‘The encounter may not take place’: negative geographies,negative mobilities

Abstract

Mobilities scholarship has been shaped markedly by relational philosophies, exemplified by the event of encounter as a window through which to examine the vibrant potentiality of life. However, recent literature on the subject of ‘negative geographies’ has questioned the affirmationist tendencies underlying such perspectives, highlighting situations, processes and spaces characterised by insurmountable or recurrent vulnerability, exhaustion, dislocation, separation and refusal. Mobilities, as yet, does not feature heavily in this literature, though notions of movement are often implied, or alluded to metaphorically. On the other hand, while mobilities scholars have in diverse ways addressed aspects of negativity in their work, these approaches stand to benefit from conceptual consideration in the terms of the negative itself. Working through the notion of ‘negative mobilities’, this article decentres the usual Spinozan/Deleuzian touchstone for mobilities work on relation and encounter, (re)turning instead to Louis Althusser’s ‘aleatory materialism’. Focusing on the enduring fragility of Althusserian encounter – the ‘may not’ – the paper questions the affirmative bias attributed to the aleatory. What might discussions of negativity mean for how we approach (im)mobilities, ontologically and epistemologically? And if the relational remains conceptually central to mobilities scholarship, how do we think mobilities through the problematisation of that term? How does an attention to negative mobilities loop back to shape thinking on negative geographies? The responses to these provocations form a necessarily feeble plea to reckon with the fragility of mobilities and moreover their propensity to engender negative experiences of both more absolute/inert (nonrelational, distant, suspended or erased) and more partial or processual (hesitant, undecidable) kinds.

Fragile encounters

The encounter may not take place or may take place. The meeting can be missed. The encounter can be brief or lasting ¹

Louis Althusser’s essay The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, ² authored in 1982-3, provides a philosophical lens through which to explore the aleatory potential of social and political life. Raw yet poetic, the text expresses a sense of vital possibility; the potentiality of revelation, or perhaps even revolution, erupting from and disrupting the normal order of things. ³ Even where not explicitly cited, the spirit of Althusser’s ‘aleatory materialism’ looms large in theories of everyday mobilities, particularly in critical studies of urban spaces as constituted, contested and transformed through experiences of ‘throwntogetherness’. ⁴ Althusser’s theory tells us that while mobilities are increasingly ordered and logistically calculated, it is precisely within these drab, economised movements that there lies the possibility for encounter and difference, for spontaneous and radical emergence.

However, as the above quotation suggests, the encounter as Althusser conceptualises it is deeply and chronically fragile. The ‘may not’ comes first and endures in perpetuity. Given recent efforts to question the predominance of both affirmationist and dialectical approaches in cultural geography – this work will be bracketed with the term ‘negative geographies’, but we will see that it exhibits considerable diversity – alongside more specific scrutiny directed towards the notion of ‘encounter’, I propose we (re)turn to Althusser’s thesis. In contrast to approaches which, drawing from Spinozan and Deleuzian philosophies, emphasise relational and affirmationist ontologies, Althusser’s encounter allows us to draw out something different concerning the ‘dance’ of negativity and geography. ⁵ Whilst the application of Deleuze especially to geography and mobilities scholarship has honed attention to the processual nature of experiences of space and movement, this has tended to foreground and valorise the transformative possibilities of rhizomatic and nomadic forms. ⁶ Whilst Althusser has also – as we will see – been applied in this way, the echo of the ‘may not’ (as well as correlative terms: ‘and yet’, ‘not quite’, ‘not necessarily’) in considerations of encounter allows us to think through the fragility of mobilities and moreover their propensity to engender or involve negative experiences of both more absolute/inert (nonrelational, distant, suspended or erased) and more partial or processual (hesitant, undecidable) kinds.

Specifically then, Althusser plays in this article as a provocation to consider ‘negative mobilities’. ⁷ Mobilities, as yet, does not feature heavily in geographical thinking on negativity, though it is often an absent presence, with notions of movement implied, or alluded to metaphorically, for instance in reference to turnings and slowings-down. Meanwhile, mobilities scholars have, in a range of ways, addressed aspects of negativity in their work, particularly with respect to forms of stillness and suspension, yet this has tended not to be considered via the conceptual lens of negativity itself. What might discussions of negative geographies mean for our understanding of (im)mobilities, for the ways in which we approach them ontologically and epistemologically, as things and processes to be understood, critiqued and intervened upon? And if relation and encounter remain central to mobilities scholarship, how do we think mobilities without/away from those terms, or through their problematisation? Finally, how does an attention to negative mobilities loop back to shape thinking on negative geographies? The responses to these provocations form a plea to reckon with mobilities of a more hesitant, recurrent or non-directional kind: moving away or leaving behind; to and fro, non-eventual, failed, lost or undecidable; exhausted or restless; shot through with missed encounter and the tinge of regret. From this list it will be evident already that there are distinctions to be made amongst these negative figures and sensations, and what they might respectively offer. In what follows I intend to draw from both the mobilities and negative geographies literatures to do some of this conceptual work.

