Introduction
Enacting geographies
Prologue
Another conference session, Brighton, January 2000.
Eyebright. A bald cube of a building. A room shaped
like the cabin of an aircraft, in lurid grey, like the interior
of a Soviet spaceship, reﬁtted for one ﬁnal, forlorn
mission. Tubular, tubercular. Sounds, and the lack of
them. The swelling background buzz of the mike system.
Speaker’s voices failing to carry the length of the tunnel,
heavy headcolds.
All that can be remembered are materials, movements,
shapes, gestures. Such as Room North 8, Pittsburgh,
March 2000. Very early in the morning, wide
awake. Bracing spring, gusting wind. Moving slowly,
steadily, horizontally between verticals along sidewalks
across traﬃc into the conference centre. Into a space
bigger than the outdoors, a gymnasium for giants, or the
open vacant jaws of a cyclops, voids of stone and metal,
and, arching over them, a walkway like a pole-vaulter’s
run-up, ﬂat but seeming to tilt upward, up into a nest
of corridors, footfalls, faces, turnings, crossroads, blank
doorways, and opening one of them, heavily hinged,
with hands and shoulders, into a large but dimly-lit,
windowless seminar room. With no slide projector.
One thing we feel is odd in recollection, in thinking
back to the two ‘Enacting Geographies’ conference
sessions we convened at RGS-IBG 2000 and AAG 2000,
the sessions from which this special issue of Geoforum
developed, is how little we can remember about what the
various speakers actually said. This is not a reﬂection on
the speakers themselves; of course we can remember the
subject-matter of their presentations, the points and
themes they sought to pursue, even the timbre of their
voices. What has slipped away are sentences, phrases,
what remains are materials, movements, shapes, ges-
tures.
We want to suggest that such things may be considered
enactments, neither subjects nor objects, signs or
referents, but processual registers of experience. The
papers in this special issue may, equally, be analogised
as materials, movements, shapes, voices; in other words,
they are not papers about ‘enacting geographies’, they
are themselves enactments. In this brief editorial we
want to try to outline the gradients and trajectories of
enactment, via three themes: opening, presenting, wit-
nessing.
Opening
We want to make a point precisely about the unfolding
nature of the world. The world is more excessive
than we can theorise. This, of course, has been said before,
yet in many ways social analysis has tried to avoid
confronting the implications. In many ways we have
failed to trust the promise of this open-ended world. All
the papers in this special issue seek, in diﬀerent ways, to
accept, aﬃrm and respond to this promise.
Firstly they seek to recognise excess: the world does
not add-up. The world does not resolve or come to rest:
‘the creation of the world did not take place once and
for all time, but takes place everyday’ (Beckett, 1987, p.
19). It is important to consider how we may learn to
welcome this situation; how we may learn to write and
research within it. There are considerable impediments
to making this acknowledgement. Perhaps foremost
amongst them is what we may characterise as a pervasive
neo-Kantianism, manifest across the social sciences,
sustained in both theoretical and, importantly,
epistemo-methodological operations. How does this neoKantianism
proceed? In various ways to be sure, however
we may say that it persists in the playing out of an
assumption that the task of analysis ‘‘is to explain that
which is apparent, observable, or known, by identifying
an underlying (transcendental) causally-generative order
of powers, mechanisms, structures, processes’’, the ultimate
aim or claim being ‘‘to show us ‘the way things
really are’’’ (Pleasants, 1999, p. 22). Herein we may
observe a curious vampirism, in which events are
drained for the sake of the ‘orders, mechanisms, structures
and processes’ posited by the analyst; an ontological
freezing in which the excessive is recuperated for
the sake of theoretical certainty, the ﬂourish of generalisation,
a well formed opinion and a resounding conclusion.
