steve pile emotions and affect in recent human geography

Emotions and affect in recent humangeography

Steve Pile

This paper seeks to examine both how emotions have been explored in emotional geo-

graphy and also how affect has been understood in affectual geography. By tracing out

the conceptual influences underlying emotional and affectual geography, I seek to

understand both the similarities and differences between their approaches. I identify

three key areas of agreement: a relational ontology that privileges fluidity; a privileging

of proximity and intimacy in their accounts; and a favouring of ethnographic methods.

Even so, there is a fundamental disagreement, concerning the relationship or non-

relationship between emotions and affect. Yet, this split raises awkward questions for

both approaches, about how emotions and affect are to be understood and also about

their geographies. As importantly, mapping the agreements and disagreements within

emotional and affectual geography helps with an exploration of the political implica-

tions of this work. I draw upon psychoanalytic geography to suggest ways of address-

ing certain snags in both emotional and affectual geography.

key words emotional geography affectual geography emotions psychoanalysis

non-representational theory affect

Faculty of Social Sciences, Geography Discipline, Open University, Milton Keynes MK6 7AA

email: [email protected]

revised manuscript received 17 September 2009

Introduction

It will not be news to anyone that affect and emo-

tions have (once again) become a major theme for

human geographical research. There is now a mass

of material by geographers, published especially

since 2003, and with more appearing all the time.1

Developing from (at least) the humanistic geogra-

phies of the 1970s and 1980s and the psychoana-

lytic geographies of the 1990s, a broad spectrum of

work now emphasises the affective and emotional

aspects of personal and social life. Most recently,

for example, there have been analyses ranging

from the affectual worlds of software (Shaw and

Warf 2009; Budd and Adey 2009) to the naming of

places (Kearney and Bradley 2009) to the experi-

ence of pain (Bissell 2009) to name but a few.

The terrain being mapped out by affectual and

emotional geography is ever expanding, but also

woven out of many threads: a short list includes

phenomenology, feminism, Massumis reading of

Deleuzes reading of Spinoza and or Deleuzesreading of Spinoza, psychoanalysis, Tardes sociology,

psychotherapy, Marx and even Darwinian evolu-

tionary thinking (see Thrift 2004a 2008, ch 10; and

Bondi 1993 2005) amongst others. In this spec-

trum, geographers have not only taken up a variety

of positions, they have also shifted position over

time. It can be hard to grasp exactly what the con-

ceptual underpinnings of this burgeoning field are.

So, one purpose of this paper is to explore these

underpinnings, to look for consistencies and dis-

putes within this broad field of endeavour. I have

not produced a list, however, but focused on those

assumptions that I believe are key to the produc-

tion of affectual and emotional geographies. I will

note just three: a specific ontology of relation,

mainly involving a concern with fluidity; a valua-

tion of proximity and intimacy; and a methodologi-

cal emphasis on ethnography.

But why bother? One answer lies, of course, in

pointing out conceptual blind spots in current work

in affectual and emotional geography. Teasing

out the shared concerns of emotional and affectual

geography, for example, reveals two under-exam-

ined assumptions, concerning the unconscious and

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 520 2010ISSN 0020-2754 2009 The Author.

Journal compilation Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009

the space in-between. Perhaps this is enough.

However, it can also be hard to determine just

what is important about this work. Nevertheless, I

believe it is a mistake to think that affectual and

emotional geographies simply validate ever-broad-

ening empirical studies of affect and emotion

(which Gregory [1981] once worried humanistic

geography had done). While the broadest argument

is, as you might anticipate, that emotions matter

(see Davidson and Milligan 2004, 424),2 as Sharp

points out the emphasis on the political manipula-

tion of emotion affect is key, and indeed offers anecessary line of examination for geography (2009,

78). However, if assumptions about the uncon-

scious and the space in-between enable comfortable

political positions to be adopted for example, in

favour of a politics of caring or of emotional trans-

formation, or against the manipulation of affect by

powerful elites, covertly behind our backs then

these assumptions are worth examining.

The paper proceeds by looking at emotions in

emotional geography, then affect in affectual geog-

raphy. This leads to an exploration of common

assumptions and incommensurable positions

within the affectual and emotional literature. The

final section raises the significance of the uncon-

scious and the space in-between for the production

of, and implications of, affectual and emotional

geographies. First, then, emotions.

Emotions: humanism, feminism and non-representational theory

Many writers consider Anderson and Smiths

2001 editorial paper the turning point in geogra-

phys recent appreciation of the importance of

emotions and affects (see for example Bondi 2005;

Sharp 2009). In their paper, Anderson and Smith

call for emotions to be taken seriously in the then

policy turn in human geography. Although a

targeted intervention, Anderson and Smith make

a general plea for thinking seriously about how the

human world is constructed and lived through

the emotions, such as pain, bereavement, ela-

tion, anger, love and so on (2001, 7). This would

involve

a fuller programme of work, recognizing the emotions as

ways of knowing, being and doing, in the broadest

sense; and using this to take geographical knowledges

and the relevance that goes with them beyond

their usual visual, textual and linguistic domains. (2001,

8)

In other words, Anderson and Smith wish to step

beyond representational geographies to think

about emotions as ways of knowing, being and

doing. Even so, they also call for an awareness of

how emotional relations shape society and space

and a need to confront empathy methodologically,

with an explicit return to philosophies of meaning

(as proposed by humanistic geographers) (2001, 9).

Less concerned with reflection, abstraction, transla-

tion and representation, Anderson and Smith

value research that depends on direct experience,

but also the search for other means of accessing

felt worlds (2001, 9). Their paper, then, weaves

together a humanist concern for lived experiences

and emotional lives, and their representations, with

a concern for doing and performing, and that

which is beyond representation (that is, the non-

representational).

Only a few years later, many seemed to have

responded to Anderson and Smiths call to think

through the feelings and emotions which make the

world as we know and live it (2001, 9).3 Thus,

geographers have described a wide range of emo-

tions in various contexts, including: ambivalence,

anger, anxiety, awe, betrayal, caring, closeness,

comfort and discomfort, demoralisation, depres-

sion, desire, despair, desperation, disgust, disillu-

sionment, distance, dread, embarrassment, envy,

exclusion, familiarity, fear (including phobias), fra-

gility, grief, guilt, happiness and unhappiness,

hardship, hatred, homeliness, horror, hostility, ill-

ness, injustice, joy, loneliness, longing, love,

oppression, pain (emotional), panic, powerlessness,

pride, relaxation, repression, reserve, romance,

shame, stress and distress, suffering, violence, vul-

nerability, worry.

