Towards an Open Sense of Place:

Phenomenology, Affinity and the Question of Being

Soren Larsen* and Jay Johnson**

*Department of Geography, University of Missouri

**Department of Geography, University of Kansas

<AB>This article contributes to ongoing efforts in human geography to theorize place as a basis

for progressive politics by linking recent work in phenomenology with contemporary

interpretations of affinity politics. The phenomenological insight is that existence is a

foundational kind of placing through which the world presents itself, and that a place-based

ontology can be developed by exploring the features of situatedness. Affinity politics involve

creating non-coercive, cooperative, and spontaneous relationships through direct action and

mutual aid. The argument presented here is that an embodied awareness of place is an expression

of an affinity politics aimed at possibilities for self-determination1 through deep relationships

with other human and non-human beings. This open sense of place is revealed in the existential

attunement to wonder and compassion, a mode of being that derives from attending to the world

in utter watchfulness, without thinking, while engaging the edges of lifeworld to reveal existence

as a situated connectedness of flow, orientation, and exchange. The paper concludes by

discussing the implications of this argument for geographical praxis. Key Words: Place,

phenomenology, ontology, affinity

One of the major directions in contemporary human geography has been to develop

understandings of place that reveal the spatiality of social life and contribute to progressive

political thought and action. Recent thinking on place stresses not only its open, fluid, and

contested nature but also its structural power to create boundaries and opacity in the reproduction

of socio-ecological dominance and cultural hegemony. Place has been conceived of as a center

for meaning, self-reflection, and interpretation (Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001), and on-the-

ground work has provided rich descriptions of the human experience of belonging and its

counterparts in dislocation, forced mobility, and lack of access (Myers 1991; Feld and Basso

1996; Dominy 2000). Places have been theorized as both historically contingent and globally

networked through the social processes that create the variegated and uneven real-world terrain

of production and consumption (Soja 1989; Harvey 1989; Lefebvre 1991; Pred and Watts 1992;

Appadurai 1996; Smith 1996). The ideological power of place is revealed in the taken-for-

granted geographies of inclusion and exclusion that simultaneously highlight strategies for

emancipatory politics (Kobayashi and Mackenzie 1989; Cresswell 1996). In this way, places

emerge out of the interplay between structure and agency to produce specific contexts for

meaning, action, and thought in the reproduction of social power (Gilbert 1988; Pudup 1988;

Massey 1991; Dirlik 1998, 1999).

Recent phenomenological work points to a sense of place as the singular existential

ground for thought, action, and understanding (Casey 1993, 1997; Malpas 1999, 2006). The

insight is that existence is placed: anything that ―is‖ first requires a situation to provide both

context and horizon for its availability as an object. Place is how the world presents itself, that is

to say, being inevitably requires a place, a situation, for its disclosure. As McGreevey (2001) has

pointed out, there is a longstanding if understated tradition in geography of attending to the

boundaries of situatedness, to the limits that separate the known from the unknown, the world

from the all-encompassing void, life and thought from mortality and nothingness. It is by

questioning and pushing against these boundaries that what is existentially real can be discerned

in the effort to articulate, always imperfectly and incompletely, the ―elusive other‖ (Preston

1997, 32) that lies beyond the horizon. Taken together, these phenomenological ways of thinking

suggest that sustained exploration into place as existential situatedness may yield deeper insight

into the human condition and guide productive and compassionate ethical relationships and

actions.

The purpose of this article is to link recent work in existential phenomenology with

contemporary interpretations of affinity politics as a way of contributing to progressive place-

based politics and thought. Affinity politics comprise diverse forms of radical activism whereby

participants are creating non-coercive, cooperative, and grounded relationships through practices

of mutual aid that disengage from the state and its institutions (Day 2005). The defining feature

of affinity politics is a shared ethical commitment to helping people develop the capacity to

determine the conditions of their own existence without direct recourse to the institutions of civil

society.2 The argument presented here illustrates how the existential awareness of place is an

expression of affinity politics in which self-determination is realized through encounters with

human and non-human others, through an ―open‖ sense of place, an attunement to wonder and

compassion amid the finitude and mutability of the lifeworld. We recognize that the terms

―wonder‖ and ―compassion‖ might sound odd and perhaps even mystical, but they correspond

most adequately to the phenomenological description of an embodied awareness of place. We

then read this place-based ontology against contemporary interpretations of affinity politics to

show how an understanding of the existential situation can be used to develop a geographical

ethics grounded in the twin conditions of human mortality and belonging.

Our argument is based on a specific understanding of ontology as the nature of being

prior to any knowledge or cognition of it, that is, the question of the meaning of being. Why is

there something rather than nothing? How is it that entities appear in something like a ―world?‖

On what ground are entities relevant and meaningful? We do not deny that other

conceptualizations of ontology are possible and productive but our argument concerning the

existentiality of place requires an existential approach to ontology.3

Affinity Politics

The term ―affinity‖ is increasingly used to describe the current approaches, tactics, and trends in

radical activism (Harraway 1991; Roman 1998; Hodge 2000; Waitt 2003; Day 2004; Chatterton

2006), and is generally considered to be one expression of the ―newest‖ social movements of the

late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Offe 1985; Mohanty 1987; Fainstein and Hirst

1995; Pile 1997; Woods 2003). Affinity politics engage no single adversary but materialize in a

shifting constellation of relationships and actions set against the backdrop of contemporary

neoliberal hegemony. The result is a slate of unexpected coalitions and partnerships. Crusty

punks and lifestyle anarchists appear with peaceniks and developing-world activists in a variety

of anti-globalization protests; indigenous peoples collaborate with Anglo ranchers,

multinationals, and environmentalists to construct and defend hybridized, globally networked

territories; young adults from suburbs drop out of the workforce to start community gardens in

inner cities as a way of engaging in the struggles of indigent minority residents. Most

importantly for geographers, affinity is finding expression in a politics of place that involves the

construction of a striking array of fluid and flexible spaces on the margin (hooks 1990; Keith and

Pile 1993; Soja and Hooper 1993; Soja 1996).

The conceptualization of affinity and its politics has roots in an intellectual tradition

stretching back at least as far as the eighteenth and nineteenth-century anarchisms of Goodwin,

Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin in the west, and even farther back elsewhere: Taoism, Zen

Buddhism, and Sufism all have strong affinity elements. Day (2005) has charted the genealogy

of affinity in western thought, along the way uncovering its defining feature: a shared ethical

commitment to helping people develop the capacity to determine the conditions of their own

existence. In the context of contemporary activism, the politics of affinity has involved creating

non-coercive, cooperative, and grounded relationships through which such self-determinations

are realized in practices of mutual aid that effectively bypass the state and its institutions. In its

purest form, there is no attempt even to engage the state through reform or revolution. The idea

instead is to render its institutions increasingly redundant through ―direct action‖ with other

human beings who are also seeking to recover their capacity for self-determination.

