Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies
L. Cadman, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
& 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Affect The pre-personal capacity for bodies to be
affected (by other bodies) and, in turn, affect (other
bodies). This capacity for affecting and being affected
subsequently deﬁnes what a body is and can do.
Everyday Life The setting for the routine and
mundane, but also improvised and transformative
practices.
Immanence A concept which seeks to overcome all
divisions, dualisms, and causal principles (associated
with transcendence) by remaining committed to the
virtual ﬂow of life itself.
Nonrepresentational Thought A mode of thinking
which seeks to immerse itself in everyday practice.
Performativity The processual and transformative
nature of practice.
Practice Competences and (embodied) dispositions
which precede and exceed contemplative thought and
reﬂection.
Introduction
Geography and Representational Modes of
Thought
Nonrepresentational geographies attend to both life and
thought as practiced and, for this reason, ‘in process’ and
‘open ended’. The genesis of the term nonrepresentational
theory began in the early to mid-1990s through a
series of books and articles written by the geographer,
Nigel Thrift, although its philosophical heritage stems
back much further. Thrift sought to challenge the dominant
mode of representational thinking throughout
human geography, in particular within cultural geography.
The cultural turn, in particular, was deemed exemplary
of the representational problematic in two
senses. First, although it focused on everyday practices
such as consumption, it tended to retreat from practice
into the (cultural) politics of representation; creating
deadening effects on an otherwise active world. Second,
and consequently, by retaining contemplative and interpretative
models of geographical thought and inquiry,
much of the nonintentional, nondiscursive, and elusory
nature of the everyday world was occluded from view.
Contrary to this, Thrift sought to alert geographers to the
embodied and performative nature of practice, much of
which subsists prior to reﬂexive or cognitive thought. He
equally sought to overcome epistemological models of
geographical inquiry which maintain dualisms between
theory and practice and thought and action.
Despite its title falling within the auspices of theory,
nonrepresentational theory cannot be considered an
epistemological approach, nor a concomitant social or
cultural explanation; it equally resists solidiﬁcation into a
focus of enquiry which might be added to the canon of
geographical thought (such as globalization or consumption,
for example). At its most bold, nonrepresentational
theory aims to overturn the very
constitution of geographical knowledge production. Rather
than creating an alternative systemic epistemological
and ontological framework, however (which would reinstall
the problem of representational thinking), it does
this through a number of tenets which seek to engage and
present (rather than represent) the undisclosed and
sometimes undisclosable nature of everyday practice.
If nonrepresentational theory is to have a principle,
then it is to conﬁgure geographical thought in the same
way that it conﬁgures life: as a series of inﬁnite ‘ands’
which add to the world rather than extract stable representations
from it. It is for this reason that nonrepresentational
geographies have claimed to be both
ethical and political.
Philosophical Antecedents
The philosophical antecedents of nonrepresentational
theory have been outlined by Thrift and are shown in
Figure 1. It is notable that, in general, geographers have
tended to focus on the continental philosophy tradition:
in particular, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and MerleauPonty,
through to Deleuze (including his collaborative
writings with Guattari), and his inﬂuence on the work of
Latour, Massumi, and Serres. While somewhat counterintuitive
to the nonrepresentational style of thinking, it is
possible to outline three dominant philosophical approaches
which have inﬂuenced nonrepresentational
geographies over the past few years. The ﬁrst is
broadly phenomenological (and includes philosophers
such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein).
1
Heidegger’s phenomenological dwelling perspective
provides a useful starting point for nonrepresentational
geographies. Rather than identifying a ground for
thought (in our minds, or in the world), Heidegger
proposes that we are always already thrown into the
world and inseparable from it. Our immersive practices
of being-in-the-world are, in themselves, disclosive and
we must avoid turning to subjective or objective reasoning
(or representational thought) to account for them.