Even those who declare themselves suspicious

of the language of emotions4 such as hatred,

shame, envy, jealousy, fear, disgust, anger, embar-

rassment, sorrow, grief, anguish, pride, love, happi-

ness, joy, hope, wonder (Thrift 2004a, 59) have

nonetheless attended to anger, boredom, comfort

and discomfort, despair, distress, enchantment,

energy, enjoyment, euphoria, excitement, fear, frus-

tration, grace, happiness, hope, joy, laughing, liveli-

ness, pain, playing, rage, relaxation, rhythm,

sadness, shame, smiling, sorrowfulness, Star Wars

affects, surprise, tears (crying), touching, violence,

vitality.

In her 2005 paper, Liz Bondi seeks to clarify

how emotion has been approached within emo-

tional geographies. To do so, she draws out three

6 Steve Pile

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 520 2010ISSN 0020-2754 2009 The Author.Journal compilation Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009

strands of thinking about emotions that precede,

and inform, the emotional turn. For her, these

strands reach back into earlier geographies: to

humanistic geography, to feminist geography and,

crucially, to non-representational geography.

Bondi points out that, while the word emotion

was not prominent within humanistic geography,

much of the work of humanistic geography was

concerned with the emotional qualities of place

and human life. She cites, for example, Ley and

Samuels (1978) iconic collection of essays, Rowles

(1978) work on the experiences of the elderly and

Tuans (1979) analysis of landscapes of fear.

Through notions such as the life-world, humanistic

geographers were able to emphasise the capacity of

places to evoke emotions such as love, hate, plea-

sure, pride, grief, rage, guilt, remorse and so on

(Bondi 2005, 435). Phenomenology, in particular for

Bondi, offers a way to blend notions of self, bodily

experience and perceptual environments (citing

Davidson 2003). Similarly, Nigel Thrift sees the

phenomenological tradition as offering a means

to develop descriptions of how emotions occur in every-

day life, understood as the richly expressive aestheticfeeling-cum-behaviour of continual becoming that is

chiefly provided by bodily states and processes. (2004a,

60)

If humanistic geography offers a means to describe

peoples rich experiences of place and emotions,

then feminist geographers politicised it. By taking

seriously womens experiences of space and place,

and treating the personal as political, feminist

geographers were alert not only to the emotions and

feelings that women experienced in particular places

and spaces, but also to how emotions framed and

circumscribed sexed and gendered experiences of

place and spaces. Feminist accounts of subjectivity,

to be sure, were now diverging from humanist

accounts. Where humanistic geography tended to

posit a coherent, bounded, self-aware and universal

human subject, feminist geography was illuminating

the incoherences, permeabilities, opaquenesses and

specificities of human subjectivity (see Rose 1993).

Significant, here, is the conceptualisation of emo-

tion: emotions were not to be objectified, but

instead, they crossed boundaries, rendering them

unstable and uncertain. Under feminist impera-

tives, humanist studies of landscapes of fear

became studies of the social geographies of

womens fear (for example, Valentine 1989). But

fear itself was re-interrogated by emotional geogra-

phy as having both interior and exterior aspects,

while at the same time calling any presumption of

a fixed binary of interior and exterior into question.

This is evident, for example, in recent studies of

phobia and space (Davidson 2003; see also Callard

2003).

What non-representational theory adds to an

account of emotions is an insistence on the signifi-

cance of that which cannot be brought into repre-

sentation whether those representations are

textual, linguistic, visual or otherwise (see Thrift

1996; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). While Thrift

tends to use emotion and affect somewhat inter-

changeably (as both Bondi [2005] and Thien [2005a]

point out), there is also an insistence on their dif-

ference. This difference turns on the representability

of emotions and affects. There is potential for dis-

agreement here, as emotional geography emphasises

the significance of expressed emotions while

non-representational theory emphasises the impor-

tance of inexpressible affects. In this paper, I argue

that there is more at stake here than a question of

emphasis. That said, there remains broad agree-

ment, in the study of emotions and affect, on the

importance of the bodily and on the difficulty (at

least) of expressing emotions (see, for example,

Harrison 2007; McCormack 2003).

Perhaps remarkably, given the seeming margin-

ality of psychoanalysis within human geography

(see Pile 1996; Kingsbury 2004), work on emotions

in geography has been strongly influenced by psy-

choanalytic and psychotherapeutic thinking. Thrift,

for example, draws on psychoanalytic insights to

argue that affects can be worked on to produce dif-

ferent ethical and political effects (2004a, 70). But

cautiously: Thrift warns that queer and post-colo-

nial use of psychoanalysis reveals how difficult

repression and liberation are to disentangle. Mean-

while, for Bondi (2005), psychotherapeutic practice

addresses two crucial problems in emotional geog-

raphy: first, avoiding seeing emotional experience

only as an expression individualised, yet universal,

subjectivity (as in humanism); while also, second,

connecting and engaging with peoples emotional

experiences as they express them (unlike non-

representational theory).

For Bondi, drawing on psychotherapy, taking

seriously peoples expressed emotions is also an

ethical imperative. It involves the recognition of

peoples extraordinary capacity for self-understanding

and self-analysis. Bondis human subject is similar,

in this respect, to humanist especially phenome-

Emotions and affect in recent human geography 7



nological accounts of subjectivity. This is readily

apparent in Bondis description of how a psycho-

therapeutic approach might aid geographical

research:

[psychotherapists] listen and seek to convey under-

standing of the other persons emotional experience;

they cultivate a form of acceptance sustainable in the

context of deeply disturbed and disturbing behaviour,

informed by a belief in the human potential for repair

and positive self-development; and they meet with

those with whom they work as emotionally open, hon-

est and genuine people. (2005, 442)

Emotional geography emphasises, and values, its

ability to derive emotionally poignant and power-

ful accounts from its research (see Davidson et al.

2005, 3). It privileges peoples expressed emotional

experiences, and treats their accounts as open, hon-

est and genuine.

For some geographers, however, the suggestion

that people are open, honest and genuine with a

capacity for deep insight into the composition of

their sense of subjectivity is hopelessly nave and

even misguided (see McCormack 2006; Anderson

and Harrison 2006). Alternative accounts of the

emotional under-wiring of social relations have

drawn, instead, on notions of affect. This work has

sought to avoid certain failings it sees in emotional

geography, such as: assuming the nature of emo-

tions; objectifying emotions by naming them;

presenting superficial accounts, because it is

mesmerised by expressed accounts of emotional life;

and failing to provide a political antidote to the

manipulation of non-cognitive and or pre-cognitiveemotional life.

