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Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place

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Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place 29 Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place MICHAEL R. CURRY The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in extent of and connections among markets; or about interest in a series of questions like the following: is the appropriate ways to draw a map of the world, the world somehow getting smaller? Is the world one immediately finds sets of beliefs so contradic- becoming more homogeneous? Are unique places tory and yet so firmly held that this simple 'location disappearing? And more technically: how does one in space' understanding of places emerges as quite think about borders in an era in which information useless. Something better is needed. can move so freely? What can we expect to happen Here I would suggest that if one wishes to deal to the nation-state? Will national identity come to with these more complex questions one needs to see be redefined, or cease to exist? And finally: what that in every era there has been a close interconnec- has been the role of technology in the various tion between the technologies available for commu- changes that have occurred? nication and representation and the ways in which If these questions have been in the air for many people have conceptualized space and place. years, there can be little doubt that they have Indeed, in a particular era one cannot really make become more frequent since the development of the sense of those technologies without having an Internet, and that they are now posed with a greater understanding of the ways in which space and place sense of urgency. Might not there be a true declara- are conceptualized, just as one cannot understand tion of independence for cyberspace? How can we those conceptualizations without having an under- be sure of the dangers lurking there? What kind of standing of the available technologies. world will we live in when e-commerce sites What follows will be in four sections. First, I replace the corner store? And, who am I, really, shall lay out three traditional ways of thinking when so many of my interactions with others are about space - as place, region and space. I shall technologically mediated? These are all questions, show that each of those conceptions can only be in the end, about places and about interactions in understood against the background of the technolo- space. For that reason, in order to formulate reason- gies available for the storage of knowledge, and for able answers to these questions one needs an under- the representation and communication of that standing of the concepts of space and of place. knowledge. It may at first glance seem that the matter is Second, I shall turn to the modem era. I shall simple - the world is a world of places within'a show the ways in which elements of each of these larger space. Yet if this simple answer works pass- earlier conceptions of space and place were in the ably when one is trying to decide how to organize a seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fashioned into closet, it runs out of explanatory power well before versions of what is now taken to be common one attempts to mobilize it in answering the ques- sense. This new common sense set the stage for the tions raised above. When one turns to concrete development of a wide range of modern intellectual questions, about the source of territorial disputes, enterprises - from physics to political theory - but has and the possibility of their resolution; or about the at the same time fimctioned to obscure and devalue AMBIGUITY OF SPACE AND PLACE 503 certain still important elements of the traditional On Topography experience and understanding of space and place. Third, I shall point to one very important reason The concepts of choros and topos raise immediate why this process of obscuring has itself remained problems, just because over a period of several obscure: certain features of the concepts of space hundred years the two terms traded meanings. As and place allow and even encourage a kind of dis- E.V. Walter has noted (1988: 120-l), choros, the cursive displacement. Through this process a group older of the two, originally appealed to subjective of authors, or even a single author, find themselves meanings, to the emotional cast associated with a using terms like space and place in multiple ways; place, as well as to the more ‘objective’ features of and it can easily appear that a rich and inclusive location; in contrast, the newer topos, which concept is being invoked, where the richness is in appeared for the fist time in Aeschylus in about fact only apparent. 470 BC, was typically used to refer to this more And finally, I shall turn to some current concerns objective sense of the term ‘place’. But by the third about the relationship between technology and century topos had begun to be used in the expres- society. I shall show that these concerns are typi- sion for holy places, while choros had begun to be cally couched in terms of one or more of the spatial used to refer to what we would now think of as conceptions that I have described. It turns out that regions, to administrative districts, and in the this contemporary discourse is very much subject to process had begun to lose its emotional tinge. discursive displacement, and we often find that By the time of Ptolemy it appears to have come people who appear to be presenting opposing view- to be accepted that there existed a topographic tra- points are simply talking about different matters. dition and a chorographic one, where the topo- Yet here, as is so often the case, this displacement graphic appeared to require skill in drawing, and the has a positive side; it is part of the sometimes con- chorographic dealt ‘for the most part, with the scious process by which language changes, and nature rather than the size of the lands’ and with through which the relationships among disparate ‘qualitative matters’ (Ptolemy, 1948: 163). Yet this phenomena come to be understood. way of rendering the distinction, laid out in the second century AD, misses something essential. We can begin to get at that something if we note TOPOGRAPHY,CHOROGRAPHY rather a different way of characterizing the topo- AND GEOGRAPHY graphical tradition. As Fred Lulcermann suggested, in classical geography The concern with the nature of places on the face ‘Topography’ was defmed as the order of discrete units of the earth and with the spatial organization of those one to another. ‘Topographical location’ was referent places - and of human activity more generally - solely to the contiguity of places. (1961: 194) has long been the vocation of geographers. But in Now, this notion of a topographical description as fact, the term ‘geography’ today encompasseswhat referring to the ‘order of discrete units’ may seem were previously thought of as three rather separate perplexing, unless we note an essential feature of forms of inquiry. And although the three had in a topographical accounts. While it would seem odd to sense been stitched together by the time of Ptolemy devote oneself to constructing a simple list of the (born about AD loo), the fact that they once were order of places (one would have the equivalent of a separate is indicative of their pointing to three very railroad timetable, without the time), if that list is in different ways of conceptualizing space and place, the form of a chronology or narrative of what was three different ways of gaining knowledge of them, seen as one went from place to place the project and three different ways of representing that seems far more comprehensible. knowledge. Indeed, we find just such topographical descrip- The three forms of inquiry are topography, tions in Homer, where chorography and geography. Putting the matter most simply, topography was traditionally the art of We reached the Aeolian island next, the home of writing about places; chorography the art of writing Aeolus, about regions; and geography the art of writing Hippotas’ son, beloved by the gods who never die - about the earth as a whole. This would seem to sug- a great floating island it was, and round it all gest that each form of inquiry or activity appeals to huge ramparts rise of indestructible bronze a different scale, fkom small to large, that of the and sheer rock cliffs shoot up from sea to sky. topos, the choros or the geos. But to put the matter (Ho~Fx, 1996: X, 1-5) in this way is to risk giving away the game, by see- ing these inquiries from a decidedly contemporary Here the reference to Homer points to a central perspective. For to see the differences as in a sense feature of the topographic account of a place - merely of degree is to miss the true distinctiveness that such accounts developed within cultures that of each concept. did not use writing. They were originally oral 504 CULTURE AND NEW MEDIA accounts, ordered in narrative and therefore world in which one is actively searching for some temporal terms. They were accounts of places in simplifying world picture. Rather, it is a world in terms of the things that a traveller saw, or would which people inhabit places, where the relation- see, along a certain route. ships between those places and others are repre- Well known among topographical descriptions sented just in terms of narrative and symbol. have been what are termed periploi, accounts of If within the topographic tradition places are rep- ‘sailing around’ some place.
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