Affinity politics can initially be understood as a longstanding alternative to the counter-

hegemonic approaches of Marxist revolutionaries, liberal reformists, and identity-rights activists.

The term hegemony originated as hegemonia in ancient Greece, where it meant the domination

of one city-state by another. Yet its rhetorical content went deeper to signify the inability to rule

one‘s self while under the command of another individual, group, or institutional order.

Beginning in earnest after 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, the institutions associated with the

European nation-state increasingly engineered this transfer in kinship with evolving capitalist

and command forms of accumulation. In the early modern era, hegemony continued to express

itself as it had in the ancient world through the overt, public oppression and punishment of a

subject population (Foucault 1979). As theorized by Gramsci (1971), however, a distinctively

cultural hegemony began to emerge in what he referred to as ―advanced‖ industrial societies; this

formation consisted of ideological practices whereby individuals forfeit self-determination by

accepting their own oppression as a ―natural‖ fact. In his governmentality thesis, Foucault (1979)

added that in such hegemonic formation, power no longer emanates from a single, visible source

such as a king or dictator, but rather in the micropolitics of bodily surveillance and discipline

through which we effectively govern each other. In today‘s global neoliberal hegemony, then,

the deleterious effects are twofold: outright exploitation of developing-world and underclass

populations through international and internal divisions of labor, and complicit acceptance by

and indifference among what Jean Baudrillard (1983) called the ―silent majority‖ of middle-class

consumers.

Hegemony contributes to deficient human relationships by undermining both the

possibility and value of direct action, mutual aid, and unmediated interaction with the people,

places, and non-human beings in our lives. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas

Hobbes (1996/1651) wrote in Leviathan that submission to a civil order such as the state is

necessary to achieve peace, pleasure, and civility among people. The idea that the state is

essential for attaining freedom became one of the defining traits of the modern era. But by

submitting to the machinations of this civil order, we give up the capacity to govern, think, and

act for ourselves in truly autonomous fashion, focusing instead on navigating through ―societies

of control‖ in which much of our time is spent in alienation from self and others (Deleuze 1992).

Alienation stems not only from the routines of working for a wage, paying bills to corporations,

filing paperwork with the state, and consuming ubiquitously advertised goods, but also and more

fundamentally from an overarching ―ethics of desire‖ in which immediate action is postponed in

favor of the insatiable pursuit of a future but ultimately illusory ―spectacle‖ that promises to

satisfy desire but only serves to stimulate and sustain it (Lacan 1992). A number of social

theorists have described and examined, albeit from diverse analytical perspectives, such

colonization of lifeworld by hegemonic systems of control and oppression (Habermas 1987;

Harraway 1991; Lefebvre 1991; Hardt and Negri 1994).

In the modern era, the conventional approach to challenging hegemony has come in the

form of counter-hegemonic movements oriented toward revolution or reform. Beginning in the

late nineteenth century, Marxist revolutionary movements sought to overturn relationships of

economic domination, but in seizing the state apparatus and using exclusionary class politics to

accomplish this goal the net effect was to perpetuate yet another hegemonic oppression and

exploitation that served as the original motivation for revolution (Day 2005). An alternative

approach is found in the tradition of liberal reformism and identity politics, which instead of

trying to overthrow the state attempt instead to manipulate its operation by seeking the

endorsement of programs and policies for pluralism and minority rights in a ―politics of demand‖

(Žižek 1997). The problem in this case is that by anticipating and accommodating such demands,

the state is essentially sustained and the alienating effects of its mediating power continue

unabated (Brown 1997 and Entrikin 2002a provide additional discussion of this problem).

Consequently, although counter-hegemonic movements appear intellectually diverse on the

surface, they share the same limitation: in fighting the prevailing hegemonic order they replace it

with hegemony, that is, a hierarchical, universalized, and ultimately exclusionary ―utopia‖ (post-

revolution fantasy or reformist program) that perpetuates the same inhumane conditions that

originally catalyzed revolution or reform. Paradoxically, then, counter-hegemonic movements

sustain hegemony by engaging it. Their intrinsic limitation is in the ―hegemony of hegemony,‖

that is, the belief that there can be no freedom without the state form (Day 2005).

The countervailing anarchist phenomenon of mutual aid can be seen clearly in, for

instance, the winter snowstorm that shuts off power and heat. The people who emerge from their

homes do more than help shovel snow, share generators and fireplaces, and cook food together

on makeshift stoves. They talk, interact, and connect. The everyday indifference of hegemony

has been temporarily suspended. As soon as power is restored, however, most people return to

their private lives in the sequestered, routine spaces of home and work. This does not mean that

we live in a world bereft of intimate and meaningful human relationships; people still become

neighbors, friends, and partners. Nor does it mean that it is possible to achieve a society without

relations of power and domination (see Foucault 1980). Rather, the issue at stake is one of

balance. If hegemony is a common tendency evident throughout human history to establish

social order by creating and maintaining social (in)difference and divisiveness, then our efforts—

political, intellectual, and otherwise—need to be directed at minimizing that domination and

exploitation by engaging the connectedness underlying individual beings and the malleability of

social and personal identities.

Affinity is an intellectual and political alternative to the counter-hegemonic approach. It

is ―not oriented to allowing a particular group or movement to remake a nation-state or a world

in its own image,‖ but rather is ―appropriate to those who are striving to recover, establish or

enhance their ability to determine the conditions of their own existence, while allowing and

encouraging others to do the same‖ (Day 2005, 13). As developed in classical anarchism and

later, threads of poststructuralist critique, affinity praxis entails subverting hegemonic oppression

and indifference without recourse to the mediating institutions of the state and capitalist markets.

