, Cognition, and the Phenomenon of the Background, ed. Zdravko Radman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 141–66 and “Comment on Thomas Fuchs: The Time of the Explicating Process,” in Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement, ed. Sabine C. Koch, et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 73–81. See also “recursive” in S. A. J. Stuart, “Enkinaesthesia, Biosemiotics and the Ethiosphere,” in Signifying Bodies: Biosemiosis, Interaction and Health, ed. Stephen J. Cowley et al. (Braga, Portugal: Portuguese Catholic University, 2010), 305–30. 4 J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). 5 Once in a while the words don’t come and it feels almost painful for some minutes as the language rearranges itself in the body. But no wrong words come either. The body implies what we want to say. 6 J. A. Fodor, “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis),” Synthese 28 (1974): 97–115.

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7 The development brings vastly greater insight, but it does not necessarily incorporate every insight, implication or advantage of an earlier analysis. 8 Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9 Ibid., 142–43. 10 See Gendlin, “Improvisation Provides,” in 1993. What comes directly from the bodily implicit is most truly one’s own and may already have taken the others into account.

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Place(s) of Ornament Kent Bloomer

Recognizing ornament as a valuable property of visual language is daunting today. The study of its legacy and function was eliminated from the curriculums of modernist art and architecture schools in the greater half of the twentieth century. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, however, the subject is beginning to be reconsidered as an important missing link in the disciplines of design and architecture. This short chapter reviews ways in which ornament performs and informs when its figures are situated within or upon the things being ornamented. A rigorous understanding of ornament’s essential visual makeup, indeed its visual alphabet and grammar, is well beyond the scope of these pages, although some small sketches are included to illustrate ideas crafted in the text. Unfortunately, a widely held misunderstanding of ornament was set in motion by the beginning of the twentieth century when the subject became lexicographically defined as a minor decorative art,1 that is, an “esthetic” detail meant to provide a superficial amount of pleasure and elaboration, rather than belonging to a powerful visual language. A comprehensive procedure today would be to carefully analyze ornament’s original and typical content throughout its own unique history, searching for its universal figuration and grammatical structure. This encyclopedic strategy is traceable to Owen Jones’s seminal Grammar of Ornament (1856) in which detailed examples of world ornament were meticulously illustrated and presented as possessing a remarkably common alphabet with conventional systems of extension and distribution. However, the Grammar did not sufficiently explore the syntactic meanings derived from different ways of emplacing ornament within various structures and settings such as the gates, buildings, and bowls being ornamented. By examining ornament’s visual performance within Edward Casey’s discourse on the phenomenology of place, both its primal function and its grammar may be better understood. Casey’s distinctions between the forms of “place” and “space” realize that a “place” requires the presence of at least two contingent regions while a “space” can be complete as a singular region. Thus while a place requires physical or temporal boundaries which necessarily address subordinate spaces, a space per se can be (indeed has largely been) imaginatively dislocated from place to become an immaterial void independent of physical contingency and capable of infinite extension.

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Elements of ornament, distinguished from the greater panoply of decoration, can only perform when they are intimately combined with instruments of practical use. In Western culture and arguably in most cultures ornament is distributed along thresholds or between coherent parts of things, although occasionally, more likely in oriental cosmology, figures of ornament may appear at the center of things. Its primordial figures, identified by an exhaustive research of world ornament from antiquity to the present, are geometrically founded upon a remarkably small, yet recurring set of meandering, ambivalent, and repeatable shapes such as zigzags, scrolls, fractals, and interlacings. Those rudimentary figures, when further developed, often become implicated with forms of natural life such as the radiant lotus or the serpent. Consider for example a picture frame encrusted with rocaille (a fantastic idiom of eighteenth-century European ornament) with its shell forms, splashes, scrolls, and foliations (Figure 8.1, left). The turbulence of the rocaille, distributed along the rigid linear axis of the physical frame, addresses the regions belonging to both the picture and a portion of the wall surrounding the frame. Coincident to addressing those regions the ornament is also addressed by them, its lively shapes appearing to be enforced by the bearing of its surroundings like the forms of a beach are impacted by the colliding substances of land and sea. If the picture within is removed (Figure 8.1, center), the rococo frame continues, in a lesser way, to ornament both regions of the wall. It is activated by and reacts to the state of “differentiation,” (i.e. the tension of differences between the sizes and shapes of the regions both inside and outside the empty frame). By contrast, if the rocaille, while remaining on the wall, is removed from the structural frame and conflated to become a compacted cluster of its own convoluted shapes, it becomes less implicated with that wall (Figure 8.1, right). No longer performing as a

Figure 8.1  Left to right: rococo frame with head; rococo frame without head; rocaille cluster on wall. Sketches by Kent Bloomer.

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mediator, the compacted rocaille assumes the autonomy of an isolated body centered within a singular and visually recessive background. It would most likely appear to be an independent, self-sufficient, and self-activating cluster of curious shapes. It is now a “center”-piece rather than a median strip. Removed from the physical frame, the rocaille has become an autonomous body to be (or not to be) ornamented in its own right. Unfortunately (for the recent history of ornament) autonomous, independent, and self-sufficient works, when perfected, became an ideal aspiration of “fine art” and fine art’s evolution into the modernist art and architecture of the twentieth century. In the same period critics and professionals, who classified ornament exclusively within the lexicon of art, declared it to be a minor art because it visually depended upon other things. Major modernist artworks privileged greater self-expression and freedom from place as they became more portable and appropriate for location in vacuous interiors like the monotonous white walls of exhibition spaces found in modern art galleries and contemporary art museums. The compacted rocaille, situated in emptiness, might be exalted as a “free” art object, an autonomous painting or sculpture capable of independent artistic expression by being liberated from its original reliance upon contiguous shapes and forces. By contrast, ornament’s visual content is actually empowered by physically engaging its supports and useful containers. How then can we explain the apparently “free” nature, (i.e. the meandering, multiplying, zigzagging, radiating, and spiraling that typify the activity of ornament’s figuration) if it is so dependent upon the authority and firmness of immediately impinging things? Is ornament’s visual exuberance merely the excessive product of a lively artistic elaboration of a mundane thing being ornamented? Or does its articulation of a lively and even turbulent condition of dependence per se manifest a much greater and pervasive reality in which the all-pervading and interdependent forces of nature are manifested? The project of ornament is to visibly situate mundane things (like gates, buildings, bowls, and picture frames) within the world-at-large, (i.e. to orient their practical appearances further outward, or inward, and away from exclusive expressions of their local identity and common work). Such visual orientations are towards the forces that make up the environment, the macrocosm and microcosm. The world-at-large was considered in antiquity to be the cosmos. “But the Greeks adopted a term for world . . . derived from ‘ornament,’ on account of the diversity of elements and the beauty of the heavenly bodies. They call it κοσμος, which means ‘ornament.’”2 Their “world,” their ornament, included “the sky, the sun, the moon, the air, the seas,” which they thought to be in “eternal motion,” an immensity in which all things are ordered, beautiful, circulating, interdependent, and situated together.3 Situating a practical thing such as a gate away from its location and into the cosmos, to make it cosmic in whole cloth, would be to make it unrecognizable as a particular gate. Its elements would be put in motion and its defining features would be dispersed. However, by embedding an amount of cosmos into the gate, and thus making cosmos a visible portion of the gate’s ordinary constitution, the gate’s local identity is both reinforced and expanded. Indeed, embedding cosmos-qua-ornament into a gate demands that the fundamental physical form of the gate remains visually explicit in order to pinpoint definite sites in which to admit and to hold an added amount of the

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world. Without explicit sites of contact, incorporating ornament into something would be dysfunctional and chaotic. Yet embedding an amount of cosmos into a concrete thing, an amount that is visibly absent, proposes importing an abundance of elements and fitting them into the limited terrain of, say, a bowl or a building. Such an abundance would be impossible to accommodate unless only summations, synopses, and evocative fragments are admitted. It is telling, therefore, that from its beginnings the content of ornament has been to express movements, transformations, and periodicity rather than portray the wholeness of any one thing (although whole entities like plants, portraits, and symbols are often incorporated as auxiliaries or icons). Consider that the ancients viewed the cosmos from an apparently stationary platform from which they could gaze at stars circulating overhead. The “here” stood still while the “there” moved and thus ornament visualizes an amount of motion out there.

Primordial figures A small set of figures provides the preliminary geometric steps to generate cosmos in a particular site. They constitute its visual foundation by immediately registering and making visible the combined shape of multiple forces imagined to converge at the site. It is telling that a simple zigzag, one of ornament’s most powerful and recurring figures, can immediately articulate the meshing of actual and imagined forces occurring both inside and outside the border of a rug (Figure 8.2, left). To the beholder, the zigzagging line simultaneously visualizes an interlocking of two different regions on either side of its path. The fractal, another primordial figure found in the ancient lotus, acanthus, and gothic tracery (Figure 8.2, center), traces the multiplication of forces undergoing a transition from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous and back to a homogeneous state.4 The fractal traces the shapes and extents of dispersion of one thing, one substance, or

Figure 8.2  Left to right: Navajo rug; Egyptian vessel, following Owen Jones (1856); germ seed, following Louis Sullivan (1924). Sketches by Kent Bloomer.

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one state transforming into another. With a fractal multiplication of lines medieval tracery displays life-on-earth transforming into life-in-heaven. Its multiplications manifest a process of metamorphosis. Louis Sullivan’s primordial figure is the Y-shape of the “germ seed” (Figure 8.2, right).5 Like two cotyledon leaves, it provides a visual form for growth that develops into his figures of ornament immersed within the triangles, squares, and pentagons in which the Y-form is contained. Ornament’s limited taxonomy of basic figures, when situated in sites of juxtaposition, give visual shape to the phenomenon of transition between here-and-there, now-and-then, inside-and-outside, and a merger of the micro and macro-cosmos. Consider the ancient keys, the basic classic figures of ornament that came into being during epic formations of three super cultures. One key was centered around ancient Greece, one around China, and one around Mesoamerica. All three keys (Figure 8.3) contain spirals describing rotation from edges to centers and back to edges.Their repetitions along pathways indicate the periodic recurrence of events such as the bud-blossom-bud sequence in ancient Egyptian ornament. Although the geometric formations of each key reveal a unique cultural vision of the cosmos, the astonishing similarity of each (granting that they originated independently from one another) is a reality that reinforces the notion that the most enduring figures of ornament are rooted in primordial forms. Their gestures (i.e. the trajectories of the line work in all three keys) are recognizable to all. They perform legibly like the visual tropes of facial expressions and the basic arm-hand-finger movements of sign language. Each of those visually powerful and meandering figures has phenomenally controlled many thousands years of design (Das Nachleben der Antike—the afterlife of the antique world)6 without losing the grip of their original formations.

Figure 8.3  Greek, Chinese, and Mayan key bands. Sketches by Kent Bloomer.

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Ornament’s primordial figures are only compact matrices, visual catalysts that are particularly suited to diagramming the convoluted physics of motion. Like the numerical science of physics, the visual “science” of ornament attempts to express patterns of pushes, pulls, moments of change, and climax that govern things, producing a taxonomy of their distinct visible shapes. Its rhythms evoke the cycles of stars and nature. An attraction to a complexity of forces is evident in the way the primordial figures converge with physical bodies. Initially contacting outer edges or joints between subordinate parts, they focus upon a body’s dynamic constitution (i.e. the joinery that cannot be artificially added, subtracted, or perceived as being auxiliary to the body’s basic formation). They settle at places where the physical activity of components is concluded (Figure  8.4); sites that define what the body does as well as what the body is. They

Figure 8.4  Corinthian capitol. Sketch by Kent Bloomer.

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seek moments in which different kinds of work performed by a variety of forces are conjoined. Therein ornament’s figuration imaginatively mimics a dance of forces which, performing in concert, is imagined to be at play. Parts of things, conjoined side by side, contact one another along their edges away from their centers, along thresholds that in themselves are without weight, or thicknesses analogous to the immaterial lines drawn upon a map to locate the borders of regions. Actual borders can be excavated to become receptacles into which ornament’s figuration “creates as much space as may be necessary to it,”7 a created region that may evoke a greater distance from the centers of immediately adjacent things. Within such receptacles the most basic figures of ornament can change size (position and shape) to manifest the immanent confluence of binding and separating forces imagined to be immediately at work. The emerging figures can be enlarged, further developed, multiplied, and transformed (Figure 8.5); indeed they can be “awakened”8 to become entangled with other forces imagined to exist in the world out there.

Figure 8.5  Frieze, Capilla del Rosario, Templo de Santo Domingo, Puebla, Mexico. Photo by Kent Bloomer.

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Ornament’s capacity to articulate the interplay of local and distant forces would be dampened if its basic figures made their inaugural contact at the static “dead” centers rather than the dynamic edges of a body’s structural components. Settling into the undifferentiated and typically homogeneous centers of individual parts or regions would merely proclaim, reiterate, and elaborate upon innate and fixed local features. The product would be like that of a tattoo bestowing luster upon a forearm rather than a wrist, a sort of decorative idolatry, like a Nazi insignia, that would bolster the importance of a particular body part rather than the body “at work.” Decorating the center of an individual component of construction, such as a brick apart from a brick wall, would be a declaration of the brick’s independence from the life of the wall-world. If a figure of ornament were posited in the dead center it would not function as ornament but be perceived as an autonomous sign, a symbol, a pretension, or a medallion. However, one exception to the solitude of the autonomous figure is in the appropriate wearing of it. Despite its portability and apparent self-sufficiency, an ornamented article of jewelry is capable of “adorning” a body when it is provisionally located in critical sites of juxtaposition such as a necklace situated around a neck. Adornment is add-ornament, an auxiliary and portable condition of ornament.

The gridded surface Ornament may be distributed by grids located upon the flat surfaces of walls and ceilings. Understood as being “regions,” walls may appear to contradict the proposition that ornament only occurs at edges of regions. Yet the architectural function of a wall as a divider actually reinforces the proposition. Walls provide potent moments of three-dimensional juxtaposition, albeit a juxtaposing of volumes of space rather than of components of construction. They are planar boundaries between the inside and outside of a building, or between rooms, and thus they are situated between contingent domains rather than between conjoined solids. A wall dividing a volume is analogous to a picture frame dividing a plane. Consider that today’s wall rarely draws attention to its internal supporting structure. Interior walls are usually silent and white, signifying a oneness of space rather than a two-ness of place. One of the ancient responses to the silence of crude walls was to overlay them with regularized shapes. In Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century etymologies, “decoration is anything added to the [structural core of] buildings for the sake of ornament and embellishment such as ceiling panels set off in gold and wall panels of rich marbles and colorful paintings.”9 Decoration addresses the entire inventory of architectural minutiae, including the ordering of panels, moldings, materials, and ornament. It also arranges paintings, light figures, furniture, and other elements of décor. Unlike the cosmic project of ornament, decoration is primarily devoted to an overall social expression of “decorum” belonging to the manners and habits of a particular constituency. In procedures of design the locating of ornament must be subordinate to and entangled within decoration’s fashionable authority.

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The grid, in both the ancient and the modern age, may order the distribution of ornament. In antiquity, the regularities of the grid were known in the arts of weaving and agriculture and were materially formulated in Pythagorean tile patterns. The immaterial coordinates within a Cartesian grid also facilitate the generation and perception of symmetry operations (the dynamic patterns of translation, rotation, and reflection) critical to the development of complex figures. Whereas it was Descartes’s project to mathematize geometry, it has been ornament’s to colonize it (Figure 8.6).“The Cartesian grid is the basis for the ‘decorative field’ needing only the borders of a wall, floor, or ceiling which contain [its] expansion towards the infinite and which afford it its magnetic presence as a field.”10 In modern design Jespersen considers it to be the basic “utilitarian armature [to be] adorned with ornament in whole or in part.”11

Figure 8.6  Ceiling ornament. Drawing by Ioana Barac, printed with permission.

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But Cartesian geometry is neither a material substance nor a concrete place in which physical force is exerted. Can such an immaterial entity substantially emplace ornament? The grid is only a virtual armature, an evanescent subdivider that is positioned between the material surface of the wall and an amount of the cosmos. It performs more like one of ornament’s basic figures rather than a material thing being ornamented. Often the visible coordinates and subdivisions of the grid, like the alternations within a zigzag, are overtaken by the sensuality of the emerging ornament. Yet ornament’s rhythmic motions remain disciplined by the grid like songs and poems remain disciplined by meter. Performing as a virtual super-matrix its subdivisions provide “compact matrices,” which give birth to an amount of cosmos. Indeed, as a foundation for ornament’s figuration, the grid distributes ornament over material surfaces. Still, after ornament is configured within the matrices of a virtual grid, which is an immaterial rather than a physical foundation, what can prevent it from becoming disassociated from the structural wall or prevent it from ultimately becoming perceived as an independent work of decoration or fine art, an autonomous entity liberated from a dependence upon the root physicality of the primary “thing” being ornamented? Consider that a virtual grid may also serve as a rational measure of the material wall. Like Isidore’s material panels, it can provide elementary steps “for the sake of ornament” to be located congruently upon the bedrock of raw construction. By respecting the actual forces, dimensions, volumes, sizes, and edges constituting a material place of juxtaposition, the grid only adds a layer of complexity capable of becoming systematically entangled with subordinate zigzags, fractals, keys, foliations, serpents, and radiations that fulfill the figurative project of ornament. It thus performs as an actual extension of the wall’s physical form by initiating a transformation from a measure of the wall to an intricate veil between inside and outside. Understood as a “decorative field,” the grid is particularly suited to displaying motion within the static forms of modern buildings. While its virtual geometry is not necessarily more powerful or eloquent than the geometry governing the components of construction, its severe regularity is more capable of becoming “entangled” with a plethora of actual and imaginary forces apart from construction. Figures of ornament within a grid appear to be more everywhere at once and less restrained by gravity, a release that may also appear to dissolve the material wall. However, in the work of great ornamenters like Owen Jones and Louis Sullivan, there is neither a disembodiment nor a loss of primal physicality. Instead, their work achieves a repose or a “dynamic equilibrium”12 between things we may simultaneously touch and imagine.

Superposition Great works of ornament, our necessary guides, are meant to orchestrate together the visibilities of here-and-there, we-and-they, movement-and-rest, ornament-and-its-holder, the intimate-and-the-immense. They do so by superpositioning those distinctions together within the same place at the same time, rather than by synthesizing, blending in, or otherwise obfuscating their differences. While the differences between “here” and

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“there” can be initially mediated by basic figures (such as the zigzag and the grid), the final product of such a mediation is not meant to be the mediator per se. Ornament does not produce an alternate entity, a symbol, a work of art, or a resolution in the sense of reforming distinct un-likenesses by distilling them under the singular authority of a third nature. It serves to position the immediate and the immense together in the same place while keeping the spectacles of both domains essentially intact and interactive. As Casey writes, the “cosmologic deals with the elemental interpenetration of simultaneously present entities rather than [only] their succession from one stage to another” (FP, 5). Thus the purpose of visually situating cosmos in the matrices of earthly things is not to privilege vastness, mediation, or intimacy, but rather to temporarily emplace all of them together, that is, to “hold” an amount of cosmos nearby for the time being. The history of Western architecture presents at least two ways to co-position ornament with the elements and facades of buildings. The classic procedure is found in triadic formations such as the vertical ordering of a base, a shaft, and a capital (and the subsets of that order) (Figure 8.7, left). The composition is a corporeal one in which the base is mundane, the shaft a force of ascension, and the capitals, pediments, or ogival tracery are the principal regions of ornament. It is a metaphor of the upright human body acting as a holder of cosmos. In classic architecture the whole is a harmonic kit of body parts and joinery organized by rigid systems of proportion with perfection in mind. As a consequence classical geometric organization tends to privilege stability over the celestial motions of cosmos. It is a resolution that has provoked periodic riots, escape

Figure 8.7  Left to right: Greek temple. Sketch by Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore; Detail, Oxford Museum of Natural History. Sketch by Kent Bloomer.

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attempts, or takeovers such as the fiery tracery of flamboyant Gothic, monstrosities, the splashing of rococo, and the psychedelic polychrome of Victorian walls. Ruskin, opposing the perfection and rigidity of classical harmonics, proposed a quasi-Gothic procedure that would privilege an “active rigidity”13 between parts. Legible elements of fantastic ornament would be positioned side by side with bare elements of construction (Figure 8.7, right) so that “when the mind is informed beyond the possibility of mistake as to the true [the basic structural and material] nature of things, the affecting of it with a contrary impression, however distinct, is no dishonesty, but on the contrary, a legitimate appeal to the imagination.”14 Ruskin’s procedure is more dyadic than triadic. The utopian modernist designers of the twentieth century dismissed such “two-(or more)-ness” altogether in favor of a oneness wrought from a process of synthesizing differences into homogenous expressions of sameness. They foregrounded a formal and all-pervading continuity of “space” over the explicit heterogeneity of “place.” The consequence of eliminating ornament’s explicit otherness was to destroy legacies capable of simultaneously presenting a visual “equiprimordiality of primary terms” (FP, 337). Discarding a capacity to simultaneously express both this-and-that plus now-and-then within the fabric of a single work of architecture has also fueled the schism between the imaginative functions of art as distinguished from the practical functions of architecture. In the twentieth century, individual works of art, whether major or minor, became expected to explore the imaginary while the practices of design, particularly architecture, became expected to make visible Ruskin’s provisional “true [and immediate] nature of things.” The classical and Ruskinian grammars of architecture remain brilliantly able to express both states. Both grammars can still vividly manifest the spectacle of something on earth emplaced within a world of arboreal and celestial motions. Yet neither could deliver a mechanistic unity, the quaint scientific ideal that foreclosed locating two different states of being in the same place at the same time. But the mechanistic world picture is losing its luster, its laws becoming suspect even in the modern science of physics traditionally endowed to speculate upon the complex workings of bodies and the cosmos. Aside from the physical sciences, how can we explain our psychological capacity to simultaneously imagine, analyze, and remember two (or more) places or activities at once? As Casey’s work reminds us, the synthetics of modernism, with its avoidance of ornament’s “heterotopology,” has both standardized and diminished the millennial wonders of a cosmopolitan city (FP, 337). We must ask therefore, what are today’s elements of ornament and where can they be placed in the fabric of today’s cities? The first answer is ready-made by allowing ornament’s universal alphabet with its self-evident primordial figures, to be its first defining property. The scope and forms of its vocabulary are limited and have remained fundamentally unchanged for untold thousands of years. Its rhythmic cycles of extension, its periodicity, can visualize temporal phenomenon. Indeed, ornament’s

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typical and familiar appearance still remains publicly comprehensible as evocations of a larger world. Finding the local place(s) to distribute ornament is more challenging in the conventional construction of modern buildings so radically transformed from the architecture of the millennium. Columns are now buried and solid walls are dissolved into glitter. The homogenizing of height and weight has diminished the architect’s ability to express gravity. But we can still play by the old rules of ornament because there are always entryways, thresholds, sequences and potentially magnificent partitions between regions. Some of them are more eventful than others and thus more capable of holding ornament. Buildings still touch the ground and the sky. Small useful things (furniture, gates, and pavilions) can hold and radiate cosmos. Decorative fields can be shaped or inscribed upon the hard materials of silent floors, walls, and ceilings to provide matrices capable of nourishing ornament in the most magnetic sites of human, natural, or mechanical interaction (Figure 8.8). It is within the firmness, indeed the resistance, of those material moments-of-juxtaposition that the imagined meanderings of cosmos, superpositioned and entangled with the physical facts of earthly substance, may ground the fleeting world-at-large and thereby reveal the primacy of place over space.

Figure 8.8  Public space, Bethesda, Maryland. Drawing by Kent Bloomer.

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Notes 1 Kresten Jespersen, “The Owen Jones Yale Lecture” (lecture presented to Arch. 1216, the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, CT, Fall Semester, 2012). 2 Saint Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 271. 3 Ibid. 4 Emer O’Daly, “The Art of Roughness” (unpublished essay, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2010). 5 Louis H. Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament (New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, 1924), 9 and plates 1–4. 6 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 181. 7 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 65. 8 Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament, plate 4. 9 Isidore, The Etymologies, 379. 10 Jespersen, “The Owen Jones Yale Lecture.” 11 Ibid. 12 Louis H. Sullivan, “Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual,” in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Dover, 1979), 191–213. 13 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (Boston: Little Brown, 1981), 131. 14 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 41.

9

Plato, Levinas, and the Erotic Image Tanja Staehler

Time and again, philosophical voices emerge that are critical of art. The most famous ancient voice in this respect is Plato, who, in the Republic, criticizes art for its questionable ontological or epistemological position as far removed from the truth, as well as its questionable ethical role since art causes false emotions and can make us afraid.1 We can identify a somewhat surprising twentieth-century representative of the same unease in Emmanuel Levinas, who already in his early philosophy offers the provocative statement that during certain times, one can only be “ashamed” of artistic enjoyment, “as of feasting during a plague.”2 Levinas explicitly suggests a return to Plato, and this return also involves revisiting Platonic arguments about art, especially where its distance from truth and its lack of audience specificity are concerned.3 Most prominent is the Platonic critique of writing, which Levinas turns into a critique of works in general. Particularly important for Levinas is the Platonic argument that written texts—and artworks—are abandoned by their father and are thus unable to defend themselves against misunderstandings (Phædr., 275c). If paintings and writings were indeed mere copies of objects and spoken words, as Plato seems to present it, then it would seem justified to regard them as lesser versions. But we will see that the situation is more complex. For both Plato and Levinas, the precarious character of art becomes increased by its seductive power. As it appeals to our senses and presents us with various versions of beauty, art often becomes more compelling than reality and creates a dimension of evasion. The seductive power of art is one of several features that art shares with Eros. The attracting powers of Eros and art are not identical, to be sure; but what they share is a strong and not fully explicable fascination that comes to us from an object that we describe as beautiful. Art and Eros share the connection to beauty, but also a number of other features that will become more obvious as this chapter proceeds. Our main focus shall be two erotic images that present a culmination point of the problematic characteristics of images, on the one hand, and Eros, on the other. One suitable way of connecting the Levinasian critique of art and Eros is provided by the concept of nostalgia. Art is nostalgic in the sense that it points back to an original that it represents (though, again, this model might not prove the final word on the

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issue) and because it refers me back to myself, my senses and sensibility that artworks appeal to. Rather than opening me up to something other and new, art throws me back onto my familiar self, so Levinas claims. Furthermore, there is an affinity between art and nostalgia where the tendency to aestheticize the world is concerned—either by way of longing for an earlier, better world or by way of imagining a more beautiful, entirely different world. When it comes to Eros, its nostalgic character is described particularly well in the myth of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium where the inexplicable strength of erotic attraction is explained by having found one’s “other half ” from a previous time when all of us would have been ball-shaped creatures. For Levinas, there is one side of Eros that could indeed be described as nostalgic; this would be the side that refers me back to myself and my enjoyment, searching for that which complements me. However, there is another side of Eros that is not nostalgic at all, but is taken over by a deep desire for the Other with whom I fall in love and who turns out to always exceed and cross through my anticipations. A closer examination of nostalgia such as the one conducted by Ed Casey in his “The World of Nostalgia” reveals the “bittersweet” character of nostalgia.4 Nostalgia is sweet because it connects us to our past (which always seems sweeter from a distance), but also bitter because that past has irrevocably passed. It can make us stronger because it gives us a better sense of how we have become who we are, yet it can also weaken us by pulling us from the present to the past. Just like Eros, who has been designated as bittersweet ever since the times of Sappho, nostalgia is bitter as well as sweet, yet in such a way that the tension between the two sides remains and cannot be absolved in a synthesis. Levinas describes the bittersweet character of love with the help of the concept of ambiguity. He introduces the concept of ambiguity [ambiguité] to capture the nature of love as designated by need and desire, which corresponds to the distinction between a nostalgic side (“need”) and a non-nostalgic side (“desire”) of Eros. According to Levinas, the erotic “is the equivocal par excellence.”5 Ambiguity is not meant here to signify a contingent gathering of different and sometimes conflicting features, but designates an internal or essential ambiguity in the phenomenon under discussion. Yet an inherent ambiguity does not mean that the phenomenon should be dismissed wholesale, and contrary to some impressions, indeed neither Plato nor Levinas dismiss the erotic and artistic realms. Such ambiguities rather lead to the clashes which interpreters point out: Plato is critical of writing yet proves an utterly prolific writer himself; he is critical of myths yet gives myths crucial roles in his dialogues, etc. It is true, however, that Plato and Levinas are now and then tempted by the idea of purifying love, ridding it of its problematic elements, as we will see in the next section. Such attempts shall be investigated here with the help of two erotic images. It will become obvious, of course, that such sorting, dividing, and cleansing are not possible (otherwise, the diagnosis of an inherent ambiguity would have been false). In the second part of the chapter, we will examine a Levinasian notion that allows for thinking ambiguity in a productive fashion: the concept of the trace. With respect to this concept, Ed Casey rightfully claims that it is actually not secondary, but primary. Yet the significance of this reversal can only emerge at the end.

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Images of Eros The ambiguity of Eros thus stems from its position between need and desire, or more precisely, as involving need and desire, in simultaneity. Throughout his work, Levinas draws a distinction between need as resulting from a lack that can be filled, and desire as an insatiable longing that can only be deepened. The object of the latter sort of desire is the Other, the other human being, as surplus and rupture. Love cannot simply be a mixture of need and desire; the two elements are too different to yield a combination. Eros is too little as well as too much; lack (and thus, need) as well as excess (and thus, desire). Levinas thus arrives at a characterization of Eros as inherently ambiguous. But is he right to conclude that this ambiguity lies at the core of the phenomenon? After all, Levinas himself refers to the possibility of finding a “love without Eros” or without concupiscence in his later philosophy.6 By separating love from Eros, Levinas wants to get rid of those aspects of love that make it a danger to ethics: love as need, according to Levinas, is ultimately a “dual egoism,” that is, a return to the self and a turning away from society.7 Yet in seeking a love without Eros, Levinas denies himself the possibility of retaining the interesting results gained in his phenomenology of Eros. Furthermore, charity or a love without Eros tends toward a love among equals, thereby losing the radical otherness of the Other. But is the character of Eros indeed unified, or would it not be more advisable to distinguish between different kinds of love? We will briefly look at two— unsuccessful—attempts of “distributing” love into different kinds: the initial speeches in Plato’s Symposium, and Baglione’s painting Sacred Eros and Profane Eros. In each case, the failure of the distribution into different characters or manifestations of Eros proves important: in the Symposium, the arguments for such a failure are presented by Socrates; concerning Baglione’s painting, they can be identified with the help of Caravaggio’s painting to which Baglione responds. In the Symposium, the first three speeches of the dialogue, by juxtaposing different theories and opinions, present the common understanding of Eros. Agathon’s speech, despite coming later in the series, belongs to the same group. While Phædrus and Agathon praise Eros for providing us with the greatest goods and for being virtuous, Pausanias and Eryximachus point to the potentially dangerous character of love. To dissolve this ambiguity, Pausanias as well as Eryximachus establish two gods of love, a good one and a bad one, as it were. This is not surprising, given that the ambiguity of love is prevalent in Plato’s work. Love has a precarious side to itself which lets us lose self-control and puts us in a state of obsession such that we are outside or beside ourselves. Yet the seeming solution of establishing two gods cannot ultimately be successful: the gods have to be good and unified. Furthermore, we cannot understand the one phenomenon of love by splitting it in two. So both the nature of the gods and the nature of the erotic undermine this division. Socrates thus continues the discussion by presenting Eros as unified. Elsewhere, namely, in the Phædrus, he comments that even the predominantly physical version of love is better than the non-lover’s “human self-control,” which dilutes every friendship (Phædr., 256e).

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The same dilemma as to how Eros should be presented and how the precarious nature of Eros can be addressed plays out in two paintings which are situated next to each other in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatlichen Museen of Berlin (separated, however, by a throughway): Caravaggio’s Triumphant Eros (Amor vincit omnia, 1601– 1602) and Baglione’s Sacred Eros and Profane Eros (Amor sacro e amor profano, 1602). Baglione responded to the provocative nature of Caravaggio’s painting and wanted to teach Caravaggio a lesson, as it were; yet Caravaggio’s painting has always been conceived as the more successful one (Figure 9.1). What is wrong with Baglione’s painting? The most obvious and nevertheless most important problem concerns the lack of Eros in Baglione’s painting. There is nothing which draws us into this painting; instead, we are witnessing a struggle that does not seem to concern us. It only becomes obvious with the help of the title that the fighting parties are the sacred and the profane Eros. The sacred Eros appears much better equipped for the fight, and he is clearly in a winning position; but we do not learn anything about the nature of love, or anything that would explain the superiority of the sacred Eros. Perhaps we find out that there is something conflicted about love—but this conflict appears here as a struggle between two parties, and not as a struggle at the core of one and the same phenomenon.

Figure 9.1  Edward S. Casey at the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatlichen Museen of Berlin. On the left is Caravaggio’s Triumphant Eros (Amor vincit omnia, 1601–02) and on the right is Baglione’s Sacred Eros and Profane Eros (Amor sacro e amor profano, 1602). Photograph courtesy of Tanja Staehler, and printed with permission of the Staatlichen Museen of Berlin.

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Caravaggio, on the other hand, portrays an Eros who faces us and exerts a strong pull while seeming to hide a secret. There is a risk involved in responding to this call, but this might well be a risk worth taking. Eros and its attracting powers are at the center of the painting, but if we can pull our attention away from him, the painting tells us more about the nature of love. Love is not just one area among many dimensions of life, indifferent to the others. Musical, geometrical, governing, and military equipment lies on the floor, crushed by Eros. Eros can exert a stronger pull than all of these, and if a conflict arises, he has the power to win. Caravaggio here confirms Plato’s observations about the unique strength of Eros. Furthermore, his painting reinforces the Levinasian concern (shared by Plato) that Eros offers a pull away from other pursuits, a dimension of evasion or withdrawal that can be detrimental to other pursuits like arts or sciences. But what do the broken or dismissed objects on the floor actually signify? First of all, it might be worth noting that they operate on different levels; while some of them stand for the arts and sciences, others represent fame in the realm of governing and warfare. One obvious reading would be that a person who is mad with love (and there is good reason to presume, with Plato, that love always involves a madness) is willing to walk across everything else, as it were. Love absorbs us and overrides everything else, even those kinds of pursuits that otherwise keep us most focused: the quest for knowledge in the sciences, the urge to be creative in the artistic realm, and the struggle for political fame. A connection between the two levels of crushed objects would thus neither be necessary nor possible. Yet interpreters of this painting tend to assume that there is another, less obvious and more controversial dimension to the objects on the floor. Building on the Virgil quote from which the title is taken (“Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori”—“Amor defeats all, and we yield to Amor,” Eclogae X, 69), it is argued that love persists over the earthly pursuits of arts, sciences, governing, and warfare.8 However, this interpretation strikes me as problematic in several respects. Most importantly, is not Caravaggio’s Eros a deliberately earthly figure, as especially the stark contrast with Baglione’s response shows? This earthly character also comes to appearance in the realistic character of the skin and the wings, which will be briefly discussed below. Furthermore, there is an “ideal” quality to arts, sciences, and political fame that allows them to endure over time and contributes to their attraction (although certain differences between the two levels described above surface again here). The Pythagorean theorem and Mozart’s operas seem at least as durable as erotic attraction. We learn from Plato’s Symposium that Eros is a creature of the in-between (metaxu, 205a), holding an intermediate position between humans and gods. Diotima explains to Socrates that Eros is neither beautiful nor ugly, but in between, striving for beauty. In order for Eros to be desiring, he has to hold an intermediate position. In that sense, Caravaggio’s Eros might have the flaw of being too beautiful; yet upon closer scrutiny, he is perhaps not so much beautiful as, rather, charming. The charming character of Eros would correspond to the development at the end of Plato’s Symposium where Eros is discussed in terms of the beloved, by way of Alcibiades’ (drunken) account of how he loves Socrates. Lover and beloved, desiring and being desired need to both be considered in a discussion of Eros.

