Affective Critical Regionality 178348084X, 9781783480845

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Affective Critical Regionality

Place, Memory, Affect Series Editors: Neil Campbell, Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby, and Christine Berberich, School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies at the University of Portsmouth. The Place, Memory, Affect series seeks to extend and deepen debates around the intersections of place, memory, and affect in innovative and challenging ways. The series will forge an agenda for new approaches to the edgy relations of people and place within the transnational global cultures of the twenty-first century and beyond.

Titles in the Series Walking Inside Out, edited by Tina Richardson The Last Isle: Contemporary Taiwan Film, Culture, and Trauma, by Sheng-mei Ma Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989, by Ben Gook The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays, by Stephen Muecke Affective Critical Regionality, by Neil Campbell Visual Arts Practice and Affect, edited by Ann Schilo (forthcoming) Haunted Landscapes, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (forthcoming) In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker, edited by Luke Bennett (forthcoming)

Affective Critical Regionality Neil Campbell

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2016 by Neil Campbell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8082-1 ISBN: PB 978-1-7834-8083-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Campbell, Neil, 1957- author. Title: Affective critical regionality / Neil Campbell. Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. | Series: Place, memory, affect | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017193 (print) | LCCN 2016029534 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783480821 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783480838 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783480845 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Geographical perception. | Human geography. | Regionalism--Philosophy. | Place (Philosophy) Classification: LCC G71.5 .C338 2016 (print) | LCC G71.5 (ebook) | DDC 910/.019--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017193 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Regioning 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1

From Regionalism to Regionality Charles Olson: ‘The Motion Which We Call Life’ D. J. Waldie: Suburban Regionality Kathleen Stewart: Fictocritical Regionality A New Atlas of Emotion: Rebecca Solnit’s West Willy Vlautin’s Northline: Fugitive Work Karen Tei Yamashita: Border Cartographies, Border Refrains

25 55 77 97 123 147 171

Conclusion: ‘Not so Much a Deficiency as a Resource’

197

Bibliography

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Index

223

v

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following, who have in many different ways contributed to the creation of this book. For invitations to discuss these ideas in some extraordinary places: David Rio, Stefano Rosso, Christine Berberich, Bent Sørensen, David Fenimore, Susan Bernardin, Nancy Cook, Wendy Summers, Krista Comer, Robert Gunn, Evan Stapleton, Gus Cohen, and Ángel Chaparro. For their inspiration, support, and critical insights: David Crouch, Steve Tatum, Katie Stewart, Don Waldie, and Willy Vlautin. As always, this is for Jane. The University of Derby provided financial support enabling some of this research to take place. Finally, this book is dedicated to my mother, who passed away before it was completed: ‘To love someone is to put yourself in their place . . . which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story’ (Solnit 2013:3).

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Introduction Regioning

1: UNDOING THE MAP OF THE SENSIBLE ‘What map are you in the process of making or rearranging?’ ask Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1996: 203), a question that sets the tone for this book alongside another statement: What we are interested in, you see, are modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a wind, of an event. And maybe it’s a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons, or subjects (Deleuze 1995: 26).

This is a book about different forms and processes of mapping that explore the complex territories of ‘regionalism’ by moving beyond conventional mapping or its objects to explore, as Deleuze suggests, alternative ‘modes of individuation’ often overlooked or underplayed. This book asks what are the shapes and patterns that make up life; what lines, grids, circles, trajectories, and complex geometries intersect as places, people, spaces, histories, memories, energies, forces, and affects; and how do they entangle and disentangle with each other to build networks, meshworks, cities, neighbourhoods, regions, nations, and worlds? As Deleuze said in an interview, ‘[L]ines are the basic components of things and events. So everything has its geography, its cartography, its diagram. What’s interesting, even in a person, are the lines that make them up, or they make up, or take, or create’ (Deleuze 1995: 33). So although it is a book about or of regionality, it seems also to always have been a book constituted of lines and shapes, although rarely regular or sys1

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Introduction

tematic. For, as John Rajchman explains, tracing such lines reveals a multitude of ‘other spaces’: If, then, segmentation of social space permits a geometry of horizontals and verticals within which to chart or locate all social ‘movement’, minorities and becomings work instead with ‘diagonals’ or ‘transversals’, which suggest other spaces, other movements. To ‘diagram’ a space is to expose such diagonal lines and the possibilities they open up, making a carte that is not a calque—a map that is not the ‘tracing’ of anything prior, but which serves instead to indicate ‘zones of indistinction’ from which becomings may arise. (Rajchman 2000: 99–100)

Therefore, as this book evolves, it takes on this active presence as a form of creative ‘diagram’ or new cartography which is not simply ‘the tracing of anything prior’, and, therefore, not seeing regionalism as a fixed and given thing or a unanimous, settled body, but rather engaging with the ‘prior’ so as to participate with and simultaneously to see beyond it and comprehend its potential, its ‘becomings’. As Rajchman continues, In developing such potentials we should no longer think in terms of lines going from one fixed point to another, but on the contrary, must think of points as lying at the intersection of many entangled lines, capable of drawing out ‘other spaces’ . . . as with one of Jackson Pollock’s lines, a line that no longer traces a contour, but is itself always bifurcating into others. The problem then becomes to ‘make lines’ rather than to ‘make a final point’. (ibid.: 100)

The Wyoming native Jackson Pollock suits this book well, since the ‘intersection of many entangled lines’ I examine throughout these pages relates to or connects in diverse ways with the American West. This book resists understanding region as straight lines, neat borders, simple rootedness, or fixed points, and instead engages with ‘other kinds of encounter and invention’ (ibid.) to better participate in and articulate the affective spacetime of regionality. As Donna Haraway once wrote, ‘The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular’ (Haraway 1991: 196), and for me, throughout this book, it is the regionalities of the American West. The West’s ‘visibility’ as a region is tied inextricably to the straight lines of its myth as ‘gunfighter nation’ (see Slotkin 1992); the epic narrative of imperial expansion, Manifest Destiny; the legacy of conquest, unilateralism—all grand stories of settlement and superiority. The idea of region, of ‘westness’, as I have called it elsewhere (see Campbell 2008), therefore, becomes distributed through these stories; inscribed, repeated, and renewed over time, constructing a powerful regime of representation or what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’, explaining how systems of division and boundaries define what is visible and audible, seen and hidden, within any aesthetico-political regime (Rancière 2009: 1). Rancière argues,

Introduction

3

however, it is precisely the role of the work of art to ‘reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures and rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction, and submission’ (ibid.: 39). In other words, the mythic frame, such as that surrounding and encircling the West, can be interfered with in order to demonstrate alternative ways of thinking and being. The ‘distribution of the sensible’, therefore, constitutes the ‘major’ language through which we come to know the Westas-region, speaking its myths, circulating its established discourses, and approving its ideologies. What is possible, however, is to unearth and experience what Deleuze and Guattari called the ‘minor’ at work alongside and within the major, not as a subsidiary or an insignificant language, but rather one that exists ‘to send the major language racing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 105, 99—emphasis in original). Since the ‘unity of language is fundamentally political’, this ‘minoring’ process intervenes in the smooth-running of dominant forms through exercising the ‘power of . . . variation’ like stuttering or stammering (ibid.: 101). The minor, therefore, can be seen to redistribute the sensible through a ‘creative stammering . . . whispering . . . [of] ascending and descending variations’, defined by ‘the extent that one deviated from the model’, so that such minor languages are ‘seeds, crystals of becoming . . . to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority’ (ibid.: 106). To rethink region and regionalism with this in mind understands the local and specific to be interventionist in wider, more distanced or global projects and ‘languages’ and yet, at the same time, refuses to allow the local to become static, nostalgic, or reductive. Rather than regionalism as a conservative process built on ‘a backwardlooking impulse’ (Steiner 2013: 1), one rethinks it as a ‘minor’ language making the dominant one stammer. Franz Kafka, according to Deleuze and Guattari, created minor literature without a standard notion of ‘the people’ as already defined and established by state and nation, myth and representation, and instead voiced the potential of an unformed ‘people to come’. The sense of ‘a people . . . presupposed already there’ (Deleuze 2000: 217), formed by the majoritarian frames of reference and scripted by the established mythic language of the nation is challenged because, rather than unanimity or a set of clearly defined lines of identity that construct the ‘people’, what is asserted instead is ‘a plurality of intertwined lines’ (ibid.: 220) from which a different, creative, and uncontained sense of ‘the people’ might emerge. Significantly, for Deleuze and Guattari, such a dynamic process aimed for ‘a state of continuous variation’, of ‘stretching’ which is, they assert in parenthesis, ‘(the opposite of regionalism)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 105). For they understand ‘regionalism’ as too often enclosed, inward-looking, conservative and static—the precise container of a ‘presupposed’ people where myths and established sensibilities are held, valorized, and perpetuated. Steiner quotes an interview with Henry Nash Smith in which he expresses

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Introduction

this problem: ‘There are healthy forms of regionalism but rigid, ideological regionalism is usually dangerous. Nothing is more anathema to a serious radical than regionalism’ (in Steiner 2013: 1). The sensibility I explore in this book resists and challenges or deterritorializes these perceptions of a narrow, ‘rigid’ regionalism, proposing instead a form of what I term ‘affective critical regionality’ which promotes (1) a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ working actively to stretch the taken-for-granted assumptions and closed-worlds of regionalism; (2) the radical potential of the ‘minor’, local, small-scale, and fugitive to erupt into and disrupt regionalism’s smooth-running, established ‘languages’; and (3) a hopeful, human relatedness emerging from a recognition and appreciation of difference, connection, and responsibility through contingency, precarity, and vulnerability—of seeing one’s self in others, asserting the potential of a ‘people to come’, and interrupting ‘the self-conscious account of ourselves’ (Butler 2006: 23). In rethinking the terms affective, critical, and regionality, my aim is, following David Matless, to demonstrate how ‘recombination generates a productive complexity and instability’ (Matless 2014: 13). Regionality, as I will show, can be an active, agitating presence, a becoming that deviates from the model of regionalism and region, which, as Matless reminds us, has roots in ‘associations of rule’ and in ‘definitional regulation’ (ibid.: 14). ‘Regionalism’ is an ‘order-word’ that ‘marks stoppages or organized, stratified compositions’, but ‘regionality’ is a ‘pass-word’ made up ‘to transform the compositions of order into the components of passage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 110). Thus, the aim here is to rethink ‘region’ as a ‘pass-word’ (that moves and agitates) not an ‘orderword’ (that fixes and defines), working through its ‘dual status of something carrying its own (contested) integrity, yet also being a region of something else’ (Matless 2014: 14—emphasis added). Quite simply, regionality regions, actively engaging, extending, overlapping, mutating beyond itself at its edges and boundaries where it touches ‘something else’. This idea of ‘regioning’ is developed from Martin Heidegger’s essay, ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’, which defines ‘openness as a region’ and ‘regioning’ as a process. The ‘conversation’ chips away at preconceptions of region as, for example, something which is fixed and ‘permits all sheltering’, only to add ‘but not only this’, for it functions ‘through its relation to us’ (Heidegger 1966: 65). 1 Region is no longer a static noun referring to ‘settled domains’ (Casey 1998: 270), but re-thought as active and variable, as ‘that-which-regions’, defined as ‘an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting’, where ‘rest is the seat and reign of all movement’ (Heidegger 1966: 66–67). For Heidegger, consciousness is both a horizon and what is beyond it, since ‘the horizon is still something else besides a horizon’, and in thinking more on this, he arrives at the notion that to think Being in this manner is ‘something like a region’

Introduction

5

(ibid.: 64). In these contradictory, challenging processes and oppositions— abiding/expanse, gathering/opening, openness/halt, rest/movement, horizon/ something besides a horizon—Heidegger proposes the energized possibilities of the critical regionality I am suggesting in this book; a conceptualization of tensions that constantly challenge us to think differently about the relations between presupposed and fixed definitions of ‘region’ and what lies beyond them and yet relates back to it in multiple ways. Of course, Heidegger offers the possibility that region ‘can’t be re-presented at all’ for to describe it would be to ‘reify it’ (ibid.: 67), suggesting that regionality is always ‘morethan-representational’: experienced, lived, performed, and felt. In this sense, it cannot be fixed at all, since it moves, and, I would add, moves us. As Derek McCormack puts it, non-representational or more-than-representational theories ‘encourage us to think of spaces and places in terms of their enactive composition through practice’ (McCormack 2013: xi). To comprehend regioning in this mobile, compositional way involves, according to Heidegger, ‘waiting’ and being ‘waitful’ (Heidegger 1966: 68–69) because ‘waiting is a relation to relate to that-which-regions’; paying attention, being open to things, so that it ‘releases itself into openness’ as both ‘distance’ and ‘nearness’, so that the process of thinking (non-representationally) itself ‘would be coming-into-the-nearness of distance’ (ibid.: 72, 68). Heidegger writes of being ‘released from re-presenting’ as if freeing oneself from the requirement to experience the world through other means than as language, image, or symbolism of any kind and equates this movement ‘to release . . . purely to that-which-regions because that-which-regions is the opening of openness’ (ibid.: 69). ‘Releasement’ or the ‘opening of man to something’ (Anderson in Heidegger 1966: 28) consists of ‘letting ourselves in’ to the process of waiting and being open to that-which-regions and where it might direct us. Although not pursued directly by Heidegger in these terms, these operations of thought and feeling suggest an affective process through which regioning is experienced, since, in Edward Casey’s words, ‘regions involve us’ (Casey 1998: 270). As a result, McCormack adds, ‘It involves thinking of bodies as lively compositions crossing thresholds of intensive and extensive consistency whose limits are defined less by physical boundaries than by capacities to affect and be affected by other bodies’ (McCormack 2013: 2). Region, regioning, and ‘that-which-regions’ all suggest being open to something beyond the immediate and the local (those elements often associated with region); a ‘dynamic ground in which man’s nature emerges’ [sic] (Heidegger 1966: 31). And yet within regioning there is simultaneously a ‘steadfastness of a belonging’ that Heidegger famously named ‘in-dwelling’ (ibid.: 81) and which, with the emergent energies, become part of this complex dynamic of ‘lively compositions’ wherein region is both local and global, near and distant, the horizon and its ‘beyond’. In fact, as the ‘Conversa-

6

Introduction

tion’ closes, that-which-regions is poetically rendered as ‘the nearness of distance, and the distance of nearness’, and this non-dialectical, coexistent process is indeed ‘the nature of thinking’ itself (ibid.: 86), the very juggling of apparent opposites that haunts the whole discussion. As the conversers reach for a single word to express the nature of thinking and to draw their conversation to its conclusion, they arrive at a fragment from Heraclitus and the Greek word anchibasiē that translates as ‘going toward’, but also as ‘going near’, and perhaps actually as ‘moving-into-nearness’ (ibid.: 88–89). In these nuances of meaning, they realise what the ‘Conversation’ endlessly reveals, that ‘we are still seeking’ (ibid.: 89) for the nature of thinking, and specifically here, for ‘the very condition of possibility’ of regioning bound up in all these twists and turns along the forest path (Casey 1998: 248). 2: ‘A REGION OF SOMETHING ELSE’ Vincent B. Canizaro in his collection Architectural Regionalism (2007) makes a passionate plea for reassessing what we mean by regionalism, arguing that it can no longer be associated with nostalgia or defined as simply ‘local’ and, therefore, as a ‘place of lesser achievement and the source of backwardness, provincialism, and chauvinism’ (Canizaro 2007: 12). For him, it is about placing the ‘local quality of life’ at the forefront, ‘not in spite of global concerns and possibilities, but in order to better take advantage of them . . . [and] to re-embed us in the reality and diversity of our local places—critically and comfortably’ (ibid.: 12). Douglas Reichert Powell sums this up as ‘regionalism assumes a cultural deficit’ (Powell 2007: 20). To challenge this ‘deficit’ is to respond to the regional/local qualities of life and be sensitive to its multiplicitous and varied potentials, becoming, in Canizaro’s words, ‘highly attuned to the constancy and change of the local environment’, and, therefore, to ‘open up possibilities for understanding where and with whom one lives . . . encourage awareness of local climate and the changing of the seasons . . . [and] open up the possibility of shared purpose, in which the concerns of here are understood as linked to there: ecologically, economically, and socially’ (Canizaro 2007: 12). The implications of these words are important for this book, suggesting, as they do, the beginnings of a methodology, a critical practice, a way of being and becoming, and a long-term political purpose. However, this book will show ‘critique as a means of creating turning points in the here and now and a conviction that in any given situation more is needed than critique if those turning points are to be cultivated. Critique is necessary but always insufficient. It may be supplemented by a positive attachment to the existing world’ (Anderson 2014: 15). Such ‘attachments’ to the local as a key to rethinking regionalism is most evidently carried through my evocation of the word ‘affective’

Introduction

7

deliberately supplementing the nature of critique, drawing together the productive relations or processes of territorializing and deterritorializing, or ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, for example. Michael C. Steiner moves towards a similar position in his collection Regionalists on the Left (2013) through his phrase ‘critical affection’, which he sees as the ability to combine ‘deeply engaged’ critique with ‘elegiac love of . . . native and adopted grounds’ (ibid.: 2). Steiner develops this idea only briefly through his work on Carey McWilliams, whose best writing he reads as ‘critically engaged regionalism’ (ibid.: 364), and it is this developed quality of critical affection he shares with the diverse writers examined in this book as they seek to comprehend the multiple relations of regionality. Affective Critical Regionality is ultimately concerned with a ‘recasting of the distribution of the sensible’, where the ‘sensible’ is constituted by ‘a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity’ (Rancière 2009: 63, 12), that is, all the discursive assumptions, textual representations, and cultural stereotypes that have, over time, shaped the standard rhetoric of region and regionalism. As Rancière reminds us, ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’, and thus, aesthetics and wider cultural practices (‘ways of doing and making’) have to ‘intervene in the general distribution’ so as to play a ‘role in the upheaval of the representative paradigm and of its political implications’ (ibid.: 13, 15). Charles Olson, whom I will discuss in much greater detail in chapter 2, expressed a similar position on the distribution of the sensible through his own critically poetic work on place and region, The Maximus Poems: ‘I’d not urge anyone back. Back is no value as better. That / sentimentality / has no place, least of all Gloucester, / where polis / still thrives / Back is only for those who do not move’ (Olson 1983: 26). His wonderful idea that ‘[b]ack is only for those who do not move’ suggests the critical nature of place invoked in this book and the refusal to see the local or regional as purely delimited, introverted, or sentimental. It also reminds us of a broader issue identified by James Williams in his discussion of Alfred North Whitehead (a major influence on Olson’s thought, whose work has many echoes in my approach here as well), where he argues that his process philosophy challenged ‘mistaken metaphysical assumptions that . . . truth lies in some form of invariance’ thereby privileging ‘any given enduring substance and its invariant properties’ (Williams 2008: 81—emphasis added). Traditional notions of regionalism, its ‘distribution of the sensible’, reflect these damaging notions of ‘invariance’ and ‘endurance’, providing comforting reassurance about place as stable, unchanging, and essentialized in the face of society’s shifting processes. In Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, such reassuring notions are referred to as ‘misplaced concreteness’ because they appear to ‘lead us away from real processes to ones that are ever further

8

Introduction

removed from true concreteness’ (ibid.: 79). Sharing much with the notion of ‘myth’, Whitehead’s ‘misplaced concreteness’ when applied to regionalism suggests its distance from vital, lived experience constructed through ‘suppressing what appear to be irrelevant details’ in order to present something solid and enduring (Whitehead 1975: 69). A similar process defines the creation of myth, according to Roland Barthes, wherein details are overlooked in favour of the ‘eternal’ and the seemingly natural that ‘goes-without-saying’, and where, as a consequence, place (or specifically, region) might become instead ‘reduced to a vast classical ballet, a nice neat Commedia dell’arte, whose improbable typology serves to mask the real spectacle of conditions, classes and professions’ (Barthes 1993: 11, 75). However, in Whitehead’s philosophy, apparently irrelevant details are not irrelevant at all, but rather the unacknowledged experiences of regionality, its signatures of change (Barthes’s conditions, classes, and professions) constituting the complex forces that create and sustain actual living entities, communities, regions, and nations, rather than their oft-represented static, but reassuring, invariant forms, or what Barthes terms ‘its monuments’ (ibid.: 75). So details matter to the methodology I am proposing if we are to question the assumptions set out above when reconsidering what regionalism might become—its dynamic relations, sensations, affects, movements, forces, ‘the withness of the body’, as Whitehead called it (1979: 62–64). According to Williams, using a metaphor we might apply to region itself, ‘We should not seek out the essence of wax but the relations between wax and heat, our ideas of wax and heat, our sensations of them, the infinite processes beyond these’ (Williams 2008: 79–80). Of course, this sense of connectedness and interrelated processes of motion and change, adaptation and difference runs contrary to the familiar perception of regionalism as static, timeless, and inward-looking. The apparently small-scale or overlooked, the ‘minor’ and the local, the marginal or the fugitive all, therefore, become the stuff of region-as-process, or what I will call, and define within this book as, regionality. As Williams teases out, this attunement is suggested by Whitehead’s rethinking of ‘common sense’, not as a neutral middle-ground of reassuring agreements, but as ‘observation’ and ‘immediate experience’ that does not ‘present a common set of facts, but a common way of experiencing . . . linked to imagination—as a creative experimental process’ (ibid.: 82). Williams terms it a ‘common sensual form of experience that invites new and shifting ideas’ and that is also ‘extremely varied’ (ibid.: 82); a type of affective process of ‘varying relations’ or ‘an alliance of imagination, sense and creativity, balanced by a wise and historically-informed and inclusive metaphysics’ (ibid.). What Whitehead proposes is ‘a counter to limited concepts of explanation’ through which he is always ‘setting events and experiences in wider contexts that they interact with’ (ibid.: 89–90—emphasis added). So

Introduction

9

‘entities’, to use another Whitehead term, are the complex moving and interacting elements that make up events (such as regionality), without being explained exclusively by their ‘wider contexts’. Instead, they both help define them and are, in turn, defined by them through this process of interaction (see Latour 2007). Another way to comprehend Whitehead’s position is to understand his argument against what he calls ‘simple location’, an idea I utilize in this book as a reminder of how regionalism, as we have already seen above, has often been portrayed as invariant or ‘settled’, having, therefore, ‘a definite place in space-time’ so that ‘you can adequately state the relation of a particular material body to space-time by saying that it is just there, in that place; and, so far as simple location is concerned, there is nothing more to be said on the subject’ (Whitehead 1975: 66; see also Casey 1998). Deleuze and Guattari (1996: 105) famously present traditional notions of regionalism in this negative manner in A Thousand Plateaus, first published in 1980, using it in contrast to their preferred vision of the ‘minor’ as ‘a state of continuous variation’ in which there is ‘dissolution of the constant form in favour of differences in dynamic’ (ibid.: 104). 2 This process of the minor’s engagement with the major (‘a constant and homogeneous system’) testifies to ‘one’s potential becoming to the extent that one deviates from the model’ (ibid.: 105). In their view, as we saw earlier, this ‘deviation’ is ‘(the opposite of regionalism)’, because in their minds ‘regionalizing’ is too often linked to ‘ghettoizing’ (ibid.: 105, 106) and thereby closing off the potential of the ‘minor’ to express its variant elements ‘by connecting, conjugating them’ to invent ‘a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming’ that reaches out beyond the seemingly narrow, traditional limits of the territorialized region (ibid.: 106). This book opens up this deliberate parenthesis of Deleuze and Guattari’s—‘(the opposite of regionalism)’—to demonstrate that affective critical regionality, like an extension of Steiner’s ‘critical affection’, presents a different approach through which the variation of the minor is more prominent and actively insisting on an opening-out process of connection and transformation redistributing the sensible and thus suggesting new political positions and possibilities of regionality. In Cinema 2, published five years after A Thousand Plateaus, in 1985, Deleuze proposed a more radical sense of region than that referred to above by discussing alternative ways time might be ‘imaged’ in film so that it is not subordinated to movement and the action of the hero but instead expressed in more complex ways in order to make visible ‘the hidden ground of time’ made up of ‘flows’ that mixed pasts and presents (Deleuze 2000: 98). In doing this, Deleuze employs the term ‘regions’ in a less derogatory manner than in A Thousand Plateaus, articulating time as more dynamic and less fixed or linear, operating simultaneously in space, where ‘all the circles of

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Introduction

the past constituting so many stretched or shrunken regions, strata, or sheets: each region with its own characteristics, its “tones”, its “aspects”, its “singularities”, its “shining points” and “dominant themes”’ (Deleuze 2000: 99). In turn, these regions ‘coexist’ as many pasts and presents, ‘simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity’ (ibid.). Deleuze’s later position suggests something closer to the nature of regionality I explore throughout this book; expressed as a layered or entangled sense of time and space, of memory and event, history and story, affect and emotion, from which assembles a critical regional presence/present, always already inflected by the past, haunted by memories, myths, and everyday realities. This assembled, active life of regionality shares much, therefore, with Tim Ingold’s comment: It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps going, finding a way through the myriad things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening not of closure. (Ingold 2011: 4— emphases added)

Regionality’s lifelines, as we saw above, are far from straight or narrow, leading from A to B to C; they are rather nested, knotted and gnarled, woven and entangled; ‘they are movements . . . a wreath of entwined lines, a whirl of catching up and being caught’, ‘always weaving, always in process and— like social life itself—never finished to form . . . [they] interweave to form a boundless and ever-extending meshwork’ (Ingold 2015: 7, 11). Like Deleuze’s reimagining of region in 1985, Ingold’s assertion of the ‘life of lines’ unravels the problem stated above, of ‘simple location’ which for so long has attached itself to definitions of region. For if, as Whitehead writes, ‘there is no inherent reference to any other times, past or future, it immediately follows that nature within any period does not refer to nature at any other period’ (Whitehead 1975: 68), and, therefore, location becomes simplified, diminished, and limited. Whitehead’s cosmology provides a way of thinking and feeling about region that insists on its processual quality, constituted by layered, interlocking, interdependent elements or ‘actual entities’, ‘mutually patterned in each other’ (ibid.: 91). Thus Deleuze’s refreshed sense of region, when explored through this conversation with Whitehead, especially Process and Reality, is constituted by complex, interconnected ‘events’, wherein ‘[a]n event has a past . . . memories which are fused into its own content’, but also ‘has a future’: ‘An event has to do with all that there is, and in particular with all other events’, an ‘interfusion’ (ibid.: 92, 128). 3 In Adventures in Ideas, Whitehead wrote quite simply, ‘The focal region cannot be separated from the external stream. . . . It is a state of agitation’ (Whitehead 1967/1933: 157), which summarizes much of this book’s concerns with reimagining region as active presence or ‘agitation’

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rather than inert, enclosed space. To understand regionality as process, as layered ‘interfusion’ or ‘meshwork’, and so as un-simple location, will be the guiding principle of my developing argument. Another key source for this book has been the thinking of Donna Haraway, whose work on technoscience, gender, race, and power provides many exciting new approaches and challenges to established, traditional frames of classification. Her interest in ‘bodies, politics, and stories’ is a good fit for my textual exploration of regionality, permitting, in her hands, a critical interrogation of ‘categories, invisible to themselves, which are called “unmarked” and which are dependent upon unequal power for their maintenance’ (Haraway 1991: 1). For her, the unmarked ranges across many fields as a type of ‘distribution of the sensible’, and is most obviously characterized by patriarchal forms of address and supposed objectivity leading to a normative point of view which she sees as universalized, ‘unlocateable’, and ‘disembodied’ (ibid.: 191, 188). In other words, patriarchy speaks as if from ‘nowhere’ because it assumes a generalized, omniscient presence that defies location and speaks as if from a position at a distance and above (ibid.: 195). Using the metaphor of vision, Haraway sees this as a ‘deadly fantasy’ (ibid.: 188) that removes the body from the consideration of the world, disembodies experience, and reduces all the intimate, affective relations with the world to ‘the god-trick of seeing from nowhere’, which universalizes to ‘put the myth into ordinary practice’ (ibid.: 189). This closely resembles the way regionalism has been cast as a broad, encompassing impression, for example, like ‘the West’ seen from thirty-five thousand feet in an aerial photograph in D. J. Waldie’s example, or compressed into the simply located dream of a ‘Northline’ in Vlautin’s novel of the same name (see chapters 3 and 6). ‘The moral’, claims Haraway, ‘is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision’ (ibid.: 190), and so anything that appears to define absolutely and to generalize experience cannot remain unchallenged. Haraway moves towards what she calls ‘situated knowledge’, which rejects this narrow version of objectivity in favour of ‘the ability to partially translate knowledges among very different—and power-differentiated—communities’ by reclaiming vision from the god-trick and insisting on ‘the particularity and embodiment of all vision’, ‘to learn in our bodies’ and produce ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’ (ibid.:187, 189, 190, 191). Vitally, to adopt this partial, situated, located knowledge is to accept that it is ‘always potentially open to critical scrutiny from disparate perspectives’ (Haraway 1997: 138). For my purposes, Haraway restates the importance of the local in-relation-to the global, ‘in tension with the productive structurings that force unequal translations and exchanges—material and semiotic—within the webs of knowledge and power’ (ibid.: 194).

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Although Haraway employs the metaphor of vision in this essay, it is always embodied and tied more broadly to intense affective relations: ‘the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate[s] in the same field with global high tension emissions . . . [as] nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning’ (ibid.: 195). In this statement, one sees Haraway’s often-stated attachment to Whitehead’s speculative philosophy and his ideas of the nexus of entities each defining the other, each part of the intricate meshwork of relationality as a process that defies ‘simple location’ (see Haraway 1997: 146–47; Ingold 2011: 13–14). Any notion of ‘universality’ is replaced by ‘partiality’ and her favoured spatial language of ‘location, positioning, and situating’ within which is emplaced the body, ‘always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body’, against ‘the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity’ (Haraway 1997: 195). Under these terms, region might be transformed, too, no longer as ‘simple location’ but as embodied and complex, awkward and partial, viewed not through the perfect lens of authority and objectivity (universalism) but through ‘interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood’ (ibid.: 195), or what I will term the ‘fugitive’ in this book. To bring Haraway’s work closer to the examples in Affective Critical Regionality, she likes to think of her approach as rather like a ‘Coyote or Trickster’ in Native American stories, coming from a particular region (or situation) but never contained by it, always likely to ‘hoodwink’ us and yet someone with ‘whom we must learn to converse’ (ibid.: 199, 201). The coyote, as Gerald Vizenor reminds us, is part of the ‘active presence’ or ‘transmotion’ of native storytellers, who challenge and undo the erasure by regimes of powerful colonial representation (Vizenor 1998: 15). 4 Vizenor writes of ‘fugitive poses’ as forms of resistance: ‘That which is fugitive proposes an insurgent force of dissident visibility; it is the hidden that reveals itself in motion. The fugitive aesthetic is thus an overflowing of borders and bordered-thinking, a liminal praxis whose generative effects activate art in a transversal represencing of indigeneity throughout Indigenous lands, languages and territories’ (Martineau and Ritskes 2014: v). The fugitive aesthetic is ‘the creative negation of reductive colonial demarcations of being and sensing’ (ibid.) that shares common ground with Haraway’s gendered argument and this book’s concern for regionality that is non-reductive, situated, and expansive. It is precisely fugitive in its ‘overflowing of borders and bordered-thinking’ and through ‘lines, images, words, movements, performances and sounds . . . break[s] from and through colonial [or regional?] enclosures to (re)discover, in their movement, turning and transformation, open spaces of imagination and creativity’ (ibid.: x). The outcome of Haraway’s situated knowledge not only helps us to reimagine the regional as something relevant to past formational attitudes but can

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also instigate new relations, modes of being, and political positions. At key moments in her essay, Haraway draws out significant conclusions that relate forward to many of the writers I focus on later in this book. For example, as we shall discuss, Kathleen Stewart (influenced by Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’) creates writings that ‘displace and flatten hierarchies between the big (important) and small (off-register, invisible) or between notions of an official system in a distance and the lived affects of everyday life’ (Stewart 2014a: 551), forming assemblages of living compositions and rhythms that together constitute the ‘energetics’ of life in all its forms. Likewise, when Haraway comments that the purpose of local knowledge and embodied particularity is the awareness and attunement to ‘the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from one another’s point of view’ (Haraway 1991: 190), she pre-empts the forms of empathy developed in the work of Rebecca Solnit (see chapter 5). She also sees in the partial and the situated a sense of self which is relational precisely because of its complexity and its inability to be ‘squashed into isomorphic slots’ (Haraway 1991: 193). She writes, employing cartographic language surfacing throughout this book, ‘The topography of subjectivity is multidimensional’ (ibid.: 193). Finally, Haraway sees that this intimate relationality between body, objects, affects, and the world by its very nature exposes all to each other, makes us responsible for each entity within the web of connections discussed earlier. Using language employed more fully by Judith Butler, Haraway writes conclusively, ‘So location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure, finality, or, “simplification in the last instance” . . . feminist embodiment resists fixation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning . . . our maps require too many dimensions’ (ibid.: 196). All of which, with its clear parallels to Whitehead and Ingold above, moves us towards the affective critical regionality explored across the pages that follow, reclaiming the potential of the local and its ‘gentle politics’ (Crouch 2010) of empathy, vulnerability, exchange, responsibility, and relationality that refuses the uncontested and absolute vision for one of ‘stuttering and swerving’ (Haraway 1997: 142), because ‘the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular’ (Haraway 1991: 196). Through these ‘intimate relationalities’ we return to the potential to include affect in our reimaginings of region: In a way, affect is an everyday term, as a verb: cold may make us uncomfortable, for example. More widely, thinking in this relatively recent interest in theorising affect, is in the noun, affect, a phenomenon or sensation that can effect how we feel, how the world feels to us, our wellbeing and so on. The affective can occur in things, in other-than human life, within ourselves and between us. We can affect other things, moments of our experience: being and becoming. Crucially, to affect can occur unintentionally, emergent from the energies between and amongst things. Hence repetition and ritual, or perfor-

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Introduction mance, can bring affects that, in the way of performativity, can effect how we engage or respond to life. (Crouch in Berberich, Campbell, and Hudson 2015: 240)

As Deleuze and Guattari explain, ‘Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164—emphasis added). In going beyond the individual, as Crouch explains above, this sense of the affective radiates, connects, encounters, lives, and relates, as forms of being and becoming: ‘not colored but, as Cézanne said, coloring’, since ‘[l]ife alone creates such zones where living beings whirl around’ (ibid.: 167, 173). ‘We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes’ (ibid.). As I shall explore throughout this book, in rethinking region as regionality with its ‘lines’ stretching out to the world, ‘we becomes universes’, engaging in what Stewart terms ‘regional worlding’ (in Vannini 2015: 23). 3: THE COMPONENTS OF PASSAGE: AFFECT AND REGIONALITY Many sections of this book demonstrate how and why the local and the particular matter. As I discussed earlier, regional as a concept comes with baggage; a particular history of thought and practice that often delimits its potential as a progressive term and presents it as territorialized, conservative, and inward-looking. For example, Lucy Lippard comments, ‘Today the term regionalism . . . continues to be used pejoratively, to mean corny backwater art flowing from tributaries that might eventually reach the mainstream but is currently stagnating out there in the boondocks’ (Lippard 1997: 36). The local/regional is stereotyped and fixed here as without merit because of its inwardness and self-referentiality. Regionalism seems to solidify this history into a fixed and knowable set of beliefs, an ‘ism’ to put alongside all the other ‘isms’ that we know as completed and defined concepts, ways of seeing and being, thinking and operating that reassure us and provide a clear horizon, a stable boundary, and a concreteness we then utilize. As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari would term regionalism in this context an ‘order-word’ because it functions to ‘mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 110). An ‘ism’ converts verbs to nouns, coming from either Ancient Greek -ισμός (-ismos), a suffix that forms nouns of action or process, state, condition, doctrine, or from the related suffix -ισμα (-isma), which more specifically expressed a finished act or thing done. An ‘ism’, therefore, congeals complex and multiple ideas into religious or philosophical systems or schools of thought, creating doctrines, principles, and orders. ‘Isms’ are associated with expressing belief in the superiority of

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some thought over others, such as sexism, racism, Marxism, Freudianism, neoliberalism. Thus, what regionalism so often achieves is a containment of doctrines, principles, orders about regions, a misplaced concreteness that this book will set in motion through a questioning of this solidity and fixity of meaning and the reintroduction of the term’s dynamism and mobility so it becomes something continuing and active, incomplete and intensely related to the world around it—regionality. Words ending in ‘-ity’ refer to a condition, a distinctive mode of existence and state of being and (potential) becoming. They designate a state of affairs but say neither how that state came about nor how far it reaches. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of ‘orderwords’ makes the contrast I am working towards: ‘There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 110) existing in contrast to the halting nature of order-language. They state that it is ‘necessary to extract one from the other—to transform the compositions of order into components of passage’ (ibid.). In my terms, therefore, and as I will discuss at greater length in chapter 1, this shifts us from notions of regionalism to regionality—from ‘compositions of order’ (that implies bringing together into a final state) to ‘components of passage’ (that signals a still-forming potential, a reassembling process from different elements). 5 This asserts a Whitehead-like process over the ‘settled’ and fixed; a dynamic described by Stewart in her essay ‘Regionality’ (see chapter 4) as ‘an event that jumps between landscape and bodies of all kinds. It is ambient, and therefore atmospheric’ (Stewart 2013c: 275). Regionality ‘pulls’ ‘hard matter into alignment . . . things into the consistency of a laugh . . . yourself into alignment with something tentative, ephemeral, incidental though powerfully felt . . . strands of influence into a plane of expressivity’ (ibid.: 275–76, 278). In so doing, regionality, contrary to its negative association with the over-localized and small-scale, has the capacity to reassemble things ‘across a geography of elements that swell’, to ‘produce worlds out of thin air’, and, perhaps crucially, to ‘reinvent the self-in-place by testing its limits’ by ‘setting out alone, without a map . . . into a world that remains palpably unpredictable and seductive beyond the carefully cordoned zones of familiarity’ (ibid.: 276). Region in Stewart’s swirling, descriptive passages comes alive again as ‘regionality’, forming and deforming ‘compositions’ into ‘the tactile compositionality of things’ (ibid.: 277); present in voices, actions, places, and histories, ‘it permeates the contours of the landscape, the rocks the glaciers left, the climate, the layers of determination laid down by histories, the leftovers of everything that has happened’ (ibid.: 278). But critically in Stewart’s poetic assemblage, regionality is awash with affect: ‘[I]mpassive corporeality . . . redemption, a glacier of impatience . . . anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage. It has drama, intensity, an energetics of tension and release’ (ibid.: 278). Following Deleuze and Guattari, these

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Introduction

are not contained affects that turn back on themselves, for they ‘pass from body to body—human bodies, animal bodies, machine bodies, bodies of thought, ecosystems, visceralities, and noumena spread out across a vast atmospheric field’ (ibid.). This tactile compositionality (another ‘-ity’ word) refuses to remain constant or fixed, for in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari or Whitehead, they ‘spread out across a vast atmospheric field’, endlessly and extensively connecting, being ‘constituted in moves and encounters that continually reset the self-world relationship’ (Stewart 2013c: 278). To know the place you are in, its people, its attunements and atmospheres, as Stewart shows, can be the origin for ‘concentric rings stretching out from encounters, tastes, bodies, neighborhoods, a valley, a state, a geographical region’ (ibid.: 280), as each ring connects beyond itself to the worlds it creates and helps to form and deform. These are not separate processes of the localized and the globalized, for the attention paid to the proximate and the immediate sensescapes enables a gathering-up in which regionality becomes ‘an edgy composite’, best defined as a ‘peculiar ongoing generativity’ (Stewart 2013c: 281). Stewart refers often indirectly to the work of Bruno Latour, whose ideas will be a touchstone for this book also, especially his Reassembling the Social (2005), and it is his sense of the necessary critique of the default position of the ‘context’ and the ‘Big Picture’ as a means to explain and ‘frame’ the world that is useful to Affective Critical Regionality. His work also echoes back to the discussion above of Haraway’s concern for the disembodied ‘god-trick of seeing from nowhere’. Latour considers the dangers of the ‘panorama’ as an image that appears to show everything but is, in reality, ‘fully closed to the outside’, a way to ‘stage totality’ by ‘nesting “micro”, “meso”, and “macro” into one another’ so as to ‘design a picture which has no gap in it’ and ‘gives the impression of complete control over what is being surveyed’ (Latour 2005: 187, 188). What he proposes instead is the ‘oligopticon’, the opposite of the controlling presence of the all-seeing panopticon, which functions by seeing ‘too little to feed the megalomania of the inspector or the paranoia of the inspected’, but ‘what they see, they see it well . . . in tiny amounts . . . narrow views of the (connected) whole’ (ibid.: 181). Such oligoptica, therefore, are ‘constantly revealing the fragility of their connections and their lack of control’ (ibid.: 188), thereby confusing the presumed default position of the Big Picture and the all-seeing global context that appears to explain everything and place us all within its frame. 6 Latour claims that it is precisely ‘this excess of coherence that gives the illusion away’ (ibid.). Panoramas ‘collect, they frame, they rank, they order, they organize’, but for all their totalizing goals, we certainly cannot dismiss them but should rather see them as ‘added, like everything else, to the multiplicity of sites we want to deploy’ (ibid.: 189). Panoramas cannot be all there is, for they become too closed off, like the grand explanatory narratives they produce, becoming ‘misleading if taken as

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a description of what is the common world’ (ibid.). 7 Like Haraway’s ‘godtrick’, Latour’s point is that to prevent the panoramic becoming dominant and thereby presenting a closed and delimited view of the world, one has to be vigilant and critical, ‘keep asking the same mean and silly questions’, as he puts it (ibid.: 190), to reconnect the distant with the proximal and to show that ‘globalization circulates along minuscule rails resulting in some glorified form of provincialism’ (ibid.: 190). 8 In the terms of this book, the danger of ‘some glorified form of provincialism’ is overcome by critical questioning of local/global relations, creating what Stephen Muecke terms ‘critical proximity, as opposed to critical distance’ (Muecke 2016), or what I see as the varied processes of affective critical regionality. Douglas Reichert Powell’s Critical Regionalism (2007) sets out many of the limitations of this ‘invariant’ view of region as ‘cultural deficit’, promoting instead a method of ‘layering . . . of texts, experiences, and interpretations of specific locales that produces, in its ongoing processes, place’ (35). However, he is bound too much to discourse and the idea that place is ‘not so much sensory, as it is textual’, and although he argues that ‘to know a place’ one must ‘participate through consumption, through witness, through appreciation, in the ongoing creation of that place’ (ibid.: 34), he underplays the importance of the affective in this process. He writes tellingly of reading ‘regional landscapes as textual forms’ and that ‘acts of writing affect the meanings of places’ (ibid.: 35), to which I would want to add affect affects the meanings of place, too, for it alters our angles of sensibility, shifting away from representing place as something already there, like a static, bounded text, and towards experiencing its variability and uncertainty as something in process and, therefore, alive. Region in these terms is always more-than-representational precisely because it engages with the intensities of affect. Brian Massumi, following Deleuze and Guattari, stresses the connectedness and intensity of affect as a means of ‘direct’ contact, requiring no ‘mediation’ (and in this sense, too, exists without representation as its mode of experience): ‘Affect is simply a body movement looked at from the point of view of its potential—its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do’ (Massumi 2015: 7). Remember, Deleuze and Guattari argued affects ‘go beyond the strength of those who undergo them’, operating ‘in their singularity, liberated from organising systems of representation’ so that when they are expressed through forms of art as ‘sensible force’, they have the capacity to surprise and shock by dislodging (or deterritorializing) ‘affects from their recognised and expected origins’ and disrupting the given and established links between words and experience (Colebrook 2002: 22, 24, 23). Thus, the word ‘region’ carries with it, as we have seen, a certain presupposed experience and meaning ‘already there’ and ‘given’ from the very beginning. Using the example of Marcel Proust’s fiction and its expression of region, Deleuze and Guattari state that affect has the capacity to show things differently and

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Introduction

‘no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them’: ‘Combray like it never was, is, or will be lived; Combray as cathedral or monument’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 168). Affective Critical Regionality offers a similar challenge to experiences and assumptions of the American West as region. It is difficult, however, to define affect absolutely because it operates in relation to and as a constituent energy of regionality as a creative and productive supplement or ‘sensible force’ that enables us to move beyond the fixed boundaries of regionalism, with its own ‘recognised and expected origins’ into new critical and creative terrains. Massumi speculates about the latency of affect as a ‘threshold of potential’ and a ‘way of talking about that margin of manoeuvrability, the “where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do” in every present situation’ (Massumi 2015: 3). Affect ‘explains why focusing on the next experimental step rather than the big utopian picture isn’t really settling for less. It’s not exactly going for more, either. It’s more like being right where you are—more intensely’ (ibid.— emphasis added). Massumi’s notion of ‘being right where you are’ coheres productively with a renewed sense of the local, regional, and situated by adding this powerful sense of intensity and depth to the experience of beingin-the-regional-world. But that ‘being’ can begin from where you are and then move, connect, relate to things beyond that point of departure: When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity. (ibid.: 4)

As Massumi explains, ‘[Y]ou have to remember that the way we live it is always entirely embodied, and that is never entirely personal—it’s never all contained in our emotions and conscious thoughts . . . it’s not just about us, in isolation. In affect, we are never alone . . . affects . . . are basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life—a heightened sense of belonging, with other people and to other places’ (ibid.: 6—emphasis added). In these words, Massumi guides us through affect to a greater understanding of what affective critical regionality might mean and might become as a way of opening-out from the closed sense of region too often prominent in cultural studies. No matter how local, small, or ordinary, our attention to and relationship with these intensities of being serve to connect us to wider processes of community and ‘the social’ while aligning us to (but never fully

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to) globality. 9 ‘Looked at from a different angle’, affect is always ‘an excess . . . like a reserve of potential or newness or creativity that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning in language or in any performance of a useful function—vaguely but directly experienced, as something more, a more to come, a life overspilling as it gathers itself up to move on’ (ibid.: 6). For these reasons, Massumi concludes, ‘I guess “affect” is the word I use for “hope”’ (ibid.: 3) because it offers up possibility in the face of apparent stasis, reminds us of what we are not but might be, reacquaints us with the forces of which we are a part, interconnects us beyond the self—to others, their lives, and the worlds that together we create. This is akin to what Crouch referred to earlier as ‘quiet or gentle politics’ (Crouch, 2010: 125) through which individuals negotiate or ‘flirt’ with space and with others-inspace, rather than simply repeat the ‘already-established’ politics of the neoliberal present. For ‘gentle politics’ emerges in and through people’s actual/ virtual connectedness to place; to their various feelings of belonging and becoming in space, and in their relations to its complexities and frustrations. In Lauren Berlant’s parallel thinking on this matter, she refers to a form of ‘lateral politics’ ‘that involves sentience, focus, and a comic sense of the pleasure of coming together once again’ (Berlant 2011: 260). She locates politics ‘in a commitment to the present activity of the senses’ wherein ‘citizenship’ is seen not as a one-dimensional adherence to established social systems, like Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’, but instead as a ‘dense sensual activity of performative belonging to the now in which potentiality is affirmed’ (ibid.: 261). For me, this returns us to the importance of the small-scale, the minor, and affect in this repositioning of regionality. These are the fragments of region that matter. Kenneth Frampton, who developed the use of the term critical regionalism and whose work is discussed in chapter 1, wrote that critical regionalism ‘momentarily checked’ the ‘ceaseless inundation of a place-less, alienating consumerism’ by asserting its differences and by implication achieved this through its interest in local details, tactility, and unheard stories. The phrase Frampton uses to describe this intervention is ‘the bounded fragment’ of critical regionalism (Frampton 1983: 162), which suggests something bounded by its sense of place and identity and yet, simultaneously, a ‘fragment’ because it is a component of a larger process, capable of adding to, joining, and becoming as well as unsettling in relation to existing, assumed forms. The ‘bounded fragment’ is awkward and irreducible because it might remain or break out, being connected to other elements, things, and affects and yet still capable of forging new connections and relations. It is a helpful metaphor for regionality as I will seek to define and use the term throughout this book. Another way to arrive at this point is to examine Rancière’s reasons why, for him, Virginia Woolf matters more

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Introduction

than Émile Zola, which he attributes to ‘her way of working on the contraction or distension of temporalities, on their contemporaneousness or their distance, or her way of situating events at a much more minute level, all of this establishes a grid that makes it possible to think through the forms of political dissensuality more effectively than the “social epic’s” various forms’ (Rancière 2009: 65). Like Latour’s ‘panorama’, the ‘social epic’ of Zola ‘binds’ the world into a whole and, as a result, provides no ‘fragment’ to cut into or challenge or, indeed, to make new connections by joining other fragments in new compostionalities. This potential for ‘critical proximity’ is better found, argues Rancière, in Woolf’s layering of time and place, of the ‘minute’ and the ‘dissensual’ forging new relations and challenging possibilities beyond simple location. 4: CONCLUSION: ‘THE CHARGE OF AFFECT’ Perhaps this introduction has, above all, found ways to understand what Rebecca Solnit meant in Hope in the Dark, that ‘the embrace of local power doesn’t have to mean parochialism, withdrawal, or intolerance, only a coherent foundation from which to navigate the larger world’ (Solnit 2004: 113). What the rest of this book tries to do is ‘navigate’ some of the routes, however meandering, by which we might trace the relations of regionality from the local to the world and back again. To do this, the book will focus on different types of writing: fiction, memoir, essays, poetry, fictocriticism and the interlinked, overlapping spaces and lines between them all. Like many of the theoretical spurs to this book, I would, like Muecke, think of it all as ‘experimental writing’ that ‘necessarily participates in worlds rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation’ (Muecke 2012: 42; see also Muecke 2016). The writing here is full of ‘multimodal or multirealist networks that intersect in a writing or reading event in order to ask how the literary text is keeping itself alive in its place(s), how it is reproducing itself and its culture’ (ibid.: 51). This writing is ‘minor literature’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari, refusing to sit comfortably within the ‘already given’ tradition and instead ‘produces what is not already recognisable’ (Colebrook 2002: 104, 103). It is the ‘foreign language’ operating within the dominant language because it asks questions of genres and how forms solidify and reinforce certain approved or presupposed values. Unanimity or a standard notion of ‘the people’ conveyed through its literature ‘speaks as though it were representing, rather than forming, its identity’ because it looks back to some fixed ideal or mythic condition against which all else is measured (ibid.: 117). ‘Writing becomes prescriptive and majoritarian’ (ibid.), maintaining the normative and established, rather than promoting any sense of the formative, projective, or pro-

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ductive flow of things. Minor literature is, therefore, about production and reproduction of ‘the people to come’, that is, a becoming, not a representation of what already exists, of what is an ‘unchanging whole’ (ibid.: 119). Therefore, the writing I discuss in this book is alive to difference and to the compositions of community and place, or what Michael Taussig calls ‘placeness’ (Taussig 2004: 205); alive within-region while creating worlds as it interacts with multiple other forces, or what I termed earlier, ‘regions of something else’, which includes its readers and their various extensive worlds. The writing I examine ‘demands movements across fields of human conduct often kept apart; a ranging, sometimes trespassing, form of enquiry’ (Matless 2014: 216); it gathers, forms alliances, reproduces because it resonates, projects, fuses, haunts, inspires, angers through all manner of ‘affective relations’ that assures us that literature is inevitably ‘something that is always in the process of being made and thus can fail to be made’ (Muecke 2012: 48, 52). These individual works by individual writers in different styles and genres are each a ‘complex ecology’ (ibid.: 53) always forming new relations but never without productive (or reproductive) functions. So when I discuss Waldie’s memoir, it becomes something else, ‘keeping itself alive in its place(s)’ while expanding outward in its relations with other genres, other places, other affects, and other purposes, always reaching beyond itself as simple ‘memoir’. Similarly, a novel such as Willy Vlautin’s Northline unfolds as a composition of ‘more-than’ fiction, demonstrated in part by its status as a novel-with-soundtrack through which a juxtapositional field opens up the reader/listener. A collage of affective relations and desires: melancholic horror, yearning, hope, despair, cruel optimism, and historical moorings. The novel’s ‘registers of reality’ (Muecke 2012: 42) cannot be contained by its generic label, for, as Muecke puts it perfectly, ‘Interruptions from outside the given discipline or field . . . are the taps on the shoulder that force the writing to write with new partners’ (ibid.: 56). Thus Olson, Waldie, Vlautin, Solnit, Stewart, and Yamashita are interrupted, tapped on the shoulder, so that their writing becomes ‘lively’ and ‘mischievous’ (ibid.: 56), bending the reader’s mind away from the acts of representation that merely sustain an established view of the world and its ‘familiar conceptual architecture’ through ‘literary events . . . performed in the writing and the reading’ (ibid.: 56). Through this process of engagement with mischievous, flirtatious texts operating across apparently different genres, or what Matless above terms ‘trespassing’, I hope this book will suggest that ‘if they have a life, it is not a life that they have on their own’ (ibid.). In other words, these writings live in unsteady, precarious relations with each other and within these connections form a processive nexus that approximates an abiding and productive sense of regionality. Once again, I am heartened by Matless’s comment that ‘confinement to one region makes study rove’ (Matless 2014: 216). From a deep consideration of the American West as ‘region’, this book

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Introduction

‘roves’, revealing ‘the charge of juxtapositions, the drawing out of contrast, the understanding of each in its setting of others . . . enact[ing] trajectories of past, present and future’ (ibid.). As an introduction to the process this book will explore, I take Ingold’s rumination on place as a helpful set of guidelines: My contention is that lives are led not inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere. . . . Places, then, are like knots, and the threads from which they are tied are lines of wayfaring. A house, for example, is a place where the lines of its residents are tightly knotted together. But these lines are no more contained within the house than the threads contained within a knot. Rather they trail beyond it, only to become caught up with other lines in other places, as threads in other knots. Together they make up what I have called the meshwork. (Ingold 2011: 148)

Regionality is composed of lines that form, deform, and reform, that ‘trail beyond’ some seemingly settled knot of meaning only to contribute to something new and different that is connected and disconnected but never fully contained or fixed (see Ingold 2011: 12–13). Regionality, as I stated earlier, is an ‘agitation’ or an incitement and the texts that I examine here contribute to this active process of becoming. As Lyotard wrote, What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of affect it contains and transmits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential energy into other things—other texts, but also paintings, photographs, film sequences, political actions, decisions, erotic inspirations, acts of insubordination, economic initiatives, etc. (Lyotard 1984: 9–10)

Or put more simply, in David Matless’s words, ‘To account for a region, move across its varieties’ (Matless 2015: 8). NOTES 1. John M. Anderson in his Introduction to Discourse on Thinking (1966) argues that Heidegger prefers to use ‘region’, not ‘Being’, in these essays because he wants to assert ‘openness and activity of Being’ and ‘region is open . . . inherently dynamic’ (27). In other words, ‘Being’ is ‘that-which-regions’ for this entails an opening up to the world, the ‘horizon’, to ‘releasement’. 2. Deleuze discusses the influence of Whitehead on his thinking in The Fold. 3. I use the idea of ‘conversation’ or dialogue with Whitehead to invoke the work of Isabelle Stengers (in Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts [Boston: Harvard University Press, 2012]) and Judith Butler (in Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Deena M. Lin [eds.], Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012]), who have written of this productive working with Whitehead’s ideas rather than a slavish reproduction of them. This book poaches from Whitehead, too, lacing his ideas into other frames of reference and citation around my reconsideration of regionality.

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4. The ‘fugitive’ aesthetic has been expressed as, ‘The freedom realized through flight and refusal is the freedom to imagine and create an elsewhere in the here; a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism. It is a performance of other worlds, an embodied practice of flight. The fugitive aesthetic is not an abdication of contention and struggle; it is a reorientation toward freedom in movement, against the limits of colonial knowing and sensing. It seeks to limn the margins of land, culture and consciousness for potential exits, for creative spaces of departure and renewal’ and ‘in lines, images, words, movements, performances and sounds that break from and through colonial [or regional?] enclosures to (re)discover, in their movement, turning and transformation, open spaces of imagination and creativity’. J. Martineau and E. Ritskes, ‘Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3(1), 2014, i–xii, iv, x. 5. Bruno Latour proposes a Compositionist Manifesto which values the idea of ‘composition’ as underlining that ‘things have to be put together . . . while retaining their heterogeneity’. ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”, New Literary History 41, 2010, 471–90, 473–74. 6. See Judith Butler on framing in Frames of War (2010), as well as Neil Campbell, The Rhizomatic West (2008). 7. See the relationship to D. J. Waldie’s brilliant analysis of aerial photography in Holy Land (chapter 3). 8. Bruno Latour reviewed Haraway’s book Simian, Cyborgs, and Women in American Anthropology (1991: 94) and wrote an unpublished dialogue in honour of her ‘Critical Distance or Critical Proximity’ available at http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-113HARAWAY.pdf. 9. Globality can be local—‘globality as a local condition’. ‘Combining contradictory terms, regional globality seems to be an oxymoron because globality refers to the whole geobody, but a region is only part of it, therefore less than the whole. Hence, a region cannot be global. However, regional globality defies this assumption and suggests that a region can be global. And so it is indeed. Lean globality studies do not require globality to be fully global; they qualify regional globality as a valid and feasible research topic’. See Lean Globality Studies, Wolf Schäfer Globality Studies, no. 7, 28 May 2007, http://globality.cc.stonybrook. edu/?p=81.

Chapter One

From Regionalism to Regionality

The introduction started to explain the move towards regionality as an active, agitating presence, a becoming that deviates from the standard model of regionalism and is, therefore, not an ‘order-word’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari that ‘marks stoppages or organized, stratified compositions’ but rather a ‘pass-word’ ‘to transform the compositions of order into the components of passage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 110). Passwords get us into places and through barriers, they open up unsuspected worlds to our attention and to wider relations, and this is how I would like regionality to function in this book as a whole, acting as a word of passage, a bridge to different ways of being, seeing, and becoming in our relations to the world. Chapter 1 will, however, deliberately go back further in an effort to understand in more detail the lines of my own thought away from regionalism towards critical regionalism and from there onward to the themes that interest me in this book. 1: ON CRITICAL REGIONALISM Lawrence W. Speck wrote in 1987 that regionalism ‘mines everyday life and perception for messages about a truly progressive future’ through its attention to ‘the particulars of place and culture . . . from experience. It tinkers, crafts, accepts, rejects, adjusts, and reacts’ (in Canizaro 2007: 71). Through this he compares regionalism to jazz: being of a place, New Orleans, and yet borrowing from other traditions, nations, expressions and continuing to influence and inflect other new forms and styles beyond its regional roots. As Eleftherios Pavlides has put it, in a progressive view of regionalism ‘the past informs the future’ (ibid.: 166) through ‘a modern phenomenon that criticized modernity by asserting difference . . . and proposing alternatives that 25

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reversed modern contempt for the old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities’ (Fox in Canizaro 2007: 212). Thus, in architecture these more progressive and theoretical concepts became associated with critical regionalism, which Stephen Fox argues was, among other things, a ‘negotiation’ between styles and traditions rather than a direct absorption into approved metropolitan forms, which meant that regionalism became an ‘uncovering and recovering of otherness as a critical practice’ (ibid.). But as Fox’s point about the ‘old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities’ suggests, these ideas were never simply contained by architectural theory or practice but always had strong alliances to wider political purposes. It is an early example of what, following the use of the term ‘minor’ by Deleuze and Guattari (as in the introduction) and developed by Jill Stoner, we might begin to think of as ‘minor architecture’ (see Stoner 2012) precisely because it remembers the old, the marginal, subcultural, and the local and draws dynamically on these perspectives to challenge ‘majoritarian’, universalist positions. Anthony Alofsin, writing as early as 1980, may have been one of the first architectural critics to move towards an actual definition of critical regionalism when he wrote of ‘Constructive Regionalism’ as ‘an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them’ (in Canizaro 2007: 370). Alofsin helped explain Lewis Mumford’s support for Bay Region Architecture, which, according to Mumford, ‘both belongs to the region and transcends the region’ (ibid.: 372) and, argues Alofsin, provided ‘criteria for criticism’ in relation to the principles of regionalism it embodied rather than a slavish following: ‘it would embrace traditions and transform tradition; it would be wed to its setting . . . it would foster craft and push the limits of technology; it would speak to the individual search for the universal’ (ibid.). 1 Alofsin began to formulate an architecture of ‘paradox’ and of ‘contradictions’ which would ‘embrace native detail and color and at the same time discourage cultural hedonism’ (ibid.). Wrestling with its paradoxes, Alofsin saw ‘human use’, ‘local life’, and the ‘bonding of people’ as intrinsic to this constructive but critical regionalism, while refuting the ‘imposition of style or visual hegemony’ and ‘cultural hedonism’ (ibid.: 373, 372). Alofsin formed these ideas while working alongside Lianne Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in the early 1980s, finding a focus in the specific idea of critical regionalism, which was given a name by the latter’s 1981 GreekEnglish essay ‘The Grid and the Pathway’. For them, regionalism ‘bears the mark of ambiguity’, a kind of doublenesss, because it has been used both to ‘foster a new sense of identity’ and also ‘proved a powerful tool of repression and chauvinism’ by enclosing and restricting styles or ‘abstract universal forms’ ‘based on the book rather than experience’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 1981: 64, 74). The tendency to hark back through earlier regionalist architectural design to ‘a sentimental utopianism’ is broken in their analysis through

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alternative forms of ‘critical regionalism’ protesting ‘against the destruction of community, the splitting of human associations, the dissolution of human contact’ so often epitomized by international modernist forms with their ‘custodial effects’ (ibid.: 76, 72). Thus, in their essay the ‘pathway’ moves, connects, and humanizes spatial practices to form ‘an architecture that grows out of movement and meeting’, imitating the local, popular architecture of lived experience with intense ‘human associations’, such as ‘doorsteps, passages, courts’, with ‘a history . . . and a social life’ rather than established and ‘highly normative architecture’ (ibid.: 76, 78, 74). For them, critical regionalism interrupts the ‘monumentality recalling another distant and forlorn elite’ through ‘an investigation of the local’, weaving a ‘braid of niches’ into an intimate ‘bridge over which any humanistic architecture of the future must pass’ (ibid.: 74, 76, 78). Embedded in their language are the earliest ruminations on critical regionalism as bound up with affective relations with place and space: ‘movement and meeting’, ‘experience’, ‘lived-in spaces’, and through their example of Dimitris Pikionis, a belief in the ‘rehumanisation of architecture’ to create ‘a place made for an occasion’ rather than just ‘abstract space’ (ibid.: 76). These traces of affect will be central to the development of critical regionalism as an architectural approach and ultimately as a developing theory or ‘critical framework’ (ibid.: 78) interested in rethinking regionalism in its relation to the world. It was this work that provoked Kenneth Frampton to write two essays published in 1983 which both extended and developed their ideas in a more systematic and theorized manner: ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’ and ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’. Both took up the challenge of critiquing the overly abstract, universal form and its consequent dissolution of human contact. However, Kevin Lynch, writing in Managing the Sense of Region (1976), had argued for the ‘sensory quality of regions’, which he believed had been largely ‘overlooked or denied’ in favour of ‘imposing a monumental form on a multitude of unwilling users’ (Lynch 1976: 4–5). In the broadest sense, Lynch recognized how ‘the sense of region affects the lives of people’ and wanted to rethink region through ‘patterns of . . . sensations [that] make up the quality of places’ (ibid.: 6, 8). For Lynch, an appreciation of the sensory meant ‘local attachment’, ‘liveliness’, a belonging to a ‘web of living things’ (ibid.: 25, 35, 34) managed practically through ‘regional agency’. He pre-empted Frampton’s work, recognizing that ‘[n]o place remained unchanged’ and that ‘from small actions, set in local circumstances, one gathers the backing to move to wider action’ (ibid.: 72, 71). Thus, in Frampton’s ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’ critical regionalism is defined as ‘a dialectical expression . . . [which] self-consciously seeks to deconstruct universal modernism in terms of values and images which are locally cultivated, while at the same time adulterating these

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autochthonous elements with paradigms drawn from alien sources’ (Frampton 1983: 149). It is a doubly disruptive force, drawing on both the local and ‘alien sources’ to disrupt the homogenous space of the universal. He is interested in ‘cultural fissures’ and ‘borderline manifestations’ as a means to challenge and question the largely unquestioned ‘hegemonic center’ (ibid.). Critical regionalism is, therefore, an expression of ‘anti-centrism’ explored through ‘sensual and earthbound’ architecture (ibid.: 149, 153), of, for example, Mexican Luis Barragán, and, according to Frampton, expressed most powerfully by Californian Hamilton Harwell Harris in his address ‘Regionalism and Nationalism’ (1954): Opposed to the Regionalism of Restriction is another type of regionalism; the Regionalism of Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. We call such a manifestation ‘regional’ only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere. . . . Its virtue is that its manifestation has significance for the world outside itself. . . . A region may develop ideas. A region may accept ideas. Imaginations and intelligence are necessary for both. (Frampton 1983: 153—italics in the original)

The distinctions here are significant and mirror those discussed in the introduction, for they emphasize the restrictive associations of regionalism as a kind of philosophical enclave protective of its styles and values in opposition to the world outside. However, Harwell Harris imagines a liberative form, emphasising the ‘critical’ in critical regionalism stemming precisely from its dialogical engagement with the outside and which, in turn, has ‘significance for the world outside itself’ because ‘a region may develop ideas’ as well as ‘accept’ them within this process. Thus, the ‘universalist’ hegemonic centre is put under pressure by the presence of the detailed local, by site tactility, and by the fissures and borderlines that such attentiveness produces. Frampton’s admiration for the Japanese architect Tadao Ando is based on his ‘trans-optical architecture’, which moves beyond sight to appreciate ‘tactile value’ and sensual, affective relations to space: Light changes expressions with time. I believe that the architectural materials do not end with wood and concrete that have tangible forms but go beyond to include light and wind which appeal to our senses . . . the detail is an element which achieves the physical composition of architecture, but at the same time, it is a generator of an image of architecture. (Ando quoted in ibid.: 159)

At this point, Frampton uses the strange but provocative phrase discussed in the introduction, ‘the bounded fragment’, to suggest how these local, tactile, fissured details, create critical regionalism as a dynamic space that is fragmentary, recombinant, and capable of generativity while also being linked or ‘bounded’ to the specific and grounded.

