Non-representational Theory

Paul Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351374798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Non-representational Theory explores a range of ideas which have recently engaged geographers and have led to the development of an alternative approach to the conception, practice, and production of geographic knowledge. Non-representational Theory refers to a key body of work that has emerged in geography over the past two and a half decades that emphasizes the importance of practice, embodiment, materiality, and process to the ongoing formation of social life. This title offers the first sole-authored, accessible introduction to this work and its impact on geography.

Without being prescriptive the text provides a general explanation of what Non-representational Theory is. This includes discussion of the disciplinary context it emerged from, the key ideas and themes that characterise work associated with Non-representational Theory, and the theoretical points of reference that inspires it. The book then explores a series of conjunctions of 'Non-representational Theory and...', taking an area of geographic enquiry and exploring the impact Non-representational Theory has had on how it is researched and understood. This includes the relationships between Non-representational Theory and Practice, Affect, Materiality, Landscape, Performance, and Methods. Critiques of Non-representational Theory are also broached, including reflections on issues on identity, power, and difference.

The text draws together the work of a range of established and emerging scholars working on the development of non-representational theories, allowing scholars from geography and other disciplines to access and assess the animating potential of such work. This volume is essential reading for undergraduates and post-graduate students interested in the social, cultural, and political geographies of everyday living.

1
Non-representational theories and geography

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the relationship between NRTs and geography. In particular, it will trace out some of the intellectual lineages of NRTs. The previous chapter introduced some of the background to NRTs emergence and identified some of their key thematic interests. This chapter will take this further by focusing in more detail on NRTs’ ‘origin stories’, both in terms of the intellectual climate NRTs emerged within, and the literal geographies of their emergence and subsequent diffusion. As part of this, more will be said about the conceptual influences that underpin NRTs and the range of social theories and philosophies that have been introduced to geography. The chapter closes by reflecting on the different ways that NRTs have had an impact on the discipline of geography and the extent of that impact.

When it comes to the unfolding relationship between NRTs and geography, NRTs have been received, and continue to be received, in a range of ways. For many, NRTs have opened up a host of different and exciting questions about life’s varied and varying geographies and have brought a new and diversified realm of matters into view. That said, a range of critical commentary has also been produced in relation to ‘NRT’. This has included strong criticism of the basic points being argued, criticism of the particular conceptual position being taken, and, in that, disagreement with the critical comments Thrift made about other geographic approaches that NRTs sought to ‘enliven’. These divergent dispositions noted, it is clear that NRTs have increasingly impacted upon the practice of research in geography in increasingly diverse ways. This will be shown here both in terms of the range of scholarship around NRTs that has emerged but also based on the broader diffusion of NRTs’ arguments into what might be seen as ‘mainstream’ geographic work.

Origin stories

In their introduction to ‘Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography’, Anderson and Harrison (2010a) suggest that there are a number of possible ‘origin stories’ for NRTs, none of which are in themselves determinate but many of which played some role in the development of NRTs in geography. These possible origins include:

the on-going impact of post-structuralism on the discipline [of geography] and, in particular, the avenues for thought opened by the translation of the work of Deleuze and Latour; an emergent concern for ‘everyday life’ and the forms of embodied practice therein; a specific confluence of energies, research interests and institutional setting focused on the School of Geographical Sciences in Bristol in the UK throughout the 1990s; the gathering together and elaboration of non-representational theories by Nigel Thrift; the crystallisation of desires to find new ways of engaging space, landscape, the social, the cultural and the political; the influence of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise [now Research Excellence Framework] through which, in Human Geography at least, value was attached to single author papers and which promoted an academic climate wherein so called ‘theoretical’ interventions could be valued as highly as more ‘empirical’ studies; a simple generational shift between the New Cultural Geography and what would follow; an ever more extensive engagement by geographers with other social science and humanities disciplines; a cynical careerist fabulation.

