From
Joy to Negativity: Yet Another Turn in Social Theory
A
Review by Paul Kaletsch (62428@soas.ac.uk)
SOAS University of London
Bissel, David, Mitch Rose and Paul Harrison (eds.): Negative Geographies.
Exploring the politics of limits. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2023. 318 pages, 35 USD. ISBN: 978-1-4962-2782-9. & Kennan Ferguson
(ed.): The Big No. Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 168
pages, 25 USD. ISBN: 978-1-5179-0929-1.
Abstract
Negativity characterizes the contemporary. Today, elections, referenda, and political practice prefer not to; they reject and resist what is offered instead. The planetary polycrisis, on the other hand, limits what politics can do and reduces it to a condition of being limited. Therefore, The Big No and Negative Geographies engage in a theoretical conceptualization of negativity and explore negative phenomena from the perspective of political theory and cultural geography, respectively.
Review
Since
the early 2000s, cultural geography has undergone a paradigm shift from
discourse and representations to bodies, matter, processes, and relations
(Bissell et al., p. 142). Today, such geographical work falls under the
rubric of nonrepresentational geography (Bissell et al., pp. 67–91).
Recently, cultural geographers embracing negativity began to contest the
dominance of such nonrepresentational work and coined the polemical label
of affirmationism for it (Bissell et al., pp. 7–13). Affirmationism in
cultural geography, according to these critics, is defined by its study of
what bodies can do and the reconceptualization of bodies as
unbounded arrangements of relations between inorganic and organic
components that are never finished but always becoming (Bissell et al., p.
142; Thomas Dekeyser and Thomas Jellis: “Besides Affirmationism? On
Geography and Negativity,” 53/2, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12684,
p. 318). Yet affirmationism extends beyond cultural geography; it includes
“immanentist poststructuralist philosophy” (Bissell et al., p. 93) and
“vitalist philosophies” (Ferguson, p. 112), such as Deleuze and Guattari,
Latour, or other (more) contemporary thought drawing on Spinoza,
Nietzsche, and Bergson. ‘Negativist’ critics contest affirmationism
ideologically – due to its blind spot of limits, vulnerabilities, and
exhaustion – politically – because of its ignorance of race and disability
both ontologically and epistemologically – ethically – since it cannot
convincingly account for intersubjective care – and epistemologically – as
it identifies the production of affects in the reader/researcher that
increase creativity as the sole merit of research (Bissell et al., pp. 47,
15, 24–25, 93, 2–3, 14, 95).
Two recently published edited volumes turn to negativity. David Bissell,
Mitch Rose, and Paul Harrison edited Negative Geographies: Exploring
the Politics of Limits. The publication introduces negativity as a
valid epistemic response, particularly the study of limits, to the
predominance of affirmationism in the field of cultural geography and as a
possible remedy for the shortcomings of affirmationism. In contrast, the
theoretical study of negative political practices, processes, and
phenomena in Kennan Ferguson’s edited volume, The Big No, considers
negativity on its own rather than as the opposite of positivity or a
reaction to it.
While the conceptual argument concerning the negative that Mitch Rose,
David Bissell, and Paul Harrison develop in the introduction of Negative
Geographies incorporates negative phenomena, that is, the failure to
recall what has passed that disregards the wish to remember, the social
production of higher death rates from COVID-19 among Black people in the
US, or what a specific body cannot do, it extends conceptual
negativity beyond these empirical manifestations (Bissell et al., pp.
14–15, 18). Posing the negative solely in the form of concrete obstacles,
vulnerabilities, and limits conceptualizes negativity as something that
one can and should surpass. In contrast, Bissell et al. frame
negativity as the “unknowable” as such that limits “what can
be known [emphasis in original]” (p. 12). On this basis, the
editors put forward two theoretical research questions: How to
ontologically conceptualize that which does not hold being (Bissell et
al., pp. 4–7)? And how to think with the negative as that which
structures the human condition as one of limitation, and, thus, remains
irresolvable, despite its constant elicitation of an insufficient but
necessary negotiation of these limits (Bissel et al., p. 12)?
The introduction argues for negativity as an analytical supplement to
relationality and not as its replacement: “Seen from the perspective of
relational ontologies, living beings seem infinitely creative and capable,
and perhaps they are. But if so, we also have to acknowledge how they are
infinitely vulnerable” (Bissell et al., p. 19). A negative stance
acknowledges that the relationality of human bodies exposes them as much
to disabling as enabling encounters. Negativist inquiries prioritize
limits over potential, such as displayed by studies attending to the
incapacitation of bodies, the absence of factories in the post-industrial
city, or death and irretrievable loss (Bissell et al., pp. 14–19).
