Stuck Inside of Mobile

Abstract

Guided by Augé’s concept of “non-place,” we conduct a mobile ethnography of the Las Vegas Strip to evoke and critically reflect on the characteristics of such environments. Informed by our findings, we contribute to the scholarship of non-places by (1) attending to three components of such environments that are seldom mentioned together (temporal organization, soundscape, and social control) and (2) suggesting a tentative model of non-places that integrates function (entertainment, transportation, hospitality, consumption); design (signage, movement, temporal organization, and soundscape); social control system (their mechanisms, visibility, power, sanctions, types of violation); performances (the roles they prompt users to play and the interactions they direct them to perform), and subjectivities (the sort of self-experiences they induce). In the conclusions, we summarize our findings and revisit the concept of non-place.

Keywords

non-place mobility mobile ethnography Las Vegas

The Mobility Turn

Mobility is a fact of life. To be human, indeed, to be animal, is to have some kind of capacity for mobility. We experience the world as we move through it. Mobility is a capacity of all but the most severely disabled bodies. (Cresswell 2006, 22)

The global order is increasingly criss-crossed by tourists, workers, terrorists, students, migrants, asylum-seekers, scientists/scholars, family members, business people, soldiers, guest workers and so on. Such multiple and intersecting mobilities seem to produce a more networked patterning of economic and social life, even for those who have not moved. (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 2)

I bend my knees, jump up from the gravel floor, extend my arms upward, grab the round edges of the red rock above me, and slowly hoist myself to the top. I stand up, look ahead, measure distance, speed, and arc, run a few steps, and jump onto the next rock. I land, stop; measure distance, speed, and arc, run a few steps, and jump onto the next one. I land, stop, and . . . arch my body backwards, quickly stepping away from the gap between this rock and the next one. I stop, my heart racing. Wew! That was close. I look down the gap and try to bring my breathing back to normal, rivulets of sweat gluing my blue backpack to my T-shirt.

I notice a chain of adjacent flat rocks forming a red round staircase that ascends all the way up to the ridge of Blue Diamond Hill. I start climbing it, scanning the ground directly in front of me, reminding myself to adjust my every step to the uneven terrain. I shift my weight left and right, backward and forward, depending on height, surface, and incline. As I near the top, every step reveals a widening vista of the valley floor below. I advance a few more steps until I can see all of Las Vegas. I stop and sit on a sun-baked rock. Viewed from here, the Strip seems drawn like a perfect geometrical form. Its tall steel and glass towers radiate outward from its center on the desert floor. Dwarfed by the surrounding mountains and undulating through heat waves, it looks like a mirage, a non-place (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Desert view of the Strip.

Over the past two decades, scholars working in a variety of disciplines have produced a noticeable “mobility turn” in the human sciences (Adey 2006; Büscher and Urry 2009; Cresswell 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Jensen 2006; Urry 2007; Vannini 2008, 2012). This turn posits the powerful impact of mobility—the movement of people, objects, ideas, and information—in reshaping all levels of social life, from consciousness to global warming.

While attention to movement was already visible in Simmel’s classical work on the metropolis (Urry 2007), in early Chicago School ethnographies (Cresswell 2006), and in Goffman’s analysis of interaction in public spaces (Jensen 2006), the mobility turn leads sociological inquiry to wider horizons and deeper levels than an interest in the phenomenon of pedestrian movement in urban environments. For Büscher and Urry (2009, 110), “studies of movement, blocked movement, potential movement, and investigations of immobility, dwelling and place-making not only illuminate important phenomena, they also provide compelling new modes of knowing.” Accordingly, a mobility paradigm seems most attuned to everyday life in contemporary mobile society. For Cresswell (2006, 43),

an increasingly mobile world means that sociologists can no longer talk, with any degree of safety, about discrete objects called societies . . . everything that has been at the heart of the history of sociology has changed or been made irrelevant due to an observable change in the world itself toward increasing levels of mobility.

Challenging social scientists to revisit their taken-for-granted assumptions, concepts, and models (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 5), mobility scholars have called for the development of a “nomadic metaphysics” that aims to replace a calcified “sedentarist” one. For example, Cresswell (2006, 27) argues that “fixed, bounded, and rooted conceptions of culture and identity” articulate socio-cognitive models that endorse the “commonsense segmentation of the world into things like nations, states, countries and places.” This common sense produces discourses, practices, and policies that—in various contexts—frame mobility as problematic, dangerous, undesirable, invasive, etc. Such framings have of course enormous consequences for various categories of people and for the societies where such framings circulate.

In the mobility perspective, we are all “in transit” (Kien 2009), passengers paradoxically stuck inside of mobile (rather than Mobile),¹ constantly moved, on the move, forced to move, (im)mobilized, left behind, or reassembling ourselves somewhere/sometime between our latest arrival and our next departure (Vannini 2012). In addition, different categories of people experience mobility under vastly diverse conditions, as “differential mobility empowerments reflect structures and hierarchies of power and position by race, gender, age and class, ranging from the local to the global” (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 3). In such conditions, immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, exiles, and guest workers—those whose mobility is typically contested, prohibited, suspended, controlled, clandestine, or enforced—become the new subjects of history (see Cresswell 2006).

In light of those ideas, it seems that spaces that are purposefully designed for the efficient management of passengers are especially interesting to study and analyze critically. To do so, we use Augé’s concept of non-place to guide a mobile ethnography on the Las Vegas Strip. As he and others remind us, non-places are increasingly colonizing the public space and encroaching on familiar places. Accordingly, if we are indeed going to spend an increasing amount of time and space in non-places, and to conduct a growing number of activities there, it seems that understanding their functioning and effects might help us navigate them more effectively, and resist them more intelligently. But in order to do so, one must move through and with them.

The Time of Non-places

In one form or another . . . some experience of non-place (indissociable from a more or less clear perception of the acceleration of history and the contraction of the planet) is an essential component of all social existence. . . . It is no longer possible for a social analysis to dispense with individuals, nor for an analysis of individuals to ignore the spaces through which they are in transit. (Augé 2008, 97–98)

Non-places are sites such as casinos, airports, theme-parks, shopping malls, supermarkets, museums, freeways, motels, and others. Calling non-place “the real measure of our world,” anthropologist Augé (2008, 63–64) defines it as a “space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.” In contrast, it can be determined by

totaling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called means of transport (aircraft, train and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purpose of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself. (Augé 2008, 64)

Lacking history, identity, or tradition, non-places “are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory,’ and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.” Lacking history, identity, or tradition, they promote the urgent and perpetual present (Augé 2008, 83–84).

