Somebody, Somewhere: Situating the Subjective Body in Sensible Space
“[As] a place is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place.”
— Steven Feld, Senses of Place
It may help to begin with the body.
It is the very thing, after all, that allows us, commonly seen as subjective beings situated in space as such, to perceive all else that surrounds us. Recognising this, we can say that phenomenological thought — which takes into account the utility of perception in constructing an understanding of the world around us — requires a complex and specific awareness, in which one’s location and one’s body’s situatedness in that particular location — among a host of other factors — are within the range of comprehension of the “subject.” Through the awareness of the subject, a space is constructed, or perhaps more accurately, comes also into the field of awareness, due to the subject’s ability to perceive it.
Phenomenological thought commonly pushes the idea that perception is foundational, and can be arrived at through the enfleshment of the self, that is, the possession of a body, which in turn acts as the filter through which sensations can be perceived. The body is an instrument by which we can both perceive the sensible world, and also be situated within it. “The primacy of perception is ultimately a primacy of the lived body — a body that [...] is a creature of habitual cultural and social processes,” Edward S. Casey writes. Because perception is simultaneously constitutive and constituted, as he further posits, “[t]he dialectic of perception and place (and of both with meaning) is as intricate as it is profound, and it is never-ending.”1
This experience of sensation through the body, the means by which we can perceive the sensible world, means that we, then, open ourselves up to perception, which is how we make sense of the world and, ultimately, our place in it.
In The Visible and the Invisible, written by Merleau-Ponty and published posthumously, he writes about “the sensible thing” as not simply a “wandering troop of sensations,” rather as the place in which the invisible is captured in the visible. Reading through The Visible and the Invisible, a new body of work will be generated, in conversation with my current practice, as read through the same text and the different themes located within it, working with the tension of ideas of perception, intersubjective realities and imagined ones, constructed by processing through memories and experiences filtered through “the lived body.”2
Nothing spaces: a study of imagined places and reconfigured landscapes
Should the typology of the body of my work thus far, which has a consistent developed visual syntax, be considered, the most obvious and recurring format and subject would be the landscape. It is present in paintings, illustration, collage and design work, photography, and lately, sculpture. These compositions represent a generalised understanding of space. The images in the paintings, for example, are largely conceived in thought, a product of reflection and memory, rather than copied from an image. Merleau-Ponty posits that, prior to every opinion, exists experience: “of inhabiting the world by our body, the truth by our whole selves.”3 Encounters with these places made way for an intimacy that allowed some type of presented depiction. Casey insists that the primacy of perception should be able to present information about what is being perceived that goes beyond the textural surface and the materiality of what is being sensed.4
However, these forms, generally mountain-like figures in a composition in space, which are recognisable to most people, are familiar as such, due to some type of experience of these things — a preconception of a thing prior to experience. There is an awareness of the object, of what is present before the seer, a reality created by thought, made possible either by direct experience (a firsthand account of what then becomes familiar), or an indirect introduction by way of research, secondhand narration or indirect experience passed on from someone else who has had these encounters.
In any case, Alfonso Lingis, Merleau-Ponty’s translator, notes that “[t]he visible is a landscape,” “a topography to be explored, uncultivated being still, wild being still.”5 It is somethingthat is elaborated upon (that is, enriched, extended, unfurled) by further pursuit.
The Intertwining / The Chiasm
Although it was published posthumously, and for all intents and purposes, incompletely (it ends with a section of working notes, which are ideas Merleau-Ponty was working through at the time of his death), The Visible and the Invisible is particularly of note, as it introduces an aspect of phenomenology that sets apart his approach to it from that of his peers. In it, Merleau-Ponty puts forth a deeper investigation of the relation of the self with the space that it occupies through the Chiasm, an Intertwining. Although modest in comparison to his much more well-known work, The Phenomenology of Perception, The Visible and the Invisible lays out Merleau-Ponty’s revisitation of his own phenomenological ontology with new ideas.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the Chiasm is “the inaugural event of visibility,” in which what we cannot see, as “effected across the substance of the flesh,” presents itself in a way that is sensible, and therefore sensible and perceptible to us, by way of our bodies. “We say, therefore, that our body is a being of two leaves,” writes Merleau-Ponty, referring to what is phenomenal — that which encounters — and what is objective — that which is encountered. “He who sees cannot possess the visible, unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it.” 6
In the assertion of a place as the subject, there exists a transposition of the traditional understanding of subject-object relations where the “seer” is understood to be the subject of what is being perceived. From the writings of Merleau-Ponty, however, through the idea of the Chiasm, an Intertwining that joins and weaves together, it could be said that the delineation between the subject and the space is not quite as clear a boundary as one would have been led to believe.
