The Myth of Space

There is no space, only place.

In his book Dark Ecology, Tim Morton dissects the notions of space and place:

“Place now has nothing to do with good old reliable constancy. What has dissolved is the idea of constant presence: the myth that something is real insofar as it is consistently, constantly “there”. The concept space was always a constant-presencing machine for making things appear consistent and solid, to make them easier to colonize, enslave, and plunder. Constant presence was part of an anthropocentric colonization protocol. The planetary awareness imagine by white Western humans about Spice Islands and global trade is now upon us, and it has nothing to do with the rush of deterritorialization, of finding oneself unbound and unhinged. It is almost the opposite. One finds oneself on the insides of much bigger places than those constituted by humans…

…It is space that has turned out to be the anthropocentric concept, now that we are able to think it without a myth of constant presence. Celebrations of deracination and nostalgia for the old ways are both fictional. It is as obvious to any indigenous culture as it now is to anyone with data sets about global warming that these were stories white Westerners were telling themselves, two sides of the same story in fact. The ecological era is the revenge of place.”

The modern Western industrial idea of space is fundamentally a Christian ecologically-imperialist concept wherein there is true emptiness in the worlda that exists to be filled or controller or manipulated. Space can be a constant because space exists to be filled, to be cultivated, to be manipulated for human ends using human means and until such time as that occurs, what comprises space is considered empty and irrelevant. A field is not a place with its own right to existence full of living organisms equally entitled to existence and of value unto themselves, it is potential terrain for human exploitation that can be valued and weighed according to its potential human benefit. 

Conservation is very much rooted in this concept, as well. Nature is a static constant to be protected or guarded depending on anthropocentric notions of what has value, what matters, and what is dispensable. Conservation says that the value and worth of “nature” is contingent upon it remaining in whatever state it was discovered by humans. Certain spaces should be maintained according to human understanding of what that they “should” be, according to human ideas of what ideal natural spaces look like. In conservation, there aren’t places to be viewed with humility and recognized to have a natural agency and trajectory on their own outside of human ken, there are only spaces to be managed according to human values.

This human, largely religious, and frequently Western, concept of space - where anything untouched by humans is an empty constant, of significance only insofar as its potential for exploitation for human endeavor - extends even to outer space, where we speak of voids and contemplate launching our waste, completely comfortable with the idea that humans should be able to make such judgments unilaterally and with unapologetic confidence in human perception being sufficient for determining the worth of anything.

Yet what we call space was never empty, never constant, never waiting for humans to do anything. Space was never disconnected, disentangled, or disengaged from the world; space has always been a vast, interconnected collection of places that are ever-evolving, ever-expanding, ever-living entitites, inextricably tethered together with the rest of our world.

There is no space, only place. Space is a fictitious concept invented to justify human domination of life and reachable existence, a distorted facsimile that denies the true living shifting complexity of our world, and the universe itself, and erases the intrinsic essential reality of place.

This conditioning, to view the world and existence in terms of space goes beyond purely physical concerns. Space has also come to dominate our internal experiences and our conceptions of relationships and emotions.

Our relationships aren’t unique to the person, they’re not unique places in our emotional lives, they’re spaces that any number of people can fill. We don’t have specific individual dynamics characterized by the different intersections of humanity we share with the people with whom we share blood, we have family. We don’t have bonds formed by choice and cultivated over time made unique and particular by the experiences and perspectives we share and see and appreciate in one another, we have friends. We don’t have people we meet that we feel a special connection to that we choose to make a priority in our lives and that we form a singular relationship with as we choose to move through life together for a time in mutually reinforcing growth and intimacy, we have romantic relationships. 

It’s not the labels themselves that are wrong or even the idea trying to quantify the different types of relationships we have, it’s that those labels are used to dematerialize and reduce the complexity and uniqueness of these things into spaces to be filled by random actors. There aren’t places in our lives where unique and distinct bonds exist, there are just quantified generalized spaces that we fill with whoever happens to wander into them. 

Moreover, like the illusion of constancy propagated by notions of space in the ecological sense, our concepts of relationships are distorted by a myth of constancy. A relationship is viewed as disposable or insignificant or less meaningful if it’s not until death. Familial relationships are considered paramount because of an implied constancy - “You always stick by family” - as are romantic relationships ordained by marriage and thus absorbed into the family label with friends being the lowest tier, considered the least significant because of the potential for separation. The spaces in our lives are assumed constant - we will always have space for family, friends, and partners - and their inhabitants meaningful only insofar as they last. Change and growth, ebb and flow, separation and connection, these are characteristics of place that have no home in relationships built upon a myth of space, where value is defined by our ability to control the trajectory of a relationship and where constancy is the one true metric of success.

It’s not only our world and our relationships where we’re conditioned to see things through the lens of space, t’s our internal lives as well.

There are “wasted” days, “wasted” thinking, “wasted” energies - wasted space in our minds. It’s not that our lives and events within and thoughts and feelings are part of an ongoing dynamic, elaborate, and unpredictable series of experiences and insights, and that such things are inherently varied and nuanced and there is no single perfect ideal way to be alive and that the process of finding the ways to become more fully expressed and feel more connected to existence is not a linear path but one full of diversions and pauses and retreads and leaps forward and back and sideways. No, it’s that there are empty spaces in our development and life and they must always be filled or manipulated to some specific use otherwise we are failing and wasting our existence, as if there is a single set end we are all aware of and meant to be working toward. The spaces in our mind - our time spent pondering or just quietly existing - are a constant that must be seen as mental real estate to be used up for more deliberate purposes.

Instead of considering a day spent unmotivated staring at a computer screen as a place in our web of experiences and life that is a valid part of being alive in this time and place, and that whether or not it was pleasant or felt constructive in building the life you want it is still part of your existence and innately has value because you are alive and have value, we’re conditioned to believe that that day was empty space meant to be filled with a particular knowable set of actions and pursuits and that had we done so we would be a better person or achieve better outcomes in our life.

The myth of space and the reality of substantive, complicated, boundary-warping place does not mean that there is some perfect harmonious state of nature that we must strive to be in and that we innately corrupt it by altering it or that we should not strive toward anything in our relationships for fear of destroying the places therein or that all our thoughts and internal behaviors are good and valuable. Rather, this idea that there exists constancy and emptiness in life and that such spaces are always meant to be filled with human pursuits and endeavors, that the most we can be is a manipulator of our feelings and relationships and environment, is a contortion of reality rooted in anthropocentric ideas of dominance and order that fundamentally denies the complexity and inherent significance of all life and of the value in a diversity of experiences, positive and negative, mundane and exciting, accessible and removed, connected and detached.

There is no space, only place.

Just because we might be able to see ways for things to be better doesn’t mean what’s there doesn’t matter or isn’t worthwhile. The places that exist in our world, in our relationships, in our minds, are as real and important as any myth of absence.

There isn’t emptiness, only places that have yet to be understood or fully seen.

And all places have value, even if we aren’t able to see it.