Demonic geographies

Abstract

Demonic geography is an approach to practising human geography that operates from the premise that there are no such immaterial entities as ‘souls’, ‘spirits’, ‘minds’, integrated stable ‘selves’ or conscious ‘free will’. This paper elaborates the theoretical framework of demonic geography by spelling out how it is different from non‐representational theory and by articulating it within recent developments in experimental psychology, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. Counterintuitively, the paper shows that the deflationary, materialistic ontology of human nature espoused by demonic geography need not lead to meaninglessness, unhappiness or the collapse of moral behaviour. Instead, subscribing to demonic geography opens up new ways to find meaning, to pursue happiness and to live the good life.

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…Recent scholarship in areas as diverse as non-representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; McCormack, 2017; Thrift, 2008; Vannini, 2015; see, however, Anderson, 2018), demonic geography (Simandan, 2017), psychoanalytical geographies (Kingsbury and Pile, 2016), and feminist geography (Bondi, 2014; Moss and Donovan, 2017; for a review, see Simandan, 2019b) has begun to incorporate the insight that humans are strangers to themselves (Wilson, 2002) and that, therefore, the explanation of human behavior requires at least as much attention to affect, the preconscious, and the preverbal, as to (allegedly) conscious free-will and (allegedly) rational decision-making. To state that we are strangers to ourselves is to state that we are at least in part opaque to ourselves.…”

Revisiting positionality and the thesis of situated knowledge

“…The act of remembering now an event that happened some time ago is constituted as a relation between two subject positions: the present me and the past me that witnessed the event. This self-referential positionality is integral to philosophical debates about the metaphysics of personhood (Parfit, 1984; Simandan, 2017, 2018c): is a person a spatiotemporally stretched entity or are we different persons at different slices in time? It is also integral to epistemological debates about the possibility of personal knowledge (Hirsch, 2002) and to research on the politics of oral histories and in-depth interviews (Dowling et al, 2016; Gardner, 2001).…”

“…The third gap (‘witnessed situation versus remembered situation’) highlights the fact that a significant part of our everyday knowledge is remembered information and that the many imperfections of human memory make our recollections inevitably impoverished accounts of the original situation we have actually witnessed (Hill, 2011). Finally, the fourth unavoidable epistemic gap (‘remembered situation versus confessed situation’) focuses on two intertwined meanings of the saying ‘we know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi, 1966): firstly, significant parts of our knowledge and memories are unavailable to conscious awareness (Simandan, 2017); secondly, people are social creatures and knowledge is therefore socially constructed within various fields of power, which means that shame, fear of punishment, explicitly political motivations (e.g. Wright, 2018), or self-presentational concerns make people share with others much less than they actually remember (Cameron, 2012).…”

“…For an account of Donna Haraway’s anti-humanist ontology, see Gane (2006). For an explicitly anti-humanist geography of fractured subjectivities, see Simandan (2017).…”

Speaking from other demonic bases of partiality

“…What does it mean to be human and to engage in a project of knowing? Dragos Simandan’s (2019) article addresses this debate by taking forward the anti-humanist project he has previously articulated as a ‘demonic geography’ (Simandan, 2017). His work elaborates a materialistic basis for ethical being, rethinking the human subject as ‘soulless’ or a mechanistic assemblage of neurotransmitted material.…”