Emotions and affect in recent human

geography
Steve Pile
This paper seeks to examine both how emotions have been explored in emotional geo-
graphy and also how affect has been understood in affectual geography. By tracing out
the conceptual influences underlying emotional and affectual geography, I seek to
understand both the similarities and differences between their approaches. I identify
three key areas of agreement: a relational ontology that privileges fluidity; a privileging
of proximity and intimacy in their accounts; and a favouring of ethnographic methods.
Even so, there is a fundamental disagreement, concerning the relationship – or non-
relationship – between emotions and affect. Yet, this split raises awkward questions for
both approaches, about how emotions and affect are to be understood and also about
their geographies. As importantly, mapping the agreements and disagreements within
emotional and affectual geography helps with an exploration of the political implica-
tions of this work. I draw upon psychoanalytic geography to suggest ways of address-
ing certain snags in both emotional and affectual geography.

key words emotional geography affectual geography emotions psychoanalysis

non-representational theory affect

Faculty of Social Sciences, Geography Discipline, Open University, Milton Keynes MK6 7AA
email: S.J.Pile@open.ac.uk

revised manuscript received 17 September 2009

psychotherapy, Marx and even Darwinian evolu-

Introduction
It will not be news to anyone that affect and emo-
tions have (once again) become a major theme for
human geographical research. There is now a mass
of material by geographers, published especially
since 2003, and with more appearing all the time.1
Developing from (at least) the humanistic geogra-
phies of the 1970s and 1980s and the psychoana-
lytic geographies of the 1990s, a broad spectrum of
work now emphasises the affective and emotional
aspects of personal and social life. Most recently,
for example, there have been analyses ranging
from the affectual worlds of software (Shaw and
Warf 2009; Budd and Adey 2009) to the naming of
places (Kearney and Bradley 2009) to the experi-
ence of pain (Bissell 2009) – to name but a few.
The terrain being mapped out by affectual and
emotional geography is ever expanding, but also
woven out of many threads: a short list includes
phenomenology, feminism, Massumi’s reading of
Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza and ⁄ or Deleuze’s
reading of Spinoza, psychoanalysis, Tarde’s sociology,
tionary thinking (see Thrift 2004a 2008, ch 10; and
Bondi 1993 2005) – amongst others. In this spec-
trum, geographers have not only taken up a variety
of positions, they have also shifted position over
time. It can be hard to grasp exactly what the con-
ceptual underpinnings of this burgeoning field are.
So, one purpose of this paper is to explore these
underpinnings, to look for consistencies and dis-
putes within this broad field of endeavour. I have
not produced a list, however, but focused on those
assumptions that I believe are key to the produc-
tion of affectual and emotional geographies. I will
note just three: a specific ontology of relation,
mainly involving a concern with fluidity; a valua-
tion of proximity and intimacy; and a methodologi-
cal emphasis on ethnography.
But why bother? One answer lies, of course, in
pointing out conceptual blind spots in current work
in affectual and emotional geography. Teasing
out the shared concerns of emotional and affectual
geography, for example, reveals two under-exam-
ined assumptions, concerning the unconscious and

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010

ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
6 Steve Pile
the ‘space in-between’. Perhaps this is enough.
However, it can also be hard to determine just
what is important about this work. Nevertheless, I
believe it is a mistake to think that affectual and
emotional geographies simply validate ever-broad-
ening empirical studies of affect and emotion
(which Gregory [1981] once worried humanistic
geography had done). While the broadest argument
is, as you might anticipate, that emotions matter
(see Davidson and Milligan 2004, 424),2 as Sharp
points out ‘the emphasis on the political manipula-
tion of emotion ⁄ affect is key, and indeed offers a
necessary line of examination for geography’ (2009,
78). However, if assumptions about the uncon-
scious and the space in-between enable comfortable
political positions to be adopted – for example, in
favour of a politics of caring or of emotional trans-
formation, or against the manipulation of affect by
powerful elites, covertly behind our backs – then
these assumptions are worth examining.
The paper proceeds by looking at emotions in
emotional geography, then affect in affectual geog-
raphy. This leads to an exploration of common
assumptions and incommensurable positions
within the affectual and emotional literature. The
final section raises the significance of the uncon-
scious and the space in-between for the production
of, and implications of, affectual and emotional
geographies. First, then, emotions.
Emotions: humanism, feminism and non-
representational theory
Many writers consider Anderson and Smith’s
2001 editorial paper the turning point in geogra-
phy’s recent appreciation of the importance of
emotions and affects (see for example Bondi 2005;
Sharp 2009). In their paper, Anderson and Smith
call for emotions to be taken seriously in the then
‘policy turn’ in human geography. Although a
targeted intervention, Anderson and Smith make
a general plea for thinking seriously about how ‘the
human world is constructed and lived through
the emotions’, such as ‘pain, bereavement, ela-
tion, anger, love and so on’ (2001, 7). This would
involve
a fuller programme of work, recognizing the emotions as
ways of knowing, being and doing, in the broadest
sense; and using this to take geographical knowledges –
and the relevance that goes with them – beyond
their usual visual, textual and linguistic domains. (2001,
8)
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
In other words, Anderson and Smith wish to step
beyond ‘representational geographies’ to think
about emotions as ways of knowing, being and
doing. Even so, they also call for ‘an awareness of
how emotional relations shape society and space’
and a need to confront empathy methodologically,
with an explicit return to philosophies of meaning
(as proposed by humanistic geographers) (2001, 9).
Less concerned with ‘reflection, abstraction, transla-
tion and representation’, Anderson and Smith
value research that depends on direct experience,
but also the search for other means of accessing
‘felt worlds’ (2001, 9). Their paper, then, weaves
together a humanist concern for lived experiences
and emotional lives, and their representations, with
a concern for doing and performing, and that
which is beyond representation (that is, the non-
representational).
Only a few years later, many seemed to have
responded to Anderson and Smith’s call to think
through the ‘feelings and emotions which make the
world as we know and live it’ (2001, 9).3 Thus,
geographers have described a wide range of emo-
tions in various contexts, including: ambivalence,
anger, anxiety, awe, betrayal, caring, closeness,
comfort and discomfort, demoralisation, depres-
sion, desire, despair, desperation, disgust, disillu-
sionment, distance, dread, embarrassment, envy,
exclusion, familiarity, fear (including phobias), fra-
gility, grief, guilt, happiness and unhappiness,
hardship, hatred, homeliness, horror, hostility, ill-
ness, injustice, joy, loneliness, longing, love,
oppression, pain (emotional), panic, powerlessness,
pride, relaxation, repression, reserve, romance,
shame, stress and distress, suffering, violence, vul-
nerability, worry.
Even those who declare themselves suspicious
of the language of emotions4 – such as ‘hatred,
shame, envy, jealousy, fear, disgust, anger, embar-
rassment, sorrow, grief, anguish, pride, love, happi-
ness, joy, hope, wonder’ (Thrift 2004a, 59) – have
nonetheless attended to anger, boredom, comfort
and discomfort, despair, distress, enchantment,
energy, enjoyment, euphoria, excitement, fear, frus-
tration, grace, happiness, hope, joy, laughing, liveli-
ness, pain, playing, rage, relaxation, rhythm,
sadness, shame, smiling, sorrowfulness, ‘Star Wars
affects’, surprise, tears (crying), touching, violence,
vitality.
In her 2005 paper, Liz Bondi seeks to clarify
how emotion has been approached within emo-
tional geographies. To do so, she draws out three
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
strands of thinking about emotions that precede,
and inform, the emotional turn. For her, these
strands reach back into earlier geographies: to
humanistic geography, to feminist geography and,
crucially, to non-representational geography.
Bondi points out that, while the word ‘emotion’
was not prominent within humanistic geography,
much of the work of humanistic geography was
concerned with the emotional qualities of place
and human life. She cites, for example, Ley and
Samuels’ (1978) iconic collection of essays, Rowles’
(1978) work on the experiences of the elderly and
Tuan’s (1979) analysis of landscapes of fear.
