Geography Meets Gendlin: An Exploration of Disciplinary Potential through Artistic Practice

By Janet Banfield

This book makes a timely and engaging contribution to geography’s resurgent interest in art and artistic practice, as well as to growing geographical concerns with embodied or pre-reflective experience. It introduces Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical and methodological work to stimulate geographical thinking and practice, and explores its disciplinary potential through innovative practice-based research into artistic spatial experience. Gendlin’s philosophy and techniques for articulating the pre-reflective are explained and illustrated using artists’ accounts of their practices, both retrospectively and during their practice. The geographical implementation of research methods informed by those techniques is detailed and critiqued. Diverse and potentially contradictory findings, and potentially problematic methodological choices, are discussed, accounted for, and reframed through Gendlin’s ideas. Significant geographical potential within Gendlin’s work—philosophical, conceptual and methodological—is identified and described, and avenues and challenges for further investigation are highlighted. This first step towards a Gendlin-informed geography invites further engagement with his work.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Release date: Sep 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137604408

Book preview

Part I

Disciplinary Terrain and Connections

© The Author(s) 2016

Janet BanfieldGeography Meets Gendlin10.1057/978-1-137-60440-8_1

1. Non-Representational Interest in Affect

Janet Banfield¹ 

(1)

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Abstract

In Chap. 1, Janet Banfield helpfully situates Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical and psychotherapeutic work within the context of non-representational geography, highlighting consistencies and discrepancies concerning the relation between the reflective (representational) and the pre-reflective (non-representational), and the specific relation between affect, emotion and cognition. Banfield highlights some of the key challenges currently faced by non-representational geography—concerning the status of the human subject in an anti-essentialist philosophy assumed to deny a psychological subject, and our capacity for accessing and apprehending affect if the affective is assumed to escape representational capture—and specifies how a Gendlinian perspective might inform these concerns as a result of the different way in which Gendlin considers affect, emotion and cognition to be related.

Introduction

This chapter contextualizes Gendlin’s philosophical and psychotherapeutic work within non-representational geography. It provides a brief account of the nature of non-representational geography, its key features and interests, and some of the critical challenges it faces. In particular, this introductory discussion of Gendlin’s work is oriented around how Gendlin understands the relation between the representational and the non-representational, and the relation between his own term for the pre-reflective (the implicit) and that more familiar to non-representational geography (affect). Rather than attempting an exhaustive review of non-representational geography and the turn to affect (for fuller accounts of which see, for example, Thrift 2004a; Anderson 2006; Dewsbury 2009, 2010b; Anderson and Harrison 2010b; Wetherell 2012), this chapter provides a general sense of how Gendlin’s work relates to specific non-representational geographical themes, activities and concerns, and the potential within it to invigorate contemporary debates and challenges, the exploration of which forms the substance of Parts 2 and 3.

Non-Representational Geography

The increase in humanistic approaches stimulated by disciplinary disaffection with positivist methods (Samuels 1978; Daniels 1985; Livingstone 1992; Rose 1993) put human experience back as a central concern to geography (Crang 1998). This encouraged detailed engagement with phenomenology, which seeks to reclaim direct primitive contact with the world to understand things in their essence, through our own embodied experience rather than presupposing scientific knowledge (Tuan 1971; Merleau-Ponty 1995; Parry and Wrathall 2011). Rather than thinking of self-contained humans distinct from the world, phenomenology proposes that the basic state of human existence is one of being-in-the-world, or actively dwelling within and interweaving with the environment (Tuan 1971; Merleau-Ponty 1995; Wylie 2006; Ingold 2011b). Buttimer and Tuan provide examples of the development of phenomenological work in geography, although more recently non-representational geography has started reworking certain phenomenological ideas, in ways discussed later in this chapter (Tuan 1971; Buttimer 1976; Wylie 2006).

Non-representational geography emerged in the mid 1990s (Thrift 2008; Anderson and Harrison 2010a) as concern grew to resolve the tension between the material and the symbolic in a reaction to a perceived stress on language and neglect of the materiality of the human body (Daniels 2004; McCormack 2004; Oakes and Price 2008; Thrift 2008; Anderson and Harrison 2010a; Leys 2011). Nigel Thrift’s Spatial Formations (1996) has been identified as marking the inception of non-representational geography (Lorimer 2007), which favours the practical, processual and eventful over representation and collective symbolism, on the basis that we come to know things through active experience rather than passive observation (Anderson and Harrison 2010a; Greenhough 2010). Although a diverse and difficult body of work to summarize, non-representational thinking can be characterized in relation to two disciplinary turns: a performative turn; and a turn to affect. These turns are encapsulated by two features of non-representational geography: its insistence on not prioritizing representations as epistemological vehicles; and its valorization of processes that operate before conscious reflection (McCormack 2005).

As part of the performative turn in geography, non-representational thinking encourages a change in focus from systems and forms of representation to processes of practice and performance, as the production of knowledge is now framed not in the representation of an external reality but in the practical process of doing things (Dewsbury and Naylor 2002; Dirksmeier and Helbrecht 2008). Non-representational geography does not dispense with representations but reanimates them as active and affective interventions (McCormack 2005). With representations seen not in opposition to practices but generated through them (Driver 2003), the focus of non-representational geography is on how rather than what (Dewsbury 2010a). Here, thought is conceived as an intervention in the world, such that if we act differently we can think differently. As a result, thinking is more than cognitive (Thrift 2004b).

Described as a turn to affect, the growth of non-representational geography has brought an expansion and intensification of interest in pre-reflective registers of experience, such as our moods, dispositions, emotions, habits and capabilities (Dewsbury 2009; Blackman and Venn 2010; Blackman 2010, 2012; Featherstone 2010; Pile 2010; Leys 2011). Non-representational theories share a concern for the sensate and (post)-phenomenological dimensions of existence (Bissell 2010), emphasizing affective sensibilities as active (McCormack 2003; Wylie 2010). In contrast to the conventional phenomenological approach of positioning a body in a landscape and positing a self inside a body (Wylie 2005), non-representational theorists have reinvented much of phenomenology on the grounds that the world is not static (Thrift et al. 2010). Rather than determining essences, which formed the focus of phenomenology, non-representational thinking is concerned with uncovering conditions and processes of their emergence (Tuan 1971; Pels et al. 2002; Simpson 2009). The subject, too, is not essential but emergent; not a cognitive construct but a practical outcome. Subjectivity is neither static nor contained within the body, but distributed beyond it, and is constituted as much by moods and sensations as it is by ideas and beliefs. In many ways, Gendlin’s work is consistent with these disciplinary developments, as it focuses on our pre-reflective experience, it is concerned with how we can articulate from that pre-reflective experience, and it provides a distributed, emergent and practice-based notion of subjectivity. Consequently, the rise of non-representational thinking in geography has brought about parallel shifts in focus from discourse to practice and from meaning to affect (Whatmore 2006), providing opportunities for geographical engagement with, and development of, Gendlin’s