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Progress in Human Geography

1–11
Sedgwick’s geographies: ª The Author(s) 2010
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Touching space 10.1177/0309132510386253
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Gavin Brown
University of Leicester, UK
Kath Browne
University of Brighton, UK

I Introduction throughout the 20th century and continues to

do so. The ‘epistemology of the closet’ is the
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died in April 2009,
means by which homosexuality exists through
prompting this forum. As a professor of literary
a regime of the ‘open secret’, something that is
criticism, Sedgwick’s work was brought to the
known through not-knowing. The concept of the
attention of geographers through her influential
closet and its epistemic effects have been
contributions to ‘queer theory’ (Sedgwick,
deployed by scholars from a range of disciplines
1990, 1994). Her work had a significant impact
(including Geography) and used to understand
on early geographical research on sexuality
the functioning of sexual relations in a broader
which sought to materialize her ideas and
range of geographic settings. Yet, Michael
demonstrate how (homo)sexuality is known in
Brown (2000) has critiqued Sedgwick’s use of
place-specific ways. As her work diversified to
the spatial metaphor of ‘the closet’ demonstrat-
consider questions of emotions, affect and
ing the complexities of attempts to practise this
pedagogy, it was taken up by a broader range
mode of analysis in material spaces at a variety
of geographers. Out of these interactions, her
of scales. Geographers have also questioned the
thinking became increasingly attuned to the
limits of ‘the closet’ as a mechanism for under-
productivity of spatial thinking. Nonetheless,
standing the dynamics of queer visibilities in
geographers have tended to be understated in
national contexts where the homo/hetero binary
their acknowledgement of her influence on our
is not the primary means of understanding
own theorizing. The four essays in this review
sexualities (Tucker, 2009).
forum redress that silence. Our own contribution
Sedgwick’s queer critique has had a signifi-
offers an overview of Sedgwick’s work, outlin-
cant influence through Gibson-Graham’s
ing how it has been taken up by geographers,
(1996) feminist critique of political economy.
considering the extent to which her writing
Gibson-Graham drew on Sedgwick’s (1994:
utilized a geographical imagination and pointing
5–9) articulation of the ‘Christmas effect’
to further areas of work.
(comparing the apparent alignment of various
institutions at Christmas time, in ways that seem
1 Queer thinking
Epistemology of the Closet (1990) has probably
Corresponding author:
had the greatest influence on geographical Gavin Brown, Department of Geography, University of
research on sexualities. In this work Sedgwick Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
argued that ‘the closet’ had shaped gay life Email: gpb10@le.ac.uk
2 Progress in Human Geography
to strengthen their social power, with mutually
reinforcing normative assumptions around
bodies, genders and sexual desires) to think about
the power of academic and popular representa-
tions of ‘globalization’. That Gibson-Graham
(1996: viii) found this a useful metaphor for
thinking about discussions of contemporary
social, economic and cultural issues demonstrates
the potential of queer critique to continue to
influence geographical thinking beyond studies
of sexualities and gender.
2 Affective thinking
Shame is an affective state that has been consid-
ered by many queer theorists in an attempt
to rethink ‘gay pride’ and the emotions
that surround it (Probyn, 2005). Certainly,
Sedgwick’s initial engagement with Silvan
Tomkins’ work (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995)
seems to have been motivated by an interest in
‘shame’ that developed from her queer work. But
this engagement also arose out of Sedgwick’s
initial treatment for breast cancer in 1991 which
inspired her to reflect on the ways in which her
mastectomy altered her own understanding of her
gender and sexuality.
In his theorization of affect, Tomkins distin-
guished between the ‘drives’ that humans expe-
rience (compelling us to eat and breathe) and our
experience of affects (such as fear and anger)
that are self-validating and may have any object.
