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Like Claddings (above), this chapter places the discourse of The Meeting Place in the context of other related work. The performative space constitutive of an encounter that will furnish a durable and just common place is defined in relation to Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja’s theorizing of the third space or the in-between. The identity of self-becoming with the performance of the in-between is illustrated by reference to the Vezo people of Mozambique. It is the emphasis on the historicity of performance that distinguishes our approach.

Pothos is an expression of Eros, and in this chapter both deifications of desire are subjected to critical scrutiny. The platonic characterization of them is questioned and an alternative genealogy offered, one that reconnects their vitality to the natural world and the interfusing of its essential elements. Here Chaos elides with life-giving pneuma – a connection that confirms the creative connection between breathing and the articulation of the world of things (see Echo Location above). The new public space that emerges from this revision might be something like the old ‘common place.’

The style and the organization of the book are explained. The way the book moves between different voices, brings together very different cultural materials, often traversing them more than once from different directions, is intended to mimic the nature of the meeting place. In a meeting place where the desire of encounter remains alive, there can never be a single, authoritative narrative.

Here some problems of nomenclature addressed. Implicit in our thesis the possibility of a ‘fit’ between people and place: sociability is always a social performance, a matter of timing and spacing. The Greek term hedra, referring to the natural fit of things, is revived and compared with the Arrernte term utyerre, tie or string. The ‘crowd’ that inhabits these places is not the one conjured up by Canetti and le Bon but self-organising, pluralist and relational.

The three previous chapters constitute the introduction to The Meeting Place. Illustrating the description of the book in the previous chapter, this chapter plunges the reader into the midst of an erotic situation and a first person narrative: a man waiting for his lover to arrive. As she fails to arrive on time, the distinction between a chance encounter and a scheduled meeting emerges.

A discussion of the philosophical significance of thinking dyadically, in terms of a fundamental relation across difference. (Meeting cannot be thought from one side or point of view.) Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm attempts to deal with this inhibition of western metaphysics. In societies that are organized into moieties (Australian Aboriginal societies, but also the Amazonian Bororo), thinking the self doubly, as a social relation, is unproblematic. In trying to bring these insights into a place-making practice the experiments of Arakawa and Gins are exemplary. In any case the difficulty of defining meeting suggests a ‘chi complex’, a philosophical aporia focused on the place where lines cross and instead of fusing cancel out.

Even in meeting places very few people meet: most pass by. In Aboriginal Australia, the choreography of non-meeting is institutionalized. There follows a discussion of a famous episodein the anthropological literature – a meeting between two clans outside Alice Springs reported by Spencer and Gillen. In his critique of their account, T.G.H. Strehlow makes it clear that this was an exceptional performance ‘put on’ for a third person (Gillen). The ceremonies performed at that time and place aimed to maintain existing boundaries and minimize illicit contact.

A social Eros of the middle ground is proposed, whose presence is made manifest in an art of arrangement or distribution. This chapter re-traverses a number of topics covered earlier – Arrernte utyerre, Greek mythologies of empire, Puritan notions of the ‘common place’ – to demonstrate the active role the ground plays as the material in which sociability is ‘written.’ When this is recognized the non-human actors (the trees, for example) involved in meeting can be recognized.

Translated into urban terms, the ‘erotic zone’ conjured up here is not a meeting place but a wall. The wall materializes the nature of encounter; it is where the desire of the other and the veil drawn in-between is made manifest. The wall divides encounter from the meeting place.

The ideas in the previous chapter are amplified and a conceptual ‘meeting place’ between northern and southern notions of socialization is suggested: an understanding of communication as dialogical and performative is common to writers like Bakhtin and Desmond and to peoples like the Warlpiri. The novelty of the Warlpiri perspective is to stage meeting as an encounter with the non-human as well as human other.

