Economizing America: Virginia Farmer, Tuskegee Student

Abstract

f, as Charles Olson says, SPACE [is] the central fact to man born in America (11), one might proceed to ask, How and where does this begin and end? Who inhabits it? What lies beyond it? In short, let us dissolve the supposed self-evidence of space in series of pragmatic questions. For notwithstanding the fabulous dramas of discovery making up American myth and history (has any nation so confused the two?), American has never simply been there, never just accommodatingly presented itself to be found, founded, and settled. is not place or happening or an extension, but rather the condition of them, their determination as spatial, physical. Heidegger points the way beyond regarding as either natural given or a system of co-ordinates by claiming, Space and time are frame, an ordering realm, with the help of which we establish and indicate the place and time point of the particular (What Is Thing? 17). and time are the possibility of things, the frame within which things emerge as such.