v.3.0

This three part essay is a revised and expanded version of my notes for a lecture and workshop with the same title I gave at last year's Occulture conference in Berlin.

It became centered around Randonauting but you may as well consider that a place-holder for many other kind of mindful ways of engagement with place. It has a meandering shape, covering a lot of thoughts I've had related to Spirit of Place or Placeness throughout the last years.

In this first part we will explore our relationship with place in general and the strange un-places in our minds. In the next part we will dig into synchronicities, contingency and divination, and in the final one we will look at deeper meanings of place and The Zone.

Close Encounters with Placeness

Exploring the Boundaries Between Self and Space.

Spirit of Place

Everyone who has ever been on 'vacation' can probably relate to this: visiting new places can have a profound effect on us. Experiences of standing before the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon for the first time, or a gothic cathedral in Europe, inspire awe and change our whole sense of being in the world. Yet, the power of place isn't limited to just the excitement of experiencing novelty or the visual spectacle; it can also be the comforting familiarity of returning to a childhood beach each summer, deepening our sense of belonging and nostalgia. Both kinds of experience described transcend mere travel; they fundamentally alter our immediate state of sensory awareness and connection to the world. A journey isn't just a physical relocation to a new setting but also a significant shift in our inner landscape, encouraging reflection on our role in the world and our personal life's narrative.

In his book Becoming Animal, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, who reflects on the intricate relationships between human beings and the natural world in all of his work, captures this succinctly:

For each land has its own psyche, its own style of sentience, and hence to travel from Rome to Paris, or from Barcelona to Berlin, is to voyage from one state of mind to another, very different, state of mind. Even to journey by train from Manhattan to Boston, or simply to walk from one New England town to another, is to transform one's state of awareness.¹

The reason why we are so intimately connected to place is grounded in our basic corporeal presence in the world, a concept elegantly articulated by Mark Johnson in his influential work, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Johnson, a prominent figure in the field of cognitive science and philosophy, argues that our physical bodies are not merely vessels navigating through space but are fundamentally interconnected with our surroundings:

as animals we have bodies connected to the natural world, such that our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, and to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and be creative.²

By weaving together insights from cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics, Johnson presents a holistic view where the body is seen as the conduit through which we interpret and make sense of our surroundings. Challenging traditional views that separate the mind and body, in The Body in the Mind, Johnson proposes instead that our sensory and motor experiences fundamentally shape our concepts, ideas, and linguistic expressions. The very physical acts of touching, moving, and interacting provide the foundational basis for our cognitive processes, including reasoning, imagination, and the creation of meaning.

Having a sense of oneself, as an individual embodied person, as a member of a society, as a self in relation to others is intricately linked to our connection with place. This nuanced relationship is explored in depth by Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas. In his book, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Malpas delves into how place forms personal and collective identity. He argues that places are not just background settings but active participants in constructing our identity and our position in the broader social and natural world:

the significance of place should not be construed as just a contingent feature of human psychology or biology, but instead as rooted in the very structure that makes possible experience or thought of the sort that is exemplified in the human (though this is not to rule out the possibility that certain particular features of our response to place may be contingently based). The sense, then, in which identity is tied to place (and so to a spatio-temporal realm in which persons and things can be encountered and a world can be grasped) is not just the sense in which a sense of identity might be tied up with a certain ‘emotional reminiscence', but derives from the way in which the very character of subjectivity, in the general and the particular, and the very content of our thoughts and feelings, is necessarily dependent on the place and places within which we live and act.³

It is a common perception that our transformation of self in places of novelty or nostalgia is merely a psychological effect 'inside our heads', a result of leisure or a break from our daily routines. This widespread perception overlooks a deeper, more complex phenomenon: the belief that we can 'pause' our embeddedness in the world and observe it from a perspective of 'visitors' moving through a landscape, ignoring the profound and intricate entanglements with our surroundings. We assume that we engage with the world around us as detached observers existing in temporarily worldless suspension.

The term was coined by renowned anthropologist Tim Ingold, whose extensive research spans the fields of anthropology, ecology, and philosophy. In his work, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. he criticises the misconception that life forms exist independently of the world they inhabit, encoded in a context-free medium—like 'genes' in biology or 'cultural information' in anthropology — falsely suggesting a separation between organisms and their environments. This view, prevalent in both fields, posits that organisms are defined by internal codes (such as genes) that are unaffected by their surroundings, and that culture operates similarly, existing inside individuals' minds and imposed upon the external world.

