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doi: 10.1068/d140395pmid: N/A
The writings of poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze are intentionally designed to defy summary. Their ‘rhizomatic’ (infinitely bifurcating) form renders it impossible to generate a totalizable, self-consistent system from them. They are nevertheless highly ordered and produce concrete effects, including situated meanings and verifiable propositions. It is, in fact, the particular form of their openness which, far from consigning them to slippery irrelevance, charges them with pragmatic power. The pragmatic dimension of the works of Deleuze can be brought out by analyzing the process of their reception, rather than attempting to isolate their content as a closed system. In the encounter between the reader and the work, the work can be seen as performing its own content. That ‘content’ is conceptual, understood in a way that sharply distinguishes ‘concept’ from ‘proposition’. For Deleuze, the concept is a dynamism. It conveys a force that is real without ceasing to be ideal. This makes the encounter with the work a literal ‘event’ in which something always new transpires. Thus alongside situated meanings and verifiable propositions, the work also produces ‘becomings’. Becoming, for Deleuze, can only be grasped as a function of an open system, and with reference to an ontological distinction between the actual and the virtual. Deleuze's emphasis on the ideal as a literal force that enters actual experience without being contained in it, that is actualized without ceasing to be virtual, that cannot but be felt but always escapes, earns his philosophy the paradoxical label of ‘transcendental empiricism’.
doi: 10.1068/d140407pmid: N/A
This paper is written in such a way that the style reproduces the epistemological problems, Memories, sounds, and feelings are part of the analysis of subjective relations to Australian spaces, accordingly these are reproduced ‘ficto-critically’. The aesthetic is both nomadological and immaterial. Apprehensions of Australian space are constructed as movement through them. Accordingly the reader is taken on a journey from the backyard to the Outback, and it is explained why these two spaces have a certain homology. Anteriority, it is claimed, is a central category for a non-Aboriginal Australian imaginary. But some accounts of Aboriginal apprehensions of space are brought out for the purposes of contrast (for Aboriginal people there is no ‘Outback’). The textual status of these Aboriginal accounts is contingent upon the structures of their knowledge and ways of obtaining it. Instances of the author's ‘capture’ on a tape recorder of stories by an Aboriginal woman, Bonnie Edwards, indicate the divergence of the form and purpose of her texts from the ‘textual suburbs’ of theory that the author usually inhabits. As he leaves her country, his practical solution to the material weight of theory and the self-presence of narrative subjectivity is an immaterial one. He gets lost.
doi: 10.1068/d140421pmid: N/A
What is space? What is spacing? And how does spacing itself hold together? The author pursues these questions, which continue to haunt and transfix geographers, by drawing upon the collaborative work of two exemplary thinkers: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What emerges from such an encounter is a fundamental shift in the way space, place, and spacing are configured; a shift which will have enormous implications for anyone concerned with unfolding the relationship between society and space. Particular emphasis is placed on the radicalization of relations, of the spacing of relations, and of relational space. Such a radicalization effectively deconstructs the field of geography as we know it, and demands that we reconfigure both the world and our theoretical-practices ‘from the middle’. This yields a world of continuous variation, becoming, and chance, rather than one of constancy, being, and predictability; and it is populated solely by hæcceities, singularities, and events, strung together through joints, intervals, and folds. Accordingly, a fractal world of infinite disadjustment, destabilization, and disjointure is what is meant by the term ‘scrumpled geography’, and it constitutes the horizon on which one should situate deconstruction, postmodernism, and poststructuralism more generally. Unfolding the joints, intervals, and folds of such a world is precisely the task undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari. However, the author reworks their own undertaking by giving it a much more explicitly spatial inflexion and consistency. Thus, the paper not only clarifies the scrumpled geography embedded within the work of Deleuze and Guattari, it also demonstrates the revolutionary implications of a rigorously deconstructive and poststructuralist consideration of space, place, and spacing.
doi: 10.1068/d140441pmid: N/A
Beginning with an account of the kitchen by the novelist Yoshimoto Banana, this author journeys through a series of Japanese domestic tales, as articulated in various sites of popular culture: homeware advertising, political campaigns, garbage disposal practices, architectural magazines, and pornographic comics. The kitchen operates in this paper as far more than a functional site in the home. It is a multifaceted concept which shows the nexus of the flow of energy between body politics, the state, and its key organ, the family. Official discourses of gender, family, motherhood, education, and employment flow through this unbound space of the kitchen. Here the kitchen is far more than architecture, it is a concept which defies material limits to become a space of domestic fantasies, both homely and unhomely, of the family and the nation-state.
doi: 10.1068/d140463pmid: N/A
The prevalence of a culture of ‘tolerance’ towards ethnic minorities in the West in the face of the practices of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe and of other more general practices of intolerance and extermination in parts of the Third World has led to a popular as well as a sometimes academic conception of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms essentialised into two radically different kinds of nationalism. In this paper I offer a critique of such a differentiation based on an examination of various practices of dealing with otherness in the process of nation building, particularly in Lebanon and Australia. I argue that practices of nation building, ranging from the promotion of ethnic cultures to mass ethnic killings, are guided by national imaginaries which, despite their empirical variety, are basically structured in the same way. This means, first, that such differences are better understood as the historical or contextual privileging of specific nationalist problematics grounded in this common national imaginary. Second, it means that within the nationalist imaginary that guides them there is a space in which, in given circumstances, the practitioners of valorisation and tolerance can turn into practitioners of mass killings and vice versa without them turning into a radically different kind of nationalists. Far from being specific to an ‘Eastern’ nationalism, the logic of extermination is inherent to any form of nation building today.
doi: 10.1068/d140487pmid: N/A
In this essay I develop the notion of ‘minor theory’ following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafka's ‘minor literature’ as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge in geography. I will explore the politics of producing theory that is, for example, interstitial with empirical research and social location; of scholarship that self-reflexively interpolates the theories and practices of everyday historical subjects—including, but not restricted to, scholars; and of work that reworks marginality by decomposing the major. I will discuss the ways that by consciously refusing ‘mastery’ in both the academy and its research practices, ‘minor’ research strives to change theory and practice simultaneously, and I will suggest that these practices can be conjoined with the critical and transformative concerns of Marxism, feminism, antiracism, and queer theory to pry apart conventional geographies and produce renegade cartographies of change.
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