Through notions such as the life-world, humanistic
geographers were able to emphasise the capacity of
places to evoke emotions such as ‘love, hate, plea-
sure, pride, grief, rage, guilt, remorse and so on’
(Bondi 2005, 435). Phenomenology, in particular for
Bondi, offers a way to blend notions of self, bodily
experience and perceptual environments (citing
Davidson 2003). Similarly, Nigel Thrift sees the
phenomenological tradition as offering a means
to develop descriptions of how emotions occur in every-
day life, understood as the richly expressive ⁄ aesthetic
feeling-cum-behaviour of continual becoming that is
chiefly provided by bodily states and processes. (2004a,
60)
If humanistic geography offers a means to describe
people’s rich experiences of place and emotions,
then feminist geographers politicised it. By taking
seriously women’s experiences of space and place,
and treating the personal as political, feminist
geographers were alert not only to the emotions and
feelings that women experienced in particular places
and spaces, but also to how emotions framed and
circumscribed sexed and gendered experiences of
place and spaces. Feminist accounts of subjectivity,
to be sure, were now diverging from humanist
accounts. Where humanistic geography tended to
posit a coherent, bounded, self-aware and universal
human subject, feminist geography was illuminating
the incoherences, permeabilities, opaquenesses and
specificities of human subjectivity (see Rose 1993).
Significant, here, is the conceptualisation of emo-
tion: emotions were not to be ‘objectified’, but
instead, they crossed boundaries, rendering them
unstable and uncertain. Under feminist impera-
tives, humanist studies of landscapes of fear
became studies of the social geographies of
women’s fear (for example, Valentine 1989). But
fear itself was re-interrogated by emotional geogra-
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
7
phy as having both interior and exterior aspects,
while at the same time calling any presumption of
a fixed binary of interior and exterior into question.
This is evident, for example, in recent studies of
phobia and space (Davidson 2003; see also Callard
2003).
What non-representational theory adds to an
account of emotions is an insistence on the signifi-
cance of that which cannot be brought into repre-
sentation – whether those representations are
textual, linguistic, visual or otherwise (see Thrift
1996; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). While Thrift
tends to use emotion and affect somewhat inter-
changeably (as both Bondi [2005] and Thien [2005a]
point out), there is also an insistence on their dif-
ference. This difference turns on the representability
of emotions and affects. There is potential for dis-
agreement here, as emotional geography emphasises
the significance of expressed emotions while
non-representational theory emphasises the impor-
tance of inexpressible affects. In this paper, I argue
that there is more at stake here than a question of
emphasis. That said, there remains broad agree-
ment, in the study of emotions and affect, on the
importance of the bodily and on the difficulty (at
least) of expressing emotions (see, for example,
Harrison 2007; McCormack 2003).
Perhaps remarkably, given the seeming margin-
ality of psychoanalysis within human geography
(see Pile 1996; Kingsbury 2004), work on emotions
in geography has been strongly influenced by psy-
choanalytic and psychotherapeutic thinking. Thrift,
for example, draws on psychoanalytic insights to
argue that affects can be worked on to produce dif-
ferent ethical and political effects (2004a, 70). But
cautiously: Thrift warns that queer and post-colo-
nial use of psychoanalysis reveals how difficult
repression and liberation are to disentangle. Mean-
while, for Bondi (2005), psychotherapeutic practice
addresses two crucial problems in emotional geog-
raphy: first, avoiding seeing emotional experience
only as an expression individualised, yet universal,
subjectivity (as in humanism); while also, second,
connecting and engaging with people’s emotional
experiences as they express them (unlike non-
representational theory).
For Bondi, drawing on psychotherapy, taking
seriously people’s expressed emotions is also an
ethical imperative. It involves the recognition of
people’s extraordinary capacity for self-understanding
and self-analysis. Bondi’s human subject is similar,
in this respect, to humanist – especially phenome-
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
8 Steve Pile
nological – accounts of subjectivity. This is readily
apparent in Bondi’s description of how a psycho-
therapeutic approach might aid geographical
research:
[psychotherapists] listen and seek to convey under-
standing of the other person’s emotional experience;
they cultivate a form of acceptance sustainable in the
context of deeply disturbed and disturbing behaviour,
informed by a belief in the human potential for repair
and positive self-development; and they meet with
those with whom they work as emotionally open, hon-
est and genuine people. (2005, 442)
Emotional geography emphasises, and values, its
ability to derive ‘emotionally poignant and power-
ful’ accounts from its research (see Davidson et al.
2005, 3). It privileges people’s expressed emotional
experiences, and treats their accounts as open, hon-
est and genuine.
For some geographers, however, the suggestion
that people are open, honest and genuine – with a
capacity for deep insight into the composition of
their sense of subjectivity – is hopelessly naı̈ve and
even misguided (see McCormack 2006; Anderson
and Harrison 2006). Alternative accounts of the
emotional under-wiring of social relations have
drawn, instead, on notions of affect. This work has
sought to avoid certain failings it sees in emotional
geography, such as: assuming the nature of emo-
tions; objectifying emotions by naming them;
presenting superficial accounts, because it is
mesmerised by expressed accounts of emotional life;
and failing to provide a political antidote to the
manipulation of non-cognitive and ⁄ or pre-cognitive
emotional life.
Affect: non-cognitive, inter-personal,
non-representational
The notion of affect can be found scattered through
the work on emotions in geography – and, as a con-
sequence, its meaning remains elusive. That said, it
is within non-representational theory that the term
has been given especial prominence and signifi-
cance. As work on emotions is inspired by phenom-
enology and non-representational theory, there
would appear to be common ground between those
working on emotions and those working on affect.
Yet, affect marks a conceptual break with emotions,
producing a distinctive affectual geography.5
While both emotional and affectual geographies
have strong sympathies with phenomenology (evi-
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
dent in work by, for example, Conradson 2005;
Paterson 2005), affectual geography draws inspira-
tion from Brian Massumi’s reading of Gilles Dele-
uze’s reading of Spinoza’s account of affect and
from Derrida’s deconstruction of language (and,
consequently, expressed emotions), which are more
or less ignored in most emotional geography. In
this vein, affect is a quality of life that is beyond
cognition and always interpersonal. It is, moreover,
inexpressible: unable to be brought into representa-
tion. Affect, in these terms, has consequently
become (albeit unwittingly) a key testing, and
proving, ground for non-representational theory.
But what is affect in these terms?
Usefully, Anderson provides a thumbnail defi-
nition. Affect is ‘a transpersonal capacity which a
body has to be affected (through an affection) and
to affect (as the result of modifications)’ (2006,
735, emphasis in the original). This may at first
appear to be a somewhat one-dimensional defini-
tion, however, this approach to affect has several
distinctive features (see also McCormack 2003;
Thrift 2004a).
1 Affect refers to the production of a capacity of
a body, a capacity that is defined by its radical
openness to other bodies.
2 Affect is not simply personal or inter-personal
(along the lines of emotional geography’s con-
ception of emotion); it is transpersonal, draw-
ing in many bodies. Affect, then, is both within
and between bodies.
3 Affect is non- or pre-cognitive, -reflexive, -con-
scious and -human. This means two things:
3a Affect is temporally prior to the represen-
tational translation of an affect into a
knowable emotion.
3b Affect is spatially located below cognition
and consciousness and beyond reflectivity
and humanness.
4 Affect is defined in opposition to: cognition,
reflexivity, consciousness and humanness.
5 Affect connects bodies, and makes them proxi-
mate, by flowing between them.
6 Affect has potential.
7 Affect’s radical openness necessarily implicates
bodies in ethical relations.
8 Representations of affect can only ever fail to
represent affect itself – that is, it is necessary to
be suspicious of, and if possible to avoid, rep-
resentations of emotions.
9 All that said, affects can be manipulated.
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
Like emotions, affects matter – but they cannot
be grasped, made known or represented. This
would appear to leave affectual geography with
a problem: its archetypal ‘object of study’ – affect
– cannot, by its own account, be shown or
understood. Worse, affect is not localisable in
personal experience or expression, as emotions
can be. McCormack cautions: ‘the creative poten-
tial of affect is arrested when one attempts to
quantify or qualify its position as personal’ (2003,
496). Strangely, then, affectual geography cannot
talk about either affect (as the non-representa-
tional) or emotions (because they are unrepresen-
tative). So, what can it do? Let’s look at
McCormack’s emblematic account of Dance
Movement Therapy.
