Progress in Human Geography 29, 1 (2005) pp. 83–94
© 2005 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/0309132505ph531pr
I Parameters, definitions and themes
This is the first of three reports I will write covering
an emergent area of research in cultural
geography and its cognate fields. During recent
years, ‘non-representational theory’ has
become as an umbrella term for diverse work
that seeks better to cope with our self-evidently
more-than-human, more-than-textual,
multisensual worlds. In as much as nonrepresentational
work allows it, these reports
will sketch out common themes of interest,
and assess impacts, critics and potentials,
variously conceptual, methodological and
empirical.
Of late, non-representational theorists
have asked difficult and provocative questions
of cultural geographers, and many others in
the discipline, about what is intended by the
conduct of research (Thrift and Dewsbury,
2000). What has been identified as deadening
effect – the tendency for cultural analyses to
cleave towards a conservative, categorical
politics of identity and textual meaning – can,
it is contended, be overcome by allowing in
much more of the excessive and transient
aspects of living. Given the scope and force
of the original non-representational arguments,
it is unsurprising that this theory
has been subject to fulsome response. In fact,
non-representational theory has become a
particularly effective lightning-rod for
disciplinary self-critique. Commentaries have
emerged from within cultural, feminist and
Marxian traditions and the more recent
coalition of critical geography. Notably,
and anecdotally, some of the most colourful
observations have been saved for bi-partisan
conversation in the conference or common
room. It is important (not to say appropriate)
that the nature of the dialogue – variously
confrontational, tribal, dogmatic, peevish and
full-bodied – goes on record early. Published
versions have been concerned predominantly
with the theoretical conditions for disciplinary
succession or progression that the term
‘non-representational’ would seem to imply
and how, in relation, the concept of performance
should be understood by geographers.
These articles are variously structured as
manifesto, critical review, restated challenge,
revanchist programme and proposed reconciliation
(Thrift, 1996; 1997; 2000; Nelson,
1999; Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000; Nash,
2000; Harrison, 2000; Gregson and Rose,
2000; Crouch, 2001; Dewsbury et al., 2002;
Whatmore, 2002; Cresswell, 2002; Smith,
2003; Jacobs and Nash, 2003; Latham,
2003a; Castree and MacMillan, 2004).1
In this report, I would like to treat the
flourishing theoretical debate as a significant
Cultural geography: the busyness
of being ‘more-than-representational’
Hayden Lorimer
Department of Geography and Geomatics, University of Glasgow,
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
84 Cultural geography
point of departure. Consequently, it is not my
ambition to unravel respective philosophical
favours and worries from reference lists
that regularly feature the likes of Serres,
de Certeau, Latour, Butler, Grosz, Game,
Goffman, Haraway, Massumi, Katz,
Merleau-Ponty, Ingold, Stengers, Levinas,
Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari. To do
so would very likely bore the most devoted
and risk baffling the uninitiated. As far as
possible, I also hope to avoid the kind of
tantalizing language and densely iterative
reasoning that too seldom offers a welcome
to the higher education teacher, or student,
enthusiastic to find out more. Rest assured,
non-representational writing can be wilfully
restless in character – or ‘purposefully immature
... to throw off some of the weight of
“adult” expectations, by privileging renewal
and challenging limits’ (Thrift, 2004: 84) –
and thus tricky to pin down. Authors range
across poststructuralism, performance studies,
science and technology studies, feminist
theory, anthropology, phenomenology and
ethno-inquiries in search of ideas. This
diverse literature has left a wash of influence,
though contrary to certain reports has not
left the discipline awash (Hamnett, 2003).
My hope is that this report opens out the
non-representational scene to geographers,
rather than tries to police it or render it too
programmatic.
Admittedly, these prefatory statements
and decisions on terms of reference do not
fully resolve the pressing issue of definition.
An alteration to the chosen title might help
for starters. I prefer to think of ‘more-thanrepresentational’
geography, the teleology of
the original ‘non-’ title having proven an
unfortunate hindrance. It is reasonable to
expect an explanation of what that ‘more
than’ might include. To summarize lots of
complex statements as simply as possible, it is
multifarious, open encounters in the realm of
practice that matter most. Greatest unity is
found in an insistence on expanding our once
comfortable understanding of ‘the social’
and how it can be regarded as something
researchable. This often means thinking
through locally formative interventions in the
world. At first, the phenomena in question
may seem remarkable only by their apparent
insignificance. The focus falls on how life
takes shape and gains expression in shared
experiences, everyday routines, fleeting
encounters, embodied movements, precognitive
triggers, practical skills, affective
intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional
interactions and sensuous dispositions.
