Placing critical geographic thought. A commentary on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

The ‘relational turn’ has been widely embraced in Human Geography and related fields over the last couple of decades as an alternative to the hubris of modern and colonial reasoning. Yet, increasingly, concerns over the extent that contemporary conceptualisations are overly ‘generative’, ‘productivist’ and ‘affirmational’ has come to the fore. There is significant interest in the possibilities for more negative understandings, highlighting failure, attrition, voiding, exhaustion, impotentiality, incompleteness and attributes of ‘non‐relation’. We draw out how, to date, most of these approaches have developed a hermeneutic approach, seeking to bring the negative and the non‐relational into the world as forces of disruption and refusal, holding open other possibilities of knowing and being in the world and enabling alternative political imaginaries. This paper seeks to outline an alternative mode of critique, one that places both relational and negative approaches under the scrutiny of an ‘abyssal’ approach. Here, after Fanon, the world violently forged into the global colour line is bifurcated via the construction of the modern subject, capable of reading itself as a subject in the world and through Human Geography as a field of study. In this always already antiblack world, the goal of ‘Abyssal Geography’ is not to continue worlding the modern subject in new ways, but to analyse and critique the mechanisms and shifts in critical thought through which Human Geography continues to salvage and to redeem the purchase of the modern subject and the world.

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Material geographies, refusal, and time from the world as abyss

Kohli

2024

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Ramírez-D'Oleo, 2023) trump all, even in abyssal work? How too does the generation of new figures (or figurative assemblings) sit alongside the dismissal of productivist imaginaries? This is a 'punchy theory-manifesto' (Dekeyser, 2023: 608), and one which has great ambition: to 'invert the stakes of analysis and critique' (78), no less. This is to be applauded. And it is clear that the book diagnoses, and responds to, ways of thinking which 'promise an escape from being suborned to the world as requiring saving at the cost of disavowal of the lives already sacrificed to its maintenance' (52). This is crucial work. And yet the affective tone which finally registered for me was of a peculiar, discomfiting flatness. The source of the flatness, truth to tell, is difficult to diagnose. I wondered if it might be because the shock of the book's argument is partly curtailed by its announcement, by their own admission, in various other iterations (Chandler and Pugh, 2022;2023a, 2023bPugh and Gfoellner, 2023;Pugh, 2022), or because it speaks to other ongoing efforts to think the end of 'the world' that are familiar to geographers (see, for instance, Colebrook, 2023). I wondered too if this flatness emerges from a theoretical doubt about some of the tensions that run through the book (between ground and groundlessness, between ontology and paraontology, between unmaking and remaking). Or might it be that such flatness is an expression of something else? Might such a project of world-ending be intimately, and necessarily, linked with feelings of quiet despair?

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Placing critical geographic thought. A commentary on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

The stakes of abyssal geography. Response to commentaries on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

The stakes of abyssal geography. Response to commentaries on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

Critique beyond relation: The stakes of working with the negative, the void and the abyss

Material geographies, refusal, and time from the world as abyss

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