Place, whether in a specifically philosophical sense or in its constructed, architectural sense — as a human-made place — should be thought of more distinctively than the everyday use of the word prescribe, though it undoubtedly remains directly related to it. And for the benefit of my present reflections, the meeting between these two distinct fields, architecture and philosophy, is of importance. Their rendezvous point, seen from above, might help us realize the enormous similarities between the two disciplines. The most prominent of which is their ability to — through the means of both science and art — construct (from Latin cōnstruō, “to heap together”); to put things together in order to build constructions without actually building them. Neither the architect nor the philosopher builds anything besides possibilities. Their actualization lies in the reframing of this “together.”
Still, where to begin with? How can we conceptualize place meaningfully from the point of view of those two ‘distinct’ yet intimate sides? That is a long shot that I have been struggling with for quite some time now. What you are about to read here are some of my thoughts on these issues. What I have come to call the first place, the first territory, or, in other words, our home, is the focus here. Be it a rented flat or a house, a caravan, or even in unending movement as our nomadic heritage insists, the place in and through which we first encounter the world is formative.
Even for the nomads, the notion of ‘first place,’ of ‘home,’ has meaning. A fundamental one, for that matter. Their home, their first place, is precisely the lack thereof. Their home is movement itself — home is where and when movement is. They reside in no territory but in its possibility. It was sedentarism that actualized one of all possibilities. And, historically, sedentarism is both a new phenomenon and something that has not happened just once. It ‘took place’ thousands of times, even for the nomadic cultures and for some, within a single generation lifespan. One might argue, diving bravely into deep history, that sedentarism never happened.
This is not what interests me here, however. Or interested me, past tense, since these are some of my initial reflections on those problems, dating back a decade now. Because of that, these preliminary notes are not just useful, but mandatory, in showing that the universe of the discourse is never fixed, even for a single person. Or shouldn’t be.
What is more important for the following thoughts is that the first place does not have to be remembered as something we want to return to. It does not have to be remembered at all. And I am relatively sure that is the case with many of us. But if and when it is remembered as somewhere and somewhen to stay or return to, our intimate relationship with it (as is the case with many natives around the world) does not have to derive from blood and soil nationalism and, more generally, vulgar identitarianism.
In other words, one can and should always think even more. This translates into the statement that my reflections are not exhaustive. They do not conclude, since I do not have any final words just yet.
On the contrary, this project of rethinking the place of place both in philosophy and architecture, of place as an agent within socio-economic, historical realities, has already cost me years and will, eventually, cost me a life. And while here I think of the first place as a predominantly phenomenal realm, this is due to the fact that—as our daughter's development so far proves—it is the phenomenological thought that best comprehends our relationship to place as a constructed and constituting arrangement, as well as to those who await us in it.
The very notion of place presupposes an initial relation of union, of a liminal pact between the subject and the world around. A pact that takes place both through the immediacy of any possible perception and through the overt, practically inevitable interaction with the objects that fill it and are organized within the reach of the hand. Moreover, place — thought of as a constructed, architectural place — necessitates the thinking of it as a particular kind of enclosing edge. A multitude of other places — those of things and objects, of others and the Other, of the phenomenal world in its totality — are seemingly brought together in it.
But the places within the place are sutured, intersecting, relational to the point where any division from greater to lesser, from more important to less important, or vice versa, proves to be an excessive abstraction, the return from which necessitates the principled indivisibility of any experience from and within it. Only the whole as a whole is comprehensible. Only the situatedness (as being-in-place) in some oneness, as dwelling in the midst of any actual or potential relating, is truly intelligible.
We could say, then, that each of us individually enters into this edged wholeness insofar as we are innately infected by the impossibility of not being somewhere, the impossibility of being nowhere. A need that only place could satisfy — the need to be together, to be situated in the world, to be territorialized, etc., and, ultimately, to be — a need that is not a necessity insofar as it is a precondition of any necessity. Michel Serre would write that
Life resides, inhabits, abides, stays, cannot pass without a place. It is as if it delineates and encodes its definition. By the last word I mean what its etymology says: indicating limits and boundaries, closed or open […].
The real necessity we face, however, and which only place as a constructed place, place as a man-made place (“a world that is before man, even if it is made by man”) can satisfy, is the necessity of preservation. The architectural place is the place built by man for man, which precedes us and whose telos is, fundamentally, the preservation of life.