While various non-places have vastly different designs, Augé notes that one of their key characteristics is the omnipresence of signs. Informational (in supermarkets or museums), directional (in theme parks, casinos, and shopping malls), prescriptive (on freeways), and prohibitive (in airports’ security areas, for example), these texts articulate the non-place’s “instructions of use.” They require users

to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but moral entities or institutions (airports, airlines, Ministry of Transport, commercial companies, traffic police, municipal councils); sometimes their presence is explicitly stated . . . sometimes it is only vaguely discernible behind the injunctions, advice, commentaries, and messages transmitted by the innumerable supports (signboards, screens, posters) that form an integral part of the contemporary landscape. (Augé 2008, 76–78)

Addressing simultaneously and indiscriminately every and any user, the signs that permeate non-places direct them to “communicate wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce.” They position users in a relation of “solitary contractuality,” prompting them to experience “solitude and similitude.” In so doing, they produce the “average man [sic],” whose identity is reduced solely to that of tourist, customer, passenger, visitor, or—more flattering—guest:

What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, is the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others. (Augé 2008, 81)

As different non-places serve various functions, one useful way to distinguish between them is to attend to the most conspicuous kinds of signage they display. Although all categories of signage can typically be found in different types of non-places, some categories will be more visible and audible than others, and those establish the main functions of a particular non-place, its “tone” or mode of address.

Going Mobile

Movement is to the body what knowledge is to the mind. (Vannini 2008, 1296)

People on the move physically are frequently people who are also on the move in their self-understanding. (Berger 1963, 58)

“Need money for coke and hoez,” announces the cardboard sign held by the homeless man leaning against the cement wall of the pedestrian overpass that links the Flamingo to the Caesars’ Palace, across the Strip. Most people walk right past him without stopping, except for three middle-age African American women. They quickly zero in on him, form a circle around him, and laugh hysterically with him about his sign. One of them moves towards him, stands close, and takes a selfie of them both on her cell phone. She gives him a few dollars for “being honest.” “Use that money wise for the coke and stay away from them hoooeeezzz,” she scolds jokingly as she catches up with her friends.

Right across the Strip, SpongeBob SquarePants is bouncing around, to the great amusement of tourists milling on the sidewalk in front of the Bellagio, whose fountains have just concluded their graceful liquid ballet to the sound of Big Band music flowing from concealed speakers. Two white women in their thirties break away from the crowd and race up to SpongeBob, wrap their hands around him, and ask a passerby to take a picture. They pay SpongeBob, pose, thank the impromptu photographer, and disappear into the cortege of pedestrians shuffling towards the Mirage, where a booming volcano is shooting warm roaring fireballs towards the sky. A short distance away, in front of the Treasure Island casino, ships simulate shooting cannon balls at each other, causing fake sailors to gracefully fall into the mini-lagoon. On this side of the Strip, three Elvis impersonators—the chubby phase—are trying to attract pedestrian traffic by crooning a few key verses from the King’s repertoire (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Three Elvis impersonators vying for attention.

A few feet away, a sad-looking Minnie Mouse in tattered clothes is waving to no one in particular. A while ago, this very same intersection was the stage of similar encounters —and even scuffles—between tourists, Batman, Spiderman, and Iron Man. As one of the Strip’s busiest intersections, this space can suddenly turn into a mini-battleground where superheroes wage turf wars against each other.

I continue my stroll on the overpass, slowing down by a twenty-something scruffy white man who is attempting a rendition of Bob Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door on his beat-up guitar. But his voice is muffled by swooshing helicopters, wailing police sirens, belching buses, irritated honking, the thundering maledictions of an old homeless prophet sitting on the sidewalk, shrill electric guitar notes fired from the entrance of a nearby Bar and Grill, and the stomach-churning mega-bass thumps radiating from the cars paralyzed in the traffic below, underneath my feet. Viva Las Vegas!

With their escalators and elevators, the overpasses link the sidewalks of the Strip’s busiest intersections and integrate many of its most famous casinos into a giant mobile network (Figure 3). Moving along those structures makes it clear that on the Strip, motion is both spectacle and experience: The plunging roller-coaster and the looping monorail. Rippling images on rotating electronic billboards and pulsating neon signs on building facades. Strolling pedestrians and gliding limousines. Airborne acrobats at Cirque du Soleil shows and seductive Salomes strutting on the stages of seedy nightclubs. John, a fortyish white migrant worker who is slowly making his way up from rural Georgia to Alaska, expresses it well:

Shit man, look at those volcanoes! You see them fireballs over there? This is what I mean about this city. Every second, wherever you turn, something’s going on. It’s not just those pretty women everywhere, but all this other action and stuff. I can’t believe how crazy this place is. It’s been so much to take in.

Figure 3.

Strip overpass.

The constant and random head movements of pedestrians on the overpass confirm John’s sensations. I try for a while to surrender to this logic, and turn my head towards whatever visual or acoustic stimulus captures my attention. After bumping into too many tourists, I contemplate switching to a “filtering” mode, but realize it might significantly limit my understanding of this environment and my navigation through it.

Moving Methods

Locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity. Or more strictly, cognition should not be set off from locomotion, along the lines of a division between head and heels, since walking is itself a form of circumambulatory knowing. . . . Indeed it could be said that walking is a highly intelligent activity. (Ingold 2004, 331)

While ethnographers of the Las Vegas Strip have produced interesting accounts and experiences of this environment (see, e.g., Borchard 1998; Gottschalk 1995; Soukup 2013; Wood 2006), none to our knowledge addresses mobility—either as social phenomenon or as research method. As mobility scholars charge, this lack of attention to the mobile dimension of everyday life in urban ethnography results in research methods that are poorly equipped to capture key aspects of mobility, such as “the distributed, the multiple, the sensory, the emotional, the kinaesthetic, the non-causal, the chaotic, the complex” (Büscher and Urry 2009). In order to correct these weaknesses, researchers have developed mobile methods that better articulate their perspective and research topics (see, e.g., Heide 2008; Ingold 2004; Jenks and Neves 2000; Kien 2009; Kusenbach 2003; Pink 2008; Potter 2008; Vannini 2008; Wylie 2005). As Büscher and Urry (2009, 103–4) explain, researchers benefit from methods that are “on the move” in at least two ways:

First, researchers will benefit if they track in various ways—including physically travelling with their research subjects—the many and interdependent forms of intermittent movement of people, images, information and objects. . . .