From nothing

Althusser sets out from nothing, from the ‘ordinary rain’ of Epicurus’ atoms falling parallel in the void. Then, all of a sudden, the swerve, the ‘clinamen’, the infinitesimal movement of an atom and its encounter with another, then more consequent encounters, building up, emulsifying, and from this emulsification the birth of something qualitatively different, the birth of a world. ⁸ Althusser follows Epicurus and Spinoza in emphasising the non-anteriority of the encounter, the notion that there is nothing pre-existent which maps or programmes what comes to occur. ⁹ It is the encounter itself which brings the atoms forth; before it, they led only a ‘phantom existence’. ¹⁰ It is only retroactively, from the standpoint of the given world into which we are ‘thrown’, that we mistakenly attribute meaning and necessity to the fait accompli of that world, giving it cause and Origin. ¹¹ In this way, Althusser pits his ‘aleatory materialism’ against the dialectical materialism of Hegel, aspects of Marx – the idealist Marx – and, one might argue, his own more structural Marxism, calling forth a radical negativity, an absolute outside. ¹²

In readings of aleatory materialism, the weight of analysis has usually been thrown forwards, aligning Althusser with an affirmationist ethos. Althusser’s encounter appears as an event of relation, unfolding, vitality and enchantment. Indeed, we see this laid out explicitly in Althusser’s claim that ‘the materialism of the encounter is contained in the thesis of the primacy of positivity over negativity (Deleuze), the thesis of the primacy of the swerve over the rectilinearity of the straight trajectory . . . the thesis of the primacy of disorder over order . . . and in the welling up of order from the very heart of disorder to produce a world’. ¹³ It seems likely that, despite the vagaries of this essay, Althusser had in mind a particular world here: that of communism, whose necessary and specifically material antecedents in the current capitalist society would only be actualised as such in the moment of their coalescence. ¹⁴ Yet the philosophy of encounter put forward in the text holds a broader appeal. The affirmative promise of encounter abounds in geographical and urban scholarship both before and after Althusser’s text. Before, in Benjamin’s flaneur, in the urban wanderings (dérives) of Guy Debord and the Situationist International ¹⁵ ; after, in work on urban everyday life and public space, ¹⁶ not least the intimate mobile spaces of public transport. ¹⁷ Encounter, in these readings, connects, transverses and escapes. It is relational and excessive.

In his explicit reference to Althusser’s work, Merrifield epitomises this scholarship through his account of the revolutionary uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011, the subsequent Occupy movement, and the role of social media in uniting marginalised groups into ‘hyper-networked’ progressive movements. Beginning from the ‘clinamen’ of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia on 17th December 2010, Merrifield charts a cascading succession of swerves, of atomistic elements coalescing around and ‘express[ing] a hitherto unknown and unacknowledged mode of solidarity latent within everyday life, a new form of empathetic human relationship—of common notions based upon adequate ideas’. ¹⁸ Thus Althusser’s ideas are broadened, via reference to Spinoza, to capture a propensity for emergent material as well as affective connections which are generative of radical novelty.

The broadly celebratory tone of geographical work on ‘encounter’, with its emphasis on enchantment, surprise, exchange and ‘shared affinities’, ¹⁹ has recently been subject to critique. In their study of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel’s autobiographical accounts of public transport, for instance, Kemmer et al. ²⁰ prefer the concept of ‘exposure’, arguing that it ‘allows for decentring white, heteronormative narratives of public space as a space of urban conviviality . . . [and] discloses power hierarchies involved that more euphemistic terms like encounter seem to conceal’. More fundamentally, Rose, Bissell and Harrison ²¹ challenge encounter for denying ‘those aspects of situations that are nonrelational in the sense that they are not about connection or communication’. ‘Nonrelations’, they continue:

draw attention to aspects of experience that are radically incommunicable, such as the singular pain or suffering of an other which can never emphatically be known and only hesitantly acknowledged. The politics of nonrelations is also about admitting the significance of impassable gaps, tears, and fissures that shoot through our ordinary attempts to relate to others, manifesting perhaps in experiences of incomprehension and confusion ²²

Concern with the nonrelational forms part of a broader consideration of negativity in recent geographical work. One of the most important debates that has so far emerged through these discussions of ‘negative geographies’ concerns the (im)possibility and ethico-political ramifications of defining, approaching, and ‘doing’ (something) with the negative. ²³ These debates centre upon differing philosophical treatments of dialectics, on the one hand, and affirmationism, on the other. To think the negative dialectically is to see it as a counter-point through/against which one passes or rebounds to produce knowledge, ‘truth’, value and so on. The negative here is considered meaningful to the extent that it ‘engenders’ or ‘transacts’. ²⁴ Those proposing affirmationist ontologies view such negative dialectics with suspicion: by searching out the form of the positive within the negative from which it supposedly emerges, we are underestimating the variation and potential immanent to life, the vitality of ‘thing-power’ ²⁵ ; of creativity and experimentation. ²⁶

