Attachment: A question of how and a question of why

When I was a PhD student, I was preparing some AAG remarks that discussed a particular author (who I knew would be in the audience) in very positive terms. I asked my supervisor whether he thought the praise was too much. His response was a chuckle and an off-hand remark: ‘never underestimate academic vanity’, he quipped. It was one of those passing moments that should be meaningless but for some reason instilled itself. Now faced with commenting on this thought-provoking paper (Anderson, 2023) – a paper instigated by a question I posed – I am faced with the prospect of indulging in my own academic vanity. On the one hand, I like the fact that Ben took up this question and I get a certain gratification from discussing it. But, on the other, I remember my supervisor's sardonic comment. The situation elicits a certain concern about myself. I am concerned about how I will appear to the reader, about my reputation and my own sense of self-image. There is, to use the terminology of this discussion, a sense of attachment. I am attached to a particular idea or imagination of who I am (and who I am not). And I am thoughtful about how I cultivate and care for that image. As I have written elsewhere (Rose, 2018), the preponderance of process theories currently circulating in geography often paints an image of self-consciousness as a series of punctuated events, as if self-hood were a matter of sensing one's body within a relational situation. But consciousness is more than a mode of sensing. It is also a mode of attachment. Embedded within every acknowledgement of the self, there is a dimension of caring for the self that is acknowledged. The very idea of a ‘self’ – the very idea of being conscious of oneself – is a mode of being attached.

At the centre of his paper is an argument that I fully agree with: there is a difference between being in relation and being attached. Like Ben, I have always seen these ideas too easily elided. One can see this most obviously in discussions around the politics of relationality whereby it is suggested that acknowledging our intimate relations with others situates an ethics of care, as if bringing our dense relationality to light naturally leads subjects to become attached to the relations they find (McCormack, 2014; Whatmore, 2002). Not only is this sentiment not borne out empirically (there is little evidence that humans care for the relations that constitute them), it neglects to provide a causative mechanism whereby recognising one's situation (being in relation) necessarily leads to attachment. In my mind, this lack of causative mechanism illuminates what I take to be one of the limits of process ontologies, that is, their inherent inability to talk about why subjects, who may indeed be unfolding, emergent, relational, and becoming, nonetheless articulate themselves as if they were stable, unchanging beings. While I concede that such imaginations of stability may be fantastical, they are nonetheless there. And I have consistently felt that there is little within process ontologies that helps us understand them. This is what makes Ben's intervention so intriguing. He does provide an account for these modes of attachment. And while my account is quite different, I whole-heartedly appreciate some company in thinking through their conceptual substance.

And yet, Ben and I do think about attachment differently. A difference borne out of starting from two incompatible (though not necessarily opposing) metaphysical positions. For Ben, the world is one where force is primary. Affect, sense, events, these are things that (for Ben and many others) do not need explanation. Affect is part of the world's physics, always present between bodies. While I am not saying that affect does not exist, I do not see it – or any other force – as primary. On the contrary, I argue that force is a response to something prior. Not another force but a lack of force. What Rose et al. (2021) call a primordial negativity; a primordial existential situation that works to undermine every force which it simultaneously instigates. This is another metaphysics to be sure, and it is one that engenders its own distinct array of terminologies, approaches, and concepts. This is to say that while I think there are definite touch points between the projects Ben and I are attempting to develop, those touchpoints look very different in each of our framings. ¹

But let's begin where we agree. In a world where objects and events perpetually emerge and unfold in relation to each other, Ben asks how is it that certain relations come to be prioritised, if not fixed, in semi-stable affective architectures of feeling. As Ben puts it succinctly, ‘if relations are contingent, attachments are those relations that endure’. As a first cut at trying to explain this endurance, Ben turns to Actor–Network Theory, a tradition that has long understood how ‘struts’ of relations can be built in a manner that makes certain conglomerations stable and enduring (Latour, 2013). The problem with such a framing is it does not properly account for the affective dimension, the fact that attachment is not simply practical but also meaningful. Attachment are attachments because they ‘matter’ – that is, they offer purpose, value, and meaning.

