by Peter Merriman

1 INTRODUCTION

My third dislike is a certain view of space, time and place … This is the view that human beings are engaged in building discursive worlds by actively constructing webs of significance which are laid out over a physical substrate. (Thrift, 1999, p. 300)

Over the past 20 to 30 years, relational, post-humanist, processual, and non-representational approaches to space and place have gained an increasing purchase within anglophone human geography, as scholars have sought to move beyond singular, static, and closed materialist framings to advance more dynamic, open, progressive, and pluralistic understandings of places and the practices which produce them (see Massey, 2005; Merriman, 2022; Rose, 1999; Thrift, 1996, 1999). While much recent work has engaged with post-structuralist thinking to approach space and place, spacing and placing, in non-essentialist, non-static, and distinctly non-Euclidean and non-Cartesian ways,¹ there have been a broad array of relational and post-humanist approaches and perspectives which build on long-standing traditions of processual and relational thinking, including studies engaging with Marxism (Harvey, 1990, 1996), Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy (Roberts, 2024; Williams & Keating, 2022), strategic-relational thinking (Jessop et al., 2008), Deleuzian and Leibnizian concepts of folded space (Doel, 1999), actor-network theories (Latour, 1997; Law, 2002), and topology (Allen, 2016; Shields, 2013). We must also acknowledge the vast array of relational and processual thinking and doing which is not grounded in Western philosophical traditions, from critical approaches to space and place approached through other philosophical, theological, or cosmological frameworks (Casey, 1997), to studies underpinned by anthropological fieldwork in non-Western cultures (Ingold, 2011; Munn, 1992, 1996; Pandya, 1990) and indigenous thinking, praxis, scholarship, and land/territory/country which in their entangled relations constitute forms of ‘place-thought’ (Watts, 2013) and ‘co-becoming’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016) that are often erased or marginalised by Western spatial practices and ontologies (Todd, 2016).

One concept which has proved particularly influential in anglophone relational thinking has been that of agencement (or assemblage), which geographers have drawn from the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Manual DeLanda, and Kim Dovey to understand the processes by which places may be seen to be continually assembled, dismantled, territorialised, and coded (see Anderson, 2012; Cresswell, 2019; Woods et al., 2021). While there are many different interpretations of assemblage thinking, Anderson and McFarlane have highlighted how scholars often focus their attention on either the processes of composition by which ‘provisional contingent wholes’ emerge from the assembling of ‘heterogeneous elements’ (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011, p. 125), or on a more Deleuzoguattarian understanding of how ‘territorial assemblages’ become extracted and configured from interrelated materials and milieux (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 503–504). Empirical applications of both interpretations tend to articulate an ‘ambivalence toward the a priori reduction of socio-spatial relations and processes to any fixed form or set of fixed forms’ (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011, p. 124), but they also tend to be incorporated into constructivist and representational accounts of the building, settling, and/or disassembling of places. This presents a number of problems, not only for scholars seeking to advance non-representational and processual approaches to the unfolding of worlds, but also for scholars engaging with indigenous thinking and ontologies where worlds are not necessarily seen to be formed of discrete and separable components, objects, and boundaries (Merriman, 2022). But what are my primary concerns about constructivist or ‘building block’ approaches to places?

First, constructivist and compositional approaches to place are often figured in assemblage thinking using dynamic and relational variants of the kinds of ‘building perspectives’ critiqued by Tim Ingold and Nigel Thrift, in which human actions are established as being of a different order and ‘worlds are [seen to be] made before they are lived in’ (Ingold, 1995, p. 66; Thrift, 1999).² While Ingold (1995) and Thrift (1999) differ in the philosophical basis of their critiques, both place an emphasis on the inherent, relational ‘withness’ of human entanglements with other things-in-the-world. Moving beyond this emphasis on withness, relations, and entanglement, however, these ‘building perspectives’ frequently rest on a constructivist ontology which presents a ‘building block’ view of the world, where worlds are built (whether in singular or plural terms) from separate (if related) material and semiotic components. These ‘building block’ ontologies are often mobilised in binary accounts of assembly/disassembly and addition/subtraction (Merriman, 2024), something which Deleuze and Guattari could themselves be accused of in using pairs of concepts which can appear binary or bidirectional, such as coding/decoding, territorialisation/deterritorialisation, or stratification/destratification (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 53–54, 502–505).

Second, this ‘building block’ approach or ontology results in the noun-like meanings of the English word ‘assemblage’ becoming foregrounded before the verb-like connotations of the French term agencement (see Anderson & McFarlane, 2011; Buchanan, 2015, 2021). This has been widely discussed in assemblage literatures within and without geography, and it becomes compounded when scholars sometimes utilise assemblage as a ‘structure-like surrogate’ that ‘permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life’ (Marcus & Saka, 2006, p. 101).

While there are many different readings of Deleuze and Guattari’s diverse body of thinking – together and separately³ – some interpretations of ‘assemblage’ do not sit well with non-representational and processual accounts which attempt to move away from ‘pointillist’ conceptions of place which foreground questions of identity and representation (Doel, 1999).⁴ In order to ‘forge a dynamic sense of place’ (Thrift, 1999, p. 296), I would suggest that scholars can usefully examine how Deleuze and Guattari mobilised the concept of agencement in close relation with other important concepts, including the ritournelle (ritornello/refrain), rhythm, milieu, territory, haecceity, individuation, and affect. It is also important to remember that Deleuze and Guattari were concerned with foregrounding alternative, minor, and molecular practices and ontologies, and were themselves influenced by indigenous thought and practice (Medien, 2019), even if ‘indigenous’ ontologies were abstracted, caricatured, and exoticised in their accounts of ‘the nomad’ (Kaplan, 1996).