In ―direct action,‖ the concern is to address real individual, group, and community needs

immediately and in the absence of a totalizing, universalizing end-game vision or teleological

identity. In so doing, the process is to render the state and capitalist markets increasingly

redundant by disengaging from them. This approach points up spontaneous action, political

improvization, spatial transience, organizational decentralization, multiple and fluid identities,

and ideological inconsistency exemplified in, for instance, the affinity group that emerged in late

nineteenth-century Spain in opposition to Marxism‘s hierarchical organizational structure or,

more recently, in temporary autonomous zones (Bey 1991) such as those created by the Burning

Man Festival and the Dazzle Dancers of New York City.4

Affinity tactics include dropping out and refusing to work, non-violent resistance,

subversion of institutional authority through parody and satire, and constructing alternatives

(e.g., community gardens, spontaneous markets, grassroots distribution webs, the creation of

bioregions) that take power from the neoliberal project by making it ever more superfluous. Each

tactic has a long history as well as its own strengths and weaknesses. Active groups such as the

Affinity Project out of Queen‘s University in Kingston, Ontario and the Earth Liberation Front5

use them in ways that range from non-violent protest and the construction of alternatives to

outright destruction of built structures and material property. The unifying thread, such that it is,

can be found in decentralized and dispersed forms of organization, fluid and interchangeable

group memberships, improvised and even contradictory approaches to political action, and the

overarching, empathetic concern to repatriate the ability to determine the conditions of existence.

In the pages that follow, we draw from contemporary work in existential phenomenology

to show how the embodied awareness of place is an expression of affinity politics. Our account

describes place in the ontological terms of ―situatedness‖—the singular and inevitable

precondition for being and by extension, all beings. Crucially, existential situatedness is not a

static setting or a ―place‖ in the conventional sense of the term. Instead, the word points to the

ontological event or ―happening‖ through which being is made evident in objects, ideas,

thoughts, experiences, identities, names--in short, the world. The next section describes this

place-based ontology.

The Phenomenology of Place

Place is commonly understood as the areal context for objects, events, and actions (Entrikin

1991). Summarizing contemporary work, Agnew (1987) described place as possessing the three

dimensions of locale (the setting for social action and interaction); locality (the arrangement of

settings relative to broader scales of political-economic process); and sense of place (the

attachments and meanings associated with locale). The complex etymological history of the term

comprises a basic tension between indicating a location or site relative to some pre-given area,

scale, or grid, and also as a locale or abode, ideas that have semantic connections to the Greek

word plateia, meaning ―broad way‖ or ―open space.‖ Adding to this complexity are the terms

topos and chora, which speak to notions of dimensionality and containment and are sometimes

equated to the English ―place‖ and ―space‖ respectively, although there is no solid historical or

etymological reason for this association (Malpas 1999, 24). To confuse this history further, the

idea of space superseded place during the course of western philosophy after the Greek concept

of kenon (void) was developed into the idea of pure physical extension as a universal container

for objects in the Renaissance and Modern eras. In this way, entities lost their ―place‖ to become

mere locations in space (Malpas 1999, 26; see also Casey 1997). What this difficult etymological

and philosophical history reveals is not only that place and space are conceptually inseparable,

but also that in our everyday lives we are so familiar with the phenomenon indicated by the word

―place‖ that definitions elude us and the concept is easily ignored or simplified (Casey 1997;

Malpas 1999).

Geographers have tried to repatriate place by showing its significance for human meaning

and intentionality on the one hand, and for social action and process on the other. Humanistic

geography originally emphasized place as the center for meaning and emotional attachment;

places are created as humans respond to, interpret, and manipulate their environs. From this

viewpoint, interesting questions have been explored regarding the nature of place in relation to

lifeworld, community, power, affect, and agency (Tuan 1974, 1977; Agnew 1989; Entrikin 1991;

Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001). Diverse structural and poststructural perspectives--some of

which incorporate elements of humanism and phenomenology--have theorized place as both

product and agent in the reproduction and transformation of social life (Kobayashi and

Mackenzie 1989). Such ideas are evident in work on uneven development (Smith 1984), space-

time compression (Harvey 1989), the social production of space (Lefebvre 1991), transgression

and ideology (Cresswell 1996), and human morality (Sack 2003). This work reveals place as

open and contested but also bounded and opaque, offering simultaneous possibilities for

progressive and reactionary forms of thought and action.

While contemporary work in human geography is laudable in that it has moved place

away from the etiolated concept of mere location, for philosopher Jeff Malpas (1999, 2006) it

has tended to miss a more fundamental understanding of place as the ―event‖ or ―framing‖

within which meaning and knowledge are first (i.e., most immediately) made possible. Often,

place is implicitly and inadvertently constructed as something separate from experience and

embodiment--something that can be constructed, to which meaning can be attached, or through

which social life unfolds. As Malpas (1999, 30) wrote regarding humanism in geography, ―it is

not place as such that is important, but just the idea of human responsiveness--a responsiveness

that need not be grounded in any concept of place or locality at all.‖ To be fair, the place-bound

condition of human life and social action is prevalent throughout geographical scholarship. The

issue is that the phenomenology of place--the quality of existence as placed--is often taken for

granted and not rendered explicit. By extension, academic debates over the relative significance

of place‘s subjective and objective qualities have tended to conceal the radically empirical

observation that any kind of being immediately presupposes its own placing (i.e., a situation in

which it is made manifest); concepts such as subjectivity and objectivity emerge as relevant only

from within this situated condition. If modernity is vexed by ―a fundamental polarity of human

consciousness between a relatively subjective and a relatively objective point of view‖ (Entrikin

1991, 1; see also Nagel 1986), then the inability to move past this dichotomy is in the persistent

failure to grasp place as the ineluctable situatedness through which the world expresses itself.

Phenomenology is perhaps the least understood philosophy imported into Anglo-

American geography during the twentieth century. As Pickles (1985) pointed out, a large part of

this misinterpretation lies in the disagreement between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger

over the nature of phenomenological study. Husserl founded modern phenomenology as the

philosophical effort to ground knowledge in experience. Returning to the Kantian problem of the

structure of consciousness, Husserl used Bretano‘s concept of intentionality (the observation that

consciousness is always consciousness of something) to argue for an understanding of the world

as a unified phenomenon of synthesis between noesis (conscious act) and noemata (object of

consciousness). In what Husserl called the ―natural attitude‖ of everyday life, objects are

assumed to exist and to exhibit definite properties perceptible to a stand-alone observer. During

the course of Western modernity, this ontological assumption served as the basis for

epistemological realism in the natural sciences and epistemological idealism in the human and

social sciences. Following Descartes, if first I think and then I am, or in the natural sciences the

other way around, an ontological dualism is immediately created between subject (res cogitans)

and object (res extensa). By making lifeworld an object, the natural and human sciences laid

claim to advances in knowledge and higher standards of living during the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, but in practice had produced a distinctively modern crisis of social

alienation, oppression, inequity, and indifference (Husserl 1970; see also Relph 1976). Husserl‘s

technique of epochē (bracketing) was designed to call the taken-for-granted world into question

so as to observe what remains: the genuine structures of a singular, synthesizing consciousness.

