Traces of Futures Affects: Inquiry, Action, and Possibility in the Event of Becoming

Keywords: Qualitative Research, Pospositivist Method, Process Theory, Pragmatism
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 4/11/2021 11:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/11/2021 12:25 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

Geography’s engagement with process-oriented philosophies unsettles notions of causality, materiality, temporality, conceptualization, and knowledge. Drawing on Whitehead’s speculative empiricism, geographers are formulating a post-phenomenological theory of space that methodologically centers ‘event’ as a concrete occasion of relational happening which opens paths for new conceptual understandings (Roberts 2014; Ash 2020). Alongside this, geographers have used pragmatist philosophy to (re)consider knowledge as the emergent and provisional tools used in relational practices of mutual affectivity (Barnett 2014; Wills and Lake 2020). These trajectories coalesce around an articulation of reality as a relational process through which materiality and ‘idea’ (concepts, emotions, imagination, memory) are thought together, as imbricated processes that neither precede nor presuppose the other. In the convalescence of interacting entities constituting the event(s) of experience, ‘idea’ becomes concrete practice open to rearticulation and (re)interpretation. Bringing these insights into conversation with interviews conducted while supermarket shopping, the critical intervention of this paper argues for a focus on how possible futures play an active role in evental becomings. These empirics point toward using Ernst Bloch’s notions of traces, ‘not-yet’, and non-synchronicity to recognize events of inquiry and practice as spatially and temporally extending from and towards the future (Daniel and Moylan 1997; Allums 2020). Reality is a relational process involving articulations between traces of past happenings and future possibilities that affect the present as they are affected by it. This orientation for a postpositivist method highlights the role of inquiry in excavating creative possibilities as they emerge through the future tenses of historical presents.