To be able to perceive what is around us — what is visible — is to understand that we are a part of this very fabric. “The seer is not a gap, a clearing, in the fabric of the visible, there is no hole in the weave of the visible where I am; the visible is one continuous fabric, since inside of me there are only ‘shadows stuffed with organs’ — more of the visible.”7 For Merleau-Ponty, it is the act of perceiving, the actuality of perception that allows for any sort of possibility for sensation. Without a body to mediate the sensible into something that we can sift through and reflect upon, there is little that can be done with what is, as it were, experienced.
There is an intersubjective relationship between what we see (by “see,” we mean here “perceive”) and how we see, through the body; one cannot be extricated from the other. Merleau-Ponty writes, “What I am is a body and a situation.”8 By this understanding, we cannot comprehend or access what we are not part of. The enfleshment of being is what allows it access to what is sensible: the visibility or enfleshment of the invisible.
Beginning the day
A typical day these days begins with a feeling of dread which has a source that I cannot seem to locate. The intention always is to do something important or productive; anything to propel me forward or further, something that will make this intercontinental move from Manila (which is in Luzon, which is in the Philippines) to London (which is in England, which is in the United Kingdom), worthwhile or, at least, make a little bit of sense.
Some days, I manage to do just that. I read, or write, or head to my studio in a warehouse Hackney Wick — initially an hour-long journey from Brockley reduced to a 20-minute bus ride after my move back to East London — or do something that, for days or weeks or months, “I’ve been meaning to do.” Most days, I stay in bed a little while, until I feel bad enough to actually go do something purposeful, or more often, until I feel too bad that I end up doing nothing important or fun.
Most of the time, I forget that I’ve uprooted myself and left the only place I ever knew intimately and personally. Sometimes, that knowledge hits me like a brick.
When I consider, for example, the point and the meaning of this “exercise” (i.e. pursuing a masters in what seems to be the opposite of something pragmatic) always comes up. The unfortunate thing is that I don’t quite know how to answer that question without the whole ordeal sounding indulgent. The place where I am from is in shambles — politically, economically, morally and so on — and while I love everyone there and the places I’ve grown up in, I have very little desire to go back there. At least not at this time in my life, and not within the next five or so years.
Here, I can ride a bus to my studio, take the Underground to see a friend, walk to the park or the museum or the shops, with minor fuss or hassle. And every time I am able to walk or commute in peace, I think about how I wish we had these conveniences back home. In Manila, the country’s capital, at least. Everyone I love back home deserves to be able to walk to the park, and it is absurd that there are no parks to walk to and the most viable way to pass the time if you feel too cooped up in your own home is one of the many malls that stand erect around the metropolis.
When I get to the studio, I’m often cold, even when the weather has transitioned into sunnier days. I often wear doubles of everything: jumpers and socks, sometimes a blanket, despite the radiator. I try not to complain and try to work work through the numbness in my fingers and my toes, because, back home, everything is melting. My family and friends are turning into puddles of sweat. There is no water, they tell me. We have no electricity. Meanwhile, here I am, scraping aluminium foil off of mountains I cast. The most arduous thing I have to do, really, is carry ill-shaped and heavy items across the city with no help, something I didn’t have to worry about when I lived with my parents and help was easy to find or hire.
At some point I got tired of painting mountains, or I’d felt so restless that I sought to make something similar, express in a different way. So I’ve given my paintings a whole field of siblings made from plaster and water-based resin and some clay. I can’t stop thinking about making my own horizon, so that’s what I’ve done: little peaks and valleys of mountains of candy-coloured stone, set together on a number of surfaces, creating an artificial space that reminds me of somewhere I’d probably been, a long time ago.