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The character of Eros as an intermediary being becomes most obvious, in Caravaggio’s painting, through the physical characteristics of the wings and the skin. In Caravaggio’s painting, both the wings and the skin are presented entirely realistically. In the case of the skin, this gives us the impression of encountering a “normal” boy whereas the wings come to correct this impression. Nevertheless, the wings are growing out of the body in an organic fashion and seem to sit naturally and comfortably. Baglione, on the other hand, presents the wings like a supplement, a kind of apparatus. Overall, the sacred Eros in Baglione’s painting appears like a warrior with equipment (including a flight machine, perhaps), not like an angel. Yet the wings are significant in the case of Eros, as Plato confirms. In the famous myth of the chariots in the Phædrus, our souls before incarnation are compared to chariots with wings, pulled by horses. Sooner or later, all the chariots lose their wings and tumble down to earth where they become incarnated. Yet when we fall in love, Eros causes our souls to grow wings again. This is a process that we are not used to at first, but to which we easily become addicted. When the loved one is taken away from us, the wings dry out again and cause us pain. Hence our desire to be around the loved one at all times—a desire that cannot be accounted for by reason. Seeing the beautiful beloved is nourishment for our wings.9 The wings mark the power of Eros, allowing us to “fly”; but they also show the precarious intermediate position of Eros, its ambiguity between material and spiritual dimensions. Baglione, on the other hand, spreads out the figures as if a fight with and defeat of the “bad Eros” could be possible. For Baglione, the Other is outside the self, next to it, clearly visible, giving the impression of a separation and confrontation. In addition to the profane Eros, he even includes a devil with Caravaggio’s face in his painting, creating a scene where an elimination of evil appears possible. Yet his painting does not do justice to the nature of Eros; it leaves us uninvolved, unlike the Other who can bring about an infinite desire.

A trace of beauty If Eros is thus a unified yet ambiguous phenomenon that cannot be purified or divided into separate manifestations, how can we come to a more unified account of it? Perhaps the object of Eros should be the point of departure. The object of art and Eros is beauty, or the beautiful. A definition of beauty poses severe problems, as the most famous Kantian conception of the beautiful as an object of “disinterested satisfaction” shows, since this description only makes sense when we enter into the Kantian conceptual framework.10 Plato, in contrast, determines the beautiful as the object of love and as that which we want to “have.” It might be implied here that a more direct determination of the beautiful is impossible. Levinas also stays away from a direct definition of beauty, but points out that beauty involves an element of the unintentional or, in his own words, there is “a splendor that spreads unbeknown to the radiating being—which is perhaps the definition of beauty.”11 Perhaps the evasive attraction of beauty stems from its character as situated between the spiritual and the material; this character cannot be captured by the all-too-familiar scheme of matter and form.

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If we follow Plato’s account of Eros in the Phædrus, our bodily nature is that which makes erotic love possible (since erotic love is inspired by our noticing a manifestation of beauty in the Other), but it is also that which makes an ultimate fulfillment of erotic desire impossible (since, as incarnate beings, we do not reach beauty itself). Similarly for Levinas, erotic desire presupposes that we are embodied beings, yet our desire reaches beyond corporeality. On the one hand, our bodily nature as needy and partly hedonistic beings endows love with its precarious position between need and desire, thus making pure love impossible. On the other hand, erotic love is only possible for an incarnate being, that is, for an essentially vulnerable being. In the realm of art, an equivalent ambiguity and paradox occur. The ambiguity of the work of art is linked to its materiality, which corresponds to corporeality in the erotic relation. In the case of art, that which enables an artwork to exist is at the same time that which limits it. A work of art is not a pure idea; it has a body. What Plato says about every logos, namely, that it has a body (Phædr, 264c), holds for every work in general. Levinas thus appears justified when he points out that statues or sculptures are the paradigmatic artworks.12 While it seems more accurate to speak about the materiality of a work of art rather than its “body,” the term “body” captures two essential features of the work of art. Firstly, the work has a capacity to rest in itself; secondly, it speaks to our senses. These two characteristics constitute the work as a work (rather than as, for example, a philosophical idea), and at the same time, they impose limitations. The work’s independence or ability to rest in itself provides it with the peculiar power to “speak” in the absence of its creator, or more precisely, without even pointing to a creator. Yet this same feature also allows for misunderstanding and misuse. Plato and Levinas are right to point to this danger that cannot be eradicated. On the basis of these reflections, it appears that ambiguity is rooted in and emerges from the corporeal or material dimension involved in these phenomena—a dimension that makes these phenomena possible, but also limits them. The paradoxical materiality that characterizes art and Eros by making them possible while also opening up their precarious and fragile features calls for a model which is not that of original and copy. Perhaps neither Eros nor art point back to an original, be it an original state of harmonious symbiosis or an original object or idea? What, if they actually much rather allow for a trace of the other to shine forth? Then again, is it not exactly Levinas’s criticism that they cannot accomplish this? But it is also Levinas who suggests that a solution can be found exactly in the notion of the trace that allows rethinking materiality in a less restrictive fashion. In order to introduce this notion, let us first return to Plato and the Phædrus. At first glance, the account of falling in love provided there seems as nostalgic as the myth of Aristophanes because we fall in love when something reminds us of the pure beauty which our souls have seen before becoming incarnated. But perhaps there is a less metaphysical, more phenomenological reading of this myth? A possible description—inspired by Levinas’s philosophy—would be this: when we fall in love, we see a trace of beauty that pulls us towards the loved one. The notion of the beautiful should be taken in the widest sense, as something that evokes our desire. When we follow this trace and indeed fall in love, we find more and more of what has evoked our desire—an inexhaustible excess, like beauty itself. We experience an excess in the

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loved one, and this excess strengthens our desire. We are aware that we do not love a particular feature, or a group of features, in the other person, but something that goes beyond all such features and of which they only bear a trace. We never fully grasp the loved one; there is always something that escapes us, and this deepens our desire. This excess could be named beauty, and, from a phenomenological perspective, that which reminds us of beauty might best be called a trace, as a manifestation of beauty which points to something that we cannot reach as such: there is always more of it, and it always withdraws. The concept of the trace, which becomes so important for Levinas’s philosophy, thus captures most aptly the experience that Plato describes here, even though Plato does not use the concept in this dialogue. “Trace” can describe the experience of feeling reminded of something without being able to remember in any clear fashion where this memory is coming from. The beautiful is thus not a copy, but a trace of beauty, reminiscent of an inaccessible surplus. As Casey points out, traces “have a status, function, and value of their own that exceeds their materiality just as it surpasses their facilitating effect.”13 The presence of a trace is such that it has always already “eluded its own presentation.”14 Perhaps this is Plato’s point about writing: if it were a kind of presentation by way of copying, it would indeed be weak and secondary; but in fact, it is a different kind of phenomenon. The trace is a uniquely subtle phenomenon, somewhere between presence and absence, or, as Levinas puts it in “The Trace of the Other”: “the supreme presence of the face is inseparable from supreme and irreversible absence.”15 Casey suggests that the working of trace, which defies the metaphysical binary of absence and presence, be described as “passage.”16 Operating as the passage between absence and presence and yet as the highest manifestation of absence and presence, trace as passage can also point back to that which has irrevocably passed, like a past that cannot be made a presence or, for example, an Eros (God or demigod) who might have struck us in passing. In his passage, Eros leaves his traces, which point us toward an excessive beauty and, at the same time, point back to a past more primordial than any familiar past. The kind of nostalgia that relates to this past is thus not of the kind which Levinas would criticize as pointing us to the self and the familiar, but connects us to a wondrous otherness that is inaccessible, except by way of its traces.

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, the Platonic dialogues are abbreviated as follows: Plato, Phædrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 506–56 [hereafter cited as Phædr.]; Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, trans. rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 971–1223 [hereafter cited as Rep.]; and Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 457–505 [hereafter cited as Symp.]. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 12.

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3 Levinas announces this return to Platonism most explicitly in his text “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 101. 4 Edward S. Casey, “The World of Nostalgia,” Man and World 20 (1987): 361–84. Recently reprinted in Existentialism: Critical Concepts, ed. Tanja Staehler (London: Routledge, 2012). 5 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 255. 6 In an interview with R. F. A. Gomez recorded in 1982, Levinas says: “From the start, the encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him. That is the responsibility for my neighbor, which is, no doubt, the harsh name for what we call love of one’s neighbor; love without Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect, love without concupiscence.” Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 105. 7 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 266. 8 See, in particular, Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 91–94 and 182–83. 9 Anne Carson describes how the “wing-growing” character of Eros leads us to the limits of our human understanding: “Eros’ wings mark a critical difference between gods and men.” Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 163. 10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §2. 11 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200. 12 Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 8. 13 Edward S. Casey, “Levinas on Memory and the Trace,” in The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, eds. John Sallis et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 243. 14 Ibid. 15 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 350. 16 Casey, “Levinas on Memory and the Trace,” 251.

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Framing the Landscape Edward S. Casey, interviewed by Azucena Cruz-Pierre

Casey’s apartment—New York City—September 14, 2011 Azucena Cruz-Pierre (ACP):  In Representing Place, you coin the term “topopoetic,” building on Bachelard’s concept of topoanalysis. By offering this term, you mark the difference between a topographic kind of depiction of a place (one that serves above all to locate, situate, explain the place) and a topopoetic representation of place (one that brings the viewer into the work itself, inviting her to contemplate, participate, and identify with this place). I would like to ask you then how Bachelard’s discussion of the “instant” figures into your conception of the topopoetic, since it appears that the instant plays a strong role in the creative force that leads to this contemplative kind of representation.1 Could we say that Bachelard’s conception of the instant, out of which moments of creativity and insight spring, is also at play in your conception of topopoetic representation? Edward S. Casey (ESC):  That’s a really fine question and a very provocative one that asks in effect: What is the appropriate temporality of a given art like painting. Here it seems to me that there are two extremes in painting. One extreme emphasizes the perdurance and permanence of the landscape and encourages but does not require slowness, deliberateness, on the part of painter. My own mentor in painting, Dan Rice, a remarkable landscape painter, would often paint and repaint a given landscape, painting it over a period of 30 years. His rendition is very subtle, so the changes are virtually invisible except to his very fine eye. The point is that he persists. The other extreme valorizes the instant, that is, the instantaneous impression, and makes an effort in the medium to be faithful to that instant. I’m thinking here of classical Chinese landscape painting with pen and ink, very quick brush sketches. In the West, there is watercolor painting, which requires very rapid work because as soon as it dries you can do very little with it. I myself am drawn to that medium. I always use a water-based medium, including acrylic, because it too dries very rapidly. I feel that there is something special about the intensity of the bond that the instant offers and which brings the body of the spectator into a kind of momentary confrontation with the landscape itself or its image.

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You could say that it’s like a precipitation. And for me, this is a way of shedding inhibitions that stem from a protracted attention to form and detail that would be much more time consuming. This is not to say that form and detail don’t have their own merit; rather, it is a question of trusting something quite gestural and spontaneous. For example, this painting right here [pointing to a painting above his sofa] probably took four minutes to paint, and I was going to go on and paint it further when Dan Rice said to me: “Ed don’t touch it. That’s it! It’s fully perfect. You must not add a single stroke to that.” And that taught me something about valuing the instantaneous image. ACP:  Not every instant is perfect. ESC:  No. Far from it. You just value what the instant can bring, its potential. The instant cuts across the “longue durée,” to use Braudel’s phrase regarding history and, especially, geography, which becomes centrally important in his account of the Mediterranean world. In that world, the “long run” is what matters; however, there is something about the image and its instantaneous character that is of special moment in other cultures—cultures that favor water-based painting. The great master of watercolor painting in American painting is of course John Marin [picks up a book from the coffee table between us containing John Marin’s work] and he painted on the same island (Deer Isle) where I go to in the summer when I am able to paint at leisure. Marin does incredibly quick things; for instance, it probably took him no more than 15 minutes to paint this work [shows an image from the book], but it’s very bold, it’s very powerful, and it’s complete. ACP:  You talk a bit about photography in your writings, but I know your focus lies more on painting. However, in connection with our discussion on the instant and representation, I am interested in what you said about photography and the fact that you referred in The World at a Glance to works by Walker Evans (one of my favorite photographers), who created a narrative about the Depression Era in the United States through his capturing of thousands of images of that difficult time. ESC:  In The World at a Glance, there is quite a bit on photography and I make a lot of the fact that the French word “instantané” is the French word for “snapshot.” Photography is an art that capitalizes on the instant. Cartier-Bresson talks about the “decisive moment.” I think that there is something paradoxical but profound about the way that the slender moment captured in a photograph—the least sliver of time—can enter so deeply and quickly into the thick durée of the landscape precisely because of its quickness and its slenderness. It’s like a kind of mercurial thrust. Note that Bachelard, in his discussion of topoanalysis, privileges the instantaneous image that is a model for him. “A sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” is his definition of image in the introduction to Poetics of Space.2 (See also his earlier book L’intuition de l’instant, soon to appear in an English translation.) Earlier in the history of art, an image was only a sketch, nothing but a mere preliminary study. We’ve seen here a profound shift of artistic sensibility. Now, belatedly, we admire Rembrandt’s sketches or Cezanne’s watercolors almost as much as their full-scale

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paintings. This is one of the forms of liberation that modern and postmodern art has brought. ACP:  Throughout your writing, there is the reappearance of artworks, be it in the form of an example to highlight a concept you wish to illustrate more concretely, as often happens in Representing Place; or in the form of an entire book that is centered on a philosophically informed critical analysis of particular forms of artwork, as we find in Earth-Mapping; or even in the form of your own artwork, an example of which we find on the cover of The World at a Glance. So, I feel compelled to pose this question, which came first for you, your philosophical or artistic interests/ practice, and how have they influenced each other? ESC:  My immersion in art came much earlier than my interest in philosophy. As a preadolescent, I had a pretty serious commitment to art, particularly painting and secondarily to jazz piano. I was really intending to become an artist until my parents, alarmed at this prospect, sent me to a boarding school that had no art at all. Whether that was intentional on their part, I don’t know, but certainly, the school had nothing to offer in art. Faute de mieux, I drifted into a more scholarly academic focus of interest. I began reading philosophy in high school—to start with, Santayana’s Skepticism and Animal Faith—and found this to be very intensely interesting, very challenging, something I really enjoyed doing: reading difficult philosophical texts, even though I knew very little about what was being said in them. So art took a second position. It was only an occasional thing at best, and this stalemate continued for a very long time, all the way through my graduate years. My first years as a professional philosopher, I was really writing, teaching, nothing else; art was ever more distant from my life. And then, in my mid to late 30s, immediately upon terminating a psychoanalysis of several years’ duration, I took a local art course in Guilford, Connecticut, where I lived at the time. I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker, entering into an intense period of artistic activity that has lasted more than 25 years. Even today, I paint a fair amount, largely when I am in Maine and on Deer Isle. But I don’t have any interest in being a full-time painter or artist. I wouldn’t like to earn my living from this. It’s best for me to keep it avocational: it’s something I do because I love to do it. I do not consider whether other people would like to purchase what I paint, or even what they think of it. Earlier, before I started painting again, I specialized in aesthetics, philosophy of art—as if by way of compensation. I was instrumental in founding a program in Manhattan with a master’s degree in philosophy and the arts because I wanted this dual focus to be available for young people who, like myself, had interests in both directions. Teaching there in the last six years has been an energizing experience for me and hopefully for the students as well. Here I keep alive the mixture between philosophy and art in the realm of teaching. My concern is this: how do artworks and the theory of art actually cast light upon topics that I as a philosopher am very invested in (nature of place, role of place in people’s lives, the character of the glance). Now, in my new work on edge, I am doing the same thing. I am breaking off part of the parent book, The World on Edge (2014), in order to write a separate volume on art, architecture, painting,

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sculpture, and drawing, where I explore the role of edge in those worlds. I can’t seem to leave art aside. In writing any given book, it seems like I must say something about how my preoccupation bears on art and how art bears on it; it’s like a happy marriage. For me, the union between art and philosophy is felicitous: effortless and spontaneous, it announces itself; I don’t have to pursue it, it pursues me.

Video call—Nantes, France to Santa Barbara, California —March 17, 2012 ACP:  In Representing Place, there is a distinction made between maps and landscape art that plays on the space/place distinction. What happens when maps and landscape art become one, that is to say, when landscape art is also a form of map, for instance, in aboriginal dream paintings? How would you describe such paintings along the lines of the distinctions you make in this book? And I would like to add that it was actually thanks to you that I became more aware of aboriginal art paintings because you had recommended reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines. A rather roundabout way to discover this kind of artwork, I admit. ESC:  Well, starting with the aboriginal situation, we have a circumstance where what I’m calling “space” is resisted in favor of what I like to call, in a more strict sense than usual, “topography,” taking the term to mean quite literally “drawing out a place,” topos graphein. And so there is a respect for what I also call the “idiolocality,” the uniqueness of a place, both in terms of its physical delineation, its contour, its structure, its mass, its shape, and in terms of the local history, which can include visits of ancestors in the case of aboriginal art so that their visits and their being there for certain periods of time and, in some cases forever, idiolocalizes, singularizes that place. Here we have a case of where maps and localism go hand in hand, and we do not have the tension between world maps as created from the Renaissance onward and local maps that have only to do with towns, cities, and neighborhoods. In the early modern period, the wish was to have a regular grid, to have representations that could be literally charted according to measures, parameters, keys that allow you to understand exactly how many miles there are between two spots on such a map. It was a matter of regular, gridded, “striated space” in Deleuze’s term. Such a sense of space still sets the norm, as with GPS global positioning maps. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, there was a counter movement to return to local maps. For instance, there was created a whole series of wonderful maps of England, of all the counties, regions of England. Starting in the eighteenth century, these were very colorful, exhibiting small icons for very particular features of the land. These were in effect naturally given “landmarks,” which became critical in local maps, such that trees, mountains, hills, rivers became very important as people were moving very slowly across the land in fact or in imagination. I would say the globalism and localism reached a kind of stasis of equilibrium somewhere toward the end of the 19th

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century. The new sensibility was slow in getting off the ground, as there were only a few individuals authorized to do this, at least in the Western world. In the Eastern world, interestingly enough, in the nineteenth century, there were Japanese maps called “yukioe” that were wonderful colorful depictions of all of Japan or of various islands of Japan done in such a pictographic way as to be completely charming and to serve mainly as paintings, even though they were also accurate as maps. So sometimes I just call these “art maps.” ACP:  This is why I was wondering, where do you draw the line between a map and a work of art? It would seem that at times the line can be quite blurred. ESC:  It certainly can be! Paradoxically, it took a certain amount of progress in modern mapping to free up the spirit of art. Before that, the artistic element in maps had been held at the margins in the form of flourishes, cartouches, embellishments of all sorts. It was put literally on the edge and considered secondary, marginal. The strong allure of this element joined forces with a pronounced localism in the mapping of countries and continents; all this really freed up energy for the imagination of maps to merge with art. ACP:  In terms of your discussion on the creation of maps, I was thinking of those maps that we create ourselves. Often, I find myself drawing maps that reflect the fact that I am someone who tends to walk places and not drive, thus referring more often to landmarks than street names. But these maps, and my own ability to find my way, really depend upon the stability of places, including the landmarks that punctuate them. For example, upon returning to Chicago after being away for several years, I find that many of the shops and buildings are now gone or changed, leaving holes in my visual cues that I relied upon for navigating my way through neighborhoods. One could make the comparison to returning home only to find all the furniture rearranged. You can no longer easily move through what used to be a familiar space. Of course, eventually I recognize where I am and start to piece it all together, but at first it is disorienting because those places that I rely on for guidance, for localizing myself, are no longer there. It’s at these times of disorientation in the familiar that I find we underestimate the importance of landmarks and how they connect us to our environment. ESC:  I think now you are pointing to the importance of landmarks in our ordinary perceptual experience which end up for the nonprofessional mapper in the form of sketch maps, wherein telling friends how to get to a place we sketch it out. But notice that this is a form of informal mapping and it is even further carried on in what’s been called mental maps, which are a kind of virtual or diffuse image that we carry with us of our neighborhood or the part of the world that we know pretty well. We may never have written it out. We may never have drawn it down. And yet we draw upon it when people ask us for directions. And in that mental map or the sketch map that results from it, landmarks do stand out, where landmark is now used very broadly because it can obviously be a building or a telephone pole, anything that has special saliency in the landscape. I’m sort of fascinated with landmarks because the word itself is a curious combination of a

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semiotic, the mark, the indicative sign, and the land. The mute pre-semiotic earth is here, as it were, semioticized, made part of a tree, a hill, and then of course buildings built upon the earth. Here we are drawn into the human enterprise of making coherent meaning that can be used for orientational, navigational, and habitational purposes. “Landmark” is thus parallel to “artmap,” a deliberatively oxymoronic bivalent phrase. But landmark combines the pre-semiotic with the semiotic. And it turns out that it’s a powerful combination for cartographic memory. It’s not just a mute object, but an object that bears sense. It struck me as a child, when some building or something I was familiar with that meant something to me was destroyed (e.g., my great uncle’s house by fire), it was almost like removing a significant part of that world that you can no longer have access to except through the landmarks which you hope survive; but if none do, then it’s a kind of place trauma. You go back and you think “Oh wow, even that is gone! My favorite candy store!” When we really move all the way along the semiotic spectrum from the image to the word, there we can dispense with maps. It becomes facultative or optional as to whether we have them because the reader is supposed to be drawn in by the fascination of the stories, the happenings that occur therein. ACP:  In such cases, I would say that we create the maps in our minds based on what is being described (that is to say, we are creating the representations visually based on verbal representations). I am a huge fan of travel writing, and when reading these books, I am going through, I am mentally seeing, the spaces. From this I create my own maps, based on the narratives that are given to me, of places I have never been. How do I know what Morocco looks like, I have never been there? But thanks to Edith Wharton, who wrote about Morocco, I can kind of see myself saying: “this is there,” “that is located there.” In some sense, I am placing myself somewhere I have never been. ESC:  So here we have this very curious thing where, you see, the writing of foreign lands actually ignites the imagination of the reader who then creates her own mental map of a world she has never been in, yet is propped up only by a few words, a few narratives, and then it’s unleashed. Here, imagination, which is in the West a sort of staple medium of being creative, actually creates another reality, which is now a narrative reality with its own mental sketch map. But it’s not even drawn out. You don’t write it down, you’re just allowing this to happen to you as you read the words; an inner cinema so to speak is going on. This shows how mapping can take us all the way into the internalities of our own imagination as well as out to the externalities of the cosmos. You know, it’s really quite a remarkable journey that mapping can take us on, if we only expand our thoughts about what constitutes a map. I’m sure that’s why I got into all that writing on maps. I was fascinated with them as a child. My mother collected maps, and they were almost like sacred objects in our household. She had them in a special portfolio and when pulling them out, it was like pulling out part of the world to be shown to my sister and myself as very young kids. I don’t think it would happen today. I doubt it. Because of GPS mapping, mapping is all too easy. We can get a map of anywhere we wish to go. So

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this special status of a map, as a unique representation with its own virtues, its own accuracies, and its own colorations—all of that becomes a faded feature of the kind of mapping we can get on Google Earth. ACP:  Very unsatisfying. It’s useful, but it’s unsatisfying. ESC:  You said it, exactly. Totally useful, totally practical, and in fact we become dependent on them. When I’m looking up an address and I’m in a town I don’t know, it’s extremely useful. ACP:  We used to just ask the person on the corner for directions, the woman on her front porch, and now we pull out our phones and find where we are and where we are going that way. ESC:  I know, there is something perverse about this. We have the world in our hand. ACP:  Exactly! Finally! ESC:  The Spanish say “el mundo en un panuelo” (“the world in a handkerchief ”). I think that’s the Spanish phrase for what we call a “small world.” Art in particular takes the world in hand . . . ACP:  You refer to “interplaces,” “in-between places,” and “non-places” in your writing, for instance, in Representing Place, where you use them in reference to the frame of a work of art as well as to describe landscape boundaries—terms that seem similar but are significantly different in kind. Could you clarify these terms, as well as provide some examples? And as you have suggested in your book, the frames are not always there, they are sometimes merely hinted at or the artist plays with the idea of the frame, or the frame becomes part of the artwork itself because the frame is decorative—like a boundary, the artwork and the frame might blur together. How can we distinguish or describe these two terms, and how are they related? ESC:  This line of thought stems from Kant in his notion of frame as part ergon, the by-work, the work around the work. And Kant has a remark—I only know this because Derrida goes on to make so much of it, others having rarely noticed it—that runs something like, “frames of works are just very secondary, very marginal, they’re just parerga, that is, outside the work alongside the work.” He dismisses such mere by-works, particularly those that are overly ornate, as mere frippery. In his view they are just kitsch, trash. Get rid of them! Nevertheless, despite Kant’s dismissing them, they are a factor in the perception of the artwork. So I would call that sense of frame as external part “ergonal.” That’s really what I call a mere border; it literally borders the work. There’s a clear distinction then between the work and the frame that is externally imposed by it, in different styles of course, but really unrelated to the subject matter, much less the style of the painting. Things get interesting when, and the first person to do this in my knowledge in Western art was Seurat, Seurat carried his pointillistic painting right into the physical frame around the painting proper. Really quite bold, quite daring. No one had ever thought to do that, because it was like a trespassing, unauthorized, like a migrant trying to come across La Frontera. And then others picked this up. Picasso plays with it, though John Marin is the great master of it. I just saw a show in Maine this summer of Marin’s

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works where the frame is literally integrated into the painting in such a way that you can barely tell the difference any longer. It’s quite extraordinary. And other people literally paint a frame right on the canvas, an internal frame as if it was a kind of echo of a separate surrounding frame. ACP:  Yes, Magritte for instance and the surrealists who did that tried to represent the idea of a portal, a symbol of entry into the psyche or unconscious, but, nonetheless, a kind of framing in the guise of anti-framing. ESC:  Yes, that was their comment on formal framing. The surrealists were onto the complexity and interest in the framing. I call this a “non-place” because of the fact that it is neither the landscape nor the still life, nor is it the painting, but it is some kind of neutral zone that nevertheless is a presence. It’s a weird type of thing that is both physically present and yet aesthetically supposed to be superficial and external. So the painters who began to create such frames were in effect dissolving the parergon and making it part of the ergon, bringing it into the work, making it integral to the work itself. That’s a way of saying that the no man’s land of the frame was dissolved so that everything becomes traversable, image, color, shape, including the former frame itself—all incorporated into the work, into the ergon, in this way. This got me very interested in the whole question of edges, because here the edge is not just the delineated sharp ending of a physical object but is complicated, delightfully complicated, made in just a thousand ways interesting, as interesting as the painting itself in some cases. So that transition for me was a movement in my lingo from border to boundary such that anything could be a boundary for anything else and there wasn’t any special privilege given to the external frame any longer. It’s a kind of democratizing of the image. The whole idea of the frame as a formal setting apart fits very well for a museum sensibility, frames in their own frame, in their own place. You think of the Mona Lisa: it would be unthinkable to have the Mona Lisa unframed—you just can’t imagine it. It’s like a thought experiment that you can’t succeed at. This is really quite a radical action of setting forth the painting for its own sake, not needing a frame at all. Many artists, staring with the abstract expressionists, had no frames at all for their works. ACP:  I am thinking here of Mondrian, of course. ESC:  Yes, absolutely. Mondrian was a master of this de-framing. ACP:  He was someone who played with the idea of lines, but regarding frames, forget it! ESC:  And sometimes he would take those lines around the edge. ACP:  Exactly. ESC:  Right off the canvas. He’s a central figure in this drama of frame and edge. All of this has to do with the creative modulation of space, in my language, really place, because the whole thing becomes an active scene of spatial interest and you don’t have zones segregated either by materials or by formal traditions of framing. Now everything becomes, as it were, a scenography, a dynamic interaction of factors. So

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any part of the canvas, including the very edge in the case of Mondrian, becomes as interesting as, maybe more interesting than, any other. For myself, this posed the question of what happens when you come to the end of represented space: what happens at the edge? If the painted image is still affected on a surface, then it has to have an edge. The next question is “What do you do with that edge?” Do you just let it be? Do you embellish it? The impulse to decorate it was what Kant was objecting to: the tendency to prize embellishment for its own sake. But what if you take the edge as an intrinsic part of a painting and no exoskeletal—as something worthy of attention for its own sake? ACP:  The highlighting of the edge you pursue in your current edge analysis of La Frontera involves the retracing, the reinscription, of edges in the form of the wall on the US-Mexico border. Here the US government is literally repeating a cartographic edge by building a wall along that edge, literally reinforcing a line that was already there, a border that was already present. Here there is a political parallel to the issue of frames in art insofar as the edge of the canvas already exists but then the frame, like a border wall, acts to accentuate the edge and thus acts to remind the viewer of the focal limit. ESC:  Yes, absolutely, frames and walls build out, and build over, edges: a case of literal ausbauen, “to build out.” And it’s often excessive, as in the case of the wall at La Frontera. Such a wall is thought to be necessary for security and for controlling immigration. Well, this is not completely foreign to the passion for built-up ornate frames so prominent in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century museums—where such frames gave a sense of dignity and splendid isolation. You may remember that Sartre, in Nausea, writes brilliant parody of the portraits of the village elders, the mayors, of a certain small town that Roquentin is living in; these portraits are all formally framed and carefully hung in the city hall. The framing is a power play, as is the wall at the US/Mexico border, and they are both excessive: they are all just too much, de trop. Frames and walls alike seek to dignify the nation or the mayor, in short, those in power. We could do a lot with this notion of the established frame or wall that is constructed to keep the content of a nation or a municipal government intact.

Notes 1 See Casey, “Taking Bachelard from the Instant to the Edge,” Philosophy Today 52 (2008): 31–7. 2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

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Glimpsing the Sublime: Casey, De Kooning, and Abstract Expressionism Galen A. Johnson

A painting titled Looking Out to Sea from Stonington (2006) appears on the cover of The World at a Glance (2007). The artist is the same Ed Casey as the author. Looking Out to Sea is a study in blue, white, green, and yellow, an abstract work with similarities to the New York school of abstract expressionism that includes Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning that shifted the gravitational center of the art world from Paris to New York City in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. For its colors and abstraction, Looking Out to Sea from Stonington reminds one of Willem de Kooning, Two Trees on Mary Street—Amen! (1975), though de Kooning’s brush work is heavier and the paint is thicker, applied with de Kooning’s characteristic splashing streaks in contrast with the lightness and delicacy of Casey’s painting. De Kooning has famously stated that he was a “slipping glimpser”1 who painted from glimpses of the world: “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.”2 De Kooning’s painting also “represents” trees rather than sea and ocean waves and by now we have landed in a thicket of questions about art and philosophy having to do at least with the meaning of representation, of abstraction, and the natural sublime of trees, water, and landscapes. We also have invoked the phenomenology of perception elaborated in The World at a Glance with the modes and modalities of vision that include the gaze, the glance, and the glimpse. Does it seem paradoxical to speak of glancing at or catching a glimpse of the sublime? Is the sublime “mere” surface to be sensed quickly by the fleeting glance or partial glimpse rather than something deep that evokes a prolonged and steady look? We will begin from the emergence and ever growing importance of the art and writings of Willem de Kooning in Casey’s writing, then turn to his analysis of the glance and the glimpse, and finally to the question of the meanings of Abstract Expressionism and the paradox of surface and depth in “glimpsing the sublime.”

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Willem de Kooning in the oeuvre of Edward S. Casey To my knowledge, the first appearance of Willem de Kooning in the writings of Ed Casey comes in a footnote on the very last page of The Fate of Place (1997): “De Kooning has remarked similarly that his paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s were done from a close-up glimpse taken at the surrounding landscape of eastern Long Island as he drove through it rapidly: ‘It’s this glimpse which inspires [me]’ (Sketchbook No. 1)” (FP, 477, n. 22). Here Casey has implicitly, perhaps unknowingly in 1997, launched the trajectory that would lead to The World at a Glance in 2007. Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (2002) also includes a discussion of de Kooning that we will postpone to our last section since it links the painter’s landscapes with the sublime. In Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (2005), we encounter a full-length seventh chapter on de Kooning. Among the topics Casey undertakes is the controversial subject of de Kooning’s paintings of the female figure in a section entitled “Woman in/as Landscape,” which focuses, not on the ferocious “bitch goddess”3 series from Woman I (1950–52) to Woman VI (1953), but on Woman as Landscape (1955) and especially upon Two Figures in a Landscape (1967) and Untitled III (1981). These latter express “the deep commixture of woman and landscape” (EM, 144) in which the very abstract figures “are so deeply immersed in the land as to be part of its very topsoil. They form the earth’s endoskeleton, as it were . . . part of the earth’s elementality” (EM, 142).4 We find a mixture of woman and water in Woman, Sag Harbor (1964) in which the nebulous, blurred female figure merges with the blue-green-white ocean water. Overall, Casey assimilates the landscape paintings of de Kooning to a new kind of mapping that is “absorptive” rather than “cartographic,” more oriented to place than sheer topographic space. Absorptive mapping “aims to capture the sense, the feeling, of a certain place or region . . . in terms of how it is concretely experienced by those who live there. [ . . . ] The lived-body is all over the place” (EM, 151) as are the elemental experiences of fire and air, earth and water. In relation to this elementality, the basic bodily action is that of taking in the sensuously felt features of a landscape. The painter’s initial experience [ . . . ] draws in the landscape, makes it part of an inherent bodily knowledge (connaissance du corps, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase) and then draws out this bodily knowledge in a work of art. (EM, 151)

Merleau-Ponty drew the concept of connaissance from the Art Poétique of Paul Claudel and it refers both to a kind of embodied, operative knowledge (connaissance) of the world that is “below” full cognition, and to our birth that is always a co-birth (co-naissance) with others and with all of nature. In Traité de la co-naissance in Art Poétique, Claudel wrote: “We do not come into the world alone. To be born for everything, means to be born in affinity with everything, together with. All birth is knowledge (naissance-connaissance).”5 With this notion of a birth of painting as a tacit bodily knowing that mixes activity and passivity, we approach the topic of glances and glimpses taken up in The World at

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a Glance. Casey tells us straightway in the “Introduction” that he has taken inspiration from de Kooning’s glimpses: How, I have asked myself, can such accomplished monumental paintings as those created by de Kooning in this phase of his career [the late 1960s] stem from mere glimpses? There must be much more at stake in glimpsing (which I take to be a basic form of glancing) than I had imagined. (WG, 8–9)

As de Kooning was his artistic inspiration, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Bergson are his primary philosophical inspirations, especially a lacuna in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception related to landscape (paysage). Merleau-Ponty gave an often unappreciated prominence to the perception of landscapes6 but without identifying “just what kind of perception is at stake” (WG, 8). The answer, Casey proposes, is the glance.

