Week 9: Place-to-space

Last week, I was struggling to find a formal connection between Thoreau’s writings and the legal framework of adverse possession. I realize now that, like always, I have glossed over groundwork in favor of contemplating the abstract. Instead of trying to find instances where Thoreau either makes use of or responds to the legal abstractions of adverse possession that establishes and enforces a particular relation to land, I thought I might start with something simpler and more elemental: Thoreau’s “place-sense.”

On the one hand, Thoreau gathered a huge amount of material about the places he encountered—about Concord in particular. This material included botanical and meteorological details, various historical anecdotes, thousands of his own personal encounters with human and non-human inhabitants, technical descriptions about a particular trade—the list goes on. Thoreau clearly finds that a description of a place can always be thicker and that one ought to thicken one’s description continuously. On the other hand, Lawrence Buell points out that the more Thoreau adds to his vast material archive of a place, the more a place “fissures” into its constituent parts and the more keenly aware the reader is of just how incomplete Thoreau’s description of a place really is (Buell 258).

However, Thoreau is not simply recording descriptions of a place. He’s also plotting those descriptions on a map. Thoreau was a surveyor favored by the government of Concord, which hired him to survey and demarcate parcels of land around the town. Through surveying, Thoreau coordinates the constituent parts of his material archive of Concord and imposes “straight lines and mathematical formulae” upon irregularities that crop up in his thick descriptions of place. At Walden Pond, for example, Thoreau marks off and subdivides the landscape into a legible map (Chura 12). I argue that Thoreau uses surveying to manage the clumsiness of his place descriptions and to connect them to more abstract frameworks. Thoreau’s writing operates from within a subject position between one that merely registers the sense-data of Thoreau’s encounters with Nature and one that constantly abstracts those encounters into the moral realm of the divine, an abstraction crucial to the Transcendental project.

This liminal position places Thoreau in a particular relation to processes whereby a place becomes abstracted into a space that can be read and inscribed. On the one hand, Thoreau contests the territorialization of traditional property law and the reorientation of the landscape by railroad commercial infrastruction; but on the other, as a surveyor, Thoreau is complicit in—indeed, an essential part of—exactly the forms of civilized encroachment and environmental defacement he denounces. But, Thoreau isn’t your average surveyor, a mere appendage of the state in its endless westward expansion. Surveyors typically do not build vast material archives of the places they survey. Thoreau’s place-sense complicates our understanding of Thoreau as a surveyor complicit in American expansion of property rights and westward colonization.

Thoreau’s surveying abstracts place into space in such a way that reconciles the clumsy incompletion of his place-sense and resists the spatial violence of land abstraction and territorialization. Thoreau is a squatter-surveyor, relying on the legal framework of adverse possession to occupy and improve the land on which he squats. As a squatter-surveyor, Thoreau challenges the traditional adversarial position between the landowner and the squatter by complicating the role of surveyor as an agent of the landowner and the position of the squatter as a marginal actor who must rely on continual improvement of the land on which he squats to maintain his rights.

In order to push my understanding of Thoreau as a squatter-surveyor, I might look to Latour’s work on networks. How can I read Thoreau’s archive of place descriptions as part of a network with the maps and charts of his surveying work? If a network “helps you redistribute and reallocate action” through ecological movement between its disparate attributes and its self-containment, then how might I construct a network of various interlocking and interdependent legal and spatial frameworks that situate Thoreau’s surveying and squatting? This network of legal and spatial frameworks would continually refer back to unstable processes whereby a place becomes a space on which law can be formed and then later applied consistently over a variegated, geographical network of places. Thoreau’s surveying and squatting challenge place-to-space abstractions on which legal frameworks are based and recoordinate the relationship between surveying and squatting to produce a different sort of abstraction. The network of frameworks Thoreau operates within redistribute and reallocate the actions of squatting and surveying to produce a new and contestatory landscape.