Sedgwick and Frank (1995) were drawn to his
suggestion that shame operates only after interest
or enjoyment has been activated in an engage-
ment with the ‘strange’ (and serves to inhibit one
or both of these affects). In a later application of
Tomkins’ ideas, Sedgwick reminded her readers
that:
Tomkins considers sexuality ‘the drive in which the
affective component plays the largest role’: not only
is it ‘the least imperious of all the drives,’ but it is
the only one ‘in which activation of the drive even
without consummation has a rewarding rather than
a punishing quality. It is much more exciting and
rewarding,’ he understates, ‘to feel sexually aroused
than to feel hungry or thirsty.’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 20)
This area of work, although acknowledged by
some geographers interested in developing
non-representational theories (Anderson, 2006;
Thrift, 2004), remains eclipsed by the domi-
nance of Deleuzian understandings of affect in
contemporary geography. Moreover, given that
Sedgwick’s interventions have been significant
in developing geographies of sexualities, further
work on affect would be fruitful in this particular
geographical subdiscipline (although see Lim,
2007).
3 Against paranoid thinking
Sedgwick (2003: 1) described her final book,
Touching Feeling, as ‘a project to explore
promising tools and techniques for nondualistic
thought and pedagogy’. This writing was
concerned with thinking about the performativ-
ity of knowledge to consider what the pursuit
and production of knowledge does. Sedgwick
offered an alternative to the ‘paranoid thinking’
which, she argued, reduces all theoretical inves-
tigations to the revelation of (already ‘known’)
underlying power structures and forms of
oppression within society. Sedgwick questioned
the effects (and affects) of these forms of para-
noid knowledge production, considering how
they serve to shut down innovative alternatives
to the status quo. The alternative Sedgwick
offered was to embrace ‘reparative’ modes of
weak thinking that harnessed pleasure, hope and
the possibilities of ameliorating social problems
in the present. This reparative method has
inspired several recent geographical investiga-
tions (Browne, 2009; Gibson-Graham, 2006;
Lim, 2007) and sits well alongside the growing
interest in similar forms of affirmative critique
(Connolly, 2008).
If there was an implicit spatiality in her earlier
work, in Touching Feeling Sedgwick considered
the spatiality of modes of thinking that occur
beside others (as a means of trying to resist the
Brown & Browne
linearity of the search for origins implied by
beneath and the telos of looking beyond). She
noted that ‘spatializing disciplines such as
geography and anthropology do, though, have
the advantage of permitting ecological or sys-
tems approaches to such issues as identity and
performance’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 8). Space in this
final work moves beyond the (purely) metapho-
rical and takes a defining role in enabling other
modes of thinking, addressing geographers’
consistent critique that she failed to consider the
material spatiality of the practices she theorized.
It is unfortunate that she did not have an oppor-
tunity to pursue this line of inquiry further.
The three contributions that follow consider
the particular ways in which Sedgwick’s work
has captured the imagination of geographers.
Michael Brown revisits Sedgwick’s work on the
epistemology of the closet, demonstrating how
its use by geographers of sexualities has revealed
some of the limits of her conceptualization.
Gerda Roelvink and Michelle Carnegie explore
how geographers have taken up Sedgwick’s
critique of ‘paranoid thinking’ and examine
how the reparative mode of research has been
Sedgwick’s closet
Michael Brown
The University of Washington, USA
I first read Epistemology of the Closet in 1993,
towards the end of my graduate school days at
UBC, and I admit that I did not make much of
it at the time. A boyfriend bought it for me, try-
ing to woo a theory-laden graduate student (he
eventually succeeded). But most of her dense
and twisty writing was lost on me. I did not
understand her prose, but I also was not
3
articulated through Gibson-Graham’s (1996,
2006) engagement with Sedgwick’s ideas.
Finally, Ben Anderson offers a critical appraisal
of Sedgwick’s theorizations of affect, and evalu-
ates how this approach to affective relations is of
use to geographers.
Interestingly, and as this collection attests,
there have been few attempts to make the
connections between Sedgwick’s various contri-
butions. Bringing these strands together here, we
hope to spark work that will work put the closet,
Christmas effect, paranoid thinking, pedagogy
and affect into dialogue with each other to
advance geographical research. For example,
further work intersecting the closet with affective
geographies could move beyond the closet as a
place of sexual (un)knowing and shame to
reconsider the spatial affects of the contradic-
tions of privacy/disclosure, public/private and
knowledge/ignorance. Finally, geographers
would do well to reconsider the performative
effects of our writing strategies and actively
strive to avoid reproducing paranoid thinking
in our research.