Attention to these kinds of expression, it is
contended, offers an escape from the established
academic habit of striving to uncover
meanings and values that apparently await
our discovery, interpretation, judgement and
ultimate representation. In short, so much
ordinary action gives no advance notice of
what it will become. Yet, it still makes critical
differences to our experiences of space and
place (Thrift, 2004).
If a necessary shift beyond bold statements
of intent has taken some time, there is now
plentiful evidence of ‘more-than-representational’thinking
being put to work, taken places
and resurfacing in unexpected forms. These
are busy, empirical commitments to doings
near-at-hand, in ordinary and professional
settings, and through material encounters
(Jackson, 2000; Philo, 2000; Kearns, 2003).
Being indicative of the operational properties
of a new body of theory, this busyness is
the focus of my reporting that follows. The
research reviewed is organized into three
themed – and sited – sections: Gardens,
Home and Work. Concluding comments turn
to the casting of emotion in cultural geography.
The majority of literature cited dates
from 2002 onwards but, given the need to set
out a new Report subject area, I have trawled
backwards a little more freely than might be
the norm.
II Reaching out – gardens
The now well-established critique of ‘representationalism’
– signature theory of cultural
geography’s landscape school – is that it
framed, fixed and rendered inert all that
Hayden Lorimer 85
ought to be most lively (Rose, 2002; Wylie,
2002a; 2002b).2 More still, the reading and
seeing of landscape-as-text was a limiting
perspectival expression of social constructivism.3
For Cresswell (an interested sceptic
of the non-representational scene) the exclusivity
of such landscape inquiry has had
specific ideological impacts: where study
might be made more meaningful, popular and
political through a closer engagement with
practice, it has instead been closed down
‘into a rarified realm of art and gardens’
(2003: 279). While these omissions demand
attention, the actual site into which the
criticism is inserted has already escaped any
such fixing. Recent work that animates
embodied acts of landscaping is situated in
exactly such manicured, husbanded and
domesticated settings: namely, the smallholding
(Holloway, 2002), the allotment
(Crouch, 2003a; DeSilvey, 2003), the back
garden (Hitchings, 2003), community forest
(Mackenzie, 2002), community garden
(Paddison and Sharp, 2005), the local park
(Laurier et al., 2005), the orchard, the copse
and the tree-lined street (Cloke and Jones,
2002).4 In each, ‘green space’ becomes a
practised formation of living: a setting for
hard graft, and the artistries and industries
of cultivation. Here, the hobby farmer, the
plotter, the vegetable grower, the artist, the
dog-walker, the dog, the human rambler
and the fruit harvester are encountered in
passionate, intimate and material relationships
with the soil, and the grass, plants and
trees that take root there.These garden studies
set out to make sense of the ecologies of
place created by actions and processes, rather
than the place portrayed by the end product.
If only a partial (and less-than-global)
response to Whatmore’s (2003) recent plea
for cultural geographers to get all agrarian
and dirty-handed, this literature does amount
to more than a rediscovery of old disciplinary
field boundaries marking agricultural and
leisure geographies. Consequently, the performance
and politics of geography’s latest
turn earthwards merits closer scrutiny.
David Crouch’s work on the British
allotment movement has its own heritage
(Crouch and Ward, 1988; Crouch, 1989), and
has become a renewable research resource
(2003a; 2003b). As much as the allotment is
a setting for encountering practical skills and
ordinary acts, it has also become a place
where emerging theoretical ideas can be
thoroughly worked over, shadowing the cyclical
effort of digging up, mulching and planting.
For a crop of new potatoes read non-representational
theory. Crouch’s horticultures do
not come prefigured. For him, creativity and
texture are most compelling and expressive as
they emerge in practice (or at least during
people’s descriptions of practice). In the ‘lay
geographies’ of the allotment he discloses
how the repetitive doing of things is affirmative
of, and can impel, a powerful sense of
being, or ‘practical ontology’ (2003a: 18).