Merleau-Ponty shifts things slightly through the notion
of the ‘lived body’. Here the disclosive nature of beingin-the-world
is available only through the body and our
bodily competences. It is then down to the later Wittgenstein
to account for the nonsystematic (it cannot be
known in advance) and performative (its rules are only
given in action) play of embodied practice. Taken together
these authors have had a profound inﬂuence on
nonrepresentational ways of thinking in the social sciences
generally, from Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’, and de Certeau’s
‘tactics’, through to John Shotter’s notion of ‘know
how’. The second philosophical approach is neovitalist
(and includes philosophers such as Spinoza, Nietzsche,
Bergson, and their reworking through the collaborations
of Deleuze and Guattari). The philosophy of Deleuze
and Guattari in particular has offered tools for those
geographers who want to escape phenomenology’s
largely human-centered understanding of (embodied)
practice and connect with the impersonal and transversal
forces of the world. Like phenomenology, Deleuze and
Guattari engage with a register that preexists distinctions
between subjects and objects, and things and appearances,
but their philosophy does not begin or end with human
experience or perception. Rather, they seek to overcome
all perspectivism by engaging with a dynamic plane of
immanence in which there are no distinctions between
what things are and what they do. Instead of affections or
perceptions residing in people or objects there are prepersonal
and continually differentiating affects and percepts.
It is for this reason that their philosophy connects
nonrepresentational geographies with recent posthumanist
and more-than-human geographies. Finally, a
third philosophical antecedent ebbs toward post-structuralism
(bearing in mind that some of the most notorious
post-structuralist thinkers – such as Lyotard,
Baudrillard, and Derrida – are absent from Thrift’s original
diagram). Post-structuralism was arguably the theoretical
ﬂavor of the month for geography during the late
1980s and into the 1990s and, although somewhat sidelined
by early nonrepresentational geographies, has been
recently revisited. Two elements of this (re)engagement
stand out. First, and partly as a response to the perceived
antirepresentational stance of nonrepresentational theory,
post-structural philosophers (such as Baudrillard)
have been engaged to offer alternative or complementary
critiques of presentist and representational thinking.
Second, and partly through the inﬂuence of nonrepresentational
theory, post-structuralist philosophers
(such as Derrida) have been repositioned in geography
beyond the realm of texts, signiﬁcation, and representation
and into that of ethics, materiality, and force
relations.
As a whole, the philosophical antecedents to nonrepresentational
theory offer a critique of the bifurcation
between perceivers and worlds found in post-Cartesian
Russia
and
Eastern
Europe
Continental Europe
North
America
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
Shotter
Game Grosz Latour Law
1980s
1960s
1940s
Mead
Deleuze
Goffman
Giddens
Husserl
BenjaminHaraway Butler
Vygotsky
Blumer
Garfinkel
Bergson
Bachelard
Wittgenstein
Heidegger
Merleau-Ponty
deCerteau
Foucault
Irigaray
Bourdieu
Bakhtin
Figure 1 The life-time-lines of nonrepresentational theory. Courtesy of Prof. Doreen Massey.
2 Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies
models of idealism (belief that access to the world is
provided through forms given in our minds) and realism
(belief in an objective world which we should seek to align
with our perceptions); that is, ways of thinking which have
persisted into current representational modes of thought.
Interlocutions
Nonrepresentational theory has emerged amidst wider
theoretical shifts in the humanities and social sciences
generally. Three areas are worthy of speciﬁc attention.
Actor-Network Theory
Emerging in the 1980s, actor-network theory (ANT)
instigated its own critique of representational thought by
focusing on the heterogeneous practices of association,
enrolment, and translation, between humans and nonhumans,
which together engineer worlds. More recently,
ANT has introduced notions of alterity (otherness) to
engage the performativity of these practices and overcome
earlier somewhat ﬂattening actor-network accounts.
The use of alterity here shares some similarities
with nonrepresentational understandings of virtuality.
