- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Regional Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
THE PLACE CALLED HOME: INTRODUCTION
Place is a tricky word. We use it all the time in everyday conversation because its meaning seems self-evident. In the field of semiotics, such words are referred to as empty signifiers because they can signify anything or everything (maybe even nothing), depending on the context in which they are used and who is using them. If you want a crash course on empty signifiers, ask a friend or stranger to define a word we can't seem to live without, like truth, love or freedom. The particular empty signifier we are dealing with here has been a staple of learned discourse since Aristotle and continues to be a serious topic of inquiry across most sites of knowledge production today, including the literary and visual arts. As is the case for many empty signifiers, place is one of those words that operate at the extremes of being either underthought or overthought.
How will I traverse this discursive no-man's land? For starters I will lay down a conventional and seemingly straightforward definition: place is space imbued with meaning and lived experience. Why do I add the qualifier seemingly? Because my definition begs at least two questions, what is space and how is it made meaningful? I will try to answer the second question on meaning-making in this essay and save the first on the capitalist production of space for the next essay. But before going any further, I want to make a couple of general claims about the overlapping terms place and space: (1) they refer not to separate and autonomous things but to interlinked processes which can be understood only in relation to each other; (2) both of these abstract processes are constrained by the reproduction requirements of the capitalist mode of production, which did not attain its mature form until the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In other words, place and space are social constructions, not eternal verities. My hope is that after reading the essays under "Place" and "Capitalism" you will see the truth in geographer David Harvey's observation: "The dialectical relation between space and place is central to understanding both the constructive and destructive aspects of the motion of capital in space and time."
In emphasizing the relational, historical and capitalist character of place and space, I will rely heavily on Marx's theory of capital coupled with Harvey's long-running inquiry into capitalist space production and uneven geographical development. Wherever Capitalism in Place takes us, these two will be our guides, showing us the lay of the land.
The first section of this essay sets the stage by considering place relative to the two totalities of which it is part, capital and capitalism. The second and third sections zero in on the place called home, specifically the succession of homes that my parents bought and sold before their deaths in 2019, several of which were the setting of my childhood and teenage years. In the final four sections comprising the bulk of the essay, I will give you an intimate history of the home in which Allyson and I have lived since 1992, and what it has meant to us, using the diagram above to analyze how our domestic space synthesizes the four "moments" of place formation.
Why have I chosen to analyze home rather than place itself? Because home is the quintessential place, the ur-place, the place where meaning-making and lived experience are most dramatically and visibly played out. Why have I singled out my family's homes rather than someone else's? Because they're the ones I know best, like the back of my hand, as the saying goes. I have lived my life in them, now they live theirs in me.
Let me say a word about the diagram above, which provides a visual representation of the process of place formation as it unfolds through its built, natural, social and cultural "moments." The left half of the circle is labelled "materiality" and represents place as a spatial configuration of physical objects; the right half is labelled "meaning" and represents place as a spatial configuration of lived experience. The arrows indicate that place formation is a circular process in which physical objects and lived experience, materiality and meaning, are constantly interacting to form a coherent spatial whole.
This process operates at many, interconnected levels. To help you visualize this idea, I have subdivided each half of the circle into two parts: the built and natural moments fall on the materiality side of the divide, the social and cultural moments on the meaning side. Here's a quick rundown of the moments. The built moment comprises all of the human-made physical structures of a given place, from streets, electrical grids and airports to public parks, sewer systems and suburban subdivisions. The natural moment includes the totality of biospheric entities, structures and processes of a given place, non-human and human alike. The social moment centers on the dynamics, strategies and practices of social reproduction which are nested in a given place. Finally, the cultural moment encompasses the values, norms and ideologies through which the meanings of a given place are represented and empowered.
You shouldn't take the moments of the circle as self-contained spatial entities like the areas of a paint-by-numbers canvas which will be filled with fast-drying acrylic paint by a hobbyist who takes care to stay between the lines. Rather, they should be regarded as useful abstractions for examining how the four moments of place are constantly swirling and blending, like the watercolor paint that flows from the tip of a wet brush, the colors bleeding into each other as they soak into the paper.
The terms "abstraction" and "moment" have particular meanings in the dialectical method of analysis, which is concerned with how the world is put together, how it changes and how it can be reproduced in the realm of thought. Marx and Harvey use this method of analysis, as will I in what follows.
The dialectical method has a long history. Its most famous practitioners are the German philosopher Hegel and Marx, his rebellious student. While Hegel advances an idealist vision of the world, and Marx a materialist one, they both start from the same two dialectical propositions. First, all serious inquiry into concrete reality and its manner of representation should deal with processes rather than things, the latter of which are moments in which processes take on thing-like appearances. Second, all such inquiry should trace the motive force behind change to internal contradictions embedded within a given process rather than to external forces that operate outside and independently of the process under investigation.
This will undoubtedly sound bizarre to most modern ears. The dialectical method runs counter to the empiricism, positivism and obsession with measurability which have dominated Western modes of thinking since the Enlightenment, and which remain embedded in the institutionalized disciplines of social science today. Fortunately, dialectical analysis continues to occupy a prominent place in neuroscience, earth science, evolutionary biology and quantum physics.
Brace yourself for a heavy dose of bizarre thinking.
Diagram: The Four Moments of Place Formation