inside/outside problem

There is an important general issue related to the size and density of nodes, which applies to our contemporary situation, though it also casts a light on Wright's proposals: What is the difference between a dense node and a network?

Considering their abstract form, we can consider both a widespread network and a dense local node as examples of networks, one nested inside the other. So if we envision local places as themselves dense with something like "internal" links, how do we maintain the distinction between an inside and an outside of the place? Does thinking of places as having internal connections and as linked to other places destroy the experience of place? If I deny that places are sharply bounded and I affirm that they are linked, do I blend all places into an indifferent sprawl?

A place is a field of social possibilities for actions* embodied in an area's different regions. As embodied a place offers directionalities and polarities even if the place is spread across discontinuous areas of space. This embodied landscape of space and of social possibiities for action "here" can be distinguished from other places that can be reached by moving along links to other places "there," where distance is measured not so much by spatial spread as by the nature of the link and the completion of local actions. A place, as opposed to a network, is created by a grammar of actions embodied in "nearby" regions, where "nearby" means grammatically linked and embodied rather than adjacent in physical space. (This sense of normative nearness should be distinguished from causal connectivity in systematic effects.) Distant regions can be "nearby" in this sense if there are the right kind of links and embodied relations, but this will not be true of all distant regions linked to here.

A local place can include a network of links, but not all networks of links are local places. Not all networks offer unified and embodied landscapes of action. It is the trajectories of action that define a dense set of nodes as a place. Places can be nested within one another, just as a place is made up of sub-areas, but not all networks of places form a larger place. My house has rooms each with a distinctive grammar for actions and roles appropriate to each room, but the house as a whole has its own embodied grammar and embodied dimensionalities for actions that take place in the house as a whole. The place that is my neighborhood is made up of smaller places such as my yard, my house, the corner store, and so on. This is a different kind of inclusion from the way that a large nation might be made up of places. My neighborhood is perceived and lived as a unified landscape for action, oriented from my position here. The nation is perceived as a network of such oriented places that can be reached by following links that extend beyond the action horizons of this place.

There are few if any embodied actions that take the space of the nation as an oriented and embodied field of social possibility. There are collections of actions (for example, voting) and more general actions (for example, selling or persuading) that could take the national network as their field, but these are not as concretely embodied* and do not have the same place-dimensionality. (A defensive war might make the space of the nation into a unified place with embodied dimensions.) There are certainly systemic effects* that take the space of the nation as their field of connection, but those are not actions in places.

It is tempting to look for some hierarchy of actions from the most local and concrete to the most general and abstract, but such a hierarchy will not create a corresponding hierarchy of places, since while a single movement in a concrete place can be a move in many games and actions on many levels at once, not all of them will be actions that are so embodied.

Index
Broadacre introduction
everywhere