4.2 David Seamon and Emplacement
4.2.2 The resultant place ballet as movement, rest, and encounter
The place ballet leads to what is often termed a triad of environmental experience. This triad is made up of movement, rest, and encounter -- each consequentially informing overall environmental experience (Seamon, 1979:132). This triad can be represented in the form of a triangle. In this upright triangle the top part is the encounter – which is invariably at the middle, the left side marks resting, and the opposite side marks movement. All of these habitual activities intersect and lead to whatever the experience of place ends up being.
The argument is that the three pillars are mutually re-enforcing (Seamon, 1979:133). This is to say that within movement the individual may go through alternating periods of encounter and rest. That same person may also rest in encounter so to later move more freely. This triad exists with all journeys. The theorist Jager (1975:251) argues that:
The round world of dwelling offers a cyclical time, that is, the recurring times of seasons, of the circles of birth and death, of planting and harvesting, of meeting and meeting again, of doing and doing over again. It offers a succession of crops, of duties, generations, forever appearing and reappearing.
This is to state it unequivocally that individuals in movement ultimately plug themselves into and out of scenes which have their own dynamics informing their overall quality. In other words, what the individual is able to engage in during either of movement, rest, and encounter determines the world within which they exist as experiencing beings. Ultimately the place ballet is the individual’s world unfolded by themselves.
The individuals within the place ballet are all of equal importance because they all contribute to a ballet which affords them consequential roles. The author Jane Jacobs was amongst the
71 | P a g e first theorists to notice and document the intricacies of routinized place experience. Looking at sidewalk usage in the city, Jacobs (1961:50) argued in the following manner:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is the intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to a dance – not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.
This is to state that for the experience of emplacement there are numerous assumed roles bringing particular subjectivities to the fore. What one individual gets to see during their performance in their lifeworld may be relayed to some other person who may then navigate through their own lifeworld with the knowledge of this other lifeworld quality of experience.
For example, an individual with the appreciation for statues and monuments may communicate to some other individual the intricacies of this appreciation. The intricacies communicated then affect how the recipient of the communication encounters their own environment after such communication.
4.2.2.1 Movement
The very first pillar to David Seamon’s place ballet is movement. In this experiential reality all individuals engage in movement within a lifeworld (Seamon, 1979:33). According to Seamon (1979:33), movement entails “any spatial displacement of the body or bodily part initiated by the person himself”. It is the case for individuals to be in the world and in their being in the world there is always a time to move for some purpose.
The body in purposive conviction is inextricable to movement. Within the place ballet the body meets the environment as a body-subject. According to Seamon (1979:41):
Body-subject is the inherent capacity of the body to direct behaviors of the person intelligently, and thus function as a special kind of subject which expresses itself
72 | P a g e in a pre-conscious way usually described by such words as ‘automatic’, ‘habitual’,
‘involuntary’ and ‘mechanical’.
This is to say that the body does the movements in a manner that does not require much thought.
What is important is that the movement is for the achievement of some experiential reality and the body often would have done this very movement numerous times before and thus is well aware of how it is done.
Movement ends up being an important part of experience because it actually plugs the individual into scene after scene of realities that are arrived at through movement (Seamon, 1979:56). For instance, it is through moving through a space that an individual learns about that place. The movement is way in which phenomenological intentionality is engaged (Seamon, 1979:58). The individual comes across the environment in a manner that exposes ever increasing parts of the space.
Everyone in the space, however, is involved in movement (Seamon, 1979:65). The individual who moves is within a space wherein there are other forms of moving occurring just as they too are moving. For instance, a person will be moving across a street at the same time as another individual in that street is moving their arms to play drums loudly. The two individuals are at the same space moving differently and this movement is what makes the place what it is at that moment. These converging movements make the place ballet which makes the place the sort of experience it is for those engaged in such an experiential reality.
4.2.2.2 Rest
Seamon deals extensively with the notion of rest during an individual’s entanglement in the place ballet. Rest is the moment wherein an individual is still (Seamon, 1979:69-70). To be still is to not be in movement. People can be thought of as still at specific sites and situations in their lives. According to Seamon (1979:70) here is a necessary prerequisite to rest:
The essential experiential structure of rest […] is at-homeness – the usually unnoticed, taken-for-granted situation of being comfortable in and familiar with the everyday world in which one lives and outside of which one is ‘visiting’, ‘in
73 | P a g e transit’, ‘not at home’, ‘out of place’ or ‘travelling’. The dwelling place is generally the spatial centre of at-homeness.
This is to state that the individual rests in those places of an elevated familiarity for themselves.
The individual knows these places somewhat extensively and may be argued to be ‘at home’
within such spaces. Any other place wherein the individual is observably not ‘at home’ can seldom be thought of as an area of highly probable rest.
The above-mentioned areas of rest may be thought of as the territory of the more meaningful experiences of that individual’s lifeworld. It is in these areas that the individual is mostly likely to be found as a part of routinized movement (Seamon, 1979:71). For instance, were an individual to feel most ‘at home’ within a church building then that church building may become a sanctuary visited every day for moments of reflection while static. These pieces of territory the individuals grow to feel they own and thus any ‘disturbances’ to the thought of ownership are unwelcome. This becomes an experiential reality as the person develops a special relationship with their site and situation (Seamon, 1979:75-76). This relationship is consequential because it connects inextricably the individual and the man qualities of their site and situation.
