Space - place - environment

The case for reopening the debate on space in our time has been succinctly put by Verona Conley in Rethinking Technologies: „Now, in a world where the notion of space has been completely changed through electronic simultaneity, where the computer appears to go faster than the human brain, or where ‘virtual reality’ replaces ‘reality’, how do philosophy, critical theory, or artistic practices deal with those shifts?“ Total electronic simultaneity, real-time, or absolute instantaneousness, if this were indeed possible, would not only mean the end of time and space but of human life as well. Fortunately, we are still far from having fully achieved this, and the broker who has, through instantaneous e-mail communication, just initiated a profitable capital flow a-round the globe, comes quickly to realize the impact of the continuance of sequential time and extensional space when he leaves his computer and gets into a traffic jam. Today we no longer derive much comfort from Kant’s conviction that time and space are a priori forms of perception and are more inclined to embrace Edward Casey’s phenomenological approach and his assumption that the concreteness of place takes precedence over space. One important concomitant of Casey’s philosophy of place is that it enhances the relevance of the body, „emplacement“ and „embodiment“ being mutually constitutive, another is the renewed importance it bestows on the „local and regional“. Obviously, the terminological field space, place, environment has to be continuously redefined in accordance with both the changing conventions of viewing and with the socio-political power struggles of every age.