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PHILOSOPHY MUSIC |
Arnold Berleant
A B S T R A C T Among the many meanings of place, one aspect that is often overlooked is its aesthetic dimension. Using T. Coraghessan Boyle's story, "Greasy Lake," as a foil, this paper explores the aesthetic in place as involving an engagement of the conscious body with a physical location. What emerges is the aesthetic, not only as a factor in the experience of place but as one of its essential features. The idea of a sacred place helps to identify place as an aesthetic field. In addition to its bearing on the understanding of place, the aesthetic also has important implications for constructing place. Introduction I want to begin with a quotation and then a question. "At night we went up to Greasy Lake. Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. The Indians had called it Wakan, a reference to the clarity of its waters. Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it. We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich scent of possibility on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets. This was nature."[1] Now my question is, Is Greasy Lake a place? And, if so, what kind of place? Perhaps by the time we come toward the end of this essay, we shall be able to answer it. But if we cannot respond, can we dismiss the question? 'Place' has become an "in" word. From the mass media to advertising, from the travel industry to the real estate industry, from sociology to geography, the fascination with place testifies, I suspect, not so much to the discovery of a hidden value as to a widespread if unconscious lament over its absence. Many of us, particularly in the industrial world, inhabit anonymous environments whose bland sterility is disguised by shiny plastic and glass surfaces. We live and work in industrialized landscapes of insular factories, strip malls, and office towers, moving with clockwork regularity along highways that are self-propelled conveyor belts, to faceless apartment buildings and generic suburbs. Yet we dream of some ideal place where we shall truly be at home. Besides creating an insatiable market for paradise in the form of idyllic vacations or escapes to exotic lands, the placelessness we suffer from reinforces -- and perhaps epitomizes-- a culture of dissatisfaction. Yet what constitutes place? Many disciplines offer many answers, ranging from simple location to the intensely present, self-transcending experience of sacred space. Our understanding and respect for the importance of place have widened and deepened from the work done over the past thirty years. But there is one dimension of place that is easily overlooked, a dimension that may be the most critical of all because it concerns experience of the most primary sort – aesthetic. Our understanding of place, multi-faceted though it be, can be enlarged still more from an increased awareness of its aesthetic dimension. To reveal this often misunderstood, often overlooked dimension is what I want to undertake here. Further, I want to explore the possibility that, in grasping the aesthetic character of place, we are not merely identifying another aspect of this complex idea but rather are probing its very center. Like Plotinus's sun, the aesthetic radiance of place illuminates its every appearance, even as its intensity decreases the farther we go from its source until place merges with the all-encompassing darkness of its negation. Some determinants of place In its most basic sense, place is the setting for the events of human living. It is the locus of action and intention, and present in all consciousness and perceptual experience. This human focus is what distinguishes place from the surrounding space or from simple location.[2] Humanistic geographers emphasize this anthropocentric meaning, a meaning that comes about through experience.[3] Place for them is the location of experience. It is realized as a set of "environmental relations created in the process of human dwelling....internally connected with time and self...." "Place thus provides an organizing principle for...a person's engagement or immersion in the world around" him or her.[4] This most general condition is basic to an understanding of place, but by being basic and general, it does not say enough about what is distinctive and memorable in this fundamental idea. Some things can be said about place generally that few would contest. One of these is a special sense of physical identity that a location can convey. Certain qualities set it apart. It may be a physical unity conveyed through topographical features, as being bounded by hills or mountains, or being partly or wholly surrounded by water. On the other hand, a central reference point rather than a boundary may bestow identity--a harbor, a mountain, or a monumental building, such as a church, temple, or mosque. On a more modest scale, a center may be a village common or square, a venerable or giant tree, a monument, or a great pole. Physical coherence is another trait that can convey a sense of place. A high degree of architectural similarity or compatibility may create the sense of a distinctive place. This is