Second, as a consequence of allowing themselves to be moved by, and to move with, their subjects, researchers are tuned into the social organization of “moves”

Mobile ethnography is thus an especially useful method to understand the mobile everyday, as the knowledge it seeks to produce emerges from the reflexive interplay between observations, cognitions, and sensations in motion (Urry 2007). As Büscher and Urry (2009, 102) remind us, “Bodies sense and make sense of the world as they move bodily in and through it.” And when one acknowledges the centrality of mobility and sensory experiences in everyday life (see Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk 2011; Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, et al. 2010; Vannini, Waskul, et al. 2010), it seems reasonable to suggest that a mobile ethnography will logically “make more sense” than ethnographies that are paralyzed by a sedentarist metaphysics, and restricted by cognitive, acoustic, and ocular biases. In addition, it is not sufficient to “just add” smell, touch, taste, or chronoception to the panoply of senses one attends to when conducting mobile ethnography. The challenge is to understand their dynamic interplay.

The Strip seems like an ideal space where to conduct a mobile ethnography for at least three reasons. First, both of us live in close proximity to this decidedly strange environment that has been the topic of quite a bit of attention in popular culture, and of scholarship in the social sciences, architecture, cultural, urban, and tourism studies, among others. This simple biographical fact is not negligible. It means that we can access our site repeatedly, for long periods, and during any part of the day, the week, and the year. Such access enables us to substantiate, qualify, deepen, and sharpen our successive (and hopefully evolving) sense-making efforts. Such access might also help minimize the risk of falling prey to “first impressions” that often plague “quickie” ethnographic forays. Second, if the mobile moment is characterized by transience, impermanence, and movement, Las Vegas is one of the most transient cities in the United States (Gottdiener, Collins, and Dickens 1999; Rothman 2002). In a recent survey conducted by the UNLV Department of Sociology (Futrell et al. 2010), 75 percent of respondents indicated they moved here from another state; 40 percent answered they would prefer to leave Nevada, and only 33 percent claimed to feel a strong sense of belonging to their neighborhood. Adding to this experience of transience and movement, the Las Vegas Strip ranks as a top vacation destination for forty million tourists a year—in a city that counts only two million residents. Third, as we develop throughout the text, the Strip is not just a good example of a particular non-place. By performing the functions of touristic destination and shopping-mall, of entertainment center and pivotal node in the global hospitality industry, of theme park and gaming environment, the Strip is an “omnitopia” (Wood 2006)—an environment that fulfills the multiple functions of all those distinct non-places, and combines their respective effects in interesting permutations. Thus, if mobile ethnography is a most instructive research approach to make sense of everyday life in mobile society, a non-place such as the Strip seems to be an especially strategic site to do so.

Blending the scholarship on non-places with our ethnographic experiences, we have decided to attend especially to their design (signage, layout, movement, temporal organization, smell, and soundscape), their social control system (their mechanisms, visibility, power, sanctions, types of violation), performances (the roles they prompt users to play and the interactions they direct them to perform), and subjectivities (the sort of self-experiences users encounter). Throughout the paper, we implicitly address those aspects of the various areas of the Las Vegas Strip through which we circulate.

Because non-places are above all characterized by the ubiquity of signs that visibly articulate their “tones” and functions, we pay special attention to those, and use actual signs we have found on the Strip as the subheadings of the various sections for the rest of this article. Because we are interested in how the social control systems of non-places shape interactions and subjectivities there, we also focus on instances where such mechanisms become salient or problematic. Because non-places prompt particular types of interaction among users and between users and personnel, we interact with a variety of people we encounter in this environment, follow them, move with them, and, when possible, inconspicuously listen in on their conversations. Because non-places seek to collapse individual differences into a standardized identity, we merge our two voices into one—that of the “average” user/passenger—and reflect on our reactions, adjustments, and sense-making processes as we circulate in this environment. Note that we distinguish between these aspects of a non-place for explanatory purposes only. As we try to convey through the text, they are complexly intertwined.

Equipped with digital writing, video, and audio-recording devices, both of us have circulated separately on many occasions in the same Strip areas and in different ones, collecting data in the form of written field notes, audio recordings of our own experiences, encounters, and sounds, and photographs of areas, visitors, interactions, and signs. After each wave of data collection, we would typically meet and compare notes to discuss our data, to detect similarities and significant differences, to attend to unanticipated questions those data suggested, to refer to useful texts that addressed those questions, and to decide on the kinds of additional data we would need to collect in order to answer them. Because non-places are especially designed for the management of (often global) passengers, we also invited foreign scholars interested in non-places and mobility to circulate on the Strip and to share their impressions with us.

We have also attempted to create a text that sidesteps the rules of realist ethnography. Because they tend to assume a static rather than a mobile everyday, to privilege the analytical and the cerebral over the sensory, and to articulate those assumptions through specific textual codes, they are of limited use to evoke a mobile research “field” and research experience. In contrast, we conduct a mobile ethnography on the Strip by moving in, through, and along it, following its vectors, rhythms, nodes of acceleration, deceleration, and arrest. In order to better evoke the experiences of/in such environments, we use a writing style that is (inter-)subjective, performative, contingent, and emergent. Like a somatic layered account, we “draw upon multiple forms of consciousness or ways of knowing, such as the embodied, the somatic, the affective, the imaginative, the linguistic and the nonsymbolic, and the intellectual and analytical” (Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, et al. 2010, 380; see also Vannini 2012). While our methods and textual style will doubtlessly fail to satisfy positivist and post-positivist standards of rigor and representation, our aims are to (1) convey the advantages of mobile methods, (2) evoke a sensory and mobile experience of the Strip, and (3) in so doing, develop the concept of a non-place.

Finally, we neither claim that our story of the Las Vegas Strip is the only story about it, nor that that the Strip is representative of the entire city of Las Vegas, nor that the particular type of mobility one experiences on the Strip is representative of the type of mobility typical of everyday life. As we develop in the conclusion, the Strip is an interesting space precisely because it features many different types of non-place—and their respective forms of mobility—in one circumscribed geographical area.

Wait Here

While prescriptive and prohibitive signs are conspicuous in airports, they are relatively rare in casinos. This absence can be partly explained by the functions the Strip serves and the kind of subjectivity it aims to induce. Enforcing obedience and self-control, the many prescriptive and prohibitive airport signs tend to be aesthetically plain, commanding, and sometimes explicitly threatening of dire consequences for failure to obey. Celebrating fun, self-indulgence, and the relaxing of customary restrictions, the Strip’s numerous directional and informational signs are designed in hot colors, fun graphics, and dynamic calligraphic styles (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Buffet sign at the Flamingo.

I walk quickly across the plush psychedelic carpets of the Caesars’ Palace main lobby, following the signs that point towards the Bacchanal Buffet, and scan one of the colorful posters advertising it:

500+ globally inspired dishes. Nine interactive open kitchens. Countless fresh ingredients. Immaculate pool views. Contemporary décor. One epic feast.