They look like mounds of crumpled paper, and I think about how that’s what photographs of mountains maybe look like to some people who don’t know what a picture is. In several of the forms, a porous surface arises from the presence of air bubbles that weren’t properly released before the mixture set into their final shapes. It’s weird to think that even though I’ve created a space for the resin to pour into, there are places that it cannot reach, and that these places are visible after it sets, evidence of something else already occupying the space.
As for the paintings themselves: the change in scale of the landscapes introduces a shift in how the image is approached. Whereas the previous iterations of these places I’ve painted were encased in smaller canvases that required a closer distance both from me, the maker, and the spectator, enlarging the scale introduces an aspect of distance, where the closeness of the seer is not necessitated for an immediate level of comprehension.
During a talk by Hal Foster on Richard Serra9, he relayed an anecdote shared by the artist, a version of which can be found in their latest collaborative book, Conversations About Sculpture. Serra spoke of his experience of walking back through a space he had just traversed: like he was passing through an entirely different place, calling himself a suture between these two “different” worlds. The space, physically, geographically and materially, could be the same field, but because of the engagement of the being that walks across it, coming from two different directions, each way becomes its own place. Each way through a space becomes a different encounter.
Most known for his giant, encompassing sculptures, Serra regarded his sculptural work as a part, an intrusion in, and an incision of space — rather than an object of art, a particular something or thing on which to project a gaze. Bearing this in mind, Serra’s work then initiates themselves as part of the space, conversing with it, and ultimately altering it entirely. We could think of the body in this way, as an intrusion into space that brings it together and constitutes it, rather than causing a division.
In the same text, in a conversation entitled “Passages and Intervals,”10 Foster and Serra talk more at length about one of the latter’s pieces, Every Which Way, a behemoth of an installation where walls and passages intrude on the space that is set out for you to pass through. It is a piece that is meant to be approached and viewed from many different places, countless positions that change the environment once you change the location towards which you project your gaze, as well as the position of your body, particularly considered and in relation to what is set out before you. “I think the piece asks you to turn again and again as you walk,” Foster shares, referencing Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of New York City11: “[E]ven when you’re in the midst of it, deep in its caverns, the city seems to be somewhere else, over there somewhere.”For Serra, this means that Every Which Way is “always there, not here. Even when you’re right up against it, it evades you.” This evasion of “what is right before you” is similar to the notion of horizon — which Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani’s translator, Jan Van Bragt, refers to as “a mere vestige of spatial imagination.”12
However, “[t]he immediate is at the horizon,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “and must be thought as such; it is only by remaining at the distance that it remains itself.”13
American poet Mark Strand touches upon a similar phenomenon through a poem, in which he begins: “In a field, I am the absence of field.”14 Much like Serra’s ideas of both the body as a suture of two different spaces and his “sculptures” as intrusions into space rather than “objects” on which to project our gazes-as-subjects, Strand speaks of body and being as what keeps these disparate things together. The body, then, is both an intrusion, a border, and a suture, something that constitutes and is constituted by the sensible space around it. In the same poem, Strand writes: “Wherever I am / I am what is missing.”
The horizon is both a fixed spot and a space that changes according to the movement of the body before it. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, or at least speaking of the relationship between the body and its surrounding space from the same place as it does, Serra’s work heavily considers the positioning of the body and its role within the space it occupies.
Location / dislocation
Throughout the last year, I’ve often thought about the situatedness of the body, how each of us is affected directly and indirectly by the places that surround us; but, rarely have I thought about my own spatial movement as a dislocation and migration. For 29 years, I had lived in the same house in Quezon City, Philippines, and in the one year and six months I have been in London, I have managed to live in three different post codes.
The spaces we inhabit, move around, and engage with inform what we think we see and the manner by which we perceives these things. As per Merleau-Ponty, there always exists a relational intersubjectivity between “beings” — as actants in a shared, always connected space — through our bodies, which for him, are what experiences the initial interactions. Everything we think we sense, and even the thoughts we form, are screened through our bodies, our beings’ points of access.
