Placemaking Eichstätt: Perspectives and Intersections

Abstract

This is a short essay on the conference “Taking Place and Making Place: Celebrating 25 Years of Space and Culture” at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (June 23–25, 2022). Based on a handful of notes and personal impressions, this is an unqualified research note and a descriptive overview of this conference from the perspective of a literary scholar. This perspective includes some brief reflections on Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Genevieve Lloyd’s reading of Spinoza as an alternative epistemology to Cartesian mind–body dualism, which approach critical engagement through a set of perspectives arising from the intersections between different fields.

Eichstätt is one of several small towns between München and Nürnberg. The Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt stands more or less in the town center by the Altmühl River. It seems like one of those European places that stood still in time, preserving some of its architectures and traditional structures. The KU, as it is known, consists of some Italian Baroque-style old town buildings, and the conference took place inside the Kapuzinerkloster, a Capuchin monastery with a cloister where friars strolled on occasion.

The following notes and observations are based on my notes, which are far from authoritative or comprehensive, but instead, form a set of perspectives, as Nietzsche proposed:

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be (Nietzsche, 2010, p. 119).

My perspectives are not the perspectives of social scientists: sociologists, ethnographers, human geographers, architects, urbanists, and others, who work on a bigger scale than literature. With this caveat out of the way, the following are my notes and thoughts on this conference.

Space and Culture 25th Anniversary: Welcome Roundtable

Prof. Dr. Michael Schillmeier, Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter and Schumpeter-Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung.

Prof. Dr. Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Endowed Research Chair and Professor of Human Geography and Sociology, University of Alberta.

Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon, Chair of General Sociology and Sociological Theory, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.

The Roundtable began with a bang. Professor Michael Schillmeier presented an instigating thought provocation: “Taking Place as the Art of Betrayal,” a meditation, drawing from Deleuze’s percepts, on mass destruction, war, and violence through “either/or” technologies such as guns or tanks. He followed it with a video by Schultz (n.d.), 2sweet2kill, configured as a form of “weapons of mass instruction.” In conclusion, Professor Schillmeier wanted us to also think through displacement rather than merely taking place.

Professor Rob Shields invited us to take the world of Space and Culture further into Place and Culture, recognizing place as a social contract artifact. He delved further into the historicity of “taking place,” and much further into the biosemiotics of trees, into the voices of plants and the languages of vegetation and forest. There is much we still do not know about trees as living entities; biosemiotics is a fairly new field, and its confluence with practices of place is yet unexplored. Professor Shields’ work continues to draw from a variety of social and epistemic experiences of spatialization, such as A Field Guide for Activating Space (Morrow & Shields, 2020).

Professor Joost van Loon was wearing a “Rage Against The Machine” t-shirt as he looked back on the founding days of Space and Culture as the founding of a band that continues to rage against the system when it matters the most. The dividing lines between the humanities and the social sciences are no longer as rigid as they were, and Professor van Loon drew attention instead to epistemic practices and narrative as necessary for placemaking. In his view, Space and Culture is ultimately about the understanding of entropy.

The round of questions that followed was stimulating and too wide-ranging to contain here. I remember discussions of human geographers and their local traditions, and other disciplinary questions concerning the journal. My notes point to a fascinating reference to Plato’s Athens as a form of placemaking in ancient philosophy and therefore placemaking as one of the foundations of Western philosophy itself. There was also a mention of Space and Culture side by side Social Text, where Alan Sokal’s “experiment” happened (Chadha, 1997). There was talk of cybernetics and the Anthropocene, of Deleuze’s “becoming-machine” (Braidotti, 2003), but at the same time, the founders view Space and Culture as a post-Deleuzian journal. For my turn, I asked Professor van Loon, “How do we understand entropy?” We then discussed entropy as a reaction, materialistic information overload, violence, dystopia, and as collapse. Finally, Professor Shields spoke of “combining ethnographic richness with scholarship,” which in my perspective condenses the identity of Space and Culture as a journal. Finally, it was time for the first panel. The questions and discussions that followed each panel are also too wide-ranging to fit here, and my memory is not enough to recall some details coherently, but I will share notes and quotations that lingered in the discussion.

Panel I

My paper was titled “Place-Based Epistemological Pluralism,” which in hindsight is rather short and general. A more accurate title would have been “Place-Based Epistemological Pluralism in the Black Hills and ‘The Great Race.’” My placemaking reading of the story known as “The Great Race” happened through both the original Black Hills setting in the territory now known as South Dakota and through the River Valley in Edmonton, Alberta.

