After the Garden?

There is a notion afoot that to engage with place takes too much time. Place is out. And isn’t it a redundant category anyway, given the contraction of space? Travelers who read airline in-flight magazines in this “time-poor” age are assured that the distance between one destination and the next is no time at all. Blaise Pascal’s fearful sphere of the modern no longer humbles the human traveler—business class knows no bounds. Forget centers and circumferences: space is everywhere and place is nowhere.¹ The mobile personality with the virtual office needs space for unfettered flow and circulation. It is a world in flux, rootless and dynamic.² Movement reigns. According to the French anthropologist Marc Augé, we are spending more and more of our time in “non-places”: airport lounges, supermarkets, hotels; on motorways, at automatic teller machines, in front of one sort of screen or another; always in transit in a theme-park kind of world where all is packaged, homogenized, and ultimately ephemeral.³ Many pass through these non-places. Some commend the experience, proselytizing the possibilities of a disengaged cyberspace, a realm of pure movement. Others grin and bear it. Back in economy class and outside the regular transatlantic loops and circuits, there are sometimes a few questions.⁴

In a world supposedly reduced to a web of Boolean strings, it is an interesting (dare it be called counterfactualizing?) experience to travel a long way, and I mean a long way. A traveler’s anecdote: When an Australian scholar drags herself off the plane at lax, it has been more than eighteen hours since departing Sydney. The conference begins in an hour, and, while the body is only slowly unfolding from its sleepless confinement in economy class, expectation pumps adrenaline. Zapp rules, okay! A well-traveled academic from the transatlantic run begins (to a murmur of affirmation): “Space is now infinitely minute; all is simultaneity.” The scholar from the Antipodes (body aching, head throbbing) would beg to differ, but does not wish to appear parochial. Anyway, doing the “long haul” to Northern Hemisphere learned gatherings is part of the price she pays for living somewhere else. She’s not complaining. She likes to travel to different places even if she has to pass through the bizarre, albeit fatuous, filament of non-place. Yet, disorienting as long-distance travel can be, she cannot easily reconcile the corporeal with the musings of the corps d’elite-at least not on day one. By day three, however, she will be back on-line, accessing her e-mail account. Maybe by then she will have a chance to suggest that place still has a place, that without it there is no other place, and that the eternal present of non-place space is decidedly limited. Maybe, maybe not. (But she does note in her travel diary that the use of “landscape” proliferates in the wake of proclamations on the death of place.)

Among the advanced economies at least, there is a strong rumor in circulation that the world is now “after the fall”-of the Wall or, more ontologically, of humanity. We are all stuck in a prolapsarian, borderless global world in which utopian horizons no longer compute. Garden and place are old hat except as fashion accessories; habitat is just another lifestyle choice. There is no pathway to or from the Garden of Eden because it is over and out. Of course, we can step into a Holodeck garden and “experience” what all the fuss used to be about.⁵ But can we? Gardens offer a good deal more than just a hyper-driven penny arcade experience. For millennia the garden has occasioned many of the desires and aspirations now filtered through cyberspace. And the garden, unlike cyberspace, tends to obviate the malaise of simultanagnosia. Indeed, for many cultures across time the garden has been both site and object of what would now be called cultural reflexivity. It has been a favorite spot for human beings to consider their lot in this and other worlds. Even as cybernetics infiltrates everyday life more...