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Frampton’s better known essay ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’ (in Foster 1990) focuses upon the tension between ‘universalization’ (closely allied to what we might now term ‘globalization’) and the ‘local/regional’, beginning his essay with a long quotation from Paul Ricoeur’s essay ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’ (1965), which explains how an increasingly standardized world of integration, convergence, and consumption creates ‘universalization’, with its many advantages for economic improvement, closer national links, and interdependence. However, as Ricoeur points out, it also marks a ‘subtle destruction’ of traditional cultures and the reign of the ‘mediocre’: ‘the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda’ (Ricoeur 1965: 276). Ricoeur unravels a ‘paradox’ by which nations want to ‘root’ themselves in ‘the soil of its past’ against colonialist influence, and simultaneously embrace a ‘scientific, technical, and political rationality’ which seems to require the abandonment of ‘a whole cultural past’ (ibid.: 277). This paradox is summed up by the dilemma of ‘how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization’ (ibid.). For Frampton, this is the situation of regional architecture, too, torn between the ‘universalised’ rational, international styles of modernism and its interest in the local, rooted, and traditional. Frampton, following Ricoeur, asserts architecture ‘has to remove itself from both the optimisation of advanced technology and the ever-present tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism or the glibly decorative’ and in this way forge ‘a resistant, identity-giving culture while at the same time having discreet recourse to universal technique’ (Frampton in Foster 1990: 20). His project for critical regionalism rejects sentimental, nostalgic versions of regionalism and any revival of ‘a lost vernacular’ and emphasizes instead, quoting Lefaivre and Tzonis at length, ‘the hallmark of ambiguity’ as a means of mediating the impact of ‘universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place’ (ibid.: 21). Thus, critical regionalism is marked by ‘critical self-consciousness’ functioning through what Frampton calls ‘double mediation’; ‘to “deconstruct” the overall spectrum of world culture which it inevitably inherits’ and ‘to achieve through synthetic contradiction, a manifest critique of universal civilization’ (ibid.). The architectural example of Jørn Utzon’s Bagsvaerd Church, near Copenhagen, built in 1976, negotiates or ‘mediates’ between styles, forming ‘a revealed conjunction between . . . rationality of normative technique, and . . . arationality of idiosyncratic form’, between the ‘regular grid’, standardized concrete and extravagant ‘patent glazing’, and most clearly between the inside and the outside (ibid.: 22). The architecture conveys ‘multiple cross-cultural references’ drawn from the ‘alien sources’ discussed above, constituting, Frampton argues, a new form of regionalism that functions with what he terms ‘an expressive density and resonance’, as if to suggest its

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complex layering of materials as well as time, memory, influence, and worldly allusions reflecting the ‘in-laying’ of the actual building into the contours of the site itself (ibid.: 25). From this expressive density and resonance, as Harwell Harris had claimed, emerges something ‘potentially liberative . . . since it opens the user to manifold experiences’ (ibid.). It is in the final section of Frampton’s essay ‘The Visual Versus the Tactile’ that he turns to affect, following the lead of Tzonis and Lefaivre in ‘The Grid and the Pathway’, expressing the importance of the ‘tactile resilience . . . of place-form’ and the vital ‘capacity of the body to read the environment’ in ways not simply determined by sight, as a strategy to resist ‘the domination of universal technology’ (ibid.: 28). His assertion of tactility, following on from the ‘trans-optical’ he admired in Ando, and his belief in sense-more-than-sight that echoes Lynch’s work on sensory regions demonstrates a different affective perception and relation to architectural form, and more broadly, in his wider argument, to region. Thus, through the ‘labile body’, one senses ‘the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses its own confinement’ (ibid.). For Frampton, such tactility is ‘liberative’ and resistant because ‘it can only be decoded in terms of experience itself’ and does not, therefore, become ‘reduced to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absent presences’ (ibid.). Here he shifts towards the recognition of an affective critical regionalism that is ‘more-than-representation’, as examined earlier, because it is embodied, experienced, felt through multiple attunements to the energies of place and space rather than a limited, ‘reduced’, substituted apprehension through sight or simulations. This ‘Western tendency to interpret the environment in exclusively perspectival terms’ (ibid.: 29) removes us and distances us and, therefore, distorts our relations to place, region, and to the world. The etymology of the word ‘perspective’ reveals its definition as ‘rationalized sight or clear seeing’, and therefore, Frampton argues, ‘it presupposes a conscious suppression of the senses . . . and a consequent distancing from a more direct experience of the environment’ (ibid.). This signals a move away from representing place as something already there, like a static, bounded, and reductionist text, and towards experiencing its variability and uncertainty as something in process and, therefore, fully dynamic and alive. Such distancing Frampton equates to Heidegger’s concern for the ‘loss of nearness’ (ibid.), which can be countered by renewed tactility and its ‘capacity to arouse the impulse to touch’ placed alongside, and working with, the ‘tectonic’, or that which ‘raises this construction to an art form’ and gives the functional form ‘expression’, ‘a structural poetic’, its ‘revealed ligaments’ (ibid.: 30, 29). Elsewhere Frampton states his intention to ‘stress the nearness of tactility as distinct from the distance of sight’, citing Lissitzky, who wrote of being ‘beyond the con-

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straints of perspective and the pathos of a false vernacular: “We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies”’ (Frampton 2007a). However, the concern for affective attunements to place should not be detached from the critical, and this is reasserted in Lefaivre and Tzonis, where they explain their choice of the term ‘regionalism’ as a ‘tool of analysis’ combined with the interrogative ‘critical’ as a determined effort to ensure ‘the responsibility to define the origins and constraints of the tools of the thinking that one uses’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2003: 10). Their purpose was to give ‘priority of the identity of the particular rather than to universal dogmas’ and thereby guard against regionalism as ‘sentimental, prejudiced and irrational’ with ‘its obsolete, chauvinistic outlook’ (ibid.). Within the latter, one can see the dangers of an overly affect-driven perspective on region tipping towards the emotive, nostalgic, sentimental and towards an enclosing and inward-looking approach, a warning later given by Frederic Jameson as the ‘isolation of the individual sense’ (Jameson 1994: 198). In developing their own genealogy for critical regionalism, Lefaivre and Tzonis looked to American critic Lewis Mumford, whose essays were critical both of any imposed, ‘imperial’ International Style and also of traditions of previous romantic regionalism itself, so that he ‘infused [regionalism] with a notion of relativity’, regarding it as ‘engagement with the global, universalising world rather than by an attitude of resistance’, becoming ‘a constant process of negotiation between the local and the global on the many different issues that traditionally made up regionalism’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2003: 34). Mumford’s preference is for reciprocity, seeing culture as a contact zone, where the ‘regional’ ‘has contributed something of value to the universal movement . . . without forfeiting its . . . characteristics [and] can absorb something in return . . . a continuous give and take’ (Mumford 1972: xi). But, as Mumford puts it in his most ‘regional’ book, The South in Architecture (1941), ‘Our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it’ and use it to create productive futures (Mumford 1941: 17–18). He stressed that the regional was not the same as the ‘aboriginal’, for it engaged always in processes of ‘co-operation, re-adaptation and development’ (ibid.: 29), comparing it, appropriately within the context of this book, to the regionality of ‘wine culture’ produced over a long period of change and growth. Neither, for him, was the regional ‘self-contained’, since that was impossible as ‘every regional culture necessarily has a universal side to it . . . open to influences which come from other parts of the world’ (ibid.: 30–31). As a result, Mumford felt, in a very prescient phrase, that ‘it would be useful if we formed the habit of never using the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea of the universal—remembering the constant contact and interchange between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it’ (ibid.: 31). Thus, when he turns to H. H. Richardson’s architecture as an example which parallels Frampton’s later sense of ‘tactility’, he highlights how this ‘constant contact

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and interchange’ could take the form of ‘feeling and emotion’ so that ‘architectural forms were in a way the extension of his own bodily structure’ (ibid.: 85). Mumford, like Frampton, claimed that emotion could not be an imitation of some ‘historic ornament or style’, but ‘it must be felt and lived by the architect’ and used in tandem with reason and critique: ‘feeling and knowledge, properly focused, deftly applied, will give their fullest returns to both the architect and the community’ (ibid.: 94, 138–39—emphasis added). What Mumford’s work underlines, however, is the necessary relationship within critical regionalism of the material and the immaterial, of the critical and the affective as elements within the process by which we might better understand the functioning of regionality more broadly. Fredric Jameson’s discussion of critical regionalism in The Seeds of Time (1994) is more guarded, viewing it as ‘a coherent aesthetic’ within which are ‘regions of possibility’ that provoke both an ‘antimodern and antipostmodern’ response as it turns against the universalist traits of high modernism as well as the more fragmented, ahistorical theories of postmodern thought (‘trans-avant-garde pluralism’, as Jameson calls it) (Jameson 1994: 184, 190, 191). Jameson rightly notes Frampton’s stress upon critical regionalism’s marginality and resistance and most significantly understands that the architectural examples are not ‘urban and internal First World’, as so often in postmodern multiculturalism, but rather ‘semiperipheral’, drawing in examples (as I have already shown) from Denmark, Cataluña, Portugal, Mexico, Greece, and Japan. This is not simply region as ‘sentimental localism’ or a ‘rural place that resists the nation’ but something closer to a ‘zone . . . in tension with the standardizing world system as a whole’ (ibid.: 191–92). Existing at a ‘relative distance’ from ‘the full force of global modernization’, critical regionalism’s alternative aesthetics have grown in contrast to these standard measures, even though, as Jameson is quick to point out, it is not a political movement (‘a problem here’, he notes) (ibid.: 192, 193). However, in the twists and turns of Jameson’s discussion, he settles on the ‘primacy of representation in contemporary architecture’ as the target and ‘challenge’ for critical regionalism (ibid.: 196). In other words, echoing Frampton discussed above, recent architecture’s attention to the visual and ‘scenographic’, to the façade, to the spectacular and theatrical commodification of space (think Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas) is challenged through critical regionalism’s interest in ‘experience’ (also Jameson’s word, see ibid.: 197). Of course, as we have seen, Frampton’s own notion of experiencing architecture relates to the tactile in particular—but also to the tectonic and telluric, as Jameson reminds us, and through these values, ‘turns back slowly into a conception of place once again’ (ibid.). Thus Frampton, as Jameson explains, celebrates the non-visual, non-spectacular elements of architecture such as the ‘joint’, a tectonic form that constructs and shapes the experience of the building. Frampton’s point, however, is that the ‘joint’ is

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not ‘representational’ but ‘ontological’ because it does not act as a ‘sign’ of something else but functions as a ‘presence’ or ‘thing’ in its own right. It is a ‘primordial tectonic element, as the fundamental nexus around which buildings come into being, that is to say, comes to be articulated as presence in itself’ (Frampton 1990). 2 For Jameson, this states ‘the fundamental innovation’ of critical regionalism, ‘whose non- or antirepresentational equivalent for the other arts (or literature) remains to be worked out’ (Jameson 1994: 197). What Jameson suggests cryptically is what this book engages with more fully, that is the ‘non-representational’ or, more accurately, more-than-representational as it develops across the ‘other arts’ in relation to the idea of regionality. To recall the introduction, affect might be seen as ‘a body movement looked at from the point of view of its potential—its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do’ (Massumi 2015: 7). Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them . . . [as] beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164). Architecture is assumed to be functional, material, and manmade and yet it possesses tendencies and capacities to move beyond these limits as affective spacetimes; as ‘passages, becomings, rises and falls, continuous variations of power . . . that pass from one state to another’ [material and immaterial ‘states’, bodies, energies, etc.] (Deleuze 1998: 139). Nigel Thrift, who took up this challenge of the non-representational (without any reference to critical regionalism or Jameson), explains it as ‘the geography of what happens’, involving, among many other attributes, taking ‘the energy of the sense-catching forms of things seriously. . . rather than . . . mere cladding’ (Thrift 2008: 2, 9—emphasis added). The architectural metaphor of cladding reminds us of Jameson’s point about the visual and the scenographic and endorses instead a still-evolving, tentative glimpse of how critical regionalism would (and could still) develop in the future by tracking and following the dynamic energies or ‘becoming’ of ‘sense-catching forms’: ‘Rather everything takes-part and in taking-part, takes-place: everything happens, everything acts. Everything, including images, words and texts [or, one might add, buildings]’ (Anderson and Harrison 2010a: 14). And therefore, Non-representational theory takes representation seriously; representation not as a code to be broken or as an illusion to be dispelled, rather representations are apprehended as performative in themselves; as doings. The point here is to redirect attention from the posited meaning towards the material compositions and conduct of representations (Dewsbury, Harrison, Rose, and Wylie 2002: 438).

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Frampton’s ‘poetics of construction’ (1990: n.p.) points in this direction: towards seeing architectural forms as embodied and performative, ‘as doings’ of ‘compositions and conduct’, rather than as commodities dressed up (cladded) and fixed in the latest fashions and gimmicks ‘in order to facilitate its marketing’ (Frampton in Canizaro 2007: 376). As such, one cannot help recall Tzonis and Lefaivre writing of ‘lived-in spaces’, of ‘movement and meeting’, of ‘exchange knots’ as crucial to their ‘critical efforts against ailing modernism’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 1981: 77–78). Ultimately, however, Jameson critiques what he terms Frampton’s ‘neoregionalism’ as a mere ‘flight from the realities of late capitalism’ that has in fact destroyed regions through standardization, commodification, and rationalization. The vernacular regional, for Jameson, is always in danger of appearing only as an assertion of some lost world, a nostalgic refuge from late capitalist forces instead of a direct political engagement or ‘dialogue’ with them (Frampton’s stated intention). Jameson’s major problem with Frampton’s work is its reliance upon and elevation of (as he sees it) pluralism and difference, concepts Jameson sees as, ultimately, part of the ‘internal dynamics’ of late capitalism rather than a bulwark against it. The post-Fordist economy with its tailored, postmodern marketing seems to fit perfectly into a ‘regionalist’ model of plural and differentiated markets ‘adapting its various goods to suit those vernacular languages and practices’, thus inserting the corporation into the very heart of the local and regional rather than in some way resisting it. For Jameson, therefore, the regional becomes the business of ‘global American Disneyland-related corporations, who will redo your own native architecture for you more exactly than you can do it yourself’ (Jameson 1994: 205). However, despite these criticisms, Jameson does concede that critical regionalism presents the ‘possibility of inventing some new relationship to the technological beyond nostalgic repudiation or mindless corporate celebration’ with the ‘capacity to . . . reopen and transfigure the burden of the modern’, and potentially ‘to fashion a progressive strategy out of what are necessarily the materials of tradition and nostalgia’ (ibid.). The idea that Frampton was merely defining a ‘distinctive regional culture’, as Jameson suggests, is, I would suggest, a misreading of his work, losing sight of its ‘anti-centrism’ and its interest in ‘dialogically opposed values’. Rather, like Lefaivre and Tzonis’s criticism of his ‘chauvinistic outlook’, it may be that Frampton’s various essays simply lose sight of the ‘critical’ in his use of their terms, as Jameson suggests. So although uneven in its expression, Frampton does desire ‘the dialectical interplay between [universal] civilization and [local] culture’ and does assert that this might happen through ‘double mediation’ and ‘interaction’, whereby modern universalization is constantly interrupted and unsettled by what, in one specific example, you will recall, he usefully terms ‘a revealed conjunction between’ (in Foster 1990: 22). The

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‘conjunctural’ thereby denies the assertion of hierarchical order, of the dominant, universal form over the regional, and instead finds effective ways to ‘mediate’ between and across forms; for example, by rejecting the ‘tabula rasa’ of modernist sites and instead working with the region and its history so that both become ‘inscribed into the form and realization of the work’ (ibid.: 26). This conjunctural process (referred to by Lefaivre and Tzonis earlier as the ‘bridge’, 1981: 78) is what Frampton calls ‘in-laying’ or ‘layering’, whereby the site ‘has many levels of significance . . . the prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time’, displaying all the ‘idiosyncrasies of place . . . without falling into sentimentality’ (in Foster 1990: 26). In these final points, despite his many critics, Frampton does present a radical vision of ‘critical regional’ space as a complex, layered, multiple, and mobile concept comprising past, present, and future that opposes efforts to reduce or limit its capacity through narrow definitions of ‘rootedness’ or equally overly encompassing notions of the universalist context. For the purposes of this book and the lines of enquiry it follows, Frampton’s architectural exploration of ‘layering’, or a type of archaeological understanding of forms in motion as tactile, tectonic, and telluric, equates to the notions of process, investigative poetics, new cartography, and alternative histories that I am keen to suggest through the concept of affective critical regionality. 2: CRITICAL REGIONALISM TO AFFECTIVE CRITICAL REGIONALITY Barbara L. Allen has pointed out that too often in the images and examples accompanying articles about critical regionalism, there are no people and that in too many discussions of the term, there is little sense of cultural formations as alive and mobile: ‘what people actually do in that region’, as she puts it (in Canizaro 2007: 421). As I suggested earlier, Frampton’s ‘poetics’ point in this direction, towards architecture as embodied and performative, ‘as doings’ composed of ‘compositions and conduct’, rather than as functional commodities. Allen asserts, however, that it is the ‘activities and practices that make these places’ (ibid.: 422), and therefore, one has to consider region as always already ‘performative’ and engaged with ‘critical affection’. In this she most echoes Juhani Pallasmaa, who claims that ‘architectural experiences have a verb form rather than being nouns’: ‘A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one’s body, moved through, utilised as a condition of other things’ (Pallasmaa 2005: 63). 3 In this way, Allen develops her notion of ‘performative regionalism . . . whereby people and things . . . have agency in the formulation of the place or region’; showing the different ways in which they act in, use, and relate to the region defines

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its ‘regional feel’ (in Canizaro 2007: 424, 425). Neil Leach explains the performative through a close and useful reading of Judith Butler’s work on gender as performativity, which he refers to as ‘an actative process’ (Leach 2006: 174): If gender is something that one becomes—but can never be—then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort (Butler 1990: 112). 4

Once again, the emphasis, as we have seen, falls on the active verb form and the sense of gender, architecture, and, for my purposes here, critical regionalism itself as something unfixed and constantly reiterated and performed. As Leach comments, these ideas shift towards a more political position, which is often viewed as absent in Frampton’s discussion of critical regionalism (as Jameson’s critique testifies), since ‘through its repetitive citational nature . . . performativity has the power to question and subvert that which it cites’ (Leach 2006: 174). Far from being a conservative and fixed thing, regionalism, following these ideas, might be seen as dynamic, critical, and potentially questioning of accepted norms and practices, especially those that emerge from presupposed, universal, or global structures and systems. As Frampton claimed, critical regionalism is ‘a recuperative, self-conscious, critical endeavour’ (in Canizaro 2007: 378), which shapes new forms rather than being attached only to some sentimentalized notion of the past or expansive view of the present, and does so by engaging, resisting, and interrogating these elements. Allen comments that ‘regions are living, changing organisms and must also be understood from their margins where the power of normativity, via performativity, is challenged’ (Allen in Canizaro 2007: 424—emphasis added). As Kathleen Stewart argues, ‘Regionality comes into view at a limit’ (Stewart 2013c: 277), where, as with Allen’s ‘margins’, normativity is under pressure in cultural fissures or at frictional edges where it is ‘decentered by what it has set in motion’ (ibid.: 277). Thus, any simple reading of region as unchanging or rigid begins to unravel at the edges where it makes contacts with other people, worlds, and multiple forces beyond itself. Edward Soja suggested in his 1989 Postmodern Geographies that ‘critical regional studies’ had the potential to open up whole new knowledges because it was flexible and willing to ‘try new combinations of ideas rather than fall back to old categorical dualities’ (Soja 1989: 189). More recently, he has termed this ‘critical regional thinking’ (Soja 2010: 56) and linked it with his commitment to ‘one of the most important outgrowths of the spatial turn’, or what he calls ‘New Regionalism’: ‘a broad-ranging shift in critical thinking and analysis affecting nearly all fields . . . [showing] more clearly

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the ways in which power and social control are embedded in the spatiality of cities and regions, [and] how this can hurt us and oppress us (Soja 2002: 7). Moving beyond its foundations in architecture and Soja’s cultural geography, Cheryl Temple Herr saw the possibilities of developing critical regionalism through a dialogue with cultural studies and importantly argued that region, as the above comments suggest, too, should not be seen as singular or monolithic but, rather, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, as an ‘assemblage’ (Herr 1996: 10–11): ‘The utterance is always the product of an assemblage— which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 51). Region expressed as an assemblage is active and processual or ‘something which happens’ (ibid.) rather than a static entity, always engaged in what Herr calls ‘dynamic relationality’ (Herr 1996: 11; see also Joseph 2007: 7–8). She claims that ‘the key to critical regionalist methodology for cultural studies is the relationality of regionalism’ (ibid.: 18), a point that aligns her with Douglas Reichert Powell’s Critical Regionalism (2007), in which he argues that because region is not ‘a specific site but . . . a larger network of sites’, it ‘is always a relational term’ (Powell 2007: 4). 5 To this end, Herr and Powell dispel the idea that the regional is closed off, preferring to see it as always networked and ‘never withdrawn from larger cultural forces’ (ibid.: 5). Powell is explicit in responding to the special issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies (2002) where Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor wrote of ‘global regional studies’ in which the attentiveness to the regional and the local (‘the holistic particularity of place’ [Reid and Taylor 2002: 23]) was part of a wider political process through which critical regionalism might build ‘global regional publics’ to develop ‘democratic control’ and ‘fostering a transnational but community-based movement for socioecological justice’ (ibid.: 24). 6 To do this, Powell advocates thinking in interdisciplinary ways about the ‘processes by which ideas about regions come into being and become influential’ in order to show that ‘regionalism is not necessarily parochialism’ (Powell 2007: 7). Powell explains this as a process of both seeing what is apparently ‘unique and isolated’ to a particular region whilst also understanding the ‘multiple vectors’ that show ‘something complex and interconnected—is also happening’ (ibid.: 18–19). This undoubtedly resonates with Frampton’s ‘double mediation’ and with Tzonis and Lefaivre’s ‘hallmark of ambiguity’ since it reminds us of the necessary critical practice of comprehending region or regionality as a dynamic process, always contradictorily spaced as local and worldly, too. Region is an ‘assemblage’, or in Whitehead’s language, as discussed in the introduction, a ‘nexus’ made up of actual entities in the process of intersection, illumination, and decline (Whitehead 1979: 18–20), or as Powell puts it, ‘dense palimpsests of broader forces’ (Powell 2007: 19).

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Frampton himself noted that ‘one of the problems with the term regionalism arises out of the affix ism since this patently implies the postulation of a style, that is, of a received set of aesthetic preferences’ (Frampton in Canizaro 2007: 378—emphasis added). He felt that critical regionalism should ‘lie beyond style’, linking it to one of his favourite readings of Heidegger on the notion of boundary: ‘For Heidegger the boundary is not the line at which something stops, but rather the contour within which something begins its “presencing”’ (ibid.: 382). Continuing our move away from architecture through cultural studies and philosophy, Frampton also recognized Heidegger’s work as an imaginative opening to further rethink regionalism as an active presence (see introduction on ‘regioning’) whose boundaries are dynamic and unfixed as in the earlier discussion of the ‘bounded fragment’. Casey’s 1996 chapter ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time’ actually used the word ‘regionality’ as part of his discussion of complex place, arguing, like Herr and Powell above, that it is characterized by ‘relationality’ and not by ‘concreteness’ (Casey 2009: 334, 348; see Massumi 2015: 50 on the ‘region of relation’). By implication, following Heidegger’s example, regionality (not a term Casey reused in later work) is a complex of dynamic forces, a ‘gathering’, a ‘holding together’, ‘holding in and a holding out’, a ‘keeping’ of ‘experiencing bodies’ as well as ‘thoughts and memories’(Casey 2009: 328). To this list I would add, of course, affects. Casey, appropriately for this book using the American West as its focus, draws on the Grand Canyon as his example of regionality, seeing within its geological region ‘the presence of arroyos, colored sandstone rock layering, certain effects of seasonal weather’ and alongside this, ‘my memory’ like a ‘region of my psyche’ and the ‘cultural and historical and social’ (ibid.: 334), which together function as regionality. Here ‘relationality’ and regionality coexist since ‘there is never a single place existing in utter isolation’ (ibid.: 347), seeing instead, as so often throughout this chapter, the assembled and intersecting layers of region ‘as an already plenary presence’(ibid.: 348). Regionality, once again, refutes the notion of ‘simple location’, reminding us always of the ‘concrete, relational, [and] lateral’ held together within any understanding of the term (ibid.: 334). In other words, invoking Whitehead’s ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’, Casey argues that space is not ‘a priori and settled’ (ibid.: 347) and place merely something imposed upon its perfection, but, in fact, regions (made up of diverse places and spaces) are themselves always a mix of the abstract and concrete through their relationality and plurality. Besides Heidegger, Casey also draws down on Whitehead’s philosophy to argue that ‘places gather things in their midst—where “things” connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts’ (ibid.: 327). To this degree, Casey asserts an ‘impure’ sense of place imbued with what he calls the ‘dirty details’ that reveal not ‘a perfected plane’, but rather an ‘inherent

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regionality’ capable of conveying ‘a plurality of places . . . grouped together’ (ibid.: 347, 348). 7 What these brief examples show is the evolving use of reframed regionalism across different disciplines and schools of thought, each, in different ways, demonstrating the interest in preserving some sense of region while recognizing the need to challenge and update its previous associations and uses. Too often ‘regional’, as Frampton explained, is associated with ‘essentialism’ based on a rooted and local sense of being and belief ‘in-here’; something bounded, closed, a ‘container’ for practices, rituals, languages, all struggling with the endangering, if amorphous, ‘global’ ‘out-there’. This book questions these assumptions by seeing them as always in relations with other forces: regions overlapping and intersecting, exchanging and layering (see Massey 2005: 183–85). Hence, as discussed in the introduction, regioning suggests this greater amenability and openness, absorbing debates on place, space, and time which have too often established oppositions and differences, with place as grounded/rooted and space as abstract and generalized, for example, and time as a straight line moving remorselessly onward. Doreen Massey argues ‘for space’ as relational and ‘a dynamic simultaneity’ with ‘connections yet to be made, juxtaposition yet to flower into interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established. Loose ends and ongoing stories’ (ibid.: 107). ‘Places are not as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space and time; as spatio-temporal events’ (ibid.: 130), or what she earlier called ‘a global sense of place’ (see Massey 1994). To me, regioning or regionality captures this dynamic contingency as a potential ‘multiplicity of trajectories’ (Massey 2005: 119) working across space, ‘woven together’ as concepts that are themselves ‘a heterogeneity of practices and processes . . . an ongoing product of interconnections’ (ibid.: 107). Region in this regard is an ‘event’, echoing Whitehead and Charles Olson (see chapter 2): ‘the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing’, with no ‘presumption of coherence’ (ibid.: 140, 141). Place, according to Massey, is not static or defined by its boundaries, its ‘long internalized history’, but is much closer to my perception of regionality: [C]onstructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus . . . articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings . . . constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself. . . . And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local. (Massey 1994: 154–55)

In this manner, she suggests that places ‘can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond. A progressive sense of place would recognize

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that, without being threatened by it. What we need . . . is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place’ (ibid.: 156). Affective Critical Regionality responds to this call, gathering up regionalities not to reduce their differences and singularities, but to appreciate them as forces within a dynamic set of relations intersecting with the world. Recently, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has engaged with critical regionalism as a method to think beyond what she calls the ‘dream of universalism’ created by the United States and Europe (Butler and Spivak 2010: 92), employing it as a dynamic set of relations intersecting with the world overcoming globalization’s supposed ‘easy postnationalism’ (Spivak 2008: 1). For her, universalism is a political dream of imposed values from the centre of power (as Frampton’s was of the dominant architectural styles of modernism), and she argues that critical regionalism offers the potential to ‘check’ such dreams (ibid.: 94). Her political agenda is uppermost in asserting that a fully critical regionalism ‘goes under and over nationalisms but keeps the abstract structures of something like a state’ (ibid.). If she maintains the importance of the state as an abstract structure, she thinks of it, however, as ‘always in the interest of taking the “nation” out of nation-state’ (Spivak 2009: 89) so as to diminish the dangers of nationalism: [K]eeping the civic structure of the state clear of nationalism and patriotism, altering the redistributive priorities of the state, creating regional alliances, rather than going the extra-state or non-government route alone, that the new comparative literature, with its alliances with the social sciences, can work at ceaselessly. (ibid.)

For her, critical regionalism is always ‘pluralizing’ and engaged with ‘poststate globality’ so as to ‘look forward to the state as an abstract and porous structure’ rather than something fixed, policed, and rigid (Spivak 2008: 113, 167, 245). Hers is a sense of a ‘critical regionalist world’ freed from the slogans of nationalism and narrow-minded ‘identitarianism’ (ibid.: 249; Landry and MacLean 1998: 88), and fully able to create active alliances and exercise ‘redistributive powers . . . in the face of global priorities’ (Landry and MacLean 1998: 91); a type of internal alternative to the nation . . . reconceived as being largely external to it; as showing some of the benefits of national identity but also reaching beyond these to embrace transnational and/or diasporic modes of affiliation and conviviality that would normally be more characterisations of ‘globalization from below’. (Huggan 2013: 550)

To provoke this more careful rereading, I am ‘using deterritorialized terms . . . torn from their area, in order to reterritorialize another notion’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 18). Hence, in this book terms such as ‘region’

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and ‘regionalism’ get reterritorialized, rethought, stretched, made ‘foreign’, and linked through various theoretical frames in order to imagine ‘another notion’, a different way of thinking and talking about place-worlds and how they are related to and made of humans, other life forms, and objects. 8 Miriam Nichols notes how such ideas are linked by a belief that ‘process, rather than substance, is primary and unending’ (Nichols 2010: 26), seeing, for example, Whitehead’s work as connected to Deleuze’s through their mutual interest in creativity and becoming ‘like atoms that combine to form molecules and finally organisms, the actual entities [in Whitehead’s theory] serve as data for one another in an ongoing creative process of recombination’ (ibid.). Whitehead’s processive philosophy shows the building blocks by which life is formed: ‘actual entities’ (like units of becoming) that relate to each other through ‘prehensions’, creating clusters or communities (such as regions) when ‘concrescence’ draws them together. This is an account of creativity, which, in Nichols’s words, is both ‘genetic and affective’, that is, a combination of a limited, biological process alongside an affective charge that because of its unpredictability ‘leaves room for novelty’ (ibid.: 27). It is the encounters that shape these actual entities and their multiple relations and interactions, through genetic heritage (the past, the social), affect and feelings, chance, and ‘agency’ (how one responds). One might even relate this back to Spivak’s political use of critical regionalism, to see the ‘genetic’ as the attachment to blood and soil nationalism and the ‘affective’ as that which connects ‘beyond’ this to a ‘de-transcendentalized nationalism’, as she calls it, that rejects a certain homogeneity in favour of variance and multiplicity (Spivak 2008: 81). In the chapters that follow in this book, I will show how these different, intersecting, and evolving conceptualizations of critical regionalism feed into and become affective critical regionality. In the final section of this chapter, however, I want to begin to explore how some of these ideas might enlarge our understanding of region—specifically Nebraska and the American West—through literature and film. As we begin this journey, I have in mind George Packer’s comment, ‘in the American din, that small thing was everything’ (Packer 2013: 76). 3: AFFECTIVE CRITICAL REGIONALITY: NEBRASKA DIPTYCH In examining regionality in this book, I will chiefly be drawing on examples from one of the most discussed ‘regions’, the American West. I do this because, first, it is has been the subject of my previous research and writing, and so follows on from those works with a certain seamlessness, and second, because when one thinks of and imagines the notion of region and its relations to nation, the West carries with it a panoply of ready-made meanings,

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presuppositions, myths, and knowledges than can be usefully employed and challenged in this study. However, I believe many of the ideas and theoretical frameworks explored and used throughout this book will have implications for considerations of region more broadly and, indeed, applied to other actual regions, too. However, as a pointer to the subsequent chapters of this book, chapter 1 concludes with an extended example drawn from this specific region. One can argue that Ron Hansen’s short story ‘Nebraska’ (1989) regions: its small towns’ names resonate across time, geography, and mood like fragments of poems—‘Americus, Covenant, Denmark, Grange, Hooray, Jerusalem, Sweetwater’ (Hansen 1989: 187); ‘conceived in sickness by European pioneers who took the path of least resistance and put down roots in an emptiness like the one they kept secret in their youth’ (ibid.). 9 The story ‘regions’ because place here intones as a gathering power in lives and landscapes, dreams and disappointments, layering into being what he calls the ‘emptiness’ of youth. Perhaps this is a sense of loss, a failure to achieve, a hope thwarted. Reading Hansen’s story engages us in ‘regioning’ (as Heidegger termed it) since ‘the task becomes not to delineate regions regarded as settled domains but to capture the action of regioning whereby that-whichregions is constituted’ (Casey 1998: 270). As Spivak argued about the nation as homogenous, it has often employed regions to bolster its narrative and yet finds little space for them and its people in the final, conclusive story, as their differences become elided and disguised, moulded into unanimity. Heidegger writes that ‘a region holds what comes forward to meet us’ (Heidegger 1966: 64) and, therefore, as Casey explains, ‘[i]nstead of standing over against us in the manner of represented objects, regions bring themselves and their content toward us as concerned parties’ (Casey 1998: 270). This sense of region does not exist ready-made, fixed, and inert, but rather forms and moves as an active presence in the process of living. Regions, contrary to the cultural deficit view discussed in the introduction, cannot be easily ‘represented’, as they are a complex and shifting presence of forces, rhythms, and relations that come together and disburse. Hence, Hansen writes of a region alive: ‘And below the silos and water tower are stripped treetops, their gray limbs still lifted up in alleluia, their yellow leaves crowding along yard fences and sheeping along the sidewalks and alley under the shepherding wind’ (Hansen 1989: 189). Thus, ‘regions involve us’ (Casey 1998: 270)—‘bring themselves and their content toward us’—not through any conventional representation of place, but rather by its presencing as affective landscape. In Hansen’s story, Nebraska’s small towns are ‘places of ownership and a hard kind of happiness’, mixing dream and disappointment in the ‘mean prosperity of the twentieth century’, formed as shapes, colours, actions, feelings, desires, and memories flow (Hansen 1989: 187). Here in Nebraska, when even ‘July in town is a gray highway’, there is some vital ordinary presence that affects our

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perception and emotion: ‘Houses are turned away from the land and toward whatever is not always’ (ibid.: 188–89). Just the imaginative leap to what ‘whatever is not always’ might mean in this context is one such moment where the apparently quotidian description of place is so much more, becoming a twist or turn in the mood, a ‘continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences’, as Kathleen Stewart puts it (Stewart 2007: 2). In this town (and all those like it), with its regionings, worlds form; lives interrelate as objects in the swirl of carrying-on: ‘hopes are made public, petty sins are tidily dispatched’ (Hansen 1989: 191). But seen from outside, the town is nowhere, nothing, just another irrelevant mark on a map of a flyover state like Powell’s ‘cultural deficit’ or what Butler and Spivak refer to as ‘jettisoned life’ (Butler and Spivak 2010: 40), in the sense that it seems not to fit into the actual, approved national narrative. As Hansen writes, ‘passing by, and paying attention, an outsider is only aware of what isn’t’; however, his own story disproves this negativity through its poetic attentiveness to what is actually happening in the intimate patterns of the town (ibid.: 192), or in what Mark Doty calls ‘those braiding elements of the sensorium’ (Doty 2010: 3): ‘a green balloon dinosaur bobbing from a string over the cash register, old tires piled beneath the cottonwood, For Sale in the sideyard a Case tractor, a John Deere reaper’ (Hansen 1989: 192). In this regioning process, the ‘nearness’ of the small-scale details of small-town life is in and of itself important, for it gives shape and expression to the compositionality and performance of people’s lives and the nuances of living. However, as the story also shows, there are subtle connections to the ‘distance’ as well, and to all those worlds, both real and imagined, that make up this particular world. As region, Hansen’s Nebraska is alive, it regions, turning potentially flat bodies spread out on the flat landscape of the Plains, into strange rhythms, pulses, and intersections. Even as ‘Mrs. Antoinette Heft’ works at the Home Restaurant, smoking cigarettes and ‘smelling air as crisp as Oxydol’, she is looking up and beyond ‘at stars the Pawnee Indians looked at’ (ibid.: 193), while ‘Alice Sorenson pages through a child’s World Book Encyclopedia, stopping at descriptions of California, Capetown, Ceylon, Colorado, Copenhagen, Corpus Christi, Costa Rica, Cyprus’, and at night ‘a sixty-year-old man named Adolf Schooley is a boy again in bed’ (ibid.: 192–93). Their names speak of diaspora and migration while their response to place reminds us of region’s complexity as explained by Deleuze as ‘all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunken regions, strata, or sheets: each region with its own characteristics, its “tones”, its “aspects”, its “singularities”, its “shining points” and “dominant themes” . . . simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity’ (Deleuze 2000: 99). In these onflows from the supposedly isolated and backward towns of Nebraska, Hansen captures something of what Stewart calls ‘ordinary affects’ through ‘performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them

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habitable and animate’ so as to construct ‘an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities’ (Stewart 2007: 4–5). Here, Hansen forms ‘an assemblage of disparate scenes that pull the course of the book into a tangle of trajectories, connections, and disjunctures’ (Stewart 2007: 5) through the objects, moments, climates, colours, and characters of smalltown Nebraska. Perhaps another, simpler approach is to follow Judith Butler’s comment on critical regionalism, which is that it is a process of ‘remapping a map’ of existing, accepted positions and assumptions that ‘does not come from nowhere’ (Butler and Spivak 2010: 118). In a similar and related manner, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013) is a film of regionality engaged in a subtle ‘remapping’ of the map of the West that comes not from ‘nowhere’, even if that is how the state is often viewed, but rather from the situated lives and experiences of people. The film is interested in the people and places of the Plains, about how they live and give meaning to their world. In Casey’s words quoted above, the aim of the film as an experience is ‘not to delineate regions regarded as settled domains but to capture the action of regioning’. Thus, it is not limited, sentimental or inward looking, for it has perspective, like the long shots of its endless vistas that encourage the audience to see the relations between people’s lives, the places they live in and have lived in, and the horizons ‘out there’, seemingly beyond them, and yet touching them at every turn. The old assumptions that regions were bordered and contained by practices of sameness, shared values, and collective histories are clearly directly tested in the film by references to economic, cultural, and demographic changes within the West. For example, this is underlined by the presence of Mexican migrants now running central character Woody Grant’s (Bruce Dern) old garage in Hawthorne, Nebraska; by the revelation of Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) that Woody had been ‘screwing some half-breed down at the Reservation’; as well as by derogatory comments made by the hapless twins of Woody’s brothers, Cole and Bart, about owning ‘Jap cars’. All through the film, Japanese or Korean cars are named in relation to the younger generation: David (Will Forte), who owns a Subaru, and his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), a Kia, and his wife a Nissan, as if to underline the shifts in markets towards a globalized economy. This globalized marketplace suggests that any concept of the United States as a ‘finished’, self-sufficient nation defined by coherent and settled regions is an illusion that cannot be sustained. One of the running motifs in the film is of cars and journey times, and when discussing American cars, one of Woody’s brothers praises the merits of the Buick ’79, a car he claims would ‘run forever’. When he asks his other brother, ‘What happened to it?’ he replies curtly, ‘Stopped running’. The irony is typical of the film’s gentle but poignant critical regionality, pointing out that nostalgia and sentimentality, here for the lost age of the Buick, have no place in the real lives of people trying to get by in the uneven world of late capitalism. This is a world which

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promises people millions of dollars as ‘winners’ in phony sweepstake letters, like the one received by Woody that propels the film’s action. And yet, for him the reality of the situation is simple, ‘Can’t say it if it’s not true’. 10 The undercutting of such ‘truths’ and many other assumptions about family, region, and relationships, alongside the widening of knowledge about history and identity, become central to the film’s purpose as it moves its audience across the West from Billings, Montana, to South Dakota to Lincoln, Nebraska. 11 The film revels in the local but not in an unquestioning manner, for it sees it rather as a complex field of affects, histories, and memories that, when examined, help us understand better both the local and its relations and intersections with the national and the global. Early on in Nebraska, David Grant is seen at his job at the ‘Mid-City Superstore’ selling a stereo system inside a soundproof listening room. Filmed from outside, we can barely make out what he is actually saying, but we know instinctively he is performing the hard sell in the vacuous universal language of consumer globalization through which products take on a mystical life of promise and ubiquitous significance without which our otherwise meaningless lives would have no purpose. This symbolic landscape of the superstore in Billings, Montana, soundproofed against the outer ‘noise’ of the world, cut off from the lived experiences of a life not governed by advertising slogans and sales talk, shelters David from the lived world he is trying to avoid dealing with (a disgruntled partner, broken relationship, communal economic decline). The customers in the store, however, do not buy the goods, and as they leave the store, David, in his overfamiliar attempt to impress them with his caring customer service, mispronounces the woman’s name—for which he is corrected. This is a further sign of David’s unsatisfied life and his entrapment within an unforgiving world of commercial flimflam and cod bonhomie. During the journey he will undertake with his father, however, the ‘noise’ of memory, lies, repressed family history, and the slow impingement into his ‘soundproofed’ environment by affective attachments surrounds David, forcing him to, potentially, re-evaluate his sedimented existence and the values it authorizes. As a Nebraskan reviewer, Bob Fischbach, said of the film, it ‘pays attention to how rural Plains people talk—what they say to and about each other, what they’re willing to talk about and what they will never say out loud. Their chatter—about food and crops and cars—is safe’ (Fischbach 2013). And yet in these moments of ‘chatter’, the film often reveals itself most, for the ‘safe’ conversations are the very material of the everyday through which people define their lives and express their joys and disappointments. Payne’s attention to these moments is as vital as the Nebraskan landscape. In many respects, as in Ron Hansen’s short story, it is the Nebraskan landscape. In leaving the grey, bleak sprawl of Billings, Woody and his son David begin their journey to Lincoln, stopping briefly at Mount Rushmore, where

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Woody’s remarks set the tone for the film’s sardonic commentary on a certain view of nationalism and the ‘fantasy of the good life’ (Berlant 2011: 1): ‘Looks like somebody got bored doin’ it. Washington’s the only one with any clothes, and they’re just sort of roughed in. Lincoln doesn’t even have an ear’. This great symbolic monument to the nation carved out of the landscape itself is no final statement but ‘just a bunch of rocks’, offering an incomplete picture of the United States. Monuments mean nothing to Woody, for, recalling Roland Barthes, ‘[t]o select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless’ (Barthes 1976: 76). Woody sees it for what it is, ‘an agent of blindness . . . reducing geography to the description of an uninhabited world of monuments’ (ibid.). The nation written on Mount Rushmore is only a tiny part of the United States’ narrative, excluding its intimate regionality, its small-scale stories, its minor voices; reducing its complex geographies to a graspable, reproducible image, a ‘myth-alibi’ (ibid.: 77). Above all, Nebraska challenges this reduced geography through its attention to detailed, jettisoned lives, alternative and lost histories, local and global intersections, and its rhythmic fascination with the closed-in and the opened-out in lives and landscapes. Payne says, ‘So many people experience our country as a five-hour plane trip’ from coast to coast, ‘[a]nd that’s not our country’ (Andersen 2013), whereas the film rejects distance in favour of proximity, ‘what we often think of as non-places—seemingly dead, discarded spaces that nevertheless spark the deepest memories in a Midwestern Proustian way’ (Romney 2013). 12 The film’s literal close-ups of Woody’s aged face, his cut head, his gaping, toothless mouth, his glassy eyes, and disheveled hair speak of this powerful observation of detail and the significance Payne attaches to it. The geographies of the film interlock, however, functioning as a dramatic tension: the sweeping Plains and open roads that force our eyes out to the horizon of land and sky but equally importantly, the ‘verticality’ of the camera examining and digging deep into people, lives, relationships, and histories. Filmed in black and white, the film has a documentary quality interrogating the landscape, lives, and spaces of the region in acute detail and precision. Indeed, the film’s cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, has listed one of his key influences as Robert Frank, who shares this intensely affected interest in people and region. Rather like in Frank’s The Americans, closed-off internal spaces, like David’s soundproof room or his tiny apartment, contrast with the flat expanses of the Plains, with their seemingly endless vistas associated in our cinematic imagination of American frontier expansion, settlement, and opportunity. This classical widescreen cinematic format with its promise of mythic splendour is constantly at odds with those internal, claustrophobic spaces, bars, offices, homes, automobiles, serving to refocus on the small

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scale and the intimate, the local and the familiar. It is from these bore holes of the everyday that the narrative flows ever outward, like intense ripples on a pool. As the film develops across the Plains, as its journey unravels, it is as if we are carried along ‘planes’ in the Deleuzian sense; planes of consistency, organization, and immanence—‘the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts . . . formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume . . . the indivisible milieu in which concepts are distributed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 36). The connections from these Plains/‘planes’ radiate and intersect from the seemingly minor events and moments of the everyday world, working to bind together people’s lives in patterns of little-recognized meaning: the desire for ‘something’, the memory of a lent or stolen compressor, the ache of a love lost deep in the past, of an unspoken war record, a dead brother, an abandoned family home, or a 1979 Buick. Across time and region, lives interrelate, deflect, lose touch, and are remembered in ways that recall Lauren Berlant’s interest in ‘the complexity of being bound to life’ (2011: 140). Woody instigates such connections, like ‘the living agent of memory’ (Brody 2013), stubbornly provoking others to recall and to remember even as he appears to forget or to dismiss the past as something that just happened or passed by (‘I don’t remember. It don’t matter’, he says at one point). Like an uncanny anthropology, the film unravels and examines what Pierre Nora has expressed as ‘the sudden flash of an unfindable identity. No longer a genesis, but the deciphering of what we are in the light of what we are no longer’ (in Augé 1995: 26). The film deals with the consequences of disappointment, of a life reviewed and failing to measure up to some yardstick derived from social and cultural dreams of the good life embedded deep in some notion of nation (see Berlant 2011; Packer 2013). In this way, the film clearly echoes Bruce Springsteen’s album of the same name, Nebraska, released in 1982, with its brooding meditation on Reagan’s America, where, according to Greil Marcus, ‘politics are buried deep in the stories of individuals who make up a nation only when their stories are heard together . . . because in a world in which men and women are mere social and economic functions, every man and woman is separated from every other’ (Marcus quoted in Burke 2011: 69–70). 13 In this respect, Woody embodies also ‘the unwinding’ of the United States that George Packer writes of, ‘the falling to earth of the Founders’ heavenly Republic in a noisy marketplace of quarrelsome factions’ (Packer 2013: 3), because, according to novelist David Vann, Woody has ‘come face to face with the terror of his utter meaninglessness and can look only to money for meaning, because this is all we have in America: money with an oblique reference to family’ (Vann 2013). Woody has no money and his family seems disconnected from him, but money, according to the unwritten gospel of the American Dream, is supposed ‘to make up for all we suffered and all we didn’t become’ (ibid.), and so Woody becomes fixated on the $1

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million he thinks he is owed and that will allow him to fulfil his dreams of owning a new truck. His quest for the money embodies his displaced desire for ‘something’ in a world that appears to offer him ‘nothing’. This point emerges from key moments in the film where the word ‘something’ surfaces: first, when Noelle, David’s estranged girlfriend, says to him, ‘Get married, break up, I don’t know. Let’s do both. Let’s just do something’; second, when David tells Ross that Woody ‘doesn’t need a nursing home . . . the guy just needs something to live for. That’s all this is about’; and finally, when Woody admits, ‘That money’s for you boys. I wanted to leave you something’ (emphasis added). These exchanges recall Berlant’s explanation that ‘[a] relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing . . . it might be a fantasy of the good life . . . they become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment [like Woody’s letter] actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’ (Berlant 2011: 1—emphasis added). Woody is caught in this trap between something and nothing, driven on by a fatuous desire derived from a deep cultural expectation to succeed and to leave your mark in the world. Of course, in the film Woody becomes a minor celebrity based only on the belief that he is a millionaire, a fact that ‘impedes’ his ‘aim’ by creating a narrative of achievement that he cannot live up to. Ironically, however, the process of trying to maintain this fantasy has the side effects of drawing him closer to his immediate family and permitting him (and us) to see others as the ‘vultures’ that Kate calls them at one point. The search for ‘something’, this cruel optimism, is part of the landscape of loss in this film; some humorous (Woody’s lost teeth and reward letter) and some existential (lost memories, relationships, time, love) and all of it pointing to the underlying concern with ‘restoring things lost or never had’ (Vann 2013). As the journey progresses and all that remains is the illusion of money, it becomes clear that loss and the restoration are more about the intangible ‘somethings’ money can’t buy, such as affective bonds between people and place, people and memory, people and others. To underpin this journey, Nebraska visualizes the landscape as panoramic lines stretching out across the Plains: highways, roads, fields, telegraph poles, power lines, irrigation ditches, and stark, seemingly endless horizons. The quest for the money seems to follow these lines, as if Woody could achieve his dreams simply by moving towards the promise of what his wife, Kate (June Squibb), calls ‘that cockamamie pot of gold’ and David a ‘stupid fantasy’. Payne nods here towards the history of western motion in search of other ‘pots of gold’, following the lines of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, which seem ironically echoed in Woody’s Sisyphean journey. Gradually, the lines and horizons that structure the film’s landscape, forming what Deleuze and Guattari would call a ‘striated space’ producing ‘order and succession’ and associated with a ‘distant vision’ (1996: 478, 493), are inter-

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rupted by more intimate ‘smooth spaces’ as Woody bonds with his sons and, through the growing influence of Kate, confronts the pain and loss of his past. Smooth space is ‘the space of the smallest deviation . . . a space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual space like Euclid’s striated space. . . . [It] is a field without conduits or channels . . . and can “be explored only by legwork”’ (ibid.: 371). A number of times, the film shows Woody walking or standing at the edges of the striated fields or roads, often urinating or looking out across the open spaces, while later we see him looking out from enclosed rooms through windows to similarly structured landscapes. The contrasts are startling and seem to emphasize Woody’s smallness in relation to the space of the West and perhaps, too, to its latent promise and mythic scope, its cruel optimism against which he is measured. Yet the film brings the audience to a contrary understanding by ‘remapping a map’ that diminishes the sweeping dreams and the mythic horizons, to instead revalue the ‘legwork’ and the close-at-hand where ‘locality is not delimited’ (ibid.: 383) but rather serves to remind us of what we had forgotten or, simply, never noticed or known. In Foucault’s words, this is ‘a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity . . . [constructed of] buried, subjugated knowledges’ set against the ‘tyranny of globalised discourses’ and made resonant through its resistance to ‘monotonous finality’ and its conscious assertion of ‘unpromising places . . . without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts’ (Foucault 1980: 82–83; Foucault 1993: 139). As Woody draws closer to his sons and wife through their sharing of ‘particular, local, regional knowledge’, the ‘unpromising places’ of Nebraska produce a regionality born of affective relations and intense recognition of Foucault’s ‘sentiments, love, conscience, instincts’. In a key scene that typifies this Foucauldian discovery, David visits the office of Hawthorne’s local newspaper and talks with the elderly editor Peg Nagy (Angela McEwan), who reveals her previous relationship with his father, as well as his significant Korean War record. In a telling comment, David says, ‘I thought he was just a mechanic’, revealing his limited knowledge of his own father’s life. Peg brings to light another history of Woody, a silent palimpsest of a singular life unbeknownst to his son: ‘Your dad was never much of a talker, and when he came back he hardly said a word. But always very kind. People took advantage of him. He couldn’t turn down a favor’. The script describes how ‘David looks at her with a puzzled expression’. The puzzle is to comprehend Woody as a complex human being rather than the father he had defined in his own mind; a man capable of fear, kindness, and sexual desire (‘I wouldn’t let him round the bases’, says Peg). In keeping with the film more generally, assumptions are continually undone and identities, of place and people, ‘unmoored’ by surprising discoveries and nuanced shifts in tone and attitude, functioning, as Spivak puts it, ‘to rid the mind of the narrowness of believing

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in one thing and not in other things’ (Spivak 2008: 94). Two other scenes, on either side of this one, demonstrate this process of ‘unmooring’ well, emphasising straight-talking Kate as an agent of ‘subjugated knowledges’ via her unsentimental local history, revealing, at the Hawthorne cemetery, details that deepen our critical understanding of family, community, and region, plunging us into the ‘smooth spaces’ of regionality. Thus, she explains that Woody’s sister was a ‘whore’ and a ‘slut’ his mother had not ‘any favors in the looks department’ his brother died, aged two, of scarlet fever and local man Keith White, according to Kate, ‘wanted in my pants’. The second scene finds the family looking over Woody’s old abandoned house, walking from room to room as a whole history emerges within the ruined remnants of the past: of how his father built the house, where his brother died, and of a resilient barn still standing outside. In Dylan Trigg’s words, this is a ‘location of memory, where trauma took place and continues to be inextricably bound with that location in both an affective and evidential manner’ (Trigg 2012: 262). In these ruins, Woody’s many pasts are seen as the haunting of his present and of what he has become; of the pain and loss and anger he feels. The camera focuses on the barn being looked at by Woody through a transition shot that moves as if through time to show Woody looking out across the field. The script is very specific: ‘Woody stands alone at the edge of a field, lost in thought. David approaches but stops just behind Woody, allowing his father a moment’. The affective dimension of this sequence is critical, for it uses the transition to suggest Woody’s inner recognition of the weight of the past, of his inheritance from his own father, and in turn of what he will pass on to his children. It reminds us of Ben Anderson’s point that affects ‘are about what a body may be able to do in any given situation, in addition to what it currently is doing and has done’ (Anderson 2014: 10). When David asks him if he ever wanted to farm like his father, Woody resorts to his stoic, detached self, snapping back from being ‘lost in thought’ to reply ‘I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter’. But he has remembered and it does matter in the context of the film, for he has inadvertently immersed David in an oblique but significant education about region, family, nostalgia, and the dangers of sentimentality through which their relations and those with others will, inevitably, change. As the film concludes, despite Woody’s realization that he is not a millionaire, David allows him an opportunity to drive a new truck through Hawthorne to impress his old friends, hold on to his dignity, and achieve ‘something’ that they will understand. Earlier in the film, in David’s apartment, there is a news report on Tiger Woods in which he explains, ‘My dad has always taught me these words: care and share’. Ironically, Woody’s journey has perhaps, as I suggested above, if nothing else, followed a similar path, becoming a story about caring and sharing, about gestures of love and empathy, and seeing how these are elements in a fuller comprehension of

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regionality—of living with others in place and, through these processes, producing and reproducing place. As Woody drives the truck, he gives his son a look, a moment of intimate respect, understanding, and love, that marks the culmination of the film’s affective movement that has shown us the imperfections of life, the deep histories of pain, and the consequences of personal and cultural actions. In this glance, which is way more important than being ‘something’, and in this fleeting moment, despite the stubborn, awkward, and flawed reality of Woody throughout the film, we come to some mutual sense of vulnerability and loss, sensing in him ourselves, in his family history traces of our own, and, as a consequence, through this relationality, in Butler’s powerful words, move ‘beyond ourselves’ and become ‘implicated in lives that are not our own’ (Butler 2006: 28). I see in these deeply affected and affecting conclusions a version of regionality as ‘relationality’ (ibid.: 24), moving us beyond ourselves, beyond the myths and the suppositions of the nation, through and beyond the inward and the ‘limited local’, towards something dispossessed of these ghosts and more able to connect lives together in new, different, and better stories, and ‘maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are’ (ibid.: 22). Through our encounters with the intimate textures of Woody’s life, the film moves beyond his experiences alone in ways that help us understand Sara Ahmed’s point that ‘the personal is complicated, and mediated by relations that make any person embody more than the personal, and the personal embody more than the person’ (Ahmed 2004: 198). Woody’s affective journey is more than personal, and through its process ‘the systematic nature of their [affects’] effects’ are revealed (ibid.). To recall the scene at Mount Rushmore earlier in the film, what Payne has created is a different kind of monument, one closer to that defined by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘always in the process of becoming, like those tumuli to which each traveller adds a stone’, for what it promises is ‘immanent’ in ‘the new bonds it installs between people’, however temporary (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 177). With this in mind, and thinking of the different ways in which Woody and David Grant learn from each other and ultimately ‘grant’ each other futures beyond the ending of the film, the last words in the script are both momentous, moving, and relevant to this sense of immanence: ‘he [Woody] and David exchange places’. 4: CONCLUSION: REMAPPING A MAP Derek McCormack writes that ‘[a]ffect is better conceived of as a distributed and diffuse field of intensities, circulating within but also moving beyond

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and around bodies’ (McCormack 2013: 3). As bodies move and collide in Nebraska with other bodies (in the widest sense), it ‘generates disturbances and perturbations that transform the intensity and reach of this field’ (ibid.) in unpredictable and, therefore, creative as well as destructive ways. The process generates ‘affective spaces’ (ibid.), like the sense of regionality I am interested in exploring in this book, ‘whose qualities and consistencies are vague but sensed . . . as a distinctive affective tonality, mood, or atmosphere’ (ibid.). This emergence of affective spaces can indeed be accidental as part of the circulation of what Stewart calls ‘ordinary affects’, as bodies and spaces interact, influence, enhance, and commingle. As Anderson puts it, Life is made up of innumerable encounters across and between different types of bodies. . . . Something of the past persists in an encounter, any encounter contains reference to past encounters, and encounters are made through accumulated relations, dispositions and habits. Encounters also involve differences, in that as bodies come together in encounters life is opened up to what is not yet determined or is to be determined. As patterns of repetition and difference, what happens in an encounter is never completely foreclosed. (Anderson 2014: 82)

In other words, this is a relational process, ‘always in the process of moving on and arriving’, as McCormack puts it, whereby regionalism becomes regionality through its encounters—‘the fugitive processuality of spacetimes’ defined as ‘a nexus of ongoing relations rather than something concrete existing in advance of these relations’ (McCormack 2013: 35), or what Massumi terms ‘a relational nexus’ (Massumi 2015: 50). Following Highmore, one might see regionalities, therefore, as ‘intricate and textured’ like ‘microregions: a garden, a shop, a kitchen. Within these regions (and outside of them too) are worlds of regions interlacing, conflicting, connecting: a palimpsest of religious regions and language regions; of family regions and food regions; of actual regions and imagined ones. These are the geographies of daily life and the theatres of flesh and psyche mapped as a complex poetics’ (Highmore 2013: 111). The chapters that follow explore affective critical regionalities generated, in different ways, through bodies set in motion and traced through aesthetic forms (poetry, fiction, memoir, theory), which in turn produce new encounters, intensities, sparks of knowledge, doubts, and questions as we read or engage with these movements. We are affected by the energetic challenges produced through such encounters and through our contact or collision with these affects, which may add to the active process itself.

