Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography

Abstract

Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have increasingly questioned the meaning and purpose of critique. Contributing to those conversations, some geographers have advocated for affirmative or reparative practices such as reading for difference or experimentation that seek to provoke more joyful, hopeful, or enchanting affects, as alternatives to what they perceive as a prevailing forms of ‘negative’ critique. In response, others have re-emphasized the centrality of negativity and revalued negative affects in the context of regimes of racialization, heteronormativity, and coloniality. Rather than taking sides in a debate thus framed, this article develops an ambivalent position that foregrounds multiple senses of difference that exist within affirmative and reparative projects. Drawing on feminist and queer geographic work, the explicitly political and difference-oriented writing of Sedgwick and Deleuze, and queer and postcolonial affect scholars, we argue for critique characterized by an ambivalent and pluralistic attitude toward feeling. Joining those arguing for a pluralization of the moods and modes of critical work, our readings suggest the necessity of a pluralism that refuses any escape from the ‘negativity’ of the social field in favor of an affectively ambivalent engagement with the inherent politics of critique in a plural and uneven world.

The post-industrial English canalscape: from enclosure to enlacement

“…We remain circumspect about the transcendent power of 'everyday' urban spaces and wary of what might be obscured or overlooked in affectively 'reparative' scholarship 'in search of a better story'. 82 We are aware that staying with such tensions has some risks, though, as thousands (like us) appear to surge to the urban canalscape to escape, move and dwell. A radical, urban commons agenda that could protect waterways and towpaths from sanitised heritage and deepened privatisation is one alternative, normative register; one that would certainly draw canals definitively away from much of the rest of the industrial ruinscape and the lineaments of abandonment, demolition, sanitisation or even 'curated decay' we find there.…”

“…15 The canal in our analysis, then, becomes a metaphor for both the uncertainties woven into the late neoliberal 'urban political' 16 and our own ambivalent orientations which, we contend, enables us to navigate between 'singular' and 'reparative' modes of critique and stay with, usefully and progressively, the contradictions, fragmentations and uncertainties in social life. 17 In the next section, we discuss our methods and cases before moving on to our three-part account of how and what kind of places, landscapes and enlacements post-industrial canals now offer and afford in the contemporary English city.…”

Negativity: space, politics and affects

“…Ruez and Cockayne carefully explain that 'affirmation' is not just about 'feeling good'; each constitutes a distinct style of approach and the two should not be conflated. 45 This is a point that Ahmed also makes in her discussions of happiness and affirmation, recognising that (perhaps confusingly) 'good feelings aren't necessarily about feeling good'. 46 Both agree, however, that there has nonetheless been a strong tendency to merge the two approaches, with researchers consistently combining affirmation with feeling good -and, on the flipside, critique with feeling bad -resulting in 'the risk of an implicit connection between the two'.…”

“…Second, geographers have begun to question, sometimes explicitly and other times less so, whether vitalist ontologies enable us to think through the sad passions, negative affects and diminished potential that mark contemporary life and how those might both enable and delimit our engagement with the world as people 11 and as researchers. 12 Finally, a number of geographers have sought to trace the limits of translating affirmation into a politics, 13 ethics 14 and critique 15 of generosity or enchantment, instead turning their attention to silence, 16 stillness 17 and refusal. 18 Tracing and extending these threads, each contributor to this paper reflects on what negativity means to them.…”

Writing economies and economies of writing

“…Culturally, disciplines such as economics and economic geography have been accused of reproducing (white) masculine privilege (Dorling, 2019;Pugh, 2020). As criticisms mount over heteromasculine performances of 'master' academics controlling the disciplinary narrative and subjectsa charge one might suggest is especially pertinent in 'economic' writingsgeographers are grappling with how to reconcile strident or negative critique with affirmations of diversity and ambivalence (Kern, 2021;Linz and Secor, 2021;Ruez and Cockayne, 2021;Saville, 2020). Decentring expertise over what constitutes 'the economy' goes to the writing practices at the core of discipline's systems of reputation and reward.…”