Abstract
This paper develops an affective post-foundational political geography to better attend to how affects might shape, and be shaped by, political processes. It foregrounds (extra)ordinary affects, sensory experiences, and atmospheres as central to how politics is felt, encountered, and experienced in nonlinear ways that exceed discourse. Attuning to affects, this paper enables human geographers to better engage with ordinary events as they unfold, traverse political registers, and potentially surface in extraordinary moments. This framework offers epistemological insight into how difference can be affectively registered and negotiated within political processes, while building points of connection between critical geography and activist praxis.
Keywords
Introduction
This paper develops an affective post-foundational political geography to better attend to how affects might shape, and be shaped by, political processes. Guided by the ‘pull’ of the ordinary (Stewart, 2007: 29), this framework foregrounds (extra)ordinary affects, sensory experiences, and atmospheres as central to how political processes are felt, encountered, and experienced. In doing so, it enables geographers to explore both the broader social foundations at stake and the granular, ordinary processes through which such radical transformations might emerge. Drawing on affect theory (Anderson, 2006, 2009, 2014; Massumi, 2002, 2015), notions of the ordinary (Stewart, 2007), and post-foundational political geography (Blakey et al., 2022; Landau et al., 2021; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023), this approach moves beyond an epistemological focus on political events as discrete ruptures or singular events (Derickson, 2017; Marchart, 2007; Temenos, 2017).
Instead, it understands political processes as nonlinear and often exceeding discourse. These processes arise through an intimate, entangled coalescence of personal and collective affects, emotions, and temporalities, comprising ordinary events that may traverse politics and political registers and, at times, surface in potentially extraordinary moments (Blakey et al., 2022; Stewart, 2007). Here, affects are understood as the pre-discursive and pre-cognitive flows that move between and beyond bodies, ‘human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 1). This reframing offers a more nuanced account of how political processes may form, stall, or fail to emerge altogether, while positioning the ordinary as a crucial site of meaning-making and world navigation.
Such an approach examines how political (im)possibilities may surface through ordinary encounters (Wilson, 2017), atmospheres (Anderson, 2009; Stewart, 2011), and happenings (Marchart, 2019). Drawing on post-foundational political geography, the concept of (im)possibility brings attention to how affects may be generative, remain suspended as latent political potential 1 , or work to disavow, suppress, or extinguish political activity. In doing so, this approach moves beyond a dialectical framework between the ordinary and the extraordinary to explore the dynamic and entangled interplay of affect, temporality, and spatiality that continually shape political (im)possibilities.
This affectively attuned reading of post-foundational political geography holds relevance for a broad range of geographers. For scholars working within post-foundational political geography, discussed more explicitly below, it offers new tools for understanding how (extra)ordinary political processes may, or may not, unfold on the ground. It invites affect scholars to attune more closely to the contingencies through which the capacity to affect and to be affected may be experienced, and how this might relate to political change. This framework also offers a conceptual basis for greater points of connection between critical human geography and activist praxis, and for examining how difference can be encountered, registered, and negotiated affectively.
Centrally, this paper provides a timely contribution to the emerging field of post-foundational political geography 2 by examining what this subfield might gain from a closer engagement with affect as it continues to gain traction within human geography. Post-foundational political geography broadly asserts the impossibility of final grounds in socio-spatial and political orders and views any attempts at ordering as contingent, exclusionary, and thus contestable (Blakey et al., 2022; Marchart, 2007). As I will later outline, recent scholarship demonstrates this field’s expanding influence and potential. Landau-Donnelly and Pohl’s (2023: 481) recent paper in this journal, for instance, emphasises the expansive potential of post-foundational political geography, arguing it ‘radically uproots’ existing geographic understandings of political and socio-spatial configurations. This uprooting brings attention to the contingency and exclusions inherent in all socio-political orderings, as well as the ever-present potential for things to be otherwise.
Landau et al.’s (2021) edited volume [Un]Grounding: Post-Foundational Geographies demonstrates the productivity of this approach for examining the implicit and generative relationships between post-foundationalism, spatialities, and geography. This growing body of literature reflects the broadening disciplinary reach of post-foundationalism, as seen in recent human geography scholarship (e.g. Blakey, 2024; Blakey et al., 2022; Saleh and Landau-Donnelly, 2024) and beyond (e.g. Jong, 2023). Such momentum underscores the need for continued critical engagement with post-foundationalism’s potentialities, which remain far from fully explored.
Despite these advances in understanding the contingent and exclusionary nature of socio-political orders, their predominant focus on moments of rupture often leaves the more diffuse, ordinary, and affective dimensions of political life underexplored, particularly in their relation to more extraordinary moments of contestation (Blakey et al., 2022; Derickson, 2017). This emphasis on rupture largely stems from post-foundational political theory’s ontological distinction between the political and politics (Marchart, 2007), which privileges moments of antagonism and more overt disruption within the domain of ‘the political’.
Productive efforts have emerged to expand post-foundational political theory to better account for the everyday and for beyond rupture, such as Temenos’ (2017) concept of an everyday proper politics which foregrounds the everyday dimensions of political engagement. Rather than collapsing rupture into the everyday, Temenos’ approach expands the terrain across which the political may emerge. This reframing offers a useful way to rethink the relationship between everyday life and political processes not as a binary, but as a continuum, and opens space for attending to the ordinary as a site where (extra)ordinary affects may unfold.