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NOTES 1. Alofsin was an assistant to Alexander Tzonis and co-authored the essay ‘The Question of Regionalism’ with Tzonis and Lefaivre in 1981 in M. Andtritzky, L. Burckhardt and O. Hoffmann (eds.), Fur eine ndere Architektur, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1981), 121–34. 2. Presence here chimes with our discussion of ‘active presence’ throughout this book and to Henri Lefebvre’s use of the word to describe rhythm. See Lefebvre, 2014. 3. One thinks here of architecture as akin to Whitehead’s notion of ‘actual entities’ in a constant process of building, growing, attaching, dissolving, and redeveloping. 4. Butler has expressed her admiration for the work of Alfred North Whitehead, and her work has been much discussed in relation to his own philosophy—see Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Deena Lin (eds.), Butler on Whitehead (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), for detailed discussions. 5. See Stephen Tatum and Nathaniel Lewis, Morta Las Vegas (forthcoming), where they argue that Las Vegas is a ‘nodal point’ in a ‘postregional space of flows . . . a “global network of local places”’. 6. See chapter 4 on Kathleen Stewart for more on this work. 7. See the later discussion of ‘Dirty Realism’ in the chapter on Willy Vlautin. Jameson also equated dirty realism with critical regionalism in Seeds of Time. 8. ‘Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap’ (Whitehead 1979: 4—emphasis added). 9. In Book Forum (online), Hansen said: ‘Part of it was that I thought the western seemed loaded with potential to tell us who we are now but had fallen on hard times with its melodrama and clichés of character and plot. I hoped to take the typical outlaw narratives as seriously as Shakespeare took Holinshed’s Chronicles and to find in the West of the nineteenth century some genetic markers for our present condition’. Kera Bolonik, June/July/August 2008, ‘Jesuits and Jesse James’. http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2463. Accessed 12 June 2014. 10. Rebecca Solnit (see chapter 5) writes of ‘the hope that the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes award will come to you, that the American dream will come true.’ Solnit 2004: 13. 11. It was filmed in fall 2012, mostly in small towns around Norfolk, including Plainview, Stanton, Hooper, Osmond, Elgin, Lyons, and Battle Creek. The film, for me, has a strong western feeling. An omitted scene has a particular western aspect: ‘They used to have a big sign with a great big cowboy on it. Must have been thirty foot tall’. David looks at the motel. Trees grow out of the windows. ‘When I was a boy, my brothers and I always wanted to come by and see the big cowboy. Real big cowboy’. Is that him? David points to a rusted sign for the RUSTLER ROOST lying amid tall weeds. The big cowboy with the buckshot-pummeled face is no more than ten feet tall. Woody replies, ‘Seemed bigger then’. http://www. paramountguilds.com/pdf/nebraska_screenplay.pdf. Accessed 12 June 2014. 12. These comments connect this discussion to a number of other texts in the book in which the ‘aerial’ view is at odds with the ground-level or local details that are too often omitted or disregarded (see chapter 3 on Waldie). 13. Payne’s film seems constantly in dialogue with Springsteen’s album, from the echo of the black-and-white cover photograph by David Michael Kennedy to its themes of loss, disappointment, families, fathers and sons, and the general air of hauntedness that runs across both works. For example, in one of Springsteen’s key songs, ‘Used Car’, is the line ‘Now mister the day the lottery I win I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again’, providing a perfect match with Woody’s fantasy of becoming a millionaire via the sweepstakes letter he is sent and the desire to buy a new truck as a mark of his success.

Chapter Two

Charles Olson ‘The Motion Which We Call Life’

1: COMING INTO REGION Having examined in the preceding chapters the ways in which critical regionalism has been debated and expanded in recent years, I wish to turn to Charles Olson’s writings as an example of nonlinear developments of critical regionality stretching back to the immediate postwar period. To maintain the particular focus of this book as a whole, I situate Olson’s interests in place, region, and world through his fascination for the American West because, as George Butterick explains, in 1945 ‘Olson had proposed a long poem for himself to be titled, simply, West—meaning the entire Western world of which the American West was an imaginative and geographic culmination’ (Butterick 1992: xx). However, in the same notebook, a few entries later, Olson shifted his focus to another book project on Gloucester, Massachusetts. This dual interest of the West and the local study of the town of Gloucester (that would later emerge as his The Maximus Poems) reveals Olson’s interest in both regional local details and their constant interchange with the wider world. In a 1946 letter to Ruth Benedict, he expressed this exchange in terms echoing Frampton’s critical regionalism as both universal and local, writing ‘that the job now, is to be at once archaic and culturewise . . . they are indivisible’ (in Alcalay 2013: 68). Such relations were always problematic for Olson, and his exploration of them refused to fall within the prescribed lines of Western metaphysics, geometries, or cartographies because in his mind they seemed interlinked, ‘indivisible’, despite conventional attempts to separate them as a means of containment and control. Olson sought instead an alternative method emerging through his sense 55

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of a fundamental ‘post-modern’ paradox: ‘information overload on the one hand, and containment—excluded areas—on the other’ (ibid.: 69). To be ‘at once archaic and culture-wise’ alters our sense of time and place, seeing the coexistences of things, of histories and lives bound up together, interrelated and resistant to an ‘information overload’ that serves to restrict rather than enrich existence. The ‘excluded areas’ Alcalay mentions are those minor, small-scale and local knowledges that enable a reshaping of experience, and which he links to broader movements of decolonization across the globe where one can see an ‘activation of the past in new contexts’ (ibid.: 78). Olson is a ‘decolonizer’ of established, entrenched views of history and culture, of the contained and yet overloaded world of postwar America, which as Amiri Baraka explained was a ‘question of putting the hinge back on the door . . . trying to find out what had been hidden from us by the emergence of this new one-sided society’ (in Ferrini 2007). These issues for Olson, as for this book, indicate the complex interchange whereby the local and the global, small and large, inside and outside, near and far refuse to be separated because they function as interconnected parts in a complex nexus of region and world. As William Carlos Williams put it in Paterson, it is ‘an interpenetration, both ways’ (Williams 1963: 3). In 1947–1948, Olson planned another book related to the West called Red, White and Black, receiving a Guggenheim grant for the project dealing with the interactions of natives, settlers, and Africans as shapers of the West and of the United States more generally. Although it was never completed, many of its ideas and elements remain as traces in his poetry and prose, such as his interest in Cabeza de Vaca, the Donner Party, the gold rush, or essays on Billy the Kid and the Sutter-Marshall Lease. What interests me here is how we might reclaim and ‘reassemble’ Olson’s thoughts on region and West as one tentative framing of affective critical regionality. These are present, too, in Call Me Ishmael’s famous statement: ‘I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman’s): exploration’ (Olson 1967: 15). Specifically, his essay on Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato states that ‘we require mapping. By topological law that the proximate: a microcosm is literally as absolute as the other one, and, in fact that something like ripples’ (Olson 1974: 53), underscoring Olson’s need to ‘map’ in unconventional ways the proximate and the microcosmic, like the specificities of the West or his home in Gloucester, as ‘ripples’ moving outward and back from this focal centre. This ‘attending with complete attention’ (ibid.: 52) is exactly what he brings to his place-studies of Gloucester, and that had, it seems, been part of his proposed work on the regional West. Bollobas describes this quality of attention as critical to Olson’s work:

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Attention, ‘the source of our very existence as human beings,’ makes subject and the world coincide. . . . Life only happens when one is interested, concerned, open to experience, in a condition of alertness. . . . In other words, only concern, attention, interest, a turning toward the world can make life happen, or bring about events. And the world lying around us can only be known and understood compassionately, through this attentive concern. (Bollobas 1992: 40—emphasis added)

This turning toward the world through concern, attention, interest is evident in Olson’s relational mapping of the local within the global, so that the smallest things tell larger stories: of conquest, trade, settlement, and power. Ed Dorn referred to ‘a really dangerous demand on attentiveness’ running through Olson’s work: ‘[I]t was all attention, that kind of local, the public record . . . the exhortation to be beyond your poetry’ (in Alcalay 2013: 2015). Thus, Olson rejects comparison, one thing to another, for this diminishes both and removes the thing (‘proximities’) from our direct and immediate experience of it denying the dynamic, affective relations between things in the world, replacing energy with the ‘suck of symbol’ rather than its underlying forces (Olson 1966: 61). In his 1950 essay ‘Projective Verse’, Olson wrote of poetry breaking ‘closed form’ through its projective/projectile qualities, its inward-outward flows as ‘energy transferred’ from world to poet to poem ‘all the way over to, the Reader’ (ibid.: 16). 1 Demonstrating his interest in the work of Whitehead’s ‘process philosophy’, discussed in earlier chapters, poetry is processual, ‘from the smallest particle’ (the syllable) ‘where it is least careless—and least logical’ outward: ‘For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance’ (ibid.: 17–18). Like the image of the dance, the syllable moves and connects to the line of the poem, which itself emerges from ‘breath, from the breathing’ as a bodily action which Olson also sees as ‘the WORK’ undertaken not to produce a simple outcome but as the performative presence in ‘the FIELD’ of composition (ibid.: 19). The poem-as-field alters our perspective, becoming about the elements or ‘objects’ with their ‘relations to each other’ as ‘participants in the kinetic’, ‘creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as those other objects create what we know as the world’ (ibid.: 20). This dynamic notion of the molecular poetic ‘field’ and of words and breaths as units of energy colliding as ‘actual entities’ of creation, creativity, and perishing perform Whitehead’s Process and Reality and simultaneously activate regionality as an in-gathering and dispersal of energies, ideas, and complex processes of connection. Lytle Shaw describes this as a process that ‘emptied out sequence and progress’, motions associated closely with linearity, coloniality, and capitalism and produced alternatively ‘a range of thick presents or instances of becoming’ (Shaw 2013: 48). Thus, within Olson’s poetic ‘collisions’, there is a deliberate ‘thickness’ whereby open clauses replace finished concepts or statements creating ‘a space of both conceptual and bodily libera-

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tion’ through which ‘new quasi-epiphanic insights . . . emerge . . . as sudden, almost physical sensations, derailing and suspending narrative’ (ibid.: 49). Although defining Olson’s poetic unit, Bram’s words also provide a provocative understanding of regionality: ‘a process, an energy, a dance . . . a field of tensions stemming from the elements participating in it, a field reenacted by the reader’ (Bram 2004: 23). Similarly, regionality is living, organic, mobile: a multiplicity within unity, echoing the epigraph to The Maximus Poems, ‘All my life I’ve heard one makes many’ (Olson 1983: n.p.). Therefore, Olson rejects any ‘ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem’ in his effort to convey ‘objects in field . . . a series of tensions’ coming ‘into being’ (Olson 1966: 20); however, in so doing, he recognizes humanity as just one of the objects in the field rather than its superior. Projective poetry for Olson ‘leads to dimensions larger than the man . . . to take its place alongside the things of nature’ as part of the field or the process of regionality as it incorporates and activates the local/global or micro/macro (ibid.: 25). Consequently, Olson resists the Greeks’ system of logic and classification and with it the reduction, as he would see it, of the complex, moving world into its representation by image or metaphor (Plato’s ‘world of Ideas, of forms’; ibid.: 55), and, likewise, refused Cartesian dualism as non-projective and so removing the energy of things as they exist in the world. 2 The ‘phenomenal’ is what he seeks; ‘the going-on’ as the body (‘organism’) in the world, rather than ‘a separating out’ into generalities which only acts as a ‘stopping’ (ibid.: 54, 55) of Whitehead’s process. Olson’s relevance to this book, is this initial remapping of regionality by replacing ‘comparison’, ‘symbology’, ‘description’, and expressing life as something else, with ‘what really matters: that a thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more important fact, its self-existence, without reference to any other thing, in short, the very character of it which calls our attention to it, its particularity’ (ibid.: 56). Thus, place or region in Olson’s thought, as in Whitehead, is non-representational, as discussed earlier, becoming instead an experienced field of energies and objects projected outward in their raw particularity through its kinetic poetics. There must be a way of expression . . . a way which is not divisive as all the tag ends and upendings of the Greek way are. There must be a way which bears in instead of away, which meets head on what goes on each split second, a way which does not—in order to define—prevent, deter, distract, and so cease the act of, discovering. (ibid.: 56)

The question became, ‘Can one restate man in any way to repossess him of his dynamic?’ despite this ‘transcendent world of forms’ that seems only to remove humanity from its connections with region (ibid.: 59, 61). The challenge is clear because ‘[t]he process of image . . . cannot be understood by

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separation from the stuff it works on’, which is region-world relations (ibid.: 61). Thus, the form of writing, of poetic expression ‘here’, cannot, therefore, be isolated from the content of the world and everything ‘out there’. If the only way to describe or measure the world is ‘a stopping of its motion’, then too much of the reality of existence, of ‘human being’, is lost in this exchange (ibid.). Olson sums it up as, ‘Art does not seek to describe but to enact’ the dynamics of being-in-the-world, comprehending ‘his own process as intact, from outside, by way of the skin, in, and by his own powers of conversion, out again’ (ibid.). The skin, therefore, to Olson is ‘both the boundary and the door, both in and out’ (Olson 1970: 32). Again, this relates closely to his reading of Whitehead, whose worldview shares much with Olson’s position: ‘Reality is . . . a weave of mutually related and dependent events, “penetrating” each other, or “prehending” and “prehended”’ (Bram 2004: 31). Olson’s ‘Human Universe’ echoes Whitehead’s ideas and why he felt the latter was ‘getting the universe in (as against man alone’—deliberately leaving the parenthesis open to project us forward beyond ‘man alone’ to the nexus of connections he is a part of. The poetic unit is a ‘full circuit’ of dynamic, kinetic flows through the outside world as a process in and then out of the human, then in turn back into the world (as others, objects, ‘society’). As Olson put it, ‘The meeting edge of man and the world is also his cutting edge’, his body and skin are vital points of contact, where he is most ‘responsible to more than himself’ and where, as soon as this responsibility is distorted, the external world is treated differently, becoming ‘not part of his own process’ and consequently allowing man to ‘use it otherwise’ (Olson 1966: 62). Clearly this is an ecological sense of place relations—‘when he turns against her [place-world] he turns it against himself’ (ibid.). The influence of Whitehead’s ‘process’ philosophy is apparent here, emphasizing ‘the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of “actual entities”’ and ‘the appropriation of the dead by the living . . . whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming’ (Whitehead 1970: xiii–xiv). Olson’s perceptions of history, space, and the body ‘enacted and performed’ (Shaw 2013: 49) these ‘living immediacies’, projecting a form of regionality in all its layered and relational complexity. In ‘A Later Note on Letter #15’, Olson refers to Whitehead directly as the man who ‘cleared out the gunk / by getting the universe in’, by connecting the local to the wider world and seeing that ‘no event / is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal event’ (Olson 1983: 249). In the same poem, appropriately, he also redefines history as a verb ‘’istorin’’, ‘to find out for yourself’ (ibid.). It is this combination of attention, extension, and experience that encapsulates Olson’s poetics as a process, ‘the act of an organism . . . a real event in the world, as ritual and story, as creation and construction, as multiplicity within unity’ (Bram 2004: 12).

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Olson wrote of these tensions between the local and the global, ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, when he contrasted the work of William Carlos Williams to that of Ezra Pound in the Mayan Letters (1953). He sees the ‘ego’ or overpowering mind of Pound in The Cantos as overriding historical time and chronology until they ‘exist . . . in an eternal present’ whereby ‘Pound moved perilously close to antiquarianism . . . [using] the past as a stick to beat the shabby and unruly present’ (von Hallberg 1978: 47, 19). In contrast, Williams’s Paterson is not driven by ego or mind, but created ‘an emotional system . . . capable of extensions & comprehensions’ [sic] whereas Pound’s ego-system ‘is not’ (Olson 1966: 82). Williams’s work ‘encompasses so much that is not Williams, so much of Paterson, New Jersey’ (von Hallberg 1974: 24—emphasis added), and it was this regionality that Olson viewed as a counterbalance to Pound’s single-mindedness. For Olson, ‘Williams is like Melville, a man who registers the goings-on of all of the human beings he lives among. He sees charge in them, worth in their fires, also a fire his own burns in, as against Ezra Pound, with that selection out of, that “the light in the conversations of—the letters of—the intelligent ones,” or at least the literate ones’ (Olson 1997: 115). This language emphasizes Olson’s appreciation of regionality as the ‘goings-on of all of the human beings he lives among . . . [the] charge in them’; an affective, active, and processive gathering-up of energies, intensities, and relations that constitute this sense of the active presence of region rather than represented through ‘the conversations of . . . the intelligent ones’. As Creeley wrote, Williams ‘does not limit the context of writing to an assumption of understanding—or, better, it attains a way of writing that feels as it goes as well as sees’ (in Olson 1966: 6). 3 This feeling/seeing process adds an affective quality that appealed to Olson’s attempt to develop a phenomenological approach to ‘’istorin’’, achieving a fuller and truer sense of place-as-process evolving from Whitehead’s critique of ‘simple location’: As soon as you have settled . . . what you mean by a definite place in spacetime, you can adequately state the relation of a particular material body to space-time by saying that it is just there, in that place; and, so far as simple location is concerned, there is nothing more to be said on the subject. (Whitehead 1975: 66)

This notion of ‘simple location’, as we have seen in previous chapters, ‘does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time’ (ibid.) and is, as a result, ‘settled’ and unrelational, with no perspective of other histories or futures. As James Williams explained, ‘any such settled point . . . necessarily closes off an endless creative interaction with processes’, when what is required is ‘a deep historical sense and an imagination that

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searches to introduce novelty rather than mere repetition’ (Williams 2008: 89). Appropriately, within the context of Affective Critical Regionality, Whitehead preferred to use the term ‘region’ instead of ‘place’, which, as Casey suggests, was most likely because of the ‘danger’ of place becoming too often a ‘site’ or ‘place as seen through the reducing glass of simple location’ (Casey 1998: 212). Therefore, the term ‘region’ (rather like Olson’s twist of history to ‘’istorin’’) enables a different, deeper perspective defining place as always moving, layered, and relational, as verb not noun, as an active ‘regioning’, of ‘deep historical sense and . . . imagination’. Olson admired Whitehead’s awareness of place as active, affective region, where things were connected and interlaced so that the ‘participant’s body is not a mere mechanism for registering sensations but an active participant in the scene of perception . . . from a certain place’ (Casey 1998: 213). The body’s complex relations to self, others, objects, and world, is itself ‘implaced’, thereby refuting simple location ‘since it takes us out of ourselves and into the universe at large’ (ibid.) and, in Whitehead’s own words, suggests ‘everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world’ (Whitehead 1975: 114–15). This is like Olson’s ‘Figure of Outward’ in The Maximus Poems, whose body, rooted in Gloucester, is also routed in the world out there. As Robin Blaser explains, discussing Olson’s annotations to Process and Reality, ‘In the same section of Whitehead, where he remarks on Bergson’s “charge that the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe,’ that is to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyze the world in terms of static categories,” Olson underlines and dates it 1959’ (Blaser 2006—with Olson’s underlined emphasis). Simple locations are just such ‘static categories’, none of which interested Olson or Whitehead because ‘[t]he problem was to make space alive in time by image’ (ibid.). Above all, it was William Carlos Williams’s delving into regionality that excited Olson, a point emphasized to Cid Corman, ‘bill gave us the lead on the LOCAL’ (in von Hallberg 1978: 57—emphasis added), and it was this he took from Paterson while refusing localism with its negative, sentimental ‘popular nostalgia for village life’ (ibid.: 58). Gloucester, he wrote, ‘can know polis / not as localism, not that mu-sick’ (Olson 1983: 14). Localism’s ‘bigotries’ relate here to forms of mediated, commercial imagery (‘the trick of / corporations, newspapers, slick magazines, movie houses . . . entertainers, sellers’) peddling a cosy version of prepackaged imagery, epitomized by Olson’s use of the word ‘mu-sick’ with its multiple connotations of saying something sick; a sick story or word coming from a sick mouth (Old English ‘mu’—‘mouth’) and more obviously its echo of ‘muzak’, a form of bland, mechanized background music (von Hallberg 1978: 58). 4 In keeping with his

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processive and projective sense of place, Olson’s local is always connected to ‘the Figure of Outward’, to its wider dimensions as a dynamic constituent of the global, for as he explained in The Special View of History, ‘History is the new localism, a polis to replace the one which was lost. . . . Man is estranged from that which he is most familiar’ (Olson 1970: 25). In The Maximus Poems, Olson writes against any nostalgic return to an ideal polis, understanding that the region is, by nature, in motion since ‘I’d not urge anyone back. Back is no value as better. . . . Back is only for those who do not move ’ (Olson 1983: 26). The small size of the Greek polis appealed to Olson’s sense of human community within which individuals interact in mutual support and care, providing a microcosm, an entire world made up of actual entities. The polis, too, shares something with Whitehead’s ‘society’ as ‘the patterned intertwining of various nexũs with markedly diverse defining characteristics’ (Whitehead 1979: 157), a sociopolitical system where the safeguarding of multiplicity enables unity. Polis was ‘the living context of a place and its location in a more collective, plural, geographical history’ (Alcalay 2013: 105). Ultimately, Olson proceeded from both Pound and Williams, the ‘halves’ he calls them, from Pound’s refusal of linear chronology for a layering of complex histories beyond time and Williams’s explorations in regionality and his sense of the actual living place of Paterson’s ‘emotional system’. Together they contribute to, though never define, Olson’s emergent writing of regional worlds, his Gloucester—‘o tansy city, root city let them not make you as the nation is’ (Olson 1983: 15). As Creeley put it, ‘[T]he world is not separable, and we are in it’, and all spacetimes coexist as ‘each moment is evidence of its own content, and all that is met with in it, is as present as anything else’ (in Olson 1966: 9). So in Olson’s writing, ‘the particular experience of any possibility in life’ is uppermost (ibid.) and alongside what he took from Williams’s mosaic of place and Pound’s bold, sweeping gestures, he forged his own approach to the local as this developing sense of regionality learnt and developed through his imaginative reading of and response to Whitehead. 2: AS MUCH A WESTERN AS WHY NOT: OLSON’S WEST Having suggested some of the key influences upon Olson’s regionality and how these translated into his own unique development of the implaced body and polis, I want to go a step further and reclaim his work to an understanding of the American West. He wrote, for example, that ‘the Continental Shelf / was Europe’s / first West’ (Olson 1983: 128), referring to the Atlantic fisheries and the Norse in Vinland as exploiters of New World nature, and in Call Me Ishmael he wrote of ‘the Pacific as part of our geography, another

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West, prefigured in the Plains, antithetical’ (Olson 1967: 13). This geographical West is also associated with forms of exploitation, such as the Donner Party searching for fortunes in the gold rush of the West, or translated into Ahab’s imperialist gaze, his ‘Roman feeling about the world’ (ibid.: 73). For Olson, Gloucester, this small town on the edge of ocean and frontier, was determined by ‘the motion / (the Westward motion)’ (Olson 1983: 125) and, accordingly, was like ‘Dodge City’, ‘a cowtown from the roar / of men after fish’ (von Hallberg 1978: 128; Olson 1983: 116). This ‘motion’ created a nexus in Olson’s work, ‘as much a Western as why not’ (Olson 1983: 116); a ‘Western’ that never materialized as the intended book but whose filament rhizomatically informs much of his interest in the imbricated relations of place, region, nation, and world. In reading Process and Reality, as we have seen, Olson came across his use of the word ‘region’ to mean ‘the relata’ extensively connected or more simply, ‘the things that are connected’ (Whitehead 1979: 294), and this linked absolutely with his emergent notions of experiential projection and a human universe of related objects discussed in the first part of this chapter. In Olson’s view of Gloucester, things connect, multiply across time and space, like the interlinked circles Whitehead uses to diagram regional connectiveness (see ibid.: 295). ‘The relation of inclusion is transitive . . . asymmetrical’, Whitehead writes, and ‘[e]very region includes other regions’, so that should you ‘dissect’ a region, ‘a set of regions’ is revealed (ibid.: 296). So even when Olson is writing of his ‘polis’, Gloucester, he is simultaneously suggesting ‘other regions’, their histories and mythologies finding inference there. Every region, as Whitehead puts it, is an ‘intersect’ with other regions and with ‘extensive potentiality external to it’, while marked internally by ‘boundedness’ (ibid.: 296, 301). This tension in the complex geometries of Whitehead’s philosophy recalls Frampton’s ‘bounded fragment’ as a way of thinking of critical regionalism as a similar contest between ‘internal’ (local) and ‘external’ (global). Hence, ‘regioning’, defined in the introduction, is fundamental to Olson’s project, since, in Bram’s words, ‘[t]he polis must be as a “society” in a sense similar to this term in Whitehead: a nexus of actual entities in an order that characterizes their mutual relationships, with itself as its cause’ (Bram 2004: 19). In turn, these ‘societies’ are related to and depend upon others, realizing through Olson’s vision the sociopolitical and ethical implications of Whitehead’s cosmology as an entangled web of being and becoming as a form of interdependent regionality. ‘Identity grows when you are an actual part, when you are in actual contact with the space wherein you live and with other “subjects” living in this space: identity grows from the place and with it. It is not static and you have the power to shape it and shape the collective of which you are a part. Identity is a story and part of a story’ (ibid.: 121). Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of the organism’, which fascinated Olson, is played out through these relations; from ‘micro’ to ‘macro’, from space to body to

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polis, for these are the ever-connected actual entities that form ‘society’: ‘abstract space turns into place’, as lived experience shapes place and forms a ‘world’, ‘sustaining multiplicity and unity within a “world” that also sustains multiplicity and unity, besides other such “worlds” with which it comes into contact’ (ibid.: 122). As Whitehead wrote, as if defining Olson’s polis, ‘The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other’ (Whitehead 1975: 181). Recalling Olson’s ‘Human Universe’, the frontier and the West are present in his comment that ‘the meeting edge of man and the world is also his cutting edge’ (Olson 1966: 62), suggesting both the creative and destructive space of the frontier region where man, under Manifest Destiny, is most ‘responsible to more than himself’. Following Whitehead’s ideas, the ‘event’ of the West as regionality is made up of ‘actual entities’ all related and productive of other, new entities. The event has a past and a future, has ‘memories which are fused into its content’ (Whitehead 1975: 92), best seen as westward motion in Olson’s work through Homer, the Vikings, the conquistadores, Columbus, onward to the westward expansion of the frontier, across the continent to the Pacific and beyond. In Olson’s performance piece Apollonius of Tyana, for example, this movement is a central motif as its hero ‘takes on the known world’ travelling ‘through [what] is already the dispersed thing the West has been since’ (Olson 1966: 143, 144). The parallel between the Greeks and the western frontier was made by western historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote, ‘What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences . . . the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States’ (Turner 1961: 62). In Apollonius of Tyana, Olson questions this relentless movement westward, ‘not satisfied that the progress, the pushing out, the activity . . . all the expanding of the earth or the heavens (even into Heaven) is worth a thing, is worth a penny more than what we had already’ (Olson 1966: 144). The journey West with its ‘imaginative and geographic culmination’, began with rich promise, but was destined to end in disappointment (a vision he carried over to the United States itself), since ‘the newness / the first men knew was almost / from the start dirtied / by second comers’ (Olson 1983: 138–39). Olson’s America is a place of loss associated with westward movement, with ‘newness . . . dirtied by second comers’ and, as a consequence, he shared little of his father’s immigrant ‘sentimentality about the freedoms of this country’ (Olson 1997b: 220). With this in mind, he wrote, ‘We are the last “first” people. . . . We forget that. We act big, misuse our land, ourselves. We lose our own primary’ (Olson 1967: 18). Like Melville, Olson goes back to space ‘to probe and find man’, following the ‘pull to the origin of things’ and to understand this loss, ‘the lost part of America, the unfound present’ (ibid.: 18–19—emphasis added). What Olson saw in the West, and initially displaced onto ‘another West’, Melville’s ocean in Moby-Dick (‘the Plains

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repeated’), was ‘his people’s wrong, their guilt’ for having missed the opportunity of the ‘the first dream’ of a New World (ibid.: 16, 105, 15). Thus, the West haunts his work, shadows it as a troubling ‘silence’ of the unfound present, for as Olson puts it, ‘Space has a stubborn way of sticking to Americans, penetrating all the way in, accompanying them’ (ibid.: 106). Just as Melville confronted the Pacific, Olson indirectly projects onto this ‘other’ West all its component elements, struggles, and lessons: space, weight, potential, the past, the future, a ‘New History’, ‘search, the individual responsible to himself’, indeed, ‘the archetype of the West to follow’ (ibid.: 109). Above all, this journey West from the Pillars of Hercules ever onward, is the actual occasion of these many entities that end for Olson in the Pacific with Ahab and the White Whale and the vital knowledge of the ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’ [sic] (ibid.: 110). In this ‘dream’s death’ (ibid.: 110), the West and its terrible movement haunts with this ending, of the individual raised above the community, questing but detached from other entities and forgetting the multiplicity in favour only of the one. For Olson, this is the root of the loss, the breaking of the true process of region, of a positive ‘founded present’ connected to people and to place. In 1959, Olson wrote West, eventually published as a pamphlet in 1966 and opening with a statement: ‘I’ve been absorbed by the subject of America all my life. One piece of it has been what the enclosed hopes, in that sense, to set down’ (Olson 1969: n.p.). The ‘one piece’ is the long-held interest in the West as played out across history from ancient times to today, from Greece to the Pacific shore. He goes on to recall ‘playing it [the West] out as a child’, referring to ‘Indian wars’ and the ‘books of James Altschuler’ (in fact, Joseph A. Altsheler), who specialized in romanticized adventure stories of the Old West like The Hunters of the Hills (1916) and The Great Sioux Trail (1918) that Olson remembers acting out as a boy ‘on the foot of Fisher’s Hill’. He describes what he calls the three American stories: (i) ‘that which was 1st’, referring to the ‘discovery’ of America; (ii) ‘the one Cowpens actualized’, referring to the decisive 1781 battle in the Revolutionary War when the British army was defeated; and (iii) ‘and then the West’. At the end of this cryptic section, Olson articulates why the West absorbed him so much: ‘So I have here a much larger story than would appear’ (Olson 1969: n.p.). From the romance of adventure stories to the foundation narratives of America, Olson sees the significance of the West in them all and simultaneously understands ‘a much larger story’ stretching out from these openings and fragments. Here are the ‘actual entities’ that Whitehead saw as the building blocks of everything, the ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent’ (Whitehead 1979: 18), from Gloucester out, from the local and the particular onward, from the West beyond in the ‘extensive connection’ inherent in all regions (ibid.: 294–301). When Olson writes of what ‘I have here’, he refers both to this short introduction to West and, more significantly, to all

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the openings that are traced through the poems that follow, both in this short pamphlet as well as across The Maximus Poems more generally, where the idea of West is a constant. Typical of Olson’s style, as discussed earlier, these uses of ‘West’ are closer to what Shaw called ‘a world of independent clauses . . . a space of both conceptual and bodily liberation’ wherein each opening is ‘uncoupled from narrative completion, swirling in and out of connection with other clauses’ (Shaw 2013: 49, 52). Erin Manning writes of ‘relationscapes’ or ‘thoughts in motion’ (Manning 2012: 5), suggesting Olson’s rhizomatic regionality, which is both rooted (the poems in West begin with ‘as of Bozeman’) 5 and yet variant and routed, shifting its suggestive mappings across locations, ideas, and feelings: ‘a world of atomistic references embodied in disjunctive clauses’ (Shaw 2013: 53). In this, Olson shares much with Deleuze and Guattari, who preferred juxtaposing or superimposing layers in montage-forming complex, overlapping ‘routes’ through which ‘established strata start to shift, opening up new fault lines and possibilities, [and] through which older conceptual personae mutate and reappear in new guises as in what Foucault called Deleuze’s “philosophical theatre”’ (Rajchman 2000: 40). 6 These ideas, as I have discussed more fully in The Rhizomatic West, find a focus in their concept of the rhizome, articulating principles of multiplicity, signifying ‘diverse form’, ‘the best and the worst’, ‘a throng of dialects’, ‘connection and heterogeneity . . . [with] any point . . . connected to anything other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 7). In keeping with this discussion of Olson, this path is located most noticeably for Deleuze and Guattari in American art and literature: in Jackson Pollock, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Leslie Fiedler, and Carlos Castaneda. ‘In them’, they argue, ‘everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside. They create a new Earth’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 30, 36). One could easily add Olson to this list, for he shared many of their interests as writers, often knowing them, writing of them, or quoting them in his own works. One link across all of these figures is their understanding of the West’s geography and heft within American culture, that ‘the true East is in the West’, and how their experimental styles demonstrated that ‘frontiers [were] something to cross, to push back, to go beyond . . . [so that] becoming is geographical’ (ibid.: 37). Sounding remarkably like Olson in ‘Projective Verse’ when speaking of these American writers, Deleuze and Guattari write, they cry, ‘Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow it or create it, to the point of treachery’, and in so doing, offer an alternative to an essentialized, inwardlooking and rooted containment (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 186–87). This geography of becoming is present in Olson’s excursions westward—‘from

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everything I no longer am, yet am, / the slow westward motion of / more than I am’ (Olson 1983: 184). To read Olson’s regionality, therefore, is to experience it as questions, irritants, beauties, all encountered actively as projective (or ‘nomadic’) thoughts: ‘To make thought a nomadic power is not necessarily to move, but it is to shake the model of the state apparatus, the idol or image which weighs down thought, the monster squatting on it’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 32). The major language (its norms, assumptions, ways of being) are disrupted by such a process of challenge—a ‘foreigner in one’s own language’ (ibid.: 32–33)—making us perceive ‘everything at the same time’ like, Deleuze says, Fred Astaire dancing but ‘not 1,2,3, it is infinitely more detailed’ (ibid.: 33). Olson often referred to dance and the body in motion in his writings, calling Apollonius of Tyana ‘A Dance with Some Words, For Two Actors’, making Deleuze’s parallel with Astaire apposite in expressing a similar characteristic of the regionality of Gloucester and, by implication, the proposed, longer book on the West that Olson never wrote. As Sherman Paul put it, ‘The open or field poetics of “Projective Verse”—so much a matter of physiology, stance, and self-originating movement—is also a poetics of dance’ (Paul 1978: 628). In Nigel Thrift’s words, dance ‘engages the whole of the senses in bending time and space into new kinaesthetic shapes, taps into the long and variegated history of the unleashing of performance, leads us to understand movement as potential, challenges the privileging of meaning (especially by understanding the body as being expressive without being a signifier’ capable of ‘generating embodied expression and affect’ (Thrift 2008: 14, 139; see also 138–42). Thus, the sensuous, affective, and corporeal coalesce in our appreciation of how the body engages with and, more significantly, shapes or ‘makes’ place dynamically, as a process moving inward and outward. Apollonius of Tyana is a dance between man (Apollonius) and place (Tyana), between the traveller and his home, between, in more contemporary terms relevant to this book, the local and the global, particular and universal. As Olson expresses it throughout the play, Apollonius journeys outward and returns in a perpetual ‘dance’ with his origins, his locale, with empires, and exploitation of land, fluctuating between being ‘almost foolishly “local”, heavy with particulars’ and expansive in a ‘dance of the world’ (Olson 1966: 145, 144). One phrase sums up so much of Olson’s work (and the nature of this book, too) when he writes of this ‘dance of passage’ as ‘a wide investigation into the local, the occasional . . . to see clearly his place’ and concludes that ‘he and Tyana were bound together and that that binding was an image of health in the world’ (ibid.: 147, 145, 47). Of course, this performance piece is not about the West, but it is, I would argue, expressing critical regionality by stressing what elsewhere Olson stat-

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ed as ‘forever the geography / which leans in / on me’ (Olson 1983: 185). Place and person, mind and body are bound in a complex relationship (or ‘relationscape’) that works on all in different ways: Apollonius leaves home (like many westward travellers in Olson’s work, such as Ulysses) to learn and be challenged by the ‘known world’, but in turn, Tyana cannot remain fixed and defined as rooted place (‘a human being is stem’, Olson writes, ‘as place never is’ [ibid.: 149]). For ‘Tyana has been changed by Apollonius’ actions away from her: it is he, his demand on himself and on life, that has made his birthplace capable of verticality’ (ibid.: 148). That is, the deepest sense of things are as layered and routed, but only together, when gathered as actual entities, as person/place/memory/past/future/present—as regionality—do these ‘verticals’ intersect with the ‘horizontals’ creating ‘multiple planes’ to become ‘a dance of the sphere of subject and object’ that saves man from his ‘split’ (ibid.: 149). In The Special View of History, Olson equates ‘horizontals’ with ‘what happens in time . . . old history’ and contrasts it with the ‘vertical’: ‘I am alive, I am doing this’ (Olson 1970: 36–37). Thus the dance permits ‘THE RESTORATION OF THE LOCAL [sic]’ (Olson 1966: 153) projectively binding vertical and horizontal, mind and body, ‘stem’ and motion, past, present, and future into ‘a new sort of learning’ of the world (ibid.: 151), as Olson puts it. He used the word ‘proprioception’ to define an inner sense telling your body how it is located in space as a dynamic embodied activity rather than a ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ process. As Olson explained, ‘[A]nything, to get the body in’ (Olson 1974: 17). Borrowing Manning’s words in discussing dance, one might argue that Olson conjures up through Apollonius of Tyana ‘a sensing body in movement, a body that resists predefinition in terms of subjectivity or identity, a body that is involved in a reciprocal reaching-toward that in-gathers the world even as it worlds’ (Manning 2012: 6). ‘When we are no longer still, the world lives differently’, its elements shift and change as motion occurs (ibid.: 15). ‘There is no “body itself” here because the body is always more than “itself”, always reaching towards that which it is not yet’ (ibid.). Apollonius is ‘not yet’ defined by his adventures in the world or by his restless travelling, for Tyana pulls him back to the local and, in Manning’s words, ‘compel[s] recompositions’ so that ‘both body and space are experienced as alive with potential movement’ (ibid.). Thus, to return again, with these points in mind, to the pamphlet West, is to see Olson’s writing as ‘fluxes’ that ‘compel recompositions’ of how we think, know, and sense regionality; forming an ‘assemblage’ (or ‘nexus’), as a complex layering of the region West, not as a simple location but as ‘extensive connection’ and process, colliding atoms, shifting and moving, dancing: ‘The utterance is the product of an assemblage—which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events’ (Deleuze and Parnet

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2002: 51). For Olson, echoing Whitehead and Deleuze, region is an assemblage (‘assembláge’, Olson spells it), being both ‘historically’ present as inter-informing actualities (Red Cloud, Bozeman Trail, Donner Party, gold rush), alive in the everyday associations with friends (Robert Duncan, Hadley Drummond, Robin Blaser), and also there in the presence of geographical relations (Bozeman, Montana, Sacramento). After the section discussed above, West begins more formally with a beautiful sepia photograph of Chief Red Cloud (1822–1909), naming his various encounters with settlers and the army across the Bozeman Trail in Montana. But within this historical frame, the poem presents a set of questions and tasks that express Olson’s sense of ‘istorin’ as ‘to find out for yourself’: to discover more, research the details, know what is missing from established knowledge of the West. Thus he asks, for example, ‘[W]as the Bozeman Rd to the gold / fields of Montana?’ Its ‘Two Poems’ subtitled ‘(fr ‘West’ possibly)’, continue this fragmentary dialogue around Red Cloud, Custer, Crazy Horse, U. S. Grant, the Mountain Meadows Massacre 7, Drummond Hadley 8—all working within his matrix of ‘World Travelers of the late / New World, the assembláge / of Californiay’ (Olson 1969: n.p.). As always in Olson’s work, time and space coexist with past, present, and future all actively alive in the language itself, ‘between Sacramento / and the old old West’ or ‘between the West, and the Future’ (ibid.: n.p.). In Whitehead’s language, it is as if ‘no two actual entities are unrelated; each . . . “feels” every other actual entity . . . can prehend another positively or negatively: if positively, one actual entity transmits itself—and thereby extends its life—to another’ (von Hallberg 1978: 86). In the reader’s mind, engaging with Olson’s West (which is more than poetry) these actual entities form a ‘nexus’ or ‘network of prehensions to every other actual entity: the many are, in that sense, the one. . . . Each actual entity is completely open to the multiplicity of experience’ (ibid.), ‘Its “being” is constituted by its “becoming” . . . the “principle of process”’ (Whitehead 1979: 23). So rather than represent a fully formed West, Olson resists metaphors and similes that serve only to diminish the power of actual entities, producing ‘only a second-hand thing . . . filtered through and to some extent, no matter how precise and apt the similes and comparisons, distorted by language’ (von Hallberg 1978: 87), and opts instead for ‘nonrepresentational’ or ‘more-than-representational’ projective language, that conjures up fluid, active relationscapes, prehensions, and interconnections of the West’s regionality. As in Whitehead’s cosmogony, Olson’s actual entities relate to a greater reality (‘a much larger story’) or what the former calls ‘concrescence’, since ‘the actual world is a process, and . . . the process is the becoming of actual entities’ (Whitehead 1979: 7, 22). Echoing Olson’s epigraph to The Maximus Poems ‘one makes many’, Whitehead explains that in his speculative philosophy ‘The term “many”

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presupposes the term “one” and the term “one” presupposes the term “many”’ forming a kind of ‘disjunctive diversity’ of ‘beings’ where ‘universals’ and ‘particulars’ intersect (ibid.: 21, 48). For Whitehead, ‘reality . . . is a weave of mutually related and dependent events, “penetrating” each other, or “prehending” or “prehended”’ (Bram 2004: 31), and likewise, Olson’s poetic regionality, like West, resembles such a process brought to life as the reader encounters and ‘breathes’ it as an event on the page and in the air, ‘as an activity, a creation, an experience’ to be taken like a breath, bodily, and then passed on or exchanged (ibid.: 32). Whitehead explains this in a phrase that I take as central to the notion of regionality throughout this book: ‘The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. . . . In this sense, an organism is a nexus’ (Whitehead 1979: 214–15). Olson sums this up with his comment that ‘the motive, then, of reality, is process not goal’ (Olson 1970: 49). 3: GET TO THE OTHER SIDE: A BIBLIOGRAPHY ON AMERICA FOR ED DORN At the heart of this regionality as ‘an incompletion in process of production’ (many/one, particular/universal, local/global, centre/circumference) forming around Olson’s West is A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn delivered to his fellow poet at Black Mountain College in 1955 after he had requested some suggestions for reading ‘about the West’. His preliminary advice to Dorn on the subject of history was to ‘dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt [sic] that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it’ (Olson 1974: 11). This mirrors a letter sent by Olson to western historian Frederick Merk in 1953 enquiring about information on ‘Fishermen’s Field, Cape Ann’, ‘the very grounds I was raised on’, to enable him ‘to saturate myself on all the history of it which is known’ (in Bram 2004: 29). Thus, the sources and reference are central to the ‘event’ (a gathering of actual entities) of the West, for as a region it was always both experience and construction, real and imagined—known through others’ senses as well as one’s own: ‘the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials’ (Whitehead 1979: 22). The region becomes and takes shape as Olson writes it, drawing on sources and asides to expand it further through the reader’s creative journey, their potential experience of regioning. Thus Dorn was this work’s first reader, seeing unity in the multiplicity of Olson’s text, and being reassured that ‘the littlest is the same as the very big, if you look at it’ (Olson 1974: 12). As part of this excavation, Olson stresses ‘individual experience’ of ‘politics and economics’ and expresses his hate for ‘sociology’ as ‘average and

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statistic’, and like all ‘King Numbers’ it will ‘obscure how it is’ (ibid.: 3). Olson structures his Bibliography around an ‘axis’ of person/process/millennia/quantity at the centre of which is ‘the local’. Thus ‘the local loses quaintness’ through its various ‘tests’ as it comes into contact with other categories or entities rather than simply to be viewed within the ‘old axis of history as time’ (ibid.: 5), and in this regard, Olson compares Walter Prescott Webb’s Great Frontier and Great Plains. Accordingly, Webb’s Great Plains ‘is led back into the trap of history as time’ by concluding that the frontier ‘is done’ as a result of the ‘Metropolis’ (ibid.), a view of region Olson disapproves of as simplistic and linear producing a limiting view of the local and the regional. Subsequently, the goal he sets for Dorn is direct and capitalized: ‘“TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE”, IS THE ONLY MORAL ACT WHICH CAN POSSIBLY CORRECT THE WEST, AS EITHER GREEK OR U.S.’ (ibid.: 5). ‘To get to the other side’ of the ‘sentimental’ and the delimited local is the critical project for Olson, as it is in Affective Critical Regionality, and to do this he draws on his nexus of sources (person/process/millennia/quantity) to challenge the trapped, ‘regionalist’ histories of the West as inward looking and parochial. Thus, the Bibliography becomes a ‘millennial’ experience through broader eclectic texts of geography, migrations, ‘physiography’, indigenous cultures, empire, astronomy, and individuals like Red Cloud, William Carlos Williams, and even Rider Haggard. All this ‘widens out’ (ibid.: 5) and encourages us to understand Whitehead’s sense of process and connection as entities relate to each other as a living organism ‘whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself . . . as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves’ (Whitehead 1975: 181). All the readings suggested under ‘person’ in the Bibliography must, says Olson, sounding just like Whitehead, ‘TRANSFER TO LOCAL’ in order to show ‘the intimate connection between person-as-continuation-of-millennia’ through the ‘penetration-of-all-past-persons, places, things and actions-asdata (objects)’ (Olson 1974: 7). As Olson goes on to explain about this everwidening-out process of reading and studying, ‘& then, depending on subject, all over the place’ (ibid.: 12). Quoting Whitehead, Olson recommends specific studies of the ‘process’ of the West and its expansion, making sure to suggest both the United States and Greece as matched empires, alongside specific writers who become part of this unusual nexus, like western historian Frederick Merk, 9 Stanley Vestal’s Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns (1952) described as a ‘riproaring burg of the West . . . Hell on the Plains . . . Babylon of the Frontier’ (Vestal 1998: 2–3) alongside Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Bernard De Voto (‘who knows as much as any literary man abt America West’ [sic] [ibid.: 8]), and Homer. What Olson wants from history is ‘that exactitude of process known’ so that it is ‘the same thing as care of Swedish cabinet maker’ and it all moves towards provoking the question ‘HOW?’ covering ‘the dividing line

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between all that was from Grks . . . to what now is’ (ibid.). To know ‘America’, to know the West, or any specific region, involves a complex diagram, like the one Olson draws in the Bibliography; a perplexing new cartography of intersecting, overlapping lines of enquiry that resists hierarchy in favour of a nexus within which ‘the littlest is the same as the very big’, and where ‘the point is to get all that’s been said’ by oral history and many other sources (ibid.: 12). This means Olson looking beyond conventional history to environmental works, like Edgar Anderson’s Plants, Men, and Life (1967), and ‘such books on regions’, like Edwin Corle’s Desert Country (1941) or Carl O. Sauer’s geographic essays, alongside other sources that might throw light on regional complexity: ‘One can only hack away at it. And read between all lines’ (ibid.: 14). Olson’s processive history deliberately reads between all lines, ignoring the established, linear, subject/object principles in favour of something more multilayered, textured, and incomplete, recalling his underlining of Process and Reality of Bergson’s claim that humanity ‘tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyse the world in terms of static categories’, rather than Olson’s preference ‘to make space alive in time’ (Blaser 2006: 17). As an example of this reading ‘between all lines’, Olson’s advice to Dorn folds Whiteheadian principles with Sauer’s geography and finds, in the process, strange coherences. Thus, Sauer’s argument against conventional regional history and geography, which ‘relied on pre-planned organization, on methodologic unity, and on derived data rather than on experienced observation’, leading to ‘assemblages of industriously collected facts, taken at second hand’ (Sauer 1963: 398), sounds like just such an example of analyzing ‘the world in terms of static categories’ and doing away with its fluency. With echoes of chapter 1’s discussion of critical regionalism, regional work for Sauer was too often divorced from experience and tactility, and he advocated instead ‘field observation’ and academics who could ‘live on frontiers’ with other disciplines and show a willingness to ‘recognize forms that express function and process, to see problems implicit in location and areal extension, to think about joint or disjunct occurrence’ (ibid.: 398–400). Resembling Olson’s interest in ‘space alive in time’, Sauer’s work clearly promoted an affective critical geography: ‘Why can’t a geographer working on the Great Plains convey to the reader the feel of horizon, sky, air, and land’; ‘Why make our regional studies such wooden things which no one may read for the insight and pleasure they give?’ (ibid.: 403). These questions evolve a geography that understands the deep interactions of person and place across time, space, memory, and imagination: ‘A cultural landscape’, Sauer famously wrote, ‘is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium. The cultural landscape the result’ (ibid.: 343). To study such a geography, rather like Olson’s advice to Dorn about America, one has to be attentive and so establish ‘a critical system

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which embraces the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp in all of its meaning and colour the varied terrestrial scene’ (ibid.: 320). But within this system, Sauer, sounding like Whitehead, asserts that geography is living and changing: ‘The objects which exist together in the landscape exist in interrelation’ (ibid.: 321). It is about ‘areal reality and relation’, through which a region’s wholeness is mapped, and it cannot be understood by simply studying its ‘parts separately’ (ibid.: 321), for to do so is to reduce region to ‘simple location’. Of course, as I have indicated, like Merk, Olson never completed his proposed big book on the West and so it remains as ghostly fragments and traces scattered in essays and throughout his poetry. Somehow, however, what rises up from these interstitial texts is something both revealing and tantalizing, strangely in keeping with the regionality I am excavating in this book. Olson’s incomplete West is an example of ‘nonsimple location’, as Casey calls it, layered and embodied, with the body as ‘at once pivot and prism of its immediate environs’ (Casey 1998: 213, 215). It is actual and virtual, rooted and routed, always mobile: Regions possess their own concreteness, as we realize when we consider the specificity of regional landscape with which we are thoroughly familiar. . . . On the other hand, [they do not] serve as mere containers [of places]. . . . Regions are no more containerlike things than places are bare positions. Regions are forms of gathering, and in capacity they have the powers and virtues of their own, which are not foreign to the dynamisms of lived bodies that make possible the configurations of places. (Casey 2009: 73)

4: CONCLUSION: TWISTING THE PRISM In discussing Olson’s sense of regionality emerging out of his intense dialogues with Whitehead, Sauer, and other sources, one is constantly struck by this recognition of ‘forms of gathering’, and in so doing, to see in action his mantra ‘form is never more than an extension of content’. The ‘gathering’ of references, asides, fragments, and projectile practices always promises this accumulative affective regioning as an active and intense nexus, a concept summed up beautifully in John R. Stilgoe’s description: Knowing the streets . . . noticing the local environment is the prism through which anyone’s understanding of the cosmos is filtered. What I think Olson did that was spectacularly successful was twist the prism in his hands all the time and look through it toward the world from the vantage point in the local; the ward, the precinct, the corner of the street, his front steps and perhaps, above all, the window in his home that looked out over what many people would say was very ordinary . . . but for him was the threshold for the world. (in Ferrini 2007)

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In this, Olson circles us back to where this chapter began, with the local as an ‘actual entity’, ‘a microcosm . . . literally as absolute as the other one [macrocosm], and, in fact . . . something like ripples’; with Gloucester, Massachusetts, as the source for his prehensions of region as ‘an incompletion in process of production’ (Whitehead 1979: 214–15) bound in an intimate relationship to the world. ‘It is by reason of the body, with its miracle of order, that the treasures of the past environment are poured into the living occasion. . . . It receives from the past; it lives in the present’ (ibid.: 339). These ripples and connections create Olson’s process view of region poured into the living occasion of his poetics, and yet, simultaneously, moving ever outward, too, towards, as he put it in his pamphlet West, ‘a much larger story than would appear’. Deleuze once wrote that ‘[a] great book is always the inverse of another book that could only be written in the soul, with silence and blood’ (Deleuze 1998: 72) as if to suggest Olson’s great ghost-book of the West ‘written in the soul, with silence and blood’ folded across and inside everything he wrote. Similarly, in A Bibliography, Olson wrote that De Voto ‘should have written the unwritten book’ and Merk’s Land was ‘the unwritten book . . . I have been trying to get out of him for yrs’ (Olson 1974: 11, 13). These remarks signal the displaced reality of Olson’s own great unwritten book on the West, which nonetheless still remains like an absent presence reminding us, in Whitehead’s words, that ‘regions are the things which are connected’ (Whitehead 1979: 294) even when they are incomplete in themselves. What this chapter has shown are the ways in which Olson’s work can be seen to, in Stilgoe’s words, ‘twist the prism’ of place by attending to the body, the local, Polis, and community to provide a suggestive and complexly affective map of regionality. Perhaps in the end, as Rebecca Solnit has written, ‘[w]orldmaking is more like poetry and less like architecture’ (Solnit 1995: 325). NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1971: 74), writes, ‘Projective saying is poetry: the saying of the world and earth. . . . Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is . . . [it] brings the unsayable into the world’. 2. Deleuze shared this starting point, too: ‘I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of the negation’ (see Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 14). 3. Olson is reported to have read closely Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception— see Ann Charters 1968: 76. 4. The idea of ‘know polis not as localism’ will also apply in the chapter on D. J. Waldie, who has often referred to the Greek notion of polis in his work even though it explores the role of suburbia. As I explain later, his polis of Lakewood is not localism, either, but always already global. 5. The Bozeman Trail was an overland route connecting the gold rush territory of Montana to the Oregon Trail. In 1863, European Americans had blazed the Bozeman Trail through the

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heart of the traditional territory of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota. It was the shortest and easiest route from Fort Laramie and the Oregon Trail to the Montana gold fields. The United States named the war after Red Cloud, a prominent Oglala Lakota chief who led his followers in opposition to the presence of the U.S. military in the area. 6. Pierre Joris, ‘Where Is Olson Now?’ blog, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/ joris.pdf, ‘(( quick addendum: for me, however it is clear that the one thinker in Europe who without knowing Olson, expanded on Olsonian themes is Gilles Deleuze (w/ Félix Guattari)— especially starting with the 1973—3 years after Olson’s death—ANTI OEDIPUS and then with A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, a book I am certain Olson would have delighted in. Note the “nomad” theme that will come in later))’, written in Albany, 30 November 2005. 7. The Mountain Meadows massacre was a series of attacks on the Baker-Fancher emigrant wagon train in southern Utah. The attacks culminated on 11 September 1857, with the mass slaughter of most in the emigrant party by members of the Utah Territorial Militia from the Iron County district, together with some Paiute Native Americans. 8. ‘April, 1968: Olson makes a last visit to San Francisco, returning via Tucson as the guest of Drummond Hadley. He retreated into California’s Sierra Nevada with poet comrades Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Later, he and Snyder continued this quest in Mexico. It was there that Hadley began to seek what he refers to as “something we may have lost: knowledges that were the result of men and women living in vast expanses.”’ Alan Weisman, http://articles. latimes.com/1993-03-21/magazine/tm-13283_1_gray-ranch-nature-conservancy-new-mexico/ 2. 9. Olson had taken Merk’s ‘History 62 (Westward Movement)’ course at Harvard in 1937–1938.

Chapter Three

D. J. Waldie Suburban Regionality

1: ON GRAYWOOD AVENUE In section 49 of D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land, he describes his father’s death in the bathroom of their suburban house on Graywood Avenue, Lakewood, California. The description meditates on the door behind which he dies: ‘a well-made, wooden bathroom door’, ‘a three-panel door’ wherein ‘[e]ach panel is nearly square, twenty-one inches wide by nineteen inches high. From edge to edge, the door is twenty-eight inches wide’ (Waldie 1996: 24–5). This strangely unsettling juxtaposition of intense personal tragedy and extraordinary, material detail speaks to Waldie’s remarkably affective relationship with space and objects in space. We all live amid such quotidian relations bridging the gulf between the unnoticed ephemera of our ordinary lives and their intersection with such momentous events of intimacy and calamity, but too often they are simply overlooked. In such details, however, we uncover, I would suggest, what Kathleen Stewart calls ‘the charge of an unfolding’ (Stewart 2007: 19) as one experience or everyday event gives rise to a set of thoughts, feelings, and intensities that cannot be foreseen or fully defined. From the immediate and local material of the ordinary, therefore, potential worlds unfold. They touch and, in turn, touch us. 1 ‘All the original doors in the house’ in Waldie’s Lakewood home, he continues, ‘are the same—grids of three rectangles surrounded by raised framework’. (Waldie 1996: 24) This ‘thing’, this ordinary door in an ordinary suburban tract home tells its own story as the material assemblage of postwar American suburbia, like Lakewood in the West and Levittown in the East, with their apparently endless repetitions of form and ‘sameness’; their 77

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factory-made precision and their absolute utilitarian purpose. The inside of Waldie’s house mirrors its outside, as the gridded door panels reflect the grid pattern that stretches for miles in all directions from his tree-lined street in suburban Lakewood. As he stares ever more intently at the seemingly banal landscape that constitutes his everyday life, and here specifically at the door behind which his father dies, he records that ‘painted white, as they are now, each square of each door is molded in the light by a right angle of shadow’ (ibid.: 25). Thus, the apparently ordinary and known, the ignored and standardized features of the cookie-cutter suburban home becomes transformed subtly over time by coats of paint on the original wood, suddenly and astonishingly altered by light and shadow into new, abstracted, and engagingly poetic forms: ‘molded in the light by a right angle of shadow’. The grid of the door, precise and regular like Frampton’s ‘bounded fragment’, inside the house, replicates the grid of Lakewood outside, itself also layered with the patina of time and human use, and indeed, like the grid of all suburbs, as Waldie is at pains to remind us throughout his writings, it never defines its absolute meaning nor contains everything within its superficial ‘framework’. In the words of Henri Lefebvre, ‘there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely . . . there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference’ (Lefebvre 2014: 16). Difference emerges within the familiar rhythms of the everyday as moments of revelation and beauty, of surprise and enchantment, ‘charge[s] of an unfolding’, acting to reconnect us with what Waldie would express as the ‘holy’. 2 In the remembering of his father’s death, it is the abstract pattern of light and shadow cast on the ordinariness and taken-for-granted qualities of the commonplace door that he also recalls. Through the strange ‘shadow’ of light, difference-as-death arrives into the repetitive gridded sameness of suburbia, reminding us all of its ubiquity and presence, its inevitability, and, perhaps reassuringly and simultaneously, of our capacity for continuance. To borrow again from Lefebvre, at this very moment, it is as if ‘[t]he presence of the scene brings forth all its presents’, that is, all the histories, uses, moments, and stories that constitute the lived experience of the actual occasion of suburban life (ibid.: 34). Waldie concludes this section: ‘The doors in my house are abstract and ordinary. The bathroom door is now forty-seven years old. My father was sixty-nine’ (Waldie 1996: 25). There is something telling and strangely heartening in his sense of the ‘abstract and ordinary’ working together in our lives, challenging us to engage with and sense mystery, enchantment, and intensities through the everyday (see Bennett 2001). In part, it is Waldie’s style of Catholicism, ‘grounded in the material world’, as he puts it (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 242), which engenders such a sensibility towards the ordinary since, according to writer and priest Andrew Greeley, such an imagination is best defined as an inclination ‘to see the Holy lurking in creation’,

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existing in an everyday world ‘haunted by a sense that objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace’ (quoted in Waldie 2007: 60). Rather than Transcendentalism in the American tradition, with its desire to transcend materiality, Waldie asserts its ‘antithesis’, immanence, because for him ‘Catholicism is mired in the everyday’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 242). 3 Thus, Holy Land ‘turns the familiar American narrative of aspiration and self-realization on its head’ (ibid.: 233–34), focusing instead on everyday commitment and resilience, or ‘[t]o put it in its crudest terms: one isn’t saved over there; one is saved here’ (ibid.: 243). In keeping with other notions of representation discussed throughout this book, Waldie is not interested in modes of address that ‘transcend’ or take us beyond the world and our lived experience of being-in-the-world but rather looks to convey, through the smallest details of the everyday, like Kathleen Stewart’s anthropology or Willy Vlautin’s fiction, our attachment to things: ‘Ordinary affect is a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact. It’s transpersonal or prepersonal—not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities. Human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water’ (Stewart 2007: 128). In Lefebvre’s words describing the ‘rhythmanalyst’, of which, I would argue, Waldie is a suburban type, ‘He garbs himself in this tissue of the lived, of the everyday . . . he will come to “listen” to a house, a street, a town, as an audience listens to a symphony’ as circulating, interacting ‘bodies’ at work to generate the living suburbs rather than those represented as ‘dead’ and static (Lefebvre 2014: 31, 32). 2: THE CONSTRUCTED AND THE DISPERSED Thus, as we read across and between the 316 sections of Holy Land, like wandering the suburban intersections themselves, we are drawn into ‘a meditation on the fate of ordinary things—the things we touch and the lingering effects of their touch on us’: a paneled door, aerial photographs, parents, a war memorial, childhood games, neighbours, a shopping centre, Good Friday, or a suburban lawn (Waldie 2007: 61). For as Waldie admitted to me in an interview, Holy Land is partly a ‘meditation on the way habits become beliefs (or perhaps the other way around)’ and operates as ‘alternately constructed and dispersed in the experience of reading it’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 233—emphasis added). As a result of such a gathering of diverse experiences, tensions, affects, and motions, it is, Waldie claims, an ‘impure’ book, ‘more mixed, it’s hybrid, it’s unclean . . . it’s about impurities’ (ibid.: 242). In other words, it never conforms to expectations, never settles, and always surprises in its emulation of the fullness of suburban life and all its multiple, contradictory rhythms. 4 Thus the polyrhythmic suburb, convention-

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ally defined by monotony and uniformity as a pejorative construct ‘suburbia’, becomes in Waldie’s version something different, a living, heteroglossic space, dispersed through multiple voices and different objects that intermingle and weave in patterns and shapes that defy the simple location of the grid. To adapt Bruno Latour’s ideas, it is as if Waldie’s Lakewood becomes an actor-network of associations, connections, ‘irreductions’ (Harman 2007: 33; Latour 2007) played out on the grid traditionally viewed as constrained and limiting. Similarly, the ‘experience’ of reading Holy Land is a weird challenge of construction and dispersal, of ‘encountering one intersection after another and moving on’ so that what matters is not the representation of the suburbs, ‘its subject’, but rather, asserts Waldie, ‘it’s about reading Holy Land’ and carrying that feeling back into ‘one’s own landscape’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 241). This sense of the ‘constructed and dispersed’ Waldie finds in the structured, connected, and lived spatiality of the suburbs, which he contrasts dramatically with its conventional aerial view, which for so long has provided the standard cultural model of knowledge about suburban life. The aerial view associated with the photographs of William Garnett provides a distanced, removed, and inhuman perspective constituted by remote, gridded imagery that literally and metaphorically ‘looks down’ on where many people live out their lives. Thus, film critic Laura U. Marks can write disparagingly in The Skin of the Film (2000) of ‘the sensuous nonplace of a North American suburb’ dominated by the ‘commodification’ and the ‘genericization of sense experience’ where the world has become increasingly optical and symbolic, dominated by the ‘abstraction and symbolization of all sense modalities’ (Marks 2000: 244). Such generic bland spaces she claims, can only be countered by ‘pools of local sensuous experience’ created by the people who actually live there, achieved through ‘practices like cooking, music, and religious ritual’, around which are ‘created new, small sensuous geographies whose monuments are grocery stores, places of worship, coffee and tea shops, and kitchens’ working in tandem with ‘their very bodies, in the organization of their sensoria’ (ibid.: 245—emphasis added). Marks sets out in these two contrasting positions the problem with discussing the suburbs, in that too often it is the distanced and remote view that dominates at the expense of the proximities evident in Waldie’s Lakewood. Marks’s initially judgemental and generalist attack on the suburbs is modified by her suggested possibility of intimacy, born of a more complex and multiple geography, a haptic or affective landscape of the everyday, no longer inert, but ‘a dramatic becoming, in an ensemble full of meaning, transforming them no longer into diverse things, but into presences’ (Lefebvre 2014: 33). Suddenly, potential is opened for relating to place differently and much closer to the sense of regionality opened up in the preceding chapters, a way

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defined by Mark Paterson as ‘an “intensive” spatiality of affects . . . between built space and individual resonances’ (Paterson 2007: 101). Like Waldie, David Beers noted in his own suburban memoir Blue Sky Dream (1996) as he flew over his neighbourhood in California, that it was like looking at ‘some immense, far too complicated board game. The sensed design to it all is what vaguely terrifies’ because this is an ‘unsentimental schema without our home, my family, me, at its center. Down there, we could be anywhere’ (Beers 1996: 16). However, like Waldie, Beers gazes onto the gridded landscape of apparent anonymity below and thinks differently, as if entering Marks’s ‘pools of local sensuous experience’: ‘I wonder whether all these people living just like me might be my people—all of us, perhaps, with a mass of connections joining me to some whole’ (ibid.: 17). Suddenly, when one bothers to look and to see through the presupposed already-defined portrait of suburban life or ‘suburbia’ (as Waldies calls it), there are, in fact, an array of stories, a ‘mass of connections’, as in Latour, to help unravel ‘the landscape people rarely notice’ (Waldie 1996: 154). Kathleen Stewart poses a question that both her own work and Waldie’s answers: ‘What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields?’ (Stewart 2011: 226). In fact, Waldie has answered this directly: ‘The suburb is not a dead thing. It’s organic and subject to all the things living things are subject to’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 245). This is the vibrant spatiality explored and enhanced by Waldie for whom suburban Lakewood presents a rich and varied space of mutual becoming where, using Paterson’s words again, ‘[i]n touching and affecting the spaces we move within, we are correspondingly touched and affected’ (Paterson 2007: 101; see also Bennett 2010). Waldie’s writings enable us to recognize different human connections to place and, simultaneously, contribute to a new approach to regionalism, or rather regionality, as I define it, as a living, moving sense of becoming. After all, in many ways, regionalism has been as disdained and vilified as suburbia. In Stewart’s words once again, regionality ‘is an event that jumps between landscape and bodies of all kinds. It is ambient, and therefore atmospheric’, and yet it ‘comes into view at a limit’ (Stewart 2013: 275). At the edge of the familiar suburban ‘region’ in Waldie, at its limit as he investigates the grid, ‘it is decentred by what it sets in motion’ because as the layers unfold their ‘labyrinth of trajectories’, a new and different ‘compositionality of things’ emerges with ‘strands of influence’ to form a ‘plane of expressivity . . . from land to heart and habit’ (ibid.: 278). Through this process of ‘expressivity’, Waldie challenges normative representations of suburbia, showing how his regionality can be critical, too, by interrogating the local and proximate precisely in order to demonstrate its universality, its connectedness, and its differences with the wider world. As

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Lucy Lippard puts it, ‘Good regional art has both roots and reach’ (Lippard 1997: 37), and Waldie’s ‘suburban memoir’ is most certainly good art that reaches out beyond its immediate realm. To achieve this, Waldie’s writing is unusual, unfixing, and rhizomatic, akin to what Stewart terms ‘cultural poesis’ or the creativity of ordinary things (see chapter 4): ‘It follows leads, sidesteps, and delays, and it piles things up, creating layers on layers, in an effort to drag things into view, to follow trajectories in motion, and to scope out the shape and shadows and traces of assemblages’ (Stewart 2005: 1028). Waldie has, of course, lived in Lakewood all his life, occupying the same house his parents bought in the 1946, and until 2010, worked as a public official for the Lakewood authority. He claims the suburbs are a ‘landscape people rarely notice’ and in Holy Land and other writings, presents an intense layering of memoir, histories, gathered stories, asides, observations, and uncannily reflective fragments that demonstrate precisely why this place is worth noticing and how a suburb’s multiple narratives, when looked at from the ground up rather than the air down, enmesh us into not just local or regional but national and international histories (Waldie 1996: 154). ‘Remembering’, he writes, ‘is sabotage against the regime of speed’ (Waldie 2004: 17), providing a method of slowing down the world and reducing its distances so that we look again at its overlooked and everyday elements; placing memories alongside the lived experiences of being, beside feeling and reasoning. In charting the varieties of the ordinary, Waldie records the ‘pulsings of affect: the risings and fallings of hope, love, hatred, and irritation; the minor and major disturbances of life set against and within a world of day-to-day habits, routines, and collective sentiments’ (Highmore 2011: xii). To this end, Waldie stands at the forefront of a reconsidered critical regionalism that this book has been examining as affective critical regionality, building upon and diverging from the definition provided by Douglas Reichert Powell who sees it as a ‘strategy for cultural critique’ that links individual moments of cultural struggle to larger patterns of history, politics, and culture, by understanding how they are linked not only in time and in the nebulous networks of discourse, but also in space, through relationships of power that can be material and cultural. (Powell 2007: 20–21)

Vitally for this study, as I suggested above, Waldie’s version of critical regionality tracks affect as part of its complex and ‘different kind of intelligence’ constituted by embodied knowledge, emotion, drive, interaction, and change, according to Nigel Thrift’s multiple definition of the term (Thrift 2008: 175). Using Stewart’s words, one might argue that in Waldie’s work the suburbs become an active presence, ‘loosened from any certain prefabricated knowledge’, tracked instead as ‘a moving object’ recording, in the process, ‘the state of emergence that animates things cultural’ and then trac-

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ing the ‘effects of this state of things’ in the everyday practices of people’s lives as they interconnect with the past, memory, things, and with the unpredictable nature of feeling. As Waldie describes, gathers, and expresses suburban regionality on the page, he tests his readers, surprises them, shifting his tone and style as if to imitate the variant community he describes. The suburbs are never only a represented world that we might easily fix in an existing image or stereotype over ‘there’ but rather always an emergent, immanent, and poetic space—akin to what Stewart calls the ‘jump or surge of affect’ building on the theory of the ‘affective as a state of potential, intensity, and vitality’ found in Deleuze and Guattari (Stewart 2005: 1027–28). 5 In fact, in keeping with much of the spirit of this book, one might see Waldie’s method as ‘more-than-representational’ because it refuses to ‘sum up’ the suburban world or to represent it according to preset images and ideas; instead, Waldie’s suburbs live, become, move, and energize as we see them emerge and pulse through his writings. As Waldie’s text journeys through the affective spacetimes of suburban Lakewood, he exposes us, as readers, to a strange ‘patterning of desire and routine’ while describing ‘the different intersections of memory, need, forgetfulness, humour and so on’ (Highmore 2011: 2). Literally, the ‘intersections’ of the suburban grid become meeting grounds or contact zones for Waldie’s layering of history, memory, and affect which together, constitute the experience of Holy Land because it is always more than something we just read, more-than-representational, for it moves us emotionally, psychologically, and materially, producing, in Ben Anderson’s words, ‘a worldly geography engaged with life . . . [paying] close attention to the subtle, elusive, dynamics of everyday life and living in all their richness’ (Anderson 2014: 7). Thus, what gradually emerges in Holy Land is a deep heteroglossia of voices, lives, images, actions, and objects simultaneously overlapping, intermingled, complex, and banal in the neglected suburban space of Lakewood. Waldie has commented that the book was in fact written for his neighbours to give voice to ‘a life made whole . . . a kind of history, I suppose, a “useable history”—but perhaps an “affective history” as well, a history that discourses on a sensibility as the means to integrating a useful life’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 236). In a wonderfully open and lucid comment on his own writing presented through his blog, Waldie wrote, ‘I don’t think there is anything that I could erase from the story that I tell myself, including my failures, despite the appeal of amnesia. Everything I think of as ordinary and sacred is here’ (Waldie 2010). 6 It is this spirit that dominates Holy Land. This ‘here’ is Waldie’s suburban region of Lakewood, a ‘bloom space’, as Stewart might term it, constituted by ‘all forms of attending to what’s happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities’ (Stewart in Gregg and Siegworth 2010: 344). Rather than dismissing the ‘regions’ of suburban life

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and living, Waldie’s significant reframing of the suburbs sees them as crucial to understanding how people exist ordinarily in contemporary culture. One might see Waldie’s work as in conversation with the developments of critical regionalism I have examined throughout this book, placing the proximate, the everyday, and the overlooked in relations with wider, global concerns. Recalling for a moment Kenneth Frampton’s work discussed in chapter 1, he wrote of ‘the dialectical interplay between [universal] civilization and [local] culture’ whereby modern, universalization is constantly interrupted and unsettled by what he usefully terms ‘a revealed conjunction between’ Frampton in Foster 1990: 17, 21, 22—emphasis added). Like the intersections in Lakewood’s grid, the ‘conjunctural’ denies the assertion of hierarchical order, of the dominant, universal form over the regional, and instead finds effective ways to ‘mediate’ between and across established forms and practices. This ‘interstitial’ process, you will recall, Frampton calls ‘in-laying’ or ‘layering’ wherein the site ‘has many levels of significance . . . the prehistory of the place, its archaeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time’, displaying all the ‘idiosyncrasies of place . . . without falling into sentimentality’ (ibid.: 21, 26). Waldie told me Holy Land could, indeed, be read as a ‘series of interruptions (in narrative, in time sequence, in authorial voice, in space)’ that, as a consequence, ‘unsettles as it mediates’ (e-mail to author 29 September 2009). To move into this layering of place, as Waldie’s work ably demonstrates, requires something more than representation, something close to what Frampton calls ‘tactile presences’ and the ‘tactile perception of space’ (Frampton in Canizaro 2007: 378, 384). Certainly, as these ideas might be applied to Waldie’s work, one can see the vital importance of how body and mind together experience and reproduce suburban regionality. The body and the city in Waldie form a critical point of intersection, for as Pallasmaa has argued, ‘The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me’ (Pallasmaa 2005: 40). The emplaced (suburban) body engages in ‘regioning’, as I defined it in chapter 1, moving in and as place, creating ‘an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens’ (Heidegger 1966: 66–67). For Waldie, the suburbs refuse to remain just a site, since, following Edward Casey, ‘site may be bodiless—it entails a disembodied overview, a survey—but there can be no being-inplace except by being in a densely qualified place in concrete embodiment’ (Casey 1998: 204). 3: SUBURBAN REGIONALITY In specifically Western American terms, as discussed in chapter 1, it was Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies (1989), who first called for ‘criti-

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cal regional studies’ with the potential to open up whole new knowledges derived from the local and based on approaches that were flexible and willing to ‘try new combinations of ideas rather than fall back to old categorical dualities’ (Soja 1989: 189). Soja explored this, as Waldie has done, by examining the city of Los Angeles, which he argues is the epitome of the ‘regionality of cityspace’ with its ‘interacting nodal settlements’ both ‘dynamic and expansive’ (Soja 2000: 16). Influenced in part by Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy (1997), with its interest in regions as ‘ensembles’, ‘relations’, and ‘interdependencies’ and its belief that regions were ‘a fundamental unit of social life . . . [a] motor process’ (Storper 1997: 245), Soja reveals in his notion of ‘regionality’ the ‘active and affective processes of social formation’, which are ‘processual and impelling’ (Soja 2000: 13). Crucial to Storper, and redolent of Waldie’s particular vision of suburban regionality, is the idea of ‘proximity’ (Storper 1997: 245), for in the space of the city, things overlap and intersect, often in productive ways, as in the surprising relations of Lakewood described in Holy Land. In Soja’s developing ideas, he refers to regionality as ‘nested’, suggesting these proximate and interrelated points of connection which, he argues, can be both ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ (Soja 2000: 17). 7 Soja prefers to now use the term ‘New Regionalism’ to define some of this work, claiming: Regions at various scales shape our lives in significant ways, and, at the same time, we shape our regions—the whole hierarchy of nodal regions in which we live, from our body space to the regional organization of the global economy and everywhere in between. (Soja 2002: 6)

As I argue here, Waldie’s approach to the suburban landscape of Lakewood has just such a ‘nested’, layered, or conjunctural emphasis, interested in the past and the community dreams of postwar U.S. culture, without being nostalgic or reductive in his attitude to its continuation and evolution as urban space. As I demonstrated in the opening to this chapter, Holy Land presents a more human, affective relationship to the soulless appearance and reputation of the suburban grid, something equally conveyed in the book’s opening: ‘That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or—even more—he thought he was becoming the grid he knew’ (Waldie 1996: 1). The author, referred to here in the third person, absorbs the grid into himself, just as the book itself metaphorically embodies the shape of the grid with its 316 sections (some long, some short) intersecting and juxtaposing across its pages; fragments and layers that together, like the lives within the gridded streets he investigates, create a story to challenge normative suburban mythology with its ‘necessary illusion [of] predictability’ (ibid.: 2). As he writes, ‘The grid

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limited our choices, exactly as urban planners said it would. But the limits weren’t paralyzing’ (ibid.: 116). One could, however, learn to live with such apparent restrictions but not entirely within them, being creative in producing a whole life inside, alongside, and outside these apparently limiting patterns of everyday existence. These patterns, however, are made up of local, sensual moments in Waldie’s suburbs, like ‘the barking of dogs near full dark in summer . . . the whole neighbourhood clearing its throat before going to bed and sleep’, crosscut with immense universal events: ‘Rain and the hydrogen bomb were two aspects of the same loss’, he writes (ibid.: 2, 3). Filtered dialogically through his memory, family history, and the communal, regional history of Lakewood, Waldie engages with himself as ‘you’ and ‘he’, as well as ‘I’, shifting his narrative across time and space, between intensely intimate confessional doubts, family crises, social banalities, and local histories, all contributing to his deep mapping of everyday place. Maps, as we shall see throughout this book, need to be rethought since, according to Waldie, ‘[e]very map is a fiction. Every map offers choices’ (Waldie 1996: 47), and Holy Land becomes a different form of layered cartography, ‘a seduction . . . a history . . . a cranky argument . . . a meditation . . . an evasion and something like a book of prayer’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 233). In this manner, Waldie might be seen to follow the path of Bruno Latour (see the introduction) and his call for an ‘alternative topography’ in which maps ‘redistribute the local’, seeing connections and networks like ‘tracings’ operating everywhere in the suburb-network discussed earlier (Latour 2007: 172). Latour explains that his is a ‘flattened topography’ that aims to put things, as Waldie does, ‘side by side’ in order ‘to hold the landscape firmly flat and to force, so to speak, any candidate with a more “global” role to sit beside the “local” site it claims to explain, rather than watch it jump on top of it or behind it’ (ibid.: 174—emphasis in the original). Too often, however, the standard view of the suburbs is disembodied and detached, akin to Latour’s sense of a ‘global’ vision which ‘claims to explain’ by ignoring the proximate and resorting to the default position of ‘the Big Picture’ for answers (ibid.: 187). Waldie emphasizes this through his exploration of the ‘distanciated gaze’ (Adey 2010: 87) of aerial photography in its representation of the suburbs, operating ‘above’ the city to generalize and disconnect it from the affective and affecting space below, presenting only ‘immense abstractions’ (Waldie 1996: 5) because ‘you can’t see the intersection of character and place from an altitude of five hundred feet, and Garnett [the photographer of Lakewood] never came back to experience everyday life on the ground’ (Waldie 2009: 3). Instead, these ubiquitous images became the fixed shorthand for suburbia (its easy ‘representation’), ‘a pattern’, writes Waldie, ‘predicting itself’ and written into the very psyche of America (ibid.: 6). The ‘optic’ defined by the aerial photograph provided a ‘radical reorientation of the senses and of relationships to the land’ (Schwarz-

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er 2004: 135), which for Waldie represented a detached and soulless view overriding the ‘haptic’ possibility of the ‘intersection’ of life lived on the ground, in touch with everyday things. Juhanni Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses discusses how the city has been overburdened by the visual, by ‘rapid motorised movement’, and ‘through the overall aerial grasp from an airplane’ (Pallasmaa 2007: 29). For him, as for Waldie, this enforces ‘the idealising and disembodied Cartesian eye of control and detachment . . . (the look from above)’ (ibid.). As I discussed in chapter 1, Frampton urged tactility in contrast to an overdependence on the architecture of the eye, arguing, like Pallasmaa, for a more haptic approach to region that ‘promotes slowness and intimacy . . . engages and unites. Tactile sensibility replaces distancing visual imagery by enhanced materiality, nearness and intimacy’ (Pallasmaa quoted in Paterson 2007: 99). Unfortunately, Waldie sees too many examples of these ‘remote control’ attitudes embedded in what he calls the American ‘national mythology’; one that refutes the ordinary lives of suburban spaces like Lakewood: The national mythology is [the suburb] never works. The national mythology is not always right. I’m very skeptical of an American ethos which is driven by the remote control. Don’t like you—click. Don’t like that—click. Don’t like this—click. I don’t see life that way. [Lakewood’s] not perfect, not right, not the best thing; it’s just a sense of myself that I find more satisfying than the clicker or the remote control alternative. (Waldie 2005: 9)

Nancy Cook elaborates on this idea, arguing that ‘myths of the American West have proven hardy. Undeveloped space, often labelled as wilderness or open space, represents the pure and the good, while development of any sort, but especially the tract home development pollutes by its presence’ (in Berberich, Campbell, and Hudson 2015: 86). Waldie’s affective remapping of suburban regionality is based on cutting through this ‘national mythology’ of ‘remote control’, through ‘sales pitch and self deception’, to reclaim disregarded experiences and express the ‘imaginative apprehension of the immanent in the everyday’ through his commitment to ‘the human-scale, porous, and specific landscape’ of suburban life (Waldie 2007: 62; 2004b: 16). As he has said, ‘Holy Land is an argument. It’s an argument about disregarding places, and it’s an argument about why a disregarded place, an ordinary place, an everyday place, why it can in fact harbor qualities of life that are profound’ (Waldie 2005: 8). To such an end, Waldie creates a new form of text with Holy Land: photographic, prosaic, and poetic, its layers of form and content present, investigate, and circulate around the structures of deep feeling and history that delineate his city-region of Lakewood. In a typically affective phrase, Waldie writes that ‘some stories bleed through the city’s glossy surface as if they knew how much we needed them. I’ve tried to tell some of these stories’

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(Waldie 2004b: 16). This bleeding narrative of Holy Land moves self-reflexively from third to first person, interweaving historical and affective elements across the landscape Waldie knows so well, a landscape like an ‘enchanted island’ where people flocked like ‘pilgrims’ to settle as if in their own personal and communal ‘Holy Land’ (Waldie 1996: 13). As a man with failing eyesight due to glaucoma and keratoconus, which prevents him from driving, Waldie walks the streets of Lakewood and travels the public transport system, noticing all the details and quirks, the lines of demarcation and celebration, hearing the voices of the living and the dead that form the palimpsest of suburban life ‘written on, erased and written over again’ (Waldie 2004b: 114). ‘What more can you expect of me’, he writes, ‘than the stories I am now telling?’ (Waldie 1996:13). Indeed, the stories are told through different narrative voices from the past and the present, from the subjective and objective, from ‘I’ through ‘he’, amounting to ‘various persons’ who ‘represent moments of turning toward myself and turning away from myself, of turning toward the reader’ (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 232). Thus, instead of ‘an author discovering new, unforeseen problems, we must speak of an author in the process of becoming, fashioned by the text he is fashioning’ (Stengers 2011: 242). These ‘turnings’ challenge the reader and resist what Waldie calls the ‘hand holding’ of traditional narrative (ibid.), simply because they insist upon a continuation of the layering of experience that he argues constructs place (and identity)—and especially within the disregarded suburbs. Undeniably, these suburban stories unravel a methodology echoing Michel Foucault’s notion of genealogy: ‘the union of erudite knowledge and local memories’ erupting against ‘functionalist coherence or formal systemization’ (Foucault 1980: 83, 81). 8 Waldie’s approach echoes Foucault’s new form of ‘effective history’ (or what Waldie earlier termed ‘affective history’), rejecting distance and remoteness, like Garnett’s aerial photographs, in favour of anything which ‘shortens its vision to those things nearest to it—the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies’ (Foucault 1993: 155). Thus, Waldie rejects aerial photographs in favour of ‘found’ family snapshots collected in the anthology Close to Home: An American Album (2004) to which he contributed a preface, ‘Facing the Facts’. These photographs, according to Waldie, ‘incite stories’ of everyday life, of forgotten ‘worlds’ forming like ‘acts of resistance against official amnesia’ (Waldie 2004a: 7, 11): suburban rooms and objects, driveways and cars, portraits and leisure time, families, occasions, and glamour poses. For Waldie these found, ordinary (but extraordinary) images are ‘bodies too, just like you and me’, circulating like materials and memories, colliding with other half-remembered stories, always generating place, becoming forms of affective regionality: ‘You were lost, but now your snapshots have found you’ (ibid.: 16).

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Lost, anonymous photographs are part of Lakewood’s regional genealogy akin to a palimpsest, which according to Foucault, ‘operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’ and in so doing refuses to confirm timehonored histories with fixed and established origins, but rather concerns itself with ‘the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts’ (Foucault 1993: 139). This is precisely Waldie’s approach, too, regarding the disregarded and ‘unpromising’ space of the suburbs, like the images in Close to Home, and uncovering along its tree-lined streets many stories; ‘its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats’ (ibid.: 144). In Foucault’s words, Waldie’s work might be seen to record ‘a particular, local, regional knowledge . . . incapable of unanimity . . . [constructed of] buried, subjugated knowledges’ made possible, recalling Latour, by the reduced ‘tyranny of globalised discourses’ and by the conscious assertion of ‘sentiments, love, conscience, instincts’ (Foucault 1980: 82–83; 1993: 139). 9 Thus, Holy Land juxtaposes tales of place and identity, a genealogy, crosscutting, like the suburban grid it examines, between historical figures and Waldie’s neighbours, childhood memories and religious rituals, his real father, the city Fathers, and God the Father. Like Foucault, Waldie reactivates ‘local knowledges . . . minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them’ (Foucault 1980: 85—emphasis added), but always in relation to major events and contexts, moving seamlessly between stories of Mr H and his fallout shelter built under his garage or Mrs R’s dead baby baptized by Waldie’s mother in the kitchen to the implications of geological shifts and water politics in Los Angeles to the racial restrictions on home ownership in the postwar United States. This telescoping of experience, putting stories side by side like Latour’s flattened topography, is typical of Waldie’s approach throughout Holy Land; finding comfort in the recurrent patterns of the local others criticize as standardization while recognizing and celebrating such ‘defection[s] from predictability’ (Waldie 1996: 20). As I discussed earlier, Latour argues for a new social cartography which is ‘flat’ in the sense that we imagine all the interactions and networks that make up the ‘social’ as quilt-like and connected in the same way that Waldie understands the suburbs spread out in an intersecting grid, a ‘compass of possibilities’ (Latour 2007: 174; Waldie 1996: 4). Latour even sounds like Waldie when he writes of all these points, ‘now remain[ing] side by side and a connection, a fold . . . made visible’ rather than held at a distance and placed within a ‘context’ as if explaining it away and therefore diminishing its own significance (Latour 2007: 174). The global is, therefore, not at a distance from the local, not its context, but should be made ‘to sit beside the “local” . . . it claims to explain rather than watch it jump on top of it or behind it’ (ibid.). Waldie’s grid operates similarly to fold the global and local

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closer together ‘progressively composing the common world’ (ibid.: 189— emphasis added) from the very diverse materials and affects of the suburbs. Latour argues that ‘composition’ ‘underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity’ and is concerned with a ‘common world . . . built from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never be made a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable, and diverse composite material’ (Latour 2010: 473–74). As I will discuss later in chapter 4, Waldie’s composition of the suburbs, its ‘compositionality’, is also closely aligned with what Kathleen Stewart’s work on place achieves and how, as I will argue, it helps to better define active notions of regionality as a process of assembling worlds from ‘strings of juxtaposed localities’ (Latour 2007: 191). Thus, as a critical regionalist or genealogist, Waldie’s work continually ‘composes’ from the local and the global perspectives suggested by the grid design which is both present in the ‘now’ of Lakewood and ever present historically, from Vitruvius to Joseph Smith’s Mormon plan for the city of Zion in 1833 to the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Not missing the ironies in all this, Waldie notes the parallel of Birkenau (Birch Wood) to Lakewood, both, in their own ways, ‘scientifically planned’ (Waldie 1996: 100), and even further, noting the fact that it was a suburb built by Jewish entrepreneurs—men who could not, given the racist postwar property covenants, actually live in the houses they built. Good and bad, restrictive, comforting, and liberating, the grid—‘as regular as any thought of God’s’— emphasized the ‘charmed pattern of our lives’ in all their rich ordinariness (ibid.: 48, 60), with all their stories of sin, loss, vulnerability, death, and redemption ‘placed side by side’ and coexisting within its sprawling streets. In isolation or silence, the risk is that these stories are overlooked or disregarded by many people with the grid seen as ‘just a pattern repeating itself’ (ibid.: 6) rather than containing anything vital and engaging. For Waldie, however, it is the ‘immanent in the everyday’ always worth noticing and recording (Waldie 2007: 62), the ‘holy’ emerging in the ordinary actions, affects, and lived realities of any neighbourhood. 4: INTERLEAVING As poet-historian of the West Coast suburbs, like the ‘prowler’ that Michel De Certeau says all historians must be, Waldie works the suburban ‘zones of silence’, constructing a version of place akin to De Certeau’s ‘fragmented strata’ and ‘moving layers’; a space of memories, ‘haunted by many different spirits . . . one can “invoke” or not,’ since, after all, ‘[h]aunted places are the only ones people can live in’ (De Certeau 1988a: 108; 1988b: 79). Lakewood’s equivalent voices, its personal and public ghosts echo through Holy

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Land creating its ‘haunted narrativity’ (De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998: 3): his dead parents summoned up through the stories he recalls about their lives and his living with them; his neighbours across the years from the primarily white demographic of the postwar period, to its increasingly multicultural makeup in the twenty-first century; the founding boosters, and still further back, the Spanish gentry who founded Los Angeles; and the dead soldiers of recent wars memorialized on a plaque in Lakewood. Waldie’s palimpsestic technique layers the fragments and traces before the reader, providing ‘a meditation on the fate of ordinary things—the things we touch and the lingering effects of their touch on us’ (Waldie 2007: 61). Crucially, in this he reveals an intimate concern for interaction and sensation—for the touch of things and their ‘vibrant materiality’ (Bennett 2010: vii) as central to history. In contrast to this vibrancy, Waldie describes in deadpan reportage how ‘monumental history’ (as opposed to ‘effective history’ in Foucault’s terms) works as a cold, public memorialization of events and people, as distanced and detached as Garnett’s aerial images of the suburbs (see Waldie 1996, sections 33, 34). For Waldie, it is the intimate histories that exist ‘in-between’ such institutional memorializations that count more; beyond the aerial view and its gridded imagery that literally and metaphorically looks down on suburbia to a view made up of the human and material landscape with their ‘joining of interests’ (ibid.: 6). For it is only when you get beneath the ‘sheet of blueprints’ with their geometric ‘street grid’ that you see Lakewood’s other histories made up of ‘water lines, sewer laterals, and storm drains’ (ibid.: 101), the material equivalents to the suburban stories he collects. Only then do you notice the wondrous details of the ordinary: ‘house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls fragile as an unearthed bone’, as well as the variety and intensity of living that goes on within these spaces (ibid.: 5). Through these organic, breathing images of cells, hives, bones, and experiences linked to the material objects of the suburbs, Waldie creates his phenomenological, affective landscape vision ‘like the illustration of a fold of skin in a high school biology book’ (ibid.: 125), through which materiality takes on intense, affective energy; never static or dead but always already engaged in the multiple processes of embodied and creative living in the world. ‘The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives’, writes Waldie, ‘I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger’ (ibid.: 94). As we read Holy Land, we experience lives and stories juxtaposed, side by side, building layer upon layer, deeper and deeper within the intersecting streets of a community constantly evolving and yet, in some important ways, remaining constant and eternal. As we read, the narrative itself weaves across time: ‘You and I grew up in these neighbourhoods when they were an interleaving of houses and fields that were soon to be filled with

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more houses’ (ibid.: 3). The word Waldie uses here, ‘interleaving’ (ibid.), deliberately invokes once again both the organic process of overlapping growth and the bookish metaphor that reminds us of how these suburban streets, for all their apparent ordinariness, are like the text we read, with each section a new ‘leaf’ combining with others new and old to form a complex, spectral ecology. Through this interleaving, Holy Land reaches beyond localism and the idea of the established region as bounded and static, while still valuing both, showing instead how these deeper stories of the grid are always simultaneously connected to national and international histories: the consequences of wars (both World War II and Vietnam), the Atomic Age, Fordism, the processes of migrational, racial, and demographic shifts into and out of the New West; capitalist expansionism; the development of a military-industrial complex in the Sun Belt economies (Lakewood is an aerospace suburb in part built to service the workers at South Bay and Long Beach); the rise of consumerism; and the dramatic ecological changes inscribed on the very landscape of the suburbs. All these ‘interleave’ Holy Land, locating Lakewood within a matrix of environmental and political change parallel to the writings of Mike Davis since City of Quartz, a book Waldie admires greatly. However, Davis’s Ecology of Fear Waldie famously termed the ‘pornography of despair’ and a ‘terrorist manifesto against the durability of ordinary things’ because, for him, it presented an overly simplistic ‘demonic’ version of Californian history insisting that ‘no story of our lives together can resist the perfect catastrophes Davis imagines for L.A.’ (Waldie 2009: 5). Instead, Waldie favours a ‘skeptical optimism’ born of a mixture of civics and Catholicism building on ‘trust, vulnerability, and a capacity for stories’ (Waldie 2004b: 27; 2007: 62). ‘My “sense of place” is based’, he writes, ‘on the belief that each of us has an imaginative, inner landscape compounded of memory and longing that seeks to be connected to an outer landscape of people, circumstances, and things’ (Waldie 2007: 62). This emphasis on sense ‘enmeshes the ghostly and the definite,’ as he puts it, drawing in from his experience of the suburbs as well as having grown up a Catholic; ‘like the Word being made flesh’ (ibid., 63). All Lakewood’s material and immaterial elements and stories interleave, until what emerges is a ‘dialog, a continuous narrative within and without, that I understand to be prayer. Because my imagination inclines to being analogical, habitual, communitarian, and commonplace, I assume that’s Catholic’ (ibid.). In a corresponding and beautiful moment in Holy Land, he writes, ‘When I walk to work, thinking of these stories, they seem insignificant. At Mass on Sunday, I remember them as prayers’ (ibid.: 111). Waldie’s book finds in the ghostly, overlooked landscapes of the American suburbs what Stewart refers to as ‘a world of affinities and impacts that takes place in the moves of intensity across things that seem solid and dead’ (Stewart 2007: 127).

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By refuting the ‘seeming deadness’ of the suburbs, however, Waldie has created a unique form of critical regionality involving the hybridization of materiality and sensibility, entwined with a type of grounded spirituality since, as he writes, ‘the everyday isn’t perfect. It confines some and leads some astray into contempt or nostalgia, but it saves others. I live where I live in California because the weight of my everyday life here is a burden I want to carry’ (Waldie 2005). Through recognizing and recording this ‘burden’, like the image of the crucifixion that haunts Holy Land from beginning to end, he constructs an affective critical regionality, appreciating the local in the context of the wider world, the inner with the outer, the material with the immaterial, the ‘Christic’ with the civic; seeing how even in the most disregarded and ordinary places love, care, and redemption might still be possible in the very practices and habits of everyday life. In the words of Kathleen Stewart, ‘Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence. A layer, or layering to the ordinary, it engenders attachments or systems of investment in the unfolding of things’ (Stewart 2007: 21). 5: CONCLUSION: SWEET THE WEIGHT YOU BEAR How appropriate it is then, that Holy Land concludes at Easter, juxtaposing religious rituals of sacrifice and atonement with the civic and community care that Waldie espouses, clearly linking the obligations and responsibilities of faith with his view of properly sustained suburban duties. ‘There was,’ he writes, ‘no distinction about who could participate in the veneration of the cross,’ and in his memory, the Easter Mass merges with the secular gathering of the suburbs until the words of the hymn ‘Pange Lingua’ take on another meaning as relevant to the struggles, pains, trials, and joys of suburban family life in Lakewood as to the death and resurrection of Christ: ‘Sweet the wood / Sweet the nails / Sweet the weight you bear’ (Waldie 1996: 178–79). The suburban grid offers both containment and contentment, perhaps like religion. It has its rules and obligations, choices and duties, and as Waldie says of everyday lives in Lakewood, ‘There are an indefinite number of beginnings and endings on the grid, but you are always somewhere’ (ibid.: 116). Location within the grid is likened to the location within faith, an imperfect belonging that somehow ‘compelled a conviviality’ by bringing people together as a community of difference (ibid.). 10 From this base, Waldie’s regional, local sense of westness expands and connects: ‘The grid on which my city is built opens outward without limits. It’s the antithesis of a ghetto’ (ibid.: 118). In stark contrast to the works of Mike Davis, discussed above, for whom L.A. has been transformed detrimentally by corporatism, greed, and racial tension into an apocalyptic junkyard, Waldie writes, ‘In the

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Catholic imagination, the Holy haunts the everyday’, and from this emerges a lesson, too, for secular suburban life, a way of countering the ‘wilful amnesia’ of the modern city through the preservation of its everyday tales. For Waldie, suburban Los Angeles has the possibility and potential to be a ‘habitat of memory’ (Waldie 2004b: 116), a kind of ‘enchanted island’, a Holy Land reborn out of fire and forgetfulness, ‘a brown city. . . . The northernmost city of the tropics’—an ‘impure mestizo city’ where difference is valued and melded into renewed, living communities (Waldie 2004b: 21; 2009: part 3). He has often referred, in fact, to his own ‘muddled notion of the Greek polis’ as at the heart of his sense of the city and its people, ‘enmeshed in its life’ bound together through loyalty as a form of citizenship forging communities (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 243). Curiously, Waldie claimed in 1999, when answering a Los Angeles Times questionnaire on ‘L.A. Lit (Does it Exist?),’ that ‘[t]he literature to come isn’t here yet’ (Waldie 1999). However, I cannot help thinking that he is too modest and that his affective memoirs of person and place with their passionate breadth and emotive depth, point us towards an affective critical regionality invested with a complex and resonant ‘compass of possibilities’ derived from an intense relationship to the everyday and a convivial ‘investment in the unfolding of things’. In the words used by Kathleen Stewart to define her own book Ordinary Affects, Waldie creates a new form of writing ‘about how moving forces are immanent in scenes, subjects, and encounters, or in blocked opportunities or the banality of built environments’ (Stewart 2007: 128). Waldie’s reimagined citizenship argues for a form of regionality through which ‘we sustain one another in our community and . . . value the ordinariness of our lives’ (McCharen 2015), while understanding that ‘vulnerability leads us to intimacy’ rather than to fear and evasion (Waldie and Campbell 2011: 247). Holy Land works rhizomatically outward from the everyday and the disregarded—the ‘landscape people rarely notice’ (Waldie 1996: 154)—to build a complex, ambiguous, and always moving (in every sense of the word) vision of the suburbs, recalling the process defined by Stewart, as a ‘sense of force and texture and the sure knowledge that every scene I can spy has tendrils stretching into things I can barely, or not quite, imagine. But I already knew that. The world is still tentative, charged, overwhelming, and alive. This is not a good thing or a bad thing. It is not my view that things are going well but that they are going’ (Stewart 2007: 128). As Waldie has written elsewhere, in similar terms, ‘To be a citizen of Los Angeles means, in this hour, not to dream but to pick up the burden and gift of bearing witness to this place’ (Waldie 2002: 6). For him, this has meant creating Holy Land, with all its awkward challenges and ‘turnings’, as a deliberate countering of the city’s ‘willful amnesia’ and as an experience ‘not . . . written for the comfortable’ (Waldie 2004b: 124). As Henri Lefebvre once wrote, ‘You want presence? Turn to literature or the church’ (Lefebvre

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2014: 57). Through such powerfully affecting and affective terms, Waldie expresses something of the poetic purpose and political drive towards a form of ‘planetary humanism’ (Gilroy 2004: 66) defined by the great French Catholic chronicler of everyday life, Michel de Certeau, who lived out much of his final years in California, and who wrote that ‘[o]ne must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name, folded up inside this thimble like the silk dress of a fairy’ (De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998: 142). As a writer of regionality, Waldie awakens such little, multiple ‘flawed and partial’ stories as if ‘marking time while this Los Angeles waits to be born’ (Waldie 2004b: 24, 21). CODA On retirement from his role as public information officer for Lakewood in 2010, D. J. Waldie posted on his KCET blog (http://www.kcet.org/socal/ voices/where-we-are/) a statement which with typical honesty and clarity explains much of what this chapter has tried to explore about his intense relationship to place: ‘Falling in love’ with what you already have is one way I’ve defined loyalty. As I’ve tried to practice it, loyalty’s expression has been a pragmatic sociability—a habit of everyday give and take across political, religious, gender, ethnic, and racial boundaries the purpose of which is the making of a moral imagination. Laid bare, that’s the sum of my years as a local government bureaucrat—a moral imagination, one that is wide enough to encircle this specific place and, just perhaps, to encompass that part of the American experience which is life in a working-class suburb.

NOTES 1. The British writer Paul Barker takes a similar view: ‘Suburbia’s enemies mock such places as uniform, dull, conformist. When were they last there? As rebellious teenagers? Suburbs are libertarian, eccentric, humane. By comparison with a city street, a leafy avenue, with its rampant hedges, has an appealing openness. Even a fruitful sense of anarchy’, Paul Barker: “Let Us Treasure the Suburbs, Our Landscape’s String of Pearls’, Independent, 1 November 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/paul-barker-let-us-treasure-thesuburbs-our-landscapes-string-of-pearls-1812761.html See also Paul Barker, The Freedoms of Suburbia (London: Frances Lincoln, 2009). 2. Waldie’s attention to the ‘ordinary’ landscape and to the details of ‘structures of feeling’ connect his approach to suburbia with Raymond Williams’s work both as a critic and a novelist. See, for example, his novel Border Country (1960), with its slow uncovering of a type of history from below, of, as he put it, culture as ordinary. Stewart in turn quotes from Williams in her Ordinary Affects (2007).

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3. Waldie shares this belief with Bruno Latour who discusses the problems of ‘transcendance’ in his ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’ (2010: 475), and with Gayatri Spivak, discussed in chapter 1, and her call to ‘de-transcendentalized nationalism’ and reject a certain homogeneity in favour of variance and multiplicity (Spivak 2008: 81). See also chapter 4 on Kathleen Stewart. 4. Waldie uses the word ‘rhythm’ many times in his interview with me and likes to think of the process of assembling Holy Land as musical (see Waldie and Campbell 2011: 230). For this reason, I am drawn to Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2014) for suggestive uses of concepts like rhythm and presence. 5. Stewart’s form of anthropological writing is linked with Benjamin, Foucault, Taussig, Bakhtin, Barthes, Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Haraway, Berlant, Sedgwick, and others. Another book of anthropology that one might relate to Waldie’s is Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). His final words about the street in London of which he writes, comes close to a description of Holy Land to my mind: a place ‘neither homogenising nor bland nor superficial. These people are entirely extraordinary, as diverse as the diversity of societies’ (297). 6. Tom M. Johnson’s ‘Lakewood: Portraits of a Sacred American Suburb’, available at http://www.tommjohnson.com/PROJECTS/LAKEWOOD/1/, takes its lead from Waldie’s statement ‘It’s not paradise, but it’s sacred’ (see Western American Literature, 46(3), Fall 2011, for a selection of the images and a short statement by the artist). 7. See Renia Ehrenfeucht, ‘The New Regionalism: A Conversation with Edward Soja’, Critical Planning, Summer 9, 2002, 5–12. 8. Waldie commented in a personal e-mail to Neil Campbell that ‘I found this judgement entirely refreshing and novel. I had never thought of Holy Land or my other work as regional (perhaps because a southern Californian assumes certain privileges for his place). But your analysis here feels right’. 9. Recently speaking in L.A. on a panel, ‘Walking in L.A’, Waldie said: ‘I would also urge you to wander in the city and wander in your neighborhood. I would urge you to become an expert flaneur. I would urge you to acquire not only pedestrianism as a vice but flanerie as a vice as well—the ability to walk into your community and expect something to occur to you as you found your way to some undiscovered part of your neighbourhood’. Bruno Latour explains his theory of reassembling the social through ‘actor-networks’ as ‘walking on foot in a flattened landscape’ (Latour 2007: 192). 10. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004), employs the concept of conviviality, defining it as ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction’ alive in many urban communities (xi). As a postcolonial critic, Gilroy is interested in the ‘other stories . . . to be told’ (166) to set against the normative and distorted traditional (racist) narratives that dominate the culture industries. He is a collector of ‘emancipatory interruptions’ to those narratives in a way that, surprisingly perhaps, connects him in my mind with D. J. Waldie’s project. In particular, Gilroy argues it is through ‘the banality of intermixture and the subversive ordinariness of . . . convivial cultures’ that these moments might be witnessed (166).

Chapter Four

Kathleen Stewart Fictocritical Regionality

1: ATTUNEMENT Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, as if responding to the specific suburban worlds of Waldie’s Lakewood, states, ‘My work is an experiment that writes from the intensities in things. It asks what potential modes of knowing, relating or attending to things are already being lived in ordinary rhythms, labors, and the sensory materiality of forms of attunement to worlds’ (Stewart 2009). Her method has evolved through her attention to the ‘intensities in things’ and her descriptions of the workings of these ‘worlds’ wherever they might appear within the everyday. And they appear everywhere. Ben Highmore comments on the impact of reading Stewart whereby ‘as you read you become more and more alert to your surroundings. Your skin begins to prickle with the apprehensions of the lives of others, of resonances of care and indifference, of anxiety and ease. . . . It attunes and reattunes the human sensorium’ (Highmore 2011: 8). Learning from Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Thing’, an essay she often refers to, Stewart’s approach (with similarities to Olson’s, too) is ‘attending to what is near’ in order to appreciate how things ‘stand forth’ through their relations with the world (Heidegger 1971: 166). This recalls Frampton’s interest in Heidegger’s ‘loss of nearness’ and the problem of ‘distancing’ and how this might be countered by the ‘tactile . . . decoded in terms of experience itself’ and not ‘reduced to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absence presences’ (Frampton 1990: 29). Rejecting narrow acts of ‘mere information’, representation, or scientific, universal definitions, Heidegger enacted a deep opening-up of the thing, like a simple jug, to its fullest ‘round 97

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dance’ with the world, standing forth as a process of interconnections, ‘gathering in’ and out-pouring, being of a source, a process and a becoming: ‘The thing things. Thinging gathers’ (Heidegger 1971: 174). An apparently inert object becomes activated through attention and attunement to its relations with the world, which itself is dynamic, vibrant, and multiple. ‘The world’, Heidegger writes, ‘presences by worlding’ (ibid.: 179); that is, we come to experience the world not through representation of it, but rather through the actions, reactions, and relations between whatever makes it up. As Stephen Muecke put it, ‘As long as history has Man central stage and things (animate, inanimate, natural) as a support act, the kinds of continuities and necessary dependencies among them will be obscured’ (Muecke 2008b: 40). Thus, our attention to the jug is a ‘mirror-play of the world’, gathering-up presences into the ‘round dance . . . the ring that joins’, so that, as Heidegger puts it, ‘[t]hinging is the nearing of the world’ (Heidegger 1971: 180–81). Through attention to the overlooked small things, our careful attunement to their active relations, flows, and surprising presences, we are drawn ‘nearer’ to the multiple processes that constitute the world. Muecke explains how, in a similar fashion, ‘things’ take on a life or a ‘career’ as a form of ‘composition’ which is both material and ‘more fanciful’, becoming, as in Stewart’s work, ‘hybrid . . . packaged into a network of relations that move the object around and give it life—vibrancy, as Jane Bennett would say’ (Muecke 2013: 2). Thus, in Muecke’s example, coal and ivory have relational histories that compose them through their use, cultural meaning, economic value, or the associated ‘magic of the stories spun about [them]’ (ibid.: 5). Bennett calls this ‘vibrant matter’ tracked through the ‘liveliness of its relations’ with other forces and objects (Bennett 2010; Muecke 2013: 5). Muecke writes, I have highlighted ivory and given it a career, which is to say a kind of life. In being alert to the forces at work in real time in shaping this life, one notices different kinds of agency, which lead me to endorse the idea of objects being animated . . . in every relationship that gives them function, meaning and affect. (Muecke 2013: 9—emphasis added)

Things and objects are not secondary or dead matter since they ‘vibrate’ through multiple relations with other forces, material and immaterial, along complex ‘lines of affect’, following ‘trajectories . . . transformations and connections’ (ibid.: 6). So Muecke tracks ivory’s ‘composition’ from the butchered elephant and slavery, through ornate artworks, billiard balls, jewelry, and piano keys to its ‘decomposition’ through its banning and cultural decline through the affective challenges of outrage, compassion, and moral righteousness. This attention to relations and networks of forces working across life, from the very smallest, overlooked thing to the larger contextual frameworks

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typifies Stewart’s drive to register the liveliness of matter, including, as Muecke also notes, the affective. As Deleuze puts it, ‘A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced’ (Deleuze 2007: 391). To bring together such relational networks, including the affective, requires a different kind of writing which ‘would not only be interdisciplinary, but also novelistic’ (Muecke 2013: 8). As we shall discuss later, this has evolved for Stewart as a hybrid form of autoethnography and fictocriticism. This chapter will examine how these various drives lead Stewart towards a further understanding of regionality, within which, to rephrase Heidegger, ‘regionalizing is the nearing of the world’. Like Muecke, whose work she admires greatly, Stewart’s acute attunement to things, relations, and ordinary affects gradually evolve towards a complex and poetic expression of regionality as a lively, active, and worldly presence: It follows leads, sidesteps, and delays, and it piles things up, creating layers on layers, in an effort to drag things into view, to follow trajectories in motion, and to scope out the shape and shadows and traces of assemblages that solidify and grow entrenched, perhaps doing real damage or holding real hope, and then dissipate, morph, rot, or give way to something new. (Stewart 2005: 1028)

Regionality is an edgy assemblage of things, circulations, sensations, and events pushing towards the ‘tactile compositionality of things’ which ‘encompasses not only what has been actualized but also the possibilities of plenitude and the threat of depletion’ (Stewart 2013c: 277; 2008: 80). 2: ‘A LIVED CULTURAL POETICS’: A SPACE ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD (1996) Stewart’s first book A Space on the Side of the Road approached these conceptualizations of actuality, potential, and depletion through her study of the ‘lived cultural poetics’ of mining communities or ‘camps’ in West Virginia, using an ‘eruption of the local and particular . . . to interrupt the expected and naturalized’ myth of region and the ‘problematics of the American imaginary’ (Stewart 1996: 3, 4, 5). In other words, through specific and prolonged representations of region, in this case, the hollers of West Virginia, ‘America’ constructed a contrary progressive story about itself. Thus ‘America’s relentless progressive track’ (Hufford 1999: 228) excluded or pushed to the ‘side of the road’ communities that it then re-presented through a process of ‘othering’, so that regions, like Appalachia, appear as a ‘finished text’ or ‘transparent “object” that can be abstracted into a fixed representation’ (Stewart 2008: 26). These representations then solidify in the

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national imaginary as backward and insular, allowing, as a consequence, ‘America’ to define itself as different, forward looking, modern, and certainly unlike this regional place. Stewart’s exploration of this ‘space on the side of the road’, initiated an emergent regionality which interrupted the smooth ease of myth with different and alternative perspectives: ‘at once tactile and imaginary . . . pressingly real and as insubstantial as ghostly traces’ (ibid.: 17). Here Stewart recalls Frampton’s critical regionalist call for ‘tactile resilience’, ‘experience’, and nearness, with her ‘“system” not either/or but both/ and: both global and local, tactile and imaginary, both set and fleeting, both one thing and another’; breaking away from the ‘recognizable frame’ (ibid.: 20, 21) of fixed definitions that represented region as mythic, static spaces, by enabling a complex, dynamic, and multilayered regionality to emerge. To counter this representational frame, Stewart’s writing assembles description, objects, voices, stories, ‘to heap detail upon detail’; a method by which ‘a surreal space of intensification’ materializes (ibid.: 21). In 2008, reflecting back on this West Virginia work, Stewart called these stories ‘incessant composition’ (ibid.: 79), as if preparing the way for her developing theory of assemblage and ‘compositionality’. A Space on the Side of the Road was heavily influenced by James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which refused to accept the represented construct of region as the ‘simple location’ of ‘southernness’. Agee’s book was ‘an effort in human actuality’, addressing ‘the immeasurable weight of human existence’ for which language is barely adequate, since to capture the energy of the region and ‘the nearing of the world’, one requires more than words. It required a form closer to Bennett’s vibrant materiality: ‘photographs . . . fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement’ (Agee and Evans 1975: xvi, 12, 13). To represent life in writing, Agee recognized, was problematic and unsatisfactory, preferring instead something closer to music turned up ‘as loud as you can get it’ with your ear jammed up against the speaker at ground level so as to ‘concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body’, for only then would you be ‘inside the music, not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music’ (ibid.: 15–16). In the raw experience of the music felt bodily (‘you are it’), like Olson’s dance, Agee expresses life’s ‘liveliness’ or vibrancy, the very ‘refrains’, to use a word favoured by Stewart, which he explores in the experimental sections in his book—descriptive, poetic, open, detailed: ‘ancient, then more recent . . . spreaded [sic] and more local, history and situation’ (ibid.: 101). Agee strives for new expressivity since ‘this is a book only by necessity’, because words cannot convey the subtle worlds within this community (ibid.: xvi). What he produces remains ‘merely portent and fragment, experiment, dissonant prologue’ to other stories outside its reach, pro-

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voked by the descriptions but never defined by them, only ever ‘catching what is thrown’ (ibid.: xvi, 236) to express momentarily the lines of life as they are lived. To borrow Muecke’s words again, Agee conveys regionality as ‘continued reproduction’ rather than completed or simply and narrowly ‘referenced’ (Muecke 2014: 170). Agee, as William Stott claims, ‘deliberately violated expectations’ of documentary reportage with self-reflexive comments, provocative asides, ‘inventories’ of place, slow accumulations of detail, and always an experimental edge, such as his use of the colon to indicate something to come, something beyond the first clause, that proves, explains, defines, describes, or lists elements of what preceded it (Stott 1973: 291, 295). Stott comments that ‘the parenthesis often left unclosed—(—open to the world’, tells us much about Agee’s intentions as a writer, while, ‘even better’, is the punctuation mark he used ‘to such fascinating excess and named a chapter for’—the colon (ibid.: 311). Agee noted, ‘These parentheses, colons and question marks are intended to indicate what it seemed that words could not as well’ (Agee quoted in ibid.: 311). 1 Stewart’s admiration for Agee and the clear relationship of his style to her new ethnography or ‘autoethnography’ (Stewart 2013b: 660) are early signs of her concern for the ‘failure of representation to capture an absolute “real”’ and the need for what she terms ‘cultural poesis’, ‘creativity of ordinary things’, or ‘compositionality’ (Stewart 2005: 1027; 2008: 73) as alternative methods to record ‘things that happen’ while critiquing ‘the dreamy documentary bubble that would contain an “Other,” subjected life world in the prefabricated good intentions of the order of things’ (Stewart 1996: 22, 27, 23). Muecke has written that ‘the historical world we build is not therefore one consisting primarily of “constructed” representations, it is a negotiable world of heterogeneities’ (Muecke 2008: 41), a world, for Stewart, best explored through cultural poesis, ‘a mode of production in an unfinished world’ (Stewart 2008: 77). Her goal is to ‘wrest cultural representation free of the very claim to problem-solving absolute knowledge’ and, following Michael Taussig, to convey ‘something like . . . the performance of a nervous cultural “system” itself’ (Stewart 1996: 23, 24). 2 Under such conditions, ‘immanent critique’, as she calls her approach, cannot pretend to be at a distance from its chosen ‘objects’ with a sense of ‘fixed “culture” as an object of analysis that was whole, bounded, and discrete’ (ibid.: 25). Instead, drawing on Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Barthes, among others, Stewart views culture as dialogical, plural, relational, and processive, always with a ‘“hard-to-grasp” quality . . . resonating with . . . “something more”’ (ibid.: 5). Her approach is to ‘track a moving object’, ‘record the state of emergence’, and uncover ‘the haunting or exciting presence of traces, remainders, and excesses uncaptured by claimed meanings’, to animate this ‘unclaimed’ ‘space on the side of the road’ through writing which is ‘committed to speculations, experiments, recogni-

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tions, engagements, and curiosity’, not simply to demystify or proclaim new truths that ‘snap into place to support a well-known picture of the world’ (Stewart 2005: 1027). Echoing Muecke’s belief that such writing could be ‘interdisciplinary, but also novelistic’, Stewart’s style is a ‘speculative topography of the everyday sensibilities now consequential to living through things. An attention to matterings, the complex emergent worlds, happening in everyday life’ (Stewart 2011: 445). Thus, Appalachia in A Space on the Side of the Road ‘is not an end, or a blueprint for thinking and acting, but a constant beginning again—a search, an argument, an unfinished longing’, and it is approximated ‘not [in] a smooth story’ but rather in ‘the thickets of storied sociality’, whose ‘fits and starts’ interrupt the efforts of a master narrative of ‘culture’ or nation (Stewart 1996: 9). Her text is ‘made up of moments of encounter, shock, recognition, retreat. It grows nervous, and whatever “system” it is able to glimpse is itself a nervous system. . . . It is a story in which there is always something more to be said’ (ibid.: 6–7). 3 Like Waldie, Stewart’s attention to ‘interruptions, amassed densities of description, evocations of voices and the conditions of their possibility, and lyrical, ruminative aporias that give pause’, serve to ‘open a gap’ in the ‘story of “America”’ which ultimately will ‘perform the problematics of the American imaginary—the problematics of subject and object, power and powerlessness, distance and closeness, certainty and doubt, stereotype and cultural form, forgetting and re-membering—so that these become constitutive elements of the story itself’ (ibid.: 7). The ‘gap’ opened here critiques the referent ‘America’ through renewing attentiveness to regionality, not as a nostalgic alternative to the national narrative or a building block within a larger framework but rather as an active, critical force, ‘a mode of questioning carried out in local ways’ (ibid.: 40). Indeed, traditional notions of regionalism viewed through Stewart’s lens of cultural poesis is an example of ‘prefabricated knowledge’ ‘loosened’ by her experimental style to encourage readers to actively experience regionality as a lived, active presence (Stewart 2005: 1027). Regionality, as her later work specifies, presents itself through ‘atmospheric attunements’ and ‘rhythms and labors of living’ which, echoing Heidegger, relate to the ‘bringing near’ of ‘worlding’ (Stewart 2011: 445–46; Heidegger 1971: 178), refuting ‘the dead or reeling effects of distant systems’ to define and fix ‘regions’ or ‘worlds’. Instead, they are animated and interconnected, ‘lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields’ (Stewart 2011: 446) forming ‘little worlds’ as forces collide, connect, and disburse as atmospheric attunements and compositions, ‘pulling matter and mind into a making: a worlding’ (Stewart 2014a: 446, 119). ‘World’ is always plural, since there are many worlds, technical, referential, fictional, religious, reproductive, that ‘interact

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with each other without necessarily, or always, going by way of the human perception of the interaction’ (Muecke 2014: 163). To record ‘things that happen’ as interactions and relations, A Space on the Side of the Road follows ‘local ways’, ‘tracked through its moves and versions, its sites of encounter and engagement, its pride and regrets, its permeabilities and vulnerabilities, its nervous shifts from one thing to another, its moments of self-possession and dispersal’ (Stewart 1996: 9). She re-cites the tales of the hollers, ‘shifts nervously back and forth between story and exegesis’ (ibid.: 40), asking her readers constantly to ‘picture’ and ‘imagine’ and ‘remember’, like Agee opening up the world through his colons and unclosed parentheses. Recalling Muecke’s fictocriticism, Stewart ‘gathers and assembles textual remnants to construct a dialogic text that reworks ways of knowing the country’ (Slater 2008: 354). She summarized her fictocritical method as ‘provocations’: ‘to follow along, read into, imagine, digress, establish independent trajectories and connections, disagree’, acknowledging that her ‘own voice is particular and partial, tending . . . to be surreal, dream-like’ in its response to ordinary spaces (Stewart 2005: 1027). But she is one voice among many ‘meandering through scenes’, groping ‘towards embodied affective experience’, noting moments of ‘impact’ and ‘agency’ ‘in the jump or surge of affect’, in contrast to ‘the plane of finished representations’ (ibid.: 1027). 4 In this swirling arena of ‘unclaimed’ but vital energies, Stewart recognizes ordinary life as creative and generative, a means of knowing the country ‘in excess of recognized objects we call texts, experience, meaning, concept, and analysis’ (ibid.: 1028). Her admiration for Deleuze and Guattari derives from their ability to ‘track actual events, conjunctures, and articulations of forces to see what they do’ rather than to fall back on the preset, presupposed, or the fixed meanings already taken for granted (ibid.). Their work is ‘in excess’ of presumed meanings and regulated languages, not so the local or minor becomes the new dominant but rather that it intervenes in any ‘universal authority’ while simultaneously provoking or initiating new connections without permitting local knowledge to be ‘codified into normality’ (Slater 2008: 357). 3: A COOLER CRITIQUE: FICTOCRITICAL REGIONALITY Agee’s experimental writing alongside Stewart’s interest in critical and cultural theory expressed in A Space on the Side of the Road, signalled her fascination with what has been variously called ‘paraliterature’, ‘research fiction’, ‘fictocriticism’, or ‘autoethnography (see Mischke in Gohrisch and Grünkemeier 2013). Exposed to fictocriticism through her work with Michael Taussig at the University of Michigan, her readings within écriture feminine and poststructuralism, and her admiration for writers like Muecke

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and Alphonso Lingis, Stewart’s mix of self-reflexivity, recitation, storytelling, and critique owes much to its approaches. According to Muecke, fictocriticism is dialogical: ‘The ficto- side of fictocriticism follows the twists and turns of animated language as it finds new pathways. The -criticism part comes in the risky leap of taking the story to a different “world”’ (Muecke 2016: preface). As one of the ‘founders’ of fictocriticism, Muecke termed it a ‘cooler critique’: Not . . . an inflammatory critique, but a cooler one that proceeds by way of tracing the relations between things, that decomposes these relations in such a way that decision-making processes are slowed down (rather than rushing to the usual conclusions via the usual transcendent concepts). Combine inventive storytelling with a more cautious analysis, then, in a poetry that decomposes and recomposes things in their lively relations. (Muecke 2013: 10)

Taussig, also an Australian, has commented, I use the Sydney expression ‘fictocriticism’ to convey the hybrid sense . . . to turn the attention of the reader to the very act of writing as an ‘anthropological’ or cultural act which engages with the desire to succumb to authority in general, and to colonial or postcolonial tropes in particular. (Taussig and Levi Strauss 2005)

Stewart’s fictocritical regionality, as I term it, contains the ghostly traces of other voices (many of which I track in this chapter), reinforcing Anna Gibbs’s assertion that ‘fictocriticism is a “haunted writing”: traced by numerous voices which work now in unison, at other times in counterpoint, and at others still against each other, in deliberate discord’ (Gibbs 2005: n.p.). Fictocriticism permits Stewart to register the multiple, dialogical nature of regionality without falling into the trap of nostalgic looking back to an origin of things or to an imposition of prescribed values. As she said in 2013, ‘Forms, to me, are social material. My claim is always that these are compositions that are happening and ones that I’m doing. I’m interested in what something is, what is going on, and where it is going’ (Stewart in Pittman 2013). Thus, fictocriticism’s hauntedness creates a layering of the text without it simply repeating an already established structure of thought or ideology, such as submissive modes of authority or established values that feminists like Hélène Cixous counter. For Gibbs, this is ‘the necessity of haunted writing: to move from citation, the kind of repetition you have when reference is deference to disciplinary authority, to recitation—the performance of repetition, a repetition of repetition in order not to reproduce identity, but to try instead to engender new differences’ (Gibbs 2005: n.p.). Rather than ‘deference to disciplinary authority’, Stewart omits theoretical frames from her later work (‘I just embed the theory in whatever it is I’m writing’),

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leaving its traces in brief asides, with which the reader then actively engages (or not), follows the lines of flight or ‘trajectory’ or suggestion (or not), ‘not to reproduce identity’ as a finished thing but to spark instead new differences and relations (in Pittman 2013). Stewart claimed the production of ‘differences’ is ‘what I’m trying to do’ through her edgy trajectories that relate, intersect, and ‘veer off’, giving material form to regionality and, as a result, ‘[t]he ideal reader . . . gets in that space and starts to think about their own attention and how to compose their attention’ through writing that functions performatively, shifting registers from criticism to fiction to autobiography to history to theory (in ibid.). Her fictocritical regionality ‘tries to mimic felt impacts and half-known effects as if the writing were itself a form of life’ that ‘leaps’, performing not like a ‘trusted guide’ helping the reader link objects seamlessly to meanings or to represent the world reassuringly (Stewart 2005: 1016, 1028; 2007: 5) but rather provocatively ‘caught in the powerful tension between what can be known and told and what remains obscure or unspeakable but is nonetheless real’ (Stewart 2005: 1028). Consequently, her writing asks questions: ‘What is going on? . . . What forces are becoming sensate as forms, styles, desires, and practices? . . . How are people quite literally charged up by the sheer surge of things in the making? What does cultural poesis look like?’ (ibid.). Accordingly, Stewart is drawn to expressive writing where thick description, affective ‘blocs of sensations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164), and interwoven landscapes of the real and imagined occur, when ‘things throw themselves together into something that feels like something’ (Stewart 2008: 76). She cites writers such as Wallace Stevens, Andre Dubus, Ian McEwan, Louise Erdrich, David Searcy, Edward Jones, James Agee, Joan Didion, D. J. Waldie, Robert Frost, and Jack Kerouac whose ‘storied’ works ‘perform the intensity of circuits, surges, and sensations’ (Stewart 2007: 7) and consequently influence her increasingly expressive ‘art of description’ as ‘simultaneous and layered . . . braiding elements of the sensorium’ (Doty 2010: 3). Deleuze and Guattari asserted that artists are presenters, inventors, and creators of affects: ‘they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound [of sensations]’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 175—emphasis added). Stewart’s affective landscapes ‘make us become with them’ rather than fix us within any preset represented territory of beliefs or emotions. Hers is provocative description, opening out, not closing down, ‘creating a syntax that makes . . . [words] pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the “tone,” the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come’ (ibid.: 176). Like Heidegger, Stewart ‘twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold on it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion’ (ibid.). As Steiner noted of Heidegger, ‘He twists and com-

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pacts the sinews of vocabulary and grammar into resistant, palpable nodes . . . striving to get language and his reader inside the actual world . . . to make luminous and self-revealing the obstinate opaqueness of matter’ (Steiner 1978: 84–85—emphasis added). Steiner’s analogy is to painting, where the colour, motion, juxtaposition of paint, space, and texture of Van Gogh’s chair, shoes, and flower are felt through the raw thickness of applied material, its energies made actual as we encounter its familiar unfamiliarity: ‘the dynamics, the roughage of a process rather than its logic or finish’ (ibid.: 85). It is more than oil, pigment, and canvas, more than representation: ‘We feel, we know . . . that there is something else there, something utterly decisive’ (ibid.: 46). Steiner’s other example (as in Deleuze and Guattari and Agee) is music’s capacity to occupy mind and body with an ‘intricate ghostliness, a tension and felt lineament of motion’, like an affective presencing: ‘meshed strands of mood and bodily stance . . . brace or make drowsy . . . incite or calm . . . move to tears . . . spark laughter . . . cause us to smile’ (ibid.). Music aspires to represent an emotion or an occasion, a mood or national identity, and yet this is not actually what it is. It is always more than representational since it moves us, activates energies, and affects of joy, anger, boredom, sadness and refuses to be mere ‘reflections of some a priori order waiting to be unveiled, decoded, or revealed’ (Anderson and Harrison 2010a: 19). Stewart’s more than representational pensive, linguistic stickiness demands attention and reattunement from the reader, as in the opening of ‘Worlding Refrains’: ‘What is, is a refrain. A scoring over a world’s repetitions. A scratching of the surface of rhythms, sensory habits, gathering materialities, intervals, and durations. A gangly accrual of slow or sudden accretions. A rutting by scoring over’ (Stewart 2010: 339). Like Heidegger, Stewart’s language ‘tends to clot, as does thick paint’ (Steiner 1978: 85), forcing the reader to slow down, rethink, project possible meanings, thereby breaking the shackles of absolute representation and meaning wherein words have clear and direct referents, agreed, established, and presupposed. Crucially, such linguistic entanglements convey the experiencing and generativity of ordinary life: neighbourhood walks, trips to the garage or hospital, being on the road, living in a house, watching television, or going to the supermarket all register immense, immanent unspoken energy, like her description of a homeless person’s sign: Hungry. Will work for food. God bless you. . . . The graphic lettering that pleads for the attention of the passing cars glances off the eye as something to avoid like the plague. Moving on. But it also holds the fascination of catastrophe, the sense that something is happening, the surge of affect toward a profound scene. (Stewart 2005: 1031) 5

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The words describe and project: ‘The surge that starts things. A cracking open, like a kernel that splits and becomes fecund. A crackling. A flashing up’ (Stewart 2007: 120). The nuances of the encounter, its ‘impacts’ and objects, its social assembling of affects like fear, abjection, hope, need, and desire alongside the divisiveness of wealth and class are revealed by the scene. 6 As the gaze moves like the car itself, it glances at a scene it is itself not a part of and yet absolutely implicated in; something happening there whose force has the capacity to affect and be affected. It is a profound scene, however ordinary; an individual encounter of bodies in space, simultaneously a collective moment in which community, region, nation, and world are bound up. Stewart’s characteristic descriptive methodology—‘the mind playing over the world of matter’ (Doty 2010: 33)—refuses reductive representation, offering instead an opening-up through Heidegger’s ‘plenitude of particularity’, the precise dynamics of encounter: ‘That which is, is that which arises and opens itself, which, as what presences, comes upon man as the one who presences i.e., comes upon the one who himself opens himself to what presences in that he apprehends it’ (Heidegger 2013: 120, 131). Stewart’s descriptive methodology recalls Whitehead: ‘Every act of experience, then, every “actual entity”, requires a description presenting it in its potentiality . . . the creation of future experiences, of other “actual entities” . . . flowing into one another to create’ (Bram 2004: 68). In such ‘transitions’, one actual entity (Stewart’s ‘somethings’, ‘affects’, ‘energetics’—see Pittman 2013) becomes, forms, or generates another new ‘“entity” [which] means nothing else than to be one of the “many” which find their niches in each instance of concrescence’ (Whitehead 1979: 210, 211). Such a process is never complete, so ‘“the actual world” is always a relative term’, never fixed but always providing ‘datum’ for another concrescence (ibid.). This comes alive attuning to small, overlooked things and the immediacy of the world’s objects, subjects, atmospheres as rhythms of actual entities, aggregates of which form the larger entities of ‘worldings’. Of course, Stewart refers to a ‘throwing together’ or a ‘composition’ (see Pittman 2013) recalling Whitehead’s sense of the ‘organism’ and ‘process’, ‘but not a static organism . . . an incompletion in process of production’ (Whitehead 1979: 214–15). As discussed in chapter 2, process philosophy links the small (local/regional) beyond itself, through ‘incompletion’ and constant reproduction and accretion, to the wider concept of world or ‘universe’: ‘It repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm’ (ibid.: 215). As Latour puts it, ‘No entity is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others’ (Latour in Harman 2007: 41). For Stewart, the described entity, what she too terms ‘eddies’, alive and active on the page and through the reader’s engagement, takes on a new phase, transitioning, reimagined beyond

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its original ‘place’ (in its actual happening or in the book’s description of it). It lives on as an ‘eddy’ within the writing and recognition, growing as part of what Whitehead terms ‘fluency’ (Whitehead 1979: 210). The culmination of this phase of Stewart’s work can be seen in her book Ordinary Affects (2007). 4: ‘AN IDIOSYNCRATIC MAP OF CONNECTIONS’: ORDINARY AFFECTS (2007) Stewart has said Ordinary Affects was ‘about the register of affect, the register of intensity, the register of impact, in multiple and surprising forms—the dramatic and non-dramatic ways that things are happening’ (in Pittman 2013), expressed through ‘descriptive detours’ (Stewart 2011: 452) into the ‘reeling present’ of the ‘space on the side of the road’ or latterly through the suburban everyday as ‘imagined and inhabited . . . a sensory connection. A jump’ (Stewart 2007: 1, 127). Suddenly region becomes ‘a world of affinities and impacts that takes place in the moves of intensity across things that seem solid and dead’ (ibid.: 127). Thus the apparently ‘solid and dead’ environment of suburbia, for example, like the one seen from three thousand feet above in the aerial photography of William Garnett (see chapter 3), is animated by Stewart’s ‘cabinet of curiosities designed to incite curiosity’ rather than ‘to characterize things once and for all’ (Stewart 2005: 1041). 7 We cannot fix the meaning or rhythm of the suburbs, despite the efforts of many sociologists and urban historians, for what is required are stories that track ‘the pulses of things as they cross each other, come together, fragment, and recombine in some new surge . . . as the promise or threat, that something is happening—something capable of impact’ (ibid.). As we traced in the previous chapter, Holy Land becomes a similar distributed biography of place attuned to the minute activities of ordinary lives, while Stewart’s work becomes an uncanny ‘grounded globalism’ (Peacock 2010) registered, as in Olson’s deep and projected topography of Gloucester or Waldie’s layered prose poetics, through her experimental, speculative fictocriticism where lived experience is more important than ‘dead effects imposed on an innocence world’ (Stewart 2007: 1). Her book is a living example of a developing regionality, with the reader assembling material, leaping with language, struggling with concepts, remembering, experiencing, being drawn back and forth recursively through recollections of work previously published and now reborn in relation to new passages, iterations, and surprises. Stewart’s writing performs regionality as ‘a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences’ with each section part of a flow of repeated impulses or rhythms, entities, ‘molecular’ as against ‘molar’, because a molar entity is ‘defined by . . . form . . .

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and assigned as a subject’, whereas the ‘molecular’ is ‘becoming’ (see Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 275). These are ‘things that happen’; ‘impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating’ or ‘strategies and their failures’ of ‘forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion’ or ‘modes of attention, attachment, and agency’ or ‘publics and social worlds of all kinds’ (Stewart 2007: 2—emphases added). Such active presences circulate through ‘bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds’ constituting what we think of as a ‘life’; stalling, captivating, pausing, or driving things on, ‘immanent, obtuse, and erratic’, and with no ‘overarching scheme’ or ‘order of representation’ confirming something already known, established, or rooted, because these are the things totalities miss, full of ‘potentiality and resonance’, making ‘connections, routes, and disjunctures’ (ibid.: 3). Ordinary affects are ‘[a] tangle of potential connections . . . moving things . . . defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected—they have to be mapped through different, co-existing forms of composition, habituation and event’ (ibid.: 4). Standard ‘models of thinking’ such as ‘representational thinking and evaluative critique’, as we have seen, resemble Waldie’s distanced aerial photographs that ‘slide over the live surface of difference’ concerned only with the ‘bigger structures’, or what Latour calls ‘context’ (Latour 2007: 191), and which, consequently, miss the ‘tangle of potential connections’ buried in the everyday. Ordinary Affects ‘maps’ these as they move through familiar spaces but without the urge to formulate symbolic meanings (what they ‘represent’ in the bigger scheme of things), to summarize their achievement or purpose, or to unearth ‘a flat and finished truth’ (ibid.: 5). Instead, like De Certeau, Stewart monitors how affects work in and through the world: what they do as impacts, encounters, contacts, and consequently her method is unsettlingly odd, inciting us to think and feel differently. Heavily influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly Rajchman’s The Deleuze Connections, she creates a performative, ‘idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities . . . pointing always outward’ and refusing closed narratives or fixed, presupposed orders of things (Stewart 2007: 4–5). 8 She assembles ‘disparate scenes’ as ‘unassimilated . . . unframed’ (ibid.: 44) happenings in a contact zone of colliding, kaleidoscopic energies whirling around bodies of all kinds (human, animal, knowledges, worlds) sharing much with Olson’s projective forms; being thrown into the world, like ‘participants in the kinetics of the poem’ (Olson 1966: 2). 9 Stewart’s poesis projects or throws things/affects into place and invites the reader to participate in the ‘surge’ that ensues and in its ‘continued reproduction’ (Muecke 2014: 170). As scenes are ‘thrown’ before the reader, they ask of us: What? Why? Where? How?—opening out through curiosity, surprise, and incitement: ‘“And” before “Is”’, as Rajchman says of Deleuze’s method battling against the ‘already given’ (Rajchman 2000: 6), so that our experience of

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reading mimics life’s process as always active but stuttering ‘and . . . and . . . and’. Look, for example, in the section ‘A little accident, like any other’, which tells how a motor bike hits a deer in west Texas and how the resonance of the event within the public demonstrates the unpredictable charge of life as the one singular happening ‘spins off’ in all directions through stories, actions (people ‘keep their eyes open’), ‘conversations’, and ‘questions’, to ‘abstracted principles of freedom, fate, and recklessness’ (Stewart 2005: 1032; 2007: 11–12). 10 The seed sown by a little accident would ‘compel a response . . . shift people’s life trajectories in some small way, change them by literally changing their course for a minute or a day’ (ibid.: 1032; Stewart 2007: 12). Like the ‘digressive, haptic’ stories (Stewart 2008: 79) Stewart collected in West Virginia, this ordinary moment unfurls to ‘add a layer of story, daydream, and memory to things’, mixing together ‘the pulsing impact of dream and matter’ (Stewart 2005: 1032, 1038). But above all, such singular events ‘spawn’ all kinds of unpredictable happenings, trajectories, spinoffs, projections ‘resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality’ (Stewart 2007: 12), just as the book itself performs the same role for the engaged reader. It ‘amasses the resonance in things’, becoming, as Gibbs said of fictocriticism, a ‘kind of hauntedness’ (ibid.: 12, 16), so as we read the scenes, as Waldie’s walks through Lakewood, they spark and spawn memories and affects that fly off as trajectories connecting or not with other people, places, and things like ‘chains of intimately connected transformations’ (Muecke 2014: 171). For Stewart, such ‘scenes have an afterlife’ that cannot be contained; rhizomatically they live on through the ‘eccentric circulation’ of stories, gestures, reproducing responses and relations (Stewart 2007: 68). So when scenes appear paused, as ‘still life’ moments, Stewart asserts that by close attention and attunement to what is here and happening, we do not refer to a ‘given possibility’ or ‘ready-made ideas’ (Rajchman 2000: 127) because ‘a still life is a static state filled with vibratory motion, or resonance. A quivering in the stability of a category or a trajectory, it gives the ordinary the charge of an unfolding’ (Stewart 2007: 19). The ‘potential stored in ordinary things’ erupts from the unpromising stillness as an ‘unfolding’, so that the ‘residues of past dreaming practices’ such as the unquestioning belief in the American Dream of progress and achievement, can be reimagined (ibid.: 21). Stewart invokes the American Dream, like Berlant in Cruel Optimism, as a closed narrative fixing aspiration by defining lives and channelling potential down narrow lines with ‘the weight of received meaning’ (ibid.: 23). It is ‘a light contact zone that rests on a thin layer of shared public experiences’ where communities are ‘sutured to a pretty picture with surround sound. . . . A sensory dream of seamless encounter floats over the currents of racial fear, rage, segregation, discrimination, violence, and exhaustion’ (ibid.: 52, 48). Consequently, ‘we dream the dream of a finished life’, of ‘living lite’ (ibid.:

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48, 50), which she interrupts through the charge, surge, and spark of the everunfolding, unfinished ordinary worlds thrown before us. Politically, Stewart resists reductionism and those myths that ‘lighten’ life, like a ‘Martha Stewart’ still-life ‘cocoon’ opened up by the layered intrusions of the uncanny horrors of living; of things not right, going wrong, breaking down, spoiling, interfering, like the ‘unwanted knock on the door’: ‘open, emergent, vulnerable, and jumpy’ (ibid.: 55). Anything appearing finished, seamless, or closed for Stewart demands interrogation; hence ‘ideology’, mentioned twice in the book, is ‘not just ideology’ (ibid.: 48, 77—emphasis added), for that is too tidy a concept, reductively flattening out the complexity of life into a framing, overarching category rather than as a ‘fold . . . in the composition of things’ (ibid.: 77). Stewart views neat ideological readings similarly to Muecke, who says Marxist readings ‘risk taking away the text’s own voice’ through reasserting a ‘chain of reference’ or ‘domain of knowledge’ rather than ‘reproducing itself’ as an ‘event’ with more unpredictable and poetic elements (Muecke 2014: 169). Instead, the body registers the composition of things as rhythms, impacts, and layers, which Stewart argues are ever present in the ordinary ‘like a secret battery kept charged’ waiting to be connected (Stewart 2005: 1038). Stories infuse and gather as life ‘tracked through bodies, desires, or labors’, traced as ‘a passing surge registered, somehow, in objects, acts, situations, and events’ (ibid.: 1040). These should not, however, be reduced to ‘ideologies’ or contained as ‘symbolic representations’ since they are ‘fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable’, like ‘flirtations’, refusing to be explained (ibid.; see Crouch 2010). Hers is a ‘cultural and political critique that tracks lived impacts and rogue vitalities through bodily agitations . . . free-floating fascination, and moments of collective excitation or enervation’ (ibid.: 1041). Fictocritical regionality expresses these ‘tracks’ through everyday events, revealing a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ that is more-than-representation and which resists the temptation ‘to present a final, or good enough, story of something we might call “U.S. culture”’(ibid.: 1041). Her work constantly deflects this desire ‘to characterize things once and for all’ and performs instead a vibrant, surging dance with the ‘myriad strands of shifting influence that remain uncaptured by representational thinking’ (ibid.: 1041). ‘It tries’, she argues, ‘to cull attention to the affects that arise in the course of the perfectly ordinary life’, pointing to the ‘generative immanence lodged in things’ and so resists the ‘named “feelings” or “emotions” invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities’ in favour of the unnameable, unpredictable ‘surge of intensity itself’ (ibid.: 1041). Her descriptive gatherings work, ‘not as a fixed body of elements and representations imposed on an innocent world but rather as a literally moving mix of things that engages desires, ways of being, and concrete places and objects’ (ibid.: 1041).

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In Ordinary Affects, Stewart describes a walk with her daughter through her suburban neighbourhood ‘laying down imaginaries’: The yards are vulnerable in the predawn. The mist rises in a yard full of playful and scary cement statues of giant bunny rabbits and gargoyles. What are these people doing with all these statues? . . . Up the street a large plastic ball is lodged in a tree. . . . The vagueness or the unfinished quality of the ordinary is not so much a deficiency as a resource, like a fog of immanent forces still moving even though so much has already happened and there seems to be plenty that’s set in stone. This is no utopia. Not a challenge to be achieved or an ideal to be realized, but a mode of attunement, a continuous responding to something not quite already given and yet somehow happening. (Stewart 2007: 127) 11

Regionality registers through the same kinds of ‘turnings’ discussed in Holy Land; from self to not-self, real to imagined, person to place, local to the world. For the ‘she’ in this is Stewart as a ‘node of impacts . . . a fictional character in a sense’ (in Pittman 2013) turning in and out of identities, just as the ‘he’ in Holy Land is Waldie across time. Stewart explains that ‘she’ is ‘not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact: she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer’ (Stewart 2007: 5). Her walk in the predawn suburb with its whole way of life exposed is both reassuring and perplexing, ‘not so much a deficiency as a resource, like a fog of immanent forces’ always tantalizing, incomplete, and surreal. Stewart’s descriptive style, in short sections like Waldie’s, gathers up fragments, reminding us of their significance as little worlds of intensities, a resource full of possibility. 12 The technique is autoethnographic as Stewart has defined it: ‘Detouring into descriptive eddies, it might slow the naturalized relationship between subject, concept, and world . . . note the incommensurateness of the elements throwing themselves together. . . . In short, it can become a way to hone in on the singularities in which things actually take place’ (Stewart 2013b: 661). Noticing and sharing these details and events of the everyday, Stewart creates a ‘relay’ of sense to spark the reader into a re-engagement, or possibly an astonishment or enchantment (see Bennett 2001; 2010), with what is present, but so often ignored, in the world around us. As Jacques Rancière has written:

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Human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together; and politics is about the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together’. (Rancière 2009: 56)

Stewart’s ‘politics’ is concerned with this ‘transformation’ through a recognition of affect in the everyday, which she admits is ‘a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation’ with the potential for a shift in perception, a re-attuning of our senses to self, region and world (Stewart 2007: 40). To borrow from Rajchman, ‘There is a logic’ to these entangled affective scenes, ‘to extract possibility from probability, multiplicity from unity, singularity from generality—the logic of “a life”’ (Rajchman 2000: 127). 5: ‘SUGGESTIVE CARTOGRAPHIES’: WORLDING REFRAINS As I have shown, Stewart consistently experiments with modes of writing ‘to flatten conceptual hierarchies between the big (important) and small (off register, invisible) or between notions of an official system in a distance and the lived affects of everyday life’ (Stewart 2014a: 551). The sense of distance and remoteness played out as the friction between the ‘faraway nearby’ in Solnit’s writings, countered in Waldie’s intimate suburban stories or through the gritty, dirty realism of Vlautin’s novels and songs, brings us closer to the ‘near-at-hand’ consistently experienced in Stewart’s fictocritical regionality where ‘[t]he ordinary is a circuit that’s always tuned in to some little something somewhere’ (Stewart 2007: 12). In recent work, she cultivates a ‘suggestive cartography’ (Stewart 2015a: 26), organizing around ‘descriptive detours’ into the ‘rhythms of living’, or life’s multiple ‘refrains’ (Stewart 2011: 445), extending her interest in regionality and specifically to ‘regional worlding’ (Stewart 2015a: 23). Her new book Worldings ‘grew out of Ordinary Affects’ in two distinct ways: first, because the latter contained a ‘proliferation of scenes’ which she thought of as ‘worldings’ or ‘energetics’; and secondly, because ‘it comes out of my own experience’ (in Pittman 2013). Terming this ‘post-critique’ (ibid.), with reference to Latour and his call for ‘compositionism’ as an alternative to critique’s tendency towards transcendence and the belief that through debunking, unveiling, and revealing, one might reach ‘privileged access to a world beyond the veils of appearance’ (Latour 2010: 475), Stewart’s ‘compositionality’ was ‘all about immanence’ and an immersion in the ordinary rather than the distanced or remote. Latour puts it very directly: ‘With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together. It is no more possible to

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compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw’ (ibid.). Stewart’s ‘discussion’ of life and place emphasizes composition and ‘capacities to affect and be affected, or an energetics’, a type of Whiteheadian process through which ‘a whole is re-theorized as a diverse and diffuse field of co-constituting elements thrown together into an assemblage in and as events’ (Stewart 2014a: 551, 499). Olson, you will recall, wanted to be ‘set free of the old line’ (Olson 1966: 21) in a similar way that Stewart sees life itself as multiple lines woven within the textured kinetics of the everyday. As I have argued, she is performative and her writing an encounter, a happening through which we, the reader, experience its energies of encounter as we traverse the pages of her work. This throwing together, as she terms it, alerts us to the motion of things, their interaction, connection, changeability, collision, and, therefore, their active potentiality. This owes something again to Heidegger: ‘We call it the thrownness of this entity into its “there” . . . the facticity of its being delivered over’ (Heidegger 1962: 174—italics in original). We don’t know where we came from or why we are here, but we are projected into existence (as in Olson’s projective verse), thrown into the midst of living with all its possibilities; ‘delivered over’ into a worlding process. The fuller sense of ‘delivered over’ or Ueberantwortung, suggests a complex relationship to life: ‘“responsibility towards that into which we are delivered”—to an actuality, to be “here”, to a complete, enveloping presentness’ (Steiner 1978: 86). For Heidegger, being-in-the-world involves ‘dealings’ [Umgang—‘going around’, ‘going about’, ‘intercourse’ are all possible meanings] with ‘entities which we encounter’ close at hand (Heidegger 1962: 95). In other words, for Stewart there is a fundamental compositionality of things along diverse, unpredictable, unfixed lines; rhizomatic without being detached from specific situations, locations, objects, emotions, relations, and powers—‘an arrangement like a musical score’ (Stewart 2014a: 550). This sense of the active presence discussed throughout this book, and seen at work in Yamashita’s vision of Los Angeles as a complex symphony of lines and traces in Tropic of Orange (see chapter 7), reminds us of Stewart’s centrality to this project and reinforces her interest in ‘a cartography of effects and affects’ (ibid.). Whether describing the American road, the colour red, small town communities in New England, or suburban lives from ‘literature to ordinary practices to state thinking’ (ibid.), Stewart unfolds their energies along these wavy lines of image, action, and imagination, forming and deforming ‘registers’ (‘rhythms, tones, and spatio-temporal orientations’, ibid.) that trouble, provoke, surprise, even befuddle the reader in their webs or lists of contradiction and possibility. As I have argued, this is not representational writing that ‘bloodlessly determine[s] worlds’ (Stewart 2015a: 26), defining and fixing one thing aligned neatly to another so that X-object represents Y-

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feeling, or A-place is revealed through B-metaphor, as if binding up the world into packages of knowledge and emotional connection on our behalf. Stewart describes this as ‘tacking perception, context, and cause onto an order of representations located nowhere in particular or in some paranoid hyper-place like the state or regional prejudice’ (ibid.: 20). Instead, her work is ‘more-than-representational’, so that rather than simply representing a Red House it becomes ‘the throwing together of the phenomena of wood and water, territory, mood, atmosphere, and sensory change’ (ibid.), as in the example of the opening paragraph of Sarah Messer’s Red House (2005): ‘Before the highway, the oil slick, the outflow pipe; before the blizzard, the sea monster, the Girl Scout camp; before the nudist colony and flower farm; before the tidal wave broke the river’s mouth’ (Messer 2005: 1). Here Stewart challenges ‘regional prejudice’ finding in Messer’s Red House a ‘compositional node’ or ‘prismatic structure’ through which matter produces a ‘worlding landscape’ radiating energies, stories, memories, affects like lines through a prism stretching, connecting, and creating still further new lines (ibid.). Recurrent words delineate Stewart’s recent work: etching, scoring, rutting, accretion, refrains, paths, and lines, for example, suggesting this cartography of physical, material marking of place or region as well as passages through it and connections beyond and across it. Perhaps the telling word here is ‘score’, deliberately and poetically engaging and provoking the reader, conveying multiply a physical marking or cutting, a musical composition, the cancelling or elimination by superimposing lines, and even the acquiring of something. Her method is a ‘double compositionality . . . that works by calling out and scoring over refrains’, as if it simultaneously digs down and slides over, both seeing the local details and their relations to their constitution of the whole (Stewart 2015a: 20—emphasis added). As she wrote, her work ‘underscores, overscores, rescores’ in a process of gathering, emphasis and repetition demonstrating how in living ‘there is nothing dead or inconsequential’ because everything matters (Stewart 2010: 339, 340). This calling out and scoring over draws us closer to things like a ‘serial immersion in some little world you never knew was there’ until it comes into contact as an affective encounter (ibid.: 340). Thus, worlding happens in the refrains of the ordinary, through ‘the dense entanglement of affect, attention, the senses, and matter’ as each little world registers like a ‘bloom space’ promising, threatening, and troubling (ibid.). ‘The world’, she writes, ‘is a bloom space’ made up of little worlds that can be ‘anything’ within its many and varied compositions: ‘the tracks of refrains that etch out a way of living in the face of everything’ (ibid.: 340, 341). As McCormack explains, ‘[R]efrains are always potentially generative of difference, producing lines of thinking, feeling, and perceiving that may allow one to wander beyond the familiar’ (McCormack 2013: 8). 13

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Stewart’s work returns on itself, as it always does, finding ‘refrains’ and ‘bloom spaces’ in familiar places, things, and themes that she ‘underscores, overscores, rescores’, repeats, reiterates, adds, refines in a form she calls ‘looping’ (Stewart 2015a: 30). It is, however, always ‘repetition with a difference’ (in Pittman 2013), an idea drawn from Deleuze, Guattari, and Lefebvre, which she expands through the notion of the refrain. For Stewart, ‘the world is composed out of these repetitive, recursive etchings of everything— of materiality, of sociality, and of meaning’, but each time it happens, it happens differently and is generative (ibid.). Things make an impact; they ‘register’ (in every sense), as in her essay ‘Road Registers’, where she follows the cartographies of the American road as ‘bloom space’, a ‘recursive haeccity’, producing ‘compositional reals’ (Stewart 2015a: 21). 14 It is, therefore, composed of multiple stories traced in the depths and shallows of ‘roadness’, as she terms it, endlessly emerging and circulating; described, laid out, and collaged on the page, as she assembles and generates the energetics of the road-as-worlding, to place alongside multiple compositions that structure a reassembled sense of the social. So rather than a fixed representation of the road (as freedom or escape or economic symptom), she provides a ‘multirealist’ (Muecke 2012: 42) participation in the worlds it proliferates and links with; an ‘assemblage’ thrown together ‘lodged in institutional effects and lived affects, materialities and dreamworlds, differences and energies’ (Stewart 2014a: 499). So one of the greatest icons of U.S. culture, particularly associated with the West, the open road, emerges compositionally as we read and engage with the essay’s registers ‘from literature to ordinary practice to state thinking’, as a ‘creative geography’ of ‘roadness’ (ibid.: 550). In this manner, presuppositions and expectations get tangled up with surprising elements ‘thrown’ into the plane of understanding of ‘roadness’ as more-than-representational, as living change, as ‘residue’, ‘generative scene’, and ‘an assembling, registering machinery of impacts and potentialities’ (ibid.: 552): ‘a poem lined out of military money, the post World War II American dream, suburban development, place names, nostalgia, the Cold war, Jim Crow, engineered landscapes, drinking while driving, class’ (ibid.: 553). Amassing layers of this ‘material-symbolic infrastructure’ (ibid.), Stewart refigures the road not as simple location from A to B, nor as dreamworld metaphor, but as ‘a worlding’ bound up in the production and reproduction of multiple ‘reals’ (including the ‘real’ of dream and fantasy), lives, events, places, and affects. Stewart’s refrains of the road, with intertextual echoes of Muecke’s No Road (bitumen all the way) (1997), score across landscape, mind, and other objects as an evolving, intense, and allusive cartography, expressing regionality, like her registers of New Hampshire ‘made up of our itineraries shuttling back and forth across its surface’ (ibid.: 557).

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In recent essays, regionality is ‘attunements’, following (or trying to) the lines, webs, lists that spin out and get thrown together into her ‘assemblages’ of affect as lived composition rather than a ‘dead’ specimen, already defined and represented for us. Bennett defines assemblages as ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts . . . living, throbbing confederations . . . uneven topographies . . . emergent properties . . . [that] make something happen . . . [but are] never a solid block but an open-ended collective, a “non-totalizable sum”’ (Bennett 2010: 23–24). ‘[A] world in the present tense’, according to Stewart, ‘is always other than its representation, or what we know of it’ (Stewart 2015a: 21). This looks back to Stewart’s admiration for Agee and his detailed description of the sharecroppers’ houses where knots or grains of wood are ‘closely collaborated and inter-involved . . . set in the twisted and cradling planet . . . subtly unrepeatable and probably infinite’ (Agee and Evans 1975: 146). Region expressed this way is ‘already a question and a something waiting to happen . . . a series of connections expressing the abstract idea . . . through a fast sensory relay’, a bloom space (ibid.: 30). Most significantly, this is never bounded regionalism, like ‘an escape into a nostalgic past captured in remnant form in the present’ (DeLyser 2005: 18), although this might be part of its assemblage and its scored refrains, because it is permeated with worlds, actively worlding. Worlding suggests these multiple active presences that constitute life and living, moving bodies and minds through space and time without settling for The World, like some perfect, finished thing within which we exist already, measured, anchored, and weighed down. As Anderson and Harrison put it, ‘[W]orlds’ are not formed in the mind before they are lived in, rather we come to know and enact a world from inhabiting it, from becoming attuned to its differences, positions and juxtapositions, from a training of our senses, dispositions and expectations and from being able to initiate, imitate and elaborate skilled lines of action. (Anderson and Harrison 2010: 9)

Life in other words is a ‘series of worldings that have laid down tracks of reaction, etched habits and of composition onto identities, desires, objects, scenes and ways of living’ rather than ‘the bloodless effects of distant systems’ (Stewart 2013a: 32). Regioning assembles, identities form, and ‘a person is a nexus of a great pile of things: the fierce and febrile attachments, the sedimented habits, the flights of fancy, the events of all kinds, the stubborn plans and their roadblocks and abductions, the sheer weight of things, or a stance to the world that remains as a residue—a distillate cooked down’ (ibid.: 32–33). Lives cohabit with forces and things of the world, material, imagined, dreamed, felt, known—‘the unrelenting too-muchness of things’— and together these multiples map out ‘a cartography of a life’ (ibid.: 33). But as we have seen throughout this chapter, this can be no ordinary, simple

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cartography but closer to Solnit’s ‘infinite atlas’ or Nick Papadimitriou’s ‘deep topography’ of regional Britain (Papadimitriou 2012: 78). Stewart’s ‘germinal aesthetic’ is a ‘tendril of practices and sensibilities gathered into an energetics of form’ (ibid.: 24), providing a radical and exciting expansion of critical regionalism crossed with more-thanrepresentational thinking and fictocriticism, finding its most sustained expression in her essay ‘Regionality’ (2013) as ‘something taking place’ (Stewart 2015a: 26). Regionality becomes bloom space, ‘that jumps between landscape and bodies of all kinds. It is ambient, and therefore atmospheric. . . . It strikes the senses. It pulls hard matter into alignment with a composition’ (Stewart 2013c: 275). In its vibrant materiality, regionality developed from the ‘space on the side of the road’, a political purpose close to that of Bennett whereby ‘encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests’ (Bennett 2010: 122). In 2008, Stewart wrote that the point of theory now is not to judge the value of analytic objects or to somehow get their representation ‘right’ but to wonder where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them as a potential or resonance. (Stewart 2008: 73)

As so many of her stories assert through their painstaking descriptions of the ordinary, ‘things don’t just add up’ (ibid.: 74), for regionality is ‘a not yet’ in an unfinished world; ‘something deferred . . . or that failed to arrive, or . . . lost, or . . . waiting . . . nascent, perhaps pressing’, constantly thrown together as ‘affective matter’ (Stewart 2008: 80, 81). Regionality is forged by happenings, tracked, like the Red House or the road, in the ‘stories of tracing things that come together’ and conveyed through the ‘sense of being in something—something grand . . . degraded . . . dumb—whatever’ (ibid.: 81). What Lisa Slater wrote of Muecke’s No Road (bitumen all the way), seems applicable to Stewart’s trajectory, since it ‘attempts to negotiate the impasse of cultural differences, not by driving along the straight roads and Imperial highways of Western knowledge, but by getting lost and being pulled into affective encounters with others and otherness’ (Slater 2008: 365). ‘Regionality’ draws together Stewart’s rich sense of ‘knowing the country’, not as a final, absolute, fixed knowledge but as something mobile, like Muecke’s rejection of straight roads and his preferred, deterritorialized process of ‘getting lost and being pulled into’. Located in ‘a small town north of Boston’, Stewart’s regionality is ‘an event that jumps between landscape and bodies of all kinds’, endlessly active, it ‘seeps . . . strikes . . . pulls’ and is felt as ambience, atmosphere, odor, voice, and light (Stewart 2013c: 275). These

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forces, affects, intensities, form ‘refrains’, as discussed above, pulling things to some ‘consistency’ or delineating ‘an affective attachment to place’ which seems rooted and inward looking. 15 Yet, suggests Stewart, these refrained territories are ‘edges’, too, abutting other and different territories (ibid.: 276), and from this apparent ‘certainty’ comes the sense of ‘disorientation’ when that bounded area is ‘edged’ upon by something else that displaces it (ibid.). From these precise moments, ‘bubble worlds’ from within seemingly closed regions (‘zones of familiarity’) to ‘reinvent the self-in-place by testing its limits’ or ‘getting lost’ (ibid.). 16 From ordinary stories of lives moving out of the familiar, like losing her way walking from her mother’s nursing home to a Pizza Factory, Stewart disorients or ‘edges’ region away from the rooted and fixed on some new ‘line, or a particular refrain’, exposing ‘its affective structure’ (ibid.: 277). ‘Regionality comes into view at a limit’ where its very territorial boundedness is put under question, ‘decentered by what it sets in motion, hollowed out by the labyrinth of its trajectories . . . [that] demand precarious alignment’ (ibid.). So ‘those laying claim to place and a lifeworld’ solidify regional iconography in order to ‘produce regionality’, whereas in reality, it is never finally produced, but rather, as Muecke put it, constantly ‘reproduced’ through ‘the tactile compositionality of things’ and their ‘strands of influence’ that ‘stretches transversally’ (ibid.: 277–78). These close, suggestive folds, assert regionality as active composition rather than resolved narrative, gathering itself from diverse, contradictory entities into a ‘plateau’ (ibid.: 278) or site where theories, anecdotes, descriptions, experiences, histories, and affects assemble, forging new connections, not as an act of mastery but of cultural poesis. Regionality ‘has drama, intensity, an energetics of tension and release, build up and lateral shift’ even though it is often oversimplified and misrepresented as ‘we’re from here’ (ibid.). Stewart’s point is that being ‘from here’, as she has traced from her earliest work in West Virginia, is, in actuality a complex assemblage making locals and regionals, contrary to the stereotype, ‘active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations’ (ibid.). Regionality is, therefore, not made from ‘coherent imprints or effects of something else’ imposed and fixing the place and its people, but rather ‘lived modalities and a history of social production and uses’, ‘qualities and affects’ that are dynamic, in composition, ‘living forms that generate a zone of connectivity’ not because of ‘what they are’ in some already-decided definition or territory, but because of ‘what they do’ and how they provoke, project, and vibrate with interrelations and trajectories (ibid.: 279).

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6: CONCLUSION: ‘LINES OF PROMISE AND THREAT’ With this in play, ‘Regionality’ circles back to ‘New England Red’ and ‘Road Registers’, to list familiar traits of region, its ‘singularities’: ‘the color red . . . a taste for Lorna Doone cookies’ with its ‘rickety infrastructure’ of ‘arcane’ examples (ibid.). Such repetitive localism (‘from here’) is seen differently, as ‘concentric rings stretching out from encounters to tastes, bodies, neighborhoods, a valley, a state, a geographical region’, as little, diverse worlds worlding through opening the closed narrative frame of expectation (ibid.: 280). Thus, Massachusetts, as a region, might seem progressive on gay marriage and health care but overtly racist over school bussing, so forming no clear and resolutely defined place, but rather an ‘edgy composite’ like a ‘machinery of connection, which is also a perpetual disconnecting’ (ibid.: 281). Regionality, as the earlier essays showed, is a perpetual blooming, assembling and disassembling, a ‘prismatic ecology’, a ‘geography of what happens’, a ‘speculative topography of the everyday’, inciting forms as an ‘improvisatory conceptuality’, of ‘peculiar ongoing generativity’ (ibid.: 281, 283) captured by the unconventional, suggestive juxtapositions of fictocriticism. Experiencing regionality, regioning, demands both the ‘energetics’ to reflect and speculate about its folds and motions while carrying the weight of its ‘carapace of spent and living forms’ (ibid.: 284). It, therefore, both preserves and activates, holds onto and lets go, contains and edges; it worlds. Doty reminds us that ‘[d]escription is made both more moving and more exact when it is acknowledged that it is inevitably INCOMPLETE’ (Doty 2010: 85), and it is appropriate, therefore, to conclude by circling back, as Stewart often does, to Ordinary Affects and its final section called provocatively ‘Beginnings’. You will recall that her first book stated this ‘is not an end, or a blueprint for thinking and acting, but a constant beginning over—a search, an argument, an unfinished longing’, and here, like Agee, she refuses to close the brackets of the book, allowing it to speculate and continue, to live on: ‘It doesn’t mean to come to a finish. It wants to spread out into too many possible scenes with too many real links between them’ (Stewart 2007: 128). Every scene I can spy has tendrils stretching into things I can barely, or not quite, imagine. . . . The world is still tentative, charged, overwhelming and alive. This is not a good thing or a bad thing. It is not my view that things are going well but they are going. . . . Ordinary affect is a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact. It’s transpersonal or prepersonal—not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities. Human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water. (ibid.: 128)

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As the book’s form mirrors its content, Stewart’s vision of regional worlds is by measures tantalizing and frustrating, ‘a beginning, just scratching the surface’, trying always to perform ‘affect’s lines of promise and threat’, tracing them wherever they may lead (ibid.: 129). What emerges across Stewart’s writings is regionality that ‘permeates the contours of the landscape, the rocks the glaciers left, the climate, the layers of determination laid down by histories, the leftovers of everything that has happened’ (ibid.: 278). But critically, Stewart’s poetic assemblage, regionality-as-compositionality is alive with affect: ‘impassive corporeality . . . redemption, a glacier of impatience . . . anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage. It has drama, intensity, an energetics of tension and release’ (ibid.: 278). Yet these are not contained energies or affects that turn back on themselves to sustain the enclosing circle of regionalism, for they exist, always on the ‘edge’ passing between bodies of every kind as tactile compositions, extending Frampton’s critical regionalism, refusing to remain fixed, and in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari or Whitehead, spreading out across vast atmospheric fields, endlessly and extensively connecting, resetting relations of self and world. To know the place you are in, its people, as attunements and atmospheres, as Stewart’s writing shows, is never a closed, single circle, as region so often appears, but rather ‘concentric rings stretching out from encounters’ (ibid.: 280—emphasis added); each ring connecting beyond itself to the worlds it is a part of, helping to form and deform them. Thus, regionality and globality intersect and inform each other dialogically, as an arrangement of ‘worldly culture’, to ‘produce worlds out of thin air’ and ‘reinvent the self-in-place by testing its limits’ like ‘setting out alone, without a map . . . into a world that remains palpably unpredictable and seductive beyond the carefully cordoned zones of familiarity’ (Stewart 2013c: 276— emphasis added). NOTES 1. Note the similarity to Olson’s use of the open parenthesis in his poems and essays, such as ‘Projective Verse’ which begins ‘(projectile (percussive (prospective’ (Olson 1966: 15). Visually, this suggests the molecular ‘energy-discharge’ (16) of his poems opening out from the poem into the world, ‘from the root out’ (18). 2. See Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (London: Routledge, 2001). 3. Stewart (2008: 72) uses the metaphor again: ‘An opening onto something, it [life] maps a thicket of connections between vague yet forceful and affecting elements’. Clearly this owes much to Clifford Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 4. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the word ‘jump’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1996: 255) as an example of how ‘particles’ becomes active in ‘composition’ on the ‘plane of immanence’. 5. See the version in Ordinary Affects (2007: 60) where the language is modified. 6. This is more potent and layered elsewhere and, typical of Stewart’s recursive style, she tells of her troubled ‘stepson John . . . becoming homeless’ and attuning to living rough (see Stewart 2011: 450 and also in Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 341).

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7. Michel Foucault argued that ‘curiosity . . . evokes “care”; . . . the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental’ (Foucault 1994: 327). 8. Rajchman (2000: 5–6) writes of Deleuze’s ‘map of connections as distinct from localizing points’ which creates a ‘we’ that is not a ‘presumption of commonsense’ but rather ‘a people that is missing, not already there’. As I argue, regionality as a ‘minor’ expression refuses to accept the presupposed formation of a ‘people’ defined and fixed by tradition and convention but actively expands the ‘localizing points’ to connect with the world and to emergent identities and selves. 9. Recall in chapter 1 our discussion of Doreen Massey’s ‘throwntogetherness of place’ (Massey 2005: 141). 10. Like so much of Ordinary Affects, sections appear in earlier publications and are often modified for the book. This section can be found in Denzin and Lincoln (2005: 1031–32). 11. Some of the atmosphere of this suburban gothic can be found in David Searcy, Ordinary Horror (New York: Viking, 2001), a book admired by Stewart. 12. Stewart borrows this from Rajchman again: ‘The vagueness of “a life” is thus not a deficiency to be corrected, but rather a resource or reserve of other possibilities, our connections’ (Rajchman2000: 84). 13. Refrain: ‘It acts upon that which surrounds it . . . extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. . . . [It] has a catalytic function.’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 349). See chapter 7. 14. Haeccity (Latin for ‘thisness’) derives from Deleuze and Guattari—‘neither beginning or end, origin or destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome’ (1996: 263). 15. Consistency here does not necessarily suggest alikeness or sameness. In Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘plane of consistency ‘performs conjunctions of flows of deterritorialization’ (1996: 70). 16. See Solnit’s notion of ‘getting lost’ discussed in chapter 5.

Chapter Five

A New Atlas of Emotion Rebecca Solnit’s West

1: CONVERSATIONS, AFFECTIONS, ALIGNMENTS In The Faraway Nearby (2013) Rebecca Solnit writes, ‘When you are well, your body is a sealed country into which you need not explore’, but when you are unwell you become more aware of your fragility and of the ‘organs and fluids and chemistry’ that make up your material being (Solnit 2013b: 129). Faced with such awareness, one’s physical system is ‘opened up’ to scrutiny, probed, examined (ibid.), and, perhaps, in these moments of recognition, placed alongside others whose bodies are both equally vulnerable, unpredictable, and potentially creative. In interpreting this metaphor, I am struck by how much it reveals of Solnit’s own project as a writer of critical regionality, whose work probes the ‘sealed country’ of the American West to understand its workings, nuances, and connections. 1 This process is not a crude healing, as such, but a plea for greater understanding and connection between people and, through them, to their many constituencies (locale, region, nation, world) through which they exist and interact. The title of her self-styled ‘anti-memoir’, The Faraway Nearby, states the core motif in her writings drawing attention to this productive, dialogical tension between the close-at-hand and the distant, between the immediate and the remote, between the local and the global. She articulates this motif throughout her work, and in meditating upon its uses, we can both move closer to a comprehension of Solnit’s project, as well as to add a critically important dimension to this book’s ongoing exploration of critical regionality. As she herself has admitted, ‘My work is all tied together in myriad ways’ (Thackara 2014), weaving stories while finding improbable links from one to the other, out of 123

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which emerges an inventive ‘meshwork of entangled lines’ (Ingold 2011: 63—italics in original) within which the ‘faraway’ crisscrosses with the ‘nearby’. As she told Benjamin Cohen, ‘The challenge is how can you not be the moralizing, grandstanding beast of the baby boomers but not render yourself totally ineffectual and—the word that comes to mind is miniature. How can you write about the obscure things that give you pleasure with a style flexible enough to come round to look at more urgent matters?’ (Cohen 2009). Solnit’s use of the concept of the ‘miniature’ suggests both the obscure and the small (as we shall see a recurrent notion in her oeuvre) while simultaneously recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘minor’, discussed earlier, as that which sends the major language of official cultures racing (see Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 104–5). 2 By invoking the miniature and the nearby, her aim is similarly a ‘creative stammering . . . [a] whispering . . . [of] ascending and descending variations’; a ‘becoming’ defined by ‘the extent that one deviated from the model’ so that such minor languages ‘must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority’ (ibid.: 98, 105–6). As she has said, this is always a political direction: It’s what I’ve tried to do. I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small, and I feel that we’ve lost if we don’t practice and celebrate them now, instead of waiting for some ’60s never-neverland of after-the-revolution. And we’ve lost the revolution if we relinquish our full possibilities and powers. (Cohen 2009)

Despite this, as with Deleuze and Guattari, Solnit refuses to dwell purely in the ‘local and small’, for she understands all the complex connections that exist to tie them inextricably to the world and so emphasizes these relations in her work at every point, knowing that ‘they are symbiotic rather than competitive worldviews’ (Solnit 2001: 10). It is, however, appropriate to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s comment from the introduction that such a process of variation and extension might be viewed as ‘(the opposite of regionalism)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 105) in its conventionally bounded forms. Solnit, nonetheless, wants to reconfigure and redistribute traditional regionalism from this perspective of the miniature and the small so that it engages outwardly with the movements and rhythms of the world of which it is intrinsically and transformatively linked. As I shall discuss later in this chapter, Solnit is fascinated by maps and, most importantly, the desire to ‘remap’ and thereby shift perceptions and alter perspectives which have too readily become taken for granted through established, dominant cartographies and their ‘supposedly seamless relations between unifying geographical accounts and systems of representation’ (Rogoff 2000: 73). So much of

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Solnit’s remapping links back to the introduction’s discussion of Haraway’s work, at the heart of which is her concept of situated, partial knowledge as a source of questioning and unsettling, critical thought and feeling: ‘The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular’ (Haraway 1991: 196). Indeed, Haraway has referred to the consequences of situated knowledge as a type of cartographic shift: ‘always . . . re-markings, reorientations, of the great maps that globalized the heterogeneous body of the world in the history of masculinist capitalism and colonialism’ (ibid.: 111). Solnit’s situated, partial, and located work shares much of the feminist drive and purpose of Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion (2002) with its goal of producing a new cartography, a ‘tender geography’, through ‘the threads of its fabric, holding what has been assigned to it with every passage, including emotions’ (Bruno 2002: 3, 11), until you can connect places in a city or on a cultural map not by way of real distances but by way of events that have been experienced in the imagination and in the reality of the people who have lived through them in the space. You can see motion in culture as deeply related to living space and lived temporality. And you can also understand that emotion itself is a movement, and then movement is something that touches a person, touches something profoundly deep within the person, which enables a deeper social transformation. (Bruno 2008: 158) 3

In The Faraway Nearby, Solnit conveys similar and related concerns through a description of a piece of artwork configured as an innovative, poetic map: [A] vast wall map of white plaster topographical reliefs of islands. Each island was connected by fine red string reaching out to the other islands, like flight routes for planes or neural pathways or blood vessels. Or conversations, affections, alignments. I think of this piece as an elegant assertion that everything is connected. Each of us an island of sensations confined to the realm beneath our skin, but a great deal of migration and importing and exporting connects most of the islands to each other. (Solnit 2013b: 130)

Paying attention to the local, a hallmark of Solnit’s writing, and something stressed throughout this book, does not disconnect it from the wider world since everywhere she sees and records the ‘conversations, affections, alignments’, the ‘import’/’export’ that attaches individuals, communities, regions, and nations into different patterns of being. 4 Like Bruno’s stated feminist purpose, there is a political dimension at work, too, in Solnit’s writing, tying her to a wider feminist activism on issues of environmentalism, human rights, and broader ‘postcolonial’ themes. 5 Of course, framing Solnit’s purpose is a desire to challenge established but narrow structures of thought and action, and this undoubtedly owes much to her feminist principles and her rage against the ‘archipelago of arrogance’ that for too long has denied

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women’s contributions to wider debates and sought to ‘explain things’ in the public and private realms. Famously, Solnit wrote a blog ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (which later became a book of the same name) in which she outlined the dangers of such attitudes: ‘The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women of my generation, of the up-andcoming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human’ (Solnit 2012) In reaction to this tendency in patriarchal structures, rather than ‘explain’ things in her work, Solnit has adopted a more fluid, dialogical style that invites the reader into the weaving of stories and the gathering of perceptions from ‘poems, dreams, politics, doubts, a childhood experience, a sense of place’, fashioning a new form of history from sources she terms in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, as ‘the grandmothers’ (Solnit 2006: 59). This denotes her relationship to the past through her shadowy, institutionalized, ‘unanticipated ancestor’, with whom ‘it never occurred . . . to ask her about the past’ (ibid.: 54). Yet it is through Solnit’s connection to her grandmother and her silenced presence that her distinctive methodology emerges: ‘And now, so many years after I first pictured a woman stepping onto a prairie, what seems vivid and near are the red-winged blackbirds on the marsh on the way to the mental hospital and the cherry cider on the way home, its taste like the red flash of the birds among the cattails’ (ibid.: 55). Through the affective landscapes of memory, history, and environment, strangely and evocatively mixed with the near and local, and attached dreamily to the hidden history of her grandmother, Solnit’s narrative style takes its hybrid flight. Vitally this counters the dominant tone of history by bringing location and voice together: ‘The authoritative voice was one that spoke objectively, from nowhere, disembodied: these [feminist] theories attempt to locate rather than dislocate voice, to embody it. Thus, body and locale unite as the incontrovertible circumstances of expression’ (Solnit 2001: 54—emphasis added). This relational, embodied, and affective sense of place echoing Haraway and Stewart is vital to an appreciation of Solnit’s politics. This approach emerges in Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (1994) where the global nuclear complex is seen as rooted in and simultaneously routed through the familiar landscapes of the West near Solnit’s home in California. Thus, the local but ‘purloined landscape’ (Beck 2009: 19–47) of the Nevada Test Site is once again part of a wider meshwork of cultural geography, or what she imagines as ‘lines of convergence . . . of biography and history and ecology that come together at a site’ combining all the stories of the place; ‘nuclear physics, the Arms Race, anti-Communism, civil disobedience, Native-American land-rights struggles, the environmental movement’ (Solnit 1995: 24). Later, reflecting on this in

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Hope in the Dark (2004), Solnit summarizes it as ‘strands of . . . history wrapped around the world’ (2004: 69), as if recognizing the West as a multifaceted and convergent regionality not, as she puts it, ‘merely in the concrete’ but ‘in the abstract too’, embodied and located as forces, energies, emotions, actions, histories ‘which may seem unrelated’ and yet begin to form ‘new connections . . . collisions even’, like a ‘spiderweb of stories [that] spreads out from any place’ (ibid.: 24). Typical of Solnit’s attentive interest in the ‘miniature’, she writes of ‘the history of gestures’ as integral to ‘the abstract whose weight I have tried to feel behind every concrete gesture at the Test Site’, for together the concrete and felt coalesce in forming the hidden history of a region that demands multiscalar critical interrogation (ibid.: 25). So Savage Dreams’ region is the invisible history of the nuclear complex expressed only as the blank spaces on official maps, becoming the focus for Solnit’s ingathering of entangled, intersecting stories through which she, in turn, remaps an altered landscape enriched by her affective critical attention to detailed and nuanced layers captured through peoples’ lived attachments to place. From being close to the ground, literally walking and camping at the Test Site, Solnit’s body relates to and enacts these stories, gradually unravelling new narratives of human-place connection and activism within the region. Hence the Shoshone, whose land is occupied by the Test Site, ‘have become active in the international struggle against nuclear testing’ (Solnit 1995: 30) alongside the Sheahans, who arrived as miners in the 1890s and whose family and land have been contaminated by radiation after testing. Side by side, Solnit builds this deeper history of region without over-romanticizing or closing it off from its relations with the dynamic forces beyond, a rhythm captured in her lyrical description of camping in the desert at night: I felt the force of scale in this place: the tiny radius of my candlelight within thousands of miles of sparsely inhabited basin and range, the continuous sweep of the ground I was sitting on, like an ocean of rock, its waves become ranges washed east from here, scores of them between me and the Wasatch Mountains . . . all pressed under a black sky heavy with stars. (ibid.: 42)

This ‘force of scale’ brings into tension, as earlier, this relationality of near/ far within Solnit’s project, tying her actions, feelings, and desires into converging lines with the ‘sweep’ and ‘waves’ moving her emplaced fragile body out into the ground, rock, ranges, and, ultimately, the sky and stars beyond. She, like the moth who dies in her candle flame, ‘seems a small thing in this vast space’, making her doubt her own protest as only ‘a tiny thing against the power of the government’ (ibid.: 42–43), and yet what forms in these self-doubts becomes the very foundation of her project and her method. Experiences like this at the Test Site convinced Solnit that the land-

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scape questions she was confronting were ‘far more interesting in their branches than their roots’, meaning it was a regional western approach she would take, investigating the ‘branches’ leading her away from any essentialized Anglo, patriarchal version of place towards a more diverse, convergent sense of something ‘mutated, invaded, hybridized, mixed’ where contesting voices could be heard and counter-histories unearthed. As she puts it at the end of this epiphany, ‘I was meant for lower things’ (ibid.: 88–89). The ‘lower’ here signifies the local, minor, and indigenous attention in Solnit’s work; the ‘dirty regionalism’ derived from the specificity of her knowledge and experience, like the section in Savage Wars where she describes the Native petroglyphs as ‘strange figures and lines and jagged bolts and circles . . . such small things’ that nonetheless reach outward to speak of ‘a culture and a relationship to the land’, offering her ‘keys to a door that had been destroyed and signs of a desire to shape oneself to the landscape rather than the other way around’ (ibid.: 89–91). 6 This process of ‘unlocking’ through the small things, thereby articulating ‘a new grammar of scale’, allows Solnit to critique the central, damaging myths of America, myths forever associated with the settler colonialism of the West: exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, or what she calls ‘room to swing your arm’ (see ibid.: 202, 137–38, 185). In quoting anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, she states her own goal of ‘displacing the narrative’ of these established myths of national expectation so as to present alternative futures within which the nation, region, and the very land itself is seen as alive and changing; ‘an unfinished project’ (ibid.: 140, 182). Echoing Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’, discussed in the introduction and chapter 1 and summed up by Jodi Byrd as ‘the loss [of] . . . the surety of colonialist mastery, the wealthy promises of Manifest Destiny’ (Byrd 2011: 34), Solnit sees the United States as determined by ‘our ability to fall out of society and into landscape’ and seek its settlement and possession under Manifest Destiny or acute romanticism. However, this process is, in truth, a ‘Tragedy’ which forms ‘the content of American optimism’ by which Americans seek to resolve conflict and loneliness through acts of spatial territorialization (Solnit 1995: 185). Such cycles need to be broken, and this is the ‘exhilarating challenge’ of Solnit’s work, reaching out beyond the complacent patterns of belief and practice towards an ‘American culture as a series of inadequate adjustments, settlings that have never yet ended the unsettled nature of the culture, and the abandonment of settlements: Where the plough now rusts coyotes shall howl’ (ibid.: 183). For Solnit, the land has been ‘framed’ by the mythologies of cruel optimism, so that the real, lived-in world is transformed (‘conceptualized’, ibid.: 263) into a painting made as if for ‘the tourist’ (or the settler colonist): ‘We look across a distance at something that is not ourselves and does not include us. Paintings are lifeless and inert: We do not enter into them and they do not change; and a museum is a

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place in which we do not live and are told everywhere “do not touch”’ (ibid.: 263). Solnit’s example of this, as ever, is from the West—Yosemite National Park—typifying this framing of region into over-simple location, ‘the boundaries of the park are the gilt frame around a masterpiece’ (ibid.). She urges us into the frame, buckling it to forge ‘a more profound engagement with the natural world as a system in which we are enmeshed’ (ibid.: 266). To achieve this, in keeping with her own attention to small things, Solnit suggests we see beyond the spectacle of landscape and in so doing, ‘learn not to look at scenery but at simple things—at our water taps which connect us to the water of distant landscapes, our garbage which ends up in landfills, our food which comes from so wide a range of managed lands’ (ibid.: 266–67). Solnit’s intimate ecology, her ‘new grammar of scale’ working from the miniature to the distant, enables reductive framing to be dismantled to see places and regions as ‘the interconnection of all things, the world as an interdependent network of systems rather than a compendium of scenes of varying quality’ (ibid.: 308—italics in original). Here, she comes closest to Nigel Thrift’s view that ‘region . . . must not be seen as a place; that is a matter for investigation. Rather, it must be seen as made up of a number of different but connected settings for interaction’ (Thrift quoted in Massey 1994: 137). This is her version of critical regionality shot through with a profound sensitivity and relationality (interdependent/interaction) that both drives Solnit’s activism and is equally mirrored in her unique style. As she told Cohen, My big breakthrough was at the Nevada Test Site. I realized there that the genres—first-person lyrical essay, reportage, critical analysis—couldn’t be separate, that I needed all the tools to describe a place so complicated, a place where all kinds of cultures, histories, and ideas converged and collided, filtered through my own experience camping out with the antinuclear activists. That breakthrough led to Savage Dreams and the mixed, meandering style I’ve mostly used since. It was breaking through genre, in some ways. (Cohen 2009)

In the much later The Faraway Nearby, she goes further to explain how this convergence and collision is always both personal and political: I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others’ paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling the story was your life. (Solnit 2013b: 130)

Along the bottom of each page of The Faraway Nearby is a single thread of story running throughout the book, an idea she first used in Wanderlust, and of which she has commented: ‘I wanted to call attention to the fact that the

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codex, the bound book, is an architectural space through which we literally travel with hands and eyes, and that to read a book of this length is quite a journey’ (Gleaves 2013). She explained the role of ‘this floating, stitching chapter’ further as a thread [that] provides continuity, literally—a single line of text that runs through all the other chapters. . . . It also invites readers to decide how to read a book that has two narratives running parallel to each other; the thread can be read before, during, or after . . . like following a path, or following a track—as in tracking animals or lost people. Stories lead to ideas, ideas lead to stories, the perception of patterns somehow happens in my mind in ways that aren’t visible even to me. . . . I see patterns of association and meaning and relation between things that are maybe far apart conventionally. (ibid.)

This meandering, associative crisscrossing thread runs through all the rhythms of her work, stemming from her fundamental understanding of lived experience which, like the landscape, cannot be neatly circumscribed, edited, or framed but remains rather an intense process of ‘relation’, affective medleys, ingatherings, and entanglements ‘where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters’ (Stewart 2013c: 176). 7 Nicholas Royle terms this generative style ‘veering’, for ‘to speak of veering is to invite another kind of dynamism into critical thinking, a new riskiness and uncertainty of control . . . swerving, whirling, flickering, proliferating affects and possibilities that are generated in reading: there is always more than one voice in a voice’ (Royle 2011: 28). Once again, I invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor as a point of reference, since for them, you will recall, minor literature functions in precisely the way Solnit (and Royle) intimate, for ‘it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language . . . makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affection of the one who speaks’ (Deleuze 1998: 107). Thus in ‘stuttering’ and ‘veering’, language is stretched outside itself and its ‘system in equilibrium’ and in so doing moves beyond the individual expressing an ‘affection’ or emotion tied only to their own experience, and connects to a wider, rhizomatic motion ‘in a state of disequilibrium’ (ibid.: 109). This is where Solnit’s writing, with its veering, stuttering style, and multiple, layered stories embodies and expresses perfectly her sense of regionality imagined through the Nevada Test Site’s ‘Storied land’ as something ‘to be described not with the straight line of a single story but with stories like the roads that converge upon a capital, for many histories had arrived there in the decades since the Death Valley Forty-Niners, and some of the old ones had not been forgotten’ (Solnit 2006: 194). In this regard, and following Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Solnit, as we shall discuss in section 2 of this chapter, is engaged in perpetually remapping the West’s regionality:

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The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself: it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages . . . it is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions: it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting. . . . It can be drawn on the wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. . . . A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to a tracing, which always comes back to the same. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 12–13) 8

In keeping with such a vision of mapping, Solnit’s style becomes its own layered but unfinished landscape (or map), full of overlapping, entwined, stories that seem to spark from each other and veer off in new, unexpected, unpredictable directions. ‘Literature’, wrote Deleuze, ‘moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete . . . and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process . . . inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomesmolecule’ (Deleuze 1998: 1). As if echoing Solnit, Deleuze sees this process as reaching beyond the individual, towards a collective and inter-linked becoming, asserting, however, ‘[t]here are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language’, and ‘literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say “I”’ (ibid.: 2–3). As Solnit told Jeffrey Gleaves, Who are we? Aren’t we also citizens, don’t we have souls and ideals, aren’t we also interfused with the natural world, biologically and psychically, don’t we extend far beneath, above, beyond that private realm? I think of that as analogous to a house; yeah, you live there, and crucial and sometimes sweet parts of your life take place there, but are we agoraphobics? Home is great to come back to, not so great to be on lockdown in. Friends, principles, ideas, writing itself, activist communities, and the natural world are great sources of strength and support to me, and that’s part of the larger territory staked out here. (Gleaves 2013—italics added)

This reminds us of Solnit’s commitment to those persistent things beyond the ‘I’: community, tribe, family, region, and world and how activism, art, and language are interconnected routes towards these ‘larger territories’. It is for this reason that Solnit’s work is always more-than-autobiography, even when she spins stories of her own experience, for it is always reaching out relationally to others and to the world. 9 As she pointed out in an interview, her approach is eclectic: ‘A spatial imagination, passion, enthusiasm, detective and research skills, and legwork. And maybe familiarity with the beautiful maps of the past and a sense of what can and cannot be mapped’ (Kelley 2012). 10

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In an image of Russian dolls first used in A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006: 206), she returns to it in The Faraway Nearby, demonstrating how so much of her work is deliberately and poetically reiterative and circuitous, like dreams and labyrinths: I am, we each are, the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other’s thoughts and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. (Solnit 2013b: 191)

She told an interviewer that the book ‘has a structure, an architecture: you can read it as the interior contained within the exterior chapters, as nesting vessels. The paired chapters return to the subjects opened up the first time around, indirectly’ (in Biggins 2013). Form and content, as ever, in Solnit’s work interfuse like the far and the near: voices, stories, layerings, connections, mutuality, exchange, and becoming, all reaching out from the local and small to something it always relates to: ‘Out of all this comes your contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange’ (Solnit 2013b: 192). Thus, style mirrors content, is inseparable from it, in a true Olsonian manner, and as a consequence through reading Solnit, one experiences regionality wherein, in Casey’s words, ‘[a] region, therefore, is a concatenation of places that, taken together, constitutes a common and continuous here for the person who lives in or traverses them’ (Casey 2009: 53). 2: A RENOVATED CARTOGRAPHY In Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit explains herself as a historian of the ‘hidden, lost, neglected’; of things ‘too broad or too amorphous to show up in others’ radar screens’, and that rather than the ‘lineal Old Testament genealogies’, which are ‘tidy stories [that] leave out all the sources and inspirations that come from other media and other encounters’, she is concerned with these varied, delinquent sources: ‘from poems, dreams, politics, doubts, a childhood experience, a sense of place’, because it is these that generate a different ‘alternate history’ (Solnit 2004: 74) ‘made more of crossroads, branchings, and tangles than straight lines’ (Solnit 2006: 59). In this, Solnit shares common ground with many of the critics, artists, and writers discussed throughout this book, with Foucault’s concept of a new history as ‘subjugated knowledges’, of Waldie’s palimpsest of suburbia, and Olson’s entangled Gloucester stories, to mention just a few of the connections. In seeking to express these ‘crossroads, branchings, and tangles’, she also shares an interest in formal experimentation or remapping through which place and experience are expressed in more complex ways that better convey the ‘hidden,

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lost, [and] neglected’. Throughout this section, I am returning specifically to Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion to illuminate some of the approaches adopted by Solnit. I will explore how she writes this alternate history or ‘renovated cartography’ using the example of remapping or ‘atlassing’ and argue that it is this process that best reveals her contribution to the concept of affective critical regionality. 11 Through her fascination with the American West, she actively opens up the region to forces both immediate and local while being absolutely connected beyond to the world’s wider political issues that impact on both, like nuclear power, climate change, and human rights. As we discussed in the first part of this chapter, Solnit understood after Savage Dreams that her ‘project’ was ‘locating and writing . . . the overlooked history of California and the West’ (Kelley 2012), initially through studying Californian Cold War artists (Secret Exhibition, 1991), through her work on western landscape photography (notably with Richard Misrach, Mark Klett, and Linda Connor), on American Indian history and the nuclear West (Savage Dreams, 1994), through Eadweard Muybridge and ‘the technological Wild West’ (River of Shadows, 2003), through detailed explorations of western cities (Hollow City, 2000; Infinite City, 2010), and in the most powerful chapter in Wanderlust, ‘Las Vegas or the Longest Distance Between Two Points’. As she admits early on in Savage Dreams, ‘I realized that I had been a Westerner all along’ (Solnit 1995: 88), and this identification provides a pivot for her work around which her ideas circulate, radiate, and connect, creating an attachment to the region which is always enabling and never limiting. To use one of her favourite and most telling metaphors, the West is her home, ‘great to come back to, not so great to be on lockdown in’. As we shall see later in this section, as Sigmund Freud understood, the idea of home is ‘uncanny’, for it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, ‘a sense of homeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home’ (Royle 2003: 1). As region, the West is ‘not so great to be on lockdown in’, either, for it turns inwards and forgets the world, dwelling nostalgically on the past imagined only as myth, constrained by the narrowest of horizons and the most immediate localism. Solnit understands this tension, figuring the West as a strange and exciting mixture of fascination and dread, the ‘tawdry’ and ‘sublime’ amid an ‘unfinished’ story and people ‘that may destroy the land before [they] learn to live with it’ (Solnit 1995: 182). Yet as writer-activist, the West seen in these terms presents the challenge of ‘[i]mprovising something better’ and imagining a future, rather than living in the past (ibid.: 182). As we have seen, Solnit refuses to remain fixed in what she calls the faraway ‘blue distance . . . the color of where you are not . . . where you can never go’ (Solnit 2006: 29), always seeing such spaces in relation to the near at hand and the local conditions of lived experience. Likewise, as we have seen throughout this book, affective critical regionality

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refuses to live rooted in the past or with the world at a distance, preferring instead a routed relationality that draws from both while always looking to new paths and different patterns of existence and ‘being-in-the-world’. This is Solnit’s journey into and from the West, seeing the weird connections across time from Manifest Destiny to the Google cultures of contemporary San Francisco: ‘The Bay Area is once again a boomtown, with transient populations, escalating housing costs, mass displacements and the casual erasure of what was here before. I think of it as frontierism, with all the frontier’s attitude and operational style, where people without a lot of attachments come and do things without a lot of concern for their impact, where money moves around pretty casually, and people are ground underfoot equally casually’ (Solnit 2013a—emphasis added). This ‘frontierism’ is another version of the settler colonialism discussed earlier that motivates Solnit’s activism and her writing. An example of this strong western emphasis demonstrating Solnit’s critical regionality is the 2010 work Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas which brings to the fore her interest in remapping that has haunted all her work. In Field Guide to Getting Lost, a book that works against the tradition of field guides being about clear identification, direction, and definitive knowledge, she explains that ‘behind every map’s information is what is left out, the unmapped and unmappable’ (Solnit 2006: 161–62). She uses the example of Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in which the cartographers created a map as large as the empire itself and yet ‘even at 1:1 scale, the twodimensional map would be inadequate to depict the layers of being of a place, its many versions’ (ibid.). Solnit’s point is crystal clear, ‘No representation is complete . . . [it] is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some haunting double’ (ibid.: 162–63). In keeping with the approach in her previous writings, Solnit favoured a new mapping of region— here the city of San Francisco—in which many different layers come into play: ‘the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency’ (ibid.: 248). In many ways the culmination of her meandering style and heteroglossic gathering of voices and materials throughout her career, Infinite City becomes the collaborative space in which dreamwork and fieldwork collide in her version of affective critical regionality generating place as ‘the textural layering of a palimpsest . . . making tours and detours, turns and re-turns, opening-up on different vistas of the production of space’ (Bruno 2002: 15). 12 Solnit’s Atlas ‘moves from the optic into the haptic’ (ibid.) to emphasize regionality as multiple energies and interests, from indigenous naming, women’s green spaces, and military sites to ‘death and beauty’, toxic pollution, and coffee shops. ‘Places’, after all, as Solnit reminds us, ‘are leaky containers’, unstable and ‘always refer beyond themselves’, and so the form of the atlas has to suggest (but never fully represent)

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these ‘unstable converging forces’ (Solnit 2010a: vii). At the heart of this unusual and challenging work full of maps and essays by her and others (including Guillermo Gómez-Peña 13) is the sense of material and immaterial landscape, of a deeply affected and affective space that refutes the idea of the map as ‘a unifying and totalizing concept, produced by a distant eye’ (Bruno 2002: 207). 14 Like Bruno, Solnit engages us in a ‘tender mapping’ (ibid.) of the city, producing a version of place that, as I suggested earlier, buckles the frame, creating a map of the land of affects . . . a very open map. Like a film it has a frame, but things keep falling off screen. At the edge, the sea would flow on the one side, the river on the other. This is a map of a specific place but also represents the place of imagination. And it is a map that wants you to navigate it, that needs somebody to actually enter the territory and move through it rather than form a single image of a place. You would constantly work on the border, around edges, to try and imagine what was behind the boundary of the frame, and your curiosity would pull you towards some terrae incognitae. (Bruno 2008: 158)

Just as Bruno’s notion of the map owes much to psychogeography, so does Solnit’s Infinite City, for both are fascinated by place’s palimpsestic qualities: ‘They bear the layers of a writing that can be effaced and yet written over again, in a constant redrafting’ (Bruno 2002: 22—emphasis added). In Solnit’s own constant redrafting of San Francisco, layers and scale become ways to contest ‘the boundary of the frame’ in traditional regionalist discourse in a similar manner to that of the Situationists who sought ‘insubordination to habitual influences’, according to Guy Debord (Debord 1955). As McDonough explains the problem, ‘By presuming an already “given” object of study (country, region, city), this geography hypostatized as transhistorical concepts that were actually the products of particular historical relations’ (McDonough 2002: 249). Thus, for the Situationists and psychogeographers, and later for Solnit, region was a complex arena for social relations expressed via their maps, like the infamous remapping of Paris, The Naked City, in which space is not context but rather ‘an element of social practice . . . the process of “inhabiting” by social groups . . . as a series of relationships ‘ (ibid.: 252, 254). This aligns with Solnit’s persistent idea of regional relationality: ‘The local exists . . . but it exists in relation, whether symbiotic with or sanctuary from the larger world’ (Solnit 2010a: vii). Accordingly, local spaces ‘refer beyond themselves’ through what Kathleen Stewart calls their ‘ordinary affects’ creating intensely complex affective landscapes (see chapter 4): Pocatello, Idaho, has had its inventions and tragedies: a heartbreak that can be mapped out in six blocks, with bars and slammed doors and a bedroom; the tale of what happened to the lands of the Shoshone and Bannock; a gold rush;

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Solnit sums up affective critical regionality echoing Muecke’s discussion of coal and ivory discussed in chapter 4: ‘The cup of coffee in your hand has origins reaching across the region and the world’ (ibid.), a point she later expands on: ‘For me, the cup of coffee is an ingathering of worlds: coffee growing in tropical highlands, dairy farming in the surrounding countryside, and hydraulic engineering that gets the water from the mountains to the plumbing and then cleans it for the sea’ (ibid.: 124). As ever, Solnit brings this back to one of her chosen images, for it both articulates a sense of home ‘at the bottom of a cup of coffee’ while simultaneously reminding us of ‘the faraway, traveling across a sea of questions’ (ibid.: 126). As Solnit reminds us, ‘the epigraph of Infinite City is Thoreau’s “I have traveled widely in Concord”. Infinite City was about finding the whole world out there without leaving home’ (Kelley 2012). In reinvigorating the cartography of San Francisco, like Debord did with the Paris of The Naked City, Solnit finds ‘many worlds in one place . . . a compendium of perspectives’, but rather than reconcile them into some golden, mythical vision of Paradise, she projects them as affective forces in contention: ‘amities, amours, transit routes, resources, and perils, radiating out from home’ (Solnit 2010a: 126, 3). So, similar to Scrudéry’s map in Bruno’s work, ‘it allows us to remap a politics of affects, but putting affects back on our map, and thus to change our navigational charts’ (Bruno 2002: 224). It challenges the cold distance of conventional mapping, like the aerial view of the world Solnit, like the Situationists before her and Waldie later, critiqued as ‘like a map of itself, but without any of the points of reference that make maps make sense’ (Solnit 2006: 40). What she invokes instead is akin to Bruno’s ‘cartographic rendering of intimate experience’ (Bruno 2002: 224). 16 For both this constitutes a feminist gesture reminding us of how ‘politics closely affects the fabric of our intimate space’ (ibid.: 224) and in so doing actively resists a reductive, patriarchally determined spatially, presenting alternatively ‘a cartography beyond the cognitive’ (ibid.: 269). In an interview, Solnit explains how this works in relation to Map 16 in Infinite City, ‘Death and Beauty’: Maps, like photographs, show specifics that dismantle clichés. They make generalities—‘There were 99 murders in San Francisco in 2008’—precise and poignant when you show the exact location of each death. You look at that map . . . and suddenly you see how that number 99 breaks down into 99 tragedies, into specific locations where you might go yourself. Maps invite us to locate ourselves in relation to whatever they show, to enter the labyrinth that is each map and to find our way out by grasping what is mapped. They are

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always invitations to enter, to arrive, to understand, in a way that is different than the invitations of visual and written art. (Kelley 2012—emphases added)

Through ‘relationality’ and an invitational process to enter, arrive, and understand, the map functions dialogically, opening out the sense of region as inclusive, recording ‘areas of knowledge, rumors, fears, friendships, remembered histories and facts, alternate versions, desires, the map of everyday activity versus the map of occasional discovery, the past versus the present’ (Solnit 2010a: 3). As we engage tactilely, pensively, and affectively with the Atlas, we ponder and argue with it, supplement it, and reimagine its findings, actively fulfilling its potential and simultaneously that of the region it performs, not as something contained and stable but rather as ‘an invitation to go beyond what is mapped within it’, like an unfathomable Borgesian library, an ‘imaginary archive of atlases’ (ibid.: 8). Like the city-as-region itself, what Solnit reminds us, is that there is no perfect representation, for that is ‘impossible’, and the best one can hope for is a poetic mapping of the ‘practically infinite’ resembling a ‘map of unfurled maps’ (ibid.: 9, 48). Central to this process of remapping is a critical, political reimagining of the self in the world. Thus, her attention to regionality becomes a crucial platform for a wider politics of empathy developed across her most important work. To borrow a phrase from Aitken and Dixon’s essay on Bruno, ‘Herein lies a remedy to amnesia and the illness of the imperious self’ (in Dear et al. 2011: 201). As I have shown, Solnit’s writing has long tackled the West as a ‘world capital of amnesia’ (Solnit 1998: 30), having forgotten its destructive, settler imperial project against indigenous peoples, the land and natural resources managed through an endlessly refined sense of the individual ego looking down upon the world as a distant, objectified material to be measured, shaped, and controlled. In writing through regionality, she repositions our view of things, bringing the local into relation with the distant, and in so doing, rethinking the normalized sense of self as independent, detached, and enclosed. ‘The question’, she writes in Hope in the Dark, ‘is about negotiating a viable relationship between the local and the global, not signing up with one and shutting out the other’ (Solnit 2004: 110). In The Faraway Nearby she expresses and expands on this perfectly: We are all the heroes of our stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them. (Solnit 2013b: 29)

To follow this idea of the self’s relations with ‘the vast expanse of the world’, I wish to turn, finally, to how Solnit works towards this position through her discussion of ‘home’ in her most recent book developed from the earlier

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Savage Dreams and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In an interview, Solnit remarked that ‘so much of my work is about getting out of the house. I want a bigger world for all of us and I feel like I live in that big world’ (Earnest 2014). In Savage Dreams, she refers to dreaming of ‘a new room or cabinet in my home’ and that how in recognizing the significance of this experience, ‘the place I have been living in is more and different than it seemed’ (Solnit 1995: 94). My point is that for Solnit, the image of home blurs with the wider region of the West ‘as the place I have been living’—and both self and home must be displaced for a different picture to appear and in order ‘to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story’. This materializes in another dream in A Field Guide’s final chapter, ‘One-Story House’, when Solnit recalls her ‘childhood bedroom’ and how she had been ‘wandering through that house’ in her dreams ever since leaving it at age fourteen (Solnit 2006: 179). Her individual psychology is totally bound up with this house, and she ‘still wasn’t out of it’ because ‘the head is home’ (ibid.). Her experiences in that house haunt her, like the histories of the West do throughout her work, and both have to be worked through because ‘nothing is lost’ and ‘the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible’ (ibid.: 182). As I suggested earlier, the supposed familiarity of home in Freudian terms is also always the unfamiliar, the uncanny. In regional terms, too, the settled familiarity of the American West, the homeliness of its mythic status in the national psyche also contains the hidden and repressed, which in Solnit’s writing have to be opened by ‘bolts of lightning sent from outside’ (ibid.: 182). In ‘One-Story House’, the ironic title points to the metanarrative (the ‘one story’) of the West (and of the individuated self) that must be challenged by Solnit’s close attention to other dreams and stories; here the interconnected ‘secret constellations’ (ibid.: 186) of the tortoise she carries into the home in a dream, a wanderer called the Turtle Man, and the image of the Americas as Turtle Island. Like a microcosm of Solnit’s project and recalling the Russian dolls discussed earlier, each of these stories ‘nests’ together, overlapping and suggestive rather than conclusive, with each, from different angles, encouraging the reader to reimagine notions of home, region, nation, and ultimately, world. But this attention to dreams is typical of Solnit’s eclectic gathering of material to express and perform regionality, and has a very specific and immediate purpose, for: ‘The golden age, the dreamtime, is the present, and too much in it is leaking out now’ (ibid.: 188). Her own movement away from her suburban home ‘into a wider sense of home in the West’ (ibid.: 194) was activated through the converging stories she gathers up in her books, while the tortoise persuades her of her deeper connection with the region and the nation ‘out of my old home’, with Turtle Island, ‘as though the whole continent could be home’ (ibid.: 194–95). Indeed, ‘perhaps it’s this sense of place that sprung me’, she writes, ‘from the house I left a quarter century before’ (ibid.: 195), shifting her from the suburban ego to a

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self engaged with a wider politics of others and the world. It is the story of the blind Turtle Man who depends on others that crystallizes this point, allowing Solnit to put forward a more detailed ecophilosophy based on what is termed here the ‘practice of awareness’, which ‘takes us below the reasonableness that we’d like to think we live with’ (ibid.: 198–99). Rather like her critical approach throughout her career, this moment in the Turtle Man narrative reveals how ‘we start to see this territory . . . isn’t so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable’ (ibid.: 199). The distanciating veil of myth presented as objectivity, the suburban idyll, and the imperial self are all exposed when the ‘reasonable’ framing of things is critiqued through what she calls ‘the delicate work of awareness’ (ibid.), that is, through her version of Haraway’s situated knowledge: the close-up, the local, and the affective rather than the distant, scenic, or spectacular. Like the blind Turtle Man asking for help in the street, his vulnerability takes him out of himself into the world: It’s okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier. It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. (ibid.)

The result of this mutuality, of ‘help being received and help being given’, is not weakness but rather a collective sense of belonging together in the world, and by accepting this exchange, ‘this hostile world becomes a very different place’ (ibid.: 200). She develops this point in her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) examining how, when faced by disaster, humans produce ‘networks of affinity and affection’ and powerful emotional bonds that ‘we don’t even have a language for’ and yet see in the relations between people at moments of crisis (Solnit 2010b: 3, 5). As this chapter in A Field Guide (and the book itself) closes, she returns to the image of the house with which it started, but now reconfigured in the light of these ‘secret constellations’, becoming, ‘a small place inside a larger one, or a small story inside a larger one; picture the stories nesting like Russian dolls’ (Solnit 2006: 206). In this ultimate, reiterated metaphor of both self and regionality, everything interconnects: self, house, county, country, and world. It is, however, the process which is critical for understanding her work: ‘I had left the house for good a quarter of a century before and just gotten out of it in my dreams over the past year, but the county was something I chose to return to again and again’ (ibid.). The return to the ‘county’, to the local and regional is the vital, generative lifeblood for Solnit’s work, never as a retreat or a refuge, but always as a place of giving and receiving or, as she puts it earlier, ‘one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small

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on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others’ (ibid.: 29). In The Faraway Nearby, a companion piece to A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit supplements her notion of the ‘practice of awareness’ through what she terms ‘empathy . . . act of imagination, a storyteller’s art . . . a way of travelling from here to there’ (Solnit 2013b: 3). 17 Solnit, herself part Jewish, shares something of Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking about the face-toface contact with the Other: ‘the proximity of the Other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself—insofar as I am—responsible for him’ (Levinas 1985: 97). Through proximity, ‘the other’ approaches and renders me responsible for him or her, and rather like Solnit’s ever-present ‘nearby’, this responsibility of one to an other is made more manifest, more tangible, and, for Levinas, forms the origins of ethics and subjectivity. One might understand this as a specific type of empathy as Solnit calls it, creating a social subject as a beingfor-the-Other, since ‘it is a responsibility that goes beyond what I do’ (ibid.: 96). For Levinas, ‘Subjectivity is being hostage’ to responsibility: ‘The self is a sub-jectum: it is under the weight of the universe . . . the unity of the universe is not what my gaze embraces in its unity of apperception, but what is incumbent upon me from all sides, regards me, is my affair’ (Levinas 1981: 127). This ethics, like Solnit’s empathetic political ecology, is always about responsibility of self to other and beyond to the world ‘incumbent upon me from all sides’. Although Levinas calls ‘substitution’ this process of standing in the place of the other, it comes very close to Solnit’s meaning of empathy: ‘In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone, and it is through substitution that I am not “another”, but me’ (ibid.). Empathy continues Solnit’s assault on distance and disconnection, for it moves us closer to each other and the world: from ‘faraway’ to ‘nearby’, so that we, for example, in practical terms, comprehend better where our clothes or food come from in the global marketplace and the consequences of such distances and detachment. ‘So many Americans’, argues Solnit, ‘are politically disengaged . . . because their sense of self doesn’t include that larger arena; they’ve no sense of themselves as citizens and they’ve been given no awareness of how much their lives are shaped by politics’ (Thackara 2014). As Judith Butler later argued in Precarious Life, developing many of the ideas discussed above from Levinas, ‘If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the “we” is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against’ (Butler 2006: 22–23). The writer’s role is, therefore, empathetic, since through ‘imagination and representations—films, printed stories, secondhand accounts—you travel into the lives of people far away’ (Solnit 2013b: 194). Critically for Solnit, and recalling once again Haraway’s work on situated knowledge, this is always ‘best at the particular,

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since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving children’ and, therefore, a critical regionality must always stem from and relate to the small scale and the local, and then to become ‘the point of entry to larger territories’ (ibid.). Thus, regionality of this kind is always also relationality for it makes encounters beyond itself, it is impinged upon by otherness and outside forces from the ‘larger arena’. 18 This relationality goes beyond the human, of course, and includes everything that impinges and affects lives and living: ‘A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events of singularities that are merely actualised in subjects and objects’ (Deleuze 2007: 391). As Butler says of the recognition of relationality, ‘we do not simply move ourselves, but are ourselves moved by what is outside us, by others, but also by whatever “outside” resides in us’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 3). Thus, ‘dispossession’ of the self as a sustained and bounded being can be paralleled with the sense of region as an inward-looking possessed, simple location that is necessarily transformed through its relations with its outside. In Solnit’s attentiveness to American western history, this equates to the regionalist exceptionalism of Manifest Destiny being undone or dispossessed by its encounters with otherness. Through the rhythms of relationality and the awareness of others, through a feeling for mutual vulnerability and precarity that runs through Solnit’s work, derived from her remapping of the West, both the bounded sense of self and region are undone, exposing what Athena Athanasiou describes as ‘the possibility of forming a basis for . . . community . . . centred on considering the vulnerability of others and recuperating collective responsibility for the lives of one another’ (ibid.: 135–36). What is at stake in this analysis is the ‘(wounded) narcissism of autonomous and sovereign self-identity, which lies at the heart of the individualistic ontology of modernity’ (ibid.: 136) and which Solnit has consistently seen in relation to the relentless ‘frontierism’ of the West and ‘Manifest destiny . . . [as] a suburb of Progress’ (Solnit 1995: 74). 3: CONCLUSION: ‘THE COMPANIONABILITY OF GHOSTS’ I opened this chapter by investigating Solnit’s metaphor of the ‘sealed country’ her work explores and in the second section discussed her refusal of the ‘One-Story House’ as a central consequence of this opening-up process. What her writing over many years has come to understand is the need to challenge certain dominant stories that frame, shape, and define life and landscape. In my terms, these stories simplify and nullify what region might become. She understands why people hold onto and endlessly retell the same story even if ‘it ties them to unhappiness’ because ‘it’s about loving coher-

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ence more than comfort’ and it’s about the ‘fear’ of any alternative (Solnit 2013b: 242). As discussed earlier, and elsewhere in this book, the cruel optimism deeply rooted in the United States means that certain stories have retained power and authority over others, tying people to familiar visions of expected success, territory, and social patterns. As Solnit writes, underlining the goal of her own work, ‘[Y]ou have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of the story, a familiar version of yourself’ (ibid.: 242). In displacing the familiar story of self and of region, Deleuze’s idea of ‘disequilibrium’ comes into play to unsettle the taken for granted often rooted in the narrowly close at hand and the local. However, what Solnit proves and what this book, as a whole, argues, is that the local and small scale need not be viewed in this way, for once unsealed and uncontained, their tangled lines connect within and beyond to the world. As she has written, ‘The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself’ (Solnit 2004: 114). The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machine and the companionability of ghosts. Here are other ways of telling. (ibid.: 248)

Solnit herself resists the temptation to offer up a ‘neat ending’ to The Faraway Nearby because to do so would be like cutting the tangled ‘thread’ that she has always cherished and allowing this to be instead ‘the ribbon with which everything is tied up’ creating only ‘a sealed parcel, the end’ (ibid.: 249). The echo is clear to where this chapter started with its image of the ‘sealed country’ against which Solnit’s work has long battled. In form and content, as ever, bound together in Solnit’s writings, what remains is the process, the wanderlust of the journey: the ‘openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea’ (ibid.). Out of the ‘emergency’ of The Faraway Nearby—her mother’s dementia and her own cancer scare—comes emergence, she concludes, recalling the earlier line, ‘you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of the story, a familiar version of yourself’. Indeed, it is this thread that links people together in a process of renewed citizenship that Solnit strives for in all her work. Echoing Haraway’s idea of the ‘coyote discourse’ as a reminder that the world is ‘always problematic, always potent’ and that we exist ‘in fields of possible bodies and meanings’ (Haraway 1991: 201), Solnit also resorts to the coyote as a metaphor of hope. For her it permits a creative vision:

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That Coyote world in which creation never ends and people participate in the power of being creators, a world whose hopefulness lies in its unfinishedness, its openness to improvisation and participation. (Solnit 2004: 108)

In this figure of creative production, Solnit sketches out her vision of the new citizen of the local global world, of affective critical regionality, who refuses to be defined only as a ‘consumer’ (Solnit 2010b: 9), and is able to reach out to others, even in the darkest times and at their most vulnerable. She calls it ‘a sense of citizenship in the world . . . a sense of connection and commitment to the community . . . and communion with the world’ (ibid.: 51–52). The reason Solnit likes being called an ‘essayist’ is perhaps best explained by Nicholas Royle, who argues that ‘the essay, then, in literal as well as literary mode’ means ‘essaying, experiment, trying out, expedition. And there is every chance of getting wrecked or lost at sea’ (Royle 2011: 68). As I have shown throughout this chapter, Solnit embraces this possibility of being lost, to the extent that she wrote a whole book about it, because through the risk inherent in lostness, one reaches out to others and to the world outside the home/self. As she has explained, ‘Really powerful stories become part of us, and just as we’re always breathing in particles of others’ bodies, so we’re always imaginatively taking in others. This is another way that we are interfused and the boundaries of the self become blurry’ (in Biggins 2013). In moments of empathy, ‘you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so’, and through this practice of awareness, ‘you travel out of yourself a little or expand’, as if drawing others and the world closer and asserting the ‘unfinished work of becoming’, and a new form of citizenship (Solnit 2013b: 195, 194, 53). This expansive becoming is an adjunct of what Butler means by dispossession: ‘moved by various forces that precede and exceed our deliberate and bounded selfhood’, thus marking the ‘self as social, as passionate, that is, as driven by passions it cannot fully consciously ground or know’ (Butler and Athansiou 2013: 4). Through the act of writing as a meandering process that stitches connections between humanity and the world, Solnit reveals that ‘[b]ooks are solitudes in which we meet’, contact zones of affective critical regionality through which we might learn a new relational politics of empathy. As she has written, ‘[T]he personal voice knows it is only one side of the conversation and that good conversation provokes response, not silence. I write with this hope of opening up the possibilities of my subjects rather than nailing down their meanings for all time’ (Solnit 2001: 10). Always countering the negative perceptions and projections of the human, Solnit ultimately sees through her version of citizenship a renewal of hope in the dark, a kind of ‘paradise built in Hell’, and instead of the persistent and inevitable ‘cruel optimism’ and ‘unwinding’ that haunts the cultural criticism of the twenty-first-century United States, she offers something else, ‘resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave’,

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yet still uncertain and fragile, but nonetheless not a fall but rather a hopeful ‘rising from the ruins’ (Solnit 2010b: 8). NOTES 1. ‘I came back and by my mid-20s found my project was going to be, among other things, locating and writing some of the overlooked history of California and the West’; see Kelley 2012. 2. Solnit refers to such officialdom as ‘a tissue of tourism’ as opposed to the local stories of the people she meets (Solnit 1995: 211). 3. Like Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion is, in part, a response to her own body’s illness (see Bruno 2002: 3). See also Stuart C. Aitken and Deborah P. Dixon, ‘Avarice and Tenderness in Cinematic Landscapes of the American West’, in M. Dear, J. Ketchum, S. Luria, and D. Richardson (eds.), GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 196–205. 4. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2005), 75, calls them ‘bounded areas of small size’ and links to the ‘local color’ writers like Sarah Orne Jewett. 5. See Alex Hunt, ‘Postcolonial West’, in N. Witschi (ed.), A Companion to The Literature and Culture of the American West (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 237. 6. This recalls Edward Casey’s notion of an ‘impure’ sense of place imbued with what he calls the ‘dirty details’ that reveal not ‘a perfected plane’, but rather an ‘inherent regionality’ capable of conveying ‘a plurality of places . . . grouped together’ (Casey 2009: 347–48). 7. Giuliana Bruno says that ‘this form of mapping becomes, in a way, the model for the kind of psychogeography that rethinks spaces in relation to fluid assemblages, and to psychic montage’ (Bruno 2008: 158). 8. Tracings in this are like photographs that trace reality, fix it, and reproduce it like a mirror image. This relates well to Solnit’s critique of Ansel Adams producing calendar landscapes that simply romanticize a mythic vision. 9. Like Kathleen Stewart (see chapter 4), we might ascribe this to a form of ‘distributed biography’. 10. The idea of legwork is discussed in the Introduction via Deleuze and Guattari. 11. ‘Renovated cartography’ comes from Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2. See also An Atlas of Radical Cartography, http://www.an-atlas.com/, a collection of ten maps and ten essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. This work, like Solnit’s, suggests a map is inherently political. One of the contributors is D. J. Waldie. 12. The idea of palimpsest recurs throughout this book. It is a useful metaphor for regionality, which is never a ‘singularity . . . but rather the architext or, . . . the architextuality of the text . . . the entire set of general or transcendent categories . . . from which emerges each singular text’. For Genette, this process is defined as a palimpsest, where ‘on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not quite conceal but allows to how through’ (Genette 1997: 1, 398–99). It is necessary as a result of this overlapping or layering to engage in ‘relational reading’ of such materials or what might also be termed ‘palimpsestuous’ (399). In the context of this book, ‘relational reading’ is the only way to experience and interpret regionality (see the introduction and conclusion for more on this idea). 13. Peña is alluded to in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange through the character of Arcangel. See chapter 7. 14. Bruno’s book evolves from her consideration of the Cartre du pays de Tendre (literally, the map of the land of tenderness), a map designed by the salon hostess Madeleine de Scudery to accompany her novel Clelie (1654). It was a seventeenth-century map of the body and of its affections, associated with gardens as ‘a landscape of emotions to be experienced as a series of sensational movements’ (Bruno 2002: 219). Later it influenced the psychogeographic maps of

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Guy Debord and the Situationists, especially their ‘The Naked City’ map of Paris (see Bruno 2002; McDonough 2002: 243) 15. One example of a project developed after Infinite City with help from Solnit is the Laramie: A Gem City Atlas project—see http://www.terrain.org/articles/29/kelley.htm. 16. See McDonough 2002: 254–55, on the Situationists’ dislike of the aerial photograph or ‘vue verticale’ because it created an imaginary whole, a ‘fiction’ that their practices of everyday life, such as the derive, sought to change. The aerial is discussed at length in chapter 3 in relation to Waldie’s work. 17. Levinas maintains that subjectivity is formed in and through our subjection to the other. Subjectivity, he argues, is primordially ethical, not theoretical: that is to say, our responsibility for the other is not a derivative feature of our subjectivity, but instead, founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas was a huge influence on Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Frames of War, which are both concerned with relations to the other and how this alters a worldview. 18. See Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison, ‘The Promise of Non-Representational Theories’ (in Anderson and Harrison 2010: 12–20), for a brilliant analysis of relationality. Also see Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 92–96, on the idea of relationality.

Chapter Six

Willy Vlautin’s Northline Fugitive Work

1: ‘A WHOLE OTHER STORY IS VIBRATING WITHIN IT’ Nate Beaty’s pen and ink drawings throughout Willy Vlautin’s first novel, The Motel Life (2006), provide an introduction to this chapter, presenting, as they do, a geographical tour opening with the ‘Reno: The Biggest Little City in the World’ sign in chapter 1, through motel signs (Morris, Sandman, Sutro, Rancho, Mizpah, Rancho Sierra, Travelers Inn, Stockman’s Casino), bars (Halfway Club, Reno Turf Club, Fitzgeralds, Elbow Room), significant landmarks (The Gun Rack, Hurleys Used Auto Hamlet, St. Mary’s Hospital, highway markers to Elko), and outward to cars, windshields, and the western road trip itself. Each image forms the landscape through which the novel’s characters move, circle around, and dream, weaving an intense local geography that both contains their lives and points beyond itself to their intersections with worlds: of escape and fantasy, struggle and pain, disappointment and yearning, mythic context and everyday optimism. In the novel, they are Jerry Lee Flannigan’s drawings described in chapter 19 as set ‘within a mile of downtown, and most aren’t even motels anymore. Once they were new and held vacationers and honeymooners from all over the country, and now they barely survive as residentials’ (Vlautin 2006: 112). The images typify what Will Lombardi has called the novel’s ‘hyperlocal sense of postwestern space’ characterized in the novel as ‘almost claustrophobic . . . [a] fixed, hermetic locale’ (Lombardi 2013: 144) existing in tension with a desire to get away and find another life, an imagined place like that mythicized in the original frontier dreams of the American West. The Flannigan brothers, Jerry Lee and Frank, try to escape to Montana and tell stories of fantasy journeys, 147

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sailing to Hawaii or as desperadoes on horseback who ‘rode way up north, through parts of California, through the desert of Nevada’ (Vlautin 2006: 169). As Earl Hurley tells Frank in the novel, ‘It doesn’t matter what it is, but a place that you can hide out in. . . . And if you find a place and it quits working, just change it’ (ibid.: 81). This tension between the street-level details of Reno’s geography and the pull towards an ‘elsewhere’ gives it a powerfully original sense of place and contributes, too, to a reconfiguration of notions of region that become more developed in the second novel, Northline, providing the focus for this chapter. What sets Northline apart, are the ways it engages with region through its detailed, affective sense of how the socio-cultural will always be ‘breaking through continuing meta-thinking to attend to people’s living in the world’ (Crouch 2010: 125). The grand narratives or ‘meta-thinking’ about the region (‘West’) are interfered with by a revaluing of the small scale, the ordinary, and the everyday, or what Nigel Thrift terms ‘fugitive work’, that is, ‘the little, the messy and the jerry-rigged’ (Thrift 2008: 197). It is this remarkable attentiveness that affect brings to the possibility of a renewed cultural politics derived from considerations of how humans interact with space and place, are defined by it, define it, and in turn, might interrupt, alter, and reshape those definitions. With this in mind, there is a critically important section in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature which reveals much about the usefulness and applicability of the notion of ‘fugitive work’ or what they, of course, prefer to term ‘minor’ literature to this examination of region. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it. In this way, the family triangle connects to other triangles—commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical—that determine its values. (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 17—emphasis added)

Minor literature is political because within its ‘cramped space’ (of the local and regional) its ‘individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it.’ Thus, the minor (or fugitive) can seem small, local, and ‘cramped’ because it expresses and records ‘something other than the literature of the masters’ (ibid.: 17), like the journeys across the West of Jerry Lee and Frank in The Motel Life. Minor or fugitive literature, or ‘microperception’ (Massumi 2015: 53), becomes political through its reach and the vibrations within it that pass outwards, transversally connecting with wider concerns and other stories that appear initially invisible, ‘cutting in, cueing emergence, priming capacities’ (ibid.: 55). Thus, small and cramped little histories of the everyday, like

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those in Vlautin’s novels, have potential to ‘connect’ with a network of forces seemingly beyond it, but which are, in reality, woven into its existence as vibrations or intersections. So, in the example from above, a story of the ‘family triangle’ is not contained simply by the domestic enclosure implied by the image of the triangle, but actually interlocks with ‘other triangles’, each individual unto itself, and yet also connected as commercial, economic, bureaucratic, and juridical fields and relations into a complex ‘network’ (Latour 2007) or ‘meshwork’ (Lefebvre 1994: 117; Ingold 2011: 42–43). Thus, a kind of complex ‘triangulation’ occurs, binding all these points together unexpectedly in something Massumi terms an ‘affective region’—‘[i]t’s a brewing, the world stirring, what I call “bare activity”’ (Massumi 2015: 52). In 1983, Granta published Dirty Realism: New Writing from America with an introduction by Bill Buford in which he sketches out what connects a fairly disparate group of ‘fugitive’ writers, from Richard Ford and Raymond Carver to Jayne Anne Phillips and Elizabeth Tallent. 1 His comments usefully demonstrate how Willy Vlautin’s writing comes out of this particular tendency in American fiction for ‘bare activity’ to conjure up worlds. Buford defines this writing as ‘of a peculiar and haunting kind’, ‘not heroic or grand’, ‘not self-consciously experimental’, and ‘not a fiction devoted to making the large historical statement’ (Buford 1983: 4). By differentiating this work from what it is not, Buford begins to chart its peculiar and haunting qualities emerging from a ‘different scope—devoted to the local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture’ (ibid.). As if defining minor or fugitive writing from a particularly American perspective, he continues, ‘But these are strange stories: unadorned [or “bare”], unfurnished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch day-time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music. They are waitresses in roadside cafes, cashiers in supermarkets, construction workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys . . . drifters in a world cluttered with junk food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism’ (ibid.). Thus, Buford coined the term ‘dirty realism’ as a mode of writing that was ‘about the belly-side of contemporary life’ wherein ‘it is what’s not being said—the silences, the elisions, the omissions—that seem to speak most’ (ibid.: 5). This chapter will track the relevance of these ideas to show how there is a whole other story vibrating within the events, episodes, and characters that structure Vlautin’s dirty realist, fugitive work Northline. Under the influence of his ‘saints’ ‘William Kennedy, John Steinbeck, Willie Nelson, and Tom Waits’ (Vlautin 2013), as well as Raymond Carver, Vlautin writes place and people actively. He describes the influence of Kennedy most eloquently, claiming he ‘has a great understanding for people who are living the hard life. He has great romance and great tragedy to him, he writes with both love and pain. He writes like a good man who’s been beat up a few times. His love

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for Albany resonated with me because I was in love with Reno the same way. I was born to the right place’ (ibid.). Unusually, Northline was published with a soundtrack by Vlautin and Paul Brainard, and although there is little space to discuss this in depth here, it functions dialogically with the words on the page, moving the reader through place (the western inflections are uppermost) while challenging expectations (soft music in violent scenes) and creating an ‘atmospheric attunement’ (Stewart 2011) or ‘space of affect’ (Ingold 2015: 73) within which the novel operates: I wanted the whole novel dipped in melancholy, the melancholy you feel after hearing a heartbreaking song. There’s an overall sadness to the book that made me write song after song. I hoped the book would have a cinematic feel, and so it made sense to me to write a soundtrack. . . . [I]f you liked the book and the music, you would once in a while put on the music and the story would come back to you. . . . Maybe it would keep the novel alive a bit longer. (Vlautin 2013) 2

The soundtrack creates a further example of a ‘whole other story vibrating within’ the novel, shaping, in Kathleen Stewart’s words, ‘An attention to matterings, the complex emergent worlds, happening in everyday life. The rhythms of living that are addictive or shifting. . . . The enigmas and oblique events and background noises that might be barely sensed and yet are compelling’ (Stewart 2011: 445). In the spaces of the soundtrack, the novel lives on in ‘knots of sound and feeling’ (Ingold 2015: 20), ‘a space opening out of the charged rhythms of an ordinary’ producing ‘little worlds of all kinds’ that form and collapse and have ‘a capacity to affect and to be affected’ (Stewart 2011: 446, 452) Finally, to bring us back to the title of this chapter and to where it will travel, Ingold insists that ‘[a]ll sound . . . is fugitive: its lines are what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of flight”. . . they do not connect, as does a straight line from source to recipient, but swirl in the in-between’ (Ingold 2015: 111—emphasis added). 2: LEAVING LAS VEGAS Northline begins in the Las Vegas MGM-owned mega-hotel Circus Circus, with its 3,000 rooms and 126,000-square-foot casino and its regular circus acts and carnival games played out daily on the Midway. But rather than the opulent glamour and the family-centred event tourism of its self-promoting publicity hyperbole, we are instead subsumed into Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘cramped space’, what Nick Tosches has called ‘a paradise for the misbegotten’ (in Tronnes 1995: 15), a place famously described by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

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The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos . . . but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair / Polish carnival madness is going on up in this space. (Thompson 1995: 148)

In Tosches’s words, this is the town where ‘Ken and Barbie can go to be bad’ (Tronnes 1995: 15) and where, in Northline, Vlautin’s Allison Johnson and Jimmy Bodie go to get drunk and fool around in the ‘executive washroom’. As if referring back to Thompson’s dark vision, Vlautin opens his novel with ‘They were above them, the circus people, in costumes, swinging from ropes’ accompanied by ‘a small band’ who ‘played lifelessly in the corner’ (Vlautin 2008: 1—emphasis added). Despite the carnival paraded all around them, in actuality this is a lifeless, gothic, corporate underworld populated by ‘low-wage service workers who live in the stucco tenements that line the side streets of the Strip’ (Davis 2002: 94–5). This is ex–casino worker Bodie’s world. As he tells Allison, he once worked as a maintenance man in Circus Circus, keeping the monolithic enterprise running even though ‘[t]hey treat you like shit’ (Vlautin 2008: 2) and cast you aside as soon as they have used you up, to replace you with cheaper immigrant labour. Vlautin’s West is scarred, like his characters, uncoupled from the good life optimism contained in the myths of Manifest Destiny because the colonized continent with its narrative of success and abundance, growth and progress, has become instead a fragile breaking space where lives splinter, collapse, and fall apart against this background of myth and expectation. It is a precarious post-West where the dreams of casino culture capitalism unravel to expose a vulnerable underclass existing at its margins and strangely at odds with its presupposed system and its framed narratives of triumphal destiny and progress. As Mike Davis comments acidly of Las Vegas, it’s ‘the terminus of western history, the end of the trail’ that began in the optimistic scripts of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion and ends somewhere between Fremont Street and the Luxor (Davis 2002: 86). Perhaps it’s no surprise then that in the opening scene in Circus Circus, surrounded by ‘[a]ll the lights and slot machines, and people everywhere’ (Vlautin 2008: 3), Allison, who remains unnamed throughout this long scene, describes ‘an old man in a wheelchair playing video keno’: ‘He was missing both legs, cut off just below the knees. He wore an old brown western shirt, a cowboy hat, his face was red from booze and gray from stubble’ (ibid.). Here is an ironic cowboy West, disabled and broken down but clinging to a vision of some twisted dream of the ‘outlaw’ world kept alive in the songs Bodie listens to and the T-shirts he and Allison wear with their slogans like lost moments of the western past.

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Appropriately, this scene ends in the amoral squalor of the ‘handicap stall’ of the executive washroom where Bodie rapes a semiconscious Allison: He ran his hands over her back, over her tattoos. He put his fingers on the small of her back where there was a silver-dollar-sized black swastika. Just above it to the left was a tattoo of the World Church of the Creator emblem. . . . She tried to hold on, to keep standing, but she was beginning to black out. (ibid.: 5)

The tattoos refer to a real organization—‘One of the fastest-growing hate groups in the 1990s . . . the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) . . . whose stated goal is “making this an all-white nation and ultimately an allwhite world”’ (Anti-Defamation League website). 3 Allison’s body is marked by Bodie’s world like a terrible cartography of masculine power and mythic fantasy, her skin a map of his dreadful preoccupations and obsessive controls over her choices and her movements. Rather like the disabled body of the wheelchair cowboy in the earlier scene, both scenes draw attention to the importance of bodies in Vlautin’s novel and how each of them tells its own story and yet simultaneously carries upon it and within it the traces left by its intense intersections with the world. As if to further this sense of the gothic, quasi-fascist environment that the novel opens with, Bodie dominates and marks her again as she lies on the floor of the stall, with ‘blood again leaking, dripping from the cut’, in a pool of her own urine, kicking her ‘as hard as he could, with his steel-toed boots’ (Vlautin 2008: 6). As Gustafson writes, ‘[T]he body is . . . directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it . . . invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Gustafson 2000: 24). As a mark of his ‘colonizing’ control, the tattoos perform the role so often associated with penal skin marking, in which the tattoos act out the ‘seeing-to-be-done’ of Bodie’s racial and gendered power (Connor 2001). Through these tattoos persists the dream of the ‘outlaw’ world Bodie yearns to reclaim, a type of static regionalism sustained by the philosophy of colonialist white supremacy, race hate, violent gender control, and brutal acts of carelessness inscribed on Allison’s flesh. 4 ‘The tattoo can serve as an indelible identity marker inscribing the boundaries of possibility for the body’ (Fisher 2002: 103), while its inscribed lines testify to Bodie’s worldview: one dimensional and striated. 5 Ironically, Bodie himself has no tattoos and yet is interested in them theoretically, studying them through the books in his apartment while inflicting them on Allison, perhaps because, as Fisher writes, ‘in conditions of general repression and strict control of the body . . . groups need to re-exert ownership of their own bodies’ through tattooing’ (ibid.: 103). Of course, here it is complicated by the imposition of the tattoo’s lines onto Allison, followed by her

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regret at the permanent inscription and its iteration of a racist ideology she does not ascribe to. Just as Allison’s body is ‘colonized’, penetrated, and abused by others throughout the novel, so the tattoo becomes a visible sign of control: ‘The tattoo substitutes a surface for the actual surface of the skin . . . the skin has been penetrated . . . [with] pigment . . . injected beneath the surface of the skin’ (Connor 2004: 63). ‘The fact that the tattoo is irremovable involves a similarly ambivalent play between injury and self-defence. Once marked, the skin can never again recapture its infantile immaculacy and clarity’ (ibid.: 63–64). Allison’s ‘infantile immaculacy and clarity’, her innocence, has been plundered by Bodie to bolster his own uncertainties in a world of change that he finds bewildering and disempowering. In turn, Allison’s skin ‘is the vulnerable, unreliable boundary between inner and outer conditions and the proof of their frightening, fascinating intimate contiguity’ (ibid.: 65). In Bodie’s violation of her skin, he both reveals his own insecurities and also exposes her vulnerability, her anxious and uncertain sense of identity that haunts the novel. What can Allison be within this demarcated, masculinist regional-world? Her body in the novel, sketched in the brutal early scenes of the book and traced via every ‘dark bruise’ (Vlautin 2008: 7) etched on her skin, becomes the terrible scripted map she wants to escape. As Connor puts it, ‘The marked skin means memory, means never being able or willing to forget’ (Connor 2004: 86). Appropriately, as we shall see, given Bodie’s fantasy of the Northline, Connor describes the ‘penal’ tattoo as ‘the hard [that] appears to impose itself relentlessly and unbendingly upon the soft’, ‘the law of the line, the line to which time is reduced’, a ‘mark of law . . . in absolute linearity’ (ibid.: 84, 86—emphasis added). For Allison, too, the inking of the tattoo is reminiscent of a scene of rape, ‘she was drunk, laying on her stomach with her shirt pushed up and her pants pulled part way down’ (Vlautin 2008: 157–58), and echoes to her memory of rape replayed in the novel as well as all the abusive sexual contacts she has throughout her life; brutal, one-way, humiliating, and shameful. As she longs to leave Las Vegas and, eventually Jimmy Bodie, she simultaneously desires to ‘leave’ her own body which she associates with shame, guilt, and humiliation, to ‘overwrite’ her disfiguring tattoo, and to break Bodie’s law of the line to discover an alternative mapping uncontrolled by him. In the meantime, she ‘overwrites’ her marked body by cutting herself, enacting pain to blot out these past traumas and the traces they have left upon her physical and psychical form. As Vlautin has said, ‘[S]he punishes her last possession, her body’ (Vlautin 2013). But always with Allison, as in the initial, pitiless contact with Bodie, and despite all the misery, degradation, and self-loathing she feels, ‘[s]he tried to hold on, to keep standing’ and to ‘dispossess’ her life with Bodie in order to repossess her own. It is the intertwining and implications of these themes and motifs with which this chapter will deal.