The glance and the paradox of surface and depth Etymologically, we learn from Casey, “‘glance’ signifies gliding or sliding off a slippery surface” (WG, 13). Its origin is from old French, glacier, meaning “to slide, slip,” also related to the modern French word for “ice” and “ice cream,” glace. The cognate English word “glacier” combines the traits of slippery slope, smooth surface, and frozen substance. Like glaciers, Casey points out, the “primary paradox of glancing” is that something immense comes from a modest source such as a stream or river (WG, 13). The glance is akin to the light touch in conversation yet it is nothing superficial lacking in insight. Thus, it comes to pass that in the cultural world “paintings are the correlates of the glance: here, too, smooth surfaces contain colors that have become congealed into definite shapes” (WG, 20). Four of the most salient qualities of the surfaces of the earth and things are taken in by the glance: shape, texture, color, and illumination (WG, 82–83). These phenomenal properties of surfaces are not taken in single file but together in concert and ongoing collaboration. In Casey’s terms, the glance is remarkable for its swiftness in the “instant” or what he prefers to call the “moment” in Kierkegaard or Heidegger’s usage, like Wordsworth’s “spots of time” or “a form of philosophical pointillism” (WG, 17, 8). The swift moment of the glance itself rests upon the eyes’ saccades, which “make glances possible without being themselves genuine glances” (WG, 301). Though this “now” of the glance matters, the even more remarkable trait of the glance is the character of the “all-at-once.” “The all-around is taken in all-at-once” (WG, 11). Of the three traits of the glance—(the now, the all-at-once, and the here), Casey argues that the all-at-once is the most distinctive. It takes in the world all together (tout ensemble) with mercurial speed. Casey differentiates the glance of the viewer of a painting from that of the painter’s glance while at work on a piece, for the latter not only glances back and forth between a model or a landscape view or photograph and the artwork, the artist also glances

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“amid parts of the evolving work” (WG, 416). This is a kind of “lateral” or “immanent” glancing around the material surface of the work—and sometimes between other works underway or completed—and is especially present in making revisions among earlier and later efforts and improvisations. “This process may be as radical as de Kooning’s practice of scraping off all the paint he had applied during one day of work, so that he could start the next day almost clean (‘almost,’ since there remained a congeries of pale traces)” (WG, 417).7 Casey’s account of the glance of the spectator viewing an artwork includes one feature about which I find myself wondering, namely that the glance of the viewer is not bound but free. This judgment arises through a discussion of two artworks by Paul Klee, Legend of the Nile (1937) and Heroic Roses (1938). The first work presents in the center the curving line of a boat with four boaters, three seated and one standing. Surrounding the boat appear many of Klee’s typical hieroglyphic symbols: letters, a fish, a plant, what may be a face with an eyebrow, eye, and the shape of a smile. These are set in varying fields of color, blues, greens, and violets such as Klee must have encountered them in the light of the Nile River valley on his trip to Egypt in the late 1920s. Regarding the logic of looking at this work, Casey argues that after the eye is first drawn to the boat due to its central position and readable sense, we can easily glance around the painting in any direction and “nothing compels me to travel one way rather than another” (WG, 419). Things are slightly altered in looking at Heroic Roses, for here the very strong linear spiral of the major rose directs the eye forcefully along its path from lower left into the center of the picture, then on to the lesser roses at the left and at the top. Casey concludes, “our eye is guided to start with,” after which our look ranges freely overcoming any possible constrictions from fame and familiarity, cultural overdetermination, or purely formal elements (WG, 421). This is something Casey means to stress about the nature of the glance in general, the “undeniably positive power of glancing, its inherent freedom” (WG, 458). There is no doubt a lot of truth in this view, for if the glance were too directed or compelled by the outside, it seems it would turn into the gaze, that is turn into one of the five major modes of gazing Casey sets forth: contemplating, scrutinizing, scanning, staring, or glaring (WG, 133–34). All that I would like to raise regarding this account is that I am almost certain it would disappoint Klee, who did seek in his paintings, certainly as they evolved in his later work such as these two under discussion, something like a “logic of looking.” Klee pursued a formal analogy between painting and music, specifically the music of Bach and Mozart with its clarity, precision, and firm rhythmic order. He refers to the rhythm of a work, as well as the form, meaning that there is a certain sequence to the logic of looking like the logic of listening to a melody. All of which is simply to suggest that the logic of looking at Klee’s late works— perhaps too for some of de Kooning since it seems impossible to ignore the mouth and teeth of Woman I, for example—is that the glance is more of what Casey calls the “bound glance.” Here the glance settles onto things in a way that respects their stable features, yet stops short of gazing. “It deals with determinate presences” and is “bound to be directed toward them and to take note of them” (WG, 108). In a moment contrary to the thought of free glancing, Casey writes that “the free/bound distinction is never absolute but always a matter of degree” (WG, 109, n. 22). I think Klee would find this

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account more conducive to what he sought to create for the viewer, an invitation into a work along a pathway for the eye that continues to be somewhat guided and structured, as the melodic theme initially appears then reappears in another variation. This very notion of theme and variation, repetition and difference, provides one way to relax the paradox regarding the glance and depth. That paradox can be stated straightforwardly: if we glance at surfaces our attention seems proscribed from the profound, the deep. It has seemed in the long history of philosophy and psychology that the gaze—contemplating or scrutinizing—gets to the depth of things. Now to this paradox, Casey seems to say two different things. One is that he finds the various appeals to depth “often self-serving or at least self-supporting” (WG, 139). So let Sartre have the gaze (le regard), we might say, with its dominance and objectification, its blinding, and its closure (WG, 136). Nevertheless, this negative approach to the heaviness of the gaze in contrast with the lightness of the glance gives away the alleged opposition between surface and depth, aligning surface with glance and depth with gaze. The second and better thing, to me, that Casey insists upon is that surfaces themselves have depth. Representing Place had already made this claim when it asserted that depth is “the first consideration,” “an uneliminable dimension” in landscape (RP, 16). Casey’s text then immediately added: “Which is not to abandon surface but to recognize (as Wittgenstein said) that ‘the depths are on the surface’” (RP, 16). Casey also cites Deleuze’s Logic of Sense that “what is most deep is the skin” (RP, 16). There are several ways to make this argument for surface as depth. One is about repetition and difference, theme and variations, already mentioned. As de Kooning himself expresses it: “Each new glimpse is determined by many, many glimpses before.”8 Casey’s own argument has to do with parts and wholes. “Surfaces are not superficial,” he writes (WG, 140). The glance lands on the surface, but “we feel that we are experiencing surface as inseparable from depth . . . surfaces at which we glance are parts of (in the strong sense of ‘parts’) the objects or persons or events to which they pertain” (WG, 141). Ultimately, surfaces are constituent moments of entire place-worlds. Casey had signaled this early on when he spoke of “glancing at” the Crazy Mountains of Montana and when he said that the glance is “like a butterfly playing on the surface of a glacier” (WG, 15, 16). When de Kooning says that each new glimpse is determined by many, many glimpses before, it opens the door to thinking about the glimpse itself and the possibility of glimpsing the sublime.

Abstract expressionism and glimpsing the sublime In New Art City, Jed Perl names de Kooning the “philosopher-king” of Greenwich Village during the time he lived there in the 1950s until his move to Long Island in 1963; de Kooning earned the title through several philosophical talks and lectures: “A Desperate View” (1949), “The Renaissance and Order” (1950), and “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951).9 Surface, slipping, and glimpses coalesce in these statements. Casey names de Kooning “that master of the painted glance” who “once called himself a ‘slipping glimpster’ [sic]” (WG, 14).10 As a primary mode of glancing, glimpsing is a more passive or receptive activity, barely noting what is unfolding. The emphasis

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is on the content, which is why Casey believes we say “a glimpse of X” but never a “glance of X.” We say “glance at,” stressing the act. Moreover, the glimpse gives us only a partial take on a scene that “cannot pretend to be either complete or comprehensive, much less definitive” (WG, 485). We glimpse what is either marginal or momentary, or both (WG, 484). In Earth-Mapping, Casey connected the de Kooning glimpses with a special form of memory, the flashback memory: “Scenes merely glimpsed returned as flashback images in his paintings by means of spontaneous retrieval; what was seemingly meaningless as an actual event became intensely meaningful as a remembered episode and painted scene” (EM, 140). Richard Shiff has enumerated three salient technical aspects of de Kooning’s painterly work as a “slipping glimpser”: the selection of painting materials for their actual slipperiness through a novel mixture of oil and water that creates speed in the starts, stops, twists, and turns; varied application of paint and materials to create details so small they can be no more than glimpsed by the viewer; and the presentation of innumerable junctures of slippage and jumps of brush stroke caused by masking, scraping, blotting, and overlay.11 He adds that in these ways, “de Kooning is impelled to make the changes, to keep moving along; this is why being a passenger in a car can both relax and stimulate him—movement and change are being provided automatically.”12 Merleau-Ponty has affirmed the deep connection among painting, movement, and glimpsing in a text from “Eye and Mind”13 that Casey cites: “The painting itself would offer to my eyes almost the same thing offered them by real movements: a series of appropriately mixed, instantaneous glimpses (vues instantanées)” (WG, 419). As mentioned, an early chapter in Representing Place first linked the paintings of de Kooning with the concept of the sublime. Referencing de Kooning’s abstract expressionist landscapes of East Hampton, Casey comments: “for all their dazzling sublimity,” yet they “contain concrete emblems of features endemic to the East Hampton area, e.g., its highly luminous atmosphere, its high-keyed coloration, the muted light of beaches, and the sparkling presence of the ocean beyond” (RP, 31). In this chapter titled “Apocalyptic and Contemplative Sublimity,” Casey has differentiated three meanings of the sublime: the “contemplative sublime” of Henry David Thoreau and the nineteenth-century painters of the American school of “luminism” such as Arthur B. Durand and Fritz Hugh Lane; the “romantic-Gothick sublime” that was its predecessor given such brilliant analysis by Burke and Kant and expressed in paintings by Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt; and an “apocalyptic sublime” that is its contemporary competitor (RP, 29). The reference to the “dazzling sublimity” of de Kooning’s East Hampton landscapes comes in the context of a discussion of the contemplative sublime found in American Luminism and in Carleton Watkins’s photographs of Yosemite Valley, thus seeming to link de Kooning to the meditative and contemplative sublime, which is further reinforced by Casey’s attribution to the de Kooning pieces of a “highly luminous atmosphere” (RP, 31). De Kooning’s aesthetic of glimpses emerged more than a decade after his published statements on abstract art from the late 1940s and early 1950s. The aesthetic is mainly found in “Sketchbook No. 1” from 1960 and “Content is a Glimpse” from 1963. Therefore, this aesthetic belongs to de Kooning’s landscapes and more pastoral works after he moved away from Manhattan’s urbanscapes to eastern Long Island. Therefore,

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as well, there is a strong sense in which these later landscapes might indeed be part of a contemplative sublime. Living at Springs, New York, de Kooning spent hours with the sea and felt that the seascape and surrounding landscape “had a certain air of Holland about it.” I reflected on the reflections on the water, like the fisherman do. They stand there fishing. They seldom catch any fish, but they like to be by themselves for an hour. And I do that almost every day [ . . . ] When the light hits the ocean there is a kind of grey light on the water.14

Nevertheless, rather than contemplative sublimity, Casey takes a different approach in Earth-Mapping. There he analyzes de Kooning’s painting in terms of a kind of theatricality that he names the “Theater of the Extraordinary.” In a work like Ruth’s Zowie (1957), there is felt the mathematical sublime of Kant as a dynamic, overpowering, bursting-forth: “a sudden detonation from within central dark masses” (EM, 141). But something more is going on: “There is always something concretely engaged, thrown, down to earth about a de Kooning painting, which locates the extraordinary in the ordinary, the sublime in the mundane, the sapphire in the mud” (EM, 141). In another de Kooning work, Door to the River (1960), the door indicates a pathway into “a wild world [ . . . ] Everything will take place beyond this door construed as an aegis and a threshold (i.e., a limen). The painting is just below it (sub-limen), thus literally sublime. It takes us to the very threshold of the natural world and asks us to join it. [ . . . ] sublimely inviting” (EM, 149). An area of common ground between Casey and de Kooning is that Casey is not afraid of the term “representative art” and, if I read him rightly, does not draw a sharp distinction between figurative and abstract art. Casey understands “representation” in the sense of “being representative,” meaning “the first item substitutes for the second and is therefore its proxy” (RP, 16). The relationship is semiological; the artwork is a sign of the content. He cites approvingly Arthur Danto’s contextualization of “representation” in terms of representatives in Congress who stand proxy for ourselves (RP, 281, n.  46).15 Even the most realistic painting by Courbet or Caravaggio or Canaletto does not merely present a scene. It does not give the “truth-about” as a facsimile, but is a “truth-to” the subject matter. Artworks “remain true to two aspects of human experience: its sheer that . . . and its concrete how . . . Landscape paintings also attain to this double truthfulness” (RP, 271). Discussing abstract painting directly, Casey writes: “what matters is that the emerging image is exfoliated in the artwork” (WG, 416). This word, “exfoliate,” which means to shed or remove the surface layers of skin or bone or tree, has the sense of a revelation or disclosure. Here one thinks of the statement of Klee featured by Merleau-Ponty, that the artwork “renders the invisible visible.”16 De Kooning too struggled his life long with the supposed divorce between abstract and figurative art. Unwilling to give up the figure, he wanted nothing to do with “the comfort of pure form.”17 He also wanted nothing to do with the abstract space of science: “the space of physicists—I am truly bored with now [ . . . ] The stars I think

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about, if I could fly, I could reach in a few old-fashioned days.”18 Yet, he liked Cubism, Gorky, and Kandinsky: I have learned a lot from all of them and they have confused me plenty too. [ . . . ] The point they all had in common was to be both inside and outside at the same time. For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody’s porch in the summer.19

I am afraid that is all we are going to get from de Kooning as far as a philosophical statement or position on abstract art is concerned. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty himself had quoted Cézanne who said “Nature is on the inside” and had defined the painter’s vocation in terms of the intertwining or hinge of inside and outside, meaning that nature “has to be incorporated in the artist before reemerging as a painting” (WG, 429). Yet, at the very moment of saying something so remarkable and important, de Kooning broke off abruptly and did not elaborate in terms of inner space, pictorial space, or space of world. Rather he deflected the philosophy toward his own personal experiences as a painter working back and forth between inside and outside. De Kooning did want to get to the abstract, the “nothing,” the emptiness sought by Newman and Rothko,20 but he wanted no part of an otherworldly spiritualism or “abstraction from” in the sense of “removed from” things.21 In the end, de Kooning contends that “forms ought to have the emotion of a concrete experience . . . The pictures done since the Women, they’re emotions, most of them.”22 With this emphasis on emotion, de Kooning does join with the abstract expressionism of Rothko and Newman over against the geometric formalism of Piet Mondrian, that other New York City painter of Dutch origin. Casey’s statement is apt: The abstraction of de Kooning’s paintings is therefore not only that of abstract expressionism in the sense in which this term is often construed. Rather than expressing a particular emotion or thought—rather than stemming from a singular subject who has that emotion or thought—it is at once an abstraction from the natural world and an attraction to that world. (EM, 149)

Ultimately, for Casey, truth in painting is about the “transfiguration” of the world (WG, 429) and the “transfiguration of the commonplace,” in the words of Danto. “At such a transfigured work, the spectator is invited primarily to glance” (WG, 430). De Kooning probably captured the meaning of transfiguration most concretely and personally, in his usual way: It seems that a lot of artists, when they get older, they get simpler: they feel their own miracle in nature; a feeling of being on the other side of nature. I get excited just to see that sky is blue; that earth is earth. And that’s the hardest thing: to see a rock somewhere, and there it is: earth-colored rock. I’m getting closer to that. Then there is a time in life when you just take a walk: And you walk in your own landscape.23

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Notes 1 Willem de Kooning, “Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans,” film script produced and directed by Robert Snyder, 1960, in The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, ed. Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente (Madras, India and New York: Hanuman Books, 1988), 177. 2 Willem de Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse,” in The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, 83–84. 3 This is the designation of Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan for de Kooning’s Woman I (1950–52) in chapter 23 (“Bitch Goddess”) of their book de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 315ff. 4 See John Elderfield, “Woman and Landscape,” and Susan F. Lake, “Methods and Materials: Easter Monday,” in de Kooning: A Retrospective, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 280–94 and 296–98. 5 Paul Claudel, “Discourse on the Affinity with the World and on Oneself,” in Poetic Art, trans. Renee Spodheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 40, 46. 6 Casey cites particularly one well-known passage from Merleau-Ponty’s text about “Paul and I together” looking at a landscape and being “jointly present in it.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 405–6. [ED: In the new translation, this passage maintains the French usage of co-présent, and reads: “Paul and I see the landscape ‘together,’ we are co-present before it.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 427–28.] 7 In terms of revisioning, one might also think of de Kooning’s practice of impressing a newspaper on an unfinished work in order to keep layers of paint wet over several days, but then he often liked the typescript or advertisement imprint the newspaper left when removed and incorporated it into the finished work, for example, Gotham News (1955). See Jed Perl, New Art City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 92. 8 de Kooning, “Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans,” 173. 9 All three of these philosophical statements by de Kooning are found in a tiny (2” x 4”) art book, The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, ed. Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente (Madras, India and New York: Hanuman Books, 1988). 10 In the 1988 edition of The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning from which I am working, de Kooning calls himself a “slipping glimpser” rather than “glimpster.” I rather like the term “glimpster,” which, to me, resonates with “jokester.” Cf. de Kooning, “Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans,” 176–77. 11 Cf. Richard Schiff, Between Sense and De Kooning (London: Reacktion Books, 2011), 235–38. For further discussion of the increased liquidity and slipperiness of de Kooning’s paints and his innovative binding mediums, such as safflower oil, see Susan F. Lake, “Methods and Materials: Woman, Sag Harbor,” in de Kooning: A Retrospective, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 367–68. 12 Schiff, Between Sense and De Kooning, 238. 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Michael Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 144. 14 Cited in Barbara Hess, Willem De Kooning 1904–1997: Content as a Glimpse (London: Taschen, 2004), 57.

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15 Cf. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 19. 16 Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in Notebooks, Vol. I, The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller and trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 80. Merleau-Ponty’s citation is found in “Eye and Mind,” 143. 17 Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” in The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, 50. 18 Ibid., 59. 19 Ibid., 54–56. 20 See The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, 162–64. 21 de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” 46–47. 22 de Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse,” 82, 87. 23 de Kooning, “Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans,” 178–79.

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Slipping Glancer: Painting Place with Ed Casey Megan Craig

I am thinking about one of Ed Casey’s paintings, the one entitled Looking out to Sea from Stonington (2006)—painted on the coast of Maine and reproduced on the cover of his book The World at a Glance (see Figure 1). The palette is almost entirely blue and green, with touches of yellow streaking upwards from the horizon. A trio of earthy smears anchors the lower left corner, echoed by four equally dark patches in the lower right. Between them, a white path opens and divides around an island of hazy cerulean blue. Casey, like most painters, applies color to a white surface (in this case, watercolor to paper), but his picture gives the strange impression that he has applied the white— poured it and pushed it like a river carving out a canyon. Casey’s fluid marks zag and swerve. Animated by an inner life, they push out from the inside in radiating scribbles and swirls. A central dab of green trails off indefinitely into the white space between sea and sky, reminding us of an elemental convergence, a lack of any hard edge where land and water, earth and air meet. The energetic strokes recall the gestural exuberance of New York action painters (and their sonic counterparts in jazz). But Casey’s paint is more humane and vulnerable in scale and tone than de Kooning’s strokes or Pollock’s frenetic drips. Pale, nearly translucent colors lend his paintings a sense of air and expanse. The lightness of the work is due in part to Casey’s preference for water-based pigments: watercolors and acrylics rather than oils. Despite an all-over quality to his surface, there is a deliberate openness in the center coupled with a striking sensitivity to and reverent distance from every edge. Describing the unique advantages of glancing near the end of the prologue to The World at a Glance, Casey writes, Instead of bogging me down—as gazing and staring often do—glancing alleviates my visual life. It takes place in the light, and it is brightening, sometimes soaring. When life becomes intolerably costly or demanding, when the world is too much with me, I can always glance my way out of the immediate circumstance. (WG, xiii)

Looking out to Sea from Stonington exhibits a similar lightening, brightening, and soaring sensibility. It’s not hard to imagine Casey wielding his brush in the same “playful,” “virtually free dance of the look” (WG, xiii) he attributes to glancing. He

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insists that he can “glance [his] way out of the immediate circumstance,” but he paints his way there as well, as if painting is the embodied extension of that “modest but momentous act” he calls the glance (WG, xv). Although Casey writes eloquently about other painters, he has said comparatively little about his own life with painting. This silence is heard most loudly in the two volumes he dedicated explicitly to studies of landscape painting, Representing Place, and Earth-Mapping (though the later includes intimate tributes to several of his own painting heroes, mentors, and friends). In neither book does he mention his own immersion in landscape painting. Painting, as a topic of investigation, pervades Casey’s texts at one level, even as it evades them at another (less articulate, more personal) level. Nonetheless, painting, as style or a way of thinking, infuses of all his work. His exquisite eye for details reflects the training and sensibilities of a painter, of someone who has practiced looking at things falling into and out of focus, of someone sensitized to the depths of color. What follows, therefore, amounts to a reflection on the relationship between painting and writing and the ways that Casey’s phenomenological texts might be interpreted as portraits of places: that is, as landscape paintings in their own right.

Groping through matter Casey’s most elaborate investigations of painting occur in Representing Place and in the chapters comprising the second half of Earth-Mapping.1 In these texts, painting is related to bodily forms of “mapping”—a term that deepens and transfigures under Casey’s scrutiny. Mapping is not only, or even primarily, the painstaking measurement and charting of landmasses that results in the navigational tools we usually identify as maps. Maps come in myriad forms. Some of them show us how to get from point A to point B, but others, those Casey associates with landscape painting, show us places in their amorphous, unchartable singularity. They reveal the spirit and atmosphere of place, rather than any abstracted and idealized sense of geography. The paintings Casey considers in Earth-Mapping (works by Eve Ingalls, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, and Dan Rice) qualify as “earth maps” insofar as they “re-create a qualitative aspect of the earth (and sometimes an entire aura of it) in the painting.” (EM, xv). Notice that each of these painters blurs the lines between figuration and abstraction. They become living models for Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “perception is not first a perception of things, but a perception of elements (water, air . . . ), of rays of the world, of things which are dimensions, which are worlds.”2 Casey emphasizes the ways in which these artists lend their bodies to the earth, relinquishing any topographical, bird’s eye view (or survol) for a thick, ground-level immersion in place. The resulting paintings expose a “haptic aspect” of mapping and, rather than delivering a recognizable image of any thing or place, they “give the viewer a sense of what the earth’s surface feels like” (EM, xvi). Navigational maps are typically drawn with fine instruments (pencils and pens, the tip of a compass), but the earth maps Casey investigates are made by less precise means. Earth mapping involves walking, scouring, dragging, and crawling: forms of movement entailing physical confrontation with material resistance that exposes the body in its

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awkward, inelegant, bulk. Earth works (broadly conceived) might be literally dug up (as with Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which Casey investigates in the opening chapter) or smeared and smudged (as with Eve Ingalls’ imprinting of her own body on a canvas). Despite the luminous quality of his own paintings, Casey gravitates toward artists who revel in opaque close-ups and brute materiality. “Groping” is one of the terms Casey employs in his description of de Kooning’s painterly mapping, a form he terms “absorptive.” Absorptive mapping requires the close scrutiny of a place from the ground up, capturing “how [a place] is concretely experienced by those who live there” (EM, 150). Describing de Kooning’s “Two Figures in a Landscape,” Casey writes: “Notice that the figure at the right, beyond being splayed and spread out on the earth, seems to be groping her way across its surface” (EM, 146). Figure(s), paint, and artist merge into a single sprawling mass, making it impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. Groping is an instructive term for thinking about the painter’s effort, as it indicates a degree of discomfort and disorientation, a clumsy lurch into the dark. Merleau-Ponty also used the example of a nighttime “groping about in [his] flat,” identifying darkness and dreams as sites of a “general spatiality,” a “pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distances separating it from me.”3 The painter, even if she works in the broad light of day, inhabits this ambiguous spatiality where distances collapse and vanishing points have yet to be drawn. Groping relates to a non-visually-centered way of moving into and through such space (or, more likely, getting stuck in place)—a slow-paced, tactile, laborious, schlep. It also signals a rough touch, something more urgent (and potentially violent) than Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of one hand touching the other. Casey’s elaborations of absorptive earth-mapping border on descriptions of the materiality of paint and the physical work of painting—a labor that is dirty and exhausting. Casey knows this, as a painter himself. Pigment is dirt or dye, and there is not very much difference between a painter and a farmer, a bricklayer, a construction worker or any other laborer whose primary tool is her body brought into contact with elements that get under her nails and into her skin. “What matters,” Casey insists, “is to move in the midst of matter, to become attuned to it and to enter into intimate relation with it” (EM, 178). Unlike the comparatively clean world of writing, from which one can return home at the end of a day without any outward trace clinging to one’s sleeves, painters’ bodies bear material records of their work. The sticky materiality of paint clings to everything it touches, underscoring the degree to which bodies interlace and intermingle and activating the “taboo power” Freud attributed to forms of contagious contact.4 Paint is paradigmatically unstable, liquid. The material literally slides through one’s hands. Meanwhile, the landscape transfigures under the scrutiny of the painter’s brush, showing itself to be in perpetual motion. Two moving bodies collide, and in their collision expose themselves as closely allied in their elemental instability. Casey invokes Whitehead’s “causal efficacy” to describe the way in which one body becomes so enmeshed in matter that there is no clear distinction between a body and the ground it occupies (think, for example, of Anna Mendieta’s 1970s Silueta Series of “earth-body” sculptures, in which she disappears into the bark of a tree).5 The painter discovers there is no privileged, immaculate view from on high, and the best he or she can do is to attend to the intricacies of the present moment, or “take in the landscape and

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exist with it” (EM, 153). Sometimes the absorption of place happens quickly, nearly spontaneously, as in the glance-like immersion Casey attributes to de Kooning, whose paintings are characterized by an unnerving speed. Other times it is a slow, congealing creep, as in the glacial, meditative waiting Casey ascribes to Dan Rice. Painting attests to an inward animation, a vis activa of places, people, and things— and their eerie and wondrous slippages. Things are moving in more ways than one can perceive at a glance, moving inwardly, writhing or creeping, seeping or blooming at speeds that evade calculations. Artists have an unusual sensitivity to these vibrations: Cézanne’s sense for the intensity of an apple, Morandi’s sympathy with a bottle, Richard Serra’s iconic Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself [1967–1968]: “to roll, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist, to dapple”6—which helped him unearth the immanent flex of steel. Like these and other artists, Casey exhibits a giddy, childlike fascination in the face of seemingly brute matter. Invoking a concept from A Thousand Plateaus, he celebrates the “local absolute,” explaining it as: “the riveting to one place that is intensely invested with energy and speed—in contrast with the ‘relative global’ of striated space, where all that matters is how to get from one place to another most efficiently” (EM, xvii). Casey goes on to connect “riveting,” with “the kind of intimate touching and close-up looking that occurs between parent and infant, between lovers, and between humans and certain animals” (EM, vii). The “local absolute” is a fine-grained, entirely fixated attention to micro-movements and details—a way of traveling in place. Casey reminds us that travel is not only far-flung transfer from one locale to another, but also the more modest and perhaps invisible tensions of stationary bodies: “movement in the midst of matter” (EM, 178), “as long as the experience is intense and intimate” (EM, 179). Deleuze and Guattari call such movement “nomadic,” connecting it with an imperative to “keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification.”7 Elsewhere (and contrary to expectations) they insist that the “true nomad,” is the one who “does not move,”8 as if genuine nomadism coincides with a radical immersion in place, a local devotion. Casey’s invocations of love and the intimacy of touch offer important correctives to Deleuze and Guattari’s more clinical assessment of nomadic journeys and bodies verging on one another.9 Bodies for Casey are not only the oozing, faceless forces Deleuze associates with the work of Francis Bacon and the “body without organs.” They are also playful zones of sensitizing contact capable of the extreme loyalty Lévinas called “obsession”—capable of generating heat and not only care (Sorge), but love and adoration.

Smoothing place In his coextensive writings on painting and place, Casey turns repeatedly to A Thousand Plateaus, and specifically to Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between smooth and striated space. In their fourteenth plateau, they describe smooth space as that space immeasurable by navigational devices and impossible to traverse in a linear progression. Smooth space is devoid of straight lines, and it frustrates every attempt at circumscription. Smooth space functions as the spatial equivalent of what Bergson

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named “lived time”—a qualitative multiplicity he associated with psychic time (the time of dreams and of life) that does not conform to discreet, countable units. Deleuze and Guattari relate smooth space to perpetual motion and an inner vibration that immanently displaces any creature who tries to stand or stay. This is why smooth space is the space of the nomad—space of incessant dislocation. Striated space, on the other hand, is that space most aggressively carved up, divided and settled. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari associate striated space with cities and smooth space with “local spaces of pure connection:” “the desert, steppe, ice and sea.”10 Casey, like Deleuze and Guattari, seems to prefer the intensity, irregularity, and abandon of smooth space—the wet space of painting. And yet, Casey’s work is also characterized by a close inspection of cities and urban life. Think, for example, of the opening passages of The World at a Glance, where he describes immersion in a march-down Broadway, the swarm of people flowing like a tide through the otherwise regular grid of New York.11 Or recall his dual attention to architectural and wild places, his emphases (following Merleau-Ponty) on the body as equally cultured and natural in Getting Back into Place. Similarly, in his focus on landscape painting in Earth-Mapping, Casey in no way limits his focus to a traditional, rural, understanding of landscape.12 While Ingalls, de Kooning, and Rice might be conceived along these lines (though they each challenge narrow definitions of landscape), Johns and Diebenkorn are explicitly urban painters. Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series is a striking example of urban smoothness. Although the paintings ostensibly depict a city (Venice, California) on the edge of the sea, we sense the fraying edges of city life as it literally trails off into the ever-shifting tide lines in the sand—as if gleaning life in the margins of the city, at the beach and into the water where the homeless collect alongside the walkers and the sunbathers, the performers, the bodybuilders, the dogs and the kids. There is a chaotic, festival mixing of all walks of life, coupled with a dual sense of possibility and danger. Unknown, experimental, and forbidden things happen at the edges of the city (which is one reason Socrates and his friends gathered in Piraeus to dream their radical Republic). Yellows and deep ochre pervade Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, acting like sand storms eroding and the geometry undergirding the picture. Those hazy golden glows testify to the amorphous, erosive forces at work in the margins of even the most well-ordered city. Casey’s texts, not unlike Diebenkorn’s paintings, represent a striking interplay between and complication of the supposed dichotomies between city and sea, striated and smooth. This becomes increasingly the case as one moves from the early work (Imagining and Remembering, which retain a strong commitment to order and delineation) to the more diaphanous, later texts. Casey notes that Diebenkorn must “strive to bring together the smooth and the striated” (EM, 135), and one can feel a coincident effort across Casey’s own work. In fact, exposing the interdependence of the smooth and the striated is a consistent focus and through line of Casey’s philosophical investigations, whether in the guise of arguing for the entanglement and co-constitution of bodies and places or showing the convergence of paintings and maps. His refusal to prioritize one over the other (smooth over striated, seas over cities) is evident in his painstaking descriptions of myriad places, his own mapping of the world, and in the very texture of his writing, which scintillates between striated, numbered distinctions

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(types of memory, a taxonomy of glances, varieties of mapping, etc.) and smooth, immersive descriptions. He travels between the literal and the figurative, drawing our attention to those “ambiguous commixtures” (RP, 274) that defy neat categorization. In the process, he delivers texts rich with details and awash in color, writing us (his readers) into the places he envisions and recalls with the skill of a Japanese painter sketching a mountain, a valley, a narrow path, trees and sky with the sweep of a brush.

Writing like a painter Is it possible to write like a painter, and how might it sound? Perhaps more than any painting, a text invariably hovers between the smooth and the striated, between amorphous and angular prose. Words are no less slippery than paint, and Casey allows his words the striation necessary to cohere and progress. This differentiates his work from the smoother, wilder, terrain of a writer like Derrida—and it lends his work a quasi-pragmatic, American tone. Describing his own phenomenological method in the 2000 preface to Remembering, Casey explains his goal as: “tak[ing] us from the realm of mind to the larger reaches of the surrounding world—from the involuted concerns of mentation to the way the world shows itself to be filled with recognitory clues, effective reminders, and things that inspire reminiscence” (REM, x). This serves as an elegant description of his overarching method. His texts open out to the wider world, even as they zoom in on features we have likely ignored, suppressed, or overlooked. His goal is one of communicative outreach from the cool realm of solitary calculation to the warmer arena of populated, affective life. He paints us pictures of what life feels like in its living multiplicity. Merleau-Ponty is an obvious and often-cited exemplar for this form of phenomenology (and Casey gladly acknowledges the influence and the debt). However, Merleau-Ponty’s texts, though often in conversation with painting, are not, in their execution, particularly painterly. They retain a vaguely medical distance from and distaste for the feel of murky materiality that Casey indulges in and with which he seems so at ease. For instance, rather than the case studies prevalent across Merleau-Ponty’s texts, Casey draws freely from his own memories and intimate experiences. This can make his texts feel more like albums, collections of personal snapshots akin to the sensibility of Wittgenstein’s Investigations and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Casey inaugurates a distinctly robust and colorful form of phenomenology, one that reminds us of the centrality of bodies and their immersion in places that shape them— giving priority to the idiosyncratic settings in which bodies converge. Parts of his texts read like the elaborate stage directions one might find in a screenplay, which never appear in the film but establish the entire atmosphere of a shot. Much of his work could be mistaken for landscape painting, that close scrutiny of a place one tries desperately to sketch against the wind and threat of fading light. Perhaps this multi-vocal, multivalent quality of Casey’s writing and the degree of fixation he has sustained on bodies and places accounts for the importance of his work for feminist thinkers who have lamented and critiqued phenomenology’s association with the dispassionate stance of reflective consciousness, and for environmental thinkers who have longed for an elaboration of the

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earth as the place of our—and not only our—dwelling. Casey practices a thick but fluid form of phenomenology marked by an exquisite taste for details and an almost reckless tolerance for evermore fine-grained differences. It is a phenomenology that dawns from an immersion in places first gleaned through drawing or painting from life. De Kooning famously described himself as a “slipping glimpster”—a phrase Casey invokes in The World at a Glance. For de Kooning this indicated his valuation of a way of looking obliquely at things, as they passed by in the blur of a car ride, from a train window, or while bicycling. It’s a fluid look, a refusal to allow sight to capture or objectify things. Casey, always eager for a finer distinction, differentiates the “glimpse” from the “glance” (WG, 8ff.). His own slipping glance becomes a discipline of attention that allows him to go deeply into his subject matter (to be immersed and even submerged in it), but to retain a light touch and a sense of joy. Anyone who knows him knows this as his characteristic mode of engagement—a focused attentiveness combined with a spritely agility in moving from one place to another, so that one often wonders how he has materialized here and now and where he has gone again. Perhaps this is also why Casey’s paintings (and his writings) never seem “torturous” (EM, 149)—a term he uses to describe de Kooning’s work. A simultaneous depth and buoyancy set Casey’s work apart from other forms of phenomenology and demand unique ways of reading. One must learn to swim in Casey’s work, to dive and crawl. There are pages where reading entails the groping of absorptive mapping he reserves for de Kooning, the sense that “to know the surface of anything—not just the paper, but the earth itself as a geographic surface—we must drag a physical body directly over that surface in such a way as to trace a path there, make a trail” (EM, 146). Other times, one must read by leaps and bounds, at the speed of a glance, as the text cascades in furious waves of vivid, singular descriptions. The surface and depth, striation and smoothing of Casey’s texts render them complex places of their own. They remind us that texts are themselves landscapes that require multiple forms of navigation at different speeds. They also remind us that description is not a decorative accessory to argumentative prose. It is prose itself, the texture and depth of meaningful expression. Writing like a painter entails lending one’s whole body to the page, so that, in the words of Merleau-Ponty describing Cézanne’s paintings: “the object is no longer covered by reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and other objects: it seems subtly illuminated from within, light emanates from it, and the result is an impression of solidity and material substance.”13 Merleau-Ponty, and Casey following him, challenges the Cartesian model of a mind spilling itself on the page, the lived body reduced to a mass of confusion and error. The body is already there, shivering in Descartes’ cold little room, making his text a graphic novel of his own discomfort, a signature of his doubt. We have largely lost the relationship to penmanship, ink and paper that situated writing and painting so much closer to one another than they seem in the modern era of word processing. But Casey reminds us how closely modes of description infiltrate one another and how much the body asserts itself into every scene. Each of Casey’s texts is an intimate portrait of a place—the place of memory, imagination, the glance, the edge. Sometimes the landscapes Casey explores are more or less psychic; sometimes they are more or less physical. Part of the genius of his

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travelogs is the way in which he complicates any neat distinction between the psychical and the physical, the soul and the body. His renderings of places are never identifiable, monolithic portraits like those busts and paintings one might find adorning boardrooms and courthouses. They are intricate and playful, more like the fantastic scenes depicted by Breughel, in which bodies tumble over one another and spill across the canvas, disclosing ever-finer and more bizarre intricacies, worlds within worlds and places within places.