In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, John Berger wrote, “Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and—at its most extreme—abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd. […] to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.”15
The themes of my work have continuously been, in one way or another, concerned with fragments. However, since I like to insert a little bit of ambiguity into the work by not being specific about what has inspired what — a reluctance to planting a work within one spot — the ties to particular places have never been as apparent to me before as it is now. Firmly rooted in one particular place, the place I had been born into, I’d only moved around for short bits of time, gathering16 a little bit of what I can refer to as “life stuff,” the texture of the sensible that Merleau-Ponty wrote about, beyond what can directly be perceived, with the ability, then, to get back into what I’d come to consider my real, ordinary life. For a while, the periods of time became halved into what I’d considered “time here,” which is whenever I’d be back home in Manila, and “time there,” which is whenever I’d be, in my body, somewhere else.
My own uprooting has been a conscious choice. It brings to mind the constant resituating of what we encounter. “Yet we do always find ourselves in places17,” Casey writes, no matter where our movement directs us. We are never, then, not emplaced bodies.
The precarity of the delineations between subject and space is something important to consider, especially when subjectivity itself is questioned. Merleau-Ponty writes: “Being is occultated across the very spatio-temporal spread of its apparition, that is true; but what we need then to come into contact with its full spread is not a method of undoing the distances to achieve immediate presence and coincidence with it, but rather the ‘idea of proximity through distance, of intuition as auscultation or palpation in depth.’” 18
Perceptual faith and intersubjectivity
“I do not look at chaos but at things,” Merleau-Ponty writes. Because of personal histories, each different from the other, the development of our own visual languages, and a sense of a shared collective consciousness, we are able to sift through detritus into some semblance of recognition.
On space and subjectivity, like Serra and Strand, Merleau-Ponty insisted upon the importance of the body when it comes to an individual’s phenomenological experience. Circling back to Every Which Way, Foster summons Merleau-Ponty and his assertion of the body and its invisibility to us as that which allows us to see. “[H]e held that our ability to see,” Foster says, “our cone of vision, emerges out of an invisibility, the opacity of our own bodies.” We are able to perceive a world because we are a part of it.
Though armed with clear imagery of what it means to be “part of the world,” in the way that Serra probably meant, Strand’s poem perhaps points to a rather self-centered subjectivity, where the gaze is directed, once again, towards the individual — specifically, the one that is currently speaking. Throughout the history of philosophical thought, we have been considered beings that project our gaze onto others, thus becoming one who sees, that is, a seer or more commonly, the subject, prescribing clear boundaries between that which who sees and that which is seen. The expansion of this field would introduce the existence of other subjects, which would remove the apparent primacy of the initial subject.19
This opens up the world before us as we know it to the idea of intersubjectivity, which would suggest that every such subject has a perception that is both completely true and completely different from ours. The space between “objects” and “beings” — that is, the visible Beings that are present in the perceptual field — is what connects us with one another. One can think of the oceans as barriers between islands and landmasses, but what are oceans but space that touches the edges of these disparate spaces? How are we otherwise connected to one another if not for that?
What would the space look like, then, when one takes into account the subjectivity of all of these different personal perspectives? If I am the suture that holds the two halves of the world that I come between, what does that make those who like to think of themselves as the subject? Thomas Baldwin writes: “[o]ur perceived world is structured by a plurality of overlapping perspectives, within which different aspects are somehow seen together; aspects of just one world.”20
Process and practice
Taking into account these tangents of exploration, in the realm of phenomenology, subjectivity, and space, the incorporation of these key points into my practice appears to be fairly clear: I will create a new body of work that exhausts the idea of space, and tests my (and others’) relationship with the field in which they exist. The intention of this body of work is to create an ongoing collection, branching out into different modes and mediums through which my experience, as filtered by my own body, can be encountered by another, through their own enfleshments.
Each medium creates a specific ought to elicit a specific reaction, which triggers synapses that jog particular parts of the brain — even though, and perhaps precisely because, they address and investigate the same idea.
The first, almost obvious recourse for me was to add another spatial dimension to the work by way of introducing sculptural elements that converse and engage with what I already have established in my practice. At the same talk at the Royal Academy, Foster says, “phenomenological space opens up to sculpture.” Sculpture, especially the kind for which Richard Serra was known, facilitates the reconfiguration of space and “declares” space in this way.
(The last thing Serra wanted, Foster claims, was to have his work be seen as an image. There is a specificity of experience — phenomenologically important — in the actual engagement with a space or a place.)
