Abstract
In this response, I address the commentaries by Friedrich and Tups and Allahyari on my paper, ‘Geographies of the Impossible’, by engaging with their main arguments, highlighting some key commonalities, and identifying further aspects that could be considered when exploring the impossible in human geography.
I would like to express my gratitude to Friedrich and Tups (2024) and to Keyvan Allahyari (2024) for their excellent commentaries in response to my short intervention on the ‘geographies of the impossible’ (Pohl, 2024). I did not expect such immediate responses of this quality, and I’m very glad for the invitation to reply to them. The two commentaries address various interesting and thought-provoking issues that I cannot engage with in all detail in this short reply. In the following, I will address some of their main arguments, highlight some key commonalities, and identify further aspects that may be considered when exploring the geographies of the impossible.
I fully agree with Friedrich and Tups in their insistence on the fragile nature of the impossible, and also with their call for further engaging with powerful and violent processes that delineate and defend the realm of the possible, and that keep the impossible at bay. At the same time, my contribution intended to highlight that the possible is an equally fragile matter. My intention was to show that the realm of possibilities, that is, ‘possible geographies’, is radically contingent and can be unsettled and disturbed at any moment when, in a quite unpredictable way, the impossible erupts. Pointing at the moments when the impossible occurs, therefore, allows us to point to the fragility of the possible. I think Friedrich and Tups offer a great complement to the argument I was pursuing, as both facets – the processes that make sure that the impossible stays impossible and the processes that allow for the impossible to happen – are dialectically intertwined. Therefore, I agree with their claim that ‘studying the emergence of new possibilities and their spatio-temporal configuration is only half the story’ (Friedrich and Tups, 2024). And yet, I still see a potential for geography as a way of tracing the impossible. Given that the impossible is so fleeting, often buried under the weight of possibilities, it can be an insightful and exciting journey to follow its traces, to point at the gaps it leaves behind, and to engage with the structural powers behind its disappearance.
Allahyari's commentary provides another vital extension of my argument by emphasizing the importance of positionality when considering the notion of the impossible. Allahyari underscores how what appears impossible to some may be entirely ‘ordinary’ to others, with these distinctions often shaped by differing epistemologies and ontologies. Also here, I fully agree that it is essential to recognize the situatedness of the impossible. The climate catastrophe, for instance, has long been deemed impossible, and postponed to some distant future, particularly in the Global North. Yet, when viewed from the Global South, it quickly turns into what Allahyari (2024) calls ‘political ecologies of the ordinary’. The climate catastrophe already produces various impossible geographies today: uninhabitable zones where life can no longer be sustained, whether temporarily during wildfires, floods, or droughts, or permanently due to rising sea levels. If there is a ‘dividing line between the North and the South’, as Allahyari (2024) reads my argument, however, it is not a strictly geographical line of distinction, as ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ are not geographical but geopolitical terms. Moreover, this line is not ‘invisible’, as Allahyari suggests. One might even argue that the distinction between the Global North and Global South is gaining more visibility through the ongoing climate catastrophe and is being reshaped through new geographies of im/possibility. My point, however, was not to simply adopt an academic self-positioning in the Global North from which to recognize and define what is possible or not but to point out that some impossibilities are ‘relative’, and that context, time, and place can therefore play a central role in understanding the limits of what is deemed im/possible.
Both commentaries address the question of discourse. Friedrich and Tups (2024) distinguish between the socio-material and discursive dimensions of new possibilities by highlighting how the lack of material substance causes the persistence of the old, whereas new possibilities ‘are often mere discursive representations of possible futures’. Allahyari (2024) argues that ‘it is imperative to acknowledge that the borders between what is regarded as possible and its negation are a mere linguistic construct, a speech act couched in its own geopolitical assumptions’. While there is nothing wrong with these statements, I would like to emphasize that my original interest in pushing for more engagement with the impossible in geography stemmed from the idea that the impossible has a certain ‘extradiscursive’ quality, that is, that it cannot be entirely captured by the symbolic order. Possibilities are indeed symbolically defined through their negation. Now, while one could say that the border between possibility and impossibility is therefore linguistically structured, it is crucial, in my view, to approach the power of the impossible in its potential to disrupt the symbolic realm of possibilities. When the impossible happens, it not only adds a new possibility to the pre-existing set of possibilities but has the potential to shatter this set of possibilities. Black Lives Matter, to take a political example, calls for Black equality in the United States and elsewhere that racism makes impossible. Its aim, however, is not an integrative one (see also McGowan, 2020: 181–189). It is not about including all lives equally in the existing system of possibilities so that Black lives are treated in the same way as other (e.g. white) lives. Its point is rather that true equality, that is, the absence of racism, is impossible within a society such as the United States, because the belonging of some rests on the non-belonging of others. Making Black lives matter would mean an utterly different society – a society that cannot be articulated within the current realm of possibilities. Here, we see why the Aristotelian notion of politics as ‘the art of the possible’ cannot but fail to grasp the most remarkable aspect of the political and why the political ultimately revolves around the ‘art of the impossible’.