‘‘[T]he ﬂash has been domesticated to serve the
functioning of a system operating according to its own
rules’’ (Massumi, 2002, p. xxvi). And yet even now, even
with the insistence of such a system, the world does not
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Geoforum 33 (2002) 437–440
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add-up, there is always something exceptional, somebody
else; an accursed share, a dangerous supplement, a
restless spirit, another example to be given. Rather than
a logic which would seek to contain and deny this
movement with its calculus of the normative, ﬁnite and
distinct and an embalming obsession with form and
meaning, we propose a serial logic of the unﬁnished. A
refrain from straining to see and write the ‘form of
forms’, the ‘principle of’, the ‘in the last instance’, for the
sake of an attentiveness to things taking-place.
Secondly these papers advocate pluralism, and a
consequent attentiveness to ‘‘how one performatively
contributes to the stretch of expressions in the world’’
(Massumi, 2002, p. xxii). Without the safety net of a
transcendental logic, a dialectic, a realism, or even a
belief in culture, pluralism seems to be the most hospitable
option. It is all too easy for the analyst to turn
aside ‘‘from the object that cannot be made to correspond
with one or other of his [sic] intellectual prejudices,
that resists the propositions of his term of
synthesis’’ (Beckett, 1987, p. 23), as if theory were based
on a labour-saving principle, or was a syringe for extracting
the essence of things. To be hospitable then, is
crucial; but to whom, or what? For whom or what are
we making space?
The ‘big picture’, the one that is provided by that
typical gesture of sociologists––drawing with their
hands in the air a shape no bigger than a pumpkin––is
always simpler and more localised than
the myriad monads it expresses only in part: it
could not be without them, but without it, they
would still be something. Far from being the milieu
in which humans grow and live, the social is only a
tiny set of narrow, standardised connections which
occupies only some of the monads some of the time
[. . .] As soon as you leave those tiny networks, you
are no longer in the social, but down in a confusing
‘plasma’ composed of countless monads, a chaos, a
brew, one, one that social scientists will do anything
to avoid looking in the eye (Latour, 2002, pp. 124–
125)
Hospitable then to whatever happens; to whosoever or
whatever arrives. And importantly, in the meantime,
hospitable to the potential for such encounters, even
now a space left empty for encounters which may contain
the potential to unfold things otherwise, each with
its varied accounts and styles of expression for speaking
and writing; each enacting a world, again and again.
Presenting
We want to work on presenting the world, not on
representing it, or explaining it. Our understanding of
non-representational theory is that it is characterised by
a ﬁrm belief in the actuality of representation. It does
not approach representations as masks, gazes, reﬂections,
veils, dreams, ideologies, as anything, in short,
that is a covering which is laid over the ontic. Nonrepresentational
theory takes representation seriously;
representation not as a code to be broken or as a illusion
to be dispelled rather representations are apprehended
as performative in themselves; as doings. The point
here is to redirect attention from the posited meaning
towards the material compositions and conduct of rep-
resentations.
If resemblance haunts the work of art it is because
sensation refers only to its material: it is the percept
or aﬀect of the material itself, the smile of oil, the
gesture of ﬁred clay, the thrust of metal, the crouch
of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic
stone (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 166)
Representations thus do not have a message; rather they
are transformers, not causes or outcomes of action but
actions themselves. Not examples, but exemplary. In
this sense representation is perhaps more usefully
thought of as incessant presentation, continually assembling
and disassembling, timing and spacing; worl-
ding.
If non-representational theory takes the work of
representation seriously, what it does not take seriously
is representationalism, or, discursive idealism. The notion
that meaning is ﬁrst and foremost a picture that is
formed in the mind, a cause of action; the precondition
of understanding of social action or identity is fundamentally
misleading. Equally, the idea that the concept
of culture is, somehow, immune from this critique is
misplaced. When culture is conceptualised as a set of
rules, as ‘a resource and a constraint’, as a frame and a
necessary mediation, as a store house of archetypes, a
collection of habits that are malleable but yet mediate in
a strangely consistent, aspatial and unchanging way
between eye and world, hand and thing, thought and
matter, body and text, it becomes numbed to the event
of life. The issue here is that from such understandings
culture is always apprehended as pre-formed. But there
is no time-out from the happening of the world, no
moment of unity in which something like a culture,
envisioned thus, could cohere. Our pluralism is not a
simple relativism. Rather there are events of enunciation,
invocations, iterations; empirical callings up of the
concept of culture to do work; it is perhaps in these
speech acts that culture exists and these may be considered
in all their contestation, but never ‘culture’ in
itself.
