March of the kitten herders

...I first heard the phrase when I was beginning my PhD work in Literature at the University of Kentucky – shortly before Danny Mayer introduced me to the wild, interdisciplinary joy that is Geography. One of my professors described the English Department's annual graduate student training course in pedagogy as an exercise in ‘herding kittens’. Indeed, she went on, the metaphor can describe almost any attempt to ‘organize’ a meeting of academics: convenors at pains to align and contain the bodies and attentions of several energetic, distracted, fleeing bundles of ideas and exhaustions, coffee stains and conference scarves. The more one gathers, the more they escape. Grappling with this revelation, my academic-newbie thoughts turned to an early scene in Raising Arizona in which Nicholas Cage, a bumbling and panicked would-be kidnapper, struggles to return five scrambling infants – the ‘Arizona Quints’ – to their collective crib. This darkly comedic moment was played for laffs thanks largely to its being well-trapped within its context-milieu. Painfully anxious about everyday (‘common sense’) materiality, Cage carefully ascends a long, rickety ladder to the Quints’ second-story window. Once inside, he discovers that these little (literal) bundles of joy express altogether different relations to physics: throwing themselves from the crib, merging with the laundry, morphing into a twenty-legged giggling biomass that flies off in all directions ... He has every reason to be more terrified of them than they are of him. Defeated, he explains to his accomplice-wife, ‘They started crying and they were all over me. It was kinda horrifying, honey’ (Raising Arizona, 1987). Today, my professor's metaphor strikes me with subtler tones. As the slapstick soundtrack has faded, I have come to hear the groans of that particular fatigue that is the condition of work within the American Academy – ‘service’ – something that is no less overwhelming for being overwhelmingly devalued by overwhelmed colleagues. I hear faintly whispered words from books and papers left unwritten while I workshop the drafts of others. I hear the email inbox ‘Ping!’ with editors’ frequent follow-ups and coaxings that are the veiled-but-inevitable precursors to all extant edited collections, reviews both article and book, and, of course, response fora in Dialogues in Human Geography. Those reading with seasoned eyes know that contributions of this kind (reports, responses, reviews, re…) often count for little in institutional assessments of our intellectual labor. We do them as service to departments, universities, disciplines, and as the Dialogues format makes clear, they can also offer service to the authors to whom they respond. At the same time, the article headlining this forum has its own terrifying and exhausting kittens to herd. It expertly synthesizes not only the already opaque concept of ‘affect’, but also the downright obscure notion of infrastructures of affect (a formulation so chaotic that, as Bosworth (2023) illustrates, it has come to mean one thing and its opposite). Indeed, given the space devoted to summarizing recent discussions, one might more readily expect to find this contribution's wranglings within the digital pages of Progress – than Dialogues in Human Geography. However, if its progression is summative, it is so only for the purposes of extracting and aggregating with each encounter, weaving thinker to thinker, paragraph to paragraph. In recent years, I have encountered the prolific weaver of ‘What is Affective Infrastructure?’ only in the form of ‘(Bosworth, 2020a, 2020b, 2020etc)’, a disembodied voice that sometimes echoes through the half-finished hallways of two books I’ve been writing for an eternity. But in the mid- to late-2010s, I knew him as a moving body – Kai – who showed up occasionally in Madison to attend a visiting lecture or workshop that I had put together. Our last meeting was a Space for Theory Workshop on Simondon I co-organized shortly before the pandemic. I was surprised when we fell into a disagreement there over topics related to those covered in the latter half of this work. After all, the discussion in this article and my research on affect share an unusual amount in common: an almost mechanical interest in the ontology and politics of affect (particularly in the flavors of Deleuze, Simondon, Althusser, and contemporary social struggles); an insistence upon the centrality of anticapitalist critique in affect theory; a faith in the possibilities of collectives and collective affects for political liberation, empowerment, and recouperation (see Woodward and Lea, 2010; Woodward, 2011; Woodward et al., 2012). Was it simply a matter of small but crucial nuances in a specialized field? Was it because our work is too proximate? Was it my comportment? Was I talking too much? Gathering my memories, the moment reminds me of another transindividual disaster; this one abruptly ending my limited interactions with Neil Smith during the 2000s. We were not close, but we were on friendly speaking terms after he kindly sat on a response panel for ‘Human Geography without Scale’ at the 2005 AAG. It was in this paper that my co-authors and I proposed our own iteration of flat ontology, which we called ‘site ontology’ after the work of Schatzki. During the talk, I was delighted to hear the frustrated but joyful Neil grudgingly confess, ‘I agree with you, but you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!’ ¹ Then, in an AAG session on dialectics two years later, I presented a paper on David Harvey and Nigel Thrift that, again, resonated with many of Bosworth's efforts here. I had conceived the paper as both a celebratory synthesis and an overcoming. Neil was not pleased. ‘Keith’, he said from the audience, ‘I can’t believe you’d say that about David!’ Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. When I hailed him from the bar at subsequent conferences, he would look right through me, walk right past me. What happened? Like the Arizona Quints, affectivity is always moving in unexpected directions and our finite efforts to structure and control it inevitably engender confusion alongside whatever modest ‘constitution’ we hope to achieve. If we cannot help but try to make sense of it, like the kitten herder, we would be foolish to assume that the fragments we capture exhaust its possible relations. (For this reason, I prefer social theory's ‘tendencies’ to the sometimes positivistish ‘determinations’.) Even by asserting this affective proximity or affinity between the Kai and Neil moments, I perhaps solipsize in advance ² a reality in which each arose through different contexts, histories, and enactments. It is like extracting solutions from problems rather than approaching problems as ideas (Deleuze, 1994). My gazing mind steps in retrospectively to localize an object relation. But we cannot conclude that this inevitably ‘common sensical’, objectifying activity of human minds (Simondon, 2020: 47) – whether we call it phenomenological intention or epistemological fixing – is coextensive with ontology. Because I contend that it is not, I continue to insist on a politically nuanced flat ontology (i.e. site ontology) for thinking affectivity. However, I reject idealists, such as Graham Harman, who invoke flatness with radically different consequences. Smith was among the first geographers to critique flat ontology with appeals to social unevenness (2012: 963–64; see also Leitner and Miller, 2007: 211–12; Dawney, 2021). This common misreading fails to grasp what ‘flat’ references; confusing actualized, very real inequities for their constituent processes. ³ A flat ontology is ‘flat’ because it (1) denies that hierarchical and essentialized orders of being are inevitable or eternal and (2) provides an open picture of the genesis of political resistance and liberation. Unevenness is neither prior to the processes generating the social field nor inevitable from them, but rather grows and dissipates as aggregating tendencies (actualization) within specific social relations (force, representation), rendering them repetitive (exploitation, oppression, devaluation). Consequently, there is always more difference being expressed in any situation/moment than is captured by epistemologico-political fixings (e.g. base-superstructure models). Flat ontology offers a more nuanced accounting for unevennesses and their overturnings by seeking to think inclusively about actualized/ing differences (rather than treating them as remainders or the margins of a sedimented political viewpoint). A sedimented approach to difference inevitably notches the boat to find the sword: it seeks to stabilize something that is irresistibly and radically open (terrified kitten herding). In this regard, Bosworth offers a related but more interesting criticism of flat ontology, differentiating his approach as ‘an historical form of an ontology of technics’ (italics in original). If flat ontology describes how things come into being, such emergence happens always and only amid already existing aggregates (conditions, contexts, and conjunctures). Site ontology's actualizations (even its potentializations) cannot help but have historicity insofar as they express through and as localizations, but our ideas of such localizations are rarely ‘clear and distinct’ (i.e. exhaustive). Thus, Marx (1990) borrowed philosophy's absolute/relative distinction to render the infinitely localized thinkable. If the absolute offers a simplified theoretical abstraction for capitalist extraction, the relative (i.e. actual) dimensions of (then) emerging capitalism depict an infinitesimal labyrinth of continuously varying affectivities (particularly the socio-machinic): a specific London street where a factory produces next to an artisanal shop in transition, each with its own specific machinery, speeds, and degrees of exploitation. Technical alienation is a general tendency, its vertiginous affectivities are infinitely and exhaustingly localized (Marx, 1990: 533–42, 602–04). Abstraction wrangles and clarifies to highlight general tendencies (aggregations) of social violence. Site ontology reminds us that these affective materialities remain excessive and turns thought toward further situated struggles. One side seeks to exhaustively gather, one side keeps flying out in other undetermined directions. Two styles, one struggle …