Ben's next step therefore is to explore ‘how people are bound to or held by specific “objects”’ – that is, how it comes to be that certain objects stand out or are separated from the myriad of other relations composing experience. And it is here where he introduces the central and most innovative aspect of the paper: the idea that attachment is a promise. Using Berlant's (2011) conception of optimism as a guide, Ben argues that attachments take shape as distant satisfactions, beckoning from afar, offering us a dream of a good life. Attachment, therefore, is not an attachment to a stable and enduring relation or object but rather a trajectory: a path towards an object whose (perpetually deferred) satisfaction promises but does not necessarily deliver. Attachment, in this sense, is ‘an ongoing movement of bringing closer that “satisfying something” the object promises’ (Anderson, 2023). While Ben is careful to provide all the necessary qualifications concerning this promise (they can be threatening as well as fulfilling, wounding as well as healing, etc.), it seems to me that thinking of attachment optimistically, that is, as an attachment desired, hoped for, and moved towards, rather than something attained, is an important distinction. It allows Ben to stay true to an ontology of relations (where subjects are always becoming in and through overlapping forms of connection and disconnection) while simultaneously providing an explanation for how certain promissory objects take shape within this vital scene: ‘from within a changing and changeable relational field’, he states that ‘some objects come to “feel necessary” to a life because of the cluster of promises that gather around them’. Promissory objects are still paths, in the sense that they open up a potential future. But they are paths immersed with optimism, with a hope that they will deliver meaning and value simply by providing direction, even when that direction tracks through exploitation and harm.

I confess that I am very much taken with the conceptualisation of attachment as promise. I like it because it bears a strong resemblance to what I term ‘dreams of presence’. Similarly, dreams of presence are framed as imaginations or fantasies of attachment that are never properly fulfilled. They are what I term asymptotic: markers of various imagined desired objects that yet perpetually recede into the distance. The central concern of my work in this regard is culture. Like Ben, I argue that cultural identity operates as a promise that harkens from yonder. We never have our identity, I argue. It is never properly ours. Rather we only ever move towards it. Culture, therefore, is never present but is only ever a dream of presence. It is something subjects orient themselves towards rather than something they definitively possess.

And yet there is a key difference. When Ben quotes my query he captures its essential problem correctly: ‘how or why [do] subjects come to be attached to the corporealites they embody’. In response, Ben provides a very compelling conception of the how question, that is, how subjects come to be attached. The problem, however, is he does not provide a very compelling conception of why. If subjectivity is perpetually unfolding and becoming, if it is only ever an expression of its relations, than why is attachment necessary? From where does a need for attachment emerge? While I can see, within Ben's argument, how various promissory notes (whether they take shape in objects or scenes of attachment) are imposed, what I do not see is any sense of why they are needed. From whence – within the available mechanisms of process ontologies – does this desire for attachment arise?

My point here is that without a coherent explanation of why (why do subjects seek attachment? Why are they lured to the fantasies that promissory notes promise? Why do they get enmeshed in various forms and scenes of attachment in the first place?), the framework Ben provides looks … a little bit structuralist. We can see this most obviously when he discusses how ‘forms of attachment … endure because exiting comes with costs’; costs which are ‘bound up with norms and the lure of normativity’, or later when he discusses ‘neoliberalising apparatuses’, which cultivate attachments to individualism and particular fantasies of success. While I am not denying the existence of power apparatuses or the social costs of denying various modes of attachment, I do wonder what the difference is between these affective architectures of attachment (which invoke costs) and traditional notions of hegemony? Is this where relational ontologies need to cast anchor to explain the engine of attachment? A conglomeration of promissory notes externally created (and imposed) by coordinated power structures working through the soft tissue of affective life?

It is this question of why that draws me to a different apriori scene. I do not doubt that the world is (partially) relational and that these relations have powerful affective dimensions that lure subjects towards various fantasies. But I also see such relations as driven by something more primordial; a dimension that is non-relational. ² The argument here is that affect and relationality are not the result of apriori forces but a response to existential problems; problems which I (and others) do not think geographers have paid enough attention to. These problems are ones that arise in our most quotidian and unexceptional circumstances (Rose, 2014): in the problem of other people (whose habits, needs, and desires we can never fully understand, accommodate, or deny), the problems posed by the natural world (whose dynamics are eruptive and cycles unreliable), the problems of our bodies (that require constant care and fail us nonetheless), and the problem of death (whose arrival is always surprising even when it is expected). Each of these problems illuminates a territory over which human beings have no sovereignty or dominion; a situation that is both pre-ontological (because it is both anterior and exterior to all human knowledge and force) and non-relational (because it infinitely transcends human capacities; Harrison, 2007). In this framing, every ambition, desire, or force to attach needs to be understood as a response to these problems; an ambition to establish some sovereignty, some power, over a dimension that both solicits our attachment and simultaneously refuses it.

There is obviously not enough space here to fully develop these arguments or the various ways they dialogue with the ideas that Ben is developing in his paper. This is very much the beginning of a conversation – a preface at best. What is significant is that we are having the conversation. Attachment needs to be a question for culture geography and while Ben and I approach this question differently, I appreciate his desire to (1) take the problem seriously and (2) the opportunity to be invited into the discussion.