Nigel Thrift

INTENSITIES OF FEELING: TOWARDS A SPATIAL POLITICS OF AFFECT

Abstract This paper attempts to take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity. It is in three main parts. The first part sets out the main approaches to affect that conform with this approach. The second part considers the ways in which the systematic engineering of affect has become central to the political life of Euro‐American cities, and why. The third part then sets out the different kinds of progressive politics that might become possible once affect is taken into account. There are some brief conclusions.

Dead Geographies—And How to Make Them Live

In this introductory paper—which follows the course of the papers included in this special issue—we argue that there are currently four main apprehensions of performance. The first of those apprehensions is provided by the work of Judith Butler on performativity. We then move to a second apprehension—the rather more general notion of performance found in nonrepresentational theory, using as an example the work of Gilles Deleuze. The third apprehension of performance is that taken from work found in the discipline of performance itself. Then, the fourth apprehension concerns the reworking of academic practices as performative.

On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time

This paper is a preliminary attempt to work out what a nonfunctionalist social theory which still retains the crucial element of determination would look like. The paper is therefore arranged in the following way. A general synoptic overview of modern social theory leads to a consideration of the four major concerns of what I will call the structurationist ‘school’. I will argue that these four concerns are crucial to any nonfunctionalist Marxist social theory which must take into account not only ‘compositional’ determinations but also the ‘contextual’ determinations involved in the constitution of subjectivity. In the final section of the paper I outline a programme which is intended to show what this social theory might look like when extended to the smaller scale and to the consideration of unique events. The concerns of human geographers are integral to this programme, and this programme is integral to the concerns of human geography.

Performing Cultures in the New Economy

This paper provides a provisional diagram of modern capitalist business. I argue that modern business managers are under greater and greater pressures of time. They are expected to work to sterner, more extensive, and shorter-term measures of performance, and they must cope with a general speed-up in the conduct of business. These pressures are, in turn, forcing managers to be more innovative. In this paper, I argue that these imperatives are linked through attempts to interpellate ‘fast’ managerial subjects who are able to take the strain of permanent high performance. These subjects are being produced through three types of active and performative space which, taken together, constitute a new geographical machine, able to make new qualities and quantities visible and therefore available to be worked upon. I consider each of these spaces in turn: new spaces of visualization, represented here by the business magazine Fast Company; new spaces of embodiment, represented here by the use of performative ideas and techniques from the humanities; and new spaces of circulation, represented here by the phenomenon of increasingly mobile means of management. I conclude by arguing that these so-far hesitant and tentative spatialities may herald a new phase of ‘caring imperialism.’

Institutional issues for the European regions: from markets and plans to socioeconomics and powers of association

This article, focusing on regional development issues, discusses thepolicy alternatives that might be mobilized to reverse the centralizing forces unleashed by the pursuit of neo-liberal policies in the European Union. It highlights the limitations of contemporary versions of the managed economy model, and explores the significance of anemerging model of development rooted in socioeconomics, and stressing the powers of ‘associationism’. While broadly sympathizing with this third way-in between market and hierarchy - as a basis for generating economic success, the article goes on to argue that questions of social equity and political democracy remain unresolved by the associationist agenda.

The automatic production of space

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.

The place of complexity

This article is an attempt to understand the increasing profile of complexity theory as a geography of dissemination. In the first part I suggest that complexity theory, itself a rhetorical hybrid, takes on new meanings as it circulates in and through a number of actor-networks and, specifically, global science, global business and global New Age. As complexity theory circulates in these networks, so it encounters new conditions, which generate new hybrid theoretical forms. In the second part of the article, I consider how complexity theory might be interpreted as the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. The conclusion offers some words of warning.

Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification

Abstract This paper argues that a shift is taking place in the fabric of capitalism as a result of a change in how the business of invention is understood. Using theoretical approaches that rely on the notion that capitalism increasingly tries to draw in the whole intellect, in the first part of the paper I argue that the new understanding of innovation currently shows up as three associated developments: as the mobilization of forethought, as the deepening of the lure of the commodity through the co-creation of commodities with consumers, and as the construction of different kinds of apparently more innovative space suffused with information technology. The second part of the paper then argues that these disclosures are leading to new forms of value, based on generating moments of rightness. There is a brief conclusion.

Driving in the City

This article argues that de Certeau’s understanding of walking as the archetypal transhuman practice of making the city habitable cannot hold in a post-human world. By concentrating on the practices of driving, I argue that other experiences of the city can have an equal validity. In other words, de Certeau’s work on everyday life in the city needs to be reworked in order to take into account the rise of automobility. The bulk of this article is devoted to exploring how that goal might be achieved, concentrating in particular on how new knowledge like software and ergonomics has become responsible for a large-scale spatial reordering of the city which presages an important change in what counts as making the city habitable.

The future of Geography

Abstract This paper is an attempt to assess the current state and future prospects of Geography especially but not only in Britain. It is quasi-polemical and should be read in that spirit. The paper looks first at the notable successes of physical and human geography. It then considers how these successes are being buttressed by current events taking place in the world. Next, the paper considers the main problems that beset geography. Finally, however, the paper ends on another positive note by considering some of the exciting new developments that are now taking place in the discipline which will allow it to relate to more of the many worlds that make up geographys vocation.