Thinking About Space

I am reading Edward Casey’s Giving a Face to Place in the Present: Bachelard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray (from The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History) and so far, I am impressed with a few of the ideas he sews together – something I wish I had read before I wrote my MA thesis, but I have to let go of that someday 😉

There are a few ideas (so far – I am not finished reading the chapter) that have me thinking. Firstly, the idea (from Bachelard) that space trumps place in terms of memory. This is my interpretation of pages 288-9. If we think about it, when we search in our memory, we can reconstruct the place and space of events, but often, time becomes distorted and loses its hierarchical dominance on the flow of events, situating memory (and one’s inner self) in the concreteness of space/place. This has me thinking about memories of a virtual/digital nature. On page 288 Casey writes: “he (Bachelard) is holding that there is a valid sense of place for nonsensible items; place can be nonphysical and yet still count fully as place“. For me, this is an important sentence if I am trying to situate the “reality” of mmorpg experiences and memories. No grand results at the moment though, simply something that made me go “hmm”.

Secondly,  there is a great talk about home and house, dwelling and memory in terms of place. In describing memory of space and geometry of one’s home, he quotes Bachelard to express memory as iterated by habit: “We are the diagram of the functions inhabiting that particular house” (p. 291). As a functionalist at heart (shhhh!) I really like the idea of this. Our memories are created through a collection of functional patterns that define our physical space, and I would venture our digital spaces as well. When I think of my online activity (and I have blogged this before – will dig it up later) the patterns of my website visiting creates a map of activity and memory that could be physically sketched out to create what I consider to be my personal ‘home’ online.

Casey goes on to discuss Bachelard’s ‘concrete topoanalysis’ by outlining four concrete traits when discussing the “in” of inhabitation  The one that has me going “hmm” again is the concept of  “in” in relation to its pairing with “out” Casey writes that it “cannot be reduced to the ‘here/there'”( P, 293). It is not a simple dichotomous relationship in/out – here/there – but rather a fluid relationship of space and being. The little “hmm” inside my head is pointing me towards random ideas of immersion, hybridity of digital space – inhabiting a virtual world while simulatenously physically existing in ‘meatspace’. Again, I have nothing more at the moment than random thoughts, light bulb moments and ponderous hmmms.