The signs lead me to a multinational and unacceptably long line of “guests” that spills out as far back as the Garden of the Gods swimming pool area. In contrast to TV commercial ads that typically display young, slim, and attractive buffet-goers gliding smoothly, unencumbered, and joyfully, the scene here is quite different. I walk up to the end of the line wondering if I really want to stand here. And for how long? Am I that hungry? And what time is it anyway? With the buffet open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., it is easy to lose track of time. Constantly distracted by signs and the random dings of slot machines, it is easy to ignore one’s own biological signals as well. The long line of docile guests beckons me to join them; I surrender.

Waiting in line, I notice a sign pointing to a small area to our left: VIP Line and Express Line—$15. Since I am already paying forty bucks for my all-you-can-eat epic brunch, there is no way I am going to spend an extra fee that will buy me a shorter wait and the momentary pleasure of belonging to a meaningless “kinetic elite” (Adey 2006, 89) who can move faster than the buffet proles. In any case, the Express Line does not seem to be moving any faster than ours. Still, I am wondering if I may be missing something important. A few minutes earlier, walking by the area where people line up in front of booths to buy tickets for various shows, I noticed the neatly roped-off “zones”—like at the airports’ boarding gates—leading to the cashiers’ windows: Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Seven Stars (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Two buffet signs for different classes of Flamingo members.

I look at the long line of immobilized guests. Tapping and sliding their fingers on their cell phone screens, or looking impatiently to the front of the line, few seem to be interacting with each other. A uniformed employee paces along the line, asking no one in particular—and with lukewarm enthusiasm—if we would like to sign up for a Player’s Card. The response is a unanimous “No thanks!” In the background, I hear a vaguely Brittney Spears voice.

The entrance area where we line up is walled off on the right by a large glass pane decorated with small clear turquoise squares. Peeking through them, I can see people inside rapidly moving between the seated eating areas and the food stations, cutting in front of one another, darting in and out of lines in seemingly random patterns. The contrast between our enforced immobility on this side of the wall and the feeding frenzy on the other is getting to me. I am becoming increasingly impatient, which I mistake for becoming increasingly hungry.

Finally, an old white woman in uniform approaches my section of the line. With a few simple gestures, she carves out a small imaginary group, mobilizes us to attention, and guides us through the seating sections, where tables are organized in three different areas, each with its own flooring and matching décor. We obediently follow her as she assigns each of us, one by one, to an available table. “Sit down here, honey,” she calmly says, not really looking at me.

Although I typically consider myself a mindful eater, I feel compelled to get the full experience for the price I paid. And that means crab legs and tamales; wood-fired pizzas and dim sum; French baguette and sushi; lasagna Bolognese and chow mien; bratwursts and sashimi; mimosas and Diet Coke. In whatever order I choose. That’s the deal. “Here, We Indulge,” a poster nearby declares. “Don’t wait to Indulge,” another echoes. Both seem to endorse my uncanny craving.

No Stopping Anytime

Vannini (2012, 101) suggests that “different places move at different paces,” and how users circulate in and through them will shape their “experience and performance of time” in them. Accordingly, while signage is an important characteristic of the spatial design of non-places, it seems that—although rarely addressed—their temporal organization also contributes to their distinctive effects. To Augé’s remark that non-places have “ephemeral” and “fleeting” qualities, we suggest that they can also be organized according to distinctive temporal parameters that replicate, deviate from, or completely subvert those that typically organize everyday life. For example, shopping malls can prompt mass movement by promoting a special “one day sale,” and theme parks can (im)mobilize flows of visitors by scheduling particular activities (parades, shows) at certain intervals during the day. Activities in airports are motivated by flight schedules that may have little to do with how passengers typically organize their time. Except for a few early morning hours, the Strip is open 24/7.

Non-places are also differently constraining in terms of their temporal dictates. For example, international passengers must arrive at the airport at least two hours before departure time, and at the boarding gate forty minutes before departure time. In other non-places, the temporal directives are more flexible. Theme parks and the Strip schedule several repeat “shows” during the day; the monorail connecting between casinos arrives every six minutes; Paris metro trains typically arrive at a station every 4 minutes; the Bellagio fountains dance every half hour, etc. In such conditions, one can have more freedom with the management of private time.

Non-places can also completely subvert normative temporal coordinates. Thus, on the ceilings of several Strip casinos, a play of lights and colors simulates the accelerated passage of a day —from dawn to night and back to dawn—at regular intervals, and at any time. As this disorienting circadian simulation occurs in an environment with no clocks and very few windows,² there is no longer any concordance between Strip casino time and “real” time outside. And stepping outside would not make much difference anyway. The near-continuous saturation by neon lights, signs, traffic, noise, and crowds easily overwhelm one’s customary experience of time and the typically clear distinctions between am and pm.

“Is it lunchtime yet?” asks a Kelly Rippa look-alike, hesitantly stepping inside the casino restaurant. The waiter and I look at our watches. 12:17p.m. “Yes, it is definitely lunchtime,” he says. “If it’s lunch time, then it’s time for a shot,” she concludes, smiling a bit apologetically at me. The waiter seems to understand her embarrassment and tells her personal stories of his alcohol addiction. They continue their small—yet highly personal—talk, and after a while, she leaves.

Back at the buffet, I begin with the seafood station where I am—yet again—immobilized in a long line. When I finally reach the head of the line, I quickly grab the last shrimps, to the audible disappointment of the woman standing just behind me. “Is there more?” she anxiously asks one of the aproned workers hurrying behind the otherwise well-stocked seafood station. He shakes his head, “Just a few minutes.” She looks disappointed.

No time to waste. I quickly heap more seafood on my large plate, already glancing at the other food stations, mentally rehearsing my next moves as I walk briskly to my miniature table, squeeze my body in, and begin to eat; in a hurry. To my left, a white couple in its fifties is quietly eating. They neither speak to nor look at each other; nor at me. For some reason, I catch myself eating much faster than usual, as if racing against some invisible clock. Five minutes later, I am back on the buffet floor, aiming with the speed and determination of a guided missile at the Italian station. I pile my plate with several layers of lasagna, cured meats and several types of cheese. Feeling a bit giddy, I quickly walk back to my table, squeeze in, sit down, and try to slow down. However, I still finish my meal in under ten minutes.

Stand up; walk to station; take food; walk back to table; sit down; eat; repeat. I go back to the Asian station, then to the salad station, then to the dessert station. After eating more than I care to remember, I struggle to stand up and realize I am about to explode. As I slouch towards the exit, I feel a bit embarrassed by my gluttony, but that feeling quickly vanishes as I approach the line of people still immobilized on the other side, and recalculate the terms of my solitary contractuality with the invisible buffet managers. If those terms make economic sense, I am a bit at loss to explain the speed at which I eat, and my complete lack of attention to taste, texture, and smell.

