INTRODUCTION
What is place? I propose to build a definition of place step by step, as one 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 constitutive parts of a whole called place, just as the foundation, framing and roof are mutually constitutive parts of a whole 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 moving, looping process in which physical objects and lived experience, materiality and meaning, are constantly interacting with each other 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." 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.
The diagram is my attempt to apply the dialectical method to the process of place formation. At the core of this method is the concept of totality. In his magnum opus Capital, Karl Marx shows how and why capitalism constitutes a totality of interrelated processes that take on the appearance of thing-like forms, and how and why these thing-like forms prevent us from seeing the internal processes underlying the totality. While Marx has little to say about place formation per se, his dialectical method is tailor-made for our diagram in which place is represented as a totality of interrelated processes that assume the thing-like forms of natural, built, social and cultural moments.
In this essay, I will focus my attention on the place called home. There are good reasons for doing this. Home is the place par excellence, where the spatial dynamics of materiality and meaning are most directly experienced, and the four moments of place formation are most clearly visible. It is also a critical site of capital as a mode of production and capitalism as a social formation. While not as large as the city, region or nation in which it is nested, nor as small as the rooms nested within it, home is constrained by the same dialectical logic that operates across all dimensions of socio-spatial life under capitalism.
I will play the part of participant observer here, taking you on a tour of the home in which my wife Allyson and I have lived since 1992, and the homes in which my parents lived before their deaths in 2019. In "The Dialectics of Home," I will use our home to examine place formation as a largely self-contained process in which the natural, built, social and cultural "moments" mesh to form a bounded and coherent space. In "The Value of Home," I will use my parents' homes to show how the psychology of home of home ownership played out for two postwar American dreamers. The final section, "Coda," deals with home as a place of healing.
Most of these homes I know inside and out. They live in me, just as surely as I have lived in them.
THE DIALECTICS OF HOME PART 1
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, where we moved when I was eight-years old.
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 there 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 seeing eye and thinking brain as a totality of multiple determinations.
How did a child's toy get so complicated? All I can say is that my old View-Master is a gift that keeps on giving. It put me on the path to a dialectical understanding of how the small world we call place works.
Another gift that keeps on giving is 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. I agreed to serve a brief apprenticeship under 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, your physical self.
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 master teacher, as this apprentice 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.
THE DIALECTICS OF HOME PART 2
In order to grasp dialectically how the halves and quarters of the circle in the diagram intermesh to form a single spatial whole, let's consider the place of all places. I am referring to home, of course. Just about everyone who has thought seriously (or not so seriously) about the significance of place uses the home as their basic reference point, for where else is the spatial linkage of materiality and meaning so dramatically played out?
Among the not-so-serious students of home is Mötley Crüe, the glam metal band whose members came from the West Coast, not far from where I grew up, and whose 1985 hit "Home Sweet Home" proves that even the most God-awful lyricists will turn to home for creative inspiration:
I'm on my way
I'm on my way
Home sweet home
Yeah, I'm on my way
Just set me free
Home sweet home
In my opinion, the band could have used some help from Irish wordsmith John Banville, who writes in one of his novels that the function of home is "to still the self's unanswerable questionings." Such poetic prose is Banville's forte. Even so, those of you who are familiar with his dark humor won't be surprised to learn that the unreliable narrator who makes this observation spends the entire novel searching in a vain for meaning and home, destroying both in the process.
No less a philosopher than Martin Heidegger invokes the home in support of his contention that place "is the locale of the truth of being." Lauded by one scholarly authority as the philosopher who "provides us with perhaps the most important sustained inquiry into place to be found in the history of Western thought," Heidegger is clearly not a figure to be trifled with, even if you find, as I do, that his prose at times comes close to gibberish.
I'll make an exception for Heidegger's description of a Black Forest farmhouse, which is a lovely paean to successive generations dwelling harmoniously in space, time and nature
“Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and sky, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope, looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and that, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead”— for that is what they call a coffin there; the Totenbaum—and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time.”
Allyson and I don't live in a Black Forest farmhouse. We live in a suburban-style ranch house located in what's left of the Piedmont Forest of metro Atlanta.
Are you ready for a house tour?