Heidegger largely agreed with the conceptualization of phenomenology as the radically

empirical inquiry into ―the things themselves,‖ but disagreed with Husserl over the abstract and

cerebral method of identifying transcendental structures of consciousness. Heidegger sought to

create philosophy instead as a language and way of thinking that discloses the active happening

of being as the source of knowledge. For Heidegger, the western philosophers who followed the

pre-Socratic Greeks had largely ignored this phenomenon of be-ing, seeking the metaphysics of

knowledge instead in categorizations of objects already present in the spatiotemporal fabric of a

pre-given world. Kant tried to transcend these limits by making consciousness itself the object of

philosophical reflection, but as Heidegger (1990/1929) observed, in the second and more

definitive edition of Critique of Pure Reason the Prussian philosopher ultimately ―turned away‖

from the question of being, which allowed subsequent thinkers such as Hegel and

Schleiermacher to reduce his thought to subjectivism. Like so many before him, Husserl also had

used an abstraction, the structure of consciousness, as the object for philosophical reflection,

effectively hiding the real phenomenon of interest: the ongoing, always-already being-in-the-

world.

Heidegger‘s move towards pure existing would appear to be the pinnacle of subjectivism,

but paradoxically the opposite is true: Being transcends (is a necessary condition for) all

consciousness and any awareness of it. The sheer fact that something like a ―you‖ is reading this

article right now already requires the condition of being. It is for this reason that all

understanding, thought, and knowledge inevitably begin from within an embedded situation

―here, in the midst of things‖ (Cavell 1993, 41). Heidegger‘s approach to philosophy is based on

this strikingly simple but easily forgotten observation: No matter where you are or what you are

doing, you always find yourself already and immediately in the world and, more importantly,

any questions about the world (or any knowledge of it) instantly presuppose and invoke this

situatedness.

It is difficult to appreciate Heidegger‘s shift of focus. As soon as we put the lived quality

of being into thought or speech, existence instantly recedes from embodied awareness, that is to

say, it becomes abstract. Yet when we do attend to the experience of existing, we notice that far

from being a single, static moment in a succession of moments, it is rather the singular, dynamic

presencing of an entire world, one that encompasses but also exceeds the empirical and cognitive

distinctions of self and other. It is like constantly finding yourself in a situation that is already lit

up, given pace, and moving in the rhythm of moods and actions. Things arise mutually like the

play of light and dark on the crest of a surfacing wave. Some actions are in denouement, others

on the cusp of realization. Certain possibilities are immediate and salient, others completely

hidden from view and impossible to fathom until brought near. So upon closer observation,

existence is actually a worlding--it never is the same twice--as the past cascades into future

possibilities within the enduring situation of a ―happening‖ that is at once out of our control but

also readily available for manipulation and interaction. Hiss (1991, 4) has described this

embodied awareness of place as ―simultaneous perception,‖ that part of the ―structure of our

attention … that drinks in whatever it can from its surroundings.‖ It is, in other words, a mode of

experience that integrates the responses of our senses in an ―even-handed, instantaneous, and

outward-looking flow of attention,‖ one that accentuates connectivity and orientation (1991, 20–

21). These are experiences characterized by utter watchfulness, split-second reactions to myriad

variables, a fluid body boundary, and a diminished self–object differentiation in which we rest

our attention concurrently on ourselves and the things outside ourselves. It is the experience of

attending to the world without thinking, but instead breathing, experiencing, and observing in the

simultaneous perception of embodied awareness.

Malpas (2006) argues that Heidegger‘s unique insight for philosophy, one that charted

the course for his entire project, was to explore this ―happening‖ or ―existing‖ as a placing, a

situatedness that gives rise to the basic possibilities of time, space, experience, understanding,

and finally the formal structures of language and knowledge. Malpas refers to this sort of

exploration as ―topology.‖ As Heidegger critic Joseph Fell (1985, 29) wrote, ―The entirety of

Heidegger‘s thinking turned out to be a protracted effort at remembering the place in which all

human experience—practical or theoretical, willed or reasoned, poetic or technical—has always

come to pass.‖ Heidegger sought to keep this omnipresent, efflorescent ―being-there,‖

―bethinging,‖ or ―event‖ (Ereignis) in view so as to ground philosophy not in the categories of

metaphysics (an intellectual practice that effectively hides the question of being) but rather in the

concrete, everyday being-in-the-world. As is well known, Heidegger (1962/1927) first

approached this analysis by appropriating the German word Dasein to capture being-there as the

foundation for existential ontology, that is, the site that being requires to take place (see sections

2–4 in Being and Time). Critically, ―taking place‖ is revealed not as an object or category but

rather in attunement (how moods and embodiment disclose the world as already there, always

thrown into a particular context) and understanding (the appropriation of possibilities for some

purpose that necessarily bears on being-in-the-world). This is how Dasein finds itself in a world

that is not simply given or preexistent, but actively disclosed in a happening that simultaneously

opens up and closes off possibilities for experience, thought, and action. In ontological terms,

then, ―being‖ is not that which is present (e.g., an object, idea, self, the world) but rather that

which is happening in the situation of disclosure, an active ―gathering in particularity‖ (e.g., an

ongoing ―event‖ or situation in which any and all being--and thinking about being--necessarily

takes place) (Malpas 2006, 16). Consequently, the possibility for a place-based ontology was

there at the beginning of Heidegger‘s thinking, but the philosopher overlooked this prospect in

his rush to prioritize temporality as the ontological ground. Heidegger, however, spent the

remainder of his career trying to find his way back ―in‖ to being, so that there is evident in the

phenomenologist‘s work a sustained effort at a distinctively topological thinking (see especially

Heidegger 1971, 1999).

For Heidegger, Dasein (―being-there‖) was no reification of subjective experience,

although he constantly defended (and developed) his work against the criticism of subjectivism.

As he complained in his Zollikon Seminars, the primary French translation of the term (―être-là‖)

was in fact a reification because it connoted a subject existing in a stable moment of time--on the

scene, in the here and now. Dasein, by contrast, was Heidegger‘s turn of phrase intended to

designate the singular ―openness,‖ or situatedness (Malpas 2006), through which being appears.

Accordingly, Dasein designates ―here‖ and ―there‖ simultaneously, a situatedness that includes

but transcends a distinctively individual or even human kind of being. As Heidegger pointed out,

the phrase ―human Dasein‖ is a pleonasm. Importantly, then, ontological situatedness is the

precondition for the experience of self and other, subjectivity and objectivity (Malpas 1999,

2006). Any term used to describe this precondition runs the risk of reification, of course, but in

the end, it is essential to remember that the name is not the phenomenon (or the precondition for

phenomena). As Heidegger‘s later writings reveal, the effort becomes one of using language

creatively and poetically to ―point out‖ the ineluctable ontological condition.