(Anderson and Harrison 2010a: 3)

In this section, I am going to pick out elements of such possible origin stories and explore them further. In particular, this section focuses on three of these. First, the relationship with and distancing from New Cultural Geography (and, with that, post-structuralism) will be discussed. This is perhaps the most commonly discussed and contentious of these origin stories. From there, I take a step back to think about some earlier engagements geographers made with other social sciences and the humanities, specifically through the developments of Time-Geography, Humanistic Geography, and concerns for ‘structuration’ as potential precursors in geography for NRTs. These literatures and relations tend to be less discussed when it comes to these origin stories. Finally, this section concludes with a discussion of the School of Geographical Sciences and the role Thrift (and others) played in working out from that specific space-time context.

New Cultural Geography and its ‘dead geographies’

‘New Cultural Geography’ emerged during the 1980s as a prominent approach to geographic research. During 1980s, a range of (largely UK-based) cultural geographers became interested in the insights of the ‘Cultural Turn’ (see Box 1.1) and, with that, Cultural Studies (Jackson 1989) and the work of a range of ‘Cultural Marxists’ (Cosgrove 1984). These ideas were translated into a geographic mind-set, producing a very different cultural geography. The ‘new’ here refers to a distinction drawn with the well-established cultural geography of the ‘Berkeley School’, practiced primarily in North America in light of the pioneering work of Carl Sauer (see Sauer 2008 and Chapter 4).

In distinction to the ‘Berkeley School’, this New Cultural Geography argued itself to be:

contemporary as well as historical (but always contextual and theoretically informed); social as well as spatial (but not confined exclusively to narrowly-defined landscape issues); urban as well as rural; and interested in the contingent nature of culture, in dominant ideologies and in forms of resistance to them. It would, moreover, assert the centrality of culture in human affairs.

(Cosgrove and Jackson 1987: 95; though see Price and Lewis 1993)

Central to New Cultural Geography then was a specific attention to how culture is spatially constituted. This, in turn, entailed a focus on issues of power, ideology, discourse, and forms of representation enacted within space. Such concerns were perhaps most evidently manifest in work critically engaged with cultural landscapes – with the representation of landscapes and the people within them, with specific meaningful objects present in landscapes (statues, monuments, signage, and so on), and the practices through which landscapes were produced and maintained (see Wylie 2007a; Chapter 5). Over the years, such analyses were developed through engagements with, amongst others, semiotics (Duncan and Duncan 1992), iconography (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), post-structural analyses of texts and representations (Duncan and Duncan 1988; Matless 1998), and feminist scholarship (Rose 1993).¹

Box 1.1 The Cultural Turn

The ‘Cultural Turn’ refers to “A set of intellectual developments that led to issues of culture becoming central in human geography since the late 1980s” (Barnett 2009: 134). This is often associated with the emergence of New Cultural Geography. However, a shift toward an interest in culture also took place in a range of other sub-disciplines in geography, such as economic and political geography, given the suggestion that culture was increasingly important to economic processes and political conflict (Barnett 2009). The Cultural Turn is often characterized by a movement away from certain approaches and trends rather than a more positive determination – a move away from a certain form of Marxist analysis, a move away from positivism/quantitative approaches, and not being realist in orientation. In their place, we find interests in post-modernism and post-structuralism (as well as Cultural Marxism), qualitative and textual analysis, and a concern for how the world is socially constructed (Barnett 2004; see Chapter 2). A significant impetus behind this shift toward an interest in culture was the work emerging from the ‘Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies’ and its “recognition of cultural diversity and processes of cultural change” (Scott 2004: 24). This has included concerns for various sub-cultures and ‘low’ cultural forms (as opposed to ‘high’ culture) (Jackson 1989) and issues of power and inequality (Barnett 2004). As such, the Cultural Turn leads to the argument that “Meanings are contextual, specific, and contingent. And this is where geography comes in: because of culture, things happen differently in different places” (Barnett 2004: 42).