The word “s-grada” (building) in Slavic languages, and more precisely its root, “grad” (city), and the pure action lexeme of build-ing, leads us to its Old Indian root, grha- (*ghordhó, from *ǵhortós), and which we translate most accurately by “house.” But its meaning is also habitation (expanded into a verb by dwelling), and also family. In Sanskrit, the intimacy between the person and the inhabited is felt even more clearly, yet there, the word means simply home. In Phrygian, it is modified to gordum. The same root can be traced in the later Gothic, where gards is again translated as house, but with the emphasis on its en-circled-ness. The proximity of gard to the English word guard/guardian, in turn, lies in the Old English gyrdan, which is again translated by enclosure, and is also found in our Slavic words for necklace — gerdan, in which the ornament appears as something enclosing the neck.
Thus in these etymological fragments, we find the enclosed — the house, the home or building, even the city, being a smaller or larger place that is inhabited and in which the shared with others, those “outside the family,” being is realized — was understood as what is being preserved or needs preservation, but above all as what preserves. Each of us is subject to the latter, not because of a clear articulation of it, an intentionality, a distinctive awareness, but insofar as the need for such a providence is constitutive of the disposition of self and world for all those who preceded us. “Others” had it and still have it, and they experience it incessantly on their own backs.
The first encircling edge, the first armed wholeness of and for man, which is what is at stake here, is, of course, precisely the home, the “ birthplace “ — the first place. It marks the genesis of our experience of both the world, in its local distinctness, and of others. In existential-phenomenological terms, home is not only the preserving, the locating in a here that is not there, a liminal organization that largely deprives us of the whims of nature, but also — as we shall see — much more. For this reason, too, it is no exaggeration to say that home is the first territory in which we are almost forcibly territorialized. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s reterritorialization and deterritorialization, here understood in the most literal sense, are consequential — they are stages of individual, concrete becoming and its concomitant choices or lack thereof.
A few additional nuances, directly derived from François Artog’s formal methodology developed in his Modes of Historicity, can help us grasp the dynamic, historicized relation to the first place. In the mythologized world and consciousness in general, in the pre-Christian “circular” or “cyclical” mode of historicity, the home seems to be ever-present within the circle; even more so in the surroundings: that of the tribe and the others, then more generally that of the polis and amidst the agora, where friendships are formed and enemies made as a result of the inevitability of disagreement.
In the linear or progressivist regime that dominates the Christian (or Christianized) consciousness of historicity, and from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution onwards, is also situated in a new politico-economical context, the home is thought of as fundamentally unattainable. It is that place that is still to come and in which everything we are promised will “fall into place.” Whether it is a question of active participation or passive bearing, in this mode, what is to come is presented — roughly speaking — as the bearer of justice heading towards us. In the present, so-called “presentist” regime, characterized by acceleration, pervasive uncertainty, and liquefaction, home is always where the subject is, no matter where exactly that “there” is, or, for that matter, “here.”
Still, our objective and initial territorialization always occur at someone else’s discretion, and it is precisely for this reason that ontogenesis has multiple specificities. No child chooses the toys or the color of his room, the decorations in it, or the material for his own swing, but all of these in one way or another influence his very first perceptions of the world and the ways of educational formation and vice versa.
Home, as man’s first place, is always already here and waiting for us. As a result, the first place reveals itself as much more than simply preserving. It is also filled with the concrete others, our loved ones, who pre-configure the social character of all situatedness — preservation as actuality, not potentiality, of domesticity. The lonely child, be it in a warm and full-of-food home, is doomed. In this sense, too, the debunking of the extreme individualism of our times, along with the myth of the self-made man, begins with the placement of the cot.
The home, as I have identified above, is also charged with certain narrow and broad aesthetic characteristics, as is that which surrounds it. It is “our corner in the world,” in Gaston Bachelard’s famous phrase from his Poetics of Space, or more precisely, “it is our first world.” In it, we find everything that concrete others like, from furniture and other instrumental or decorative paraphernalia to the more concrete embodiments of art, whether popular or not, archaic or not, but most of all the organization of place as already constructed one, the relation of these same welcomers of ours to light and its patterning, and how this infinite set of specificities communicate with each other, relationally constituting what we mark by the term home. However, we must not forget the landscape that frames our surroundings, also the city, village, etc., in which the home fits, thus binding us to the particular characteristics of the set — the second place.
It is important to note here that Bachelard’s work, while explicitly engaging with the poetics of space, never loses the latter’s noetic charge, constitutive for subjectivity. On the other hand, more critically, Bachelard’s poetics is much more concerned with the phenomenological experience of space as charged with meaning and relationality, as modal (in a sometimes phantasmagorical way), as saturated with subjectivity (and fundamentally determining all subjectivity and the potency of subjectivation) and, therefore, its — however imagined — experience as place; that is, an intersection of time and space.