Coda: First places last Casey hones his painterly attention every summer on the coast of Maine, where, bounded by the smooth space of the sea, he devotes himself to painting the landscape. I imagine this as a sacred ritual of immersion in the outdoors and the inarticulate shimmer of light. Much of Casey’s writing takes place at the edge of the sea as well, from the west or the east coast of the United States.14 Santa Barbara and New York figure prominently in Casey’s philosophical imagination, but so does Kansas—the land of his childhood and a place marked by its own forms of smoothness: fields, wide horizons, big skies. In Earth-Mapping, he describes one of Jasper Johns’s map paintings and notes “the curious gray blotch in the center (where Kansas is located)” (EM, 125). In Remembering, he lists “‘Abilene,’ ‘Enterprise,’ ‘Asheville,’” (REM, 197)—two cities in Kansas and one in North Carolina—as those places most emotionally resonant for him. Casey’s work (both painting and writing) exudes a sense of roaming, a “refusal to stay put—a rejection of simple location” (EM, 94), one could associate with a Midwestern experience of place as wide and open. Kansas is landlocked, and perhaps Casey’s gravitation toward increasingly smooth space is fueled by a childhood dream of the seashore. His incessant championing of the in-between might also be traced back to his earliest placement in the middle of the country. Kansas, Santa Barbara, New York, Maine—these are places that inflect Casey’s painting/writing and his poly-placial vision. Casey’s writing is intimately related to the activity of looking and rendering, the intimacy of touch and the repeated attempts characteristic of holding a brush and facing a blank surface. All of his work, from Imagining to Edge, might be read in terms of painting. As he chronicles close-range engagements with phenomena that evade scrutiny and slip out of grasp, he also performs a sophisticated form of analysis, something Bachelard called topoanalysis: “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.”15 Such analysis is a form of traveling in place that seems tied to an artist’s aptitude for fine-grain looking and repetitive, manual labor: digging through clutter, the strategic slinging of dirt. Painting entails a form of scrutiny that is also closely related to psychoanalysis—a painstaking awakening to things dim or difficult to discern—those things that lie buried in the margins of one’s psychic life. If Bachelard’s attends to the neglected corners of our first shelters and Freud fixates on the subterranean worlds of dreams and the unconscious, Casey gleefully ferries between, drawing maps of their possible convergence. There are things one can only learn through drawing or painting, a secret knowledge, like the intimacy acquired by handling the surface of a rock or shell carried

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for years inside of a pocket. The “object” softens over time. It takes on a new shape and become increasingly coextensive with one’s own body—like the primal house that Bachelard describes being in “passionate liaison” with one’s body.16 This happens with the repeated pressure of touch, the weight of one body imprinting another. But it also happens under the weight of a certain look, as a landscape softens and blurs under the gaze of the painter. Painting is a way of touching things and being touched by them in return. One can paint the same place for years and not know one’s way about that place. I can imagine Cézanne trying to hike Mount Saint Victoire, only to find himself helplessly entangled in the foliage of the first tree, getting nowhere. In a way, the painter gets too close to things and therefore never knows his way about. She is always traveling in place. And yet, in another way, a painter knows things about places that no one else knows, as the blind sense things about color that the sighted never discern.17 Painting rekindles experiences of intimacy and wonder one may have had as a child, lying close the ground, awake to the tremors of tiny creatures and blades of grass. Casey notes: “Lived place thrives—is first felt and recognized—in the differentiated and disruptive corner, the ‘cuts,’ of my bodily being-in-the-world. This is why the child’s experience of place is so poignantly remembered” (FP, 236). Children live closer to the ground, more in tune with the fine textures of places and more susceptible to their grip (and this is both an asset and a hazard of childhood). The painter retains something of this exaggerated integration—a lack of distinction between herself and a landscape that can be painfully disorienting, but also powerfully grounding, an intensely local loyalty to things close by and underfoot. Imagine a conceptualist list of directives that might describe Casey’s painstaking portraits of places (or that would function as an art assignment for a basic drawing class): 1. 2. 3. 4.

Get in place. Glance. Find the edges. Paint/write.

The first step is probably the hardest, for it entails doing something we can’t help doing, but that is very difficult to do consciously. It entails integration, a contract, with some specific place, something Merleau-Ponty called “a communion with the world more ancient than thought.”18 It may in fact involve traveling by walking, driving, by plane or boat or train, but it will also, inevitably, require that other form of travel in place so crucial in Casey’s work: a significant psychic shift and attunement to one’s surroundings, a painter’s sense of atmosphere that borders on an animal’s sensitivity to its habitat and prey—an ability to track by scent and touch. We are always already some place, but we are rarely alive to place. Casey’s painterly texts invite us to that life. In the process, they ask us to remember the vulnerability and openness of our own child, even infant, bodies, and to imagine or dream our totemic animal bodies, urging us to write and paint the places of our most intimate entanglements with ever-greater tenderness, abandon, and devotion.

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Notes 1 Casey provides a sustained discussion of photography and painting—with references to Paul Klee, Gerhard Richter, Renoir, Monet, and others in chapter twelve of The World at a Glance. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 218. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2003), 331, my emphasis. 4 In Totem and Taboo, Freud cites anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas: “Persons or things which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with electricity; they are the seat of a tremendous power which is transmissible by contact.” Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage, 1946), 24. 5 On “causal efficacy,” see Casey, EM, 98. 6 See Richard Serra, “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself (1967–1968),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkely: University of California Press, 1996), 602. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2008), 177. 8 Ibid., 532. 9 The carnal sense of “groping” that figures in Casey’s notion of earth-mapping coincides with a heat and a reminder of love across his work, both of which have significant ethical implications that go beyond the scope of the present text. 10 Ibid., 544. 11 “It is the AIDS march we had planned to join! It takes only a single glance to realize what is happening. Down we go into the street, joining the marchers as they move by rapidly” (WG, 2). 12 In Remembering, Casey adopts Erwin Walter Straus’s expansive definition of landscape as “the space of the sensory world” (REM, 197). Also see The World at a Glance, 7ff. 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” trans. Michael Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 62. 14 Undoubtedly much of his writing also takes place in-between coasts, in mid-air. Ed and I share a love of writing in public places and in transit, as if the din of conversation ensures a connection with everyday life, while locomotion enables a certain mobility of thinking. 15 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 8. 16 Ibid., 15. 17 Helen Keller writes, “Without the color or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness.” Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1920), 108. 18 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (2003), 296.

13

Drawing with/in and Drawing Out: A Redefinition of Architectural Drawing through Edward S. Casey’s Meditations on Mapping Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Angeliki Sioli

In the indeterminacy of drawing—the contingent way that images arrive in the work—lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way to understand who we are and how we operate in the world. William Kentridge1 In the architectural discourse of today it has become commonplace to state that digital design software is the way of the future, accepting the belief that within the last 20 years digital drawing tools have radically transformed the way architects visualize their ideas, represent their projects, and even build their work, regardless of their cultural background and ideological positions. This belief is undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that architectural magazines and online publications display an overwhelming amount of virtual three-dimensional images of built and unbuilt spaces, seemingly always innovative; that architectural offices around the world invest valuable time and money extruding and rendering abstract geometrical figures into apparently realistic building possibilities or testing new methods of computational design; and that students of architecture in universities spend hours in front of their computer screens struggling to master the digital media. The most evident result of this “digital revolution” is the abundance of three-dimensional glossy renderings, often appearing impressive and incredibly modern (or even futuristic), conveying the feeling than an immense change has taken place in the world of architecture. Yet, a more careful examination of history readily reveals that this mode of architectural representation is based on assumptions that were initially postulated in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the writings of Jacques-Nicolas-Louis Durand, who claimed that the exclusive function of architectural drawings was instrumental and prescriptive, that they were to be precise projections in Cartesian space capable of fully depicting and efficiently predicting the reality of a

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building to come, avoiding if possible any adjustments in their translation into the real world. The roots of this mentality are ultimately found in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and coincide with the birth of scientific cartography, a relationship that will have a bearing on the discussion to follow. By the end of the eighteenth century, architects started to adopt polarized positions: While some reacted to an impoverished sense of place in culture by producing theoretical projects and using narratives to describe the qualities of space in buildings, evoking lighting effects, textures, and materiality,2 the mainstream started to operate on an implicit assumption that the geometrical spaces manipulated through graphic means by architects are actually the “places” where we live. As soon as the fundamental axiom of the sciences, eventually extrapolated to the humanities, became “invariance,” the richness and ambiguity of symbolic thought3 and traditional technē-poiesis were questioned and rejected. Architectural “graphein” (drawing) was assumed to be “scientific” and purely reductive. Because of this change architectural drawings were no longer understood as both “objective,” needed to communicate an adumbration of the building to come, and yet open to their necessary “translation” onto a place by a skillful operation of craft, always dependent on the architect’s insight. Vitruvius had described this basic skill of the architect to “translate” between the idea and the concrete realization of a work as “cunning intelligence” (sollertia in Latin, metis in Greek), always taking into account an emotional, embodied experience of the world. This “performative” understanding had been in place since the initial use of drawing in architecture during the Renaissance. The capacity to design from an awareness of both architecture as a form of mimesis, allowing it to become a site of existential orientation (through its connection to theoria—a philosophical understanding of the order of the universe) and cultural communication (through its connection to phronesis—in the sense of Aristotle’s practical philosophy), while acknowledging the qualities of place to appear eloquently, was understood in classical theory as the primary talent of the architect. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, and more specifically after Durand’s radical transformation of theory into applied science and practice into technology, this definition of the architect’s métier became almost inconceivable. Looking even cursorily at mainstream architectural drawings and theoretical arguments of the last two centuries, it is easy to detect their debt to Durand and their roots in Cartesian assumptions. It is thus not hard to argue that digital design software like two-dimensional AutoCAD for example (to begin with one of the first digital tools used by architects, a software that was initially designed for engineers) assumes drawings to be prescriptive entities, creating the illusion that practice can be reduced to a system of rational rules.4 Someone could of course argue that although AutoCAD is based on the assumption of the uniform Cartesian space, it is still strikingly different than drawing on a piece of paper, implying a series of new important changes. Yet, exploring the way the majority of architects use the software shows that for them it is basically a drafting method more efficient and more productive than the hand-drawn orthographical drawings that have been the norm in architecture since Durand’s introduction of descriptive geometry and a grid as a basis for a “mechanism of architectural composition,” which as we have suggested already presupposed space as Cartesian 3-D, regardless of the medium (Durand recommended, for the first time,

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the use of transparent paper to draw with precise ink lines, avoiding all rendering or color).5 Indeed, the digitally drafted plans, façades and elevations printed out of the AutoCAD’s Cartesian grid-based environment are not substantially different when compared to the two-dimensional drawings Durand included as examples in his Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’école polytechnique in Paris at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. Understanding the full implications of this genealogy of contemporary architectural representation reveals that, while some of the possibilities, options, and formal choices offered to the design professional have been magnified by the digital media nowadays, the new tools are constructed on assumptions that were present before the inception of digital media. This is of course not to say that digital tools are neutral and indeed they can become highly problematic. Their capacity for seduction and true innovation, for example, as well as their responsiveness (or lack thereof) to cultural values must be examined carefully. But, by the same token, the real issues of architectural representation cannot be circumscribed by a discussion of the media themselves. Another example may be useful to drive this point. If by using Autodesk Rivet (first released in 2004), for example, “you can define forms and geometry as real building components for a smoother transition to design development and documentation,” or “turn conceptual forms in a more seamless way into functional designs [ . . . ] and with the use of the Green Building Studio plug-in you can compare the estimated energy consumption and lifecycle costs of design alternatives, [ . . . ] with an analysis result presented in a highly-visual, graphical format for easy interpretation,”6 it is because the mainstream architectural practice since the early nineteenth century already worked upon assumptions and expectations that eventually lead to the design of such software. This sort of dream of a seamless marriage between theory (understood as holistic building science) and practice was already present in the writings of Jean Rondelet, a colleague of Durand at the École Polytechnique in Paris. The product description of Revit is revealing on an additional level. It underscores the uncritical assumption of architects that generally believe the spaces and objects in the computer screen are actual representations of an external reality, the software being capable of providing a one-to-one connection with it. Revit provides a comprehensive “picture” of the building to come. Since the software in addition helps to optimize the process of construction, it further reduces the possibility of understanding the site as truly particular, as a place with qualities, changing light and textures that will inevitably “transform” design intentions. Nevertheless, the idea that the rendering is the reality to come, a sort of “photograph from the future,” is also to be found behind the traditional (non-digital) techniques of photomontage for instance, where a picture of the site and a photographic juxtaposition of a well-crafted physical model could produce more or less the same effect as a digital rendering. The levels of the realistic resemblance may vary among media, but using the photomontage technique prescriptively is similar to the way the majority of digital renderings are now produced. The reductive fallacy is even more extreme in the case of the most recent trend of computational design. Architects now tend to believe that they can turn the physical environment into measurable data and parameters (scanning space through their cell phones, for example), feed the information into computers and ask the software to

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provide all the possible combinations of these data (number of people who move, number of cars, amount of sunlight, etc). This information is eventually transformed into architectural forms and these are then immediately transcribed into reality, potentially becoming buildings supposedly generated by “real life” parameters. As we have discussed the successive iterations of digital technology in the universe of architectural representation, it has become increasingly more obvious that the discussion around the topic of what might constitute an appropriate architectural drawing capable of producing a meaningful building is beyond the scope of the digital in itself. Trying to understand the changes that have taken place in architecture in relation to digital technologies is only a small part of the whole picture. Accusing the digital design software for the undeniable fact that buildings have no meaningful connection with their built environment or cause a sense of placelessness, and for the transformation of architectural practice into a process of production without existential meaning, clearly defined aims or reference to human values, tends to overlook the real causes. These are complex and can only be grasped through a deep historical insight of the development of Western architecture in relation to its changing cultural milieu, from classical antiquity to the present. The basic issue that is generally within the architect’s control and must be currently reexamined is how architects do things in relation to a revised conception of reality that includes an embodied consciousness (rather than a Cartesian ego cogito) and what drawings must be like as they acknowledge the primacy of perception, capable of revealing a world pregnant with intellectual and emotional meanings. In this regard, Edward S. Casey’s recent study on Earth-Mapping has some really interesting insights to offer.7 Casey’s concern is focused on earth works, a form of art that has evolved in the last 60 years. He examines through the works of different artists a number of alternative modes of mapping (maps as representation of earth and place), taking the conversation beyond a sterile argument around the use of specific media. Casey attempts to redefine what a map is and what different categories of maps may accomplish through representation. Given that the obvious fundamental issues concern the relationship between the map (usually, since early modernity, a projective drawing ruled by linear perspective) and reality, Casey’s observations can be fruitfully extrapolated to questions of architectural representation. The different categories of mapping proposed by Casey are actually broad enough to be seen and understood as different ways of drawing. The first way of mapping (drawing) is what Casey calls mapping of. “To make a map of X means, typically, to stand apart from X; if it is not to survey it literally, it is to put it down with resolute exactitude, to position it on a grid in terms of pre-posited world coordinates, to determine distances between points, and to embody a readable sense of scale for everything represented in it” (EM, xx). This first category coincides with the beginning of modern architectural representation in the Baroque period, when architects started to believe that their plans, sections, elevations, and perspectives could be coordinated as a system to depict a building. Capitalizing on the work of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century geographers and mathematicians like Federico Commandino and Girard Desargues, the Jesuit Andrea Pozzo was the first

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author to clearly describe this assumption in his Rules and Examples of Perspective (1st ed., 1693). The second category is called mapping for. Mapping for is producing a map that can even “occur in the guise of a simple sketch meant to serve as a reminder of how to follow complicated directions to a certain place” (EM, xxi). “Their point is to provide a schema of how to move more efficiently across a portion of (implicitly or explicitly) gridded space” (EM, xx), and are “in effect maps for others (i.e., newcomers, including oneself as a stranger to a place)” (EM, xxi). Both of these kinds of mapping, characteristic of scientific cartographic representation, employ diverse sorts of projections that sometimes necessarily distort distances or configurations, and yet are meant by definition to provide precise depictions of the world out there. The advances of technology and the use of satellite high-precision photographs for creating evermore accurate maps of (or maps for) is simply an elaboration of the assumption present since the beginning of scientific cartography that mathematical projection is the “truth” of the lived world (best understood by Descartes as res extensa). These kinds of maps are analogous to architectural drawings where the building is objectified through orthographic projections as an autonomous entity defined exclusively through its exact geometries, measurements, dimensions, and quantitative specifications. Regardless of their functional rigor or formal virtuosity, architects employing representation in this manner tend to repeat themselves, creating similar buildings everywhere in the world. As we have suggested, implicit in this way of working is the assumption of space as geometrical, isotropic and homogeneous, a distant entity that never acknowledges the possibility of a place’s particular characteristics to become part of the architecture. These maps and drawings are actually what Casey calls processes of plotting instead of charting, in the same way that a journey can be just a trip and not a voyage: Just as trips are from one determinate point to another and always concern the details of the actual world, so plotting bears on actualities. [ . . . ] Voyages are either imaginary or inspired by imaginative possibilities and in this respect rejoin charting, which projects the possible in comparative independence of terrestrial realities. (EM, 88)

To the mapping cases of mapping of and for, the philosopher opposes mapping with/ in, or mapping out. Where the first two kinds of map are indicative signs by their very nature and function—each being a subsistent particular that points to the presumed existence of another such particular (i.e., object, place, or region)—a map with/in proceeds by adumbration rather than by indication: by indefinite indirection rather than by definite direction. Instead of the land (or sea or city) as a discrete entity or the relationships among the locales themselves, what is mapped here is one’s experience of locales, [ . . . ] how it feels to be there, with/in that very place or region, whether the feeling itself is one of amazement or boredom, duress or ease. (EM, xxi)

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With this kind of mapping or drawing, one experiences oneself as with the landscape and place instead of apart from it. Furthermore, the category mapping out refers to the process of “getting the experience into a format that moves others in ways significantly similar to (if not identical with) the ways in which I have myself been moved by being with/in a particular landscape or place” (EM, xxii). With the process of mapping with/ in you find yourself so much into the landscape/place that you must find a way out in order to make this experience accessible to others (EM, xxi). We would like to suggest that this mode of experiential mapping is resonant with a tradition of critical/poetic drawings in architecture over the last two centuries, which saw its beginnings in the Carceri series of etchings by Piranesi. Starting by questioning the hegemony of linear perspective, Piranesi’s “second stage” Carceri etchings contradict the Cartesian understanding of space as a uniform medium void of qualities. Piranesi seems to have been keenly aware of the difficulties involved in “building” significant depth—allowing for the appearance of qualitative place—in a world that had started to identify lived space with Cartesian space. So in his etchings he engages emotional responses through qualified experiential spaces that invite imaginative inhabitation while implicitly questioning the possible translation of such depicted places into “three dimensions” (it is impossible to build them as if they were coherent with orthogonal plans and elevations at scale). Piranesi insisted that his work was a form of architecture and yet his drawings are inherently noninstrumental and in the sense we are discussing here, nonrepresentational. This tradition was followed up later in the century in the theoretical projects of Etienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu, and more recently, in the drawings of Aldo Rossi and John Hejduk. This mode of drawing is also enacted in view of practical realizations, like in the watercolors of Stephen Holl and in the drawings and sketches of Alvaro Siza, just to mention two well-known examples. Understanding the role of drawings through this definition and engaging in drawing process and idea communication with this basic assumption underlying our disposition, the world around us is a priori perceived in phenomenological bodily terms and the designed buildings are created in relation to it, attuned to our feelings, emotions, and senses. These drawings are based on the belief that “the loved body is what affords a ‘feel’ for a given landscape, telling us how it is to be there, how it is to know one’s way around it ( . . . ) the vehicle of knowing how we can be said to be acquainted with a certain landscape” (EM, xvii). They are definitely nonrepresentational and prescriptive but deal with what is real, although not necessarily true. They overcome the scientific sterile actuality or truth that understands space in terms of efficiency and cost and emphasize the poetic reality where the feeling of a room changes radically when it is full of sunlight or under the spell of the moon, or when you are in love and in anticipation of the beloved’s arrival, or depressed and bored. Through these kinds of drawings architecture may become “the vehicle for an event we desire, whether or not it actually occurs,” as Aldo Rossi writes in his Scientific Autobiography, an open possibility for life to take place since “without desire no certainty remains, and the imagination itself is reduced to a commodity.”8 Moreover, such drawings with/in and out, partake from language’s narrative nature and depart from a strict mathematical executional logic, expressing the rich and complex spatial entity that architecture is (in

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cultural, social, political, or constructive terms); a product and artifact of humanity’s deeper existential inquiries. Digital design software has certainly contributed to the impoverishment of the built environment through the devaluation of craft and its tendency to ignore the experiential meaning of materials as it manipulates form. It has enabled both the repetition of the exact same forms regardless of the place-world, and often gratuitous formalistic innovation to an unprecedented degree. Over the last decades, this strikingly powerful tool has captured all our attention, making us think less critically as we engage less and less with the physical world around us (trusting solely Google Earth for all the information we need to know a place) and in fact allowing the imagination to intervene less and less in the design process. The result is a world designed for a technological way of life that requires no skill to live it, a flattened world that, as a constitutive part of our consciousness, enhances our sense of nihilism. This is unquestionably a reality that has been facilitated by digital tools, since their very nature is to reduce lived experience to numerical data. Yet, as we have argued here, the roots of its implicit mentality are elsewhere so that we can’t simply affirm that the digital is the “cause” of our pathological environments. This creates an ambiguity with regards to the tools themselves. Is it possible to “return” to the world of experience through mediations that reduce the wholeness of such experience to “1’s” and “0’s”? Recent software has even attempted to question its assumed Cartesian ordering systems to allow for a more embodied engagement with the process (as for example is the case with 3DsMax where the camera tries to simulate our vision—which may be a fallacy, since our vision is not merely homologous to photographic perspective—and there is the assumption that a body can move around the designed building), while even more sophisticated recent software (although extremely complex to use properly) allows one to work in non-Cartesian space and draw without having to use precise measurements, facilitating drawings as a thinking process. Such is the case with software like Maya, initially designed to create artifacts based primarily on narrative structures, such as interactive 3-D applications, video games, animated film and visual effects,9 and with which architects have recently engaged. What always makes the issue more complicated is the discrepancy between the way the software is intended to operate and the way architects use it,10 as well as the fact that software tends to be more and more complex, so that to adapt or even subvert the designer’s aims requires a very deep knowledge of the program’s “digital architecture.” If we want a present and future architecture that may contribute to overcome the impoverishment of our built environments, it is paramount that we engage architecture’s tools of representation under the terms of drawing with/in and drawing out, (in the same way that the artists presented by Casey understand mapping; producing alternative maps that reconcile the bodily feeling of being in the earthscape and its representation). The issue is to skillfully master all the design media available in view of an expressive intention that recognizes the primacy of the world of experience, the meanings already given in the natural and cultural worlds. Digital or not, the architect must be able to decide which media to use and how, taking advantage of what they can offer and acknowledging at the same time their inherent limitations. In the same way that what used to be “a porous black solid, consisting of an amorphous form of carbon, obtained

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as a residue when wood, bone, or other organic matter is heated in the absence of air,”11 was transformed by the hands of architects and artists into the expressive medium of charcoal and charcoal has even come to mean the very drawing made with the medium, every tool at our disposal should be used towards a meaningful architecture. Since indeed, as Kentridge says, drawing is nothing less than understanding “who we are and how we operate in the world.”12 A thoroughly critical and careful redefinition of the role of architectural drawings and their relationship to what we build is crucial to start mapping our way out of the current precarious situation.

Notes 1 As quoted in Sue Ferguson Gussow, “Dirty Drawing: Teaching Architects to Draw,” in Dirty, Dedicated, Daring, Delicate, Drawings (exhibition catalogue of the Danish Architecture Centre), ed. Anette Sørensen (Copenhagen: Dansk Arkitektur Center, 2012), 23. 2 Among the first we could list Boullée, Ledoux, and Piranesi. More will be said about Piranesi later in this chapter. On the second point, Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières was the first theoretician ever to focus on qualities of spaces in a house as the main issue in architectural theory (The Genius of Architecture; Or the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations published in 1780). Such spaces were modulated according to their uses, so that for example a “boudoir” must be sensuous, with curving forms, textures, and light that further such effect. The desire to reconstitute qualitative place in architecture first appeared as a reaction to Cartesian spatial impoverishment. The moment that architectural “graphein” was assumed to be “scientific,” by the likes of Perrault, Pozzo, and Desargues (coinciding with the birth of scientific cartography as well), architects tried to implement other forms of representation that included feeling and experience in drawing and writing. Prior to this time, the conception of qualitative place (topos) that Aristotle characterized since antiquity was always present and architects never recognized the qualities of space as an intellectual “problem” or issue until the late eighteenth century. 3 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 6. 4 We would like to express our gratitude to our colleague Jason Crow for helping with a more critical and insightful understanding of the different aspects and possibilities of the various digital design tools. Jason is a PhD candidate in the Theory and History Program at McGill University. 5 For more on this issue see: Jacques-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis des Leçons d’Architecture, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1819). 6 “Rivet for Architectural Design,” accessed October 17, 2012, http://usa.autodesk.com/ revit/architectural-design-software/#design. 7 Although we decided to devote the present chapter to questions of architectural drawing in relation to issues of mapping, it would be an omission here not to mention Edward S. Casey’s remarkable contribution to architectural discourse in relation to the notion of place. Casey’s main concern during his intellectual life has been precisely to discuss the transformation of culture’s perception of embodied place as qualitative to a placeless understanding of space, a concern that is of major significance in contemporary architectural practice. Casey has foregrounded place’s power “to

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direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are (as well as where we are not)” (GBP, xv). His insight, as expressed in his two books The Fate of Place and Getting Back Into Place, not only offers a valuable reflection on how we might make architecture nowadays, but also stretches the limitations of an architectural practice that insists in imagining buildings floating in uniform space, not connected with a place which is a priori pregnant with meaning. Quoting one of J. J. Gibson’s epigraphs that reads “we do not live in ‘space’” (GBP, xiii), Casey argues that “our lives are so place-oriented and place-saturated that we cannot begin to comprehend, much less face up to, what sheer placelessness would be like. ( . . . ) Even when we are displaced, we continue to count upon some reliable place, if not our present precarious perch then a place-to-come or a place-that-was” (GBP, ix). Place thus emerges through Casey’s work as an inseparable reality of our being in the world.The significance of place was a tacit understanding for most traditional architects who never believed their creations made any sense apart from the acknowledgement of such preexisting qualities. In the late eighteenth century, architects started to feel the need to qualify (through words) the character of spaces so that they might compensate for the growing cultural assumption that identified the space of reality with an isotropic and homogeneous Cartesian res extensa. Curiously perhaps, given the long story of this problem told by Casey that goes back to Anaximander, only during nineteenth century could architects start to propose that the issue for their discipline was the “artistic manipulation of space.” Such an acknowledgement almost coincided with phenomenology’s discovery of “space” as an ambiguous reality with its origin in bodily spatiality and motility. 8 Aldo Rossi, Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 72. 9 “Autodesk Maya,” accessed October 17, 2012, http://usa.autodesk.com/maya. 10 Ibid.; our appreciation again to Jason Crow. 11 “Charcoal,” Online Oxford Dictionary, accessed October 19, 2012, http:// oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/charcoal?q=charcoal. 12 Again, as quoted in Sue Ferguson Gussow, “Dirty Drawing: Teaching Architects to Draw,” 22–23.

14

Where in the World Is Art’s Edge? An Artist’s Quest1 Eve Ingalls

Where in the world is art’s edge? How does the edge of an artwork perform in the world? These questions have occupied me throughout my creative process. This chapter tracks my ongoing attempt to assign a role to the edges of an artwork that will heighten the work’s impact and meaning. The importance of art’s edge struck me during the first of many summers spent in a log cabin situated in a pristine 2.3 million acre roadless Wilderness. The cabin offered protection from the overwhelming vastness of space and the power of nature, but beyond its walls I felt completely vulnerable and out of place. There were two ways to locate myself. The first was to go forth once a day to experience the Wilderness with my body, like an animal traveling in circles that began and ended at the cabin. The center point of my physical presence became the cabin as I circled out ever further into the Wilderness.2 The second locating device was to retreat to my desk by a large window from which I could safely view the Wilderness while charting my place within it on a gridded map.

The edge of painting Painting seemed impossible: the rectangular edge of a painting would permit only a fencing in of nature. I also faced bringing my Wilderness paintings back into the grid of the city that marks most viewing situations. How could a Wilderness painting become a meaningful rectangle when lodged within a vast array of urban rectangles? The very problem of representing Wilderness needed to became the major theme of my work. The relationship of humans to nature, especially wild nature, is notoriously problematic, in part for ecological, demographic and ideological reasons, but another significant factor is that the tools of our symbolic universe permit only partial access to wild nature. We use symbolic means to analyze and understand nature, but these also draw us relentlessly back and forth between the conflicting demands of the natural and the built environments.

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Two series of paintings stress this movement. In Wild Signs, we experience nature through culturally defined sign systems. Each painting is built of interlocking triangles. The triangles serve as nouns that refer to nature’s triangular shapes: mountains, valleys, shelters, burrows. The triangles allow us to take the landscape apart, to test and understand nature’s forces; we experience the types of action and interaction (the “verbs”) that occur as the triangular “nouns” are brought to touch each other’s edges in a variety of ways. One of the paintings in this series, Being in Plato’s Timaeus, alludes to Plato’s description, in his Timaeus, of the elements of the universe as constructed of triangles with differing qualities.3 In the second series, Nudging the Sublime, I painted panoramic Wilderness landscapes on 18-foot-wide rectangular canvases. When working on these panoramic paintings, I sensed a need to imagine scenarios (all cultural constructs) that would activate the rectangular edges of the canvas, opening them to the forces of nature. While painting Behind Oceans, I became Poseidon holding the rectangular stretcher by the reins as if it were a team of horses. The horses strained in every direction as I tugged on the reins, the contents of the rectangle were shaken ferociously, and the rectangular edges seemed ready to crack. This enactment gave a dynamic to the rectangle itself. Similarly, as I worked on the surface of Shadow and Shining, I imagined that it was divided into three sections and that new information was scrolling down from nature across the edge of the canvas into each of these sections as my brush reached out to catch the details.4 The Nudging the Sublime series opens a vast and trailless wild territory that stretches out beyond the viewer’s peripheral gaze and feels endless. No entry points for the viewer’s feet are depicted, no horizontal surfaces for us to rest on. The viewer confronts the paradox of Wilderness in America. Legislation designates Wilderness areas, and we can experience aspects of their power, but we cannot be a permanent presence in the Wilderness, because of the overbearing effect of our cultural presence on nature. Part of us always remains on the outside. But when we are viewing an artwork, we are in a special place. The rectangular canvas unexpectedly takes on characteristics of a theater: the lively world of the viewer (audience) is in front of the painting (stage). There is also a dynamic interaction of forms within the rectangle that opens its edges to the entrances and exits of elements of a larger world beyond. These “off-stage” elements help to expand and locate the meaning of what is happening within the rectangular “on-stage” painting space. Transforming the edge of the painting, whether rectangular or triangular, into a distinct force with active qualities allowed a breakthrough: by letting the outside edge of the artwork bear a significant share of the meaning, I was able to charge the surfaces with new power.

Sculpture at the body’s edge Theater as a model brought me to Samuel Becket’s play, Happy Days, in which he depicts the basic existential needs of a lone individual. In shuttling back and forth between Wilderness and city, I had recognized that these two environments elicited vastly different body responses and that an investigation of the physical edge between

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my body and the world was warranted. I wanted to enact and interrogate my own basic existential needs. This prompted a further development in my reflection on art’s edge: if the artwork were three-dimensional, the edge between body and world could be situated along the actual edge of the artwork. This entailed a radical change in focus. Sculpture was the result—sculpture begun in a large city. In the course of seven months at a sculpture facility in Berlin, I created a series in which I imagined that the natural world was gone—erased right up to the edge of my body—and that my task was to enact gestures that would bring the world back. I filled balloons with plaster and pigment and trapped them in the spaces formed between my skin and the air around my body. During the minutes required for the plaster to harden, I was able simultaneously to enact and record basic gestures that humans might use to place themselves in the world—gestures that concern shelter, orientation, and communication. Because we often engage in repetition to reinforce our presence, I repeated these movements until larger stacked units emerged.5 These works aim to evoke body memories so strongly that sight seems on the verge of being blinded by touch. I was exhilarated because I was in a performance mode that eschewed compositional issues and turned the creative act into a “real” event. Body energy radiated from the core of the work to its edges, transforming undefined space into a place in which the individual could feel existentially present in the ambient world.

Nature, culture, and paper’s edge I worked on this theme until my continuing travels provoked a deepening awareness of the arbitrary nature of humans’ designations of “Wilderness.” Wilderness is defined and bounded by a human drawing act that becomes fixed in legislation; its boundaries are politically inserted with inadequate regard for nature’s edges (“edge” here understood as the location where one natural entity ends in three-dimensional space; “boundary,” by contrast, as an arbitrary human demarcation that is linear and conceptual). The Wilderness boundary often demarcates no natural ecosystem; given the legislated rigidity of that boundary, the Wilderness could eventually become a territory in which certain indigenous animals and plants can no longer survive. Issues concerning the nature/culture divide began to overtake my previous sculptural emphasis on the basic existential needs of the lone individual. My focus became the complexity of shifts in edges that anthropogenic climate change might be causing in both natural and built environments. Once again, an altered view of the world necessitated a new medium: handmade paper fabricated in my studio. Paper became my choice for two reasons. First, it offers an enormous range of qualities: it can express the lightest of air molecules and the heaviest of stones, and it can record the intricacies of wear and tear on the cultural and natural fabric of the world. Secondly, paper allowed me to continue experiencing the performative aspects of art making that began with the plaster work. Paper became my collaborator. Throughout the papermaking process, I set up conditions that mirror natural forces. Pulp and water interacted as they would in nature, participating actively in the shaping of the paper. For instance, drying paper can twist into radically different shapes. It can even twist the internal metal rods on which the paper is frequently

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supported, much as the drying out of the cells of a dead tree causes its trunk to spiral in one direction. The sculpture Not Fitting was structurally quite flat as I was building it, but, as it dried, it performed a three-dimensional dance involving massive shrinkage. The active collaboration of these natural forces in paper brings a sense of added life to the work; forms are pinched and pulled, moving before one’s eyes, producing the impression that an event is in the process of unfolding. The sculpture is not so much representing but reenacting an event in the world in a new medium. The outside edge becomes a register of the buildup of the forms and energies that have been set in motion. Not Fitting, for instance, separates the globe into three layers: the continents, the oceans, and the vast cities that float like dirty clouds over everything. A perfect fit between the three layers becomes increasingly difficult as climate changes, oceans rise, and population density increases. As in Not Fitting, all of my more recent sculpture appears to be changing location, structure, and shape before the viewer’s eyes. These sculptures are not site specific,

Figure 14.1  Not Fitting (2009), by Eve Ingalls. Abaca handmade paper, pigment, wire, Kozo paper. 78″×78″×40″. Photo by Ricardo Barros.

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but “site uncomfortable,” as if they have come from another place and are passing through space on their way elsewhere, where their edges may transform and take on new characteristics. Sculpture’s capacity to evoke a variety of edges, both internal and external, is particularly rich in Wishful Filaments; the title is a play on Freud’s dreams of “wish fulfillment.” This sculpture depicts an accordion book that is being opened out into the wider physical world where it can serve as a stairway to escape an impending disaster. But the stairway is propped up with wood and held high in the air by marionette wires, suggesting that the flight will fail. Installing this sculpture transformed my vision of the capacity of edges: it is possible to install a sculpture in such a way that the edge of the sculpture is completed by something that the artist did not make—something that is already in place in the world. A simple object can be coaxed into becoming a part of

Figure 14.2  Wishful Filaments (2006), by Eve Ingalls. Abaca handmade paper, string, rope, wood, filament. 129″ × 43″ × 123″. Photo by Ricardo Barros.

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the sculpture for as long as the sculpture is present. The long crosspiece on the ceiling that holds the marionette wires is simultaneously part of the gallery and part of the sculpture. The back of the stairway appears to have been pulled up in haste from the ground and supported by a pile of wood scraps. The wood suggests another temporary appropriation. Not only does the sculpture draw everyday objects to its edges as active participants in the sculptural event, it also draws the viewer into the sculpture. The viewer is not, however, invited to touch the sculpture. Instead, certain elements of the sculpture reach out to the viewer’s body via the invisible vectors that characterize haptic space; they charge the viewer’s body to perform a specific physical task. Before the mind and its symbolic tools can catch up to the force of this powerful physical presence, the viewer facing Wishful Filaments is made to feel “responsible” for checking that the wood scraps form a solid support, should a journey of escape become necessary. In other works too, the viewer is frequently implicated in the performance of an action implied by my sculpture. The sculpture Position Available (Figure 14.3) implicates the viewer in a more direct manner. At first the sculpture had three elements: the handmade paper planet, the bentwood arrows that distort the Earth’s contours, and the strings that suggest a torn weaving that is barely being held together. Strings are attached to the ceiling in such a way as to suggest a splaying open of landmasses by the force of the architecture in which the sculpture is viewed. The architectural space becomes a part of the sculpture, showing that cultural forces activated in our buildings impact the globe. As

Figure 14.3  Position Available (2009). Abaca handmade paper, wire, string, bentwood. 96″ × 89″ × 58″. Photo by Ricardo Barros.