Affect: non-cognitive, inter-personal,non-representational

The notion of affect can be found scattered through

the work on emotions in geography and, as a con-

sequence, its meaning remains elusive. That said, it

is within non-representational theory that the term

has been given especial prominence and signifi-

cance. As work on emotions is inspired by phenom-

enology and non-representational theory, there

would appear to be common ground between those

working on emotions and those working on affect.

Yet, affect marks a conceptual break with emotions,

producing a distinctive affectual geography.5

While both emotional and affectual geographies

have strong sympathies with phenomenology (evi-

dent in work by, for example, Conradson 2005;

Paterson 2005), affectual geography draws inspira-

tion from Brian Massumis reading of Gilles Dele-

uzes reading of Spinozas account of affect and

from Derridas deconstruction of language (and,

consequently, expressed emotions), which are more

or less ignored in most emotional geography. In

this vein, affect is a quality of life that is beyond

cognition and always interpersonal. It is, moreover,

inexpressible: unable to be brought into representa-

tion. Affect, in these terms, has consequently

become (albeit unwittingly) a key testing, and

proving, ground for non-representational theory.

But what is affect in these terms?

Usefully, Anderson provides a thumbnail defi-

nition. Affect is a transpersonal capacity which a

body has to be affected (through an affection) and

to affect (as the result of modifications) (2006,

735, emphasis in the original). This may at first

appear to be a somewhat one-dimensional defini-

tion, however, this approach to affect has several

distinctive features (see also McCormack 2003;

Thrift 2004a).

1 Affect refers to the production of a capacity of

a body, a capacity that is defined by its radical

openness to other bodies.

2 Affect is not simply personal or inter-personal

(along the lines of emotional geographys con-

ception of emotion); it is transpersonal, draw-

ing in many bodies. Affect, then, is both within

and between bodies.

3 Affect is non- or pre-cognitive, -reflexive, -con-

scious and -human. This means two things:

3a Affect is temporally prior to the represen-

tational translation of an affect into a

knowable emotion.

3b Affect is spatially located below cognition

and consciousness and beyond reflectivity

and humanness.

4 Affect is defined in opposition to: cognition,

reflexivity, consciousness and humanness.

5 Affect connects bodies, and makes them proxi-

mate, by flowing between them.

6 Affect has potential.

7 Affects radical openness necessarily implicates

bodies in ethical relations.

8 Representations of affect can only ever fail to

represent affect itself that is, it is necessary to

be suspicious of, and if possible to avoid, rep-

resentations of emotions.

9 All that said, affects can be manipulated.

8 Steve Pile


Like emotions, affects matter but they cannot

be grasped, made known or represented. This

would appear to leave affectual geography with

a problem: its archetypal object of study affect

cannot, by its own account, be shown or

understood. Worse, affect is not localisable in

personal experience or expression, as emotions

can be. McCormack cautions: the creative poten-

tial of affect is arrested when one attempts to

quantify or qualify its position as personal (2003,

496). Strangely, then, affectual geography cannot

talk about either affect (as the non-representa-

tional) or emotions (because they are unrepresen-

tative). So, what can it do? Lets look at

McCormacks emblematic account of Dance

Movement Therapy.

Early in 1999, McCormack reports (2003), he

began to research the practice of Dance Movement

Therapy. Although he starts off thinking about

Dance Movement Therapy through geographies of

emotion and mood, McCormack comes to realise

that the therapeutic practice is founded on not ask-

ing how people feel. Here, non-representational

theory and dance movement therapeutic practice

seem to concur: asking people to communicate

their feelings will only solicit a kind of affective

false consciousness, where the client rehearses

crass caricatures of what they actually feel. None-

theless, this trite language of emotions is hard to

shake off. Indeed, Dance Movement Therapys

focus on the body and movement reveals, to

McCormack, just how difficult it is to abandon

personal corporeal ways of thinking and doing

(2003, 492).

He must, McCormack says, stop trying: stop try-

ing to understand, stop trying to move the right

way: what I needed to do was to become respon-

sive to different surfaces of attention rather than

seeking to go behind or beyond them (2003, 493).

Emotions that might appear on the surface cannot,

in any way, be traced back to some affectual pre-

condition. Indeed, every effort is made to avoid

treating emotion as the outward expressive repre-

sentation of some inner subjective reality (2003,

494). McCormack therefore withdraws from the

more usual ethnographic lines of questioning that

ask how do you feel about that? Instead, there is

a close description of events, which focus attention

on what bodies are doing: dancing, smiling, gestur-

ing, playing, laughing, and so on.

Similarly, Anderson insists that affect does not

reside in the subject, body or sign as if it were

possessed by a subject (2006, 735). Affects emerge

in encounters between bodies (dont assume

human bodies6), and these affects are registered

by changes in the capacity to affect or be affected

and or in changes in intensity. Anderson showsthat, in almost any choice that people make, there

is a component that wishes life to be somehow

better. Hope, for example, appears in three dis-

tinct ways: as an affect, in flows of hope; in feel-

ings, as a sense of hopefulness; in emotion, as

actually expressed hopes. Anderson, then, pro-

vides a conceptual model that maps the relation-

ship between affect, feeling and emotion. This is,

in effect, a layer cake model of the mind-body.

Thus:

Layer 1: the non-cognitive affect is the deepest layer,

below, behind and beyond both pre-cognition and cog-

nition. As these are non-cognitive, they are non-psycho-

logical, in that they never become psychological objects.

Affects reside in bodies, plural: they are not simply a

bodily content or capacity, affect refers to flows (of

affect) between bodies.

Layer 2: the pre-cognitive feelings lie between affects

and emotion, but they are not yet expressed or name-

able, remaining tacit and intuitive. Nevertheless, feel-

ings can emerge into consciousness. These are distinctly

personal, as feelings are the emergent patterns that

derive from heterogeneous flows of affect through

bodies. Feelings are a response, therefore, to transper-

sonal affects and cannot be said, then, to be contiguous

with the individual, even while they are personally

experienced.

Layer 3: the cognitive emotions are expressed feelings,

being both conscious and experienced. Although emo-

tions emerge from feelings, and represent personal

experience, they are socially constructed, through lan-

guage and other representational practices.

By introducing a pre-cognitive layer between non-

cognitive affects and cognitive emotions, Anderson

is seeking a way to allow the tacit and intuitive a

place within affectual geography. Thus, Andersons

(and others) layer cake postulates a split in subjec-

tivity: between affect and feeling, and between feel-

ing and thought. Significantly, there are two

different kinds of borders between the layers: an

impermeable one between the non-conscious

(Layer 1) and the pre-cognitive (Layer 2) and a

one-way permeable border between the pre-cogni-

tive (Layer 2) and cognitive (Layer 3). There is,

firstly, no way for non-cognitive affects in Layer 1

to reach cognitive expressed emotions in Layer 3,




nor, secondly, can anything in the cognitive layer

filter into other layers: both are fundamental

aspects of affectual geographys model of affect.

