Performing place promotion—On implaced identity in marketized geographies

Abstract

In the period that has become known as late capitalism, processes of commercialization are continuously taking on new forms. These tendencies enact an influence on how people understand themselves, the social relations they engage in, and the world around them. Geographical knowledge is no exception and has become increasingly shrouded in the language, symbolism, and tropes of marketing. Following the work of Judith Butler, we explore how these tendencies have profound implications on our self-construal, making discursive “implacement” an expedient factor in the marketization of identity. Further, we examine how two interrelated marketing discourses deal with places as commercial entities: the country-of-origin effect and place branding. In their commercial vernacular, they provide salient examples of subtle yet inescapable effects on the understanding of self-construal. In presenting this sensitizing diagnostic, we hope to further advance issues of stakeholdership as it pertains to the place-world and to offer new trajectories of critical inquiry into the commercial relevance of place.

The Möbius strip of market spatiality: mobilizing transdisciplinary dialogues between CCT and the marketing mainstream

“…As Andéhn et al (2019, p.3) outline, implacement "denotes what one's being in place means… through the subject's historical relations to place". Therefore, while emplacement suggests a pro-active choice to ephemerally gather people, products, and practices in a particular place (Bradford and Sherry, 2018), implacement points to lingering associations that cannot simply be abandoned or dismissed at will (Andéhn et al, 2019). This suggests a different understanding of the space-place relationship, one akin to De Certeau's (1984, p.117) conceptualization where "space is composed of intersections of mobile elements" and "a place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence […] it implies an indication of stability".…”

“…From a CCT perspective the crucial innovation is that implacement emphasises issues of ideology and institutionalism (Andéhn et al, 2019). This stimulates a more critical reading of place-making as a process of solidifying spatial, social, and symbolic arrangements into ossified images and identities.…”

“…As the geographer David Harvey (1993, p.4) once noted, "we express norms by putting people, events and things in their proper place and seek to subvert norms by struggling to define a new place from which the oppressed can freely speak." The concept of implacement refocuses attention onto those who struggle to shed the sociosymbolic consequences of spatial associations (Andéhn et al, 2019), such as international migrants or those who grew up in 'the wrong part of town'. Places can serve an important symbolic function in communicating the identity of individuals and groups, but for some there is also value in anonymity (Coffin, 2019).…”

“…As shown by the mainstream literature on Country-Of-Origin effects, products and services also seek to evoke the atmospheres of certain geographies in order to appeal to consumers (Andéhn et al, 2016;Rashid et al, 2016). Connecting back to the interests of implacement, the ideological question becomes whether these innumerable commercial connections to countries and other places makes it more difficult for individuals to freely define their own identity (Andéhn et al, 2019). Indeed, certain sites may be defined by refusing to reterritorialize a typical atmosphere, such as independent coffee shops that are attractive to consumers because they are so unlike the dominant coffee shop template provided by Starbucks (Thompson and Arsel, 2004).…”

Plateaus and Afterglows: Theorizing the Afterlives of Gayborhoods as Post-Places

“…It is post-phenomenological in the sense that it treats the experience of place as an ephemeral 'becoming' that emerges from the machinic entanglements of heterogeneous entities (Coffin 2019). Such becomings may be ephemeral, but their effects can be carried to other times and places in alternative forms, as when the direct experience of a place becomes a memory then applied to products and services (Brunk et al 2018;Andéhn et al 2019). Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 22) put this more poetically, writing that "lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants".…”