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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] //-->ArticleProgress in Human Geography36(5) 613–627ªThe Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0309132511435002phg.sagepub.comTowards an evental geographyIan G.R. ShawThe University of Glasgow, UKAbstractThis paper puts forward a new way of thinking about objects, worlds, and events. The philosophicalcontribution of the paper pivots around the idea that objects areforce-full:smoldering furnaces of affects thatare capable of creating, policing, and destroying the very contours of existence. The paper begins with aproblem, which is how to account for objects, worlds, and events outside of human consciousness or‘in-themselves’. It answers by constructing an ‘evental geography’ from the ontologies of Martin Heidegger,Alain Badiou, and Graham Harman. A ‘geo-event’ names the transformation of a world – from galaxies tonation states to ecosystems – by ‘inexistent’ objects and the forces they unleash. The paper is situated at thebusy crossroads of (object-oriented) philosophy, non-representational theory, and actor-network theory.Keywordsaffect, actor-network theory, Badiou, Harman, Heidegger, philosophyI IntroductionWe are all children of events, thrown into aworld of revolution and change. Volcanoesbubble and boil, oceans heave and toil, nuclearbombs flatten cities, and protestors topple brutaldictators. These events can tear apart the fabricof sense and habit in the world. Exactly how oneis to articulate these moments is important fortaking hold of the politics and possibilitiesrooted in the very texture of the planet – indeed,in the very folds of existence.But such articulation is fraught withphilosophical baggage. How do we theorizeand represent events and the worlds that theytransform? This paper engages these importantquestions by reviewing past and present geo-graphic thinking, before constructing its ownformulation on the status of ‘world’, ‘event’, and‘object’. Ultimately, the success of this venturerests on the thought of Martin Heidegger (2000,2010), Alain Badiou (2009), and Graham Harman(2002). Although these figures are underwrittenby unique ontological signatures, this paperaims at synthesizing their philosophies towardsexplaining what an ‘evental geography’ mightbe and why it is important.So what exactly is an event? Consider thefollowing three. Event 1: in 1871 proletariatsseize power in Paris; united under the red flagthis working-class commune punctures a holein bourgeois history. Event 2: on 23 August2005, an extreme low-pressure point forms overthe Bahamas, creating a hurricane baptized asKatrina. One of the strongest and most deadlyof Atlantic hurricanes, this category 5 disasterwould later batter and drown the city of NewOrleans. Event 3: 65 million years ago, a periodlong before our species left footprints on theplanet, a meteor approximately 6 miles wideCorresponding author:The School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, TheUniversity of Glasgow, East Quad, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UKEmail: Ian.Shaw.2@glasgow.ac.ukDownloaded fromphg.sagepub.comat Uniwersytet Jagiellonski on February 21, 2016614Progress in Human Geography 36(5)collided with Earth, sending dust and debrisflying into the air. This noxious blanket wouldeventually commit dinosaurs to a fossilizedfuture.The reason for naming these three events isthat each one either took place with humans orwithout them. Event 1 was a seemingly expli-citly anthropocentric event; event 2 involvedthe interaction between humans and ‘nature’;and event 3 happened before there was any traceof human consciousness on earth. But must weconfine ourselves to this human/non-human bin-ary? The purpose of this paper is to provide adefinition of an evental geography beyond theprimacy of anthropocentric correlation, centeredon the concept of the ‘geo-event’, which –briefly for now – is defined as the transformationof a world by ‘inexistent objects’ and the result-ing shift in affective relations between objects.For decades, following Kant’s (1997)‘Copernican Turn’ (the Enlightenment philoso-pher’s insistence that the world is principallycorrelated with thinking), continental philoso-phy has been concerned with deconstructingand challenging the nexus of discourse, culture,and power-knowledge (e.g. Derrida, 1976;Foucault, 1970). The influence of poststructur-alism is vast, having made a massive impactin geography, where its scholars and practi-tioners took on the epistemological challengesposed by the cultural turn to deconstruct thefixity of meaning and the stability of spatialcategorizations and orderings (e.g. Dixon andJones, 1998). Feminist geography and laterfeminist political geography and geopolitics(England, 2003; Fluri, 2009; Hyndman, 2001;Massey, 1994; Sharp, 2007) sought to highlightthe human body as enmeshed within discursiveregimes