Layers and borders remain assumed within affectual

geography: assumed and universal whether the

cake has two (non-cognitive and cognitive) or three

(with pre-cognitive) layers.

Affectual geography, then, provides an ontolog-

ical model of the mind and body that presumes

that it is always already partitioned, with discrete

spaces being sectioned off from one another.

These partitions, consequently, are universal and

immutable: emotions and affects have their place,

and they do not move. This model conflicts with

the humanistic and psychotherapeutic models of

emotions and affects as fluid and relational that

can be found in emotional geography. Unsurpris-

ingly, perhaps, some have judged affectual geog-

raphy to be too abstract, too little touched by

how people make sense of their lives, and there-

fore too inhuman, ungrounded, distancing,

detached and, ironically, disembodied for femi-

nist, and by extension emotional, geography

(Bondi 2005, 438; see also Thien 2005a; Nash

2000).

In fact, affectual geography is none of these

things: there is abstraction, but it is abstraction

from what it considers to be the abstract language

of emotions; knowing requires the detachment

from detachment, and not detachment itself; and,

the body is central to affectual geographys ways of

knowing indeed, both approaches draw heavily

on phenomenology so to do. Even so, affectual

geographys account of the psyche remains frus-

tratingly mechanistic, immutable, undynamic and

mystical (that is, offering no account of how the

psyche came to be this way).

I have argued that affectual geography marks

a conceptual break with emotional geography.

Yet I have also argued that there are sympathies

of approach and subject matter. In the next

section, I will make explicit some of the

basic shared assumptions that underpin both

emotional and affectual geography, but more

importantly explore the fundamental difference

between them. All this is better to see two geog-

raphies that require further thought and explora-

tion: first, the unconscious, and second, the

space between. Remember, to reiterate Sharps

point, these are not simply conceptual issues;

they are also ethical and political (2009, 78; see

also Barnett 2008).

Three common grounds; a shared groundthat is not actually shared; and afundamental disagreement

Three common grounds: (1) relational ontologiesthat privilege fluidity; (2) valuing proximity andintimacy; and (3) an ethnomethodological predis-positionThere are shared coordinates in the latitude and

longitude of emotional and affectual geography.

Both are in agreement that emotions and affects are

fluid (using a range of synonyms to describe this).

This is a shared ontology: emotions move; affects

circulate. Emotions and affects are mobile. While

both have a place for patterns of emotions (such

as long-standing geographies of fear, for example)

or affects (such as underlying predispositions

towards hope), basically they are interested in

movements and circulations: in flows between peo-

ple, and other things. They share, then, a relational

ontology that privileges the fluid over the fixed.

In this account, emotions and affect are espe-

cially unbounded. Yet, even while they both agree

that emotions and affects are channelled in some

way (whether through pipes and cables or

through emotional labour), neither approach has

enough to say about the psychological and or non-psychological production of boundaries and the

(im)permeabilities that enable and maintain this

channelling; nor, commensurately, abjection, fixi-

ties, intransigencies, psychotic breaks, fetishes, and

so on that is, about the stuff that doesnt change

easily or change much at all or, indeed, at all. Sim-

ply valuing relationality or fluidity or openness

can ignore the genuine difficulties such subject

positions can pose for people. There are, of course,

exceptions, often associated with psychoanalyti-

cally-inspired work: for example, on phobias or

autism (see Callard 2003; Davidson 2003 2007;

Andrews 2008).

The relational ontology of affectual emotionalgeography has another key feature: it privileges

proximity and intimacy. Although emotional geog-

raphers want to talk directly to people about their

personal feelings and affectual geographers dont,

each prefers forms of knowledge that deliver a

sense of the intimate, especially where this is nor-

mally hidden. This can as easily be delivered

through analyses of representations (such as Bill

Violas video art [see Thrift 2004a] or W G Sebalds

haunted writing [see Wylie 2007]) as through vari-

ous forms of interviewing or observation (such as

10 Steve Pile


Morris and Thomas 2005; Hubbard 2005). How-

ever, gaining a sense of the emotional or affectual

experiences and undercurrents of life involves a

kind of peeling away of superficial and glib

responses. Indeed, the more intimate and detailed

a story whether provided by an emotional or an

affectual geographer the more real or true and

powerful it is taken to be. These are narratives

that tend, ultimately, to value the emotionally poi-

gnant: in a very catholic way, this tends towards

pain and suffering, rather than pleasure and joy

(by contrast, see Kingsbury 2005); towards the

pathological, even if this is in the most prosaic (or

pleasurable) of circumstances.

Preoccupied with these proximate and intimate

accounts of situations and events, both emotional

and affectual geography share a default methodol-

ogy best termed ethnography, deploying varia-

tions on participation and observation. To be sure,

there are others: examples include textual analyses

of autobiographies; the analysis of the failure of

representation in literature and cinema; and the

stories of witnesses to injustice and suffering.

Even so, soliciting or discovering testimony is cen-

tral to the research of both (consult Dewsbury

2003). Each may participate in situations or events,

or not; each may occupy the role of observer, for

a time at least; but neither do so with the expecta-

tion of conveying a way of life (or death, it

should be added). Both are averse to interfering

with testimony, however derived, while their anal-

ysis unfolds. Neither wish to convert emotional

situations or affectual events into conceptualisa-

tions alienated from their grounding in real, vital

life. Each approach, that is, grounds it truths in

close-in empirical narratives.7 In all this, the body

becomes key.

A shared ground that is not actually shared: thebodyIt appears at first sight that emotional and affectual

geography share a view of the body. They both

draw heavily on phenomenology, and each tends

to treat the body, consequently, as the authentic

location of emotions affects. It is the locationfrom which one experiences and speaks and

researches. Thus, both emotional and affectual

geography privilege, or foreground, the body in

their studies (compare, for example, Wylie 2005;

Longhurst et al. 2008; McCormack 2008). In this

view, the body is the site of validation of know-

ledge: emotions are expressed and experienced in

the body; affects define what a body can do. Here,

there is a shared suspicion of intellectualising,

where the body is marginalised or ignored, in

favour of ethnographic truth of the event or of

first hand accounts. Nevertheless, they divide on

the body.

For emotional geography, the body is a site of

feeling and experience. These experiences and feel-

ings are socially embedded, but they are localisable

in the body, and relationships between bodies. The

body, though embedded in social relations, is ulti-

mately personal: it is the location of the psychologi-

cal subject. Emotions may take on social forms of

expression, but behind these forms of expression

lie genuine personal experiences that are seeking

representation. Indeed, it is the political imperative

of emotional geography to draw out these personal

experiences, to bring them to representation. Thus,

emotional geography cares by bearing witness to

the emotional lives and personal experiences of its

subjects. The more emotional the expression of

personal experiences, in this logic, the more the

researcher cares.