Juan Guevara from the University of Alberta had to move his paper “Stairs and the Informal: Socio-Material Understanding of Informal Places” and Lars Nowak from the Hunan Normal University FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg presented “Places on the Threshold of Nature and Culture: Reflection on Richard Long’s Land Art,” where he analyzed in detail photographs of British artist Richard Long. Pradeep Sangapala from the University of Alberta presented “Colonial Spatialization of Anuradhapura,” on a major city of Sri Lanka, discussing how “colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it,” as Dirks (2021) put it in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India.

Panel II

Sena Karahan Mimar from the Sinan Fine Arts University presented “Studying Everyday Acoustic Palimpsests: Bottom-Up Approach to Develop Creative & Performative Research Practices/Methodologies,” drawing from “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening” by Daughtry (2014) and Audio-Vision by Chion (1994) to discuss “sound inbetween-ness” and the thorny question of the nonhuman. Nicholas Hardy from the University of Alberta presented “Urban Ebullience: Adventures in Knowledge Production Within the Hyperlocal,” a short feature video consisting of recordings and photographs of Edmonton with a synthetic narration, interrogating the proverbial question of “Why is there something instead of nothing?” in the manifestation of hyperlocal places, which he called the “teeming inferno of matter.”

Rémy Bocquillon from KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt followed with “Taking and Making Place Through Sound: From the Phonotope to the Phonocene,” a compelling theoretical map from Deleuze and Guattari to Sloterdijk, Haraway, Despret, and Schulze across concepts such as ritournelles, transduction, and research-creation practices in thinking-with sounds that perform sociology in the Phonocene. Elena Siemens from University of Alberta presented “You Are Here: Personal Maps, Street Art, and Making a Difference.” Vallee (n.d.) followed with “Home/Bodies: A Soundscape,” where he presented the project “Grid of Nows” focused on tea-making rituals, sounds, and vibrancies of being.

Panel III

The first two papers in this panel dealt with the aftermath of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Andrew Burridge, Justine Lloyd, Dan Ghezelbash, and Richie Howitt from Macquarie University presented “Were We All in This Together? Sub-National Border Closures During Covid-19 Along the NSW Border,” and Soumili Kundu from the South Asian University presented “Locked in the Apartment: How the Urban Middle Class Grappled with Routines, Bodies, and Place During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” both generating perspectives on place during the pandemic.

In the meantime, Professor Joost van Loon decided to accommodate other panelists and moved his paper, “Ent-Ortung, Sous-Rature and Khora: The Case of Sheikh Jarrah,” a dense investigation into Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. In this reading, he configured “Hasbara as an epistemic practice” through the works of Carl Schmitt and the concept of “sous-rature” in Derrida (who developed Heidegger’s concept), performing a critical anamnesis of place informed also by the concept of systrophe as articulated by Michel Serres.

Juan Guevara from the University of Alberta was able to condense two papers into one presentation: “Material Clientelism: Understanding Informal Politics From Below” and “Stairs and the Informal: Socio-Material Understanding of Informal Places,” both dealing with the informal as a locus of place. Finally, Neda Genova from the University of Warwick concluded the panel with “Adventures in a Labyrinth: A Fictional Topological Exploration,” an engaging stroll through Borges’ conceptualization of labyrinths and the film Labyrinth by Jim Henson.

Panel IV

Gerhard Rainer and Christian Steiner from KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt presented “Making Places With Mobile Knowledge—Practicing Place in the Globalized Wine Industry,” discussing an epistemic configuration of place through the concept of “terroir,” where the wine itself tastes like a place. Rainer and Steiner also discussed more-than-human geographies where place becomes a dynamic, non-essentialist epistemic configuration.

Frank Zirkl from KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt presented two papers: “From Global to Local Entanglements in Brazilian Soy Business: Making Place in Midwestern Agrobusiness Towns” and “Hop Production in the Holleday Region in Bavaria: Changes (Not) Taking Place due to New Demands of Breweries and Consumers?” discussing the taking of place and making of place through plantations in Sinop, Brazil and Holleday, Bavaria.

