Dialogues in Human Geography

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 we’re unashamedly guilty of ourselves. It’s easy to see why: journeying between cartography, 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 Guattari’s 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 Guattari’s philosophy as its most generative vector for human geographic thought and technique.

At a time of general crisis and continuing Anglophone depoliticization of ‘French Theory’, it is crucial to affirm the affinities of Guattari with Marxism, including with Althusser. The particular uptake of Guattari in geography is submitted here to a critique by focusing on a series of ironies, which index the deliberately anti-Marxist habits of certain corners of our discipline.

This commentary responds to Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis’ focus upon Felix Guattari’s own work and its ethos of what they call an ‘impractical philosophy’. Pivoting off the intellectual courage present in Gerlach and Jellis’ affirmation of the potentialization of ideas that places experiment before judgment, and uncertainty before certainty, I draw attention to three aspects housed within their overall argument: (1) the shift from a scientific to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, that (2) rethinks the status and production of subjectivity, and that ultimately (3) pushes the importance for geography as a discipline to be one that takes care of the world’s mental ecologies as much as it does its physical ones.

Here I discuss how Guattari’s ‘impracticality,’ as Gerlach and Jellis put it, harbours rich models for political and theoretical practice. I describe these in terms of Guattari’s participation in militant activism and anti-psychiatric organizations, as well as his cross-disciplinary theoretical engagements, all of which exemplify nuanced navigations of ‘problematic fields’. After surveying what these are and how they work in Guattarian philosophy, I briefly engage Gerlach and Jellis’s dismissal of certain tendencies within geographic theory.

The commentary unpacks the claim that human geographers have been zealous consumers of an ever-expanding array of French thinkers (Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan & Co.), and that they have been far too hasty in seeking to apply the resulting morass of ‘French Theory’ to the pressing concerns of human geography. It also considers the claim that the work of one notable French post-structuralist thinker – Félix Guattari – is unamenable to such immoderate consumption, hurried digestion and swift application: not only because the delirious Guattarian ‘jargon machine’ spews up a vast amount of always already obsolescent nonsense in the very place that is ordinarily reserved for an accumulation of sense (good, bad and obviously all too common) but also because this jargon machine is basically inexplicable and essentially inapplicable. Having grasped the virtue of theoretical indigestion, thoughtful impracticality and resolute inapplicability, the commentary makes a final splurge of ‘Applied Guattari’ by way of ‘Applied Derrida’.

Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis’ essay calls on geographers to extend their engagement with the rich spatial vocabularies of Gilles Deleuze’s collaborator and co-author, Felix Guattari. This commentary considers the tenor of Gerlach and Jellis’ call to think alongside Guattari and invites them to situate their response to the heterogenous, transnational communities that make up their disciplinary audience. It also optimistically calls for recognizing where the spirit of Guattari’s might already be at work in ‘human geography’ today.

In this brief response we thank the commentators for their provocations, give-in to a certain lovesickness, sing-a-long with Alanis Morisette and conclude with a little tender contempt.

Over the past decade, the concept of financialization has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of scholarly inquiry across several social–scientific disciplines, human geography among them. The subject of a burgeoning, variegated literature advancing both theoretical delineation and empirical substantiation, processes of financialization, on many accounts, belong alongside those of globalization and neoliberalization as the defining dynamics of late modern capitalism. In the spirit of fostering a constructive dialogue, this article develops a broadly based critique of such accounts, one structured around the core idea of limits. Financialization, it suggests, is substantively limited, both as a concept and as the array of real-world processes to which that concept variously pertains. The article identifies and fleshes out five key sets of such limits and the connections between them: analytic, theoretic, strategic, optic, and empiric limits. If the concept of financialization is to do substantially positive descriptive and explanatory work going forward, the article submits, these limits must be explicitly recognized and their implications explicitly factored in. This, the article concludes, is no small challenge.

In his review of the application of the term ‘financialization’, Christophers points to the limits of the concept in providing conceptual clarity about global change. Analytically, it is viewed as being so nebulous as to be meaningless. Theoretically, it is equivalent to ‘reinventing the wheel’: many existing ideas have more clarity and explanatory power. Strategically, it has diverted attention from the more important study of money. Its empirical significance and historical importance appear to have been exaggerated. Finally, financialization as a real-world process is criticized for its totalizing tendencies, with the ‘financialization of everything’ being a logical conclusion for many of its adherents. In response to Christophers’ claims, I argue that financialization is a concept-in-the-making. It has not received the same attention, at this stage, as intellectually rich concepts such as globalization and neo-liberalism. Rather than abandoning the term, social scientists should undertake more carefully crafted studies that provide empirically grounded understandings of the motives, dynamics and impacts of financialization.

In response to Christophers’ timely critique of the concept of financialization, and its usage, I reflect on the productive possibilities inherent in research that actively engages with the notion of ‘financialization (un)limited’. Drawing on research into property investment and development, I reflect on the value of studies that take cognizance of the evolving and protean nature of financialization as a process and, in addition, take seriously the notion of limits and spatial contexts.

Brett Christophers’ nuanced critique of the concept of financialization provides a useful check on its exuberant adoption within human geography and other disciplines. While acknowledging the article’s important and timely intervention, I question Christophers’ overriding concern with financialization’s lack of novelty. Drawing examples from the financialization of land, I argue that the (undeniable) existence of historical parallels and prior theorizations does not automatically invalidate the term. Instead, the central challenge for researchers is how to place the current wave of financialization within historical context, acknowledging both continuity and novelty.

The financialization literature tries to make sense of how the world has been changing and continues to do so. There is real potential for financialization to conjoin real-world processes and practices that are conceptually treated as discrete entities. Financialization is an inherently spatial phenomenon that should be much more central to economic–geographic analysis, explaining how the financialization of the global economy is tied to financialization at other scales as well as to the financialization of the state, economic sectors, individual firms, and daily life.

This response elaborates the role mediation plays in making ‘financialization’ visible and argues that it is crucial to analyze the institutional and mathematical infrastructure of finance in any treatment of financialization. Together, these two points form a paradox: in a period in which media representations make it seem critically important to understand the world of finance, the technical mathematics used by financial theorists and practitioners makes doing so almost impossible for most people. Understanding the history of the mathematical models professionals use to make financial decisions must be central to an analysis of financialization.

This commentary takes up some of the arguments Christophers develops in his piece on ‘The Limits to Financialization’ and spins them further through the prism of the ‘financialization’ of farmland and agriculture. The paper requalifies the optic, empiric, and strategic limits of the financialization literature that Christophers identifies, eventually making a call for ‘getting in between’ M and M′—exploring the practical activities of financial economization while at the same time maintaining the analytical validity of the category of capital. This is a frictional project. The contribution ends with a note on strategy, asking whether knowledge about such activities can be of any strategic political use.

In this response to the commentaries, I extend my critique in a new direction, arguing that work on financialization has had the perverse effect of black boxing ‘finance’ and crucial dimensions thereof. In developing this argument, I draw explicitly on, while seeking to generalize from, incisive observations contained in the commentaries. In doing so, I argue that it is important to address limits to financialization—political limits—not identified and addressed in the original article.