While “fast” is increasingly guiding our approach to eating and many other activities in contemporary society (Gottschalk 2008), this self-enforced marathon in a setting that celebrates excessive and leisurely indulgence must be prompted by other features of this environment. “Reward Your Way of Life,” declares the casino elevator poster, showing happy and attractive young people gathered around a generous dinner table and sipping red wine. In contrast, my buffet experience felt more like an exercise in industrialized mass-feeding punctuated with, I will admit, a few nice touches that made me feel “special”—just like everybody else.

Emergency Exit—Alarm Will Sound

Rice’s (2003) ethnography of a British hospital suggests that the soundscape of a place can have transformative effects on one’s daily experiences, dispositions, and sense of self. As he puts it (p. 4), “sound, combined with an awareness of sonic presence, is posited as a powerful force in shaping how people interpret their experiences” (see also Atkinson 2005, 2007; Bull 2000; Vannini 2012; Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk 2011; Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, et al. 2010). The same also obtains in non-places; but while scholars of these environments have typically focused their attention on visible aspects such as physical structure, signage, and other visual simulators, we suggest that attending to acoustic simulators (sounds—their types, organization, volume, frequencies, etc.) is no less important.

For example, the soundscapes of shopping malls, supermarkets, and theme parks often consist of continuous peppy musical soundtracks (Beer 2007) that are sometimes interrupted by excited and joyful announcements. In contrast, airports, metro, and train stations are distinctive by—among other sounds—emotionless public announcements (“The train to Paris will depart at 11:15 from platform 3”) that are often introduced by a Pavlovian bitonal electronic bell commanding passengers’ attention and mobilizing them as certain kinds of subjects. The Strip soundscape is a bit different.

Slowly walking around the Caesars’ Palace casino floor, I feel a bit dizzy by the store windows, the wares they display, the recycled air, the pulsating lights, the crowds moving about, and the omnipresent signs. Dizzy and disoriented by different soundtracks streaming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Their melodies collide with low-frequency moans unleashed by the electric bass of a live band, the rhythms of electronic dings, voices, and jingles streaming from hundreds of slot machines, the tinkles of clinging glasses, the rushing waters in the fountains, the constant buzzing human voices, and the random high-pitched yells of lucky gamblers. There is no “dead air,” no moment of silence, no escape. Dizzy and also a bit queasy by my short walk around the main floor that steers me through an olfactory blend of Chinese fast food, coconut air-freshener, rancid sweat, clove cigarettes, fried fish, chlorine, melted cheese, cigars, chocolate, roasted coffee, and insolently pungent perfumes. I try to steady myself up, but around here, there’s nothing to hold on to. I walk towards an elegantly engraved golden “Gentlemen” sign pointing to a restroom, and stumble inside.

The brightly lit restroom smells of jasmine soap. Men stand equidistant at the urinal stalls, leaving an empty one between them. The walls, urinals, and floor are all in off-white and brown marble-looking tiles. In contrast to the multi-sensory pounding in the main lobby, this place feels strangely luxurious, controlled, calming, and safe. Sure, there is still an irritatingly loud bubble-gum Rock song streaming from the ceiling, and I am still probably being watched by invisible cameras, but here it’s almost bearable. I notice the small TV screens in front of every sink. Commercial ads for casino activities and landmarks are popping up in rapid succession. Everyone seems excited and happy. Feeling a bit better, I slide my hand under a thin steel curved dispenser that magically brings forth cold water. I splash some on my face, trying to focus. Our attempt to understand the effects of the soundscape in a (non)place is not enough. Since these effects can be muted, amplified, or otherwise transformed by other aspects of the environment (and vice-versa), it seems that moving through it is the only way to experience their reciprocal effects. Thus, for example, while loud sounds might disperse visitors away from particular areas, olfactory stimulators can attract them and otherwise shape their perceptions, judgments, and behaviors—often at a non-conscious level (see, e.g., Holland, Hendriks, and Aarts 2005 and Krishna 2012). Mobility on the Strip is perhaps disorienting precisely because of the abundance of these stimulators that simultaneously incite the different senses at non-conscious levels.

Insert Ticket

As a non-place, the Strip cannot be reduced to just a single building or a group of buildings. It must include the routes leading to them (airports, freeways), and the circuits connecting between them. Unsurprisingly, these circuits are encoded by the same logic of the nodes they link. For example, the Las Vegas airport and the Strip enjoy a quasi-symbiotic relation, and the transition from one to the other is both smooth and seamless. The airport’s arrival and departure lobbies feature noisy slot machines passengers can play at; many airport stores feature Strip-related merchandise, and the baggage claim areas are dominated by gigantic TV screens that loudly advertise various Strip landmarks and shows.³ The taxi cabs transporting passengers from the airport to the Strip also display commercial ads celebrating Strip landmarks on their roof, on their trunk, in promotional booklets and magazines tucked in the back seat area, and on small TV screens embedded in the back of the front seats and facing the back-seat passengers. The very circuit between the airport and the Strip guides passengers through canyons of neon lights and billboards that all articulate the same principles (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Mobile commercial ad.

The recently built monorail that links the major Strip casinos materializes the metaphor of an integrated circuit as a fait accompli. I walk up to the deserted entrance to the monorail platform at the Flamingo, locate the ticket machines, follow its instructions, and insert my credit card in the slot to pay $5. I wonder about the sanctions levied against those who get caught without a ticket, and remember that this entire area is most probably under high-tech surveillance.

I insert my ticket into the tollgate, the doors open, and I walk to the escalator that lifts me up to the platform (Figure 7). The signs announce “Northbound” and “Southbound,” and an emotionless computerized female voice repeatedly announces, “The monorail arrives every six minutes.” Five other individuals are seated on the platform chairs, silently waiting. In the center of the platform, a magazine stand displays free monorail magazines and colorful coupon booklets for various casinos. I decide to ride on the southbound train, which will take me to the Bally’s/Paris, and MGM Grand stations. The monorail approaches, stops, and opens its doors. Two white men in their fifties step out, disoriented, looking up for an exit sign. “There it is,” announces one excitedly, pointing to the sign. They both hurry toward it.

Figure 7.

The monorail.

I enter and sit down across an older Hispanic man as the monorail slowly glides on its circuit that loops around the back of the Strip casinos. The car is silent, except for a prerecorded computerized voice that repeats: “Please hold firmly on the handrail at all times.” But nobody is standing. On the wall, a poster announces the monorail slogan: “You Party. . . . We’ll Drive.” Another computerized voice announces the next station: “Now arriving at MGM Grand station.” The monorail stops, the doors open, and I step out looking for the exit.