This is why, in his work, the poetics of place all but shatters any attempts to posit a poetics of space. Even as the dimensions of the temporal are almost entirely obliterated by the agitated, poetic-dream-ridden mind, its dimensionality remains locked, latently active amidst the very dynamics of the memory line from which every such dream originates and into which it flows.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, “art begins not with the flesh, but with the house; that is why architecture is the first of the arts.” Long before them, in his Aesthetics, Hegel had reached a similar conclusion. But also every non-architectural art is housed in the architectural. And how could we orient ourselves in the “other” arts if we did not first recognize — in a perceptual-intellectual (not a priori) way — spatiality; if we did not learn to perceive and distinguish the particularities of dimensionality of length and width, and especially of depth? And are the other dimensions even there without the third and especially the fourth, if we (can) distance ourselves from our indoctrinated abstraction of geometric, Euclidean space?
Here is revealed the essential role played by the philosophical notion of place within the limits of the dynamic aesthetics. It is only from the position of the embodied multidimensional character of reality, which is to say from the position of the world-centered self, from the position of subjectivity having itself as a segment of the ordering of that same reality, that the whole complex dynamic of the given is formed its own unity, and finally its own meaning. And if the given always leaves both unity and meaning, which it attains unhindered by its concentration in whichever center of itself, in whichever perceptual agent, it is because its unceasing reference is just that — unceasing.
What then can surpass the home, thought of as a constructed place, in this contest of the arts, since it is always the depth, always the profundity of the known and the mysterious, into which the self falls unarmed, gradually knowing the given through the embodied dynamics of the consciousness immersed in and unfolding it? A race in which the self recognizes the world first as its world, then as theirs, others’, and finally as the common?
And is not home, in this primary genesis of subjectivity, a whole world of which it is more or less to become a partial sculpture? It and what surrounds it: the city, the landscape, the sprawling “infinity” that fits into our every molecule. They stretch the bonds between their atoms like strings, taking up the body’s instrument, the flesh-tool.
The first place and what surrounds it appear as the most distinct limit of primary experience of and with the body in the world, and among others. We are made of the constructed place as it is made of the Other. Can we not conclude that the Other creates me, just as it creates the home in which I find myself first, while the home on a par with the Other makes me?
On a larger scale, I believe, the neighborhood, the city, etc., should be thought of as home. In this “etc.” lies even the comparison between our planet and another planet — the eternal aspiration of sci-fi writers. Mother Earth, Gaia, and the like are all attempts to bring domesticity to its limit, that is, to universality. The same applies to adverbs of the cosmopolitan type.” “But there, in that other city, the sun doesn’t rise as it does here,” the melancholy traveler would groan. “There the mountain protects us from the onslaughts of the wind, but we children of the sea are used to it — we miss it.” Similar is the experience of the science fiction heroes colonizing other planets.
Moreover, the things, the events, the days and months, the mundanity of the boring, as well as that of the new, the interesting, and the multifaceted, happen differently in differently organized and filled places, and are expected differently. But it follows that we are a primal sculpture of the place we have welded, in a more concrete or more abstract way.
As I have identified above, such a sculpting is, of course, partial. This is why I speak of the home as partially sculpting and guiding our aesthetic flair and identity. It shapes perception, thus dynamising experience. We are, in other words, its offspring. We carry it within us so that every other thing is — willy-nilly — compared and measured against it, juxtaposed alongside it.
Home, the first place, has the peculiarity of retaining its at least principled immutability. It is unchanging insofar as we know every corner of it, as everything in it remains somehow the same, despite the changes, the constant passage of time, and human co-creation. This is also true of the larger plan of what surrounds it. Despite the new supermarket on the corner, sprouting from the rubble of the abandoned building we played in as children; despite the playground, which in our memories is a space for playing marbles; despite the unfamiliar, replaced faces; despite it all, the first place remains the first place we can ever “return” to.
But the brushstrokes of memory smear the present with the past. The bad copy — if I may indulge in this escape into Platonist jargon, — the false, the phantasmagoric, is given to perception; it is reality itself, which does not correspond to memory and clashes with it. Nothing happens in the room in which so much of our individual history has happened, in the small town, and on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the big city, where everything is still and it seems as if ‘time has stopped.’
Such a consideration of what passes away in place as non-passing ought to be — at least in principle — impossible, given that the place itself is equally spatial and temporal. To speak of the absence of time in situatedness, therefore, would be to speak of the absence of a livable experience from a given place. Such a problem, from a phenomenological or even existentialist perspective, could easily be solved by making sense of the absence of an adequate situatedness — that is, one that makes us have our present experience as if we were somewhere we’d rather not be: an example might be the prison, the clinic, etc., and, in our case, the reality in which place is other to the memory of it.
