Embracing Lococentrism: A Response to Thomas Brockelman's Critique Review by: Edward Casey Human Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 459-465 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20011129 . Accessed: 10/09/2014 12:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
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19: 459-465,
Human Studies ?
Academic
1996 Kluwer
Review
1996.
Publishers.
459 Printed
in the Netherlands.
Essay
Embracing
Lococentrism:
A Response
to Thomas Brockelman's
Critique EDWARD CASEY Department
of Philosophy,
State
University
of New
York, Stony
Brook,
NY
11790,
U.S.A.
remarks, I stand accused of "topocentrism." opening a term of my own devising. In fact, I would rather admit to lococentrism, or "topocosm") is too The topos lurking in "topocentrism" (or "topophilia" as a reminiscent of Aristotle's idea of topos sheer and extremely confining In Tom Brockelman's
notion that launched 2000 years of debate on the subject. simple container-a In contrast, locus, once stripped of its strictly geometric carries signification, of "local" and "locale" which I happily endorse. Thus I am connotations indeed a lococentrist and a locophiliac. and (I'd also admit to chorocentrism but that is another, more
chorophilia,
Platonic,
tale).
1. Beyond of terminology, serious issues are raised by Tom Brock questions I now wish to address. Perhaps the most challenging elman which of these concerns the fascination with no place or placelessness which Brockelman takes to be characteristic of a certain avant-gardist strand in modern archi? tecture
and also,
in modern life itself. Citing Hilberseimer's by extension, 1924 of it instructively with Le Cor (and contrasting project busier's scheme for "the city of three million inhabitants"), my critic discerns an impetus toward the creation of a site that in effect offers no place to be that deconstructs the very idea of place by its alienated, empty, and deso? late structure. In other words, Hilberseimer's is project "doubly Utopian:" the no is good place place.
Hochhausstadt
first response to this line of thought is to remark rather dog? that the very notion of "no-place" is incoherent inmy matically view. Whenever it is proposed, it yields on analysis to a signifi? cant residual sense of place ? as I have tried to show elsewhere ex nihilo accounts of creation, or in the in the case of supposedly
i) My
case of an aboriginal chaos.l But we do not need to be theological to make the point: the citation from "Paris, Texas" with which Brockelman
a wish
but
only
vast
less
begins does not posit to be "far away," in "a deep,
to be "no place" country" that is no
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460
EDWARDCASEY a place
I speak of for lacking a name. (I should add that when mean I not in do but "site," no-place degenerate place place as in Heidegger's its "deficient modes," "levelled-down," place terms).
is that between propose that a more pertinent distinction connotes and (for human empty place "empty" full place?where at least) desolate, vacuous, lacking history and other forms beings of specific content, and "full" signifies such things as resonant,
ii) Iwould
familiar. fulfilling, satisfying, between what we experience have just moved and where or other types offamiliaris
It is the difference, for example, in an utterly new place where we there are no friends or family members
and what we feel in a place we already inhabit that is full of local history and about which we have a great deal of local knowledge. Of course, this is not to deny that we can be surfeited and disillusioned with a known place, over-full with it and longing to pull out stakes and seek a new place; or that, once in that unknown place, we may be exhilarated and not depressed. I think you will agree between fateful, difference
Still,
neither of place,
that there these
is an important, and often of place and that
two kinds
to no-place-at-all. Each is a distinctive differential destinies. decidedly
is tantamount affording
sort
most Hi) That being said, it appears to me that one of Brockelman's effective sallies against me is that I have neglected not so much as empty place - to which a certain strand of twentieth no-place is also at play in Heideg? century architecture points (and which construed as the "unhomey"). This ger's notion of the Unheimlich of critique is formally parallel to Derrida's critique (metaphysi? as this presence cal) presence, appears in such quasi especially architectural
terms as "nearness"
and proximity," close allies of I should admit, vulnerable familiarity to deconstruction of the very binary opposition of "empty" and that also informs Husserl's "full," an alternative phenomenology and hominess.