especially the case when it contrasts with other, nearby areas, as in a historic district, the old center of a large city, or an architecturally distinguished new development. This last raises the issue of perceived value. A suburban development built to one or two conventional models has architectural coherence. But while this imparts identity to the neighborhood, it is not likely to convey the feeling of enhanced presence that we associate with place. Coherence may also be conveyed by boundaries, as in an urban square, common, or plaza, or a bounded interior space, as the walls of a room or a house. We may realize place in a neighborhood or town that possesses a high degree of coherence relative to its scale. This may be true, as well, of a region, such as a mountainous area or a coastline. Specific examples of all these may come easily to mind, but I hesitate to mention any here for fear of deflecting consideration of the validity of the idea by a disagreement over particular cases. Of course physical characteristics alone do not create place. Cultural geographers are right in joining the human factor to these features. Whether this connection comes about through actions, practices, or institutions, or through the simple presence of a conscious, sensing person, it is in the interaction of human sensibility with an appropriate physical location that place acquires its distinctive meaning. One common form that this takes is in historical or cultural associations. Sometimes these predominate in giving identity to a location not otherwise distinguished, as may occur with the site of a battlefield or a massacre, a building or site where an important document was signed, or the birthplace or home of a famous person. In such instances, place depends not so much on its physical characteristics as on the aura with which our knowledge invests the location. Personal memory may also imbue an area with a similar distinction. Such features, then, as distinguishing physical identity and coherence, together with the consciousness of significance, can contribute to the sense of a distinctive presence that we associate with the special character of place. These are important and they need to be carefully specified in each individual case. But there is, I think, something more to the special quality of place, a dimension that is not so much a physical characteristic or a cultural layer of meaning as something that underlies these more articulable features. This is its aesthetic dimension. Let me develop this in two directions. One is to suggest a descriptive account of the aesthetic experience of place. Like any such description, aspects of it will be peculiar to the individual case and the personal experience, while other aspects will be characteristic of a cultural sensibility. Yet perhaps some features will possess a generality that may be theoretically useful. My second purpose is rather different. It is to draw out some of the implications of this description of experience for the design of place, or rather for designing the conditions in which a full experience of place can occur. The aesthetic in place We ordinarily think of aesthetic as referring to art, to the value that distinguishes art objects from other, more ordinary things and occasions. At times we ascribe this value beyond art to nature, as when we admire a landscape or delight in the intimate wonder of a spring flower or glorious sunset. But what can this aesthetic value have to do with place? To deal with this question we need to focus, not on the occasion or the object we call beautiful, but on the experience we have at such times and on the qualities and characteristics of the situation of which that experience is a part. For what we value here lies, I think, not wholly in a work of art or a natural occurrence but in the conditions under which we encounter it and in what takes place. What, then, characterizes such an aesthetic situation? In answering this, it is important to return to the etymological origins of the term itself.[5] The word 'aesthetics' comes from the Greek aisthsis, literally perception by the senses. For Baumgarten, who in 1750 identified it as a distinct discipline, aesthetics is the science of sensory knowledge directed toward beauty, and art entails the perfection of sensory awareness.[6] This observation is not only historically important; it sets the scene for understanding the field of aesthetics squarely on the basis of sense perception. Moreover, there can be no perception, direct or imaginative, without the body and, as it is human experience we are concerned with, the conscious, active human body. Given the development of the field of aesthetics into complex theoretical issues in the ensuing two and a half centuries, it is important to reaffirm this sensory connection. Aesthetic perception then becomes not a purely conscious act and not a merely subjective occurrence; rather it is grounded in the human body and the existential conditions of human life. These conditions are important to specify because they bear directly on our understanding of the aesthetics of place. People are embedded in their world, their life-world, to use a term from phenomenology. A constant exchange takes place between organism and environment, both of which are so intimately bound up with each other that our conceptual discriminations serve only heuristic purposes and often mislead us. For instance, we readily speak of an interaction of person and object or person and place, but the term 'interaction' presupposes an initial division that is then bridged. Yet in the most basic sense of existence, there is no separation but rather a fusion of things usually thought of as discrete entities, such as body and consciousness, culture and organism, inner thought and an external world. Therefore we may understand the setting of human life as an integration of person and her or his environment.