Like nonrepresentational theory, ANT prioritizes mobile
practices and shares an appreciation for the complexity of
the social world; it equally aims to resist becoming
pigeonholed into a form of social theory. While nonrepresentational
theory draws much from ANT, there are
also some important differences. In particular, as part of
its intent to overcome the residual idealism of representational
thought, ANT instigates a methodological
symmetry between humans and nonhumans. Contrariwise,
although taking an interest in materiality and the
more-than-human, nonrepresentational geographies have
tended to emphasize the expressive practices of human
body-subjects as most indicative of the ﬂow and disruption
of everyday life (a facet which has been disputed
by proponents of ANT).
Performance Studies
The interdisciplinary arena of performance studies subsists
at a productive interface between the performing
arts, the use of performance in everyday life (from dance
and multimedia technologies through to political rallies),
and academic notions of performance and performativity.
Nonrepresentational geographies have drawn much from
the potentialities of this interface. For instance, the performing
arts – in theater but also in forms of street art –
provide a means for nonrepresentational geographers to
witness and expand the realm of now time and conjure
up its potential to create new forms of life. Here the very
performativity of (scripted) artistic performance manifests
the groundless uncertainty and hence potentiality of
the present. Equally, through examples drawn from
experimental and revolutionary theater (such as the
performative social therapies of Fred Newman and Lois
Holzman), nonrepresentational geographies are able to
advance experimental ways of knowing that do not prescribe
outcomes in advance.
The Body and Emotions
Since the 1980s the body has become a well-established
locus for study in the social sciences. Authors have sought
to critique a prevailing Cartesian intellectualism which
creates a dualism between mind (conscious intellect) and
body (matter) and subsequently prioritizes the former.
Calls to attend to the body have not escaped the geographical
imagination: feminist, queer, and health geographies
have all sought to explain how geographical
knowledge is largely disembodied, and have repositioned
the body as an important site of power-knowledge in
contemporary life. Further, and more recently, an ‘emotional
turn’ in the social sciences has sought to overcome
any residual Cartesianism found in rationalist ways of
understanding human bodies – a facet which has given rise
to an emerging subdiscipline of emotional geographies.
With respect to the body, phenomenological approaches in
nonrepresentational theory diverge from the construction
or representation of bodies toward the very ‘being’ of
bodies. Further, neovitalist approaches have shifted the
focus from ‘what is the body?’ toward asking ‘what can a
body do?’ (in its human and inhuman forms); and have
done so by engaging the practices and technologies of
bodily ‘becomings’. These differences also permeate
nonrepresentational geographies’ preference for the term
affect rather than emotion (although the two are sometimes
used interchangeably). While neither nonrepresentational
geographies nor emotional geographies
seek to locate emotions in atomistic, or privatized individuals,
and instead consider them as produced through
relations, emotional geographies have tended to focus on
personal narratives of human emotions (such as depression,
fear, or love) whereas nonrepresentational
geographies have positioned human and inhuman capacities
for affecting and being affected as prior to any
namable emotional states. This dualism between named
emotions and impersonal affects is not a strict one however,
and recent emotional geographies, particularly those
inﬂuenced by the psychoanalytic tradition in geography,
are engaging theories of practice (such as those found in
the therapeutic encounter, for example) to reconﬁgure
relations between affect and emotion.