In affectual geography, the body is not seen as

personal, but as transpersonal. More, the body is

used to challenge the expression of emotions: the

body, in this sense, is the location of the non-psy-

chological. The body is not used to solicit telling

testimony about peoples lives, instead it becomes

a device that enables the researcher to reveal the

trans-human, the non-cognitive, the inexpressible,

that underlies and constitutes social life albeit

unknowingly. If the body in emotional geography

is a way of recognising differences, of recognising

the human in humanity, then affectual geo-

graphys body is both universal and also prior to

its constitution in social relations. As a conse-

quence, the singular body ceases to be of political

or ethical interest.8 Instead, the focus of political

and ethical theorising turns towards interactions

between bodies and (the manipulation of) flows of

affect.

So, both emotional and affectual geography take

the body seriously, but not in the same way. Both

acknowledge the social production of the body, yet

in ways that tend to universalise the body either

by valorising the personal that lies beyond the

social, or by assuming a transpersonal non-human

that lies beyond the production of humanness.

Here, we can begin to discern the fundamental

split that separates emotional and affectual geo-

graphy.




A fundamental disagreement: the thought versusaffectThe fundamental difference between emotional and

affectual geography lies in the split between the

thought and affect, as mirrored in the split

between the cognitive and the non-cognitive. To be

sure, the thought, here, is a psychological object.

This can involve thought thoughts, such as per-

sonal and collective rationalisations or expressed

emotions or abstract ideas, and so on. However,

the thought is more than just thought thoughts: it

includes a range of unthought thoughts as well,

including thinking at the back of the mind or on

the tip of the tongue, and also inklings, intuitions,

deja` vu, the tacit, premonitions, sixth senses, sensa-

tions, fancies, feelings, and so on. Affect, mean-

while, is non-cognitive describing both a bodily

capacity to be affected, and to affect, and also spe-

cific flows of affect that lie beyond cognition. It is

the unthought.

Heres the rub. In emotional geography, affect

remains a psychological object: a thought of some

kind, even if it is an unconscious one. Meanwhile,

in affectual geography, affect is always non-psy-

chological: affect is never an object of conscious-

ness, nor is it even unconscious or an unthought

thought.

In emotional geography, even with its focus

clearly on expressed emotion, thought is related

somehow to affect. There is no presumption that

thought is an object that is only constituted in con-

sciousness, even while it is an object of conscious-

ness; nor is thought only determined by social

meanings, expressions and values. This allows

thought to reach back into pre- or non-conscious-

ness, and to connect albeit in disguised and opa-

que ways to affect. This is not to say that there is

a straightforward relationship between the two: the

thought is not the affect (on this everyone agrees).

However, thought can convey something of the

non- or pre-cognitive feelings of an individual.

Thus, emotional geographys subject is a psycho-

logical subject.

In contrast, affectual geography views the psy-

chological subject with enduring suspicion. This is

because non-representational theory sees thought

as being consciously and socially constituted

through representational practices of all kinds.

Thus, consciousness is seen as essentially inessen-

tial, as are other layers of the mind (the precon-

scious or unconscious), with the essence of being

lying underneath, in the body or bodies (not neces-

sarily human): effectively, in materialities and in

affects. Affect, in this understanding, cannot be

attached to, or emerge into, a thought; that is, it

cannot become an object of consciousness. Concep-

tually, thought is radically detached from affect.

Consequently, affectual geography emphasises the

non-psychological (that which cannot be repre-

sented) aspects of the subject; evident, for example,

in abject suffering and pain, when the subject has

its cloak of subjectivity torn to shreds (Dewsbury

2003; Harrison 2007; Bissell 2009).

So, emotional geography is focused on a psycho-

logical subject, where thoughts and affects are

entangled in complex and devious ways; in

contrast, affectual geography is focused on the

non-psychological subject, where affects are

always already ungraspable and unrepresentable

by thought. Fine. But so what? This split has conse-

quences for how we understand the manipulability

of emotions and affect for political purposes and,

also, the ethical imperatives that might be bound

up in emotions and affects.

Thus, Thrift passionately argues that affect is

being actively engineered, such that it is becoming

increasingly akin to the networks of pipes and cables

that are already part of the technological uncon-

scious of the city (Thrift 2004a, 58; also 2004b). This

engineering metaphor has its own technologic: it

casts affect as something that can be piped or

cabled, rewired, rerouted, re-networked in con-

scious and intentional ways. Much of Thrifts work

is devoted to the urgent analysis of the means and

effects of engineering affects: from the emotional

soup of corporate life to the political use of rhetoric

to the geopolitics of fear (see Thrift 2008, ch 10). He

cautions that emotional vocabularies only express

affects that have already been engineered by the

powerful. Thus, Thrift is suspicious of the language

of emotions precisely because they appear personal

and authentic, when in fact they are not.

As Thien astutely observes (2005a, 4523), in this

logic, emotional geography becomes characterised

as belonging to an increasingly inadequate form of

politics that is out of tune with, and incapable of

understanding, both the real world manipulations

of affect and also a whole range of potential

political interventions in these manipulations.

Meanwhile, affectual geography, and consequently

non-representational theory, seems to have turned

away from a spatial politics of affect towards a

generalised argument about the commodification of

12 Steve Pile


everything and the (associated) affectual mobilisa-

tion of the masses by the powerful (see Barnett

2008). Consequently, it can be accused of produc-

ing a depersonalised politics incapable of resonat-

ing with peoples actual experiences. Thus, Thien

(2005a) argues that models of affect proposed by

Thrift and others effectively marginalise emotions

by making them appear secondary and superficial.

Nor does she agree with non-representational the-

orys rendering of emotions as always already engi-

neered.

The debate between emotional and affectual

geographies is not simply an intellectual land-grab

for ownership of terms, such as affect, feeling, emo-

tion, or for contents, such as love, hate, anger, fear,

joy, and so on. It is a conceptual and political strug-

gle. Splitting, or not splitting, thought from affect is

the central fault line that distinguishes emotional

and affectual geographies.9 Yet the debate about the

relationship between the non-cognitive and the cog-

nitive, the conscious and the unconscious, about the

dynamics and resistances of psychological and non-

psychological processes can usefully be taken a step

further. What remains, however, after all this agree-

ment and disagreement is a failure in all but the

psychoanalytic parts of emotional and affectual

geography to really think through the uncon-

scious, and also how it is that emotions and oraffects actually do move between people.

