Setting, Space, Capital

Cherry Cheesman

When you think about a memory where you feel most inspired, most like yourself, do

you think about where that memory took place? Was it halfway through an excruciating family

hike? In the midday of August, on your hometown’s busiest street? In your room?

Oftentimes, you do not think about the setting of this memory in explicit terms – but you

will remember and recount details that are inseparably linked to it. Like the texture of your skin,

– is your hometown humid? – the temperature of the air you embraced or sought refuge from,

the shape of the trees you passed as you thought about, and felt comfortable in, yourself.

Setting is such an enormously important part of our everyday lives – so important, that it

can often swallow our field of vision, until we are taken from it. But language, flavor,

experience, and every small detail that makes a person individual, are so deeply linked with

setting, linked with the entire world that influences us.

But, now more than ever, capitalist society has more reason than ever to strip us of

positive, meaningful connections to setting. Profit initiatives continue to damage our climate at a

breakneck pace, stripping biodiversity and true variation in our natural environment, which is

one of the oldest distinctions in setting. Removing the necessary resources and individuality of

specific settings, who may rely on them for survival, also decreases their ability to interact with

and sustain a place of survival against other, more economically prosperous settings.

The idea of a person integrating themself in their environment is being deprioritized, for

the benefit of capital. If workers do not have community in a specific place, then it is easy for

them to be relocated, wherever their occupation may need them to be. People, uninterested in the

places they move to, do not have to concern themselves with guilt, if they force poorer

communities, more integrated into their setting, into other places.

Sanitized ground is the easiest to build on.

Especially within the realm of art, it is so important to pay attention to setting – why

certain settings are deemed as interesting, what about them stands so stark and distinct, and the

settings people flock to. Because even as settings are becoming flatter and flatter, sanitized

further beyond what they were, people still have a deep, intrinsic desire to attract themselves to

settings. Yes, a large part of this is community, which is one of the shining factors of setting, but

there is also the space beneath human interaction, the layer of the natural world that often acts as

a formation of the community’s bonds. Whether it be a specific rooftop location with the best

sunset, a corner of natural plant growth, efforts to maintain and visit parks, under the drudge that

society has turned interacting with setting into, there is a real love and effort in distinguishing

ourselves. We will strive to preserve a sense of realness, to remember the intricate details that

make up our memories, and remember what, in an increasingly artificial world, is real.

To remember the color of the sky on an unimportant weekday is to remember yourself. I

hope that as many people as possible are struck by their personal details, and are so overcome

with them, that they feel the need to voice them, as random as they may be.