Towards an evental geography

collided with Earth, sending dust and debris
flying into the air. This noxious blanket would
eventually commit dinosaurs to a fossilized
future.

The reason for naming these three events is

that each one either took place with humans or
without them. Event 1 was a seemingly expli-
citly anthropocentric event; event 2 involved
the interaction between humans and ‘nature’;
and event 3 happened before there was any trace
of human consciousness on earth. But must we
confine ourselves to this human/non-human bin-
ary? The purpose of this paper is to provide a
definition of an evental geography beyond the
primacy of anthropocentric correlation, centered
on the concept of the ‘geo-event’, which –
briefly for now – is defined as the transformation
of a world by ‘inexistent objects’ and the result-
ing shift in affective relations between objects.

For

decades,

following

Kant’s

(1997)

‘Copernican Turn’ (the Enlightenment philoso-
pher’s insistence that the world is principally
correlated with thinking), continental philoso-
phy has been concerned with deconstructing
and challenging the nexus of discourse, culture,
and power-knowledge (e.g. Derrida, 1976;
Foucault, 1970). The influence of poststructur-
alism is vast, having made a massive impact
in geography, where its scholars and practi-
tioners took on the epistemological challenges
posed by the cultural turn to deconstruct the
fixity of meaning and the stability of spatial
categorizations and orderings (e.g. Dixon and
Jones, 1998). Feminist geography and later
feminist political geography and geopolitics
(England, 2003; Fluri, 2009; Hyndman, 2001;
Massey, 1994; Sharp, 2007) sought to highlight
the human body as enmeshed within discursive
regimes and power matrices, but also as perfor-
mative (Butler, 1990) and a way of troubling
hegemonic ideas about gender and sexuality. The
influence of feminist materialities (Buchanan and
Colebrook, 2000) similarly goes a long way to
upturn the false stereotypes that poststructuralism
is only concerned with representation and text.

However, what remains present in the nucleus
of the cultural turn more generally is the posi-
tion of human beings as transcendental forces
in the world. Commenting on this, Bryant et
al. (2011) state:

despite the vaunted anti-humanism of many of the
thinkers identified with these trends, what they give
us is less a critique of humanity’s place in the world,
than a less sweeping critique of the self-enclosed
Cartesian subject. Humanity remains at the centre
of these works, and reality appears in philosophy
only as the correlate of human thought. In this
respect

phenomenology,

structuralism,

post-

structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism
have all been perfect exemplars of the anti-realist
trend in continental philosophy. (Bryant et al.,
2011: 2–3)

How, then, do we as geographers probe the

‘world-in-itself’; that strange and unflinching
infinity that is indifferent to human thought and
discourse; the very same universe that will per-
sist long after human beings return to the very
same cosmic dust that beats in their hearts? To
be sure, the importance of the ‘non-human’ has
always been central for explaining geographic
difference. Objects such as cockroaches (Biehler,
2009), mosquitoes (Shaw et al., 2010), dogs
(Haraway, 2008), elephants (Lorimer, 2010),
seeds (Kloppenburg, 1988), lawns (Robbins,
2007), refrigerators (Freidberg, 2009), sugar
(Mintz, 1985), railways (Schivelbusch, 1987:
40), technology (Winner, 1977), military robots
(Shaw and Akhter, 2011; Singer, 2009), and soft-
ware code (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005) all pattern
sociopolitical life. Perhaps now, more than ever,
objects and things (Ingold, 2010) are of central
concern to geographers, as Clark (2011) puts it:

[O]nce again the raw physicality of the world is ris-
ing up the agenda. Once more, the inherent forceful-
ness of the earth and cosmos, nature’s capacity to be
a great deal more or a lot less than what we would
ask of it, is weighing upon us. (Clark, 2011: XIII)

Yet there is no single method to describe the

non-human.

Marxist

geography

has

long

614

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

stressed the dialectical relationship of subjects
and objects (Harvey, 1973, 1982, 1989, 1996;
Peet, 1991; Smith, 2008). In the Grundrisse, for
example, Marx (1973: 92) writes: ‘Production
thus not only creates an object for the subject,
but also a subject for the object’. In this sense,
Marx reverses the Hegelian dialectic to stress
how conscious subjects arise from the concrete
foundations of the earth itself – a type of ‘meta-
bolism’ (Smith, 2008: 41). This dialectical
thinking overturned the Cartesian assumptions
of early spatial science, in order to stress the
production of space (Lefebvre, 1991) and the
attending social implications (Soja, 1980). It
should be added that running parallel to this
was a phenomenological conception of objects
laden with meaning, symbolism, and sensation,
which in turn created a sense of place and life-
world (e.g. Buttimer, 1976; Pickles, 1985;
Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1974).

Political ecology has drawn on Marxist

theory to describe the exploitation of people
and environments (Blaikie and Brookfield,
1987; Mitchell, 2002; Peet and Watts, 1996;
Robbins, 2004; Watts, 1983). This broad field
of thought has attempted to reconcile the
so-called division between nature and culture,
perhaps at the expense of sharpening this divi-
sion. Indeed, an inherent, almost paradoxical
problem within political ecology and Marxist
theories of nature is how to stress the productive
relationships between humans and ‘nature’
which can oftentimes be exploitative without
coming ‘perilously close to reasserting the sub-
ject/object dichotomy of the Enlightenment,
where human ingenuity is played out on an earth
that is imagined as static and inert’ (Braun,
2008: 197).

Actor-network theory tackles this same

subject/object dichotomy, with Latour (1993,
2005) arguing that all things, whether human
or non-human, are ‘actants’ capable of mediat-
ing with each other in a network. He thus
dissolves the ‘dirty fiction’ of modernity, which
is the division between subject and object:

Instead, there is nothing but a cosmic hailstorm of
individual actants, none of them inherently natural
or cultural. In fact, precisely because of its attempts
to purify the two districts of the world from one
another, the so-called modern age has created a
greater number of hybrid objects than have ever
been known before. (Harman, 2009: 58)

Relatedly, assemblage theory plugs different

component pieces together to form assemblages
marked by their relations of ‘exteriority’
(DeLanda, 2006). Assemblages are useful to
geography because they ‘reflexively remind us
of the embodied and evolutionary character of
ourselves as humans and more-than-humans.
Social relations are more-than-social and more
than extensions of the social into other loca-
tions’ (Robbins and Marks, 2010: 185).