and power matrices, but also asperfor-mative(Butler, 1990) and a way of troublinghegemonic ideas about gender and sexuality. Theinfluence of feminist materialities (Buchanan andColebrook, 2000) similarly goes a long way toupturn the false stereotypes that poststructuralismis only concerned with representation and text.However, what remains present in the nucleusof the cultural turn more generally is the posi-tion of human beings as transcendental forcesin the world. Commenting on this, Bryant etal. (2011) state:despite the vaunted anti-humanism of many of thethinkers identified with these trends, what they giveus is less a critique of humanity’s place in the world,than a less sweeping critique of the self-enclosedCartesian subject. Humanity remains at the centreof these works, and reality appears in philosophyonly as the correlate of human thought. In thisrespect phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernismhave all been perfect exemplars of the anti-realisttrend in continental philosophy. (Bryant et al.,2011: 2–3)How, then, do we as geographers probe the‘world-in-itself’; that strange and unflinchinginfinity that is indifferent to human thought anddiscourse; the very same universe that will per-sist long after human beings return to the verysame cosmic dust that beats in their hearts? Tobe sure, the importance of the ‘non-human’ hasalways been central for explaining geographicdifference. Objects such as cockroaches (Biehler,2009), mosquitoes (Shaw et al., 2010), dogs(Haraway, 2008), elephants (Lorimer, 2010),seeds (Kloppenburg, 1988), lawns (Robbins,2007), refrigerators (Freidberg, 2009), sugar(Mintz, 1985), railways (Schivelbusch, 1987:40), technology (Winner, 1977), military robots(Shaw and Akhter, 2011; Singer, 2009), and soft-ware code (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005) all patternsociopolitical life. Perhaps now, more than ever,objects and things (Ingold, 2010) are of centralconcern to geographers, as Clark (2011) puts it:[O]nce again the raw physicality of the world is ris-ing up the agenda. Once more, the inherent forceful-ness of the earth and cosmos, nature’s capacity to bea great deal more or a lot less than what we wouldask of it, is weighing upon us. (Clark, 2011: XIII)Yet there is no single method to describe thenon-human. Marxist geography has longDownloaded fromphg.sagepub.comat Uniwersytet Jagiellonski on February 21, 2016Shaw615Instead, there is nothing but a cosmic hailstorm ofindividual actants, none of them inherently naturalor cultural. In fact, preciselybecauseof its attemptsto purify the two districts of the world from oneanother, the so-called modern age has created agreater number of hybrid objects than have everbeen known before. (Harman, 2009: 58)stressed the dialectical relationship of subjectsand objects (Harvey, 1973, 1982, 1989, 1996;Peet, 1991; Smith, 2008). In theGrundrisse,forexample, Marx (1973: 92) writes: ‘Productionthus not only creates an object for the subject,but also a subject for the object’. In this sense,Marx reverses the Hegelian dialectic to stresshow conscious subjects arise from the concretefoundations of the earth itself – a type of ‘meta-bolism’ (Smith, 2008: 41). This dialecticalthinking overturned the Cartesian assumptionsof early spatial science, in order to stress theproductionof space (Lefebvre, 1991) and theattending social implications (Soja, 1980). Itshould be added that running parallel to thiswas a phenomenological conception of objectsladen with meaning, symbolism, and sensation,which in turn created a sense of place and life-world (e.g. Buttimer, 1976; Pickles, 1985;Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1974).Political ecology has drawn on Marxisttheory to describe the exploitation of peopleand environments (Blaikie and Brookfield,1987; Mitchell, 2002; Peet and Watts, 1996;Robbins, 2004; Watts, 1983). This broad fieldof thought has attempted to reconcile theso-called division between nature and culture,perhaps at the expense of sharpening this divi-sion. Indeed, an inherent, almost paradoxicalproblem within political ecology and Marxisttheories of nature is how to stress the productiverelationships between humans and ‘nature’which can oftentimes be exploitative withoutcoming ‘perilously close to reasserting the sub-ject/object dichotomy of the Enlightenment,where human ingenuity is played out on an earththat is imagined as static and inert’ (Braun,2008: 197).Actor-network theory tackles this samesubject/object dichotomy, with Latour (1993,2005) arguing that all things, whether humanor non-human, are ‘actants’ capable of mediat-ing with each other in a network. He thusdissolves the ‘dirty fiction’ of modernity, whichis the division between subject and object:Relatedly, assemblage theory plugs differentcomponent pieces together to form assemblagesmarked by their relations of ‘exteriority’(DeLanda, 2006). Assemblages are useful