Political will and human geography: Non-representational, post-political, and Gramscian geographies

Abstract

Inspired by philosopher Peter Hallward’s call for a renewed focus on political will, this article examines its conceptualization within three areas of the discipline: non-representational theory, post-politics, and Gramscian geographies. Non-representational theorists draw attention to the role of affect in shaping political life, but have little to say about conscious collective volition. In contrast, post-politics scholars offer an extensive vocabulary for understanding political will as a prescriptive form of agency, but risk confining the political to an abstract, regulative idea. Meanwhile, Gramscian geographies’ dialectical approach to political will can complement both by mediating between extremes of objective and subjective determination.

Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze

“…While the significance of vitalist ideas in making sense of geography’s fascistic past is beyond question, what is often overlooked is the ontological privilege afforded to the figure of the individuated organism within this history and the role this figure has played in suturing the concept of life to an expansionist geopolitical agenda. The historical proponents of this agenda invoked the unity of the State by proposing an analogy to the living organism, as Doucette’s (2020) recent analysis makes clear. 1 Life, from this organic perspective, is associated with an irreducible unity traditionally reserved for biological individuals: a unity of purpose that is deemed to be lacking in the deterministic webs of non-living, physical matter.…”

“…1.Doucette (2020: 320) notes the historical appropriation of vitalist philosophies by strains of reactionary thought within the discipline and describes how ‘the organic theory of the state popularized in the late 19th and early 20th century by vitalist-inspired thinkers such as Ratzel, Mackinder, Kjellén and Schmitt likened the state to a living organism’.…”

Contemporary art and the geopolitics of extractivism in Turkey's Kurdistan

“…Art's critical potential in this context is seen leverageable not simply by confronting Western audiences with war's violent reality, but rather by problematising the drive for solutionist intervention and consensus characterising the very notions of democracy and peace touted by the proponents of these wars, while also indexing the dissentience-oriented political work that needs doing outside the gallery or museum (Ingram, 2011(Ingram, , 2016Sachs Olsen, 2019). Methodologically, then, this literature appraises art's aestheticsas-geopolitics against "post-political" notions of democracy, peace, and prosperity used in legitimising neoliberal policies that at once inflict and mask various forms of marginalisation and violence in cities and beyond (Doucette, 2020;Roberts et al, 2003;Swyngedouw, 2009;Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014; on aesthetics beyond art, see Goonewardena, 2005;Harvey, 1990).…”

From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement in Pakistan

“…Here in one simple conversation is the laying down of the socio‐spatial bases of immediacy and partisan universal as necessary moments to forging a concrete universality. The demand for dignity and equality here is “not some abstract universal” but one emerging from “real or actual movement … [which] has its practical origins in history and geography; it does not precede them” (Doucette 2020:323, emphasis added). As with Fanon, Manzoor recognises the need for the native intellectual to retreat to the spatial‐social grounds of popular bases within their communities, “to fall back towards the countryside”, to “learn their lessons in the hard school of the people”, to join the people “in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to”, and then—and only then—culminate back in the urban core, the (potential) terrain of concrete unity (Fanon 2001:100–101, 182).…”

“…In this moment, the potential for an active universality is revealed through determinate and situated forms of socio‐political practice. This is the “ long labour … involved in the formation of political will … [which] necessitates deep engagement with language and meaning” while also “requir[ing] attention to the spatial and temporal rhythms of organisation, the contradictory and sedimented conceptions of the world” which concretely structure the terrain of political practice and transformation (Doucette 2020:327, emphasis added). Here, the new urban question in Pakistan will be briefly elaborated as potential terrain for a concrete universality, the moment when a richer—but always contingent and processual—universality is revealed: “a universal which embraces within itself the wealth of the particular” (Hegel, quoted by Anderson 1995:34).…”