M. R. Chesterfield

This essay describes one morning in a backyard, sitting and then walking, and what it showed about a first-person phenomenological practice. The framework belongs to two companion papers and is only summarised here. Husserl’s epoché supplies the method, and Merleau-Ponty’s lived body and sedimentation the account of the walker. The first memory to return was prompted by a breeze and arrived piece by piece, which I read as Husserlian awakening and pairing and as a small-scale version of transposition. I distinguish a practice of attending to clouds and then listening from suppression and from the epoché, and I treat the present as held open at both edges. Two matters remain open: the status of mood and conditioning, and the criteria for a better description. The evidence is one body’s, at a named time, under declared brackets.

Regional transposition names an experience for which the phenomenology of place has no word: embodied knowledge sedimented in one region doing interpretive work in another region, structurally unrelated to the first and previously unvisited, and altering both the region that is read and the one who reads it. This paper describes the phenomenon from a single case, in which the Tasmanian highlands gave back a small town in the Central Highlands region of Victoria as it was in the late 1970s, which the town itself no longer holds. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit as a transposable style, Husserl’s analyses of type, horizon and passive association and Heidegger’s thrownness, I argue that transposition is regional rather than local, generative rather than a simple transfer and temporal at root, and that the distance between regions is its condition rather than its obstacle. I distinguish it from place attachment, nostalgia, projection, translocality and the distinction between homeworld and alienworld; read it against Bachelard, Casey, Relph and Tuan; trace precedents and failures from Egyptian inscriptions through Herodotus, Thomas Mitchell and the twentieth-century continental philosophers; set out the method under which it will be tested on a return to Tasmania in the near future; and answer the objections that it is only analogy, false memory or economic coincidence, stating the possible outcomes of the test in advance.

Phenomenology has studied place closely and region hardly at all. The word appears throughout the literature on place, but only as scenery: the surround in which a place sits, or the scale at which a writer has chosen not to work. This paper asks whether a region can be given to a body—present in experience, not merely known about—and argues that it can, provided the question is put structurally rather than by analogy with the room. Drawing on Husserl’s accounts of horizon, type and habituality, and on Merleau-Ponty’s lived body (corps vécu), motor intentionality and sedimentation, I argue that a region is neither an object of perception, since no vantage presents it, nor the world-horizon, which has no edge to cross. It is a third structure: a horizon that can be entered. Regions are plural, have thresholds rather than boundaries, are constituted across returns rather than in any single encounter, and can fail to be constituted at all. I then set out how the claim can be tested: a dual bracket that declares in advance what was already known, in the body and from the archive; a hinged encounter at each site; and three outcomes, one of which is failure. A further possibility, transposition, emerges at the first site: sedimented bodily knowledge from one region doing constitutive work in another region with which it has no connection. The argument is drawn from regional Australia and from one body’s traversal of it.