Kaleidoscope

Framing Capitalism in Place:
A Marxist Travel Guide

PLACE: 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 rituals 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. Pretend that you are a kid in a toy shop who has just discovered this amazing optical contraption. Like the View-Master which introduced me to the mysteries of virtual space, the kaleidoscope is your portal to wondrous places you have never seen before.

You bring the kaleidoscope to your eye and turn the tube slowly, causing the multi-colored fragments to tumble at the end of the tube. Let's say these fragments are in four colors, the same number as the moments in the diagram. You 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, can a mere four colors assume so many different visual combinations while retaining their overall balance and coherence, their fixed symmetry?

Now, consider the two arrows surrounding the circle in the diagram. I put them there to indicate that the process of place formation is one of circular motion in which the moments are constantly bumping into and overlapping with one another, a process of what might be called "creative destruction," to borrow a term from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter.

This circular motion tells us something important about place formation. Any given place might appear to be a solid, stable and permanent thing, a timeless dwelling like Heidegger's Black Forest farmhouse. But as the dialectical method teaches us, appearances can be deceptive, for place is actually a site of ceaseless flux and flow as the four moments are assembled, disassembled and reassembled.

With our dialectical kaleidoscope in mind, let's 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 (see the gallery "Yankee Landscapes"), 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 fantasy. 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 our wisteria. My precious maples now seem to be seeping from the natural and cultural moments into the built moment, where they serve as a kind of arboreal accessory, reminiscent of those potted plants that Atlanta's most famous (or infamous) corporate architect, John Portman, liked to use to drape his hotel atriums.

But the 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. The final result was not exactly square and plumb, but I'm happy to report that it's 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 part of the social reproduction of domestic space and as such 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 son safe, well fed and on track for adulthood. In light of all this, shouldn't we put our kitchen routine in the natural moment on Darwinian grounds that there are few things more natural than people having babies and caring for them so that their genetic material will be passed down to the next generation?

But this would put us on treacherous terrain by naturalizing the heteronormative assumptions underlying the gendered division of labor in our domestic commons. These assumptions, it could be argued, are not natural at all but learned. They are part of the process of acculturation and thus belong to the cultural moment. They might even 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 like to think of myself as a feminist, I am disinclined to draw this conclusion. But I recognize that someone else looking at our domestic arrangements might see things 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 made good on his promise to publish 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 reality 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." Sigmund Freud made much the same point in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he develops the concept of "overdeterminations."

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 considered a sizable number of the parts we will be in a position to discern their interrelations and co-dependencies which make up the whole.

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.

What a strange and compelling combination of qualities, our man Mr. Marx. In no particular order, he was a philosopher, a polemicist, a political economist, a lover of science and literature, a Communist revolutionary, a social visionary and something of a romantic humanist.

Framing Capitalism in Place: A Marxist Travel Guide

PLACE: KALEIDOSCOPE

Framing Capitalism in Place:
A Marxist Travel Guide