Water that will (never) forget itself: Tracing the knowledge politics of the spacetimeunconscious

Abstract

This commentary engages with Secor’s intriguing proposition of the spacetimeunconscious as a supplement to quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s spacetimematter, which puts forth a non-linear conception of time, irreducibly linked with a discontinuous notion of space, and a vibrant, multi-agential perspective onto matter. By interconnecting new feminist materialisms and psychoanalytic geographies, Secor nuances existing approaches in psychoanalytic geographies by placing emphasis on the elemental, material paradoxes of the unconscious – existing in/as/from the same fabric but also outside of themselves, in different aggregate states. With the aim to draw urban studies scholars and geographers closer to psychoanalytic thought, I make use of my own non-expert point of departure to first shed light on the offerings towards the academic politics of knowledge production that Secor's text holds. Second, I specify conceptual alignments between psychoanalytic and hydrofeminist geographical thought. Third, I mobilize the disjointed trope of hauntology to assist Secor's call for a more ambivalence-embracing and poetic approach to the production of geographical texts, knowledge and epistemologies.

Introducing the spacetimeunconscious: water that will forget itself

Anna Secor's (2025) article, ‘Spacetimeunconscious’, provides an intriguing account of interconnecting new feminist materialisms, famously epitomized in the work of quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad (2007), and psychoanalytic geographies (e.g. Kingsbury and Pile, 2014). Secor's text not only introduces the readers to psychoanalytic concepts such as the unconscious, but also viscerally engages our thinking about the restless materialities of objects, memories and elements. With this, as I read it, she invokes a more creative, poetic engagement with geographical imaginaries, roaming under the umbrella term of ‘geopoetics’ (e.g. Magrane et al., 2019). In response to Secor's captivating piece, the following commentary is structured along three aspects: First, I discuss Secor's approach to knowledge to be generated about materialities via the psychoanalytic conception of the spacetimeunconscious. Second, I drag to the fore a framework that lingers in both Secor's choice of empirical example (i.e. water turning into ice and back) and her conceptual alliance with hydrofeminisms, which attend to the socio-material entanglements between human, and more-than-human, bodies of water. Third, but by no means last, I turn to the trope of the ghostly or spectral, inspired by Derrida's (1994) hauntology that engages with the ever-returning presence of the past in the present. Notably, these thematic highlights are contingent and are related to my own situated positionality to read and access Secor's text.

With this commentary, I aim to familiarize an interdisciplinary community of non-experts with the intriguing ideas that psychoanalytic thought more broadly, and psychoanalytic geographies in particular, offer to advance understanding of temporal and spatial relations. This objective is motivated by my own relative dearth of knowledge about the offerings of psychoanalysis. While I have come in contact with psychoanalytic geographies through collaborations with my colleague and friend Lucas Pohl (e.g. Landau and Pohl, 2021), I humbly consider myself as a distant relative to this theoretically sophisticated debate. However, and rather than shying away from engagement due to an overwhelming veneration, I step into a hopefully productive dialogue to ask questions, request clarifications, and inquire about possibilities to empirically apply psychoanalytic geographies, and the spacetimeunconscious, understood as a supplement to Barad's proposition of spacetimematter. This commentary also seeks to follow Secor's call (at least how I interpret it) to further cultivate a sense of (un)grounded epistemologies that guide geographical inquiry, writing and theory-building – starting from a point of intellectual inquiry that is utterly decentered, displaced, disjointed and exposed (e.g. Landau et al., 2021). This shift radically reorganizes our approach to study and work with knowing and unknowing subjects, objects, places, spaces, splits and sutures between them, which continue to co-constitute academic realities and regimes of knowledge production. Ultimately, within this feminist hauntological outlook on the ‘world’, Secor's fine-grained rerouting of writing differently provides a much-needed contribution to the (re)shaping of paths that rebuild academic writing, publishing and debate.

Knowledge ∞ the spacetimeunconscious

Secor's text offers an intriguing yet subtle contribution to ongoing discussions about the politics of producing academic knowledge (e.g. Jazeel and McFarlane, 2010; Lorente, 2021), and maybe, geographical knowledge in particular (e.g. Magrane et al., 2019). Secor almost non-chalantly offers psychoanalytic knowledge as a form of ‘knowledge that does not know itself’, ‘an unconscious knowledge without a subject’. If unconscious knowledge really works without a subject, how does anyone come to know it? Who is the subjectless subject? Who does ever get access to it, and how do ‘we’ even know that that lumpy thing over there is ‘knowledge’? What if we cannot distinguish between the unknown or unknowable of and within unconscious knowledge? In the first passages, Secor leaves us irritated. However, later in the text, Secor suggests a distributed approach to both knowing and unknowing, which constitutes ‘a confounding and a dreaming, inherent to this distributed practice of knowing’. In sum, Secor's contribution of the spacetimeunconscious trundles into the heterogeneous theoretical project of disjointing, decolonizing or ungrounding epistemologies that have for too long reified and hierarchized categories of what knowledge is, and what it is not, agglutinating them to contingent yet laden valuations such as ‘excellence’, ‘impact’ or ‘relevancy’. Let us briefly step into another conceptual milieu that could have been elaborated in Secor's text, or could be further developed in the future to (dis)place the spacetimeunconscious in geographical thought.

