Abstract
This paper offers a theory of detachment as a distinctive social-spatial (non)relation as a contribution to recent debates about relations and relationality in contemporary human geography. It argues that ‘detachment’ has thus far served as other to and problem for the literatures concerned with (non)relational geographies. As part of an approach to relationality that advocates for an orientation to multiple, different kinds of (non)relation, the paper proposes three complementary understandings of detachment: detachment as the absence of a promise; detachment as the imminent loosening of a promise; and detachment as the ending of a promise.
Introduction: Detachment is everywhere
Geographies are made, unmade, and remade by detaching and being detached. For detachments are potentially everywhere: in the separation that enables killing at a distance and indifference to genocide (Fluri, 2023); in spaces of joyful decadence that allow for queer flourishing (Price, 2015); in stalled detachments from Empire (Gilroy, 2004); in everyday ways of coexisting well with non-humans (Ginn, 2014); in the desire to go ‘plastic free’ amid intensifying climate crisis (Hawkins, 2021); in boredom and other disaffected feelings (Anderson, 2021); in large dam projects that destroy, fragment and marginalise (Helmcke, 2023), in spiritual practices that create momentary solace, whether through joy or ascetic registers (Van der Veer, 1989); in withholding as a way of relating to others in the city (Simone and Broto, 2022); in how people navigate disappointment in the gig economy (Bissell, 2022); and so on. Any list of detachments can only ever be incomplete, always open to further ways in which geographies are made, unmade and remade by something or someone becoming distanced and separated from an ‘object’ 1 that no longer, if it ever did, holds some kind of promise. Slow and fast, definite and ambivalent, felt and unfelt, places are full of detachments – from past identities, an almost lost love, genocide happening elsewhere, a past version of oneself, norms, institutions.
Detachments are everywhere, although not always clear cut, willed or experientially present to the subjects or collectives who inherit, inhabit, or initiate them. Something losing its promise, or maintaining a distance from something, are part of the conditions of formation and emergence for the presence or continued absence of something new, whether that ‘something new’ is welcomed or not. From detachment, a desirable future might cross a threshold to become newly possible. But detachment might also be forced, it might continue or induce harm. Detachments fracture and fragment, destroy and damage, repair and bring sustenance, allow flourishing. Ends and beginnings blur when detachment happens, just as detachment might blur with its supposed antonyms, including, and perhaps especially, attachment (Anderson, 2023a; Cockayne and Ruez, 2023).
If detaching and being detached can be found throughout human geography, detachment as a concept alongside attachment, folding, entanglement, and so on is rarer, even amid intensifying debates about the promises and pitfalls of contemporary relational geographies (Bissell et al., 2021; Dekeyser et al., 2022). Detachment surfaces most explicitly within human geography at the meeting place between this unsettling of the promise of relationality and situated accounts of specific practices of letting go or operations of separating (e.g. Barker, 2022; Bissell, 2022; Ginn, 2014; Straughan and Bissell, 2022; Straughan et al., 2022; Strong, 2023; Zhang, 2021). In this paper, I build on these nascent starting points to outline ways of thinking about detaching and being detached, complementing recent work on ‘attachment’. I offer a conceptual vocabulary that starts from a proposition that the paper develops – detaching involves the absence or loss of the promise of something, an absence or loss that induces some form of distance from the demand of an ‘object’ and our obligations to it, even if the promise may linger.
To centre the question of how geographies are made in, by, and through detaching and detachment is, however, to immediately face a problem. Detachment and synonyms have provided the negative other to the promises attached to ‘thinking relationally’ across multiple subdisciplines over the past 25 years (for plenary statements of this promise in geography see Whatmore (2002), Massey (2005)). Since the early to mid-2000s, ‘thinking relationally’ has been heralded as the epistemological and ontological solution to overcoming the endemic detachment that was not so much an accidental by-product of modernity, but a common feature across diverse ways of being modern, scarring relations with human and non-human others and the planet (see Bennett, 2001; Whatmore, 2002). A hope became invested in ‘thinking relationally’: the hope of learning to coexist better, to develop new forms of reciprocity founded in an affectively charged recognition of mutual interdependence with knowable and unknowable human and non-human others in a precarious world teeming with differences (see, recently in relation to indigenous ontologies Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Kanngieser et al., 2024). Contemporary calls in and beyond human geography to ‘think relationally’ about x or y topic implicitly retain this ‘normative dichotomisation’ (Candea, 2010: 243) between detachment and its valued other – engagement, entanglement, interconnection, attachment, or simply relation per se. The diagnosis was that too much detachment was symptom and cause of various systems of harm; all rooted in the indifference and lack of recognition and care that the separation and distance of detachment supposedly enables.