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the high-shrinkage paper was drying, the Antarctic curled like a belt towards me. Its rounded enclosure invited me to enter, put on the belt, and bear some responsibility for the state of the world. At that moment the piece acquired its buckle (lower left side), its title, and the energy generated by an unexpected connection. The sculpture’s top edge opens into a tug of war with the architecture, while the bottom edge claims the viewer’s body as part of the sculpture. In a 2012 exhibition, Out of Place and Time, the sculptural forms reveal a world in which climate change is assaulting natural and cultural edges. Objects, as well as life forms and processes are left out of place, suspended in locations and situations where they are unable to perform their usual functions. Discovering a new purpose for these things consequently becomes a crucial task at every scale. Two works highlight such significant shifts in function and purpose. In Drawing Back to the Pyramid (Figure  14.4), a house, fresh off the drawing board and startlingly made of hollow paper two-by-fours and shingles, sinks into what might be melting permafrost, its original cubic form morphing into a pyramid, implying that one is in the presence of a tomb. The sculpture becomes a double-edged image: we are caught between the edges of its original cubic shape and the outlines of its future as a pyramid. The other work, A New Chiaroscuro, is a rectangular wall sculpture.6 Having described above my departure from art confined to rectangular edges, I recently discovered new meaning in those edges. The sculpture depicts pelicans struggling in the oil-laden Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The sculpture was prompted by warnings printed on maps of the Gulf, stating that “the boundaries as depicted might be incorrect”: we cannot be sure of information as it is presented to us.

Figure 14.4  Drawing Back to the Pyramid (2011). Abaca handmade paper. 65″ × 134″ × 173″. Photo by Ricardo Barros.

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Every aspect of this sculpture highlights this fact. A flat rectangular piece of window screen with an open-gridded weave hangs in three-dimensional space 12 inches out from the wall on which it casts shadows. This foot-wide gap separates the screen from the wall for the full extent of the sculpture’s diameter. The edges of this rectangle are faint, softened both by the transparency and by the projected wall shadows. The viewer’s presence causes movement in the air around the screen, further destabilizing object and shadow. The lighting is such that the moving shadows of the screen and of its images are in focus on the wall, making it hard to differentiate drawn forms from shadow forms. Furthermore, a shallow three-dimensional image of a pelican, directly attached to the shadow projection on the wall surface, adds to the confusion about what one is seeing, leaving the impression that the depicted images are floating behind the surface and escaping the rectangle. From a distance, the drawing on the screen appears technically related to an old master drawing done in chiaroscuro. As one approaches, however, one sees that black paper pulp has been embedded in the gridded structure of the screen, forming marks that resemble pixels. It is these “pixels” that perform the drawing act, revealing simultaneously Earth’s air filled with polluting particles and a new way to represent and define edges. Art’s edge is an edge like no other: it places the artwork forcefully in our midst and gives shape to our experience of the internal energy that floods the core of the artwork. This energy is sparked by drawing together the familiar and the unexpected; new meanings and an expanded field of influence open before us. Art’s edge is the edge of a test site, a site that allows for the “what ifs” that provoke such discoveries. As Suzanne K. Langer observed, the artist’s “knowledge of life goes as far as his art can reach.”7

Notes 1 It is a pleasure to contribute to this book and thus to acknowledge the impact that Edward S. Casey has had on my work through his insights and his friendship over several decades. 2 Ed Casey pointed out to me that Henry David Thoreau describes a similar experience in his essay “Walking,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862 shortly after his death. 3 See www.eveingalls.com, Painting, section 1. 4 See www.eveingalls.com, Painting, section 2. 5 See Touching Air 97 Times and Of Hugs and Other Shelters, www.eveingalls.com, Sculpture, sections 4 and 5. 6 See www.eveingalls.com, Sculpture, section 1. 7 Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 391.

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The Reinscription of Place Edward S. Casey, interviewed by Azucena Cruz-Pierre

Video call—Nantes, France to Santa Barbara, California —March 23, 2012 The power of light Azucena Cruz-Pierre (ACP):  Light has played a central role in your thinking. In Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps, your discussion of American Luminist Painting describes light as that which illuminates and situates things in a painting, to such an extent that one could follow Plato in believing that light forms part of the object. Light reappears in your work on the glance: illuminating our perceived world and allowing us to navigate it with our bodies and eyes. So, regarding light, I have two questions I would like to ask you. First, could one say that although light is key to acts such as glancing (an outer kind of light) and remembering (which requires an inner kind of light), that nevertheless there can be too much light? For instance, do we tend to glance more in a dark theater, where the dim glow of the screen or stage lights barely illuminates the faces around us, or in a brightly lit lecture hall, where the other faces can be clearly seen, including my own that is doing the glancing? Secondly, is there a relationship between voice and light? Since light appears to be a theme running through your other projects, deliberately or not, I wonder if your new work on edge or on voice also bears traces of this leitmotiv. Edward S. Casey (ESC):  Extraordinary things happen within the elements of sound and light, and yet these have to do with something other than light, other than sound. Through light and sound we undertake either to realize our vision or to articulate our thoughts. In voicing our thoughts, we actualize them, and bring out what would otherwise be kept to ourselves and would doubtless remain much less developed. Sound provides space or spaciousness for voice to explore thought with oneself or with others, as we’re now doing ourselves at this moment. Light similarly provides a dimensionality, an openness in which and through which activities can occur, and glancing is here paradigmatic. But given that light

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seems to be particularly penetrating, it’s acutely valuable for all of our practical and theoretical activities insofar as they are, however indirectly, always reaching into a public domain. “Public” implies open space, so light does serve, it seems to me, as an essential via media. Or perhaps “element” is a better term than medium, where element means something that can be employed, applied, or extended in very particular ways by animal activities such as glancing and other modes of looking. Light mobilizes, transports, conveys something like the glance or and shapes all corporeal movement, such as walking—it’s difficult to walk in the dark! Even if Aristotle says you can tell time in the dark, many activities are either precluded or rendered dangerous in the dark. Light thus stabilizes and orients more than sound, and it does so in a very elementary way. Glancing in particular takes note of what happens in the light, and it proceeds according to non-measurable units through which the world can make visual sense. Typically, it takes advantage of the illumination in one punctuate instant. I’m very interested in the relationship between the instantaneous and time, as well as that between the glance and space. In both cases, light is the connecting term, the term that allows them both to coexist constructively—sometimes creatively, sometimes destructively, as when the glance is meant to pin someone down, stereotype them, reject them out of hand, etc. Here we reach into the dark side of light itself. Inner and outer light need to be distinguished; but inner versus outer is a fairly sophisticated distinction and it would take further reflection to bring these charges to full elocution. ACP:  I also think of the concept of light as being a kind of illumination, but not in the sense of literal illumination; rather, as an event in terms of which medieval and early modern thinkers discussed the process of coming to ideas, reason, and even rationality. ESC:  It is interesting that so many classical philosophers are wedded to the notion of the link between lux and veritas. In fact, lux et veritas is the motto of my undergraduate college, light and truth, and this is indeed a medieval phrase. Truth is known in the light—although this was, of course, an internal light! I’m skeptical of this linkage. Phenomenology has taken me and many others out into the lit-up world, outside the cave, and into the rough and tumble of everyday existence. Out there, the light that falls is either artificial or solar or a combination, and is the by means by which we make our way on earth. Another dimension of such light is profoundly orientational. We might even say that light is the matrix within which orientation, or navigation, occurs in the lived world. Without light we wouldn’t have visible landmarks, we wouldn’t actually be able to make our way except very narrowly in our immediate space, as happens when we grope around in the bathroom in the dark. But light as such won’t give orientation, for which we need both light and established landmarks. Making our way through an open landscape, there is something very special about light and our ability to read clues in that light, and again the glance seems to be a kind of primary organ or directional antennae. That is why I inserted a whole chapter on orientation in my recent book on the glance, because we orient ourselves very quickly by picking up on the markers of a scene, even a scene not yet known to us. We desperately search for anything that

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would give us guidance; but this requires at least a minimal light so that we can pick out the inherent directionality of the world into which we have been thrust, and especially if this is a very new world. ACP:  Returning to what you were saying about lux and veritas: in regards to voice, I was thinking about your discussion of multiple voices. Your discussion of voice in your APA Presidential Address appears to advocate for the necessary recognition of multiple voices, implying that there is no “single” voice and, hence, I would add, no voice that could claim absolute truth, as was the case in medieval and modern (and even certain contemporary) thinking. There is no place in your thinking for the dogmatic voice. ESC:  Yes, that is a very nice point. I have been deeply influenced by Fred Evans’s critique of the oracular voice, the singular voice, which claims to have all the truth—of having gained access to truth in the light—and I was trying to propose an alternative notion of listening to a multitude of voices as a paradigmatic case of authentic sound space and the social world. And so the question became for me how to open ourselves to a maximal number of voices that speak out on any given topic, in the rich sense of a qualitative and not a quantitative multitude that is. For me, this was captured in the situation of the agora. In our own lives, the equivalent is creating an open forum to the greatest extent possible with our friends, family, and other social and political groupings. Nor are such intermixed voices necessarily situated in public space or political space: they can be anywhere. The question becomes how to maximize this factor of multitude, a very rich term that Hardt and Negri brought into political discourse with their great book Multitude. I think phenomenologists could be expected to contribute to such a theory of multiple voices, specifically in terms of how such voices are heard and of how they create in relation to each other a composite voice with overtones and undertones and overlaps, etc. Fred Evans’s The Multivoiced Body has taken a first giant step in this direction. At the same time, I accept Derrida’s critique of the notion of auto-affection and the voice being the voice of the privileged author or thinker, that is, a kind of monophonic voice, and am now trying to move to a model much closer to that of Jean-Luc Nancy in his gem of a book on listening. Nancy contends that we cannot understand others unless we listen to them, and he makes extensive use of the dual meaning of the French word entendre, both to listen and to understand. The book consists of a series of puns on this word that happens to be bi-semantic, entendre and so double entendre, etc. This intriguing set of words led me to wonder about its equivalent of glancing in the acoustic domain. We grasp another’s voice very quickly, and even their thoughts by means of their voice. In other words, there is a kind of sonic alertness that is comparable to visual alertness. Vigilance is at stake in both cases. What is happening just now is very important. So we’re now moving once again toward the notion of the dense and impactful instant. All of this has seemed to me to be a distinctly phenomenological contribution to the notion of vocality, sound, and related terms.

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ACP:  It is true that, in general, phenomenologists have a propensity to give priority to the visual, pushing aside the other senses, and it is wonderful that you, a phenomenologist, are giving serious thought and attention to the oral and aural. In everyday life, I believe that, due to overstimulation, people are moving towards the extremes of sensitivity on the oral spectrum with some being entirely too sensitive, being almost debilitated by the abundance of noise in the world, or, for the same reason, being desensitized, to the extent that they no longer seem to be auditively aware of their environment. In both cases, there is a blocking out of the aural world and this includes, I would guess, the voices of others. This must have ramifications on activities such as navigation, listening to others, being part of a community, and a range of other activities that depend on this particular sense. ESC:  I agree with you that noise pollution is extensive, as we can experience when walking into almost any café or restaurant in New York City. And here phenomenological description can make a very special contribution that other forms of philosophy, and other humanities and social sciences, are not going to make. My work on glance and voice address this paradox and I would also here include my recent work on edge. In all three cases, I have been focusing on things that are (or at least seem to be) transitory, passing, fleeting: “peri-phenomena,” I call them. Just a voice, just a look, just an edge—each turns out to be saturated with significance. This offers a clue to the life-world, which we cannot do without and which, though difficult to capture and very mercurial, seems to me to be inadequately assessed because of the emphasis upon slow substance, prolonged duration, and considered thought. ACP:  Philosophy in certain respects has been influenced by the scientific attitude that prefers things it can study for a long period of time, things that exhibit a sense of permanence. ESC:  Permanence is indeed the issue. This is what Heidegger calls “determinate presence,” and he claims the Greeks were already obsessed with it, as parousia (in his discourse the pertinent term is Anwesenheit). One concrete form of determinate presence occurs when you substantify something that has stayed the same over time and therefore you freeze it and you disregard its internal complexity, its interest, its interaction with yourself: its “flow,” in a word. All of that is sacrificed for the sake of eidetic structures or scientific laws. Plato and modern science are indeed in collusion here (a collusion to which Heidegger already pointed in his Introduction to Metaphysics), each seeking in their own way the monumentality of the permanent in space and time. ACP:  This is significant in terms of how your account of light resembles a searchlight as opposed to the light of typical scientific thought, which is more like a spotlight. The spotlight on the prisoner, the spotlight that focuses on the dissection table, the spotlight that rests there, that grounds the figure. In fact, the spotlight pins down its object. In your case, light functions much like the glance, it illuminates in a brushing, sweeping motion. It allows for things to come and to go, it doesn’t hold fast onto what it is looking at, or glancing at, and it certainly doesn’t pin down.

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ESC:  Yes, nicely put. There is a dynamism of the glance, in particular, that fits with the flow of becoming—there is a close connection between glancing and becoming. Not just literal organic becoming or life, but more generally the kinetic, the changing: the category coming ultimately from Hegel and then much explored by Deleuze. I find that Elizabeth Grosz is also doing remarkable work with this term, extending it to the philosophy of biology, feminism, etc. “Becoming” is particularly well suited for those things that change so rapidly, so quickly that you cannot claim that there is always a single substance, that they are always the same. This fits with the character of the glance—to move fast and to touch lightly. As we say, the glance caresses. A light once-over captures the gist of a complex development, and is quite enough on many occasions, though not on every occasion: we can be misled, we can be wrong, and situations sometimes need more scrutiny. Yet the glance often suffices much more fully than we might have imagined. That is what I mean about something that seems trivial, peripheral, and fleeting in fact turning out to be the most effective way into phenomena, which, by their very nature, are nonpermanent and, in a word, transitory. Here again we return to my fascination with the instant. Not so much the Heideggarian “moment” (Augenblick), because that is actually the moment of existential self-realization or transformation, and is rather too theatrical for my taste. At stake here is a sheer instant, the instantaneous, since that is the proper time of the glance. It’s like a searchlight that quickly penetrates the icy surface to get to whatever inner nisus or telos might be at stake in a given phenomenon. Such is the unsuspected power of the glance. Seemingly nothing at all, but actually, in the end, from it we learn almost everything about the world, at least in terms of the visual world. I accept the widespread critique of ocularcentrism, but this critique is of the gaze, a form of scrutiny that focuses on the permanent. Emerson said: “The glance reveals what the gaze obscures.” My passion is with the kind of looking that has to do with the impermanent. Because this seems to me to be under-explored, I was led to write 500 pages on something most philosophers consider to be of no serious significance. ACP:  It is overlooked due to it’s being so “everyday” and habitual, but it is certainly not nothing, as you have now made us aware.

The world of the hyper-glance ACP:  In your writings on the glance, you have mentioned that modern technology is changing how we visually engage the world. In fact, it is promoting more and more “glancing” through the use of structured environments. It has been so extreme in the media that there have been complaints that it is diminishes our ability to focus for long periods of time as well as limiting our freedom of visual (and perhaps physical) movement. While you praise the glance in The World at a Glance, and rightly so, as our primary mode of engagement with the world (along with the body), could there not be a problem with this trend toward hyper-glancing?

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ESC:  Certainly, and I like your term “hyper-glancing” for this phenomenon. I did not fully explore that dimension in The World at a Glance, but now feel I should consider these factors. There is a down side to glancing, especially given its unholy alliance with modern technology. In particular, the technology of video screens and the rapidly changing images they make possible is important to consider, and a number of studies have suggested that they contribute to attention deficit disorder. Direct causality is difficult to establish here, but these technologies obviously exacerbate such difficulties of attention. I think the hyper-glance that is brought on by virtual space and the exceedingly rapid turnover of images in that virtual space, and particularly in video space and screen space, is a very special breed, as it were, of glancing. This is brought about by, and actually becomes dependent upon, the mechanics of computers, movies, and other such technologies. In other words, it lives as a parasite upon these modes of accelerated entertainment whose primary edict is to never be boring, to never let the audience be bored. Therefore, the rapid turnover of images—sheer change for the sake of distraction—becomes the name of the game, and then the glance follows suit in a parasitic or passive way. In its original form, the glance was really for the sake of survival (for example, being able to detect predators quickly in a complex environment). This glance survives in the lived bodily experience, which is never entirely trapped by the technological world; however rapid and hyper it may become, the glance remains keyed at some level into a living or organic environment. This deeply adaptive form of glancing contributes to an active and bodily subjectivity: running, walking, and so on. The posture of the body and the style of the glance are called forth in a very constructive, often very subtle way. Whereas in hyper-glancing of the sort that high-technology seems to foster, the human subject is lured into extreme passivity—on the couch drinking beer, and just taking it all in. Glancing on the couch before a television set occurs, yes, no doubt about it, but that glance is much more of a mere oscillation of the eyes moving mindlessly between visual clues. Between active glancing and such docile taking-in, there is an important difference, not just of degree, but of kind, because all has been preset on the screen, according to the screenwriter’s technology. It’s all been scripted somewhere else. It is no longer a living world at which one looks. ACP:  What happens when we leave the couch, when we leave the haze of the television, when we’re out there in the world? How does this visual training by the media then effect how we glance at things around us? Do we carry on that mode of rapid hyper-glancing, distracted glancing, in the real world? ESC:  This question gets at something important. Whereas passive glancing in the contemporary world is scripted and imposed (while we ourselves willingly take up the posture of the passive subject in such situations), once we are out into an open world, the glancing takes on differential velocities depending upon the degree and kind of importance of the subject or event that we’re confronting. Whitehead talked about reintroducing the concept of “importance” into philosophy, and here we see that the glance figures out very quickly what is important in the environment, what is

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worth looking at again, and what is worth scrutinizing. The glance takes on a highly specific speed, sometimes it is very quick, sometimes it deliberately slows down to absorb more detail. The adaptability and the functional differentiation among glances in the open environment make a world of difference. I do not address these matters as such in my book, but our conversation is taking me in this direction. This is, however, parallel to the theme discussed earlier regarding aurality and the importance of moving into the actual acoustic environment to hear others speak. A report of what they’ve said, including a written report, is insufficient. Confrontations, encounters, discussions—these are all parallel to the world of the glance, where the inter-action between the agent, the subject, and the actual environment becomes crucial. To play with Heideggerian language, perhaps we can call this an “authentic glancing,” glancing that really has a reason, a raison d’être. I’m dubious about the inculcation, induced encouragement, and, finally, the almost completely harnessed spontaneity of technological glancing. ACP:  You could say that such technology and such programming pushes us to glance. It’s not opening up to allow for the glance, it’s actually forcing the glance. ESC:  Yes, you are forced to follow the quick sequence: to hyper-glance; our look is drawn very rapidly along predetermined pathways. The sequence of images (and glances) is programmed by a corporation, a company, or a film or TV enterprise so as to serve their interest—most often the maximization of profit. Again, the issue is not so much the literal speed of the glance; the problem is that the dazzle of shifting images can cover over deeper structures. The danger lies not in glancing too much or too quickly, but in glancing passively or “inauthentically.” In terms of the speed of the optical act itself, that is an empirical or physiological issue. There would be, of course, a limit or a point of exhaustion. ACP:  I wonder if the exhaustion we feel comes not from the physical act of glancing itself but from all of the sensorial information that we acquire in glancing. Through watching my infant son absorb his environment, I have become increasingly aware of how we train ourselves or have become trained to glance. “Trained” in the sense that we develop our glance through our interaction with the environment, eventually becoming more discerning in our glancing so as to, hopefully, limit the possibility of exhaustion. ESC:  Humans are very adaptable in this regard as in others. They are very creative with their glances, unless of course they are being controlled, programmed, or overdetermined by the media. The media offer an occasion for diversion from human connection, concentration, or focus upon tacit dimensions: what I just called “deeper structures.” Surely we need a fair share of diversion in our lives, so not to be too sober or serious: too much the creatures of “the spirit of gravity.” But if we are always ready to be diverted by diving into an app on a micro-screen we carry with us at all times, then I am hard-pressed as a philosopher to think there is space and time left for creative thinking, serious thinking. We need to glance otherwise, and think otherwise, in an era of imposed mass entertainment.

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Taking the glance to the edge ACP:  The glance (my own and those of others), as you indicate, establishes limits and boundaries. How does this affect my perception of place and how can it limit or delimit my mobility (my freedom, whether physically, psychically, or visually)? ESC:  This is a very helpful question and I suddenly realize a bridge to my current work that I’ve never seen before. I think the glance is particularly adept at picking out peripheries and edges of objects, scenes, places, and landscapes. There is an affinity between the edge and the glance insofar as the glance, as it were, pauses, is arrested by edges. This relates to our earlier discussion of orientation. But now we’re really talking more about the outer edge of a scene, where scene includes place, region, and so on. There is something very powerfully sensitive about the glance as it seeks the outer edge, the definatory terminative edge of something. I can go this far but no farther in a given scene: the edge of a field, the edge of a vacant lot, the edge of the sidewalk on which I am now strolling. In fact, the glance goes to the edge more than to the neutral and empty middle, unless there is something extraordinary in that middle. Otherwise, there is a fascination with finding out how far a given stretch of space extends, not of course metrically, but in terms of its sensuous, qualitative presentation. ACP:  This does connect with my experience of glancing. Unless there is something particular in the midfield range, something to fix upon, I look for how far my eyes can go. ESC:  This is a genuinely curious connection, that between the glance and the edge. My work on the glance has led organically to the edge. I hadn’t seen that link earlier, but I do believe there is an affinity between the two—hence The World at a Glance (2007) and my forthcoming The World on Edge will be companion volumes. A place is this place, where I can glance freely, precisely because of the limits it has. A major focus of my new work has been on “limits,” “borders,” and “boundaries,” and devising a whole nomenclature for kinds of edges. But these are really varieties of the neutral term “periphery,” and the edge draws the glance out to the periphery by a kind of internal force or momentum. The glance is quite literally carried to the edge; it glides along the surface until the surface reaches a turning point, an “edge,” where the glance breaks off, drops off, and pursues another surface. This basic action of the glance is a pretty powerful force in the world of vision, and certainly more powerful than we’ve been giving it credit for. Notice again, how this is parallel to the critique of determinate substance, which asks us to focus on what that surface is the surface of, the physical thing it is: that chair, this person. The glance is always already gliding around such things toward that which encompasses them, sliding toward the far side of a given thing where it will be turned back or move on to another thing. In this way, I learn by my glancing what the environing world is like as a congeries of things: what kind of complexity this world proffers, what the outlines (and in-lines: we also glance at internal edges) of this world are like, how it is constituted in vision. There is a formative force at play even in the most fleeting glance.

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ACP:  Perhaps your distinction between borders and boundaries further demonstrates this connection between glance and edge. Consider an instance where I get to an edge and there is a chain-link fence that I can see through. That is to say, my body can go no farther, but my sight can still travel beyond this barrier. The fence is somehow permeable, in your sense of a boundary (we could argue that, if I am relatively fit, I can climb this chain-link fence and even if I cannot, my glance can travel beyond it, seeking out a new edge that lies beyond). But there is another instance where one’s glance meets a wall and the (visual) impact is a hard one, it can go no further, except perhaps with the aid of the imagination whereby I imagine what lies on the other side of this wall, of this defining limit, where my glance has been arrested. However, even with the aid of my imagination, I still have to deal with the physical fact that my glance, and my body, are stuck, they can go no farther. ESC:  This is a very nice description. Walls have all kinds of efficacy, and not just in stopping bodies from moving over or past them. But you’re quite right—in many cases walls are designed so as to occlude vision, and this reminds me of subversive images placed directly on border walls. One instance I have in mind sprang up spontaneously in two different places, independently, which makes it all the more remarkable! The first appeared on the wall at the Israel-Palestine border, the other on part of the wall in Nogales at the US–Mexico border. In an amazing act of synchronous creativity, artists in each place applied to the wall a very realistic image of the landscape you would see looking from one side to the other were the wall not there to occlude the look. ACP:  They did a trompe de l’œil! That’s brilliant! ESC:  Yes, exactly! In both cases, you find yourself looking as if through the wall, even though this is literally impossible. This act of seeing through does not need to physically bomb the wall or tear it down in order to manifest precisely the view that is being blocked—the beautiful landscape on the other side. At play here is a subtle but effective message; in fact, so effective that in the case of the image at the US–Mexico border—which took the form of an enormous color photograph of the scene on the other side—it was put up as a temporary protest and taken down soon after, as if in anticipation of its being torn down and destroyed. The Mexican artists who created this subversive image quite rightly sensed that it embodied the spirit of all those who do not love a border wall. ACP:  Yes, good walls make good neighbors, but . . . ESC:  In fact, Frost’s line was meant ironically. I went back to that poem and studied it carefully not too long ago, and it turns out that he was a pretty crafty codger. The famous line does not really mean that walls help us to keep a decent distance from each other—to keep us in our respective places. On the contrary, he felt that walls undermine the spontaneous friendship of neighbors. His question really was: “Why build them at all?” And this is a serious question. It makes me think of the gated communities in America . . . I don’t know if they have them in France, I’m sure they do, right?

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ACP:  Actually, there have been such communities for years, and more and more of them are cropping up, mostly in the South. I was surprised to find this out, but, yes, they exist here too. ESC:  In America, these are wealthy suburbs where people are quite afraid of others coming onto their property. It’s really absurd because they can still get in if they’re really committed to it. But, nevertheless, it’s apparently psychologically reassuring to think that only I with my password can get through this gate with my armored vehicle. It flashes a non-welcome sign to the world: “keep out”! These are now becoming exceedingly numerous in America. In cities such as San Diego, Denver, places I’ve recently become more familiar with, have vast projects of these. Upper-middle-class people giving themselves the illusion that they are safe behind the walls. It’s really quite extraordinary! But you’re right—their glances are thereby curtailed . . . even if they somehow savor being trapped in their own juices. ACP:  They’re basically building their own little prisons. ESC:  Exactly so. Just as they don’t want people to look in, so they also don’t want to look out at the open spectacle of the world. This is a subtle form of the malaise sometimes called being in-curious about the world—not caring, not wanting to know more. Yet the attitude involves an optical element, a foreclosing of vision. Lacan says that psychosis is a foreclosure of the symbolic. Well, this self-enclosing is a kind of political psychosis: you’re foreclosing looking out, and precluding (and occluding) people looking in. In a vibrant city, you can just walk past people’s houses. No one lives behind a wall; the windows are not barred and locked up; the shades are not perpetually drawn. By contrast, there is something really deeply withdrawing about this malaise we are discussing; it is nothing less than a refusal of the open glance and of the world it discloses. ACP:  When it comes to walls, it seems that what matters is which side of the wall you are on. On the one hand, this deeply influences one’s feeling, sense of security, but, on the other hand (or side rather), one has a sense of being alienated, one’s sense of self is affected, one’s sense of value is affected, one’s sense of freedom is affected. However, in the end, everyone is affected by its presence. Even those who are on the “free” or “secure” side are also affected in ways that are detrimental to their everyday lives, since it may provide them with a sense of false security or grandeur that leads to other long-term problems. But overall, no matter what side one is on, our perception of place, our perceptions of others, and how we interact with place and others are all deeply affected by the wall. ESC:  Our location in relation to the wall leads to very different effects in terms of political perception, psychological well-being, and one’s sense of inclusion or exclusion. The power of a physical wall goes far beyond its function as a physical barrier—it blocks and undermines whole lives. My life cannot be lived in the space on the other side of the wall; in that space, I am not welcome, for those with the right income or the right privilege are the ones who possess the right to the enjoyment of that space. Walls are really powerful, and every time you put a wall up, you set up a very deep binary that resonates throughout the whole social universe, well beyond the physicality of the wall itself. Here the physical colludes with the sensory, and

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lived bodies, which are always at stake, are drawn in or kept out. A simple wall, but with quite extraordinary effects! And this is precisely how edges take us into other universes, carrying us beyond the purely perceptual character of their being into the micro and macro-structures of all that is.

Embodied freedom ACP:  In your analyses of voice, edge, memory, and especially place, the concept of freedom is implied in the way you discuss the porousness, openness, and permeability of these terms. Yet, you have not formally offered a fleshed out discussion of freedom in your writing. How would you define your conception of freedom and the way it fits with your philosophical thinking? ESC:  That is a lovely question, because it turns out there is something you don’t know about me: freedom was my very first philosophical topic of intense interest, and I even wrote my undergraduate thesis on the concept of freedom in psychoanalysis. After graduating, I read many books on freedom, and even reviewed an enormous 800-page book called The Idea of Freedom for a philosophical journal. I was so fascinated that I set myself the goal of actually learning what everyone in the entire history of philosophy had said about freedom. I was just completely rapacious; it was a moment of genuine philosophical obsession! My interest in freedom went underground when I turned to imagination, but it resurfaced briefly at the end of the imagination book. I have a brief discussion of what I call the “thin autonomy” of imagination in its ethereal moments; but I don’t pursue the topic further. And then, in the memory book, wishing to be symmetrical, I came up with the idea of what I call “thick autonomy.” Thick autonomy involves slowly realizing who you were in order to become who you are. This is, of course, related to our recent discussion about body and place as a kind of background to innovative action. But then it vanished again and, you’re right, it has not returned. ACP:  Well, not explicitly. But, upon reading your work, I keep finding moments of it, glimpses of it. ESC:  I think it hovers in The World at a Glance . . . the glance being for me a paradigm of perceptual freedom . . . ACP:  There is also how you glance. In glancing, you can either constrain the freedom of somebody by turning your glance into a gaze, or even choosing to ignore their glance or to not glance at them at all, a form of negating their existence. Or, on the contrary, with a glance you might give freedom to others in the sense that you are simply touching lightly upon their existence, you are not holding them down, you are not pinning them down. It’s a kind of look that allows for mobility and here I equate mobility with a certain kind of freedom. ESC:  With the glance, one retains the mobility of shifting onto different things, so one is never inescapably invested. There is a kind of double dis-investment from staring or from gazing. The glance is, then, a special form of freedom, and I do edge toward this view in my book. But I don’t quite ever get there, so this is really an

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excellent question. I wonder how it may also relate to my work on edges: do edges permit or inhibit freedom of certain types? I’ll probably have to work on this more systematically. In fact, approaching your question from a different angle, I should note that I was deeply influenced by Isaiah Berlin’s great essay, “The Concept of Liberty,” in which he discusses the difference between positive freedom and negative freedom. As he so marvelously and so simply put it, negative freedom consist in removing obstacles to one’s desired actions. (This was in fact Hobbes’s position.) Positive freedom means a freedom coming from within one’s own being, as Kant had claimed with respect to our noumenal freedom. My own position on freedom would resist both of these extremes. Rather, for me, freedom is always fully situated and comes to pass through the thick medium of memory, body, place, and maybe edge. This is a type of freedom that is hard won, never quickly achieved. I’m not really interested in freedom as spontaneity, caprice, or frivolity; I’m interested in a freedom that arises like an emergent property from an unlikely, unwieldy, maybe even an awkward, heavy mass of body, memory, and place. This is a freedom you can say you earned and deserve if you can get there. If you’re not crushed by the three factors just mentioned, then you have a chance! You can come just to the other side of those, but never entirely beyond them, because you are always a body with memories and in place. Or, as I would now say, you are always in a situation with edges. Freedom, then, is not a question of transcendence; it’s an issue of gaining a foothold from within these materialities, gravities, specificities, and so forth. To echo Jankélévich’s notion of the presque rien, I’m interested in a kind of freedom that is almost nothing, a freedom that is neither dramatic nor theatrical, but also not the operation of an inherent nihilation (in Sartre’s sense of that term). ACP:  It’s not the revolution. ESC:  No, it’s not the revolution, it’s not autonomy, it’s not self-creation. I would call it a kind of subtle self-modulation, involving deep but often imperceptible changes . . . ACP:  It’s an embodied kind of freedom. ESC:  Embodied freedom, that is exactly right. Even as you’re changing the key of the melody of your life, the melody remains, the song lingers on. And people who know us know our melody, though they can also be impressed that we have creatively modulated it, allowed it to take up a different rhythm, put it in a different place, all of that, but still it is you. ACP:  It’s the formation of the core identity, so you have this freedom that forms part of this core identity of yourself, such that, if things change, such as your environment or situation, you nevertheless have this core sense of self that includes this type of freedom. ESC:  I’m not altogether comfortable with “core” if that implies a fixed inner essence. I’d rather say that the freedom I have here in mind takes you beyond yourself while remaining yourself . . . such as for someone who has a child. As a new mother yourself, you have in a sense extended your freedom, even though you have also taken on

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new responsibilities. Having a child is opening up avenues in your life, as well as in your child’s life, into a future that will be different than it would have been had it not happened. That future is an open register of free choices: where to live, how to live, etc. So it actually increases the range of free choices as well as the accompanying commitments. Of course, some of it is heavy, some of it is exhausting, but, on the other hand, it also seems to me to spin off new possibilities for self-realization. Nevertheless, I must underline that self-realization is not self-creation. Having thoughts, including memories, that have their own weight; respecting this or that, living with it and moving with it, doing something with it: all this requires a modest but deep-lying freedom. ACP:  Could we then also say that this concept of freedom, as we’re discussing it here, also requires a certain amount of openness, because there are certain kinds of freedoms, such as some revolutionary ones (not all!), that arise out of a closed perspective or agenda, a closed-off kind of discourse: this is experienced as “our freedom” but not entirely mine; it’s more like a shared search for freedom. But the kind of freedom that we’re discussing now requires a certain openness to the world. It’s not something born out of an “us versus them” or “us versus me” situation; it’s not divisive but inclusive. ESC:  Perhaps we could call this a deep and deepening form of communitarian sensibility. Here I mean this term not in a limited, sectarian way, but rather to indicate ever-expanding communities. In a sense, this would require an always amplifying openness to others, other cultures, or whatever is other. We can make these others part of our lives, allowing them into our personal midst: in the optimal circumstance, others are open to us and we are open to them. We have a responsibility, I believe, to try to bring about conditions where that becomes more likely. And that requires very innovative constructive actions, including political actions, in order to create certain material conditions of possibility for a common world—for a shared “commons.” These conditions do not come easy—they are hard won, and in myriad ways, in every nation, region, town, household, all the way down.

The political edge ACP:  What prompted you to decide to include more explicit discussions of sociopolitical issues in your more recent work on the glance and on edges? What place does the sociopolitical have for you in phenomenological research? In our conversation in New York, you had mentioned that it was Mary Watkins who motivated your interest in the events surrounding the US–Mexico border, as well as your increasingly politically oriented activities in other parts of your life. Can you discuss her influence, and the other motivations for these directions? ESC:  Yes, Mary was the gentle but forceful precipitating cause who drew me much more fully into the social-political. I had been dancing with it, holding it at arm’s length for a long time, even decades. I perhaps felt I lacked the vocabulary or the background to contribute with regard to the great political and social issues of our time. By joining forces with Mary seven or eight years ago, it became clear to me that

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I do have something to say (though not as much as she), and I could at least make a beginning. Together we traveled to the US–Mexico border, and to other parts of Mexico, and this took me, literally, over the edge. Confronting circumstances of great economic, political, and social duress around the border, south of the border and, indeed, north of the border too, led me to realize that such suffering can no longer be ignored by anyone else who cares about current life in those parts of the world and still others. ACP:  There are quite a few Americans who go to Mexico, but the majority go via airplane, and so they don’t step or drive across the border, they don’t see the border or engage the border physically. I think that your experience of literally crossing the border completely changed your perspective, and perhaps this would not have happened if you were dropped somewhere in Mexico, as if the border didn’t exist. ESC:  Right. The border exists in the eyes of those who patrol it—but still more so in the bodies of those who try to cross it without documentation. ACP:  Otherwise, it becomes invisible. ESC:  Yes, invisible. It’s not the real border; it’s only a line on a map. My proximity to La Frontera, as the US–Mexico border is called in Spanish, while living in California has made all the difference. I have been to that border some six or so times, including a recent visit in which Mary and I drove all the way from Brownsville, Texas, the very eastern end of the border, over the entire length to the western end in San Diego. This experience of getting up close, of talking with people all along the border, led to our writing about it together. Our book is going to be called Coming Up against the Wall: Re-Imagining the US–Mexico Border. ACP:  I recall the earlier stages of this work when you had planned to include it in your forthcoming book on the edge. The fact that you have made it into a separate volume with Mary only seems to highlight this shift in your writing to something of a more sociopolitical tone. ESC:  Social and political forces were all around me in Paris when I was there in the mid-1960s. I was immersed in them and studied them with Althusser, and yet I saw no bridge from the Marx he taught so brilliantly to my study of phenomenology. Many years later, the combination of my relationship with Mary and my being close to La Frontera changed all this—my social and political coming out occurred. This was rather belated, but then again my personal motto is “never too late!” It was not a matter of a dramatic conversion. I just thought to myself this is a good time, the right topic, the right time of my life, for a major change to occur in this dimension. Since then, it has been quite an odyssey for me. I do not as yet have a full vocabulary for what I’m doing and writing. Yet I am intrigued by the possibility of doing something novel in this area that would reflect my foundation in phenomenology, maintaining phenomenological description as a practice, yet also going somewhere else upon this basis. If what I do in this direction makes any difference or is distinctive, it may reflect the fact that bodily situatedness in very particular places has been a theme for my work for the last 25 years. Now it seems irresistible to think of interpersonal interactions and events in sociopolitical, historical, and cultural terms.