togeography because they ‘reflexively remind usof the embodied and evolutionary character ofourselves as humans and more-than-humans.Social relations are more-than-social and morethan extensions of the social into other loca-tions’ (Robbins and Marks, 2010: 185).The theoretical engagement over the ‘more-than-ness’ to human existence finds itself playedout by a number of scholars (Braun, 2004a, 2006;Haraway, 1991, 2003, 2008; Whatmore, 2002).As Bakker and Bridge (2006) note:it is important to assert that the unruliness ofmateriality should not be located in ‘natural’ lawsor limits. Rather, the critical issue – and a fruitfulfocus for research – is the way in which contempo-rary materialities have been produced historically,and the ways in which we can think imaginativelyabout creating ‘new natures’ as ‘possible futures’.(Bakker and Bridge, 2006: 21)This excitement over the ‘more-than-ness’ andthe possibility of ‘newness’ can be traced, inpart, to the widespread influence of the philoso-pher Gilles Deleuze (1994; see also Buchananand Lambert, 2005; Colebrook, 2002; Deleuzeand Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002). Difficultto define, Deleuzian approaches affirm theexcess of life over and above the categories thatseek to contain it. This vitalist rendition ofexistence has blossomed into a range of con-cepts: rhizomes, multiplicities, immanence, anddifference, as well as a range of theoretical andempirical engagements (Doel, 1999; Marstonet al., 2005; Massey, 2005; Saldanha, 2007;Downloaded fromphg.sagepub.comat Uniwersytet Jagiellonski on February 21, 2016616Progress in Human Geography 36(5)Shaw et al., 2010; Whatmore, 2002). Above all,Deleuzian approaches awaken and animate mat-ter itself, which is no longer viewed as the dumband clumsy stuff of a forsaken unphilosophicalrealm. Speaking to the importance of this, Ben-nett (2010: IX) asks: ‘Why advocate the vitalityof matter? Because my hunch is that the image ofdead or thoroughly instrumentalized matterfeeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fan-tasies of conquest and consumption.’That geography was dead and needed to bemade alive was an idea put forward with earlywork on affective and non-representational geo-graphies (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). Theguiding philosophy was that ‘The world is moreexcessive than we can theorise’ (Dewsburyet al., 2002: 437). The idea certainly caughton, as a growing number of human geographerssought to explore the busy realm of affectivematerialities behind and beyond what can bethought (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Braun,2008; Dewsbury, 2003; Lorimer, 2005;McCormack, 2003; Shaw and Warf, 2009; Thrift,2008; Woodward and Lea, 2010; Wylie, 2005; seealso Pile, 2010). Speaking of a ‘vast spillage ofthings’, Thrift (2008: 10) writes that ‘things formnot so much a technological unconscious as atechnological anteconscious. . .a warp and weftof inhuman traffic with its own indifferentgeographies’.It is precisely this ‘indifference’ to humanthought, existence, and practice that I want toemphasize. So many attempts to fuse and hybri-dize culture and nature, humans and animals,subjects and objects, and other neo-Kantiandivisions, have resulted only in the subtleinvestment of their power. The reason geogra-phy is so important is that it does not lose sightof the worldliness of objects, beyond their cor-relation with human thought. The purpose ofthis paper, then, of constructing an evental geo-graphy, is to situate geography as the pre-eminent philosophical condition: to place theworld, its objects and its events as the genericconditions of existence. Yet, rather than reachto metaphysical skies or subterranean material-ities, I argue that events are already localizedwithin objects themselves. The approach allowsus to describe the unstable foundations of allworlds – from galaxies to nation states to ecosys-tems. The result is to define what a ‘geo-event’is, and answer how objects themselves areresponsible for transforming worlds. This tracesa similar logic to Badiou’s definition of the‘event’ as a moment of radical change, onlystripped of the necessity of human subjects. Atstake is the inherently political division between(1) what exists in a world and is visible and (2)what exists in a world and is invisible. As it turnsout, this division is not just policed by transcen-dental subjects, but is located in the relationsbetween objects themselves. In this sense, poli-tics is not ‘more than human’ – it wasneversim-ply human to begin with.II Heidegger’s worldIf I am attempting to synthesize the philosophiesof Heidegger, Badiou, and Harman, it is notbecause it is uncontroversial to do so: theyappear antithetical to each other. For many,Heidegger is seen as a philosopher of ontology,a ‘shepherd of being’, and a critic of the meta-physics of calculation. Badiou, on the otherhand, is driven by mathematical