Early in 1999, McCormack reports (2003), he
began to research the practice of Dance Movement
Therapy. Although he starts off thinking about
Dance Movement Therapy through geographies of
emotion and mood, McCormack comes to realise
that the therapeutic practice is founded on not ask-
ing how people feel. Here, non-representational
theory and dance movement therapeutic practice
seem to concur: asking people to communicate
their feelings will only solicit a kind of affective
false consciousness, where the ‘client’ rehearses
crass caricatures of what they actually feel. None-
theless, this trite language of emotions is hard to
shake off. Indeed, Dance Movement Therapy’s
focus on the body and movement reveals, to
McCormack, just how difficult it is to abandon
personal corporeal ways of thinking and doing
(2003, 492).
He must, McCormack says, stop trying: stop try-
ing to understand, stop trying to move the right
way: ‘what I needed to do was to become respon-
sive to different surfaces of attention rather than
seeking to go behind or beyond them’ (2003, 493).
Emotions that might appear on the surface cannot,
in any way, be traced back to some affectual pre-
condition. Indeed, every effort is made ‘to avoid
treating emotion as the outward expressive repre-
sentation of some inner subjective reality’ (2003,
494). McCormack therefore withdraws from the
more usual ethnographic lines of questioning that
ask ‘how do you feel about that?’ Instead, there is
a close description of events, which focus attention
on what bodies are doing: dancing, smiling, gestur-
ing, playing, laughing, and so on.
Similarly, Anderson insists that ‘affect does not
reside in the subject, body or sign as if it were
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
9
possessed by a subject’ (2006, 735). Affects emerge
in encounters between bodies (don’t assume
human bodies6), and these affects are registered
by changes in the capacity to affect or be affected
and ⁄ or in changes in intensity. Anderson shows
that, in almost any choice that people make, there
is a component that wishes life to be somehow
better. Hope, for example, appears in three dis-
tinct ways: as an affect, in flows of hope; in feel-
ings, as a sense of hopefulness; in emotion, as
actually expressed hopes. Anderson, then, pro-
vides a conceptual model that maps the relation-
ship between affect, feeling and emotion. This is,
in effect, a ‘layer cake’ model of the mind-body.
Thus:
Layer 1: the non-cognitive – affect is the deepest layer,
below, behind and beyond both pre-cognition and cog-
nition. As these are non-cognitive, they are non-psycho-
logical, in that they never become psychological objects.
Affects reside in bodies, plural: they are not simply a
bodily content or capacity, affect refers to flows (of
affect) between bodies.
Layer 2: the pre-cognitive – feelings lie between affects
and emotion, but they are not yet expressed or name-
able, remaining tacit and intuitive. Nevertheless, feel-
ings can emerge into consciousness. These are distinctly
personal, as feelings are the emergent patterns that
derive from heterogeneous flows of affect through
bodies. Feelings are a response, therefore, to transper-
sonal affects and cannot be said, then, to be contiguous
with the individual, even while they are personally
experienced.
Layer 3: the cognitive – emotions are expressed feelings,
being both conscious and experienced. Although emo-
tions emerge from feelings, and represent personal
experience, they are socially constructed, through lan-
guage and other representational practices.
By introducing a pre-cognitive layer between non-
cognitive affects and cognitive emotions, Anderson
is seeking a way to allow the tacit and intuitive a
place within affectual geography. Thus, Anderson’s
(and others’) layer cake postulates a split in subjec-
tivity: between affect and feeling, and between feel-
ing and thought. Significantly, there are two
different kinds of borders between the layers: an
impermeable one between the non-conscious
(Layer 1) and the pre-cognitive (Layer 2) and a
one-way permeable border between the pre-cogni-
tive (Layer 2) and cognitive (Layer 3). There is,
firstly, no way for non-cognitive affects in Layer 1
to reach cognitive expressed emotions in Layer 3,
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
10
nor, secondly, can anything in the cognitive layer
filter into other layers: both are fundamental
aspects of affectual geography’s model of affect.
Layers and borders remain assumed within affectual
geography: assumed and universal – whether the
cake has two (non-cognitive and cognitive) or three
(with pre-cognitive) layers.
Affectual geography, then, provides an ontolog-
ical model of the mind and body that presumes
that it is always already partitioned, with discrete
spaces being sectioned off from one another.
These partitions, consequently, are universal and
immutable: emotions and affects have their place,
and they do not move. This model conflicts with
the humanistic and psychotherapeutic models of
emotions and affects as fluid and relational that
can be found in emotional geography. Unsurpris-
ingly, perhaps, some have judged affectual geog-
raphy to be ‘too abstract, too little touched by
how people make sense of their lives, and there-
fore too ‘‘inhuman’’, ungrounded, distancing,
detached and, ironically, disembodied’ for femi-
nist, and by extension emotional, geography
(Bondi 2005, 438; see also Thien 2005a; Nash
2000).
In fact, affectual geography is none of these
things: there is abstraction, but it is abstraction
from what it considers to be the abstract language
of emotions; knowing requires the detachment
from detachment, and not detachment itself; and,
the body is central to affectual geography’s ways of
knowing – indeed, both approaches draw heavily
on phenomenology so to do. Even so, affectual
geography’s account of the psyche remains frus-
tratingly mechanistic, immutable, undynamic and
mystical (that is, offering no account of how the
psyche came to be this way).
I have argued that affectual geography marks
a conceptual break with emotional geography.
Yet I have also argued that there are sympathies
of approach and subject matter. In the next
section, I will make explicit some of the
basic shared assumptions that underpin both
emotional and affectual geography, but more
importantly explore the fundamental difference
between them. All this is better to see two ‘geog-
raphies’ that require further thought and explora-
tion: first, the unconscious, and second, the
‘space between’. Remember, to reiterate Sharp’s
point, these are not simply conceptual issues;
they are also ethical and political (2009, 78; see
also Barnett 2008).
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
Steve Pile
Three common grounds; a shared ground
that is not actually shared; and a
fundamental disagreement
Three common grounds: (1) relational ontologies
that privilege fluidity; (2) valuing proximity and
intimacy; and (3) an ethnomethodological predis-
position
There are shared coordinates in the latitude and
longitude of emotional and affectual geography.
Both are in agreement that emotions and affects are
fluid (using a range of synonyms to describe this).
This is a shared ontology: emotions move; affects
circulate. Emotions and affects are mobile. While
both have a place for ‘patterns’ of emotions (such
as long-standing geographies of fear, for example)
or affects (such as underlying predispositions
towards hope), basically they are interested in
movements and circulations: in flows between peo-
ple, and other things. They share, then, a relational
ontology that privileges the fluid over the fixed.
In this account, emotions and affect are espe-
cially unbounded. Yet, even while they both agree
that emotions and affects are channelled in some
way (whether through ‘pipes and cables’ or
through emotional labour), neither approach has
enough to say about the psychological and ⁄ or non-
psychological production of boundaries and the
(im)permeabilities that enable and maintain this
channelling; nor, commensurately, abjection, fixi-
ties, intransigencies, psychotic breaks, fetishes, and
so on – that is, about the stuff that doesn’t change
easily or change much at all or, indeed, at all. Sim-
ply valuing ‘relationality’ or ‘fluidity’ or ‘openness’
can ignore the genuine difficulties such subject
positions can pose for people. There are, of course,
exceptions, often associated with psychoanalyti-
cally-inspired work: for example, on phobias or
autism (see Callard 2003; Davidson 2003 2007;
Andrews 2008).
The relational ontology of affectual ⁄ emotional
geography has another key feature: it privileges
proximity and intimacy. Although emotional geog-
raphers want to talk directly to people about their
personal feelings and affectual geographers don’t,
each prefers forms of knowledge that deliver a
sense of the intimate, especially where this is nor-
mally hidden. This can as easily be delivered
through analyses of representations (such as Bill
Viola’s video art [see Thrift 2004a] or W G Sebald’s
haunted writing [see Wylie 2007]) as through vari-
ous forms of interviewing or observation (such as
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
Morris and Thomas 2005; Hubbard 2005). How-
ever, gaining a sense of the emotional or affectual
experiences and undercurrents of life involves a
kind of peeling away of superficial and glib
responses. Indeed, the more intimate and detailed
a story – whether provided by an emotional or an
affectual geographer – the more ‘real’ or ‘true’ and
‘powerful’ it is taken to be. These are narratives
that tend, ultimately, to value the ‘emotionally poi-
gnant’: in a very catholic way, this tends towards
pain and suffering, rather than pleasure and joy
(by contrast, see Kingsbury 2005); towards the
pathological, even if this is in the most prosaic (or
pleasurable) of circumstances.
