Towards a Vitalist conception of Place in the era of the Control Society

In ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, Deleuze marks the passing of the “Disciplinary Society”. These societies operated on localisable, hierarchical topologies idealised in the model of the factory: ‘bringing everything together, giving each thing its place, organizing time, setting up in this space-time a force of production greater than the sum of component forces’ (Deleuze, 1995: 177). Their passing signifies not just the “breaking down” (Deleuze, 1995: 182) of old institutions, but the introduction of the “Control Society”, characterised by ‘ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines at work within the time scales of closed systems’ (Deleuze, 1995: 178). The topology of these new mechanisms of power, unlike the centralized uniformity of the factory, are diffuse, molecular, and networked. Galloway and Thacker identify one of the characteristics of this society as the, ‘increasing everydayness of surveillance’ (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 15) through the likes of webcams, CCTV, spyware, UAVs, and, perhaps most pertinent today, the mechanisms of surveillance on social media such as data collection. This indicates a shift away from the localisation and fixity of power relations, towards a nomadic and networked practices.

As such, the idea of “place” seems antiquated in modern discourse, almost luddite in its insistence on a conceivable, bounded spatial configuration, which can be individuated from a network. With the innumerable cross-currents and flows that permeate borderlands, the continual flux of actants which, voluntarily and involuntarily, are moved through places, and the omnipresence of control mechanisms, “place” appears as a non-concept to Control Societies. The redundancy of place is analogous to the process of globalization, mirrored in Marc Augé’s anthropology of supermodernity and the production of non-places, ‘spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which […] do not integrate the earlier places’ (Augé, 1995: 78). These range from the likes of supermarkets, to airports, motorways, and as such are characterised by transit and an erasure of identity, they are spaces of absolute control. Their proliferation is a signpost of the status of “place” in contemporary life.

However, a regression towards earlier models of place-centred thought could pose huge risks for the progression of “supermodernity” and especially the struggle against its dominant rationality; Neoliberalism. The anti-globalist argument against supermodernity, seen in the likes of anti-capitalist activism, focuses on specific places as sites of enchantment, possessing some sort of stable identity and functioning as sites of memory. It is also, however, often utilised by regressive, right-wing and nativist actants. The link between identity and place is one that bears too many scars from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, as well as their resurgent reactionary forms. Arguing for “place” against “non-place” can seem, in the face of an already globalised, “disenchanted” world, futile at best and dangerous at worst. The argument is also ignorant of the current political topology of symmetry which Galloway and Thacker identify, of “networks fighting networks” (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 15), the political priority of the network undermines the significance of any one place. Rather, the emphasis today is on spatial practice and invisibility, like Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone, ‘[a]s soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle’ (Bey, 2017).

This essay will argue that, in fact, place is not a regressive concept, but one that is entirely relevant to not just political activism, but the continuing practice of everyday life. To justify this claim, this essay will examine the role that place plays in several influential philosophical texts, including Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Martin Heidegger’s ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, and the disparate, but sustained engagement with space in the work of Michel Foucault. At first, the subject-centred method of someone like Heidegger seems incompatible with the anti-phenomenology of modern materialist thought. However, I wish to show that an experiential mode of place, rather than contradicting the de-localising tendencies of modern theory, can work with it. In other words; place can be utilised as a vital concept in strategies against control societies. Part of my aim is to expand this reconceptualization to encompass not just short-term activist practices but place on a much broader, everyday scale.

Whilst this subject may at first seem too broad in its horizons, attempting to reconfigure an already much written about topic to assimilate a variety of modern theory, this essay will seek to make place a focused and practical concept. Its primary objective is to identify the role that place can play in the shifting topologies of a society in which power operates on a covert, diffuse level. “Space” is a concept with a much wider usage in contemporary critical theory and thought. Not only does this word appeal to the “topological” and “diagrammatic” thinking of Deleuze and materialist thought, but also to ideas of “social space” and spatial production as expounded by the likes of Marxist-Urban theorists like Lefebvre and de Certeau.

Place, in comparison, is an uneasy concept in its conservationist fixity. Yet Edward Casey argues for its ontological priority, ‘place serves as the condition of all existing things. This means that, far from being merely locatory or situational, place belongs to the very concept of existence. To be is to be bounded by place, limited by it’ (Casey, 1993: 15). As such, place is an inescapable category of critical enquiry. However, the boundaries that Casey distinguishes are not negative limitations, but positive presences, ‘intrinsic to [something’s] being, a condition for its very existing’ (Casey, 1993: 15). The emphasis on this positivity provides glimpses threads towards a more vitalist approach that resonates with modern theory.