In this paper I speak to current debates on how geographers theorise place, suggesting that assemblage is not always the best way to do this if we wish to foreground process and the dynamism of places. I argue that geographers who are keen to advance processual and dynamic understandings of place in Western contexts might usefully focus on one of Deleuze and Guattari’s other concepts, the ritournelle – ‘literally “a little return” or a little thing that returns’ (Joughin, 1995, p. 200) – which is generally translated into English as either ‘refrain’ or ritornello (from the Italian origins of the term).⁵ I draw attention to this concept because it can help scholars to focus on the rhythmic, repetitive, differentiated, intensive, affective, political, eventful, minor, habitual, performative, and territorial qualities of processes of placing and emplacement, while resisting any easy assimilation into constructivist and representational ‘building’ perspectives which foreground the assembly and disassembly of singular or plural worlds. I argue that the concept of the refrain is particularly useful for rethinking binary oppositions of place and non-place – where experiences of place and placelessness might usefully be approached as eventful or uneventful apprehensions of a series of circulating and unfolding refrains with differing rhythmic effects, depending on the variable capacities of bodies to affect or become affected.

In focusing on the concept of refrain, the paper amplifies and develops an important but minor line of argument which can be traced through Deleuzian, Guattarian, and Deleuzoguattarian writings on place, rhythms, habit, and movement over the past two decades. This is the suggestion, as Nigel Thrift stated in a rarely cited essay from 2006, that:

place can be taken to be a set of refrains which circulate among spaces producing rising and falling intensities, gradually establishing a territory which may be permanent or fleeting but which always demands that notice be taken. (Thrift, 2006, p. 552)

A similar observation was later advanced by Tim Edensor when drawing on the writings of Henri Lefebvre and others to focus on the dynamic geographies of rhythm and repetition (see Edensor, 2010, 14–15), while there are strong parallels with writings on habit inspired by the work of Félix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze:

Don’t places emerge in habit, through the repetition of practices and performances, itineraries and routines? Each rendition is accretive, building on the last and oriented to the next. Each rendition similar to the former but with new acquisitions introduced each time, however minute or imperceptible. Habit is then a way of appreciating that a sense of place is emergent and developmental, rather than static or authentic. (Dewsbury & Bissell, 2015, p. 23)

Dewsbury and Bissell’s reflections on the geographies of habit, performative practices, and affective milieux resonate with Deleuze’s thinking on rhythmic repetitions and refrains (see also Bissell, 2011, 2013). It is, however, in Derek McCormack’s (2002, 2010, 2013) writings on rhythm and movement that the ‘refrain’ has been most fully developed in geography, leading him to conclude in his 2013 book Refrains for Moving Bodies that ‘the refrain – perhaps more so than rhythm or atmosphere – provides a way of grasping the transversal quality of affective spacetimes’ (McCormack, 2013, p. 8).

Following on from these early writings, the refrain has started to feature more regularly in geographic debates, although it is rarely the primary focus of attention. This includes critical discussions of the refrain amid the increasing attention in geography to the solo writings of Félix Guattari (see Gerlach & Jellis, 2015; Jellis et al., 2019), in assessments of Deleuze (and Guattari)’s contribution to thinking on space and place (Saldanha, 2017), and in more empirically focused discussions of laughter (Emmerson, 2017), practices of care (Frazer, 2022), mapping (Gerlach, 2015), territory (Brighenti & Karrholm, 2020), and national identity (Instone, 2010). It is also important to situate this concern with the refrain alongside a much longer history of geographical engagement with process, movement, dynamism, flux, and rhythm. This ranges from attempts to incorporate movement and change into theoretical approaches to space and time in fields like spatial science, time geography, structuration theory, and post-structuralism (see Merriman, 2012a, 2012b), to more recent work on rhythms, rhythmanalysis, and rhythmology inspired by the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, Pascal Michon, and others (see Crespi & Manghani, 2020; Edensor, 2010; Lefebvre, 2004; McCormack, 2002; Mels, 2004). What’s more, indigenous understandings and apprehensions of movement, process, change, becoming, and entangled relations are frequently positioned as central to ‘non-Western’ ontologies, cosmologies, and approaches to place, placing, and placelessness in different parts of the world (e.g., Pandya, 1990; Watts, 2013).

In section two of the paper I position the concept of the ritournelle in relation to Guattari’s solo writings from the 1970s to the 1990s, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative book A Thousand Plateaus. While many of Deleuze and Guattari’s examples focus on the territorialising and deterritorialising refrains of bird song, animal movements, and musical rhythms, I highlight the importance of everyday rhythmic refrains in the composition, crystallisation, or performance of places. I discuss the importance of Gilbert Simondon’s writings on individuation and crystal growth for Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, before discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the refrain as being like a ‘glass harmonica’, which effectively articulates the reverberative, refractive, and rhythmic aspects of the concept.