A number of the papers in this special issue contain
what are recognisably empirical moments. On the one
hand these papers certainly ﬁt into and operate as de-
438 Introduction / Geoforum 33 (2002) 437–440
velopments of an ongoing exposition of the social and
material world. However, on the other hand, and this is
what we would seek to underline, they operate as singularities.
And thus as presentations, they touch upon
the ‘event of events’; the taking-place of the empirical,
and partake of the ‘stretch of expressions in the world’.
Thus in mobilising the term presentation our aim is not
to promote a na€iive realism (and thus a surreptitious
return to representationalism), but rather to suggest that
each text is a moment in iterative and disseminative
chains and processes; exemplary and diﬀerential, creative
relays which may or may not resonate, which may
or may not ﬁnd a hospitable destination. To fold with
the world in this way is not a method in the traditional
sense, but a matter of ﬁnding a way of going-on, a way
of getting somewhere. There is no set of instructions for
this method, no programme to unroll, not even a handy
Baedeker or Lonely Planet guide within which to conﬁrm
identiﬁcation. Rather than attempt to lay out a
prescription for encounters, perhaps it is better to oﬀer
some tactical suggestions. They need not be anything
more then disposable maxims, or opening words for a
dialogue:
• Theory is always already practical.
• Reading theory and doing ﬁeldwork should not be
diﬀerentiated as practices.
• Certain empirical encounters should not be resolved.
• ‘‘It is the reduction of the social to ﬁxed forms that
remains the basic error’’ (Williams, 1977, p. 129).
• Politics is not limited to the Social.
• I do not have experiences, they are not mine. Experience
is trans-subjective.
• The goal of reﬂexivity should not be transparency.
• The deﬁnition of the problem is something that remains
problematic.
• ‘‘Method in general is a means by which we avoid
going to a particular place, or by which we maintain
the means of escaping from it’’ (Deleuze, 1983, p.
110).
• Discourse is not a closed system, a discourse is a ﬁeld
of potential.
• The notion of a hegemonic discourse is an oxymoron.
• An example is only an example of itself.
• Materiality is agency.
• Space is a verb not a noun.
Witnessing
The papers in this issue attempt to eﬀect particular
accounts that embrace the openness of the world, accounts
that leave a space for something else to happen.
In this sense we want to pay particular attention to
diﬀerent modalities of accounting for and witnessing the
world, where to witness is both the moment of experience
and a stance thereafter towards the world that
acknowledges and attends to the gap between what we
have seen and are seeing, with what we have written and
could write, and with what we have said and can ‘say’
(can gesture towards). This process operates in two directions
that come together in the act of doing, in ‘‘intelligence-as-action’’
(Melrose, 1994).
First, the world calls us to witness it into being. We
are ‘‘caught in the fabric of the world’’ (Merleau-Ponty,
1969, p. 256), cast in its materiality, in a world of
transubjective modalities of experience, an in-between
world of imperatives instigating our activities. We are
thinking here of aﬀect, for example, the push of the
terrain upon the ‘muscular consciousness’ of the body
(Bachelard, 1986), the spiritualized pull or uplift of a
chord of music, and the stillness struck by the colour of
paint. Aﬀects are not about you or it, subject or object.
They are relations that inspire the world. Such aﬀects
and percepts (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 163–
199) extract from representation another way of judging,
another way of reacting to the world about us.
There is a need to move away from speaking of aﬀections
and perceptions (which would overemphasise a too
subjective, too human, account), to move towards an
account that takes seriously the world’s own forces. This
is a world between potential and determination, between
what has happened and what could, a world captured in
the tension of its present tense of becoming, a not yet
enacted moment where we meet and greet ourselves in
the aﬀect that inspires action. In sum, aﬀects and percepts
are that through which subject and object emerge
and become possible, they speak to the emergent eventuality
of the world.