Main Tenets
Practice
Nonrepresentational theory has also been referred to as a
theory of mobile practices, and it is perhaps its attention
Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies 3
to practice which offers the main challenge to representational
modes of thought; notably, because if practice
is primary then we cannot point to a world amenable to
mental representation beyond those practices constitutive
of it. Practice is not a new focus for geography: attempts
to map everyday practices are evident in the time
geography of Torsten Ha¨gerstrand during the mid-1970s,
and an intention to engage practice – understood as a
primordial structure of the lifeworld which precedes
scientiﬁc enquiry – preoccupied earlier phenomenological
perspectives in humanistic geography, such as that
of John Pickles in the 1980s. Further, an attention to
practice can be allied to the general shift in social and
cultural geography during the 1990s to take everyday
mundane activities seriously. One such recent example
can be found in ethnomethodological approaches, which
seek to engage with everyday ‘talk in action’. The importance
of practice has been taken, by nonrepresentational
geographies, into ﬁve different directions. First,
nonrepresentational geographies position non- or precognitive
practices as primary (and unlike ethnomethodology
pay little attention to conversation
analysis). Unlike earlier phenomenological accounts,
however, they are not interested in eliciting a primordial
reduction but in understanding practice through its historical
(following Bourdieu) and spatial (following de
Certeau) speciﬁcity. Second, practice is not conceived as
the property of individuals with prior intentions but as
dialogical and processual. This means that practices are
responsive and often entail unpredictable, or unintentional,
outcomes. Third, due to their processual
nature, practices as such elude explanation. On the one
hand, this means that nonrepresentational geographies
refuse to reduce practice to a higher-order interpretation;
practice itself is much more attuned to the rhythm and
ﬂow of everyday life than any static understanding can
offer. On the other hand, practice as a way of doing (or
becoming) amidst the ﬂow of everyday life will inevitably
entail gaps in meaning (such that we may reﬂect on
what we do, but we do not know what ‘what we do’ does).
Practice is therefore closely tied to notions of perfomativity.
Fourth, nonrepresentational geographies are
increasingly recognizing that the expressive and experimental
potential of practices, particularly body-practices,
are becoming increasingly valorized in contemporary life
(e.g., through yoga and numerous behavioral therapies).
Finally, an attention to practice not only urges geographers
to attend to everyday life in its doing (and
making) but it also pushes geographers to reﬂect on the
practice of geographical knowledge production, in particular,
on the status of theory. Nonrepresentational
theory as a whole displaces the term theory from its
explanatory role as epistemology and pushes it toward a
much more modest supplement to practice. While nonrepresentational
approaches are notoriously
intellectually rigorous, the use of theory is not sought to
explain or represent but to provide a toolkit to engage
and expand the world.
Everyday Life
Nonrepresentational geographies are concerned with the
practices of everyday life: a popular term which has been
adopted in three related senses. First, authors have focused
on what is most commonly understood as everyday
life – the mundane, oft routinized, humdrum of everyday
living (such as listening to music, dancing, gardening,
walking, and shopping). These activities manifest as
habits which allow us to cope and go on in the world.
Inﬂuenced by the likes of Bourdieu and de Certeau,
nonrepresentational geographies have sought to grasp
these taken-for-granted background practices as embodied
dispositions. Where this work differs is that
practices are not inevitably linked to symbolic orderings
(such as taste in Bourdieu) nor is the potentiality of
everyday life necessarily connected to tactical resistance
amidst wider cultural forces (as with de Certeau). Indeed,
once allied with a renewed interest in performativity, the
taking place of everyday life instigates the routine and
mundane but also improvization, play and, inevitably,
change. This links with a second usage of everyday life in
nonrepresentational geographies; one which seeks to
counter the assumption that it is necessarily profane and
ordinary. By thinking through the virtual realm of
memory, the sacred, and, in its most concrete formations,
bodily practices such as meditation or dance, nonrepresentational
theory seeks to contribute to a (re)enchantment
of everyday life (which runs counter to
Weber’s secular and routinized notion of disenchantment).
Third, the spatiality of everyday life in nonrepresentational
geographies is not simply personal,
individual, or local. Taking cues from Lefebvre’s notion
of ‘everydayness’ through to Deleuze’s ‘virtualities’,
nonrepresentational geographies have sought to engage
with the very life of everyday life; that is, a transversal
force, or an excess, which constitutes the everyday
rhythms of, for example, world cities.