Preoccupied with these proximate and intimate
accounts of situations and events, both emotional
and affectual geography share a default methodol-
ogy – best termed ‘ethnography’, deploying varia-
tions on participation and observation. To be sure,
there are others: examples include textual analyses
of autobiographies; the analysis of the failure of
representation in literature and cinema; and the
stories of witnesses to injustice and suffering.
Even so, soliciting or discovering testimony is cen-
tral to the research of both (consult Dewsbury
2003). Each may participate in situations or events,
or not; each may occupy the role of observer, for
a time at least; but neither do so with the expecta-
tion of conveying a way of life (or death, it
should be added). Both are averse to interfering
with testimony, however derived, while their anal-
ysis unfolds. Neither wish to convert emotional
situations or affectual events into conceptualisa-
tions alienated from their grounding in real, vital
life. Each approach, that is, grounds it truths in
close-in empirical narratives.7 In all this, the body
becomes key.
A shared ground that is not actually shared: the
body
It appears at first sight that emotional and affectual
geography share a view of the body. They both
draw heavily on phenomenology, and each tends
to treat the body, consequently, as the ‘authentic’
location of emotions ⁄ affects. It is the location
from which one experiences and speaks – and
researches. Thus, both emotional and affectual
geography privilege, or foreground, the body in
their studies (compare, for example, Wylie 2005;
Longhurst et al. 2008; McCormack 2008). In this
view, the body is the site of validation of know-
ledge: emotions are expressed and experienced in
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
11
the body; affects define what a body can do. Here,
there is a shared suspicion of intellectualising,
where the body is marginalised or ignored, in
favour of ethnographic ‘truth’ of the event or of
first hand accounts. Nevertheless, they divide on
the body.
For emotional geography, the body is a site of
feeling and experience. These experiences and feel-
ings are socially embedded, but they are localisable
in the body, and relationships between bodies. The
body, though embedded in social relations, is ulti-
mately personal: it is the location of the psychologi-
cal subject. Emotions may take on social forms of
expression, but behind these forms of expression
lie genuine personal experiences – that are seeking
representation. Indeed, it is the political imperative
of emotional geography to draw out these personal
experiences, to bring them to representation. Thus,
emotional geography cares by bearing witness to
the emotional lives and personal experiences of its
subjects. The more ‘emotional’ the expression of
personal experiences, in this logic, the more the
researcher cares.
In affectual geography, the body is not seen as
personal, but as transpersonal. More, the body is
used to challenge the expression of emotions: the
body, in this sense, is the location of the non-psy-
chological. The body is not used to solicit telling
testimony about people’s lives, instead it becomes
a device that enables the researcher to reveal the
trans-human, the non-cognitive, the inexpressible,
that underlies and constitutes social life – albeit
unknowingly. If the body in emotional geography
is a way of recognising differences, of recognising
the human in humanity, then affectual geo-
graphy’s body is both universal and also prior to
its constitution in social relations. As a conse-
quence, the singular body ceases to be of political
or ethical interest.8 Instead, the focus of political
and ethical theorising turns towards interactions
between bodies and (the manipulation of) flows of
affect.
So, both emotional and affectual geography take
the body seriously, but not in the same way. Both
acknowledge the social production of the body, yet
in ways that tend to universalise the body – either
by valorising the personal that lies beyond the
social, or by assuming a transpersonal non-human
that lies beyond the production of humanness.
Here, we can begin to discern the fundamental
split that separates emotional and affectual geo-
graphy.
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
12
A fundamental disagreement: ‘the thought’ versus
‘affect’
The fundamental difference between emotional and
affectual geography lies in the split between ‘the
thought’ and ‘affect’, as mirrored in the split
between the cognitive and the non-cognitive. To be
sure, ‘the thought’, here, is a psychological object.
This can involve ‘thought thoughts’, such as per-
sonal and collective rationalisations or expressed
emotions or abstract ideas, and so on. However,
‘the thought’ is more than just thought thoughts: it
includes a range of ‘unthought thoughts’ as well,
including thinking at the back of the mind or on
the tip of the tongue, and also inklings, intuitions,
déjà vu, the tacit, premonitions, sixth senses, sensa-
tions, fancies, feelings, and so on. ‘Affect’, mean-
while, is non-cognitive – describing both a bodily
capacity to be affected, and to affect, and also spe-
cific flows of affect that lie beyond cognition. It is
the unthought.
Here’s the rub. In emotional geography, affect
remains a psychological object: a thought of some
kind, even if it is an unconscious one. Meanwhile,
in affectual geography, affect is always non-psy-
chological: affect is never an object of conscious-
ness, nor is it even unconscious or an unthought
thought.
In emotional geography, even with its focus
clearly on expressed emotion, thought is related
somehow to affect. There is no presumption that
thought is an object that is only constituted in con-
sciousness, even while it is an object of conscious-
ness; nor is thought only determined by social
meanings, expressions and values. This allows
thought to reach back into pre- or non-conscious-
ness, and to connect – albeit in disguised and opa-
que ways – to affect. This is not to say that there is
a straightforward relationship between the two: the
thought is not the affect (on this everyone agrees).
However, thought can convey something of the
non- or pre-cognitive feelings of an individual.
Thus, emotional geography’s subject is a psycho-
logical subject.
In contrast, affectual geography views the psy-
chological subject with enduring suspicion. This is
because non-representational theory sees thought
as being consciously and socially constituted –
through representational practices of all kinds.
Thus, consciousness is seen as essentially inessen-
tial, as are other layers of the mind (the precon-
scious or unconscious), with the essence of being
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
Steve Pile
lying underneath, in the body or bodies (not neces-
sarily human): effectively, in materialities and in
affects. Affect, in this understanding, cannot be
attached to, or emerge into, a thought; that is, it
cannot become an object of consciousness. Concep-
tually, thought is radically detached from affect.
Consequently, affectual geography emphasises the
non-psychological (that which cannot be repre-
sented) aspects of the subject; evident, for example,
in abject suffering and pain, when the subject has
its cloak of subjectivity torn to shreds (Dewsbury
2003; Harrison 2007; Bissell 2009).
So, emotional geography is focused on a psycho-
logical subject, where thoughts and affects are
entangled in complex and devious ways; in
contrast, affectual geography is focused on the
non-psychological subject, where affects are
always already ungraspable and unrepresentable
by thought. Fine. But so what? This split has conse-
quences for how we understand the manipulability
of emotions and affect for political purposes and,
also, the ethical imperatives that might be bound
up in emotions and affects.
Thus, Thrift passionately argues that affect is
being actively engineered, such that it is becoming
increasingly akin to the networks of pipes and cables
that are already part of the technological uncon-
scious of the city (Thrift 2004a, 58; also 2004b). This
engineering metaphor has its own technologic: it
casts affect as something that can be piped or
cabled, rewired, rerouted, re-networked in con-
scious and intentional ways. Much of Thrift’s work
is devoted to the urgent analysis of the means and
effects of engineering affects: from the ‘emotional
soup’ of corporate life to the political use of rhetoric
to the geopolitics of fear (see Thrift 2008, ch 10). He
cautions that emotional vocabularies only express
affects that have already been engineered by the
powerful. Thus, Thrift is suspicious of the language
of emotions precisely because they appear personal
and authentic, when in fact they are not.
As Thien astutely observes (2005a, 452–3), in this
logic, emotional geography becomes characterised
as belonging to an increasingly inadequate form of
politics that is out of tune with, and incapable of
understanding, both the real world manipulations
of affect and also a whole range of potential
political interventions in these manipulations.
