Introduction

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE: INTRODUCTION

What is place? Let's build a definition of place step by step, as we might build a house, starting with the foundation, proceeding to the framing and ending up on the roof. First, place is a location in space. Second, it is a bounded location in space. Third, it is a bounded location in space that possesses coherence. These three structural elements—location, boundedness and coherence—are mutually dependent parts of a whole or totality called place, just as the foundation, framing and roof are mutually dependent parts of a whole or totality called house.

Let's now dig a little deeper and ask the question, what turns the parts of place into a whole place, giving a particular location its boundedness and coherence? What processes inside the house transform the foundation, framing and roof into a home? The diagram above shifts our attention from the fixed elements of place to the fluid processes of place formation. The left half of the circle is labelled "materiality" and represents place as a bounded and coherent whole made up of physical objects; the right half is labelled "meaning" and represents place as a bounded and coherent whole made up of lived experience. The arrows around the circle indicate that place formation is a fluid process in which physical objects and lived experience, materiality and meaning, are constantly interacting to form a bounded and coherent whole.

The process of place formation operates at many, interconnected levels. To help you visualize this idea, I have subdivided each half of the circle into two parts or "moments." This is a dialectical concept used by Karl Marx to analyze how interrelated processes which make up a totality can take on the appearance of thing-like forms, and how these thing-like forms can prevent us from seeing the interrelated processes at work in the totality. While Marx has little to say about place formation per se, his dialectical method is tailor-made for our diagram. I will be leaning heavily on this method in what follows. For the moment (pun intended), you can think of place as the totality; the moments as the thing-like forms; and the arrows as the interrelated processes.

The built and natural moments fall on the materiality side of the divide, the social and cultural moments on the meaning side. 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. These four moments interact in such a way as to produce a bounded and coherent place.

In breaking down the structures, processes and moments of place formation, I am going to consider one place in particular, home. There are good reasons for proceeding in this way. Home is the place par excellence, where the spatial dynamics of materiality and meaning are most clearly visible and most directly experienced. Home is not as large as the city in which it is located, nor as small as one of the rooms contained within it, but it operates according to the same basic logic as a city or a room, albeit at a different scale. In this essay, I will focus on the home my wife Allyson and I have made since 1992, and the homes my parents made before their deaths in 2019. This essay is therefore a home-bound story of my family and its history. I know most of these homes like the back of my hand. I have lived in them, just as they live in me.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE: INTRODUCTION

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist