The chapter considers Whitehead's notion of eternal objects as a task of 'adventuring amid physical experiences in this actual world' (1978: 256). The reason for doing so is to address a specific environmental problem: namely, of communicating the existence of nuclear waste buried underground for the (at least) 100,000 years that these materials pose a threat to organic life. To engage with the problem of communicating over more-than-human-time horizons, the chapter considers an unlikely genealogy of eternal objects existing between Whitehead and formal practices of nuclear waste management. Focussing on the eternal object of the colour red, and particularly its expression in Edvard Munch's The Scream, the chapter concludes by arguing for the need to understand eternal objects as an infinite quality of nature with a capacity to produce alternative evaluations – a line of thinking of relevancy to future studies and social science engagements with nuclear waste futures.

Technologies have been theorised to understand their powers to produce spacetimes – notably through Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics as constitutive of human ontology. However, less attention has been paid to how technologies shape spacetimes according to their own distinct logics of evolution, the result being a tendency to reduce technological agency to a question of its effects on human being. The first half of the paper elaborates this problem in conversation with geographies of the digital turn. The second half introduces an alternative approach through Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic notion of technology characterised by its own logics of evolution – what I term techno-genesis.

This article assays geographical research into nuclear cultures, and cognate conversations in atomic heritage, toxic waste studies, and memory and landscape studies, as one way to develop the notion of nuclear memory. In doing so, we survey how geographers and social scientists have sought to think and communicate memory of nuclear things through three specific modes: the archival, the aesthetic, and the speculative. Our central argument is that nuclear memory provides a theoretical orientation for geographers to engage with alternative possibilities for thinking nuclear waste futures besides anthropocentric notions of common sense.

This paper develops the notion of the technological unconscious by engaging with the geographic relationship between technology and the production of subjectivity. Drawing upon research with the Alternate Anatomies Laboratory in Australia, the paper advances this relationship through an empirical encounter with sonographic imaging. Contributing to conceptualisations of the ways technologies participate in unconscious activity, in this paper ultrasound imaging (sonography) is turned to as one way to think about the enunciation of subjectivity that assists the ultrasound technician in homing-in to particular signifying and a-signifying semiotic cues. Rather than siding with broad understandings of the technological unconscious, the paper articulates the production of specific processes of the technological unconscious via machinic enunciation, which reveals ways of rethinking human-technology relationships through the infra-sensible semiotic operations.

AbstractWriting at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear to be undergoing a reprise across the social sciences and humanities – whether through engagements with speculative cosmology (Stengers, 2006), speculative empiricism (Debaise, 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), speculative research (Wilkie et al., 2017), or speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011) – in this chapter we introduce Speculative Geographies and our motivation for assembling the collection as a way of considering what concepts and practices of speculation might mean for geography, and how speculation might itself be conceived as geographical. In approaching the relationship between speculation and geography, we introduce the book as a collective desire to complicate the modes of thought used to evaluate experience by crafting alternatives, pluralising perspectives, and thereby problematising the immediately given. Far from abstract thinking, in this chapter we conceptualise speculation, after A.N. Whitehead, as a task of thinking abstractions – a style of thinking that prioritises an openness to what thought might become, and which therefore reconfigures empirical problems beyond what seems given in an immediate experience. The chapter traces key genealogies of this speculative practice including speculative philosophy, speculative fiction, and speculative design. Finally, we provide an overview of how the three themes of the book – ethics, technologies, aesthetics – speak to the chapters making up this edited collection.

The relationship between ‘philosophy’ and the ‘geo’ has received renewed attention with the rise of the terrestrial and the planetary as leitmotifs for thinking about the collective subjectivation of particular kinds of world. In some of these conversations, this relationship is developed to consider how social collectives emerge with the production of particular kinds of territorial abstraction. Three decades since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published What is Philosophy?, book that has a lasting legacy in developing geophilosophy as a particular mode of transcendental empirical enquiry, this special issue revisits the relationship between geophilosophy and the production of an alternative sense of the earth. In this introduction, we approach geophilosophy in its pluralism by showing how the concept does not only concern the question of how to retain a sense of difference and contingency in thought, but also concerns a mode of enquiry that presents opportunities to experiment with alternative forms of collective subjectivation. Assaying the legacy of Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy on contemporary forms of earth-thinking, the article identifies the unique demands and geophilosophical possibilities taken up by the contributors to this issue that question how to recuperate another sense of the earth.

Abstract. This paper approaches the question of nuclear safety in relation to the prospects of living archives, and in particular, it explores two public events where sociocultural aspects of nuclear waste management in Sweden were enacted. Drawing on an ongoing research collaboration with the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), the paper examines (1) a grass-roots play entitled Kopparkistans hemlighet (or The Secret of the Copper Box), and (2) a drawing competition hosted by schools located near a nuclear waste storage facility in the Östhammar municipality, considering how these events help reproduce certain kinds of social and cultural responsibility. Contributing to critical debates in the social sciences and humanities intersecting questions of memory preservation, nuclear waste, and post-nuclear natures, we consider how the forms of responsibility produced through these public experiments inform important, albeit unconventional, modes of nuclear waste management insofar as they suggest how long-lived nuclear waste sites might become living archives without assuming a narrow notion of heritage and human memory preservation for all time and space. To conclude, we evaluate how the legacy of the two events might be incorporated into wider strategies of nuclear waste management.

In conversation 1 with Didier Debaise, this piece thinks transversally across Nature as Event (2017a) and Speculative Empiricism (2017b) to explore some of the key stakes in his philosophy, namely: the relationship between the task of thinking a speculative empiricism and the problem of the bifurcation of nature. Engaging with the themes of nature, abstraction, dualism, pragmatism, and the role of stories in dramatizing our sensitivity to the world, the conversation develops Debaise’s contribution to theorising alternative modes of knowledge and experience capable of admitting those infra-sensible, inaudible, or imperceptible qualities of events. Distinctly, Debaise introduces here the problem of ‘predatory abstractions’ as one way to understand the problem of bifurcation. Ethically, the question of predatory abstractions makes new demands on the social sciences: to story new abstractions capable of deepening our experience of nature.

Post‐humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the “human” as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situatedness and attention to nonhuman agencies within post‐humanist thought complement and extend existing methodological innovations within human geography. We do so with reference to a series of Masters workshops – a somewhat overlooked space of research‐creation – each of which explored the implications of post‐humanism on methodological practice. The introduction concludes with three key tenets that were followed in each of the individual workshops, and which set out an ethos for practising post‐humanism more broadly.

This article develops the theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual. It does so to respond to a recent tendency to posit affect as vague form of relationality exceeding the individual. Instead, the article outlines how affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian line of thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one that pertains to embodied individuals. Instructing this move is the writing of Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher who conceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual. Engaging with Simondon’s conceptualisation of individuation and perception as a way to trace the importance of these pre-individual processes, affect is understood more precisely as a potentialised orientation of non-individuated relationality. More significantly, though, the article argues that Simondon’s notion of the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect, through which thought is directed towards processes of individuation exceeding the individual but that, nevertheless, modify the genesis of affection, perception and action – an argument I make tangible through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and perceptual experience. An ontogenetic logic of affect, I suggest, demands that the thought schemas through which social scientists evaluate processes of affect be open to these pre-individual potentials that orientate perceptive experience.