In section three I revisit a familiar and well-established set of debates in geography, anthropology, and cognate fields about the relationship between place and placelessness, or places and ‘non-places’. After outlining the arguments that have underpinned dominant theoretical approaches to placelessness and non-places, and critiques of the binary opposition of places and non-places, I argue that experiences of place and placelessness can usefully be approached as more-or-less eventful expressions of a series of circulating, deterritorialising, and territorialising refrains which have differing rhythmic effects. With their fluctuating and pluralistic character, refrains show up as highly dynamic and reverberative transversal forces which may or may not be apprehended or sensed by users, and one of the key characteristics of experiences of placelessness seems to be a failure of human occupants to be individuated as separate from these environments and to experience separation from these environments.

2 LA RITOURNELLE: POSITIONING THE REFRAIN IN GUATTARI AND DELEUZE’S THINKING

[Didier Eribon:]… do you think you have created any concepts? [Gilles Deleuze:] How about the ritornello? We formulated the concept of the ritornello in philosophy. (Deleuze, 2006, p. 381)

Ritornello: the four syllables of this naïve, infantile word evoke the repetitive games, songs, dances and nursery rhymes of our childhoods. Even though the ritornello finds its origin in sophisticated music, it always threatens to devolve into tedious and sclerotic song. (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 125)

While the concept of the ritornello or refrain is most commonly associated with the eleventh chapter – titled ‘1837: Of the refrain’ [De la Ritournelle] – of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), it is a concept which Guattari first developed in his early solo writings and continued to explore until his death in 1992. The ritornello threads together or resounds through many of Guattari’s diverse interests, including music, literature, ecology, and, of course, psychoanalysis. It emerges in his psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work with patient R.A. at La Borde clinic in the 1950s (Guattari, 2015, p. 39), although it is more systematically developed as part of his critiques of psychoanalysis and development of an alternative, transversal schizoanalysis in the 1970s and 1980s, both on his own and with Gilles Deleuze (Guattari, 1995).

The refrain receives its first lengthy discussion in Guattari’s 1979 monograph The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Guattari, 2011), in which he defines refrains as ‘basic rhythms of temporalization’ (ibid., p. 108) which cut across ‘the dichotomy between material processes and semiotic processes’, constituting one of several ‘concrete operators’ or ‘concrete machines’ that establish ‘this time and this space lived by a particular assemblage in a particular context which is ecological, ethological, social, political etc.’ (ibid., p. 105). Refrains are positioned, here, as key to the plural, ongoing, and repetitious (yet differentiated) enactments of spaces and times, but despite hinting at the spatial, environmental, and political ramifications of this thinking – and the inclusion of examples from animal and avian ethnology – almost one third of The Machinic Unconscious (Part II) focuses on literary motifs, discussing the ‘refrains of lost time’ in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume magnum opus À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’) (see Guattari, 2011, pp. 229–331).

With the publication of A Thousand Plateaus in French in 1980, the ritournelle (refrain) becomes more closely associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s emerging political-ecological thinking on the intersecting themes of territory, milieu, rhythm, assemblage, and repetition, and they exemplify their arguments through examples relating to animal and avian ethnology (including chaffinches, Australian grass finches, and rabbits), art (Paul Klee), and music (with discussions of Debussy, Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Schumann, among others).⁶ One important but brief example is drawn from Guattari’s critical readings of ‘the status of repetition in psychoanalysis’, and particularly his analysis of the fort da game outlined by Sigmund Freud and later by Jacques Lacan (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 129).⁷ Writing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had discussed how the ‘compulsion to repeat’ features in the behaviour of children, referencing the case of an 18-month-old boy who gained pleasure from a single repetitious game where he would exclaim ‘o-o-o-o’ when throwing a toy away (which was interpreted by Freud as an exclamation representing the German word fort, or ‘gone’), before shouting da (‘there’) on its return (Freud, 1991, p. 284). While Freud presents the child’s instinctive ‘compulsion to repeat’ in relation to the absence and return of his mother, Guattari argues that both Freud and Lacan overlook the importance of the fort da exclamation as a repetitive, comforting, and rhythmic refrain, because they either ‘treat it as a phonological opposition or a symbolic component of the language-unconscious’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 299).⁸

The fort da refrain becomes positioned as just one example of the kinds of everyday rhythmic, expressive, melodic, and embodied refrains through which minor forms of territorialisation and deterritorialisation occur (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006). These range from the ‘repetitive games’ of children (Sauvagnargues, 2016), to little ‘ditties’ hummed by adults to themselves – ‘tra la la…’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 299) – or nursery rhymes sung to children – ‘Rockabye baby on the tree-top’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p. 73). These more everyday examples hint at ‘the refrain’s escape outside the [formal] musical field’ (Guattari, 2011, p. 288), although they still relate to sound, hinting at the role of sonic and rhythmic forces and events in reverberating through or being enfolded into everyday environments. Indeed, the focus of many scholars continues to be on either Deleuze and Guattari’s musical refrains or on refrains connecting music and dance (see Gallope, 2017; McCormack, 2002; Saldanha, 2017; Stivale, 1998). In his book on Space after Deleuze, Arun Saldanha (2017, p. 117) emphasises that ‘the concept of the refrain is extremely useful for studying the aural components of patriarchy, religion, the state, and nationalism, the most powerful territorializing forces in society’, but I would add that the repetitive territorialising and deterritorialising refrains which are involved in the delimitation and individuation of such spatial concepts as home, community, nation, place, and world also have more-than-sonorous, physical/material and kinaesthetic/gestural components. Moving beyond sound and music, then, refrains act as transversal affective forces which may become crystallised, delimited, and apprehended as lively and eventful ‘existential territories’ (Guattari, 1995, p. 15; cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Guattari, 2011; Kleinherenbrink, 2015; Saldanha, 2017; Sauvagnargues, 2016).