Second, in the performances that make us, the world
comes about. This is about giving space to the event of
the world, to make primary its emergent nature, and to
the active role we too play in actualizing that which
happens––we are thinking here speciﬁcally of what
we make visible by what we cite as signiﬁcant. In particular,
an awareness of the coming-to-be, the badly
formed, the seemingly inconsequential, the ephemerally
felt; the desire that lights up a room, the turning you
didn’t take (but which still haunts you), the anxiety of
completing the next task. This is not to rely solely on
past forms of expression; it call upon us to open up the
spaces between words, towards an awareness of a distributed
agency, to an academic stance that embraces
the unseen, perhaps intolerable ways, the world aﬀects
us.
These are not arcane concerns; they speak directly to
our practices as social scientists, to the way our techniques
are attentive to aspects of the world’s unfolding.
We are thinking of an expanded socio-logic, of mobilising
other sources of expression (literature, art, performance),
and above all of rearticulating what counts
Introduction / Geoforum 33 (2002) 437–440 439
as signiﬁcant. This would be a commitment to a resolute
experimentalism.
Summary
We conclude the editorial by glancing ahead to the
individual papers. This overview seeks only to highlight
motifs, themes, arcs and trajectories (since the papers
will obviously exceed anything we might say about them).
John Wylie’s paper, An essay on ascending Glastonbury
Tor, draws upon the work of Merleau Ponty and
Heidegger to illustrate how the act of visualizing itself is
always a making of seer and seen. The paper thus seeks
to speak of a subjectivity produced and performed via
practices of ascension and elevation, and, in doing so, to
move towards a new understanding of visible landscape
in terms of sensuous practices. Cataloguing his own
ascent of Glastonbury Tor, Wylie seeks to enact the Tor
for the reader, engendering its visibility, its cultural
histories, and thus its sensuous reality through his nar-
rative.
Motifs of landscape and practice recur in Mitch
Rose’s paper, Landscape and Labyrinths, which seeks to
sketch out a conceptual and methodological approach
to cultural landscape beyond the structuralism of cultural
geography, which, Rose argues, skewers landscape
through stabilisations of meaning. An ontology of
overdetermination and surplus, as elaborated by Althusser
and Bataille, is oﬀered by Rose as a possible
means of becoming attentive to the excessiveness of
landscape.
Derek McCormack’s A paper with an interest in
rhythm moves from the false problematic of representing
movement to become an exposition of movement within
the folds of writing. In a virtuosic exploration of rhythm
McCormack produces an animated space that moves,
folds and achieves consistency via both non-subjectifying
and subjectifying forces. Theoretical considerations
are not side-stepped by this performance; rather, the
particular rhythms of Deleuze, Guattari and Lefebvre
are engaged and enfolded by the paper.
Paul Harrison’s paper The Caesura: Remarks on
Wittgenstein’s interruption of theory, or, why practices
elude explanation, presents a precise and exacting
philosophical exposition of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Harrison uses the work of Wittgenstein to oﬀer
a diagnosis of idealism within much contemporary social
analysis. Linking up with the special issue’s concerns,
Harrison suggests that it is the performative
which occupies the space vacated by Idealism; a replacement
of the Cartesian Ideals of certainty for
‘inﬁnitive’, and distinctly geographic, understandings––
taking -place, making -sense––which speak of the time of
the present, not of all Time.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank Andrew Leyshon for
his support and enthusiasm for getting this themed
section of Geoforum published.
References
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John David Dewsbury
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
University Road
Bristol BS8 1SS, UK
E-mail address: jd.dewsbury@bristol.ac.uk
Paul Harrison
Department of Geography
University of Durham
Science Laboratories
South Road
Durham DH1 3LE, UK
E-mail address: harrison@durham.ac.uk
Mitch Rose
School of Geography
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
E-mail address: rose@nottingham.ac.uk
John Wylie
Department of Geography
University of Sheﬃeld
Winter Street
Sheﬃeld S10 2TN, UK
E-mail address: j.w.wylie@sheﬃeld.ac.uk
440 Introduction / Geoforum 33 (2002) 437–440