Building on this work, I propose that the ontological synergies between affect theory and post-foundational political geography, particularly their shared rejection of fixed foundations and emphasis on excess, enable the development of a productive conceptual framework. While these approaches diverge in their ontological commitments (Anderson, 2006; Mouffe, 2005), their convergence allows for an engagement with affective becomings that remains attentive to the shifting parameters of what can be brought into relation. As I will elaborate through a fuller review of the distinctions and interrelationships between post-foundationalism, post-foundational political theory, and post-foundational political geography, such an approach enables an understanding of the temporarily stabilised structuring conditions that render certain (political) becomings seemingly possible or impossible.
Alongside attending to the felt and embodied ways in which the political may surface in ways beyond discourse, this approach underscores the nonlinearity of political processes, emphasising their emergence as dynamic and contingent processes unfolding across varied temporalities. An affective post-foundational political geography takes seriously the spectral (Derrida, 2012) influence of the past (where the past ‘haunts’ the present and shapes current experiences and future possibilities) and extends towards envisioning future plural trajectories. As Kenis and Mathijs (2014) argue, maintaining this kaleidoscope of plural alternative futures is a key aspect of repoliticisation, especially in response to post-political diagnoses of the present.
By approaching post-foundational political geography through an affective ontology, this framework contributes to theoretical discourse and activist praxis by enabling greater epistemological granularity in analysing contingencies. Building on Machen’s (2020) critical reflections on expanding research impact to better incorporate radical social theory, this paper seeks to empower activist movements and counterpublics by demonstrating how affects and the ordinary might be mobilised to enhance activist praxis. In the current political moment, an affective post-foundational political geography offers a vantage point for understanding how spatialities and atmospheres may become sites of affective intensities, negotiation, contestation, or indifference, where dominant narratives and power structures may be reinforced or challenged through ordinary practices, encounters, and resistances.
Such granularity also enables what Landau et al. (2021: 28) describe as an ‘alliance between political theory and political praxis’, offering activist groups a framework to grapple with their precarity, contingencies, and capacities to resist hegemonic social orders (Marchart, 2018). More broadly, attuning to the workings of contingency can strengthen solidarities within post-foundational political geography and across human geography more widely, connecting with allied concerns around instability, relationality, collective action, and political change.
These theoretical and practical concerns give rise to two central research questions: (i) how can approaching post-foundational political geography through affect enrich understandings of (extra)ordinary political processes? and (ii) what new openings for thinking about (extra)ordinary political processes might arise from a greater sensitivity to affect(s) within post-foundational political geography? To provide scope for the paper, I examine how post-foundational political geography can be enhanced through a more affect-attuned approach, rather than advocating for the benefits of cross-pollination. What affect theories might gain from post-foundational political geography represents a rich avenue for future research.
The paper unfolds across three sections. First, I critically review the literature on post-foundational political geography, affect theories, and the ordinary, mapping the conceptual terrain where an affective post-foundational political geography can emerge. Second, I introduce an affective post-foundational political geography framework, exploring the conceptual and empirical possibilities it offers while addressing potential tensions in their convergence. Third, I conclude by examining the novel openings this framework presents for advancing critical research and its links with activist praxis.
Post-foundational political geography, affect, and the ordinary
Post-foundational political geography
Post-foundational political geography is an emerging radical social, political, and spatial theory in human geography (Blakey et al., 2022; Landau et al., 2021). Gaining traction partly through its relationship with post-political literature (Mouffe, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2009, 2010, 2011; Swyngedouw and Wilson, 2014), its potential remains far from exhausted (Blakey et al., 2022; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023). Before articulating how an affective post-foundational political geography might be conceptualised, I will clarify important distinctions between related theoretical frameworks that share intellectual lineage but differ in scope: post-foundationalism, post-foundational political theory, and post-foundational political geography. This paper focuses specifically on the latter to provide a targeted contribution to human geography and to foreground a more expansive understanding of political processes.
Post-foundationalism rejects the notion of any ontologically correct or ‘natural’ way to order society (Marchart, 2007), distinguishing itself from foundationalist approaches seeking absolute truths and anti-foundationalist positions abandoning grounding entirely. The prefix ‘post-' acknowledges grounds as necessary for social orderings while theorising them as inherently contingent, exclusionary, and unstable (Butler, 1992; Laclau, 1989). Introduced into English language discourse by Crook (1991), post-foundationalism foregrounds the fundamental paradox that grounds are simultaneously necessary yet contingent, always containing the potential for alternative arrangements. By ‘ungrounding’ these foundations (Landau et al., 2021), post-foundationalism enables critical reflexivity on structures of power and privilege, opening possibilities for alternative arrangements (Blakey et al., 2022).
Building on these broader philosophical insights, post-foundational political theory extends these ideas into the realm of political order(ing)s. Landau et al. (2021) trace Marchart’s (2007) genealogy as foundational in formalising these ideas into English language political theory through the articulation of the political difference. This distinction emerged from earlier work on the paradox of politics (Ricœur, 1965) and post-Marxist thought (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997). Marchart (2007) draws a parallel between Heidegger’s (1988) ontico-ontological distinction and the division between politics and the political. Politics, as articulated by Mouffe (1999, 2005), refers to the structured domain of governance, formal institutions, and socio-political frameworks that define and maintain a particular order. In contrast, the political exists because no socio-political order is ever fully natural or complete; it is always marked by exclusions, contestations, and agonisms.