[7] As humans we are inescapably embedded in a life-world that incorporates our physical bodies, our personal and communal histories, our social education and practices and, not least, our cultural ethos. Perception is integral to our experience of that world, and this means that the aesthetic is grounded in the very conditions of living. Perception, however, cannot be understood prejudicially as primarily visual. Particularly in environmental experience, perception is synaesthetic, since all the senses are engaged in a homogeneous fashion. The usual discrimination of the senses that gives primacy to distance over contact receptors not only tends to denigrate our physical experience of the world but leads to the tendency to ignore the formative importance of the senses in being closely bound up with the body. Environmental experience involves the contact senses; it is "intimate sensing," as one geographer puts it.[8] These senses include the haptic sensory system, which covers not only touch but the subcutaneous perception of surface texture, contour, pressure, temperature, humidity, pain, and visceral sensation. To this we must add the kinesthetic sense, which includes muscular awareness and skeletal or joint sensation through which we perceive position and solidity from the degree of resistance that surfaces have. And by means of the vestibular system we indirectly grasp body movement in climbing and descending, turning and twisting, moving freely or among obstructions. In such ways, environmental perception engages our full capacity for sensory perception in an interpenetration of body and context.[9] To know a place is to experience that environment. What, then, is it to experience place? What is distinctive about the aesthetic experience of place? One crucial feature is that, by introducing the aesthetic dimension, place becomes demarcated by the range of perception. This restricts its scope in any instance to the particular context of perceptual experience. Place in this sense, then, applies only to a complex field of perceptual experience involving person and setting, together with the range of historical and cultural influence, knowledge, and meaning that invariably imbue that field. This is a critical point for our purposes, since it confines the aesthetics of place to contexts that embody direct experience, such as a room, home, building, street, square, or neighborhood, and only by extension to a city, region, or country. The same point applies to identifying places in a natural environment. This demarcation, moreover, is never sharp, for when the scope of an environment extends beyond perception that is immediate and direct, its vividness decreases as its scope increases from, say, a neighborhood to an entire town, a province, or a country. Perhaps another way of recognizing this difference is to distinguish between place and environment. Environment is by far the wider concept. While it includes place, the range of its denotation can extend from the local to the cosmic. The most general meaning of place as aesthetic, then, is a particular perceptual environment that joins a distinctive identity and coherence with a memorable character, and with which we actively engage in attention or action. An authentic sense of place involves "being inside and belonging to your place both as an individual and as a member of a community, and to know this without reflecting upon it."[10] Sacred place A central concern in searching for the heart of place lies in identifying the human role. As with the concept of environment, place is usually understood as related to but distinct from the human participant. Karjalainen takes as basic the notion that "places provide human beings with a framework for environmental involvement." Both people and places make a contribution: "Palpable landscapes and impalpable mindscapes continually intermingle and form internal relations with each other."[11] True as this characterization is, I do not believe that it entirely grasps what is exceptional about our most compelling experiences of place. This is where the idea of sacred space can serve as a guiding beacon. I should like to develop the idea of an aesthetics of place, then, not from the outside, carefully adding traits to the most general conditions of what constitutes place in order to arrive at a highly refined notion of its aesthetic, but from inside the experience, as it were. And it is here that sacred space can be a powerful exemplar of the aesthetic in place. In sacred space, we find a touchstone from which to consider its other meanings and uses.