Before proceeding to discuss how the concepts of refrain/ritornello might shape geographic understandings of place, it is important to expand on Guattari and Deleuze’s theoretical approach to these terms and the related concepts of rhythm, milieu, assemblage, and territory. First, it is useful to contextualise the refrain and related concepts in relation to the processual ontologies that were advanced by Deleuze from the mid-1960s and Guattari from the early 1970s. Here, the focus is not on static, delimited positions, forms, and objects, or on simple constructivist logics of cause and effect, or action and reaction, but on the eventful emergence or becoming of transversal political and material forces and qualities which are continually territorialised and deterritorialised, appearing to affect, take hold of, and emerge from individualised bodies of different kinds (see Deleuze, 1988, 1991, 2004, 2015). Second, while refrains are categorised by Deleuze and Guattari in a number of different ways, it is ‘territorial refrains’ which loom large in A Thousand Plateaus, and are of primary concern to me here, being approached as ‘rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have become expressive – and have become expressive because they are territorializing’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 317). Refrains have (at least) three ‘simultaneous’ or intermixed ‘aspects’ – ‘sonorous, gestural [and] motor’ dimensions (ibid., p. 312) – and these very different territorialising and deterritorialising functions and qualities are nicely reflected in Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation that ‘a refrain’ is (like) a ‘glass harmonica’:

the refrain is a prism, a crystal of space–time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. The refrain is therefore of the crystal or protein type. (ibid., p. 348)

Refrains are presented as simultaneously constitutive, catalytic and refractive, and as melodious and rhythmic – both glassy and harmonic. In an endnote, their crystalline comparisons are linked to the work of composer Oliver Messiaen and artist Paul Klee, but elsewhere in A Thousand Plateaus they acknowledge the important influence of Gilbert Simondon’s writings on crystal growth, ontogenesis, and individuation to their thinking (ibid., pp. 551 n. 58, 49–53).

Writing in the book form of his 1958 doctoral thesis, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Individuation (2020), Simondon used the example of crystals growing in solutions to illustrate his assertion that physical, social, psychic, and collective individuation occur through ontogenetic, environing processes by which distinctive dynamic ‘individual-milieu coupling[s]’ emerge and transform (Simondon, 2020, p. 3). This book had an important influence on Deleuze’s thinking from the mid-1960s. Deleuze discussed part one of the book in a highly positive review in 1966 (Deleuze, 2001), while it formed a major component of his non-representational philosophy of individuation and difference-in-itself as outlined in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 2004; also Deleuze, 2001), as well as his later writings with Guattari on individuation, assemblages, milieu, strata, and haecceities in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). In Simondon and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, milieu must be interpreted in light of its multiple meanings in French, referring to ‘surroundings’, ‘middle’, and ‘medium’ (in the sense of a chemical or elemental medium) (Massumi, 1988, p. xvii). Deleuze and Guattari position milieux as ‘vibratory … coded … block[s] of space-time’ which emerge from chaos as there is a territorialising and deterritorialising of ‘milieu components’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 313, 315). Individuated territories must be approached as dynamic assemblages-in-becoming that start to crystallise when ‘rhythms … become expressive’ and ‘milieu components … become qualitative’ (ibid., p. 315). Dynamism and change are seen as key to any understanding of the melodic, repetitive, and differentiated processes by which milieux, rhythms, territories, and refrains emerge and crystallise, but whereas many geographers have turned to the concept of agencement (assemblage) at this point to explain how territorialising and deterritorialising forces and events may result in a degree of ‘consistency’ by ‘which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together’ (ibid., p. 327), I would argue that the concept of the refrain holds more promise in understanding consistency as a processual tendency resulting from forces of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, rather than as a partially stabilised, static, or closed state of things:

What is primary is the consistency of a refrain, a little tune, either in the form of a mnemic melody that has no need to be inscribed locally in a center, or in the form of a vague motif with no need to be pulsed or stimulated. (ibid., p. 332)

Refrains are dynamic and rhythmic, repetitive but differentiating, and their tendency to achieve a degree of consistency – disrupting events and refracting forces in a transversal deterritorialising/reterritorialising movement – is emphasised by a range of thinkers (Catarelli, 2019; McCormack, 2002). For Derek McCormack (2002), the ‘individuation’ of ‘a multitude of refrains’ can best be approached through the concept of haecceity (ibid., p. 478), which Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 261) ‘reserve’ for ‘a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance’:

A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. (ibid., p. 261)

Places, nations, and other dynamic spatial configurations could be usefully approached as individuated haecceities, but the emphasis on completeness and ‘perfect individuality’ presents similar problems to those associated with ‘assemblage’. In contrast, the concept of rhythmic refrains ensures that our focus falls squarely on repetitive individuating and collectivising processes and tendencies, not individual forms-in-becoming.

The analogical figure of the glass harmonica very effectively portrays the dynamic, refractive, and melodious qualities of the refrain, which take us a long way from accounts which focus on the construction or building of singularly delineated spatial formations, assemblages, or haecceities. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the ‘refrain [is] eminently sonorous’ because when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more and more refined’, as it ‘invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 347, 347, 348). Nevertheless, constructivist language does occasionally seep into affirmative accounts of the refrain, such as when Elizabeth Grosz argues that ‘the refrain is fundamentally constructive’:

it brings together a series of disparate elements all fundamentally vibrational – sights, sounds, rhythms, material objects, geographical features, found objects, its own bodily reactions – into an organized synthetic totality, a territory that now contains or locates expressive qualities – colors, textures, tones, tempi – all made into a kind of assemblage, a natural creation. The refrain decomposes elements in order to recompose new totalities that amuse, protect, and enhance (Grosz, 2008, p. 56).