Terrestrial activities on the vegetable patch
offer access to metaphysical concerns, not
least the spatialities of doing and the sensuous
nature of becoming. Crouch explores how far
versions of ritualized and habitual performance
allow for the openness in conduct and
unexpected potentials in our performativities,
and how the unremarkable labour and physical
proximities of gardening can have a
remarkable currency for the individual subject,
allowing for periods of ease in life where
we ‘hold on’, and moments when we reach
out and ‘go further’ (2003b). For their part,
Hitchings (2003) and Cloke and Jones (2002)
are more obviously attentive to the intimacies
and intersubjectivities shared between plants,
trees and people. These entangled relationships,
that are found to incorporate love, care,
need and (commercial) demand, are also a
means to consider place-making agencies and
therapeutic feelings of dwelling. Such material
affinities are not always within touching
distance. In participative work with diasporic
communities Carvalho and Tolia-Kelly (2001)
show how it is the remembered feel of, as
well as ‘picturable’ feelings for, a cultivated
landscape that continue to matter, however
remote.
Geographers are only too aware that
finding a plot of ground likely to yield either
food or flowers is very often about more than
structures of feeling. Historically, securing the
right to produce has been tied to visions of
material progress (Tuan, 2002), based on a
radical politics of protest and community
action (Howkins, 2002), forestalled by
exploitative, embodied regimes of colonial
control (Duncan, 2002), and in specific
instances enabled by state intervention as a
route towards moral and physical improvement
(Linehan and Gruffudd, 2004).
Foregrounding the destructive body politics
of fruit harvesting in California, Mitchell
(2003a) connects his own family’s privileged
domesticity to the material difficulties
endured by others to simply ‘get by’ in life; all
of which would seem geographically distant
and qualitatively different from the well-being
(or affect) of ‘holding on’ and the exuberant
joys of ‘going further’. Yet, just as the experience
of physical effort does not fall neatly into
opposing registers of pleasure or pain, the two
realms of research are not irreconcilable.
Through the conjunction of political and
personal plots in the past and the present,
DeSilvey (2001; 2003) builds a narrative of
allotment communities in Edinburgh. Here,
archival finds, potting-shed ethnography, real
cultivating, life history and advocacy efforts
in a Scottish Parliamentary allotment inquiry
are deployed to achieve corresponding political,
academic and individual outcomes.
Similarly, Crouch and Parker (2003) consider
the recent mobilization of an embodied
micropolitics where a specifically English
heritage of ‘digging’ and lay identity of ‘the
Digger’ is resurrected as a resistant tactic
in struggles over land use.5 Elsewhere,
Hinchliffe et al. (2005; see also Whatmore
and Hinchliffe, 2003) lead a tour of former
city allotments and industrial land that are
now corridors and islands of wild nature, and
where humans and nonhumans are enrolled
in habitat conservation. Here, the disuse, and
possible misuse, of threatened urban environments
are a reason to act up for a new
political science, and a means to do justice
through experiments in ‘cosmopolitics’.
Through modest engagement such
contributions consciously reach out to other
(non-academic, non-human) communities, and
in so doing gesture towards an emancipatory
potential in the geographical turn towards
earthy practice and its spacings of performance.
For Cresswell (2002; 2003) – keen to
splice non-representational argument with the
structurings of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond
Williams – and Szerszynski (2003) – who
finds in Hannah Arendt’s writings on labour,
work and action a useful resource to rethink
the ecological imperatives of performance –
such work will probably communicate a
desirable brand of critical, earthly activism.
III Coming back – home
In everyday life, the journey from garden to
home is a short and convenient one; similarly
so in recent geographical research. Amid the
juggling of domestic living, cultural geographers
are finding an ideal environment to
better understand the habitual practices,
intuitive acts and social protocols that draw
together humans, objects and technologies.
Or, what after science and technology studies
we now confidently refer to as ‘relational
materialities’, and thanks to a resurgent interest
in phenomenology know as multisensual
engagements. In different measure, these
cultural geographies carve out extrarepresentational
forms of address by focusing on the
material agencies, (dis)orders and previously
marginalized presences of the home. The
imperative placed on researching homely
formations of immediacy is apparent in
Tuan’s (2004: 165) description of how belonging
happens: ‘Home that can be directly
experienced – not just seen, but heard,
smelled, and touched – is necessarily a small
and intimate world. It is this direct experience
that gives home its power to elicit strong
emotional response.’ Unsurprisingly, there is
no ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy for accessing
embodied knowledge and emotional response.
The rediscovery of the senses, and the line of
86 Cultural geography
critique aimed at geography’s once prevailing
visualism, is routed through contrasting
theoretical literatures. Following Miller’s
(2001) edited collection on the material cultures
of domestic settings, ethnography has been a
unifying force, although promising research is
sometimes flattened by pro-forma social science
treatment of interview transcripts.
Whereas soundscapes of the city can be
made mobile and go public thanks to multimedia
technologies (Bull, 2000; DeNora, 2000),
Anderson (2004a) examines how at home
the act of listening to recorded music is sometimes
bound to the shifting temporalities of
memory. We hear how music is an effective
medium to orchestrate personal remembering
and an affective one when – without warning
or preprogramming – it renders us speechless,
charges our body or transports us somewhere
else. Of course, one person’s inspirational
soundtrack can be another’s hellish racket,
especially when heard through an adjoining
wall. Bijsterveld (2003) reveals the difficulties
that emerge in negotiating conditions for
‘appropriate’ domestic noise and good neighbourliness
in the modern city. In Law’s (2001)
work on migrant Filipino women in Hong
Kong’s domestic labour economy, it is sharing
in the taste, smell and texture of food that
offers comforting reminders of home and
bonds of friendship. However, the practice of
food preparation, its odours and eventual
consumption in public spaces also offer
grounds for ethnic discrimination and a
contested urban geography. To such new
‘-scapings’ of ear, mouth and nose (Thrift,
2003a), Hetherington (2003) adds the sort of
tactile competencies we employ when making
ourselves comfortable indoors, and can thus
all too easily overlook. Recalling Bachelard’s
classic phenomenology of corridors, rooms
and corners – ‘Whereas we enter our houses
through the front door, we enter our
homes through our slippers’ (2003: 1939) –
Hetherington presents the touchingly familiar
as a performed way of knowing and as an
encounter with praesentia (the confirmation
felt in the movement, shape or absence of an
Other). Relatedly, Rose (2003) and Chambers
(2003) investigate how family photographs
are powerful prompts for feelings of
proximity, togetherness, order and a gathering-in
of those not present. Examining how
women arrange, store, view and care for their
family snaps as household objects (rather than
texts), Rose decentres (but does not relegate)
vision in the spacing of ‘homeliness’.
Like Anderson, she finds in Barthes’ concept
of punctum a persuasive explanation for the
‘affective intensities’ – or emotional surges –
of memory. A cross-section of other work
shows how feelings of belonging are experienced
as both sited and mobile, variously
hinging on: the objectness of photographs
(Edwards and Hart, 2004), a community art
project (Mackenzie, 2004), nostalgia felt for
acts of home-making abroad (Blunt, 2003),
the storytelling possibilities latent in surviving
personal effects (Dylser, 2003) and the lived
spaces of the caravan as a home-away-fromhome
(Crouch, 2001). Less public and more
practice-orientated than earlier ‘memorywork’
in cultural geography, this literature
takes its steer from the complex, personal and
affirmative workings of bodies and emotions.
Introducing a home-themed issue of
Cultural Geographies, Blunt and Varley (2004)
stress how a devotion to the hearth is often
founded on gendered performances of
domesticity. Dohmen (2003), one of the issue
contributors, considers how anthropological
treatments of women’s threshold designs in
south India have been attentive to artistic
rituals of production (for comparable performance
work in north India, see Nagar,
2002). Dohmen’s fieldwork-based analysis of
the acts of drawing and observing ‘home’ at
ground level on the street (as opposed to a
deciphering of the Kolam designs themselves)
explains Tamil attitudes to womanliness and
to well-being in the world.6 In the western
household, effective home-making is most
often an exercise in carefully sealing off
the outdoors and keeping ‘everything in its
place’. By focusing on the repetitive everyday
chores undertaken by women to create
Hayden Lorimer 87
corresponding regimes of family orderliness,
cleanliness and care, Helen Watkins (2004)
carefully unpicks the moral economies of
domesticity. Seemingly mundane in execution,
the performance of housework requires
repeated adjustments to organizing systems,
an intimate knowledge of the microspaces of
domestic appliances, such as the refrigerator,
and negotiated traffickings between the
realms of disposable objects and meaningful
possessions (Watkins, 2003). Tellingly, it was
during the domestic dramas of moving house
that Jacobs (2003) rediscovered and then
revived the shelf-life of Home rules (Wood
and Beck, 1994), a book that explores how
domestic sociality is constituted as a world
of things in a room. Thankfully, as yet no
clear line exists between research pressing
performative and relational theories into
the service of gentle celebration or resistant
politics. However, care must be taken that, in
pointing up diverse assemblages of objects,
technologies and practices, what emerges is
not simply a smear of equivalence. Claims
made for the flattened and radically symmetrical
ontologies of actor-network theory have
recently met with calls for closer attention
to conditions of ontological dissonance and
ethical redistribution (Pels et al., 2002;
Vandenberghe, 2002).
Rather than the familiar feel of an
emotional hearth, home can be differently
experienced as a place of retreat and
entrapment. Drawing on research with
women who suffer from agoraphobia, Bankey
(2001) and Davidson (2003a) present troubling
accounts of anxious, embodied affect.
Davidson’s (2003b) recent phenomenology of
complex and individually experienced phobias
reveals how feelings of losing control of the
bounded self, and the prospect of social
encounters in ‘open’ space, can make domestic
sensations of enclosure, privacy, shade and
darkness necessary for tolerable living. When
inner and outer states blur, the local
reorganization of home can be therapy for
coping with feelings of‘not-being-at-home’in
the world.7
IV Moving about – work
The shifting spaces and mobile places
incorporating our working lives have been
the subject of increased attention among
researchers committed to making social relations
a more-than-representational concern.
These new cultural-social studies of work
follow a very different lineage – but are not
entirely divorced – from geography’s more
established traditions of inquiry in social
reproduction, local labour markets and
regional restructuring. By paying close attention
to the ‘being of business’, technology,
transport, the (re)ordering of space, new
communications media, practising bodies and
foodstuffs are drawn together in nonlinear
relationships (Brown et al., 2001; Valentine,
2002; Esbjörnsson and Vesterlind, 2003).
Here, familiar phenomena take shape through
locally situated practice. Thus, the region
becomes an entity that is daily and hourly
articulated in-and-out-of the boot of a
salesperson’s car (Laurier and Philo, 2003).The
organization is an entity spaced and peopled
voluntarily, and is dependent on the creation
of an aura of support and co-dependence
(Conradson, 2003). The location of power
outlets on public transport, and personal
workspace in a leisure setting, are pressing
‘office’ concerns for the mobile service
worker (Brown and O’Hara, 2003). The culture
industry is a loose affiliation of like minds
who share the same postcode, lifestyle and
taste in coffee (Latham, 2003b; see also
Gibson, 2003). Together these studies pick
out different logics of scale and location, and
promise to disclose new topologies of circulation,
connection and mobility in everyday
working practice (Callon and Law, 2004;
Urry, 2004).
This work draws on science and technology
studies, finds favour with key tenets of
non-representational theory, and in certain
instances extends established research traditions
in ethnomethodology and conversational
analysis. Here, the sociological works of
Garfinkel, Sacks, Lynch, Suchman and
Goffman are metric standards. Helpfully,
88 Cultural geography
Laurier (2003) offers a ‘Q and A’ guide to the
corpus and with it the simplest injunction for
research conduct: follow people and objects
in action and as they move.The ethno-inquiries
he introduces are based on programmes of
mobile field study and the thickest, anatomical
descriptions of doing. Thus, Ueno and
Kawatoko (2003) use machine histories
and technicians’ information to reveal the
sociotechnological space of a knowledge network,
and Ikeya (2003) demonstrates how
mobility is managed through the locational
technologies of an emergency medical system.
Once encountered in this methodical
way, work becomes a practical accomplishment
based on repertoires of closely
connected and highly skilled actions: talking,
driving, phoning, organizing, scheduling, navigating
and eating. In concentrated or diluted
form, ethnomethodological accounts might
not be to everyone’s tastes. Critically, in their
attention to ‘counting, measuring, evaluating
and decision-making as it actually occurs,
rather than looking with a clever coding
matrix already in hand for the‘interesting’bits
of fieldwork that seem to fit the code’
(Laurier and Philo, 2003: 90–91), they do
offer geographers a radical understanding of
the metrology used by ordinary ‘members’ to
make sense of myriad spaces of practice in
ordinary life.
In so far as doing is a core concern for
more-than-representational geographers,
creativity in research design and method still
needs to be unshackled (see also Crang,
2003; Thrift, 2000). Perhaps the concern is
that experimentalism during data collection
will be emasculated by established codes for
the‘proper’representation of research in publication.
If so, developments such as Cultural
Geographies’ regular ‘In Practice’ slot offer a
welcome home for less conformist reporting.
Latham (2003b) is similarly anxious that people
try to push research methods out in new
directions. Offering a lead, he revives and
reworks the diary-photograph and diaryinterview
to ‘get at’ and write up flows of
transient, street-level experiences during
everyday work and relaxation (2003a).
Questions of what momentary experiences
look like, and of how meaning (or
incoherence) open out into narrative, are also
Edensor’s (2003) concern in a series of
compelling photo-essays. The ruined industrial
sites he has photographed exceed a visual
aesthetic to suggest an invisible record of
co-presences, uncanny encounters and
forgotten regimes of work.
V Concluding remarks – casting
emotion
In drawing this report to a close, I want briefly
to consider two ways in which a reconvening
of geography’s social and cultural communities
is taking performative research on travels
elsewhere. First, a few words on continuing
efforts to demonstrate how the body is still
something we each live through differently.
Having drawn attention to the fleshiness and
pliability of bodies that unsettle the spacings
and extend the scope of ‘the subject’,
Longhurst (2001; 2003; see also Jacobs and
Nash, 2003) has argued for somatic research
that remains attuned to different shadings of
subjectivity and identity. Notably, it is the
insistences of just such a cultural-feminist
programme that has nudged the more-thanrepresentational
debate out of a predominantly
white, western orbit. Gender, transnational
and ethnic identities (Mahtani, 2002; Hyams,
2002; Lahiri, 2003), issues of dis/enablement,
the exercising of power and social position
(Houston and Pulido, 2002; Routledge, 2002;
Haller, 2003) are familiar knotty issues that
geographers are now finding ways of
recasting, and intervening in, through a
critical engagement with ideas of performance
as variously choreographed, citational or
improvisational.
Secondly, and a touch more speculatively,
it is timely to think on extending significant
‘other’ alignments of theory in geography’s
emerging corpus of work on minds and bodies.
Phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism
and social interactionism are already being
drawn together in productive inquiries focusing
Hayden Lorimer 89
on issues of gender, mental health, care, wellbeing
and embodiment. In a review of this
field, Philo and Parr (2003) note that until
recently contemplating the ‘unconscious’ has
been an unsettling experience for most
geographers. This caution and scepticism
when faced with individual psychosocial
experience is not so different from the guarded
reception that subject-centred experiential
exercises in non-representational geography
continue to be met with. Personally, Thrift
finds no such impasse. Even if his ‘underworld’
of affect is less obviously indebted to,
or directed toward, circles of psychoanalytical
debate it still:
shows up preformed before any action takes
place. Equivalent to all the paratextual
apparatuses that are the basic format of the
act of reading, this historically sedimented
‘unconscious’ ranges all the way from the
simple facts of how we measure the world so
as to ensure that we are in the right place at
the right time to the way that our bodies are
fired up by body disciplines often learnt in
childhood and which push us in particular ways
even before cognition has had its say. (Thrift,
2003b: 2020)
It is in an affective realm of ‘wild new
imaginaries’, emerging from repertoires of
sensation and emotion, that Thrift finds
grounds for a joyful optimism of will, and the
promise of an alternative politics of generosity,
respect and readiness: ‘Can we form a
new uncommon sense? Can we produce new
sequences of strange and charmed? Can we
form new maps of together?’ (Thrift, 2004).
The vision that beckons is breathtaking: likely
to leave the traditionally schooled geographer
blinking and flinching. The promise is remarkable:
transports of delight to a brave new
world of fringe science. In recent work,
Anderson (2004b) takes up this project, disclosing
the mannerisms and reactions that
elude a grammar of representation and are
experienced as everyday articulations of
boredom and hope. Likewise, McCormack
(2003) draws on his participation in Dance
Movement Therapy to propose an affective
register of ethics.
