Erotics of Place

A GPS can locate a human being. The “glowing blue dot on the Google-mapped smartphone” shows where your phone is. But, Paul Griffiths (Decreation) argues, these devices cannot locate human flesh. Such devices work only as they treat your flesh as “inanimate body,” which is not what it is (161-2).

Our relation to place isn’t the same as the relation of inanimate things. It’s not “exclusively spatial” and cannot be accounted for by “specifying Cartesian coordinates of space.” Locatedness is, rather, “an erotic relation, one of desire or delight or their opposites, to timespace” (161).

Griffiths continues, “the being-in-place of human flesh is always uneven, stumbling, incapable of adequate representation on a grid. For human flesh, there is holy ground and unhallowable, the soft and welcoming place and the place of despair; and the distance between such places is not capable of measure by rule or by grid.” 

For us, “timespace [is] gathered and furled and concentrated and distended, a panorama of shrines and altars and places of pilgrimage as well as of death pits and bomb sites and concentration camps. Flesh genuflects here, is embraced there, is fed elsewhere, and flees in horror through deserve places elsewhere again. The map of its locatedness would be more like a weather map of isobars unevenly concentrated into zones of high pressure and low than like a gridded plan on which all places are alike” (162).

We might emphasize that that for humans time has the same modulated quality – gatherings and furlings and concentrations and distensions. Because, as Griffiths implies, our relation to time like our relation to space is erotic.