Emplaced Qualities

Abstract

‘Quality’ and ‘space’ were not treated jointly as a key consideration in the main social scientific paradigms. Nor were ‘experience’ and ‘place’. This paper asks what vocabulary could close this gap without falling into a trap of reductive materialism that treats emplaced qualities like reified ‘variables’, or reductive idealism that disembodies them and treats as ‘signs’ and ‘ideas’. We address this issue by jointly thematizing two important pairs of concepts: distributive and attributive quality, and lived and reflective experience, and relating them to space. Many culturalist frameworks have ignored space and prioritized reflective attribution of quality. This is an epistemological problem because as Merleau-Ponty had already showed spatial emplacement of human experience is existentially and culturally fundamental. This has been transformed into a lingering methodological problem, largely because phenomenology was marginalized in English speaking social sciences. Drawing on its over-looked classic concepts, notably the ones by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schütz, as well as congenial new conceptions, the present paper offers relational holistic definitions of space, place, quality and experience, and it situates them vis-à-vis traditional dimensions of qualitative sociological analysis. Subsequently, an outline of a phenomenological theory of ‘emplaced qualities’ is proposed. The iconic club Berghain in Berlin provides a provisional exemplification framed by Henri Lefebvre’s anti-idealist notion of “architecture of enjoyment” and Michel Foucault’s spatio-cultural notion of “heterotopia”.