These are of course ideal categories. Both dialectics and affirmationism are diverse approaches, the lines between them frequently blurred. This is perhaps best expressed in Benjamin Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative, a wide-reaching ‘critique of continental theory’ which identifies in proponents of negative dialectics various forms of ‘low affirmationism’. ²⁷ Nonetheless, we might say that the negative tends either to be passed through (transacted) or passed over. The initial challenge posed by negative geographies is thus what it means – or, indeed, whether it is possible – to dwell with the negative. This does not mean that dialectical or affirmationist tendencies are necessarily vanquished. Indeed, comparing the two most recent geographically-leaning volumes on the negative – Secor and Kingsbury’s A Place More Void ²⁸ and Bissell, Rose and Harrison’s Negative Geographies ²⁹ – it is these questions which arise once more. Contributions to the former examine negative spaces (voids, holes, edges) as sites which, in one way or another, harbour a certain disruptive potential. Meanwhile, contributions to the latter pose the negative as an ‘absolute outside’, suggesting geographies of limits, separations (Rose, Bissell and Harrison), dislocation (Wylie) or exhaustion (Bissell), and an altogether more ‘feeble’ ontology, with vulnerability and fragility at its core. ³⁰

Definitions of the negative tend correspondingly to be hesitant ones. Dekeyser and Jellis for their part settle on the ‘semblance of a definition, as that which disunifies or undermines . . . a manner of describing the coming apart or breaking down of concepts, passions, reason, bodies, ethics, lives and more besides’. ³¹ Compared to talk of separations and limits, this definition conjures a more processual interpretation of negativity, something which we will return to later in the context of mobilities literature. For now however, the point is to figure negativity non-dialectically, in a manner that recalls affirmative critique’s disavowal of dialectics, but without simply inverting it. ³² As affirmationism highlights possible futures cleaved from the conditions of their emergence, so thinking on negativity highlights situations of absence or loss which, in part through their very incoherence, bear little relation to any given set of causes or pre-conditions and as such cannot be recovered or retraced.

We must be careful here. For Noys, such concessions to incapacity risk amounting to the mirror of ‘low affirmationism’, a ‘weak negativity’ which simply surrenders, leaving us unable to engage in ethico-political practice. ³³ Yet, just as the aim is not to go ‘beyond’ affirmationism – to say that nothing relates or that there is not always some form of relation ongoing – but rather to draw attention to things ‘besides’ or outside of its reach, ³⁴ nor is there a desire to go ‘beyond’ forms of agency, strength or capacity. Instead, we might say, it is a recognition of the ‘may not’, ‘not necessarily’ or ‘and yet’; of the enduring ambivalence of a situation and a refusal of any insistence that every nothing harbours the latent potential for something. ³⁵

We can clarify this by comparing such ideas of negativity to the doxa of resilience, according to which entities (are expected to) adapt, rapidly and creatively, to change and emergency. ³⁶ Here too there is a form of surrender, one which moves on from and in doing so conceals the initial failure. ³⁷ Negativity proposes that we state the situation not to overcome it, nor to accept or adapt to it, but rather to stay with(out) it. One example is a growing body of work which admits the fragility of academic practice itself, from mundane ‘failures of interest’, ³⁸ to more deep-seated ‘bad feelings’. ³⁹ In contradistinction to work which attempts to ‘reclaim’ failure or frame it as a challenge to be overcome, ⁴⁰ in these interventions the negative stands first and stands alone, or at least apart.

The case of academia will be elaborated upon later in reference to discussions of leaving. For the moment, we might return to the affirmationist reading of Althusser. Without meaning to disparage Merrifield’s sense of hope – after all, he is writing from within the given world of the encounter – what hits home in re-examining each of his examples (the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, social media) is the overwhelming dis-appointment of it all. Taking that word seriously, in both a spatio-temporal and an affective sense, ⁴¹ they highlight the ambiguity nested within Althusser’s theory. ‘The encounter may not take place or may take place. The meeting can be missed. The encounter can be brief or lasting’ ⁴² – If the encounter is truly aleatory, then, just as it took place, it can just as easily not take place. And, even once it has taken place, there is no necessity that secures its grasp or duration. So while we might retrospectively find in Merrifield’s examples reasons why, ‘in the end’, they did not hold, for Althusser it is intrinsic to aleatory materialism that the not comes first, it remains and recurs, it keeps coming back.

This attests to the negative as an irreproachable outside, known only through the awareness that the given world is not necessary, that it might just as well not have been. It is this persistence of the nonrelational which fundamentally troubles attempts to discuss negativity and geography together, and which is perhaps even more problematic for considering negativity alongside mobilities.