Performance and Performativity
Attention to practice and everyday life is closely tied to
notions of performance and performativity: terms which
have had varied uses in geography since the 1990s.
Whereas early work in geography tended to utilize notions
of performance to describe the scripted routines of
subjects in space, later work turned to Butler’s usage of
performativity to discuss the repetition of discursive
scripts which precede and bring forth (gendered, sexed,
and racialized) subjectivities. While nonrepresentational
geographies have attended to the increasing use of performative
knowledges in everyday life, methodologically
4 Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies
they share most with the second perspective, in particular
Butler’s attention to the iterability of performance.
However, they tend to question her emphasis on signs
and signiﬁcation to account for subjectiﬁcation. Subjectiﬁcation
for nonrepresentational theory is not tied to
relations between subjects and discourse, rather it is just
one possible outcome in a series of irretrievable (i.e., they
cannot be contained) and indeterminate (i.e., they cannot
be wholly known) events. This understanding of performativity
can be linked to two further facets of nonrepresentational
geographies. First, performativity is
constitutive of the ongoing nature of practice. Performativity
is not an act in time, rather it is the spacing
which allows the next moment; it enables the unexpected
and transformative but also the mundane ability to simply
go on. This sense of performativity allows nonrepresentational
geographies to articulate embodied
practice and yet retain its inherent openness amid the
ﬂow of the world. Second, once the world is considered as
productive and processual, then, for academics to become
worthy of the eventful nondiscursive world, it demands a
reﬁgured academic style; one which recognizes that
academic praxis itself is performative. Nonrepresentational
geographies tend to position academic research as
partial, not in the vein of our situatedness, but in the very
encounter or call to attend to the world. To be faithful to
this encounter, nonrepresentational geographies do not
aim to resemble it through academic representations, but
to experiment with the thinking which occurs on the
interstice between thought and practice.
Embodiment and the Body
There are, broadly, three ways that understandings of
embodiment and the body have been engaged with in
nonrepresentational geographies. These can be conceived
as: sensuous and expressive; historical and invested; and
capacitous and affective. First, drawing from Heidegger’s
attention to the disclosive capacities of being and, especially,
Merleau-Ponty’s notion that the lived body is our
vehicle for being-in-the-world, phenomenological approaches
to nonrepresentational theory have focused on
the noncognitive and expressive nature of the human
body-subject. This work singles out the particular potentiality
and capacity of human embodiment (as opposed
to animals and other materialities) but has
nevertheless sought to dismiss any residual humanism or
intentionality by emphasizing that embodiment is infolded
through joint body-practices with other beings
and other objects. Furthermore, when combined with
notions of performativity, being is bypassed in preference
for the openness of becoming. Second, more historically
attuned nonrepresentational geographies have sought to
highlight that investment in the capacities of human
bodies is part of an ongoing project of biopower which
has shifted from Foucault’s original formation – as the
investment and management of the vital characteristics of
human populations – toward the vital characteristics of
life itself. Here bodies are not disciplined subjects but
molecularized virtualities. Third, and sharing tenets with
the second, nonrepresentational geographies have turned
to the notion of affect as a way of expressing the force and
capacities of (human) bodies. Although affect as a term
traverses psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry, the
philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari gives nonrepresentational
geographies an understanding of the
body as deﬁned by the affects of which it is capable.
Through the notion of affect, bodily dispositions such as
joy, boredom, and despair are wrenched from cognitive,
atomistic, or strictly emotional understandings and into
ethological encounters. Bodies here are not organs or
functions (as in the causal analyses of etiology) but
modes of speeds and slowness, and capacities for affecting
and being affected, which never reside in things as such.
Virtuality and Multiplicity (Time and Space)
Nonrepresentational geographies are concerned with
everyday practices, yet they seek to avoid any recuperation
of these into strictly empiricist or modernist
understandings – such as those accounts that conceive
the goings on of the social world through a ﬁxed viewpoint
with the intention of describing pure movement.