[12] Although I shall begin by citing some instances of sacred places, I am somewhat reluctant to do so because examples will inevitably suggest the idea that 'place' is a physical location. However, as I develop its aesthetic import it will become apparent that a sacred place is never a location only. As fully aesthetic, it becomes an environmental event that fuses participant and location in an aesthetic field. But for the moment, it will be helpful to mention briefly the physical location of some of the most well-known sacred places. One is the Louvre, with its spreading magnificence of scale, structure, space. Another is the Guggenheim Museum, with its spiral exterior form and its ascending and descending spiraling interior space. The Piazza San Marco is probably the most famous of squares, with its articulated sides, active surfaces, and embracing but unconfining boundaries. The form of the Gothic cathedral is for many the physical embodiment of the religious sacred, joining the individual worshiper with the community and the transcendent order of things.[13] Sacredness, however, lies not in the physical place alone but in the significance that people experience and assign to it. 'Sacredness' is a human designation, and even here we find a range of meanings. In its most pallid sense, a sacred place may refer to land valued not for commercial reasons but because it is most beautiful, most healthy, most productive.[14] Generally, however, we concentrate considerably more normative significance on the idea than this. Let us explore it further. The concept of the sacred can refer to a place, to an experience, or to something more complex: place experience. In associating the sacred with aesthetic experience, Hepburn identifies a strong perceptual focus, the recognition that things have more than utilitarian value but a condition "where we can find...modes of being other than our own," together with respect, reverence, and wonder. This last conveys a religious-metaphysical meaning that cannot be suppressed – the sense of humility and awe toward something that has intrinsic value.[15] A place may be sacred because it is invested with great personal meaning, perhaps where an event of life-changing proportions occurred. Or, more modestly, it may be a place precious to us because it is where we can come in touch with our deepest layers. A sacred place may have irresistible force through its social or cultural significance. Yet the personal and social are themselves not clearly distinguishable, for our social experiences resonate deep in our most private thoughts, and the cultural process that shapes our language, speech, comportment, and goals forms that person we call ourselves. But whatever the primary source of its reverential significance, a place becomes sacred, I believe, by its power to assimilate a person, producing a synthesis of space, physical features, and the dynamic, conscious body. Often we recognize this occurrence by a feeling of wonder and perhaps even breathless awe. Part of this may come from the rarity of such a self-transcending event. Such an experience of place resembles our encounter with the noblest works of art, whose force overwhelms and engulfs those who engage with it. I call this experience of appreciative immersion 'aesthetic engagement,' the perceptual experience of total absorption in the work at hand. Moreover, this term serves equally well to denote the most compelling experiences of the so-called fine arts and of environment. A sacred place, then, offers the willing participant a high degree of aesthetic engagement and engenders an experience that is intensely positive: As we expand beyond our finite boundaries, we may be overcome by a pervasive benignity conjoined with a sense of humility at the power such a situation generates. Our world has been gifted with many artists who, in their works, have created the conditions for experiencing the sacred. Such occasions occur in all the arts. Music is a particularly rich source, for it is an art whose auditory properties can convey the spatial and architectural characteristics we associate with place. Some works announce this quality at the very beginning, such as the Fauré Requiem, Beethoven's Ninth, and the Sibelius Violin Concerto, while others develop it cumulatively, as happens in Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Handel's Messiah. Among the many instances from the arts of space and volume, overwhelming encounters of the aesthetic sacred can occur with Brancusi's Endless Column and the Rothko Chapel. The last of these is a powerful illustration of a place explicitly designed to be sacred, and the force that the Chapel evokes is almost palpable as one approaches and enters it. These various examples, however, are only the signs of possible sacred occasions. They are reminders of what one may experience when engaging with those works. For such an experience to occur, a ready participant must join an evocative object in a compelling situation. Sacred places offer a guide to what gives "place" its special quality and force. Of course the world is mostly made up of less-than-sacred places. But their leading features—the full perceptual engagement of a perceiver with a location that possesses identity and coherence in a seamless unity of experience— lie at the center of place. These occur with weaker intensity on less profound occasions. Yet however vivid it may be, the peculiar force of this experience of place lies in the fact that "we do not grasp space only by our senses...we live in it, we project our personality into it, we are tied to it by emotional bonds; space is not just perceived...it is lived."