Those criticisms of modern places are wrong that depend on simple identifications, either thinking of us as floating place-makers with nowhere to dwell, or thinking of us as helpless pawns of some cultural process.
There are, however, subtler versions of these criticisms, which agree that we are neither the simple products nor the lordly directors of meaning and grammar, but then go on to say that it is exactly because we are in that middle, and yet not in control, that we are vulnerable. These subtler criticisms admit our involvement in the process but see it as derailed or made inauthentic by factors that twist or repress our native spaciousness.
I agree that we can lose touch with our own activity in the creation and the reproduction of social grammars. What I oppose is the conversion of empirical processes and social pressures into unstoppable transcendental forces. There is plenty of work to do dealing with the concrete details of this consumer society or that scheme of patriarchal oppression, without turning those into universal totalizing forces.
We can find room to maneuver in the temporal structures necessary for there to be any meaning at all, and in the excess meaning that is a condition for any meaning to be definite. These keep us from being rigidly confined or totally dominated. Indeed we slide around on these factors even when we are trying to make ourselves rigid and confined.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001