Nonrepresentational Theory

Nonrepresentational theory (NRT) is a reaction against the stranglehold of representation in cultural geographies. Although by no means unified, NRT in human geography has two broad positions. Epistemologically, it seeks to challenge the notion that representation is “all there really is” by emphasizing the unruly forces of life that elude cognitions and conceptualizations. It is in this sense that NRT does not herald the overturning of representation—perhaps, as Hayden Lorimer suggests, a better name for nonrepresentational theory would be “more-than-representational theory.” Ontologically, NRT breaks with a Cartesian division between “subject” and “object.” Replacing this philosophical dualism is a flat ontology based on the interplay of affect, practice, and performance. The work of Gilles Deleuze, a 20th-century poststructuralist philosopher, greatly influenced the general contours of NRT. Playing down the hegemony of “images of thought” and structural thinking in philosophy, Deleuze was keen to affirm a world where differences could roam free without being subsumed to representation. The virtual is the name Deleuze gives to the domain of differences, relationalities, and potentialities always latent within the world of actualized phenomena. The Deleuzian legacy is clear in NRT—cartographies of the virtual are already always “interfering” with our clearly [Page 2042]cut mappings of the world. NRT champions difference, immanence, and relationality over a geography based on repetition, transcendence, and division.

As the pioneer of NRT, the British geographer Nigel Thrift argues that NRT is at its core a “non-cognitive methodology” for being in the world. Similarly, Dewsbury believes that NRT is a way of presenting the world in all its immanence rather than representing it. That is, Dewsbury believes in a kind of “witnessing” of the world before it becomes discursively constituted through representation. In other words, witnessing is an experiential engagement with the radical relationality of perspective. Similarly, John Wylie's work on landscape calls the reader into a postphenomenologi-cal reading of “being.” That is, his account of landscape does not denote a “gazed-upon” space by an intentional subject—landscape is rather the processual forces of being that disclose both subject and object. As a constant producing, landscape is none other than a Deleuzian folding. The subject is a folding of landscape itself, or rather, the subject is what comes to occupy the position of the fold—with difference created and assembled through the “variations” and “inflections” of folding. Landscape is thus the materialities and sensibilities with which we see. The Cartesian subject dissolves into endless foldings and texturings.

In summary, a nonrepresentational geography seeks to uncover the processual forces of our world that produce social and spatial relationships. This is achieved by a noncognitive methodology that pays attention to practice and performance. In a very Heideggerian sense then, NRT pivots around the central ontological condition of “being-in-the-world.” How do we relate with the world, with other humans, and with the nonhuman? NRT answers these questions from a variety of perspectives of philosophers from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger to Judith Butler and Bruno Latour. Interested readers should consult the works of geographers such as Nigel Thrift, J. D. Dewsbury, Derek McCor-mack, and John Wylie.

...