Meanwhile, affectual geography, and consequently
non-representational theory, seems to have turned
away from a spatial politics of affect towards a
generalised argument about the commodification of
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
everything and the (associated) affectual mobilisa-
tion of the masses by the powerful (see Barnett
2008). Consequently, it can be accused of produc-
ing a depersonalised politics incapable of resonat-
ing with people’s actual experiences. Thus, Thien
(2005a) argues that models of affect proposed by
Thrift and others effectively marginalise emotions
by making them appear secondary and superficial.
Nor does she agree with non-representational the-
ory’s rendering of emotions as always already engi-
neered.
The debate between emotional and affectual
geographies is not simply an intellectual land-grab
for ownership of terms, such as affect, feeling, emo-
tion, or for contents, such as love, hate, anger, fear,
joy, and so on. It is a conceptual and political strug-
gle. Splitting, or not splitting, thought from affect is
the central fault line that distinguishes emotional
and affectual geographies.9 Yet the debate about the
relationship between the non-cognitive and the cog-
nitive, the conscious and the unconscious, about the
dynamics and resistances of psychological and non-
psychological processes can usefully be taken a step
further. What remains, however, after all this agree-
ment and disagreement is a failure – in all but the
psychoanalytic parts of emotional and affectual
geography – to really think through the uncon-
scious, and also how it is that emotions and ⁄ or
affects actually do move between people.
Two missing geographies: (1) the
unconscious and (2) the space in-between
Emotional and affectual geographies share some-
thing else: the use of the concept ‘unconscious’ for
aspects of the mind that are non- or pre-conscious
and an idea of relationality that invokes the space
in-between bodies (see Harrison 2007). Yet, for me,
both these notions warrant further consideration.
This is not simply because they often enough
remain tacit or assumed, but because a dynamic –
psychoanalytic – conception of the unconscious
and of the spaces between subjects may allow the
weaknesses in both emotional and affectual geo-
graphy to be avoided. To make this argument, I
will draw on the work of psychoanalytic geogra-
phers, whose work has been under-used or ignored
by much of emotional and affectual geography.
The unconscious
Both emotional and affectual geography claim
some inspiration from psychoanalysis, whether this
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
13
is directly from Freudian psychotherapeutic prac-
tice or as filtered through queer theory. Indeed,
both claim to value, for example, drive theory (see
Callard 2003) and its potential to disrupt cosy and
easy renderings of emotion and affect (see Bondi
2005, 439; Thrift 2004a, 61). I have noted, moreover,
the layer cake of non-cognitive, pre-cognitive and
cognitive in affect theory. This bears a remarkable
resemblance to the psychoanalytic topography of
unconscious, preconscious and conscious (respec-
tively). Thus we might draw equivalences between
the non-cognitive and the unconscious, the pre-cog-
nitive and the pre-conscious, and the cognitive and
the conscious.10 Potentially, then, a psychoanalytic
conception of psychic systems might be easily
transplanted into affectual geography. Similarly,
emotional geography’s emphasis on the flows of
emotions between people draws on psychothera-
peutic concepts of transference and counter-trans-
ference (following Pile 1991; Bondi 2005).
Yet psychoanalytic geography is also at odds
with the humanistic inspirations of emotional and
affectual geography, where these imply a subject
that is stable, coherent and integrated; nor can psy-
choanalytic geography rest easily with any pre-
sumption of a split subject that is universal,
ahistorical and undynamic (see Philo and Parr
2003). Psychoanalytic geographies have, in other
words, been relentlessly Janus-faced: always point-
ing in (at least) two opposite directions at once. An
example would be Paul Kingsbury’s (2005) study
of Jamaican tourism, where holidaymakers work
hard to make their holiday a holiday, while those
who serve the holidaymakers work to produce a
space for holidaying that appears to require no
work. Similarly, we can recall Gillian Rose’s (1993)
notion of ‘paradoxical space’, where apparent con-
tradictions are actually responsible for producing
space.
Using psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject,
affects and emotions can be seen as both personal
and social: without the personal being reducible to
the social, nor the social being reducible to the per-
sonal (Pile 1996, 241–56). Emotions, thus, no longer
belong exclusively to any individual – even though
they are experienced and expressed this way – but
are part of what we might call a psychodynamics
connected to space and place. Emotions, now, lie
between individuals, and between individuals and
perceptual environments. Meanwhile, affect turns
on the notion of intensity and its capacity, there-
fore, to ‘do’. Affect is strongly associated with the
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
14
unconscious and the Id, but this does not mean
that it cannot ‘leak’ into other systems, or find
forms of expression: just as unconscious thoughts
(that have enough intensity associated with them)
find expression in dreams through dream-work, so
can affects find expression, but always in disguised
and deceitful ways (Pile 2006).
While psychoanalytic geographies have tended
to be suspicious of expressed emotions, this does
not mean that they do not take them seriously.
Instead, psychoanalytic geographies have tended to
focus on desires and anxieties, phobias and plea-
sures – in the middle ground between inexpressible
affects and expressed emotions (see Callard 2003;
Davidson 2003; Thomas 2004; Thien 2005b; Pile
2005; Kingsbury 2005).
I would like to mention three consequences of a
specifically psychoanalytic conception of the
unconscious for both emotional and affectual geo-
graphy.
(1) The psychoanalytic concept of unconscious is
mostly associated with the notion of repression
(and perhaps this is why it is sidestepped in both
emotional and affectual geography). Whatever one
thinks about repression – and I must emphasise
that much of psychoanalytic theory is devoted to
conceptualising an unconscious that is produced
by non-repressive mechanisms and is, indeed, non-
psychological – what psychoanalysis demands is
an account of the production of the unconscious,
even while its contents and dynamics remain fugi-
tives from knowing. Psychoanalysis, consequently,
asks not only about how repression is achieved,
and why, but also about how that repression is
maintained or adapted.
Psychoanalysis presumes that the unconscious
carries out a kind of guerrilla warfare with those
agencies (such as the Super-Ego) that try to prevent
it from gaining expression. The unconscious strug-
gles to find ways of making its presence felt
against all means of preventing it from so doing.
This, then, undermines any cognition-centred emo-
tional geography that takes for granted the genu-
ineness of expressed emotions (in agreement with
affectual geography); and also, any affectual geo-
graphy that presumes an already existing
impermeable layer between the non-cognitive or
non-psychological and everything else (in agree-
ment with emotional geography). Here it is impor-
tant to remember that the psyche is always already
corporeal, so psychoanalysis usefully offers a way
of avoiding the dichotomy of the psychological and
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
Steve Pile
non-psychological, or of the mind and the body
(see Pile 2009).
For emotional geography, the unconscious requi-
res a sense of the limits of emotional openness,
honesty and exposure. For affectual geography, it
suggests the need for an account of the production
of the capacities of bodies or of affects, rather than
simply ‘disappearing’ this into the transpersonal or
universal.
(2) The topological understanding of the uncon-
scious in psychoanalysis enables two key questions:
how does anything get into the unconscious (as a
produced space); and, once there, can it get out
again? If the unconscious is entirely sealed (as
affectual geography presumes), then there is very
little problem. Unconscious circulations of non-psy-
chological contents simply would not trouble the
conscious mind, and we should consequently bear
them no mind. There’s no point in dealing with the
non-psychological aspects of human psychology if
they cannot affect – have an impact upon – the
psychological. In practice, ironically, affectual geo-
graphy abandons this assumption. This is problem-
atic, of course: at the very least, affectual
geography’s models need to be modified to permit
affects to emerge into higher layers. That said,
neither emotional nor affectual geography have
accounts of how, or why, affects emerge into (or
are prevented from emerging into) cognition and
representation.
As affects can trouble the mind, more ques-
tions arise: which affects? Why some and not
others? How? What prevents some affects emerg-
ing? Can affects emerge direct into cognition, or
must they always be routed through the pre-
cognitive? What is, in other words, the exact nat-
ure of the permeable layer between non-cognitive
and pre-cognitive, the pre-cognitive and the
cognitive? And so on. Politically important
amongst this is the question of whether the
cognitive can influence the pre-cognitive and
cognitive, and how? It is the presumption that
the powerful can manipulate the non-cognitive
that needs greatest attention.
All this may appear abstract, but Heidi Nast
(2000) has shown how unconscious racisms and
Oedipal dynamics structure the fabric of the city.
For her, unconscious psychodynamics can find
their expression, albeit unwittingly, in seemingly
conscious and rational ways, such as urban form.
