In dialogue with the work
The moon is (an upside-down) place…
by artists Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith and Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert

What is the role of place in the task of self-identity? This short meditation draws on hermeneutics and phenomenology to reflect upon how our sense of self draws on place and location. It concludes by pointing to the need to embrace our environmental identity, which locates self-identity in the midst of space and materiality.

I close my eyes and faintly hear the sound of a wind—not the warm breeze of summer or chilly blast of winter, but an autumn gust. The sound comes from the flutter of leaves, empty of chlorophyll, stripped to yellows and reds and browns and half-heartedly clinging to branches. The trees wish to sleep. 

When I open my eyes, I see leaves falling through the sky, roly-poly, pell-mell, tumble-bumble, until at last they nestle into the organic litter on the ground. The breeze isn’t constant, but picks up and dies down. Following the inevitable cycle of seasons, it is fall. I find myself responding. Some forms of my reaction are rather mundane—a jacket comes out of the closet, a hat is worn, lights are turned on earlier each day. But the response appears in other ways, too. I catch myself shuffling my feet through piles of leaves to hear the satisfying ruffle of crisp organic matter. My face enjoys the ambivalent caresses of weather, when some days are crackly and others dampen down the soil. The place itself responds to how the sun hovers lower in the sky—waterfowl and butterflies bid leave, plants and insects nestle into the earth more fully. And moods turn with the weather—pensive, inward, and utterly seasonal.

The American painter Grant Wood captured similar feelings in his painting Plaid Sweater (1931), now part of the collection at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. In this work, Wood has made a portrait that becomes an autumnal icon. A young boy stands in a sweater and athletic pants, an American football casually placed between his thigh and right hand. In the background we see trees bedecked in autumnal colors. The overall color palette of the painting exudes the season—the boy wears browns, maroons, tans, and a hint of grey. What is remarkable about Wood’s painting is the fact that we come to know the boy, not only through his expression and demeanor, but through our reading of the landscape that surrounds him. If we take our own experience of fall as a starting point, we can meet the boy in the midst of his role in the space he occupies. He conveys a sense of individuality and personality, not by standing apart from a landscape, but by standing in the completeness of being woven within place. Taking a respite from the exertions of a game (a game that is now almost the primary symbol of the autumn season in Iowa, where Wood spent his career as a painter), his character emerges from the falling leaves, woods, and farmfields. The landscape—and even more, the place he stands within—reinforces our sense of who the boy is. Wood has captured a particular person—one who is defined by the “placial” background of the portrait itself. 

Just like this boy, our selves are defined by surroundings. I am me because of where I am. I’ve written previously about how place and the creation of a self-identity are intertwined—place locates and localizes self-identity.[i] I am embodied, a person in places and spaces. Self-identity is an attempt to see through the entangled questions of who, what, and where.

The sense of self is oriented around the issue of identity because, as Susan Clayton writes, “Identity can be described as a way of organizing information about the self.”  But identity is not a simple or unified thing. For, Clayton continues, “Just as there are multiple ways of organizing this information, we have multiple identities, varying in salience and importance according to the immediate context and to our past experiences.”[ii] Because of its multivalent nature, the self is constructed in dialogue with individual and social perspectives on self-identity. I am who I am today because of who you are today, and who we both were yesterday and will be tomorrow. The danger, of course, is that the unity of our sense of self is threatened with dis-integration unless we have an overarching framework to understand how the manifold, discordant elements of self-identity can be unified. This is not merely a question of the “substance” of the self, but also a question of how to connect our actions, feelings, and physical presence with the cognitive aspects of self. 

Insofar as one’s self-identity weaves together the various levels of the self, self-identity is a relational construction instead of an autonomous, individualistic one.  Thus one’s identity is a social construct, for, as Paul Ricoeur argues, the tension of figuring the self occurs to some degree because the self becomes the self through the other. What makes up this other, however? Certainly other humans participate in the construction of the self. But we might remind ourselves of philosopher Martin Heidegger’s later definition of humans in terms of “the fourfold” (das Geviert) in order to expand the meaning of otherness. For Heidegger, the fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals presents a relational unity that allows each of the four to emerge as what they are. To be mortal—as Heidegger would understand it, to be human—is to be “capable of death,” but this is only possible in relation to the gods, sky, and earth. The other opens the self to what is beyond itself, as both an individual and a being in the world. What we should take from Heidegger is this: Human selfhood requires boundaries, but these boundaries must be porous, pointing beyond the human and toward more radical forms of otherness. Such an otherness is outside the domesticated, the cognized, and the cultural. Put otherwise, the boundaries of the human world express the limits created by the otherness of the non-human, the undomesticated, and the physicality of our world. 

Representing this philosophical shift toward a more expansive sense of otherness, environmental psychologists recommend expanding the other to the more than human. In other words, our sense of self is not confined solely by other human selves, but also by the otherness of the spaces, places, and environments that bind us together. The biotic and material worlds contain us, and yet remain outside our sense of “being human.” This has practical implications—in addition to the social aspects that are important for identity, environmental aspects are important. Indeed, a specifically environmental identity comes from our interactions with the natural world, as well as from “socially constructed understanding of oneself and others (including nature)”[iii] that open us to other locations—those of economics, politics, technology and science, emotion, aesthetics, and so on. Environmental identity rests on the meanings and values that emerge from our being in the world, in all of the ways that being entails. In other words, “[p]lace-based meanings tell us something about who we are and who we are not, how we have changed and into what we are changing.”[iv]

A sense of environmental identity is grounded upon a simple fact of mortality—our place is never the same, and it never needs to be. The ever-changing multiplicity of elements that create space come together anew each moment. Each time the question “Who am I?” is asked, the place is different. There is a freedom to be gained when we see how our self-identity is a process of reinscription within the ongoing material change of our locale. Alteration means a confrontation with difference. Difference, in turn, requires us to more fully open ourselves to others, to the Wholly Other itself. Starting this meditation in the midst of falling leaves might provide a hint of that.

The moon is (an upside-down) place….

Video work by Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith and Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert (in-situ acts, filming and editing by Taylor; poem written and recited by Christopher). Cosmic noise recordings: courtesy of Antti Kero, KAIRA (Kilpisjärvi Atmospheric Imaging Receiver Array), Finland.

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Article footnotes

[i] “Memory, Imagination, and the Hermeneutics of Place.” Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics. Edited by Clingerman, Treanor, Drenthen, and Utsler. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

[ii] Susan Clayton, “Environmental Identity: A Conceptual and Operational Definition” in Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature, edited by Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 45.

[iii] Susan Clayton, “Environmental Identity: A Conceptual and Operational Definition” in Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature, edited by Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 46.

[iv] R. Bruce Hull IV, Mark Lam, Gabriela Vigo, “Place Identity: Symbols of Self in the Urban Fabric,” Landscape and Urban Planning 28 (1994): 110.

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