Our home is a 1,500 square-feet (2,100 square-feet, if you add the half basement), 3-bedroom, 2-bath house built in 1956, the kind of housing marketed to millions of aspirant working- and middle-class families eager to pursue their American Dreams after World War II and the Korean War. We bought it in 1992, two years after moving to Atlanta.
We spend a good deal of time in the kitchen, which anchors both the material and meaningful dimensions of our home. The material side underwent a facelift about twenty years ago, when we removed a wall separating the kitchen from the dining area. We weren’t looking to open up more space for formal entertaining, since Allyson and I are pretty private people who don't throw a lot of parties. Rather, we did away with the wall because the choreography of cooking, eating and cleanup in our household requires lots of elbow room.
Allyson and I each have specific duties to perform, and they go a long way toward defining us as a couple. She handles grocery shopping, meal planning, food prep and cooking; I set the table, clear the dishes, load the dishwasher, put the dishes up when they're clean and dry, wipe down the kitchen countertop and pour the chef her well-deserved, after-dinner limoncello. I'll leave it for you to judge whether or not this is a fair and equitable arrangement.
I don't think either of us were aware of it at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight it seems to me now that the wall-demo project sought to bring materiality into alignment with meaning. We were trying to create a material space suitable for the sexual division of household labor that governs our kitchen routine. A domestic commons, so to speak. Or to put it another way, we wanted to create a material safe zone for the round-the-clock negotiations that, for the most part, have facilitated our work routine and kept the peace during a marriage that is going on forty-three years as I write.
The main thing Allyson and I do in our safe zone is talk, and not just about neuroscience. We share old memories, make new ones and entertain a select few pain-in-the-ass house guests who never leave, no matter how many times we glance hopefully at our watches. If you haven't guessed already, the guests I am speaking of are the memories we have of our younger selves.
I just read an interview with a prominent neuroscientist who said that a common mistake is to think of memories as photographs. Marcel Proust may have been able to retrieve his childhood memories in photo-realist detail after tasting a madeleine, but most of us muddle by with messier, and far less reliable recollections. Memories, according to this expert, are akin to unfinished paintings stacked up in an artist's studio. We are the artist and our brain is the studio where we work. No matter how many times friends and loved ones tell us to put the brush down and call it quits, we are unable to stop touching up, reworking, even painting over our mental canvases in order to satisfy whatever emotional needs we have in the present. Some of these paintings are so old we can't remember when we started them.
Our brain is a veritable museum of such paintings―the Met, MOMA, Guggenheim, Frick and Whitney packed into a single viewing space between our ears. But unlike these well-known institutions that keep regular business hours, our brain is open around the clock, allowing us to come and go as we please, day and night, so that we can continue editing our works in progress.
Allyson and I have given material form to our memories at home in a variety of ways. For example, a long bookshelf in our kitchen holds my late mother's cookbooks. These mean a lot to Allyson, who learned much of what she knows about the culinary arts from her mother-in-law. They are also a kind of shrine to Allyson's friendships with other women in her life, friendships that have been cemented by a shared interest in food and cooking.
On the walls of our kitchen hangs artwork done by a couple of friends. Sadly, we've lost touch with one of them. The other, Theresa, is a former student of mine who lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she teaches and helps run the university's Women's and Gender Studies Center. Years ago, she gave us one of her clay sculptures that is proudly displayed next to the door leading down to our half-basement. Her husband Jack gets my vote for the most hilarious writer east of the Mississippi River. A number of his signed books can be found in our living-room bookcases. We don't see Theresa and Jack as often as we would like to. But this doesn't matter. What does matter is that Allyson and I feel their friendship and presence through the material objects they made and gifted to us.
Every meaningful space is filled with such mementos.
From our kitchen we have a clear view of the backyard through a sliding-glass door. When I'm in the kitchen, I often find myself gazing out this door and reminiscing about how the backyard used to look, before I planted three Japanese maples, my pride and joy, which I have watched grow from saplings into mature trees. I also put up birdfeeders in the backyard, where cardinals, titmice, chickadees and the occasional rose-breasted grosbeak used to feast on black sunflower seeds until the squirrels chased them away. I finally admitted defeat and moved the birdfeeders to the front yard, a safe distance from the neighborhood bullies.