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ACP:  Many people have used your work as a springboard into various sociopolitical issues, including issues in feminism as well as urbanism. I found it essential for my own discussions on the problems of urban public housing. In other words, many have seen this potential in your work, which has offered them a base upon which to build or to complement with their own sociopolitical discourse. ESC:  In fact, reading your work confirmed for me the relevance of what I was doing. You actually saw it much more clearly than virtually anyone else and it convinced me that, yes, I have something to say in this area after all: I was speaking political prose and didn’t even know it! And in your case this was all the more striking because you are living in a part of the world that I had long left, and had never really thought of in an expressly political or cultural way. So you really taught me that, yes, indeed, I can press farther in this direction than I ever thought was possible. In short, your work was at once confirming and inspiring. ACP:  Thank you, Ed. ESC:  Let me add that the continual intimate bonding between body and place—“no body without place, no place without body”—is for me a virtual mantra and axiom of my work. Their partnership was for me a springboard into issues of cultural and political significance. In this spirit, I wrote a paper recently on racialized bodies at the border at the request of Emily Lee. She challenged me to extend my thinking in this direction. That allowed me to add a third dimension, other human beings in dire straits, to my focus on bodies in less stressful places. The fact is that we are aware of others, however subliminally, at all times. The ongoing perception of these others is something that enables my new work to bear more explicitly on political and social dimensions. In The World At A Glance, the perception of others is treated in a more ethical manner than in any explicitly political direction. I will be giving a paper at SPEP (2012) on the Occupy movement in America from the standpoint of spatiality and the disposition of bodies. Edges come into this work quite explicitly, not just borders and boundaries, but also the edges of city and private property. This raises the issue of trespassing, going over the line, rather than toeing it or stumbling over it: all of these being modes of transgression or exclusion. I would like to explore the spatial dynamics in a different key: that of edge. It’s rather like performing my place and glance work on a different stage on which the intricate interplay of edges is featured.

Moving into place ACP:  In your essay “Between Geography and Philosophy” (2001) you treat Bourdieu’s concept of habitus while also claiming that we need to consider the body/place relationship as more than merely socially determined, thus leading to the formation of a triad of terms for how the bodily self is engaged with place: habitus, habitation, idiolocality. First, I would like to ask how you came to use the term “idiolocality.” ESC:  I coined this term because I wanted to capture a sense of the local and then to combine and intensify this with the notion of the peculiar or the strange—as in idios in the Greek sense, which implies not only “private,” but also “odd.” It is

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applied to Socrates several times in Plato’s dialogues. I wanted to get a sense of what is peculiar, eccentric, different, about a given place, so that would be the idiolocality or the idiolocal dimension of that place. It’s as simple as that, but for this I needed a special term. ACP:  This helpful distinction continues to appear in your more recent work on borders. In that respect, I would like to see if we could further connect this triad with what you now say about borders and edges. Typically, your accounts of place and of movement through space—whereby you claim we carry with us an evolving sense of self that arises out of our bodily experience of space and place—sound rather fluid and conducive to the postmodern nomadic lifestyles that more and more of us lead. However, I would like to ask you what happens when, for instance, the undelimited horizontal boundaries that you posit are in fact limited borders. Here I think not only of the implantation of borders that close off a given landscape, reinscribing on the body-self the triad that you speak of, but also of transplantation, whereby I move to a new region or place where the landscape appears foreign and perhaps “unnavigable” due to sociopolitical, physical, psychological, linguistic or other factors, leaving one unable to integrate habitudinally, habitationally, and idiolocally into the new environment. Would this experience shift the balance of the inward permeation and outward expansion of place on the body? ESC:  You’re quite right—all of those terms that you bring up, habitus, habitation, idiolocality, working in and through the body, are really a matter of flow, influx, outflux. There is no neat model whereby to map them. Skin, as a breathing organism, is not only very permeable; it is itself an organ of the lived body. For me, it furnishes a kind of paradigm of what I call a “boundary,” and so the body becomes a kind of operator in its lived environment, an agent that is not only effecting change in this environment, but equally changing and moving itself, and also taking in deeply, being influenced by its entire surroundings. It is often set back. It is not only inspired but also depressed, or frankly discouraged, by its idiolocal world . . . I don’t want to imply that habitation, habitus, happen in some quasi-automatic way whereby the subject simply assimilates whatever it encounters, that all is well, and that all manner of things will be well. No, it isn’t anywhere as easy as that. My analysis typically is about people who are already stationed in a place, dug in, having lived there for a long spell. The implaced bodies I treat are more sedentary than nomadic. Why is that? I think I’m very close to Merleau-Ponty here—to his stance and sensibility that human creativity comes, or at least his kind of creativity came, from a deep immersion in a single setting, in his case France, and more particularly Paris, very much as in Proust’s case. People like Merleau-Ponty enjoyed a stability of landscape when they were growing up; it was always there for them, a persisting ground that served as a source of inspiration. Their rootedness there via habitus and habitation allowed them to move beyond its limitations creatively: limitations of class, race, and ideology. This is distinct from coming into a new landscape where the challenges of learning a language, getting to the grocery store, getting acclimated and situated, can painful and very awkward. In this case, one stops short of habitus, short of habitation; in this circumstance, the idiolocality

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of the new place comes forward as something very conspicuous: “this is a strange place,” we say to ourselves. So the idiolocality of one’s circumstance is emphasized, whereas the habitus and habitation are only slowly acquired over many months and years—and sometimes never. This is a spatiotemporal analysis of being more or less at home in one’s life-world. Here my question is likely to be: what is it like to be a body in a place you know quite well? So I prefer to begin with familiarity of place (or its cultivation), since for me, such familiarity is far from being constrictive; on the contrary, it may become a ground for freedom and creativity itself. I’m thinking here of Stravinsky’s claim in The Poetics of Music that creativity takes place within the constraints of your own environment (including the formal constraints of a given musical genre). In my own personal case, I never had the wish to get out of town; I was doing fine in Topeka as a young person, but life took me elsewhere. A fortuitous event can change everything, even if you are not seeking it out: for instance, a fellowship to Paris that took me away from my then deepening roots in Chicago as a graduate student. Here I indulge in personal idiosyncrasy, some of the vagaries of my own life mixed in with my preferred brand of phenomenology seen as on the lookout for forms of abiding connectionism. I privilege that which is well known by me and, more particularly, by my body (my corps connaissant, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase). I begin by knowing how to navigate my milieu, and only on this basis do I feel I am able to think as openly and as freely as I can. My habitudinal base, instead of choking me or chortling me (as it might for many), is actually the very road into becoming comparatively uninhibited in thought and writing. I was teaching Merleau-Ponty only yesterday, and I came across some marvelous passages that I had never noticed before. In the body part in chapter one, where he says that bodily constraints are not only necessary to being human, but they’re actually a very good thing, because without them we would have a false freedom, an artificial sense of volatility and flight. The real task is to establish a hard-won freedom beginning from the constraints that you already possess and that are already you. With regard to familial, social, and cultural constraints, Merleau-Ponty says in effect “bring them on!” Short of being shackles, they can be a source of inspiration, or a place for the “respiration of being,” as he puts it in “Eye and Mind.” I think my sensibility gravitates in this direction—toward moving on to different paths to come by gaining a more profound understanding of where we now are. This is a freedom at the edge of our lives, or better as that very edge. ACP:  Given this bent, I can now see how you became so committed to discussing and promoting the idea of place, as opposed to joining the ranks of philosophers who continue promoting the concept of space as central to our experience of the world. You really had to promote place, because you were yourself so very much implaced wherever life took you. ESC:  I was (and am) a place-o-philiac. Place is at the very top of my list of intrinsically valuable dimensions at any given moment, right up there with people. For me, there is a serious competition going on here between people and places—which does not exclude their intimate relationship. A volume of Santayana’s autobiography is called

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Persons and Places: this would be just the kind of balance that has held true of my life. I don’t think it’s perverse, I don’t think it means I’m inhuman or de-personal, but just crediting place with its own virtues along with those of being human. When I’m in California, I’m delighted to be with Mary and her family and my sister; on the other hand, I do acutely miss New York City, and I have to be honest that I miss the place and its many inhabitants—many of them unknown to me. So there we are, life has brought me to this particular equipoise of places and people. Just as the body is a kind of mute mass for the most part, so places are an equally mute mass around us; the two factors conjoin forces to create a kind of shadowed depth; out of the placial shadows there comes for me—and I’m sure for others too—insights and illuminations that only slowly emerge. I just wrote an essay in memory of James Hillman called “Taking Your Time,” which is all about slowing down, the philosophical virtue of ralentissement in an age of velocity. It carries forward the work of Virilio’s Speed and Politics. ACP:  Yes, that was exactly what was coming to my mind. Paul Virilio’s work on velocity, vitesse. ESC:  Let me come back to a final angle on your previous question: how one moves from absolute novelty in the idiolocal to settled habitation. Here habitus is the middle term. It allows for the slow acquisition of reliable bodily postures and movements that themselves allow you to orient yourself in a new place. So it isn’t just a visual or cartographic or verbal matter; it’s your body itself that has to begin to internalize the movements, the know-how, the savoir-faire of how you get from one place to another. As we tacitly map this region—knowing how to get to the butcher, or to the patisserie—habitus slowly builds a place-specific confidence in one’s orientation, and this is quite apart from explicit thoughts or emotions. You can be dreadfully homesick, and yet your body is nevertheless drinking in that place slowly, imbibing it, creating a reliable reserve at the level of habitus, which seems to me to be the effective tertium quid between one’s dislocated cerebral and one’s emotional self and ongoing habitation. Habitation arrives fully when you can say to yourself, “well, I’m feeling pretty much at home now” (or at least much more at home). Idiolocality arises with your own first emotional and ideational takes, from being in an unaccustomed place, including one’s original home-place. From this emerges a slow amassment and internalization through the body in the form of habits and actions. Habitation comes to crown this succession—when one is lucky enough for this to happen—and it implicates the entire lived body and the whole place in which you and the environment come into some form of compatibility, some type of collusion or even collaboration, though this is by no means always constructive or peaceful. ACP:  Habitation as you describe it would seem to require a certain openness; that is to say, it would depend on how one approaches a place. ESC:  Yes, it certainly would. ACP:  Having had to adapt to living in a new country with a new language, I’ve thought at length about place and, more specifically, “what is place for me?” Is it

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really only my immediate surroundings or do I have “islands” in some respect? Placial islands. In my case, I have a place for me that is in the United States, a place for me that is here in France, but it seems that with these places I form a kind of composite place comprised of many places that helps me situate myself where I need to be at the moment, but that doesn’t leave me disconnected from everywhere else I need to be as well. ESC:  We’re being here, thanks to the body, and we thereby realize what Husserl calls the “absolute here”: you are absolutely here for sure, but, on the other hand, you are also elsewhere. To be absolutely here is a gift of one’s own bodily presence in a given place. Despite the complicating effects of imagination, memory, language, and “skyping”—which we are practicing right now—each of us is managing somehow to be in our own place: absolutely so even as we relate to each other in virtual space. It’s really quite remarkable, isn’t it—something philosophers should think more about. Based on your current life and mine as well, a promising personal memoire is suggested; it might be called something like “Between Places” or “Life Between Places” . . . ACP:  The idea that we bear traces of where we come from reappears in your discussion on voice, such that our voice bears the traces of the other voices that come before our own. So, I cannot help but note the correlation between what you’ve said on borders and boundaries and your recent APA Presidential Address on voice, which involves listening to the voices of others and coming into my own. Not only does our voice reflect other voices, past and present but, without a kind of open-boundary-like environment, I would argue that we cannot hear or experience all the voices that are presented to us, made available to us, in our presence. A limiting of physical movement, I would think, would lead to a limiting of vocal movement, which then puts limits on which voices are heard and which voices we listen to. How can we implace ourselves in an environment, which is to say, inhabit an environment, when we are closed off to the voices of those who are around us? How can we navigate our way socially, physically, and so forth, if we have no link to the voices of the region we find ourselves in? This is how I link it to habitus, because it does form a part of it, the voices of others. We come with a history of voices that inform our personal voice, but then we are put into a new situation that has its own part to play, the habitus. I think voice forms part of this habitus, but then if we move to another place for example (and you yourself must find this to be the case), we have one voice on the one coast and another on the other coast . . . ESC:  Yes, this is true, and certainly the case. I can only begin to answer this challenging question here. Voices penetrate our bodies by way of our open and receptive ears and their deep echo chambers. By simply listening to them, the voices of others are incorporated into our (physical, psychological, and personal) self— they resonate deeply within us and throughout our bodies. ACP:  Which is why Odysseus had to shut out his hearing. ESC:  Exactly so. By blocking his ears, he could not hear the voices of the sirens who were calling, singing—nor could he hear his own voice had he chosen to speak. You

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point to a very prominent phenomenological fact about voice. The voices of others, like those of the sirens, enter our bodies in subtle and powerful ways, rendering us receptive sounding boards in these circumstances. So what I’m emphasizing with the porosity of boundaries comes home and finds its natural locus in the phenomenon of voices, whether they are actually heard or merely imputed. My emphasis on listening in the 2009 APA address was meant first of all to single it out as a sense that is really more extraordinary than we might have suspected, thanks to the profound bodily permeability of sound, especially articulate sound that we receive as something we understand. And the second reason is that, ethically and politically, we have a certain implicit mandate to listen to others carefully, if only to hear their suffering, what they wish for and call for, and what kind of implicit demands they’re putting upon us. Lévinas would agree that there is a kind of absoluteness about this, such that you can’t mitigate it, you can’t really compromise on the other’s telling you something; you may not want to hear it, but, in their speaking to you of their grievances, their lives, their wishes, their desires, in some important sense you are absolutely subjected to the demand of that discourse. And I think, therefore, that you must listen to their voices. Putting this in Kantian language, you ought to listen, so much so that this could be said to be a fourth categorical imperative alongside his celebrated triad of imperatives: listen well, listen deep, listen up. The phrase “listen up” derives from military situations in which a mere recruit is expected to listen attentively to his or her officer. Thus I take it to mean to listen carefully and to put the other in the position of the main speaker, as if this other were hovering above me. I’m also struck by a second locution, “to listen into,” whereby you are asked to listen to what the other really wants to say, often between the lines, rarely explicitly stated. So, for all those reasons, voice comes to enter the scene . . . Admittedly, I have a rather odd approach to voice, which for me is really the voices of others, and only rarely my own voice. In my presidential address, I deconstruct the whole idea of finding your own voice, as if that were a single, special, unique vox, only my own and no one else’s, a unique possession of mine. ACP:  It would be dangerous to think in such possessive terms, something likely to lead to dogmatic discourse. In thinking “this is my voice,” you give yourself a sense of authority that is a false one. ESC:  This is where Fred Evans’s work enters, with his remarkable book, The Multivoiced Body, in which the authoritative voice that listens to no one other than itself is named the “oracular voice.” This is a voice that insists on being heard, and ultimately becomes demagoguery or tyranny because, in this circumstance, only a single leader’s voice is held to be worth listening to: Hitler’s voice or Mussolini’s voice. Such fascist voices represent the culmination of the modernist emphasis upon finding the authoritative voice, the authentic voice, and ultimately, “my” voice: Mein Kampf might have been titled Meine Stimme. I am deeply skeptical of any claim to possess this kind of voice and I am much more interested in how to convert any such grandiose claim into something more modest—acknowledging your voice as more like a receptive medium, as with a piece of wood in which and through which other voices resonate; the voice as a literal sounding board.

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ACP:  This line of thought nicely corresponds with the Merleau-Pontian conception of the chiasm, which implies that we’re not isolated individuals, we’re intertwined with other beings, with other things in the world, we’re not simply identities existing solus ipse. ESC:  Absolutely. I agree all the way, but I am suddenly wondering what the French original of “intertwining” is . . . ACP:  It is entrelacer, s’entrelacer: literally “to interlace,” “to be laced between.” ESC:  Such interlacing or linkage is a nice point for us to end with, since it can occur only among and across edges, my current preoccupation. Edges not only isolate and separate, they also tie things together—as with edges held in common. This gestures toward where I wish to go in future writing: toward a more inclusive ontology and its corresponding political expressions. It also bears on my past work in memory and place, each of which is chiasmatic in its own way. By the same token, imagination and the glance leap across preexisting edges in interstitial bridging actions: they are the geniuses of transitional spaces, whether imaginary or real. Here, in this middle way and at this interim place, my work comes together. My deep thanks to you, and to Don in the first set of interviews—to both of your voices—for drawing me out on these intricate and often enigmatic matters. Despite limitations of time and abysses of space, we have generated genuine philosophical dialogue together.

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Casey Comes to the Edge: Borders, Boundaries, Diagrams, Arts, and Islands Gary Shapiro

For some years, I have had the privilege of reading Edward Casey’s work and I’ve thought of it as on the edge, edgy, as leading us to places, sites and sights (both spellings), topoi in both geographical and philosophical senses that are intriguing, exciting, and eminently worth exploring. Casey’s ongoing phenomenological exploration of the place-world in its aesthetic, artistic, cultural, and historical dimensions challenges disciplinary borders while focusing on and clarifying boundaries, zones of indeterminacy and transition. His important series of studies—beginning with Getting Back into Place—are, to use his term, inviting thresholds that beckon us to rethink what it is to live, move, and have our being in the place-world. Casey has gone beyond a general phenomenology of place to interrogate the borders and boundaries of contemporary life, notably such contrasts as those between welcoming thresholds, as in Central Park’s The Gates, and the harsh character of exclusive borders like that between the United States and Mexico, as policed, surveyed, and enforced by the powers of the state (continuing these reflections, we might also see these as two paradigmatic and even complementary sites of American empire, alternately offering hospitality and enforcing exclusion). Casey’s itinerary has become geophilosophical. His journey explores the utopian dimension of what Foucault calls the “other space” of a Central Park, whose picturesque qualities are intensified by Christo and Jean-Claude’s intervention; and it limns the forbidding quality of those international borders that are targets of panoptical observation and the control and disciplining of bodies. Above all, Casey’s explorations show us that place is good to think with. If place has at times been marginalized in philosophical discourse, he shows us that the marginal itself—borders and boundaries—needs rethinking.1 Casey is our leading recent exponent of the genre of philosophical literature that deals with travel, walking, and human geography, a genre whose noble antecedents include Rousseau, Thoreau, and Nietzsche. In this chapter I would like to follow Casey, following his steps we might say, in thinking about borders, boundaries, and thresholds. Given the intensive infinity of exploration possible on our finite globe, I limit myself to two main cases, which echo his in several ways. One is Central Park,

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including The Gates, the other an experience of border crossings and boundaries to, on, and in Turkey and the divided island of Cyprus. There is, I think, a book yet to be written on The Philosophy of Central Park. Large design projects of this sort require a thinking of and with the earth, involving the play of borders, boundaries, and thresholds. Central Park is the most influential, certainly the most visited, American work of art of the nineteenth century. Central Park has a known philosophical diagram which we call the picturesque—dating from the time of Bentham—and so we might call it the anti-Panopticon.2 Decades after co-designing Central Park, when Olmsted directed the United States’ premier landscape design firm, he assigned to his associates Uvedale Price’s three-volume Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and on the Use of Studying Pictures for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (1794). Price was in some ways a predecessor of Edward Casey; his study is a proto-phenomenological treatise, informed by a sensitivity to climate, atmosphere, and what Pope called “the genius of the place.” Price has encyclopedic ambitions to discuss earth, air, water (fire is mostly absent) and to review various forms of design and planting. He offered a diagram of the picturesque to Olmsted and associates, which they adapted in projects across North America, as the builders of Pennsylvania’s Stateville Prison adapted Bentham’s diagram of the Panopticon. That diagram necessarily involves a kinaesthetics: it must offer some account of how bodily movement is coordinated with vision. The picturesque diagram involves sinuous paths, changing elevations, new and surprising, enticing views revealed as a corner is turned or a rise surmounted. So while Price could be seen as still captive to the gaze rather than the glance in the role that he gives to painting as an organon of landscape design, nevertheless his analysis of the painting/landscape gardening relation is superior to Kant’s (which he seems not to have known). In Kant’s sketchy system of the arts, landscape gardening is a species of painting, as if a park were a single picture or a series of pictures.3 Price’s picturesque space is one in which we move along paths, lines, or tracks that continuously or abruptly disclose new views and orientations. Where Bentham offered a diagram for total visibility with relatively fixed positions for observed and observer, Price laid down principles for exploiting the moving body’s multiplicity and complexity of orientations and views; he was, if you like, explaining the concept of the threshold. The English park or landscape garden that provides the pattern for Central Park is constituted by a complex play of borders and boundaries. The great parks were private property, having been decisively appropriated by major estates through the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century. As such, they had borders to keep out poachers, vagrants, or wanderers. While maintaining these protective borders, the parks as experienced from the inside gave the impression of being continuous with the surrounding countryside, taking full advantage of what the Japanese call “borrowed scenery.” To put a more political edge on it, the parks masked a landgrab by the aristocracy by creating the illusion of borderless spaces. In Casey’s language, the park generated a sense of a boundary, a zone of indeterminacy, but it did so through the use of a concealed border, or frame, such as the sunken trenches or ha-ha’s that surrounded the park or part of it. While I am in sympathy with Casey’s appropriation of a logic of vagueness from Peirce, Husserl, and others, it is important to note that here vagueness is something that is produced; there is not only a logic but

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also a technology of vagueness. The frame or parergon, as Derrida explains, is neither simply inside nor outside the work.4 Just as a picture frame both detaches a painting to the gallery wall while attaching it to the same context, so the frame of the grounds performs the same double function. When Olmsted and Vaux (hereafter Olmsted) translated the diagram of the private English park into the public, urban space of New York, borders could not be concealed so easily (now, from almost any point in the park, large parts of the New York skyline are visible). Inside the park it was different. In “Coming to the Edge,” Casey says that Olmsted “went to elaborate lengths to keep the landscape as pristine as possible (even if this entailed considerable earth removal to create this very perception!).” Now the pristine is that which is archaic or original, that which is uncorrupted by civilization. The designers created the impression of “naturalness” by following the diagram of the picturesque, which calls for intricacy, variety, and a multiplicity of thresholds. They operationalized this general diagram in the cartographic Greensward Plan that hangs in Park headquarters. Although the diagram of the picturesque differs markedly from the diagrams of the walled Italian renaissance garden or from the intensively centralized schema of a park like Versailles, which echoes the forms of monarchical power, it is still a diagram, a way of delimiting, marking, and coding a territory, of indicating schemas for the movement of bodies within. That so many, at least in the West, have accepted the results of this diagrammatic reterritorialization as “natural” indicates the amazing success of this paradigm, whose parochial origins go back to the British adaptation of certain landscape motifs from painters of imagined Italian scenes such as Claude Lorrain. Seen from this perspective, The Gates are a contemporary technologization of the picturesque diagram that the nineteenth-century designers adapted from eighteenth-century parks and their theorists who in turn adapted their ideas from seventeenth-century painters. Do not suppose that the painters were in communion with true “natural” landscapes, which they simply transcribed, for in addition to their indebtedness to all the conventions and history of painting, the pastoral places that served as their models were themselves formed by the industry of shepherds whose herds ate up the young shoots of trees and so produced the expanses of lawn whose recent descendants are to be seen in corporate parks and suburban neighborhoods. This territorialization (to speak Deleuzian) was the ground for a deterritorialization in painting, which could become the provocation for a reterritorialization in the English park. I too accepted the invitation of The Gates’s thresholds in February 2005 and spent the better part of two days following the paths they laid out through the snowy park. Having ignored the park in winter before, these walks were a revelation. The sheer multiplicity of the visitors in all their diversity, and the shared enthusiasm for the collective experience, seemed in keeping with the designers’ broad expectations for their work. I was reminded of Olmsted’s comparison of the experience of strolling through a park to music, and that comparison was sharpened for me by Deleuze’s discussion of the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus.5 There Deleuze suggests homologies or analogies between musical styles and various modes of constructing, inhabiting, or abandoning a territory. In what he calls the “classical” form, the aim is to produce order from chaos; the minimalist example is a child singing to herself in the dark to provide an elementary sense of structure. In landscape design, this would correspond

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to clearly bordered gardens like those of renaissance Italy (“paradise,” let us recall, is a Persian word for an enclosed garden). In the exemplary form of the “romantic” mode, an animal, say a bird, marks its territory by singing; the romantic mode involves the search for a landscape, one that needs to be claimed and established. The romantic—as in European romanticism—aims at the “natural” which is not far from the “national,” both involving a reference to the natal, to birth, filiation, and origin. The English park is decidedly romantic in this sense; Olmsted’s adaptation of it for the democratic multitude is a brilliant variation that lends itself to a project like The Gates and whose effects Casey has well described in “Coming to the Edge.” Olmsted reversed the framing of the English park. In those parks, the frame was hidden in order to create the impression of open space but the space was an exclusive and private one. Central Park has a clearly defined and visible rectangular boundary but opens up its interior to the multitude, as Casey observes. In the “modern” mode there is an opening to a wider context, like the bird greeting the day or a music that transcends national traditions, like the music to come that Nietzsche sensed was on the horizon.6 This is a movement of deterritorialization, the taking of a line of flight without set goals or limits. Its analogue in land art could be a work such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (which both Casey and I have discussed), with its allusions to the extremes of cosmic scale.7 It embraces and exemplifies entropy while echoing and amplifying the spiral character of the crystals that compose it. James Turrell’s ongoing cosmic project in the Arizona desert seems to belong to this genre as well. I’ve tried to show that the apparent naturalness of such places as Central Park is enabled by theoretically sophisticated diagrams and must be understood as the choice of one diagram over another. What shall we say about political borders, especially highly policed ones like that between the United States and Mexico? Casey explains the way in which the state prevents or severely regulates the movement of bodies, proceeding by the problematic identification of the real and the ideal. In the case of the United States and Mexico, the border, with all its problems of life and death (as well as definition and location), is the remainder of war and the movement of peoples. It was a continental war, a gigantic land grab opposed by Abraham Lincoln; students at Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton were still debating its legitimacy 70 years later. Olmsted saw Central Park as the solution to the typical problem of the city, the acute congestion and condensation that are necessary dimensions of an urban center. Formerly, cities had walls for defense and the border between the inside and the outside imposed interior compression. But around the seventeenth century, artillery power rendered city walls much less cost effective than other forms of security, and this, along with the growth of commerce, required better roads and transportation. The cities founded by Europeans in the Americas were not walled, because the lessons of the European wars had been learned. Now while Manhattan was never constrained by military walls, a similar effect of condensation is effected by what we might call its “natural” marine boundaries. So one of the great urban planning projects of the last two centuries was the introduction of centralized open space that was also coordinated with roads and streets. It was what Nietzsche called architecture in “the grand style.” You might think then that an island has natural boundaries, given by its coastline, so that it would not encounter the aporia of nature and culture that Casey speaks of in

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the border near San Diego. In Derrida’s last lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, he took the figure of the island as correlative with absolute sovereignty.8 But some islands are divided, not just into neighborhoods, like Manhattan, but by internal borders, like Haiti and the Dominican Republic or like Cyprus, split between ethnic Greeks in the south and ethnic Turks in the north. And at the political and cultural center of the island, there is a late medieval city of narrow labyrinthine passages and streets. Nicosia/Lefkosa is enclosed by the remains of a gigantic late sixteenth-century wall, erected by the Venetians just a few years before they lost the island to the Ottomans. Through this already amazing complex of winding ways, contained by a perfect circle studded with 11 symmetrically placed bastions, runs the UN green line or buffer zone. So the question I will pose—because it was posed for me on my visit to Cyprus—is whether it is possible to imagine an art, a cosmopolitan art, if you will, that could do something for divided Cyprus. If not an architecture in the grand style—there seems to be no room here for a technologization of the picturesque—what then? Sometimes you can cross all the borders, present your ticket, have your passport or visa stamped, and still not know where you are. Cyprus could be the perfect Mediterranean island with beaches, views, historic sights, ruins, a picturesque walled city, charming harbors. It is also a border between Christians and Muslims, and some might say between Europe and the Middle East or Asia. Cyprus is a case of the hypertrophy of borders. Now the border between north and south has overwritten and over-coded all of its earlier identities. The new border is a narrow zone administered by the United Nations between the north and the south. This is a no-man’s-land running through one of the world’s last divided cities and one of its few divided islands. But what should we call a disputed border? In reference to contested Kashmir, it’s simply called the line of control, but there is no UN zone there. I was traveling with a university group on an academic mission that first took us to Turkey, a state intensely conscious of its borders and territorial integrity, for example with respect to the Kurds who would like to establish borders for a new Kurdistan that would redraw the maps of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Turkey wants to join the European Union and thus relax its borders with the states that compose the EU. The chief of strategy for the Turkish army told us that it was the destiny of the Turkish people to continue their westward movement, and I hope that he was thinking of peaceful border crossings and new boundaries, although his rhetoric reminded me, alas, of Germany’s Drang nach Osten. It was only at the Ankara airport, as we left for Cyprus, that I discovered that neither our airline nor our destined airport had any international standing, because the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus is a self-proclaimed state recognized only by Turkey. The Greeks in the south refer to the area as “Turkish occupied Cyprus” and the UN has been trying to broker a deal to reunite the island—in a general referendum in 2005, the north approved the Annan plan for reunification whereas the south rejected it. So the question immediately arose whether we were indeed crossing a border; were we really leaving Turkey? Or were we traveling into a Turkish military zone? At passport control we were told that if our passports were stamped by the northern authorities a number of countries (notably Greece and south Cyprus) would refuse us admission. The north Cypriots had devised a border strategy: we were given separate visa forms on which our comings

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and goings could be recorded without infecting our passports. A Mediterranean island like Cyprus may have a number of inviting thresholds, that is harbors, in which there is a lively interchange between the outside and the inside. Such is the beautiful and picturesque northern port of Kyrenia/Girne. Yet now the threshold for most international travelers is the unrecognized airport where entrance requires the visitor’s complicity in an evasive scheme of documentation—quite a contrast with the invitation that Casey describes at the San Francisco airport. To what kind of border were we coming? We had just come from Turkey (or were we still there?) where university space is a contested site with respect to the issue of women’s covering—the headscarf issue. In furtherance of its official secularity, Turkey prohibits wearing headscarves at universities and in civic buildings (although the prohibition itself is open to interpretation and differently enforced from one institution, and even from one classroom, to another). There are inspection stations at the borders of Turkish campuses to regulate the movement of women’s bodies. But North Cyprus has no such restrictions, and this gives it a certain claim to sovereignty. Its universities are full of what the Turkish novelist Oran Pamuk calls “headscarf girls.” Like the major Turkish universities, those in North Cyprus are English speaking, so the women students, at least, almost all of whom are covered, seem to have come there to pursue a Western anglophone education while following tradition as they understand it. North Cyprus universities are growing as they draw an enthusiastic cohort of covered women. The other growth industry we noticed was vacation, holiday, second home, and retirement housing and construction, with a strong British market. So the North appeared as a strange boundary zone: a state and not a state, Turkey and not-Turkey, a place where covered women and Brits on holiday or retirement shared a common space. It was enough to provoke a certain nostalgia (which we encountered throughout our trip through Turkey) for what many see as the tolerance and diversity of the Ottoman Empire. In Deleuze’s essay on “Desert Islands,” he reminds us of the mythic attraction of the new origin, of starting over, associated with that figure. Cyprus is perhaps the opposite of the desert island, and not merely because it is geologically continental, having lost its connection to the mainland. The history is one of coding and over-coding, territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. The archaic Cypriots were ousted by the Achaean Greeks, and the island was invaded by Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians before Alexander added it to his empire. Egyptian Ptolemies held it until Rome took it. A few centuries later, Cyprus passed to Byzantium, but was devastated for centuries by Arab pirates. During the Crusades (a movement of bodies across borders and through boundaries that still requires geophilosophical study), Richard the Lionheart seized it from the Byzantines and promptly sold it to the Knights Templar who quickly resold it to the Crusader Guy de Lusignan whose dynasty held it for three centuries. Venice got it through a complex kinship arrangement in 1489 and built some remarkable walls before being ousted by the Ottomans just 80 years later. The Ottomans encouraged conversion to Islam but also restored the Greek Orthodox faith for those who remained Christian. A most peculiar genealogy, considering the island’s current division. As Nietzsche says, only that which has no history can be defined.9 In 1878, Britain leased Cyprus from the Ottomans as part of an anti-Russian

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deal and inherited it by default in the First World War. Greek Cypriots spearheaded the struggle for independence that culminated in 1960. In 1974, rival military juntas in Athens and Istanbul then in power (both supported by the United States) became involved in disturbances that led to the current division of the island. It’s as if Cyprus, so accustomed to conflicting sovereignties, religions, and empires could not tolerate resting within its own borders. North Cyprus is the supplement of Turkey, in Derrida’s sense. It is both external to that which it supplements and yet in some sense necessary to it. It is external insofar as the fiction is maintained that it is an independent state. It is also necessary insofar as Turkey, given its ethnocentric nationalism, must defend Turks wherever they may be while displaying its explicit commitment to “European” political freedom by tolerating and cooperating with regimes that allow full public expressions of religious commitment. North Cyprus could be said to be both inside and outside Turkey (as Guantanamo is both inside and outside the United States). As we flew into this condensed, over-coded, semiotic and political stew, I leafed through the airline magazine and found a brief notice of a current art exhibition on the island. Remarkably, the exhibition was apparently not confined to one side of the green line separating north and south, and there was a hint that it challenged that very division. We had to seek out the exhibition, even if that meant changing our tight schedule and venturing into the UN zone and perhaps into the Greek side of the island. Despite dire warnings by our Turkish guide that we would at best be turned back and at worst find ourselves in trouble with the authorities, we proceeded to the entrance point to the green line early on our first morning, armed with only the scantiest information about the actual exhibition. We knew that some of its scattered exhibits were in the vicinity of the UN zone. As it turned out, there was no problem in leaving North Cyprus and we walked into the no-man’s-land controlled by the United Nations. How ironic it was that a city built as a walled and unified capital, the fortified center of the island, should itself be radically partitioned in this way. The old city is a wonderful maze, full of narrow winding streets that invite a wandering exploration and also the traveler’s joy and anxiety at being temporarily lost and disoriented. Every corner is a threshold. Yet on and through this enticing interior space there is superimposed the contemporary border enforced by the United Nations, an organization of states which, whatever its peacekeeping mission, is ultimately committed to border logic. Nicosia/ Lefkosa could be a smooth space, in Deleuzian terms, but the forces of striation prohibited this. On entering the UN zone we immediately became aware of the vastly different aesthetic and political messages emanating from the two sides, a difference that was not part of the art exhibition in the narrow sense, but which provided its essential context. On the Turkish border, houses were well maintained and often beautifully landscaped. The Greek border, in contrast, had been deliberately kept in a state of ruin and decay, meant to reflect the ravages of civil war. Large signs and posters on the Greek side—the signs themselves in a state of decay like the buildings—accused the Turks of inhuman massacres, related stories of innocent victims of Turkish aggression, and called Turkey an apartheid regime. So the two sides were already engaged in a political-aesthetic border confrontation. But where was the art exhibition? Certainly

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not in the UN zone, where we were constantly reminded by prominent signs that photography was prohibited (I now have a set of photographs of signs forbidding photography). Wandering through the zone, we eventually came to a point of passage into the south, had our papers stamped once more, and strolled for about 15 minutes, visiting a Greek Orthodox church with services in Polish (possibly for UN soldiers) and got a brief glimpse of busy city life. On the way back, we encountered a solitary hunger striker, a 50-ish Belgian man, who explained that he had been traveling in contested areas like this one to make the case for peace. We found the office of an NGO promoting the preservation and restoration of Nicosia’s architectural heritage, implicitly making the case for reunion or some as yet undetermined path beyond the current fracture. When we returned to Nicosia later that day, we encountered signs of the art exhibition. Ironic dada-esque signs reading “Cyprus über alles” were pasted in various places, suggesting a bitter mockery of all the suspicions, on both sides, of a united Cyprus. We saw witty political drawings; we viewed pictures of men and women, figures distorted by bar codes, metaphors of political dehumanization. We spoke with a sponsor of the exhibition and acquired a map showing exhibit locations and listing scheduled events on both sides of the line, but with no representation of the line itself. Eventually we learned more about what we had first heard as a rumor: that several parts of the exhibition had been taken down or prohibited by the authorities on both sides, who responded to a threat to their common investment in exclusionary topology. As featured on the front page of the Cyprus paper, an artist in the north had draped a newish and stylish apartment building with rags and laundry to suggest some of the conflicts of high and low, of the included and excluded, in Cypriot life. Although the owner (her father!) had given permission for the exhibit, the mayor of the northern half of Nicosia/Lefkosa had formally declared the work to be garbage, and so it was destroyed. Art was challenging the prevailing notions of sovereignty, and all the sovereigns, great and small, were terrified of the threat. I thought of the title of the exhibition “leaps-of-faith,” which seems to allude to Kierkegaard, who saw religion as requiring a leap beyond all of that which is known and assured. Here the leaps (plural) were leaps over, around, and through the borders. The map that accompanies the exhibition shows the city’s streets encircled by the wall and its bastions, but fails to indicate the green line. It suggests an alternative city, but the impression is complicated by the map’s key which indicates that several events were held at locations within the UN zone. Films were shown in both north and south with titles such as: “Borders of Europe,” “The Empty Center,” “Territories,” “Urban Bodies,” and “Demonstrators’ Bodies.” According to the exhibition website: The exhibition will be held in the site of the highly charged so-called green line— in the abandoned buildings and on the street—and will spill into public spaces and venues on both sides of the city, thus drawing attention to the function of public space and calling into question the notion of “boundaries,” both visible and invisible, between past and future.10

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In a world of sovereignties and nationalisms, a leap of faith beyond the limits of state and nation is a task not only for art in the narrow sense, but for the art of politics, the political imagination. “Leaps-of-faith” was not our only encounter with philosophical thinking about borders and boundaries in Cyprus. After the excursion into the UN zone and the south, we heard a Finnish professor argue that the south was trapped in ressentiment, unable to give up its attachment to the trauma of 1974’s civil war and invasions; he deployed Nietzschean and Freudian concepts to imply that the green line divides noble and base, the self-affirming and the resentful. We told him that our group from Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, understood a little about this from our own history. The verbal and visual statements at the border by both sides could be cited as supporting his view. Yet the psychogeographer seemed insensitive to the question of the arrogance that this drawing of lines seemed to involve. As Casey says that he has no solution to the US–Mexico border problem, so I have no advice for Cyprus. If there was an encouraging sign to be found there, it was the action of the artists, shamans, and sorcerers (as Deleuze would say) who challenged the borders with invitations to the seemingly impossible—a thinking of the impossible, a teleological suspension of striated space, a leap of faith beyond the surveying devil. But such leaps of faith seem to require the intervention of the sorcerer/artist who marks a territory and establishes boundary zones.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on a commentary read in response to Casey’s talk and essay “Coming to the Edge,” originally given at the annual session of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy held at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, December 2005. While that essay seems not to have been published in its original form, Casey has discussed some of its themes in a number of published texts, including “Borders and Boundaries: Edging into the Environment,” in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 67–92; “Keeping Art to Its Edge,” in Rethinking Facticity, ed. François Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 273–88; and “Keeping Art to Its Edge,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 2 (2004): 145–53. 2 We are fortunate that Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park, was apparently unimpressed by his college visit to Yale, and so set out to educate himself. If he had gone to Yale in the 1840s he would not have studied with phenomenologists but with dreary disciples of Thomas Reid and William Hamilton. As it is, he not only became a major geographical journalist, writing still classic books on Texas and the South, but was also a careful student of the English picturesque and its theorists. I have discussed the design of Central Park further in “The Pragmatic Picturesque: The Philosophy of Central Park,” in Gardening—Philosophy for Everyone: Cultivating Wisdom, ed. Dan O’Brien (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 148–60.