The first chapter also delineates a negativist notion of politics. The
incessant acceleration of the polycrisis of the contemporary constantly
and increasingly imposes limits on bodies and political thought and
action. In the face of such unmanageable problems, politics – whether in
the form of a radical revolution, totalizing power, or technocratic
reformation – loses its omnipotence (Bissell et al., pp. 1–2). Instead,
political practice transforms into “small gestures striving to respond to
that over which nothing can be done” (Bissell et al., p. 21).
Understanding politics as a precarious effort leads the authors to think
about how to research something or someone without ignoring its or their
unknowability or shoving it aside (Bissell et al, p. 25–26). Moreover,
they ask what follows from epistemic practices that reflect on what
imposes limits on what they can know and embrace unknowability as a
condition of study.
Chapters two, four, five, and six put the introduction’s abstract
conceptual, epistemological, and political reflection on negativity into
practice. In chapter two, Chris Philo engages with Simone Weil’s – a 20th
century “French intellectual and religious guide” (Bissell et al., p. 49)
– cosmology of a world created by a divine being only to be abandoned and
left to its own devices of the laws of physics and the chance event
(Bissell et al., pp. 41, 56–57). In other words, even the tiniest
component was willed by God, and thus remains basked forever in a divine
light. And yet, at the same time, every being is stranded in a cold and
cruel universe marked by an absence of God and a lack of meaning, and
structured by the fight for survival, accident, and the determination by
physics (Bissell et al., pp. 52–61). Based on these ontological
commitments, Philo proposes a peculiar kind of negative geography: “An
imagined geography of miniscule glints shaded by darkened patterns is also
how I might depict my current sensibility” (Bissell et al., p. 61). To
illustrate the latter, Philo points to the precarity of neoliberal
academia, while he exemplifies the former with the small things in life: a
kind word, the sight of an animal, a walk (Bissel et al., p. 39).
Negative Geographies permits the contributors transdisciplinary
liberties that result in a few methodologically and stylistically very
unconventional chapters. Chapter four and five feature among those. This
liberal approach of the edited volume broadens its audience beyond readers
interested in cultural geography, negativity, or critiques of
affirmationism to scholars with an interest in the incorporation of
heterodox writing techniques into academic knowledge production and
fiction or non-fiction writers with an interest in transdisciplinarity.
For instance, Vickie Zhang’s chapter four auto-ethnographically explores
her own fieldwork experience in the People’s Republic of China. Working
with this material, the author reflects on translation – in the sense of
“translation as shuttling between cultural worlds, broadly understood”
(Bissell et al., p. 95) – on a conceptual and practical level. Both
negativist and affirmative epistemologies demand from Zhang a once and for
all decision prior to translation either for surrender as doing the work
to get to know the translated on their terms rather than that of the
translator or for a repairing reading that creates a pleasing research
object to mobilize affects that enable the translator. The chapter,
instead, proposes that an ethics of translation means to constantly
negotiate these mutually exclusive demands and choices (Bissell et al.,
pp. 111–115). Each decision also forces the translator to bear the
consequences of forfeiting the other in practices of self-love or
sacrificing one’s well-being to do the other justice.
Chapter five by Avril Maddrell provides an autobiographical narrative
about loss, grief, and volunteering with the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death
Society. On this basis, the author investigates how bereavement, on the
one hand, disables, and, on the other hand, facilitates actions that
negotiate this existential experience (Bissell et al., p. 121). The
chapter reconceptualizes agency as “to act where and when one can”
(Bissell et al., p. 133, emphasis in original). Such a formation of agency
is contingent on one’s relations, experiences, and vulnerability, and
wavers between incapacitation and being called into action (Bissell et
al., p. 123). Both chapter four and chapter five successfully navigate the
balancing of academic and non-academic writing. The narration creates an
immersive reading experience, a sense of intimacy, and, at the same time,
drives forward an argument and contribution to the study of translation
and the political.
David Bissell explores exhaustion as a fundamentally geographical concept
and phenomenon with a distinct temporality, for example, “a body out of
time with the demands of a changeable world” (Bissell et al., p. 140), and
spatiality, for instance, “a body incapacitated by a heavy object”
(ibid.). The sixth chapter continues to outline how the meaning of
corporeal exhaustion changed from a positive sign of one’s efforts to an
unproductive, and thus, negative side effect of labor. Bissell then
develops how exhaustion along the dimensions of corporeality, spatiality,
and the possible operates both as the “negation of vitality” and
the “condition of vitality” (Bissel et al., p. 160, emphases in
original). The chapter offers a rich overview of theories and studies of
exhaustion and possible trajectories for considerations of exhaustion in
the field of geography instead of confining itself to one
reconceptualization of exhaustion, showing that it is impossible to
exhaust exhaustion.