Of nothing

Althusser sets out from nothing. We gather this by speaking with Althusser via the text. But we can also speak to Althusser by speaking against him. For as well as the nothingness within the text there is also that with which the text swerves into being. In what is doubtless a shocking account for the reader, Althusser starts from the death of his wife at his own hands – strangled in ‘a state of mental confusion’ – and his consequent 2 years’ incarceration in psychiatric institutions. ⁴³ This horrific violence, which the translator Goshgarian calls an ‘abyss’, ⁴⁴ laces the text with a strange absence, an unknowable pain, but it also leads us to proceed with caution, even distrust. ⁴⁵ For Althusser, it is his ‘surprise’ at the world into which he is thrown upon release from the institution that cues the text. ⁴⁶ Yet this ‘abyss’ is not something which can be overcome through its words. We may observe that the theory itself seems at an odd disjuncture with the structural Marxism with which we usually associate Althusser. However, Goshgarian, here and elsewhere, contests the notion of a rupture, arguing that aleatory materialism has its precursors in Althusser’s earlier works, but that this lineage is in the current essay obscured by a general incoherence of structure and writing. A sense, then, that Althusser’s thought itself is somehow in a process of deterioration. ⁴⁷ Rather than a reason for dismissing the text altogether, this leads us rather to emphasise again the fragility of the encounter; to question the pre-eminence of affirmationist interpretations which would see in the text the production of knowledge or the building of ideas, forgetting the unknowable pain, the abyss at its centre.

Speaking more generally, while Althusser reckons with the void as ‘the object of philosophy’, ⁴⁸ attempting to speak of the negative as geographers is inherently difficult because in doing so we threaten, we undo geography. Kingsbury and Secor begin their edited collection by discussing the threat of ‘zero’ to Western society. For the ancient Greeks, ‘[z]ero was a fearful proposition’, owing both to its ‘whiff of the grave’ and its ‘odd behaviour’: ‘Multiplying by zero turns all quantities to dust, crushing the number line to a mere point . . . the result is nonsense, the defeat of mathematical reason’. ⁴⁹ The aim of the modern geographical discipline, intrinsically tied from its outset to this same mathematical reason, was to relate; to allow one thing – the unknown, the distant, the imperceptible – to be known through (its relation to) another: the known, the close, the visible. We may think here, for example, of the perspectival drawings and calculations which Mumford associates with the quantification of space and time. ⁵⁰ As such zero is a radical threat because of its nonrelation, or because by relating it undoes or uncreates, erasing what it encounters. Critical and vitalist geographies may break from the structured determinism of these particular forms of relation, but even to them the negative threatens by undermining relation as such. Zero, in other words, is the threat of an encounter which produces nothingness, absence or loss.

Even more fundamentally than the study of geography, the study of mobilities is premised upon the relational. Mobility is commonly conceived as an outward and moreover (spatio-temporally) forward movement which produces, expands and/or connects. Crucially this rings true even for critical mobilities scholars, whom in their rejection of quantitative, functionalist perspectives, frequently call on Spinoza, Deleuze and others to emphasise the transformative and ontogenetic qualities of movement: the ‘body-becoming (connecting, always) becoming-toward, always with’. ⁵¹ It is therefore understandable that, as Wilson says, ‘the turn to encounters has been deeply connected to the turn to mobility’, with (spaces of) movement providing the opportunity for affecting and being affected by human and more-than-human engagements beyond the border of the body. ⁵²

At the same time however, there have been a range of attempts from mobilities scholars to explore negative aspects of mobile phenomena. For instance, considerable work has been done on themes relating to immobility. Notable here is Bissell and Fuller’s 2009 Special Issue on ‘the revenge of the still’. Within the issue’s introduction it is observed how mobilities scholarship, and particularly work gathered under the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, has always been concerned with the relation of (im)mobilities, embodied in concepts such as Urry’s ‘mobilities and moorings dialectic’. ⁵³ As Peter Adey cautioned early on, ‘if mobility is everything then it is nothing’. ⁵⁴ Indeed, it is in the dependency of mobility upon (relative) immobility where the politics of mobilities lie.

Whilst hugely valuable, these contributions show how mobilities studies has been shaped by a dialectical approach. This approach tends first to consider immobility (of some) primarily in terms of its potential to facilitate or become mobility (of others), and, second, to presume a perceptible separation of mobile and immobile bodies/objects which allows for comparison, an assessment of relative velocity. The result of these presumptions is a spectrum which aligns mobility with (the potential for) relation at one end, and immobility with nonrelation at the other. Negativity, to the extent that it concerns the nonrelational, tends to be thought as largely immobile. Indeed, voids tend to evoke stasis or a sense of inertia – the use of ‘inert’ to refer to unreactive gases in chemistry a clue here to the assumed ties between mobility and relation. And yet, as Althusser, following Epicurus, sees it, the void itself is a kind of phantom movement: movement without encounter. We should take care then not to immobilise the negative. But, at the same time, what is mobility if it does not relate? If the encounter is missed or does not last; if it produces nothing rather than something, then what is there to study here?

In attempting to elucidate nonrelational mobilities in this way, I am aided by some of the work which destabilises the presumptions identified above. This is work which, firstly, insists upon a non-dialectical approach, taking as its object forms of absence, distance, and undecidability; which investigates the negative capacities of mobilities, their potential to, in a processual manner, fatigue or exhaust; and which makes the distinction (by means of disintegration) between molar and molecular mobilities.