I locate the MGM Casino “Entrance” sign and follow the other passengers down an escalator. We enter a large hall guarded by tollgates that slow down our movement. Walking through one of them, I notice an elderly white woman who seems trapped on the other side of the entrance. She has inserted her ticket into the tollgate and is waiting for an old couple to join her. She seems irritated because her ticket is not working and the gate refuses to open. Other passengers quickly walk right past her through adjacent gates, seemingly unconcerned by her sudden detention. I walk slowly and pause, just to see how this mini-crisis unfolds. She tries a few more times to open the tollgates by pushing on them, but to no avail. She seems to become even more annoyed when one of her traveling companions grumbles an irritated “Great!” The older man traveling with her grudgingly inserts his ticket into the gate and hurriedly pushes her through. While this violation must surely have been detected by surveillance systems, no security personnel intervenes.

No Left Turn

Since non-places explicitly or implicitly require users to “prove their innocence” and right to be there (Augé 2008), they can also be distinguished by their systems of social control—their mechanisms, visibility, the power those who enforce them wield on users, the typical violations they are mandated to prevent and punish, and the kinds of punishment they typically inflict on violators. On one end of the continuum—at the museum, the theme park, or in the metro, for example—users prove their innocence and right to circulate there by showing their admission ticket. At the motel, by showing their room key. At the supermarket, by filling up a shopping cart or basket (Augé 2008). At the airport—the other end of the continuum—passengers must first prove their innocence by showing or scanning their travel and identification documents. But this is not enough. Having successfully moved through that first triage station, they must then also submit to interrogation, body scans, groping of body parts, and examination of their personal belongings, in public view, by uni(n)formed, unsmiling, and armed operatives, whose first instinct seems to suspect everyone (Adey 2004; Kellerman 2008).

Similar distinctions obtain for the visibility of control mechanisms in various non-places, and the power those who enforce them wield on users. At one end of the continuum, shopping malls, museums, motels, and supermarkets often rely on a barely noticeable and rather unthreatening security personnel who wield little power over users. On the other end, some international airports are patrolled by conspicuous armed soldiers, police officers, or other categories of security operatives. Regardless of the power differentials between these visible agents of social control and users, it seems that those who enforce the rules do not generally make them, while those who do make the rules remain largely invisible and anonymous. This situation also contributes to the sorts of performance users of different non-places are prompted to play, the kinds of subjectivities they are likely to experience, and the kinds of creative acts of resistance they are likely to scheme (see Wood 2006). Feeling completely identifiable, scrutinized, and powerless, users of non-places where security personnel are conspicuous and legally empowered to administer violence, detain, or deport may realize that personal appeals to rules-enforcers are likely to be unpredictable, and that personal appeals to rule-makers are likely to be prohibitively onerous or futile. In such a situation, compliance seems to be the safest option.

Similarly, users of various non-places will suffer significantly different fates for violating their respective rules. At the museum, the theme park, or the shopping mall, for example, violators may be reprimanded, asked to leave, or threatened with the intervention of official policing forces. At the airport, they may be sanctioned with cavity searches, confiscation of their belongings, detention, incarceration, or deportation. Users of non-places are typically aware of those differences and integrate them in their performance; but not always:

A California man got thrown out of San Diego’s airport when he refused a revealing full-body scan and then an alternative pat-down, telling a Transportation Security Agent, “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” John Tyner, 31, said he was told he could face a civil lawsuit and a $10,000 fine for leaving the screening area before the security check was complete, according to news reports and his blog. (Flam 2010)

In addition, non-places do not solely regulate passengers’ circulation through the use of signs affixed to posts, walls, or ceiling, but also by their very physical designs that motivate and inhibit movement, velocity, and trajectory. As Urry (2002, 262) notes, the power to determine one’s own and others’ corporeal mobility is an important form of power in mobile societies. This power is especially palpable in non-places such as airports (Adey 2004), where passengers are forced to intermittently slow down, wait, or hurry up, are channeled along particular paths, and are strongly prohibited from accessing certain areas (Adey 2008; Kellerman 2008). These prescriptions/prohibitions on movement prompt passengers to interact in subservient ways with the complex hierarchy of personnel they encounter there. They are expected to show deference, seriousness, punctuality, efficiency, celerity, diligence, and vigilance. And that kind of performance necessarily also encodes how passengers are likely to interact with others in the same category. As Gottdiener (2000, 31) remarks, in non-places such as airports, interactions between passengers are often “transient” and emotionless as they tend to keep to themselves, to see others as strangers, and to generally avoid interaction with them. At other times, airports can also promote intense yet transient connections between complete strangers, but also “freak-outs,” and other disturbing emotional outbursts (see also Iyer 2000).

Waiting in line at the Bacchanal Buffet, a white American man of about thirty years waits impatiently in front of me, moving from side to side, and standing on his toes to see if our line is moving. Every once in a while, he exhales loudly. “I can’t believe I paid forty bucks to stand in another line,” he fumes, his eyes angrily squinting at the front of the line. As an employee rushes by, he abruptly leans over and asks her, irritated, “Is this the line to the bread, the meat, the Latin-American? Which is it?”

“Yes,” she answers calmly, “this is one line for all three stations. You have to wait and move along the line to each station.” That answer does not seem to satisfy or calm him down very much. Overhearing this exchange, an old Middle Eastern man standing behind me adds to the confusion: “I don’t think this is the line for the meat,” he remarks.

“I just asked and they said this is the one line for all three stations,” the angry “guest” snaps back. After about three minutes of silent waiting, the older Middle-Eastern deftly maneuvers his way up to the meat station, creating a new line. The white man in front of me throws his hands up in the air: “I can’t fucking believe this!” At the same time, he seems resigned to his fate. There is not much he can do, and those who prepare, carry, refill, clean up, or replenish the food trays are unlikely to intervene or call casino personnel to punish this violation. No one seems to be in charge—or care very much—and the only security personnel I recall seeing nearby is a sixtyish man riding a slow-moving futuristic electric car with large SECURITY stickers on its sides. While “solitary contractuality” frames the relationship between users and the “abstract commerce” (Augé 2008) that manages non-places, the social contract that regulates relationships between users seems both unclear and precarious.