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2: JIMMY BODIE OR THE EVOLUTION OF A COW-PUNCHER (OR COW-PUNKER?) Jimmy Bodie’s home continues this gothic countering of any expectations we might have of a traditional western novel of openness and optimism: ‘built in the basement of an old house . . . [with] concrete floors, an unfinished ceiling, and cinder block walls painted white’ (Vlautin 2008: 7). The scene within this space establishes the precise regionalist context for the events of the novel to follow, with ‘an American flag hanging by the door, and a lamp made from the fender of a 1946 Ford coupé’, and with books on ‘guns and self defense . . . tattoos . . . immigration, US history . . . a framed picture of his mom and dad’ and records by ‘Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, David Alan Coe [sic], Buck Owens, Chet Atkins. Hundreds of country and rockabilly records’ (Vlautin 2008: 8). It is here where, having abused Allison in Circus Circus, he leaves her naked and handcuffed to the bed for ten hours, further asserting his patriarchal power, like the marking of her body with tattoos and bruises, defining Bodie’s macho signature and his perverse attachment to a type of outlaw ‘westness’, identified with an essentially narrow and uncompromising version of masculinist regionalism. The idea of him not getting a tattoo is important for a couple reasons. One is that he doesn’t fully believe any of the neo-Nazi rhetoric. He’s smarter than that. It also shows that he’s clear about what he wants and doesn’t want on his body yet he gets Allison to get the tattoos. He’s marking her body because he can. He has control of her. (Vlautin 2013)

Bodie’s version of cultural identity is embedded in a particular view of tradition that has its roots in a narrow version of ‘westness’ defined best by Owen Wister’s essay ‘The Evolution of a Cow-Puncher’(1895), imagining the American frontiersman (or ‘cow-puncher’) as a naturally selected individual within a precise European Saxon genealogy. Rather like Frederick Jackson Turner’s view of the role of the frontier in forming American identity, Wister viewed westward expansion, with its rigorous, masculine pursuits and opportunities for extremes of endurance, ingenuity, and violent interaction, as providing a laboratory for the soul to rediscover the repressed energies essential to an Anglo-Saxon ‘blood line’. The essay maps an American national identity rooted in Saxon spirit and re-rooted in the ‘cattle country’ through the male ‘cow-puncher’ who arrived as part of a ‘motley’ ‘tribe’, a ‘heap of cards shuffled from . . . various unmatched packs’, a ‘harlequin platoon’ (Wister 1995: 43, 56), and is transformed by the rediscovery of his old, essential Saxonism emboldened in the peculiar conditions of the West. For Wister, these individuals cohered in the West, and ‘soon grew into a unit’, expressing the characteristics of the ‘race’; ‘pluck[ed] from

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the library, the haystack, and the gutter, [when] set upon his horse. . . . It was no new type, no product of the frontier, but just the original kernel of the nut with the shell broken’ (ibid.). This ‘original kernel’ articulates Wister’s version of essential, racial, and gendered identity rooted in Saxon Europe and amplified in the soil of America. Stuart Hall explains how such essentialist thinking works in relation to identity, as ‘a sort of collective “one true self”, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves”, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’ (in Rutherford 1990: 223). Such an idea provides a fixed sense of ‘one people’ with ‘stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of . . . actual history’ and so authorizes a sense of ‘oneness’; ‘the truth, the essence’ of national identity (ibid.). This is the ‘original kernel’ from which the Anglo-Saxon identity emerges to redefine itself in the West, and yet it is not the environment that forms identity; it merely provides the conditions for its expression, the ‘soil’ in which the ‘kernel’ will root and grow. Bodie’s ‘westness’ seems cut from the same cloth as Wister’s, based on the same adherence to essentialized notions of masculinity and region, and maintained through what Svetlana Boym would term ‘restorative nostalgia’ (Boym 2001: 41). This is the effort to ‘rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps . . . [that] characterizes national and nationalist revivals . . . which engage in anti-modern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and . . . through swapping conspiracy theories’ (ibid.). Bodie tells Allison, ‘We’ll have a bunch of land and a garden. We’ll have horses and dogs. . . . We’ll sleep under the stars’ (Vlautin 2008: 159) and asserts a man’s world where identity is defined through action and hierarchical power over women, nonwhites, and those different from yourself; it is a ‘paranoiac reconstruction of home . . . predicated on the fantasy of persecution’ (Boym 2001: 43). Thus, in the novel, he rails against nonwhite Americans and has clear sympathies with the WCOTC, seeing Las Vegas as the epitome of America’s racial decline: ‘It was a dump to begin with, then you add all the fucking new people. And the Mexicans come in like fog, cover everything, get in everywhere. . . . Pretty soon they’re gonna ruin everything’ (Vlautin 2008: 28). Over a hundred years before, Wister wrote similarly of the ‘debased and mongrel . . . hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities into Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce’ (Wister 1995: 42, 37). Boym terms this ‘the creation of a delusional homeland’ that must be defended at all costs (Boym 2001: 43). Bodie’s regressive dream is to escape the threat of the southwest borderlands and its ‘fog’ of immigrants by moving to a mythical and pure region ‘North’ (his ‘delusional homeland’): ‘You know we should move. Head up north. . . . Get a place in Montana’, he tells Allison early in the novel (Vlautin

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2008: 30). It becomes a recurrent theme for Bodie and central to his distorted nostalgic geopolitics of America and the West; whereby Mexicans become the target of extreme racism and yet simultaneously Sitting Bull can be admired because ‘he didn’t want to integrate. He didn’t want his people to go to church and be shit on or go to our schools and get laughed at. We should have cut off a state or two and let them be’ (ibid.: 42). This ‘North’ functions in Bodie’s mind like a renewed but retrogressive frontier West like Wister’s or as simplified as Turner’s ‘line’ marking ‘an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order’, where the white, ‘self-made man’ could be untrammelled and free (Turner 1961: 69). In Bodie’s letter to Allison later in the novel, once she has escaped his physical controls, he returns to his fantastical cartography of straight lines (see Ingold 2007): I’ve decided I really am gonna be moving North. Like I always wanted. Just draw a line and go. A Northline. The farther north, the better. Away from everyone. Away from all the weirdos and freaks and Mexicans and Niggers. . . . I figure the farther North you go, the better it’ll be. A place saner and normal. Simpler. Maybe get a place out in the woods. Maybe Alaska. (Vlautin 2008: 98)

Bodie operates in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 474–500), characterized by control, simple gridding, and the joining together of points, as in the quotation above: the line joining points on immigration, racism, sanity, normality, and the North into a unified argument or what Boym terms a ‘perfect snapshot’ of the past (Boym 2001: 49). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Bodie marks or ‘striates’ Allison’s flesh with lines cut into her by violence and tattooing, exemplifying Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation that striated space ‘closes off a surface and “allocates” it according to determinate intervals’, ‘assign[s] constant directions’, and is defined by ‘long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance . . . inertial points of reference’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 481, 488, 494). Similarly, Bodie ‘allocates’ his relations with Allison and ‘closes off’ her agency and, through his political worldview, exercises an ‘inert’ and ‘invariant’ sense of region fixed in time. Bodie’s Northline is an abstraction, a ‘simple location’ (see introduction) abstracting from experience and actual, lived realities and affects. Instead, a nostalgic myth forms, calcifies, fixes, detaches itself from the ‘particularity of a given place’ and takes on generalized characteristics without the detailed, tactile, experiences or ‘the special color, texture, luminosity . . . of that place . . . the sensory qualia’ (Casey 1998: 212). This recalls Haraway’s patriarchal ‘deadly fantasy’ that removes the body from the consideration of the world, disembodies experience, and reduces all the intimate, affective relations with the world to ‘the god-trick of seeing from nowhere’, which universalizes to ‘put the myth into ordinary

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practice’ (Haraway 1991: 188, 189). Bodie operates from just such a ‘nowhere’; his resurgent dream of the West-as-Northline. The Northline is an ethnically pure vision of a New New World or a reconfigured West without its immigrant populations but with all the associated imagery of the frontier. For example, Jonathan Raban wrote of Noxon, a small western town and home of the Militia of Montana, a group associated with the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, as having a similar ‘version of the West [that] seemed half boy-scout play-acting, half deadly paranoia, with some queer Bible-reading thrown into the mixture . . . like bad-blood descendants of the homesteaders’ (Raban 1996: 299). What Raban terms the ‘perverse legacy of the homesteading experience’ in the West (ibid: 300) is Bodie’s mythic frontier space of the paranoid imagination, ‘simpler’ because it refuses, as in all mythology, according to Roland Barthes, to deal with the complexities of history with all its messy, complicated, and troublesome realities: myth is a ‘conjuring trick’ which ‘turned reality inside out . . . emptied it of history and . . . filled it with nature’ (see Barthes 1976: 142–43). Bodie’s ‘North’, ‘filled . . . with nature’, is like Raban’s Montana or his fantasy of Alaska: a delusional space of myth which ‘abolishes the complexity of human acts . . . gives them the simplicity of essences . . . organizes a world . . . without contradictions because it is without depth . . . a blissful clarity’ (ibid.: 143). This is Bodie’s vision of an essentialized time-locked West: a ‘place saner and normal. Simpler’, as he puts it. However, as Peter Davidson has written, the ‘idea of the North’ ultimately ‘is always a shifting idea, always relative, always going away from us . . . always out of reach’, reminding us of the illusory and unattainable quality of Bodie’s frontier dream (Davidson 2005: 8). As Vlautin told me, When I was kid a lot of people I knew always talked of Montana and Alaska and Northern Nevada and Wyoming as heaven. As places where there wasn’t traffic or people of color or people who thought differently from you. I grew up hearing about these places like they were the promised land, EL DORADO. Mountains, rivers, hunting, fishing, freedom. The old life. None of the people I knew ever moved to these places. It was just their dream, their escape. The thing is watching a movie or reading a novel about the West is very romantic and appealing but living on a ranch or a small town in the West is hard work and often it’s a patchwork of jobs just to get by. It’s hard to make a decent living. Jimmy Bodie lives in the dream of the West. When his life begins to unravel he dreams of heading north, of drawing a line North, a Northline, and picking a new spot to live, a new life where he’s different, the area’s different. There’s nothing there that will scare him. The world won’t be changing. All he’ll do is work hard and be the man he wants to be. It’s his dream. (Vlautin 2013)

As the novel unfolds, Bodie’s sense of simple, striated location and its inherent politics of hate is countered by an alternative sense of place closer to

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Casey’s place of ‘special color, texture, luminosity’. It is through Allison Johnson (and then Dan Mahoney) that this ‘smooth space’ is encountered as she struggles with the ‘subjugating, overcoding, metricizing’ that Bodie inflicts upon her, since ‘the tighter the striation, the more homogeneous the space tends to become’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 486, 488). 6 Yet as Deleuze and Guattari assert, smooth and striated spaces are always a mixture, dialogically engaged, in perpetual ‘translation’ one to the other and back, borne out in Allison’s struggle with Bodie, whose presence perversely provides ‘a milieu of propagation, extension, refraction, renewal, and impulse’ (ibid.) through which she moves to some new space, or what we might see, in the terms of this book, as affective regionality. 3: ‘GET THE HELL OUT OF DODGE’: ALLISON JOHNSON’S LINES OF FLIGHT Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at that. (ibid.: 482)

If Bodie operates striatedly in the West, from point to point along preset and gridded lines, then Allison comes closer to ‘smooth space’ operating ‘between lines’ set by his worldview, edgily and stutteringly shifting ground as she journeys across the spaces of the city of Reno. In contrast to Bodie, as Clare Colebrook puts it, ‘there is always more than one line or tendency of becoming’, since ‘intersections or encounters . . . produce unheard of lines of new becoming, or “lines of flight”’ (Colebrook 2002: 133). For Allison, the city’s lines are constantly navigated and recrossed as she wanders the streets, circling back, often staggering, noticing, and incrementally sensing Reno as a different space of relations than that experienced in the gothic subworld of Bodie’s Las Vegas. As David Crouch explains, ‘Journeying . . . is material and metaphorical; journeys are in the liveliness of energies’, and do not necessarily imply mobility, for they take on ‘varying trajectories . . . [with] long gestation but also instantaneous presence; to happen in tensions and adjustment in life’ (Crouch 2010: 19). Allison is always nervous and so rarely at ease in the city, and yet her mental and physical wanderings in Reno, her ‘journeyings’, reveal ‘an accumulation of proximities . . . proper to “becoming” (more than a line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 488—emphasis added). As Crouch aptly puts it, ‘Amidst life’s journeys and journeyings becoming happens’ (Crouch 2010: 20). Allison moves through ‘close vision-haptic space’, whereas the striated is aligned to ‘a more distant vision’ such as the Northline, and this means, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘orientations, landmarks, and linkages . . . in continuous variation’, including ‘local spaces of pure connection’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 493) Hence, Allison jour-

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neys through her notebooks where she addresses her troubles, doubts and fears: ‘I’ll never change I know that. . . . You’re too scared to do anything about it’ (Vlautin 2008: 21); through her love of Patti Page and Brenda Lee: ‘Romantic and lonely and self-doubting. They are very cinematic and grand but also intimate. Like a movie. When you hear a song that transports you, that takes you out of your daily life, that makes you disappear into it, that’s luck’ (Vlautin 2013); through her imaginary friendship with ‘gentle and nonthreatening’ (ibid.) Paul Newman, who advises and cajoles her throughout the novel: ‘My recommendation is to start new. Get the hell out of Dodge’ (Vlautin 2008: 60); and through her actual physical movements within the novel—from the desert to the city, Las Vegas to Reno, from home to work: ‘The sun was coming up over the mountains and beginning to lay down upon the city. Every morning for the last three weeks she’d left work and taken a walk’ (ibid.: 96). It is also the material world of Reno she affects and that affects her; of everyday labour, survival, getting by, lapsing, self-harming; of ‘Home Depot’, ‘Kmart’, ‘Baskin Robbins’, and ‘Babies R Us’; of $150 per week motel rooms, Patti Page and Brenda Lee cassettes, and all-day bingo. This accumulation of proximities become what Kathleen Stewart terms ‘ordinary affects’ reconnecting Allison with immanent life, however problematic it is, enabling her to overcome Bodie’s worldview with the West figured as traumatized by immigration and subsequent loss, and separated from its idealized and mythic Manifest Destiny summed up by his invention of the ‘Northline’. As Colebrook explains, this is akin to a Freudian drama that Deleuze counters with his emphasis upon ‘becoming’ and invention: ‘evidence of the positivity of desire, the tendency of perception to become through what is not itself rather than always retrieving some lost, mythical, and originally unified image of itself’ (Colebrook 2002: 135—emphasis added). Bodie’s worldview is constructed from ‘some lost, mythical and originally unified image’ of ‘West’, now translated into pure ‘North’; a vision that entraps Allison and that she only very gradually and painfully moves away from through her hard-won sense of becoming. She, in many ways, represents the isolation of modern Western America. She has no real family to rely on, no family business, no strong role models, no Church or community support. She’s alone as are her sister and her mother. The West means nothing as a symbol to her, she, like the vast majority of the new Westerners just want to find a place to live and work. (Vlautin 2013)

Countering Bodie’s directional line and fixed colonizing politics, Vlautin’s postwestern novel restores complexity through Allison’s journey, marked by her ‘accumulation of proximities’, intense emotion, local details, and crises of survival, resembling the weird intricacies of Stewart’s ‘ordinary affects’

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giving ‘everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences’ (Stewart 2007: 2). In one of her imagined conversations with Paul Newman scattered throughout the novel, offering Allison some alternative vision of masculinity, a type of ‘new man’ in contrast to the brutal misogyny of Jimmy Bodie, he tells her to ‘start new. Get the hell out of Dodge’ (Vlautin 2008: 60) and leave behind the excessive trap of Las Vegas. As if deliberately countering the frontier West of Bodie, Newman steers Allison away from the dangerous fiction of her boyfriend’s world, away from his straight and unwavering, yet simple, ‘line’, towards something more ambiguous but rewarding. Central to this movement is her discovery and experience of the complexity of human acts, a type of confrontation with history that Bodie would rather avoid or annihilate through his acts of violence and control. Rather than his ‘Northline’ pointing ever farther away from the lived experience of the complex, multicultural West, Allison comes to understand a life made up of multiple lines, ‘marching to different beats and differing in nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 202), with each person in turn a complex multiplicity, ‘a bundle of very diverse lines’ that intersect, cross and fray, forming no easy rectilinear form of identity but always a type of intricate ‘meshwork of entangled lines of life, growth, and movement’ (Lefebvre 1994: 117; Ingold 2007: 80). As Ingold explains in Being Alive, It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening not of closure. (Ingold 2011: 4)

Like the tattoo line drawn on Allison’s back by Bodie, she has to learn to undo this rigid demarcation and make her own map of life, a map composed not of a single, determining line from a point of origin in a racist creed or a mythic construction of ‘westness’, but something less simple and perhaps more real that ‘keeps on going, finding a way through’. As Ingold reiterates, and as Allison’s journey will gradually reveal, ‘This is the world we inhabit . . . a meshwork of interwoven lines’ (ibid.: 63). In opposition to Bodie’s rectilinear thinking epitomized by the ‘Northline’, the tattoo, and his racist politics, Allison learns through painful contact, evasion, and eventual reciprocity an alternative way of being and becoming made up from different modes or ‘routes’, as Lefebvre calls them: ‘danger, safety, waiting, promise’ (Lefebvre 1994: 118). Her story unfolds along routes or ‘entangled lines’ of ‘danger, safety, waiting, promise’ once she escapes the terrible limitations of Las Vegas and Bodie’s imprisoning and frozen world. As Allison wanders the streets of Las Vegas, trying to escape

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Bodie, it was as if ‘[w]ith each passing building she passed, she was more certain’ of the need to ‘start new’ (Vlautin 2008: 66). It is only once inside the tractor-trailer of T. J. Watson, picked up at a desert truck stop, that she uses her name for the first time, as if, suddenly her identity begins to emerge from Bodie’s deep, manipulative shadow. Throughout the ensuing, novel she hitchhikes, walks, busses, wanders from Las Vegas to Reno and then around the city itself from motels to cheap apartments to laundromats to low-wage jobs and ice cream parlours learning ‘[t]his tangle is the texture of the world’ (Ingold 2011: 71). Abandoning the perversely containing security/control relations offered by Bodie, the risk for Allison is having no direction at all: ‘Where you going to?’ asked a cab driver, to which she answers, ‘Nowhere, I don’t think’ (Vlautin 2008: 68). As her life moves on from unwanted pregnancy to despair, to adoption, anxiety, guilt, and self-harm, Allison’s sense of direction becomes confused and ever more uncertain, fluctuating between ‘nowhere’ and the desire to ‘disappear’ ‘anywhere’ and ultimately towards a gradual, if vulnerable, location in the ‘here’ and now, or what she later calls ‘some place’ (ibid.: 116). At her lowest point, she desires the complete erasure of self: ‘Her body shook. She wanted to die. To disappear. To have the cleaning lady come in and find nothing, not a trace that she had ever been there. Not a trace she’d ever been anywhere or done anything in the world’ (ibid.: 70). Or else she circles back as if repeating her earliest violation in the Circus Circus washroom, to other enclosed, cramped spaces, often bathrooms, kitchens, or motel rooms where: ‘Her anxieties started again. Her breaths quickened and her body tensed’ (ibid.: 86). Her self-harming and eventual suicide attempt embody her desire to disappear from the memory of her painful pasts, from Bodie, her rape by the busboys, and her low self-esteem. She confesses to Paul Newman at one point, as if parroting Bodie’s desire, ‘I would have had us sneak away and get a place a thousand miles from anywhere’ (Vlautin 2008: 87), claiming she would protect him from the tough moments in his own movies. To this he replies, as the voice of Allison’s better self, ‘That’s why I’m here’ (ibid.). Her yearning to protect Paul Newman in these fantasies and for him to advise and look out for her, like a surrogate father, become a testing ground for the slow learning process that emerges from her entangled lines of experience. Allison undergoes a type of ‘feminine fraying’ (Berlant 2008: 18) as she learns that her own ideal of love, relationships, and life is based on a particular version of romance—typified by her conversations with Paul Newman—which have been undermined by her experience with Bodie. What Berlant calls the ‘romantic fantasies of love as reciprocity’ (ibid.: 19) are what Allison both desires and fears because her anxieties stem from the terrible realization that she might never find the ‘required’, socially defined territory of reciprocity, and yet she still is drawn to their inherent, potent attraction. Through Paul Newman and his characters

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(‘her friends, her allies, her confidantes’, as Vlautin terms them [Vlautin 2013]), she imagines a better life of contact, care, and communion which in other ways gradually emerges in her actual life as brief moments of exchange, gift giving, and reciprocity. As Vlautin puts it, ‘She’s attracted to kindness. A serious break for her. I think so many live on the fence between hope and kindness and then bitterness and disillusionment’ (ibid.). This materializes initially through her flight from Bodie with the truck driver T. J. Watson who ‘gave her twenty dollars and his home address’ and, in an important act of exchange, Allison ‘made him a list of television shows she thought he might like’ (Vlautin 2008: 51) and continues at the Cal Neva restaurant where she works, through her contact with other people who like her seem vulnerable and whose lives are equally precarious. Echoing Levinas, discussed in chapter 5, Judith Butler has written, ‘Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure, both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all’ (Butler 2010: 14—emphasis added). As Vlautin has said of Allison, ‘In her heart lives romance and goodness, it comes to light in her dream life with Paul Newman. One of her greatest attributes is that she gravitates towards kindness given to her. . . . When someone is nice to her, she accepts it. She knows what type of people she wants. That’s her saving grace’ (Vlautin 2013). Allison is learning to live again, to live ‘socially’ among others who are open to tentative ‘exchange’ (‘kindness given’) without violence or abuse, placing one’s life in the hands of the other. Within these scenes, lines of life become productively entangled and folded into others’ lives, forcing Allison to reassess and reimagine her existence beyond Bodie’s circumscription. Thus, Allison pays for ‘a frail old woman . . . dressed in western outfits’ to eat and in return she ‘began leaving drink tokens and old horse racing magazines . . . snapshots of the dog, old blank postcards, and even a copy of an old Brenda Lee record after the girl told her she was her favourite singer’ (Vlautin 2008: 91). Later a ‘middle-aged black man’ in return for some extra coffee says, ‘In exchange I’m going to give you a sure win on a pick four’ (ibid.: 92); and Penny Pearson, with her own body-image issues and addictions, accepts Allison as an equal worker and friend at Curt Vacuums and exchanges stories of their troubled lives. Exchange for Allison has previously been only about economics and sexuality registered in the novel by her extreme anxiety and nervousness and never about affection, love, and care. As a result, these acts of sharing and reciprocity constantly contest with her fears and anxieties rushing back from the past, ‘like blood leaking from a nose’ (Vlautin 2008: 157). Even when she meets Dan Mahony, a man as scarred both physically and mentally as Allison, she is still uncertain, tentative, and precarious. When he buys her a snow globe from San Francisco, she ‘wasn’t sure what he meant by giving it’

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and insists on buying him a breakfast so ‘we’ll be even’ (ibid.: 113). Being even is for Allison a step away from Bodie’s uneven relationship of control and towards an independent life, however flawed and edgy it remains. But her overwhelming affect is of precarity, of ‘the present . . . saturated with a sort of restlessness, but also that the future is made uncertain and becomes difficult or impossible to predict’ (Anderson 2014: 129). For if Allison is making small steps beyond Bodie’s haunting past, her ‘precarity makes present an unstable here and now vaguely menaced by an uncertain future’ (ibid.). Significantly, Dan Mahoney is a man ‘marked’ (ibid.: 165) by terrible, random violence, whose life has been uprooted because of it, turning him into a tentative and edgy person feeling more in common with Iraq veterans he cares for in hospital than anyone from his old life. From this shared marking by life, Dan and Allison gradually realize a mutual struggle through which they ‘should keep trying to move back into the world’ (ibid.: 166). Moving back into the world is not easy for Dan or Allison, as we have seen, in part due to the region’s dark past played out through its violent misogyny, callous fear of difference, and the wound it has left on them both. Yet as Butler argues, ‘I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control’ (Butler 2006: 46). In giving over to the Other, one exchanges and relates, accepts reciprocal and shared responsibilities, changes with the world and so ‘petitions’ (ibid.: 44) the future rather than live under its fretful shadow. 4: MOVING BACK INTO THE WORLD Dan’s home is contrasted with Bodie’s basement room, with its ‘large black velvet painting of a Mexican bandit smoking a cigarette. His scarred face, his faded sombrero, his leather ammunition belt across his chest, his eyes staring off into the distance’ (Vlautin 2008: 173). Although ‘cluttered and un-kept’ (ibid.), the room identifies Dan with the very ‘Other’ Bodie despises, suggesting at least, a more open view of the West in the twenty-first century. As Dan’s vulnerability is exposed in this scene through emotion and honesty, he tells Allison ‘I knew I was beat’, with ‘tears . . . falling from his face’ (ibid.: 176). In a moment of rare, but powerful mutuality, Allison says to herself ‘Dan Mahoney couldn’t take control of her . . . he could barely take control of himself’ and so ‘felt all right with him there’ (ibid.: 178). ‘There’ in this context, is the streets of Reno, now becoming a space of care, mutual vulnerability, and hesitant hope, where, as Newman tells Allison, ‘It’s up to you to make your own way’ (ibid.: 183). Above all, as we shall see, Dan embellishes this ‘there’ with a sense of history and affect, confirming Newman’s other advice that ‘there ain’t no place where you can escape to. There’s no

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place where there ain’t weirdos and death and violence and change and new people. You head up to Wyoming or Montana and you’ll run into the same things as you do in Vegas or New Orleans. You’ll run into yourself’ (ibid.: 185). With Dan, Allison stops trying to escape and begins to appreciate her life as a bundle of lines coming together in Reno; imperfect, still unsettled, but potentially relational. This is played out in the two final chapters of the novel, ‘Camping’ and ‘The Strip’. In the first of these, Dan and Allison go into the desert ‘playa’ beyond the city in a scene reminiscent of the climax of the great Reno film and novel The Misfits (see Campbell 2013). 7 Suddenly the cramped, claustrophobic spaces of the novel open out into the smooth space of the desert that ‘goes on for miles and miles’ (Vlautin 2008: 188), where Dan came with his uncle to heal after his hospitalization: ‘Everything makes better sense when you’re in the middle of nowhere’ (ibid.: 188). And yet what is different about Dan is that, unlike Bodie’s frontier fantasy of the West as a safety valve that he could actually live in, he sees the desert as a ‘place to daydream in’ rather than to settle in (ibid.). In the final chapter of Northline, ‘The Strip’, Allison meets Dan on the streets of Reno on the day that one of its oldest casinos, Harold’s Club, is to be pulled down. The chapter’s attention to the affective relations of region show, in Colebrook’s words, ‘the power, not to represent the world or located subjects, but to imagine, create and vary affects that are not already given’ (Colebrook 2002: 103). Vlautin mines the everyday for such moments, finding there ‘invisibilities’—the ‘not already given’—to challenge the major distribution of sensibility, that is, the ‘given’ regionalism of its mythic archetypes. We enter, in Lauren Berlant’s words, ‘the ordinary as a zone of convergence of many histories, where people manage the incoherence of lives that proceed in the face of threats to the good life they imagine’ (Berlant 2011: 10). So it is the Old West regionalist myth of settled, coherent aspiration, the one epitomized by the mural at Harold’s Club and warped through Bodie’s fantasy, against which we now measure the strained lives of Allison and Dan in this final chapter. The mural was an iconic portrait of mythic westward expansion of America, built in 1949; seventy feet long by thirtyfive feet tall and composed of 220 forty-by-forty-eight-inch panels: ‘It showed a wagon train encamped for the night around a campfire near a waterfall. On a nearby bluff, Indians wearing loincloths and feathered headdresses stalked the pioneers. Lighting inside the mural gave the appearance of crackling fire and flowing water’ (Bledsoe 2012). Above the mural, red neon letters proclaimed, ‘Dedicated in all humility to those who blazed the trail’. The mural was a visible restatement of the Old West theme that the owners had created for the whole casino, which also boasted a Covered Wagon Room, a Silver Dollar Bar, and Roaring Camp Room (filled with western memorabilia).

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Through fragments and flashes of lives being lived and of living-on, Vlautin’s novel operates less as a conventional narrative thread of action and resolution and more as ‘the charge of unfolding’ that Stewart describes in Ordinary Affects (Stewart 2007: 19). He mobilizes these ‘ordinary affects’ through a scene of convergence full of layered textures, where individual lives share public space, and actions proceed as possibilities, like ‘spreading lines of resonance and connection’ (ibid.: 4). According to Vlautin, Dan and Allison are ‘people who have fallen through the net’ of mainstream society and yet whose stories deserve to be heard amid the bland white noise of contemporary celebrity cultures and vague, distanciated politics (in Merritt 2008). By using this real, historical event from 16 December 1999, Vlautin creates an intersection of their everyday lives within the larger (but always related) context of social, cultural, and economic change. Throughout this scene, the city ‘becomes its own character’ interacting with Dan’s and Allison’s bodies, senses, and imaginations and tangled up with Vlautin’s attention to detail and the specificities of ordinary affects: Allison’s thermos, a bag of donuts, their gestures of ‘walking’, ‘waiting’, or their feelings of tiredness and nostalgia. These seemingly insignificant moments engage the reader into a tightly focused and yet strangely fluid region of hardship and struggle within which these people measure out their lives, apparently unaware of the bigger picture against which they move. And yet, Vlautin’s Reno geography is once again, as it has been throughout the novel, necessarily exact: ‘[W]alking to the Cal Nevada Casino . . . they walked down Center Street. He led her across Second Street and turned left towards Virginia’ (Vlautin 2008: 190). Indeed, this psychogeography becomes a site of memory and commemoration for Dan, who has lived in Reno all his life, and as he takes pictures at the scene, each click of the lens evokes a memory associated with the casinos, mingled with his uncle’s stories of the place’s history, and their lived experience of it now, at this exquisite moment of transition. As Vlautin has said of Dan, he ‘understands that there is beauty in the area. He’s a part of the old Nevada. He knows the desert and the mountains, he knows where the best diners and bars are. He in many ways is the old West, but he’s now damaged. He is now isolated and unsure. The world’s changing but again he falls on the side of hope and survival’ (Vlautin 2013). Of course, Dan’s old West nostalgia is not wrapped up in the same ideology as Bodie’s ‘restorative nostalgia’ but instead produces something closer to Boym’s ‘reflective nostalgia’ with its ‘meditation on history and passage of time’ while being concerned with ‘the irrevocability of the past and human finitude’ (Boym 2001: 49). Although they both respond to the West-asregion with the ‘same triggers of memory and symbols’, they ‘tell different stories about it’ (ibid.: 49). If, as Boym argues, nostalgia is about the ‘repetition of the unrepeatable’ (ibid.: xvi ), then Dan seems to understand that

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Reno cannot be what he remembers it was, but it does not prevent him commemorating that past and using it productively to heal the wounds of his life and to imagine some different future. He is an ‘off-modern’, as Boym puts it, whereby ‘reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together’ (ibid.) and ‘affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection’ (ibid.: 50). Dan’s recollected narratives of Harold’s Club stand as his ‘critical reflection’ on the decline of old Reno as well as the loss of something both deeply cultural and personal; some sense of connection to place. ‘All the old places from that era are disappearing. I guess nothing stays the same’, he says to Allison. But what replaces this architecture of memory that ‘tell[s] you about the things that have gone on here in the past’ are just ‘strip malls’ and corporate industrialized landscapes without any rooted connection to a specific place or time: I guess no one here cares about the past anymore. Might not seem like anything, but maybe it is. So many people move here and to Vegas and all over the West. They don’t have any sorta roots. Maybe chain places are the only roots people have anymore. Maybe roots are Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell and Wendys. And places like Wal-Mart and K-Mart. (ibid.: 191)

But places and history live on in other, productive ways. Dan’s response, though melancholic, tries to reflect upon change in the spirit of ‘reflective nostalgia’, and his phrase ‘might not seem like anything, but maybe it is’ shows his effort to comprehend and adjust to change and transition, while the photographs he takes, alongside the stories he tells, are all active relations with the past and with the future that set him apart from Bodie. Dan’s affective remapping of the Reno landscape reflects also upon the experience of Allison, whose rootless life of exploitation and sexual violence has led her from Las Vegas to Reno in the course of the novel. Her response to Dan’s reflective tribute to the old Reno and to the demolition of the casinos is more pragmatic: ‘I guess people just need a place to live’ (Vlautin 2008: 191), and yet she instinctively understands his response to change as a version of what she undergoes throughout the novel as ‘things get worse or different’ in her own life (ibid.). Allison adapts, lives on, gets by. Dan recalls how the Harold’s Club mural elicited his uncle’s request ‘to tell him about all the people in it’; about the name of the ‘mountain man’, ‘where the Indian lived’, and ‘how many kids the lady in the wagon train had’ (ibid.: 191–92). For in Dan’s and Allison’s contemporary Reno, the pioneering spirit and the yearned-for good life has become a haphazard dream of escape to a new life imagined and enacted by the latter as she moves restlessly to evade Bodie’s violence, others’ sexual predation, her own addictions and relentless self-harm. The righteous trailblazers of the old West

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narrative have become the source for Bodie’s right-wing ideology of hate or advertising gimmicks for a New West fantasy of easy money and unending leisure, and even that is about to be replaced by a more corporate, globalized landscape of big-box stores and fast-food outlets. Dan resists these onedimensional narratives in an ‘ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary’ manner, reflecting on ‘the home . . . in ruins’ (Boym 2001: 50) as he surveys the disappearing landscapes of old Reno. Amid this collision of temporal and spatial memories (Dan’s past and Allison’s recent traumas) and their harshness of existence, something intense, new, and potentially generative emerges because, as Boym explains, echoing Butler, ‘[t]he ethics of reflective longing recognizes the cultural memory of another person, as well as his or her human singularity and vulnerability’ (ibid.: 337). So although Allison’s response is not as embedded in place as Dan’s throughout this scene, they both nonetheless, recognize each other’s expressive regionality as ‘a freedom to remember, to choose the narratives of the past and remake them’ (ibid.: 354). Although still haunted by Bodie, even to the point of imagining him in the crowds in Reno in the final moments of the novel, she has disrupted his ‘line’ of control, his Northline, through independence, education, labour, and acts of mutual care and intimacy that begin to extend her ‘between lines’ and open up the tentative possibility of some new space for a different life. Allison and Dan locate in each other’s encounter with this affective landscape some fragile and possible, although tantalizing, hope for the present and future: ‘[S]he opened her eyes to see him. She grabbed his hand and kissed him with desperation. She kissed him with fear and hope and uncertainty. And in weakness she gave everything to him right then and there among the people and the fallen, ruined old casino buildings’ (Vlautin 2008: 192). In these ‘forms of attention and attachment’, as Stewart calls them (Stewart 2007: 5), their bodies connect uncertainly, tentatively, yet in a moment of intimacy unseen elsewhere in the novel. This is no romantic ending nor narrative closure, for Vlautin resists ‘riding a great rush of signs to a satisfying end’, as Stewart puts it, preferring instead to offer only ‘fear and hope and uncertainty’ amid social ruins and through this to show ‘an ordinary saturated with affect’s lines of promise and threat’ (Stewart 2007: 5, 129). 5: CONCLUSION: ON FUGITIVE MOBILITY I have shown throughout this chapter that Allison’s and Dan’s ‘lines’ are never the same as Bodie’s sense of the singular and fixed Northline because their ‘line escapes geometry by a fugitive mobility’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 499). They capture the two meanings of the word ‘fugitive’ suggesting

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both a person who has escaped from captivity or intolerable circumstances, and something quick to disappear, fleeting, elusive, wandering, roving, like a vagabond. Their journeyings embrace these tendencies, refusing Bodie’s narrow, striated regionalism and pointing towards a different fugitive regionality. For Allison, as this scene dramatizes, there is a ‘continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between points’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 488—emphasis added). Bodie’s homogenous line is bisected and disrupted by Allison’s and Dan’s ‘fear and hope and uncertainty’, understanding that their relations to region are not fixed in time, but always already marked, like their bodies, by ambivalence. Regionality as experienced here resembles Brian Massumi’s discussion of affect in Parables for the Virtual (2002), where he describes ‘a bundle of potential functions localized, as a differentiated region, within a larger field of potential. In each region a shape or structure begins to form but no sooner dissolves as its region shifts in relation to the others with which it is in tension. There is a kind of bubbling of structuration in a turbulent soup of regions of swirling potential’ (Massumi 2002: 34). This shifting, active presence of regionality is in keeping with their journeys throughout the novel forming no single, settled regional identity (like Bodie’s fantasy) but instead producing something mixed and variant like ‘a turbulent soup of regions of swirling potential’ or what Massumi has also called ‘a region of relation’ (Massumi 2015: 50). Affect is characterized by its ‘openness’ and its ability to ‘escape confinement’ (Massumi 2002: 35) because it directs itself beyond where it is embodied or anchored, reverberating intensely outward and inward. ‘When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn. . . . You have stepped over a threshold’ (Massumi 2015: 4). As Massumi goes on to say, this means affect is often felt as ‘shock’ because it interrupts the actuality of things, but it is also always ‘continuous’, if unnoticed, amid the clutter of the everyday, ‘like a background perception that accompanies every event, however, quotidian’ (Massumi 2002: 36). But it is here amid this fluid field of experience, like Reno at its dynamic threshold of change, where things unfold, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes mundanely, and sometimes astonishingly to upset the ‘already-established’ or static sense of region. As we discussed in the introduction, Massumi has spoken of ‘affect’ as related to ‘hope’ because it is about the present rather than projecting forward into what might be (like the regionalist fantasy of the Northline) and so endlessly locked into cycles of pessimism and optimism. ‘The question of which next step to take’, he says, ‘is a lot less intimidating than how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will finally be solved’ (Massumi 2015: 3). So it is, according to Massumi, rather about ‘“where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do” in every present situation’. But this is not ‘settling for less’ or ‘going for more’, ‘[i]t’s more

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like being right where you are—more intensely’ (ibid.). The end of Northline, is a ‘minoring’ process where static regionalism is made to stutter by the local, small-scale, details of affect through which one opens oneself up to being affected by others and by the world. Through Allison’s and Dan’s precarity and their mutual sense of fear, hope, and uncertainty, they are ‘undone by each other’ and, as a consequence, are positively implicated ‘in lives that are not [their] own’, thus ‘reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss’ rather than the arrogant egoism of timeless myth and regenerative violence (Butler 2010: 23, 25). Through these strange enchantments of the everyday, of ‘holding on’ and ‘going further’, as Crouch calls it, and through these intense moments of affective connection to others and the world, we might attune ourselves differently to region, for ‘amidst life’s journeys and journeying becoming happens’ (Crouch 2010: 20). As we have seen, for Allison and Dan ‘becoming happens’ as a complex resonance formed by their surprising and varied attunements to real and imagined place, through their awkward intimacy, and their mutual trepidation of what is still to come. Through our appreciation and feeling for these ‘regions of swirling potential’, we comprehend ‘the creative possibilities of tiny instances of humanity’, as Daniel Miller has written; of the affective charge of the kiss and the touch, the memory and the hope, even when tinged with fear (Miller 2008: 295).Therefore, as the old buildings of another West fall around them in the unsettling affective landscape of Reno, Nevada, there is the sense that, if nothing else, ‘[t]he world is still tentative, charged, overwhelming, and alive’ (Stewart 2007: 128), and, in Berlant’s words, ‘[e]ven those people who you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least’ (Berlant 2011: 10). Allison and Dan experience ‘ways of connecting, to others and to other situations . . . in processes larger than [them]selves . . . a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life . . . of belonging, with other people and to other places’ (Massumi 2015: 6). In Deleuze’s words, what we experience here is ‘not the myth of a past people’, for that is the one linked to Jimmy Bodie’s western mythic politics of hate and closed, static regionalism, his terrible, rigid Northline; but rather ‘the story-telling of the people to come’, acting as a ‘foreign language in a dominant language’ (Deleuze 2000: 223), a type of ‘fugitive work’, elusive and fleeting and yet forming an affective critical regionality that is reflective, tentative, still forming but always potentially generative of new and different relations. In contrast to the straight Northline of Bodie, Allison’s and Dan’s lines are frayed and ‘open-ended’, reminding us that ‘what matters is not the final destination, but all the interesting things that occur along the way’, the journeyings (Ingold 2007: 170).

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NOTES 1. More recently, the phrase ‘Kmart realism’ has been coined to ‘represent and reproduce the disintegration of public life [and] the colonization of private life by consumer capitalism’ (see Clark 1995). 2. See Neil Campbell (ed.), Under the Western Sky: The Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin (University of Nevada Press, forthcoming), for more on these issues. 3. World Church of the Creator (now known as the Creativity Movement). ‘The group, whose battle cry is “RaHoWa” (Racial Holy War), proclaims that “Creativity,” the ostensible “theology” of the Church, “is a racial religion whose prime goal is the survival, expansion and advancement of the White Race.” For “Creators,” as members of the hate group call themselves, “every issue, whether religious, political or racial, is viewed through the eyes of the White Man and exclusively from the point of view of the White race as a whole.” Ultimately, WCOTC hopes to organize white people to achieve world domination, “free from alien control and free from pollution of alien races. . . . Only on the basis of recognizing our enemies, destroying and/or excluding them and practicing racial teamwork can a stable lasting government be built.”’ See http://archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/wcotc.asp. Accessed December 2015. 4. This continues the skin-marking theme in The Motel Life, where Annie James is both marked by her controlling prostitute mother and later, filled with self-loathing, harms herself. 5. Deleuze and Guattari discuss striated space as about ‘order and succession’ with ‘lines or trajectories . . . subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another . . . plotting regions known and unknown onto a grid’ (1996: 478–79). 6. Deleuze and Guattari (1996: 361) refer to ‘smooth space’ as ‘vectorial, projective, or topological’ and so connect across this book’s chapters to discussions of Charles Olson’s ‘projective verse’, for example. 7. Vlautin told me, ‘I loved that movie because it reminds me of old Reno, the Reno my family knew, the one my mom’s boyfriend knew. It’s full of possibility and opportunity and open land with the romance of a TV western’ (Vlautin 2013).

Chapter Seven

Karen Tei Yamashita Border Cartographies, Border Refrains

1: THE VERY LAST POINT WEST: CIRCULARITY, GLOBALITY, AND REGIONALITY Deleuze and Guattari provide a wonderful description we might apply to the West perceived as a self-contained circle, labelled, self-referring, represented, territorialized in history, myth, and everyday culture. We think we know it when we see it. The West is, therefore, familiar and reassuring because of its ‘circularity’; well rounded, joined up, whole, enclosing, and policed (like its mapped, geographic borders or its familiar stereotypes). The unanimous values and ideologies that sustain and reproduce that circle have been equally well defined, rehearsed, and sedimented into the national imaginary. But from within this apparent circle, within the region West, and through its relations with its outside are forces to be harnessed, realized, and released; what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘the great refrain in the little refrains’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 350). 1 Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets something in . . . launches forth. One opens the circle . . . in another region . . . created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time it is in order to join with the forces of the future. . . . One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines . . . ‘lines of drift’ with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities. (ibid.: 311–12)

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Becoming postwestern, emphasizing a move beyond the circularity associated with regionalism, unsettles this circle in a manner that is beautifully suggested by the quotation above. The ‘unfastening’ that Eleanor Ty (2001) has written of or the ‘friction’ described in Anna Tsing’s work articulates this process, opens up this tightly bound circle, and ‘lets something in’ (Tsing 2004). This is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a ‘function of the working forces it shelters’, as if from within the West itself; and therefore, from within region emerge uncanny forces it has ignored or repressed to cross the line, traverse the border, launching out into dialogue with the world that it is already a part of but often in denial of, as if improvising a new identity out of the elements it has long suppressed or shaped into its controlled, insular circularities. Suddenly, if we ‘let something in’, something that actually admits globality as an active engaging principle, the circle is opened out into rhizomatic ‘“lines of drift” with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities’. 2 Thus, thinking of the West’s regionality and globality, as a contested relation, as I have throughout this book, alters our perception of it; reshaping it is through such lines of drift, so that ‘westness’ becomes part of a larger system of discourse, beyond the American national imaginary, pointing in many directions at once. In other words, no longer thinking of region as ‘circular’, established, and rooted, only pointing back on itself, inwardly, like Bodie’s rigid ‘Northline’ discussed in chapter 6, but as having lines of connection and flight beyond itself, vectors beyond its geographic and political borders, towards a different perspective that sees the West through the prism of worlding. The conventions of region as circular, closed, or ‘bounded’ (as discussed in the introduction and chapter 1) are interrupted, unsettled, and correspondingly enhanced by worlds of interconnection and relations, by forces of globality that are not the same as ‘globalization’. As David Watson has said, following on from Stewart’s position in chapter 4, worlding is a ‘whole new way to globalize . . . an alternative . . . a globalization filled with human potential: respecting differences and exchanging ideas, synthesizing rather than stratifying’ (in Wilson and Connery 2007: x). Region can thus be rethought as attached and attentive to the world around it and to which it relates: ‘constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumulation defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to “becoming”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 488—emphasis added). But what this point suggests is that globality or ‘worlding’ does not override or cancel out the ‘local’ but rather encourages the relations of the local (its accumulation of proximities) as significant forces through which we continually rebuild the self-world relationship. As Christopher Connery puts it, ‘the local was always worldly’ (in Wilson and Connery 2007: 3). Therefore, to think of a global West, we have to think postwestern, postregionalism (actively thinking outside the circle), to get ‘beyond’ the deep associations of the word ‘West’ and the fixities of regionalism that this book

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has countered. The West is mired in a universal claim to centrality and dominance: to Western Civilization, ‘West is Best’; always the centre of an enclosed circle. Thus, my use of the term ‘regionality’ rather than ‘regionalism’ throughout this book places the emphasis upon process and becoming rather than established ground and invariance so that encircled unanimity is challenged by multiple processes, little refrains, local histories, and the ‘minor’. In chapter 4, regionality in Stewart’s essay of the same name, comes alive through her swirling, descriptive passages, forming and deforming ‘the tactile compositionality of things’ (Stewart 2013c: 277); present in voices, actions, places, and histories—‘it permeates the contours of the landscape, the rocks the glaciers left, the climate, the layers of determination laid down by histories, the leftovers of everything that has happened’ (ibid.: 278). This compositionality is affective, an intense energetics of tension and release whose deep local energies or ‘accumulation of proximities’, form regionality as ‘a relational complex, a nexus’ (Massumi 2015: 50) through which place is experienced and lived, as it affects and in turn is affected. However, these are never contained energies or affects that turn back on themselves to sustain the enclosing circle of regionalism, for they ‘pass from body to body— human bodies, animal bodies, machine bodies, bodies of thought, ecosystems, visceralities, and noumena spread out across a vast atmospheric field’ (Stewart 2013: 278). In this sense, as Massumi points out, ‘the body is that region of in-mixing from which subjectivity emerges. It is the coming together of the world. . . . It’s a brewing, the world stirring’ (Massumi 2015: 52). This is never a closed, single circle but rather, you will recall, imagined as ‘concentric rings stretching out from encounters, tastes, bodies, neighborhoods, a valley, a state, a geographical region’ (Steward 2013: 280—emphasis added), each ring connecting beyond itself to other worlds. Stephen Muecke, borrowing from Peter Sloterdijk’s work, refers similarly to a ‘living country’ as ‘spheres abutting each other and sometimes dissolving into each other’ (Muecke 2016). Regionality, therefore, functions with a language ‘that runs along the seam where matter and myth connect and disconnect continuously’, aware of and capturing the ‘in-mixing’ of ‘real staff’ and ‘made-up stuff’ (Taussig 2004: xviii). In this sense, regionality and globality interrelate dialogically as a form of ‘worldly culture’ within which this ‘concentricity’ of movements in and out, back and forth, are like the pulsings of life that refuse to be divided neatly into one or the other but are endlessly imbricated in each other. As Taussig has written, ‘Through their enchantment, their danger and beauty, they usher in a world of force and substantiality felt from within, a world that escapes from the time-based cause-and-effect reality we most of the time like to think we observe . . . the world of “immanence”’ (ibid.: 314).

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2: REGIONALITY-AS-COMPOSITIONALITY: KAREN TEI YAMASHITA’S POSTWESTERN NOVELS Karen Tei Yamashita’s postwestern novels, Tropic of Orange (1997) and I Hotel (2010), explore many of these processes by constantly ‘stretching out from encounters, tastes, bodies, neighborhoods, a valley, a state, a geographical region’ gathering up disruptive cartographies or schizo-cartographies to present the West, not as encircled territory ‘given as an object, but always as intensive repetition, as piercing existential affirmation’ (Guattari 1995: 28) of global or ‘worlding’ regionality. To return to the Deleuze and Guattari quotation above, one might argue these novels move ‘along sonorous, gestural, motor lines . . . “lines of drift” with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities’ emerging from its self-conscious intertextual ‘stretching out’ to the world. In so doing, however, a novel such as Tropic of Orange embraces the local while placing it in conversation with the global and in so doing, owes much to Latin American magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or to Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Mike Davis, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose works, in various ways, travel this path of regionalglobality, too. Central to the narrative of Tropic of Orange is the surreal notion of a shifting continent in which previously fixed lines that stratify and organize space (and minds), dividing North and South, East and West are actually moving, pulling, for example, the Tropic of Cancer north and with it a new, normally excluded or contained population. By using metaphors of export/import, Yamashita suggests how the ‘approved’ trade of global capital and the ‘illegal’ traffic of people are becoming increasingly fuzzy. In a similar way, Deleuze and Guattari envisaged a physical model in which there is ‘a continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points, the formation of a plane that does not proceed by parallel and perpendicular lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 488). Amid the turmoil of these events, ‘the freeing of a line’ (tropic, border, hemisphere), Yamashita imaginatively and provocatively ‘remaps’ the space of the West and contemporary globalization through Los Angeles, the region-West, and its multiple relations with the world as a kind of a compositional plane. In the rich, affective landscape of the novel, therefore, ‘one no longer covers over; one raises, accumulates, piles up, goes through, stirs up, folds’ the experience of region into a complex composition (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 194). This becomes, as we read its processes and relations, a novel of globality/regionality because it speaks from the local pulsing details of life, like Walter Mignolo’s (2000) ‘local histories’ or Stewart’s (2007) ‘ordinary affects’, drawing on affects (‘the ascent of the ground . . . in saturations, fibers, and layers’ [Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 194]), based in

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the multiple experiences and stories of diverse peoples, moving across borders and frontiers. Together, the interlocking, expanding grid or ‘ground’ of the novel, set out in its ‘HyperContexts’ section at the beginning (of interlinked days, themes, and characters), builds to form an alternative atlas of affective performance, of region as relational, alive, still forming, shifting, and collapsing, like Whitehead’s actual entities discussed earlier, that blossom and relate and die. As Arturo Escobar put it, commenting on Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’, it is ‘the articulation between subaltern and hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern; and with the remapping of colonial difference towards a worldly culture’ (Escobar 2004: 12–13). Here the ‘colonial difference’ is within and without the United States, Mignolo’s ‘coloniality’ (2000: 52) played out as the consequences of uneven distributions of power, wealth, and control in cities, regions, and worlds. As Ruth Hsu argues, ‘colonizers have pulled across that western portion of the North American continent nets of narrative that seek to erase the multiple ways that people of colour have predated white settlers and the ways that indigenous people continue to play crucial roles in that continent’ (Hsu 2006: 87). Yamashita’s remapping is driven from the grid or ground by the ‘subaltern’ nonwhite populations of the Americas, suggesting alternatives to these nets of narrative that reinforce the circular regionalism described above, aiming instead ‘to inscribe volumes in the thickness of the plane itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 195). The ‘thickness’ of Yamashita’s approach is found in its detailed rendering of the city encouraging ‘an opening out of US boundaries in different registers (the political, the imaginative, and the critical) and multiple directions (south and west, especially)’ (Chuh 2006: 621). Such a ‘thickness’ of style owes something to the work of Sesshu Foster, a happa poet of mixed Anglo/Japanese descent, whose City Terrace Field Manual was published the year before Tropic of Orange in 1996. 3 Yamashita’s admiration for Foster’s work links their mutual interests in the multistoried and regional, for, as he explained, ‘[a]s Faulkner was able to locate the history and destiny of the nation in his “postage stamp of earth,” as he called it, in Mississippi, it falls to me to articulate that story in the language indigenous or appropriate to Los Angeles’ (Foster to Kelleher n.d.). His patchwork of prose poems shift the reader through a complex landscape of events, memories, documents, and powerful descriptive flashes: ‘I witness Pan-African colors of night. Mexican tricolor streetlights, Vietnamese yellow dawns’ (Foster 1996: 26). Foster assembles his city-region as fragments or samples from affective experience: ‘Korean signs of Koreatown are just another word for feelings. Beautiful hair of Vietnamese noodles. Wonderful smile of oranges sold at East L.A. on-ramps’ (ibid.: 51). The city-region and the West it sits within, is best explored through the ‘volumes in the thickness’ generated by the Tropic of Orange’s key charac-

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ters, one of whom, Arcangel, is based on the performance artist Guillermo Goméz Peña. Appropriately, the latter described his art as producing an ‘other cartography’ concerned with ‘a transborder culture not imposed from above but organically emerging from within’ (Goméz Peña 2000: 205). This section will examine how Yamashita’s own work, following writers such as Foster and Goméz Peña, engages in the similar production of an ‘other cartography’ of contested borders that constitute contemporary American culture. Another character, Japanese American Manzanar Murakami, we are told, ‘maybe . . . schizoid, but maybe not’ (Yamashita 1997: 43), and yet, appropriately, given the complexity and contradiction of Los Angeles, ‘[n]o one was more at home in LA than this man’ (ibid.: 36). As John Blair Gamber has argued, Manzanar ‘dwells in a Heideggerian sense that relates living in relationship to place with being open to existence’ recognizing ‘the vital forces that swirl in their respective and collective liquidities’ (Gamber 2012: 134). This harks back to our earlier discussion of Heidegger’s notion of ‘regioning’ as ‘an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting’, where ‘rest is the seat and reign of all movement’ (Heidegger 1966: 66–67). Manzanar is a homeless ex-surgeon, strangely at home in the fluid terrain of the city, who spends his time conducting the symphony of traffic flowing, stuttering, and stalling on the L.A. freeway: ‘the great root system, an organic living entity . . . a great writhing concrete dinosaur . . . the greatest orchestra on earth’ (Yamashita 1997: 37). His attention is drawn, however, to the city as organic and liquid, rather than fixed and defined, to ‘the great flow of humanity [that] ran below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city’ (ibid.: 35). His processive relation to region, following Heidegger, gathers all, ‘opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting’. What he conducts is the rhizomatic West full of untapped human potential, symbolized by these lines of mobility, living and moving: a ‘root system’ no longer anchored and fixed by notions of historic space, settlement, and tradition, but one shifting and writhing with global tensions and flows. Tropic of Orange recognizes ‘the imaginary lines’ created and policed by globalization, ‘of borders that allow capital and commodities but not people to pass’ (Vint 2010: 405) and seeks to unsettle them. ‘The complexity of human adventure over lines of transit’ (Yamashita 1997: 56) are revealed through Manzanar’s emblematic schizoid vision and affective relations with the city. As an ex-surgeon, his job had meant ‘careful incisions through layers of living tissue’, whereas now he contributes as a ‘missing person’ (ibid.), cast out from the mainstream, capturing the lost sounds and rhythms of the city—its layers of sonic geography, like a Benjaminian ragpicker, he recycles the ‘leftovers’ of the city, scavenges the detritus for the overlooked

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and the abject. ‘There are maps and there are maps and there are maps’, we are told, by Manzanar, who could see all of them at once, filter some, pick them out like transparent windows and place them even delicately and consecutively in a complex grid of pattern, spatial discernment, body politic. . . . For each of the maps was a layer of music, a clef, an instrument, a musical instruction, a change of measure, a coda. (ibid.)

For Yamashita, regionality is crosscut with globality in ways that are rarely represented in the approved notion of globalization as erasing the local in order to homogenize and universalize experience and knowledge. Her questioning of official cartography (like so many of the writers examined in this book) seeks an alternative way of thinking and experiencing place, which like Manzanar is nonlinear and more about life as dynamic, interrelated, and affective. The past, present, and future are not separated, like the local and the global as discussed above, but coexist and interfuse in layers that are not abstract, for they ‘began within the very geology of the land’, with the rivers below ‘connected and divergent, shifting and swelling’ existing alongside, the ‘man-made grid of civil utilities’ (ibid.: 57). With echoes of Waldie’s rich palimpsest of L.A. discussed in chapter 3, these are the ‘historic’ and ‘prehistoric’ grids below the city, like unnoticed foundations and energies that connect to the ‘great overlays of transport’ weaving across space ‘dynamic and stagnant, patterns and connections’ distributing ‘definition’ to the city: from ‘wealth to race, from patterns of climate to the curious blueprint of the skies’ (ibid.). The refrains of regionality flow through Manzanar’s alternative atlas: ‘It was all there’ in this ‘great theory of maps, musical maps, spread in visible and audible layers’ (ibid.). 4 Refrains in this context refers to ‘any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 323—italics in the original). They are processes of territorialization which ‘draw out and draw together blocks of spacetime from the chaos of the world’, and although they may be repetitive and consistent, they can also be intensely felt, ‘radically open’ and so ‘potentially generative of difference, producing lines of thinking, feeling, and perceiving that may allow one to wander beyond the familiar’ (McCormack 2013: 7–8). As McCormack stresses, ‘[A]ny expressive territory . . . can be considered as refrains’ (ibid: 8), and in Yamashita’s case, this is the city-region of L.A. or the I Hotel in San Francisco, ‘territories held together and held open by affective relations of various kinds’ (ibid.). Following Félix Guattari (see the conclusion) and McCormack, one might regard regionality as experienced in Yamashita’s novels as ‘existential territories composed of multiple refrains: kinaesthetic, conceptual, “material”, and

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gestural’ (ibid.). Hence, specifically, Manzanar’s palimpsest of the city with its multiple refrains, combines personal memories of internment and loss (and so expresses a whole other global-regional coloniality) into the freeway’s symphony and beyond that to the world. As he puts it, ‘Encroaching on this vision was a larger one: the great Pacific stretching along its great rim, brimming over long coastal shores from one hemisphere to another’; from west to east, south to north, across continents (Yamashita 1997: 170). Yamashita writes, ‘Manzanar looked out on this strange end and beginning: the very last point West, and after that it was all East’ (ibid.). His vision sees the once joined land masses now ‘come to this, cracked into continents . . . human civilization covered everything in layers, generations of building upon building upon building the residue, burial sites, and garbage that defined people after people for centuries’ (ibid.). Manzanar’s local knowledge and his deep connection to the spacetime of L.A. does not, however, remove him from such large-scale, hemispheric shifts, in fact, the opposite, for they are these manifest in the very little and great refrains that resonate in both. In Manzanar’s redistributed globality, it is the layers that inform the structure, the little refrains that connect people, place, and time that relate to, and characterize, the great refrains of ‘worldly culture’. Globality, in this vision, according to Manfred Steger, is ‘a social condition characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, and environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant’ (quoted in Ty 2001: xiii). Manzanar’s layered urban symphony ‘of simultaneity, change, stability, and convergence’ (Hsu 2006: 91) forms an alternative deep grid of regionality that is about much more than geography, for it includes the active and affective relations of people, place, time, memory, and history. 5 As Iain Chambers writes, ‘Identity is an ever present, ever unfolding, bass line; a rhizomatic figure, a fugue drawn from the languages that transport and sustain us, a solo and improvisation on the energies that unfold and devolve in the world (rather than an isolated work that withdraws and redraws the world into the single and constant note of the self)’ (Chambers 2001: 118–19). Manzanar’s expression of global regionality is mirrored by African American Buzzworm in the novel, who is also concerned by how maps might better reflect ‘the stories of the life surrounding him’ (Yamashita 1997: 43). 6 His premise is that ‘line wasn’t something drawn on the ground’ (ibid.: 217) because it’s way more complicated than that. As he ponders a map of L.A. torn from Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz, supposedly showing the ‘Gang Territories’ in 1972 (see Davis 1990: 301; Yamashita 1997: 80–81), ‘[h]e shook his head’, recognizing the limitations of the map’s ‘thick lines’: ‘If someone had put down all the layers of the real map’, he says, ‘maybe he could get the real picture’ (ibid.: 81). As Hsu explains, ‘Lines placed on this text, like iron bars on windows, assert and enact separation’ (Hsu 2006: 89).

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An ‘existential territory’, like a region, as we have seen above, is not static enough to be accurately mapped by cartographic thick lines; it has to be instead attentive to details and to dynamic change and to the layers that Manzanar identifies: ‘Somebody else must have the big map. Or maybe just the next map. The one with the new layers you can’t even imagine’, says Buzzworm (Yamashita 1997: 82). He expresses the need for critical regionality in the spirit sustained throughout this book; for a territory deterritorialized, ‘[o]pening the assemblage [like the region or city] onto a cosmic force’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 350). Through the little, multiple refrains of the L.A. region that Buzzworm records, he pays attention to Deleuze’s ‘microscopic . . . crystals, molecules, atoms, and particles, not for scientific conformity, but for movement, for nothing but immanent movement’ (ibid.: 337). He speaks of the need for the local, ‘a place to live under the master plan’, and not to simply accept the distant ‘poster boards and scale models’ that reorganize space to suit late capitalism (Yamashita 1997: 82). His grandmother is told over and over again that the destruction of neighbourhoods to widen the highway would not ‘affect’ her (ibid.: 82–83), and yet it is precisely at this level of affect that it all matters, since these spaces are precisely homes, memories, histories, like those later dramatized in I Hotel. As with Manzanar’s symphony, possibility emerges from Buzzworm’s attentiveness to the ordinary affects of regionality’s refrains rather than a slavish adherence to the master plan. Yamashita’s emerging affective critical regionality, rather like Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘territory’, ‘already unleashes something that will surpass it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 322); that is, from within L.A. and the West there is the crystal of something always forming beyond it, something postwestern that endlessly reminds us of its connections to the Cosmos, to the World. This ‘something’ indicates the potential for change that arises when regionality and globality are interconnected. It is the creativity and invention outside standardized patterns of globalization and regionalism that will ‘surpass’ both, critique both, to provide a realignment of values and notions of the ‘social’—the ‘surplus value of passage or bridging’ by which assemblages (like regions) deterritorialize and reform (ibid.: 314). ‘The territory’, or what I think of as regionality, ‘itself is a place of passage’ (ibid.) and, to return to my opening quotation, will ‘open onto a future’. For Yamashita in Tropic of Orange and I Hotel, it involves a renewed sense of ‘people’ no longer contained by the space in which they happen to live, but becoming as they ‘re-map’ and re-experience the city (and by extension, the region West), like Manzanar and Buzzworm. But it is also about the freeway community in the novel fashioned out of the chaos of accidents and endless jams, where the homeless occupy luxury cars and forge an alternative society; creating ‘a new kind of grid’ (Yamashita 1997: 238) that forms more like ‘a net of loose threads’ with no ‘resolution’; or about imagining a new geography where

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lines of demarcation and division are redrawn, creating a different, radical sense of the ‘social’ in which difference is not policed and controlled, but a positive, generative force for new subjectivities and better communities (ibid.: 246, 248). As Yamashita has put it in commenting on the central motif of movement in the novel, I used the metaphor of the land moving but actually it’s the humans who have moved. The geography has changed because humans have created this transition. I suppose it’s fantastic and more radical to talk about the land moving, in terms of the artistic or visual effects of the book. But the real message is that people are moving. And that has changed the landscape entirely, because they’ve taken their culture and their landscape with them. (Gier and Tejeda 1998)

As McCormack argues, such ‘moving’ affective regionalities ‘have the potential to generate a feeling of something happening that disturbs, agitates, or animates ideas already circulating in ways that might open up possibilities for thinking otherwise’ (McCormack 2013: 9–10). This is the productive friction of Tropic of Orange. 3: A ‘VIBRATING REGION OF INTENSITIES’: I HOTEL Yamashita’s interest in relations of place, space, and politics, of ‘people moving’ in every sense of that phrase is picked up in her sprawling and ambitious novel I Hotel (2010), which takes a specific existential territory, the International Hotel in San Francisco, as a ‘place of passage’ through which she can continue to re-map the West and its many communities. The International Hotel, or ‘I Hotel’, was a single-room-occupancy dwelling on the corner of Kearny and Jackson streets in Manilatown-Chinatown, San Francisco, housing retired migrants who had worked along the Pacific coast. I Hotel follows the rise and fall of the hotel from the years 1968 (the time of the student riots at San Francisco State and Berkeley and the broader civil rights struggles) to 1977 (when the hotel was demolished for gentrification) by charting the personal and collective histories of the numerous, disparate characters and groups involved deliberately or peripherally in their attempts to save it. It is an architectural text, structured as intersecting, folding boxes of identities, places, times, and stories (as set out in the book’s contents page) coalescing in the hotel and its countless histories. The hotel functions as what Mikhail Bakhtin terms a ‘chronotope’ (a time-space) ‘where the knots of narrative are tied and untied’, ‘the primary point from which “scenes” in a novel unfold’, as if ‘materializing time in space’ (Bakhtin 1990: 250). Or in other words, events in time ‘take on flesh and blood’ within the chronotope,

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allowing ‘the power of art to do its work’ (ibid.) through, in Yamashita’s book, multiple stories and little histories that, placed side by side in the reader’s mind (like Waldie’s alternative suburban grid discussed in chapter 3), form a woven fabric of crossings and recrossings or folds of narrative and image that never simply define or represent but rather produce and evoke affective regionalities. The book continues the work of Tropic of Orange, which, as Hsu writes, is ‘redrawing the map of this city [Los Angeles], and by extension the region’ (Hsu in Lim et al. 2006: 77—emphasis added). As Bakhtin argues, ‘Out of the actual chronotopes of our world . . . emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text)’ (Bakhtin 1990: 253). Thus, through the International Hotel, an ‘actual chronotope’ of San Francisco, California, and the West, Yamashita develops multiple ‘reflected and created chronotopes of the world’ through the novellas that form the unfolding and enfolded structure of the novel. It is, to follow Bakhtin, a process of worlding undertaken through a densely layered pursuit of the many worlds within a world (the I Hotel itself). Each layer of the novel works once again as a refrain, and as Stewart suggests, ‘Refrains are a worlding’ revealing ‘some little world you never knew was there’ through ‘an attunement to a singular world’s texture and shine’ (in Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 339, 340, 341). Yamashita’s structure is ‘scattered across political affinities, ethnicities, artistic pursuits’, with ‘ideologies cast in diverse directions . . . different trajectories’ and yet with a genuine sense of presence, of everyone ‘there, really there’ (Yamashita 2010: 610). These rhizomatic trajectories or ‘reflected and created chronotopes of the world’ traverse I Hotel as its numerous ‘storeys/stories’, imitating the building itself to the degree that the novel consists of ten novellas ‘or ten “hotels”’ each with its own entrance and exit (ibid.). And yet there are nodes of connection, ‘parallel stories’ (ibid.) where the different hotels intersect and rhythms or refrains entangle one section with the next in the reader’s mind. As Yamashita puts it, this, despite being a mighty book, is a ‘rendering to be continued and completed by others’ (ibid.). Through its many, ‘little’ narratives with political heft and resonance (the struggle for civil rights, the anti–Vietnam War protests, Yellow Power, resistance to urban renewal, and the fight for education reforms), Yamashita reminds us of Bakhtin’s point about the world and the worlds it directs us to and, even more so, to Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that ‘the cosmic force was already present in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains, the great maneuver in the little maneuver’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 350). As such, I Hotel is defined by its little refrains ‘collecting every little memory, all the bits and pieces, into a larger memory, rebuilding a great layered and labyrinthine, now imagined, international hotel of many rooms’ (Yamashita 2010: 605). Refrains used in this sense, have the capacity to rupture established patterns of discourse (like the conventional realist novel in Yamashi-

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ta’s case) and to ‘overthrow . . . the organisation of the “already classified”’ (as in assumptions about Asian American identity) (Guattari 1995: 19–20). Expectations and logic are broken up by refrains as a ‘looping of “prepersonal” affective forces’ or a ‘gathering of forces’ (Bertelsen and Murphy in Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 143; 145). The refrains build architecturally and poetically throughout the novellas, such as when Chen visits Angel Island, where Chinese migrants were processed on arrival in the United States, to study the writings on its walls before they are erased. The poems and drawings are ‘haunting. . . . Like cave paintings’ (Yamashita 2010: 63), collectively portraying a community forming in America, coming to the region of the West and ‘becoming’ a ‘We’ (as this chapter is called). Yet this is not the ‘globalist “we”’ [that] circulates in the First World’s political, economic, and cultural discourse’ (Lee 2007: 502), since the latter is the unilateral, universalist ‘we’ already critiqued in Tropic of Orange. That ‘we’ is based on the ‘imperialist nature of the few who presume to speak for all, whose particularity presumes the status of the universal’ (ibid.: 503), like the univocal call to Manifest Destiny in the West or the universally imposed styles of architecture that first provoked critical regionalism (see chapter 1). Instead, the ‘we’ Yamashita explores in both Tropic and I Hotel is a new collective sense of a community of difference invented not through imposed universalism but rather from something more organic and ‘ground-up’, a version of what I have referred to in this book as ‘the people to come’ (see chapter 6). This multivocal, multistoried structure is set out early on, as in Tropic of Orange’s ‘HyperContexts’ section, through a set of diagrams prefacing the novel diagrammatically with folding boxes that summarize each novella as a ‘map for the reader to figure out’ where he or she is in the book (Yamashita in Yu 2014: 77). These cubic ‘maps’ were inspired by the architectural blueprints that Yamashita’s husband, an architect, was working on while she was writing I Hotel. Thus the structure includes all the floors, including the views from the side. They included electrical plans, plumbing plans, and these plans were all mapped, and he had to think about the whole thing as layers of construction. I knew that what he was doing was that he was visualizing this in three-dimensions and going down to every blueprint to mark changes. If he changed anything, then the whole building had to change. So, I thought, a novel is like that. If you change any piece of it you have to make sure that there is consistency through the entire novel. And, finally, the simplest thing for me turned out to be these boxes. (ibid.)

