Becoming Places

From the back cover:

Becoming Places is about the practices and politics of place and identity formation – the slippery ways in which who we are becomes wrapped up with where we are – this book exposes the relations of place to power. It links everyday aspects of place experience to the social theories of Deleuze and Bourdieu in a very readable manner. This is a book that takes the social critique of built form another step through detailed fieldwork and analysis in particular case studies.

Dovey uses an old friend of mine, Deleuze to construct the idea of the assemblage of place. Assemblage operates at both a micro and macro level independent of scale as does place. Assemblage corresponds to Bordieu's notion of the field and Latour's actor-network-theory where all describe a gathering of many different influences to create a sense of a space. In all of these, too, is the notion that these senses of space are continually in a state of change or a becoming of place that is counter to the Heideggerian notions of being. Rajchman in his book Constructions believes that the Heideggarian notion of a spatial rooted ontology is a source of false naturalism and constraint on the freedom of being human.

Once we give up the belief that our life-world is rooted in the ground, we may thus come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced as existential anxiety and despair but as freedom and lightness that finally allows us to move.

Dovey also explores sense. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze constructs an idea of sense through analysis of Lewis Carroll's work that explores not the every day 'common sense' and 'good sense', but rather the logic of sense that is infused with paradox. Sense is not something that resides in things or spaces, but rather it is "an event that connects the material and expressive poles of the assemblage" (Dovey 2010: 25). Any quest to 'make sense' of the world results in paradox as does Alice's trip through Wonderland. If we try to extract the sense form the assemblage, we neutralize it and are left with the smile without the cat. (Deleuze 1990: 32).

From all of this arises the idea of intensity that is most strongly linked to the sense and affect of place (Dovey 2010: 26).

Intensities are directly desired effects or qualities rather than meanings, however, desires become overcoded as everyday experiences are reduced to signified identities as in a tourist brochure. This is what we mean when we say a place has become 'trendy' or commodofied - the sense of place is seen to become clichéd, a prepackaged meaning for consumption (Dovey 2010: 26).

Dovey also examines place-as-assemblage as a coherent multiplicity of parts, a hotch-potch with no pre-existing whole through Deleuze|Guatarri and Henri Bergson's notions of multiplicity as either extensive or intensive. Extensive multipilicities' constituent parts are defined by their spatial extension and are unaffected by new additions as jelly beans retain individual flavors as more are added to the jar. Intensive multiplicity is like soup that is changed by each new ingredient. A city is an intensive multiplicty. When each new person, building or neighborhood is added, the sense of the larger place changes (Dovey 2010: 27).

So what:
This is what is happening in Austin: the feeling that the sense of place is turning into a commodity. The influx of cool seekers are the buyers, and the extant citizens of Austin are the unwilling sellers of weird. Each additional person who moves to Austin to consume the commodified weird changes the place from a space of weird creation to one of cool consumption. What happens when all of the weird is gone? Is it merely replaced by production of cool and the next migrants come for cool? I believe this is already happening. What should the strategy be to productively deal with this?

The intensity of the creation of weird is falling even as it is diluted and displaced by consumers of it. Is there a way to maintain the sense of place that is so attractive? Can this influx of consumers be used as a positive factor to create a WeirdNext that actually makes Austin more of what it is versus less?