For contemporary readers, Heidegger is often a controversial figure because of his

troubling involvement in National Socialism, which has led to genuine and persistent skepticism

about the ethical repercussions of the philosopher‘s ideas, especially those on authenticity,

resolution, and historical destiny. Malpas and others (Marx 1987, 1992; Nenon 1992; Polt 1999)

have countered not only that Heidegger‘s poor political decisions cannot be used to dismiss great

ontological insight, but also and more importantly that he failed to follow the real implications of

his own thought. The topological approach to being holds out the possibility for a distinctively

compassionate mode of attunement and understanding that discloses the situated character of

being and keeps it in view. Compassion, in short, is founded in a wonder at the situatedness that

calls our existence into question (Marx 1992; Nenon 1992; Polt 1999). For to have awareness of

being, and by extension to seek an understanding of the meaning of being, is to recognize one‘s

existence as already in question: vulnerable, perishable, contingent. This is part of what

Heidegger (1962, 32) intended in his original formulation of Dasein as ―the being for whom

being is an issue.‖ Before anyone can even begin to inquire into whether she or the world

actually exists, she must already have an understanding, at least on some level, of what it means

to exist in order to pose the question at all (Being and Time, section 13; see also Polt 1999, 47).

What it means to ―be‖ is precisely to come into question (Malpas 2006, 250). This is no less true

for Dasein itself, which is incomplete by dint of its ontology, defined in terms of the possibilities

that it is not yet and a factual past that it can no longer be. More than a scholar, teacher, parent,

or partner, Dasein is a chooser that is always becoming, that is to say, Dasein dwells (Polt 1999).

Dasein, then, is essentially nothingness; as Heidegger (1992/1924, 22E) put it: ―Then Dasein

would be: being questioning.‖

Two implications follow from calling being into question. First, questionability gives the

world what Malpas (2006) has called its ―iridescent‖ quality, its shimmering into infinitely new

and unpredictable ways of disclosure. Iridescence is a way of naming how the world is an

interplay of being and nothingness, situation and void, mediated by a limit or horizon that can be

traversed but never transcended. Every object appears only because its own edges give it

presence; a figure can appear only against a backdrop or ground. Like objects, words and ideas

stand out as meaningful because of their context, that is, their situation relative to other words

and ideas. In our everyday experience of the landscape, we navigate through ―taskscapes‖ that

bring entities together in unique situations with distinct horizons (Ingold 1993). Those horizons

can be crossed over, but crossing only serves to open up new places, new situations. Our own

mortality is the ultimate boundary—it is the limit to all our small possibilities as human beings—

but one that also gives meaning and motivation because without mortality, being would not be at

issue. A boundary is not only the edge from which an entity begins and ends but also a horizon

for becoming something other than it is presently. For while situatedness allows entities to be

disclosed as what they are at any given moment, it also prohibits them from being fully disclosed

as all that they are (Polt 1999). What this means is that in any given situation, entities can always

come to being in a new way.

A second implication of questionability is wonder. The Greek word for ―wonder,‖

thauma, meant ―an excess of being; an overabundance.‖ Recognizing the contingency and

vulnerability of all individual beings cultivates a profound wonder that there are any beings at

all. Wonder is brought into sharp focus through the experience of mortality. As Heidegger

explained in sections 46–53 of Being and Time, we do not have to actually experience death to

know that our end is always there. Mortality is a special kind of possibility, what Heidegger

called our ―ownmost possibility‖—it is the visceral understanding of the impossibility of being,

the end of existing. Given this overarching nothingness or ―void‖ (McGreevey 2001), it is a

wonder that there is even the slightest opportunity for meaning, thought, and action (Marx 1992;

see also Nenon 1992). This feeling is captured by the German phrase entsetzen angst, an anxiety

that knocks us out of the comfortable, secure banality of the everyday in which things are simply

taken for granted. The uncertainty that attends mortality reveals the world‘s precariousness and

perishability, the marvelous absurdity in being‘s simultaneous contingency and meaningfulness,

and finally that we are ―radically dependent upon things other than ourselves to realize even the

few limited possibilities available to us‖ (Nenon 1992, 18).

This ―radical dependence‖ on human and non-human others is compassion (Marx 1992).

Ontological situatedness—what Heidegger called the ―there‖—has the paradoxical quality of

belonging to every one (it is always already ―mine‖) and yet to no one in particular (it is the

―world‖) (Malpas 2006, 58) Attuned to such situatedness, the expression of ―you‖ and ―me‖

comes out of an underlying being-there—we are existentially dependent on being-in-the-world

for any sense of self, other, ego-identity, or even alienation. The underlying feature of ―being-

there‖ is an enduring finitude,6 in both the immediate sense (as in changing place, context, or

mood) and absolute sense (as in the prospect of nonexistence, nonbeing). Paradoxically, then,

each ―being‖ that appears in awareness is part of a more durable situation of change and

transformation. The ethical implication is twofold: Every human and non-human ―being‖ is

ineluctably connected to every other, and every being possesses the capacity to change. By

calling being (in the sense of stable presence of form) into question, the contingency intrinsic to

situatedness opens possibilities for compassion, that is, a sociality of dwelling together amidst

the common condition of a meaningful but finite existence comprised of inevitable change and

perishability (Marx 1992). Compassion is a kind of clarity based on the insight that to make

sense of being-in-the-world, to find one‘s proper place in it, requires helping others to do the

same (Marx 1992; Foltz (1995, 15) refers to this phenomenon as ―saving‖ being).

The next section develops the argument by showing how the embodied awareness of

place opens up an affinity politics expressed in the possibilities for self-determination through

deep relationships with other human and non-human beings. In conventional language, affinity

denotes an attraction, connectedness, or empathy between two or more entities. The affinity for

place lies in the attunement to and understanding of situatedness, a mode of being that discloses

the constant mutability of the world, the sense of self as exceeding its own boundaries, and the

compassion intrinsic to grounded social and ecological relationships. Affinity politics, by

extension, represents an empirical-historical context for developing an open sense of place as

progressive political praxis. Specifically, such politics entail taking up a position at the boundary

between self and other in a place where transformation can occur through spontaneous social and

ecological connections.