Again, there is one set of specifications for the forms of life that are carried around – as it used to be said – ‘inside people's heads'. And there is another set for the environment, often identified with ‘nature' or ‘the physical world', upon which these forms are inscribed.⁴

This perspective creates a dichotomy between the internal, encoded aspects of life and the external environment, neglecting the interdependent relationship between them.

In the subsequent sections, we will delve deeper into the understanding that 'place' transcends its simplistic representation as a mere point on a map 'in our heads' or 'the world out there' as a backdrop of our lives. We will explore its role as a potent ontological force, one that profoundly influences our identity at various levels—personal, societal, and even species-wide.

The narrative of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a classic colonial Australian novel that was later adapted into a film, serves as an uncanny illustration of the themes discussed here. Set against the backdrop of the mysterious Mount Diogenes⁵ in central Victoria, Australia, on Valentine's Day in 1900, the story unfolds around a group of students from a girls' private school and their math teacher on an excursion to study and to have a picnic in the shade of the rock formation. After lunch four of the girls ask permission to explore the area and take geological measurements. They climb higher and higher into the rocks and soon a surreal atmosphere envelops them, leading to the inexplicable disappearance of several girls and subsequent tragic events, including the suicide of the school's headmistress.

An intriguing interpretation of the story is that the protagonists are no longer 'British colonizers' but have now been transformed into something else — they became 'Australians'. The foreign land had not only been conquered by the colonizers. In a weird kind of feedback loop the territory itself had also inevitably colonized the conquerors inner landscape.

Placelessness

The the buttoned up and well dressed Victorian characters in the story embody a broader human struggle stemming from a profound disorientation. This disorientation was triggered by a shift away from the old Aristotelian worldview, which valued a purposeful, interconnected cosmos, to Descartes' 17th-century philosophy of mind-body dualism. This dualism posits that the mind and body are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances: the mind is non-material and capable of thinking, while the body is material and operates in the physical realm. This separation laid the groundwork for viewing the mind as detached from the physical world, including one's own body.

David Abrams writes:

Psychological qualities once felt to be proper to the surrounding terrain—feeling-tones, moods, the animating spirits-of-place known to reside in particular wetlands or forests—all lost their home with the dissolution of the enclosing, wombish character of the pre-Copernican cosmos. For unlike quantities, qualities are fluid properties arising from the internal, felt relations between beings. Such feeling-tones now had no place in the physical world—itself newly conceived as a set of objects that had no internal relation to one another. Nature was beginning to be experienced as a pure exterior—a world of external, mechanical relationships: a world of quantities. It is only natural that psychological qualities fled from this open exteriority in the wake of the Copernican revolution, taking refuge in the private space now assumed to exist inside each individual.⁶

This division has been cemented into our collective psyche, with most scientific disciplines operating under the assumption of a clear demarcation between the mind, as an internal entity, and the world as something external. This dichotomy extends beyond the realms of science, permeating many modern spiritual practices as well:

If much natural science of the last two centuries held itself aloof from the nature it studied, pondering the material world as though that world were a huge aggregate of inert objects and mechanical events, many new-age spiritualities simply abandon material nature entirely, inviting their adherents to focus their intuitions upon non-material energies and disincarnate beings assumed to operate in an a-physical dimension, pulling the strings of our apparent reality and arranging earthly events according to an order that lies elsewhere, behind the scenes. Commonly reckoned to be at odds with one another, conventional over-reductive science and most new-age spiritualities actually fortify one another in their detachment from the earth, one of them reducing sensible nature to an object with scant room for sentience and creativity, the other projecting all creativity into a supernatural dimension beyond all bodily ken.⁷

Of course pointing fingers to a single cause or figure, such as Copernicus, Descartes, Kant, 'capitalism', 'empire', or 'technocracy', oversimplifies the complexity of these major paradigm shifts in human understanding. These shifts have deeply influenced how humanity perceives itself and the world, leading to a sense of alienation and fragmentation. Recognizing and acknowledging this disorientation is the first step towards integrating it.

