Attenuationism

SLIDE 1 — The Lisbon morning

Good morning.

I want to begin gently in someone else’s morning, and somewhere else entirely, with a man watching a dawn, in this quote.

SLIDE 2

The morning unfurls itself on the city, interleaving light and shade (or rather degrees of intensities of light) amongst the houses. It does not seem to come from the sun but from the city itself, for the light issues forth from the city’s walls and roofs (not from them physically but from the simple fact of them being there) ...

This is Bernardo Soares, Pessoa’s semi-heteronym, an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon on his way to work.

Watching this dawn he feels, for a moment, full of hope. He goes on to say,

SLIDE 3

If I observe myself as closely as I observe the city, I realize that all I have to hope for is that today, like every other day, will come to an end.

And then, a few lines later:

SLIDE 4

The eyes of reason also look at the dawn, and I see that the hope I placed in it, if it ever existed, was not mine.

It belonged to those men who live for the passing hour and whose way of thinking I, for a moment, unwittingly embodied.

I want you to hold onto that morning, because everything I say in the next ten minutes is an attempt to describe what is happening in it.

SLIDE 5 – Pessoa Overlay

Notice what is not happening in Soares’ morning. Nothing has broken. Nothing has been taken from him. The city is there. The light is there. The day is ahead of him. Nothing in the scene presents as crisis or breakdown, and nothing determinate within it tells us what is missing.

And yet something is wanting. The hope arrives only to reveal itself as belonging to other people. What is left him is the one thing that cannot fail to arrive: the end of the day.

I am a geographer, returning to the subject I love after a few decades doing other stuff. It’s changed a little bit! And my interest is that I do not think our discipline can currently say what has happened here with Soares.

SLIDE 6 — Minima Relata

That is where my work / PhD began, though I came at it from another direction.

My paper Minima Relata: Reflections on Negative Geographic Life, published in Progress in March, started with a difficulty I could not resolve when reading “the negative turn”.

Parsing the literature, I kept encountering a paradox. To name a void is to fill it; to posit an outside risks detaching negativity from geography’s relational ground; and infinite exteriority risks becoming empirically unreachable.

Using a schema I built of thirteen negative linguistic-conceptual functions, I saw a gravitational pull towards recuperation, onw where diminishment becomes latency, exhaustion becomes a threshold of transformation, and burnout becomes metamorphosis. Dawney and Jellis call this the lure of redemption.

And so I defined a besides position, one neither affirmationist becoming nor negative nowhere, rupture, void and finitude. One where life persists but only just. Where it isn’t generative, collapsed, broken, or necessarily awaiting transformation.

I called these registers Minima Relata: empirically graspable constellations of attenuated socio-spatial life that persist without becoming otherwise, at the near-limit of relation itself. A body on a bathroom floor. An asylum family in a hotel room. A claimant in their twenty-ninth month of waiting.

But Soares is not one of these. His morning is nowhere near a limit. He goes to work, he has a city, he writes beautifully about all of it.

Yet something in his morning has the same shape. Which brings me to what I call attenuation.

SLIDE 7 — Attenuation

I define attenuation as a quality of diminished lived relations, centred on a contraction in their capacity to transform their terms, or what becomes possible through them.

Such contraction becomes perceptible through the particular qualities of those relations: in what they can reach, their reciprocal responsivity, what can pass through and return from them, and whether what does so can make a consequential difference.

Minima Relata names the limiting condition, where relations persist without becoming otherwise at the near-limit of relation itself.

But attenuation, I now see, obtains long before such a limit: Minima Relata, it turns out, belong to a much wider field of diminished relational possibility.

And here is the crux. Attenuation does not necessarily entail less relation.

Relations may multiply, accelerate and intensify in frequency, extent, informational density and operational effectiveness, even as their capacity to become otherwise contracts.

More relational activity does not entail greater relational possibility.

SLIDE 8 — Lack inside abundance

So perhaps lack is no longer necessarily experienced as absence.

Perhaps it is increasingly produced inside abundance.

Friendships can sustain continuous acknowledgement while carrying little. Workplaces can become dense with messages, meetings and assessments while losing incidental encounter and belonging. Institutional encounters can become increasingly information-rich while becoming answerable to classifications rather than to particular people. Frictionless services can become progressively more efficient while removing occasions to ask, answer, wait for, negotiate with or accommodate anyone.

Soares has a city, a light, a day, a job to go to. His encounter with the dawn is rich in perception, affect and thought. Yet the possibility it opens contracts almost as soon as it appears.

SLIDE 9

So whilst cultural geography has attended closely to many of these phenomena, I do not think it has yet named the relational condition they have in common.

And I want to suggest a reason: some of the concepts through which cultural geography has become extraordinarily sensitive to relational and processual worlds can make diminished relational possibility difficult to distinguish.

Take relation. Treating relations as exterior to their terms helped us escape accounts in which relation was already contained within independently given entities. Yet a priority of relations can make their existence or activity difficult to distinguish from their quality: their reciprocity, permeability, potential to transform

Assemblage thinking can register constraint, oppression and decomposition. Yet composition and productive differentiation remain powerful underlying logics. What happens when an assemblage continues composing and producing while its capacity to transform its terms or what becomes possible through them contracts?

Or take practice, where recurrence is understood to generate and revise the arrangements it belongs to. A practice whose transformative possibilities progressively contract can continue to look, from within that account, much like one that is still producing.

SLIDE 10

This is where Theodor W. Adorno becomes useful to me.

From Adorno’s mediated structure of experience I draw a reciprocal responsivity between subject and object. Its asks can the object register against the concept through which it is apprehended? Can what returns disturb that concept? Can subject, object or thought be altered through the encounter?

Can the object answer back?

Adorno writes that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.

And so I want to suggest that our concepts produce remainders too, and that attenuated relational life may be among them.

Through an Adornian scaffold of mediation, constellation and metaphysical experience, I ask what our non-representational concepts secure and what they may elide.

It is from that encounter that attenuationism as a disposition emerges.

SLIDE 11

Staying within relational thinking, attenuationism asks us to stop assuming that the presence, intensity or activity of relation tells us what that relation remains capable of.

Its value then is diagnostic, because arrangements of this kind can appear functioning, stable and uneventful, and yet nothing determinate need be missing from them.

SLIDE 12

And so to finish up, Soares is not a man without hope.

He is a man whose hope reaches only the one thing that cannot fail to arrive.

I think there is a great deal of contemporary life with that shape, and what I want to offer our discipline is a way of saying so.

Thanks. I hope you have a relationally rich morning and conference … and the end of the day arrives.