The theoretical engagement over the ‘more-

than-ness’ to human existence finds itself played
out by a number of scholars (Braun, 2004a, 2006;
Haraway, 1991, 2003, 2008; Whatmore, 2002).
As Bakker and Bridge (2006) note:

it is important to assert that the unruliness of
materiality should not be located in ‘natural’ laws
or limits. Rather, the critical issue – and a fruitful
focus for research – is the way in which contempo-
rary materialities have been produced historically,
and the ways in which we can think imaginatively
about creating ‘new natures’ as ‘possible futures’.
(Bakker and Bridge, 2006: 21)

This excitement over the ‘more-than-ness’ and

the possibility of ‘newness’ can be traced, in
part, to the widespread influence of the philoso-
pher Gilles Deleuze (1994; see also Buchanan
and Lambert, 2005; Colebrook, 2002; Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002). Difficult
to define, Deleuzian approaches affirm the
excess of life over and above the categories that
seek to contain it. This vitalist rendition of
existence has blossomed into a range of con-
cepts: rhizomes, multiplicities, immanence, and
difference, as well as a range of theoretical and
empirical engagements (Doel, 1999; Marston
et al., 2005; Massey, 2005; Saldanha, 2007;

Shaw

615

Shaw et al., 2010; Whatmore, 2002). Above all,
Deleuzian approaches awaken and animate mat-
ter itself, which is no longer viewed as the dumb
and clumsy stuff of a forsaken unphilosophical
realm. Speaking to the importance of this, Ben-
nett (2010: IX) asks: ‘Why advocate the vitality
of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of
dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter
feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fan-
tasies of conquest and consumption.’

That geography was dead and needed to be

made alive was an idea put forward with early
work on affective and non-representational geo-
graphies (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). The
guiding philosophy was that ‘The world is more
excessive than we can theorise’ (Dewsbury
et al., 2002: 437). The idea certainly caught
on, as a growing number of human geographers
sought to explore the busy realm of affective
materialities behind and beyond what can be
thought (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Braun,
2008;

Dewsbury,

2003;

Lorimer,

2005;

McCormack, 2003; Shaw and Warf, 2009; Thrift,
2008; Woodward and Lea, 2010; Wylie, 2005; see
also Pile, 2010). Speaking of a ‘vast spillage of
things’, Thrift (2008: 10) writes that ‘things form
not so much a technological unconscious as a
technological anteconscious . . . a warp and weft
of inhuman traffic with its own indifferent
geographies’.

It is precisely this ‘indifference’ to human

thought, existence, and practice that I want to
emphasize. So many attempts to fuse and hybri-
dize culture and nature, humans and animals,
subjects and objects, and other neo-Kantian
divisions, have resulted only in the subtle
investment of their power. The reason geogra-
phy is so important is that it does not lose sight
of the worldliness of objects, beyond their cor-
relation with human thought. The purpose of
this paper, then, of constructing an evental geo-
graphy, is to situate geography as the pre-
eminent philosophical condition: to place the
world, its objects and its events as the generic
conditions of existence. Yet, rather than reach

to metaphysical skies or subterranean material-
ities, I argue that events are already localized
within objects themselves. The approach allows
us to describe the unstable foundations of all
worlds – from galaxies to nation states to ecosys-
tems. The result is to define what a ‘geo-event’
is, and answer how objects themselves are
responsible for transforming worlds. This traces
a similar logic to Badiou’s definition of the
‘event’ as a moment of radical change, only
stripped of the necessity of human subjects. At
stake is the inherently political division between
(1) what exists in a world and is visible and (2)
what exists in a world and is invisible. As it turns
out, this division is not just policed by transcen-
dental subjects, but is located in the relations
between objects themselves. In this sense, poli-
tics is not ‘more than human’ – it was never sim-
ply human to begin with.

II Heidegger’s world

If I am attempting to synthesize the philosophies
of Heidegger, Badiou, and Harman, it is not
because it is uncontroversial to do so: they
appear antithetical to each other. For many,
Heidegger is seen as a philosopher of ontology,
a ‘shepherd of being’, and a critic of the meta-
physics of calculation. Badiou, on the other
hand, is driven by mathematical thinking. Add
Harman to the mix and even more discord rings
out: Heidegger was dismissive of ‘tools’ as phi-
losophical objects, whereas Harman starts with
them. But a synthesis is possible, and it all cen-
ters on the status of the event. First, though, it is
useful to recall that Heidegger’s great ‘chal-
lenge’ to philosophy was to return to the ontolo-
gical – which had been ‘forgotten’ by
philosophers ever since Plato and Aristotle
associated being with beings. Such a return to
being itself, the most universal yet elusive of all
concepts, is a torch carried by both Badiou and
Harman, even if they answer the challenge dif-
ferently to their Black Forest progenitor.

616

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

Heidegger has made a modest but continual

influence in geography and spatial thinking
(see, for example, Elden, 2000, 2001, 2005;
Harrison, 2007; Malpas, 2006; Pickles, 1985;
Schatzki, 2007; Wainwright, 2010). Heidegger’s
persistent focus was always unconcealment as
the event of being. Heidegger had a keen eye for
the shadow and light that bathes our world, teas-
ing out new wonders, only to dispel others into
the void. This is the evental power of being, one
that does not reside solely within any human con-
sciousness. In Introduction to Metaphysics
(2000) Heidegger argues that being is ‘phusis’,
a Greek word that means ‘what emerges
from itself (for example, the emergence, the
blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens
itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such
unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in
appearance – in short, the emerging-abiding
sway’ (Heidegger, 2000: 15). This emergence:

can be experienced everywhere: for example, in
celestial processes (the rising of the sun), in surging
of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming
forth of animals and human beings from the womb.
But phusis, the emerging sway, is not synonymous
with these processes, which we still today count as
part of ‘nature’ . . . Phusis is Being itself, by virtue
of which beings first become and remain visible.
(Heidegger, 2000: 15)

Heidegger argues that this originary meaning has

become lost and corrupted, and philosophy
associates being with beings, rather than their
unconcealment (al ¯etheia) from shadow into light.