In the 1960s, Guy Debord, a prominent figure in the avant-garde and political theory, emerged as a revolutionary voice against the prevailing currents of capitalism. As the founder of the Situationist International (SI), a group dedicated to critiquing and transforming modern society through radical artistic and philosophical practices, Debord introduced the concept of the 'spectacle' to describe and expose the ways in which capitalism has permeated every aspect of life, creating a society where genuine human experiences are replaced by mere representations and where the commodification of life is all-encompassing:

Spectacle is perhaps the major force in modern civilization: through selective, edited representation, the process of spectacle-making serves to reduce the vibrant, pluralistic, living richness of existence to a lifeless image which is then presented as reality. Spectacle serves to remove the "object" or "specimen" from its natural state of being itself into a state of separation ... Existence, which is a seamless continuum, is thereby represented as a disconnected assemblage of discrete and unrelated "objects" ... Spectacle is thereby a selfreferencing fiction, and like all such fictions, difficult to see for what it is. It is a closed loop that has, by accident and intention, created a specific self-perpetuating modus operandi.⁸

One practice that the SI encouraged to uncover the 'spectacle' was the 'Dérive' - the act of aimless drifting through the urban landscape, being led solely by subjective stimuli from the surrounding architecture. By doing so the drifter would notice the omnipresent organizing power structures that urban planning had imposed upon the city dwellers, the logic of production and commerce ruling the architectural landscape. Drifters were encouraged to create their own psychogeographical maps of the city, breaking the imposed structures and re-territorialize them into representations that would harmonize the inner from the outer sense of place in a more integral way.

In the 21st century cities show no more resemblance to how they looked in the 1960s, so the 'dérives' are probably less suited to unveil and break out of imposed patterns. 'Empire' has shifted to more subtle cybernetic means of control focusing mainly on individualized stimulation of desires in either aestetically harmonized environments or distracting us from 'the world' altogether by luring us into the fully synthetic version of artificial desire stimulation behind the inescapable multitude of our screens.

In this context, the practice of 'Randonauting' emerges as a potent antidote to the digital age's disembodied experiences. It combines elements of adventure, randomness, and the exploration of one's immediate environment. The 'Randonautica' smartphone app is used to generate a random set of geographical coordinates within a radius close to the participant. Participants, known as "Randonauts," then embark on a journey to these randomly determined locations, ideally with an open mind and a sense of curiosity, without any preconceived expectations of what they might find or experience.

Randonauting resonates with the Situationist ethos by inviting individuals to engage directly with their environment. It also suits the zeitgeist perfectly, because it lures the individual from within the confines of their portable screens 'out to the world' offering a way to reconnect with the tangible and the real, drawing attention away from the virtual distractions that dominate our lives.

But the aim is not just to discover new physical spaces and to defy the predetermined narratives and structures that digital and urban spectacles impose, but to go a step further and challenge one's own habitual patterns of movement and thought, to break out of daily routines and potentially experience the world in a new, more profound way. The core idea is that randomness and serendipity can lead to meaningful experiences, insights, or encounters that one would not have encountered in the course of the regular, predictable paths through life. The simple act of Randonauting has the potential to rekindle a sense of wonder and discovery in the everyday and to experience more meaningful connection to the places we live and to the myriad possibilities they hold.

The foundational theory of Randonauting laid out in a collection of text files published by the Fatum Project, argues that we all are trapped the confines of our daily experiences and perceptions, navigating through our "reality tunnel" imposed by the multitude of unseen rules that govern our lives—ranging from societal norms to personal habits and cognitive biases. These forces collectively form what's known as the "Stasis Field," effectively keeping us within the familiar bounds of our reality.

no matter what choices you make, and no matter how many variations on how your day may pass, there are always some places where you simply cannot be, because none of the chains of your decisions leads there.⁹

Through my own experiences and following the stories of others on the app's trip report feed and Randonauts subreddit it becomes evident that randonauting has the potential to lead to extraordinary moments. These experiences can range from simple, unexpected discoveries, more or less meaningful coincidences, serendipidous encounters, all the way to profound psychological shifts and, on occasion, events that might even be described as 'high strangeness'.

Part 2