[16] We can also discover the aesthetic in the ordinary locations that bind us to them, and these place locations may occur on different scales. They may be a town common, a public building, a traditional path, or a room distinguished by strong emotional or use associations. Others may be a traditional beach, a hill or mountain, or a monument that stands as a focal point of local identity. An aesthetic place may perhaps even be an empty lot in a city neighborhood that exhibits little of the beauty of a landscaped garden. For a local child, however, the wildflowers, tall weeds, and rugged ground may offer the delight and charm of a realm of fantasy and adventure. Such locations as these can provide the circumstances that encourage the aesthetic engagement that sacred places have the capacity to evoke so forcefully. Wherever it be, the aesthetic experience of place is one of inhabitation, of 'dwelling,' to use Heidegger's term, of engagement. It is important to recall the dimension that meaning can add to this kind of experience. Place locations often possess a certain resonance as a repository of social, cultural, or personal significance. Traces of the past that are visible in a townscape form a kind of materialized memory. Walter Benjamin noted this in relation to Paris. He saw Paris and its arcades as the past materialized in space, as the embodiment of a collective memory, and an historical index marks the date when these sights become legible as such. Place is thus not only a topographical-geographical designation but one that also embodies meaning: The city, one's body, and psychological space interpenetrate.[17] Memory may even confer an enhanced presence on a location that is otherwise undistinguished.[18] Thus, material form, sensuous apprehension, and social or personal significance can together create the special perceptual experience of aesthetic engagement that distinguishes place from simple geographical location. Some implications Exploring the idea of place in this way leads to some curious questions and even more curious answers. For example, is 'place' a personal designation or a communal one? Surely we must acknowledge the public status of the location of many of our most striking experiences of place. On the other hand, if place is not simply a location but the experience of one, then it is necessary to think of it as dependent on the presence and participation of people. Place then identifies a particular sort of environmental encounter. So the question of whether place is personal or communal can be answered in the affirmative in both cases: Place may be a communal designation for locations commonly experienced in the significant way I have tried to describe. But at the same time, place is ultimately an experiential event, and thus its referent is a contextual human situation centered in personal experience. Another question is its locus. Does place require a physical location or can it be non-material? Can the electronic space of the computer take on the attributes of place? Is there cyberplace in cyberspace?[19] How this is answered obviously depends on one's definition of place. If place requires a physical location, then clearly no place is possible in cyberspace. That would please many, since the view is common that the computer constructs a fictitious world in which nothing is real but only virtual. If, on the other hand, we define place as a location with which we become assimilated in aesthetic experience, then it may be that place does indeed exist in cyberspace. The same total absorption that people used to experience when they still read novels is now common with the computer.[20] The work being done in creating domains of virtual reality has great significance, for many of the same questions that can be asked about actual, or better yet, common sense reality, can also be posed here. The possibility of constructing cyberplace has applications in areas in addition to the virtual world of computer games, such as virtual archaeology.[21] But irrespective of where it is located, the human component is critical. Issues concerning immaterial place do not appear only in relation to computer technology:[22] www.learningsites.com/NWPalace/NW_Render_archives.htm Similar questions can be asked about dream space and imagined space. There is, indeed, something to be gained in explanatory force from a definition of place that is not earthbound. It may be that some of our most vivid and compelling experiences of place occur in space that is imaginary or in dreams. These may be seen as a comment on the spaces in which many of us live in industrialized environments, spaces that at the least are not memorable and that often provide what is perhaps our most common experience of location, placelessness. For there is an obverse side to the meaning of place that is found in built environments that are inauthentic, that have no distinctive identity and that evoke experiences that are pallid or superficial.