Anxious Geographies - Mission Statement: Without Direction

I say 'mission statement' with more than a pinch of sarcasm. Mission statements work towards; they look forward, hypothesising and visualising a linear time-space. Mission statements are projectiles, aims and targets. They are logistical – logistics is something that might come up a lot in the posts that follow – calculating mobilities, mediating strategy and tactics (Neilson, 2012), the war of maps and the war of streets and houses (Weizman, 2006).

A mission statement without direction is something of a misnomer then. Perhaps we could set out to wander, careless meandering. Yet neither flaneurie nor dérive are what this blog seeks – no, struggles – to talk about. Far from liberation, anxious geographies belong to severance and separation. I suspect it may stray (flee/hide) from this sooner or later – that which is without direction has little momentum, after all – but this blog begins by being inspired (it’s not the right word, but it’s the one I’ve got) by recent writings on ‘negative geographies’ (Kingsbury & Secor, 2021; Dekeyser et al., 2022). Reflecting upon the pre-eminence of relational and affirmationist thinking, of the ever-becoming in-betweenness and possibility of our world, these works stress the limits, the not there, the not-quite. Where we fail, where we lose. Not the field of resilience (fail better), but that of repetition, of spiralling: fail again, fail worse (see Heath-Kelly, 2015).

Where do we fail? There is a distinct spatial aspect to failure, daily and mundane. Failed geographies in my experience might be the cold atmospheric memory of the room where that job interview went so badly, where I choked on my thoughts. Yet it is perhaps more powerfully the daily threshold of spaces I do not exit or enter – my own flat; that café or library I had intended to work in. These are connections not made, missed opportunities which, I imagine, have foreclosed so many possible avenues for expansion. Paranoia is so much about immediate, homely geographies, (infra)structures of comfort and provision turning inward, turning against, empty like the fridge in so many heavy-handed portrayals of loneliness, or pushing back, lurching out at us like the fridge in Requiem for a Dream.

Opened up to reveal emptiness, nothing much going on. This is what research is like so much of the time. Supposedly we are building something, something sturdy, a structure, an argument – this, as Wigley (1991) observes, is the etymological root of the defending of a ‘thesis’ at the heart of the university – yet so often we feel unstable and forgotten, self-important and self-loathing. Our body-image is bloated and out of sorts. This blog responds, therefore, to the call for a more ‘feeble’ scholarship (see Deckeyser et al., 2022: 8), not nihilistic but cognisant of mine and others (in)capacity for nihilism. All may not be lost but sometimes (and somewhere) we lose. On the move, we might make connections, we might grow or gather. Yet the textures of everyday geographies are abrasive, they wear away at us, prodding and poking and sapping. The city is a repository for my energy. My skin flakes away to concourse dust, my tears soak down into groundwater.

There is power in this, too; power expressed primarily not as connections or even responsibilities, but as exposure and complicity (Kemmer et al. 2022). As Vickie Zhang points out, as researchers imposter syndrome may come not only in the form of feeling as if we are a fraud of expertise – of knowledge in a particular field or concerning a particular issue – but also as emotional or attitudinal fraudulence: “a more passive failure to feel the right way” (Deckeyser et al., 2022: 13). And so onto anxiety itself. While I would say that I suffer from a mild-yet-fluctuating condition of anxiety, and that this without doubt underlies this blog and its affinities to the negative and the hesitant, anxious geographies is, at the same time, an intentionally vague title. Anxiety here is atmospheric; it emanates or builds within and among both human and non-human forms (Anderson, 2009). It is aesthetic, in that it takes on appearances and may be experienced as sensory, phenomenological, if only as uncertain traces, hardly detectable. Moreover it is mobile, circulating but more distinctly oscillating, pressurising and leaking. Kin-aesthetic, therefore, inasmuch as sensations flow and lapse, hovering on the periphery or disappearing altogether, rendered-superfluous or insensible (Mutter, 2022).

Kingsbury and Secor in the introduction to A Place More Void write of the tension of writing or not writing (2021: 6). I have written here, and now I need to not write, to pause writing or else this will become yet another tactic of aversion, enthusiasm fading out…

References

Anderson, B. (2009), ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2): 77-81.

Bissell, D. Rose, M. and Harrison, P. (eds, 2021), Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Deckeyser, T. Secor, A. Rose, M. Bissell, D. Zhang, V. & Romanillos, J.L. ‘Negativity: Space, Politics and Affects’, cultural geographies, 29(1): 5-21.

Heath-Kelly, C. (2015), ‘Securing through the Failure to Secure? The Ambiguity of Resilience at the Bombsite’, Security Dialogue, 46(1): 69-85.

Kemmer, L. Sgibnev, W. Weicker, T. & Woods, M. (2022), ‘Spaces of Exposure: Re-thinking ‘Publicness’ through Public Transport’, cultural geographies, 29(2): 285-299.

Kingsbury, P. and Secor, A. (eds, 2021), A Place More Void, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Neilson, B. (2012), ‘Five Theses on Understanding Logistics as Power’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13(3): 322-339.

Weizman, E. (2006), ‘The War of Streets and Houses: The First Treatise on Urban Combat: Thomas Bugeaud’, Cabinet, 22/Insecurity, Summer 2006. Available at: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/22/bugeaud.php [accessed 14/04/2022].

Wigley, M. (1991), ‘Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture’, Assemblage, 15: 6-29.