Becoming with Rocks : Arriving in the Riddling Middle of (tourist) Places: touch, proximity, indeterminacy

Abstract: The tourism industry is both large and growing, with private and public actors investing heavily in the commodification of places to travel to, supporting individuals with the wealth to do so, to be in different places for short time periods. Correspondingly, popular discourses and research within tourism studies have arisen, looking at attitudes and social and environmental impacts drawn along delineations of the tourist and the host and spatially enclosed tourist places or ‘destinations’.  In this thesis, I seek instead to focus on how we might be different in places. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of assemblage and a focus on embodiment, I offer a reflexive account of an onto-epistemological inquiry into becoming with a range of other beings and things that are co-constitutive of the harbour wall or ‘the rocks’ at the Visby marina. Over a 6 month period of participant observation, I seek to be responsive to the emergent properties and knowledge of the fluctuating actors amidst the place assemblage of the rocks. The essay I offer within this thesis is part of what is resulting from these relationships and becomings. Within the essay, one of many themes I take up is a problematic view of place as being filled with objects of matter as opposed to an entangled, relational web of beings and things. Tourism easily commodifies places when they are seen as containers for bodies and objects, and this creates a distinct view of ‘tourist places’. I follow with a call to disrupt the imagined difference between tourist places and places in which we lead our daily lives in the hope of living outside of the shadow of human exceptionalism.  Accordingly, this thesis calls us to re-think tourism as but one part of our lives, as entanglements of bodies and things in and as place.