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Abstract
If we are to explore the real possibilities and limits of new media as it stands in relation to cultural heritage and the sense of place then it is important to be clear on the conceptual ground on which any such exploration must stand. This essay aims to map out some of the ground that may be relevant here, and to clarify some of the concepts that are at issue. In so doing, it also opens up an examination of the connection between place and heritage, and the possible threats and opportunities that new media seems to offer in regard to this connection.
Keywords:
Notes
[1] Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, 165.
[2] The discussion from ‘The Thing’ is prefigured by a brief passage in Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus Being and Time (see H105) that takes the overcoming of remoteness to be an essential tendency in human being.
[3] I use the term ‘new media’ to refer to a mode of contemporary media technology rather than to any particular technology or collection of technologies—hence its appearance as a singular rather than plural term. The pervasiveness of new media across all contemporary media, including its transformation, or potential transformation, of pre‐existing media, means that the contrast between so‐called ‘old’ and ‘new’ media really only has applicability historically, and is difficult to apply contemporaneously.
[4] See my ‘Cultural Heritage in the Age of New Media’, 23.
[5] Elsewhere I have characterised this approach as a form of ‘philosophical topography’, and have argued that it is an approach itself adumbrated in Heidegger's work. For more on this see my Place and Experience, esp. 39–43; and also Heidegger's Topology, esp. 27–37.
[6] This is close to Lev Manovich's definition of ‘new media’ in his The Language of New Media. The difference is that he takes it to refer to a certain range of technologies whereas I take it to refer to a mode of technology that is not exhausted by any specification of the specific technologies that may fall under it.
[7] This is not to deny that the other concepts at issue here give rise to complications of their own—especially in the case of the concept of cultural heritage. However, the concept of place presents a much greater degree of philosophical complexity than either of the other two concepts—something indicated by, if nothing else, the long history of philosophical discussion associated with the concept—while the complications associated with the concept of cultural heritage in particular (including those concerning just whose heritage and whose culture is at issue), are more often political rather than strictly philosophical in character.
[8] See Casey, The Fate of Place, esp. 133–93.
[9] For a more detailed discussion of this way of understanding place, see Place and Experience, esp. 157–74.
[10] Ibid., 159–63.
[11] Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 289: ‘She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.’
[12] Aristotle, Physics IV, 208a30.
[13] One might object that there are some possible exceptions to this within the history of ideas—for instance, God, universals—but even leaving aside other complications, it is not so obvious that such concepts necessarily entail some ‘unplaced’ mode of existence, rather than a different mode of existence, and so also of placedness.
[14] See Casey, The Fate of Place, x. Note that Casey's very precise use of the word ‘site’ in this passage is much narrower and more specific than that which I used above in talking of Gertrude Stein's Oakland, or than that which I use below.
[15] Menin, ‘Introduction’, 1; the embedded reference is to Rapoport, ‘A Critical Look at the Concept “Place”’, 31–45.
[16] Tuan, Space and Place, 6. Tuan's work is enormously important as a milestone in the theorisation of place as a sui generis concept, and is foundational to contemporary humanistic geography, and yet, although Tuan nowhere presents matters in quite the stark fashion that Menin does, still he seems to rely on what I tend to view as a ‘subjectivised’ conception of place that actually makes place secondary to space. See my comments on Tuan in Place and Experience, 30, note 33.
[17] See Casey, The Fate of Place, esp. 79–161, and idem, ‘Smooth Spaces and rough‐Edged Places’, 267–96.
[18] Menin adds the remark that ‘there can be little, if any, material that has no meaning’, and if this is to be made consistent, then it would seem that it has to be understood along the lines that there can be little, if any, material with which there cannot be some form of engagement.
[19] Gibson, Neuromancer.
[20] See Place and Experience, 39–41; see also Heidegger's Topology, 33–35.
[21] The term originally refers, of course, to the womb, having the same Latin root as ‘maternal’ and ‘maternity’.
[22] In this respect, while I am sceptical of the frequently made claims for new media as opening up completely new realms of place and space, or making possible places and spaces of a entirely new kind (these claims typically ignore or underestimate the extent to which any such realms, and any such place and spaces, remain parasitic upon the places and spaces that already exist), I do not deny that new media has a creative capacity to reshape the places and spaces around us, to expand and extend those places and spaces, and even to create new places. In this respect, the technologies of new media stand among a host of ‘place‐shaping’ and ‘place‐making’ technologies both old and new. What new media does not do, however, is bring about any radical transformation in place or space as such.
[23] Heidegger calls this ‘Gestell’ (often translated as ‘Enframing’)—see Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 3–35, esp. 29.