In some of the early introductions to NRTs written by Thrift New Cultural Geography formed a key target of critique and something that NRTs were variously articulated against. However, New Cultural Geography was rarely named. This unfolded less through the direct citation of, or engagement with, examples from such New Cultural Geographers’ work and more through the targeting of some of New Cultural Geography’s conceptual influences. For example, Thrift (1996: 4) was critical of work informed by post-structural philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, in which, he claimed:

A hardly problematised sphere of representation is allowed to take precedence over lived experience and materiality, usually as a series of images or texts which a theorist contemplatively deconstructs, thus implicitly degrading practices.

This is not to say, though, that NRTs are not found in post-structuralist philosophies (Cresswell 2013a; Doel 2010; Wylie 2010; see Box 1.2). Rather, Thrift’s target of critique here is a particular version of post-structuralism which led geographers to focus on, for example, the sorts cultural landscapes suggested above, taking them primarily (or even solely) as texts that can be read. The problem for Thrift is that these ‘texts’, whether literally a text or something treated ‘as-text’ (see Duncan 1990), form the primary focus of the analysis rather than the practices that they potentially play a part in shaping.

Box 1.2 Post-structuralism and geography

Post-structuralism is a name that is normally used to refer to a relatively diverse body of philosophical work that emerged during (and since) the 1960s in France (Harrison 2006). In terms of general characteristics, one important point for much of this work is that it is:

profoundly suspicious of anything that tries to pass itself off as a simple statement of fact, of anything that claims to be true by virtue of being ‘obvious’, ‘natural’, or based upon ‘common sense’. As a philosophy and a set of methods of doing research, post-structuralism … exposes all such claims as contingent, provisional, subject to scrutiny and debate.

(Wylie 2006a: 298)

From this, it is common to encounter claims that a whole host of things (values, meanings, identities, social structures, or hierarchies) are ‘constructed’ rather than true or essential and that such claims to truth need to be deconstructed through a process of radical questioning. Effectively, post-structuralism is suspicious of anything claiming to act as a foundation for thought or understanding. This suspicion meant, for example, “examining how social relations of power fix social practices, objects, events, and meanings as self-evident, given, natural, and enduring” (Dixon and Jones 2004: 80). Post-structuralism’s role was to un-found such fixings.

Post-structuralism has been a significant influence for Cultural Geography since the 1980s. This included the growth in interest amongst New Cultural Geographers in representation – “the social mediation of the real world through ever-present processes of signification” (Dixon and Jones 2004: 87) – and questioning the politics and inequalities that are found in and are reproduced by these representations. However, given post-structuralism’s internal diversity, post-structuralism has influenced other approaches to cultural geography. For example, certain strands of post-structuralism such as Actor Network Theory (ANT) have also influenced the development of more-than human geographies (see Whatmore 2002; Chapter 4). The development of NRTs in geography has equally been influenced by the work of ANT but also other post-structuralists, including Deleuze and Derrida (Wylie 2010; see Chapter 2).

In his chapter ‘Steps to an ecology of place’, Thrift (1999: 300) develops this critique of representationalism further in listing one of his theoretical ‘dislikes’ as work which takes the position that:

human beings are engaged in building discursive worlds by actively constructing webs of significance which are laid out over a physical substrate. In other words, human beings are located in a terrain which appears as a set of phenomena to which representations must be affixed prior to any attempt at engagement.

Again, Thrift’s target here is work where the focus falls upon the deliberate and deliberative production and attribution of meaning, in this case by subjects in relation to the environment they live within. It is not so much that Thrift is arguing that we do not do this. Obviously, at times, we will find ourselves in a situation where we quite consciously interpret and project meanings onto our surroundings based on our past experiences and current frame of mind. For example, we might reminisce with family member...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Non-representational theories and geography
• 2 Non-representational theories and practice
• 3 Non-representational theories and affect
• 4 Non-representational theories and materiality
• 5 Non-representational theories and landscape
• 6 Non-representational theories and performance
• 7 Non-representational theories and method
• Concluding
• References
• Index