The relationship of space to place is not oppositional, as de Certeau demonstrates in The Practice of Everyday Life; Whilst place ‘is the order in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence’ and thus ‘an instantaneous configuration of positions [which] implies an indication of stability’, space, on the other hand, ‘is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it’, consequently; ‘space is a practiced place’. He gives an example of this differentiation: ‘the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers’ (de Certeau, 1988: 117). Compared to the “positive presence” that place elicits in Casey’s formulation, for de Certeau it appears almost as a negative influence; a stable order imposed from above, liberated only by the practice of spatial production. The power relations implicit in this conceptualisation problematises an immediate reconfiguration of place, undermining its potential as a liberational mode of political engagement.

The “stability” of place, as posited by de Certeau, indicates not just a reproduction of social relations, but also the legitimation of surveillance in accordance with control societies. If a place is imposed from above, then the fixity of that place will be reliant on its mechanisms of power. An interesting case study which might help to illustrate this is the modern music festival. Whilst originally conceived as spaces of liminality and absolute ‘freedom from work and social norms’ (Friedler, 2018), the modern music festival has undergone a series of inconspicuous transformations which correspond with this authorial fixity. From the implementation of trackable wristbands, perimeter fences patrolled by guards, “SkyCop towers” and surveillance drones with facial recognition technology, these localised mechanisms mark this transition

These measures keep us trapped in the fest, a concentrated zone of consumption. You have no choice but to buy from the vendors, to watch artists perform beneath logos. As temperatures soar over 100 degrees, sponsored activities are tied to survival: Cool off in the Heineken igloo! Skip the water lines by liking H&M on Facebook!

(Friedler, 2018)

These “security” tactics are justified by a manufactured public anxiety over terrorist attacks, which arise from the technology of connectivity, as Galloway and Thacker show, ‘Bomb threats and terror alerts inject intangible anxiety into the population just as a real bomb might do. […] Without connectivity, terrorism would not exist in its current form’ (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 16). As such, the move from Disciplinary to Control society results not in a redundancy of place, but a re-signification of it. The modern music festival is conceived with these mechanisms of control inscribed into its architecture; the stability of the towers, the control of the drone, the traceability of the wristbands, the display of logos, they all relationally coexist as a distributed series of elements (to refigure de Certeau’s definition of place) which exists separately from the spatial practices of festival-goers. But, this also prompts the question of whether they exist independently of spatial practices.

This relationship between place and spatial practice, architecture and the experience of architecture, is touched upon in an interview with Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’. When asked whether he sees any possibility of an architecture of liberation or resistance, he responds

I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of “liberation” and another is of the order of “oppression.” There are a certain number of things that one can say with some certainty about a concentration camp, to the effect that it is not an instrument of liberation, but one should still take into account - and this is not generally acknowledged - that, aside from torture and execution which preclude any resistance, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings.

(Foucault, 2002: 354)

Again, this differentiates place from spatial practice, here identified as “resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings”. He later elaborates, ‘[...] I do not think that there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature - absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice’ (Foucault, 2002: 354). It is also significant that Foucault finds an architecture of absolute “oppression” impossible. Whilst this on the one hand allows for the activity of resistance and disobedience, it also establishes for architecture the capacity for indeterminacy, and therefore for place to be indeterminate.

This slippage between “stability” and indeterminacy also complicates the relationship between place and spatial practice. In the article about Coachella, for instance, Frieder identifies the spatial practice as an “ironic embrace” of Capitalism, ‘[w]e tag sponsored content and tweet back at brands’ (Frieder, 2018). Yet, one must question if these spatial practices are assimilated back into the genius loci of a place. One must also question the role of place-making in the festival prior to corporate sponsorship and the invasion of control mechanisms; the original utopian vision of the music festival. Whilst unable to permanently fix liberation into its architecture, its creation coincided and facilitated the spatial practices of liberation. The practices of place-making and spatial practice are interwoven, as Foucault goes on to say

I think it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other.

(Foucault, 2002: 356)

This is true not only in the duality of control mechanisms and spatial practice, but in the oneness of place-making and spatial practice. Whilst control mechanisms can be inscribed into the architecture, they cannot wholly define that place. Indeed, place retains a hesitant indeterminacy which accords with the contingency that Foucault describes. Analogous to de Certeau’s formulation, place and space are not opposites, but connected by processes of time and agency. The “instantaneous” presence of place facilitates the contingency of spatial practice.