[23] This leads us to ask whether a location that goes beyond the bland and becomes offensive or ugly can be experienced as a place: Is Greasy Lake a sacred place? Despite the repugnance with which we may hold the scene that Coraghessan Boyle describes in his unusual story, it does, in fact, meet the criteria I developed in my discussion of place. The three youths in the story are sensitive to the compelling quality of Greasy Lake. They are caught up in its spirit, lose their sense of discrete selfhood, and engage in wild, impulsive, aggressive behavior that exactly carries out meanings embodied in that place. But of course there is nothing edifying in the self-transcendence they experienced. Their response to the powerful force that the lake exercises on them is hardly positive; in fact, it is just the contrary. So, then, what kind of place is Greasy Lake? One of the many confusions to which the term 'aesthetic' gives rise is the assumption that it denotes experiences that enrich and even ennoble those who engage in the special, highly valued perceptual situations we call aesthetic. I think this is a confusion because the very same qualities we praise as aesthetic – an intense sensory presence, directly felt, resonant meaning, and expanded awareness – can, on the other side of the scale, be offensive and possibly harmful. An aesthetic standard can be applied with equal effectiveness to failures of taste and to anaesthetized or oppressed sensibilities. Aesthetic perception is involved here, but it is frustrated, offended, even damaged. Rather than exclude such experiences from the realm of the aesthetic and therefore render them immune to critical aesthetic judgment, we must regard them as occupying the negative side of a scale of values in an all-embracing aesthetic. What is at work, then, is a negative aesthetic, one that shifts experience below the level of neutral ground and into "the all-encompassing darkness" mentioned before, into the nether regions of negative value.[24] Negative place thus differs from placelessness. It is experience of the dark side of place and, in its own way, testifies to the power that place exercises on its inhabitants. Greasy Lake is thus an "anti-sacred" place, forcefully exhibiting the negation of many of the features of the sacred. But it may be too hasty to write it off as an aesthetic failure: Does Greasy Lake indeed carry a negative aesthetic? Our dismay at the events in the story, at their violence, coarse sexuality, brute anger and fear, is indeed not so much an aesthetic concern as a moral one. Moreover, discomfort and even fear are also compatible with a positive aesthetic: witness the long fascination with the sublime. So perhaps our discomfiture with Greasy Lake raises ethical issues fused with aesthetic ones but distinguishable from them. In its forceful presence and transcendent power, Greasy Lake may indeed be an aesthetic success. Where, then, do we experience negative places, if not at Greasy Lake? While some places may be as forceful in their own way as Greasy Lake is in its, the aesthetic of most, whether positive or negative, may not quite achieve the power of the sacred and many may fall well short of this. Yet this may, in fact, may make negative places all the more insidious. Perhaps in its emptiness of all character, we may see placelessness as falling flat on the neutral center of the scale. From this point on down the ladder of negativity we can find many familiar failures, from the depressing anonymity of suburban streets to the oppressive hyperstimulation of shopping malls, from the vulgarity of commercial strips to the raw devastation of strip mines. Interestingly, placeless or negative places may in time metamorphose into rewarding places through physical or conceptual changes. Levittown has changed from a development of anonymous regularity into an area of architectural variety and local pride.[25] Some regard the architectural design of Las Vegas not as a display of vulgar sensationalism but as a vibrant beacon of vitality. Designing place Place, then, is not a physical location nor is it a state of mind. Rather we hve characterized it as the engagement of the conscious body with the conditions of a specific location. This brings us to a further question: How can this understanding of the aesthetics of place influence the making of place? One way to answer this is to say that the goal of good place design is to create conditions that convey a touch of the sacred. Such designs need not necessarily be profound but they must nonetheless have a significant presence. To achieve this is as much an artistic as a technological task. In fact, it requires the use of science in the service of art, for no glib formula can achieve place. A mechanical solution is a sure prescription for the failures we