As an extradiscursive kernel that cannot be properly articulated within the symbolic order of possibilities, the impossible has an emotional and affective dimension that may be worth considering. In a further geographical contribution to the impossible, Menga and Vanolo (2024) delve more deeply into the immanent contradictions and affective experiences at stake in today's ways of coping with the climate crisis. As they argue, trying to live a sustainable lifestyle is fraught with all sorts of encounters with the impossible that result from the inability to not engage with the unsustainable societies we are part of. Realizing ‘that, no matter what I do, I am unsustainable, or, [to] put it differently, that sustainability is impossible’ (Menga and Vanolo, 2024: 7, emphasis in original) opens up the affective terrain of ‘glitches’, which enable us to engage with the struggling subjectivities navigating these impossible worlds. The glitches resulting from persisting impossibilities could be understood as a conceptual counterpart to what Friedrich and Tups (2024) call the ‘fugacity of emergent possibilities’. While the glitch refers to a moment where a certain spatial configuration encounters an inherent fissure, thereby bordering on an impossibility, fugacity refers to how a new possibility is subordinated to the pre-existing realm of possibilities. Such ‘glitch epistemologies’ (Leszczynski and Elwood, 2022) and fugacity epistemologies are, in turn, linked to speculative modes of thinking that are called into question by Allahyari concerning their transformative capacity. And while I agree that new epistemologies alone will not ‘deliver us to a blueprint for action’ (Allahyari, 2024), I think it is crucial for geographers that exploring the impossible through new ways of thinking can push us further into the inherent contradictions that make living with climate change, racism, capitalism, etc., unbearable in order to ‘offer analytical perspectives, new insights and ultimately fuel the desire for a collective systemic change’ (Menga and Vanolo, 2024: 16).
Friedrich and Tups (2024) end their commentary with a question on ‘whether new beginnings presuppose the end of old worlds’ and whether the realization of the impossible thus relates to the ‘ultimate destruction of the old’. When reading these lines, I felt reminded of the famous quote by Antonio Gramsci (1992: 276) on the notion of crisis: ‘The crisis’, he states, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. Friedrich and Tups (2024) then go on with reference to ruins as potential ‘spaces for new beginnings, for encounters that constitute new ways of being, experimenting, transforming, and flourishing’. This take is crucial in my view, and I fully agree that the ruin functions as a potential spatial metaphor to describe the current societal condition (see also Pohl, 2021), which may be seen as a time in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Nevertheless, in my view, the ruin is of crucial importance, as it precisely does not allow us to fantasize about ultimate destruction but forces us to think of new beginnings from within the endings of the old. It is in this sense that ruins are bastions of historical materialism. The ruin is an interregnum in which morbid symptoms appear until something emerges that takes on the form of something new.
Let me end with a brief note on hope, as it is also featured in both commentaries. Particularly, Friedrich and Tups (2024) argue that there is a sense of hope in the examples I gave, and that this hope is linked to the chances that new possibilities actively eradicate the socio-material persistence of old possibilities and hegemonies. This is a very elegant way of putting it, and I agree that it must be crucial for a geography that studies the impossible to look for the chances of a material (and not ‘merely discursive’) unfolding of the impossible. Nevertheless, I think that hope will not be the guideline when addressing the challenge of future-making in times of crisis and destruction. Hope is for those who wait and wish for others to do something. What is needed is a certain amount of courage. Courage is what we should look for when we set out to explore how the demand for the impossible is collectively articulated – and this courage will rely on ‘a relentless fight for the very possibility of a future in the ruins of our present’ (Horvat, 2021: 34).