However, the “instantaneous” presence of place also ignores its pre-history and making. Whilst de Certeau is concerned with proving the non-passivity of citizens, he does not go far enough in uniting spatial practice with place-making, which is important for the conceptual reconfiguration that this essay proposes. This concept of place-making needs to be further differentiated to distinguish the subjectivity of various actants and their efficacy. Whilst thus far in this essay it has been solely the activity of those with power and authority; architects and planners, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger discusses the qualities of place-making intrinsic to being, which greatly widens its conceptual scope.

For Heidegger, rather than “building” being a means towards “dwelling”, the two terms are innate to one another, ‘[w]e do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers’. As such, dwelling is, ‘the manner in which mortals are on the earth’ (Heidegger, 2013: 146). Through an act of linguistic archaeology, Heidegger identifies the Old English and High German word for building, “buan”, which also means to dwell. Through the inescapable act of dwelling, we are also builders. However, building in this sense does not entail manual labour as such, but rather a bringing of the “fourfold”[1] into a location

Dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their presencing. How is this done? In this way, that mortals nurse and nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow. Cultivating and construction are building in the narrower sense. Dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building.

(Heidegger, 2013: 149)

Whilst the mystical implications of the fourfold, alongside the decidedly provincial nature of Heidegger’s writing, seems inconsequential to the more urban slant of de Certeau’s ideas, considering “building” not in terms of physical construction, but as the positive presence of dwelling, has radical implications for spatial practice. Like de Certeau, Heidegger sees spaces as deriving from place, ‘[s]pace is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location’ (Heidegger, 2013: 152). Yet, rather than existing apart from places, we contribute to the ongoing creation of those places through time. Heidegger also posits, like Casey, the ontological priority of situatedness, ‘we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things [emphasis added]’ (Heidegger, 2013: 155). This is not to contradict de Certeau’s “instantaneous coexistence” of place, as Heidegger still regards our movements relative to places as a form of spatial practice. But, in emphasising the constancy of our “staying with things” and the productive nature of dwelling, one cannot help but re-read “place” from the bottom up. Instead of places being imposed from above, their creation is intrinsic to our being.

An example of this form of place-making can be found in William Wordsworth’s ‘Poems of the Naming of Places’; for instance, in ‘To Joanna’, the narrator is inspired to carve the name of his muse into a rock where they had once travelled through, ‘And I, and all who dwell by my fireside, / Have called the lovely rock, Joanna’s Rock’ (Wordsworth, 2006: 172). Like many of Wordsworth’s other poems, the place on which he reflects is discovered through travel, ‘One summer morning we had walked abroad / At break of day, Joanna and myself’ (Wordsworth, 2006: 171). After coming to a place called “Rotha’s banks”, the narrator stops to contemplate the scene, ‘Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld / That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. / The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, / Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again…’ Then

...long afterwards, when eighteen moons

Were wasted, as I chanced to walk alone

Beneath this rock, at sunrise, on a calm

And silent morning, I sat down, and there

In memory of affections old and true,

I chiselled out in those rude characters

Joanna’s name deep in the living stone…

(Wordsworth, 2006: 171-172)

The narrator’s act of graffiti, rather than existing as a spatial practice within the confines of a location, is, in fact, productive of a new location. One could imagine this narrative transposed onto an urban setting with still the same effect. Whilst he is already at a place called “Rotha’s banks”, he creates another place which sits within it. Like the fourfold intrinsic to Heidegger’s dwelling, the narrator’s building stems from “memory of affections old and true”, a response to the being-there described in the poem. This act of memory and affection establishes a phenomenological basis for a place to be made, but also draws attention to the temporal grounding of places indicated in the “mortality” of the fourfold, ‘[m]ortals dwell in that they initiate their own nature - their being capable of death as death’ (Heidegger, 2013: 148). The fixity of place is profound due to the absolute un-fixity of human life.