Gavin Brown and Kath Browne
interested in her project, though I should have
been. My theoretical sights then were set on rad-
ical democratic theory. My political interests
Corresponding author:
Department of Geography, The University of Washington,
Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195-3550 USA
Email: michaelb@u.washington.edu
4 Progress in Human Geography
were trying to preserve a record of AIDS politics
that soon would be lost.
It was during that time that the so-called
‘spatial turn’ in social theory was giving
geographers an intellectual reach that seemed
refreshing and exciting. A central feature of this
spatial turn was the proliferation of spatial meta-
phors. Cultural studies seemed to be stuffed full
of spaces, sites, constellations, placements,
locations, cartographies, and of course mappings.
Geographers were excited but wary: excited
because it seemed that (finally) critical scholars
were starting to cultivate geographical imagina-
tions; wary because their spatial language seemed
so frequently to be just that (Smith and Katz,
1993). The goal was often not to infuse cultural
theory with spatiality, but rather to pour old
intellectual wine into new rhetorical bottles.
So it was in this context that I tried to read
Sedgwick’s tome on the closet. The central the-
sis of the book was that ‘virtually any aspect of
modern Western culture, must be, not merely
incomplete, but damaged in its central substance
to the degree that it does not incorporate a
critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual
definition’ (Sedgwick, 1990: 1). For me, the
book’s central thesis was of secondary impor-
tance to the very foregrounding of its object: the
closet. It is a spatial metaphor that conveys the
denial, erasure, and concealment of queer people,
their desires, and their sexual relations. The term
of course had been in popular lexicon for at least
20 years, but Sedgwick was the first to make us
think about it more fully.
Perhaps the most refreshing point to take was
that the closet was a particular form of oppression
and domination. Unlike other identity-
oppressions, one sometimes can hide one’s sexu-
ality. Its duality was also a key – if ironic – theme.
The closet, Sedgwick insisted, was a knowing-
by-not-knowing. People might know a friend or
character was gay, but without that individual
ever having articulated it herself. People might
know that a particular neighborhood or city was
‘gay’, without ever having set foot there, or had
in-depth knowledge of that place. Heterosexuals
might criminalize or condemn ‘homosexual’
sex-acts they themselves enjoy with the opposite
sex. One could be both in and out of the closet
simultaneously. Whether or not one was ‘out’
might complexly depend on their multiscalar
time geographies. Furthermore, it is not reducible
down to late capitalism or patriarchy. Sedgwick
offered insight and language to get at the
structuration of heteronormativity.
As a critical human geographer, however,
I was frustrated by all the metaphorical, non-
material and relentlessly textual dimensions of
the book (Sedgwick was, after all, an English
Professor). Her arguments about the centrality
of the closet, and its paradoxical epistemology,
were based in careful reading of various texts.
I read the exclusive focus on the text as the exclu-
sive space of the closet as potentially blinding us
to the materiality of the closet, and its theoretical
possibilities for critical human geography. Had
I not just been taught by a previous generation
of geographers that social relations and struc-
tures were always-already spatial? For me, it was
then a short leap to reconceptualizing the closet
as not ‘merely’ a clever and revealing spatial
metaphor, but also a geography. I began to think
of the spatialities and scalarity of concealment,
of denial, and of erasure of gay men. I began to
reconceptualize the closet as a spatial structure
and a set of spatial practices (Brown, 2000).
But all that was so long ago. Do we still need a
theory of the closet in these ‘post-gay’ times?
At a time when there has been widespread main-
streaming and acceptance of queer people and
relations, certainly some queer academics have
argued against the dominance of the closet, and
queer theory has moved beyond the concept
towards intersectionality. I consequently agree
that there are limits to the closet’s usefulness
in theorizing hetero (and homo) normativities
and homophobias.
But moving beyond a concept need not mean
abandoning it. So I close by arguing for the clo-
set’s continuing utility. I think any argument that
Brown & Browne
the closet has become passé and anachronistic is
one that privileges time over space, the historical
over the geographical. It is an argument that
perhaps reflects the structural advantages of our
own cosmopolitan academic lives in progressive
enclaves. Perhaps the closet is less salient for us;
but we are not everyone, everywhere. Hetero-
normativity is still a (spatial!) structure that
conceals, denies, and erases (Morello, 2009).