The main painting I’d produced in conjunction with this research, “The Intertwining,” is a massive work of oil on linen, spanning three meters wide and 1.8 meters high. For the MRes showcase, the set-up of Somebody, Somewhere at CSM’s White Laboratory was not quite what I envisioned while making it. Due to space restraints, (what I strongly felt like was) selective inclusion, and the lack of general support from the university’s internal team in terms of arranging this show, things had to be taken apart, taken in, and rearranged so as to be, at the very least, visible.A website, Somebody, Somewhere21, was made and projected beside the work, to provide grounding and context to something that, to me, looked like it’d been floating in an abstracted space. The intended effect of “The Intertwining” was supposed to be a large sort of sideways canopy, a land mass in motion, moving alongside you, a created space in engagement with a subject. Instead, the piece was brought down very low, requiring spectators to come closer for a proper look. A series of mountainous forms22 made from jesmonite, clay, and plaster, formed a horizon on narrow planks close to the ground, though there were meant to have been displayed on a much higher table, as a whole and coherent collection.
To move the sculpture, Serra thought, was to destroy it, and so these late alterations in the provision of space altered, too, the intended effect. Echoing Merleau-Ponty, Serra believed that the involvement of the body was crucial, but if the body is not engaged with my work in the way I’d envisioned it to be, what is the meaning I have then created?
Later that day, ︎I was told by a colleague that it felt like I’d created a space like a basement or a site for some sort of intimate, communal gathering. Another positively remarked on the closeness required to be able to view them, and I then thought about how it’d been made possible to approach one horizon, this horizon, without it having escaped you. It wasn’t what I’d envisioned for it, but a space was still constructed.︎ In any case, it exists in a different iteration, perhaps the most optimum one, somewhere else.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau makes the distinction between “space” or espace and “place” or lieu.23 “Thus,” he says, “space is composed of intersections of mobile elements,” that is, directions, velocities, and time. Although both terms, according to de Certeau’s usage, do differentiate between two different perceived fields or areas, both “space” and “place” may refer to one particularity, though focus in on two different aspects of the same thing, where “place” refers to a location and “space” refers to what de Certeau calls a “practiced place.”
“Space is a society of named places,” Claude Lévi-Strauss writes.24 What lies before you, then, is both and neither, which is what Merleau-Ponty presumably referred to by asserting that “space is existential” and “existence is spatial.”25 In other words, we are never not emplaced.26
These relations and movements within a space have necessitated an extension in process. The changes in my own environment, surroundings, and experiences have opened up the world in a different way — creating a place within which my body exists — and have, in turn, opened up the points in which the ideas rumbling around in my brain can enter.
These newly opened windows have allowed for an extension, a lateral creation, into a variety of other means of expression, including but not limited to a website, which in itself is a space and place, printed matter in the form of a book that is part-autobiography, part-research notes, and part-visual essay, both of which are continuously going to be a work in progress. The nature of my research practice, I’ve found, is one that, for as long as I keep reading about it, and engaging with it, will endure. My chosen mode of output, then, is a designated space online in which I can, at once, publish for immediate public consumption.
Distilled into the printed work are images and text that engage with one another. These are carefully arranged into more sensible, related way, that is, organised in such a way that the order in which they appear can arrange a semblance of a narrative, but also ambiguous enough that the narrative is not strictly prescribed, allowing for a freedom in construction and consumption.
In the introduction of David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska’s Artist Novels, they speak of the artist novel as “a means to blur identities, an intersubjective space,” different from conceptual art’s “analytic distance.” The act of reading invites a collaborative action where the “narrative generates a space common to two subjectivities: the one that wrote the text and the one that reads it.”27 For Maroto and Zielinska, artist novels are a means by which the artist can respond to their need to reclaim what they refer to as a “lost territory,” indeed another expression of place, that which mediates between the artwork (that relates to the novel) and the spectator.28
Although the text that is generated through this project for now is not strictly a novel-form of text, but a conglomeration of written pieces and observations set in place beside imagery and concept, the diagram of “expanded spiral of narrative fiction” introduced in the foreword by Maroto and Zielinska functions similarly here. The work moves outwardly or inwardly, passing through three different spaces: public space, exhibition space, and the space of the page. Here, the artist novel exists as a form of intervention, where the move to the so-called space of the page invites a recalibration of the kind of engagement is commonly expected and required of spectators that experience work that is situated inside a white cube.