find in such conventions as the routine emulation of the international style or the clichés of postmodern architectural design, such as the Palladian window. Not only is there no convenient recipe for place-making, but the abstract visual techniques that are the stock-in-trade of architectural design, such as the plan, elevation, parti, model, and computer-generated simulations, are at best partial and often misleading. For place to be aesthetically successful, designers must develop their perceptual capacities, including kinesthetic consciousness, somatic spatial awareness, the sensory recognition of volumes and textures, auditory acuteness, and the richly complex sensibility of synaesthetic perception. Each site, each project, each situation is different, and a sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in its unique features will help in designing distinctive and authentic places. It would be valuable, too, I think, for designers to acquire a phenomenological perspective – an intense awareness of the actual direct experience of sites and structures, and to learn to convert this into a sensitivity to the creative possibilities of specific locations. It is in working through such experience that real places may emerge.[26] Like any art, place design combines technical mastery with aesthetic sensibility. Place design may be compared with architectural design, in fact it can be considered to encompass it, for architecture is part of the larger endeavor to create human places. All such efforts require a conjoining of art and science, and all are vulnerable to prosaic formulas. Most important, they offer the same opportunity to create conditions in the world in which people can be at home. Like architecture, place design creates the conditions for dwelling. Art, whatever more it may be, is at its etymological base the skill in making something. All the arts construct the conditions for intrinsic experience, and, if the design of place is to be an art, its goal must be that of all the arts: the shaping of experience. A poetics of place must put the aesthetic in place. "Is Greasy Lake a Place?", lecture given at the University of Joensuu, April 1, 2003. [1] T. Coraghessan Boyle, "Greasy Lake," in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, ed. Richard Ford (London: Granta Books, 1993), p.555. [2] See E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), pp.42-43. [3] Yi-Tu Tuan, "Place: an experiential perspective." The Geographical Review, 65, 2 (1975), 151. [4] Pauli Tapani Karjalainen, "Place and Intimate Sensing," Nordisk Samhällsgeografisk Tidskrift [The Nordic Journal of Social Geography], 27 (1998). [5] Wolfgang Welch has emphasized the etymological sense of aesthetics (lit. aisthsis, perception by the senses) in much of his work. See Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997), pp.5-7. Also Wolfgang Welch, "Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics: Toward a New Form of the Discipline," Literature and Aesthetics, Oct. 1997, 17ff. [6] Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Frankfurt a. O., 1750), Vol. I. [7] "In this cultural environment, people are embedded in their world. We are implicated in a constant process of action and response from which it is not possible to stand apart. A physical interaction of body and setting, a psychological interconnection of consciousness and culture, a dynamic harmony of sensory awareness all make a person inseparable from his or her environmental situation. Traditional dualisms, such as those separating idea and object, self and others, inner consciousness and external world, dissolve in the integration of person and place. A new conception of the human being thus emerges. Humans are seen as organic, conscious, social organisms, experiential nodes that are both the product and the generator of environmental forces. These forces are not only physical objects and conditions, in the usual meaning of environment. As we have seen, they also include somatic, psychological, historical, and cultural conditions. Environment becomes the matrix of all such forces. As an integral part of an environmental field, we both shape and are formed by the multitude of forces that produce the experiential qualities of the universe we inhabit. These qualities constitute the perceptual domain in which we engage in aesthetic experience." Arnold Berleant, "The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic," The Great Book of Aesthetics: Proceedings of the XVT International Congress of Aesthetics (Tokyo, Japan: forthcoming). [8] J. Douglas Porteous, "Intimate Sensing," Area 18, 250-251. See also Karjalainen, op.cit. [9] See James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). Also Arnold Berleant, "Environmental Aesthetics," in Art and Environment, Proceedings of Sanart III Symposium, Ankara, forthcoming. [10] Relph, op.cit., p.65. [11] Pauli Tapani Karjalainen, "Real Pace Images," in The City as Cultural Metaphor, ed. A. Haapala (Lahti, Finland: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, 1998), pp.95, 101. [12] In the context of such a discussion of the sacred as this, it is common to speak of sacred space. However, I believe that