of perception deconstruction be re-formulated
I am also,
in the Fifth
and Sixth Logical Investigations. But, for the moment, Brockelman's charge can thus: my mistake is to overvalorize not placeper
aside
se but full place, place that is contentful and richly ramified -to the neglect of null place, place that is empty of significant content or connection with other places. Null or empty place (labelled by as "no place") that is not merely Brockelman the excluded other ? of full place but a powerful if often suppressed and unrecog
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EMBRACINGLOCOCENTRISM -
nised
461
in certain extraordinary surfaces of modernity, as Hilberseimer's movements such project of 1924.
desire
avant-gardist
2. Here the question comes down to: what does itmean to want to lose or lack ? to This is not at all the same thing as the desire wish to bsplacelessl place - nor - a is it tantamount to lack shelter of any kind urge at best self-defeating a a nomadism: with with fascination to nomadism. allied (It is, however, us I shall return.) The desire to which Brockelman is, points topic to which the desire not to have full place: to lack its in the language I here employ, It is the desire to have and promises. accoutrements and shapes, pleasures ? the largesse of locus. It is also, I think, of place done with the plenitude identifies as the "markers" of full the desire to do without what Brockelman means of i.e., all that makes centers, boundaries, ready orientation place: a place at once familiar and identifiable. All this makes perfect sense, both reaction to fullness of place) and (bastal is a comprehensible psychologically historically
the avant garde can be said to be precisely on guard against sense of previous satiated, state-sanctioned implacement). remains: is the deep wish at work here the desire to lose all to be utterly placeless? I doubt it. On my reading, the pertinent
(where
any self-satisfied, But the question
sense of place, desire (characteristically sense
of place
longer guided or particular perspectives. yet to be more exact we
and postmodern) is to substitute a different a sense: new sense of place that is no engorged
modern
for the prior by established
such as centers or boundaries placial parameters I have labeled this new sense "null" or "empty,"
should say that it is empty of inherited conventions and practices of place and its determination. In fact, however, it is never no own in these It is. has its such as ways: altogether empty place parameters a felt endlessness, or a-centeredness, or lack of perspectival footholds. That I state these parameters in such privative terms shows the continuing potency
of plenary placement in a given culture (in this case Western culture), but as ? or even as as in Hilberseimer's built instance itwill be felt and projected, as a place, a place with plenipotentiary experienced powers that are unique to it and not merely borrowed from models of by negation pre-established full places. For
this
is all about: as built, places, even the building places and vacuous, askew and de-structured, will bring with them an set of textures and contours, directions and horizons. engaging They will a exhibit determinate of dimensional always group predicates: special ways of being here/there, right/left, near/far, etc. And they will do so thanks to the continuing in their midst of one term entirely neglected presence by Brockelman: the body. To this, then, we shall have to return.
most
is what
ascetic
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462
EDWARDCASEY
turn first to something not neglected by my critic :the problematic indicates is that, in the case of the What this problematic of Unheimlichkeit. ? the full that to be at the empty is present in, indeed perforates, uncanny, letme
3. But
is also, and by the same token, not to be at home: that at the heart of the paradigm of implacement, (or, more reductively, being-at-home being But this is not just a matter of a is to be found in displacement. housed), in the hearth of the house, but, more chink as it were still, of a radically
home
are indissociable: and displacement there is implacement versa. without and vice As Brockelman says displacement implacement Unheimlichkeit "only denies the existentialist tellingly: Heidegger's Utopian in the same gesture by which it acknowledges it." The denial of impulse situation
in which
no
the not-at-home, accomplished into question
as Brockelman the displaced has it) is only (or "distopian," more its Or "what calls by directly, recognition. domesticity exists at the heart of the 'home' and only there"
Iwould not want to deny this "mutual imbrication" of place and dis-place (as we may call the existential not its contradictory: contrary of place: precisely Just as Sartre had said that "there is a hole in the heart i.e., not non-place). we can say that there is a gap in the house of Being. But I also of being," so want