Both near and far away I see evidence that
queer affirmations and visibilities often risk
brutal and violent attacks by forces seeking
to closet them. Attempts at resisting shame and
claiming space are still ongoing (Johnston,
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the imagining
of diverse economic possibilities
Gerda Roelvink
University of Western Sydney, Australia
Michelle Carnegie
Macquarie University, Australia
In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
asks:
What does knowledge do – the pursuit of it, the hav-
ing and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowl-
edge of what one already knows? How, in short, is
knowledge performative, and how best does one
move among its causes and effects?’ (Sedgwick,
2003: 124, original emphasis)
Borrowing Sedgwick’s praise for J.K. Gibson-
Graham’s (1996) foundational book The End
of Capitalism (As We Knew It), in this short
piece we wish to celebrate the ‘profoundly
imaginative’ contribution of Sedgwick’s thinking
to geographers’ rethinking economy as a site
5
2007). People still often need to move to come
out (Gorman-Murray, 2009). Their experiences
and geographies are still denied and occluded
(Tucker, 2009). These oppressions still do not
reduce down to class, race, or gender; and
despite the current ecumenical intersectional-
ity, I still see a closeting reluctance in critical
human geography to incorporate (queer)
sexualities non-reductively into other critical
or radical projects. So I want to thank Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick for helping me – and all of
us – to see what was right in front of us, in so
many places.
Michael Brown
of diversity. This rethinking economies project
largely stems from the realization that, rather
than changing the world, left political economic
critique has contributed to the hegemony
of capitalism (Gibson-Graham, 1996). As
Gibson-Graham describe it:
In the vicinity of such [capitalocentric] representa-
tions, those who might be interested in non-
capitalist economic projects pull back from ambitions
Corresponding author:
Gerda Roelvink, University of Western Sydney, Bankstown
Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia
Email: g.roelvink@uws.edu.au
6 Progress in Human Geography
of widespread success – their dreams seem unrealiz-
able, at least in our lifetimes. Thus capitalism is
strengthened, its dominance performed, as an effect
of its representations. (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 615)
Sedgwick’s insistence that knowledge is
performative offers economic geographers a
choice in the kind of knowledge they produce
and her work calls on us to take responsibility for
the effects of these choices. In what follows we
highlight Sedgwick’s influence on economic
geographers choosing to participate in the
creation of diverse economies. We identify
Sedgwick’s ideas that are central to Gibson-
Graham’s (2006) recent thinking and, through
the diverse economies project, are now spreading
in economic geography and other fields of
inquiry.
Sedgwick’s insights into the performativity of
knowledge have facilitated diverse economies
scholars to develop thinking techniques and
research practices that proliferate new knowl-
edges, thereby contributing to economic possi-
bility. Sedgwick’s (2003) work on affect in
particular has enabled Gibson-Graham and their
collaborators to understand the relationship
between bodily and emotional dispositions, the-
oretical commitments and the performative
effects of research (Gibson-Graham, 2006;
Healy and Graham, 2008; McKinnon et al.,
2008; Roelvink, forthcoming). Sedgwick raises
the concern that critical analysis has become
identical with, and limited to, paranoid ways of
thinking. As she puts it, ‘in a world where no one
need be delusional to find evidence of systemic
oppression, to theorize out of anything but a
paranoid critical stance has come to seem naı̈ve,
pious, or complaisant’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 125–
126, original emphasis). Touching Feeling pro-
vides a picture of the critical thinker who, guided
by their ‘anxiety-mitigating’ stance, attempts to
expand their discursive framework in order
to negate the possibility of surprise (pp. 128,
130). This paranoid stance leads to what
Sedgwick describes as ‘strong theory’. Strong
theoretical analyses develop associations
between entities, extending the reach of theory
and reducing the role of chance and possibility.
Sedgwick’s critique of strong theory clearly
resonates with Gibson-Graham’s critique of
capitalocentrism. In A Postcapitalist Politics,
Gibson-Graham (2006: 4) suggest that ‘the nar-
rative of neoliberalism as global capitalism’s
consolidating regulative regime exemplifies
strong theory at the cutting edge’. Critical/strong
theoretical scholarship on neoliberalism sub-
sumes a wide variety of political and social
changes, from the rise of community organiza-
tions in welfare provision to entrepreneurial
innovation, to capitalism (via the association
with ‘the market’) (Roelvink, 2007). Sedgwick
(2003: 139, 142, original emphasis) asks us to
question the ‘faith’ critical theorists have placed
on the ‘demystification’ of hegemonic forces,
such as capitalist dynamics, asking us to con-
sider the effect of our representations on an
already paranoid audience to whom surprise and
the new is taken as an affirmation that ‘you can
never be paranoid enough’ rather than a possi-
bility for transformation.