A first step to theorising detachment is to suspend the quick move between an ontological claim that entities are made in, by, and through relations and an ethical-political position that relations are, in some way, always good or positive (Giraud, 2019; Harrison, 2007, 2015). My deliberately long list of detachments in the opening paragraph was designed to make it difficult to judge detachment in general as positive or negative, a matter of affirmation or negation. Still, a push might be needed to detach detachment from the ‘negative affect’ (Strathern, 2020) that gathers around it in the wake of the interest in relationality. I am particularly inspired here by those queer political movements and forms of living for whom detachment from the hold of heteronormative conventions, including through forms of ‘disidentification’ (Muñoz, 1999), becomes part of an immanent utopianism of not-yet desires, practices and forms of life (Muñoz, 2009). We might also consider how ‘detaching’ is advocated in specific forms of Western psychotherapy as a way of navigating or exiting harmful interpersonal relations, or the longstanding emphasis on something like ‘detachment’ (and ‘renunciation’) in Buddhism 2 . But my tactic of suspending judgement about detachment in general also resonates with a conjuncture in which the normative dichotomisation between detachment and synonyms for relation is beginning to be a little unsettled. Partly this is because the problem of how to detach well is now a pressing political issue amid intensifying global crises. As Cockayne and Ruez (2023) stress, so much of progressive or liberal politics in the present begins from the recognition of the need to detach from systems and structures that bring harm to self, other, or world, and yet people remain deeply attached to and affectively invested in. Detaching is therefore framed as necessity, even if it brings loss, or, as Berlant (2008: 31) puts it, a ‘terror’.
In this context, paper offers a theory of detachment as a distinctive kind of (non)relation from outside the normative dichotomisation between relation and its others, but whilst still affirming the vital insights of work on relationality. In doing so, I perform and advocate for an approach to relationality that better attends to the multiple kinds of (non)relations that make, unmake and remake geographies. My wager is a simple one – that staying a while with detachment reveals a fundamental social-spatial (non)relation that is integral to geographies. In the first section I summarise how detachment has featured as other and problem in relational geographies. As well as establishing the case for attending to detachments in their difference from other (non)relations 3 , and avoiding equating detachment with the negative or negativity, the remaining three sections detach three distinct understandings of detachment from each other and elaborate each over the course of the paper. Via work on disaffected affective states, section two proposes that detachment names the maintenance of distance from something so that an ‘object’ does not hold a promise. The following section encounters Lauren Berlant’s (2008, 2011) writings to develop this definition of detachment by elaborating on the complex relations between detachment and its supposed antonym – attachment. I offer two further understandings of detachment: detaching as imminent to attaching so that the hold of a promise is loosened, and detachment as the ending of a promise or of the association of a promise with an ‘object’. In conclusion, I return to questions of relationally and argue for a focus on different kinds of (non)relation, including detachment as the absencing, loosening, and ending of a promise.
Section one: Detachment as other and problem
Detachments and acts and events of detaching are many and multiple. Whilst to be ‘detached’ can hold negative connotations of an absence of care or interest, being ‘detached’ has also been a virtuous disposition to be welcomed, especially in the context of liberal institutions (see Anderson, 2001). Detachment as performed through types of disaffection – coldness, boredom, inscrutability, coolness, and so on – can be a necessary act of survival or refusal that protects a marginalised subject from a too demanding situation (Bissell, 2023; Yao, 2021). Similarly, we can think of many cases where cultivating detachment is presumed to lead to some kind of good, for self, other, or world: in the asceticism of some religious practice and experience, for example, or emergent practices of detaching from digital worlds as found in ideas of ‘digital detox’. Moreover, most movements for social change from the left or right centre the necessity of some kind of event of detachment from normal and normative habits of thinking-feeling. Conspiratorial injunctions on the cosmic right to ‘think for yourself’ involves a detachment from ‘normie reality’ (Ridgway, 2025), for example. And, from the left, as Bey (2021: 12) puts it in the context of trans lives: ‘The present conditions must undergo an immense detachment; we must detach, unfix, from such conditions if we are to engender something other than this’.
However, despite what we could call welcome or necessary detachments, within work concerned with relationality ‘detachment’ has typically functioned as the negative other or a problem to be understood and explained. A framing that does resonate with some of the negative Western connotations of detachment as disposition and interpersonal style involving too much of the wrong sort of distance – generating indifference to other’s suffering and an absence of empathy, underpinning impersonal forms and systems of power, and leading to passivity and inaction (after Candea et al., 2015). Indeed, we can understand the ‘relational turn’ as a reckoning with the harm of too much of the wrong type of detachment, in the context of a diagnostic critique of Western modernity as an event of detachment from others and world (as in the thesis of disenchantment or devitalisation) (see Bennett, 2001; Latour, 1993). Overcoming the problem of detachment, or common synonyms such as separation or distance, has been central to the claims made about the value and therefore necessity of ‘thinking relationally’, even as work emphasizes the importance of cuts and separations to relational configurations (e.g. Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Strathern, 1991). Across the variations which only ever gave relational thinking an uneasy, unsteady disjunctive unity from the start, has been a diagnosis that the problem of detachment and various ‘technologies of anti-relationality’ (Gilmore, 2022) lurk at the heart of Western modernity. This is particularly the case for work concerned with modernity’s foundational violences, be they racism, environmental harm, or patriarchy (e.g. Plumwood, 2002 on ‘hyperseparation’). But the aversion to something like detachment is also the case in partially connected approaches animated by process philosophies, with their critique of ‘[t]he persistent ontological faultlines separating human beings from the rest of nature’ amongst other ontological separations and divisions (Roberts, 2024: 2).