Two missing geographies: (1) theunconscious and (2) the space in-between

Emotional and affectual geographies share some-

thing else: the use of the concept unconscious for

aspects of the mind that are non- or pre-conscious

and an idea of relationality that invokes the space

in-between bodies (see Harrison 2007). Yet, for me,

both these notions warrant further consideration.

This is not simply because they often enough

remain tacit or assumed, but because a dynamic

psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious

and of the spaces between subjects may allow the

weaknesses in both emotional and affectual geo-

graphy to be avoided. To make this argument, I

will draw on the work of psychoanalytic geogra-

phers, whose work has been under-used or ignored

by much of emotional and affectual geography.

The unconsciousBoth emotional and affectual geography claim

some inspiration from psychoanalysis, whether this

is directly from Freudian psychotherapeutic prac-

tice or as filtered through queer theory. Indeed,

both claim to value, for example, drive theory (see

Callard 2003) and its potential to disrupt cosy and

easy renderings of emotion and affect (see Bondi

2005, 439; Thrift 2004a, 61). I have noted, moreover,

the layer cake of non-cognitive, pre-cognitive and

cognitive in affect theory. This bears a remarkable

resemblance to the psychoanalytic topography of

unconscious, preconscious and conscious (respec-

tively). Thus we might draw equivalences between

the non-cognitive and the unconscious, the pre-cog-

nitive and the pre-conscious, and the cognitive and

the conscious.10 Potentially, then, a psychoanalytic

conception of psychic systems might be easily

transplanted into affectual geography. Similarly,

emotional geographys emphasis on the flows of

emotions between people draws on psychothera-

peutic concepts of transference and counter-trans-

ference (following Pile 1991; Bondi 2005).

Yet psychoanalytic geography is also at odds

with the humanistic inspirations of emotional and

affectual geography, where these imply a subject

that is stable, coherent and integrated; nor can psy-

choanalytic geography rest easily with any pre-

sumption of a split subject that is universal,

ahistorical and undynamic (see Philo and Parr

2003). Psychoanalytic geographies have, in other

words, been relentlessly Janus-faced: always point-

ing in (at least) two opposite directions at once. An

example would be Paul Kingsburys (2005) study

of Jamaican tourism, where holidaymakers work

hard to make their holiday a holiday, while those

who serve the holidaymakers work to produce a

space for holidaying that appears to require no

work. Similarly, we can recall Gillian Roses (1993)

notion of paradoxical space, where apparent con-

tradictions are actually responsible for producing

space.

Using psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject,

affects and emotions can be seen as both personal

and social: without the personal being reducible to

the social, nor the social being reducible to the per-

sonal (Pile 1996, 24156). Emotions, thus, no longer

belong exclusively to any individual even though

they are experienced and expressed this way but

are part of what we might call a psychodynamics

connected to space and place. Emotions, now, lie

between individuals, and between individuals and

perceptual environments. Meanwhile, affect turns

on the notion of intensity and its capacity, there-

fore, to do. Affect is strongly associated with the




unconscious and the Id, but this does not mean

that it cannot leak into other systems, or find

forms of expression: just as unconscious thoughts

(that have enough intensity associated with them)

find expression in dreams through dream-work, so

can affects find expression, but always in disguised

and deceitful ways (Pile 2006).

While psychoanalytic geographies have tended

to be suspicious of expressed emotions, this does

not mean that they do not take them seriously.

Instead, psychoanalytic geographies have tended to

focus on desires and anxieties, phobias and plea-

sures in the middle ground between inexpressible

affects and expressed emotions (see Callard 2003;

Davidson 2003; Thomas 2004; Thien 2005b; Pile

2005; Kingsbury 2005).

I would like to mention three consequences of a

specifically psychoanalytic conception of the

unconscious for both emotional and affectual geo-

graphy.

(1) The psychoanalytic concept of unconscious is

mostly associated with the notion of repression

(and perhaps this is why it is sidestepped in both

emotional and affectual geography). Whatever one

thinks about repression and I must emphasise

that much of psychoanalytic theory is devoted to

conceptualising an unconscious that is produced

by non-repressive mechanisms and is, indeed, non-

psychological what psychoanalysis demands is

an account of the production of the unconscious,

even while its contents and dynamics remain fugi-

tives from knowing. Psychoanalysis, consequently,

asks not only about how repression is achieved,

and why, but also about how that repression is

maintained or adapted.

Psychoanalysis presumes that the unconscious

carries out a kind of guerrilla warfare with those

agencies (such as the Super-Ego) that try to prevent

it from gaining expression. The unconscious strug-

gles to find ways of making its presence felt

against all means of preventing it from so doing.

This, then, undermines any cognition-centred emo-

tional geography that takes for granted the genu-

ineness of expressed emotions (in agreement with

affectual geography); and also, any affectual geo-

graphy that presumes an already existing

impermeable layer between the non-cognitive or

non-psychological and everything else (in agree-

ment with emotional geography). Here it is impor-

tant to remember that the psyche is always already

corporeal, so psychoanalysis usefully offers a way

of avoiding the dichotomy of the psychological and

non-psychological, or of the mind and the body

(see Pile 2009).

For emotional geography, the unconscious requi-

res a sense of the limits of emotional openness,

honesty and exposure. For affectual geography, it

suggests the need for an account of the production

of the capacities of bodies or of affects, rather than

simply disappearing this into the transpersonal or

universal.

(2) The topological understanding of the uncon-

scious in psychoanalysis enables two key questions:

how does anything get into the unconscious (as a

produced space); and, once there, can it get out

again? If the unconscious is entirely sealed (as

affectual geography presumes), then there is very

little problem. Unconscious circulations of non-psy-

chological contents simply would not trouble the

conscious mind, and we should consequently bear

them no mind. Theres no point in dealing with the

non-psychological aspects of human psychology if

they cannot affect have an impact upon the

psychological. In practice, ironically, affectual geo-

graphy abandons this assumption. This is problem-

atic, of course: at the very least, affectual

geographys models need to be modified to permit

affects to emerge into higher layers. That said,

neither emotional nor affectual geography have

accounts of how, or why, affects emerge into (or

are prevented from emerging into) cognition and

representation.

As affects can trouble the mind, more ques-

tions arise: which affects? Why some and not

others? How? What prevents some affects emerg-

ing? Can affects emerge direct into cognition, or

must they always be routed through the pre-

cognitive? What is, in other words, the exact nat-

ure of the permeable layer between non-cognitive

and pre-cognitive, the pre-cognitive and the

cognitive? And so on. Politically important

amongst this is the question of whether the

cognitive can influence the pre-cognitive and

cognitive, and how? It is the presumption that

the powerful can manipulate the non-cognitive

that needs greatest attention.