I would like to suggest that, following from this and other work in both negative geographies and mobilities literatures, a notion of negative mobilities encourages us to consider two overlapping sets of phenomena: first, movement which leaves, which dislocates, ⁵⁵ loses/gets lost, misses or undoes; second, movement which is hesitant or undecidable, neither here nor there. Both of these movements are expressed in encounter’s recurrent fragility.

Going back to nothing

One of the examples which Althusser draws upon to illustrate aleatory materialism is the problem of Italy’s unification in Machiavelli’s work The Prince. The philosophical significance of the figure of the prince for Althusser lies precisely in their lack of origin or heritage: ‘some nameless man [sic.] . . . who establish[es] himself [sic.] in some nameless corner of Italy’. ⁵⁶ While primarily this signals the non-anteriority of the encounter, in the specific case of Cesare Borgia which Machiavelli highlights we may locate an underlying, persistent or recurrent fragility. Borgia would have been Machiavelli’s prince, Althusser tells us; was on his way to being until, in the marshes of Ravenna, ‘at the critical moment’, he was struck down with fever. ⁵⁷ The encounter was missed, or rather did not hold, not quite. The aleatory thus cannot be presumed to lean forward. It cuts both ways. If we remove its directional bias, then it consists of both a negative and an affirmative potentiality: (what seems to be) something can at any moment slip away to(wards) nothingness. The encounter that never was, or a world undone, withdrawing, ebbing away.

Within these ideas there is already a sense of mobility. Yet, when it comes to the work so far done on negative geographies, discussion of mobilities has been largely absent. Whilst, for example, Dekeyser suggests that negativity prompts us to reconsider concepts at the heart of geography, mobility is not named among them. Yet, in the open question that follows, mobility is multiply implied. How, Dekeyser asks, might we attend to our concepts ‘if we begin not from the capacity to come together, to make-work, to build, as our discipline of “earth-writing” and “earth-building” often encourages us to do, but instead take seriously the imminent potential for cracking-open, falling apart, slowing down, encountering limits, becoming numb or coming to a stand-still?’. ⁵⁸ Falling, slowing, coming to a stand-still: these ideas beckon us to explore further how mobilities scholars have attended to notions of slowness and stillness, and in ways that moreover question affirmationist or dialectical approaches. ⁵⁹

We might begin with Bissell’s proposition of ‘the loop’ as a new way of diagramming everyday, small-scale or neighbourhood mobilities. ⁶⁰ Countering ‘the line’, which focuses attention upon pointillist understandings of proximity and the active maintenance of already-existing relations to significant others, the loop foregrounds the ‘passive’ and ‘transversal’ proximity which emerges through our receptivity to previously unknown near-dwellers in the process and sensed experience of mobility itself. As such, this diagram echoes other mobilities work in encouraging a processual understanding of mobility, an attendance to its experiential qualities. The everyday loops of neighbourhood mobility thus carry the potential to open us up to encounter. But what of those instances where the encounter is missed, or where mobility does not cue but in fact curtails receptiveness?

A recognition of negative mobilities constitutes a struggle to put to the fore failed, never- or not-quite mobilities and mobile encounters. This can start, epistemologically, from the recognition that, in our use of ‘mobile methods’, we are frequently thwarted by the persistence of nonrelation. As an Undergraduate geographer, I took myself to Berlin to undertake fieldwork for a thesis on memory and urban spectacle framed through the ideas of the Situationists. Upon reflection and with an honesty I can now afford, what I found walking around the city was far from the enchanted world of surprising encounters I naively anticipated. Much of the time, to echo Zhang, ⁶¹ I felt fatigued and frustrated, my movements overly determined by the base needs of my body (muscles, stomach, bladder). Often, we set out with anticipation, with a readiness to engage, only for mobility itself to drain our confidence. Contrary to feeling freed or open, we find ourselves weighed down with the dis-appointment, guilt and regret of missed encounters.

Furthermore, while encounter tends to be associated with movement, particularly the fleeting, ⁶² this does not mean that encounters necessarily encourage or precipitate mobility at all levels. Encounter may close down opportunities or capacities to be mobile, may restrict or diminish through (physical, emotional) exhaustion desires and/or abilities to move. The mobile encounter may be an exposure or collision which, all of a sudden or perhaps over time, saps confidence or capacity. Aside from highlighting that mobility may produce immobility, this begs us to consider the non-dialectical, negative aspects of mobilities themselves: a mobility that is processual without being productive or relational.

Bissell himself comments on the potential for mobilities to fatigue. Here the repetitiveness of the loop ‘might induce exhaustion and attenuation . . . a body . . . enrolled into but disintegrated from the demands of the day’, leading to alienation and agitation. ⁶³ Perhaps the diagram of the loop needs augmenting here. With its motifs of out and return, the loop retains a restful, leisurely orientation conducive to receptiveness. In doing so, it does not seem suited to illustrating mobilities characterised by missed encounter, exhaustion or loss. This suggests first of all that a more fitting diagram might feature an interminable looping rather than a tethered and circumscribed (if repeating) loop. Seen this way, the loop more closely resembles a figure of eight, the holding pattern adopted by aircraft unable or unwilling to land. This is a figure not of suspended mobility (e.g. delay) but suspension through mobility. Yet in thinking not only about fatigue but also missed encounter and loss, we should consider another diagramming, that of mobility as erasure.