Sedgwick has helped diverse economies
scholars to understand the researcher’s bodily
dispositions – the paranoid ‘anxiety-mitigating’
stance mentioned above and the reparative
stance mentioned below – that compel strong
theoretical work, and thus to explore shifts in
stance as a way of generating different economic
representations. She anticipates Gibson-Graham’s
(2008: 619, emphasis added) question: ‘How
might those of us interested in diverse econo-
mies choose to think and theorize in a way that
makes us a condition of possibility of new
economic becomings, rather than a condition
of their impossibility?’ At the heart of this
question is recognition of the ‘co-implicated
process of changing ourselves/changing our
thinking/changing the world’ (p. 618).
Sedgwick (2003: 137, 144–145) gestures
towards a reparative stance, a ‘way of knowing’
Brown & Browne
that seeks pleasure, a multiplicity of experi-
ences and enacts a Foucauldian ‘‘‘care for the
self’’, the often very fragile concern to provide
the self with pleasure and nourishment in an
environment that is perceived as not particu-
larly offering them’. Seeking pleasure and
nourishment from their work, diverse economies
scholars have adopted a reparative stance
(towards the economies they study) and with it
Sedgwick’s weak form of theorizing that is ‘little
better than a description of the phenomena which
it purports to explain’ (Tomkins, as quoted in
Sedgwick, 2003: 145). As Gibson-Graham
(2006: 8) note, weak theory has proven ‘particu-
larly useful for a project of rethinking economy,
where the problem is the scarcity rather than the
inconsistency of economic concepts’. Weak the-
ory has enlarged our intellectual field to contain
possibilities for fulfilment alongside existing
concerns that prompt anxiety.
Working with Gibson-Graham, diverse
economies scholars have applied Sedgwick’s
theoretical ideas to the questions of how to
reconstitute economies and development path-
ways as plural and diverse (see, for example,
Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2008; St. Martin,
2005). For instance, combining Sedgwick’s
thinking on the reparative stance with scholar-
ship on hope (Lingis, 2002), where hope is
understood as a sense of multiplicity and possi-
bility in every action, Carnegie (2008) has pro-
duced a weak theory of development in eastern
Indonesia – a region characterized as ‘lagging’,
based on its limited industrialization and capital-
ist expansion. Weak economic theorizing does
not hold the world to an existing theoretical
7
framework. Rather it aims to open up the econ-
omy through rich description thereby allowing
diverse economic forms, including market and
non-market transactions, various forms of paid
and unpaid labour and different kinds of enter-
prise, to be visible and potentially built upon.
This weak theorizing has made diverse forms
of self-provisioning and semi-subsistence activ-
ities knowable in a region where, despite their
continued contribution to household survival,
such economic activities have been rendered
non-credible and or non-existent by strong the-
ories of capitalist development and moderniza-
tion. In changing her stance to one of hope
Carnegie struggled with guilt about neglecting
Left commitments to the documentation of ‘sys-
temic oppression’. Sedgwick’s (2003: 140) work
has helped diverse economies scholars face such
guilt, suggesting to us that perhaps we do not
need to confirm what everyone already knows
– the violence of capitalism on the third world.
Sedgwick’s work suggests that our perfor-
mative approach to research needs to attend
to the ways that research assembles the econ-
omy, and the ways in which this limits and/or
facilitates possibility. Her radical thinking on
performativity has enabled diverse economies
scholars to respond to representations that
strengthen the hegemony of capitalism and
to experiment with assembling the economy
in new ways (Roelvink, 2009) and she will
continue to guide us in imagining diverse
economic possibilities. Our gratitude to her,
and our indebtedness to her work, will likewise
continue.