All this may appear abstract, but Heidi Nast

(2000) has shown how unconscious racisms and

Oedipal dynamics structure the fabric of the city.

For her, unconscious psychodynamics can find

their expression, albeit unwittingly, in seemingly

conscious and rational ways, such as urban form.

In this topographic, the unconscious is not separa-

ble from consciousness, nor a layer beneath or

14 Steve Pile


behind or beyond peoples awareness, it is under

peoples noses (see also Thomas 2004; Hook 2005;

Kingsbury 2007). As importantly, both unconscious

and conscious processes structure the production

of urban space, and these can interfere or collude

with one another (see also Pile 1996).

Following on. (3) In affectual geography, the

non-cognitive remains relentlessly unknowable,

unrepresentable. In emotional geography, the

unconscious is abandoned in favour of expressed

inter-subjective relations. Neither relies upon an

account of the specific contents of the uncon-

scious, nor of what happens in the unconscious.

Turbulent passions remain on the surface, while

still waters run deep. There is a consequence to

this, and it returns us to the political.

A strong argument for thinking about affect in

non-representational theory is that it is being engi-

neered by the powerful. It is suggested that this

may be happening, in new forms, through (for

example) consumerism, management techniques

and skills training, and media representations. It is

not clear, since affect is supposedly non-cognitive,

how it is that the powerful and non-representa-

tional theory can actually have this ability to

know the unknowable, let alone to engineer that

which cannot be grasped. If, on the other hand, it

is argued that the powerful are actually manipulat-

ing the pre-cognitive or cognitive, then what role is

affect playing? Maybe, instead, affects resist the

manipulations of the powerful. We simply do not

know.

Similarly, many emotional geographers have

wished to incorporate an understanding of emo-

tional transferences into their understanding of the

power dynamics within research practices, yet

there is no account of the complex ways in which

these transferences might express themselves.

Unconscious fantasies bound up in the research

process can be remarkably powerful and hard to

reveal precisely because both the researcher and

the researched produce them together, unwittingly

(see Pile forthcoming). Instead, emotional geogra-

phy has tended to provide rather plain descriptions

of the emotions the researcher expressly feels (see

Widdowfield 2000).

If questioning the topographics and dynamics of

the unconscious gnaws at the conceptual ropes that

bind emotional and affectual geography, then it

also opens up the geography of these approaches.

Lets look at just one such geography: the space

in-between.

The space in-betweenEmotional geography commonly concerns itself

with the emotions that people feel for one

another and, more extensively, for places, for

landscapes, for objects in landscapes and in spe-

cific situations. In such studies, people express

emotions about something. These emotions are

taken as personal, yet there is often an attempt to

fit these expressed emotions into a wider context

of emotions. Even so, an understanding of this

wider context is frequently built up out of peo-

ples expressed emotions. Commonly, then, the

space between people is one of direct experience,

and based on the smooth transmission receptionof tacit or explicit feelings (whether from other

people or from objects such as landscapes). This

in-between does not scale up particularly well.

What, for example, is the emotional geography of

global charity or urban pleasures? What physical

and psychological distances are formed and per-

formed? How does emotion jump scales or,

indeed, produce scales? And what resistances

might there be in the space between people and

their environments?

These are not unknown questions for emotional

geographers see an exemplary essay by Deborah

Thien (2005b) or Rachel Pains (2009) study of the

geopolitics of fear but the geography of

in-between is relentlessly constructed in the smooth

space of an encounter between a person and

another person or people; or in the encounter

between a person and their environment, whether

through travelling, dwelling, reading, ageing, con-

suming, cowering or whatever. This is not a neces-

sary default mode, but this is this space between

that is easiest to ally with a politics of caring, and

the production of caring or care-less environments.

Emotional geography can and should examine its

own presuppositions about relationality, encounter

and the space in-between.

Affectual geography, meanwhile, has come up

with three distinct ways to represent the space

in-between. Affects flow between bodies by circula-

tion, by transmission and by contagion (see, for

example, Thrift 2008, 23543). Even acknowledging

that metaphors are necessarily inexact, each is

somewhat problematic for thinking about how

non-cognitive affects cross the space between peo-

ple, and indeed how they are manipulated.

We have, to a degree, already encountered circu-

lation. It is pipes and cables, as used to distribute

water or television (rather than other forms of




circulation, such as circuses or ideas). It is mechani-

cal and practical. It is engineered. The problem is

that the metaphor is inadequate to its object: where

pipes and cables, and engineering, are knowable

and graspable, affect according to non-representa-

tional theory is simply not. Nor do we know

how the piping, or the cabling, is constructed.

More than this, these pipes and cables presume

that affects, as they are distributed, are immutable

in transit: from wherever they are distributed from,

the affects that leave and the affects that arrive.

The recurring metaphor of pipes and cables (see

McCormack 2008, 426) may explain nothing, but

more in doubt is whether it actually describes any-

thing useful about how affect s actually travel s.Transmission, meanwhile, appears to be modelled

on radio, rather than, say, the dissemination of

ideas through specific networks or perhaps the

workings of car engines. In this model, the capacity

to affect is likened to radio transmission and recep-

tion. In this sense, the transmission of affect has

two specific qualities: it spreads and it is program-

matic. Further, it relies on the idea that bodies are

like radios. This broadcast metaphor gives it a spe-

cific geography: of broadcast area and of points of

transmission and reception. This, though, begs dif-

ficult questions about points of transmission and

the quality of reception. Do we all have the (same)

capacity to transmit (affect) and receive (be

affected)? If not, who has what? And how is this

capacity (or incapacity) produced (or not)? As

importantly, this is not the pipes and cables chan-

nelling of affect, it is more like broadcasting

through an ether. The space between bodies is not

bridged by pipes and cables, but is an invisible

field within which bodies are always already

located. But what is the nature of the ether that car-

ries affects? How do we pick up affects? And

how far do they reach from one body to another,

across a room, through a city, nation, world?

Finally, contagion. In this, affects are like viruses

that hop by some medium: air, water, exchanges

of bodily fluids between people, thereby infecting

them. People, in this view, are infected through

proximity to a source and by the vectors of the dis-

ease. But who is the plague Mary of an affect?

What vectors? What viruses? Is an affect a body in

itself with its own life and life cycle? Is anyone

immune, or can they be immunised? Interestingly,

contagion speaks to the corporeal, non-human

and non-cognitive assumptions being made in

non-representational theory about affects. In this

respect, it may be non-representational theorys

best metaphor. However, the idea that affects are

like viruses naturalises the ways in which affects

might live in and through bodies, paradoxically

rendering them uncannily knowable by associating

affects with what humans know about viruses and

their representations of them.

