Place as No Fixed Thing: Towards a More Dynamic Conceptualisation of Place The experiential approach that associates place with the human being and its

everyday actions suggests that the mobility and the changeability of the contemporary

4 “On this reading, place and locality are foci for a form of romanticised escapism from the real business of the world. While ‘time’ is equated with movement and

progress, ‘space/place’ is equated with stasis and pervasion.” (Massey, 1991, p.26)

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world are simply signs rather than reasons for a more dynamic and a less definitive conceptualisation of place. By reference to the work of thinkers like Bachelard,

Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Irigaray, and Nancy, Edward Casey asks: “is it not time to face up to place? Or even to give it a new face, so that we can at last find it, and thus our own, ineluctably implaced selves, once again?” and suggests that place is itself “no fixed thing: it has no steadfast essence”(Casey, 1997, p.286). Apart from connecting to the regional ground and embodying this connection, place can more widely be understood and defined through historical and cultural relations, through social and gender relations, and within changing and contingent environments, as long as these create the conditions for narratives to develop⁵. This suggests that place can be studied through a wide variety of topics, fields, and traits, therefore it is more of a case of different appearances and expressions rather than a standard value or a single story to be told.

To think about place in sexual, social, historical, and political terms, and thus through action and engagement, means to think about existence in transition rather than in stasis, and also to think about the body in its physicality, not only in connection to the permanence of dwelling, but also in relation to the historical, political, and social

context. In “Of Other Spaces” Michel Foucault (1986) sees the experience of the world as a network of relations that juxtapose and intersect with each other designating sites.

In Foucault’s thinking, space itself has a history, and this is why it varies across time and societies. Thus space and place can never be the same from era to era, but are instead as variable as time, and historical entities subject to time (Casey, 1997, p.298).

According to Foucault, medieval space was the space of “emplacement”⁶, a “hierarchic

5“Each [of the authors] tries to find place at work, part of something ongoing and dynamic, ingredient in something else: in the course of history (Braudel, Foucault), in the natural world (Berry, Snyder), in the political realm (Nancy, Lefebvre), in gender relations and sexual difference (Irigaray), in the productions of the poetic imagination (Bachelard, Otto), in geographic experience and reality (Foucault, Tuan, Soja, Relph, Entrekin), in the sociology of the polis and the city (Benjamin, Arendt, Walter), in nomadism (Deleuze and Guattari), in architecture (Derrida, Tschumi), in religion (Irigaray, Nancy).” (Casey, 1997, p.286)

6“In the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places, as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where

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ensemble of places”, which turned on distinctions between sacred and profane, heavenly and earthly. But this space was ruptured by Galileo’s infinite open space that reduced a body’s place into a position and a location, a moment/point in its movement. Following from that, “today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement” (Foucault, 1986, p.23). The site is now defined by relations between elements within series, trees, or grids. For Foucault the contemporary world is the

“epoch of space”, the epoch in which time – the dominant feature of the nineteenth century – has been absorbed into space. Simultaneity, continuity, transition, negotiation between the near and the far are all features of space as we perceive it today: “we are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life

developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (Foucault, 1986, p.22). The clear hierarchy of the Middle Ages, the sacred and the profane, has not ceased to exist in this context, but is instead much more hidden within sets of relations and connections and has transformed into oppositions

“between private space and public space, between family space and social space…

between the space of leisure and that of work” (Foucault, 1986, p.23). Foucault suggests that we live within a heterogeneous sort of space, inside which relations designate sites that might be closed, semi-closed, or open, others that can be fluid or clearly delimited, and others that can be superimposable on one another⁷ or not. Heterotopias suggest

“counter-sites” within this world, places of a different order within space, which create their own “other” reality, in which conditions normally held apart collapse into one another. They destroy any established order by undermining its very language as “they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’” (Foucault, 1971, p.xix). Such spaces juxtapose different sort of places and things in a way which makes it impossible to find a

“common locus”, a common place for all of them. In this sense, heterotopias dissolve our myths and function outside any law or geometry. Foucault’s thinking allows the

things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.” (Foucault, 1986, p.22)

7 “We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.” (Foucault, 1986, p.23).

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“absolutely different” from its surroundings to be located within geographical space and also to be juxtaposed with reality.

While Foucault explains “other spaces” through “heterotopology”, Deleuze and Guattari think of “other space” as the marginal space that exists on the side of settled civilisations. Nothing is settled and fixed here. In Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, the arborescent hierarchy of Western thought is replaced by the rhizomatic structure that enables heterogeneous connections outside pre-determined paths: “any point of the rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.7). Rhizomes are composed of lines rather than points, of dimensions rather than units, or better, of “directions in motion” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.23). The rhizome does not have a clear beginning or an end, but constitutes a “middle” (milieu) that develops in all directions and creates multiplicities constantly subject to

transformation. Unlike the static and fixed structure of the tree, the rhizome appears in constant motion. Through the concept of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari develop the idea of the smooth and striated space and the “war machine” that functions in the margin of the “State apparatus” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.390). Based on the model of the nomads in the steppes of Asia in the thirteenth century who fought against the state from the outside, the “war machine” suggests a “pure form of exteriority”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.390), fluid and changing, that combats the state in its static character. The “other” is here the outsider, the fluid that challenges the static and the fixed. Smooth and striated spaces are not simply two sorts of spaces that exist in opposition: the two not only co-exist, but the one is constantly being transformed into the other and vice versa. Hence the city, a clearly striated space, gives space to nomadic appropriation and movement that transforms it into smooth space, while the sea, a smooth space, is organised through meridians and parallels imposed by maps, and thus translated into striated space. Striated space is a homogeneous space, a space delimited and ordered, where movement happens from one point to another and their distance can be counted. On the other hand, smooth space is a space “in no way homogeneous”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.525), but instead infinite, undetermined, and

“amorphous” that is, without form. In smooth space the points are subject to the

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trajectory, and movement within it is directional and not dimensional⁸. Space here is to be occupied rather than counted. Not only does it give space to multiplicities, but it constitutes itself as a multiplicity. The sea, the steppe, the desert suggest smooth spaces par excellence. As such, smooth space is a space for vagabondage, a nomad space devoted to wandering and roaming between regions, constructing sets of relations within infinite space. According to Deleuze and Guattari, in nomad space dwelling occurs within the journey: “the nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; it is his territorial principle” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.480). Immersed in this region, he is identified by movement, always within the region, so that although he “deterritorialises”, there is no “reterritorialisation”

afterward⁹. His existence is not localised, as he exists through the whole region, yet this region becomes significant/local and the place where he actually is¹⁰. Thus the nomads inhabit the desert and also “make” the desert and are made by it.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest a significant connection between body and place, disengaging them at the same time from fixity and groundedness. The “where” of things has here to do with the way they are structured and how they act in space. Space

becomes haptic and sonorous, and “everything is experienced in relation to this ground, which is fully with the aesthesiological and kinaesthetic body” (Casey, 1997, p.307).

And since the ground becomes not something to be perceived, but something to be negotiated due to one’s immersion in space, dwelling can be also construed within change and movement.