Following earlier calls for relational understandings of
time and space, nonrepresentational geographies acknowledge
the coexistence of a multiplicity of time–
spaces. Where they make a distinct contribution to these
ideas is that they engage the effective groundlessness of
this multiplicity, in particular through adopting a quasiDeleuzian
understanding of virtuality. The concept of
virtuality does not entail a real world in which there are
(virtual) possibilities, nor does it conﬁgure the possibilities
which might manifest in a real world (in which
case the real resembles the possible and does not consider
the event of change). Virtualities are different from
possibilities in that they are in every sense real but not
always actualized. They do not settle in beings or things
and can be described as the continuously differentiating
relations between forces prior to any actualization. In one
sense they are like a variable push or an outside that
envelopes the forces which make worlds; and the combination
of forces always changes. This notion of the
virtual points to an intensive and formless multiplicity
(through the groundless depth of virtuality) rather than
simply an extensive multiplicity (through the depthless
and timeless extension of relations), which is found in
some network and relational accounts of space.
Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies 5
Implications
Nonrepresentational theory is both a methodology and a
(political) practice (or, a practical poetics), inasmuch as it
seeks to reconﬁgure both what it means to do research
and to be political.
Research Methods
Nonrepresentational thinking tends toward an academic
style which seeks to describe and present rather than
diagnose and represent. Its ethos of generosity castes a
shadow on much of the methodological toolkit available
for geographical ﬁeldwork (in particular: in-depth interviews,
focus groups, and participant observation which
each accentuate contemplative and interpretive modes of
thought). Still, there is no method as such for nonrepresentational
research, nor has there been much sustained
engagement as to how nonrepresentational theory
might reconﬁgure the collection of ﬁeldwork. Indeed, it is
questionable how far nonrepresentational geographies
can really shift the inherent perspectivism and epistemological
commitment of ﬁeld data collection techniques.
Nevertheless, nonrepresentational geographies do
seek to harness and experiment with the mainstay of
qualitative research methods (notably ethnography and
participant observation but also diaries and in-depth
interviewing), developing approaches such as ‘observant
participation’ and ‘performative ethnography’. Further,
the drive to acknowledge the research process itself as
performative ranges from philosophical speculation on
the particular call to witness the geographical world,
through to, in its practical incarnation, an acknowledgment
of the co-fabrication of the research encounter that
inevitably creates something new (a facet shared with
recent posthumanist and more-than-human geographies).
Finally, the presentation of nonrepresentational research
has adopted performative and experimental writing styles
which seek to present either something of the ephemeral
nature of everyday practice or the potential of performative
writing itself. The use of montage (which
juxtaposes different research methods that inhabit different
time-spaces), for example, has been sought to
address the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational
world.
Politics and Ethics
Nonrepresentational geographies have engaged with
three senses of the political. First, they have positioned
affect as central to individual and collective political
dispositions, and as an important trope for contemporary
forms of governing. Approaches here range from engaging
the affective circulation of fear during the War on
Terror, to an awareness that a therapeutic ethos has become
an important tenet for governing in the West.