Gerda Roelvink and Michelle Carnegie
8 Progress in Human Geography
Shame, paranoia and other affects
Ben Anderson
Durham University, UK
In the conclusion to her essay on the novelist
Henry James, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes
one affect – shame – as a ‘kind of free radical’
(Sedgwick, 2003: 62). By this she means that
shame ‘attaches to and permanently intensifies
or alters the meaning of – of almost anything’
(p. 62). Always insisting on the plural – affects
rather than the singular Affect – Sedgwick’s
writings attune to the combinatorial complexity
of shame, paranoia and other affects. They do so,
in part, through their own variegated affective
charge. At once enchanting, funny, humbling,
and harsh, affects course through Sedgwick’s
attempts to touch the textures of social life. Her
deceptively simple starting point is one shared
with recent non-representational writings on
affect (Anderson, 2009; Bissell, 2008; Brown,
2008; McCormack, 2008): the freedom of the
affects to combine with more or less any aspect
of life. If we start by thinking of affects as ‘free
radicals’, there can never be a carefully circum-
scribed affectual or emotional geography neatly
separate from other geographies. Drawing on
Silvan Tomkins, Sedgwick’s writings show
how:
Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people,
ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions,
institutions, and any number of other things, includ-
ing other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger,
disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy. (Sedgwick,
2003: 19)
In thinking of affects as ‘free radicals’,
Sedgwick’s work evokes the dynamism of affec-
tive and emotive life, while never forgetting that
affects do become attached to ... almost
anything. Consider paranoia. Analysing para-
noid forms of knowing, Sedgwick’s (2003) point
is not that everyone caught up in the hermeneu-
tics of suspicion feels something called ‘para-
noia’. Her analysis does not quite take place at
the phenomenological register, and certainly not
at the discursive. Paranoia is, rather, a name
given to a certain anticipatory affective relation
– one that can be found across diverse domains;
individuals may move in and out of fleeting
paranoid practices, while paranoia can and does
become durable, infusing shared histories or ani-
mating epistemological communities (Sedg-
wick, 2003: 150). Like her writings on shame
or love, in learning to touch paranoia Sedgwick
shows how affects are never autonomous. They
are only ever imbricated in something more than
the affective or emotive, infusing practices, reso-
nating with discourses, coalescing around
images.
Despite her attention to affect, Sedgwick is a
theorist who has rarely been directly engaged
with geographical writings on affect and emo-
tion (see the brief mentions of Sedgwick’s
engagement with Tomkins in Anderson, 2006,
and Thien, 2005). Jason Lim (2007) has pro-
vided perhaps the most sustained engagement
in his attempt to understand sexuality through
affect, deftly thinking with Sedgwick’s writings
on paranoid ways of knowing to understand
Corresponding author:
Department of Geography, Durham University, Science
Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
Email: ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk
Brown & Browne
the relations between critique and affirmation.
The lack of attention to her work may be because
Sedgwick does not quite fit the kind of concep-
tual vocabularies currently being drawn on,
developing an affect theory that makes little
reference to Deleuze, is more than phenomenolo-
gical, and is certainly not social constructionist,
even as it owes a debt to social constructionist
thought. So what difference might an encounter
with Sedgwick’s work make to the practice and
ethos of Social and Cultural Geography?
First, we must be careful with the terms Affect
and Emotion. The two terms – in Rabinow’s
(2007) sense of ‘term’ as a word þ referent þ
concept – have become reified placeholders, uni-
tary categories used at one time vaguely, at
another specifically, for all of affective life.
Sedgwick insists on qualitative differences
between the affects (Probyn, 2005). Love is
different from fear and from shame and so on.
Her wager is that it is necessary to make defini-
tional room for qualitative differences between
the affects if we are to attune to the textures of
social life. She finds in Tomkins’ writings a rare
sense that there are ‘finitely-many’ affects
(Sedgwick and Frank, 1995). The starting point
is the freedom of the affect system with regard
to aims and ends (in comparison to the drives
which are more constrained, the exception
being sexuality). The result is a sense of
extraordinary combinatorial complexity as
affects combine with ... more or less anything.
In doing so they produce emotions that are
potentially unlimited in number. Following
Sedgwick, it becomes imperative to attend to
the specificity of this or that affect or emotion.
