Place Becomes the Law

It has become customary to distinguish between place and placelessness in terms of a distinction between the specificity of a particular environment and the standardised uniformity of the environment respectively. 1 In this article, I negotiate this dichotomy, and in the process address the role played by place in reinforcing the law of the city. My principal thesis is that the qualitative judgment concerning place and placelessness relies on a questionable conflation between culture and subjective experience, insofar as cultural assessments determine the experience of a place independently of that place itself. Phenomenologically, the implication of this claim is that place is formed in advance of it being experienced - a position untenable for a phenomenological method. By turning to Agamben's (1998) writings on law, Virilio's (2005) writings on the city and Merleau- Ponty's (1968) notion of 'flesh', I attempt to breach this division between place and placelessness with two claims. First, because the spatiality of law occupies a normative and stabilising presence, I argue that the concept of 'place' lends itself toward a purely formal notion entirely complicit in defining place as an experience. Second, through applying this claim to a phenomenological analysis of borderlines, my claim is that the characterisation of placelessness as being pernicious to the centrality of place rests on a false premise: namely, that place is singular and incommensurable, while placelessness is barren of specificity. Implicit in this claim is a commitment to phenomenology's role in disturbing sedimented judgments of experience. The outcome of this paradoxical emergence is a lawless zone played out on the border between the visible and the invisible, which I will consider with recourse to Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'flesh'.