Building on the idea that all attempts at orderings are contingent and exclusionary, as noted by Blakey et al. (2022) in their understanding of post-foundational political theory’s ‘healthy scepticism’ towards claims of all-inclusive orders, there is always an ‘excess’ (Mouffe, 2005: 53) or an ‘uncounted’ (Blakey, 2021; Rancière, 1999: 116). It is around these through which agonisms coalesce and the political may surface. This always-present potential for alternatives creates the ontological possibility for transformation and radical change (Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023). For Mouffe (1999, 2000, 2005), it is this coming together of differences that is central to democracy. In other words, post-foundational political theory provides critical reflexivity on what is possible (politics) or impossible (the political) to be brought into relation.
While the distinction between politics and the political has been a productive theoretical tool, it risks reifying them as static ontological categories. This has led to a focus on moments of rupture, understood as overt and radical displays of the political (Blakey et al., 2022), thereby narrowing the aperture of analysis at the expense of everyday agents, processes, and spaces of transformation (Derickson, 2017; Temenos, 2017). Acknowledging this, Blakey et al. (2022) propose a more enmeshed approach to the political difference, one that moves beyond a strict dichotomy to account for the complexities of political processes. This enmeshed approach informs my understanding of political processes and allows me to advance an epistemological argument, focussing on how, when, and where the political may surface in (extra)ordinary moments, rather than making an ontological claim that essentialises what the political ‘is’.
This understanding of a more fluid approach to the political difference has been taken up by scholars such as Swyngedouw (2021) who propose a more processual view of the political that extends beyond the immediate spatial and temporal confines of ‘the event’. Another particularly insightful empirical example is Temenos’ (2017) concept of an everyday proper politics. In the context of drug policy reform activism, Temenos (2017) argues that mundane, incremental acts of resistance in everyday spaces, like needle exchanges or safe consumption sites, are political acts that question the order of politics in challenging the stigmatisation and criminalisation of drug use. These everyday practices are argued to be as politically significant as dramatic moments of rupture yet have often been overlooked or depoliticised in favour of more seemingly radical events (Temenos, 2017). Similarly, Saleh and Landau-Donnelly (2024) critique post-political assumptions that genuine political change is limited to materialising through radical ruptures, overlooking the everyday, embodied manifestations of unfinished urban alternatives fostered by the continuous process of hope.
While Temenos’ (2017) work valuably sensitises us to how public issues get governed and who is in-/ex-cluded within such formations, it is carefully grounded in discursive politics and materialist policy practices. This emerging attentiveness to the everyday dimensions of political processes suggests a productive direction for post-foundational political geography, one that I propose can be further developed through explicit engagement with (ordinary) affects.
Moreover, for Dikeç (2012), space is fundamentally understood as a mode of political thinking, with his work highlighting the spatial dimensions of a post-foundational political theory (Dikeç, 2005, 2012, 2015). While Sparke’s (2005) earlier contribution to a post-foundational political geography analysis of the nation-state received less traction, more recent efforts have explicitly developed this theoretical intersection. Notably, Landau et al. (2021: 10) synthesise a post-foundational geography, aiming to make the ‘(dis)connects visible, to potentially create new formations that interlink spatial politics, political space [and] the politics of space’ 3 . Building on these foundations, Landau-Donnelly and Pohl (2023, p. 481) propose that a post-foundational (political) geography ‘radically uproots geographic understandings of political and socio-spatial realities’ through three key concepts: negativity, antagonism, and contingency. These concepts bring forward engagements from post-foundational political theory, yet extend these insights into spatial manifestations.
Negativity, elaborated through the concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), signifies what remains unassimilated or excluded by dominant orders, emphasising the irreducibility and contestability of socio-political frameworks (Blakey et al., 2022). This ‘outside’ is not solely about non-relational aspects or the unaffected (see Bissell et al., 2021) but emphasises an ontological point: there will always be an ‘excess’ (Mouffe, 2005: 53) or ‘supernumerary’ (Rancière, 1999: 58) that remains excluded from existing spatial configurations. Antagonism(s) emerge around these exclusions, forming spatialities of contestation where the limits of the existing order are exposed. This perpetual potential for antagonism underscores post-foundational political geography’s emphasis on contingency, the third key concept, highlighting the instability and provisional nature of any socio-political ordering. Landau-Donnelly and Pohl (2023: 488, emphasis original) argue that contingency draws attention to orders that could be ‘otherwise, but also elsewhere or elsewhen’, reinforcing that no configuration of power, space, or politics is ever absolute and allows for an expansive entry point to conceptualise how things could be otherwise.
Affect(s)
Affect remains an elusive and heavily contested concept that resists definitional certainty, existing in a lingering state of indeterminacy within the ‘not-yet’ (Spinoza, 1959: 87) and ‘in-between-ness’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 1). Rather than ascribing to a ‘pure or originary’ state (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: p. 1), affect is better understood through its metaphors – flows, intensities, and surges – that position affects within a broader, intensely relational, coalescence of human and nonhuman entities (Anderson, 2014). Affects do not exist in isolation but become relationally attached to and influence the felt intensity of a multitude of phenomena, from tangible objects and sensations to abstract ideas, activities, institutions, and other affects (Sedgwick, 2003). The most frequent use of affect theory in geography, and the social sciences more broadly, draws from a Deleuze (1988) understanding building on Spinoza, which privileges this reciprocal and relational understanding of affect as the capacity to affect and to be affected. Massumi (2002) develops this notion to conceptualise affect(s) as representing radical openness to affecting and being affected.
