Negativity: space, politics and affects

Abstract

This paper reflects on the status of ‘negativity’ in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity means to them, and considers its various legacies and potential future trajectories. Along the way, the contributors offer ways of attending to negative spaces (voids, abysses, absences), affects (vulnerabilities, sad passions, incapacities, mortality) and politics (impasses, refusals, irreparabilities). However, rather than defining negativity narrowly, the paper stays with the diversity of work on negativity being undertaken by geographers and other scholars, discussing how varying perspectives expand or dismantle particular elements within spatial theory. Collectively, the contributors argue for paying attention to negativity as the faltering, failure or impossibility of relations between body and world, thus situating it in conversation with relational thought, vitalist philosophies and affirmative ethics.

Distribution, dis-sumption and dis-appointment: The negative geographies of city logistics

“…What I am referring to as ‘negative geographies’ encompasses a wide range of works which address the idea of negativity in different ways (see also Noys, 2010). To borrow from Anna Secor’s (in Dekeyser et al, 2022: 9) reflections, interventions vary between those – of which Secor’s own edited collection with Paul Kingsbury (Kingsbury and Secor, 2021) is one – that approach the negative as a site of potential with which something might be done, and those – such as Bissell, Rose and Harrison’s (2021) Negative Geographies – which question the very possibility of approaching or doing anything with the negative.…”

“…As demonstrated by the contributions to Bissell et al's (2021) collection, the latter work is itself wide-ranging, engaging thinking on geographies of dislocation (Wylie), loss (Maddrell) exhaustion (Bissell), and ‘ugly’, ‘bad’ or ‘ambivalent’ feelings (Ngai, 2007; Zhang, in Dekeyser et al, 2022; Ruez and Cockayne, 2021). Critiquing vitalist, affirmationist and relational thinking, this literature speaks through a shared cognisance of the vulnerabilities and limits of bodies (human or otherwise) and spaces, and of the capacity to know them (Rose et al, 2021).…”

“…On the other, they arise from a growing recognition, among cultural geographers in particular, of the (non-)place of negativity in experiences of space, affect and (im)mobility (e.g. Ngai, 2007; Harrison, 2015; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Bissell et al, 2021; Ruez and Cockayne, 2021; Dekeyser et al, 2022).…”

“…City logistics represents itself as ‘void-fill’. Yet in doing so it signals a spatial ambiguity at the heart of logistical process, as well as across the ‘parallax’ between different conceptualisations of negativity: a question of what, if anything, may be ‘done’ with the negative (Secor in Dekeyser et al, 2022: 9). Whilst purporting to do something with nothing, logistical interventions produce separations and voids at ever-finer scales.…”

“…What are most often implied (if not interrogated) here are the affirmative affects attached to logistical consumption: the ease, smoothness and satisfaction. Less commonly contemplated are the negative affects : the ‘familiar tinge of guilt’, the anxieties, frustrations, exhaustions and refusals which haunt and dis-appoint everyday life (Bissell, 2020, 2021a; Wylie, 2021; Dekeyser et al, 2022: 7).…”