The negative framing of detachment resonates and repeats longstanding critiques within the West of detachment as a distinctly modern, gendered and classed disposition and interpersonal style (see Anderson, 2001) 4 . In other words, it resonates with modern critiques of modernity that emphasised the interdependence of beings, affirmed the oneness of experience, and established intensity as ethical good (Garcia, 2018). But detachment is not only present in relational thinking as the other to be overcome. Modern detachment is also an actually existing condition with real force and harmful and damaging effects to be explained. Put simply, if everything is made in, by and through relations, then how do the various detachments that underpin structural violences form and endure? Different relational theories offered different ways of explaining how the aberration of detachment and the mis- or non-recognition of a foundational interdependence came to be. For example, the concept of ‘purification’ in Latour (1993) names something like a process of detachment. Coexisting with the ‘hybridization’ that proliferates hybrid quasi-objects, ‘purification’, was the name for the act of separating and holding separate. Purification: ‘creates two distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other’ (ibid: 10–11). Whilst sometimes less explicitly motivated by countering the harmful political effects of specific detachments, terms within the orbit of process philosophies – crystallisation, individuation, territorialisation, and so on (see Merriman, 2024) – do similar work of orientating to how separate entities come to exist and effect.
All of this leaves the detachments I began this paper with in a strange place. Other to be overcome, problem to be explained, it is little surprise that detachment as a distinctive kind of (non)relation has until recently rarely been explicitly present in geographical work animated by the imperative to think and act relationally. The ethical-political imperative has, instead, been to describe and affirm how that which might appear to be separate, or has been rendered separate, is actually connected or entangled or attached or folded. It has been to reveal what Latour (1993: 37) termed ‘[t[he unthinkable, the unconscious of the moderns’ – translation, mediation, entanglement, folding, and so on. In this respect, relational thinking is not new in its aversion to detachment and commitment to revealing connection and affirming interdependence and (un)folding. It shares much, for example, with Marxist approaches that explained how particular detachments – between, for example, consumer and worker as enacted through the commodity form and structured and lived as alienation – were constitutive of the dynamics of capitalism.
Section two: Detachment as a separation and the absence of promise
The position of detachment as other and problem is changing. Recent work in human geography has begun to pay more attention to the kinds of (non)relation ‘detachment’ and ‘detaching’ appear to be part of amid a questioning of the normative dichotomization between relation and something like detachment. Whilst primarily emerging from debates about the project of cultural geography, a similar orientation to what Wylie (2021) terms ‘dis-geographies’ is nascent across human geography today. Economic geography work, for example, has recently centred disassembly, dissociation, and dis-sumption in the context of the (un/re) making of value (Ibert et al., 2019), amid the intense circulation of things (Mutter, 2022). The question of whether and how detachment happens, and if it does what type of ethical-political problem it might be, has been central to political geography’s concern with today’s forms of state violence and the formation of borders and in-between spaces (e.g. Fluri, 2023; Gregory, 2023; Leshem, 2025). Likewise, urban geography work has long been concerned with the relations between detached styles and practices, as performed through dispositions such as the blasé attitude, and urban conditions, as well as urban forms (re)produced through detachment (see McFarlane, 2021 on fragments), and processes such as enclaving (Nielsen et al., 2021). For Simone and Broto (2022), in the context of work with residents in cities in the majority world: ‘Detachment refers to the unintegrated aspects of urban life, but also to the range of strategies whereby citizens remain aloof and disinterested in hegemonic narratives of success within a given capitalist framework’ (Simone, 2018).
But it is from within an explicit hesitation before the easy invocation of relationality in cultural geography that an interest in something like detachment, and other linked terms is most explicitly emerging. Whilst I’ve established above the necessity of not equating detachment with the negative, work in the orbit of ‘negative geographies’ focuses on how something like detachment is the very condition for relations (often inspired by Harrison, 2007 and Yusoff, 2013 on the nonrelational). Something like detachment – alongside synonyms like disconnection, displacement, separation, removal, withdrawal or disengagement (Bissell et al., 2021), and a more unruly, elusive set of voids, gaps, lacks, and holes (Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Pohl, 2024) – are the condition and accompaniment of that which is included within the category of ‘relation’, including connection, attachment, entanglement, folding, and so on. Something like detachment responds to and generates an ‘unalienable difference’ (Rose et al., 2021: 5) that may interrupt, disrupt, inhibit, obstruct, or unsettle any seemingly settled relational ‘positive’ order 5 (in this respect this work is particularly critical of the monism of process approaches).
Situated research that complements these plenary statements about the non relational focuses on how specific substantive geographies are (de/re)composed through practices, events, or strategies of detaching and the resulting detachments. Ginn (2014: 541), for example, in his work on what he terms ‘encounters/detachments’ between slugs and gardeners in UK gardens, argues for ‘[a] new ethics of detachment that could work sometimes around, sometimes in parallel, sometimes antecedent to or after, the relation and practices of relating’. Bissell (2022) and Barker (2022), in research on disinvesting from investments in the gig economy and ‘awakening’ in prepping communities, respectively, show how detaching becomes a way of inhabiting and navigating different kinds of loss in a precarious present. Strong (2023) describes how amid grinding poverty and precarious forms of living, all kinds of detachments happen between people and between people and the worlds they hope to build 6 .
From this research, an orientation opens to detachment as a practice, event and/or strategy of creating and thereafter maintaining some kind of distance, whether desired or undesired or some ambivalent mix. Straughan and Bissell’s (2022) research on gig economy workers in the context of COVID-19 is exemplary in this regard. Staying with the non-encounters that make up pandemic gig work, they show how something like detachment generates various kinds of distance: people are separated from meaningful work, the platform (Uber Eats), and from sustaining and convivial peer support. These separations, emergent from ordinary non-encounters and conditioned by the political economy of the platforms, are thereafter formative of specific geographies and experiences of gig economy work.