Because it lacks a pure or originary state from which to definitively ground its meaning (Anderson, 2006; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), affect can come to represent a coalescence of varied theories, practices, and knowledges. Affect theories draw from multiple and diverse intellectual lineages, including neuroscience (Tomkins, 1962), the Spinoza-inspired philosophies of Deleuze (1988), as well as feminist, decolonial, and queer theoretical perspectives (Bondi, 2005; Cvetkovich, 2012; Thien, 2005). This interdisciplinary convergence of affect theories (plural) culminated as a distinct geographical approach in the ‘affective turn’ of the late twentieth century (Clough and Halley, 2007). This turn emerged within a broader disciplinary landscape attentive to relational ontologies (Jones, 2009), questions of representation (Flaherty et al., 2002; Gilmartin, 2004; Thrift, 2004), and an enhanced cultural focus on embodiment, practices, and performances (Anderson, 2019). Interrelatedly, these concepts emerged because of growing momentum within the discipline, for example, broader relationality debates emerged from work within non-Euclidean geometry which understood scale as a site of connectivity (Jones, 2009; Thrift, 2004) and related debates in response to the crisis of representation (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987). Despite affect theory’s elusiveness and resistance to definitive resolutions, scholars engage with it due to its ‘formative powers’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 3) in exposing folds of (non)belongings and propose that thinking through and with affect opens conceptual, ethical, and political possibilities (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Sharp, 2009), which this paper explores.
Significant conceptual work has carved out a distinct theoretical path for affect, separating it from the realm of emotions, despite the two being ‘significantly conjoined and separate because of their subject matter, language, (political) vision and genealogies’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 205). This separation has primarily hinged on contrasting ideas around cognition and representation (Pile, 2010). Affect is argued to be autonomous (Massumi, 1995), operating ‘beyond cognition’ and as an ‘unthought’ interpersonal force flowing between bodies (Massumi, 2002; Pile, 2010: 8). This idea of flows is taken up by Thrift (2004: 58), who proposes that affect is akin to ‘networks of pipes and cables… providing the basic mechanisms and root textures of urban life’. In contrast, emotion is conceptualised as the cognitive, conscious, and ‘knowable’ representation of felt experiences (Massumi, 2002; Pile, 2010).
While the Deleuzian–Spinozan approach has become a touchstone within Geography, critical approaches, particularly feminist interventions, have complicated the affect/emotion distinction. For example, feminist engagement with affect theories has critiqued this binarised understanding of affect and emotion (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Cvetkovich, 2012). In direct response to Thrift (2004), Thien (2005) critiques the focus on the transhuman within affect theory, arguing that such theorisations have depoliticised the concept by framing it as an impersonal, virtual force wholly exceeding the realm of individual emotions. Instead, Thien (2005) advocates for understanding emotion as integral to relational, intersubjective spaces and the very co-constitution of emotional subjects/selves and their environments.
Understanding this potential depoliticisation of affect from scholars like Thien (2005) and Hemmings (2005) underscores the need to recognise how affective experiences diversely manifest across varied cultural, social, and political contexts. This contingency of affects is further advanced by Ho (2023), who brings crucial attention to how affects are embedded within specific spatial and temporal dimensions. Responding to critiques about the individualisation of affect (McCormack, 2007; Thrift, 2004), Ho (2023: 1) emphasises feminist understandings of affect through privileging ‘intersubjective relations, collectively felt intensities and the social-spatial hierarchies of power’, whereby affective experiences circulate and are unequally (re)produced through interactions, movements, and encounters within dynamic spaces.
A related notion that has animated discussions of affect is the idea of excess (Anderson, 2006; Massumi, 1995, 2002, 2015). In beginning to work towards a specific theory and vocabulary for affect, Anderson (2006: 735) asserts that the ‘more-than or less-than rational cannot be reduced to a range of discreet, internally coherent, emotions which are self-identical with the mind of an individual’. Affect exceeds formal signification and expression, challenging traditional contexts of emergence and transmission (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). This theoretical approach opens more divergent political understandings, resonating with more-than-human worlds and decentering the human as the primary phenomenological subject 4 (Anderson, 2006; Bennett, 2010; Whatmore, 2002).
However, important tensions remain within the literature, particularly regarding the distinction between affect and emotion, as highlighted by Thien (2005) and Anderson (2006) on the interiority/exteriority of affect and emotion. While the literature rigorously engages with the (in)differences between emotion and affect 5 , I align with feminist insights on their entanglement, while retaining Deleuze’s (1988) notion of capacities as an entry point to critically theorise how such personal and collective experiences may manifest in the (extra)ordinary. This approach is particularly significant given my positionality in this deeply personal and theoretical endeavour. I take forward a critical reflexivity, acknowledging the privileges of my white, female, and able body, underscoring that research and knowledge production are always embodied practices.
Stewart’s ordinary affects
Building on this relational understanding of affect/emotion, this paper draws on Stewart’s (2007) pioneering work on ordinary affects as a framework for understanding individual/collective lived experiences. Stewart provides an expansive entry point into the complexities of ordinary affective life through a collage of personal and theoretical reflections on how the banal animates lingering and momentary affective experiences. The ordinary is situated as a ‘shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life’ (Stewart, 2007: 1). In brief vignettes ranging from the affectual sparks within a shopping centre to unexpected resonances from encounters with death in a rural café, Stewart (2007) mediates on the complexity of the seemingly inconsequential, having the capacity to evoke the past, disrupt the present, and permeate the future.
This exploration of the resonances of certain affective atmospheres ‘give[s] everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies’ (Stewart, 2007: 1), allowing for an understanding of ordinary affects to be conceptualised as public feelings that exist in broad circulation yet permeate the intimate, influencing my entangled conceptualisation of affect as above. Stewart (2007: 10) invites us to take forward the idea that ‘something happens’ within ordinary scenes, the prose lingering on seemingly ordinary details to bring attention to their affectively charged openings onto complex relational forces. As such, ordinary affects are not solely personal or individual, but conduits through which broader social-material fields circulate and accrete. This idea of circulation can be felt within Stewart’s (2007) understanding of the spectral (cf. Derrida, 2012) dimensionality of affects, situating felt presences as the residue of past events, histories, exclusions, and sensibilities that continue haunting and infusing the present (see Fredriksen, 2021).