thinking. AddHarman to the mix and even more discord ringsout: Heidegger was dismissive of ‘tools’ as phi-losophical objects, whereas Harman starts withthem. But a synthesis is possible, and it all cen-ters on the status of the event. First, though, it isuseful to recall that Heidegger’s great ‘chal-lenge’ to philosophy was to return to the ontolo-gical – which had been ‘forgotten’ byphilosophers ever since Plato and Aristotleassociated being with beings. Such a return tobeing itself,the most universal yet elusive of allconcepts, is a torch carried by both Badiou andHarman, even if they answer the challenge dif-ferently to their Black Forest progenitor.Downloaded fromphg.sagepub.comat Uniwersytet Jagiellonski on February 21, 2016Shaw617The formal existential totality of the ontologicalstructural whole of Dasein must thus be formulatedin the following structure: the being of Daseinmeans being-ahead-of-oneself-already in (theworld) as being-together-with (innerworldly beingencountered). This being fills in the significanceof the term care. (Heidegger, 2010: 186)Heidegger has made a modest but continualinfluence in geography and spatial thinking(see, for example, Elden, 2000, 2001, 2005;Harrison, 2007; Malpas, 2006; Pickles, 1985;Schatzki, 2007; Wainwright, 2010). Heidegger’spersistent focus was alwaysunconcealmentasthe event of being. Heidegger had a keen eye forthe shadow and light that bathes our world, teas-ing out new wonders, only to dispel others intothe void. This is the evental power of being, onethat does not reside solely within any human con-sciousness. InIntroduction to Metaphysics(2000) Heidegger argues that being is ‘phusis’,a Greek word that means ‘what emergesfrom itself (for example, the emergence, theblossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opensitself up, the coming-into-appearance in suchunfolding, and holding itself and persisting inappearance – in short, the emerging-abidingsway’ (Heidegger, 2000: 15). This emergence:can be experienced everywhere: for example, incelestial processes (the rising of the sun), in surgingof the sea, in the growth of plants, in the comingforth of animals and human beings from the womb.Butphusis,the emerging sway, is not synonymouswith these processes, which we still today count aspart of ‘nature’. . .Phusisis Being itself, by virtueof which beings first become and remain visible.(Heidegger, 2000: 15)Heidegger argues that this originary meaning hasbecome lost and corrupted, and philosophyassociates being with beings, rather than theirunconcealment (aletheia)from shadow into light.¯Heidegger’s thoughts on what being ‘is’begin with an existential analysis of the modeof being that is familiar to all of us: ‘Dasein’, theontological fact that we are always-already‘being-there’. Unlike all other objects, humanbeings have unique access to this ontologicalstructure, since it is only with Dasein that beingis an ‘issue’. Dasein is forever thrown in a worldthat it cares about, dwells within, and encoun-ters alongside others, as it shuffles between itspast, present and future:Unlike traditional humanistic or Cartesianaccounts of subjectivity, Dasein is a space ofactivity that is non-transcendental and entwinedwith the world: ‘Subject and object are not thesame as Dasein and world – this faulty opposi-tion is the foundation of the false metaphysicalproblem of how we come to know the world’(Heidegger, 2010: 60). For Heidegger, worldis not equal to space (Heidegger, 2010: 99), andneither is world synonymous with nature:‘Worldliness cannot be understood in terms ofnature, and indeed, nature can be made intelligi-ble only on the basis of worldliness’ (Dreyfus,1991: 113). World is instead the set of meaning-ful practices, equipment, and sayings thatrelate to a referential whole, of which Daseinis practically immersed and cares about, as‘being-in-the-world’. This is to say that neitherworld nor Dasein exist independently: being-in-the-world is a relational space of activity –a clearing that is constantly worlding the thingsthat are taken care of.Heidegger went to a great deal of pain toundermine Cartesian accounts of subjectivity,yet he is reluctant to admit that objects or animalshave worlds. For him, stones are completelyworldless, whereas animals are ‘world impover-ished’, which is to say they are affected by beings,but cannot relate to beings ‘as such’ or to beingsas a whole. Heidegger’s disavowal of nature’spossibility of world is addressed by his attemptto ground nature in ‘earth’, the source thatgrounds and conflicts with worlds (Inwood,1999: 246). Yet, despite the fact that Heideggerhas always recognized the importance of things,whether streams or hammers, his interest pivotson their usabilityforDasein. Consequently, rail-ways and volcanoes, mosquitoes and dolphins,Downloaded fromphg.sagepub.comat Uniwersytet Jagiellonski on February 21, 2016 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |