Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

In this paper we offer a discussion of the ‘materiality’ of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of ‘rematerializing’ human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’, it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a ‘rematerialized’ urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than ‘grounding’ urban geography in more ‘concrete’ realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the ‘material’ and ‘nonmaterial’ while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban.

Engineering affective atmospheres on the moving geographies of the 1897 Andrée expedition

How might the dynamic materiality of atmosphere be addressed in ways that register simultaneously its meteorological and affective qualities? The present article considers this question via a discussion of the kinds of atmospheric spaces in which the emergence and experience of modern balloon (or aerostatic) flight is implicated. In doing so it argues that aerostatic flight can be understood simultaneously as a technology for moving through atmosphere in a meteorological sense and as an event generative, at least potentially, of atmospheres in an affective sense. This argument is exemplified via a discussion of a particularly notable instance of balloon flight: the attempt, in 1897 by a Swedish engineer, Salomon August Andrée, and two companions, to fly to the North Pole in a hydrogen-filled balloon. Drawing upon a range of contemporaneous accounts, the article makes three claims about the expedition: first, that it can be understood, following Spinoza, as an effort to engineer a mode of addressing the meteorological atmosphere as a relational field of affect; second, that the passage of the expedition can be understood in terms of the registering of atmospheres (in both meteorological and affective terms) in moving, sensing bodies; and third, that the expedition was also generative of a distributed space of anticipation and expectancy. In concluding, the article speculates upon how conceiving of atmospheric space as simultaneously as meteorological and affective might contribute to recent attempts to rethink the materialities of cultural geographies.

Molecular affects in human geographies

In this paper I engage critically with the relation between affect and the molecular—the former touching upon but not limited to questions of mood and emotion, and the latter registering the power of processes including, but not limited to, the neurochemical. The backdrop to this engagement is an emerging diagram of the molecular processes and pathways in which affect is implicated. The emergence of this diagram not only foregrounds the importance of thinking critically about how affect is caught up in a range of techniques and technologies: it also raises the question of how to attend to molecular affects—and their implication in the matter and movement of thinking—without falling back upon a kind of biological or physiological reductionism. I provide a provisional answer to this question. In doing so I draw support from a range of thinkers, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, each of whom points to the possibility of cultivating a kind of molecular logic of sense. In moving towards a conclusion, I speculate about how this logic productively complicates the thinking space of human geography.

Diagramming practice and performance

In this paper I seek to apprehend some of the powers of nonrepresentational practice and performance through an encounter with the rhythmic movement of the body. I concentrate on eurhythmics, a practice that emerged in Geneva in the late 19th century and early 20th century as an effort to improve musical appreciation through rhythmic movement. Drawing on work in cultural and architectural theory, I argue that the historical and cultural geographies of eurhythmics can best be apprehended diagrammatically. Specifically, I situate eurhythmics in diagrammatic relation to the corporeal kinaesthetics of rhythmic movement, to practices of social and cultural transformation, and to architectures of performative potential. By apprehending the geographies of eurhythmics in this way, I not only work to demonstrate that nonrepresentational styles of thinking and working multiply rather than undermine the field of power in which geographers move, but also present a sense of how these powers can become implicated in the very practice and performance of geographical research.

A paper with an interest in rhythm

This paper is a performative effort to move with and through the expressive and theoretical spaces of an interest in rhythm. This interest emerges initially from the middle of an encounter with the 5 Rhythms™, a contemporary somatic practice that uses rhythm to facilitate and catalyse expressive movement. Rather than seeking to excavate representational meaning from an encounter with the practice or using it to critically diagnose the corporeal politics of contemporary society, this paper apprehends the creative movement emerging from an encounter with/in the non-representational, performative potential of the 5 Rhythms™. By becoming a deliberately playful effort to hold onto the lines of movement emergent from the affective, kinaesthetic territories of this practice, the paper works to avoid either falling back upon a representational ethics that stops this movement dead in its tracks or becoming seduced by an aesthetics of weightless escape. This effort draws particular support from Deleuze and Guattaris writing on the refrain, a concept that provides a vehicle through which the lines of an interest in rhythm gain expressive and theoretical consistency. Because the territories of the refrain open onto lines of movement that are as much figural as discursive, the paper works to animate the lines of movement emerging from an encounter with the 5 Rhythms™ through a series of non-representational diagrammatic interventions. Finally, in drawing the diagrammatic lines of this movement in-between, the paper becomes not so much a series of lines about moving, but a series of lines moving about.