Heidegger’s thoughts on what being ‘is’

begin with an existential analysis of the mode
of being that is familiar to all of us: ‘Dasein’, the
ontological fact that we are always-already
‘being-there’. Unlike all other objects, human
beings have unique access to this ontological
structure, since it is only with Dasein that being
is an ‘issue’. Dasein is forever thrown in a world
that it cares about, dwells within, and encoun-
ters alongside others, as it shuffles between its
past, present and future:

The formal existential totality of the ontological
structural whole of Dasein must thus be formulated
in the following structure: the being of Dasein
means

being-ahead-of-oneself-already

(the

world) as being-together-with (innerworldly being
encountered). This being fills in the significance
of the term care. (Heidegger, 2010: 186)

Unlike traditional humanistic or Cartesian

accounts of subjectivity, Dasein is a space of
activity that is non-transcendental and entwined
with the world: ‘Subject and object are not the
same as Dasein and world – this faulty opposi-
tion is the foundation of the false metaphysical
problem of how we come to know the world’
(Heidegger, 2010: 60). For Heidegger, world
is not equal to space (Heidegger, 2010: 99), and
neither is world synonymous with nature:
‘Worldliness cannot be understood in terms of
nature, and indeed, nature can be made intelligi-
ble only on the basis of worldliness’ (Dreyfus,
1991: 113). World is instead the set of meaning-
ful practices, equipment, and sayings that
relate to a referential whole, of which Dasein
is practically immersed and cares about, as
‘being-in-the-world’. This is to say that neither
world nor Dasein exist independently: being-
in-the-world is a relational space of activity –
a clearing that is constantly worlding the things
that are taken care of.

Heidegger went to a great deal of pain to

undermine Cartesian accounts of subjectivity,
yet he is reluctant to admit that objects or animals
have worlds. For him, stones are completely
worldless, whereas animals are ‘world impover-
ished’, which is to say they are affected by beings,
but cannot relate to beings ‘as such’ or to beings
as a whole. Heidegger’s disavowal of nature’s
possibility of world is addressed by his attempt
to ground nature in ‘earth’, the source that
grounds and conflicts with worlds (Inwood,
1999: 246). Yet, despite the fact that Heidegger
has always recognized the importance of things,
whether streams or hammers, his interest pivots
on their usability for Dasein. Consequently, rail-
ways and volcanoes, mosquitoes and dolphins,

Shaw

617

do not have a world (Harman, 2007: 83), and it is
this refusal that will be the departing point for the
essay.

Already we have started to get a feel for

where an evental geography might take
inspiration from: the movement between onto-
logical concealment and unconcealment. But
Heidegger’s distaste for ‘mere things’ hinders
any progression into understanding a posthuman
definition of world (and therefore, ultimately, of
event). What about gunpowder, nuclear power
plants, and oil rigs? Are these not philosophical
resources in their own right? Later, the paper
will say ‘yes they are’, but for now we need to
establish the ‘world-in-itself’, and this means
outlining what makes a world a world, beyond
a Heideggerian definition. This is a logic
already found in the work of Alain Badiou,
which I will now distill to a far simpler form
than the philosopher himself subscribes to.

III Badiou’s world

Alain Badiou is indebted to Martin Heidegger,
from his philosophical project to the title of his
magnum opus. Badiou is in agreement with
Heidegger’s insistence that philosophy takes
up the ontological question and probes being
itself (and the ‘event’ of being as type of uncon-
cealment). Unlike Heidegger, however, such a
return is made through mathematical reasoning.
Badiou’s theoretical apparatus has made some
impact to geographical modes of thinking, par-
ticularly his discussion of the ‘event’ (Bassett,
2008; Constantinou, 2009; Constantinou and
Madarasz, 2009; Dewsbury, 2007; Shaw,
2010a, 2010b). Badiou’s (2009) most recent
venture is to outline a spatial ontology founded
on the existence of worlds. These worlds can be
anything from the Jurassic kingdoms of dino-
saurs to the peaceful swaying of trees in an
autumnal garden: in each case, they are com-
prised of objects woven together to form a
bounded ‘there’. Put simply, a world ‘tears
space open’ to form its ‘there’. Heidegger first

saw this when he noted that worldly appearance
is founded on an originary conquering of space:
‘appearing in the first and authentic sense, as the
gathered bringing-itself-to-stand, takes space
in; it first conquers space; as standing there, it
creates space for itself; it brings about every-
thing that belongs to it, while it itself is not imi-
tated’ (Heidegger, 2000: 195).

In Being and Event (2005) Badiou utilized set-

theory to argue that there is an infinite number of
multiples (the building blocks of being) that
become organized around a ‘count-as-one’ (a
type of organization) to form a ‘situation’. His
original

ontological

statement

was

later

expanded by his post-‘Logics of Worlds’ phe-
nomenological turn, which states that when these
multiples appear in a world they are counted as
‘objects’ by the ‘transcendental’

(Badiou,

2009). Badiou states that transcendental opera-
tions (like the count-as-one) exist to ensure that
appearance within a world is stable and bounded,
rather than chaotic and unbounded. In his words:

As a situation of being, a world is not an empty
place – akin to Newton’s space – which multiple
beings would come to inhabit. For a world is noth-
ing but a logic of being-there, and it is identified
with the singularity of this logic. A world articulates
the cohesion of multiples around a structured oper-
ator (the transcendental). (Badiou, 2009: 102)

The transcendental is a phenomenological oper-

ator that structures what multiples get to appear
within the world as objects and how intensely
they appear. Thus, on the side of being-qua-
being there is an infinite number of multiples,
but only a restricted number of these appear as
objects in a world. Those multiples that are not
gathered by the transcendental lie within the
shadows of ‘inexistence’, leaving an infinite
excess underlining the finite contours of a
world. If this excess announces itself autono-
mously it is labeled as an ‘event-site’ capable
of changing the logic of the world.