Detachment is, then, a matter of the production of a type of distance through separating from some ‘objects’, and/or the ongoing maintenance of existing distance. But despite the emergent interest in ‘something like detachment’, as I have deliberately ambiguously phrased it so far, detachment as a distinctive kind of (non)relation is rarely explicitly specified as such in either literature. Plenary statements about ‘nonrelational’ or ‘negative’ geographies do not differentiate detachment from a range of synonyms, instead advocating ‘[t]hat negative geographies remain a site of radical alterity, an absolute outside, forever removed from that which could touch, relate, and thus potentially transform, colonize, or otherwise transfigure’ (Rose et al., 2021: 5). Whilst work on detachment practices/strategies quickly flattens detachment into a synonym, usually disconnection, and does not expand on detachment specifically. Ginn (2014: 534), for example, centres the production of distance: ‘I here employ a definition of detachment as denoting a range of dispositions in which life is not drawn together, but pulled apart’. Detaching and disinvestment blur in Bissell (2022). In Barker (2022), like Ginn (2014), detachment is the realization of some form of distance. Likewise, in his account of love lost and held onto amid inequality, for Strong (2023: 374), detachment is a general term, counterpoised to the more positive term attachment, signalling ‘the removal, derision and exclusion of certain bodies …’. The same movement of equivalence between detachment and disconnection or disengagement also happens outside of geography (see Candea et al., 2015 in anthropology). In an STS/Cultural economy literature on detaching as an economic strategy or logic, for example, ‘detachment’ becomes equivalent to ‘decoupling’, or more colloquially disconnecting. For Brembeck et al. (2021: 307): ‘Detachment is also a material operation and set of strategies whereby “something” or “someone” is disconnected from previous bonds and displaced elsewhere’.
To expand on the specific kind of distance from an ‘object’ that characterises detachment, and build from the initial orientation to detachment as involving separation and the production of distance, we can turn to another partially connected literature – on being ‘detached’ as an affective disposition and orientation to others and worlds (after Yao, 2021; Berlant, 2015; Bissell, 2023). To be detached is, in some way, to learn to not be affected by something that you are still in relation with. To be detached is to inhabit and hold what appears to be some kind of affective distance even if you remain in proximity and even if connected and affected, in some way. But to be detached can also involve becoming newly open to something else. For Yao (2021: 17), focussing on disaffection in the writing of queer women of colour, ‘Unfeeling is the detachment from attachments to hegemonic structures of feeling and the potential for striving toward a radical politics of liberation’.
There are other places we could think about detachment from, and there are obviously challenges in moving from disaffected affective states and their varied ‘detachment styles’ (Berlant, 2022) to detachment as a type of (non)relation. But disaffected affective states nevertheless offer us a generative place to develop the emphasis on distance in work on practices and strategies of detaching. We can approach detachment as the generation of a type of distance whereby the demand, call, or obligation towards something is refused, resisted, exited or sidestepped. Central to this indifference is that the ‘object’ related to does not hold a promise for an (individual-collective) subject. By ‘promise’ I refer to a certain ‘satisfying something’, after Berlant (2011), that gathers around the ’object’ and offers a resource for attachment and thereafter belonging and identification (see Anderson, 2023a) 7 . Detachment is an act, process or event of separating that results in the absence of promise from an ‘object’. We may be connected to, entangled with, or otherwise related to an ‘object’, indeed, being in relation might be necessary for a relational order to form and endure, but the ‘object’ does not promise. It does not come to stand apart from other ‘objects’. We do not encounter it as embodying and offering us a promise to attach to and organise a form of life around. Detachment results in indifference from within relation; the ‘object’ detached from is rendered equivalent to and interchangeable with a host of other ‘objects’.
Thinking from disaffected affective states, which are themselves multiple in style and effect, therefore helps us be more specific about detachment. Detachment is a distinct kind of (non)relation that involves the establishment and then maintenance of distance so that an ‘object’ does not promise. We might all too briefly compare this understanding of detachment as a kind of (non)relation with the emphasis on individuation in relational geographical work most influenced by the process philosophies of Simondan and Whitehead (see Merriman, 2024; Roberts, 2024). There individuation is a generic name for a process whereby something momentarily crystallises from a pre and trans individual ground. The result is that places, for example, are treated as ‘individuated distillations, deformations or perturbations that are plural, multi-phased and have political and environmental consequences
Understood in this way, we can expand on the proposition that provides the subtitle for this paper’s introduction and, in its provocative generality, means that detachment per se cannot apriori be judged as negative or positive: detachment is everywhere 8 . Detachment is everywhere because all geographies may involve some ‘objects’ not holding or offering some kind of promise. To return to some of this paper’s examples – residents detach from elite urban restructuring projects (Simone, 2018), Uber Eats and the gig economy do not sustain (Straughan and Bissell, 2022), love for another is lost as the grind of poverty bites hard (Strong, 2023), heteronormativity and its norms are exited (Muñoz, 2009). But constitutive detachments shadow all geographies, beyond those which can be named and are experimentally felt – lives are always-already detached from other forms of living, from alternative political economies, from different ways of coexisting with non-humans, from other ways of organising intimacy and practicing relation, from a place elsewhere, from the lives of never known others.