The introduction of Negative Geographies and chapters two, four,
five, and six either systematically investigate or conceptualize
negativity or – often creatively – practice negative ways of knowing.
Therefore, anyone interested in the downsides of affirmationism, or the
concept of negativity and its analytical and normative purchase should
start with this volume. Although chapters seven, nine, ten, and eleven
work well on their own, these four chapters only seem to peripherally
relate to negativity and lack an explicit conceptual or empirical
engagement with the negative. Hence, they dilute the volume’s thematic
coherence.
Chapter seven and eleven offer theoretical reflections. In chapter seven,
Jessica Dubow starts from Zizek’s discussion of “the refusal of fifty-one
officers and reservists of the Israel Defense Forces to fight beyond the
‘Green Line’ of Israel’s pre- 1967 border” (Bissell et al., 2021, p. 167)
in 2002 as an ethical miracle with theological heft. Drawing on Franz
Rosenzweig, “the German-Jewish philosopher and theologian” (Bissell et
al., 2021, p. 169), the chapter contrasts a conceptualization of the
miracle as a temporary irruption of a negative temporality that “asks only
that we live in the weakest, most woundable, of presents” (Bissell et al.,
2021, p. 167) to Carl Schmitt’s, the legal theorist of the Nazis, notion
of the exception that suspends the legal order and underpins unchecked
state sovereignty (Bissell et al., 2021, pp. 168–169). Chapter eleven sets
out with a discussion of the collapse of a coalition between “liberals and
Islamicists” (Bissell et al., 2021, p. 264) in 2012 after Egypt’s January
Revolution in 2011, followed by a coup by the military. The second part
reads Stanley Cavell and Chantal Mouffe to conclude with a tragic
reconceptualization of democracy: “How do we reckon with submitting to
those who will misunderstand us, misknow us, and inevitably fail us?”
(Bissell et al., 2021, p. 265).
Chapters nine and ten explore negativity in empirical contexts of
violence. In chapter nine, Richard Carter-White investigates the genocidal
mass killings of “groups including Jews, Communist Party leaders, and
suspected partisans” (Bissell et al., 2021, p. 234), perpetrated by Nazi
Einsatzgruppen, “SS paramilitary death squads” (Bissell et al., 2021, p.
234), during Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe. In chapter ten, Mikko
Joronen reconceptualizes power and techniques of governmentality in his
investigation of warnings of the civilian population issued by Israel’s
Defense Force in the 2014 Gaza War and a 2012 strategy of controlling the
supply of food to Gaza by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of
Health.
In contrast to chapters four and five’s apt integration of non-academic
writing into an academic text, chapters three and eight fail to achieve
this. After an insightful and succinct genealogy of non-representational
theory and critique of its affirmationist bias, Paul Harrison’s chapter
three transforms into an account of the author’s personal history with the
non- in non-representational theory and unfortunately becomes very
hard to follow. Similarly, at the beginning of chapter eight, John Wylie
very captivatingly narrates how his daughter dislocated her shoulder when
she slipped during a hike. The following unsystematic etymological
reflections about dislocation, disorientation, disappearance, and
distance, however, do not convincingly explore the possibility of a
negative geography.
Kennan Ferguson’s The Big No engages with negative epistemic and
political practices, that is, practices that do not affirm the world or
produce an alternative but refuse options or negate the status quo
(Ferguson, 2022, p. ix). The book makes a theoretical and philosophical
case for the political sufficiency of the negative, the no, and refusal
(Ferguson, 2022, p. ix). The no, from this perspective, serves an
important ideological function: it reveals that the world as it is depends
on the yes “as a modality of power” (Ferguson, 2022, p. x) that affirms or
reproduces it.
In the introduction of The Big No, Ferguson proposes three
different nos: The no of resistance engages in political refusal despite
being hopelessly overpowered (Ferguson, pp. xi–xii). “[T]he no of forking
paths” (Ferguson, p. xiii) denies an axiom, replaces it with another, and,
on that basis, imagines a fully-fledged alternative. Epistemologically,
for instance, Katerina Kolozova, in the fourth chapter, suspends the
humanist concept of the human and replaces it with “the human as
determined by the reality of humanity, that materially determined reality
of species of ‘objects’ called human” (Ferguson, p. 61). This epistemic
move enables the author to detach humanism from the tenets of philosophy
and Enlightenment and to rethink it from the perspective of humanity as a
species (one of many). Lastly, chapter five and chapter six engage with
the abolitionist no. The abolitionist no uncompromisingly negates the
entire imagined community of the social due to its operation as a form of
domination (Ferguson, pp. xi–xii, xvi). While these different kinds of nos
may not work in concert but compete and contradict each other, all of them
share the form of the big no. They are not uttered on a whim but are
matters of principle and operate “uncompromising, unreconciling,
unbending” (Ferguson, 2022, p. xix).