Yet this fixity, as Heidegger shows, requires a consistent act of dwelling, a “staying with things”, which reflects the conservationist concerns of Wordsworth. In a note at the end of the poem, Wordsworth notes that real inscriptions on the rock have faded ‘from the wasting of time’ (Wordsworth, 2006: 172). The combination of the graffiti and the poem, which captures the phenomenological act of dwelling intrinsic to the place, convey an underlying anxiety about this “wasting of time” and the contingency inherent to location. Casey expands on the necessity of time to place, ‘There is no (grasping of) time without place; and this is so precisely by virtue of place’s actively delimiting and creatively conditioning capacities. Place situates time by giving it a local habitation’ (Casey, 1993: 21). By creating a place Wordsworth realises his own mortality, but in the supposedly mimetic act of poetry, he attempts to stave off its contingency by creating another place in words. Yet, as Heidegger writes

Even when we relate ourselves to those things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things themselves. We do not represent distant things merely in our mind - as the textbooks have it - so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for things. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location.

(Heidegger, 2013: 154)

Thinking of a place is analogous to dwelling, but this raises a vital point as to the existential qualities of place. The act of thinking about place isn’t representational, as Heidegger shows, meaning that Wordsworth’s poem isn’t exactly mimetic in the sense that it mirrors place. Rather, the spatial practice of mimesis at work in the poem aids the production of “Joanna’s Rock” and situates it amongst locations which already exist (i.e. Rotha’s bank); in accordance with the idea that place is exclusively the product of dwelling. In short to name and/or think of a place is to construct that place.

Hence, there is an indeterminate obscurity in the combined act of naming places and recognising the Ozymandian contingency of those places. The conservationist tendencies implicit in both Heidegger’s thought and Wordsworth’s poetry almost seems to work against (or, because of) this contingency by asserting the sovereignty of the individual to fix places in time. The mystical aspects of Heidegger’s fourfold, whilst bringing a sense of Romanticism to place, fails to justify its value to modern theory and the need for an exploit to Control Societies. Whilst in de Certeau, there is, rather, a playfulness to this fixity. For him, place names, ‘create a nowhere in places; they change them into passages’ (de Certeau, 1988: 104). This adheres to a spatial practice, but de Certeau goes further

...these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of “meanings” held in suspension, directing the physical deambulations below…

(de Certeau, 1988: 104)

There is a recognisable overlap between the function of names to “make themselves available to diverse meanings” and the Romantic unity of naming and building. Indeed, de Certeau states that these proper names of places possess “magic power”, and thus are left open to the indeterminacy of a multiplicity of subjective experiences. The “constellations” of names behaves in much a similar way as the networked, nomadic subjectivity of Deleuze, but de Certeau charges the individual, localisable nodes with anarchic power:

Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of an emptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.

(de Certeau, 1988: 105)

This “second” geography is also hinted at in the “territorial gangsterism” of Bey, ‘[n]ot one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed… in theory’ (Bey, 2017). The attempts to capture place, be it in the country or the city, cannot ever be finalised as, “[o]nly psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real’ (Bey, 2017). Here, Bey perhaps has too much faith in the “human mind”, the experience and naming of places is also itself a form of map-making.

Although, an experiential conception of place shouldn’t have to contradict recent innovations in network theory. The manifold “nodes” which make up a network are like places, they are locations which gather intersecting spaces. However, a place is also, itself, a network. De Certeau’s “instantaneous coexistence” of things qualifies this and so too does Foucault in the concept of the “site” defined by, ‘relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids’ (Foucault, 1986: 23). This replaces previous modes of spatial engagement such as “extension” and “localization”, and is further elaborated by Casey’s assertion that, ‘[a] thing is not merely in a place - that is the important but not the exhaustive sense of place-as-container that Aristotle was to adopt in his Physics - but a thing constitutes its (own) place’ (Casey, 1993: 16). On a phenomenological plane, as demonstrated in Wordsworth, Joanna’s Rock is constituted by a relationship between a series of things; nearness to Rotha’s Bank, the presence of the narrator, the effect of Joanna’s laugh echoing off the rock. These things do not occupy Joanna’s Rock, but they are Joanna’s Rock. The “magic power” in its name captures the ephemerality of this instantaneous network, an ephemerality intrinsic to what Galloway and Thacker identify as the ‘most insubstantial of substances’ (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 37), the “nothing” that characterises relations.

Perhaps this is no different from de Certeau’s “creation of nowhere” in spatial practice. This sense of becoming-nothing is what animates the moment to moment recreation of places, the recognition of a space of indeterminacy within places open to Ozymandian contingency. As a habitation of time and space, place possesses the largest potential for a confrontation with difference; this is to recognise the nowhere that permeates the where. Their becoming-nothing signifies not a void, but a mortality, an existential presence. To politicise place would be to unleash this heterotopic potential, one that confronts fixity and homogeneity.

