The subject of place: Staying with the trouble (original) (raw)

What makes a place a place? A question that has eluded thinkers, from Aristotle to some of the leading social scientists of our age. Intuitively it can be sensed that ‘place’ belongs to a different register or modality of existence than other geographic signifiers such as ‘space’ or ‘site’. The question I wish to pose in this chapter is how we can find ways to begin to re-conceputalize place in a manner that, with the words of Donna Haraway (2010), ‘stays with the trouble’ of the entangled ontological complexity of the phenomenon of place instead of forcing us to succumb to unwarranted reductions. A conceptualization that may be of help in highlighting just how the concept of place appears to transverse the ingrained but highly artificial subject/object-divide which is latent in much of Western thinking. Instead I hope to showcase some of the intellectual tooling that may be of help in tracing the intertwinement, or even mutual constitution, of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, as well as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’, which complex ontological phenomena such as places may help to open our eyes to. Borrowing words from Dovey, we can hopefully find some ways to explorehow to “move beyond a false choice between place as pre-given or as socially constructed” (Dovey, 2010:6).