While Grosz emphasises ‘construction’, a bringing together, organisation, and synthesis, her final sentence hints at the processes of perpetual decomposition and recomposition which are also associated with the movements of refrains, and I would argue that the rhythmic forces and transformative qualities of refrains are a key aspect to understand if we are to avoid reproducing a binary language of construction and destruction/deconstruction. As such, it might be useful to see refrains as refractive, reverberative, and generative of folds, rather than as constructive and as gathering (cf. Doel, 1999).

The spatial dimensions of refrains – focusing on space, nation, world, and territory – are explored in a number of writings by Deleuze and Guattari and others, although rarely in a systematic manner or in depth (see Deleuze, 1997; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Guattari, 1995; Kleinherenbrink, 2015; McCormack, 2013; Saldanha, 2017; Stewart, 2010). The most detailed discussion, to date, has been Derek McCormack’s (2002, 2010, 2013) thinking on the refrain or ritornello, where he builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s writings to argue that ‘while qualified by a certain spatiotemporal consistency, refrains are radically open: that is to say, while they may be repetitive, refrains are always potentially generative of difference’, giving rise to ‘a certain expressive consistency’ that is ‘“hazy, atmospheric”, but sensed nevertheless, as intensities of feeling in and through the movement of bodies’ (McCormack, 2013, pp. 7–8, 7).

In his research, McCormack (2013, p. 2) focuses on kinaesthetic practices such as dancing, commentating, and choreography, examining ‘how bodies and spaces coproduce one another through practices, gestures, movements, and events’. This includes discussions of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), radio commentary of national sporting events, as well as analyses of choreographic practices associated with William Forsythe, Rudolph Laban, and Erin Manning. Mobile bodies and performance practices assume centre-stage in McCormack’s experimental geographies, but what if we were to draw on the concepts of the refrain/ritornello to try and understand and rethink concepts which are often approached as more static, durable, and slow-changing, rather than as lively and performative?

In the following section I examine how theoretical writings on the refrain and individuation can help scholars to move beyond conventional arguments about the socio-spatial practices, movements, and fixities associated with experiences of place, placelessness, and non-places.

3 REFRAINS OF PLACELESSNESS

Experiences of the uniformity and standardisation of places have a very long history, while qualities of placelessness have fascinated architectural theorists, planning writers, and academics for at least 70 years. Writing in the ‘manifesto’ which concluded the famous ‘Outrage’ issue of The Architectural Review in June 1955, Ian Nairn argued for techniques of ‘visual planning’ that would ‘maintain and intensify the difference between places’ by preventing the ‘annihilation’ caused by the creeping spread of a uniform ‘subtopia’ across the British landscape (Nairn, 1955, p. 451). In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, planner and activist Jane Jacobs argued that changes to cities were ensuring that their ‘character’ was becoming increasingly ‘blurred until every place becomes like every other place, all adding up to noplace’ (Jacobs, 1965, p. 352). In a more neutral account, the urban designer Melvin Webber highlighted the increasing importance of processes of interaction rather than fixed places in the stretching out of communities in a ‘nonplace urban realm’ (Webber, 1964, p. 79), while in his 1976 book Place and Placelessness Edward Relph addressed the issue of placelessness through the lens of an emerging humanistic geography grounded in phenomenology and existentialism. Drawing on writings on ‘existential space’ and ‘lived space’ by thinkers such as Otto Bollnow, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, and French geographer Éric Dardel, Relph argued that ‘places are differentiated because they have attracted and concentrated our intentions’, being ‘set apart from the surrounding space while remaining a part of it’ (Relph, 1976, p. 28). Individuals form an ‘essential relationship to places’ through embodied practices of ‘dwelling’ (ibid., p. 28), and what results is a wide variety of situated or immersive relations with places which generate different feelings of ‘insideness’, ‘outsideness’, ‘self-consciousness’, ‘unselfconsciousness’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘inauthenticity’. The challenge, for Relph, was that the mid-1970s seemed to be marked by a gradual erasure of ‘localism and variety’ under the influence of ‘forces of placelessness’, resulting in a ‘placeless geography’ with a weakened ‘sense of place’ (ibid., p. 79). For many thinkers, then and now, these ‘forces of placelessness’ were closely aligned with capitalist processes of production, commodification, globalisation, and standardisation.

While Place and Placelessness could be criticised along a number of lines, one of its influential assertions was that infrastructures of mobility and mass communications are key agents in the erosion of place and the spread of placelessness. This assertion echoed earlier writings by Janelle (1969) on ‘time–space convergence’ and by Horvath (1974) on the spread of ‘machine space’, while it has been explored more recently in an influential book by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Augé, 1995).⁹

