Places as refrains: A non-constructive alternative to assemblage thinking

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, whether underpinned by academic engagements with Western philosophy, anthropology, or indigenous thinking and praxis. One approach by anglophone geographers has been to incorporate assemblage thinking into constructivist and representational accounts of the building, settling, and/or disassembling of places, but here I argue that assemblage may not be the best way to do this if we wish to foreground process and the dynamism of places. Assemblage theories place too much emphasis on the structural logics and thing-like qualities of identifiable places, even when they aim to focus on the processual or verb-like qualities of places. I suggest that geographers who are keen to advance processual and dynamic understandings of place can usefully (re)focus their attention on Deleuze and Guattari's writings on the ritournelle (refrain) because they articulate many of the rhythmic, repetitive, differentiated, intensive, affective, eventful, and performative qualities of placing and emplacement, while resisting any easy assimilation into constructivist and representational ‘building’ perspectives which foreground the assembly and disassembly of worlds. I outline the usefulness of Gilbert Simondon's writings on individuation and crystal growth for understanding individual-milieu relations, before discussing Deleuze and Guattari's description of the refrain as being like a ‘glass harmonica’, which captures the reverberative, refractive, and rhythmic aspects of the concept. I then revisit a series of well-established debates about the relationship between place and placelessness, or places and ‘non-places’, suggesting how placelessness and non-places can be linked to either a failed process of individuation or to uneventful expressions of a series of circulating, deterritorialising, and territorialising refrains which have differing rhythmic effects.