Finally, Jutta Kister from KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt presented “Envisioning Places: Taking and Making Future Places in the Woods,” which proposes polity practices for forest preservation, but unfortunately she didn’t have good news: “The German forest is not doing well.” A bark beetle infestation has been the bane of German forests in the past few years, and this paper brought to light this sad reality that Kister countered with imaginaries of the future.

Panel V

Ge Zheng from Sichuan University presented “The Regeneration of Urban Space in the Context of Globalization: The Punkspace Burst From an Industrial Heritage,” discussing the “genius loci” from classical Roman religion, the protective spirit of a place. A lively discussion followed on the possible definitions for the term “punkspace.”

Dalal Elarji from Universität Liechtenstein presented “De/Reterritorializing Interstitial Spaces: The Cases of Floating University Berlin and Agrocité Paris,” a dense comparative architectural design study of the Floating University in Berlin and Agrocité Paris calling for a “minor architecture” after Deleuze’s “minor literature,” working through haptic experience. Jeongwon Gim from the University of Alberta followed with “More Than a Façade: Aestheticized Branded Apartments in South Korea,” exploring questions of place in architecture and interior design.

Jim Morrow from the University of Alberta concluded the panel with “Gemütlichkeit and Everyday Life,” an entertaining and lively presentation, first drawing from recent statistics on the pandemic of loneliness among a large contingent of adults in major global cities, and finally calling for Gemütlichkeit as a kind of social activation of place that would bring people back together, encouraging group-life and relationality to the other and the natural world.

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Martina Löw: “Spatial Uncertainty: The Pluralization of Spatial Figures in Daily Life.”

Professor Martina Löw’s keynote paper was an intriguingly complex exposition of sociological theory on the social spatialization of everyday life. She drew from the Latin distinctions between Figura and Forma as a scheme where Figura has plasticity, movement, and resonance, whereas Forma is stable and static, drawing from her works, such as “The Re-Figuration of Spaces and Refigured Modernity—Concept and Diagnosis,” (Knoblauch & Löw, 2020). In my perspective, the paper in a sense called for an end to globalization toward a sociology of knowledge amid the uncertainty. Remote delivery had its issues, sadly.

The keynote address was followed by a performance by Ipek Oskay and Serkan Sevilgen: “Sounding Microcosmos,” a bio-sonification artwork that underlines the “conditions of anthropogenic stress on the microorganisms and their network,” and how such microorganisms can be an ally against climate change, yet most overlooked in enacted policies.

Panel VI

The panel began with Michael Holaschke from KU Eichstätt—Ingolstadt, presenting on “The Global in the Local: Thinking Latour Between Social-Media and Places of Commemoration,” discussing the tearing down of racist and reactionary statues in social media through Latour’s actor-network theory and the “yawning break between what encloses and what is enclosed, between the more local and the more global.” Holaschke called for flat ontologies as self-organized systems against essentialist, hierarchical, or binary modes of thought.

Leila Khodabakhsh and Nassim Mehran from the KU Eichstätt—Ingolstadt presented “A Political Ecological Critique of Placemaking: Realizing Chitgar Lake as a Collective Desired Waterscape in Tehran,” a fascinating deep dive into a specific place, figuring authors such as Abbas Saffari, Mehran Moosavi, and M.A. Sepanluo. Next, Foroogh Mohammadi from Memorial University of Newfoundland presented “Developing, Resisting, or Bridging Experience of a Sense of Belonging: The Experience of Negotiating Home After Migration,” which was a compelling argument in a diagram on symbolic interactionism where Home and Belonging are now in a cycle with Transnationalism.

Finally, Professor Rob Shields invited us to “Place-making and the making of a New World” in a discussion of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry as the “situation.” Working through Peirce as well as Dewey, Professor Shields explored the virtualities of situation through Erwin Goffman’s Frame Analysis and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as socially ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions. He distinguished virtualities from abstractions and pointed out that we have neglected heuristics. In discussion, Professor van Loon pointed out that Dewey’s ethics are in line with Spinoza’s ethics, which led to other discussions of Deleuze, Rorty, and the pragmatists.

A persistent impression in recent years has been that Western philosophy in a sense has operated on the Cartesian subject since the Enlightenment and only recently we have been able to turn back to Spinoza and consider the Ethics as an alternative epistemology to mind–body dualism. As Genevieve Lloyd wrote in Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics:

To read Descartes is to read ourselves—to see made explicit some of the basic structures of modern self-consciousness, even if some of them may appear more exotic than they do in the forms in which we now see them. If to read Descartes is to read what we ourselves are, to read Spinoza is to get glimpses of what we might have been—of possibilities of self-consciousness that run against the grain (Lloyd, 1994, p. 169).