Access Restricted

Like other non-places such as airports or theme parks, the Strip is a “space of transition” (Gottdiener 2000, 10) that induces “new feelings of self, new identities that are set off by stimulators engineered within the new consumer fantasy domains.” As Adey (2008, 439) elaborates, these stimulators are “intended to excite bodily and emotional dispositions at an unconscious and pre-cognitive register.” Like airports and theme-parks, casinos can thus also be “vertiginous places” (Iyer 2000, 62) that induce a “dream state” (p. 50), a “state of no-mind,” an “out-of-the-body state in which one’s not quite there, but certainly not elsewhere” (p. 54).

The MGM Grand casino floor layout is designed to suggest movement along obvious vectors. In its center, the twenty-feet-wide polka dots patterned carpet traces a linear path through the casino floor, and overhead, a multitude of signs indicate various “stations” along the way: Lobby, Guestrooms, Valet, Self Park, the Underground, Sports/Poker, Ka Theatre, Showrooms, and The Central. The actual places to which these arrows point are hidden and indistinct. Extending the patterned design on the floor are paths in similar colors and shaped like peacock feathers of slot machines, tables, and bars. Here, people do not walk but sit at booths, stand around tables, throw dice in the air, wait in roped off lines for the Ka Cirque du Soleil show, sit on high chairs at the blackjack tables, or slump on low ones at the slot machines. Whatever they are doing, they seem expected to be busy playing, consuming, or eager to do so.

I veer off the polka-dot path and follow one of its feathers that leads to a battery of slot machines. I sit down randomly to play at a Wheel-of-Fortune! one. In just five minutes, I lose ten dollars. That does not even give me enough time to get a free drink from the scantily clad and visibly exhausted waitresses orbiting around the tables. Did I move too fast? I ask someone at random for the time. 2:50p.m. Surprised, I realize I have already spent about two hours following the rhythms and tracks of the casino ground floor, stopping here and there at various slot machines, experiencing mild bipolar swings when I win or lose.

Continuing on the featherlike path, I reach the blackjack tables area, and choose a $5 table serviced by “Mike” the dealer, as his nametag indicates. I stop a few feet away from this table and scan the area around us. All the blackjack tables are positioned in a circle that is roped off and only admits dealers and select personnel staff. The dealers stand directly behind the tables passing out cards to players. Serious-looking men with short hair, dark business suits, and a visible earpiece stand behind the dealers. They jot notes in their little booklets and intermittently lean over to the dealers to count the chips and whisper in their ears, but it’s too noisy to hear what they are saying. Every few minutes, cocktail waitresses circulate amid the blackjack tables, taking drink orders and collecting tips.

I sit quietly at Mike’s table, a few seats away from the only other player. We don’t say anything, but just look at each other’s hands every time Mike lays a new card on the table. I wonder if players at $20, $50, and $100 tables enjoy a different kind of treatment from their respective dealers or cocktail waitresses. By sitting at this table, we have voluntarily categorized ourselves at the bottom rung of the casino food chain. How does one establish a sense of identity in this non-place? And what kind? “Sign up for Platinum membership today. It’s free and easy,” a sign promises. Waiting for Mike to deal, I also realize that although I’ve interacted casually with many different people today—lost tourists with folded maps, salespeople trying to push their wares, the Kelly-Rippa look-alike, the smiling greeter at the entrance of the shopping area, and service workers—the only time someone asked my name was the cashier at the food court where I ordered chips and salsa. “We’ll call your name as soon as it’s ready,” she said calmly, without making eye contact. But maybe that’s exactly the point. While airport passengers must establish and verify their identity as soon as they enter, here other principles may be at play. As a white man in his early thirties confides to a friend sitting next to him at the bar,

Whenever I’m in Vegas, for some reason I talk with this funny East Coast accent, like I’m from Boston. What I love about Vegas is that we can be whoever we want to be. Like those chicks last night. They didn’t know anything about us. Who knows where they were from, you know what I mean? They could have been putting on this fake persona, just like we are. . . . Haha!

If my lumpen status at Mike’s table invites a certain type of interaction and treatment, the coup de grace for any sense of identity in this kind of non-place finds its most hallucinatory expression at the Monte Lago casino. Here, blackjack players do not interact with a human dealer but with a virtual one appearing on a high-def screen positioned behind the blackjack table, precisely where a real dealer would stand (Figure 8).

Figure 8.

A virtual dealer.

Young, pretty, sexy, smiling, vaguely Asian-looking, the virtual female dealer simulates distributing virtual cards. When no one is sitting at the table, she turns her head left and right at regular intervals, amicably greeting invisible patrons, and inviting them to play at her table. For all intents and purposes, some categories of casino “guests” have eventually become interchangeable and anonymous bodies whose movements and decisions have become reduced to data for multiple sensors that process them according to some algorithm. Because underneath the promises of extravagant wealth and the immediate satisfaction of desires, underneath the conspicuous display of abundance and the dizzying cornucopia of choices, one’s willingness and ability to spend still matters a great deal for the kind of treatment one is granted. If many non-places seek to flatten the demographic differences that distinguish between users (race, gender, ethnicity, etc.), the “class” variable still increases and restricts one’s access to the much touted resources these spaces promise. In this sense, and not unlike non-places designed for air travel, “Access Restricted” does not solely refer to a physical sign affixed to doors or walls, but also to a stratum of users, and to the range and quality of services and interactions to which they will be entitled.

This Is Not an Exit

The attempt to capture mobility experiences is always an incomplete one, always in process, always becoming, and understanding it will always be partial. This means that in the process of understanding the experience, the actual methodology becomes unveiled as the experiences unveil. (Jiron 2011, 50, quoted in Vannini 2012)

Feeling claustrophobic and mildly irritated, I decide to leave the MGM Grand and survey the cluttered horizon for an “Exit” sign, but cannot find any. I circle around the main lobby a number of times, feeling lost. After a while, I spot a young man wearing a dark business suit and an earpiece standing in front of a restaurant. I walk towards him and ask for directions. With a few words, he points me to the general area of the Rainforest Cafe and two sets of exit gates. The one on the left leads to a bridge that will transport me to the New York New York casino. The one on the right leads me back onto the Strip sidewalk. I choose the right one, find myself back on the Strip, absent-mindedly following a group of excited young Italians. I weave my way through deafening noise and throngs of mesmerized tourists who—drinks in hands and heads rotating in every direction—are streaming out of casinos, bars, and restaurants. Along the way, I step through invisible corridors of cold air blasting through their open doors. Small clusters of homeless people sit on the sidewalk across from those doors, trying to enjoy the free relief from the blistering heat. Towering above the scene, the gigantic Margaritaville café marquee announces “Licence to Chill.”