Hydrofeminisms ∞ the spacetimeunconscious

Secor's piece is an elemental text. It is not stable or smooth. It shivers a bit, it might want you to scratch your nose, move around in your seat. Secor pushes the ways in which we write in and about space (e.g. Landau-Donnelly, 2023). While Secor starts the piece with the unforgettable example of water turning into ice due to a ‘nucleator’ – a speck of dust inhibiting (or enabling?) an elemental process of transformation. The powerful body of work on hydrofeminism (e.g. Neimanis, 2017) or wet ontologies (e.g. Steinberg and Peters, 2015) could be a strong conceptual ally in developing the spacetimeunconscious further. Hydrofeminists’ dam-breaking work on (bodies) of water has not only emphasized the radical, inextricably relationality of matter and unconscious, but also deepens links with decolonial scholarship that is well aware of the sometimes painful ghosts of the past (e.g. Gordon 2011; Sharpe, 2016). Let us turn to these ghosts wavering within the spacetimeunconscious.

Ghosts ∞ the spacetimeunconscious

Secor's text, to me, appeared as a nucleator itself – the element that reshuffles aggregate conditions, the ‘speck of dust’ that intervenes in the smooth continuation of water being water, positivism being positivism, a peer-reviewed journal article being precisely that. Considering Secor's text as nucleator marks it as an opportunity that can drive a wedge through psychoanalytic geographies as they currently flow. Secor's piece might present just that tiny kernel of matter ‘out of place’, which is needed to transform psychoanalytic geographies (i.e. water) into spacetimeunconscious (i.e. ice). What a chilly insight. Or is ‘The Real’ a nucleator? Are there multiple nucleators (my dictionary does not know a plural; it shows me a frantic red line under the word nucleators)? Can nucleators latch onto each other and grow together? With Secor's confident degree of speculation, which almost self-evidently interconnects the diverse destinies of a Freudian client by the name of Anna O., and a contemporary refugee, Ali, whose present perception of time is penetrated by a future they remember. Ultimately, writing a nucleator-text produces a state (and place!) of ambivalence that is not easily overturned. The nucleator-text weighs in on you and, at the same time, sucks you out of your shoes into a space just above the ground. Did you feel the same way? Or Anna? Which Anna?

This brings me to another hovering conceptual connection, which leads me to suggest that Secor's reflections chime with Derrida's (1994) hauntology. More specifically, the spacetimeunconscious can be viewed as haunted by the presence of the past (or the unconscious) – the spacetimeunconscious is always-already already there (e.g. Campbell, 2022). There is an ongoing, yet necessary, confusion between temporal scales in a hauntological (spacetime)unconscious. This throws us back to the irreducible, sometimes aching contingency of connections between time, space and matter, or time, space and the unconscious. As Secor puts it, ‘the dream recurs, but it is different every time’ – in other words, the dream is both haunting and haunted at the same time. Secor does not only write about non-linearity, but literally takes the reader on a journey to read non-linearly with her, and through her writing. This, at least to me, made the reading of the spacetimeunconscious utterly affective, experiential, and embodied. Similarly, Secor not only uses the montage as a metaphor, but powerfully advances an epistemology of the montage in this text. It is in Secor's temporally polyvalent diagnosis of the unconscious in general, and unconscious geographical knowledge in particular, that neat separations between categories, disciplines, bodies (of water) and places start to appear as always-already leaking, dripping and bleeding into each other's liquid territories; nobody's waterproof. We are facing the ghostly montage we could call icewatermeltrepeat, or watermemoryicedreamicewatercut. Secor's text materializes a Möbius strip, folding inside out and outside in again, which she has discussed in further detail elsewhere (e.g. Martin and Secor, 2014). In sum, the spacetimeunconscious provides another stage, form, cloak or appearance to existing psychoanalytic geographical imaginaries that have dealt with ghosts in castles, feelings, public spaces, abandoned buildings, etc. (e.g. Buser, 2017; Pile, 2010; Pohl, 2020).

Outlook: more-(than)-human(e) psychoanalytic geographies?

Pohl's (2023: 307) assessment that ‘it is hard to imagine a more human geography than psychoanalytic geography’ sends us off with a promising outlook on why critical geographers, entangled in times of multiple crises, should turn to psychoanalytic geographies. With Secor's text, a two-fold nucleator/split arises. On the one hand, Secor's embodied account of the spacetimeunconscious may provide a more humane approach to psychoanalytic geography. On the other hand, and thanks to the deeply elemental-organic-ghostly nature of Secor's writing, maybe she opens up the debate towards a more-than-human(e) account of psychoanalytic geographies, or wet psychoanalytic geographies, in which the spacetimeunconscious constitutes an always-already present nucleator – a haunted speck of dust.