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3 Immanuel Kant, “On the Division of the Beautiful Arts,” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §51: 197–202. 4 Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1837: The Refrain,” in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 6 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), §225: 116–17. 7 Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Casey, “Keeping Art to Its Edge” (2004), 145–53. 8 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1998): Chapter II, section 13: 52–54. 10 “Leaps-of-Faith,” www.leaps-of-faith.com. [EDS: The official website for this exhibition is no longer available. The exhibition description remains available at: “Leaps of Faith,” accessed on December 24, 2012, www.neme.org/118/leaps-of-faith.]

17

The Body as the Place of Care Eva Feder Kittay

Here/there and there/here Rosemarie left her three children when all were still under the age of eight in the Philippines to work as a live-in nanny for a family in San Francisco. She sends most all of her earnings to her family in the Philippines. Her children are cared for by her mother and a nanny. (Her husband does little childcare.) She has been abroad for ten years, but keeps close contact with her children, calling them frequently and corresponding regularly.1 When the girl that I take care of calls her mother “Mamma” my heart jumps all the time because my children also call me “Mama.” I feel the gap caused by our physical separation especially in the morning, when I pack her lunch, because that’s what I used to do for my children . . . I used to do that very same thing for them.2

Rosemarie, we may say, exists in a “nomad space” which, as Lisa Eckenwiler, borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, says “capture[s] the experience of those who are in some sense distributed between places, who are at once ‘here/ there and there/ here.’”3 Rosemarie is here in San Francisco, but she is here only because what is most important to her is there in the Philippines. Rosemarie is, “here/there.” Her heart is there, but the work that supports those about whom she cares is here. She is “there/here.” Unlike traditional nomads, migrant women such as Rosemarie do not move from place to place, picking up their tents, their family and community with them as they leave. Instead, these nomads leave a critical part of themselves behind. They change location, but in some sense they do more than retain their connection to their place of origin—even as they leave for a new place, they remain in their original place. As one mother put it: “I would catch myself gazing at nothing thinking about my child. Every moment, every second of the day, I felt like I was thinking about my baby.”4 These women leave homes and middle-class careers that no longer allow them a middle-class existence. They leave their families, not infrequently children who are sometimes still very young. They say farewell to elderly kin for whom they might

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otherwise have the responsibility to care. They depart from their husbands, lovers, and friends. They know that when they return, their children will be grown, and might not know them at all; their mothers and fathers may no longer be alive; their husbands may have taken another woman as wife. They go because nations of wealth are very much in need of careworkers who can: tend to their increasingly numerous elderly, care for the children whose mothers are in the workforce or who are just wealthy enough to employ a domestic, and assist disabled people newly entitled to such support. These needs are a sign of ways people’s lives have improved. Longevity, the movement of women into the workforce, the rights of people with disabilities are among the forces that create the pull that brings the migrants to the receiving nations. But the need that pushes the migrations is a consequence of oppression: remnants of colonialism, postcolonial forms of domination and oppression, and a neo-liberal global economy in which the sending nations are the losers. Arlie Hochchild has called this migration a “global heart transplant.”5 I will not try to document these injustices or give a macro-level analysis. In this short chapter, I wish to remain on what Rhacel Salazar Parreñas calls “the subject level of analysis.”6 I will posit that the body to whom one gives care is itself a place, and moreover that it constitutes a here for the caregiver. Many of the migrant careworkers are bound both by the place occupied by the dependents they leave behind and by the place of the charges they are paid to care for. I want to consider how this bifurcated implacement, which I will call a bi-placement, of the migrant careworkers contributes to the harm of this global heart transplant.

Care and place Our lives are so place-oriented and place-saturated that we cannot begin to comprehend what sheer placelessness would be like.

Edward S. Casey (GBP, ix) We always occupy a place or are moving from place to place. Places are part of the ecology in which we are situated and constitute what we are as subjects. Places are given by nature or culture, but places are also constructed by ourselves and those who are meaningful in our lives. Places are what we occupy as individuals, and places are part of the social world. As beings that move, we are always moving in place and away from a place. When we are lost, when we feel out of place, we experience “the emotional symptoms of placelessness—disorientation, depression, desolation . . . a sense of unbearable emptiness” (GBP, x). We find these symptoms in the reports of the migrant women: “Sometimes you feel the separation and you start to cry. Some days, I just start to cry while I am sweeping the floor because I am thinking about my children in the Philippines.”7 The disorientation, depression, and desolation that many of the migrant women experience is surely related to the sense of displacement. The displacement is more than the physical distance they travel. Parreñas who has extensively studied the experience of Philippian migrants writes: “The dislocations of migrant women include

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partial citizenship, the pain of family separation, the experience of contradictory class mobility, and the feeling of social exclusion.”8 Above all, the place they leave, with all its familiarity—the sounds, the sights, the food, the familiar modes of interaction—is a place of care. They cannot feel at home in their new place because their children are elsewhere. The places they left are ones where the women had been, or would have been expected to be, the prime caregiver to children and sick, disabled or elderly kin. In a particularly odd and perhaps cruel twist, they leave precisely because they see themselves as caregivers. The women leave because they believe the place they inhabit has failed them and their families in making it impossible to obtain the resources and support they need to care properly. Thus they enlist others to tend to the physical daily needs of the ones they care about while they undertake labor in distant lands that will allow them to send the remittances needed to obtain nourishing meals for their families, assure an adequate education for their children, get medical attention for the ill, disabled and frail for whose welfare they are responsible, and provide the material trappings of a good life in the twenty-first century. Because the nations who are wealthy enough to pay for good, reliable, educated caregivers are looking for women just like them, these women are in the unique position to provide the role of the provider in the family. In a male-dominated society, the caregiver role is often regarded as nonfungible and gendered female. The role of provider is gendered male and is more fungible. But in the cases we are considering, the caregiver role becomes fungible while the provider role can be filled only by a singular person. The gendered identification of the provider role is suspended; although the role of hands-on caregiver remains highly gendered and either a female kin or a paid female domestic takes it on. Yet the women redefine caregiving as involving more than the daily hands-on care. Care is an attitude, a virtue as well as a labor. The affective relationship that makes the well-being of another critical to our own well-being is what drives the women to migrate, and that affective relationship remains a powerful force even in the face of long and continuous absences. Care as a virtue is clearly exhibited in the extent of hardship and deprivation the women are willing to undergo to assure that their loved ones are well taken care of. Care as a labor is less easily accommodated in the case where hands-on care is impossible. Care as a labor is often understood to require being in the physical presence of the one in need of care. This is especially so when we are speaking of caring for those who cannot meet those needs for themselves because of physical or developmental constraints and not because they prefer to have another do the work for them.9 Although most of the women feel they are doing just that— meeting the needs of the ones for whom they care—the meeting of daily needs, of the hands-on care, is not care that they are able to provide at a distance. The actual body of the loved one, which was the site that defined the place of care, is no longer where they carry out the labor of care. This consideration brings us at last to the important relationship between care and place. How place-dependent is care? The labor of care requires an attentiveness to another that is best achieved by direct visual, auditory and (even) tactile contact. Furthermore, caring is often facilitated when we have come to know the other well, and are motivated by strong affective bonds. Such closeness is achieved only with difficulty when we

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do not inhabit the same place. Responsibility and responsiveness are facilitated by proximity. Not only do the caregiver and the cared for need a place to share together, when I am the caregiver, especially when a strong affective bond is the motivational source of my care, my own sense of here is given (in part, at least) by the person for whom I am responsible and for whom I care. This experience is perhaps best illustrated in the case of a nursing mother in the earlier months when her child is entirely dependent on her milk. There is a sense of disorientation, as if something is missing, when one leaves a baby in those early months. When one is caring for an ill relative, one may be desperate to get away, but there is a lingering presence of the other borne of a concern that does not depart, even when we are physically absent. In the case of the nursing mother, hormonal changes account for much of that feeling, but in other cases it is clear that a sense of responsibility to those who are so very dependent upon oneself clings to us, and we are attuned to what might be occurring elsewhere. One never feels fully here. For the migrant woman, the here where she is not is not only her native land, but the very body of the one she cares about. Her new here furthermore requires her to tend to a different body, a different place in a different place. The conviction that the migrant women have that they are continuing to care for their loved ones, even in an absence that extends for years at a time, and even as they take responsibility and do the hands-on care for the persons in their charge, is tied to this sense of here. They are not only bringing in earnings which they send as remittances back home, but their thoughts, their concerns, their attention is directed to a significant extent to what is happening to those dependents that they leave behind— even as some of the same sort of attention has to be directed to the here where they are physically present, as is so apparent in the reflections of the woman who speaks of the difficulty of preparing the lunch of the child in her charge. From an objective perspective, here is where her body is and where the people whose care she is charged with are. There is where the ones she most cares about are. The objective here enables the remittances she sends there. But from everything these women tell us, subjectively the there where their loved ones are continues to be a here for them. It is the here that one utters to the person they care most about, “I will always be here for you.” The here of her own body is in some ways a there for her. “I will always be here for you, even when I am there; I am there only because I am here for you.”

The body as place Casey makes the case that not only is the body always in a place, but the body itself can be seen as a place, as a “here.” But when Casey speaks of the body as a place, he is speaking of our own body as a place, while I have been speaking of the body of another—the cared for—as a place, a place of care. The body of the other is not only a place, it is the place where I am a caregiver. It is the bodily here for the caregiver qua caregiver. Casey suggests five ways in which the body itself, that is our own body, is a place. I will consider how the different senses function when the body of the cared for is the

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caregiver’s here and whether these help guide us to the wrong done to the place-making agency of migrant caregivers such as Rosemarie.10 Here in part. Here in part is the familiar notion of viewing our bodies as a form of extension that we differentiate into parts, different here’s. We say, for example, “the pain is here, not here” and we point, in both instances to different parts of our body. The body in this case is constituted by a set of here’s that, insofar as it is my body, are all “here’s” to me. Similarly, we can, and I believe do, think of the body of a beloved for whom we care as one more part among the many parts of our own body. When we tend to the cut on a child’s finger, we feel their anxiety, wince as we apply the astringent, feel the relief when the bandage is applied and the child smiles. We treat the child’s finger as if it were our own, a part of our own body. That body remains a here for me as long as I have the attitude of care for it and as long as I feel responsible for that individual’s care. The migrant leaves a sort of here with her dependents, even as she parts from them. Here of my body proper. As we locate ourselves in a place, say a room, it is as a body that we do so. Just as each place is implaced in another, for example, a room may be located in a house which is located in a street which is located in a city, etc., so the reverse iteration ends in the place that is our body, our body in its totality. If instead it is the body of the cared for that situates the caregiver in a here, then she locates her here through that other body. A migrant mother whose here is the body of her children—ones who live in place that she leaves—leaves her here in the sense of the “here of [her] body proper” as well as in the sense of “here in part”. This subjectively given here of the caregiver is also needed for the cared for who needs to know that she can count on the constancy of the other.11 At the same time, objectively, she is in a new here, (in New York or London, or Singapore) taking care of other dependent beings for whom she also needs to be here when they need her. She struggles with this dual implacement. She is thus not so much displaced as bi-placed.12 However, adopting the here of her new charge threatens to displace the here of her children. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila,13 in an article aptly entitled “I am Here, But I am There,” remark that “migrant women, socially defined as primary caregivers, have to distinguish their transnational motherhood from an act of abandonment or disowning of their children.”14 Here of my by-body. This is the experience of the body as place in movement. “At the limit, this leeway becomes an entire range of free actions when we consider all of the various paths which my body can pursue” (GBP, 53). The body in executing an instrumental role relative to our will is experienced in this way. I go from my house to the grocery store: I am here along the entirety of that path. When we think of the body of the one for whom we care as this sort of here, our here is similarly the moving here of the other. My child goes to school and I accompany her and the here of my body and the here of her body coincide. As she is in school and another takes responsibility of her, being at school is her here and is no longer my here,

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except insofar as I continue to think about her, worry how she is doing, etc. But when I feel confident about her care, I can let go of that here. The migrant woman has to relinquish this here of her loved ones. Their comings and goings cannot be her own here, and she has to trust that they will be in good hands as they move around in their world. She has her own here and that of the “by-body” of her charge to be concerned with. The abandonment of by-body here of the people she leaves behind can cause great sadness in the migrant as she is unable to follow her child’s movement through the world and through time. Pei-Chia Lan writes about a Filipina migrant mother, Evelyn: Evelyn: I feel very upset about my children. They don’t talk to me. This one . . . I left her studying in college, but now she got married and has a son already . . . She never told me she got a [boy]friend! She never told me.15

The child she leaves becomes frozen in her memory. It is hard to envision her child as she goes to school, enjoys her friends, feels sadness and disappointment in her endeavors, and so on. The migrant woman with an elderly parent cannot accompany her mother or father to the doctors’s office, comfort her in a hospital bed. This separation from the body of the loved one is a form of alienation, indeed a self-alienation, that comes with the migrant experience. Both a bitterness and a comfort is found in the fact that the caregiving situation into which she is thrust (and that provides both for her livelihood and for those back home) does make the by-body of another her place as well—but it is not fully her place. Her relationship to her charge is temporary. She will be dismissed when the child gets older, when the ill person gets well, when the elderly person dies. It is rare that a real and lasting relationship is formed with either the dependent or the family. Her relationship to those for whom she labors, whose well-being are her long-term commitment comes unraveled through distance and time, and has somehow to be mended if she and they are to feel whole.16 Regional here. The regional here is the expanse constituted by the various paths we can pursue as a body. We are here “in this house” or “in this neighborhood.” Within such a region, we experience a here that has a direct relationship with the here that is our body. As against these here’s that constitute the region, there is a there where I am not. When the body that constitutes the regional here is not our own body but that of another, the regional here occupies an ambiguous relationship to our own bodily here. In the case of the migrant women, the here of the one they care about is one they shared at one point and no longer share. “I am a Filipina,” she might say and mean by that that the Philipines remains her regional here. It is both part of her identity and is the here of those who are most important to her. Yet the regional here of the charge she now cares for and where objectively she finds herself is, of necessity, a here for her. In terms of the regional here, then, she is again bi-placed. Interpersonal here. Finally, Casey, drawing on Husserl, speaks of an interpersonal here in a way that excludes another’s body serving as a here for me. Casey speaks of the other’s (t)here as resisting our own here and as “an intrinsic limit to my own range.”

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Where the other is, I cannot be. Thus “what is there for me as the other’s lived body is, for that other himself or herself, a here of self-presence” (GBP, 54). In contrast to this “interpersonal here”, I have suggested a different sort. The caregiver sees the body of the other as the here where I locate my attention, identify my concern, and direct my activity. To the extent that I can, I step out of myself and find my own sense of place in the other. That is, I identify and empathize with the other, all in the service of meeting their needs, wants, and desires. The two interpersonal here’s are polar opposites. In the Husserlian conception, the other defines where my here ends. In mine, the other is the place I enact an empathetic identification and her here becomes my own. Yet there is third interpersonal here. Casey speaks of an “arc” that bridges the here I experience to the here of another. This is place that is constructed intersubjectively. Such a place is constructed “not only between people who live in a place, but also between people who live in different places.”17 The very experience of relationship is placial. Relationships can feel suffocating. They can provide a zone of safety, a “place” of comfort, a “place” where we experience anger or joy. The notion of place here is perhaps metaphorical, but if place need not be a fixed locality, it should include a place—a here—between two heres, that is an interpersonal relationship. Relationships of care include all three forms of the interpersonal here as moments in the relationship. The body of the other is our own here as we attend to it and engage empathetically. But the body of the other also resists us. The other’s needs, wants and desires are ultimately her own, and some will remain opaque or inaccessible to us. Our own needs, wants, and desires will eventually assert themselves against the other. In addition, a caring relationship, like any relationship, needs to recognize both our discrete being and our connectedness. Relationship occurs in the place between individuals, who, although individuals, are nonetheless connected. If I fully identify with a pain that renders you incapacitated, I too would become incapacitated and so unable to help you. If I care for and about you without recognizing our difference, I will confuse my own state for yours and so be unable to meet your needs. If I so fully identify with you that I lose my moral compass, I will be incapable of giving you guidance in living a flourishing life. And if you see me as nothing more than an appendage of you, you will lose the respect for me that is critical to my ability to function not only as an individual, but as an effective caregiver as well. Thus, while the body of the one we care for is a here for us, it can only remain so if we allow both of us to be in the here of a relationship. Nonetheless, relationships, even if punctuated by periods of absence, and even if constituted across distance, generally require some physical proximity to be sustained and to adjust to changes in the lives of each. We also crave the physical warmth of another, the sensuous presence of another. The imagination may go a long way to fill in for the actual experience when absence is inevitable, but most of us possess only a limited imagination. Without a shared physical space, the place that is a relationship becomes thin and precarious. And this is the hazard faced by the migrants. The case of the migrant caregiver offers up a skewed geography of love and care. Given the relational constitution of self, and motivational structure of care,

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the care expected of a hired caregiver occupies a phantom space in this geography of relationships. The mothers speak of “pouring” one’s love into their charges. The expression is reserved for the relationship with the ward and is not used when speaking of their own dependents. The discomfort we feel with the idea that a woman leaves her child for years at a time to tend to some other child signals a moral harm. In another work I have argued that the nature of wrong is not easily captured by the various regent frameworks of justice.18 There I claim that the harm is best understood not through a theory of justice but through an ethic of care. For an ethic of care places our relational identity front and center. As our very identity and sense of well-being is tied to the relationships we have formed, some of the most damaging harm we experience lies in the severing of relationships. In the case of migrant careworkers, even as ersatz relationships are forged—relationships that are made to be broken—the central relationships of their lives threaten to come unraveled. If we need to leave a vulnerable person to the care of another, but can return at close and regular intervals, we can repair the few strands that have frayed. But long absences do not allow for this mending and by the time one can be face-to-face, it may be too late to repair the damage. If relationships are themselves places, then the migrant women find themselves in the wrong place without any possibility of returning to the place whence they came, as the grounds of the relationship has shifted over time. The difficulty of recovering the relationship is great not only because the ones left behind have changed, but also because the migrant woman who is bi-placed undergoes a self-rupturing. With her fractured self, there is no longer an integral self to stand in relationship with either of the parties for whom she cares. Without these relationships her displacement is complete and we can indeed expect to find the symptoms of placelessness that Casey so well described. The harm of severed relationships is joined with the harm of never feeling oneself as fully here.

Notes 1 Rosemarie is a composite of many of the women discussed by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas in Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 2 Migrant Filipina domestic worker interview quoted in ibid., 119. 3 L. A. Eckenwiler, Long-Term Care, Globalization, and Justice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 81. 4 Quoted in Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 89. 5 See, for instance, Arlie Russell Hochchild, “Love and Gold,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Arlie Russell Hochchild and Barbara Ehrenreich (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 22. 6 See, for instance, Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 30–33. 7 Ibid., 119. 8 Ibid., 12. 9 Diemut Elisabet Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1995).

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10 For an account of place-making agency, see P. Raghuram, C. Madge, and P. Noxolo, “Rethinking Responsibility and Care for a Postcolonial World,” Geoforum 40, no. 1 (2009): 5–13. I discuss the notion below. 11 Nel Noddings writes: “Caring over time need not be—in fact, never is—an unbroken series of caring encounters, but it must be marked by a basic constancy. The adult must convey a message to the child: ‘I am here for you.’” Nel Noddings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 26. 12 This analysis is of course a simplification for the purposes of isolating one significant feature of the migrant careworker’s experience. There are many others who normally constitute the here that is defined by the significant persons in an individual’s life. Often these individuals are dispersed and we find ourselves with many here’s that orient our lives. Furthermore, the here that fashions what we identify as home involves more than the significant individuals in our lives. The sounds, smells, tastes of a place, as well as the visual contours, all define a here for us. The neighbors, the sense of community, the social and political institutions that shape our lives in less immediate but no less significant ways are also part of our experience of a here. We may bring all our significant others with us, but still not feel at home, still feel that a part of us remains in the place we have left. 13 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “‘I’m here, but I’m there’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” Gender & Society 11, no. 5 (1997): 548–71. 14 Cited in Pei-Chia Lan, “Maid or Madam? Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor,” Gender and Society 17, no. 2 (2003): 196. 15 Ibid., 196. 16 Again, the picture I drawn is oversimplified. Real relationships are far more complex than the abstract ones I invoke. The relationships that arise from the situation of paid caregiving can become very deep and permanent and the relationships that are based on love and kinship can be fraught with ambivalence, may include violence, abuse, and exploitation. Nonetheless, the default assumptions and the basic narrative that underly the distinctions among these two sorts of relationships shape and color the variations in the actual relationships. 17 Raghuram, Madge, and Noxolo, “Rethinking Responsibility and Care for a Postcolonial World,” 8. 18 Eva Feder Kittay, “The Moral Harm of Migrant Carework: Realizing a Global Right to Care,” Philosophical Topics 37, no. 2 (2009): 53–73.

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Voices and the “Spirit of Place” Fred Evans

In a series of innovative works, Edward Casey argues that place has priority over all other aspects of the setting that we call our own. Even when we feel our mind has allowed us to step outside of place, we are still within it: “We are always, at all times, out there in places,” even “when we summon up places in mind and memory. The net of place encompasses the maw of mind” (GBP, 312). More specifically, Casey claims that place is “phenomenologically” and “ontologically” prior to space, time, body, and mind. He grants it phenomenological priority because we never encounter things, other persons, or our own selves outside of a surrounding. Even geometrized space, calibrated time, and numbers refer back tacitly or overtly to the capacities of our body and, through them, to the place where they too are already situated and oriented. This experienced priority of place, moreover, is something we feel “by and in our bodies” rather than think with our minds. The ontological, as opposed to phenomenological, priority of place is based on the idea that sentient beings can “make use of [things]” only insofar as they are “always already in place” (GBP, 313). In other words, place cannot be encompassed “by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists” (GBP, 15). Significantly, Casey adds that each place has its “spirit.” This spirit makes a place special and enters oneself and others as its “witnesses or occupants.” It thereby eliminates “the binarism of Self and Others” (GBP, 314). In his more recent work, Casey has begun to elucidate a notion that might clarify spirit. This new endeavor suggests that spirit consists of the voices that contest with one another for determining the meaning of the place in which they find themselves. We can see if this suggestion is correct, as well as grasp the fuller sense of voice for Casey, by examining the two articles in which he articulates this new notion: “Limit and Edge, Voice and Place” and “Finding (Your Own) Philosophical Voice.”1 In interrogating these two essays, we shall focus on the first and the location where it places us: “La Frontera,” the border area between Mexico and the United States. The second article will serve as a reservoir from which to draw refinements on his use of voice in the first article. But it will also fulfill a more personal aim—of helping me, and perhaps Casey, to find out more about our own philosophical voices. I add that Casey’s

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voice resounds in mine, as that of a friend and a philosophical mentor during and beyond my graduate school years.

Dimensions of an event La Frontera: site of a wall that marks the shame of its sponsors, even if they do not acknowledge it—and the hopes of those who would pass around it even though they risk perishing in the desert. For Casey, La Frontera is an occasion to confront this wall or at least to stand witness to its oppression by way of his philosophical voice and its conceptual tools, “limit and edge, place and voice.” We can listen to what Casey says and assess the value of his tools by starting with his presentation of some facts about La Frontera and then progressing to his idea of it as an “event” filled with voices. La Frontera was established as a border between Mexico and the United States by the treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo in 1848. Further policy decisions have created a wave and a wall. The wave is the movement of Mexicans to the United States. The impetus of the current migration began with NAFTA and the cheap price of subsidized US agricultural exports that left many Mexican campesinos without livelihoods. The wall that blocks this movement involves the restrictive immigration and naturalization polices of the Department of Homeland Security and a very expensive material barrier that “has had the effect of driving aspiring immigrants around its far ends, only to find danger and death in the deserts beyond.”2 Casey refers to this tragedy as an event. He defines an event as “the conspiring of edge and limit, place and voice in an actual occurrence that can be remembered and dated in historical time.”3 The word “conspiring” here is especially significant. It tacitly refers to what Casey calls “limitropic” phenomena. The major phenomena of this sort besides limit are the three other components of an event: edge, voice, and place. Each of these three involves “a limit that acts both as an extremity and a threshold for a thing or event.”4 This limit exceeds the event associated with it at a particular moment and thereby “initiates a new chapter in its history,” that is, “a turning point for that which moves beyond that limit.”5 Moreover, the limit of an event and each of its components can be seen, touched, heard or otherwise experienced with the senses only on pain of no longer being a limit. Indeed, we have only two alternatives with respect to a limit: to remain within it or to “trespass it as a threshold.”6 La Frontera is an event in this limitropic sense. As the legal, historical, and cartological border between Mexico and the United States, it is inseparable from the mental or other ways in which we encounter its expanse and yet cannot be exhausted by them. Thus everyone at the border is “aware of La Frontera as an irrefrangible limit.”7 Despite its intangibility as a limit, the border has an edge. An edge is endogenous to an event and “terminates from within” it rather than, like the limit, “coming from the outside to circumscribe a thing or a happening.”8 Thus those at the border also experience La  Frontera as “a material edge, as a barrier to crossing that constrains personal aspirations and bodily movement.”9 At the same time, it operates as a threshold, pointing to the other side whose access it attempts to block.

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Besides being an untouchable limit and a sensible edge, La Frontera is also a “place,” that is, “whatever gathers around it,” including the ground and the sentient and inanimate beings in the bioregion.10 Casey points out that the frontier between two countries can properly be called a place only when it is taken as a “boundary” rather than as a well-defined and rigid “border.” As a place, the specific area of the frontier “fades out,” marking “a transition into another place,” and is “porous,” allowing “movement back and forth, in and out.”11 More specifically, place is both a “substrate” and a “shelter” or “aegis.” As a substrate, it offers “stability”; as an aegis, it “fosters new intentions and creations.” Each of these “powers” is necessary for place to be productive: without aegis, “stability is staid and stationary,” and without stability aegis is “ungrounded and nebulous.”12 It is here, when the two powers are both operative, that the “edge” of La Frontera takes the form of a boundary rather than a border: it begins its “presencing” from within the substrate of the boundary and, at the same time, is the limit just beyond the “felt or known aegis” of the boundary.13 As dimensions of an event, then, limit, edge, and place are always ahead of themselves, are always calling upon us to think or act beyond our current station. At this point, Casey has the notion of place as the heart of La Frontera or of any other event involving creatures like ourselves. But now voice enters this scene. Indeed, it has been waiting all along, biding its time to help make clearer how La Frontera can be a place of spirit and overcome the binary split between self and others referred to earlier. Casey begins his presentation of voice by setting out how it involves limit, edge, and place. The limit of voice consists in the phonemic laws and semantic structures (“morphemes”) of language. These laws and structures determine the limits of sounds thus permitting us to produce and understand them. Each of the produced words and sentences has its edge, that is, its point of termination and the interval necessary for the subsequent word or sentence to happen. Moreover, voice is the place of these linguistic sounds, gestures, actions, or any other expressive structure with its limit and edge. In the case of the “dispossessed of the earth,” for example, Casey exclaims that voice “is the place of [their] suffering—a place arising in acoustic and not strictly spatial terms.” When all this happens,” he adds, “we have an event.”14 In the last section of his article, Casey clarifies the role that voices play in determining events. He indicates that the major voices at the border are the hopeful immigrants, border patrol officials, and tourists from the United States. All of them include the awareness of La Frontera as an irrefrangible limit. This awareness can take two major forms—La Frontera as a “mute non-place (a silent site),” a “virtual tomb (of hopes and bodies alike),” a division of people into the excluded and the free; or La Frontera as “the place of liberating possibilities,” of “voices, edges of creativity, limits that un-delimit, boundaries where beginnings are made.”15 Casey postulates that there are two groups of creative actions associated with the liberating possibilities of La Frontera as a place. The first consists of using a cannon to shoot a clown over the wall, loosening balloons displaying appropriate slogans and suggesting a bird-like freedom, and undertaking similar “performative political actions.” These political actions transform the “strident militarism” and presumed permanence of the wall into its “material origins,” “geographic location,” and the image

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of the “ruins” that it, like all other walls, will eventually become. The wall is thus “put into place.”16 The second group of creative actions comprises artistic works and productions that convert “site into place, legal limit into living edge, and stifled voices into expressive outcries that take voice with eloquence and force.”17 Without these productions we would be left “with nothing but the wall itself and its bland and blank surfaces.”18 Casey elaborates that these seemingly “epiphenomenal acts” transform the substrate of the otherwise “bare surface” of the wall, its status as “sheer site,” into a “place” “for differential thought and action—an event in short.” Indeed, “a threshold is reached and passed over, the limitropic is suspended, and the artworks transport us al otro lado” of the wall.19

The primacy of voices At the beginning of his account of events, Casey took place and its two powers, substrate and aegis, as the dynamic source of new intentions and creations. These powers converted La Frontera from a border into a boundary. But in his description of this conversion, Casey appears to have identified the political and aesthetic voices as the source of the creative actions at La Frontera. In other words, the voices, as the place of these actions, become the primary creators of La Frontera as a place and as an event. Voices, and not limit, edge, or place, become the first among equals of these four limitropic components of an event and hence of La Frontera. Each of these components requires the other, but the voices are, to quote Dylan Thomas, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” If voices have primacy, then this implies some changes in Casey’s account of La Frontera as an event. The insightful remarks he makes about voices in his later Presidential Address indicate that he may agree with these modifications. In these remarks, he equates voice with thinking and thus, following Plato, with “discourse,” that is, the way our speech or other means of expression provides things, others, and ourselves with recognizable identities and suggests the relevance they could have for us. Casey also stresses some of the sensory aspects of voice—range of pitch and volume, nuances in tone, mood, and timber—but notes that they “carry the inflections and subtleties of meaning.”20 In other words, a voice producing these sensuous qualities points at once to the bodies that enunciate it and to the discourse that it expresses. But voices also signal a third dimension. Casey indicates this when he emphasizes the hybridity of our voices: each is shot through with the voices of the others; in speaking, we “re-voice” their discourses in our own—just as my citations in this paper incorporate Casey’s words into my discourse, inflecting them with my voice. His words contribute to mine, but also may contest, even subvert, my use of them. Thus Casey says, “What I fancy to be ‘my own philosophical voice’ is composed of a chorus of voices” and constitutes, to cite Casey citing my work, a “body considered as ‘an arena of intersecting voices.’”21 Using his technical terms, we “inculcate” other voices in our own. Once they are appropriated by us, they resound within our voices. But we return the favor by “addressing” these voices and thus “othering” them along with our own when their enunciators lend an ear to what we say.