Badiou gives the example of the Paris

Commune in March 1871, to show how the

618

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

once ignored workers appeared in the world – in
the turmoil of barricades and blood on the
streets. His point is that politics always excludes
certain people from the world, and their appear-
ance warps the previous ‘rules of the game’. We
must therefore acknowledge a worldly leftover –
and this is the condition that nurtures the event-
site. All told, Badiou’s philosophy hinges on
this tension between those objects that exist in
the light of the world, and the pressure exerted
by those multiples in the shadows of the trans-
cendental: an eternal tension between existence
and inexistence.

What is more, not only is it the case that some

multiples are cast aside by the transcendental,
but also the multiples that do appear in the world
are themselves only partially present: ‘no multi-
ple comes out unscathed from its appearance in
a world. If it is there – in such and such a world –
it exposes itself ‘‘in person’’ to a singular intel-
ligibility, which is not conveyed by its pure
ontological composition’ (Badiou, 2009: 196).
In other words, the object is an uneven synthesis
of its being and being-there. An object cannot
exist ‘in-itself’ since it must always ‘compro-
mise’ with the world it appears within: its
elements

will

networked

differentially

depending on the ‘there’ of its appearance. But
this does not mean that a multiple is totally sub-
missive to the world: it still retains its ontological
integrity in appearing through the existence of
‘real atoms’ – elements drawn from its being
that act as knots between the logic of appearance
and being-qua-being: ‘the concept of object
designates the point where phenomenon and
noumenon are indistinguishable, the point of
reciprocity between the logical and the onto-logi-
cal’ (Badiou, 2009: 241). The Badiouian object is
thus ‘a point of tension-ridden convergence for
the ontological (i.e., being qua being irreducible
to worlds) and the transcendental (i.e., being-
there in a world)’ (Johnston, 2008: 363).

An object is therefore in constant tension

with its world, and its onto-transcendental
synthesis is never complete: bits and pieces of

the object remain in excess of its current rela-
tions, which therefore leave an ontological
reserve in the background of the world. But this
excess cannot ‘speak for itself’, as Badiou repeats
(in spite of himself) the Heideggerian slant
towards the pre-eminence of Dasein. Badiou is
fiercely anti-humanist, following in the footsteps
of Althusser and Lacan. Yet Badiou requires
human subjects for an event-site to sustain itself
and have maximal consequences (a process
labeled as ‘fidelity’ or ‘faithfulness’). Although
he insists that a subject is in fact not reducible
to human corporeality, psychology, or even
psychoanalysis (it is rather a ‘form’ or ‘relation-
ship’ to the event) – it is still only humans that can
sustain the event. Graham Harman quips:

If I were to start saying: ‘I’m a Badiouian, but
I think that rocks and earthworms are also capable
of invoking the generic through art, politics, science
and love,’ what do you honestly think Badiouians
would say in this case? Would they say: ‘Cool.
Badiou never specifies that it has to be a human’?
You know full well that they would dismiss such a
position as vitalist crap. The whole spirit of
Badiou’s philosophy is of a militant human subject
disrupting given states-of-situations in truth events.
(Graham Harman, quoted in Bryant, 2009)

Badiou cannot construct events without subjects.

We find this insistence across Badiou’s early
work, and even into Logics of Worlds: ‘In effect,
I subordinate the logic of appearing, objects and
worlds to the trans-worldly affirmation of sub-
jects faithful to a truth’ (Badiou, 2009: 37). But
what if hurricanes, nuclear bombs, volcanoes,
CIA drones, coal, and railways were themselves
objects capable of redefining the contours of a
world? If all great philosophers have a single
great idea, then Badiou’s is the concept of inexis-
tence: all appearance in a world is finite, but the
being of that world is infinite, and this inexistent
excess is the source of evental change. And cru-
cially for this paper ‘every object possesses,
among its elements, an inexistent’ (Badiou,
2009: 323). To sum up, all worlds are capable
of producing events, and this is not because all

Shaw

619

worlds are watched by subjective sentries ready
to rally around a truth – it is because objects, in
their own appearance in a world, carry with them
inexistent elements that are potential sources of
change.

IV Contingency within objects

Badiou’s thesis on the synthesis of an object with
its world points to a great deal of contingency
located within the molten core of an object itself.
It also provides a source of worldly change
beyond human intervention. Badiou’s former stu-
dent Quentin Meillassoux (2008) takes this idea
even further, to argue that being itself is a mon-
strously contingent force, indifferent to reason
and necessity; thus radicalizing David Hume’s
famous skepticism (see Hallward, 2011). If Meil-
lassoux affirms a reality ‘in-itself’, outside of
consciousness, and a radical type of contingency
devoid of necessity, then Harman argues this con-
tingency is located within objects themselves.

In a founding text of ‘object-oriented

philosophy’, Harman (2002) extends the
Heideggerian analysis of tools. Heidegger’s
famous analysis of equipment (particularly the
hammer!) states that objects are not used theo-
retically or categorically – we do not just stare
at them – but rather we use them, and in that
usage they ‘withdraw’ from us into a dark ‘sub-
terranean reality’. Harman argues that this
withdrawal does not just take place between
Dasein and tools, but between all inanimate
things. That is to say that when a rock meets a
rock, it does so on a superficial and ontic level
– not on a deep ontological level. Inanimate
things ‘unlock’ each other only to a minimal
extent and therefore leave behind an inaccessi-
ble surplus.