Whilst the loop is non-linear and transversal, it holds a certain resilience in its repeatability, as a path that can be returned to or retraced. What this potentially excludes is the irredeemable loss which, like spontaneous emergence, is a property of the aleatory. If the structure of any given world cannot be traced to that of the atoms whose encounter gave birth to it, then in working backwards we have the same problem: that when a world is erased or has failed to take hold, we cannot identify in the present situation the ‘parts’ of which it (would have) consisted. In the naming of what has been erased or did not take place, we are always-already missing something, or perhaps everything. This speaks both to a process of dissolution and to the sensation of that which is lost and cannot be recovered. It speaks to the missing signified of the erased, the impossibility of putting one’s finger on, and moreover effectively communicating, that absent something.

In the mobilities literature these ideas are reflected in work on geographies of distance and leaving. Handel, drawing upon Cresswell, posits that ‘[m]obilities as a field of research might be defined as the discipline of paying attention to the distance between points’, not taking distance for granted as mere connection but unpacking it, exploring its content. Handel thus urges consideration of distance in itself, but always in a critical, relational sense. However, in the process of leaving or missing there is also a distance produced which is nonrelational in the sense that it involves disorientation or miscomprehension, a path which cannot necessarily be retraced or returned to. Rather than distance as a measurable or passable terrain, this is more akin to a sensation of being or feeling distant, a sense of dislocation. In Wylie’s autobiographical essay on landscape and memory for instance, he examines how the ‘perspective’ attained through patterns of leaving and returning does not by necessity produce attachment, proximity, or control, but may rather result in sensations best-described as uncanny. Perspective as an arrangement always, he reminds us, invokes a ‘vanishing point’. ⁶⁴

Can thinking through negative mobilities therefore show greater sensitivity to these experiences, to distances ‘impassable’ not because of physical or technological obstruction or a lack of resources, but because of the erasures produced in attempting to return or close the gap? This is evident, for example, in the (post-)Covid expansion of urban platforms and logistics. On the one hand, this is a significant densification in the city’s connections, characterised by an increasingly rapid availability of all manner of goods and services, at one’s fingertips and to one’s doorstep. On the other, and reasoning dialectically, this is an outsourcing of mobilities which, contrary to the traditional order, forces some to move to enable (relatively privileged) others to stay put. ⁶⁵ From a third perspective however, we might pay attention to the way such developments in urban economy, labour and landscape produce, precisely, a set of absences, loopings and exposures that are nonrelational in that they are irrevocable, interminable and incommunicable. The expansion of these relations feeds off and exacerbates the emptying of the city, proliferating vacant plots and ‘dark warehouses’ ⁶⁶ – we might ask whether it is precisely the loops of neighbourhood which are being lost or erased here. At the same time, it depends upon mobilities which are deeply precarious for those who undertake them, perpetually negotiating their exposure not only to economic exploitation and bodily exhaustion, but also frequent stigmatisation and assault. ⁶⁷

In one sense this concerns nothingness and absence, yet it also refers to an erosive quality of mobilities which undo or reduce. In the same respect, examinations of negative mobilities might be broadened to identify processual understandings of negativity, distinct from ‘the negative’ as an inert limit. After all, while both negative geographies and negative mobilities concern the nonrelational, that which leaves, misses or cuts short is different from that which stands alone. In the next section, we will address this by returning to the idea of leaving, this time in the context of academic mobilities. Here it expresses the insomniac qualities – the edginess, dislocation and undecidability – produced by the coexistence of mobile and immobile sensations.

Something and nothing, neither here nor there

While Althusser has been a helpful provocation to these thoughts on negative mobilities, it is necessary to point out the limitations of his theory. In adopting Epicurus’s atomistic perspective, Althusser may be guilty of the ‘base materialism’ rejected by Bergson and Deleuze ⁶⁸ : a philosophy which focuses upon ‘molar’ bodies and in doing so ignores ‘molecular’ processes. ⁶⁹ In discussing limits and incapacities for example, it would be all-too-easy to slip into talking about the individual body as a bounded entity, anaesthetised against or sealed off from the world. Or else, in discussing mobilities and erasure, we might be tempted to envision a void of pure speed, the ultimate non-place. ⁷⁰