In this topographic, the unconscious is not separa-
ble from consciousness, nor a layer beneath or
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
behind or beyond people’s awareness, it is under
people’s noses (see also Thomas 2004; Hook 2005;
Kingsbury 2007). As importantly, both unconscious
and conscious processes structure the production
of urban space, and these can interfere or collude
with one another (see also Pile 1996).
Following on. (3) In affectual geography, the
non-cognitive remains relentlessly unknowable,
unrepresentable. In emotional geography, the
unconscious is abandoned in favour of expressed
inter-subjective relations. Neither relies upon an
account of the specific ‘contents’ of the uncon-
scious, nor of what happens in the unconscious.
Turbulent passions remain on the surface, while
still waters run deep. There is a consequence to
this, and it returns us to the political.
A strong argument for thinking about affect in
non-representational theory is that it is being ‘engi-
neered’ by the powerful. It is suggested that this
may be happening, in new forms, through (for
example) consumerism, management techniques
and skills training, and media representations. It is
not clear, since affect is supposedly non-cognitive,
how it is that the powerful – and non-representa-
tional theory – can actually have this ability to
know the unknowable, let alone to engineer that
which cannot be grasped. If, on the other hand, it
is argued that the powerful are actually manipulat-
ing the pre-cognitive or cognitive, then what role is
affect playing? Maybe, instead, affects resist the
manipulations of the powerful. We simply do not
know.
Similarly, many emotional geographers have
wished to incorporate an understanding of emo-
tional transferences into their understanding of the
power dynamics within research practices, yet
there is no account of the complex ways in which
these transferences might express themselves.
Unconscious fantasies bound up in the research
process can be remarkably powerful and hard to
reveal precisely because both the researcher and
the researched produce them together, unwittingly
(see Pile forthcoming). Instead, emotional geogra-
phy has tended to provide rather plain descriptions
of the emotions the researcher expressly feels (see
Widdowfield 2000).
If questioning the topographics and dynamics of
the unconscious gnaws at the conceptual ropes that
bind emotional and affectual geography, then it
also opens up the geography of these approaches.
Let’s look at just one such geography: the space
in-between.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
15
The space in-between
Emotional geography commonly concerns itself
with the emotions that people feel for one
another and, more extensively, for places, for
landscapes, for objects in landscapes and in spe-
cific situations. In such studies, people express
emotions about something. These emotions are
taken as personal, yet there is often an attempt to
fit these expressed emotions into a wider context
of emotions. Even so, an understanding of this
wider context is frequently built up out of peo-
ple’s expressed emotions. Commonly, then, the
space between people is one of direct experience,
and based on the smooth transmission ⁄ reception
of tacit or explicit feelings (whether from other
people or from objects such as landscapes). This
in-between does not scale up particularly well.
What, for example, is the emotional geography of
global charity or urban pleasures? What physical
and psychological distances are formed and per-
formed? How does emotion ‘jump scales’ or,
indeed, produce scales? And what resistances
might there be in the space between people and
their environments?
These are not unknown questions for emotional
geographers – see an exemplary essay by Deborah
Thien (2005b) or Rachel Pain’s (2009) study of the
geopolitics of fear – but the geography of
in-between is relentlessly constructed in the smooth
space of an encounter between a person and
another person or people; or in the encounter
between a person and their environment, whether
through travelling, dwelling, reading, ageing, con-
suming, cowering or whatever. This is not a neces-
sary ‘default mode’, but this is this space between
that is easiest to ally with a politics of caring, and
the production of caring or care-less environments.
Emotional geography can and should examine its
own presuppositions about relationality, encounter
and the space in-between.
Affectual geography, meanwhile, has come up
with three distinct ways to represent the space
in-between. Affects flow between bodies by circula-
tion, by transmission and by contagion (see, for
example, Thrift 2008, 235–43). Even acknowledging
that metaphors are necessarily inexact, each is
somewhat problematic for thinking about how
non-cognitive affects cross the space between peo-
ple, and indeed how they are manipulated.
We have, to a degree, already encountered circu-
lation. It is ‘pipes and cables’, as used to distribute
water or television (rather than other forms of
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
16
circulation, such as circuses or ideas). It is mechani-
cal and practical. It is engineered. The problem is
that the metaphor is inadequate to its object: where
pipes and cables, and engineering, are knowable
and graspable, affect – according to non-representa-
tional theory – is simply not. Nor do we know
how the piping, or the cabling, is constructed.
More than this, these pipes and cables presume
that affects, as they are distributed, are immutable
in transit: from wherever they are distributed from,
the affects that leave and the affects that arrive.
The recurring metaphor of pipes and cables (see
McCormack 2008, 426) may explain nothing, but
more in doubt is whether it actually describes any-
thing useful about how affect ⁄ s actually travel ⁄ s.
Transmission, meanwhile, appears to be modelled
on radio, rather than, say, the dissemination of
ideas through specific networks or perhaps the
workings of car engines. In this model, the capacity
to affect is likened to radio transmission and recep-
tion. In this sense, the transmission of affect has
two specific qualities: it spreads and it is program-
matic. Further, it relies on the idea that bodies are
like radios. This broadcast metaphor gives it a spe-
cific geography: of broadcast area and of points of
transmission and reception. This, though, begs dif-
ficult questions about points of transmission and
the quality of reception. Do we all have the (same)
capacity to transmit (affect) and receive (be
affected)? If not, who has what? And how is this
capacity (or incapacity) produced (or not)? As
importantly, this is not the ‘pipes and cables’ chan-
nelling of affect, it is more like broadcasting
through an ether. The space between bodies is not
bridged by pipes and cables, but is an invisible
field within which bodies are always already
located. But what is the nature of the ether that car-
ries affects? How do we ‘pick up’ affects? And
how far do they reach – from one body to another,
across a room, through a city, nation, world?
Finally, contagion. In this, affects are like viruses
that hop – by some medium: air, water, exchanges
of bodily fluids – between people, thereby infecting
them. People, in this view, are infected through
proximity to a source and by the vectors of the dis-
ease. But who is the ‘plague Mary’ of an affect?
What vectors? What viruses? Is an affect a body in
itself with its own life and life cycle? Is anyone
immune, or can they be immunised? Interestingly,
contagion speaks to the corporeal, non-human
and non-cognitive assumptions being made in
non-representational theory about affects. In this
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
Steve Pile
respect, it may be non-representational theory’s
best metaphor. However, the idea that affects are
like viruses naturalises the ways in which affects
might ‘live’ in and through bodies, paradoxically
rendering them uncannily knowable by associating
affects with what humans know about viruses and
their representations of them.
Although radio waves and viruses do, at least,
have an ungraspable or invisible side to them,
these metaphors also render opaque the actual
mechanisms and media through which affect might
actually travel between people. We simply do not
know how an affect might be transmitted, or
passed, from one body to another.
It would appear that there is still much work to
be done in thinking through the geographies of
emotional and affectual life.
Conclusion
Emotional and affectual geography is, at first sight,
far too broad and complex to have anything like
coherent conceptual underpinnings, far less a radi-
cal split between one form of emotional geography
and another. Charting agreements and disagree-
ments within the burgeoning field of emotional
and affectual geography has been a means to iden-
tify both its weaknesses and limits. I have mapped:
(1) their relational ontologies, privileging fluidity
and movement; (2) their interweaving, and valua-
tion, of proximity, intimacy and closeness; (3) their
shared methodological predispositions; and (4)
their understandings of the body. The crux of the
matter, however, is the presumed relationship – or
non-relationship – between thought and affect in
emotional and affectual geography.
Emotional geography ensures that there is
no split between thought and affect. It is argued
that there is no straightforward correspondence
between affect, the thought and its representation.
Nonetheless, emotional geography fails to account
for the relationship between them – and this failing
is strongly associated with emotional geography’s
turn away from its anti-humanistic psychoanalytic
roots towards a cognition-centred approach, under-
pinned by phenomenology. This is especially evi-
dent in those places where emotional geography
ignores the dynamics of the unconscious.