Stewart’s (2007) quietly powerful invocation of affects and the excess of the event demonstrates how the present can ripple and disrupt the future, holding open multiple alternative possibilities. Massumi (2002: 215) complements this understanding, writing that affect takes place as ‘something more, something to come’, whereby the Spinozan ‘not-yet’ provides an anticipatory logic whereby ‘seeds of change...might not be activated in the moment’ (p. 221). Similarly, Ho (2023: 2) brings attention to the ‘experiential qualities of time’ of slow, waiting, the impasse, crises, emergencies, and punctures that shape collective intensities, memories, and experiences (Berlant, 2011; Berlant and Stewart, 2019; Stewart, 2007).
Supporting such an understanding, Berlant’s (2011, 2022) conceptualisation of the ordinary coalesces around recognising it as a deeply complex site intertwined with structures of power and the complexities of social life. Rather than being a neutral landscape, the ordinary is continually negotiated and contested within specific socio-cultural contexts. In their works including Cruel Optimism (2011), On The Inconvenience of Other People (2022), and The Hundreds with Berlant and Stewart (2019), Berlant proposes that the ordinary is shaped by collective affects – shared feelings, sensations, and dispositions that influence attachments, senses of belonging, and aspirations. For example, affects around ideals of citizenship produce (cruel) attachments to certain visions of the ordinary, the good life (Berlant, 2011). Both Stewart (2007), Berlant (2011, 2022), and collaboratively (2019), recognise that the ordinary is an affectively charged precarious terrain shaped by uneven power relations and exclusions. It is a site of contested meanings and unfolding social complexity, rather than habitual stasis. This understanding supports Stewart’s (2007: 29) view of the ordinary as a site that ‘throws itself together’ through ‘forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found… or it falters, fails’.
I draw on Stewart’s (2007) contemplation of where ordinary affects might go in the development of an affective post-foundational political geography. I propose that this framework better attends to the ordinary within (extraordinary) political processes, providing attention to how they can be experienced in nonlinear, spectral, and ordinary ways that exceed discourse. For Stewart (2007: 27), ‘it [is] the paying attention that matters – a kind of attention immersed in the forms of the ordinary but noticing things too’. This paper advocates for the art of noticing and attuning to affect, emphasising how ordinary temporalities and spatialities, extending beyond the immediacy of extraordinary political events, may become sites where political possibilities are encouraged, repressed, invoked, or denied.
Stewart’s (2007) affective inquiry offers a generative framework for (re)directing attention to the banality of the ordinary and its potential political significance, positioning it in relation to, but distinct from, the everyday. While the ordinary focuses on affective emergence and flux, capturing the dynamic and ephemeral nature of encounters, the everyday emphasises more patterned practices, including their socio-political implications, contingencies, and disruptions (see Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2024; Temenos, 2017).
Stewart’s approach also offers empirical methods for investigating the animating role of affect by providing a lens to examine how the ordinary can contribute to broader political processes, assemblages, and formations. This perspective shifts focus away from traditional, institution-centric analyses of politics, foregrounding instead the affective potentialities, atmospheres, and happenings through which collective aspirations and actions emerge within the ordinary. I find Stewart’s (2007: 11) conceptualisation of the ordinary as a ‘maze of inspirations and experiments’ particularly resonant with post-foundational political geography’s emphasis on the unpredictable emergence of the political. This maze-like quality captures the ever-present possibility for the political to surface in (extra)ordinary events and the inherent uncertainty and fragility of such emergence – some pathways may lead to transformative moments while others terminate in dead ends, mirroring how political potentials may manifest, remain latent, or dissipate entirely.
This broader question of what is meant by political potential has been approached differently by affect scholars. For example, Ahmed (2004, 2010) proposes that certain affects ‘stick’ to certain bodies through their repetition in discourse, thus shaping certain bodies as fearful to the nation-state. Whereas, Berlant (2011) perceives the political import in the ability to forge or disrupt attachments between bodies, worlds, and objects of desire, coalescing in ideas of ‘the good life’. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Massumi (2015) explores how political change can arise through micro-political practices that disrupt or sustain existing assemblages. As outlined by Anderson et al. (2012: 171), assemblages can represent a ‘concept, ethos and descriptor’. For Massumi (2015), and evocatively conveyed by Stewart’s reflective narration, assemblages are dynamic networks of human and nonhuman actors, institutions, and infrastructures. These micro-political practices operate at the level of affective intensities and desires, where small-scale actions and interactions can trigger broader transformations and the emergence of alternative orderings, challenging dominant power structures and exclusions. This complex understanding begins to conceptualise the wider proposal of the interplay between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
An affective post-foundational political geography
Drawing on the above literature review, this section introduces an affective post-foundational political geography, guided by the question: how can approaching post-foundational political geography through affect enrich understandings of (extra)ordinary political processes? An affective post-foundational political geography advances an affective relational epistemology while retaining the essence of post-foundational ontologies regarding parameters of possibility. Specifically, affect theories can enrich post-foundational political geographies in three key ways: (1) by offering a more expansive approach to political processes through cultivating sensitivity to the ordinary, (2) by providing greater epistemological granularity in analysing contingencies, and (3) by advancing a nonlinear understanding of (extra)ordinary political processes. Additionally, I begin to tease out (productive) tensions that may arise from the convergence of these theoretical approaches.
Offering a more expansive approach to understanding political processes by cultivating sensitivity to the ordinary
Firstly, I argue that an affective post-foundational political geography offers a more expansive approach to understanding political processes by cultivating sensitivity to the ordinary. This expansiveness unfolds in two key ways. First, it enables an engagement with the affective and nonlinear dimensions of political processes while attending to what may exceed discourse. Second, by foregrounding the ordinary, this approach offers a more nuanced understanding of the extraordinary as a coalescence of ordinary, affective, and spectral experiences. Drawing from Stewart’s (2007: 16) prompt to reconsider ‘what counts as an event’, I approach extraordinary political moments as assemblages of affects, emotions, temporalities, and spatialities that shape one another. This perspective highlights how lingering and ephemeral affects circulating through the ordinary may both generate and resist extraordinary political formations.
This expanded notion of the ordinary within political processes emerges from a complex engagement between affect theory and post-foundational political geography, whose ontological orientations initially appear in tension. While both frameworks challenge essentialism and foundationalist thinking, they do so through distinct ontological commitments. Affect theory, following Massumi and Deleuze, operates through a ‘positive’ ontology that emphasises generative potential, excess, and radical becoming. In contrast, post-foundational political geography’s ‘negative’ ontology, as conceptualised in the above section (see Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023), foregrounds absence, lack, and the impossibility of final grounds. While both frameworks also share the language of excess (Anderson, 2006; Mouffe, 2005), post-foundational political geography understands excess as what lies outside of orderings, emphasising absence and contingency rather than generative potential. Affect theories, by contrast, focus on excess as emergence and processes of becoming that extend beyond representation.
Rather than viewing these ontologies as incompatible, I propose that their productive tension generates theoretical and practical possibilities for understanding how political processes unfold on the ground 6 . While affect theories emphasise processes of becoming, post-foundational political geography understands the ongoing negotiation of contingent boundaries between the possible (politics) and the impossible (the political). An affective post-foundational political geography, using Stewart’s (2007) work on ordinary affects, thus serves as a conceptual bridge between these perspectives by demonstrating how excess and absence can jointly shape political processes. Moments of affective intensity surface precisely from the fragility of fixed foundations, suggesting that the generative potential of affects and the contingency in post-foundational political geography are mutually constitutive. This theoretical synthesis provides a more nuanced framework for understanding how political processes unfold on the ground, where certain becomings are rendered politically impossible, while others, shaped by affective dynamics, appear as contingent rather than explicitly political.
Furthermore, an affective approach in post-foundational political geography broadens our understanding of political processes beyond discourse. Ayata et al. (2019), in their methodological contribution to analysing affective societies, argue that focussing on affect provides a nuanced perspective that transcends the dominance of language. By mapping ordinary affective dimensions onto (extra)ordinary political processes, such as encounters with activist spaces, I suggest we can observe how these experiences shape political processes in ways that intersect with and exceed discursive frames. Rather than positioning mundane interactions, encounters, or atmospheres as lying outside of how we understand political processes, this perspective demonstrates how the ordinary is already entangled with discursive formations while also operating through other registers, with its ever-present potential to surface and reconfigure orderings. It underscores the complex interplay between affect and political trajectories, emphasising that political actions are not solely driven by discourse or ideology but are also influenced by the spectrality of pre-personal, pre-discursive emotional dynamics (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010).
Providing greater epistemological granularity in analysing contingencies
Secondly, a more nuanced understanding of the ordinary within political processes enables greater epistemological granularity in analysing how such processes, and (extra)ordinary events, form, fail to emerge, or remain indeterminate. This enhanced perspective emerges from a productive tension between affect theory and post-foundational political geography’s distinct approaches to contingency.
Affect theory, particularly as developed by Massumi (2002) and Gregg and Seigworth (2010), conceptualises contingency in terms of the actual coming together of relations, foregrounding the becoming of (political) configurations through embodied encounters, atmospheres, and micro-level affective assemblages that can disrupt or reorient socio-political formations. In contrast, post-foundational political theory approaches contingency as the very conditions of (im)possibility for certain orderings (Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2024; Marchart, 2007; Mouffe, 2000). It is not about the emergence of specific relational configurations per se but rather about the broader, temporarily stabilised structuring conditions that render some configurations possible while foreclosing others.
I propose that these perspectives exist in productive interplay rather than opposition. While affect theory celebrates emergent potentials, post-foundational political geography emphasises that affective assemblages are always shaped by social grammars of power, identity, and institutional constraints (Landau et al., 2021; Marchart, 2003, 2007). By critically bringing these perspectives together in an affective post-foundational political geography, I propose that contingency can be understood through the momentarily stabilised, yet fragile, conditions that render certain political becomings seemingly possible or impossible. This perspective allows for a more granular understanding of the contingencies through which the ‘political’ and the possible may be unsettled, or indeed ungrounded (Landau et al., 2021), by ordinary affects.
Advancement of a nonlinear understanding of (extra)ordinary political processes
Thirdly, an affective post-foundational political geography offers a nonlinear understanding of (extra)ordinary political processes, highlighting the spectrality and contingency of affects (Derrida, 2012). Affect theories provide a nonlinear account of time within their theoretical frameworks and empirical applications 7 . To demonstrate the value of this framework for advancing understandings of political processes, I cross-examine Stewart’s work through a Mouffian lens and engage Medina García’s insights on bridging post-foundational political geography with post-colonial, decolonial, and feminist thought through affect theory. This example illustrates post-foundational political geography’s alliance-building potential, also highlighting the contributions an affective framework may generate (Medina García in Blakey et al., 2022; Landau et al., 2021; Machen, 2020).
Stewart (2007) vividly captures this nonlinearity in lyrical prose, portraying temporal fluidity and the multiplicity of lived experience through a vignette of an accidental deer collision and its aftermath. In the scene, bikers arrive at a café still reverberating with the visceral impact of the crash, their bodies carrying the event as a physical memory. Meanwhile, other café patrons, detached from the immediate event, weave the story into a ‘thicket of stories and social maneuvering’, transforming the café into an ‘ordinary maze of inspirations and experiments’ (Stewart, 2007: 11). Through an affective post-foundational political geography lens, this maze of varied reactions, a mix of visceral resonance, narrative expansion, and social navigation, exemplifies the ‘coming together of differences’ that Mouffe (1999, 2000, 2005) understands as central to democracy. The bikers’ embodied affects intersect with the café-goers’ discursive and social manoeuvres, illustrating how affective experiences and diverse interpretations coexist and collide within momentarily stabilised yet fragile conditions. These interactions highlight the plurality of values and responses that Mouffe (1999, 2000, 2005) sees as essential to democratic engagement, like Kenis and Mathijs (2014) who propose that maintaining this kaleidoscope of plural alternative future trajectories is a key aspect of repoliticisation.
Stewart’s vignette also draws attention to the temporal dynamics of affect and its possibilities. The past lingers in the bikers’ bodies as the crash’s resonance, while the present unfolds as collective and individual engagements within the café. The future remains open, as Stewart (2007: 11) (as a detached subject) imagines future responses to the event, predicting how ‘people will keep their eyes open for bike parts’. Through this, Ho’s (2023: 2) ‘experiential qualities of time’ come into focus, illustrating how affective intensities blur past, present, and future. This temporal entanglement aligns with Berlant’s (2011) understanding of the political and Temenos’ (2017) everyday proper politics, broadening the terrain of how we understand the political, the ordinary, and their affects as sites of potential transformation. Moreover, this spectral haunting beyond the event, by conversations exceeding and transgressing the event itself, evoking the past and seeping into the future, becomes sites of meaning-making, world navigation, and contingent (im)possibility. These alternative imagined future actions (such as finding a bike part) and their plurality represent the ordinary affective (im)possibilities that may surface in extraordinary political processes and the potential of new articulations of political identities and practices.
This vignette about the deer collision speaks to Massumi’s (2002: 221) understanding of the Spinozan ‘not-yet’, whereby affects and their excess can become folded into time that may not be ‘activated or obvious at the moment’. I argue that this temporal fluidity directly addresses the need for greater epistemological granularity in analysing contingencies, helping to address critiques of post-foundationalism and post-political narratives more widely. Lees (2013: 940) argues that the post-political condition is led by an ‘all or nothing’ approach to the political, while Beveridge and Koch (2017) question the post-political ‘trap’ by potentially creating narrow parameters for what is, or what isn’t ‘political’ (see Blakey et al., 2022).
Advancing this more epistemological (rather than ontological) argument, I argue that approaching post-foundational political geography through an affective lens retains an understanding that extraordinary political events or moments may lie dormant within the ordinary until potentially activated by a moment in time, an affect, an encounter, an atmosphere, a happening, or a bike part, revealing the fundamentally contingent nature of political formations. Equally, drawing on Stewart’s (2007: 29) commentary of the ordinary as a site which may ‘falter [or] fail’, affects may circulate in the ordinary and cease to surface in ordinary or extraordinary political moments. This recognition of potential inactivity or failure also extends post-foundational political geography by taking seriously moments of slowness, inertia, and inactivity.
Reading through affect theory, Medina García’s contribution in Blakey et al. (2022) seeks to unite feminist, decolonial, post-colonial, and post-foundational political theoretical understandings by complicating a focus on ‘the event’. Instead, the 8M Feminist Strike is positioned as an articulation between politics and political change happening through everyday and ordinary practices, solidarities, and plural agencies. Taking place in Spain, Medina García uses the strike to illustrate how political processes (and proposed affects) are irreducible to single events, instead unfolding across the ordinary and extraordinary, multiple spatialities, temporalities, and through diverse subjectivities negotiating difference(s) within the movement itself.
When viewed through the lens of affect theory, Medina García’s insights into the spatial and temporal complexity of political processes align with the nonlinear nature of affect. The unfolding of the feminist strike across multiple spatialities and temporalities illustrates how affective energies and their excess are continually negotiated, reconfigured, and redistributed within and beyond the movement (Stewart, 2007). This affective reading, which questions ‘what counts as an event’ (Stewart, 2007: 16), shows that ordinary and extraordinary political processes are in a constant state of negotiation and evolution, disrupting linear conceptions of temporality and dialectical understandings of politics/the political and the ordinary/extraordinary.
Furthermore, this affective lens shows that extraordinary political processes emerge not only from structural conditions and possibilities, which post-foundational political geography identifies as contingent yet temporarily stabilised structures, but also from ordinary affective encounters that transcend more normative political analyses (Ayata et al., 2019). These encounters have the potential to imagine and later establish new spaces of (ordinary) resistances, solidarities, and exclusions, challenging existing orderings (see Landau et al., 2021; Marchart, 2018). This intricate coming together not only enhances our understanding of how political processes unfold on the ground but also highlights the dynamic interplay within the (extra)ordinary, drawing attention to the opportunities that emerge when extraordinary events are understood in relation to the ordinary.