What those possibilities might be is yet to be explored, but this discussion was a starting point for some of us at the conference.

Panel VII

All members of this panel came from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at TU Wien, and the panel theme was “Urban Studies, Everyday Life and Lived Space.” Burcu Ateş, Laura Sobral, and Predrag Milić presented first: “‘Here, Daily Life Becomes a Pedagogy Itself!’: The (Un)learning Practices of Taking Place,” discussing the pedagogy of Célestin Freinet. Angelika Gabauer followed with “Ageing, Space and Subjectivity: The Meaning of Place for the Ageing Subject,” an engaging discussion of subjectivity in place through urban studies. Sabine Knierbein presented her paper on “Everyday Theorizing in Urban Studies,” followed by Xenia Kopf, “Making place through taking place: The creation of urban space through the performative lens” and Tihomir Viderman, “Affect and Pedagogical Perspective on the Construction of Visual Representation of Space.” These deep dives into urban studies had much to offer to social scientists, and I was interested in what I managed to apprehend from these engaging presentations.

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Celia Lury, “Where Is Distribution?: The Wherewithal of Personalisation.”

Professor Celia Lury was a delight to listen to; her humor and sensibility made for a compelling keynote, and I left wanting to hear more. Analyzing a range of sources from theory, media, ads, and memes, she first introduced wherewithal as a methodological principle and proceeded to discuss ads, slogans, and memes such as “People Like You” or “Patients Like Me” and “I Am Research,” extrapolating into an inter-relating measure of likeness. She discussed the institutionalized hierarchy of kinds of scale in relation to data, and introduced the concept of fractal scaling, suggesting examples as CRM software in higher education and its use of personal data (MyUniversity, and such). Pointing to an intensification of Difference, Professor Lury also discussed the events of #MeToo and #JeSuisCharlie in their different repercussions. There was also a mention of Benjamin as the “pure middle,” infinitely divisible, or the “communicable middle,” which Lury draws from the title Benjamin’s-abilities (Weber & Benjamin, 2009). She concluded that distribution is to be found in the continuous interaction of the wherewithal, where we are always “dividuals” instead.

And as we were barely able to begin digesting all this, we followed the schedule to the final event of the conference.

Film Screening and Q&A

Thomas Dekeyser and Andrew Culp: Machines in Flames

Machines in Flames is an experimental film about an investigative search for “CLODO”—a group that started bombing computer firms in 1980 Toulouse only to disappear after nine attacks without ever being found. Journeying through investigative folders, extensive digital maps, and late-night video recordings of CLODO’s targets, Dekeyser and Culp (n.d.) present learnings from their deep dive into the historical and contemporary lives of anti-computation assault. They trace the limits of archival research and ask whether they ended up reproducing the very logic of policing that CLODO so feverishly sought to dismantle. What would an “anti-archive” look like?

The film also featured a quotation or fragment attributed to Heraclitus as an epigraph: “XX. Κόσμον τόνδε τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων οὔτε τις θεῶν οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησε, ἀλλ᾿ ἦν αἰεὶ καὶ ἔστι καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα” (Jones, 1931, pp. 476–477). I am not able to recall the translation quoted in the documentary, but my question to the directors referred to this “everliving fire” to which the universe will return, and from whence it came—fire as a medium: of light and technology, of creation and destruction, and the solar power that makes life possible.

Concluding Remarks

Dr. Rémy Bocquillon and Professor Joost van Loon tirelessly organized the conference with the aid of several students. Dr. Bocquillon managed all the technical apparatus for the hybrid conference format on Zoom with great care and diligence throughout. Extra thanks go to the students and volunteers who set up tables for coffee, tea, and drinks, and helped out with everything else. We all felt welcome arriving from different parts of the world.

I remember walking back to the hotel in a daze and thereafter flying back to my usual life in Edmonton. I have been since grasping at these threads and trying to situate myself. We were all privileged to have experienced such an immersion into a broad range of subjects, ideas, and place-based epistemologies. This was a confluence of lives and places that I will look back on as an event that defined and matured my thinking of place and beyond.