Merriman, in attempting to negotiate the tensions between a ‘nomadic metaphysics’ and its critics, breaks down the dialectical quality of immobile and mobile by urging us to think in terms of the becoming-molar and becoming-molecular of bodies, movements, actions and events, with a processual quality of continuous solution and dissolution. In this way, mobilities and immobilities co-exist. A body or thing as a molar, defined and perceptible entity may exhibit immobility, whilst at an imperceptible level there is also flux and movement (or vice-versa). There are immobilities which unleash movement, or mobilities which induce a kind of paralysis. This is important because, as has been emphasised throughout this article, thinking in terms of negative mobilities means resisting ideas of negativity as something either whole or inert: negativity may be processual, if not as ‘becoming’ then as diminishing or undoing. It is notable that molecular mobilities have garnered particular attention in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the unruly vitality in question being that of a virus which results not only in the simultaneity of perceptible immobility (lockdown regulations) and imperceptible mobility (e.g. the circulation of test samples), but also, from the human standpoint, in an undoing of life (social, economic and biological). ⁷¹

More broadly, negative mobilities might well diminish but they do not necessarily obliterate. Just as ‘there are certain degrees of “voidness” in the void’, ⁷² negative mobilities consist of different gradations of negativity. The exposures of mobility might, for example, augment one’s experiences in ways that make things more arduous, increasing the burden of movement even if it does not eradicate the intent or necessity to keep moving. Conversely, even if relation is on some level unavoidable – we cannot ‘disappear completely’ ⁷³ – relation does not saturate mobility to the extent that nonrelation is excluded. This is to say that in the recurrent fragility of the encounter, there is the ‘may not’, the potential for nothingness, but there is also the ‘and yet’, the caveat or hesitancy. Since ‘[i]gnorance, hesitation, and inaction have always been anathema to modernity’, ⁷⁴ these aspects of experience are often backgrounded. For Harrison, drawing primarily from Barthes and Derrida, the assumed necessity of action, practice, decision – either this or that, either with or against – is disturbed by the radical suspension of the decision, by the undecidable. ⁷⁵ Yet this is expressed in the notion of ‘remaining still’, in a withdrawal from or suspension of movement. What, then, is the undecidable of mobilities?

There is certainly an edginess to it, in Philo, Parr and Söderström’s conceptualisation of both geographic edge-spaces and the sense of feeling ‘on edge’. ⁷⁶ Negative mobilities move along the edge, or better – since this ‘edge’ is not necessarily geographically marginalised; indeed it might be found at the very centre – they ‘edge along’, with a movement that is precarious, exposed to the elements and to the proximity of the drop. This is a mobility which can be exhausting, yet not in a way that equates to or culminates in a zero level of movement. In their work on the ‘intimate geopolitics of resource extraction’, Straughan, Bissell and Gorman-Murray refer in passing to Pelbart’s figure of the insomniac as that typifying the exhausted human. As opposed to tiredness, which implies ‘a dialectic of work and productivity’, exhaustion consists of ‘a dissolution of the self’, manifesting affectively as irritability, mis-/non-communication, and breakdown. ⁷⁷ Thinking of this figure of the insomniac more broadly is a useful way to consider negative mobilities as undecidable. Insomnia considered analogously as a form of mobility impresses a sense not only of hesitancy, but of restlessness and agitation, a bodily constriction characterised paradoxically by intense, if unfulfilled or unfulfilling, movement. This in turn helps us to frame the recurrent fragility of the encounter with respect to negative geographies and negative mobilities. As Rose, Bissell and Harrison say, falling short of dialectical resolution, ‘[t]here are simply turnings: turnings toward and turnings away from the problem of the negative’. If we take these turnings literally, then we obtain focus on mobilities as to and fro, neither here nor there, without productivity, resolution, or settled destination. ⁷⁸

Returning to Bissell’s diagramming of mobilities above, there is a further amendment to make. The shape of these mobilities is not linear, nor is it looped; it may be interminably looping, but it better resembles a scribble – not a creative, idle doodling, but a furious scribbling out. ⁷⁹ This brings us back to the erasure, but at this point we see that the erasure has a form, the shape of an erasure. As has been explored in the practice of erasure art, any erasure is also a reinscription. ⁸⁰ Yet scribbling out (as opposed to a more purposeful deletion or redaction) specifically expresses the sudden fragility of the idea in the very moment of its putting forward. It is a withdrawal which also unsettles or destabilises. In the missed encounter, in not relating or being non-receptive, we may be said to withdraw into ourselves. And yet at that very moment we also discover the instability of the body into which we withdraw. Not a whole, protected body, but one which feels unfamiliar, restless and clunky – with a heart which beats ‘on its own!’, ⁸¹ but also with clenched teeth, anxious breath, and a whole series of sensations and molecular mobilities beyond our understanding. As in Wylie’s ‘dis-location’, ⁸² bodies simultaneously extend outwards and inwardly fragment, like sinkholes opening up on a busy highway.

