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With apologies to Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, one might argue that anything or anyone exists as such (that is, has value) only because it occupies the most concrete actual someplace. Location, in other words, is not incidental but constitutive. I am who I am because always I am someplace: I am the particular sensibility occupying a particular spot at any given moment, and the lines organizing the universe lead from and return to that spot. To be sure, place as we commonly define it seems to be an absolute. But it is no more permanent or less apparent than most other categories by means of which we sort and try to understand our experience. Take a landscape view. One looks out across a middle distance of abandoned pasture, thickening now with mullein heads and goldenrod and a few saplings, its old stonewall boundaries partly tumbled as a result of gravity, weather, neglect; just past where an old dairy barn is exfoliating into dust, the grade shifts as flat graduates to upland; farther back yet, hill amplifies into mountain, rounded and grey but, with granite insistence, both ancient and obviously present . Above everything visible in the whole scene, a smear of deep blue, mottled by cloud and lined with shots of light, weighs down on earth like the thickest of Van Gogh’s skies, so that its mass seems to keep things in their places. All of this seems so real that one turns away and, having other places to go, leaves it in the full belief that it remains right there. Only of course it does not. What gave shape to all of the things making up that view was not the enduring, absolute interrelation of all the points in space that it includes, but rather the single point the viewer occupied. The inter­ relation does not cease to be when the eye is withdrawn, and indeed there are many kinds of interrelation the eye never took in (for I am talking here of the “classical” landscape, landscape at a human scale), but the view as such was nothing other than a temporary assemblage of impressions. It was incident to the viewer’s occupation of the point that organized it for the moment of its apprehension. Take the viewer away and the view collapses—nay, ceases to exist at all. Even just move the viewer along a bit and the whole thing changes with surprising ease. Perspective, we need to remember, is an amalgam of the points seen and f o r e w o r d Wayne Franklin the viewer’s stance. This was the lesson discovered with fresh intensity during the mechanization of travel. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has shown in The Railway Journey, trains challenged the eye in ways it had never been challenged before. Varying speed, the confinement of the traveler to a mostly lateral view, even the corporate corridor of the right‑of‑way—all were factors in re‑forming popular perception. With the shift away from the railway and toward the automobile, some of these factors remained the same (a highway is the new corporate corridor, both allowing movement and confining it along a set axis), while others (such as the frontal assault of motion on the driver) were deeply altered. In either instance, however, what allowed place to make sense was its organization through the definitely placed observer. On the train, place became a sequence of variably blurred sidewise panels—moving very fast right at hand, more slowly in the middle distance, and hardly at all (or seemingly in reverse) at the back of the whole. In the automobile, the drivers suddenly took over the engineer’s seat. Place now roars directly at the eye, relentlessly strung on a line of sight. There is no escaping it as long as one keeps on keeping on. Seemingly, there is always more of it. Place is far more complex than we assume when, pulling off the highway in response to a sign announcing “View Point Ahead,” we cease our motion and take on a socially programmed passivity in expectation that we, too, will see the prescribed thing. Even so, the highway department sign can be taken to indicate all the means by which the phenomenon of the mere spatial glimpse—the fleeting apprehension indicated above—becomes a passable commodity in the trade of ideas and images and values we call culture. Place endures not so much as topography—rather, as topos...

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