Not far from the maples are the final resting places of our late pets, Sugar Cat (named after Sugar Creek in western Kentucky, where we found her half-starved and wandering in the woods) and Clay Dog (named after Cassius Clay, another homegrown Kentuckian, better known as Muhammad Ali). On cold winter mornings, we would wake up to a lot of hissing and barking as our pets staked their claims to the toasty pocket of air that formed in front of the main heating vent in the dining room. (Clay never made it past the early rounds, despite his name and weight advantage.) Their backyard graves are marked by a concrete tablet of the Ten Commandments that we picked up at a roadside junk shop in South Georgia and repurposed as a tombstone, along the lines of Heidegger's sacred Totenbaum which you might remember from his Black Forest farmhouse revery.
From the kitchen I also watched our son Brendan shoot hoops in the backyard and grow from a boy into a man. He now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife Sara and their daughter, a beautiful baby girl who will soon be paying a visit to the place where her dad grew up.
Like the kitchen, the backyard is a composite space when viewed through our conceptual View-Master. The material side is demarcated by a chain-link fence and a wooden gate which establish a clear boundary line between our property and the neighbors'. The meaningful side is interlaced with emotional attachments, past, present and future. If you were to ask Allyson or me where the materiality of our home, kitchen and backyard begins, and the meaning ends, we would say, "It's all one."
THE DIALECTICS OF HOME PART 3
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 wall-demo 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, like the paints off a watercolorist's brush which mix and mingle as they are absorbed into the paper.
To visualize what I am getting at, suppose the circle in the diagram is the eyepiece of a kaleidoscope. Pretend 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 through which you see volcanic explosions of colors and shapes.
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 so as 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 symmetry?
You will recall that I put two arrows around the circle of our diagram in order 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 still photo. Any given place might appear as a solid, stable and permanent thing, but only if we able to perform a miracle and stop time dead in its tracks. The dialectical method reminds us that time never stops, motion never ceases. It 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 colors of the kaleidoscope, the four moments of the diagram, 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 and coherent 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 proud to report that it is still standing decades later. 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 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, in the present case. 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 uses 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 at long last be able to revel in their concrete relations with each other and with natural world. Put another way, he looks 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.
While Marx was not as steeped in music as his lifelong friend and comrade, Frederick Engels, his dialectical method possesses a certain jazz-like quality of free improvisation, notwithstanding the charge by some critics that he is a determinist and reductionist who is incapable of recognizing the role of agency and free will in human affairs. This suggests one final analogy.
THE DIALECTICS OF HOME PART 4
The formation of place through its natural, built, social and cultural moments can be likened to a performance by one of John Coltrane's classic quartets from the 1960s, four instrumentalists who produced some of the most richly textured jazz ever recorded.
Let's get into my DeLorean Time Machine and travel back to the band's glory days at the Half Note Club in the Village. Bring a couple of your friends, and don't worry, the tab is on me. When we get there, the club is packed and seating is first come, first served. Our party has to split up. You end up seated a few inches from Coltrane on sax, your friend is alongside Elvin Jones on drums, your other friend is practically sitting in the lap of keyboardist McCoy Tyner, I am squeezed up against Jimmy Garrison on bass.
Afterwards, we go out for a drink and compare notes. It soon becomes clear that each of us has heard something slightly different. You think Coltrane killed it, your two friends lobby for Jones and Tyner, I'm ready to anoint Garrison the new king of jazz. It slowly becomes clear that while one and the same music filled the room, what each of us actually heard was dominated by the sound of the instrument and instrumentalist closest to us. We should have played musical chairs, changing seats after each set rather than sticking to one place. That way, each of us would have had a total listening experience.
Just as multiple listening points enable us to grasp the organic wholeness of a Coltrane performance, so multiple viewing points enable us to grasp the organic wholeness of place. And in the same way that the band needs a leader to meld the virtuosos into a harmonious whole, so place needs some coordinating force to bring the four moments together in a bounded and coherent spatial configuration. Who or what, then, is the Coltrane of place?
Diagram: The Four Moments of Place Formation