Edinburgh Research Explorer Geography and emotion - emerging constellations Citation for published version: Smith, M, Davidson, J, Cameron, L & Bondi, L 2009, Geography and emotion - emerging constellations. in M Smith, J Davidson, L Cameron & L Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, pp. 1-18. Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Emotion, Place and Culture Publisher Rights Statement: © Smith, M., Davidson, J., Cameron, L., & Bondi, L. (2009). Geography and emotion - emerging constellations. In M. Smith, J. Davidson, L. Cameron, & L. Bondi (Eds.), Emotion, Place and Culture. (pp. 1-18). Farnham: Ashgate. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 1 Introduction: Geography and Emotion – Emerging Constellations Astronomy tells us that the light from the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters star cluster, takes approximately 400 light years to reach the Earth. And yet those few photons which, having travelled this unimaginable distance in time and space, impinge upon our eyes can excite the most profound and varied of feelings, can change, dispel, or deepen our moods, incite and admix awe, wonder, and utter loneliness, and even, if we should happen to be so fortunate, entangle themselves in those universally expansive feelings of inseparable closeness impressed upon us as the very moment of love’s realization in a starlit kiss. Suddenly the whole world appears differently. What could possibly be more romantic? Well, clearly such responses are not simply matters of cause and effect, automatic reactions to the impact of light-waves on the retina. Some might, for example, be altogether immune to romantic feeling, regarding such astral associations as expressions of self-indulgent affectation rather than heartfelt affection. Perhaps romance is a fiction best left between the covers of True Love stories—‘for women’. And after all, doesn’t romantic love (and its association with the experience of nature as sublime) have a recent and fairly well documented history? Isn’t it, at least in part, socially and culturally constructed, and usually along gendered lines? And then there are other circumstances to be considered. What if it happens to be -40 degrees out there or the stars are obscured by smog and the 2 glare of sodium lamps? What if those concerned are too hungry, angry, tired, or distracted, to pay attention to heavenly bodies? What if they regard stargazing as merely a metaphor for wasting valuable time given their busy schedules and the accumulating business in their in-tray? Such differences and difficulties raise the question of what it might mean to think about emotional geographies when emotions also have a culture, history, seasonality, psychology, biology, economy, and so on: When to detail the intricate entanglements of even a single emotion (if one could ever be analyzed apart from others) might take longer than those photons’ earth-bound journeys and still leave more undiscovered—just as the Pleiades contains many hundreds more than the six stars usually visible to the naked eye. (According to mythology Merope, the seventh sister, married Sisyphus, a mere mortal and so shines less brightly than her sisters—so much for romantic love!) How might emotions be described ‘geo-graphically’ when such feelings can connect us to places so far beyond the confines of the earth and yet still evade capture by the writings of any discipline? Of course, we have to start somewhere. Even if the shifting grounds of emotions are not easily identified, they can’t be studied in a vacuum - unless by this we mean the experiments conducted on those beings we occasionally fling into circular orbits far above the planet’s atmosphere. Emotions might need to be understood as events that take-place in, and reverberate through, the real world and real beings, and so far as we know the existence of living, breathing, creatures is a pre-requisite for emotions to exist at all. (Perhaps Merope knows differently.) We can, at least, be sure that emotions are amongst the most important ways in which such creatures, including humans, are both connected 3 with and disconnected from their world and their mortality. Indeed, emotions are a vital ingredient in the very composition of the world as a world, as something more than a concatenation of causes and affects, as those places, people and incidents, that become meaningful to us, that we care about, fear, disdain, miss, hate, and sometimes, inexplicably, love. Without emotions we might indeed survive in (but hardly experience) a world that resembled the empty space envisaged by Newtonian mechanics and measured by Cartesian coordinates (see below). Such a space is not, of course live-able, indeed it doesn’t even exist, in the same way that the ‘empty’ inter-stellar medium of outer-space exists. Yet its origins and effects are, unfortunately, much closer to home. It is, as Lefebvre reminds us, a secondary abstraction (abstract space), a historically and culturally specific rationalization, the purpose of which is the ‘reduction of the “real” on the one hand to a “plan” existing in a void and endowed with no other qualities, and, on the other hand, to the flatness of a mirror, of an image, of pure spectacle under an absolutely cold gaze’ (Lefebvre 1994, 287). This modern, Western, ‘formal and quantitative’ understanding of space ‘erases distinctions, as much as those which derive from nature and (historical) time as those which originate in the body (age, sex, ethnicity)’ (Lefebvre 1994, 49). It claims to be neutral, universal, apolitical, value and emotion free, and this claim is precisely why this understanding of space facilitates political, bureaucratic, and technological interventions of a kind that regard emotional involvements as either faults to be corrected, as vestigial and worthless remnants made defunct by the linear march of ‘progress’, or as resources to be 4 manipulated in order to ensure more efficient forms of (human) resource management (see, for example, Hochschild, 1983). This abstract understanding of space, which, according to Lefebvre, increasingly dominates the modern world, facilitates the emotionless reduction of a diverse and beautiful planet to that ‘raw material’ (Lefebvre 1994, 31) necessary to reproduce a society - which itself is now re-envisaged in terms of a social ‘system’. It thereby also serves to conflate the reproduction of complex, creative (excessively emotional) social relations with the crude ‘biological’ reproduction necessary for the system’s survival (Lefebvre 1994, 50). Lefebvre’s analysis can thus be connected with Foucault’s claims about modernity’s increasingly ‘bio-political’ management of populations and, via this, with Agamben’s (1998) chilling account of the increasingly pervasive reduction of real human beings to the category of ‘bare life’, that is, to human beings stripped of their political possibilities, subject only to a ‘cold gaze’ that, for example, reduces people to abstract information stored in governmental computer systems, to faces re-cognized technologically. As this imaginary abstract space is realized around us it wields, says Lefebvre, (1994, 52) an ‘awesome reductionistic force vis-à-vis “lived” experience’, a violence recently exemplified by the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign of the U.S military machine in Iraq. But, since ‘shock’ and ‘awe’ are also emotions even this example of reductive force remains open to critique in terms of its emotional duplicity, the fact that even the ‘empty’ abstract space supposed by the ‘military precision’ of such plans still requires and utilizes its own emotional ‘proxemics’ (288). These are suited to treating the world and its inhabitants as abstractions (as collateral damage rather than as diverse, living, individuals 5 or beings) to cutting emotional ‘ties’, and celebrating emotional distance (a very modern, masculine, and in Lefebvre’s (and Lacan’s, 1992) terminology ‘phallocratic’ ideal) now implicated in leaving hundreds of thousands in Iraq dead, angry, mourning, despairing, furious, hopeless, vengeful and bereft—hardly the results originally predicted by abstract planning, but hardly surprising to anyone with any understanding of the affects of violence. Emotions are then intimately and inescapably caught up in the current re-writing of the earth, the production of new, transformed, geographies, and New World Orders, that affect us all, albeit in very different ways. And yet the question of how we might feel as well as think about these transformations is seldom addressed and this is (only one reason) why the world needs emotional geographies and why geography needs to take emotions seriously. Unfortunately, emotions have often been deliberately excluded from, or habitually suppressed within, many geographical discourses, especially those which understand geography