Space has collapsed and placed has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension

We have been telling ourselves that homogenous empty "space" has conquered localized, particular "place". We are either the kind of person who thinks that the category of place is a quaint antique or we are the kind of person who thinks that the category is worth preserving because it is antique. In a certain way, we are the same kind of person.

Many have pronounced the death of place since the 1970s. In literary studies the announcement has gone hand in hand with the language of textuality versus speech. Our habitual talk pits speech (presence, villages, the organic, slow time, traditions) against textuality (dissolution, speed, modern, and postmodern technocultures). Yet the coordinates are terribly out of date. In a twist no one saw coming (because we weren't looking outside the human), space has by no means conquered place. That postmodern meme was simply a late symptom of the modern myth of transcending one's material conditions.

Exactly the opposite has occurred. From the standpoint of the genuinely post-modern ecological era, what has collapsed is (the fantasy of empty, smooth) space. "Space" has revealed itself as the convenient fiction of white Western imperialist humans, just as relativity theory revealed Euclidean geometry to be a small human-flavored region of a much more liquid Gaussian spacetime. The Euclidean concept that space is a container with straight lines is good enough to be getting on with if you want to voyage around the coast of Africa to reach the Spice Islands. Space in this sense has collapsed, and place has emerged in its truly moonstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its nonhuman dimension. How? Now that the globalization dust has settled and the global warming data is in, we humans find ourselves on a very specific planet with a specific biosphere. It's not Mars. It is planet Earth. Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, biosphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate. Moreover and perhaps more significantly: bird's nest, beaver's dam, spider web, whale migration pathway, wolf territory, bacterial microbiome. And these places, as in the concept of spacetime, are inextricably bound up with different kinds of timescale: dinner party, family generation, evolution, climate (human) "world history", DNA, lifetime, vacation, geology; and again the time of wolves, the time of whales, the time of bacteria.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 9-10