Seamon argues that the home, in a rather surprising manner, as he sees it, is an integral part of the static periods within the place ballet. The home must have some relationship to feelings of at-homeness (Seamon, 1979:78). This is to see the home as one of those places wherein the individual is most likely to be ‘at home’. According to Seamon the home often provides a physical centre from where all movement stems (Seamon, 1979:79). The home therefore is fundamentally a physical site. One way to think of it is as that position a ballerina would take at the beginning of a performance. It is from this position of rest that all the ‘events’ of the ballet will be channelled, in all their decoration.
Once the individual has a ‘home’ within the ballet that position is thought of as owned by that individual and of elevated importance because it is the point from within which this individual moves out to experience their lifeworld (Seamon, 1979:80). Seamon highlights encroachment
74 | P a g e into a home as an event which may be greeted with discomfort from the homemaker. For instance, during the performance of the ballet some ballerina may be out of position – they may be in someone else’s home, this results in compromised performance of both manoeuvre and rest as these ‘misplaced’ individuals tamper with their performances either by mistake or deliberately. Ultimately, the home is a private and highly meaningful space for the individual who mostly looks to rest within the home.
The home within the place ballet becomes a place for both regeneration and peace of mind (Seamon, 1979:81-83). The physical rest within the home has the qualities of rejuvenation. The individual after much movement in the world finds time within the home to physically rest and regain their energies. Furthermore, this time spent at home can be used for thinking about things that were events during the day. These events may become objects of analysis as the individual at rest makes sense of them. Ultimately, the home is where the place ballet either proceeds from or comes to a pause within.
4.2.2.3 Encounter
The last highlighted event of the place ballet is that of encounter. Encounter, it is argued, is not as clear-cut an event as movement and rest. During the encounter the individual and their environment can be argued to experience viewings of each other (Seamon, 1979:99; Wylie, 2006). This is to say that to encounter is to be engaged in an unfolding of site and situation.
This unfolding exposes the features, from the most miniscule (sometimes) to the more pronounced, of the geographic site and situation. For example, the individual may encounter a tree in the same manner that they encounter a limping person. Ultimately, encounter is the awareness and engagement of things (animate and inanimate) outside the body of the individual. Seamon then proceeds to argue for there being a continuum of awareness.
Encountering the world can be of varying qualities (Seamon, 1979:103; Bridge, 2013). At some point the individual may notice more about their site and situation. At some other point the same individual may not notice much. For instance, today an individual may notice, and be able to read quite easily, some writings beneath a statue. However, on the following day this
75 | P a g e individual may forget where to look when confronted by that statue. This is the phenomenological reality of the varying qualities of encounter. Seamon labels these encounters as a line moving from obliviousness to noticing to watching to stopping on heightened contact and basic contact (Seamon, 1979:103).
To be oblivious to site and situation is to be aloof. To be aloof is to not notice the environment laid out to be unfolded with its features. For example, a person may not notice a broken down statue or a person greeting them simply because during their movement upon site and situation they are in deep thought. Such preoccupation, however, is not always the case. To notice is to bring into full awareness a thing about the site and situation. For instance, a person may notice something about a statue that he or she had never noticed before for some reason. This experiential reality ensures the possibility for surprise and intrigue when manoeuvring within site and situation. Ultimately, what the person sees is informed consequentially by factors that play on that person’s capacity to see.
The other types of encounter, viz. watching and contact, are types of awareness that are also either intentional or involuntary. Seamon (1979:104) argues for watching being a conscious activity whereby the individual prefers to be taken in by movement that occurs in front of him or her as they take the time to be static themselves. This is akin to sitting at the neighbourhood park and watching ducks in a pond.
The contacts (basic and heightened) contain moments of the body in complete envelopment with its site and situation (Seamon, 1979:111-116). This is to say that the body is profoundly aware of itself and the site and situation it finds itself within. As a perceptual being the body appreciates its positioning within site and situation as that spatial reality which is most consequential to the quality of its perceptual field (Seamon, 1979:116; Merleau-Ponty, 1996:140; Wylie, 2006; Bridge, 2013). Ultimately, the kinds of encounter engaged inform the quality of the unfolding of place towards its experience. In other words, what is encountered and how it is encountered consequentially inform the quality of place experience.
76 | P a g e It should not be lost on the reader of this thesis that under such characterisation the place ballet must necessarily be operating on at least two levels. There is the individual ‘ballet dancer,’ viz.
the walker, and then there is the overall ballet as a collection of all walkers engaged in their own distinct movements within geographic site and situation. The overall ballet is therefore a scene of movements, rests, and encounters that inform overall place experience most consequentially because they are the routine everyday experiences of the individuals.
The person engaged in the place ballet often moves, rests, and encounters within the same site and and situation. Each time the place ballet occurs is a time wherein the individual’s subjectivities are engaged by and are engaging their environment. The environment can be thought of as an entity/product that the individual is in effect performing a place ballet upon.
However, repetition makes the quality a product always in the production process rather than a finished product. In other words, the actions of movement, rest, and encounter are repeated interactions that are treated as such and not as if activities whose qualities will be judged as just one experience. This experiential reality is of embeddedness in a scene of site and situation that is to remain unchanged if there is no change in the individual’s contribution to the place ballet. Edward Relph (1976) writes expansively about an embeddedness he terms insideness in relation to environmental experience. This thesis now discusses the theorisations of Edward Relph as a complement to the already discussed place ballet theory.