Refrains for moving bodies : experience and experiment in affective spaces

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction. Affective Spaces for Moving Bodies 1. Transitions: For Experimenting (with) Experience 2. Rhythmic Bodies and Affective Atmospheres 3. Diagramming Refrains: A Chapter with an Interest in Rhythm 4. Ecologies of Therapeutic Practice 5. Commentating. Semiconducting Affective Atmospheres 6. Moving Images for Moving Bodies 7. Choreographing Lived Abstractions 8. Promising Participation Notes Bibliography Index

The space-times of decision making

By way of an extended introduction to a theme issue on the space–times of decision making, this paper pursues two objectives. We first review some of the ways in which geographers—and especially economic geographers—have examined decision making over the past decades, showing that previous engagements with the decision are informed primarily by thinking from economics, psychology, and certain strands of sociology. Drawing on a wider range of intellectual resources, we then outline eight propositions that might guide future research by geographers and others into the space–times of decision making. These propositions help us to move beyond the idea that the decision is a singular moment abstracted from the context within which it takes place and undertaken by a discrete actor or set of actors. Instead the decision is understood as a differentiated, affectively registered, transformative, and ongoing actualisation of potential against a horizon of undecidability in which past, present, and future fold together in complex ways. A number of research questions follow from the outlined propositions: these pertain to the sites and techniques of decision making, its relationships to the governing of life, and our own decision-making practices as academics.

Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives: The Spectral Geographies of Material Remains

Remote sensing is an important geospatial technique employed across the discipline, yet it remains tangential to the conceptual and empirical concerns of cultural geographers. A modified understanding of remote sensing can, however, inform cultural geographical research into the persistence and circulation of spectral geographies. Revisiting a specific episode of Arctic exploration—the 1897 Andrée Balloon Expedition to the North Pole—provides a vehicle through which to substantiate this claim. The remains of the expedition, including objects, diaries, photographic film, and human remains, were found on a remote, ice-covered Arctic island in 1930. Over time these remains have become generative of a spectral afterlife: a distributed field of affective materials that circulates through specific configurations of object, text, and image. Moving through this field can best be undertaken as a modified kind of remote sensing, where remote sensing is understood not so much as a technology of distanced, elevated image capture but as a set of mobile and modest techniques for sensing the unsettling geographies of the spectral. Enacting this process of remote sensing, however, requires the cultivation of distinctive modes of narration, demonstrated here through the dispersal, scattering, and ongoing return of the question, “Where is Andrée?”

Profiling the passenger: mobilities, identities, embodiments

What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as both a subject and an object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, from nomad, flaneur to consumer? How is the passenger represented, practiced and performed? How has the passenger and their experiences been conceived, imagined, manipulated, regulated and engineered? And what kind of human-technology assemblages do passengers enact? Through four short perspectives, this paper seeks to ‘profile’ the passenger as a distinctive historical and conceptual figure that can help to add greater precision to the analysis of our mobile ways of life. The passenger is explored as an object of speculative theoretical debate, a figure entangled in a host of identities, practices, performances and contexts, and an important way to illuminate key conceptual problematics, from representation to embodiment.

Geography and abstraction: Towards an affirmative critique

A critique of abstraction has become one of the most important reference points for contemporary human geography. The terms of this critique have, however, been limited by the tendency to oppose the abstract to the lived. This paper argues that abstraction can be affirmed as a necessary element of understandings of lived worlds in the making. Doing this requires revisiting the relation between abstraction and two matters of disciplinary concern: experience and materiality. These matters of concern are drawn together via one technology of abstraction, the diagram, before an affirmative critique of abstraction for geographical thinking is outlined in concluding.