Abstract
Throughout the mid-1990s, Thrift published a number of influential scholarly contributions that foregrounded praxis and an approach to thinking defined as ‘nonrepresentationalist’. Some two decades on, Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts offers a timely reflection on the critically creative strides taken towards work that sits under the umbrella of non- or more-than-representational geographies. This includes attending to those forces that are ‘fleeting, ephemeral, not-quite subjective, diffused, distributed and difficult to grasp’ (p. 1). Across 23 chapters, Boyd and Edwardes bring together British and Australian voices in order to delve deeper into scholarship taking place at the geography–art nexus. While the collection’s overarching contribution is its focus on those ‘forces that guide creative practice’ (p. 1), five interest points crosscut the collection. And while each chapter speaks to one or more of these, they also reflect pressing debates within this vibrant interdisciplinary field.
The first interest point centres on creative-led participation or co-productions. Participatory approaches are not new to either research setting, but what does seem valuable is the collection’s focus on practice-driven processes and a wide range of co-productions taking place in various forms of ‘creative doings’. To illustrate, Edwardes examines co-produced human–non-human affective encounters in the home studio – from camera film and glass, to beds, tables and off-cuts. Other chapters expand our understanding of participation. Some call for examining participation beyond a creative output’s fabrication to include its transportation, assemblage and destruction, while others approach participation as the ‘willingness to engage ethically in creative practices’ (p. 170). Co-productions also incite socio-political possibilities. Raynor’s chapter explores how co-produced stories of austerity become illustrative of the possibility of what can happen when people are brought together. For non-representational and/or creativity scholars, the collection offers ways of thinking about the mutually co-constitutive processes of human bodies, matter, space and time, as well as the ethical and political responsibilities arising from creative-led participation.
Second, the collection addresses experimentation and risk-taking. Within creative-led disciplines, risk and experimentation, alongside failure, are inevitable components to working creatively. For human geographers, this raises epistemological questions, among which is the role of risk in designing and doing research, and of experimentation in knowledge documentation and dissemination. Indeed, a performance approach is that which relishes failure. Across the chapters, experimentation emerges as integral to the exploration and expression of selfhood. Risk is approached as an inevitable outcome to the assemblage of creativity, politics, space and time. And, experimentation is understood as generative. Notably, Duffy et al. approach moving (disabled) bodies as the means through which the social relations that discipline bodies can be challenged. For those of us (institutionally) co-opted into being risk-adverse, creative practices ask us to flesh out how experimentation, risk and failures are integral to research excellence. They also prompt sustained consideration of the always experimental, risky processes by which identities are crafted and social values contested.
Third, and extending calls to take seriously our multispecies worlds, the collection explores diverse materialities. It examines the assemblages of matter in creative doings and affirms the agency of non-human actors in making worlds. With the anthropocene attracting increasing attention, it is unsurprising that the geologic earth comes to the fore, with contributors exploring geothermal agency and geologic withdrawals. For others like Edensor, materiality is a way of connecting distant places. The collection also delves into the materiality of non-representational representations. Gordon-Murray’s experiments in image degradation most especially echo wider attempts to bridge the divide between the live-ness of creativity and methods of documenting or displaying them. By emphasising materiality, the collection confronts the image of the lone creative expert, and rather embraces the artful, techno-scientific and earthly materialities that co-shape creative doings. Moreover, in grappling with the representational/non-representational binary, it opens the possibility for creating in-between this contested space.
More ambitiously, the collection engages with those forces most difficult to comprehend. Such creative happenings include events that are intangible, pre-conscious and spontaneous. Happenings emerge as that which occurs in-between the recorded event and the experience of the event, or as personal, fragmented explorations in memory. Quiet events like Bissell’s car journey remind us of that which is palpably felt as it-happens. Happenings also materialise as practices of thinking, such as in the storying of lives. And yet, creative outputs, including the image, are equally argued to hold the capacity to capture or seemingly halt eventfulness. As Lovejoy notes, the power of the creative object rests in its capacity to make the unremarkable remarkable and the invisible visible. Perhaps the greatest strength and subsequent challenge of non-representational geographies are their commitment to foregrounding those forces that require a different type of explanation. The collection illustrates how the slippery, intangible aspects of our experiences play a central role in writing the richness of our world.
The final interest point relates to how knowledge is produced, gathered, known and valued. This is about much more than recognising that knowledge is produced multi-sensually, and rather valuing those forces that are habitual, practised, intuitive and affective. Creative practices enable us to explore what knowing feels like in practice. For some contributors, it necessitates examining the multisensual sources that guide everyday practices or shape decisions about the production of space. Others consider how audiences encounter creative knowledges and the ways in which we might, as researchers, maximise multi-sensuous interactions with them. But knowledge also raises questions of value. Hawkins and Hughes thus call for greater consideration into what knowledge contributions might look like. What seems apparent is that creative and non-representational approaches ask different questions, and they are shaped through differing methodological approaches. This can enhance our ability to attend to complex research problems and to engage diverse stakeholder groups.
With the theories of non-representation gaining currency outside of geographical settings and creative geography courses springing up across Universities, this edited collection seems well placed to make a useful contribution – whether to those working on affect, performance, materiality and multi-species living in cultural geographies, or on space and place in artistic fields. It provides useful case studies into diverse creative doings and it demonstrates the promises of writing research creatively. It also goes some way towards balancing – though not always interweaving – voices from across these aligned fields, albeit from predominately White Western contexts. If asking ‘whose voice is represented’ is one of the questions brought to the fore, another is whose body is being discussed. While sexuality and dis/ability make appearances, the bodily markers that are testament to our diverse social lives remain surprisingly absent. Furthermore, 20 years ago, Thrift faced critiques that his theories of non/representation were apolitical. Despite a select few chapters, this collection could have done more to examine what a politics of creative doings might mean in practice.