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This third dimension of voice suggests an amplification of what Casey said about the limit and edges of voice in his article on these phenomena. A voice doesn’t first exist and then respond to the others; it is always already responding to or addressing other voices, always part of an interplay that simultaneously separates the voices and holds them together thus forming a dialogic body. The limit of a voice is therefore not only the phonemic laws and semantic structures of abstract language; it is also the implicit or explicit citations of other voices, our appropriations of them, when we are responding to them. These citations constitute the limit of our voice and the threshold that it can pass beyond. The transcendence of this threshold is the change in one’s discourse or the often surreptitious production of a new voice brought on by the dialogic interplay, the contest for audibility, among the voices of society. Similarly, the “edge” of a voice is as much the shift from one interlocutor to another as it is the break between individual words. This amplification of the limits and edges of voices suggests that we have to make an adjustment in Casey’s depiction of the relation between voices and La Frontera. He says that the performative political actions and artistic productions just delineated transform La Frontera into a boundary rather than a border, and the bare wall into a place rather than a site. But this overlooks the pervasiveness of voices and that society is a multivoiced body from the very beginning. This vocal way of thinking about La Frontera implies that it has always been a boundary since its inception, the wall a place or limit, and the whole an event. The US government constitutes a voice that makes the area persist as an exclusionary event, as a place of creative intolerance, as a limit that trespasses itself into ever more inventive ways of walling off one part of humanity from another, of ever sharpening its edge. In short, creativity can belong to the oppressor as much as to those who resist the latter politically and artistically. This modification means that there is never a “mute non-place,” “bare surface,” or a “mere border.” For creatures like us, the sensory world is always already converted into the subject matter of the interplay among the voices of society—into what these voices are always capturing in their discourses as part of their contestation for audibility with each other. This capture is never complete: from within this penumbra of voices, the material world continually interrupts the attempted appropriations of it, forcing changes in discourses as the (often welcome) price of these efforts on the part of the voices and their enunciators. Just as the discourses of others continually bring about changes in ours as we cite (incorporate) them, the quasi-voices or expressive gestures of things do the same in their special idioms of resistance and solicitation. This view is the result of realizing that voices intrinsically make references to other voices—response or address, tacitly or overtly—and constantly pull the place of this occurrence into the social maw of the interplay among them. We can grasp the more specific meaning of this view of voices by relating it directly to La Frontera. The US government attempts to maintain this place and its wall as a device that says: “Stay out! We only want you to cross when we need cheap labor and feel secure we can send you back when we’re finished exploiting you.” This discourse (like that of capitalism) continually and even creatively accommodates the interruptions of furtive bodies and the landscape—surveillance experts update their techniques, “legal” vigilantes “assist” the border guards, political demagogues vary their shrill warnings,

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and vandals pursue petty tactics to counter the fulgurations of the political activists and radical artists. In turn, the insurgent activists and artists continually transform their language in light of what they see around them and as a response to the US government’s exclusionary actions. But there is a difference in these two types of voices despite their common creativity. The government voice is an “oracle.” It presents itself as the fount of truth no matter how nebulous or unpalatable its commands and justifications might be. It pretends that its pronouncements are non-revisable even as it struggles to subordinate the landscape and the words and actions of its opponents—of what it fears—to the terms of its own ordinances. The voices of the activists and the artists—when true to their aspirations for liberty—differ from those of the government. Their enunciations are done in the name of the dialogic body itself. They affirm the creative interplay among the voices of society and the type of listening that goes with it and that Casey praises in his “Address”—a hearing that is willing to allow its discourse to undergo changes in light of what the other says.22 This affirmation valorizes at once solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity (the production of new voices). It even includes hearing the nihilistic voices, the oracles that would close down this creative interplay among voices in the name of their fear of the other and their desire to maintain their hegemonic power. But only hearing them: the dialogic body’s affirmation of itself includes, indeed promotes, resisting the tendency of the nihilistic voices to become or persist as policy-making voices. The dialogic body resists, that is, its own aberrant tendency to silence itself under conditions of duress. To summarize these remarks, the wall is never a bare surface and La Frontera is never a mute non-place, mere border, or nonevent. Even before their existence, voices are the conversion of the place they will occupy into the subject matter of their dialogic contestation with one another. The “spirit of place” is these voices. In their creative interplay, they preclude the binary of “Self and Others” but not their mutual valorization of each other’s difference or the unity constituted by their dialogic exchanges and their resounding in one another: each is at once part of the identity and the other of the rest. The result of this would continually be Nietzsche’s famous “conversing and controverting gods” and the multivoiced body’s affirmation of the political virtues, unity, difference, and creative interplay—if it were not for the contrary tendency of the dialogic body, of society, to harbor a fear of its clamorous voices and to silence itself when this low grade anxiety is exacerbated by other threats. But, and here the spirit of Casey rises to the fore, the clamor of the interplay among these voices can never be silenced. We preserve a counter-memory of this body on the basis of the hybridity of voices that Casey champions in his “Address.” This counter-memory is also abetted by the necessity for oracles to keep at least one other voice intact as the enemy that would justify their existence.

Challenges for voices I have argued that voices are the first among equals in the creation of events such as La Frontera and that this is congruent with Casey’s elaboration of voice—that in re-voicing his discourse, in citing it, I have not countered its spirit even if I may have questioned

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some of its letter. But there are challenges for the notion of voice that confront both of our articulations of it. How we answer the ones that I present here may emphasize our differences as well as commonalities and instance the contestation among voices that we have been considering. The first challenge concerns our status as individuals. In his exploration of hybridity, Casey says our voices are “singular yet not solitary.”23 They are not solitary because of the other voices resounding in them. But they are singular because we “make ourselves voice” by expressing, “each in our own way, the many voices to and into which we have listened in our differently configured lives.”24 Indeed, Casey says that the more we “listen to,” “incorporate” and “transmute,” the voices of an “expanding set” of others into ours, the more “heterovocal” our voices become, then “the more singular [deeper, denser, and receptive] our own voice will come to be,” both for itself and “for addressing itself to still other such voices in turn.”25 I agree with these claims about singularity and hybridity. But they pose a question to Casey and the rest of us: what is the source of this singularity that is composed of, yet exceeds, the other voices resounding within it? We only know ourselves as voices. From the beginning of our lives, we inherit a voice that was already part of the social body: the voice of the son, or of the daughter, of the older or younger sibling, and the discourses appropriate to them. Each is at least a temporary “lead voice” populated with other voices. We therefore cannot be a source of singularity that exists prior to or outside of the voice(s) we inherit. We can be this origin only from within that voice and its “heterovocality,” that is, the other voices resounding in that “place” and that are always, from the beginning, introducing changes into our discourse and thus resisting the conservatism of tradition. To capture the singularity of our voice, we must get beyond the vocabulary provided by the linguistic structure of active and passive voice: “I did ‘x’” versus “x was done to me,” “I spoke” versus “I was a mere vehicle for the voice I inherited.” It is rather that we “become” our voice more intensely, “slip,” over time, into another one of the voices resounding within our own, “give over” to or resist the changes becoming more salient in our discourse due to the intensity or pervasiveness of other voices, or adhere to other tendencies that fall somewhere between the limits of being an active agent in or a passive vehicle of our destiny. This new vocabulary would suggest that we are only “elliptically” rather than strictly identical to our lead voices and its entourage: we enunciate our voice but it throws us ahead of ourselves into its ongoing interplay and the contest for audibility with the other voices of society. Moreover, does our singularity in the related sense of uniqueness (as opposed to agency) issue from some pre-or extra-vocal spark of individuality? Or does it instead come from our dialogic history and the differential saliency among our voices, the one produced by that history and our elliptical role within it? Besides these questions about singularity, another persists concerning the nature of the dialogic body of society: is it monistic or pluralistic? On the monistic model, each voice contains a prototype of every possible voice and yet new voices are continually being created through the interplay among the others. Because of this creation of new voices, the social body is constantly undergoing metamorphosis. The first part of this claim—each voice contains all the rest in prototypical form—is akin to some of

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Ferdinand de Saussure’s remarks on language. According to Saussure, we never exist outside the diacritical system of our common language. Moreover, this language “is never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the collectivity.”26 When I say I speak English, I imply a certain totality—my language—but not that every part of it is lodged in my brain. However, the ease of access I have to these other parts, of discovering them while using the language, suggests that they fit an already established pattern, that I am housed in the language of my linguistic community, even if not all of that language is immediately accessible to me. Translating Saussure into the idiom of voices, I am part of a dialogic body, and therefore all of its voices are part of mine (and at the same time my other) even if some of them influence me more immediately and with greater effect than others. But what of the part of the model that concerns creativity and novelty? Adherents to the monistic model can say that the voices to come are already implicit in the social body and in our lead voices, albeit, as prototypes, without exactitude and specificity; but they are also always changing as what they will become. Each time an implicit voice is actualized by the interplay among the other voices, each time it gains saliency, it, and the changes it brings about in the actual voices already in play, establishes a new framework for the status of the future voices that are yet to be actualized. In short, implicit voices are like unborn children waiting to enter a world where a place or role is already set up for them—except this world and their role change with the creation of each voice that precedes these new arrivals. Put differently, the implicit voices are relatively indeterminate prior to becoming actualized. The relatively more determinate form they will take on is influenced by the always-changing diacritical order that awaits them. The nature of the monistic model of the dialogic body can be clarified further by considering a problem raised by a former student of mine and now one of Casey’s, Emiliano Diaz. In his formal response to a paper I gave, he proposed that the monistic model implies that the creation of a new voice affects all the other voices in existence and thus, counter intuitively, that a new voice produced right here by you and me would also be registered by interlocutors everywhere else, no matter how distant. To this thoughtful concern one might reply that far-away others are indirectly affected by the new voice even if they are not fully aware of it. The new voice is as much a part of their immediate dialogue as it is of ours, but it has a saliency, relative to the other voices, that is lower in theirs than in ours; its audibility is less for them and hence so is its immediate influence on their conversation. If events happen that shake up the current hierarchical ordering of the saliencies of the voices resounding in their own, then the power of this new voice might increase and make itself more evident in their dialogues. Indeed, the simultaneous discovery of new ideas by people who are not in direct communication with each other might serve as evidence for this universal audibility of a new voice in a dialogic body that includes us all. According to the pluralistic model of the dialogic body, the immediate network of voices does not already implicitly include all other voices. Instead, it is “elastic” and can take in new voices from the outside. For example, the group of US tourists at the

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border can hear the voices of Mexican migrants and thus entertain their perspective on the wall. When the discourse of the tourists incorporates fragments of the migrants’ discourse into their own, the voices of the tourists change to one degree or another. Because each voice is diacritically related to the rest in its immediate ensemble, because each is what it is at least partially through its differences from the rest, these changes amount to the metamorphosis of the dialogic body that constituted the society of the tourists but now includes the voices of the migrants. This metamorphosis takes place in that particular locale, La Frontera, but not anywhere else, at least not until members of this group introduce their modified discourse into other societies of voices. The problem with this model is to explain the sense in which the network is “elastic.” This is especially important in light of the famous problem of the incommensurability of the discourses expressed by different voices. The traditional way of addressing this problem is to claim that a universal grammar or language exists and that, through its medium, we can translate and thus understand any other discourse. But this overlooks that language is an abstract word for discourse and that discourses often express different worldviews. Thus the imposition of a universal language would in effect declare the sovereignty of a particular discourse and its value system: it would wipe out the singularity or difference of the other voices in favor of itself. In contrast to this scenario, the universal hybridity proposed by the monistic model of the dialogic body means that we already possess—are—the many different voices (their prototypes) and thus understand them. The other voices are at once part of our identity and our other, preserving both the solidarity and the heterogeneity of society as well as its creativity through the ongoing interplay among these voices (when not curtailed by oracles). Politically, the affirmation of our own voice is therefore that of all the rest and thus provides a basis or motivation for “listening to others” in the open manner to which both Casey and I subscribe. Unfortunately, the pluralistic model has difficulty answering the incommensurability problem. If a new voice is not in some sense already resounding in the voices of the others, how can it become commensurable with the different discourse of its novel host? The “elasticity” proposed by the pluralistic model names, but does not solve, the problem. The model also does not provide the basis—the unity—for hearing other voices prior to having merely extraneous and expedient reasons for extending this favor. Casey has always valorized individuality and creativity. The pluralistic model might appeal to him more. Although I share those values, I emphasize the social and political stage upon which they play their roles. As Casey’s discussion of La Frontera demonstrates, he is no stranger to that stage either. He and I enunciate voices that contest each other more about nuances of the dialogic theme than about extreme differences. The resonating of these two voices within one another can only contribute to the more ample development of these different models and the concern for the world they represent. I know that Casey’s will continue to resound within mine and the voices of many others in the years to come.

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Notes 1 Edward S. Casey, “Limit and Edge, Voice and Place,” Radical Philosophy Review 12, nos. 1–2 (2009): 241–48; Edward S. Casey, “Finding (Your Own) Philosophical Voice,” The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 84, no. 2 (2010): 27–44. 2 Casey, “Limit and Edge, Voice and Place,” 242–43. 3 Ibid., 245. 4 Ibid., 241. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 242. 7 Ibid., 243. 8 Ibid., 242. 9 Ibid., 243. 10 Ibid., 244. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 244–45. 14 Ibid., 245. 15 Ibid., 246. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 247. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 247–48. 20 Casey, “Finding (Your Own) Philosophical Voice,” 29. 21 Ibid., 33. [EDS: See Fred J. Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).] 22 Casey, “Finding (Your Own) Philosophical Voice,” 38–41. 23 Ibid., 35. 24 Ibid., 42. 25 Ibid., 33, 37, 41. 26 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 13.

Appendix: Chronological Bibliography of Works by Edward S. Casey (Selective) Compiled by Kathleen Hulley

Books Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976; 2nd ed., 2000. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; 2nd ed., 2000. Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1991; 2nd expanded ed., Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2004. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993; 2nd expanded ed., 2009. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. The World at a Glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Edited books Explorations in Phenomenology, co-edited with David Carr. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. The Life of the Transcendental Ego, co-edited with Donald Morano. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986.

Translated books The Notion of the A Priori by Mikel Dufrenne. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966; new ed. 2009. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience by Mikel Dufrenne. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

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Articles 1966 “Le Poétique.” Revue d’Esthétique 19 (1966): 315–32.

1969 “Meaning in Art.” In New Essays in Phenomenology, edited by James M. Edie, 100–115. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.

1970 “Truth in Art.” Man and World 3, no. 4 (1970): 351–69.

1971 “Expression and Communication in Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30, no. 2 (1971): 197–207. “Expression and Manifestation in Sellars and Dufrenne.” In Language and Human Nature: A French-American Philosophers’ Dialogue, edited by Paul Kurtz, 78–83. St. Louis, MI: Warren H. Green, 1971. “Imagination: Imagining and the Image.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31, no. 4 (1971): 475–90. “Man, Self, and Truth.” The Monist 55, no. 2 (1971): 218–54. “Reflections on Man’s Relation to Truth.” Philosophy Today 16, no. 1 (1971): 34–42.

1972 “L’Esthétique aux Etats-Unis.” Revue d’Esthétique 26 (1972): 93–117. “Freud’s Theory and Reality: A Critical Account.” Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 4 (1972): 659–90.

1974 “Toward an Archetypal Imagination.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1974): 1–32. “Toward a Phenomenology of Imagination.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5, no. 1 (1974): 3–19.

1975 “Imagination and Repetition in Literature: A Reassessment.” Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 249–67. “L’imagination comme intermédiare.” In Vers une esthétique sans entrave: mélanges offerts à Mikel Dufrenne, edited by Gilbert Lascault, 93–113. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1975. “Phenomenology Comes of Age in America: Essays in Honor of John Wild.” Man and World 8, no. 2 (1975): 119–20.

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1976 “Comparative Phenomenology of Mental Activity: Memory, Hallucination, and Fantasy Contrasted with Imagination.” Research in Phenomenology 6, no. 1 (1976): 1–25. “The Image/Sign Relation in Husserl and Freud.” Review of Metaphysics 30, no. 2 (1976): 207–25; Reprinted in Cross-Currents in Phenomenology, edited by Ronald Bruzina and Bruce W. Wilshire, 120–43. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978.

1977 “Imagination and Phenomenological Method.” In Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, edited by Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick, 70–82. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. “Imagining and Remembering.” Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 2 (1977): 187–209.

1978 “Imagining, Perceiving, and Thinking.” Humanitas 14 (1978): 173–96.

1979 “Perceiving and Remembering.” Review of Metaphysics 32, no. 3 (1979): 407–36. “Time in the Soul.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1979): 144–64.

1980 “Freud and Piaget on Childhood Memory.” In Piaget, Philosophy, and the Human Sciences, edited by Hugh J. Silverman, 63–97. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980. “On the Issue of Presence.” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 10 (1980): 643–44. “Time Out of Mind.” In Dimensions of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge, edited by Ralph H. Moon and Stephen Randall, 143–58. Berkeley, CA: Dharma, 1980.

1981 “Literary Description and Phenomenology Method.” Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 176–201. “The Memorability of the Filmic Image.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6, no. 3 (1981): 241–64. “Sartre on Imagination.” In The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by P. A. Schilpp, 139–66. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1981.

1982 “Getting Placed: Soul in Space.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1982): 1–25. “Presence and Absence: Scope and Limits.” Review of Metaphysics 35, no. 3 (1982): 557–76.

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1983 “Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan: The Dialectic of Desire.” With J. Melvin Woody. In Interpreting Lacan, edited by Joseph. H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 75–112. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. “Keeping the Past in Mind.” Review of Metaphysics 37, no. 1 (1983): 77–95; Reprinted in Descriptions, edited by Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985.

1984 “Commemoration and Perdurance in the Analects, Books I and II.” Philosophy East and West 34, no. 4 (1984): 389–99. “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty.” Man and World 17, nos. 3–4 (1984): 279–97. “Origin(s) in (of) Heidegger/Derrida.” Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 10 (1984): 601–10.

1985 “Commemoration in the Eucharist.” In God: Experience or Origin? edited by Antonio de Nicholás and Evanghelos Moutsopolous, 214–34. New York: Paragon, 1985. “Findlay’s Philosophy of Mind.” Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay, edited by Robert S. Cohen, Richard M. Martin, and Merold Westphal, 114–38. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985. “Memory and Phenomenological Method.” Phenomenology in Practice and Theory, edited by W. S. Hamrick, 35–52. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985. “Reflections on Ritual.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1985): 102–9.

1986 “Earle on Memory and the Past.” In The Life of the Transcendental Ego: Essays in Honor of William Earle, edited by Edward S. Casey and Donald V. Morano, 179–92. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986.

1987 “Derrida’s Deconstruction of Heidegger’s Views on Temporality: The Language of Space and Time.” In Phenomenology of Temporality: Time and Language. Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, 1987. “The Place of Space in The Birth of the Clinic.” Journal of Medicine & Philosophy 12, no. 4 (1987): 351–56. “The World of Nostalgia.” Man and World 20, no. 4 (1987): 361–84.

1988 “Jung and the Postmodern Condition.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1987): 100–105; Reprinted in C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture, edited by Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acierno, 319–24. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

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“Levinas on Memory and the Trace.” In The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, edited by John C. Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta, and Jacques Taminiaux, 241–55. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988.

1989 “Back of ‘Back to Beyond’ and Creeping Dichotomism.” In Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, edited by David Ray Griffin, 233–37. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989. “William Earle 1919–1988.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63, no. 1 (1989): 31–32.

1990 “Heidegger In and Out of Place.” In Heidegger: A Centenary Appraisal, 62–98. Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, 1990. “Place, Form, and Identity in Postmodern Architecture and Philosophy: Derrida avec Moore, Mies avec Kant.” In After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, edited by Gary Shapiro, 199–213. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990. “The Subdominance of the Pleasure Principle.” In Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle, edited by Robert A. Glick and Stanley Bone, 239–58. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

1991 “‘The Element of Voluminousness’: Depth and Place Re-Examined.” In Merleau-Ponty Vivant, edited by M. C. Dillon, 1–29. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991.

1992 “Forgetting Remembered.” Man and World 25, nos. 3–4 (1992): 281–311. “Once More into the Verge: Review of Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge by David Farrell Krell.” Research in Phenomenology 22 (1992): 186–99. “Remembering Resumed: Pursuing Buddhism and Phenomenology in Practice.” In In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, edited by Janet Gyatso, 269–98. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992. “Retrieving the Difference between Place and Space.” Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, special ed. Architecture, Space, Painting (1992): 54–57.

1993 “Anima Loci.” Sphinx: A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts 5 (1993): 122–31. “On the Phenomenology of Remembering: The Neglected Case of Place Memory.” In Natural and Artificial Minds, edited by Robert G. Burton, 165–86. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993. “Reality in Representation: Earth and World in Landscape Painting and Maps.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought 54 (1993): 32–41.

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1996 “Embracing Lococentrism: A Response to Thomas Brockelman’s Critique.” Human Studies 19, no. 4 (1996): 459–65.

1997 “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 13–52. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1997. “Imagination.” Co-written with Elizabeth A. Behnke and Susumu Kanata. In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Lester Embree et al., 340–44. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. “Joseph Margolis on Interpretation.” Man and World 30, no. 2 (1997): 127–38. “Memory.” In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Lester Embree et al., 452–57. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. “The Place of the Sublime.” In Passions for Place, Book II: Between the Vital Spacing and the Creative Horizons of Fulfilment, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 71–85. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. “Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place.” Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (1997): 267–96. “Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop.” Human Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 169–80.

1998 “Erinnerung an den Ort des Anderen innerhalb des eigenen Selbst.” (“Remembering the Place of the Other within Oneself.”) Translated by Antje Kapust. In Der Anspruch des Anderen: Perspektiven phönomenologischer Ethik, edited by Bernhard Waldenfels and Iris Därmann, 291–316. Munich: Fink, 1998. “The Ghost of Embodiment: On Bodily Habitudes and Schemata.” In Body and Flesh, edited by Donn Welton, 207–25. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. “The Production of Space or The Heterogeneity of Place: A Commentary on Edward Dimendberg and Neil Smith.” In The Production of Public Space: Philosophy and Geography II, edited by Andrew Light and Jonathan Smith, 71–80. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

1999 “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise.” In Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, edited by Elizabeth Grosz, 79–97. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. “The Unconscious Mind and the Pre-Reflective Body.” In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley, 47–56. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999.

2000 “Stompin’ on Scott: A Cursory Critique of Mind and Memory.” Research in Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (2000): 223–39.

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“Taking a Glance at the Environing World.” In Confluences: Phenomenology and Postmodernity, Environment, Race, and Gender, 3–38. Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, 2000. “Taking a Glance at the Place of Soul in the Environment.” In Psychology at the Threshold, edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Lionel Corbett, 347–63. Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2000. “The World at a Glance.” In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 142–64. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000.

2001 “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4 (2001): 683–93. “Body, Self, and Landscape: A Geophilosophical Inquiry into the Place-World.” In Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, edited by Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till, 403–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. “J. E. Malpas’s Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Converging and Diverging in/on Place.” Philosophy and Geography 4, no. 2 (2001): 225–30. “On Habitus and Place: Responding to My Critics.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4 (2001): 716–23. “Taking a Glance at the Environment: Prolegomena to an Ethics of the Environment.” Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001): 1–21.

2003 “The Difference an Instant Makes: Bachelard’s Brilliant Breakthrough.” Philosophy Today 47 (2003): 118–23. “From Space to Place in Contemporary Health Care.” Social Science & Medicine 56 (2003): 2245–47. “Imagination, Fantasy, Hallucination, and Memory.” In Imagination and Its Pathologies, edited by J. Phillips and J. Morley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. “Mapping the Earth Otherwise.” In Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, edited by Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs, 147–63. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. “Taking a Glance at the Environment: Preliminary Thoughts on a Promising Topic.” Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, edited by Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, 187–210. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003.

2004 “Abyssal Absences: Body and Place in Altizer’s Atheology.” Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, edited by Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder, 125–45. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004. “Attending and Glancing.” Continental Philosophy Review 37, no. 1 (2004): 83–126. “Keeping Art to Its Edge.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 2 (2004): 145–53. “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art.” Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman, 260–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

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“Nature in/as Sublime.” Studies in Practical Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2004): 11–22. “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Framing Public Memory, edited by Kendall R. Phillips, 17–44. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

2006 “David Carr on History, Time, and Place.” Human Studies 29, no. 4 (2006): 445–62. “The Ethics of the Face to Face Encounter: Schroeder. Levinas, and the Glance.” The Pluralist 1, no. 1 (2006): 74–97. “Phenomenon and Place: Toward a Renewed Ethics of the Environment.” Spring: An Annual Journal in Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought 76, Psyche and Nature II (2006): 175–200.

2007 “Borders and Boundaries: Edging into the Environment.” In Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, edited by Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick, 67–92. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007. “Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History.” Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (2007): 507–12. “Looking around the Edge of the World: Contending with the Continuist Principle and the Plenarist Passion.” Chora V (2007): 151–78. “Public Memory in the Making: Ethics and Place in the Wake of 9/11.” Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, edited by Gregory Caicco, 69–90. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2007.

2008 “Edges and the In-Between.” PhaenEx: Journal for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture III, no. 2 (2008): 1–13. “Keeping Art to Its Edge.” In Rethinking Facticity, edited by François Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson, 273–87. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008. “Questioning ‘Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 402–4. “Taking Bachelard from the Instant to the Edge.” Philosophy Today 52 (2008): 31–37.

2009 “Teaching Thinking.” In Reimagining Education: Essays on Reviving the Soul of Learning, edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Jennifer Leigh Selig, 137–48. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2009. “Bataille: Discerning Edges in the Art of Lascaux.” In The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, 165–85. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009.

2010 “Aesthetic Experience.” In Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, edited by Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree, 1–7. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010.

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“Finding (Your Own) Philosophical Voice.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 84, no. 2 (2010): 27–44. “Mikel Dufrenne (1910–1995).” In Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, edited by Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree, 81–84. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010.

2011 “Do Places Have Edges? A Geo-Philosophical Inquiry.” In Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, edited by Stephen Daniels, Dydua Delyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, and Douglas Richardson, 65–73. New York: Routledge, 2011. “The Edge(s) of Landscape: A Study in Liminology.” In The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies, edited by Jeff Malpas, 91–110. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011. “Remembering John Wild.” Continental Philosophy Review 44, no. 3 (2011): 263–65.

2012 “Going Wireless: Disengaging the Ethical Life.” In Mobile Technology and Place, edited by Rowan Wilkin and Gerard Goggin. New York: Routledge, 2012. “Random Reflections of a Founding Witness.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 93–101. “Space.” In The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, edited by Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, 202–10. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Index 9/11  34–6 Altizer, J. J.  31, 33 architecture  98–9, 107–9, 153–60, 168–9, 199 Aristotle  23, 37, 40, 63, 75, 154, 174 art, artwork  7–12, 17–18, 25, 35, 38–9, 99, 106–8, 111–18, 123–31, 133–40, 143–51, 163–70 autonomy  27–9, 70–1, 183–4 Bachelard, Gaston  6, 17, 30, 75–7, 124, 150–1 Baglione  7, 113–16 Basso, Keith  31 Bergson, Henri  22, 39, 49, 54–9, 75, 135, 146 Bernstein, Richard  31 bi-placement  206 Birdwhistell, Ray  35 Bloch, Marc  47 body  4–6, 9–12, 27–9, 32, 35, 48, 50, 64, 66, 75, 80, 86–7, 89, 92–4, 99, 102, 104, 107, 117, 123, 134, 144–7, 149–51, 158–9, 164–5, 168–9, 177–8, 181, 183–4, 187–91, 196, 206–11, 215, 218–23 environment  6, 86–8, 91, 93 habit  22, 39, 40 memory  21–2, 24, 27, 48, 165 borders  9–13, 25, 35–7, 103, 105, 128–31, 180–1, 185–8, 191, 195–203, 215–20 and boundaries  12, 26, 129, 169, 180–1, 187–8, 191–2, 195–203, 217 Braudel, Fernand  46, 124 Caravaggio  7, 113–16, 139 Cartesian space  10–11, 24, 49, 55, 105–6, 153–60 Central Park  13, 35–7, 196–8 commons  5, 34–7, 185

communication  5, 8, 34–6, 73, 77–81, 154, 158, 165, 222 community  5, 34, 37, 80, 176, 205 cosmos/kosmos  6, 36, 74, 79, 99–101, 106–9, 128 Christo and Jeanne-Claude  13, 37, 197 de Kooning, Willem  10, 134–40, 143–9 Deleuze, Gilles  8, 41–3, 75, 126–7, 146–7, 177, 197, 200, 203 Derrida, Jacques  42–3, 129, 148, 175, 197, 199, 201 Descartes, René  24, 55, 75, 105, 149, 157 Dufrenne, Mikel  19–31 Durand, Jacques-Nicolas-Louis  153–5 duration (durée)  8, 46, 53–61, 124 Earle, William  18, 31 Earth-Mapping  7, 9–12, 38–9, 125, 134, 138, 139, 144–7, 150, 156 edge  7, 9, 11–13, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 34, 36–7, 40, 56–7, 59–60, 125–7, 130–1, 143, 147, 148–50, 164–70, 173, 176, 180–7, 189, 196–8, 215–19 political  5, 41, 185, 196 eidetic phenomenology  3–5, 17–19, 27, 176 encounter  8, 10, 30, 50–1, 55, 57, 80–1, 133–4, 198, 203, 215–16 ethics  23, 25, 67, 111 Evans, Fred  12, 31, 175, 192 event  5, 10, 12–13, 29–30, 37, 43, 48, 138, 158, 165–6, 168, 178, 189, 216–19 exterocentric  33, 69, 71 Fate of Place, The  3–6, 33, 35, 40–1, 65–6, 73, 134 Febvre, Lucien  47 Fink, Eugen  18 Foucault, Michel  42, 75, 195 frame  3, 11, 25–7, 68–9, 98–9, 104, 129–31, 196–8

242

Index

Frampton, Hollis  55 freedom  5, 10, 13–14, 27–9, 34, 70, 99, 136, 177, 180, 182–5, 189, 201, 217 Freud, Sigmund  21, 23, 25, 30, 145, 150, 167, 203 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  21 gaze  54, 56–61, 133, 136–7, 151, 164, 177, 183 Gendlin, Eugene  9, 26 Getting Back Into Place  3–4, 35, 38–42, 45, 49, 66, 94, 147, 161n. 7, 195 Gibson, J. J.  50, 88, 161 glance  1, 2, 7–14, 20, 24, 54, 56–61, 125, 133–8, 140, 143–4, 146, 149, 151, 173–85, 193, 196 glimpse  10, 54, 133–4, 137–8, 149, 202 Goffman, Erving  35 Goldsworthy, Andy  38 Guattari, Felix  8, 41–3, 75, 146–7, 205 Habermas, Jürgen  35 habitus  187–91 Halbwachs, Maurice  46–7 Hegel, G. W. F.  23, 177 Heidegger, Martin  6, 9, 17, 19, 21, 24, 30–1, 33, 39, 43, 49–50, 54, 56, 63–6, 69, 75–80, 135, 176, 179 heteronomy  29 Hillman, James  4, 21–5, 30–1, 190 history  5, 40–3, 45–51, 75, 124, 191, 200, 216, 221 Hölderlin, Friedrich  17 home, homeplaces  2, 20, 40–2, 48, 50, 79, 127, 145, 190, 207–8, 210 horizon  12, 23, 26, 56, 58, 78, 81, 143, 198 Humbolt, Wilhelm von  79 Husserl, Edmund  2–3, 18–20, 23, 26, 30, 33–4, 49, 50, 53–7, 61, 86, 135, 191, 196, 210–11 idiolocality  10, 13, 126, 187–90 imagination  2–4, 11, 17–20, 24, 27–8, 30, 50, 76, 79, 108, 126–8, 149, 158, 181, 183, 191, 193, 203, 211 Imagining  2–5, 17–20, 25, 27, 45, 147, 186 Ingalls, Eve  9, 11, 143, 145 instant  123–4, 135, 174–5, 177 Irigaray, Luce  42

James, William  27, 31, 148 Jay, Martin  43 Jung, Carl Gustav  23 Kant, Immanuel  23, 25, 28, 30, 34, 40–1, 49, 58, 63, 75, 116, 129, 131, 138–9, 184, 192, 196 Keller, Catherine  31 Klee, Paul  10, 136, 139 La Frontera  12–13, 129, 131, 186, 215–20, 223 Lacan, Jacques  22–3, 182 landmark  39, 58, 127–8 landscape  9–13, 27–9, 38, 51, 56–9, 73, 123–31, 134–5, 137, 139–40, 144–51, 158, 164, 174, 181, 188, 196–8, 219–20 language  6, 17–18, 77–81, 89, 91, 97, 158, 179, 188, 191, 217–20, 222–3 Levinas, Emmanuel  7, 78–9, 111–13, 116–18, 146, 192 listening  7, 32, 136, 175–6, 191–2, 220, 223 Lyotard, Jean-François  42–3 Mallarmé, Stéphane  17 maps, mapping  7–11, 38, 126–8, 134, 138, 144–9, 150, 156–60, 169 margin  1, 3, 5, 25–7, 33, 41, 138, 147, 195 Marin, John  124, 129 memory  4–9, 12–13, 20–4, 27–9, 33–4, 45–51, 63–71, 128, 138, 173, 183–4, 215, 220 see also body, habit, place Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  2, 10, 14, 17–26, 30–2, 39, 50, 53, 55–6, 87, 134–5, 138–40, 144–51, 188–9, 203 migrants  13, 129, 205–6, 208–12, 217, 223 mind  4, 20–1, 27, 33, 48, 69, 107–8, 148–9, 168, 215 movement  28–30, 36–9, 48, 50, 54, 58–9, 69, 138, 144, 146, 164, 170, 174, 177, 188, 191, 196–200, 209–10, 216–17 Nancy, Jean-Luc  42–3, 75, 175 non-place  11, 13, 76, 129–30, 217, 219–20 Nora, Pierre  5, 45–51 nostaligia  1, 7, 42, 45, 111–12, 118, 200 Occupy Wall Street  34, 187 Odysseus  42, 191

Index Olmstead, Frederick Law  196–8 others  13, 14, 34, 49, 65–6, 73, 77–8, 81, 92, 112–13, 116–18, 134, 157–8, 173, 175–6, 179, 182–3, 185, 187, 191–2, 207–9, 211, 215–24 painting  7–12, 38, 99, 104, 111–18, 123–31, 133–40, 143–51, 163–70, 173, 196–7 Pascal, Blaise  41, 75 Peirce, Charles Sanders  31, 196 perdurance  5, 63, 67–8, 123 Perec, Georges  74 phenomenology  1–5, 9, 17–27, 32, 35, 37, 40, 49, 53–61, 63–4, 97, 113, 133, 148–9, 174, 186, 189, 195 description  4, 17–18, 27, 33, 42, 176, 186 memory  4–5, 21, 24, 27, 33, 45, 48–9, 68–9 place  2–6, 9–14, 18–19, 21, 24, 27–31, 33–43, 45–51, 53–61, 63–71, 73–82, 85–6, 91, 94, 97–109, 125–30, 134, 137, 143–51, 153–9, 163–7, 173, 180–93, 195–6, 200, 205–12, 215–22 reduction  19 Plato  3, 7, 40, 55, 63, 70, 73–5, 112–18 poetry  3, 10, 17, 41 Portman, John  39–40 Pre-Socratics  33, 36, 40 Proust, Marcel  54, 188 psyche  5, 12, 20–1, 124, 130 psychoanalysis  7, 22–5, 125, 150, 183 psychology  3–5, 22–5, 137 Remembering  3–5, 22–3, 25, 45, 49, 63–70, 147–8, 150 representation  2, 7–11, 28–9, 38, 50–1, 81, 123–9, 133, 139, 153–60, 202 Representing Place  7, 9–11, 28, 38, 123, 125–6, 129, 134, 137–8, 144, 173 Rice, Dan  123–4, 144, 146–7 Ricœur, Paul  18–19, 31, 47 Rilke, Rainer Maria  17 Sartre, Jean-Paul  17, 19–20, 27–9, 43, 131, 137, 184 Sennett, Richard  35 setting  10, 12, 27, 33, 56, 76, 215

243

Snyder, Gary  34 space  4–12, 25, 28, 35–6, 39–43, 48–51, 53–4, 56, 58–9, 64–70, 73–8, 82, 85–94, 104, 108–9, 126–8, 130–1, 134, 139–40, 143, 146–7, 150, 153–60, 163– 70, 173–6, 178, 180, 182, 188–9, 191, 193, 195–8, 200–3, 205, 211–12, 215 nomad  76, 146–7, 188, 205 spatiality  64, 66, 70, 145, 161n. 7, 187 striated and smooth  8, 126, 146–7, 150, 201, 203 Spirit and Soul  22–3, 27 Stevens, Wallace  17 Straus, Erwin  23, 30 style  39–40, 144, 178 subjectivity  6, 33, 65–6, 69, 178 sublime  10, 12, 133–40 surface  10–11, 46, 56–60, 104–6, 124, 131, 133, 135–7, 139, 143–5, 149–50, 164, 170, 180, 218–20 technology  11, 78–9, 81, 89, 154, 156–7, 177–9, 197 temporality  9, 12, 24, 43, 48–51, 54–6, 58–9, 63–71, 74, 77, 80–1, 97, 107–8, 123, 189 time  4, 6, 13, 25, 34, 40–1, 43, 49–51, 53–60, 64–71, 73–82, 86–7, 90–1, 106–8, 118, 135, 147, 174, 176–7, 186, 190, 210, 215–16, 221 topos/topology  40, 47, 64–5, 69–71, 74, 160n. 2, 195, 202 topoanalysis  4, 33, 76–7, 124, 150 topography  10, 126, 134, 144 topopoetic  10, 28, 123 trauma  29–30, 128, 203 Up Against the Wall  12, 35, 186 US-Mexico border  12, 131, 181, 185–6, 198, 203 vagueness  13, 26, 196–7 voice  7–9, 12–14, 42, 173, 175–6, 183, 191–3, 215–23 multiple voices/the multivoiced  13–14, 31–2, 175, 219–21 Watkins, Mary  12, 24, 35, 185–6, 190 Whitehead, Alfred North  30–2, 178

244 Wiener, Norber  79–80 wild places  4, 12, 36, 39–40, 139, 147–8, 163–4 witness  5, 29, 216 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  31, 137, 148 world  1–2, 4–6, 8, 11, 18, 21, 23–5, 33–4, 36, 50, 64–6, 69, 73–82, 98–100, 108–9, 112, 126–9, 133–5, 139–40,

Index 143–51, 154, 156–60, 163–70, 173–82, 185, 189, 206, 210, 219, 222, 223 place-world  4, 33, 36, 137, 159, 195 World at a Glance, The  2, 26, 54, 57, 66, 133–4, 143, 147, 149 Zinn, Howard  36