Article

Dialogues in Human Geography

2015, Vol. 5(2) 131148
Guattari: Impractical philosophy The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/2043820615587787
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Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis

University of Oxford, UK

Abstract
In the midst of a certain zeal for French Theory in human geography and the social sciences of late, there
has been something of a rush to operationalize Guattari (among others) in a pseudo-methodological
manner; something were unashamedly guilty of ourselves. Its easy to see why: journeying between car-
tography, metamodelisation, tracing, transversality, enunciation and diagramming, Guattari offers a
seductive array of concepts and philosophical tools for human geographers. There seems, however, to be a
disjuncture between the conceptual import of such terms and their empirical rendering. In this explicitly
experimental article, we want to open up a series of lines of flight as to how Guattari can inform empiricism
without reversion to straightforward application or metaphorical appropriation. In doing so, we offer a
number of speculations on how Guattaris work can be evoked in the crafting of a different tenor of well-
established geographical methods. Put differently, we want to accentuate the impracticality of Guattaris
philosophy as its most generative vector for human geographic thought and technique.

Keywords
cartography, existential territories, Guattari, impractical, metamodelisation

Introduction much, then, for his supposed mania for chemistry

(Guattari, 1995); we would sooner argue that Felix
In the midst of a certain zeal for French thought in Guattari is better caricatured as the archetypal
the social sciences (Cusset, 2008; Elliot and
geographer, or at least geophilosopher, than as a
Attridge, 2011) and in human geography (Barnett,
bit-part chemist encumbered solely by molecules.
2009, 2012; Elden, 2009), there has been something
Bewildered by the array of these aforementioned
of a rush to operationalize the work of a limited set
concepts, it is small wonder that as human geogra-
of nominally post-structuralist philosophers. This
phers, we are quick to stake a disciplinary claim in
article looks both to extend and to disrupt this ten-
this thinker. There is, however, a disjuncture between
dency, by introducing the work of Felix Guattari,
the conceptual import of such terms and their empiri-
a significant yet understudied thinker whose impor- cal rendering. In this explicitly experimental article,
tance to human geography is potentially far-
we want to open up a series of lines of flight as to how
reaching but still largely neglected. At first blush,
Guattaris import seems to be startlingly clear:
journeying between cartography, metamodelisation,
Corresponding author:
tracing, transversality, enunciation and diagram- Joe Gerlach, School of Geography and the Environment,
ming, Guattari offers a seductive array of concepts University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK.
and philosophical tools for human geographers. So Email: joe.gerlach@ouce.ox.ac.uk
132
Guattari can inform geographical thought and tech-
nique without reversion to straightforward applica-
tion or metaphorical appropriation. In doing so, we
offer a number of speculations on how Guattaris
work can be evoked in the crafting of a different tenor
of well-established geographical methods. Put differ-
ently, we want to accentuate the impracticality of
Guattaris philosophy as its most generative vector
for thought and technique in human geography.
At this stage, it is doubtless easier to advertise
what this article does not do. Specifically, it is not
an instrumental piece that attempts to engineer spe-
cific research techniques wrought out of Guattaris
conceptual toolbox; to do so would not only be dis-
ingenuous towards a Guattarian ethos but it would
also be to miss the point, namely, that the normative
impulse of applicability itself is to limit the con-
ceptualempirical potential of all ideas, not just
those pertaining to Guattari. The problem, as we see
it, is that human geography has been rather quick to
appropriate and apply ideas from beyond the disci-
pline, as part of an ongoing cycle of faddishness,
which plays into the auditing, and stultifying, logics
of, for example, the United Kingdoms Research
Assessment Exercise and Research Excellence
Framework1; logics that Guattari himself would
almost certainly abhor, such are their micro-fascist
implications for intellectual thought and politics. It
is for this reason, then, that we look to the impracti-
cal; not as a slowing down of reasoning (Stengers,
2005) but as a speeding up of thought. Rather than
link the impractical to a mantra of slowing down,
we want to deploy Guattari and his speed of
thought and his jargon machine to resist systemati-
zation and application.2 To do this, we play the very
logic of instrumentalization against itself; taking a
putatively new thinker, and assemblage of concepts,
with which to intervene in and trouble the apparent
ease of engaging with theory. As such, we acknowl-
edge Harveys (2006: 410) fears of introducing this
or that new thinker, theorist or theory into the grand
parade of external interlocutors as to what geography
might and should be about, but use this precisely to
address concerns about hyper-faddishness.
Nonetheless, we do not wish to abrogate respon-
sibility for what Guattaris ideas might do for human
geography. What, then, is the affirmative push of
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
this article? Split into three parts, the article, like-
wise, does three things.3 The first part examines
briefly the veritable bombardment of French The-
ory in human geography of late, centring specifi-
cally on the contribution of Guattari to the social
sciences. As such, the article will offer a critique
of recent scholarship that has attempted to use Guat-
tari in a pseudo-methodological manner; one that
subsequently denies the schizophrenic energies of
his conceptual work. In response, the second part
of the article examines the importance of Guattaris
ideas for human geography, by way of three signal
motifs of Guattarian thought existential terri-
tories, metamodelisation, and cartography
through which geographers might re-apprehend
notions of disciplinarity, method, and abstraction.
This prominent Guattarian triplet is elected here for
its obvious geographical investment.4 The way in
which these motifs are explored is deliberately ten-
tative, in part because we are reluctant to operatio-
nalize, instrumentalize, and standardize Guattari
ourselves, and because we find ourselves agreeing
with Thrifts (2008: 2) contention that too much
in the way of clarity should not necessarily be
counted as a good thing. Notwithstanding this, the
article aims to speak both to those well versed with
Guattaris idiosyncratic vocabulary and to those
geographers who find his work irritable or unfami-
liar. The third and final part of the article considers
the political and ethical import of what it means to
be impractical in contrast to accentuating an ideas
ostensible practicality. To be sure, to highlight the
impractical is perhaps to engender a dubious dualis-
tic impasse with the practical, but at the same time,
it might also foreground the centrality of an experi-
mental and indeed micropolitical ethos in geogra-
phical research. In sum, and appropriately enough,
the underlying question we pose to human geogra-
phy is charted by Guattari himself when he asks the
following question of the psychoanalytical institu-
tion, how do we work for its liberation, that is, for
its re-singularisation (1995: 135). This question
likewise can be reappointed in the context of
this discussion, namely, how do we work for the
selfsame liberation of Guattaris philosophy, for
its re-singularization in human geography? Put
bluntly, how might the impracticality of Guattaris
Gerlach and Jellis
philosophy be understood as its most generative and
productive characteristic?