Second, nonrepresentational geographies have advanced
a politics of hope which seeks to retrieve hope from its
grounding in utopianism and into the realm of the ‘not
yet’. Finally, nonrepresentational geographies have
sought to rework what constitutes the political and what
it means to be political. As this approach encompasses the
previous two, it will be focused upon, here. Nonrepresentational
geographies do not take the available
spaces for political enunciation as given (such as that of
pressure groups or policy relevant research); neither,
however, do they retreat into restoring a ‘true’ ground for
the political (e.g., the Greek polis). Rather, they are concerned
with cultivating political spaces through an
awareness of the openness of the present time. This follows
from the notion that political and ethical dispositions
do not proceed from the cognitive facilities of
human beings but exist beyond conscious thought (we
rarely, for example, consult moral codes in order to act
ethically). Rather than consider this an impediment to
political action, nonrepresentational theory seeks to
harness its productive potential. On the one hand,
through a politics of disclosure, not for authenticity, but
for the creative potentials of the precognitive realm (by
engaging with numerous body-practices and the performance
arts, for instance). On the other hand, and in its
more Deleuzian incarnation, this disclosure moves
toward a politics of witnessing; a form of attunement
which seeks to open up geographical and political
thought to the unfolding (and sometimes wonder and
enchantment) of the world. These approaches are, no
doubt, risky and experimental (i.e., one cannot prescribe
in advance the outcome), but not unproductive (i.e.,
something happens which might create new forms of
life). In brief, politics and ethics are pulled away from
judgment and universals, not simply as a matter of
principle but because political and ethical dispositions
exist on multiple (affective, emotional, anticipatory,
precognitive, technological, molecular) registers which
have thus far been neglected in much of political theory.
Current Imbrications and Challenges
Reception and Critique
Although in principle nonrepresentational theory seeks
to avoid becoming a subdiscipline, the project initiated by
Thrift has certainly fashioned a niche in the academy for
likeminded geographers, or fellow travelers, who are
advancing and expanding its central tenets. At present a
handful of (largely UK based) geographers might be labeled
as nonrepresentational, and several others (interested
in post-structuralism, (post)phenomenology, and
more-than-human geographies) strongly intersect with
many of its themes. The key motif of nonrepresentational
theory however – to overcome the ‘dead’ geographies of
6 Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies
representation – has (perhaps unsurprisingly) also been
received with ambivalence, critique, and, occasionally,
outright annoyance. These engagements vary but can be
summarized by three main concerns: ﬁrst, a neglect of the
importance of representation; second, the denial of power
and power geometries; ﬁnally, and drawing on the previous
concerns, the forgetting of gender and/or sexual
difference.
The ﬁrst critique suggests that, although representation
occludes much from view, many people actively
(seek to) represent. Further, as the history of subaltern
politics tells us, representing is a very effective political
tactic. This critique has emerged in response to a perceived
tendency of nonrepresentational theory to set itself
up as positive alternative (i.e., what we might have) to
programmatic and representational politics (i.e., what we
have got) which, in itself, is a programmatic gesture. Yet,
the ethos of nonrepresentational theory also asserts that
there is not really a choice between representation and
nonrepresentation, there are only singular presentations.
Indeed, even a seemingly representative political gesture
(such as the broadcasting of a presidential speech) incorporates
a whole array of presubjective and inhuman
affects. Still, it is partly in light of this critique that
nonrepresentational geographies have recently adopted
the term ‘more than representational’.
Second, authors have critiqued the retreat from discourse
and power toward practice and affect. They have
also questioned the emphasis on expressive forms of
embodiment which makes it difﬁcult to account for what
appear as relatively stable, sometimes restrictive, bodily
practices (especially those that are connected to wider
imperatives, such as gender roles or nation building, for
example). By way of response, the geographer, Derek
McCormack, has offered a kind of Deleuzian inversion of
Foucault – by which the forces to affect and to be affected
precede, and exceed, any stratiﬁed formations of
power-knowledge. Here, the largely ineffable virtual
realm can actualize into diagrams. These diagrams are
not plans, nor ideas, but a spatiotemporal consistency that
holds forces to affect and be affected together. Although
compelling, this approach does not address the racialized,
gendered, and sexualized dimensions of this affective
stability, and is unlikely to satisfy those concerned with
this occlusion.