Section three: Detachment-attachment
Detachments, as the ongoing maintenance of distance so an ‘object’ does not promise, are (re)produced through practices, strategies, events, and operations (even if these often operate in the background and may not be experientially present to the subject or collective that is formed through and carries detachments). One risk of this expansive understanding of detachment is, though, that detachment becomes everything. Now it is the case that detachment as understood here may be everywhere, for the reasons discussed above. But detachment is only one amongst numerous other (non)relations that (un/re)make distinct substantive geographies. It is not and cannot be every (non)relation. The second risk is of reproducing a simple oppositional binary between detachment and attachment (or synonyms) (Cockayne and Ruez, 2023). To avoid this risk, in this section I tie detachment more directly to its supposed opposite – attachment – via Lauren Berlant’s (2008, 2011, 2022) work.
Much of Berlant’s (2011) work stays with and tries to understand with empathy why and how some detachments are difficult, especially in extended impasses full of dramas of adjustment and (mis)recognition. In distinction from how detachment is framed as problem and other in much relational thought, the issue for Berlant is the difficulty of detachment, the stubborn grip of promises and the attachments that hold them. Often, they pose the problem of what they call ‘bruising processes of detachment from anchors in the world’ (Berlant, 2011: 13) from within impasses where the grip of normative attachments and their capacity to offer sustenance is being at once loosened and resolutely held onto. They pose the political aim of their work in the following terms, where occasioning detachment is intimate with a politics of inventive multiplication, an intensive logic of the ‘more’ that resonates with some queer political projects: I ague to delaminate the desire for a good life from the images of what’s valuable that you’ve been trained to attach to it. Then let us attach other images of living that can help locate what’s good in relationality and make better infrastructures for living that we have to keep inventing and invigorating. (Berlant, 2018: 115)
Why is it so hard to leave those forms of life that don’t work? Why is it that, when precariousness is spread throughout the world, people fear giving up on the institutions that have worn out their confidence in living? (Berlant, 2012, no pagination)
We might pause and wonder who exactly fears ‘giving up’ or has had their confidence worn out, but rather than an empirical claim I hear in Berlant’s words a generative question, one that has long animated anti-normative forms of queer theory – why is detachment so difficult even in situations of harm and damage? Of course, Berlant is not the first to pose the problem of how systems of harm and damage are difficult to detach from. As well as feminist practices of consciousness raising, we hear echoes of Marxist ideology critique and Gramscian accounts of hegemony and commonsense in how Berlant centres how forms and systems that harm rest on the intensities of attachment, (mis)recognition, and identification. What makes their answer novel in a crowded field is their proposition that attachments, even to ‘bad’ ‘objects’, and even if they cause harm to self, others or world, provide anchors and sustenance for living (see Anderson, 2023a). In the type of relation that is an attachment, an ‘object’ becomes ‘promissory’ – it holds out the promise of sustaining, or nourishing, or just allowing the subject to keep going.
There are no attachments without detachments (Anderson, 2023b). The first form of detachment – the ongoing maintenance of existing distance so an ‘object’ does not hold a promise – is the condition for all attachments, both co-constitute once another. All attachments are also always-already detachments, some of which are named and known, many of which remain insensible and unthought. Indeed, we could read the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ against the grain in this way. Berlant’s (2011) concern is with paradoxical situations in which both holding and exiting an attachment brings harm, in a context where there are compromised conditions of realisation for the promises that gather around an ‘object’. Their case is the cluster of normative good life fantasies that just about endured across the transitions of fordism to post-fordism, as the post-war settlement crumbled. But even as this uneasy attachment-almost detachment just about endures, it is shadowed by what may be unfelt, unthought, constitutive detachments, principally to other ways of organising and living work-life and intimacy beyond Fordist good life fantasies.
But the example of ‘cruel optimism’ is instructive for opening two further ways of considering detachment, supplementing my account so far of detachment as the absence of promise. In the ambivalences and paradoxes of cruelly optimistic relations, we find that detachment is also, first and developing from Cockayne and Ruez (2023), a name for the imminent loosening of the hold of a promise and, second, the end and subsequent afterlives of a promise. Both versions of detachment supplement the generality of thinking of detachment as the absence of a promise and the maintenance of distance within proximity, to home in on the specific way in which attachments and detachments blur with one another. Obliquely, both are influenced by the psychoanalytic ethos so important to Berlant’s work and practice. Specifically, my account of attachment-detachment below centres the overdetermination of any relation or relational order, ambivalence about whether attachments or detachments are ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ and where and how to draw lines between them, and the movement of substitutions and displacements 9 .
3a) Imminent detachments and loosening the hold
Detachment and attachment are often not easily separated. Lines between them blur as the subject of attachment oscillates between bringing an ‘object’ closer and temporary distance. In scenes of attachment, promises are intensely present (Anderson, 2023a). But intensified scenes are necessary precisely because the presence of promises might wane, their hold might loosen, especially if their conditions of realisation become more problematic, or they become shrouded in disappointment. Promises become more distant, for a while, or are perhaps held onto ambivalently, where once the attachment was intense. As Cockayne and Ruez (2023) astutely stress, detaching is imminent to attachment, as well as its condition. A simple example might be how the lure of a political ideal or project might temporarily lesson in the aftermath of political defeat, amid the melancholy, burnout, and bitterness of the ‘politically defeated’ (Proctor, 2024).
Indeed, subjects might hold all kinds of ambivalent or difficult or contradictory or paradoxical or indifferent relations with ‘objects’ that they nevertheless remain, in some way, attached to (see Zhang, 2021: 113) on the ‘unenviable double bind’ of coexisting affirmable and unaffirmable desires). Imminent detachments might be momentary, a daydream of something else, or more durable – a slow loosening of the hold of the promise of an ‘object’, even if the ‘object’ is still held onto, and indeed might return intensely. Cockayne and Ruez (2023) emphasise this blurring of lines between attachment and detachment as an ordinary feature of the activity of attaching and the relation of attachment. The hold of ‘objects’ and their promises loosen and strengthen, wax and wane, as socio-spatial and political-economic conditions change, and as subjects live and navigate changing everyday lives. An example might be the difficult holding onto the promise of a stable job, or durable reciprocal intimacy, amid intensely precarious conditions of life and labour (see Silva, 2015). Detachment whilst remaining attached is part of the non-linear dynamic of navigating the non-sovereignty of being-in-relation, in a way that is not equivalent to dramas of misrecognition. As Cockayne and Ruez put it: Here detachment is imminent to the attachment as a pulling away from objects we like: as a desire for an impossible independence from or for them, or perhaps as a floundering for more control over them or over ourselves (Cockayne and Ruez, 2023: 424)
Cockayne and Ruez’s point, after Berlant’s (2022) later work, is that attaching-detaching happens amid the ‘inconvenience’ of others and our relations with them. Their point is an important one: it is not just ‘objects’ in a relation of cruel optimism that are difficult or problematic, ‘It’s also that optimistic attachments that aren’t cruel are also difficult and inconvenient as well’ (Cockayne and Ruez, 2023: 424).
I hesitate before saying all attachments are inconvenient and difficult. But Cockayne & Ruez’s is an important corrective to any account of detachment as a severing that is the other to attachment as a linear process of holding onto to and being held by an ‘object’. What Berlant (2022) calls the ‘pressure’ or ‘tension’ of being in relation is inhabited and responded to through the movement of drawing closer to and distancing from ‘objects’ that nevertheless hold out a promise.
What detaching whilst remaining attached does is an open question. Sometimes momentarily detaching might be necessary to reconfirm that the promise does remain a promise that continues to hold out something valued. Sometimes detaching without the loss of the promise results in a stalled, or struck, attachment that is at once a partial or incomplete attachment-detachment. We might think here of discussions about the politics of melancholia as a collective condition of stalled detachment amid an attachment that has become intensely problematic (see, on ‘liberal melancholia’ (Anderson and Secor, 2025), or ‘postcolonial melancholia’ (Gilroy, 2004)). Subjects inhabit a scene of stuckness, a limbo between holding and letting go. And sometimes calls to detach, or conditions that appear to force detachment, might provoke an intensified attachment, a desperate holding onto an ‘object’ and its promises. This is, in part, one of the lessons of the concept of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). Contractions of the conditions of possibility for the realisation of a promise can result in a paradoxical intensification of acts of attempting to hold onto an ever more fragile difficult to achieve promise (in Berlant’s work, residues of the Fordist settlement as refracted through neoliberalising logics in the present impasse).
But detaching whilst remaining within an optimistic attachment might also be prefigurative – making present a glimpse or hint of something different or something better. We could reverse Cockayne and Ruez’s (2023) account of attachment as proposal, and treat the act, event or process of detaching whilst remaining in an attachment as a ‘counter-proposal’ – that is a way of prefiguring what it might mean to exit an attachment and the hold of a promise that continues to offer something valued. Different kinds of practices, acts, and events of detaching make present alternative ways of existing in relation to self, other and world. The hold of an ‘object’ loosens, even if it has not (yet) ended, and retains its promissory status. ‘Loosening’ implies the grip or hold of a promise has become unsettled, a way of navigating and making sense of the world is beginning to be unlearnt, even as it endures and has yet to be exited. As an example, we could think of the myriad mundane escape attempts that are part of everyday spaces – daydreams and fantasies (Pile, 2005) – but coexist with attachments. A little different to the ongoing and imminent work of attaching-detaching in direct relation to an ‘object’ of attachment, everyday daydreams are fleeting, barely recognised ‘anticipatory illuminations’ (Bloch, 1986). Of course, not all daydreams loosen the hold of promises; some (re)confirm an attachment.
3b) Detachment as the end of a promise: Substitution and displacement
Asking what imminent detachments might do centres how detaching from within an attachment can begin a beginning. A loosening of the hold of an ‘object’ can herald, catalyse or initiate a willed or unwilled, desired or lamented, start of something different and new. But when detachment is imminent to attachment, the beginning is not-yet, with the act of detaching folding back into the attachment, sometimes to intensify the attachment. Scenes of attachment – event-spaces whereby the ‘satisfying something’ the ‘object’ offers is intensely present (Anderson, 2023a) – can be understood as one way of ensuring imminent detachments do not cross a threshold to become a disruptive ending. Closs-Stephens (2022), for example, documents the range of spaces through which attachment to a mostly ambient, often detached from, nationalism is reaffirmed, resulting in attachment to nationalism and its promises being held together through its intensification. Similarly, we can think of the staged mass rallies that have been so central to the mediation of right-wing populism as spaces where detachment from populism’s affective appeal is forestalled. Whilst not the focus of this paper, imminent detachments are often governed when they threaten to disrupt or end a normative ‘form of attachment’. The figure of the bored or otherwise disaffected worker, for example, becomes a problem when ‘passion’ is necessary for kinds of service sector work that generate buzz or other kinds of good intensity (Hong, 2022).
But sometimes a promise ends or an ‘object’ loses its promise. Sometimes detachment results in a willed or unwilled, desired or grieved, welcomed or struggled against, ending of either a promise and/or the association between an ‘object’ and promise. We can think of lots of examples across different substantive geographies of promises or associations of objects-promises ending; in letting go of fantasies of what a good life might be; in exiting institutions of heteronormativity as other sexualities are practised; in the devastation of lost love; in letting go of the promise of fossil fuelled progress, amongst so many more.
Loosening the hold of an object-promise crosses a threshold to become something different: the promise of an ‘object’ ends, and it changes its status for and to a subject. With different rhythms and intensities, as detachment might be fast or slow, drawn out or punctual, the ‘object’ no longer has the status of a promise that offers the subject who attaches to it meaning, value, intensity, or something else that sustains. Detaching thereafter changes the ‘object’ previously attached to, just as the subject changes as a promise is lost or given up. Whatever ‘it’ might be, its promissory status disappears, and it becomes something different to the (individual or collective) subject who once attached and found meaning, intensity or something else valued. Indifference is generated; although, as we shall see, neither the ‘object’ nor the promise simply folds back into the background detachments that, as argued in section 2, may be present in all relational social-spatial orders. Examples might be how promises of meritocracy based on hard work are detached from as economic conditions worsen, or how dating apps are detached from as hopes for whatever is felt as utopian intimacy are too regularly disappointed.
Creating intervals between endings and beginnings, detachment involves complex, non-linear changes to the individual and/or collective subject, ‘object’, and the promises that bind them. When considering the end of the promise of an ‘object’, this type of detachment must happen after the promissory status of an ‘object’ has been assembled in scenes of attachment and through forms of attachment (Anderson, 2023a). Albeit an attachment that, as we have seen, is conditioned by past detachments and is constantly (re)composed by practices of attaching-detaching. Any ‘object’ can lose its promise if the conditions dictate it, or if detaching becomes felt as necessary for a subject to survive or flourish, or if a subject if forced to give up or leave: a once held onto identity that offered a way of navigating a world might fade before ending, the promise of flexible work as a scene for self-realisation might end amid grinding precarity, a rural place might never be returned to as sexual freedom is felt in a city, a city’s promise exited amid the grind of displacement occasioned by the housing crisis, or a convention ended as a new form of intimacy is experimented.
To make matters a little more complex, we should draw a distinction between the substitution of promises, and the displacement of a promise from an ‘object’ to another, with the promise enduring (perhaps with change) across the displacement.
Sometimes the promise itself ends, replaced by others. A new promise comes to offer the ‘satisfying something’ that Berlant (2011) shows is central to attachment. Promises end; promises begin. We might think, for example, of how forms of ‘slow living’ and ecological ‘back to the land’ movements cultivated as an alternative to the ecological crisis involve a willed detachment from the promises of fossil fuel modernity. Other promises are substituted for the promises that gather around fossil fuels, for example harmonious and reciprocal coexistence with the earth and human and non-human others over limitless ‘growth’ (see Pickerill, 2025). To give another example, for some men the promise of tender, non-violent forms of masculinity replace hegemonic masculinities, amid a reconfiguration of binary gender relations. ‘Substitution’ names a process whereby the desire to attach remains (after Zhang, 2023), as does what attachment offers, but it is (re)configured through a different promise. An example of substitution is the way in which promises of self-realisation at work replaced ‘security’ for some subjects in the transition from the Fordist settlement to neoliberalism from the mid-1970s (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). Another might be how that promise of ‘self-realisation' is now being replaced by the promise of ‘passion’ during the twilight of neoliberalism as precarity spreads and intensifies (see Hong, 2022). In processes of substitution, the ‘object’ remains the same – in these examples work – but the promises change: security-self-realisation-passion.
As the above examples demonstrate, substitution requires all kinds of work, including intentional acts of inducing or intensifying detachment, as well as processes whereby available promises shift and change. Returning to the example of the promises gathered around work across neoliberalisms conjunctural crises, we could understand the extension of neoliberalising logics as happening through a series of promissory substitutions. With detachment from some promises, here the equation between stability and work, being a necessary part of a shift between social-spatial formations (from Fordism to neoliberalisms). Today, in the twilight of neoliberalism, amid a sense of its end and amid intensifying precarity, a different detachment is happening – from the promises of neoliberalising apparatuses and logics bound up with self-realisation through work to other ways of justifying precarious worlds and advising subjects how to navigate inescapable, enervating, precarity (on these substitutions see Hong, 2022; Orgad and Gill, 2022).
Substitution names a change in the presence of promises, with the ending of one promise and the coming to presence of another. The coming to presence of other promises reminds us that ‘forms of attachment’ are always forms of detachment (again, avoiding any binary between attachment and detachment, whilst holding onto their difference). But at other times the same promise attaches to a different ‘object’. Promises are displaced onto new ‘objects’, but the promise remains broadly the same. Whilst this process might involve change to the promise and relation to it, detachment is primarily from the ‘object’, not the promise. There is a process of displacement, whereby the same promise moves and becomes entangled with a different ‘object’. What ends as detachment happens is the coupling of promise and ‘object’. Net Zero, for example, is the new repository for a range of promises that once attached to Fordist worlds of work, including a return to ‘growth’ (without damage) and meaningful, secure work that itself secures a life (as in the ‘Green New Deal’). None of these promises are more important than the promise once attached to fossil fuels that has now been displaced onto net-zero – that there will be a future, that catastrophe will not come to pass, and that the future might be better than the crisis prone present.