Discussion: Affinity and an Open Sense of Place

Affinity confronts a distinct set of obstacles in theory and practice. While affinity is the result of

direct action and mutual aid, there is no ―pure‖ affinity movement in the world today, as all of

the newest social movements contain at least some modernist elements of fixity, exclusion, and

difference. Homophobia has been a particularly prevalent obstacle in this regard (Day 2005).

Equally troubling are the violent and destructive acts done under the affinity banner, such as

when ecoactivists burn suburban homes or destroy SUVs. These problems turn on the ever-

present potential for exclusion and divisiveness in constructing even the most progressive

politics of social change. And it should go without saying that conflict and contest are seemingly

inevitable aspects of human interaction, political or otherwise, which might lead some to

discredit affinity out of hand as a chimerical ethics. Finally, because of its own diffusive and

amorphous nature, affinity is difficult to sustain as a viable basis for enduring change over the

long term since it resists the blueprint logic of a metanarrative or any end-goal vision for social

action. These issues point to the question of scale. So much theorizing in geography and

elsewhere emphasizes the need to go beyond the phenomenological perspective to understand

collective action at a scale that exceeds the relations among individuals. Is it possible to move

from the locus of phenomenological interactivity to structured social action? Are compassionate,

intimate relationships in any way effective in challenging and transforming the broader structural

forces of power, capital, and ideology?

Paradoxically, this problem emerges from how scale has been constructed in academic

and popular discourse. Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005) recently critiqued the dominant

hierarchical conceptualizations of scale, in part on the grounds that these approaches reify and

reproduce a set of micro–macro binaries into ―levels‖ that become conceptual givens through

which real, everyday interactions are explained and thereby contained and etiolated. As Moore

(2008, 206) added, ―the conceptual bases of hierarchical scale are politically regressive because

they unhelpfully reproduce sociospatial inequalities and choke off possibilities of resistance.‖

Efforts to nuance hierarchical scale with metaphors of networking or nesting ultimately do not

overcome the ontological prioritization of the highest, most global ―levels‖ over the myriad

intimate and local situations in which social life is actually lived, known, and negotiated (Raffles

2002; Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005). Scale, in other words, depends on the ―god trick‖

of methodological perspectivism that underwrites the illusion of a ―view from nowhere‖ through

only which local actions can be explained (Haraway 1991). From this point of view, hierarchical

scale and any attempts to construct politics on this basis trend towards an ideological fixity that

neglects the lived features of everyday life.

Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005) propose instead a ―flat ontology‖ that foregrounds

the myriad, particular, and always-emergent sites of social interactivity constituted by human and

non-human practices that network into and are transformed by connections with other sites. In

their words, flat ontologies ―consist of self-organizing systems … where the dynamic properties

of matter produce a multiplicity of complex relations and singularities that sometimes lead to the

creation of new, unique events and entities, but more often to relatively redundant orders and

practices‖ (2005, 422). As a scientific-cartographic discourse, scale obscures its own social

construction within precisely these networks and sites--university campuses, government offices,

corporate board rooms, the research field. As Raffles (2002) noted in his discussion of local

knowledge, the explanatory power of scale--or any scientific knowledge for that matter--depends

less on its ―intrinsic truthfulness‖ than it does on its ability to travel through networks of power

and prestige as scientists and others marshal intellectual, physical, and political-economic

resources to ensure its reproduction across sites in myriad networks (see also Latour 1988). A

flat ontology discloses this process of social construction to show how the production and

application of scale in specific situations, or ―sites,‖ is itself an expression of power through

which social life is differentiated, organized, and controlled.

The motivation for deconstructing scale, then, is to open real spaces for political

intervention based on the insight that global inequality and social oppression can be engaged and

challenged in and through actual sites and their connections, not on some abstract level of their

operation or arrangement. The site is a paradoxical place, however, both a generative nexus for

variation, creativity, and interaction but also (and more often) a context for closure, restriction,

redundancy, and reaction. Once scale is deconstructed, then, the challenge becomes how to

engage, manage, and think about connectivity from within an embedded, situated position and

therefore without recourse to a totalizing or reductionist geographical framework. One of the

main difficulties for progressive place-based activism, for instance, concerns how to balance

―local‖ values, needs, and interests against the impacts of ―global‖ capital and power without

diminishing the place‘s connectivity and interactivity (Massey 1991; Dirlik 1998). Contemporary

geographical approaches to moral and political philosophy ask how the material, social, and

experiential dynamics of place offer guidance for ethical judgments and morality in the modern

world (Sack 1998, 1999, 2003; Entrikin 2002a, 2002b). Work on democratic place-making, for

example, supports deliberative models that envision democracy as a form of place-making that

arbitrates the inevitable tensions between identity and difference (Entrikin 2002a, 2002b).

Progressive politics involve coming to places where deliberation, argument, engagement, and

contest can occur among multiple and evolving groups that are held together by their own unique

bonds, meanings, and places.

The phenomenology of place presented in the previous section similarly envisions

progressive politics from a situated position. The key distinction is that the phenomenological

approach engages an ontology in which place precedes space. To illustrate this difference,

consider the work on democratic placemaking, which is premised on an anthropocentric

definition of place as a constructed and bounded area of a space that precedes both existence and

project. Space is primary in ontological terms; it gives rise to natural and social elements that are

subsequently ―mixed‖ into places through human activity. From this perspective, place

effectively bridges a preexisting divide between the natural world and the human world, and as

such it can be used as a concrete, everyday guide for morally appropriate and politically

progressive thought and action. The phenomenological approach, by contrast, is based on the

radically empirical observation that situatedness is singularly universal, preceding and therefore

giving rise to the spatial possibilities of location (identity) and extension (difference) that

constitute any kind of ―world.‖ Empirically speaking, there is little doubt that the natural and

social are distinct from one another and often at odds, and that the gap we perceive between them

is real in our everyday experience. The phenomenological perspective, however, shows that

cognition, existence, and indeed all things present first depend on place as the situated but

universal ground required for a world—natural or human—to appear. Place does more than

bridge; it grounds.

An open sense of place encompasses but extends beyond democratic ideals towards an

anarchic affinity politics anchored in the attunement to existential situatedness. So in addition to

the value of enhanced intellectual and moral appreciation of areal variation and context, the

phenomenological argument illustrates how the existential and embodied awareness of place

contributes to humane relationships and encounters by viscerally pointing out and reminding us

of the fluid, dynamic property of human being and social identity; the empathetic concern for the

self-determination of others in symbiotic relation; the disengagement from civil society as a

point of negotiation to focus on the immediate quality of lived existence; and most basically, the

explicit prioritization of being over ideological-intellectual abstraction in the formulation of

political and moral praxis. An open sense of place engenders an ethics based on encounters at the

edges of lifeworld where the paradoxical condition of being—the absurdity of belonging to a

contingent finitude—is harnessed for transformation, growth, and compassion. The classical

anarchist and affinity forerunner Pierre Proudhon (1969, 104) wrote of this experience as the

―fecundity of the unexpected,‖ that is, the iridescence and profundity that is intrinsic to being

when its place is made evident.