Marc Augé’s writings on ‘non-places’ (non-lieux) emerge from the semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional ‘anthropologies of the near’ which he starts to undertake in the mid-1980s and 1990s (Augé, 1995, p. 7). While traditional ‘anthropological places’ are characterised as familiar, occupied, historical, geographically delineated, and socially and politically structured dwelling-spaces ‘where identities, relationships and a story can be made out’ (Augé, 2000, p. 8), non-places such as airports, motorways, and shopping malls are associated with forces of globalisation, mediatisation, individualisation, and acceleration which lead to the proliferation of ‘spaces of circulation, communication and consumption, where solitudes coexist without creating any social bond or even a social emotion’ (Augé, 1996, p. 178). Augé’s binary opposition of place and non-place has been widely criticised, with scholars arguing that he normalises and universalises a very specific, partial, and privileged set of experiences of non-places by an unknown and unsituated (male) observer, while ignoring the complex relations and entanglements different users may establish in such spaces, overlooking the role of matter and materiality in social relations, and refusing to examine how mobility practices produce and sustain places (see Frow, 1997; Latour, 1993; Merriman, 2004, 2009; cf. Massey, 2005). Non-places are frequently identified as a particular type of (super)modern space devoted to practices of consumption, communication, and mobility, and as a result Augé concludes that they are ‘empirically measurable and analysable’ spaces which ‘could be quantified’ in units of area, volume, or time (Augé, 1995, pp. 115, 79, 104). Non-places are associated, here, with a somewhat singular set of experiences of a certain type of architectural space, but in other passages Augé seems to change tack, arguing that non-places are ‘a reflection of attitudes, positions, [and] the relations individuals have with the spaces they live in or move through’ (Augé, 1998, p. 106). Experiences of placelessness appear to be more subjective and individual, emerging amid a plurality of practices of (dis)engagement, and Augé states that ‘what is a place for some may be a non-place for others, and vice versa’ (Augé, 1999, p. 110).

Despite Augé’s suggestion that place and non-place are closely related, a series of binary, opposed tendencies remain ever-present in many discussions of place and non-place. It is suggested that ‘places’ are characterised by a dense web of relations, attachments, and symbolic meanings, possess strong social bonds and relations between individuals, have a clear sense of history, and are inhabited by individuals who develop a clear and self-conscious sense of being at home in their surroundings (Augé, 1995). Non-places, in contrast, are occupied by individuals who are somewhat detached, closed off, or alienated from their environment, coexisting with others in solitude. Users of non-places are passive witnesses to what we might think of as a non-event, reflecting the French legal judgement of the non-lieu, in which a court denies the proceedings, determining that there is no case or place to judge, and demarcating a ‘space completely emptied out of eventfulness’ (Bosteels, 2003, p. 136). In this account, places are seen to be constructed or assembled through the establishment of social relations, the building of physical environments, the clear demarcation of bounded identities for bodies (human and inhuman), and through the high levels of place literacy that certain groups seem to have of these symbolic sites. Non-places, however, are seen to be ‘illegible’ for many travellers (Thrift, 2002), lacking relations, attachments, history, symbolism, and eventfulness, and it is presumed that they are replacing places which possess all of these qualities (Augé, 1995).

Instead of positioning place and non-place in binary opposition – interpreting places as fulsome, productive, constructed, meaningful, and valuable, and implying that non-places lack relations or result from a dismantling or destruction of relations – experiences of place and placelessness might usefully be approached as eventful or uneventful expressions of a series of circulating and unfolding refrains with differing rhythmic and territorialising effects, depending on the variable capacities of bodies to affect or become affected. Drawing on the ideas of Simondon on ‘individuation’ and Guattari and Deleuze on the ‘refrain’ and ‘haecceity’, I would suggest that experiences of placelessness and what Augé terms non-places are not due to an absence of relations, meanings, and constructive forces. Rather, these experiences may actually result either from an absence or failure of processes of subjective individuation whereby the experiencing subject and occupied environment are not registered as separate, or as a result of processes of collective individuation by which new haecceities emerge in which travellers/consumers/workers and their surrounding environment remain in distinctive, ontological ‘individual-milieu coupling[s]’ (Simondon, 2020, p. 3).

We could ask why this is the case. Some may conclude that it is the design and functionality of infrastructures such as airports, shopping centres, and motorways which produce generic environments in which the relatively privileged traveller and shopper may happily or unselfconsciously dwell, consume, or move, becoming temporarily at-home and collectively individuated with an ‘associated milieu’ as distinctive haecceities such as ‘business woman in an airport’ or ‘commuter in a car’.¹⁰ Others might conclude that particular ‘individual-milieu coupling[s]’ result from specific situated embodied practices of travelling, shopping, or consuming media images (cf. Friedberg, 1993; Schwarzer, 2004). Either way, I would suggest that when the refrains constituting and maintaining these uneventful but distinctive ‘individual-milieu coupling[s]’ alter – resulting in a delay, a free upgrade, or feelings of excitement, frustration, or boredom – there occur processes or events of (re)individuation or collective individuation. In these moments, distinctive spaces of consumption and mobility may become individuated and separated as bounded, distinctive places, and travellers or shoppers may become individuated and related to as identifiable, emotive, and relatable human beings. It is this quick transition between experiences of place and placelessness which might explain why many academic traveller-consumers simultaneously confirm what Augé is suggesting and feel the need to qualify his interpretation (see Merriman, 2009). Indeed, it is my contention that an individual’s experiences of place and placelessness may not only fluctuate in quick succession but may even merge or coexist in rather ‘uncanny’ hybrid experiences reflecting the complex atmospheres of airports, motorways, and shopping centres and the multitude of circulating refrains which may or may not be apprehended.