What emerges in its place is a ghostly cosmos in
which humans, dogs, oak trees, and tobacco are on
precisely the same footing as glass bottles, pitch-
forks, windmills, comets, ice cubes, magnets, and
atoms. Instead of exiling objects to the natural
sciences (with the usual mixed emotions of

condescension and fear), philosophy must reawaken
its lost talent for unleashing the enfolded forces
trapped in the things themselves. (Harman, 2002: 2)

The ontological ‘difference’ Harman is high-

lighting is between objects in their readiness-
to-hand and presence-at-hand, or between their
private interior and their public exterior. When
objects encounter each other, there is an event
of connection but also of supreme disconnec-
tion: the rock does not encounter the other rock
as a rock, but only partially. The mosquito does
not encounter the human as a complete human,
but only partially (as a blood-meal): ‘Being
itself, just like rock-being and moon-being,
necessarily exceeds any encounter we might
have with it, untouched and untouchable by the
as-structure’ (Harman, 2002: 97); ‘No object
ever unlocks the entirety of a second object,
ever translates it completely and literally into its
own native tongue’ (Harman, 2002: 223). When
objects do collide with each other, they
translate, change, and reshape each other. In
summary, objects reduce each other to carica-
tures – they literally ‘objectify’ each other –
which means the world is bursting with meta-
phor and parallax. An object’s being is always
in excess of its ‘public face’ (and, as I will argue
below, is therefore capable of transforming the
world it belongs to).

V The theoretical framework for
understanding the geo-event

At any one time, the world we see and experience
is partial, like the tip of an iceberg that plunges
deep beneath a murky ocean. It is a caricature
based on the relations between objects. Such con-
tingency is held back by transcendental objects
that act as anchors within a world. When these
transcendentals are overthrown by inexistent
objects, a new world is constituted. In a nutshell,
this is the definition of the geo-event.

First then: how to define a world. A world is a

constellation of objects. These objects are con-
stellated together because they affect each

620

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

other. This may sound simplistic, but consider
the deeper lesson at hand: objects are constantly
affecting. In their very existence, they force
themselves upon each other – reducing, reshap-
ing, channeling, annihilating, eroding, fusing,
scouring, electrifying, and so on. An object, in
this sense, is not defined by its brute materiality
or an underlying ‘life’. Either maneuver would
be a form of reductionism. Instead, an object
is precisely what it does. Levi Bryant argues that
‘What Deleuze says here of animals holds
equally, I believe, for all objects, whether ani-
mate or inanimate: all objects are defined by
their affects or their capacity to act and be acted
upon’ (2011: 274). All of this is to say that no
object exists apart from its world: to exist is to
affect and be affected by the world. Against the
Cartesian notion of things on a flat space, we say
instead that ‘all is worlds’.

Just as we cannot conceive of world as an

empty ground or a passive container, neither can
we see objects as lifeless and inert. Instead, and
to repeat, objects affect – they make a difference
by their very existing, and never do they just ‘sit
there’. Objects are therefore force-full: they are
full of forces, smoldering furnaces of affects.
Yet when objects affect one another, that affect-
ing does not exhaust the potential range of
affects possible (Harman, 2002). The object is
therefore inherently split between worldly exis-
tence and worldly inexistence: a synthesis that
produces a contingent surplus.

But it is readily observable that worlds are

not chaotic: they are for the most part stable and
do not exhibit the monstrous contingency that
Meillassoux trumpets. We must account for this
stability without leaving the domain of objects
themselves. Accordingly, the world is stabilized
or anchored around ‘transcendental objects’.
These are like all other objects – constantly
affecting and force-full, but the difference is
they affect all of the objects in a world. In doing
so, they produce the overall synthesis of the
world, including its limits. This consequently
means that notions such as ‘scale’ or even ‘size’

need to be recast not as a priori beginnings, but
rather as a posteriori outcomes of affective
relations between objects within a world (see
Marston et al., 2005, for more on this). It is also
here that Nietzsche (1968) is helpful, as he dis-
cusses the struggle between active and reactive
forces, creating a political ontology of force:

My idea is that every specific body strives to
become master over all space and to extend its force
(its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists
its extension. But it continually encounters similar
efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by
coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of
them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then
conspire together for power. And the process goes
on. (Nietzsche, 1968: 340)

If we locate these forces in objects themselves,

the spirit of this quote points to a world of unequal
forces clashing and colliding, creating, if only
temporarily, the contours of existence at any
given time. Deleuze (2006: 39) defines an active
force as ‘Appropriating, possessing, subjugating,
dominating’. Reactive forces, on the other hand,
are always defined by their inferior relation to
active forces. We can therefore think of transcen-
dental objects as ‘active forces’, whereas ‘nor-
mal’ objects are ‘reactive’. This does not mean
that normal objects (let us call them existent
objects) are mere slaves; rather, it points to the
unequal direction of caricature in the relationship
between a transcendental and existent object.
Transcendental objects reduce existent objects
to their own image, their own caricature of force
relations. Nietzsche saw this in the struggle
between active and reactive forces. This means
that although existent objects do affect each other,
they do so only through a transcendental synth-
esis; only through the partiality of a presence-
at-hand.

Crucially,

however,

the

transcendental

does not caricature the object completely, it
does not exhaust all there is: the synthesis
within a world is incomplete. If an object is
existent, it is precisely because it excludes its

Shaw

621

infinite surplus, and is thus shadowed by a
leftover inexistence. But this inexistence is not
a ‘potentiality’. Rather, we can think of it as an
object itself, an actuality, since the inexistent
actually exists (as a bundle of affective forces)
– but it is not synthesized by the transcendental.
Like a Russian doll, the existent object contains
within it an infinite amount of inexistent
objects. We therefore have three types of
objects: existent, inexistent, and transcenden-
tal. To state the difference between them again,
within a world an existent object is an object
that is caricatured by the transcendental object.
It exists, but exists in an inferior relation to the
objectification of the transcendental. Conver-
sely, the inexistent object is an object within a
world that is not caricatured by the transcen-
dental. It is clandestine, autonomous, and vola-
tile. The politics of this setup are located
precisely in the ability of transcendental objects
to police the very counters between the existent
and inexistent within a world.

