Anti-Places

Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. suggests that the standard Western view of history as temporal is fundamentally opposed to North American Indigenous modes of thinking. North American Indigenous thought, as he claims through his lifelong research into pan-North American Indigenous philosophies, is very often founded in a spatial mode of history. Temporal thinking produces an understanding of history in which place is unimportant; merely a backdrop for actors, ideas, and moments to play out in an unbroken chronology of events. Spatial thinking, however, puts the particular locality of place at the heart of history, emphasising experiential knowledges of the world in the immediacy of local relationality. Indigenous Americans, for Deloria, naturally look about them in order to understand their place in history (and in the world), not into an abstracted past or future.¹

In the Western temporal mode, the euro-colonial concept of Manifest Destiny offers us a clear example of temporal thought: A place (like North America) acts as nothing more than the stage upon which an idea or an event (like European supremacy and colonialism) can spread onwards in an abstracted timeline. Temporal and spatial modes of understanding history produce, in this way, perceptibly different relationships to land: Either as tool and stage for the universal or as relation and cradle for the particular.

I am interested in this epistemic tradition as a framework for appraising the development of mines beyond places such as Deloria’s home in the Standing Rock Sioux nation in North America. Particularly when faced with the creation of what I will refer to as anti-places in this piece: Places which have had their particular and complex locality transformed through devastation into the imminently replicable, controlled, and determinant landscape of the mine.

I believe that this indicates a spatial (re)turn in thecritical tradition of Deloria. The very question of what “to do” in the face of this indicates a need torelate to the spatiality of these voids, these annihilated anti-places: Now that this place is devoid of all material value in relation to the march of “capital” and “progress” as ideas through history, what is this place here and now? Or what could it be? Bringing this place back into history spatially. Often, though, it seems our answer is simply to scrub the scars of this extractive relationality from the landscape with water management processes which disguise the devastation of the landscape only by spreading the burden across other spaces (i.e.: draining other waterscapes or dumping contaminated material). Turning these anti-places into lakes works only to terraform these anti-places back into existence to create abstracted neo-places, rendering their re-creation into recreation. Water softens the edges of dis-placement, crafting landscapes shaped by transitory recreational infrastructure in which we float above and around the place-that-once-was, not encouraged to enter into complex emplaced relationality with it, because to do so would require genuine consideration of Deloria’s spatial thinking and, so, to truly consider what it means to have annihilated a place in the name of an abstracted temporal history of “progress”. This terraforming of the void does not bring back the place: Inhabited, travelled, and rich in relation as it once was. In a sense, the temporal mode continues to reign over these anti–turned-neo-places.

The irony of this piece is that I have, in a way, displaced myself by turning to the scholarship of a Standing Rock Sioux intellectual. However, I think that working with this framework of spatial thinking in the European context helps me to comprehend the scale of devastation which such extreme extractive practices represent. Besides, the emphasis on particularity in the epistemic tradition of spatiality and locality highlighted by Deloria is useful to me in that it does not attempt to enforce Sioux thought on, say, Germans or Sorbs (or the other way around). Rather, it pushes us (in a region whose socialist and capitalist histories are strictly temporal in Deloria’s sense) to consider precisely the particularity of that place. For me, this is the power of spatial thinking when faced with annihilated landscapes.

Extractive industries such as the open-pit mining found throughout regions such as Lusatia are clearly demonstrative of the tool/stage conception of a place. In fact, I think that such extreme mining practices might be said to represent the “purest” relationship of Western temporal thinking with places: Dis-placing a place through extreme extractive practices which are abstractive to such an extent that true annihilation of place is achieved culturally, ecologically, and topographically. All traces of the place which made, and was made by, its inhabitants – human, animal, and geologic – are wiped away forever. The temporal mode sweeps through these places in the form of the mines, vaporising them into atomised units of themselves which can be used in the service of the “ideas” of capital growth and universal societal progress. The underground foundations of these now dispersed “anti-places” in their mined and atomised forms are burnt as fuel and spread across the land as fertiliser, sending them into the world as pollution which makes itself known to us by its presence in our lungs, bloodstreams, soils, and waterways.

However, in de-placed post-extraction landscapes we face the inescapability of re-placing an utterly annihilated locality. Once the landscape is devoid of relational value to the temporal mode in the form of resources to “fuel” the march “forward” through abstract history we must face the void. Something within us seems unable to ignore these anti-places. The void in the landscape where spatial histories were once relationally made troubles us for some reason. We cannot just leave a hole where there was once a “place”.

For me, the question remains, then, in the spatial (re)turn: How do we, in our Western landscapes of extraction, relate to these anti-places in a tradition of spatial thought, such as that which Deloria highlights? Of course, Deloria’s work encourages us to look into locality to understand our place in history (and the world), and there are certainly active, living traditions of resistance and place-making right here in Lusatia. Look, for example, to the Sorbs or the anti-mining youth activist movements.

Deloria’s thinking here, however, offered to me an incisive means of thinking about these post-extractive spaces as I entered them. What does it mean to turn these anti-places into transitory leisure landscapes, re-creating and maintaining this dis-placed place as a neo-place with an infrastructure which holds people in transit? In a sense, dis-placed landscapes become transitory nowherescapes where we might float, literally, in the void left behind by the march forward into the abstract history of the West. I wonder if this must really be our future? What does it mean for us to agree, explicitly or implicitly, to the development of such a means of relating to these anti-places? And how might we think differently about them if we consider their place in a spatial, rather than temporal, history?

1. Vine Deloria Jr., Metaphysics of Modern Existence, 2012 ↩︎