The first chapter, by Joshua Clover, studies the lumpenproletariat,
“those decisively rather than momentarily outside the formal wage”
(Ferguson, p. 7). The ‘lumpen’ constitute a surplus population
within capitalism, that is, “surplus to capital and its needs” (Ferguson,
p. 5). The unemployed, for instance, hold only a negative value within
capitalist logic for they are ‘unproductive.’ Such an excluded population
holds at least a revolutionary potential and Joshua Clover studies the
relations between different regimes of managing this ‘threat.’ While the
policing of coloniality permanently excludes the ‘lumpen,’ the
promise of absorption into the labor market disciplines the lumpenproletariat
in capitalism (Ferguson, p. 9). Instead of the expected capitalist
conversion of coloniality, the author observes the colonization of global
capitalism: “more people globally find themselves circling the towns,
never to be granted admission” (Ferguson, p. 10). Whereas the chapter
begins with a discussion of how a worker rejects capitalism and how,
despite being tortured, an imprisoned Algerian revolutionary refuses to
answer the colonial interrogators, the core of the chapter unfortunately
loses sight of resistance as a form of negativity.
Chapter two works with the assumption that the Reagan brand of
neoliberalism could only take hold in the US because, in the 1940s and
1950s, US politics, economics, and society pivoted from “the New Deal
principles of economic equality and a strong regulatory state” (Ferguson,
p. 24) to a public policy that delegated social welfare to the market, and
concentrated “on promoting growth and boosting consumption” (Ferguson, p.
23). Theodore Martin contends that in this period US society disposed of
its own concept of society and the necessity of a society at all, and
increasingly viewed the political solution of problems as fundamentally
impossible. Thus, it only makes sense that the chapter analyzes novels
that “suggest that society doesn’t exist” (Ferguson, p. 20) from this
time. Accordingly, Martin compares three post-World War II US-American
crime novels to develop the phenomenon of antisociality as a response to a
society that has relinquished the very idea of society. Similar to the
first chapter, this chapter offers more on literary antisociality as “a
violent record of the very inescapability of social determination”
(Ferguson, p. 21) than on antisociality as a form of negativity.
The title of Laruelle’s third chapter announces a critique of Deleuze’s
and Derrida’s conceptualization of difference. Unfortunately, the chapter
never takes the time to introduce the concepts of either author that it
refers to, even though the complexity and opaqueness of both oeuvres
clearly warrant such a slow and close reading. The pace of Laruelle’s
writing consequently makes it hard for the reader to follow what he
critiques and why. Despite my familiarity with Derrida and Deleuze and
patient reading of Laruelle’s chapter, I could not grasp the argument of
this chapter on a substantive level. Apparently, Laruelle’s school of
non-philosophy is renowned for such obscurantism. However, especially for
readers unfamiliar with non-philosophy, the volume’s lack of an attempt at
a definition or introduction of non-philosophy will prove discouraging,
particularly because the introduction, and chapters three, four, and six
draw on this line of thought.
As the Afro-pessimist analysis of Frank B. Wilderson III’s
auto-theoretical fifth chapter points out, even radical politics
exploitatively recruits Blackness for the ‘universal’ agendas of
anti-racism/anti-capitalism, based on the claim that these projects
somehow automatically facilitate “Black liberation” (Ferguson, p. 88). The
author argues that, since the narratives of subaltern redemption of the
intersectional left center on the restoration of something lost – of land
and/or labor power – they inevitably depend on the exclusion of Black
people whom slavery – as a “relational dynamic” (Ferguson, p. 94) of
violent commodification – structurally deprives of the capacity for
ownership and loss (Ferguson, p. 91).
Afro-pessimist ontology asserts that society is founded on anti-Blackness:
“the gratuitous violence used to conserve the structural positionality of
the slave as constituting the anti-Black world” (Ferguson, p. 105). Since
the social rests on a violent differentiation between beings and
non-beings, there is no reason to reform society or build another social
structure in a revolution (Ferguson, p. 112). As Andrew Culp states in the
sixth chapter, Afro-pessimism, therefore, practically and theoretically
commits to the ending of the world (Ferguson, p. 113). For example, since
Black people suffer from deracination, that is, “natal alienation”
(Ferguson, p. 109), the abolitionist project of “general deracination”
(Ferguson, p. 114) commits to the uprooting of everyone and everything in
order to spread deracination. Afro-pessimism does not answer how this
works practically and what future this might result in because these
questions commit to the sustenance of an anti-Black world, while
abolitionism invests in Black liberation qua an undoing of this world
(Ferguson, p. 117).
