PLACE is Primary

Casey’s work reawakens why PLACE for millennia was central to our lived experience. His point is obvious and until now overlooked. We ‘unlearned’ PLACE in the Industrial Age, when it no longer fit our purposes. But in our displacement in the Digital Age, PLACE is once again primary to our lives and our well-being.

The concept of place isn’t simple – but it is irreducible. Every attempt at definition of PLACE moves in circles. The word location is from a Latin word for place. Area derives from Latin for an open field. Position comes by several steps from the Latin ponere, to put or place, which derives in turn from posinere, which is connected to the modern word site. It is possible to move from one language to another, looking at nuances of difference in the concept of place by etymology, but inevitably it all comes back to the experience of being-in-a-place. As Augustine says of time, “I know what it is unless I am asked to define it.” The first knowledge of place is the experience of place.

In the Industrial Age, an understanding of place gave way to a different organizing idea – space. Abstraction rules, and the concepts of Space and Time take over our mode of thinking – even in science, where they have become the conjoined pair Spacetime. The pre-eminent geographer Yi Fu Tuan, notes in the introduction to his book Space and Place that space is the more abstract term (and therefore, in our modern framing, primary), and he explains that, “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”

But as Tuan himself reminds us in a different context, we all begin as infants, and it is difficult to imagine the newborn baby experiencing its first out-of-the-womb place, hopefully the warm and milky embrace of its loving mother, as an “undifferentiated space” which will somehow be transformed to a place by longer acquaintance. Place is a primary experience, so much so that when something happens we say it took place, that is became real, and when we have difficulty remembering who someone is we say we can’t place that person. To be is to be embedded in place.

Remaining with our newborn, the place he or she occupies at first, is rich in sensation but not in specifically visual sensation, which will later become a primary tool for the perception. Matters of touch—soft, hard, warm, cool, wet, dry—and of taste—sweet, sour, salty, bitter—are matters of survival. In our casual thinking we imagine our senses to be receptors of what the external world sends us (sound waves, touch, reflected light), and that is true enough. But it is through interacting with the world around us, the place we find ourselves, that our senses, acting together and in unity with other neural functions, begins to construct an experience of the world, the place, where we are. And if where we are is a “placeless place” we have lost something tangible and important.

Consider this. Our ability to see or picture the objects in our visual field has to be learned. By reaching for things, moving toward them or away from them or having them move toward or away from us, we construct a perception of dimension. If an adult with normal eyesight is fitted with special glasses that turn the visual field upside down, soon enough the perceiver will adjust and things will again look right side up. The data that correct the visual field come from other senses. Remove the glasses, and things will look upside down again, but only for a little while. Our senses perceive information that comes to us from outside, but working together and in concert with our sense of balance, the experience of gravity, our proprioceptive perceptions, and other developing neural activity, our senses reach out and grasp the world rather than waiting to passively receive it.

Most of us have had the experience of waking in a strange environment, and in the first moments of consciousness assembling the unfamiliar and confusing visual signals into a perception of a place that turns out to be utterly wrong. As we become more fully awake, we instantly revise the perception of where we are. The primary experience of place is not an external given but synthesized from sensory information by neural processes.

The experience that underlies our ability to grasp the place where we exist is an interpersonal experience. Brain development in the human child depends on a rich and active human environment. We learn to experience, including the primary experience of place, by interacting with others. Place is a social event.

Edward Casey, after ruminating on the relationship of place to space and time, concludes that the primary experience of place is of the event (of being in place) which inseparably combines in place both space and time.

Then how are the concepts of Space and Time understood?

The concept of space is abstracted from the experience of movement through place. One classic definition of time is that time is the measure of motion. A more abstract and modern version is that time is the progress of events in succession through past, present, and future. In both of these definitions, place is the primary experience from which the concept of time is abstracted in the same way the concept of space is abstracted from place.

OK. Why does it matter that for us to be is to be in a place?

In the Digital Age, the complexity and rate of change are eclipsing our institutional and our personal ability to adapt. What once worked is not working any longer and it won’t get better without us. Focusing on PLACE is in our DNA, it is how to regain the power of us.