A geo-event takes place when inexistent

objects replace the transcendental objects of a
world. In doing so, they completely redraw the
ontological cartography of force relations
within the world. It is precisely because objects
are not static but affective that the possibility of
the geo-event is eternal, since the inexistent
object constantly beats within the molten core
of an existent object and world – exerting a pres-
sure that cannot be held back indefinitely. Put
differently, what is existent is always a finite
fac¸ade holding back an infinite contingency.
Object by object, the geo-event de-anchors the
integrity of the world. This is a process of
creative destruction: a new world is made from
the ashes of an old one. Therefore, a geo-event
is the name for the process of reconstitution of
the transcendental makeup of a world, in which
inexistent objects replace, reshape, and reconfi-
gure what is existent within the world. Perhaps
just as important is to consider what a geo-event
is not. The reshuffling of existent objects is not
enough to change the world completely, since

what is existent within a world is already prefi-
gured or ‘captured’ by transcendental objects. It
is only the inexistent that is capable of
transforming a world, since only the inexistent
escapes the laws of what is, and heralds what is
to come. Change in its everyday sense, then,
refers simply to the changing articulations of
existent

objects

under

the

logic

the

transcendental.

VI Conclusion

Although geography is traditionally rooted in
analyses of how flora and fauna – together with
geology and climate – influence human settle-
ment and cultural landscapes, what is different
about the contemporary ‘return’ to objects is the
manner in which it is taking place. As Latour
(2005) puts it:

what is new is not the multiplicity of objects any
course of action mobilizes along its trail – no one
ever denied they were there by the thousands; what
is new is that objects are suddenly highlighted not
only as being full-blown actors, but also as what
explains the contrasted landscape we started with,
the over-arching powers of society, the huge asym-
metries, the crushing exercise of power. (Latour,
2005: 72)

It is with this renewed sense of the power of

objects themselves to transform social, biologi-
cal, and political existence that this paper has
situated itself.

The geo-event names the transformation of a

world by inexistent objects and the resulting
change caused by their appearance. This state-
ment is built from a conceptual architecture that
began with the statement that existence is
worlded and not undifferentiated. A world is a
constellation of objects, and they are constel-
lated because they affect each other. This meant
defining an object not as a lump of matter, but as
force-full: as a smoldering furnace of affects.
However, there is an ontological unevenness
at work, too. Worlds are stable and not chaotic
because there are objects, transcendental

622

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

objects, which ‘caricature’ or ‘police’ all
other existent objects in the world – which
is to say they regulate how they appear and
relate with each other. Inexistent objects,
conversely, are the primary sites of contin-
gency within a world, since they escape the
transcendentals. The metaphor deployed to
explain this was that existent objects are like
‘Russian

dolls’

that

contain

infinite

amount of inexistent objects. Indeed, a geo-
event is nothing other than this reshuffling
of objects from inexistence to existence;
changing the coordinates between what is visible
and invisible. I now want to finish this conclusion
by providing some methodological pointers on:
(1) difference, (2) power, (3) affect.

1 Difference

It is important that the difference of each object
is preserved. Just because a plane and a dog are
objects, it does not mean that they are the same,
either ontologically or analytically. Each object
has a different capacity to affect other objects,
and in different ways. To say that ‘everything
is an object’ is not therefore to presume symme-
try. It is precisely ontological unevenness that
I want to emphasize (which is explicit in the
difference between existent and transcendental
objects). Particular attention must therefore be
paid to objects themselves and the forcing they
do, without reducing them to an underlying
materiality, life-force, subject, or cosmic whole.
It is here that I agree with Latour’s ‘principle of
irreduction’, which Harman sets up as follows:

For Latour, a thing is so utterly concrete that none of
its features can be scraped away like cobwebs or
moss. All features belong to the actor itself: a force
utterly deployed in the world at any given moment,
entirely characterised by its full set of features.
(Harman, 2009: 14)

Such an insistence that the world is made up of

objects contributes to ‘displacing the hubris of
humanism so as to admit others into the calculus

of the world’ (Braun, 2004b: 273). But it does so
not by erasing difference, but by multiplying it.
All of this is to say that there is no singular onto-
logical vessel that creates a world (such as a
human), but instead a carnival of objects that
produce difference.

2 Power

Marston et al. (2005) and later Woodward et al.
(2010) outline a ‘flat ontology’ for describing
social and political life, crystallized on a theoreti-
cal construct called the ‘site’ – which designates
an ontological coming-together of bodies, doings,
and sayings. The methodological guidelines they
offer for studying the site are as follows:

Like pick-up sticks, one can never expect to encoun-
ter the same distribution, and the number of possible
relations is multiplied exponentially, even though
one can expect varying repetitions of certain types
of force relations. Method-wise, pick-up-sticks is
not about finding one’s way out, but about worming
around by way of experimentation, testing the vari-
ous pressures and intensities that go into the site’s
composition. As a result, research is experimenta-
tion, an ongoing process whose results are never a
matter of stable states, but rather commentaries on
relationality, affects and conditions of dynamic
relation. (Woodward et al., 2010: 276)

‘Testing the various pressures and intensities

that go into the site’s composition’ is not only
an important methodological point, it is also
an inherently political one. For an evental geo-
graphy, there must be a methodological specifi-
city for defining what objects in a world are
responsible

for

holding

together.

The

researcher must ask, therefore, what are the
transcendentals of the world and how do they
caricature, restrain, restrict, and police other
objects in a world?

Given that power distributes (unevenly) what

objects appear in a world and what objects do
not, appearance – the aesthetic – must also be
seen in this political light. Transcendentals
police the affective faultline between the visible

Shaw

623

and the invisible, the heard and the not heard,
the felt and the not felt. As Rancie`re (2004)
writes, aesthetics are a:

delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and
the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultane-
ously determines the place and the stakes of politics
as a form of experience. Politics revolves around
what is seen and what can be said about it, around
who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,
around the properties of spaces and the possibilities
of time. (Rancie`re, 2004: 13)

The methodological guideline here then is to

probe beneath what is obviously seen, felt, and
heard, to discover what objects are marginalized
to enable the existent world to appear. This is
how power must be studied in an evental geo-
graphy: as the capacity to police the aesthetic
faultline in a world.

3 Affect

Geographers have long engaged affect to
describe the human and non-human forces
responsible for mediating and transforming life
(Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Braun, 2008;
Dewsbury, 2003; Lorimer, 2005; McCormack,
2003; Pile, 2010; Shaw and Warf, 2009; Thrift,
2008; Woodward and Lea, 2010; Wylie, 2005).
An evental geography contributes to this body
of work by emphasizing the affective nature of
objects themselves. An object is force-full, a
smoldering furnace of affects defined by the
capacity to act and be acted upon. A geo-event
is an inherently affective event, given that previ-
ously unfelt or oppressed affective forces are
unleashed when inexistent objects topple the
transcendental makeup of a world. So-called
‘natural’ disasters are an obvious example of a
geo-event – given their capacity to instantly
change a world. As Clark (2011: 73) writes, the
disaster ‘is the event so severe that in its tearing
away of the foundations, structures and relations
that make the world legible, it also deprives
those it afflicts of their capacity to absorb and
process the event, to render it intelligible’.

These perturbing forces mean that very often
geo-events do not make ‘sense’. They are onto-
logical noise, confusing, perplexing. But per-
haps the point here is not the methodological
dead-end that geo-events are nonsense, but
rather, that they produce new-sense, based on
new affective relations and habituations. If
sense, quite literally, is the affective relation
between receptors and worldly stimuli, then it
is a materiality that can be disrupted or even
broken by the geo-event, which has the capacity
to produce new articulations of being-in-the-
world.

This paper has constructed an evental geo-

graphy – the rough scaffolding from which an
analysis into the nature of objects, worlds, and
events can be made. An endless number of
events

continue

shock,

surprise,

and

devastate the inhabitants that dwell on this
Earth: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the
Japanese tsunami, the Haitian earthquake, and
the political uprisings across the Middle East
and North Africa. None of these events can be
completely reduced to the direction of human
beings: all of them involve bits and pieces of the
planet – unequal associations of objects that force
worlds together and force them apart, from
unmanned military drones hovering in the sky,
to fossilized carbons deep beneath our feet.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers that provided me
with such in-depth and challenging comments. I
would also like to acknowledge John Paul Jones III
and colleagues at the University of Arizona for
comments on earlier revisions of this paper.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.

References

Anderson B and Harrison P (eds) (2010) Taking-Place:

Non-Representational

Theories

and

Geography.

Farnham: Ashgate.

624

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

Badiou A (2005) Being and Event. London: Continuum.
Badiou A (2009) Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II.

London: Continuum.

Bakker K and Bridge G (2006) Material worlds? Resource

geographies and the ‘matter of nature’. Progress in
Human Geography 30: 5–27.

Bassett K (2008) Thinking the event: Badiou’s philosophy

of the event and the example of the Paris Commune.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26:
895–910.

Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of

Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Biehler DD (2009) Permeable homes: A historical political

ecology of insects and pesticides in US public housing.
Geoforum 40: 1014–1023.

Blaikie P and Brookfield H (eds) (1987) Land Degradation

and Society. London: Longman.

Braun B (2004a) Modalities of posthumanism. Environ-

ment and Planning A 36: 1352–1355.

Braun B (2004b) Querying posthumanisms. Geoforum 35:

269–273.

Braun B (2006) Environmental issues: Global natures in

the space of assemblage. Progress in Human Geogra-
phy 30: 644–654.

Braun B (2008) Theorizing the nature-society divide. In:

Cox K, Low M, and Robinson J (eds) The SAGE Hand-
book of Political Geography. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE,
189–204.

Bryant L (2009) Badiou and correlationism. Available at:

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/
badiou-and-correlationism.

Bryant LR (2011) The ontic principle: Outline of an

object-oriented ontology. In: Bryant L, Srnicek N, and
Harman G (eds) The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism

and

Realism.

Melbourne:

re.press,

261–278.

Bryant LR, Srnicek N, and Harman G (eds) (2011) The

Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Rea-
lism. Melbourne: re.press.

Buchanan I and Colebrook C (eds) (2000) Deleuze and

Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Buchanan I and Lambert G (eds) (2005) Deleuze and

Space. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.

Buttimer A (1976) Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers
66: 277–292.

Clark N (2011) Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a

Dynamic Planet. London: SAGE.

Colebrook C (2002) Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.
Constantinou M (2009) Badiou’s topology of action as an

ethical epistemology of the event. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 27: 771–782.

Constantinou M and Madarasz N (2009) Being and

spatialization: An interview with Alain Badiou.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27:
78–795.

DeLanda M (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assem-

blage Theory and Social Complexity. New York:
Continuum.

Deleuze G (1994) Difference and Repetition. London:

Athlone Press.

Deleuze G (2006) Nietzsche and Philosophy. London:

Continuum.

Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.

Derrida J (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins University Press.

Dewsbury JD (2003) Witnessing space: ‘Knowledge with-

out contemplation’. Environment and Planning A 35:
1907–1932.

Dewsbury JD (2007) Unthinking subjects: Alain Badiou and

the event of thought in thinking politics. Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers 32: 443–459.

Dewsbury J, Harrison P, Rose M, and Wylie J (2002)

Enacting geographies. Geoforum 33: 437–440.

Dixon D and Jones JP III (1998) My dinner with Derrida,

or spatial analysis and poststructuralism do lunch.
Environment and Planning A 30: 247–260.

Dodge M and Kitchin R (2005) Code and the transduction

of space. Annals of the Association of American
eographers 95: 162–180.

Doel M (1999) Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabo-

lical Art of Spatial Science. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield.

Dreyfus H (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on

Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.

Shaw

625

Elden S (2000) Rethinking the polis: Implications of

Heidegger’s

questioning

the

political.

Political

Geography 19: 407–422.

Elden S (2001) Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault

and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum.

Elden S (2005) Contributions to geography? The spaces of

Heidegger’s Beitra¨ge. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 23: 811–827.

England K (2003) Towards a feminist political geography?

Political Geography 22: 611–616.

Foucault M (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology

of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon.

Fluri JL (2009) Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from

below’. Political Geography 28: 259–265.

Freidberg S (2009) Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge,

MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Hallward P (2011) Anything is possible: A reading of

Quentin Meillassoux’s ‘After Finitude’. In: Bryant L,
Srnicek N, and Harman G (eds) The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.
press, 130–141.

Haraway D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Re-

Invention of Nature. London: Free Association.

Haraway D (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto:

Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago,
IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Haraway D (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press.

Harman G (2002) Tool-being: Heidegger and the Meta-

physics of Objects. Chicago, IL: Open Court.

Harman G (2007) Heidegger Explained: From Phenom-

enon to Thing. Chicago, IL: Open Court.

Harman G (2009) Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and

Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.

Harrison P (2007) The space between us: Opening remarks

on the concept of dwelling. Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space 25: 625–664.

Harvey D (1973) Social Justice and the City. London:

Edward Arnold.

Harvey D (1982) The Limits to Capital. Chicago, IL: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press.

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An

Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cam-
bridge, MA: Blackwell.

Harvey D (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of

Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heidegger M (2000) Introduction to Metaphysics. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Heidegger M (2010) Being and Time. New York: State

University of New York.

Hyndman J (2001) Towards a feminist geopolitics. The

Canadian Geographer 45: 210–222.

Ingold T (2010) Bringing things back to life: Creative entan-

glements in a world of materials. ESRC National Centre
for Research Methods, Working Paper Series. Available
at: http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1306.

Inwood M (1999) A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Johnston A (2008) Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou

and Kantian transcendental idealism. Continental Phi-
losophy Review 41: 345–366.

Kant I (1997) Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics

That Will Be Able To Come Forward As Science: With
Selections From The Critique of Pure Reason. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kloppenburg J (1988) First the Seed: The Political Econ-

omy of Plant Biotechnology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. New York:

Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to

Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Lefebvre H (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Lorimer H (2005) Cultural geography: The busyness of

being

‘more-than-representational’.

Progress

Human Geography 29: 83–94.

Lorimer J (2010) Elephants as companion species: The

lively biogeographies of Asian elephant conservation
in Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 35: 491–506.

McCormack DP (2003) An event of geographical ethics in

spaces of affect. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 28: 488–507.

Malpas J (2006) Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place,

World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marston SA, Jones JP III, and Woodward K (2005) Human

geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers 30: 416–432.

Marx K (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of

Political Economy. London: Penguin.

Massey D (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Massey DB (2005) For Space. London: SAGE.
Massumi B (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement,

Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

626

Progress in Human Geography 36(5)

Meillassoux Q (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the

Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum.

Mintz S (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar

in Modern History. New York: Viking Penguin.

Mitchell T (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics,

Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Nietzsche F (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage.
Peet R (1991) Global Capitalism: Theories of Social

Development. London: Routledge.

Peet R and Watts M (1996) Liberation Ecologies. London:

Routledge.

Pickles J (1985) Phenomenology, Science and Geography:

Spatiality and the Human Sciences. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Pile S (2010) Emotions and affect in recent human geogra-

phy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
35: 5–20.

Rancie`re J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribu-

tion of the Sensible. London: Continuum.

Relph E (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
Robbins P (2004) Political Ecology: A Critical Introduc-

tion. New York: Blackwell.

Robbins P (2007) Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and

Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.

Robbins P and Marks B (2010) Assemblage geographies.

In: Smith S, Marston S, Pain R, and Jones JP III (eds)
The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies. Thousand
Oaks, CA: SAGE, 176–194.

Saldanha A (2007) Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the

Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.

Schatzki TR (2007) Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space.

Stuttgart: Steiner.

Schivelbusch W (1987) The Railway Journey: The Indus-

trialization and Perception of Time and Space. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.

Sharp J (2007) Geography and gender: Finding feminist

political geographies. Progress in Human Geography
31: 381–387.

Shaw IGR (2010a) Sites, truths, and the logics of worlds:

Alain Badiou and human Geography. Transactions of
the Institute of Geographers 35: 431–442.

Shaw IGR (2010b) WALL-E’s world: Animating

Badiou’s philosophy. Cultural Geographies 17:
391–405.

Shaw IGR and Akhter M (2011) The unbearable

humanness of drone warfare in FATA, Pakistan.
Antipode. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00940.x.

Shaw IGR and Warf B (2009) Worlds of affect: Virtual

geographies of video games. Environment and Plan-
ning A 41: 1332–1343.

Shaw IGR, Robbins PF, and Jones JP III (2010) A bug’s

life and the spatial ontologies of mosquito manage-
ment. Annals of the Association of American Geogra-
phers 100: 373–392.

Singer PW (2009) Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution

and Conflict in the 21st Century. London: Penguin.

Smith N (2008) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital,

and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: The Univer-
sity of Georgia Press.

Soja E (1980) The socio-spatial dialectic. Annals of

the

Association

American

Geographers

70:

207–225.

Thrift N (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Pol-

itics, Affect. Abingdon: Routledge.

Thrift N and Dewsbury JD (2000) Dead geographies – and

how to make them live. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 18: 411–432.

Tuan YF (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental

Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Wainwright J (2010) On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the

world’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geogra-
phers 35: 507–521.

Watts M (1983) Silent Violences: Food, Famine and Pea-

santry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.

Whatmore S (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures,

Cultures, Spaces. London: SAGE.

Winner L (1977) Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-

Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.

Woodward K and Lea J (2010) Geographies of affect. In:

Smith S, Pain R, Marston SA, and Jones JP III (eds) The
SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies. London:
SAGE, 154–175.

Woodward K, Jones JP III, and Marston SA (2010) Of eagles

and flies: Orientations toward the site. Area 42: 271–280.

Wylie J (2005) A single day’s walking: Narrating self and

landscape on the South West Coast Path. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 30: 234–247.

Shaw

627