If experiences of place and placelessness are generated by a series of circulating or unfolding rhythmic refrains which take hold of human bodies in different ways, then the differing capacity of bodies to affect and be affected is likely to be influenced by the prior experiences, habits, acquired skills, ‘equipment’, and strategies of those bodies, their familiarity with these spaces, and how they are individuated, identified, and differentiated by others. In the case of air travellers, their capacities may be influenced by their class of ticket, frequent traveller status, who they are travelling with, their age, physical activity, gender, national citizenship, ethnicity, and more. Airports, too, have varying material capacities, and are cross-cut by multiple and multifarious refrains associated with the movements, materialities, and monitoring of working bodies, travelling bodies, freight, data, aircraft, motor vehicles, noise, weather, buildings, and much more. These may also reverberate with a more diverse set of refrains linked to the labour market, immigrant mobilities, travel habits, international standards and protocols, airport design and construction, capitalist imperatives and processes, and shifts in global markets (Fuller & Harley, 2004; Gordon, 2004). All of these interconnected refrains play important roles in generating distinctive affective forces, atmospheres, and patterns of events which may or may not be apprehended by particular travellers. While important research has highlighted the repetitive refrains associated with the labour patterns and automation systems of airport workers (Lin, 2022; Rinkart, 2017; Rosler, 1998), and the engineering of the affective atmospheres experienced by travellers (Adey, 2008; Kraftl & Adey, 2008), academics have all-too-frequently focused on the relatively privileged experiences of travellers and consumers who dwell in these spaces (Gottdiener, 2001).

In many interpretations, the placelessness of airports is seen to result from processes of globalisation, commodification, and standardisation that are impelled by the kinds of ‘capitalistic ritornellos’ discussed in Guattari’s later works (Guattari, 1995, 2013; Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 136). These capitalistic refrains reverberate through bodies and spaces in multiple ways, depending on their capacities to affect and be affected, their variable capacity to sense and apprehend particular rhythms, their intimate entanglements with milieux, and the different ways they are individuated.¹¹ Deleuzian-Spinozan concepts of affect can usefully focus our attention on relations between human and nonhuman bodies of different kinds, and their variable capacity to affect and be affected, but the concept of the refrain takes us further still, forcing us to pay attention to the transversal, rhythmic, and political movements or forces which may or may not gain a certain consistency as they constitute and cut across bodies of various kinds.

As with Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on affect, there will be critics who find this distancing from pre-formed individual subject-positions to be politically problematic, as it reframes the terms by which questions of individual agency, action, and memory can be understood. In response – albeit briefly – I would suggest that the approach to refrains I am advancing here has strong parallels with the expansive literature in poststructuralist feminism and critical race theory which mobilises concepts of becoming and molecularisation to unpick fixed identities and ‘the representational practices that “construct” social categories’ (Cockayne et al., 2017, p. 590; cf. Colls, 2012; Grosz, 1994, 2013; Saldanha, 2006, 2007, 2010). This includes the very varied writings of Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Édouard Glissant, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, and Trinh T. Min-ha, as well as feminist geographers who have focused on ‘the politics of location’. In their different ways, these and others have challenged social scientific studies which assume pre-formed social stratifications, clearly demarcated subject positions, and remain committed to human-centred understandings of causation, action, force, and power relations, positioning those subjects in singular, static, dimensioned spaces, rather than acknowledging the important ways in which ‘milieus … pass through and inhabit bodies as much as they surround them’ (Saldanha, 2017, p. 116).

4 CONCLUSIONS

In approaching places and placelessness as resonant effects of rhythmic refrains, scholars can focus on the transversal processes through which places and non-places are incessantly identified and represented, becoming perceptible and imperceptible, as refrains circulate, take hold, and lead to processes of ontogenesis and individuation. In seeking to move beyond simple, representational approaches to repetition, Deleuze and Guattari mobilise a very distinctive concept – the refrain – for approaching non-representational aspects of processes of spacing and placing. What refrains do is to territorialise and deterritorialise through reverberating actions and processes that lead to the individuation of place and non-place from multiple milieux. This focus can be traced back to Deleuze’s distinctive understanding of repetition in Difference and Repetition, where he contrasts conventional representational approaches which focus on the ‘repetition of the same’ with a non-representational, intensive understanding of repetition which is opposed to ‘all forms of generality’ and ‘acts as a double condemnation of habit and memory’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 6, 8). Repetition is approached as intensive, dynamic and ‘poly-rhythm[ic]’ (ibid., p. 23), unfolding ‘as pure movement, creative of a dynamic space and time’ (ibid., p. 27). Through such an engagement with these processual and non-representational understandings of rhythms, repetition, and refrains, geographers can advance anti-essentialist, post-humanist, and non-constructive approaches to the unfolding of actions and events which do not rest on simplistic binaries and singular figurations of space and place. While ‘assemblage theories’ can be mobilised in ways which maintain a focus on the incessant processes through which space and places emerge (see Anderson, 2012), they are all-too-frequently discussed aside from Deleuze and particularly Guattari’s broader political concerns and the associated concepts of milieu, rhythm, and refrain (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). By focusing instead on the repetitive unfolding of various spatiotemporal rhythmic refrains which may have physical, kinaesthetic, sonorous, and visual dimensions – generating political, economic, and social effects and affects – we can insist that they are never settled, static, or singular in their configuration, and trace the molar and molecular dimensions of refrains which appear perceptible at some moments and imperceptible in others (see Merriman, 2019). The focus here is on the dynamic transversal movements underpinning events, as well as the processes of individuation and crystallisation by which particular individual figurations emerge and remain in tension or solution in what Gilbert Simondon referred to as an ‘individual-milieu coupling’ (Simondon, 2020, p. 3). If we are to try and move away from the ‘building perspectives’ (Ingold, 1995; Thrift, 1999) which underpin many singular, representational, and static ‘pointillist’ geographies of space and place, then scholars need to embrace more transversal concepts such as the refrain, milieu, and haecceity which cut across conventional binaries of human/non-human, agency/structure, action/reaction, assembly/disassembly, individual/environment, and molar/molecular, and refuse to be easily settled, structured, and bounded.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the editors of Transactions and to the reviewers for their constructive engagements with the arguments in the paper.