While the concept of non-place is often used to refer to a wide array of environments, our mobile ethnography of the Strip points at four contributions to the study of these settings, and suggests that attending to them will both enhance our understanding of non-places as well as help us distinguish between them. First, while Augé emphasizes the importance of the spatial organization of non-places (design, signage, movement, etc.), we find that their temporal organization also contributes to their effects on users. Accordingly, a more thorough understanding of the design of non-places should include attention both to their temporal organizations (speed, rhythm, duration, flexibility, correspondence with normative temporality) and the articulations between these and other components. Second, while scholars of non-places have typically focused on their physical and visual dimensions, we suggest that the soundscapes of non-places are also important stimulators of movement, interactions, and subjectivities. Paying attention both to the soundscapes of non-places and their articulations with the other components will also enrich our understanding of these environments. As we also discuss, smells are important and should be examined both as separate stimulators and as interacting with the other features of non-places. Third, we propose that the social control systems deployed in non-places is also an essential component that enhances our understanding of their effects. It goes without saying that users located at the intersection of various social—and physical—categories will respond to those interacting effects in different ways, even though non-places attempt precisely to flatten those differences. Fourth, in light of the characteristics mentioned above, we conclude that one hopefully useful approach to non-places consists in distinguishing between them by assessing how they integrate five interrelated components: (1) function, (2) design, (3) social control systems, (4) performances, and (5) subjectivities.

We acknowledge that—with few exceptions—(non)places typically neither force visitors to do anything nor “compel them to submit to their design” (Wood 2006, 325). Like any other built environment, (non)places have their own “preferred encodings” that shape users’ interpretations and responses. As research and everyday events suggest, visitors of these environments can and do indeed use them in all sorts of creative and productive ways, appropriate space and time for private needs, and engage in acts of resistance (see, e.g., Vannini 2012; Wood 2006).⁴ However, the freedom to resist those preferred encodings and the consequences for doing so vary greatly across different types of non-places and users. Interestingly also, while visible signs inscribe the amount of freedom that will be tolerated in different non-places, we are rarely told about the reasons for the limitations to which we must submit. And this silence, by itself, already invites a certain subjectivity, a certain way of being, of moving, and of interacting in these environments.

Some (non)places induce the flanêur, others motivate the patriotic, obedient, punctual, and conforming passenger, and still others prompt the badaud. Roughly translated as a “dope,” this persona is an “intoxicated observer open to signification, but unable to synthesize meaning and achieve active participation” (Walter Benjamin, cited in Woodward, Emmison, and Smith 2000, 352). However, while the badaud was wandering—intoxicated by mind-altering substances—in structured spaces, here, users are disoriented by sign and design.⁵ Engineered by a visual, acoustic, and olfactory cacophony, this disorientation drives constant pedestrian movement across vast and eerily similar expanses, with mind-numbing redundancy both within and across casinos. Incidentally, there are preciously few spaces in casinos where one can just sit without having to consume or play, and there is not one public bench on the entire Strip. In other words, constant mobility is not solely motivated by design, sign, sound, smells, etc. but also by the conspicuous absence of particular object.

The Strip’s mostly informational and directional signs interpellate users as anonymous, adult vacationers who travel here to enjoy self-indulgent fun, thrills, a little extravagance, and risqué experiences in controlled, safe, tolerant, and depersonalized environments. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the famous commercial motto promises. In contrast to other types of non-place whose efficient functioning depends on the punctual and well-orchestrated flow of passengers, the Strip encourages users to circulate relatively freely through hyperstimulating mazes that readily scramble spatial, temporal, biological, biographical, emotional, ethical, and cognitive coordinates. Its directional and informational signs must thus be read on the move and against a broader context that both incites and soothes an anxiety of excess and self-control. For Wood (2006, 322), this context prompts a “seemingly paradoxical relationship of intoxication and ambivalence,” of being “vulnerable and slightly illegal” (p. 320). In such conditions, the mechanisms of social control can afford to be rather invisible, and to appear lax and lenient. But at your own risks.

Although not directly grounded in our ethnographic data, we would like to point at two other features that may help distinguish between non-places. The first is that many non-places benefit from repeat visits by users. For example, residents of a neighborhood may visit local malls every weekend, month, or holiday season, and some malls serve as hangouts for young people (Anthony 1985; Matthews et al. 2000). Similarly, many passengers ride the same train or subway lines every day of the week, and at precise times. Some families make it a tradition to visit the same theme park on the fourth of July or other national holidays. The same obtains for the Strip. While most casino visitors will probably stay there once or infrequently, many locals and tourists repeatedly visit or stay at selected ones. Those repeat users of non-places might very well consider these locations to be places and develop attachment to them. Accordingly, non-places should be distinguished by the kinds —and likelihood— of attachment people can and do develop towards them.

Second, as Adey (2006) has observed in his study of airports, non-places move. Buildings can change location, expand, are redesigned, develop satellites, connections to other buildings, etc. This feature is especially visible on the Las Vegas Strip, as new buildings can quickly appear, expand, or implode. Accordingly, an additional feature of non-places that deserves attention concerns its rate and type of change, and the consequences of those for mobility, attachment, subjectivity, and social interaction.

Like places, non-places are obviously also constituted by location, objects, and meaning (Gieryn 2000). However, what perhaps distinguishes non-places from places is the over-determination of meanings they impose on users. Pitched at all the senses, bypassing conscious detection, embedded in the design, articulated in signs, and backed by the implicit or explicit monitoring by social control systems, this over-determination directs users’ mobility, incites their affective intensities, prods them to interact in expected ways, and prompts distinct subjectivities. Since—to various degrees—many places also feature these characteristics, it might be worth considering that a non-place is not the antithesis of place, but a point on a continuum, a combination of qualities—a sensibility. However, as passengers of the mobile society, we increasingly find ourselves circulating through non-places—sometimes by choice, sometimes against our will; sometimes for pleasure, sometimes by necessity. Since the sensibility of non-places is rapidly colonizing that of traditional places in many areas of the world (Cresswell 2006, 44) and since its effects spread beyond specific locations, it requires our critical attention. What happens in Vegas does not, in fact, stay in Vegas.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Simon Gottschalk is professor of sociology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Associate at the Centre International de Recherche sur l’Individu et la Société Hypermodernes. Co-author of The Senses in Self, Culture and Society, he has published numerous articles and book chapters that develop a critical interactionist perspective about phenomena as varied as youth cultures, hypermodernism, food, sensory ethnography, terrorism, the acceleration of everyday life, environmental identity, mental disorders, the mass media, and virtual interactions.

Marko Salvaggio is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who conducts qualitative research for the National Center for Health Statistics. His academic interests revolve around mobilities, urban spaces, and the natural environment. Since 2006, he has investigated the social, economic, and environmental implications of the backpacking subcultures in Central America. He has also written about environmental health issues and water scarcity in the American desert Southwest.

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