I: Rush
It is something of a truism to remark that continental
philosophy and the more striated assemblage of
French Theory have heavily influenced certain parts
of human geography, not least in its cultural var-
iants. To be sure, it is increasingly rare not to
encounter a text under the broad banner of human
geography which is not informed by or unaware
of some kind of post-structural thought. This is
perhaps most evident in cultural geography which,
as Cresswell (2012: 98) notes, can be rather insistent
on examining an endless series of citations.
Indeed, it is the emergence and proliferation of
non-representational theories (NRTs) that have
done much to promote but also develop the spatial
dimensions of this kind of philosophy (see Anderson
and Harrison, 2010; see also Doel, 1999). Whilst not
on the same plane of prominence as some such as
Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, or Lyotard Guattari is
steadily emerging as a substantial figure in human
geography (Dewsbury, 2000; Katz, 1996; McCor-
mack, 2003, 2005, 2013; Saldanha, 2010).5 His
work is also garnering attention in and across philo-
sophy (Stengers, 2010), sociology (Genosko, 2002),
and cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010; Murphie,
2004), all of which plays into what has been
described of late as the Guattari Effect (see Alliez
and Goffey, 2011; Alliez and Querrien, 2008). As
such, it is quite difficult to identify a genealogical
lineage from which Guattari emerges and similarly
problematic to assert obvious disciples and concep-
tual descendants of his work.
The get-out clause here would be to suggest that
there are multiple Guattaris, three of which can be
posited upfront. First, there is Guattari the anti-
Freudian psychoanalyst who steadfastly refused the
infantalization of his patients by Oedipal markers
and cognitive therapy. Second, there is Guattari the
micropolitician, the proponent of ethico-aesthetic
acts, themselves techniques for disrupting the global
obsession with technocratic modes of governance.
Third, there is Guattari the agitator, the comrade, the
one who paid the bill for Antonio Negris exit out of
133
Italy, the disruptor of the disciplines within which
he operated. For the sake of brevity, three Guattaris
are perhaps enough for now, but it goes without say-
ing that there are infinitely more iterations; indeed
the psychoanalyst, the micropolitician and the agita-
tor are anything but discrete variables of Guattaris
character.6
Why, therefore, the present focus on Guattari in
the context of geographic research and geography
more broadly? To some extent, this project is one
of spotlighting a thinker who has largely been
occluded, conceptually and otherwise, by his own
partnership with Deleuze. Undoubtedly, the act of
spotlighting can quickly turn to fetish and the valor-
ization of a suspect novelty freighted through an
individual author, but at the risk of sounding defen-
sive, this article is not a homage to or a hagiography
of Guattari. Instead, one of the reasons for focusing
on Guattari is because we would wager that the
manifold geographies and geographic concepts that
are deployed in the likes of A Thousand Plateaus
and What is Philosophy are outwardly more Guat-
tarian than they are Deleuzian. That is not to dis-
avow Deleuzes input far from it but it does
seem that the geographic impulse beats more fer-
vently in Guattaris work, from the Molecular Rev-
olution through to Schizoanalytic Cartographies.7
Moreover, whilst Deleuze (1988) deals elsewhere,
theoretically, with the limitations of the notion of
method as a stilted artifice of enquiry, Guattari
through his clinical and militant practices more
explicitly experiments with an empirical approach
tilting towards the affirmation of technique; itself,
as William Connolly (2002) suggests, a less rigid
and directional mode of doing research than that
of method in which the latter might be construed
as an established means to a prefigured end. As
such, harnessing Guattaris practised shift from
method to technique might push geographers closer
towards research that itself is more sensitive to what
Cosgrove describes as the, creative, sometimes
anxious, moments in coming to knowledge of the
world (1999: 2).
Strange perhaps that Guattari has hitherto
received muted attention from geographers in
the midst of an otherwise palpable rush to French
Theory in some quarters of cultural geography. In
134
Guattaris case, the rush is not so much marked by
sheer numbers flocking to cite or appropriate his
work but by a, quickening in the straightforward
applicability of his concepts. This quickening is not
exclusive to Guattaris assemblage of thinking, and
indeed the rush to theoretical applicability finds
echoes in contemporary human geography else-
where, particularly in cultural geography and spe-
cifically in the conceptual tumult of NRT (Thrift,
2008), wherein despite the manifest appeals made
by its exponents to hold on to a radical conceptual
indeterminacy is still liable to an awkward sedi-
mentation or fixation of ideas, practices and phi-
losophical traditions particularly by those scholars
searching for the misplaced security offered by
a seemingly stable theoretical framework. In other
words, much like the rendering of an actor-network
approach into actor-network theory (much to the
chagrin of Bruno Latour and others in years of late),
so too has non-representational theory become
4dangerously close to morphing into Brand NRT,8
abused subsequently as a theoretical straw shibboleth
in which the rush to provide supposed categorical
clarity has yielded, ironically, some bizarre moments
of conceptual muddle, not least in the bastardizing of
affect into the quite unrelated term, affectual (see
Pile, 2010; see also the subsequent critical commen-
taries: Bondi and Davison, 2011; Curti et al., 2011;
Dawney, 2011; Mohammad and Sidaway, 2012).
To be sure, it is not all sledgehammer theorizing
and blunt application; on the contrary, the diverse
constitution and nature(s) of academic geography
have afforded and nurtured a conceptual experiment-
alism that perhaps the strictures of cognate disciplines
would simply not allow. Again, on the flip side of
the aforementioned misguided appropriation, non-
representational styles of experiment and encounter
have generated remarkable space times of research
(Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Dewsbury, 2012;
Lapworth, 2015; McCormack, 2014; Patchett,
2008; Roberts, 2012; Romanillos, 2008; Simpson,
2013). Nonetheless, despite this conceptual varie-
gation, there seems to be a lingering tendency in
geography that is dismissive of such theorizing
and impracticality, a tendency that conflates and
confuses an absence of obvious ideological politi-
cal motivation in the likes of NRT with a lack of
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
substance. Perhaps this can only be whispered anec-
dotally, but what has become known as critical
geography is also ironically, in Anglo-American
quarters, astoundingly conservative in its thinking
and its concomitant judgements as to what passes
the threshold of being radical or critical. Readers
subscribed to the online crit-geog forum, for
example, might have a sense of the sometimes
vitriolic vanguard reactionism to which we allude
here.
Elsewhere in the social sciences, Guattaris invo-
cation of mapping has, for example, been figured
problematically as a mere metaphor (Walkerdine,
2013); this transformation of a vibrant concept into
a metaphor this awkward sleight of hand then
allows its subsequent application as a mode of anal-
ysis for whatever matter of concern is at hand, in this
case, space. Put differently, this metaphorical ren-
dering inhibits the conceptual potential of Guattaris
sense of mapping and cartography by focusing on
the concepts representational effects; as Walker-
dine (2013: 763) surmises, cartography can be a
means of mapping possible transformations and of
supporting them. It can act as an analytic for under-
standing transformations but also for supporting
them into an uncertain future. Whilst we support
this sense that cartography might propagate the vir-
tual, we are not convinced by the idea that Guattaris
cartography can be diagrammed as an analytic
which in turn can be applied to whatever situation;
bluntly, it is perhaps just too convenient, or, just too
stubbornly practical.
Not that it is for us to be accusational; we our-
selves have been all too content with indulging in
what Guattari would call idea thievery, happily
pushing his notions of gentleness, the ethico-
aesthetic and micropolitics, all through, among other
things, a spell of hitch-hiking around southern Eng-
land.9 In other words, we have been complicit in
applying Guattari in the context of fieldwork; the
question we continue to ask ourselves here is: are
we missing the point? To some extent, when reading
Guattari, one is confronted with a dilemma; how to
negotiate Guattaris own oscillation between on the
one hand, his composition of ruthlessly strict dia-
grammatic schema and on the other hand, his lacka-
daisical attitude to the way in which his ideas are
Gerlach and Jellis
ripped, torn and transformed. In the following three
speculations into three prominent Guattarian motifs,
we attempt to think through the methodological sig-
nificance of Guattari in a manner that refrains from
a mode of application, yet which emphasizes their
micropolitical impulse.
II: Speculations
As we outline the three speculative moments in
this article, we want to hold on to the idea that a con-
cept is only worth the life one invests it with. Its
function is less for the purpose of guiding represen-
tation and action than of catalyzing the universe of
reference that frames a pragmatic field (Guattari,
2009a: 192). The expressive resources of Guattaris
conceptual terminology, as Andrew Goffey (2012:
xvi) notes, range from the unusual to the untransla-
table, from the pathological through the mundane, to
the avant-garde and the abstract. The emergence of
such a vocabulary flags the taking off of the Guat-
tarian jargon machine (2012: xxi). Whilst this
vocabulary can be rather abstruse at times (Gen-
osko, 2002), we want to foreground how these terms
operate as part of a specific, experimental under-
standing of theory, in which theory acquires great-
est contact with the real through its very artifice
(Goffey, 2012: xxi).
Existential territories
The first notion we want to put through its paces, in
such an understanding of theory, is that of existen-
tial territories. Our wager, here, is that existential
territories may be a helpful, if impractical, way of
apprehending disciplines, and the idea of discipli-
narity. Taking as our focus human geography, we
want to consider how the discipline is composed
around a set of existential refrains or what Guattari
also terms graspings rather than a set of defini- geographers have recently returned to reflect on the
tions or procedures. We read grasping, which is
adopted by Guattari from Whitehead (see Guattari,
2012: 270, note 16), as the tentative establishment
of some coherence in chaos (Bains, 2002; Murphie,
2010). Grasping is the process of the coming together
of the event, which is less a logical outcome and rather
a temporary arrangement. It is this quality of change
135
and recomposition that we think characterizes human
geography.
There has been no shortage of reflections on the
nature and identity of geography particularly
human geography ever since it became institutio-
nalized as a discipline (Livingstone, 1992). No
doubt, we are not the only ones with undergraduate
students (and colleagues) who are perplexed, if not a
little jaded, by reflecting on the status of the disci-
pline or any of its sub-disciplines. This is, in part,
because such reflections on disciplinarity tend to
highlight coherence and unity. Of course, there are
good reasons for this and there are some themes
that may well hold, however loosely, geographical
enquiry together especially in terms of funding
and recognition as a proper discipline. As Andrew
Barry et al. (2008: 2021) observe, A commitment
to a discipline is a way of ensuring that certain dis-
ciplinary methods and concepts are used rigorously
and that undisciplined and undisciplinary objects,
methods and concepts are ruled out. However, they
are quick to note that it would be a mistake to think
that this implies any kind of disciplinary homogene-
ity or closure, disciplines are routinely character-
ized by internal differences; the existence of a
discipline does not always imply the acceptance of
an agreed set of problems, objects, practices, the-
ories or methods, or even of a shared language or
common institutional structures (2008: 2627).
What Guattari offers us as human geographers is a
way of rethinking the heterogeneous assemblage
of what constitutes the discipline by way of a plur-
ality of existential territories. This offers geogra-
phers a way of articulating both how the discipline
is as disunified as we often acknowledge it to be and
foregrounds how we are invested ethically, exis-
tentially and politically with particular projects.
This is not specific to human geography, but we find
it a particularly productive encounter given how
territory (Elden, 2009, 2013).
Existential territories need not be based on ethni-
city, culture or place (Watson, 2012). And the search
for an existential Territory doesnt necessarily
involve searching for ones country of birth or a dis-
tant country of origin (Guattari, 2008: 42); this is not
the essential relationship between territory, frontier
136
and sovereignty (Gottmann, 1973). As to what an
existential territory actually is, there is no easy way
to say this, with Guattari only giving us an ambiguous
starting point. Existential territories, Guattari (2012:
40) remarks, can neither be discernibilized nor dis-
cursivized as figures represented on a background
of co-ordinates of representation. How do we dis-
cern here from Guattaris own discernibilization?! sibility of such a notion of the discipline.
Interrobangs aside, an existential territory is com-
posed (and recomposed) by an array of tentative
graspings, tendencies which themselves have no plo-
table trajectory. By way of illustration, an existential
territory is a background hum of experience; a way of
existentially knowing yourself, without recourse to
everyday labels, categories and identities. To para-
phrase Massey (2005), imagining territory and
space as in process, is to insist on the openness of
the future. What we find interesting about the notion
of existential territories is that there is no emphasis on
boundaries. Accordingly, thinking about disciplines
in this way encourages us to think about how they are
organized around a series of refrains or disciplinary
motifs rather than the kind of policing work
that goes into deciding what falls within the purview
of a particular field. It also restates the question of
what is geography in a more affirmative, or affective,
spirit: what moves us as geographers?
We make two substantive points here. The first is
that we want to counter the notion of existential ter-
ritories to that of egotistical territories. Whilst we all
have a particular conceptual territory that we might
associate with our own research, all too often there
is an anticipatory movement of carving out a partic-
ular field of ones own. This takes many forms, the
latest of which is claim staking on blogs and twitter.
It is not that we wish to rail against the use of social
media. Rather, it is the tendency to present a pithy
sound bite, an all-too clear message outlining
research, which seems to us to have a pre-emptive
deadening effect that forecloses the very distribu-
tion of research. There is nothing wrong with the
idea of dissemination except perhaps the word
itself but the apparent ease with which a research
project is condensed into a blog post or tweet strikes
us as having more to do with individual projects than
a disciplines existential territory. Indeed, if we heed
Guattaris critique of integrated world capitalism
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
(IWC), a quaint name for something altogether more
terrifying, we might question how certain research
agendas, their practicality and their impact, all capi-
tulate to certain logics of innovation. Therefore,
whilst human geography could well be understood
as a mutating existential territory, the production of
certain desiring trends for turf staking harms the pos-
Another disruption to a straightforward applica-
tion of existential territories to thinking disciplinary
stomping grounds is that Guattari often works with
doubling couplets. At first blush, we were drawn
to thinking about these couplets as a device to slow
down thought, devices which prevent a too easy
analytical movement. Yet, as we read further, we
found that this process of doubling and redoubling
enables one to pick up speed in the middle (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2004: 28). As such, the term push
might be thought of in two ways here, seemingly
helping to push on human geography (one more
push for more of the same) and to push over (a gen-
tle nudge rather than a shove).10
Guattari pairs existential territories with incorpor-
eal universes; the former are singular, idiosyncratic,
sensible and finite, the latter are non-dimensioned,
non-coordinated, trans-sensible and infinite (Pindar
and Sutton, 2008: 85, note 15). To put this differently,
we might consider how human geography has
escaped its past content and internal constraints: how
it has renewed itself through the rigorous indisci-
pline of its effective couplings with processes other
than its own (Massumi, 2008: 27). That is to say,
existential territories are not given as an in-itself,
closed in on itself, but instead as a for-itself; precar-
ious and singular, capable of both stratified and
deathly repetitions or of opening up processually
from a praxis that enables it to be made habitable
(Guattari, 2008: 35).
The second point is that thinking with existential
territories also allows us to consider fieldwork dif-
ferently. Whilst there is no doubting tendencies
towards particular conceptual grounds, there is also
a kind of pull that marks a commitment or partic-
ipation to a particular field or case. Indeed, the
very notion of fieldwork, or the case study for that
matter, becomes less about identifying a specific
bounded example but rather more as a series of
Gerlach and Jellis
graspings. As Lauren Berlant (2007) has already
argued, the case reveals itself not as a form but as
an event that takes shapes; fieldwork is an event that
we only ever grasp at. Fieldwork raises questions
around a range of topics, but one that rarely features
in discussions is one of existence. How do concepts,
materials, participants and questions co-produce an
existential territory one which is always recom-
posing itself? By way of a response, we explore two
further Guattarian notions, metamodelisation and
cartography, signal motifs for rethinking the way
in which human geographers engage with concepts.
Metamodelisation
Throughout much of Guattaris work, and in particu-
lar in his last book, Chaosmosis (Guattari, 1995), he
develops the neologism of metamodelisation.11
This term can be seen as an integral part of his work
on schizoanalysis, a reaction to, and frustration with
what he saw as the shortcomings of much psychoana-
lysis. It is integral because Guattari was particularly
critical of the use of models in psychoanalytic treat-
ment. He craved the freedom of construction of new
types of models relating to the analysis of the uncon-
scious (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 299) rather than
the proposition of a global alternative to existing
methods of analysing the unconscious (Guattari,
1996a: 122). Although much could be said about the
unconscious, or psychoanalysis more broadly, what
we want to acknowledge here is that the imposition
of standard models, or orthodox methods, can be
oppressive. We draw on Guattari, therefore, to focus
attention on the ongoing creation and construction of
novel models, which we think could be extended to
think about geographical techniques more generally.
Indeed, foregrounding the notion of metamodelisa-
tion complicates the ways in which we understand,
develop and practise geographical techniques.
Guattari understood the term model in several
ways (see Watson, 2008) but they all share the idea
of a model as a repeated pattern. What distinguishes
metamodelisation from modelisation is the way that
it develops possible openings onto the virtual and
onto creative processuality (Guattari, 1995: 31).
Elsewhere, this is figured as a resistance to modeli-
sations which simplify the complex (1995: 61).
137
Instead, Guattari argued that, the more complex the
models become, the less risk they run of using sys-
tems of reference that crush the sensibility to what
happens (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 312). By
thinking in terms of metamodelisation, the idea of
modelisation becomes untethered from both its
representational foundation and its mimetic repro-
duction (Genosko and Murphie, 2008: np).
The invocation of the prefix meta- is unfortu-
nate, as it could initially seem to be a model of all
models or instead of other models. Instead, follow-
ing Brian Massumi (2011), we consider meta- in
another etymological sense: among rather than
after. In fact, Guattari says as much, models will
only be considered as one among others (1996b:
197). Metamodelisation is a way of constructing
models from within all other models; it is an imma-
nent modelisation. Guattari is very pragmatic: no
model is right but you cannot step out of all model-
ling either. Metamodelisation draws on other mod-
els, and therefore retains the prefix meta-, but this,
to reiterate, is a meta- from the middle rather than
from above. It draws on aspects and components
of models that are useful and discards those that are
not needed.12 This borrowing of parts of models is
experimental, bringing together different compo-
nents for particular situations. Metamodelisation is
productive of a new kind of reality; it functions;
forces things together (Genosko and Murphie,
2008: np).
The suggestion here, then, is that the term could
help foster a productive dialogue between those
engaged in the process of modelling and those prac-
tising a putatively more critical human geography
because it highlights how a range of different kind
of geographers are trying to articulate alternative
processes when they exist (Guattari and Rolnik,
2008: 132). Whilst there have been few pivotal texts
on modelling (Chorley and Haggett, 1967; Macmil-
lan, 1989; Peet and Thrift, 1989), a number of recent
articles suggest that there may be a renewal of
interest in the practice (Clifford, 2008; Lane, 2011;
Lane et al., 2011; OSullivan, 2004). Perhaps one
of the most interesting developments here has been
the suggestion that models are useful when they
unsettle rather represent, when they open up new
possibilities for investigation and interpretation
138
(Lane, 2011: 231). Put differently, it is when models
do not add up that they can bring about new ways of
thinking and researching.
This treatment of models as both disruptive
and generative is taken up in Lanes participation
in a recent project, which was committed to doing
flood risk science differently (Lane et al., 2011).
The project attempted to counter the predominance
of certain sorts of hydrological models and, in
particular, the notion that these models are universal
technologies, where the model does not change,
only the initial conditions. By cultivating different
means of practising science, a model was co-
produced by the academics and the local residents
who participated in the project. Those involved had
initially expected to reuse an existing hydrological
model to foreground upstream processes but the
failure of these earlier modelling efforts meant that
the project became concerned with developing a
new model. Lane et al. argue that it was not simply
a case of translating local knowledge into a series of
concepts and assumptions to inform model develop-
ment (2011: 28) but an attempt to challenge the
ways in which models are constructed. Crucially,
the (co-produced) model was formulated specifi-
cally for the place in question. Rather than have a
ready-made model that is made to work everywhere,
their project suggests that models be developed for
particular sites. Lane et al.s work is useful for
thinking modelling in geography, in part as it
bridges physical and human concerns. However,
we can return to Guattari to further emphasize and
extend this commitment to specificity. This is less
a preoccupation with continuing debates around the
ideographic and nomothetic (Sayer, 2000), but
rather an argument that human geographers practise
an ethos of modelling when developing their meth-
ods or, put differently, that they metamodel their
techniques.
How might metamodelisation function in prac-
tice, though? And how might we hone practices of
metamodelisation? We can follow Guattari when
he explains that his perspective involves shifting
the human and social sciences from scientific
paradigms towards ethico-aesthetic paradigms
(Guattari, 1995). Guattaris ideas emerged from his
encounters with an experimental therapeutic space
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
and later came to describe these not just as schizoa-
nalysis, or metamodelisation, but as an ethico-
aesthetics. For him, treatment is not a work of art,
yet it must proceed from the same sort of creativity
(Guattari, 2009b: 192). Moreover, Guattari cham-
pions aesthetic practises in Chaosmosis, explaining
that although art does not have a monopoly on cre-
ation, it engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and
unthinkable qualities of being (1995: 106). This,
then, is art understood in a very broad sense (as a
way or style of life, a care for the self) and not in the
narrow sense of a specialized, segmented, impover-
ished domain in contemporary capitalist society (the
art market). Similarly for human geography, we
might think of the ethico-aesthetics of technique.
A technique, like a model, should only be used once,
because to reuse it would be transform it into a gen-
eral theoretical (or methodological) schematic. Just
as relentless reworking of models helped Guattari
ensure that metamodelisation never became a gen-
eral model (OSullivan, 2010), so too we might
rework technique so that it never became a method.
The danger with the metamodel, we might note, is
that is about starting over again. The metamodel is
impractical in that it is always operating at the edge,
avant-garde in style and resolutely anti-conservative.
If the model always has to be made anew, how are
certain aspects conserved? What arises is a certain
tension between the need to hold on to something
of a model (something that works) and the desire for
newness (something that is specific). And, of course,
Guattaris claims that there is no pre-given model
that it must always be reconstructed are vaguely
heroic in their incessant demand for newness.13
Whilst this chimes with the mantra of speed up!, a
gentle counterpoint may be to consider how geogra-
phers might recycle (if perhaps not cherish) and rein-
vent that which has endured.
Guattaris mania with models and modelisation
is important as it invites geographers to reflect fur-
ther on constructions. This is something that human
geographers are readily familiar with think of the
importance of class, gender, economy or representa-
tion, to list just a few examples. We want to use
Guattari as a platform for extending current thinking
about the construction of method, in particular, and
how specific techniques might be developed for
Gerlach and Jellis
particular sites or situations.14 The conundrum
posed by Guattari is that approaches need to be
adapted to each singular situation there is no
one-size-fits-all method and yet we need not
necessarily start from scratch. The emphasis, then,
is not on how we abandon methods that have served
us well over the years but rather on how we revita-
lize and respecify these very methods through the
techniques that we develop. This is in keeping with
the ethos of many NRTs (see Thrift, 2004) that
understand the world as incomplete and inconsis-
tent, necessitating an approach that is animated by
a spirit of affirmative experimentation. We think our
contribution can be read in this same sense: it offers a
way of thinking how to combat the methodological
conservatism that permeates undergraduate and
postgraduate methods courses without disavowing
these methods. Guattari encourages us to reflect on
the transition from method to technique and fore-
grounds the import of specificity.
Cartography
Cartography, or map-making, as the royal science of
empire par excellence, might on first appearances
seem antithetical to the experimental energies of a
Guattarian conceptual ethos. What place for this
technology of capture in the excesses, flows and
transgressions of geographical research? Again,
there resounds a sheer impracticality in the imposi-
tion of a Euclidean geometry upon the pressing con-
cerns of contemporary social and political life. As a
geographer, the temptation is to use Guattaris car-
tography as an orienteering device for fieldwork
or for conducting research more generally, thus it
can be used dangerously to cleave apart subject
from object. Worse still, as we mentioned earlier,
cartography can be simmered down to mere meta-
phor, despite the fact that Guattari alongside
Deleuze had previously disavowed the notion of
metaphor in their reading of Kafka, preferring
instead the processual tenor of term metamorpho-
sis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). How, then, might
we harness a Guattarian cartography that holds back
from metaphor? One such technique would be to
disrupt the epistemological vector of cartography,
to unsettle its vertical accord as a science with which
139
to view the world from above, or with which to
determine a narrowed, clinical gaze. In other words,
it is to mess with the facile practicality of cartogra-
phy; to refrain from using cartography as an analy-
tical superimposition upon matters of concern,
shifting instead towards mapping with Guattari as
a mode of opening-up the virtual, of using cartogra-
phy to produce conceptual and empirical disorienta-
tions. As Guattari (1995: 28) himself suggests, the
primary purpose . . . of cartography is thus not to
signify and communicate, but to produce assem-
blages of enunciation. Immediately, this appeal to
an assemblage of enunciation necessarily recog-
nizes the plurivocal potential of cartography, and
indeed the multiple lines of flight, desire and politics
that constitute cartographic thinking and practice.
Yet let us not pretend any conceptual novelty is
afoot; reflecting upon the well-known dubious
imperial and belligerent heritage of cartography,
Guattari is not saying anything geographers have
not said before critical cartography is a long estab-
lished and vibrant school of enquiry (see, inter alia,
Crampton, 2010; Crampton and Krygier, 2006; Har-
ley, 1989; Harris and Harrower, 2006; Wood, 1992,
2010); and a more troubling, even nefarious, carto-
graphic reason has been disrupted at painstaking
length (see Olsson, 2007). That, to purloin a Latour-
ian turn of phrase, cartography has never been
representational, that it has always been caught up
in some form of geopolitical enunciation are well-
rehearsed tenets of a critical approach to cartography,
and Guattari joins those geographers highlighting an
ongoing problem with the wider understanding of
cartography as a straightforward ontological signifier
or an epistemological guarantor (see Boria, 2013;
Caquard, 2015; Gerlach, 2014; Kitchin and Dodge,
2007; Kitchin et al., 2013). Beyond the narrower con-
fines of strictly cartographic practice, geographers
have also been busy in conjuring the conceptual and
empirical tools with which to approach broader mat-
ters of critical Geographic Information System (GIS),
the geoweb and geovisualisation all through a sus-
tained engagement with social theory (see, e.g.
Leszczynski and Wilson, 2013; Wilson and Graham,
201315). Guattari might, therefore, come to the assis-
tance of geographers interested in unpicking both the
metaphysical properties of maps and geographical
140
visualisations more widely whilst also contributing to
the unsettled political debate that rages therein. Spe-
cifically, Guattari can take further those geographies
that assert cartographys autonomy from its supposed
ontological guarantees of accuracy, precision and
distance, thereby undoing its semiotic efficiency, its
heretic labour of pulling apart reality from represen-
tation. Admittedly, it is not immediately obvious as to
how Guattaris thought translates in this scenario; the
situation is not helped insofar as, despite his predilec-
tion for maps and mappings, Guattari never thought
to think through his version of cartography alongside
cartography! Likewise, in his assessment of a bur-
geoning IWC in The Three Ecologies, Guattari did
not anticipate the growing, global interest in drawing
maps; a recent explosion in participatory cartogra-
phies (Thrift, 2012), analogue and digital that are
opening up novel forms of political articulation,
whether they be open-source platforms for hobbyist
pastimes as in the case of the wiki-based OpenStreet-
Map or the agitprop in the form of the Atlas of Rad-
ical Cartography (Bhagat and Mogel, 2008). The
point here is not to make the claim that a Guattarian
sense of cartography democratizes or liberalizes the
concept or the practice of mapping; such a claim
would be to fall into the trap of a suspect liberal over-
coding. Nor is the point here to make sense of maps,
something geographers continue to pursue, despite
its futility when what matters, as Guattari would
suggest, is cartographys asignifying properties. (Guattari, 2009a: 279). Semiotisation here is clearly
No, the point here is to pivot on the minor register
of cartography, on its non-representational geopoli-
tics as a way of sustaining an ethos, not least in geo-
graphical fieldwork, that emphasizes speculation
over certitude, disorientation over orientation; a spec-
ulative form of research that makes no pretence of
providing a universal structural foundation (Guattari,
1996c: 98).
What Guattaris cartography could contribute to
more substantive terms lies less in cartography itself
as it does more towards the design and processes of
geographical research writ large through a novel
focus, or rather a schizoanalytic take, on semiotics16
and politics, but again recognizing that Guattaris
thinking here is intended to add to, not to usurp geo-
graphical scholarship on such matters. First off,
human geographical research with Guattari, might
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
negate the semiotic moment of signification; the
need to matter, the need to project signs of meaning,
the need for relevance or the insistence on an auto-
propositional logic of my research does this. In
other words, human geographical research with
Guattari begins with something of a rejection;
rejecting all these modes of pre-established encod-
ing, all these modes of manipulation and remote
control, rejecting them in order to construct modes
of sensibility, modes of relation with the other,
modes of production, modes of creativity (Guattari
and Rolnik, 2008: 24, emphasis added). One might
(and perhaps should) read this moment of negation
as a blunt resistance towards and/or a dismissal of
certain methodological tropes in the social sciences
those pre-established encodings of subjects,
objects, fields, ethics and positionality; encodings
that are simultaneously, dare we say, dialectically,
generated by and generative of insipid market inten-
sities in higher education. With Guattari, a mere
rejection on its own terms is, of course, never
enough. So what else; what of these other modes
of production and creativity? In response, a move
is needed away from the aforementioned semiotics
of research, and instead a concomitant push to the
process of semiotisation is required. Semiotisation
is, what happens with perception, with movement
in space, with singing, dancing, mimicry, caressing,
contact, everything that concerns the body
a shift from the static heuristic of a cartographic
semiotics of sign and signifier to a processual ani-
mation of lines of flight and lines of enquiry, a form
of opening up the research and its attendant pro-
cesses so that matters of concern of all kinds . . .
connect and conjoin very different practices rele-
vant, for example, to the arts, sciences, social strug-
gles, etc (Guattari, 2011: 171). The motivation of
human geographical research (or human geogra-
phys desiring) then becomes less a semiotic prac-
tice of staking signs and signifiers in the service of
impact, and instead becomes a process of semiotisa-
tion, an art of emitting the interruptive signs, trig-
gering the cues that attune bodies while activating
their capacities differentially (Massumi, 2009: 6).
This is about human geographical research working
at both a micropolitical register of affect and a more
Gerlach and Jellis
avowedly macropolitical register of institution, pol-
icy and representation to disrupt the staid accord of
contemporary social sciences, inventing instead
techniques that disorientate. It is about creating
research that itself can create a set of vectors
whereby the virtual and actual come to meet
(Holmes, 2009: 73), and whereby what is generated
does not matter in a cliched political framework.
Indeed the modes of expression and creativity
engendered by human geographical research need
not attain some degree of infamy to be felt or sensed,
instead what we can accentuate is an inhabitation of
the mundane and ineffably prosaic. How to put this
plainly? When embarking on a research project,
start not with the institutional tyranny of what rele-
vance, what impact, what goal your queries might
yield. Instead, begin in the middle by not knowing;
by allowing Guattaris schizo-energies and anti-
intuitive cartography to disorientate enquiry, disrupt
questions and muddle the field.
Circling back to all things mapping, and divorced
from its representational certitude, cartography finds
greater critical purchase in the context of research;
geometric practicality is replaced by affective, virtual
impracticality or as Guattari (2009a: 46) puts it, by, a
cartography of affects, on the level of daily relation-
ships. This goes to further disrupt the classically ter-
ritorial logic of the field in fieldwork; the field
diagrammed as the suspiciously bounded space of
matter and events. Instead we are encouraging the
field itself to be disruptive. Part of this disruption
goes back to one of Guattaris central motifs in Schi-
zoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari, 2012), namely,
the chaotic passage from speaking of subjected
groups to speaking of subject groups capable of
their own articulation. Cartography, when taken
metaphorically, or enforced practically in research,
creates a subjected field, and therefore a subjected
and arguably stilted fieldwork. Through Guattari,
and therefore harnessing affect in particular, geo-
graphical research can be less encumbered by the
excavation of data as it might be concerned with
constructing those modes of sensibility suggested
in the process of semiotisation. In sum, cartogra-
phy does not have to be equated with a technocratic
form of geographical research, or more specifi-
cally, geographical fieldwork.
141
Strangely enough, even when cartography is
deployed as a conceptual metaphor, authors often
ignore or negate the product of cartography, specif-
ically, that of the map; cartography in this case is
just pure heuristic. Yet whilst we do not pretend that
maps are stable artefacts in of themselves, they are
nonetheless continually emergent in the practice of
cartography. Maps and cartographies, or maps and
mappings, are immanent to one another, much like
empiricism and conceptualisation. As such we could
conceive of geographic research, like maps, as
something akin to Guattaris aesthetic machines,
or to figure research as a machinic process, not in its
automotive, industrial sense but in its incessantly
productive momentum.17 This is to think research
an anticipatory machine, always on the cusp of the
actual and virtual; a strange contraption, as Guat-
tari (1995: 92) muses a machine of virtuality made
up of blocks of mutant percepts and affect, half-
object, half-subject, already there in sensation and
outside themselves in fields of the possible. If this
sounds all too tentative, then so be it; a Guattarian
cartography is less a framework as it is an approach
or ethos, a way of deranging the subject/object
accord of much of social scientific research, instead
accentuating the role of bodies in the folds of expe-
rience. This also calls into question the themes of
participation and to be participant in geographic
research. Participation is often taken as a byword for
inclusiveness in research, and it assumes that parti-
cipants can be cartographically prefigured, but as
Massumi (2002: 231) remarks participation pre-
cedes recognition. A Guattarian cartography recog-
nizes how participation is as much about enrolment
into the affective as it might be into a representa-
tional rhetoric of the democratic, or as Woodward
et al. (2010: 273) suggest, bodies do not merely find
themselves in positions of relative or interlocking
distribution, but participate in the production of the
fields of force through which they aggregate. To
be sure, there are some fantastic examples of attun-
ing to affective modes of participation and keeping
company with Guattari in geographical scholar-
ship, notably in the multiverse works of Derek
McCormack (McCormack, 2013) in which the
choreographic and the cartographic collide, or singu-
larize, to proffer refrains for speculating, researching
142
and micropolitical space times. As the nod to McCor-
macks work suggests, Guattaris appeal is largely
confined to cultural geography and to those geogra-
phers working in a non-representational register. Yet
as McCormacks work attests to, the transversal
nature of Guattaris thinking and practice that it cuts
across different concerns and different ecologies
must surely be of utility to a broader spectrum of
human geographers.
In brief conclusion to this speculation, we might
assert that Guattaris cartography lends not the prac-
ticality of stabilization, resolution and render but
constantly provides the impractical conditions of
apprehension; the uncertainty of the field, the provi-
sional natures of participation and the affective
coordinates of writing. Or, to borrow from JD
Dewsbury (2014: 151) we ask for cartography to
be made apprehensive, not to be certain, to be
apprehended, to arrest, to be arrested, to be caught
dumbfounded in the flow . . . of something else.
III: Impracticality
Throughout these speculative moments, we have
raised a number of questions surrounding the polit-
ical and ethical urgency of what it means to engage
with an impractical philosophy. As we noted in the
introduction, to privilege the impractical is perhaps
a dangerous move, but in the same manner in
which, for example, deterritorialization and re-
territorialization run immanent to one another, so
too does the impractical with the practical. Recal-
ling Oscar Wilde (2001 [1891]) on what counts
as a practical scheme, we might regard the practical
to be that which can be undertaken in the present
conditions; or rather, the practical as the condition-
ing of possibilities. A preoccupation with the prac-
tical, we contend, is a limit to the vibrant potential
of geographical research. We are no doubt not the
only geographers to be chided by colleagues with
self-assumedly more practical credentials for being
too theoretical or too abstract, and thus ren-
dered impractical geographers. Yet the impracti-
cal, conversely, not only disrupts the ease at
which concepts are applied but also operates in and
through the register of the virtual. In short, we are
not equating the impractical with the impossible;
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
we are, however, suggesting here an abandonment
of the ethic and method of application. This
would entail altering the kinetics of geographical
research altogether; harnessing a Guattarian ethos
that eschews a ponderous dwelling on the efficacy,
viability or projected output of an idea, and which
instead demands an acceleration in theorizing and
conceptualization.
Guattaris theoretical edifice is at once tantaliz-
ing and impenetrable. His concepts, charming,
heroic, curiously scientific; his writing, dense,
pacey and crazed; and his love of diagrams . . . all
serve to make Guattaris work impractical in a very
immediate sense. If his words and ideas do not pass
the threshold of practicality or practicability, then
this is precisely to underline what Ian Buchanan
(2013) identifies as the deliberate guarding by Guat-
tari against the reductive tendencies of the practi-
cally-minded. It is also to dismiss the snobbery
that exists around the supposed gap between style
and substance. Style has substance; it is in itself sub-
stantial. Substance too, is stylistic, not least because
as Goffey (2012) remarks, the plane of expression
and content is inseparable from a characteristic
pragmatics of style. Likewise, if as Guattari intones,
style is a central component of enunciation, we
implore those engaged in geographical research to
experiment and play havoc with style. Geography,
the craft of earth writing, has never been a singular
one, or a stable articulation of planetary affairs.
Avoid, then, the phantasmic trap (Guattari, 1995)
laid by those that would have you believe that style
over substance is a triumph of the superficial over
the profound. Sometimes the self-declared profound
gets lost in the mire of liberal earnestness and the
superficial, sadly, is ignored despite its lively detail.
Acknowledging the title we have borrowed, and
tweaked, from his erstwhile collaborator, we might
riff off the idea that although Guattari is difficult
and some people will not get on with his thought
it is not a question of follow[ing] every proposition,
mak[ing] every connection the intuitive or affec-
tive reading may be more practical anyway (Hur-
ley, 1988: iii). What we are suggesting, then,
chimes with Robert Hurleys invitation to read
Deleuze: to read with a different attitude. Reading
Guattari may not be anything like reading poetry but
Gerlach and Jellis
neither does it need to be about extracting and
applying a practical idea. Instead, as we have been
trying to perform in this piece, there is scope to read
Guattari in a way that seeks to amplify the reso-
nances between different domains of thought. The
impracticality, such as it is, resides in making these
relays, these transversal movements; it inhabits the
very difficulty in flashes of understanding.
By way of a brief summary; three motifs, and
three provisional transversal movements. First,
we turned to existential territories as way of appre-
hending the thinking spaces of disciplines. What
makes a discipline, such as geography, cohere are its
refrains, its graspings. Of course, these may well be
multiple but it also helps to think about the mutating
conceptual and practical agendas that constitute a
field of work. Existential territories also offer pur-
chase on how we imagine engagements with the
empirical, and most pertinently, encounters that
make up fieldwork. As per our earlier comment on
style, this requires a moment of abandonment. For
example, in undertaking fieldwork, excise those
identitarian codes and categories which so viciously
inhibit the questions that can (or cannot) be posed.
We do not offer a substitute here, as the deliberate
negation of identity is itself the affirmative step.
Second, we attended to metamodelisation as a way
of navigating the tortuous passage between method
and technique. Without abandoning the generative
constraints of orthodox methods, we harness Guat-
taris musings regarding the ongoing construction
of models to reflect on the fabrication of relation-
specific techniques. We do not offer any particular
examples out of fear of lapsing into a practical
utility but suggest that novelty, for the sake of
itself, is not necessarily the end goal. It is, instead,
of iterating, of experimenting, with geographical
technique. Third, we speculated on the potential of
cartographys impracticality; tracing away from its
representational certitude, harnessing instead its
ability to chart the virtual. This figures maps and
mapping as anticipatory machines or abstractions
of anticipation that both complicate the matter of the
field and likewise give cause to rethink classic
axioms such as positionality and participation. In
short, this is to decouple once interesting ideas from
feminist geographies away from their deadening
143
bind into cartographic logics; the confessional of the
penitent researcher in which they prefigure their
relation to fieldwork and events. It helps rethink the
logic of participation; not enrolment through spur-
ious democratic enumeration but through a specula-
tive, processual series of attachmentdetachments,
the very matter of geography.
These three speculative moments all stem from
an untethering of Guattaris ideas from a particular
context whether that be institutional psychoanaly-
sis, militant politics or philosophizing to reflect on
the impracticality of theory in human geography.
That is to say: the stop, the start, the confusion, the
flash, and the shards; the movement from theory to
the empirical and back again.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lily Kong and two anonymous
reviewers for their constructive, detailed and patient com-
ments. We are also very grateful to the School of Geogra-
phical Sciences at the University of Bristol and, in
particular, to Merle Patchett, JD Dewsbury, Nina Wil-
liams, Andrew Lapworth and Tom Roberts. And to Derek
McCormack, thank you for leaving the page intentionally
blank.
Notes
1. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the
successor to the United Kingdoms Research Assess-
ment Exercise (RAE).
2. In many ways, this relates to recent work on acceler-
ationism (see Mackay and Avanessian, 2014) but
here we want to accentuate the impractical as much
as the speeding up of thought.
3. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer who
commented on the importance of thinking in threes
for this article. The predilection here for a three-
fold refrain and structure pivots on Guattaris own
speculation of a triumvirate of ecologies (Guattari,
2008) but we recognize that there are as many twos,
fours, ns and n1s as there are threes.
4. This is not to play down the importance of other terms
that make up Guattaris thoroughly geographical
vocabulary, which might include deterritorialization,
re-territorialization, universes, diagrams, mappings,
tracings, lines, points, figures, folds, chaosmos, earth,
geo-philosophy and so on. However, we attend to just
144
three in this text as we think it is these which speak
most closely to non-representational theories cur-
rently espoused in human geography.
5. At the same time, more of Guattaris back catalogue
is being translated into English (Guattari, 2006,
2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2012; Guattari and Rolnik,
2008).
6. Francois Dosses (2010) biographical account of Guat-
tari and Deleuzes collaborations poignantly illustrates
the many more Guattaris there were in a seemingly
Sartrean existential understanding of identity, running
transversally from psychoanalyst, to comrade, from
frantic womaniser to a catatonic depressive.
7. Whilst we are drawn to arguments which have made a
case for how Guattaris work informed Deleuzes
(see, for instance, Alliez, 2011a, 2011b; Dosse,
2010), we prefer to follow Nadauds (2006: 13) sug-
gestion that they were co-extensive in an immanent
process of production through assemblage. More-
over, this chimes with Deleuze and Guattaris own
reflections that it is no longer of any importance
whether one says I (2004: 3).
8. This sense of theoretical branding has been heigh-
tened by sporadic debates in geography over whether
non-representational theory (NRT) (with or without
the hyphen) should indeed be labelled NRT or
more-than-representational theory (Lorimer, 2005)
or even anti-representational theory (Jones, 2008).
Here we insist on the non, taking our lead from
Anderson and Harrisons (2010) crucial work in tying
together multiple strands of non-representational
thinking.
9. The experientialexperimental milieu for the attempts
to rethink and reclaim hitchhiking as a fieldwork
technology work its way from the SenseLabs Society
of Molecules, which took place in mid-May 2009,
across 16 locations or, rather, 16 molecules. The Soci-
ety of Molecules as a distributed event was conceived
as an experiment in co-producing interventions with
ethico-aesthetic reverberations. For us, this injunction
propelled a sensibility towards enacting hitch-hiking
as a technique for geographical fieldwork (see Abra-
hamsson et al., 2009; McCormack, 2013).
10. We are indebted to one of the reviewers for pointing
out the double duty of the term push in the article
and for his or her pithy characterization, which we
have included.
Dialogues in Human Geography 5(2)
11. This has often been translated as metamodelling but,
as will hopefully become clear, we choose to use
his neologism of metamodelisation without transla-
tion to emphasize the link between modelisation
and metamodelisation, and to embrace Guattaris
thought rather than try to map it onto another set of
terms, such as metamodelling, or even remodelling
(cf. Watson, 2008).
12. This is to paraphrase Guattari, who didnt believe
that there are any general models that can be applied.
Either a model is useful for something . . . or else it
must be set aside (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 185)
13. We do not contend, though, that Guattari made a fet-
ish of the new, nor that he was a victim of fashion;
he certainly was no dupe of the consumer society as
noted by one of the reviewers.
14. This is not to ignore, as very helpfully noted by one of
the anonymous reviewers, the broad influence of con-
structivism of all varieties on the past several
decades of theory and development in methodology.
15. See related special issues on the geoweb and neo-
graphy at GeoJournal (volume 78) and Environment
and Planning A (volume 45), respectively.
16. In the case of semiotics and cartography, again, geo-
graphy has taken a keen interest. See Wood and Fels
(1986) as a good example of such interest.
17. This resonates with Deleuze and Guattaris (2004)
animation of the relationship between orchid and
wasp which demonstrates that the former is not imita-
tive of the latter but that the two produce a new real-
ity; the orchid-wasp. Research, similarly, is not the
tracing of a present situation but the production of a
new map.
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