As an expression of affinity politics, an open sense of place involves finding and creating

relationships at the edges of ontological situatedness as a lived point of access to progressive

thought and action. In so doing, the idea is to disengage from the hierarchical abstractions of

scale, state, and civil society to concentrate instead on direct and unpremeditated actions

undertaken in the attunement to situatedness. Such actions disclose being-in-the-world as a

shared place, a phenomenon that has been called mitdasein (Heidegger 1962), the ―we‖ (Sartre

1965), and ―I-Thou‖ (Buber 1970). In short, extra-ordinary encounters challenge the ontological

assumption of an independent self alienated from an autonomous world. The effect is to generate

original and even unpredictable ways of thinking and acting that move beyond the binary and

scalar logics associated with conventional politics. An open sense of place is about undertaking

―possibilities as possibilities,‖ transforming the hegemonic experience of (in)difference by

finding the shared place in which all beings dwell (Nenon 1992, 6). Such politics are oriented

towards overcoming not only the desire to dominate but to be dominated as well.

In practical terms, an open sense of place can be seen in carnival, celebration, and rites of

passage as well as in temporary autonomous zones (Bey 1994). It is found in the coalition

politics of Native and non-Native activists who overcome the burden of colonial history and

ideology by developing strong interpersonal relationships out of a shared concern for the

integrity of belonging to a specific place in the world (Larsen 2004). It finds expression in the

solitude of remote places that force the encounter with one‘s own finitude but paradoxically

disclose a heightened sense of connectedness, of oneness with being (Baker 2005). It is incipient

in the moment when through sustained, unprejudiced attention to the world, the ―I-It‖

relationship is transformed into a co-constitutive ―I–Thou‖ interactivity (Buber 1970). Or as

McGreevey (2001) described in his reaction to Larry Gottheim‘s independent film Fog Line,

when viewed with sustained attention, the film shows what appears to be a static photograph of

trees as living, breathing, vital and alive—as beings, not objects. An open sense of place surfaces

in the intimacy of individuals experiencing simultaneous perception as the world discloses itself

(Raffles 2002), and also in the ecological ethics of attuning to place (Stefanovic 2000). It is

evident in the classroom when the structural divide of student and instructor dissolves into

collaborative questioning, experiential learning, and challenging the taken-for-granted world, and

also in the place-based learning communities (Davidson-Hunt and O‘Flaherty 2007) that bring

indigenous peoples and scientists together in open, democratic dialog about different ways of

knowing and interacting with the environment. Affinity, in short, is everywhere and everywhere

embodied—decentralized, rhizomatic, anarchic.

Phenomenological ethicist Werner Marx prefigured such an open sense of place. As

Nenon (1992, 17) explained, Marx was concerned with creating the ―possibility of human

community that is not based on negotiation, on contracts or rights of individuals, but on a

spontaneous recognition of the needs of others that moves one to feel a bond with the other and

out of that bond to recognize the other as a fellow mortal and behave accordingly.‖ What is

revealed are politics that seek genuine, unpremeditated action in support of one‘s fellow beings.

Such politics highlight perishability, absurdity, and wonder through spontaneous, compassionate

relationships and actions that do not require an ideological foundation but rather spring from the

embodied awareness of the shared condition of belonging amidst finitude. Marx (1992, 40) wrote

about the specific ways that moving to the edges of situatedness and attending to the void

transform the experience of the other into ―the other of myself, that is to say: as the person whose

Being constitutes a value in itself and who is given over to the same finitude as I am.‖ An open

sense of place is about recognizing the stranger as neighbor and fellow dweller; it is the praxis of

bringing people and non-human beings near through mutual aid and direct action. Again, Marx

(1992, 53): ―What do I hear and see in an intuitively rational way in this attunement of nearness?

I see and hear that my fellow man, [sic] although he is another person, is not a stranger.‖ For

activism, this approach points out ethics that are grounded in the situatedness of being.

The idea is not to eliminate closure and replace it with openness—the world is disclosed

only in and through a situation that is simultaneously cleared and bounded, at once meaningful

and contingent (Malpas 1999). Rather, the effort is to reflect on and thereby open up this

existential place to achieve productive balance and interpersonal growth given the inevitable

ontological condition of closure and finitude. Consequently, an open sense of place does not call

for abandoning theorizing about structured social action, historicity, or space. Any form of

communication, including this one, necessarily invokes linguistic and theoretical abstractions of

self, other, site, and world. The attempt here has been to use language, a way of closing and

bounding the dynamism of being into discursive categories, to point out the openness that

underlies being and animates any awareness of it. This effort suggests that all theories about the

world are inevitably placed, emergent from within a situatedness that necessarily involves social

and ecological relationships with others. In the end, an open sense of place is realized by

attending to the edge of lifeworld, to the other, where compassion and wonder are revealed in the

paradoxical condition of belonging to perishability, and where the self becomes a concourse of

ever expanding interactions.

This point bears repeating: To quote McGreevey (2001, 254), ―the world and the void …

come as a pair,‖ which means that any movement towards the boundaries of situatedness

immediately implies attunement and understandingthat is, being-in-the-world. Outside of

madness and death there is no possibility of completely transcending the self and its situation.

Dominance and ideology are inevitable if for no other reason than the sphere of interaction is

immediately and inevitably limited and circumscribed; there is always something unknown and

unfamiliar beyond in the void. But it is possible to take up a position at the borderlands, in

between the self and other, known and unknown, world and void. An open sense of place keeps

us moving towards the edges so that we may find genuine opportunity to challenge and

transform our relationships with the world, one another, and the heavy cloak of the self. When

boundaries are breached, albeit temporarily and contingently, thinking stops and real presence

begins, a consciousness that engenders an intensified sense of connectivity and meaning amidst

the absurdity of being. Hegemony is challenged when otherness and difference are engaged at

the edge of lifeworld. In this respect, the topological approach and the affinity praxis that

pertains both unfold in relation to hegemony as a leverage balancing social relations towards

equity, compassion, and tolerance in human affairs.