Although radio waves and viruses do, at least,

have an ungraspable or invisible side to them,

these metaphors also render opaque the actual

mechanisms and media through which affect might

actually travel between people. We simply do not

know how an affect might be transmitted, or

passed, from one body to another.

It would appear that there is still much work to

be done in thinking through the geographies of

emotional and affectual life.

Conclusion

Emotional and affectual geography is, at first sight,

far too broad and complex to have anything like

coherent conceptual underpinnings, far less a radi-

cal split between one form of emotional geography

and another. Charting agreements and disagree-

ments within the burgeoning field of emotional

and affectual geography has been a means to iden-

tify both its weaknesses and limits. I have mapped:

(1) their relational ontologies, privileging fluidity

and movement; (2) their interweaving, and valua-

tion, of proximity, intimacy and closeness; (3) their

shared methodological predispositions; and (4)

their understandings of the body. The crux of the

matter, however, is the presumed relationship or

non-relationship between thought and affect in

emotional and affectual geography.

Emotional geography ensures that there is

no split between thought and affect. It is argued

that there is no straightforward correspondence

between affect, the thought and its representation.

Nonetheless, emotional geography fails to account

for the relationship between them and this failing

is strongly associated with emotional geographys

turn away from its anti-humanistic psychoanalytic

roots towards a cognition-centred approach, under-

pinned by phenomenology. This is especially evi-

dent in those places where emotional geography

ignores the dynamics of the unconscious.

Affectual geography radically splits affect from

thought, and thought from its representatives. In so

doing, it constructs affect as the pure non-represen-

tational object: it cannot be known, grasped or

16 Steve Pile


made intelligible. The means through which affect

might make itself known, whether via feelings or

emotions or representations, are thereby rendered

opaque. Nonetheless, contradictorily, affect can be

consciously and deliberately engineered, but no

account of how this is possible is given. Without a

theory of affect itself or of how affect circulates,

gets transmitted or becomes contagious affectual

geography can (ironically) only deal with its sur-

face expression.

Though affect cannot be presented or repre-

sented, affectual geographers, drawing upon non-

representational theory, constantly evoke moments

when affect is evident: be these smiles, laughter,

jokes or hope, anger, shame and so on. Apologies

for being blunt, but this is a straightforward hypoc-

risy. It continually does what it says cannot be

done: it cannot help but re-present and represent

affect and in language. Ultimately, the non-repre-

sentational theorys approach to affect demon-

strates two things: first, that it is fundamentally a

representational practice that is, importantly,

unable to recognise itself as such (see, for example,

Latham and McCormack 2009); second, that it is

not a theory, but a chain gang of metaphors (or

resources, or assumptions).

The greatest threat to emotional geography is

that it should tie itself ever more closely to two

things: (1) first, an ever-expanding shopping list of

expressed emotions that geographers should shop

for without ever reflecting on why emotional

geographies should be conducted in the first place;

(2) an increasingly cognition-centred, humanistic

and romantic view of expressed emotions, where

accounts that display ever greater poignancy and

intimacy become the stock-in-trade of the caring

researcher. That is, emotional geography must

know why emotions are important and interesting;

also, it cannot presume that its approach is the

only way to be caring, intimate or close; and it can-

not assume that intimacy and proximity are inher-

ently more caring or better than distance. Put

another way, emotional geography ought to be able

to recognise the care involved in non-representa-

tional and other styles of researching and writ-

ing. Avoiding these pitfalls will allow, promisingly,

emotional geography to extend its repertoire of

geographies, rather than simply lengthening its list

of affecting emotions.

Behind all this is a struggle between political

visions: one formed around caring and emotional

transformation, another formed around the critique

of affectual manipulation and an ethics of radical

openness. Whatever the worthiness of these polit-

ico-ethical positions and who would dare argue

against either? lessons drawn from psychoana-

lytic geography should cause pause for thought.

But this should not prevent us from thinking more

about emotions, feelings and affect for weve

much further to go in thinking through their geo-

graphies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Open Universitys cul-

ture, space and politics collaboratory for their

insightful reading of an early (12 000 word!) draft

of this paper. In particular, Nadia Bartolini, Melissa

Butcher, Simon Hutta, Gillian Rose and Ariel

Terranova-Webb provided detailed comments that

influenced the progression of this paper. Progres-

sion to publication was guided by the insightful

and supportive editorial work of Alison Blunt.

Notes

1 Including this sample from the last few years: Adey

(2008 2009); Bosco (2006 2007); Brown (2008); Carter

and McCormack (2006); Cloke et al. (2008); Colls (2004

2006); Dyer et al. (2008); Fenster (2004); Hasse (2005);

Holloway (2006); Kearney and Bradley (2009); Kraftl

and Adey (2008); Kraftl and Horton (2007); Kwan

(2007); Lorimer (2008); Mackian (2004); Major (2008);

Milligan (2005); OTuathail (2003); Rose (2004); Saville

(2008); Smith et al. (2008); Smith et al. (2009); Thomas

(2007); Tolia-Kelly (2006); Wood and Smith (2004). See

also notes 3 and 4 below.

2 Also see Davidson and Bondi (2004, 373) and David-

son et al. (2005, 1).

3 See, for example: Widdowfield (2000); Davidson and

Milligan (2004); Davidson and Bondi (2004); Thien

(2005a); Davidson et al. (2005); Davidson (2007).

4 Here, we can include Dewsbury (2003); McCormack

(2003 2007 2008); Latham and McCormack (2004);

Anderson (2004 2005 2006); Thrift (2004a 2008, chap-

ters 8 and 10) and Harrison (2007).

5 Amongst the more significant papers on affect, from

the perspective of non-representational theory, are:

Dewsbury (2003); McCormack (2003 2007); Latham

and McCormack (2004); Anderson (2004 2005 2006);

Thrift (2004a 2008); Harrison (2007).

6 See, for example, McCormack (2007).

7 Narratives that, because of their ever closer attention

to detail, once drew sharp criticism for their increas-

ing failure to see the big (or indeed a bigger) picture:

see Gregory (1981).




8 This view has been rightly condemned for its failure

to differentiate between differently produced bodies

(see especially Tolia-Kelly 2006; also see Saldanha

forthcoming).

9 This fault line has another feature. Fundamentally, if

emotional geography is seeking a utopia of form (via

intimacy), then non-representational theory is seeking

a utopia of process (via affect) (following Harveys

[2000] distinction).

10 Note, psychoanalysis has more than one way to

understand the mind-body: see Pile (2009).

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