to insist on other ways
than these models
in which The
dialectic
suggest. to architecture, entirely appropriate Eisenman's with animadversions)
less
occurs, displacement of self-undermining
which
immanent
immanence
is
concerns
itself (despite of place." In this
necessarily loci, "stability one rightly and naturally looks for instability in the very locus of domain, I presume the building. that this is what "deconstuctivist" is all architecture about: how to build instability into stability, or how to un-build stability in political itself. (Similarly, action one destabilizes the seat of power from if one is to be fully effective. within Judith Butler has analyzed Rosa Parks' stabilitas
of the previously forbidden seat at the front of a bus as an instance occupation of a performative action that was efficacious it took place in the just because from which blacks had been very place excluded, thereby creating a lasting destabilization ofthat place in the form of a subversive "citational legacy."2) But
there
is displacement and displacement. Sometimes it happens not in a but between For in of which Bash? 's given place places. example, journeys one are is subversive of stable instance.3 These, too, pilgrimage home-places, now not from within but precisely from outside: from an exteriority that is no longer the posit of an interiority the (as is the house that is riven with or more generally the house of Being that creates its own outside uncanny, as the "inessential," the merely is a etc.). This exteriority "represented," or nearness creature not of metaphysical but of motion between intimacy the motion of the body as it moves itself, or is vehicled, places: among diversely
distinguishable
places.
The
exteriority,
and thus the alienation
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of
463
EMBRACINGLOCOCENTRISM
in the is a function of the moving the displacement, body, not of a fissure - or of a house as its architectural intact wall of Being otherwise holding are one moves In relation to each other, the places between which place. dis-places: moving getting into place,
there, I am no longer here; getting here, I am not there. In I am necessarily and vice versa. displaced,
so I am conceding, is right then, that Tom Brockelman trenchantly In particular, stable scenes of implacement. when it comes to comparatively of site, he introduces a critical nuance that is lacking inmy own assessment an too I link to monolithic of modernity. The avant which all conception ? to Eisenman in architecture from Hilberseimer garde and the postmodern an intertanglement an internal complexity, of the empty and the manifest 4.
full, not adequately generous conflicting ? a lacuna
reading, tendencies even
(even, building of destabilizing But
inmy book (not even, recognized in my treatment of the desolation
despite Brockelman's or the of wilderness
of Versailles). is a hole in the heart of place There in the most is a stable, perduring place, whose prototype a a and especially, deconstructive that makes virtue building its very stability if not structurally). visually,
there are other places,
rooms (remembering ch?ra that Platonic to is that other that with? say, ways by "room"), place (even becomes Just as there is complication (or should we dis-place. other
be translated
may inmodernity)
from within ifwe follow Brockelman-Heidegger-Derrida, say im-plication?) there is complication from without, most notably in journey? (or ex-plication) a to from basic action that occurs in every known ing, moving place place: ? as culture. My concern here in Getting Back into Place?is with broadening the vista of place, arguing for a metamorphic of kinds of place, profusion while to find a few place-constants. It ensues that there is trying nonetheless a multiplicity of kinds of dis-place (and identifiable traits of it). The crucial link between this diaspora of implacing and displacing is the lived body that dwells in (more or less) perduring places while also travel? ? them them. (For example, or, for that matter, ing between remembering we as nostalgic are about lost places as about elapsed times; nostalgically: here I accept Brockelman's of the nostalged insightful assessment place as a Jean place, posited only from within ametaphysical domesticity. has argued that nostalgia is a peculiarly modern phenomenon: the cultural and historical is entirely apposite.4) specificity
represented Starobinski here 5. As been
I hinted
is not not even after sufficient stress has or traveling an issue of nomadism, as fashionable in the wake of Deleuze more and Guattari and, recently
earlier, to motion
given this has become
and eloquently,
Alphonso
the issue
Lingis.