Openings
With the previous section having outlined an affective post-foundational political geography, I now turn to the second question: what new openings for thinking about (extra)ordinary political processes might arise from a greater sensitivity to affect(s) within post-foundational political geography? Where closings in post-foundational vocabulary refer to the stabilisation and sedimentation of meaning, this section is structured around openings to explore what may become temporarily unsettled or reconfigured with an attunement to affects. I intentionally retain the plural to reflect the multiplicity of conceptual and empirical work that might emerge in this space, rather than to offer any definitive conclusions. Importantly, openings do not necessarily promise generative outcomes; rather, they are affective moments of (im)possibility.
An affective post-foundational political geography offers the potential for radical theoretical and empirical interventions, extending the influence of post-foundational political geography beyond theory and into praxis (Landau et al., 2021). By attending to the ordinary within political processes and their relation to extraordinary moments, this framework advances how we understand political processes, opening new avenues for academic inquiry and practical engagement, exemplified through the affective reading of Medina García. This aligns with Machen’s (2020) work on critical research impact, which is especially notable considering the emergent nature of post-foundational political geography, particularly on the concepts of challenging policy, empowering resistances, and envisioning alternatives.
An affective post-foundational political geography further offers critical epistemological sensitivity to how we understand the relationship between seemingly ordinary events and the (potential) extraordinary surfacing of the political. In doing so, it challenges processual, dialectical, and linear accounts of political development by foregrounding the ways politics can be felt and experienced, particularly through affective and non-discursive registers. This is exemplified in Stewart’s account of the deer collision, which highlights how affective intensities and atmospheric shifts can disrupt the ordinary and make political possibilities momentarily perceptible.
Importantly, an attunement to ordinary affects can be understood as an activist act in itself. Theorising and engaging with the ordinary may empower resistances by redefining activism as a spectrum of practices that are not constrained by radical extraordinary events but encourage a sensitivity for the felt, the embodied, and the fleeting. As such, the framework’s potential to connect with activist scholarship and praxis is particularly rich (Landau et al., 2021; Marchart, 2018). An affective post-foundational political geography may influence activism by expanding ideas of where and how political change may take place, resonating with Machen’s (2020) suggestion of platforming voices to engage with critical theory research impact. Here, post-foundational political geography has wider relevance considering its broader alliances with decolonial, queer, and trans geographies in its commitment to interrogating dominant structures, centring marginalised voices, and exploring alternative modes of being and belonging (Medina García in Blakey et al., 2022). However, platforming voices from outside dominant paradigms in the Global North could expand its radical potential alongside more critical reflexivity of positionality, better accounting for the body behind the researcher, as we, like (extra)ordinary events, are the culmination of histories and geographies that shape the research we produce.
Furthermore, an affective post-foundational political geography framework suggests new lines of geographic inquiry, such as better understanding affective encounters as products of urban micro-climates of political activity (Pikner, 2016). For example, preliminary fieldwork examining the political productivity of the use of graphic imagery in vegan activism in Manchester, UK, has demonstrated how these encounters generate a complex topology of spoken and performed responses, from sustained ethical dialogue to embodied moments of discomfort and avoidance. The ambivalent nature of these public interactions demonstrates how political transformation operates through affective registers rather than solely through discourse, suggesting that even fleeting encounters can sow Massumi’s (2002: 221) ‘seeds of change’ through the generation of affective intensities and ethical reflexivity. By bringing into focus the alternative order(ing)s of veganism, such imagery destabilises meat-eating and carnism (Joy, 2011) and may create openings for socio-political and ethical reimaginings (which may be thought of as extraordinary). This framework has thus been fruitful in understanding how (extra)ordinary political processes unfold on the ground, suggesting that affective dispositions, bodily sensitivities, choreographies, and subtle atmospherics are important parts of political processes, whether initiated by encounters with graphic activism or failing to emerge.
In conclusion, this paper has proposed an affective post-foundational political geography, highlighting the conceptual and empirical opportunities that emerge when post-foundational political geography is rethought through affect. I have argued that this framework enhances our sensitivity to the ordinary within political processes by demonstrating how these processes unfold nonlinearly and beyond discourse. Additionally, I have shown how the ordinary can traverse politics and political registers, and surface in extraordinary moments. Such moments, rather than being isolated events, emerge as complex assemblages of affects, emotions, and temporalities.
More specifically, I have outlined three contributions of this framework: (1) it offers a more expansive approach to political processes by foregrounding the ordinary, (2) it provides greater epistemological granularity in analysing contingencies, and (3) it advances a nonlinear understanding of (extra)ordinary political processes. These arguments offer an enriched perspective on how political processes unfold on the ground, bridging critical geography and activist praxis. An affective post-foundational political geography thus presents an expansive and original approach for rethinking how human geographers and activists can conceptualise and better engage with political processes.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Aurora Fredriksen and Dr Joe Blakey for their continued generous and invaluable feedback, insightful guidance, and steadfast support in developing this paper and throughout my doctoral studies. My thanks also go to the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (NWSSDTP) for their generous funding and continued support. Lastly, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments, constructive feedback, and encouragement in refining this paper.
Ethical considerations
This research briefly draws on early empirical data collected through anonymised observation of activist events in public spaces and autoethnographic reflections. Given the overt nature of these events and the anonymisation of all recorded data, no additional ethical considerations arise. Ethical approval for this research has been granted by the University of Manchester Environment, Education and Development PGR School Panel (Ref: 2024-21052-37723).
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership, Grant Number ES/P000665/1.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.