How does such a conceptual diagramming lend itself to mobilities and cultural geographies more concretely? As an example, we would argue that it allows for a greater sensitivity to situations or structures where (im)mobilities coincide to produce or exacerbate unsettling, distancing or exhausting experiences. We can think again here of the complex mobilities tied up in the idea of leaving. Two sessions at the 2022 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference – organised by Rachel Colls – were dedicated to ‘feminist geographies of leaving’, providing invaluable reflections upon experiences of leaving, staying and ‘taking leave’. A number of the contributions focused on the academic context, elucidating power-laden forms of negative (im)mobility resulting from expectations, assumptions and pressures around the meaning and importance of leaving. ⁸³

As Rachael Squire’s contribution to one session argued, and as Hopkins et al. observe of academic mobilities more broadly, the expectation that academics should strive to move elsewhere places a – notably gendered – disadvantage on those researchers whom, for any combination of reasons (research interests, family proximity, mental wellbeing etc.), might elect to ‘stay put’. ⁸⁴ In this case, the choice to stay is framed as a failure to leave, and in a sense a failure to relate or be receptive (to continually expand knowledge and networks, for example). This not only has tangible impacts on career progression, but can also produce a sense of dislocation shaped or eroded by mobilities, encounters and opportunities (supposedly) missed or foregone. At the same time, negative mobilities may also lead us to examine more critically those structures which posit a dialectic of movement and stasis, such that (over)work can be compensated for through ‘taking leave’: a temporary, controlled and delineated withdrawal from activity seen to facilitate reflection and as such boost productivity. As Salminen’s paper made clear, experiences of taking leave do not necessarily correspond to these expectations. ⁸⁵ Indeed, returning to the figure of the insomniac, they may at times be marked by a non-dialectical exhaustion, a withdrawal that is nonetheless restless and frenzied.

In both cases above there is an undecidability, a neither here nor there-ness which rubs uncomfortably with assumptions of mobility as building, relating, expanding or going-towards. In one sense, this is an adjunct to work already done by critical mobilities scholars and cultural geographers to move beyond the thin linear threads of socio-economic perspectives orientated between points of departure and arrival, ⁸⁶ illuminating the ‘thickness’ and intensive qualities of mobile experience – something woven, multi-textured and processual, always in-the-making. ⁸⁷ Negative mobilities might further explicate the wealth and unevenness of experiences, not only in the making of mobilities, but in their deterioration; where the weaving comes loose or falls away: the frayed, the snagged, the moth-eaten.

And yet

In the wake of a growing consideration for the negative and negativity in geography literatures, the above has turned towards Althusser’s philosophical treatment of encounter as a means of drawing attention to negative mobilities. Rather than fleshing out a new ‘conceptual framework’ – never mind a programme or manifesto declaring the aims and objectives of future research – this is imagined as a more tentative procedure, conscious of the potential for slippage and entropy.

For instance, doubts and criticisms are likely to remain regarding both the conceptual and applied usefulness of negative geographies. There is a sense, in some of its early forays, of old philosophical fault-lines being perhaps unnecessarily redrawn. There is also the charge of ‘weak negativity’, of a kind of surrender, which forecloses encounter and denies agency by excusing non-engagement. On the other hand, there is the spectre of Noys’ ‘low affirmationism’. For instance, just by thinking the negative are we not in some sense relating it? ⁸⁸ By writing these thoughts into existence as a (possible) journal article, am I always-already displaying a kind of resilience, a willingness or desire to transform negativity into something positive or productive? And yet, the fragility remains and recurs. In the ‘and yet’, the ‘may not’ and the ‘not quite’, there is, accepting all doubts, a purchase to negative mobilities, a grip without guarantee. This ‘and yet’ tells us that, as we reach out, we are left grasping. A riposte, then, to the insistence of the additive, forward tradition; of the ‘and so’ or ‘henceforth’ which dominates discourses of knowledge. On the one hand, negative mobilities allows us to be a bystander to the impasse of the negative, a witness, albeit one stricken, held or holding back. ⁸⁹ On the other, it exposes us to that which escapes us in the process of its escaping, in its slippage, withdrawal or ceaseless postponement.

We must ask here not only how negative geographies permits us to think differently about mobilities, but how negative mobilities allows to think differently about (the negative and) geography. One important contribution is that, in their processual fragility, negative mobilities help to stave off the potentially ‘incapacitating effects’ and ‘transcendent logic’ sometimes attributed to negativity. They allow us to minimise the risk of a totalising logic wherein ‘we can only speak of things – including ourselves – through the abstract prism of “what they are not”’. ⁹⁰ To put it differently, if we insist on negative mobilities, then we are forced to dwell alongside what we might miss, leave or erase – or indeed what might miss, leave or erase us and others – rather than simply escaping or moving on.

The figures referred to in the above resonate with the kinds of lost mobilities and geographies common to our age, not least those future losses towards which we continue to speed. More immediately, in the interminable looping of the figure of eight, and the undecidability of the erasure as a scribbling out, there is also an attempt, determined yet feeble, to reckon with the discomfort of experiences – both others’ and our own – which seem not only distant but which perhaps slip further away with our attempts to approach, be receptive to, or encounter them. Finally, there is an increased sensitivity to mobilities which, in all their complexity, reach out and connect whilst in the very same moment leaving those mobilities increasingly exposed and worn down, edging along through spaces, infrastructures and institutions.