The dis-placement
to which
I am pointing
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464
EDWARDCASEY
as we can call it) nor to drifting ("loose nomadism" is What interests me revisitation of places (strict nomadism). across a place or between places mundane: it is the movement an that is accomplished by ordinary "legwork." A journey is not necessarily It can even happen distant or disparate places. elaborate progress between in a place, I walk say, a house or a home. When including a built place to micro about a house from room to room, I am traveling from micro-place is reducible
neither
to periodic much more
This is as true of moving around differentially. as a I around conventional home-place: displace building as Imove, a series of dis-places ? places and as I do so I constitute myself are still part of my purview, I am not at, yet which still present, still full even as they are receding from view. Thus I hollow out a set of concatenated I occupy place. a deconstructive
the house
are not the same These dis-places simple action of walking. Brockelman have (and Heidegger) pointed us, but they are not incompatible them either: indeed, they rejoin them in a complex with of and that are as empty as they are full, or as full dis-places congeries places as they are empty ? thanks to the body that is their mediatrix. by my dis-places as those to which
I am suggesting of the binaries of empty 6. What
is that, in addition to the deconstruction and full, natural and cultural, Hestial and Hermetic, wild and domestic, etc., there is another factor that we can consider at once and disseminative and that itself escapes these binaries annealing (and common virtue of their This others) by is, once again, the being premise. therefore
Its primacy has been argued by Merleau-Ponty and in in her two books The Sheets-Johnstone (most notably and The Roots of Power). But Iwould prefer to speak but of a double role. One role is pre-deconstructive: this
lived-moving body. our time by Maxine Roots of Knowledge
not of "primacy" is the body's remarkable
to hold together otherwise and capacity disparate terms: above and the and all, place seemingly incompossible homey dis-place, If this role is annealing, the other role is disseminative: for the body unhomey. is not a mere thing that stabilizes or underlies. It takes us out of ourselves as well
as out of the binaries which
it itself combines: it takes us into complicated near of the and the horizon and do not far, configurations boundary, which admit of any easy subsumption under such metaphysically terms complacent ' as "for-itself or "in-itself," or "self and "distance," "other," "proximity" etc. The
even as it body keeps us together in place and its many dis-places us apart in these same places and dis-places. As annealing, the body is a connective as tissue of lives in built places; it is the wild disseminative, factor in the same uncanny domiciles.
drives
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465
EMBRACINGLOCOCENTRISM
7. It always takes someone else to identify one's own metanarrative, and I am deeply grateful to Tom Brockelman for having done this so perspicuously inmy own case. He has put his discerning finger on my "framing narrative" term of modernity. of place as the repressed To this extent, he has spotted a utopianism in Getting Back into Place of place as the ultimately valorized term. (In fact, the history of place is a checkered one: the repression is already at work as early as the Hellenistic I out have traced this history in a period. back at me in this form from someone whose forthcoming book.5) Coming grasp
of matters
charge very But even
of place
seriously. if I am an unabashed
I think not. At
utopian?
is as subtle
as that of my
interlocutor,
I take this
am I a topo and locophiliac, or wish to if this means that I propose,
lococentrist
least not
an ideal place or even a better place. Rather, my interest lies in propose, what given places, hateful or salutary, good enough or imperfect, are like for those who
their lithe or limping bodies. By the I am not distopian: in my descriptive work nothing
inhabit or traverse
same
them with
token, however, argues that particular places should not be improved for particular personal or political purposes. Am I then atopian? Certainly not. For if I do not hold with Richard Sorabji that "all there is is place,"6 I do hold that places matter greatly
in the things
that matter
to us all.
Notes 1. See
into Place: Edward S. Casey Back (1993). Getting the Place-World. Indiana of Bloomington: University
Toward Press,
Ch.
a Renewed
Understanding
1.
2. Judith Butler, lecture at Stony Brook, Spring, 1994. 3. Cf. Getting into Place, 280-286 Back of these journeys. for an analysis See Jean Starobinski Idea of Nostalgia. esp. 90-95. (1966), The Diogenes: 5. Edward S. Casey A Philosophical 1996), The Fate of Place: (forthcoming, History. of California Press. ley: University
4.
6. Richard
(1988). Matter, Sorabji Space, and Motion: 127. Ithaca: Cornell Press, University
Theories
in Antiquity
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Berke?
and Their Sequel.