Similarly, this is how my website functions, where the site of the project exists throughout a wider field. It is not simply an amalgamation of work, collected and displayed, as though an archived work. The pieces are threaded through a continuous scroll, where the spectator can control their level of engagement. The basic points are all there, but multiple entry points are provided for those who would like to dig a little deeper, a little like walking down a street and selecting which establishments to enter.
There is also the aspect of semi-permanence to he website, which allows for a return, a closer look, given that it is left up and running, available for future encounters, an opportunity to engage with a world and a body that are constantly in flux, constantly going through movement and relocation. As mentioned before, Casey talks about the gathering initiated by places, which creates what he calls its “peculiar perduringness,” something that allows for a return to a particular place — not merely in terms of spatial geography or material positioning — but the same place.29
The work within this project ultimately, are simultaneously recordings of and reactions to what I, with my body, encounter in this life: a collection of accounts — written, drawn, reassembled — to construct a narrative, expressed through ways that can be encountered by another.
It is ultimately attempting to achieve the re-construction of space as a place where the gaze occurs, taking into account the importance of the body when navigating the space, and through moving image, soundscapes, illustrations, printed matter, paintings and sculptures, create an environment of sensible matter that opens one up to the full experience of it.
Borrowing from de Certeau: “This experience is a relation to the world; in dreams and in perception, and because it probably precedes their differentiation, it expresses ‘the same essential structure of our being as a being situated in relationship to a milieu’—being situated by a desire, indissociable from a ‘direction of existence’ and implanted in the space of a landscape. [...] From this point of view ‘there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences.’ The perspective is determined by a ‘phenomenology’ of existing in the world.”30
Because of continuous engagement with what surrounds me, an incessant gathering of material to process and respond to, it will never be a work that I can, in good faith, consider to be done or finished. The pivots and detours and changes in direction are very much a part of the work, as much as the material manifestations of them.
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FOOTNOTES
1 Casey, Edward S. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena” from Feld, S. and Basso, K. Senses of place, p. 19. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research advanced seminar series. 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 3 Ibid., p. 28. 4 Casey, Edward S. Ibid, p.17. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research advanced seminar series. Merleau-Ponty refers to this as “depth”, Husserl, the “hyelctic” factor. 5 Lingis, Alphonso. (1968) “Translator’s Preface” from Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 52-57. 9 Foster, Hal. (2018, 27 October) Hal Foster on Richard Serra. The Royal Academy. 10 Serra, Richard and Foster, Hal. (2018) Conversations About Sculpture. CT: Yale University Press. 11 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1956) Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York, NY: Philosophical Library. 12 Van Bragt, Jan. (1982) Introduction from Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan Van Bragt. CA: University of California Press. 13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123. 14 Strand, Mark. (1979-1980) "Keeping Things Whole" from Selected Poems. New York, NY: Knopf. 15 Berger, John. (1991) And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Penguin Random House, Vintage International. First published in 1984. 16 In the same text, Casey writes, “Places gather [...] Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts.” Drawing on an assertion that both Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty made (unbeknownst to the other) — “the hold is held” — Casey elaborates, writing, “To gather placewise is to have a peculiar hold on what is presented (as well as represented) in a given place. Not just the contents but the very mode of containment is held by place,” p. 26. 17 Casey, Edward S. Ibid., p.17. 18 Ibid., p. 128. 19 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Ibid., pp. 245-302. New York, NY: Philosophical Library. 20 Baldwin, Thomas. (2004) Introduction for Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis, p. 19. New York, NY: Routledge. 21 Santos, Carina. (2019) Somebody, Somewhere. http://somebodysomewhere.today. 22 Santos, Carina. (2019) “The Absence of Field.” 23 De Certeau, Michel. (1988) “Spatial Stories.” The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117. Translated by Steven Rendall. CA: University of California Press. 24 Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind, p. 168. 1966. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1948) The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. (2004) New York, NY: Routledge. 26 Casey, Edward S. Ibid. 27 Maroto, David, and Joanna Zielinska, eds. Foreword. Artist Novels, p. 11. 28 Ibid. 29 Casey, Edward S. Ibid., p. 26. 30 De Certeau, Michel. Ibid., p. 117