In this chapter we start to investigate the mechanics of encounter, the gestural and choreographic techniques used to mediate communication where no language exists in common. Australian illustrations are given of the foundational role of mimicry. Then, mimicking the structure of the previous chapter is explained, these historical performances are shown to communicate their meaning in the same way that Valery says the Symbolists (and Mallarme in particular) create a poetic event. Finally, the recent discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ suggests a neurological mechanism for mimicry which collapses the aesthetic/historical, reflective/non-reflective distinction.

The synthesis of the remarks in the previous chapter is the idea that an ‘algorithm of sociability,’ a composite movement form governing the etiquette of the in-between. But how is this desire space written, remembered or reproduced? This question allows another traverse across the personal material introduced earlier, as well as a further amplification of the character of Eros in public space. The notion of the erotope is introduced and the question of its persistence in private and public memory.

An Australian example of an erotic encounter stabilized as a discursive meeting place (or site of exchange) is given: the language notebooks of First Fleet Surgeon, William Dawes, which mainly record a conversation with an Eora woman called Patyegarang. The discussion that follows shows that the recovery of this erotope involves a parallel performance, embodied in this case in a sound installation I made based on the notebooks and installed in a new commemorative museum.

A second traverse of the work of Arakawa and Gins brings together the findings of the book, that home is mobile (wherever you are but always somewhere, defined relationally). This definition avoids being aimless because of the intelligence of the feedback mechanism that drives us. The cyberneut of public space constantly modifies his/her behavior in relation to others. Self-doubled, the reflective individual is a dramaturg of turbulence, one of many self-consciously maintain the flow of things. In an astonishing transposition of this insight, Wardaman elder, Bill Yidumduma Harney, explains how the trees walk about at night, accompanying us in the dark.

The Meeting Place returns to the personal note, perhaps another moment in the lover’s saga of unfilled meeting. The performance of a public mimic is described. But before that another unfulfilled project is discussed, Giacometti’s unrealized public art commission for the Chase Manhattan Bank’s Pine Street Plaza. The reason why this work did not materialize, I suggest, was because of the constitutional resistance of encounter to representation: the paradox of the curatorial arrangement of the maquettes for this work is drawn out. The public mimic does not merely suggest a shortcoming: he brings out the genius of Giacometti’s figure arrangements, that they are free in their distances, always about to meet, attentive: they remember the trees and the author of all meetings that hold the promise of an encounter, Eros, the Public Worker.

The zone of encounter is poised between meeting and non-meeting; it materializes the in-between – the way that Leonardo da Vinci uses sfumato (or blurred outlines) suggests the indistinctness that characterises an object of desire that must remain enigmatic. The writing of this mimetically-constructed desire space must also be performative, inviting the social sciences to venture beyond their domains ‘into the thick of things. When they do this things become more indistinct (or veiled), more turbulent and unpredictable.

The question of the status of Giacometti’s work is raised: does an aesthetic achievement like his have any historical value? Does it have an implications for a better practice of meeting. Examples of ‘first contact’ negotiations (from Magellan’s voyage and from early Australian accounts of ‘corroborees’) are given to show that in non-western societies, the mimetic techniques used to broker contact are not purely theatrical: they are historical performances.

A new theme is introduced: the question of the motivation of meeting. Historically, meeting is precipitated by the migrant, the exile, the one who comes from another place. Therefore, meeting is always a triangulation between those who meet and the historical (exceptional) circumstance in which they meet. Meeting is always shadowed by ambiguity, by a desire of avoidance at the heart of the approach. Writers like Levinas, Agamben, Nancy and others are discussed for their views about the politics and ethics of encounter: none of them considers the ontological significance of the dance as such.

The point has been made that ‘meeting’ is never between two people: it is always shadowed by the desire of encounter. This shadow can be the physical setting, the historical circumstance and the mimetic nature of social behavior as such. In this chapter a new shadow/shade is introduced, that of the ancestors, whose death underwrites our plunge into the realm of change. A remarkable instance of this from colonial Australia is given, where the relationship between stepping out of oneself towards the other and dying is illustrated. Picking upon the migrant theme of the previous chapter, this insight is also attributed to the Australian-Iranian sculptor Hossein Valamanesh.