Endnotes

¹ I use the phrase ‘non-Euclidean’ to refer to the many different approaches to space which push beyond Euclid’s geometric axioms and principles. In mathematics, this includes the non-Euclidean geometries advanced by Bolyai, Gauss, Riemann, and others, but my primary concern is with social science and humanities approaches which focus on mediated and more-than-metric socio-spatial relations. By non-Cartesian, I mean approaches which cut against two related understandings of space in the work of Descartes: first, his understanding of space as necessarily extended, corporeal, and coextensive with matter; and relatedly, second, his understanding of space as dimensioned and plottable using Cartesian coordinates (see Merriman, 2022, pp. 7–9, 24–25).² Ingold (1995) contrasts ‘building perspectives’ with what he calls ‘dwelling perspectives’, advocating an approach firmly grounded in phenomenology. Thrift’s (1999) approach is slightly different, moving away from ‘building perspectives’ toward non-representational theoretical approaches inspired by a range of thinking, including post-phenomenology, actor networks theories, American pragmatism, performance theories, and the later writings of Wittgenstein.³ Space prevents me from discussing the many different readings here, but one study, by Kleinherenbrink (2018), challenges the idea that Deleuze is primarily a thinker of process, positioning his philosophy as a forerunner to object-oriented ontologies.⁴ Doel uses the term ‘pointillism’ to critique the tendency of many geographers to reduce space and place to distinctive, bounded, identifiable, and representational points, areas, and volumes (Doel, 1999). The term ‘Pointillism’ is more commonly used to refer to the French artistic movement of the late 1880s and 1890s, in which painters like Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Camille Pissarro represented scenes using thousands of individually painted dots. The two versions of pointillism are not dissimilar in their spatial ontologies.⁵ Throughout this paper, I use refrain and ritornello interchangeably, which will tend to be determined by the texts being discussed and the translated term they use. Lexicographers state that the French term ritournelle is derived from the Italian word ritornello, which – in English – has been used to discuss music since the mid-17th century, referring to ‘an instrumental refrain, interlude, or prelude’, particularly musical refrains at the end of a verse (OED, 2023a, 2023b). In Dialogues II, the book’s translators explain that while the ‘French word ritournelle is usually translated as “refrain” in the musical sense and also covers the repeated theme of a bird’s song’, Deleuze preferred ‘the word “ritornello” as the most appropriate English rendering’ (Tomlinson & Habberjam, 2006, p. x). There are clearly advantages to each term, which are discussed in detail by Alliez and Goffey (2011). On the one hand, ‘refrain’ is a more commonly used term in everyday English, and evokes ‘the music of the everyday’ much more effectively than the word ‘ritornello’, with its close links to classical music (ibid., p. 17). On the other hand, ‘ritornello’ allows authors to mobilise ‘neologisms such as ritornellization’ (as a ‘putting into refrain’), as well as possessing ‘humorous resonances’ with Nietzsche’s interpretation of the ‘eternal return’ (or retour éternel in French) (ibid., p. 17). This is significant because the ‘eternal return’ was important to Deleuze’s critique of commonplace conceptions of identity and difference in Difference and Repetition (2004).⁶ On musical refrains, see Gallope (2017).⁷ Guattari trained under Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s, and as a practising psychoanalyst at La Borde clinic he worked under the Lacanian psychiatrist Jean Oury. A number of scholars have suggested that Guattari drew the concept of ritournelle from the writings of Lacan (see Guesdon, 2013; Sauvagnargues, 2016).⁸ The different interpretations of fort da by Freud and Lacan are discussed in much greater depth by Guattari (1995) in his book Chaosmosis.⁹ In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 Deleuze advances a somewhat similar concept of ‘any space whatever’ (or whatsoever) which he draws from the work of the filmmaker (and his former student) Pascal Auger (see Deleuze, 1992, 2005; Rousseau, 2011). These are post-war, post-industrial ‘spaces which we no longer know how to describe … deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction’ (Deleuze, 2005, xi). Deleuze’s concept has received little discussion in geography, though see Saldanha (2017).¹⁰ The emergence of the haecceity ‘woman business traveller in an airport’ has parallels in Deleuze and Guattari’s examples of the bus-horse-street haecceity in Freud’s case of Little Hans, and the dog-road haecceity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 263). It is important to add that these couplings/haecceities are partial rather than generic and universalised figures, and they do not preclude the becoming of specific situated and differentiated identities.¹¹ Guattari draws parallels between his own writings on the refrain and Walter Benjamin’s discussion of ‘aura’ and Roland Barthes’ ‘punctum’, which may both be seen to ‘arise from … [a] singular refrain-making’, for ‘without this aura, without this refrain-making of the sensible world … the objects that surround us would lose their “air” of familiarity and would topple into an anguishing strangeness’ (Guattari, 2013, p. 209).

Original Source | Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers