- HOME
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
A CHRISTMAS STORY
My earliest encounter with the dialectical method, or at least the earliest one I can remember, took place in the living room of my childhood home, located in Covina, California.
On this particular morning, I found under the Christmas tree a gift with my name on it. It was a bright red View-Master stereoscope, a popular toy when I was a kid growing up. I spent the whole day peering through its binocular eyepieces and clicking the reel of transparencies from one pair of stereo images to the next. What I saw was a three-dimensional galaxy of strange and unknown places, so real I could almost reach out and touch them.
Much later in life, I learned that the paired photos were taken with a stereo camera, which was really two cameras in one, their lenses separated by a couple of inches. When the photographer released the shutter, two frames of film were simultaneously exposed, resulting in a pair of transparencies taken from slightly different angles. The View-Master was designed in such a way as to allow the left eye to see one image, and the right eye the other. For reasons I still don't fully understand the brain resolves all of this confusing visual information into a single, seemingly three-dimensional image. The flat monotony of a still photo gives way to the wondrous depth of virtual reality.
The technology of stereo photography is analogous to the dialectical technique of abstraction, which is on display in our diagram of place.
In the same way that a stereo camera captures two images of the same subject from different angles, the abstractions of materiality and meaning in the circle enable us to "see" place through two different lenses. And just as the effect of three-dimensionality cannot happen until we load the paired images into the View-Master and behold them through the binocular eyepieces, so the power of abstraction to replicate the concrete reality of a given place in terms of its materiality and meaning cannot be realized until we put the abstracted parts back together again in our thoughts. When we do this, place is revealed to the thinking brain as a totality of multiple determinations.
How did a Christmas toy get so complicated, you might be asking. All I can say is that for me the View-Master is a gift that keeps on giving.
Another gift that keeps on giving is my wife Allyson who spent many years teaching International Baccalaureate psychology at Druid Hills High School, around the corner from where we live in Atlanta. She told me some time ago that if I was seriously interested in understanding the dialectics of materiality and meaning, and their relation to place, I should acquaint myself with the ABCs of neuroscience. And so I did with her expert guidance.
Modern neuroscience is a mode of investigation that speaks directly to our understanding of place and place formation, owing in large part to its strong dialectical and materialist bent. Think of a place you know well. Maybe it's where you live, work, shop, vacation. You have come to know this place with every one of your physical senses, how it looks, smells, sounds, feels to the touch, even tastes (say, water out of the faucet or vegetables from the backyard garden). This knowledge accumulates and deepens as the materiality of place interacts with the materiality of your body.
But you also know place through mental representations of it which are immensely powerful by virtue of their meaning to you. Your emotional and psychological attachments to a given place are mediated by material and physiological processes operating at the neuronal level. Physical sensations of place provide raw materials for the cognitive mapping which is central to subjective experience, and which takes the form of memories, reveries, dreams, personal narratives. Through such mental representations the human mind develops a sense of self-awareness, agency, and the capacity for acting upon the physical world.
Allyson is a great teacher, as this pupil can attest. Thanks to her, I now understand that the contradictory unity of materiality and meaning is not only instantiated in place but also imprinted in consciousness.