Conclusion: Towards an Open Sense of Place

An open sense of place will never trump domination, oppression, and indifference completely—

the place of existing is always partly bounded and opaque—but its decentralized and anarchic

expressions represent a way to create and sustain a sociality of dwelling together at the

boundaries of situatedness, in between what is known and that which is unknown, unexpected,

and transformative. In this sense, affinity is an expression of the embodied awareness of place,

but only if and when we travel to the edges of that situatedness. When the self periodically

returns home, it embodies an increasingly rich blend of affinities that motivate new journeys to

borderlands. These observations bring us to a pair of concluding points.

First, topology helps to illuminate existential features that relate to and in some cases

underpin arguments in a cross-section of contemporary work in human geography. By exploring

the contours of ontological situatedness and questioning the limits of being, an open sense of

place accords with a vision of geography as ―attending to the void‖ (McGreevey 2001) and of

―seeing through to the real‖ (Sack 2003). As Robert Sack has explained in his realist conception

of intrinsic geographic judgments, moral quality is enhanced in increased awareness of the ―real‖

and appreciation of the world‘s empirical complexity and contextual diversity. Although the

argument presented here is based in existential phenomenology, it is similar in the effort to draw

from place as a fount for progressive political and moral praxis. This consonance is prefigured in

Bachelard‘s (1964) topo-analysis whereby to know the self is to explore not only the places it

inhabits but also the ontological edges that mark off its possibilities for transformation and

growth. Such explorations contribute to an open sense of place by heightening the awareness of

context and situation, contingency and possibility, finitude and belonging. As Sack (2001) has

pointed out, though, seeing through to the ―real‖ is also about sharing this awareness with others

in the form of reciprocal gifting that enhances both the quality of experience and the depth and

texture to reality. In the event, these encounters point up the shared condition of dwelling—the

paradoxical condition of belonging amid finitude—and thereby cultivates meaningful and

compassionate relationships with other human and non-human beings.

Second, as a deeply geographical praxis, an open sense of place is complementary to the

theoretical effort to understand social activism at a scale that exceeds the relations among

individuals. While theory gives us insight into the structural, historical, and social dimensions of

social inequality and progressive politics, those understandings are realized, tested, and enriched

in and through worldly encounters with other human and non-human beings—in the classroom

or seminar room, on the street, amidst nature, in the places of protest. An open sense of place is

anarchic precisely because the world is iridescent. It refuses totalizing theoretical statements in

favor of a commitment to not-knowing that catalyzes spontaneous interactions with others in an

attitude of openness and receptivity. This does not, however, discard the need for theoretical

understanding of structured social action. But it is to say that even something as abstract as

thinking is realized only in embodied and relational encounters. At base, theory is ―intimate‖

knowledge (Raffles 2002). An open sense of place is guided by the recognition that existential

situatedness is the singular motivating precondition for thought and action, and that sustained

engagement with this place yields affinities that are at once unpredictable and haphazard but also

complementary to progressive political and moral praxis because they are attuned to ontological

humility and compassion. It should be apparent by now that this focus on ontological attunement

and understanding departs from Day‘s (2005) approach to affinity.

Phenomenology is, in part, a rigorous description of the kinds of experiences that can

open possibilities for human life and lead to new attitudes towards the world and others (Marx

1992). The phenomenology of place presented here reveals that being is universally disclosed as

situatedness, a ―there‖ that is simultaneously open but bounded, intensely personal but

immediately intersubjective by dint of its paradoxical condition of belonging amid finitude. This

topological approach to phenomenology complements contemporary theorizing of place in

human geography as fluid and contested as well as structuring and constraining. Its ontology

suggests that the embodied awareness of this place is an affinity politics undertaken through

encounters with human and non-human others at the edges of ontological situatedness. An open

sense of place is the attunement to wonder and compassion, which engender politics that are

always partial, local, and intimate but also catalyst for an ethics of genuine empathy grounded in

the profound circumstances of being.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the five anonymous reviewers who provided exceptionally

helpful and constructive critiques of two earlier drafts of this article. We would also like to

extend our gratitude to Audrey Kobayashi for her guidance and patience throughout the peer-

review process. The authors are responsible for the content of the argument as well as for any

remaining errors or omissions.

Notes

1. ―Self-determination‖ refers to the individual and collective capacity for choice, growth,

and expression without external compulsion or interference; the concept is often used to

refer more specifically to political sovereignty for national and indigenous groups. It is a

problematic term for this article, however, because we are describing a form of

embodiment that transcends self and other. In this sense, self-determination is a shorthand

label for a kind of awareness grounded in a deep understanding of ontological

situatedness, which we describe in terms of being attuned to wonder and compassion.

Despite the intrinsic limitations to the phrase, we use it periodically throughout the article

to refer to this broader idea of existential awareness and connectedness.

2. By definition, the conditions of one‘s existence are part of civil society, as is the effort to

manage those conditions. The affinity impulse, however, is to create radical relationships,

actions, and spaces that do not depend on civil institutions for their sanctioning (as in the

tradition of liberal reform) or motivation (as in the tradition of class-based revolution).

3. There is, of course, no single existential ontology. Our ―existential approach‖ simply

implies that to account for ontology first means accounting for existence.

4. The Burning Man Festival is an annual participant-driven event in experimental

community that started in San Francisco but now is held in the Black Rock Desert of

Nevada with an estimated 48,000 attendees. For more information, please refer to The

Burning Man Project at www.burningman.com (last accessed July 5, 2010). The Dazzle

Dancers are a performance troupe founded in New York City in 1996. Their mission is to

use the ―powerful forces of dance, glitter, fun…and deep-felt group unity‖ to create an

―infectious energy with audiences…and spread a message of love and sexual freedom.‖

For more information, please refer to their website at www.dazzledancers.com (last

accessed July 5, 2010).

5. For more information on the Affinity Project, please refer to the group‘s website at

www.affinityproject.org. Details on the history and evolving mission of the Earth

Liberation Front are available at www.earth-liberation-front.org. (Both sites last accessed

on July 5, 2010.)

6. We recognize that many readers will interpret ―enduring finitude‖ as a contradiction in

terms. The point we are trying to convey is that being is a kind of ―presencing‖ that

begins and ends simultaneously but endures nonetheless. The experience we had in mind

here is that of an ocean wave: by crashing down upon itself (thereby ending its existence

as a single ―wave‖), it is sustained and moves forward as an ―event‖ or a ―happening‖ as

new ―waves‖ form closer to shore.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211-

6170, email: larsens@missouri.edu (Larsen); Department of Geography, University of Kansas,

Lawrence, KS 66045-7575, email: jaytjohnson@ku.edu (Johnson).