- 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: KALEIDOSCOPE
While materiality and meaning constitute the stereo lenses of place, each of them is an ensemble of two elements. It bears repeating that these four moments and the two larger ones to which they belong are abstractions useful for analyzing the process of place formation process as a whole. They are not actual spaces with clearly marked boundaries, like the plat of our lot which we keep in a locked fireproof box along with our wills, medical directives and other top-level classified documents.
How might these analytical categories apply to the home-sweet-home story I have just shared with you? For the sake of discussion, let's put the kitchen remodeling project in the built moment, the Japanese maples in the natural moment, the kitchen work routine in the social moment and the memory-making practices and objects in the cultural moment.
Easy-peasy, right? Well, maybe not. As I have said, these moments are far from watertight; they seep into each other at every point.
To visualize what I am getting at, suppose that the circle in the diagram is the eyepiece of a kaleidoscope, like the one you see in the above image. Pretend that you are a kid in a toy shop who has just discovered this amazing optical contraption. Like the View-Master that introduced me to the mysteries of virtual space, the kaleidoscope is a window looking out on wondrous places you have never seen before.
Bring the kaleidoscope to your eye and turn the tube slowly. Multi-colored plastic fragments tumble at the end of the tube. Let's imagine that these fragments are in four colors, blue, red, green and yellow. Now, watch as symmetrical patterns of color, texture, light and shadow flow across your field of vision, coming together and falling apart, an effect produced by mirrors that are positioned in the tube to reflect the cascading fragments. How, you ask yourself, can a mere four colors assume so many different visual combinations without losing their overall balance, coherence and fixed symmetry?
Remember that I put two arrows around the circle of our diagram to represent the process of place formation as one of kaleidoscopic motion in which the four moments are continually bumping into and overlapping one another. This motion tells us something important about place formation. When we stop turning the kaleidoscope, the pattern we see freezes: the moving picture becomes a snapshot. Any given place might appear at one moment in time to be a solid, stable and permanent thing, akin to Heidegger's Black Forest farmhouse. But the dialectical method warns us against mistaking thing-like appearances for the real thing. Place is not a timeless thing but a site of unceasing flux and flow as the four moments are assembled, disassembled and reassembled.
With our dialectical kaleidoscope in mind, let's now revisit the Japanese maples growing in our backyard. I assigned them to the natural moment for the obvious reason they are part of the biosphere and subject to the same rules and regulations that govern plant life generally.
But someone could reasonably object that these trees belong to one or more of the other moments. For example, I planted them out of a desire to bring the backyard into conformity with certain ideas I had about what a proper landscape should look like.
Only later, when Allyson and I were exploring the cradle of American landscape culture in the Hudson Valley, did it dawn on me that my ideas were rooted in aesthetic traditions and practices going back centuries. For all I know, Heidegger himself was unconsciously channeling these same ideas into his Black Forest meditation. In other words, my Japanese maples say as much about the cultural moment as they do about the natural moment.
And now I should add a detail which I failed to mention earlier, namely that the planting of the trees was part of a larger backyard improvement project that included the construction of an arbor for the wisteria we intended to plant. The maples and wisteria now seem to be seeping from the natural and cultural moments into the built moment, where they serve as a kind of decorative accessory to the bordered space of our backyard, reminiscent of the potted plants that Atlanta's most famous (or infamous) corporate architect, John Portman, used as drapery in his hotel atriums.
Another detail worth mentioning is that the wisteria arbor was a DIY job. Rather than pay a professional carpenter to do it, I went down to Home Depot, bought all the pressure-treated lumber I needed along with a new Skill saw and several bags of six-penny galvanized nails. While the final structure was not exactly square and plumb, I am happy to report that it is still standing. If DIY projects like this one are a critical strategy employed by most households struggling to cut costs and stay within their budgets, then the arbor should be considered as part of the social reproduction of our home. In other words, it should be filed under the social moment.
The case of the Japanese maples has taken us full circle, with stops at each of the four moments. It illustrates that our categories of analysis are not discrete spatial things but useful abstractions enabling us to observe the multiple determinations that comprise the dialectical process of place formation.
The same might be said about the kitchen work routine. The organization of labor in our household is an ensemble of practices related to the social reproduction of domestic life, and as such seems right at home in the social moment. But these practices are also entangled with biological reproduction, for through them Allyson and I were able to keep our only child well fed and on track for adulthood. In light of all this, isn't there a case to be made for putting our kitchen routine in the natural moment on the Darwinian grounds that there are few things more natural than having babies and caring for them so that the parents' genetic material will be passed down to the next generation?
But this logic would put us on treacherous terrain by seeming to naturalize the heteronormative assumptions underlying the gendered division of labor in our domestic commons. These assumptions, it could be argued, are not natural but learned. Because they are directly involved in the process of assigning of meaning to social practices, they properly belong to the cultural rather than the social moment. One might even go so far as to say they serve as a form of ideology, if by that term we refer to the appropriation of values and norms for the purpose of buttressing social power—patriarchal power, to be precise. Since I don't like to think of myself as an agent of patriarchy, I am disinclined to draw this conclusion. Even so, I am aware that a third-party observer of our domestic arrangements might see the power dynamics of our household work routine quite differently.
Nor should we forget that this discussion of the kitchen work routine began with the built moment. Knocking down an interior wall separating the cooking and eating areas was a small job that cascaded into other, more expensive improvements and upgrades, which won't surprise any of you who have gone down the rabbit hole of home remodeling.
The kitchen work routine, like the Japanese maples, has bled into all four of our moments.
Around and around we go, just like the kaleidoscope, a fitting symbol for the dialectical method of analysis whose object of study is always motion, flow, fluidity.
It would be wrong to think that the porous nature of our analytical categories exposes some flaw or deficiency in them. If place formation is a fluid process in which materiality and meaning are being constantly rejiggered into different spatial configurations, why shouldn't the categories we use to analyze this process be fluid as well, or "elastic," to borrow an apt word from Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman?
Marx was the dialectician par excellence. While he never published a book on his method, he used it to brilliant effect in all his writings on political economy and the capitalist mode of production. Through the dialectical method Marx is able to see capital as a "concrete" totality made up of contradictory processes.
Concrete reality and its representation in thought cannot be boiled down to a single cause, factor or force. Dialectical analysis is not about cause and effect as these terms are usually understood. "The concrete is concrete," Marx writes in the Grundrisse, "because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse." Freud made much the same point in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he develops the concept of "overdetermination."
To say that reality and its mental representation are concrete means that they are made up of far too many determinations for any of us to grasp at one time. To say that reality and its representations are abstract means that they have been carved up into smaller parts that we can analyze, one at a time. Once we have carefully analyzed a sufficient number of these abstracted parts and put them back together in our minds, the interrelations and co-dependencies which make up the whole will start to reveal themselves.
Marx used the dialectical method and the technique of abstraction to critique bourgeois political economy, analyze the internal workings of the capitalist mode of production and advance his radical vision of a future society in which human beings will be able to revel in their concrete relations with each other and with natural world. Put another way, he looked forward to the time when all of us will be free to develop the full range of our "powers and capacities" as social and creative beings.
Wiki, "How to Make a Kaleidoscope"