Yet, the heterotopia, as expounded by Foucault, cannot be a simple model of place-making. The museum is one example of a heterotopia, described as places

...in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit [...] the idea of accumulating everything [...] the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.

(Foucault, 1986: 26)

This perpetual “will to enclose” and preserve mirrors a false enlightenment ideal of creating a universal narrative of upward progress. It is place as created and maintained by the control mechanisms of authority, a zombified space defiant of contingency and difference. The experience of heterotopic dread is expressed by Robert Smithson

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead viewers to things once called “pictures” and “statues.” Anachronisms hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on the eye. [...] Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

(Smithson, 1996: 41-42)

The fatalistic language used here emphasises an underlying biopolitical aspect to place. As Heidegger shows place to be a product of life through the indistinguishability of dwelling and building, Smithson presents the museum as a kind of antithesis of this, a form of power over life. Indeed, there is a parallel experience in example of the music festival; in being kept alive it has lost its original heterotopic qualities and its autonomy. The vast archive of dead stories, immortally on show is the reverse of (re)created places, which, in contrast, possess, ‘fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state’ (de Certeau, 1988: 108). Secret pasts are an exploit (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 81) in the mechanisms of control societies, an indeterminate life in places that resists control. The “imperial science” behind map-making, a sort of deadening of space, cannot entirely capture the practice of place-making which (like the Temporary Autonomous Zone) maintains ‘an affinity for the genius loci’ (Bey, 2017).

The keeping-alive of otherwise dead places via the mechanisms of control societies is a

A kind of life-support machine. A politics of place should recognise this approach the concept not as indicative of fixity, but of indeterminate contingency. Rather than a transcendental category, place is an assemblage whose agency results in its own naming by a subject. It is a bounded set of material relations remade moment to moment by differing subjectivities. The act of naming brings those relations into a unity, a oneness, which in turn recognises the spaces it creates, providing lines of flight. In the name is the “magic” indeterminacy, a withdrawn nature, an inorganic vitality to which control and power are anathema. The zombification of space is a process which converts, ‘the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe’ (Bey, 2017), where place is not an expression of life, but a seizure of it. Augé’s “non-place” reflects this total cancellation of place, yet, ‘it never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it’ (Augé, 1995: 78).

The various thinkers engaged with over the course of this essay all capture some vital essence about the politics of place in the era the control society. Whilst Bey establishes a good model for spatial politics in the Temporary Autonomous Zone, its guerrilla tactics are presented as means rather than ends, exceptions rather than the rule. The politics of place need to be widened to engage place on the day-to-day basis of everyday life. This includes not just the creation of new places, but a realisation that existing places are interdependent on continued dwelling and possess a level of autonomy. A recognition of this autonomy is a recognition of the nowhere in somewhere, the multiplicity of experience, both within its geographical boundaries and without (via remembering), both human and non-human. Like the self for Deleuze and Guattari, place is ‘a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013: 291). Hence, the vitality in place is not a link to identity, a totalised selfhood, but an opening onto difference. This is the heterotopic potential within every somewhere. 

Bibliography

Augé, M (1995) Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London: Verso.

Bey, H. (2017) ‘T.A.Z. : the Temporary Autonomous Zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism by Hakim Bey’, Hermetic Library, URL: <https://hermetic.com/bey/taz3#labelWillToPower> [Accessed 10/05/2018].

Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back into Place: toward a renewed understanding of the Place-World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

De Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Bloomsbury.

Deleuze, G. (1995) ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ in Negotiations, 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, M. (2002) ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’ in Power: The essential works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, volume 3, London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. and Miskowiec, J. (1986) ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16(1): 22-27.

Friedler, D. (2018) ‘Music Festivals are the Corporate Dystopia we Deserve’, The Outline, <https://theoutline.com/post/4215/music-festivals-dystopia-coachella> [Accessed 07/05/2018].

Galloway, A. R. and Thacker, E. (2007) The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Publishing.

Heidegger, M. ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Heidegger, M. (2013) Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper Perennial.

Smithson, R. ‘Some Void thoughts on Museums’ in Flam, J. (ed.) (1996) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wordsworth, W. (2006) The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth, Ware: Wordsworth Editions.

_________________________________________________________, ‘To Joanna’ pp: 170-172.