In comparison to substitution, displacement happens when the ‘object’ that came to be the repository for promises, and their accompanying fantasies, can no longer bear the weight of serving as the occasion for the potential realisation of the promise. This is often in cases where realisation has been deferred or delayed, but attachment to specific promises is tightly woven into the fabric of a life. So, in the above example, amid the slow cancellation of the time of progressive betterment (see Secor et al., 2022), other ‘objects’ can no longer bear the weight of the cluster of promises that surrounded progress and the good future to come. The future is threatened by catastrophe amid actual and not-yet extinctions in a crisis prone present (see Robson, 2025; Searle, 2022). And yet the promise that there will be a future, that all is not lost, that the catastrophe will not come to pass, endures. Net Zero therefore becomes the repository for the promise that there will be a future, that a sustainable, non-disruptive, transition to other energy systems will realise the promise of a better future. The ‘object’ changes, but the promise endures across its displacement between ‘objects’.
Substitution and displacement are part of a vocabulary for what we might call an economy of detachment – a complex field of substitutions and displacements through which changes to the promises that give value to a life are (re/dis)organised. With these qualifications, we can think more about the end of a promise as a non-linear process, avoiding the assumption of a simple linear process of movement from the presence of a promise to the end point of disappearance. Even if promises end and are substituted, moving from presence to complete absence is unlikely. They subsist within the complex, overdetermined present, leaving all kinds of spatialised and spatialising traces and residues even after they have been replaced, substituted, reattached or displaced. Williams’ (1977) category of the ‘residual’ is useful for thinking of how promises subsist in the present. They become ‘residual’, in the sense of existing in the present, kept available to be reactivated and rearticulated. Rather than becoming just another thing to be connected or not to, the ‘object’ becomes something that once held a promise, just as past promises linger, unmoored from ‘objects’. Think of how the relation between fossil fuels and bellicose national progress is reactivated in ‘net-zero populism’ (Paterson et al., 2023), or fossil fuels can return as a promissory ‘object’ after energy transition in the context of the present absence of other futures (Lewis, 2024). In both cases, a set of residual promises – of good futures tied to fossil fuels – are reactivated as part of the growth and intensification of right-wing populism.
Conclusion: Between endings and beginnings
This paper has stayed with detachment in the context of emergent debates within geography around the promise and limits of relational thinking (see Bissell et al., 2021; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021). I have wondered about detachment as a specific kind of (non)relation, one amongst many, that scramble the lines between categories of the negative and positive, relational and nonrelational. As such, the paper advocates an approach to (non)relations in human geography that wonders about differences between ever proliferating kinds of (non)relation, including disengagement, disconnection, dissociation, attachment, disassembly, entanglement, connection, and so on (and on). My multiplication of different (non)relational kinds is designed to unsettle any quick invocation of ‘relation’ or ‘nonrelational’, their opposition, or mapping distinct kinds of (non)relation onto categories of the experiential or ethical-political ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ (see Merriman (2024) for a similar argument, but from a different process philosophy inspired position). As part of this project, the paper has proposed three ways of thinking about detachment that makes detachment as something more than the other to or problem for relational thinking. It has been motivated by the wager that staying a while with detachment discloses an important social-spatial (non)relation.
The first rendition – detachment as the absence of promise – implicates (non)relations of detachment in all geographies. Detachment names a relation of continuing connection but with distance so that an ‘object’ does not hold promise. In this respect, detachments might not be sensed, might not cross a threshold to be a matter of bodily affection, let alone recognition, consciousness or identity formation. We may not know who or what we are already detached from (Anderson, 2026). And yet separation from the promise of what we are still connected to, or entangled with, is often necessary for a social-spatial order to endure.
My second and third renditions of detachment shift from detachments as (non)relations that precede and condition any attachment, to detachment as folded with its apparent antonym – attachment. Detachment is imminent to attachment, as the promise of an ‘object’ is brought closer and distanced from as part of subject formation. Detaching is a counter-proposal that loosens the hold of an ‘object’; a minor experiment with not being held or bound by something, as well as a way of adjusting to the ‘pressure’ or ‘tension’ (Berlant, 2022) of being in relation. The third and final rendition of detachment names a process of separating whereby something loses a promise that it once held, and/or a promise ends. Here detachment is an ending. But endings rarely involve total absence. Detachment as ending might involve all manner of substitutions and displacements. Promises might also live on, becoming residual parts of the present, conditioning through their absence present attachments, or serving as resources for future (re)attachments.
These three renditions of detachment leave us with a set of questions that return us to the starting proposition of the paper – that detachment from harmful conditions is an urgent ethical-political task in the contemporary crisis ridden conjuncture. What does detaching make newly possible and what is lost? What might that which detaches desire to give up, or be forced to give up, as detaching happens? What endings and beginnings accompany detachments and practices, strategies and events of detaching? And how do promises live on after they have been ended amid the complex substitutions and displacements that detachment as the work of ending is intimate with? The questions foreshadow a geography of detachments which is always-already a geography of attachments.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the anonymous referees, Noel Castree, and participants at a work-in-progress workshop at The School of Geographical Sciences, Bristol University for comments on previous drafts of this paper. Particular thanks to Vickie Zhang and David Bissell for convening such a supportive and convivial space for thinking together. The paper has benefited enormously from conversations over the last few years with Paul Harrison, Amy Robson, Anna Secor, and Helen Wilson.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.