Affectual geography radically splits affect from
thought, and thought from its representatives. In so
doing, it constructs affect as the pure non-represen-
tational object: it cannot be known, grasped or
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
made intelligible. The means through which affect
might make itself known, whether via feelings or
emotions or representations, are thereby rendered
opaque. Nonetheless, contradictorily, affect can be
consciously and deliberately engineered, but no
account of how this is possible is given. Without a
theory of affect itself – or of how affect circulates,
gets transmitted or becomes contagious – affectual
geography can (ironically) only deal with its sur-
face expression.
Though affect cannot be presented or repre-
sented, affectual geographers, drawing upon non-
representational theory, constantly evoke moments
when affect is evident: be these smiles, laughter,
jokes or hope, anger, shame and so on. Apologies
for being blunt, but this is a straightforward hypoc-
risy. It continually does what it says cannot be
done: it cannot help but re-present and represent
affect – and in language. Ultimately, the non-repre-
sentational theory’s approach to affect demon-
strates two things: first, that it is fundamentally a
representational practice that is, importantly,
unable to recognise itself as such (see, for example,
Latham and McCormack 2009); second, that it is
not a theory, but a chain gang of metaphors (or
resources, or assumptions).
The greatest threat to emotional geography is
that it should tie itself ever more closely to two
things: (1) first, an ever-expanding shopping list of
expressed emotions that geographers should shop
for – without ever reflecting on why emotional
geographies should be conducted in the first place;
(2) an increasingly cognition-centred, humanistic
and romantic view of expressed emotions, where
accounts that display ever greater poignancy and
intimacy become the stock-in-trade of the caring
researcher. That is, emotional geography must
know why emotions are important and interesting;
also, it cannot presume that its approach is the
only way to be caring, intimate or close; and it can-
not assume that intimacy and proximity are inher-
ently more caring or better than distance. Put
another way, emotional geography ought to be able
to recognise the care involved in non-representa-
tional – and other – styles of researching and writ-
ing. Avoiding these pitfalls will allow, promisingly,
emotional geography to extend its repertoire of
geographies, rather than simply lengthening its list
of affecting emotions.
Behind all this is a struggle between political
visions: one formed around caring and emotional
transformation, another formed around the critique
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
17
of affectual manipulation and an ethics of radical
openness. Whatever the worthiness of these polit-
ico-ethical positions – and who would dare argue
against either? – lessons drawn from psychoana-
lytic geography should cause pause for thought.
But this should not prevent us from thinking more
about emotions, feelings and affect – for we’ve
much further to go in thinking through their geo-
graphies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Open University’s cul-
ture, space and politics collaboratory for their
insightful reading of an early (12 000 word!) draft
of this paper. In particular, Nadia Bartolini, Melissa
Butcher, Simon Hutta, Gillian Rose and Ariel
Terranova-Webb provided detailed comments that
influenced the progression of this paper. Progres-
sion to publication was guided by the insightful
and supportive editorial work of Alison Blunt.
Notes
1 Including this sample from the last few years: Adey
(2008 2009); Bosco (2006 2007); Brown (2008); Carter
and McCormack (2006); Cloke et al. (2008); Colls (2004
2006); Dyer et al. (2008); Fenster (2004); Hasse (2005);
Holloway (2006); Kearney and Bradley (2009); Kraftl
and Adey (2008); Kraftl and Horton (2007); Kwan
(2007); Lorimer (2008); Mackian (2004); Major (2008);
Milligan (2005); O’Tuathail (2003); Rose (2004); Saville
(2008); Smith et al. (2008); Smith et al. (2009); Thomas
(2007); Tolia-Kelly (2006); Wood and Smith (2004). See
also notes 3 and 4 below.
2 Also see Davidson and Bondi (2004, 373) and David-
son et al. (2005, 1).
3 See, for example: Widdowfield (2000); Davidson and
Milligan (2004); Davidson and Bondi (2004); Thien
(2005a); Davidson et al. (2005); Davidson (2007).
4 Here, we can include Dewsbury (2003); McCormack
(2003 2007 2008); Latham and McCormack (2004);
Anderson (2004 2005 2006); Thrift (2004a 2008, chap-
ters 8 and 10) and Harrison (2007).
5 Amongst the more significant papers on affect, from
the perspective of non-representational theory, are:
Dewsbury (2003); McCormack (2003 2007); Latham
and McCormack (2004); Anderson (2004 2005 2006);
Thrift (2004a 2008); Harrison (2007).
6 See, for example, McCormack (2007).
7 Narratives that, because of their ever closer attention
to detail, once drew sharp criticism for their increas-
ing failure to see the big (or indeed a bigger) picture:
see Gregory (1981).
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
18
8 This view has been rightly condemned for its failure
to differentiate between differently produced bodies
(see especially Tolia-Kelly 2006; also see Saldanha
forthcoming).
9 This fault line has another feature. Fundamentally, if
emotional geography is seeking a utopia of form (via
intimacy), then non-representational theory is seeking
a utopia of process (via affect) (following Harvey’s
[2000] distinction).
10 Note, psychoanalysis has more than one way to
understand the mind-body: see Pile (2009).
References
Adey P 2008 Airports, mobility, and the calculative archi-
tecture of affective control Geoforum 39 438–51
Adey P 2009 Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics,
and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 274–95
Anderson B 2004 Time-stilled space-slowed: how bore-
dom matters Geoforum 35 739–54
Anderson B 2005 Practices of judgement and domestic
geographies of affect Social and Cultural Geography 6
645–59
Anderson B 2006 Becoming and being hopeful: towards a
theory of affect Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 24 733–52
Anderson B and Harrison P 2006 Questioning affect and
emotion Area 38, 333–5
Anderson K and Smith S 2001 Editorial: emotional geog-
raphies Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
26 7–10
Andrews G J 2008 Spaces of dizziness and dread: navigat-
ing acrophobia Geografiska Annaler 89B 307–17
Barnett C 2008 Political affects in public space: normative
blind-spots in non-representational ontologies Transac-
tions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 186–200
Bissell D 2009 Obdurate pains, transient intensities:
affect and the chronically pained body Environment and
Planning A 41 911–28
Bondi L 1993 Locating identity politics in Keith M and
Pile S eds Place and the politics of identity Routledge,
London 84–101
Bondi L 2005 Making connections and thinking through
emotions: between geography and psychotherapy Trans-
actions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 433–48
Bosco F J 2006 The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three
decades of human rights activism: embeddedness, emo-
tions, and social movements Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 96 342–65
Bosco F J 2007 Emotions that build networks: geographies
of human rights movement in Argentina and beyond
Tijdscrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 98 545–63
Brown G 2008 Ceramics, clothing and other bodies: affec-
tive geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters
Social and Cultural Geography 9 915–32
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
Steve Pile
Budd L and Adey P 2009 The software-simulated air-
world: anticipatory code and affective aeromobilities
Environment and Planning A 41 1366–85
Callard F 2003 The taming of psychoanalysis in geogra-
phy Social and Cultural Geography 4 295–312
Carter S and McCormack D 2006 Film, geopolitics and
affective logics of intervention Political Geography 25
228–45
Cloke P, May J and Johnsen S 2008 Performativity and
affect in the homeless city Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 26 241–63
Colls R 2004 ‘Looking alright, feeling alright’: emotions,
sizing and the geographies of women’s experiences of
clothing consumption Social and Cultural Geography 5
583–96
Colls R 2006 Outsize ⁄ outside: bodily bigness and the
emotional experiences of British women shopping for
clothes Gender, Place and Culture 13 529–45
Conradson D 2005 Freedom, space and perspective: mov-
ing encounters with other ecologies in Davidson J,
Bondi L and Smith M eds Emotional geographies Ash-
gate, Aldershot 103–16
Davidson J 2003 Phobic geographies Ashgate, Aldershot
