How to engage? Assemblage as ethos/ethos as assemblage

Introduction

How to engage in engagement? How to speak or write about an ethos of engagement? In Anderson et al.’s (2012) paper on the geographies of assemblage, ethos is named on multiple occasions as a way of relating to engagement. It is an ethos that ‘attends’, is ‘committed’, and an ethos that ‘emphasizes’. However, how ethos works, what it does and what future work it could do as a kind of relation to assemblage, is left slightly underdone. What I would like to do in this commentary is to unpick the use of ethos and assemblage in the paper, and specifically explore the way assemblage becomes a kind of ethos in itself, and how ethos might be understood through assemblage in wider geographical work. By unravelling the use and maybe neglect of ethos within the paper and wider geographies, despite its animating force within them, I hope to make some comments about how we think, do or live ethos within research and writing, and the promise of assemblage as ethos/ethos as assemblage, for broader geographical concerns.

The paper names a relation between assemblage and ethos or assemblage as ethos. This is assemblage as ethos apart from, and as well as, assemblage as thinking, writing, doing. Ethos animates the discussion of assemblage as more than a concept or a term, but rather the labelling of an orientation, perhaps a disposition towards engagement. An ethos is not engagement itself, but a way of engaging with engagement. Assemblage is then a way of colouring this mode or style of engagement not necessarily with content but with a direction, possibly force, almost certainly a susceptibility. For the authors, assemblage might be ‘an ethos of engagement that attends to the messiness and complexity of phenomena; an ethos that is committed to process-based ontologies that challenge conventional explanations by focusing on materially diverse configurations; and an ethos that emphasizes the open-ended, unfinished nature of social formations’. By way of Marcus and Saka, this kind of engagement might even be ‘almost a nervous condition’, sensitive to instability and multiple combining and compositional change. Ethos/assemblage is a manner of experimentation. It is less testing but more searching; a ‘tracing’ of relations, bits and pieces, and effects. Deleuze’s description of assemblage is turned back onto itself as ethos – a certain ‘sympathy’ to relations, objects, exteriors, and orderings.

Now how ethos is being mobilized here in relation to assemblage, it seems to me, and conversely to the rest of the paper’s startlingly precise and nuanced arguments for assemblage, appears rather a bit vaguer. Is it an attunement? A capacity to become attuned? To develop a propensity, a commitment? Assemblage thinking is what taints this ethos or regimen of engaging. But what precisely does this mean? What is an ethos and how can a way of thinking about assemblages become accompanied by a kind of ethos towards engagement, ethos assembled while underpinning the thinking of assemblage as word, concept and agencement? Ethos then provokes some centrally important questions for how one addresses theory and practice and engagement itself. We could be concerned that ethos too easily becomes a kind of misnomer for styles of conceptual and methodological engagement or maybe something before the formalized use of these sorts of terms and identifiers, as Anderson (2005) has jettisoned in his writings on hope. Moreover, how is this ethos gained, how is it developed, grown? How can an ethos be burgeoning or networked? Is ethos a tool, in a sense of a tool-kit kind of way we might try to teach theory and method, or more something learnt and developed over time, or intuited? Maybe ethos is even a sort of habit, perhaps a style or a fashion, an obsession, but does that mean it is particularly hard or easy to break or shift? How might ethos be divorced from, for instance, an approach, or a collection of theories and practices of concepts, terms and methods, etc? To a certain extent ethos appears to say nothing, while saying everything. And so I wonder whether we cannot talk about ethos (what other words can we use?) more explicitly, to describe the engagement with encounter/engagement seriously without reducing it to a singular term, particularly when areas of geography have become so adept at exploring different forms of engagement and expression. How can we describe, write or even think about how we engage in engagement seriously? Could a retreat to ethos be a way of talking about thinking-feeling without naming or describing these modalities of research experience?

