Undoing mastery: With ambivalence?

Abstract

In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne’s article ‘Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography’. We do so by picking up ambivalence—or more precisely, ambivalence about ambivalence—as a tool with which Ruez and Cockayne leave us. We find this tool somewhat difficult to grasp, but we understand this as part of its design. Ambivalence undoes the subject’s mastery. In doing so, we find that an airing of ambivalence gives other kinds of entangled, indeterminate, and unknowing relations room to breathe.

What should we do with bad feelings? Negative affects, impotential responses

“…For these geographers, evaluation of negative affects is temporarily halted; there is, to use Agamben’s first sense of impotentiality, the diagnosis of a capacity not to do something. Rather than offering ‘an assertive direction as to where critical geographers must now turn’ (Wilkinson and Lim, 2021: 115; Linz and Secor, 2021), ambivalence is an incitement to evaluate affects through their potential in specific situations.…”

For a new weird geography

“…Wylie (2021;227) notes that geographers face difficulties when accounting for affects and phenomena of 'negatives, nons-, and absences [...] precisely because any action, description, or reference that brings them into light, into visibility, itself negates their particularity, their specific manner of not-being'. Ambivalence has been promoted as a means of dislodging this purported tension 'without privileging either positive or negative feelings in advance' (Ruez and Cockayne, 2021;102; see also Dekeyser and Jellis, 2021;Gandy and Jasper, 2017;Linz and Secor, 2021;Romanillos, 2015;Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018;Murray, 2020).…”

“…It is precisely such an ‘approach’, which might make encountering weirdness generative rather than regressive. Following Linz and Secor (2021; 111), the Biologist’s approach is an ‘ambivalent orientation’ to weird spacetimes: ‘one that is elbow deep in the disconcerting irresolvability of complexity’. Reflecting on the encounter, she asks: ‘I was unlucky—or was I lucky?’ (VanderMeer, 2014; 17).…”

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.…”