Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises

Abstract

Attachment is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary cultural geography. Cultural geography is full of relations that look like attachments. But attachment as a concept is mostly absent, used interchangeably with association, connection or simply relation per se. In this article, I respond to dissatisfaction with the flattening effects of the relational turn by arguing for a cultural geography orientated to attachments. Engaging with the work of Lauren Berlant and other feminist and queer theory in dialogue with actor-network theory, I conceptualise attachments as enduring trajectories that ‘bring closer’ something which comes to feel necessary to a way of life. This means that ‘objects’ of attachment – whether a person or a place, a song or a nation or anything else – come to be encountered as promises. To understand the (de/re)composition of attachments, this paper offers two concepts. Forms of attachment are arrangements that make available promises to be attached to. They channel the optimism of attachment. The presence of the promissory object intensifies in scenes of attachment – everyday space-times of limited duration which give an affective push to forms of attachment. The result of orientating inquiry to forms and scenes of attachment is a cultural geography of promises.

Desire’s misrecognitions, or the promise of mutable attachments

“…In his article, ‘Forms and Scenes of Attachment: A Cultural Geography of Promises’, Anderson (2023) issues an appeal to cultural geographers to attend to people's attachments. He offers this call – one that he shares with Rose (2021) – in the context of a now thoroughly relational subdiscipline which, nonetheless, seems to have neglected questions of meaning and investment despite its proliferation of approaches to affective life.…”

“…Like Anderson and many others, I have been greatly moved and inspired by Berlant's writing. Promise is an idea that Anderson draws out of Berlant's proposition that ‘[a]ll attachment is optimistic’, defining it as a relation that brings the subject closer to the promise of ‘a satisfying something’ that is sensed ‘in the wake of’ an object of attachment (2011: 1–2 quoted on Anderson, 2023). In this context, promise refers to something specific, something different in subtle but important ways to the conventional understanding of a promise as a declaration or commitment by one party towards another – as a pledge between an I that promises something to a you .…”

“…Whilst its specific terms are left deliberately open, promise figures in Anderson's article as something closer to an affective presence: as a promise of ‘something better to come’ made available to the self through affective proximity to the object of attachment. Through this optimistic orientation, a promissory object becomes characterised as that which feels like it ‘opens a valued future’ (Anderson, 2023).…”

“…Whilst Anderson begins his article with an epigraph quoting Berlant, that ‘[a]ny social theory worthy of its ambition requires a space for enigmatic, chaotic, incoherent, and structurally contradictory attachments’ (2011: 685 quoted in Anderson, 2023), the enigmatic, incoherent, and chaotic dimensions of attachment could feel like they disappear over the course of the article. Despite a stated attention to the ‘(re/de)composition of people's affective attachments’ (Anderson 2022), the article tends to maintain its focus on processes of recomposition over those those of composition or decomposition, drawing on its apparatus to mainly describe how (ostensibly) stable forms emerge.…”

Attachment: A question of how and a question of why

“…It was one of those passing moments that should be meaningless but for some reason instilled itself. Now faced with commenting on this thought-provoking paper (Anderson, 2023) – a paper instigated by a question I posed – I am faced with the prospect of indulging in my own academic vanity. On the one hand, I like the fact that Ben took up this question and I get a certain gratification from discussing it.…”