Ethos as assemblage

Ethos has not been taken unquestioned within geographic inquiry. For instance, the endeavours of ‘morale geographies’ are partially organized around certain commitments of engagement in research and its subjects, as well as understanding the ethos of the moral and ethical bases for action and engagement in the world. Ethos is not necessarily figured as assemblage, yet certain assemblages identified within the empirical encounter appear to demonstrate certain kinds of ethoses of strong moral and political import. For instance, Cloke et al.’s (2007; Johnson et al., 2005) research into service provision for the homeless explains how organizations, institutions and private bodies and charities, hold ‘missions’ and ‘values’. Ethos speaks across a collective of fragile links. It connects organizations of peoples, documents and policies, from disparate documents and organizational structures to the practices of running a soup run. Den Besten et al. (2011) show how in the context of the now cut-short school capital rebuilding and refurbishment programme in the UK, Building Schools for the Future (BSF), many schools sought to impose an ‘ethos’ of learning. This often involved certain kinds of student engagement and participation, through the material structure and reconstruction of the school buildings that housed them; the fabricated material things that populated that school; the institutional rules and norms as well as the interaction between the teachers; the children and the community; and the policy framework of BSF that promised so much. But it is to non-representational geographies where perhaps the most promise lies in assemblage as ethos.

Assemblage as ethos

Rachel Colls’ (2012) recent intervention into feminist geography and non-representational theory helps articulate what an ethos of engagement might become. Non-representational geographies are considered ‘multiple, anti-essentialist, pluralist in ethos’ and Colls’ engagement is one of response and in a spirit of generosity to the call and content of this writing and the work which has opposed it. Non-representational geographies appears to have, for Rose and Wylie, an ‘emergent ethos’ and multiple agendas (Rose and Wylie, 2006: 475) intent on stopping what Alan Latham with David Conradson identify as ‘habits’ worth breaking. This demands ‘an ethos of experimentation and pluralism in how we think, research, and present our human geographies’ (Latham with Conradson, 2003: 1904). For Whatmore (2002), it is ‘care’ and generosity. Indeed, the trappings of a vitalist ‘ethos’ undergirding burgeoning, insistent and volatile topologies are some of the characteristics assemblage thinking might draw on. According to Dewsbury (2003: 1913) then, attending to actualizing worlds means a ‘research ethos that touches upon the small intricacies of life’. For McCormack (2009), thinking through affective movement and materiality can be done through a ‘commitment to different modes of address and presentation’, modes which are ‘integral to the ethos of geographical encounters’, ‘ecologically’ embedded (Bennett, 2004) in more-than-human assemblages. For Anderson, excavating the obligations of radical utopian thought, ethos is collated alongside a ‘skill’ or ‘skills and ethoses’ (Merriman et al., 2008: 204) and ‘style’. Ethos might include an ‘attention’, but most substantially it is an ethos of hope which is not ‘defined by a specific set of skills and techniques’ (Anderson, 2006: 706), but rather a more subtle ‘learning to affect and be affected’.

Learning ethos

Loraine Daston (2005) has located ethos within older forms of belief, knowledge and their moralization. Here we have ethos as enthusiasm to a melancholic temperament and susceptibility; moralists under the council of an Aristotelian ethic of habit and regimen, and 19th-century scientists suppressing subjectivity in favour of scepticism where an ethos of belief is withheld. So, if we are to think of ethos as potentially a commitment, a ‘style’, a form of responsibility or generosity, should we be also asking questions of where assemblage thinking might help? How might we think about assemblage, non-representational geographies or the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ as sympathies on the verge of celebrating or rejecting their own ‘excessive belief’? Surely we are betraying our own interests in alternative modes of subjectivity, experience, attunements to becoming, emotions and affects, not to consider the spaces of academic knowledge/belief where ethoses of engagement are formed and inspired, where ideas have caught like fire, and commitments have been forged? If we think of ethos across disciplinary concerns, Philip Crang (2010) has recently argued that it might be far simpler to think of cultural geography as much more than a disciplinary area or space. Crang’s is more of a ‘style’ of thought, ‘fashioned through a ‘re-turning’ over of energizing tensions’ in his commentary (2010: 194), ethoses or orders of assemblages which survive across time, disciplines, departments, allegiances, through translocal relations and connections amid differences and transformations. Some of the questions we might ask over such ‘energizing tensions’ have to undoubtedly be about research communities, patronage, friendships, politics, students, books, lectures, news, emails and blogs, and hopefully the charge and excitement of sets of ideas and shared feelings of working together, the ‘enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous feelings are in the air’ (William James in Daston, 2005: 22).