Finally, feminist critiques have suggested that nonrepresentational
theory has a tendency to invert the very
dualisms it seeks to overcome – mind/body, representational/nonrepresentational,
thought/practice – and it is
somewhat ironically able to do this through a disembodied
stance (preferring abstract discussions of affect
over emotion, and being rather than sexed being, for
example). Feminist geographies and nonrepresentational
theory share some familiar territory in geography (in
particular an interest in performativity, the body and,
more recently, emotions and bodily biotechnologies) and
it is perhaps this shared territory which has provoked
most debate between the ﬁelds. While nonrepresentational
theory has a certain indebtedness to feminist
theory (and, if the above arguments are followed, perhaps
even a debt to the feminine), and while feminist theorists
(such as Colebrook, Braidotti, and Grosz) have engaged
with nonrepresentational philosophers such as Deleuze,
nonrepresentational theory in geography has yet to address
issues of sexual difference. This is, in part, due to its
desire to avoid discursive or psychical understandings of
the body-subject. It also points to nonrepresentational
geographies’ preferred Deleuzian approach to difference
‘in itself ’ rather than feminist geographers’ engagement
and deconstruction of difference ‘between’ (male/female,
masculine/feminine, man/woman). Indeed, whether
issues of sexual difference can be incorporated into the
nonrepresentational ethos as it currently stands in
geography, or whether nonrepresentational geographies
might reconﬁgure feminist geographies’ understandings
of gendered and sexed bodies is, thus far, a largely undiscovered
terrain.
Passivity and the Nonrelational
Recent engagements, which have emerged from within
nonrepresentational geographies, have sought to interrupt
its propensity toward the active, expressive, and/or
otherwise affective nature of (embodied) experience. Paul
Harrison has introduced notions of passivity and the
nonrelational to counter the imperative for nonrepresentational
geographies to always instill an afﬁrmative
will to connect, relate, and become. He uses the
example of mental or physical pain – a nonintentional
state we can only bear or endure – to conceive of a
passivity which cannot be subsumed into relation, but is
simultaneously its condition of (im)possibility. Whether
the nonrelational will be absorbed into the grammar of
nonrepresentational theory or whether it offers an alternative
(post)phenomenological path followed by
authors such as Agamben, Blanchot, Derrida, LacoueLabarthe,
Levinas, and Nancy, is in the process of being
explored.
See also: Actor-network theory/network geographies;
Affect; Becoming; Body, the; Dwelling; Emotional
geographies; Performance; Performativity.
Further Reading
Anderson, B. (2004). Time-stilled spaced-slowed: How boredom
matters. Geoforum 35, 739--754.
Dewsbury, J. D. (2000). Performativity and the event: Enacting a
philosophy of difference. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 18, 473--496.
Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies 7
Dewsbury, J. D., Harrison, P., Rose, M. and Wylie, J. (2002). Enacting
geographies. Geoforum 33, 437--440.
Harrison, P. (2000). Making sense: Embodiment and the sensibilities of
the everyday. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18,
497--518.
Harrison, P. (2007). ‘How shall I say it y ?’ Relating the non-relational.
Environment and Planning A 39, 590--608.
Latham, A. (2003). Research, performance, and doing human
geography: Some reﬂections on the diary-photograph, diaryinterview
method. Environment and Planning A 35, 1993--2017.
Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: The busyness of being ‘morethan-representational’.
Progress in Human Geography 29, 83--94.
McCormack, D. (2005). Diagramming practice and performance.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, 119--148.
Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial Formations. London: Sage.
Thrift, N. (1997). The still point: Resistance, expressive embodiment
and dance. In Pile, S. & Keith, M. (eds.) Geographies of Resistance,
pp 124--151. London: Routledge.
Thrift, N. (2000). Afterwords. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 18, 213--255.
Thrift, N. (2004). Summoning life. In Cloke, P., Crang, P. & Goodwin, M.
(eds.) Envisioning Human Geographies, pp 81--103. London:
Arnold.
Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of
affect. Geograﬁska Annaler 86B, 57--78.
Thrift, N. and Dewsbury, J.-D. (2000). Dead geographies and how to
make them live. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18,
411--432.
Wylie, J. (2006). Depths and folds: On landscape and the gazing
subject. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24,
519--535.
8 Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies