ZA121 Theory and practice in human geography, November 28th, 2024
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Politics of performance and affect: the imperative of being non-representational
Pavel Doboš

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Non-representational theory
̶Origins in the Anglophone geography of the start of 21st century
̶Critique of representational cultural geography
̶The aim to make geographies living (again)
̶Drawing on long histories of „theories of practice“ as well as poststructuralist philosophy
̶but less Foucault and more Deleuze

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Bristol school of cultural geography
̶Beginnings in the 1990s with new original kind of geographical thought
̶geographer Nigel Thrift coming to Bristol and working there (1987-2003)
̶New highly theoretical M.Sc. and Ph.D. programmes in „Society and Space“
̶students advancing Thrift‘s thought: John Wylie, Mitch Rose, Derek McCormack, J.-D. Dewsbury,
Marcus Doel, Paul Harrison, Ben Anderson, …
School of Geographical Sciences | School of Geographical Sciences | University of Bristol

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Nigel Thrift (1949 – ?)
̶Urban, economic and cultural geographer
̶Originally a Marxist geographer (collaborations with Richard Peet) and an elaborator of
time-geography
̶Then interested in a wide range of geographical issues
̶2000: „His main current interests are in the exclusionary geographies written into software,
non-representational theory, embodied ‘methodologies’ like dance, and the reworking of political
economy.“
Spatial Formations (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society): Thrift, Nigel:
9780803985469: Amazon.com: Books Non-Representational Theory Knowing Capitalism | SAGE Publications
Ltd Cities: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering: Reimagining the Urban by Nigel Thrift
(1-Apr-2002) Paperback: Amazon.co.uk: Books

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New important concepts
̶A lot: practice, event, affect, performance and performativity, becoming, body and embodiment,
subjectification, habit, relations and relationality, matter and materiality, assemblage, haptics
and sound, rhythm and refrain, atmosphere, …
̶emphasis on different (more animate, vital and living) concepts than in representational cultural
geography

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Difference Between Affect & Effect With Examples| Affect vs Effect Performativitiy and mimicry.
Performativity: linguistics – cultural theory (Judith Butler) - ppt download

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Different view of politics
̶More focus on micro-politics than macro-politics
̶Political affects
̶power-laden work or instrumentality of things, events or bodies
̶politics (as discourse or ideologies) can be interpreted from power-imbued representations – as
representational cultural geography does… but how these representations affect us? what are
mechanisms of their (emotional or other) working? what effects can they have? what subjects can
they bring forth? what difference can they do in the world? how they remake our space of life?
̶Spaces of political atmospheres
̶Events of politics
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Politics of Affect | Wiley

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‘It’s not about forgetting representations’ or ‘NRTs look at what representations do’, but also in
work which shows how affects, practices, relations, events, and the like unfold in ways which are
in some sense contextual or circumstantial. Such contexts or circumstances are not necessarily
determinative of how an event, practice, encounter or whatever will unfold and we don’t necessarily
know in advance what impact they may or may not have. The key point is that they hold the potential
to impact upon the unfolding of social life and there is a politics associated with this. (Simpson
2020: 223)

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