In the introduction and chapters four to six, The Big No
successfully introduces contemporary political thought on negativity and
epistemic and practical modes of negativity. The reader can easily follow
how the introduction’s framework of the three different nos turns into an
actual through line that ties the volume together, since chapter four
explores the rejection of humanism as a no of forking paths, and chapters
five and six discuss the abolitionist no in Afro-pessimism and
non-philosophy, respectively. However, I felt the lack of a dedicated
chapter on the no of resistance. Moreover, chapter one and two do not
explicitly discuss negativity empirically or theoretically. Even though
both chapters work well on their own, they read more like articles than as
parts of the volume. Some editing to explicate the negativity implicit in
the texts might have benefited them.
Since Laruelle’s constant framing of Derrida’s thought as “Judaic”
(Ferguson, p. 50) in The Big No reads irritating, some contextualization
and explanation here might have proven useful. Furthermore, chapter two
provides a compelling conceptual differentiation between coloniality and
colonialism (Ferguson, p. 6). Joronen’s references to “Israel’s colonial
project” (Bissell et al., p. 207) in chapter nine of Negative
Geographies might have benefited from similar conceptual and
normative clarification.
Negative Geographies by Bissel et al. points out that the trans-
and interdisciplinary return of the negative exceeds the domain of mere
cultural geography and extends to Afro-pessimism, nihilism,
accelerationism, and contemporary literature (Bissell et al., p. 13).
Ferguson, likewise, situates The Big No in the trajectory towards
negativity initiated by queer theory’s refusal of “procreative sexuality”
(Ferguson, p. x) and rejection of the social as a system constituted by
heterosexual men’s denial of their same-sex desire and the exclusion of
women. In their introductions, both books point out that we are not just
witnessing yet another turn in academia but truly negative times in the
world. Ferguson’s The Big No insists on the prevalence of the no
in contemporary politics that connects Brexit, Trump, “French Yellow Vests
Protests” (Ferguson, p. ix), and the Native American resistance against
the Dakota Access Pipeline. Negative Geographies similarly invokes
politics but to demonstrate the negative within politics, that is, the
limits of politics, in the face of the crises, such as “right-wing
nationalism” (Bissell et al., p. 1), “ecological destruction” (ibid.),
structural racism, economic inequality, and the militarization of the
borders of the Western world, that seemingly cannot be stopped. The
volumes, hence, contribute to a larger conversation that challenges
modernity, progress, and the affirmationist re-enchantment of the world.
Reading both volumes together creates a dialogue between two different
conceptions of negativity and power. Negative Geographies responds
to affirmationism’s worship of power. For instance, with regards to
corporeality, the affirmative love for the body’s power of acting grants
epistemic visibility only to what the body can do, the connections
that the body forms, and its current productivity and processes of
transformation (Bissell et al., p. 14). The geographical volume, instead,
develops a conceptualization of negativity as an ontological form that
limits what the body can do and, thus, grants visibility to what the
body cannot do, and allows to think corporeality as being limited.
The Big No conceptualizes power as an affirmative force that
sustains the world as it is – often through the cooptation of reformist
and revolutionary changes (Ferguson, p. x). Negative practices,
accordingly, say no to power – and/or to this world – and remain
self-sufficient in their rejection of the demand to provide alternatives.
Accordingly, The Big No provides the politics of the negative
(resistance, rejection, and withdrawal) to Negative Geographies’
ontological conceptualization of negativity as corporeal limitation (being
as being vulnerable, finite, and hurting).
German Abstract
Noch
ein ‚Turn‘: Die Wendung von der fröhlichen zur negativen Theorie
Negativität zeichnet unsere Gegenwart aus. Heutige Wahlen,
Referenda und politisches Handeln lehnen Angebote entweder ab oder leisten
Widerstand. Die planetarische Multikrise hingegen begrenzt, was Politik
tun kann, und reduziert Politik zu solch einer Kondition der Begrenztheit.
Deshalb untersuchen Kennan Ferguson in The Big No und David
Bissell, Mitch Rose und Paul Harrison in Negative Geographies
negative Phänomene empirisch und konzeptualisieren Negativität theoretisch
durch die Blickwinkel der kulturellen Geographie und politischen Theorie.
Copyright 2024, PAUL KALETSCH. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).