Placement

In discussions of space and place, “placement” invites consideration of an object being in a particular location. Placement can be deployed literally or figuratively, but essentially it refers to where a thing is situated. Yet placement can go beyond simply describing where a thing is presently located. It can suggest where something should or should not be situated.

Placement provides a foundation whose meaning can be nuanced by prefixes. If something is “em-placed,” there is a sense of belonging and stability. The thing can be imagined as being in its ‘proper’ location. If something has been “dis-placed” that stability has been disrupted. If something “re-places” something else, the spatial order has been reconfigured.

The notion that things can have a ‘proper place’ is a constructed concept. Foucault begins his discussion of heterotopias by detailing the development of Western notions of space (which he identifies as the preeminent occupation in the epoch of simultaneity). Foucault speculates that Europe, during the Middle Ages, developed a “space of emplacement, “a hierarchic ensemble of places” (22). With this sense of emplacement came a sense of stability. There was a set order that helped define the character of places. Foucault identifies the disruption of this fabricated order as “the real scandal of Galileo’s work… [it posited] an infinite, and infinitely open space…. A thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement” (23). The loss of such a basic grounding would require serious conceptual reconfigurations.

Other scholars also consider how modern developments trouble the notion that something can have a set place (and reconfigure notions of placement). Schivelbusch, writing about railroads, describes the “annihilation of space and time.” The ability to easily travel resulted in once distinct local locations “losing their inherited place, their traditional spatial-temporal presence or, as Walter Benjamin sums it up in one word, their ‘aura.’”

However, even in the modern age, place and placement have not been evacuated of meaning. Edward Casey notes: “our ‘immediate placement’ as subjects ‘counts much more than is usually imagined. More, for instance, than serving as a mere backdrop” (Gorfinkel and Rhodes ix).

Lefebvre notes: “the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space” (38). Interrogating the (im)proper placement of something can illuminate elements of place’s social construction and its ideological implications. To use an illustrative example, one of the defining characteristics of a ‘pest’ relates to it being out of its ‘proper’ place. A bug outside the house – fair enough. A bug inside the house – that’s a problem. One can see a toxic extension of this basic notion in contemporary immigration debates.

So far, in this short post, the focus has mostly been on the reactionary or socially hegemonic connotations of placement. However, placement carries no set ideological inflection. Doreen Massey posits a strong sense of local placement as a means of resistance. Massey tweaks Schivelbusch’s assessment of modernity, describing an “annihilation of space by time,” an unevenly experienced loss of grounding (24, emphasis added). In opposition to this, she attempts a progressive reclamation of ‘local’ communities and senses of belonging, avoiding misinterpreting places as having homogeneous identities. Instead, Massey’s conception draws attention to the multi-faceted and interconnected potential of these local places. Massey conceptualizes placement not as an exclusionary practice, but a potential avenue for solidarity among diverse underprivileged groups recognizing shared senses of attachment.

(Isaac Rooks)

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Places.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

Gorfinkel, Elena and John David Rhodes. “Introduction: The Matter of Places.” Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2011: vii-xxix.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today June 1991: 24-29.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: U California Press, 2014. Kindle file.