But, in the vulgar sense of ‘time has stopped,’ time, the concept of which allows us to withhold changes, to let them happen without surprise, is absent precisely because the changes seem to fail to actualize themselves. They cannot affect that almost ideal constitution of place in memory, of its immediate and compelling connectedness to it. It is as if our sensibility delivers us not a single alteration, not a single change in the field of the phenomenal. Everything has stopped, nothing is happening, and this would mean that everything is frozen in the immovability of death; in the irrelevance of the last place, which is ever here and whose omnipresence is somehow anticipated by the bored, morbid, and utterly disinterested with what is going on right now consciousness.
Such immanent immutability somehow manages to impose a sense of a threshold to the perceptible, beyond which it is difficult to pass. When it comes to the first place, in other words, memory dominates over perception, but somewhat tenuously, somehow evasively. Precisely because of this, here lies the possibility of a lasting exchange between the different vectors of the self-experiencing self, of its (sometimes extremely fragmented) ‘continuity’ and in this sense — it is here that the inner, never indifferent dynamism, which particularly interests me, takes shape.
Apropos, what does not enchant us aesthetically, what is not reducible to any of the traditional categories, and what — on a primal level — we would rather accept only with reservations or deny at the first opportunity, is precisely that which opposes our original aesthetic ‘refinement.’ It sows the seed of the original rupture, of the refusal and cultural rebellion against everything else, often marking the direction of escape and the possibility of the emergence of the absolutely new. At stake here are relations of compatibility and incompatibility, which relate to each other dynamically, respectively, often replacing their possessions. Lotman notes the obvious:
In the phenomenon of art, two opposing tendencies can be brought out: the tendency to repeat what is already known and the tendency to create something fundamentally new.
Yuri Lotman, Culture and Explosion
It is precisely the latter that has the possibility of being produced in the blatant conflict between what is opposed to that which is first given to us as the endlessly repetitive and painfully familiar established. In this sense, we are all, especially today, refugees from the “culture war” that has gripped the globalized world spread over our palms. It is precisely the failure to recognize the transition from the incompatible to the compatible, that is, the dynamism of different perceptual attitudes and their initiation, that the reactionaries exploit so skillfully.
If we only knew, however, the extent to which we are made of the place. This is what Bachelard seems to be asking us, the place into which we have first fallen. The extent to which we are made by its curves and cracks, by the roughness or evenness of its walls and floors, by the light that floods in shafts through the wide-open or curtained-down windows, ricocheting, dancing everywhere — in the shop windows, on the light-lacquered parquet, on Magritte’s strange, aged reproductions.
If only we knew how much we are made of the acoustics that scatter the voices of our loved ones as it sees fit, along with the echoes of our sonorous, childish laughs. How much we are made of the movement of air on stifling summer days that makes the droplets on our necks feel like tiny pins poking beneath the surface of our skin. From the street, the sounds of which intrude, now purring, now droning; from the rolling of speeding or dragging cars, and pedestrians strapping on umbrellas and beach bags against the backdrop of the far-stretching sea, covered with “bunnies.”
Innumerable are the manifestations of the first place, which, as Bachelard unerringly judges, awaken in us the reveries, the ruminations, or even the daydreams peculiar to the poetic. In the quasi-poetic reverie in which I have just found myself, I allowed — do not know how — to layer, to stratify various places; to realize in one a multiplicity of habitations in which I have permanently dwelt and which have left their lasting imprint on the various memories, the various shades of the individual peculiarities and manifestations of things — by adding to them the present, the most recent of innumerable preceding habitations. Here is where I will leave you after raising some important questions.
What do such marginal dynamism and homogenization mean in the plan of psychological “self”-experience? Does it mean that I have indulged in some type of retroactive generalization, atoning for the individual shortcomings of every place I have been, and the one I am in?
Moreover, what marks such an encounter of the line of memory with that of perception; an encounter in which the now-present becomes indistinguishable and is absorbed, reworked by, and into what is already gone? But also — does this mean that the first place is larger in volume than all the others, which it somehow contains or adopts, constituting a generalized home, a genius loci of the poetic, dreaming self?
Would all this mean that places somehow manage to coexist in memory like a then, infinitely connected to a there that we seek when we face the calm stream of consciousness, that rarely conscious ‘poetic’ in itself, surrender to which promises dominion to the lord of appearances?
Could the initiation into such mental transversalia — myriad vectors mapping the different planes of memory, picking up one another and abandoning each other somewhere along the way — be essentially banal?
And aren’t these vectors part of the subjective experiences of particularities, of the distinctive specificities of place, and in that sense to be beyond any possible trivialization, even as they fit into the supposed promises of uniqueness?