Second, Sedgwick offers an account of the
force and organization of corporeal difference
that refuses the ‘binary homogenization’ or
‘infinitizing trivialization’ that discussions of
difference are too often captured by (Sedgwick
and Frank, 1995: 15). The basis to her account
of social differences is an account of the material
substance of the body that sees it as permeated
by information, feedback and representations.
9
This is a turbulent corporeal materiality. It is
distinct from other ways of thinking about the
body; the body is not a flicker in a more-than-
human assemblage, as we find in certain forms
of actor-network theory, nor is it an undifferen-
tiated flow of visceral arousal that is only
secondarily socially constructed in some form
of symbolic order. Instead, the words biological
or natural are cleaved from the word essential,
and given a contingency and performative
charge. The body becomes a body of textures,
a set of physical properties that act and are acted
upon over time and may be mobilized in diverse
performative contexts.
Third, Sedgwick exposes exposure. She
exposes, relentlessly, excruciatingly at times,
what she terms the shift from anti-essentialist
to private eye that marks a certain theoretical
moment closely aligned to social construction-
ism. I think that moment is now passing, having
been challenged by the diverse energies of
corporeal feminism, post-phenomenology and
an embodied neuroscience. But the problem
Sedgwick diagnoses is a little different, and
pertains equally to those moments as they begin
to become sedimented. When she draws out
the anti-biologism of contemporary social con-
structionism, her concern is not anti-biologism
per se. When faced with the violences biologism
has been caught within, anti-biologism is at
times a necessity, an urgent task. The problem
is with any theoretical manoeuvre that becomes
automatic, translated from a problematic into a
deadened habit, moving from a question that
forces us to think to a routine to be mastered and
repeated. Sedgwick reminds us to worry away
about the strength of any theory, the becoming
habitual of its questions, procedures and
sensibilities.
What consequences might these three
features of Sedgwick’s work hold for recent
work in Social and Cultural Geography on
spaces of affect, emotion, and their interrelation?
Through the tone of her writings, Sedgwick
encourages us to experiment with the affects that
10
are layered into our ways of relating to the world,
inviting us to think and act with enchantment,
hope or generosity while retaining a keen sense
of anger at the existence of harm, damage and
suffering. However, perhaps the most important,
challenging but obvious implication of her work
is that it invites us to reflect on how we theorize
what affect and emotion are and do. For
example, I do not think it is enough any more
to simply claim that emotions and/or affects are
relational, and/or are emergent from relations
and/or take place in relations. Understood as
an analytic position, relationality is a claim that
can be and has been made about any and all phe-
nomena that geographers deal with. It tells us
nothing specific about affect or emotion. While
I would not disagree with the basic proposition,
arguing that entities are ‘relationally constituted’
has become automatic, a habit of contemporary
theory. From Sedgwick, we learn of the need
to pose more specific questions about affect,
emotion and their interrelation. Take the cate-
gory of emotion: what is and is not assumed to
fall within the term emotion (background
moods, intense and focused involvements, life-
long dedications); how do emotions differ from
one another (on the basis of intensity, duration
and so on); are emotions always accompanied
by certain practices of thinking (such as judge-
ment); and how can emotions be said to be social
or cultural (via a symbolic order, through the
performative effects of doing emotions, through
their emergence from assemblages)? Sedgwick’s
writings disrupt the distinction between affect
and emotion that has emerged in some recent
work on emotion/affect, society and space. The
terms have, in the main, fallen on one side or the
other of the divides between the personal/
impersonal and semiotic/asignifying (Ngai,
2005). Sedgwick unsettles this distinction. Not
because she suggests that an analytic distinction
between affect and emotion is wrong. Indeed in
her own work she advocates a distinction
between infinite emotions and the finite affects
that cannot easily be fitted under the heading of
Progress in Human Geography
either ‘affectual’ or ‘emotional’ geographies.
Rather, her style of doing theory warns us again
the translation of any theory into a procedure to
be repeated. It provoke us to refuse the security
that conceptions of affect and emotion may offer,
while insisting that we must continue to offer
such conceptions if we are to sense, bear witness
to, critique and affirm how affects and emotions
are part of social-spatial orders.
Ben Anderson
Acknowledgements
Ben would like to thank Gavin and Kath for their
invitation to contribute to this forum, and for their
helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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