Davidson J 2007 ‘In a world of her own . . . ’: re-presenting
alienation and emotion in the lives and writings of
women with autism Gender, Place and Culture 14 659–77
Davidson J and Bondi L 2004 Spatialising affect; affecting
space: an introduction Gender, Place and Culture 11 373–
74
Davidson J and Milligan C 2004 Editorial: embodying
emotion sensing space: introducing emotional geogra-
phies Social and Cultural Geography 5 523–32
Davidson J, Bondi L and Smith M eds 2005 Emotional
geographies Ashgate, Aldershot
Dewsbury J-D 2003 Witnessing space: ‘knowledge with-
out contemplation’ Environment and Planning A 35 1907–
32
Dyer S, McDowell L and Batnitzky A 2008 Emotional
labour ⁄ body work: the caring labours of migrants in
the UK’s National Health Service Geoforum 39 2030–8
Fenster T 2004 The global city and the holy city: narratives on
knowledge, planning and diversity Pearson, Harlow
Gregory D 1981 Human agency and human geography
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 6 1–16
Harrison P 2007 ‘How shall I say it . . . ?’ Relating the non-
relational Environment and Planning A 39 590–608
Harvey D 2000 Spaces of Hope Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh
Hasse J 2005 On the cultural significance of spatial bound-
aries in cemeteries – the example of cemeteries for
drowned sailors Geographische Zeitschrift 93 221–36
Holloway J 2006 Enchanted spaces: the séance, affect, and
geographies of religion Annals of the Association of Amer-
ican Geographers 96 182–7
Hook D 2005 Monumental space and the uncanny Geofo-
rum 36 688–704
Emotions and affect in recent human geography
Hubbard P 2005 The geographies of ‘going out’: emotion
and embodiment in the evening economy in Davidson J,
Bondi L and Smith M eds Emotional geographies Ashgate,
Aldershot 117–34
Kearney A and Bradley J J 2009 ‘Too strong to ever not
be there’: place names and emotional geographies Social
and Cultural Geography 10 77–94
Kingsbury P 2004 Psychoanalytic approaches in Duncan
J S, Johnson N C and Schein R eds A companion to
cultural geography Blackwell, Oxford 108–20
Kingsbury P 2005 Jamaican tourism and the politics of
enjoyment Geoforum 36 113–32
Kingsbury P 2007 The extimacy of space Social and Cul-
tural Geography 8 235–58
Kraftl P and Adey P 2008 Architecture ⁄ affect ⁄ inhabita-
tion: geographies of being-in-buildings Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 98 213–31
Kraftl P and Horton J 2007 ‘The health event’: everyday,
affective politics of participation Geoforum 38 1012–27
Kwan M P 2007 Affecting geospatial technologies: toward
a feminist politics of emotion Professional Geographer 59
22–34
Latham A and McCormack D 2004 Moving cities: rethink-
ing the materialities of urban geographies Progress in
Human Geography 28 701–24
Latham A and McCormack D 2009 Thinking with images
in non-representational cities: vignettes from Berlin Area
41 252–62
Ley D and Samuels M eds 1978 Humanistic geography:
prospects and problems Croom Helm, London
Longhurst R, Ho E and Johnston L 2008 Using ‘the body’
as an ‘instrument of research’: kimch’i and pavlova Area
40 208–17
Lorimer H 2008 Cultural geography: non-representational
conditions and concerns Progress in Human Geography 32
551–9
Mackian S 2004 Mapping reflexive communities: visualiz-
ing the geographies of emotion Social and Cultural Geog-
raphy 5 615–31
Major C 2008 Affect work and infected bodies: biosecurity
in an age of emerging infectious diseases Environment
and Planning A 40 1633–46
McCormack D 2003 An event of geographical ethics in
spaces of affect Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 28 488–507
McCormack D 2006 For the love of pipes and cables: a
response to Deborah Thien Area 38 330–2
McCormack D 2007 Molecular affects in human geogra-
phies Environment and Planning A 39 359–77
McCormack D 2008 Engineering affective atmospheres on
the moving geographies of the 1897 Andrée Expedition
Cultural Geographies 15 413–30
Milligan C 2005 From home to ‘home’: situating emotions
within the caregiving experience Environment and Plan-
ning A 37 2105–20
Morris S and Thomas C 2005 Placing the dying
body: emotional, situational and embodied factors in
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
19
preferences for place of final care and death in cancer
in Davidson J, Bondi L and Smith M eds Emotional
geographies Ashgate, Aldershot 19–32
Nash C 2000 Performativity in practice: some recent work
in cultural geography Progress in Human Geography 24
653–64
Nast H J 2000 Mapping the ‘unconscious’: racism and the
Oedipal family Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 90 215–55
O’Tuathail G 2003 ‘Just out looking for a fight’: American
affect and the invasion of Iraq Antipode 35 856–70
Pain R 2009 Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geo-
politics Progress in Human Geography 33 466–86
Paterson M 2005 Affecting touch: towards a ‘felt’ phe-
nomenology of therapeutic touch in Davidson J, Bondi
L and Smith M eds Emotional geographies Ashgate,
Aldershot 161–73
Philo C and Parr H 2003 Introducing psychoanalytic
geographies Social and Cultural Geography 4 283–93
Pile S 1991 Practising interpretative human geography
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16 458–
69
Pile S 1996 The body and the city: psychoanalysis, space and
subjectivity Routledge, London
Pile S 2005 Real cities: modernity, space and the phantasmago-
ras of city life Sage, London
Pile S 2006 Building dreams: space, psychoanalysis and
the city Annual of Psychoanalysis XXXIII 79–92
Pile S 2009 Topographies of the body-and-mind: skin ego,
body ego, and the film ‘Memento’ Subjectivity 27 134–54
Pile S forthcoming Intimate distance: the unconscious
dimensions of the rapport between researcher and
researched The Professional Geographer
Rose G 1993 Feminism and geography: the limits of geographi-
cal knowledge Polity Press, Cambridge
Rose G 2004 ‘Everyone’s cuddled up and it just looks
really nice’: an emotional geography of some mums
and their family photos Social and Cultural Geography 5
549–64
Rowles G 1978 The prisoners of space? Exploring the geo-
graphical experience of older people Westview, Boulder
CO
Saldanha A forthcoming Skin, affect, aggregation: Guat-
tarian variations on Fanon Environment and Planning A
Saville S 2008 Playing with fear: parkour and the mobility
of emotion Social and Cultural Geography 9 891–914
Sharp J 2009 Geography and gender: what belongs to
feminist geography? Emotion, power and change Pro-
gress in Human Geography 33 74–80
Shaw I G R and Warf B 2009 Worlds of affect: virtual
geographies of video games Environment and Planning A
41 1332–43
Smith F, Jamison J and Dwyer C 2008 Work and wonder
at the weekend: on emotions in feminist geographical
praxis Gender, Place and Culture 15 533–45
Smith M, Davidson J, Cameron L and Bondi L eds 2009
Emotion, place and culture Ashgate, Aldershot
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
20
Thien D 2005a After or beyond feeling? A consideration
of affect and emotion in geography Area 37 450–6
Thien D 2005b Intimate distances: considering questions
of ‘us’ In Davidson J, Bondi L and Smith M eds Emo-
tional geographies Ashgate, Aldershot 191–204
Thomas F 2007 Eliciting emotions in HIV ⁄ AIDS research:
a diary-based approach Area 39 74–82
Thomas M E 2004 Pleasure and propriety: teen girls and
the practice of straight space Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space 22 773–89
Thrift N 1996 Spatial formations Sage, London
Thrift N 2004a Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial pol-
itics of affect Geografiska Annaler 86B 57–78
Thrift N 2004b Remembering the technological uncon-
scious by foregrounding knowledges of position Envi-
ronment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 175–90
Thrift N 2008 Non-representational theory: space ⁄ poli-
tics ⁄ affect Routledge, London
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 5–20 2010
ISSN 0020-2754  2009 The Author.
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
Steve Pile
Thrift N and Dewsbury J-D 2000 Dead geographies—and
how to make them live Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 18 411–32
Tolia-Kelly D P 2006 Affect – an ethnocentric encounter?
Exploring the ‘universalist’ imperative of emotional ⁄
affectual geographies Area 38 213–17
Tuan Y-F 1979 Landscapes of fear Blackwell, Oxford
Valentine G 1989 The geography of women’s fear Area 21
385–90
Widdowfield R 2000 The place of emotions in academic
research Area 32 199–208
Wood N and Smith S J 2004 Instrumental routes to emo-
tional geographies Social and Cultural Geography 5 533–48
Wylie J 2005 A single day’s walking: narrating the self
and landscape on the South West Coast Path Transac-
tions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 234–47
Wylie J 2007 The spectral geographies of W G Sebald Cul-
tural Geographies 14 171–88