space is both too abstract a term and too diaphanous to adequately denote the particularity and materiality of those locations where we experience the sacred. The discussion that follows, then, will center on the notion of a place as sacred. [13] See Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp.74-75. [14] Noel Perrin, Introduction to Dennis Stock, New England Memories (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1989). [15] Ronald W. Hepburn, "Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics," in The Reach of the Aesthetic (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), pp.124-125, 127. E. Relph's characterization of existential space resembles this account of sacred space. [16] G. Matoré, L'Espace Humain (Paris: La Columbe, 1962), pp.22-23. Quoted in Relph, p.10. [17] Mari Laanemets, "Places That Remember," in Kaia Lehari and Virve Sarapik, eds., Koht ja Paik / Place and Location (Estonian Academy of Arts, 2000), pp.73-75. [18] See Frances Downing, Remembrance and the Design of Place (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000). [19] William Gibson, who is considered to have coined the term 'cyberspace' in his novel Neuromancer, "created a world in which information can be accessed via neurally wired maps that interconnect with the world-wide lattice of information flow, which registers the user's/immersant's location within the system" Richard K. Merritt,"From Memory Arts to the New Code Paradigm: The Artist as Engineer of Virtual Information Space and Virtual Experience," Leonardo 34, 5 (2001), p.405. [20] Software designers have made this explicit. There are about a dozen online computer role-playing games that establish virtual worlds. One of the most ambitious is Sony's game, EverQuest, whose half a million subscribers inhabit a virtual world called Norrath. The strong communities that develop around these games enter into commercial systems that use an internal currency. Yet these often spill out into the "real" world through internet auction sites where digital goods are traded for cash. Sean Dodson, "Playing for keeps in the cyberland of Norrath," Guardian Weekly, March 28 - April 3 2002, 23. [21] A consortium of university researchers and private firms is developing life-size virtual reality applications, including haptic tools to enable one to feel draperies, clothing and structural surfaces. This is being applied to the virtual reconstruction of archeological sites, in particular the ninth century B.C.E. palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal. See UB Today, Winter 2002. See also [22] See Patricia Donovan, "Digital Archaeology," in UB Today, Winter 2002, pp.18-21. Further information can be found on the following web sites: www.classics.buffalo.edu/htm/UBVirtualSiteMuseum/summaryNimrud.htm www.learningsites.com/NWPalace/NWPalhome.html [23] See E. Relph, Place and Placelessness, Ch. 6; also his "Sense of Place," in Susan Hanson, ed., Ten Geographic Ideas That Changed the World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp.205-226. [24] This, of course, but mentions a large and important issue about which I have written elsewhere but which would deflect us from our main purpose here to pursue farther. See "The Human Touch and the Beauty of Nature," in Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997) Ch. 4. [25] Residents of Levittown have protested against raised ranches because they are seen as destroying the historic character of the area. [26] "You should never plan a road if you haven't visited the place many times. It is not enough to go there once...You should go in different moods. You should go when you're drunk, and try the feeling of how it is to sing in the forest. You should go the following day when you have a hangover. You should go when your heart is broken...Then perhaps you know if you can build that road or not." Risto Lotvonen, resident of Hyvinkää, quoted in Pauline von Bonsdorff, ed., Ymparistoestiikan Polkuja (Paths of Environmental Aesthetics) (International Institute of Applied Aesthetics Series, Vol. 2, Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 1966), p.130. Also mentioned by Emily Brady, "The Aesthetics of the Natural Environment," in V. Pratt et al., eds. Environment and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999), p.159. We should follow "...an approach that is responsive to local structures of meaning and experience, to particular situations and to the variety of levels of meaning of place; an approach that takes its inspiration from the existential significance of place, the need that many people have for a profound attachment to places, and the ontological principles of dwelling and sparing identified by Heidegger. Such an approach cannot provide precise solutions to clearly defined problems, but, proceeding from an appreciation of the significance of place and the particular activities and local situations, it wold perhaps provide a way of outlining some of the main directions and possibilities, thus allowing scope for individuals and groups to make their own places, and to give those places authenticity and significance by modifying them and by swelling in them." Relph, p.146. |