Those people anxious that non-representational
theory should care more about
mattering more, and those who have felt
most keenly criticisms of cultural geography’s
retreat into a ‘comfort zone’, will know that
the spectrum of emotions, passions and conditions
felt in social life is by no means
exhausted (for further discussion, see
Anderson and Smith, 2001). Lest anyone
forget, the emotionally charged, performing
body is not an ecstatic subject tout court.
What of anger, disgust, hatred, horror, stress,
isolation, alienation, fear, terror, dread, decay,
loss, denial? These all-too-common feelings
make for an undeniably (and, for many I’m
sure, undesirably) bleak roster of future
research. However, for the likes of Mitchell
(2002; 2003b) they are expressed and
endured daily as self-defining realities in the
destructive, debilitating, destabilizing and
devastating landscapes that he has charged
cultural geographers with being culpably
uninterested in. As ÓTuathail (2003) demonstrates,
such a project can immediately scale
up and territorialize somatic concerns. By
tracking the global reach of those gut feelings
pushing on the new century’s geopolitics, he
connects America’s ‘affective economy of
revenge’ to ‘a re-energized economy of
affect’(2003: 868). Researching the materialities
of those emotions or casts of mind that
‘cut-to-the-quick’ of body-subjects and
inhabited spaces would undoubtedly pose
manifold methodological difficulties and lead
to uncongenial or harrowing encounters;
although a tradition of such scholarship certainly
exists in cognate disciplines like social
anthropology. Moreover, any such project
would have to be read against Callard’s
(2003) insightful and provocative argument
that, in their treatment of the unconscious
and nondiscursive, geographers must
countenance the possibility that a dominant
disciplinary paradigm of power exercised for
political resistance and progressive emancipation
does not always fit, and thus may not
achieve stated ends. Whether alighting on
the splendour or the disenchantment of
90 Cultural geography
emotional subjects, whether seeking out the
therapeutic or the degenerative, whether
persistent, processual or evanescent, such
emotion-work should certainly press harder
for forms of empiricism that are lively, tireless
and scrupulous, and it should continue to ask
searching questions of our persistent urge to
divine fixed meaning from the midst of things.
Even if avowedly modest in ambition, however,
these efforts should always be alert to
local, situated conditions necessary for tolerable,
sustainable, shared lives.
This‘geography of the humours’, recast for
a contemporary social world, is at best a fragile
framework that might repay closer study.
Appropriately enough it is but one transient
outcome of a more-than-representational
dialogue stridently committed to the uncertainty
of outcomes. Following the themed
approach adopted here, in my next report I
plan to focus on recent efforts by cultural
geographers to understand and document
‘the event’, and to deal with the new spatialities
found at the interface between bodies
and machines.
Acknowledgements
For extremely helpful comments on a draft
of this report, I am grateful to Fraser
MacDonald, Nick Spedding (ever the incisive
critic) and colleagues at University of Glasgow,
especially Ignaz Strebel and Kate Foster.
Notes
1. Dance has been identified as an activity useful
for introducing geographers to the new language
of performance, and as a guard against
the urge to make judgements based solely on
the outputs of practice. For those wishing to
follow this debate, see Thrift (1997), Nash
(2000) and McCormack (2003).
2. This critique has its provenance in disciplinary
terrains beyond geography, but tracking the
argument it is not possible in a short report.
3. Cosgrove (2002) offers the most recent statement
on this ‘representational’ approach to
the study of landscape in cultural geography,
and indicates how it continues to be
responsive to critique.
4. ‘Horticultural Geographies’, a themed-conference
organized by Georgina Couch, took
place at University of Nottingham,
September 2003; see also Couch (2000).
5. ‘Digging’ as a practice is derived from the
seventeenth-century radical group The
Diggers orTrue Levellers.The name relates to
their challenge to established laws and custom
by cultivating common land.
6. Recent examples of performance thinking
being used to approach nonsignifying, everyday
practices of belonging extend beyond critical
anthropology: for work in archaeology, see
Turnbull (2002) and, in history, Roach (1996).
7. Longer historical understandings of the emotions,
specifically fear and anxiety, are traced
in Bourke (2003) and Rublack (2002).
Notably, Bourke offers a different disciplinary
critique of representationalism and presents a
powerful case for emotions to be treated as
subject, not byproduct, in historical scholarship.
Relatedly, Gowing (2003) recovers
troubling experiences of fear, sexual assault
and physical violence among women in the
seventeenth-century English home.
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