Lisa Lowe wrote that ‘Asian American culture’, rather than being assimilated into the ‘universality of the national political sphere’, should be seen as ‘an alternative site where the palimpsest of lost memories is reinvented, histories are fractured and retraced, and the unlike varieties of silence emerge into

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articulacy’ (Lowe 1996: 6). To some degree, Yamashita’s ten novellas that create I Hotel are such ‘sites’; multiple and fragmented attempts to reconstruct memories and histories of Asian America in the West, while simultaneously admitting the impossibility of even codifying such ‘unlike varieties’. Whereas Lowe’s intent was to construct a ‘coherent, contemporary formation’ for Asian American culture (ibid.: 6), Yamashita’s sprawling, layered, and folding project attempts no such grand narrative, preferring instead something deliberately more incoherent. The lives she explores are akin, in the final analysis, to ‘hotel lives’, that is, communal, shared, and cooperative and so ‘subversive’ (Yamashita 2010: 590) when compared to the assimilationist dream of the nation as individualist, capitalist, and property owning. 7 As Yamashita wrote, ‘[W]e were already the displaced people in the city’s plan to impose a particular meaning of home and a particular meaning of nation’ (ibid.). But the chronotope of the I Hotel is a different, incoherent home, ‘the very home we hoped to find. Or perhaps it was a home with what we might call potential, so that we knew we could give up or energies to making it what we imagined it should be’ (ibid.: 597). Yamashita’s regional (and national) belonging, her sense of ‘home’, is never fixed or final but is an assemblage of ‘energies’ or affects, of hope, potential, and imagination as much as any determined rhetoric or ideology. Through the regionalities in I Hotel, a new ‘blueprint’ emerges for yet another alternative mapping of the West. The novel circles around the politics of home, nation, history, and memory, using the I Hotel as a chronotopic node through which to address broader political concerns. Hence, the struggle at San Francisco College over an Asian American studies programme allows Yamashita an ironic focus for the novel’s central question about what or who ‘Asian Americans’ actually are. The indivisibility of ‘Asian Americans’ as an identified group is constantly commented on, critiqued, and displaced in I Hotel, often becoming sources for the book’s comedy, such as when the Crazy Man rants that ‘Chinamen are made, not born . . . out of junk-imports, lies, rail-road scrap iron, dirty jokes, broken bottles, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia’ (ibid.: 81—italics in original). These people are ‘a miracle synthetic’, as he calls them, asserting the rich and varied construction of identity that cannot be reduced to ‘Asian American’ or any one single thing in a similar way that region itself can never be fixed and contained. So, the novel asks, what is the place of ethnic identity and community in the region? ‘Why doesn’t our history count?’ asks a student in 1969: I Spy Hotel, articulating a central concern of Yamashita’s. This ‘counting’ of history, wherever it comes from, is the goal of her accumulative voices, stories, and genres that collectively resist any trite, unanimous proclamation of coherent narratives of identity. In the novel, for example, Professor Chen understands that ‘if Paul and his generation of writers wanted a history, they

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would have to dig it up and invent it for themselves’ (ibid.: 101). Through the interlocking layers of I Hotel, Yamashita ‘digs up’ and ‘invents’ histories in the plural via comics, illustrations, redactions, analect-inspired narratives, dossiers, scripts, a film screenplay, and dance choreography alongside more conventional storytelling structures, such as the legend, short story, or novella. But there is no effort to unite all this into a coherent or smooth-flowing document, as I Hotel becomes a moving, changing contour of countless shapes and immeasurable differences; not a single ‘Asian American’ identity or community but numerous expressions, still emerging and becoming, unfinished, eccentric, and unpredictable: ‘[F]or if many endings are possible, so are many beginnings. History may proceed sequentially or, as they say, must proceed sequentially, but stories may turn and turn again’ (ibid.: 301). Indeed, Yamashita’s ‘stories . . . turn and turn again’ through I Hotel, as in Tropic of Orange, as little refrains spiralling ever outward from the most commonplace events or local moments, as if dramatizing Lao Tzu, quoted in 1968 Eye Hotel, ‘A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet’ (ibid.: 49). As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their discussions of refrains, ‘What makes a material increasingly rich is the same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be heterogeneous’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 329), and this is precisely Yamashita’s structural goal. Indeed, the novel employs the hyper-local I Hotel with ‘traffic passing easy on Kearny. Across the street familiar haunts—liquor store, pool hall, café with the gravy on the rice. Honk of cars and honk of old men coughing up yellow phlegm onto the sidewalk’, described tellingly as ‘my brick roots’ at one point (Yamashita 2010: 219, 433). The novellas, however, spread out as ‘routes’ and manifold refrains suggesting layers of activities and events happening simultaneously and yet holding heterogeneities together. This might be conveyed as Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross lyrics intersecting with the writings of Eldridge Cleaver or Mao Tse-Tung; or through echoes of Allen Ginsberg (see ibid.: 110), James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Bulosan, or John Okada with The Water Margin or Charlie Chan; or through the constant shifting of genre and register as the book hybridizes as one reads it. The chapter ‘Dance’ typifies Yamashita’s formal approach, whereby ‘Sandy has this idea to combine Peking Opera with what Gerald is calling avant-garde jazz’ to create a new dance whose ‘old molecules are being pushed around by this new music . . . [until] . . . [t]he frozen becomes fluid in the form of dance’ (ibid.: 278). As Gamber argues, Yamashita favours the ‘liquid’ over the fixed and sedentary in her novels, with ‘all boundaries— whether between nations or territories; between past, present, and future; between the self and the other; or between humans and other species . . . positively polluted, recognized as porous, and constantly permeated and penetrated’ (Gamber 2012: 122). The ‘new music’ and the dance it inspires typifies this liquidity even to the point that pages 279–84 express it visually

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as a hybrid mix of movements, repetitions, descriptions, and suggestions, of ‘texture and density and intensity’, as if trying to answer the question, ‘What’s the memory of the Asian American body?’ (Yamashita 2010: 279). Clearly, the dance and music together engages bodies, both physical and nonphysical as spontaneous movements, memories (‘arranged marriage’, ‘born in camp’, ‘kitchen, fourteen years old’), places (‘to the West’, ‘Fillmore’, ‘Pearl Harbor’), and kinetics (‘stomp’, ‘fall to knees’, ‘circles’). In the whirl of the dance, everything moves liquidly as ‘a body that resists predefinition in terms of subjectivity or identity, a body that is involved in a reciprocal reaching-toward that in-gathers the world even as it worlds’ (Manning 2012: 6). As Yamashita resists predefinition or the ‘global “we”’, she simultaneously projects, through the liquid lives of migrants who both ‘reachtoward’ and ‘in-gather’, the liminal spaces of the local-global cultures of the Pacific Rim. These are people whose I Hotel home, with its deep local histories and traditions, will be demolished to make way for ‘forty-eightstory multinational corporate trading posts’, which they will, ironically, be ‘expected to build, maintain, clean, and service’ and yet ‘weren’t expected to live anywhere nearby’ (Yamashita 2010: 590–91). Through expressing these stories, Yamashita ‘worlds’ through conveying their intimate regionalities, whereby ‘[a] local refrain . . . opens out onto the cosmic refrain’ (O’Sullivan 2006: 62), resonating across the novellas, colliding and melding, echoing back on one another, repeating and evolving just like the place and the people they express, ‘like pictographs splashed across rice paper’ (Yamashita 2010: 279). Ultimately, a changed sense of regionality emerges through this dynamic process, one both located in the so-called brick roots of the territorialized I Hotel itself and simultaneously expressed as the endlessly bisecting and intersecting routes of the deterritorialized lives lived in the West for Asian Americans. These are lives both separated from and overlapping with African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, and their interconnected spaces of coloniality: Angel Island, Tule Lake, Coit Tower, Alcatraz, and I Hotel itself. As we pass through the novel’s ten ‘hotels’ layering our experience as readers, it is akin to the journeying through Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘thousand plateaus’; being ‘not at the beginning or the end’ but always in the middle, ‘a continuous, vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 21–22—emphasis added). As they put it, ‘a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in the brain?’ (ibid.: 22). After all, plateaus can be seen, as McCormack explains, as ‘territories of resonant potential, blocks of spacetime that constructively interfere with one another in myriad ways’ (McCormack 2013: 79), and this is exactly how I Hotel works.

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The novel ‘avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’, with sections that ‘constructively interfere’ with one another, ‘talking’ across time and space, evolving an alternative history of the postwar United States and, specifically, of the Pacific West Coast region in which the book is set. This is a history of resistance and revolution marked by the heterogeneous refrains drawn from Malcom X, Marx and Engels, Mao, the Bandung conference, all held together like ‘pictographs splashed across rice paper’. But for Yamashita, this history stretches much farther back, placing the West as a region epitomizing colonial oppression, since it was here, according to Akagi (‘Underneath he’s a Panther, but if necessary, he’s the Asian American community’ [Yamashita 2010: 210]), that the U.S. government’s ‘theory of genocide’ came to prominence, even though it, too, had started when the first invaders from Europe came and, in quotes, ‘discovered’ America . . . they immediately started to practicing this theory. Initially it was focused against the Native Americans, then finally against the Mexican people on the West Coast, and they disguised the theory as ‘manifest destiny’, dig. (ibid.: 211)

But of course, he goes on, the theory was extended to ‘Chinese people’ and called ‘Yellow Peril’, and then the exclusion acts, then the ‘Japanese people’ through internment ‘for their own protection’, and finally on the campuses of universities and the streets of cities, as well as in Indochina (ibid.: 212) during the turbulent counterculture of the 1960s. This ‘Third World solidarity’ even extends to outer space: ‘They’re always colonising someplace. Colonize the moon, if anybody was there’ (ibid.: 215). As Yamashita has said, the West is synonymous with the ‘American imperial nation’, existing at the ‘edge of the nation . . . the finality of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny . . . the end of the frontier . . . a place of brutal destruction of native peoples’ (Yamashita 2013). Her writing has always been interested in localities, neighbourhoods, communities, and is, therefore, regional without being parochial or nostalgic. Her writing is, however, critical regionalist because it is always related to the wider forces of coloniality that infuse and shape the local and global. Coloniality here is ‘the logical structure of colonial domination’ underlying all the adventures of expansion, occupation, and exploitation (Mignolo 2005: 7). I Hotel constantly frames the West in terms of Manifest Destiny, just as Tropic of Orange had before it, quoting Karl Marx on the ‘discovery of America’ as ‘fresh ground for the bourgeoisie’, paving the way for the ‘world market’, and creating ‘a world after its own image’ (Yamashita 2010: 315, 316, 319). The ‘Last Point West’, as she called it in Tropic of Orange, is the endgame of coloniality in Yamashita’s work (as in Mike Davis’s work or the fictions of William Gibson), with groups trying to put into practice the theories of revolutionary politics. See, for example, the

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contrast between 1972: Inter-national Hotel, chapter 3, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ derived from Lenin and packed full of quotations from radical texts and chapter 4, ‘In Practice’, where the ground-level activism of women tries to work it all through in practical ways. The very next chapter is called ‘On Colonialism’, presenting a meshwork of quotations: Fanon, Soyinka, Memmi, and Mandela, that further connect the processes of Yamashita’s project of refrains, both local and global, ironic and sincere, tragic and comic, humorous and deadly serious. The Americas figure large in I Hotel as part of an even larger Global South (including the Caribbean, the Philippines, South America, and Africa) and situates its role squarely at the heart of capitalism. In this, Yamashita seems to echo Quijano and Wallerstein, who wrote, ‘The Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist worldeconomy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas’ (Quijano and Wallerstein quoted in Mignolo 2005: 47). The process they term ‘Americanity’ was, therefore, absolutely bound up with coloniality and its ‘massive exploitation of labour’, ‘the expendability of human life’, and insatiable desire for ‘increasing productivity’ (ibid.). Yamashita’s novel maps the consequences and the resistances to this ‘world-system’ not as a linear history which simply endorses ‘“modernity” as a triumphal historical process’ but rather ‘as a series of nodes’ deployed to provide ‘a theoretical anchor in the perspective of local histories (and languages) instead of grand narratives’ (Mignolo 2005: 49). Translated back into the regional lives of those around the I Hotel and the ‘nodes’ of connections their lives have with other anti-colonial struggles in the world, Yamashita’s experimental novel resists the sweep of linearity and inevitability—the consequences of Manifest Destiny—and establishes instead ‘alternative temporalities’ to challenge the rhetoric of modernity and coloniality (O’Sullivan 2006: 94). Radiating around this very specific, contained place, the I Hotel, with its regional locus of migrants, their cultural practices, and local histories is something uncontained and more than regional in any conventional sense. Here, what transpires in the streets around Kearny where the I Hotel stands is a whole transnational, global regionality like that discussed in the first section of this chapter, that builds outward and inward as we respond to the diverse refrains of coloniality and capital, of migration and violence, internment and Cuba, Black Power, and Asian American cultures. Any sense of nation-state as unanimous and pre-given, bolstered by its ‘dream of universalism’, as Spivak calls it (in Butler and Spivak 2010: 92), is challenged by this complex global/regional/local matrix to the extent that ‘such a nation is subject to the whims of trade and exchange, both material and intellectual, that seep through and in time overtake the formalities of borders so carefully guarded by armies, navies, and stone fortresses’ (Yamashita 2010: 320). Of course, Spivak, as we discussed in chapter 1, argues that critical regionalism ‘goes under and over nationalisms’ (Butler and Spivak 2010: 94) and to an

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extent the novel’s multiple refrains function in a similar fashion, seeping across borders to enact and embody the affective spacetime of regionality not as a sedentary and fixed concept but, as we have seen through the book itself, as full of travel, of journeying, of routes and roots. Paul Lin’s poem early on in I Hotel speaks of a type of migrant regionality: ‘The yin and yang / of self / split in multiple and / prismed refractions / against the sun / that inevitably sets in the West’ (Yamashita 2010: 46). To be of a place, as local as the residents of I Hotel, is never to solely be defined by its parameters, since, as the whole novel demonstrates, these communities ‘in the West’ are already transnational, intersecting with other cultures, traditions and histories like ‘prismed refractions’ of the multiple influences and emotions to be found in the chronotopic hotel. For example, when the historian Chen Wen-guang tries to produce a chronology of the ‘days in turmoil at San Francisco College’, he soon realizes that it could not encompass the dynamic energies of events, and ‘he discovered but a single and continuous silken thread pulled away, unravelling at every tug the very fabric of a robe once splashed in calligraphic dreams’ (Yamashita 2010: 37). The imposed order and logic of the chronology are ‘pulled away’ and unravelled, unsettling the presupposed ‘fabric’ of history so that the structured ‘calligraphic dreams’ are no longer enough to tell the story and construct the history. Like Manzanar conducting traffic flow in Tropic of Orange, Yamashita’s alternative is the novel we read; an analectic orchestration of many ‘silken threads’ forming a new fabric of alternative temporalities and spatialities for the reader. In one scene from 1975: Internationale Hotel dealing with the Hama family’s history from internment to dissidence and political protest, characters examine the murals in the Coit Tower, sparking memories and stories about the artists, the protests, and the histories emanating around their production in the 1930s. The ‘brushstrokes’ full of ‘memory and knowledge’ (Yamashita 2010: 499) tell untold, regional stories: slowly following the industry of the American people of San Francisco, California. The morning light, cast in filtered angles through narrow, recessed windows, illuminates frescoed images of powerful working people. The people working in factories, on farmlands, on railroads, and in shipyards. Hardworking people building America. (ibid.: 495)

Yet in Yamashita’s work, no matter how filtered, narrow, or recessed the spaces are, this regionality, like the murals she describes, engage vital histories with significant reach and lasting resonance for the nation and the world. 8 So the Monkey Building (the Montgomery Block) she remembers, as she views its erstwhile location from the tower, carries both ‘memory and knowledge’ of the times, the artists, and their struggles; of Communism and protest, bohemian lives, aesthetic politics, and cultural loss. What this section

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reminds us is the ways in which Yamashita’s novel functions itself as a form of ‘living mural’ (ibid.: 503) alive with characters, intersecting stories, political causes, and unlikely and surprising juxtapositions that, taken together, in tension, produce a variant history of the Asian American West. It is ‘living’ in the sense that Estelle Hama when she looks at the painted images on the walls looks through them, too, ‘as if seeing another panorama’ (ibid.: 501). As Yamashita ‘paints’ in diverse ways the novellas that make up I Hotel, as I have argued throughout this chapter, it is as if she, too, wants the reader to see ‘another panorama’ beyond the surface and the initial story, like Mignolo’s notion of ‘An-other thinking’ that ‘requires a change in the terms, content and questions’ (Mignolo 2005: 114). In the following chapter, ‘Estelle Hama—Equality’, Yamashita continues to explore the persistent theme of how to represent Asian American experience through Estelle’s own paintings gathered for an exhibition by her son Sen; ‘framed’, ‘labelled’, put ‘under glass’ (Yamashita 2010: 505), and arranged on walls of the gallery. For her, these ‘form a tableau against a backdrop of events . . . [her sons] cannot know but must learn to remember’ (ibid.: 506). Estelle’s artwork functions like Yamashita’s in I Hotel: less an ‘exhibition’ displayed inertly in space, and more a ‘living mural’ of experiences and lived realities of survival (see ibid.: 510). However, Estelle, although an artist and storyteller, refuses to believe that fiction or comic books have enough seriousness to contribute to this process of survival and remembering that she identifies with the politics of aesthetics. Fiction, for her, ‘twists the truth. It’s all lies’ and leads only to deception, while a cartoon ‘deflates a tragic image to the level of the comic book superhero’ (ibid.: 513). What her sons try to persuade her is that all stories, whatever their source, whether factual or fictional, contribute to necessary political work, or what Harry Hama reminds her is like the ‘dream work of revolutionary ideas’ (ibid.: 520). In Yamashita’s novel, there is a wild mixture through which politics speaks and no single source or approach holds sway over any other, mirroring the I Hotel with its ‘complex nervous system’ ‘transmitted from our roof in pirated waves and retransmitted from a 304-foot tower overlooking the hills of Oakland . . . resonating and rippling in waves into the far reaches of the City, across the Bay and through its fingered peninsulas’ (ibid.: 580). Once again the form and content of the novel work together to emphasize the resonating refrains spreading outward connecting the simple, local structure with the world beyond. 4: THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY In a section early in I Hotel, Paul tries to understand the distinction in Edmund’s work between the territory and the map: ‘[I]t’s like the territory is the

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real land and the map is just a representation. So you got a map in your head about yourself, but there is the real you or self that is the territory’ (Yamashita 2010: 34). The problem arises, Edmund explains, ‘when the territory is changing but the map stays the same’ (ibid.). Regional locality has so often in the United States stayed the same and tried to define itself by identities, borders, and boundaries that, over time, have been ‘in reality’ hard to justify or explain. Myths so often form to police and protect these defined boundaries, creating imaginary ‘maps’ to guide us through and fix us within such potentially changing territories. Yamashita is fascinated by this ‘disconnect’, as Edmund terms it (ibid.), between the map and the territory, or between the ‘changing’ and the ‘same’. In the refrains of her work, she explores the ramifications of this disconnect as it is played out in the lives of those living in the Golden West; in a region defined by a myth of sameness—opportunity, Manifest Destiny, the frontier and yet, in reality, a place of immense turbulence, difference, and change where notions of self, community, and ‘the people’ are never simply defined or aligned to that static myth, but are, like the territories she brings to life in her novels, multiple and layered. Like Yamashita, Deleuze and Guattari ask, ‘What map are you in the process of making or rearranging . . . which lines are you severing, and which are you extending or resuming?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 203). For the only map or diagram worth making is rhizomatic, with ‘multiple entryways’, ‘performance’, and no ‘pretraced destiny’ (ibid.: 12–13), made up of ‘a set of various interacting lines’ (Deleuze 1995: 33). Indeed, echoing Yamashita’s use of the word territory in I Hotel, Deleuze and Guattari explain that ‘the territory itself is a place of passage . . . already . . . in the process of passing into something else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 323). For them, what matters is ‘[t]he passage of the Refrain’ (ibid.) as ‘a way of conceiving of territories as processual compositions’ (McCormack 2013: 80). Therefore, relations, mobilities, dialogues, and passages equate to the notion of the refrain in Deleuze and Guattari; ‘everything that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 347). Such labyrinthine entanglements, exchanges, and relations make up the refrain which functions like a ‘prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it . . . extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, or projections, or transformations’, and in so doing, it has a ‘catalytic function’ enhancing exchanges, reactions, and interactions between things. Thus, the refrain is involved in ‘evoking a character or landscape’ rather than ‘constituting’ it because, like music, with which it is most associated, it has the capacity to be comforting as well as suggestive and generative of different meanings and emotions (ibid.: 349—emphasis added). Although refrains are associated with territorialization (as in bird song) and so can be repetitive and consistent, they are also ‘radically open . . . potentially generative of difference,

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producing lines of feeling, thinking, and perceiving that may allow one to wonder beyond the familiar’ (McCormack 2013: 8). Perhaps what Yamashita is moving towards in I Hotel is a form of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘Nomadology’ because it refutes a ‘sedentary point of view’ and opts for ‘multiple narratives like so many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 23). She creates an ‘assemblage’ ‘plugged into the immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case’ (ibid.: 23), and in so doing, she refuses to simply reproduce the ‘world’ as a given structure into which events, identities, representations, and histories are plugged, preferring instead to understand these as relations ‘splashed in calligraphic dreams’ (Yamashita 2010: 37). Foucault’s notion of ‘subjugated knowledges’ emerging through ‘particular, local regional knowledge’ has been critical to this book (as to all my work) as it was to Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs (2000). 9 Mignolo writes of ‘building an “after–(Latin) America’ as a process being undertaken with ‘Leadership coming from the energy of each locality’ rather than from ‘Eurocentric projects of liberation’ because ‘“truth must be elsewhere’ (Mignolo 2005: 101). In earlier work, I have written of the postwestern phase and I would argue Mignolo’s ideas are another contribution to this movement away from and ‘after’ the narrow definitions of regionalism and nation that have for so long persisted in the United States and in the West. Similarly, Yamashita’s novel challenges readers to think differently, see time and space alternatively, and to step beyond established frames of knowledge, reality, and linear structures in a version of ‘critical border thinking’ or what Mignolo also terms ‘An-other thinking’ (ibid.: 114). It requires ‘delinking’ how we think, write, and live from ‘taken-for-granted’ systems and recognizing that ‘the best solutions are not necessarily found in the actual order of things under neoliberal globalization, and it also means knowing that thinking otherwise is not only possible but very necessary’ (ibid.: 117). Regionality opens out to these positions, connects to ideas that Mignolo explores, to ‘interculturalidad’ and the ‘pluri-cultural’ (ibid.: 120). In 1977: I Hotel, after the closure of I Hotel, a new ‘we’ emerges from the movement: a ‘we’ of ‘immigrants from the Old and New Worlds, from the black and white South and tribal America, we the dockworkers of the long shore, we the disabled and disavowed vets, we the gay and leathered, we the garment workers, restaurant workers, postal and clerical workers . . . we of the unions, tired and poor, we the people’ (Yamashita 2010: 588–89). Importantly, this new sense of ‘the people’ invented in the struggles witnessed throughout the novel, is linked by Yamashita to a mythic vision of the West, and of ‘how frontier towns began: with a trading post and a saloon with a second floor of lodging rooms. . . . The trading post became a dry goods store, and the saloon a restaurant and hotel. That was our basic town. After that, we’d add a church and school. . . . But when we took everything away

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and thought only about the second floor of lodging rooms, we remembered that people have always come from distances and had to be accommodated, given shelter and a bed, and what we used to call board’ (ibid.: 589—emphasis added). This payment of lodging, this ‘exchange’, she argues, is the very basis for ‘citizenship’, and yet as towns became cities within nations, the life of the hotel changed, becoming symptomatic of class and wealth divisions until the idea of living in a hotel became suspect. Those who lived there, as in the I Hotel, were ‘transitory . . . not considered permanent or stable members of society’ (ibid.: 590). Communal life and the ‘sharing’ that hotels encouraged were seen as dangerously un-American, going against the established and accepted versions of national identity and ideology based on individualism and property ownership. The ideal of ‘home’ and of settlement did not correspond to the reality of the hotel lives of Asian Americans who, while ‘our towns’ borders were porous for outsiders’, became contained, ‘confined within . . . a Chinatown bounded by California, Kearny, Broadway, and Powell’ (ibid.: 594). Yet Yamashita refuses this confined view, asserting instead how each generation found some point of relation with the other: ‘[W]e saw ourselves, our own stories of struggle and sacrifice connected to their stories . . . the honor due to those who’ve gone before’ (ibid.: 595). What becomes established through this process of affective regionality, through the intimate, layered appreciation of history and experience, is a sense of home, but not the home we’d left, but the very home we hoped to find. Or perhaps it was the home with what we might call potential, so that we knew we could give up our energies to making it what we imagined it should be. For some of us, it was family and purpose, for some a realization of our talents, and for others, it was an idea, and not just any idea. (ibid.: 597)

Yamashita describes affective critical regionality at work here as always relational, exchanging ‘energies’ between bodies and other things, including material things, ideas, and concepts (hope, imagination, potential), and yet none of these elements are stable or fixed. Secondly, this affective space is processual and dynamic, developing and transforming through ‘attention, participation, and involvement’ (McCormack 2013: 4). Thirdly, these are non-representational spaces that cannot be grasped or pinned down as complete or fully formed, and instead ‘generate vague but tangible shifts, twists, and turns in the multilayered sensibility from which thinking takes place’ (ibid.). This ‘home’, therefore, is constructed of ‘fragile and sometimes fleeting combinations of percepts, affects, and concepts—ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking that can align in potentially eventful and novel ways’ (ibid.). The I Hotel is, therefore, always an affective spacetime or chronotope, a set of complex regionalities, differences, and identities gathered up through the

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intervention of Yamashita’s fiction while never accepting unanimity. These are always differential spaces of division between generations, ideologies, and practices where the idea of a coherent or stable ‘we’ is impossible. Yet all this process and diversity is Yamashita’s preferred vision of regionality, anchored in the city of San Francisco but uncontained by it, for as she has written, ‘We were an open book written in a hundred dialects’ (Yamashita 2010: 594). The energies of her affective spacetime, of I Hotel as a moving, living thing, are ‘exploding and swirling away from the center—Manilatown, Chinatown, Japantown—spinning away with phallic impressions of Pyramid and Coit, spanning bridges of Wharf, Bay, and Golden Gate, dotted islands of Alcatraz and Angel . . . away and away and away. America. America’ (ibid.: 605). The novel’s vibrant variety and sprawling energy has performed this swirling and spinning away throughout, ‘collecting every little memory, all the bits and pieces, into a larger memory, rebuilding a great, layered and labyrinthine, now imagined, international hotel of many rooms’ (ibid.). Recalling Tropic of Orange’s sense of the local and contingent over the global and homogenized and its refusal to accept any media-driven, remote, persuasive version of a neatly mapped globalization, what she presents instead is a politically charged, richly detailed understanding of ‘contemporary reality as changeably and multiply experienced’ (Vint 2010: 412). The world we are often presented with as a given reality is challenged by different ‘worldings’ emerging through close-up and detailed experiences of local hidden histories and surprising regionings. The mediated world could never convey the experiences of living: ‘The virtually real could not accommodate the magical’ (Yamashita 1997: 197). Instead, ‘you had to have been there yourself’ (ibid.) amid these varied encounters, which, like Stewart’s description of the multiple refrains of regionality (see chapter 4), form a series of intertwined ‘tactile compositions’ permeating ‘the layers of determination laid down by histories, the leftovers of everything that has happened . . . gathers itself into a plateau [or a “hotel”] at which intensities become expressive, form a territory’ (Stewart 2013c: 278). As Stewart argues, although regionality is about the local, about place, about saying ‘we’re from here’, it is always also more than this, too, as we can see through the radiating intensities of Yamashita’s novel moving inwards and outwards from the specificity of the lives of I Hotel to the world it also encompasses and produces. In Stewart’s words, regionality is not fixed or stable but ‘constituted in moves and encounters that continually reset the self-world relationship’ with those seen as ‘local’ venturing out ‘mapless’ and vulnerable and yet, through their encounters, becoming ‘knowing readers of emergent situations’ (ibid.). The importance of Yamashita’s project, as the final words of the novel attest, is to ‘reset the self-world relationship’ and to challenge the ‘mapped’ and unanimous versions of social reality, cultural identity, and official history with active, affective encounters: to ‘resist death and dementia. To haunt a

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disappearing landscape. To forever embed this geography with our visions and voices. To kiss the past and you goodbye, leaving the indelible spit of our DNA on still moist lips. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Bitter’ (Yamashita 2010: 605— emphasis added). But as those ultimate four words suggest, what remains is contradictory, surprising, and different, even oppositional, a ‘frictional zone’ or ‘rickety infrastructure’ (like the I Hotel itself) since ‘[b]eing “from here” nests in concentric rings stretching out from encounters to tastes, bodies, neighborhoods, a valley, a state, a geographical region’ (Stewart 2013c: 278, 279). Yamashita’s ‘complex architecture of a time, a movement, a hotel, and its people’ articulates, just as she had in Tropic of Orange, a sense of regionality that understands place as affective spacetime which is real and contingent, rooted and routed, ‘a live composition’ (Stewart 2014a: 550), that is ultimately and significantly an active presence, ‘a small offering, a rendering to be continued and completed by others’ (Yamashita 2010: 610). NOTES 1. See Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of relations of smooth and striated spaces discussed in chapter 6 (see 1996: 476–77) and in particular their discussion of the quilts of the United States that are a mix of both the order of striated space and the smooth space of improvization. One comes from the other, they coexist as ‘a furtherance of one through the other’ (ibid.: 477). 2. See Alys Eve Weinbaum and Brent Hayes Edwards (2000: 31): ‘By “critical” we mean three things: first, that thinking of the “globe” destabilizes nation-based projects of cultural study and thus intervenes into the way in which scholarly inquiry reproduces various forms of national exceptionalism. Specifically this means thinking about structures of domination as confluent across national borders, and at the same time unevenly felt within them. Second, by “critical” we mean paying attention to the relationship of historical reciprocity between class and race in the context of western imperialism and overdevelopment, again, both within nations and among them. Third, by “critical” we mean being suspicious and questioning of the term “globality” itself’. Mignolo argues ‘globality is articulated in local histories . . . reveals local histories in their complexity’ (Mignolo 2000: 77). 3. ‘As happa, mixed Anglo/Japanese American, growing up in the mestizaje of Chicano barrios of East L.A. during the Vietnam War, one of the first things I had to recognize was that my identity was not “ethnic,” per se, that is, my identity is not cultural (or sub-cultural—as the hyphen between ethnic-and-American, such as Italian-American or Armenian-American or Arab-American would suggest), it is historical and political. That is to say, my ID is American—my diverse heritage is that of America; this heterogeneous character to each of our identities goes back to Manifest Destiny, to the frontier and the genocide of American Indians, to an expanding American empire through the contemporary era of SFFTA, CAFTA and globalization today’. See Kelleher (n.d.). 4. See Waldie’s Holy Land discussed at length in chapter 3. 5. Yamashita has said: ‘More layers. The idea of extending what is on the ground, who occupies Los Angeles, and how that’s constantly changing. It’s not more real, but more ample and complex. . . . But I wanted to bring in places and things that may not have been mentioned before’. Gier and Tejeda 1998. 6. ‘Buzzworm’ is an old western term for rattlesnake. Buzzworm creates a ‘buzz’ in the novel and ‘this resembles what I earlier called synekism and Storper calls buzz, the stimulus of urban agglomeration, the stimulus of nodality, of concentrated density creating new ideas and new movements. These clusterings of people can be highly generative of innovation. Some-

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times this stimulation is expressed in art and music, at other times it works to create new kinds of innovative labor and community coalitions’ (Soja 2002: 7). 7. ‘Hotel lives’ recalls Vlautin’s exploration of the ‘motel life’ discussed in chapter 6. Both are about mobility, insecurity, and the lack of a conventional ‘home’ in the West. Stephen Tatum has described this as ‘vagabondage’ (see Tatum and Lewis forthcoming). 8. Yamashita specifically describes and comments on the ‘Library’ mural of Bernard Zakheim and ‘City Life’ by Victor Arnautoff. 9. Mignolo’s book was published the same year as my The Cultures of the American New West but after American Cultural Studies (with Alasdair Kean) (1997), in which this idea was first discussed.

Conclusion ‘Not so Much a Deficiency as a Resource’

1: THE AFFECTIVE HORIZON In Regionalism and the Reading Class, Wendy Griswold argues that regionalism offers the reading class a cultural mooring to anchor and orient them in a tumultuous world’ (Griswold 2008: 175), but in many respects, this book has argued for a very different purpose. Under the developed notion of regionality, the texts examined have consciously worked to ‘unmoor’ readers, challenge perceptions, and provoke variance instead of certitude. Regions, therefore, no longer function to ‘anchor’ us unquestioningly in place, since, as Whitehead argued, ‘[t]he community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production’ (Whitehead 1979: 214–15). In reviewing regionalism as regionality, it becomes activated, alive, an ‘incompletion’, open and responding to other perspectives as if its edges are no longer bounded and contained but rather touched by and connected with force fields beyond it. As Whitehead also put it, ‘[T]he focal region cannot be separated from the external stream. . . . It is a state of agitation’ (Whitehead 1967: 157). Most significantly, this book argues that region cannot be simply defined by traditional and fixed concepts of regionalism with its deeply embedded nostalgia or notions of ‘local color’, although, without doubt, one cannot dismiss these elements as insignificant since they remain part of an assemblage of scored refrains that relationally and actively are thrown together in and as regionality. Region is like John Rachjman’s description of ‘the vagueness of “a life”’, ‘not a deficiency to be corrected, but rather a resource or reserve of other possibilities, our connections’ (Rajchman 2000: 84), with all 197

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its gaps and anomalies seen as opportunities for creativity, new ideas, and potentials. In Stewart’s reworking and development of Rajchman’s point, she writes, ‘The vagueness or the unfinished quality of the ordinary is not so much a deficiency as a resource, like a fog of immanent forces still moving’ (Stewart 2007: 127). This book has aimed to investigate this ‘resource’ and to unleash the ‘immanent forces’ contained within regionalities which, from multiple perspectives and through varied genres, explore these ‘edging’ relations and propose regionality as ‘already a question and a something waiting to happen . . . a series of connections expressing the abstract idea . . . through a fast sensory relay’, or what Stewart has called a bloom space (ibid.: 30). So when Stewart enters into a regional space (like all the writers discussed in this book), it refuses to remain static like a still life precisely because it is a life composed of its manifold, if unnoticed lines and circuits of ordinary affects that swirl around, ‘filled with vibratory motion, or resonance’ (ibid.: 19) reaching out beyond itself into what Félix Guattari calls ‘regions of being’ (Guattari 2013: 4). In turn, affect permits, I argue throughout the book, a significant addition to our sense of regionality, recognizing its mobility, connectedness, and its relationality, since, as Guattari comments, ‘[a]ffect should stop being thought of as a raw energetic matter. In fact, it is a hyper-complex object, rich with all the fields of potentiality it can open up’ (ibid.: 186). By always critically engaging affect in our consideration of region, these ‘fields of potentiality’ reveal it as more than what we thought it was, and certainly not what Whitehead called ‘simple location’, but instead something alive and constituted ‘out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found’ (Stewart 2007: 29). Guattari’s example is love, which is not simply ‘resolved at the end of the expectation of a libidinal “discharge”’ because it is charged with affective power, ‘loaded with the unknown worlds at the crossroads of which it places us’ (Guattari 2013: 186). Love does not ‘just concern “identifiable” persons’ but reaches and extends outward to ‘things, animal and cosmic becomings’; like all affects, it points in many directions with ‘atmospheric alterities that haunt the affective horizon of the living world’ (ibid.). To return to chapter 7’s opening quotation with this in mind is to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the ‘thread of a tune’ that has, I believe, recurred throughout this book and to see how the closing ‘circle’ of regionalism can be opened from its inside ‘as a function of the working forces it shelters’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 311–12). From inside regionalism, from within its circle or sphere of influence, one finds working, active forces, ‘energetics’ of the local, small scale, and fugitive that overspill region’s traditional boundaries and its presupposed and bounded definitions. Instead, from these ‘minor’ languages with their various, troubling ‘compositional-

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ities’, as Stewart calls it, something ‘launches forth, hazards an improvisation’ creating unforeseen relations that emerge through contacts and encounters, along ‘lines of drift’. In this critical process, circular, bounded regionalism becomes plural affective regionalities, ‘with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities’ (ibid.). At the heart of this stream of ideas is the sense that ‘the cosmic force was already present in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains, the great maneuver in the little maneuver’ (ibid.: 350). These ‘little refrains’ of the ‘minor’ or the ‘fugitive’ are politically vital to the ways in which regionalities intervene in the striated space of the global world, asking questions of its assumptions, challenging its narrow points of reference, and provoking new and different relations. Charles Olson would have called this ‘a wide investigation into the local’ (Olson 1966: 147). Similarly, let us recall Rebecca Solnit stressing that ‘[t]he embrace of local power doesn’t have to mean parochialism, withdrawal, or intolerance, only a coherent foundation from which to navigate the larger world’ (Solnit 2004: 113). As I have shown, relations between the local and global can be navigated anew without simply falling into the normative binaries that have for so long dogged regionalist discourse. As Solnit argues ‘you can have an identity embedded in the local circumstance and a role in the global dialogue. And . . . this global dialogue exists in service of the local’ (Solnit 2004: 114). Small things do matter, many voices can be heard, and differences can sustain and enhance the richness of living: ‘The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself . . . the little stories [of] a hundred thousand websites, listservs, and blogs on the net . . . it’s local farmers, farmers’ markets, seed diversity, organic crops’ (ibid.: 114–15). This book shows how regionalities, in their varied forms and entities, function in a similar way, redistributing sensibilities, challenging givens, performing identities, embodying spaces, activating empathy, opening potentials ‘to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers’ (ibid.: 115). As regionality produces and is in turn produced, it expresses a series of restless, immutable forces and affects that circulate, join, fall away and reform, like refrains in an unending song or like meandering, sometimes crisscrossing, lines: ‘It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises . . . but . . . expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know’ (ibid.: 136–37). But in recognizing this relationship to the near and far, the local and global, we might find ‘grounds to act’ precisely because we cannot finally ‘know’ things exactly or see the world as already defined and fixed. The hope that both Solnit and Judith Butler, among others, write about stems from this precariousness, from an unknowability that reacquaints us with humanity and its deep relations with the world as refreshingly fragile and open, rather than robust and closed off to new potentials and new meanings

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(as region often is). As Butler puts it, ‘[T]his might prompt us, affectively, to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning . . . and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform’ (Butler 2006: 151—emphasis added). I surely do not make myself, since I am already in the world of others, of language, of complex life, before I begin to act and to do as I do. All that is not me is the condition of my acting, and I could not act without such conditions. They impinge, they enable, they sustain. . . the performative theory of action has to be resituated in a relational understanding of living organisms, human and nonhuman, to understand both what sustains life and what imperils it. . . . Since life which exceeds me is a condition of who I am, and so there is no life that is exclusively my own, even though my own life is not every life, and cannot be. (Butler 2012: 16)

Affective regionality, as I have addressed it, accepts this precarity as a ‘resource’ not a ‘deficiency’, seeing the edges of region as open, porous, always connecting, and perhaps best seen as complex, entwined lines rather than a sealed container. Yet such lines inform each other, overlap, interconnect, bind, and fray like a Jackson Pollock painting, both marking an existential territory and, at the same time, pointing beyond it and deframing it. They are singular and collective within the ‘region’ since, as Tim Ingold put it, ‘[l]ife will not be contained, but rather threads its way through the world along myriad lines of its relations’ in a knotted, entangled form that creates a ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2007: 103; 2011: 148). It is the ‘lines of its relations’ that this book has followed as they loop and fold, crease and radiate within a range of writings that, however local they appear, however ‘regional’ to the American West (for example), refuse to remain simple locations. Inevitably within this nexus of layered and colliding forces, actions, affects, struggles, and joys, we come to comprehend regionality as itself always actively worlding. Brian Massumi argues that ‘in affect we are never alone’ because it enables endless connections to be made ‘to others and to other situations’ creating ‘a heightened sense of belonging, with other people and to other places’ (Massumi 2015: 6). This mapping of regionality as a worlding process can be seen in Allen C. Shelton’s fictocritical and haunting Where the North Sea Touches Alabama (2013), mixing memory, desire, history, and imagination; air, water, earth, fire; past, present, and future into relations of place that are hybrid and layered, ‘edged up against each other’ with many different worlds overlapping and ‘interacting . . . with my relatives in rooms that no longer exist’ (Shelton 2013: 145, xxvi). Like most of the writers discussed in this book, for Shelton, too, there is a desire to ‘destabilize’ and remap these regions,

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worlds, and their relations ‘like the tracings left by a fly in a morgue flitting from body to body’ (ibid.: 125, 85). Although Shelton’s book is nominally about Alabama as place and region, it resembles the tracings of the fly as it flits around and about in all directions: ‘This might be the capital of my dreams’, he writes, ‘but the empire reached out in widening circles as if I had been dropped like a corpse or a rock in a lake’ (ibid.: 145). 1 However, these ‘widening circles’ or narrative vectors increase creatively and actively our sense of the human and nonhuman worlds that compose region so that it is closer to a ‘tangled bank’ than any clear, simple location (ibid.: 126–27). Reading Shelton’s own tangled memories and journeyings, one becomes embroiled in ‘[t]he viscosity of memory . . . the stickiness that holds the scene together’ (ibid.: 127) and, therefore, reminding us of the multiple ways regionality composes. 2 As Deleuze put it in an interview, and as I discussed in the introduction, ‘What we are interested in, you see, are modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a wind, of an event. And maybe it’s a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons, or subjects’. (Deleuze 1995: 26—emphasis added). In other words, as I put it earlier, not to think of the region as circular, established, and rooted, only pointing back on itself, inwardly, but as having lines of connection beyond itself; lines of flight or vectors beyond its geographic and political borders; always moving towards an alternative perspective that sees the West (or any region) through the prism of worlding as ‘an Assemblage of enunciation with multiple heads’ (Guattari 2013: 204–5). As I discussed about Nebraska early in this book, regionality is about living with others and for others in place, of recognizing our own responsibilities and frailties in the face of others without retreating into the stubborn enclosures of sameness and prejudice or the throwaway rhetoric of ‘globalization’. Through the processes or ‘regioning’, of producing and reproducing place as a series of becomings, we might move ‘beyond ourselves’ (and our places) and, therefore, be ‘implicated in lives [and places] that are not our own’ (Butler 2006: 280). The region as a type of rooted circle or sealed container is, therefore, interrupted, unsettled, and enhanced by worlds (from within and without), by forces of locality and globality interacting, attached and attentive to the world around it and to which it relates: ‘constituted by an accumulation of proximities . . . [where] each accumulation defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to “becoming”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 488— emphasis added). To be attentive to those things close to hand is the beginning of this process through which, in Deleuze’s words, we might find ways of ‘restoring our belief in the world’ (see Deleuze 2000: 171–73), which Massumi interprets as meaning that ‘we have to live our immersion in the world, really experience our belonging to this world, which is the same thing

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as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there is no room to doubt the reality of it’ (Massumi 2015: 45). For Deleuze, and as this book has explored, this often begins with the proximate and the small, for ‘we must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving-stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy’s bandages, and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is’ (Deleuze 2000: 173—emphasis added). He goes on to claim that this attention to the small or overlooked is a powerful source for change: ‘We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part’ (ibid.). Charles Olson once wrote that if humanity fails to recognize its full relations to region and the world, ‘unbroken from the threshold of a man through him and back out again’, then ‘all he does inside his house is stale, more and more stale as he is less and less acute at the door. And his door is where he is responsible to more than himself’ (Olson 1966: 62). To me, this speaks of the important relations and rhythms between region and the world and warns that any failure to explore and develop this complex ethical dialogue will, inevitably, produce only staleness and isolation from one another and ‘this world as it is’. In a similar example, Isabelle Stengers tells of her neighbour entering the room in which she is working and how this singular action becomes ‘a presence that de-localizes me and signifies a world from which I have suddenly ceased to be protected’ (Stengers 2011: 92). Rather like Olson’s closed house, Stenger’s room is a form of ‘simple location’ (‘here’) which is then troubled positively by the presence of other entities (‘theres’). 3 At this threshold, as discussed in the introduction, ‘people might take [time] to learn how to see faithfully from one another’s point of view’ (Haraway 1991: 190), breaking out from the apparent cautious safety of their ‘region’ in order to care empathetically for all regions and all human and nonhuman beings that reside there. Similarly, Massumi writes of affect as a ‘threshold of potential’ and a ‘way of talking about that margin of manoeuvrability, the “where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do” in every present situation’ (Massumi and Zournazi in Massumi 2015: 3). As Massumi concludes, affect is ‘like being right where you are—more intensely’ (ibid.) because seeing affect’s relations to regionality promises an ‘excess’ spilling out from the most unlikely, ordinary moment or thing. Massumi, you will recall, terms this ‘a reserve of potential or newness or creativity’ experienced in the intersections of affect (ibid.: 6). This book has tried to open up these ideas for further thought and experimentation like ‘an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh’. It has been a journey along multiple lines and deep chasms and, as it turned out, necessarily troubling and perplexing. It could have been very different and should,

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probably, have included other material than the examples I chose to consider. But in the spirit of the book’s key concepts, it is alive, still forming, an active becoming. It is political in the only way I know and critical in the sense outlined by Foucault: I can’t help but dream of a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to that wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms. (Foucault 1994: 325) 4

2: FROM REGIONALITY TO ECOSOPHICAL SPECULATION Poetry might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined. (Guattari 1995: 21)

Foucault’s notion of a type of critique that ‘would bear the lightening of possible storms’ leads us to consider, in this final section, the work of Félix Guattari, whose own writing ‘reads like Science Fiction, producing worlds beyond this one and inventing new terms with which to articulate and describe them’ (O’Sullivan 2010: 276). Guattari saw the threat of ‘existential contraction’ as homogenizing forces (like those Frampton describes at the beginning of ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’) imposed their authority to narrow down the world by ‘controlling and neutralizing the maximum number of existential refrains’ (Guattari 2000: 47, 50). 5 Singularity is Guattari’s term for heterogeneity and difference which he saw being curtailed, ‘evaded or crushed’, everywhere (ibid.: 50) ‘circumscribed’ by powerfully dominant refrains (Guattari 1995: 15). His own work, like that undertaken with Deleuze, sought heterogeneity, to ‘resingularize’ by affirming differences ‘both from each other and from a notional “Self”’ (Pindar and Sutton in Guattari 2000: 9). Rather than be defined by any overriding presupposition or ‘refrain’—local or global—Guattari stressed negotiations or mediations between positions within what he called ‘existential Territories’ (Guattari 2013: 26). These can be, as discussed in chapter 7, ‘precarious, finite, finitized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually’ through something ‘almost imperceptible’, which from its smallness might spring ‘enormous repercussions’ (Guattari 2000: 53, 10), opening up circumscribed existential territories onto ‘a constellation of Universes’ (Guattari 1995: 17). In a series of beautiful examples, recalling that above of a ‘seed which splits open the paving-

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stones’, Guattari explains how the small, minor, or overlooked can work to such ends: ‘a rock loosed by frost balanced on a singular point of the mountain-side, the little spark which kindles the great forest, the little word which sets forth the world a-fighting’ (in Guattari 2000: 11). From the minuscule to the ‘Universes’ of possibility, these trigger ‘thresholds’ or what he calls an ‘interface between sensible finitude . . . and the trans-sensible infinitude’ making possible ‘incorporeal domains of entities’ where a ‘nuclei of eternity lodges between instants’ (Guattari 1995: 111, 17). As McCormack argues, ‘affective spacetimes’, such as regionalities, ‘can be understood at least in part as existential territories composed of multiple refrains: kinaesthetic, conceptual, “material”, and gestural’ (McCormack 2013: 8), all with the capacity for ‘eternity’ lodged between their ‘instant’ appearance. Like my argument throughout this book, Guattari looks to artists and aesthetics to provide ‘the best cartographies of the psyche’ and to draw our attention to these resingularizing presences or different (‘transversalist’ [Guattari 1995: 16]) refrains emerging in creative works as a form of ‘mental ecosophy’ which we might otherwise fail to notice (Guattari 2000: 37, 35). What Guattari calls ‘analytic cartographies’ have the capacity to ‘extend beyond existential Territories’, rather like affective critical regionality extends beyond old forms of regionalism, and can do so ‘as in painting or literature’ through their capacity to ‘evolve and innovate . . . open up new futures’ and challenge ‘sedative discourse’ (ibid.: 40, 41). Just as some forms of regionalism are often referred to as nostalgic and romanticized throughout this book, Guattari is quick to point out that ‘it would be absurd to want to return to the past in order to reconstruct former ways of living’ since to extend and unsettle old existential territories (like regions), one must ‘learn to think “transversally”’ (ibid.: 42, 43). This means, in part, to comprehend ‘the interactions between ecosystems’ rather than their separations and to understand, as Guattari argues, that there are at least three ecological registers: ‘environment, social relations and human subjectivity’ to bear in mind (ibid.: 43, 28). Guattari opposed closure and stasis in all his work and in particular saw subjectivity as a creative process, assembling itself through its relations and contacts to others and the world (other existential territories, Universes, the Cosmos). This transversality promotes greater sensitivity, working across and between the three ecologies and their ‘interfaces’, which is nonreductive and defined as ‘a logic of intensities . . . concerned only with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes’ (ibid.: 44). Sounding like Whitehead, Guattari wants a logic to capture the motion of process (as opposed to rigid systems or structures or frames), presenting ‘existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization’ (ibid.: 44). Key to this process of opening is affect operating as a catalyst between a ‘multiplicity of movements and events’ (McCormack 2013: 112) and reminding us of Massumi’s description of affect: ‘When you affect something, you are at

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the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn. . . . Affect is the passing of a threshold’ (Massumi 2015: 4). Such ideas chime with my arguments about regionality as process, becoming, and transmotion, constantly breaking ‘out of the totalising frame’ of regionalism through ‘processual lines of flight’ (Guattari 2000: 44) with an affective intensity that is unpredictable and, therefore, always potentially inventive and productive. As David Matless puts it, ‘To account for a region, move across its varieties’ (Matless 2015: 8). Hence, if region is an ‘existential locus’, then affective critical regionality, following Guattari’s discussion, is ‘an intensive given which invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations’ (Guattari 2000: 45). In order to achieve such goals of critique and social change (‘a new art of living’ [Guattari 1995: 20]), Guattari calls not for a consensus but rather for an imaginative ‘dissensus’ in ‘everyday life’ that acknowledges ‘individual, domestic, material, neighbourly, creative . . . personal ethics’ and fights on many ‘tangled and heterogeneous fronts’ (ibid.: 50–51). For Guattari, there were too many singularities ‘just turning in circles’ (ibid.: 51) (like my earlier sense of region as circular and enclosed) desperately in need of activation through what he terms ‘micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices’ (ibid.). Echoing Foucault’s new critique quoted above and mirroring this book’s concern for the small scale, minor, and fugitive, Guattari’s desire to interrupt the self-perpetuating turning circle with tangled lines of difference presents the political possibilities of regionality as an energized sense of care—a ‘new gentleness’—of responsibility, attunement, and mutuality. ‘Ways should be found’, he writes, ‘to enable the singular, the exceptional, the rare, to coexist with a State structure that is the least burdensome possible’ (ibid.), but it will always have to be through ‘multiple molecular revolutions’ (ibid.: 21). An example Guattari gives in Chaosmosis is of the kitchen at the clinic La Borde which functions as an affective ‘territory’ or, for my purposes like a type of negative regionalism ‘close[d] in on itself . . . the site of stereotyped attitudes and behavior, where everyone mechanically carries out their little refrain’ (ibid.: 69). However, this region ‘can also come to life, trigger an existential agglomeration, a drive machine . . . a little opera scene: in it people talk, dance and play with all kinds of instruments, with water and fire, dough and dustbins, relations of prestige and submission’ (ibid.). Suddenly, as in a scene from the fictions of Vlautin and Yamashita or the anthropology of Stewart or Muecke, the kitchen shifts from repetitive behaviours within the ordinary to something that sparks into place, spawning different relations like a ‘resource of ambience, of contextual subjectivity . . . indexed to the degree of openness’ (ibid.). As McCormack comments on the same scene, it is a revalorizing of ‘relational affectivity of very ordinary contexts . . . facilitating transformations in . . . “processual subjectivities”’ (McCormack 2008:

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7). The kitchen, like a mythic region, is a ‘well-worked zone of enunciation . . . closed in on itself . . . subjected to roles and functions’ and yet can ‘find itself in direct contact with Universes of alterity’ drawing beyond its ‘existential entrapment’ (Guattari 1995: 70). Regionality has this similar capacity, like ‘a story in which there is always something more to be said’ (Stewart 1996: 7), producing ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’ (Haraway 1991: 191). What Guattari proposes is a ‘generalized ecology’, emphasizing like Haraway, the spatial language of ‘location, positioning, and situating’ within which the emplaced body operates against ‘the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity’ (ibid.: 195). To achieve this, he embraces all ecologies and explores transversal relations across them, stressing that ‘[e]cology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority’ because a truer, fuller ecology ‘questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations’ as they affect environment, society, and the subject (Guattari 1995: 52). At his most utopian (and he is often this), Guattari sees his ‘tri-ecological vision’ as bringing ‘into being other worlds beyond . . . abstract information, to engender Universes of reference and existential Territories where singularity and finitude are taken into consideration . . . to dare to confront the vertiginous Cosmos so as to make it inhabitable’ (ibid.: 67). This happens through a ‘multifaceted movement’ (like Stewart’s ‘prismatic ecology’; Stewart 2013: 281) that will ‘analyse and produce . . . collective and individual subjectivity that completely exceeds the limits of individualization, stagnation, identificatory closure, and will instead open itself up on all sides to the socius’ (ibid.: 68). 6 Although ‘region’ is not a word Guattari employs often, his resistant to ‘a dominant subjectivity’ and to any consensualizing actions within existential territories (ibid.) suggests an awareness of how such structures of feeling might promote the very ‘stagnation’ and ‘identificatory closure’ he most feared. My reason for invoking Guattari’s work at the end of this book is to draw some parallels with the affective critical regionality I have tracked through the types of aesthetic works he so much admired ‘to forge new paradigms’ through ‘the best cartographies of the psyche’ (ibid.: 37). In a clear and useful example of the ‘redefinition of the body’, Guattari comes closest to this refreshed sense of ecosophical thinking and, for me, its relations to regionality. For him, bodies are always ‘an intersection of partial autopoietic components, with multiple and changing configurations, working collectively as well as individually’; bodies that are more than simply human, but, in fact, all types ‘mythical, religious, ideological’ (Guattari 1995: 118). 7 Like my sense of regionality, Guattari’s ‘bodies’ or ‘existential territorialities’ are always ‘partial and yet open to the most diverse fields of alterity’ (such as the kitchen at La Borde) so that even ‘the most autistic enclosure’,

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like the most inward-looking, nostalgic, conservative region, ‘can be in direct contact with ambient social constellations . . . historical complexes and cosmic aporias’ that challenge, extend, and stretch it beyond itself (ibid.: 118). The regionalities revealed across the chapters of this book form a new regional ‘ecosophy’, concerned, as in Guattari’s work, not just with the environment but with social and mental ecologies as well, with ‘corporeal’ and ‘incorporeal species’ (ibid.: 120) which together raise key questions: How do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos? (ibid.: 119–20)

Guattari’s expansive sense of ‘the future of all life’ requires ‘different ways of seeing and of making the world’ (ibid.: 120), emphasizing, as this book has done, new modes of understanding and relating to the everyday, the small scale, and the minor as consistent building blocks in wider perceptions and actions in the world. As Hsuan Hsu put it, artists and critics need to ‘find a way to care about both the distant and the local’ and ‘can only succeed by imagining and inhabiting larger terrains of sympathy, solidarity, and collaboration’ (Hsu 2005: 62). From the local to the global, from self to other, finite to infinite, subject to object, across all possible ‘bodies’, affective critical regionality functions to constantly ‘reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity . . . a sense of responsibility’ alongside ‘love and compassion for others’ and ‘the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos’. Of course, this is political, too, because it insists upon a ‘new type of social practice better suited both to issues of a very local nature and to the global problems of our era’ which gathers up and produces ‘assemblages of enunciation’ that reflect ‘the singularity of a situation’ (Guattari 1995: 121—emphasis added). 8 In other words, these are political ideas produced from ‘multiple micropolitical registers’ (ibid.) and affects providing ‘ways of connecting, to others and to other situations’, offering ‘our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves’ (Massumi 2015: 6), resonating back through this book to Stewart’s ‘ordinary affects’, the intense genealogies of Waldie’s Lakewood, or the diverse historical voices of Yamashita’s I Hotel. In fact, every chapter of Affective Critical Regionality has produced regionalities as ‘assemblages of enunciation’ that challenge ‘dissensually’ the centralized, globalized ‘normcore’ of contemporary U.S. culture in favour of ‘an aspiration for individual and collective reappropriation of the production of subjectivity’ (ibid.: 133). Heterogeneity (‘heterogenesis’ in Guattari) is the focus of political concern in the regioning discussed in this book, exploring the interfaces and intersections between points of view, value systems, and

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ideologies that may have a deep relation to the local but still ‘establish [ . . .] transversal junctions between the political, the ethical and the aesthetic’ (ibid.: 134). For Guattari, too, this is exemplified in aesthetics and the work of writers, artists, and poets whose efforts foreground this contest over the ‘question of subjectivity’ which he aligns, of course, as only one part of his triecosophical vision (environmental, social, mental; ibid.: 135). Subjectivity is, therefore, no more a ‘natural given . . . than air or water’ and so artists have to be engaged in the narrowest and widest of struggles: ‘How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and permanently reinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with Universes of mutant value?’ (ibid.). This is the progressive, active, and potential function of affective critical regionality and its firm belief that ‘the world can be rebuilt from other Universes of value and . . . other existential Territories should be constructed towards this end’ (ibid.: 134). As David Matless explains, ‘Movements make the region, furnishing rather than diminishing geographic particularity. Never complete, always refurbished, regional identity cannot help but be provisional; provision denoting not only tentativeness, but sustenance’ (Matless 2014: 219). Through Guattari’s leaps of language and concept there emerges this exact sense of the ‘provisional’ which can be applied to a rethinking of regionalism as regionality, that is, as something both tentative, precarious, and vulnerable and simultaneously productive and sustaining. To borrow from Simon O’Sullivan’s discussion of Guattari, there is ‘something deceptively simple’ at work in these ideas, ‘namely, that each of us interact with each other and the world in a specifically different manner . . . to become an active participant in changing our lives as they are at the moment, not to wait for an event that might force us to change’ (O’Sullivan 2010: 277). In one last poetic example, Guattari expresses this sense of provisionality as a resource emerging through our interactions with place and our capacity for creative change and the formation of ‘new constellations’ triggered by the ‘refrain-making of the sensible world’: [W]hat sometimes minuscule details does the perception of a child walking down the dismal passageways of a social housing estate fasten on to? How, starting from a distressing seriality, does he succeed in consummating his discovery of a world of magical haloes? (Guattari 2013: 209)

From the distressing seriality and repetition of ordinary experience, a world of magical haloes might emerge; worlds born of immanence not transcendence, from ‘a turbulent soup of regions of swirling potential’ contained not in life as it should be, but in life as it is (Massumi 2002: 34). Or to return finally to Kathleen Stewart, this reminds us of the capacities of affective critical regionality not as ‘social construction—but the moment itself when

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an assemblage of discontinuous yet mapped elements throws itself together into something’ which even if repetitive ‘leaves a residue like a track or a habit . . . a composition—a poesis—and one that literally can’t be seen as a simple repository of systemic effects imposed on an innocent world but has to be traced through the generative modalities of impulses, daydreams, ways of relating, distractions, strategies, failures, encounters, and worldings of all kinds’ (Stewart 2008: 73). In Deleuze’s words, ‘From this we can get the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: “I am a cartographer”’ (Deleuze 1988: 44). NOTES 1. Shelton’s book mirrors this widening circle in its form as well as content, since there are over sixty pages of detailed notes that extend and entangle the narrative and move it and the reader in different directions, along new lines of flight. 2. Guattari refers to how ‘affect sticks to subjectivity’ (Guattari 2013: 203). 3. As Stephen Muecke told me, commenting on Kathleen Stewart’s sense of regionality, ‘the sense of being “from here” . . . can never simply be parochial or self-enclosed’ (personal email, 2 April 2015). See also Solnit’s discussion of ‘home’ in chapter 5. 4. Appropriately, this comment is used in two key works that have inspired and challenged me in the writing of this book, in Anderson and Harrison (2010: 1), to open their book, and in Muecke (2012: 44). 5. Guattari saw Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) as the engine of repression, control and infantilizing consensus. It shares much with globalization, too, in its management of worlds and affects through its repetitive forms and mechanisms. 6. See Jeffery Jerome Cohen (ed.), Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013), which explores a version of ecology which replaces neatly distinct entities interacting with each other in observable and predictable ways, with a more Guattarian sense of ‘a restless expanse of multihued contaminations, impurities, hybridity, monstrosity, contagion, interruption, hesitation, enmeshment, refraction, unexpected relations, and wonder. A swirl of colours, a torrent, a muddy river’ (xxiv). 7. Maturana and Varela (1980) define ‘autopoiesis’ as a system organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components. At this time, the components have the following characters: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously, they regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) they constitute it (the system) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. See H. R. Maturana and F. J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980). 8. ‘Assemblages of enunciation’ are the multiple gatherings that form a ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivation’.

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Index

active presence, 2, 12, 42, 53n2, 60, 82, 102, 108, 114, 117, 167, 193 affect, 1, 5, 6–8, 11–14, 15, 17–19, 21, 22, 26, 30–31, 33, 37, 38, 40, 43, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 60, 67, 68, 70–73, 73, 77, 78, 79–81, 82, 82–83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 94, 98, 102, 105–106, 107, 108–110, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120–121, 125, 130, 135, 136, 148, 150, 159, 164, 165, 166, 167, 167–168, 169, 172, 174, 176, 178, 181, 182, 192, 198, 200, 202, 204, 207, 209n2 affective critical regionality, 3, 9, 12, 16, 18, 35, 41, 56, 82, 93, 94, 123, 129, 133, 136, 143, 157, 192, 204–205, 207–208 affective spacetimes, 33, 83, 204 Agee, James, 100–101, 103, 105–106, 117, 120 Ahmed, Sara, 51 Allen, Barbara, 35, 36 Alofsin, Anthony, 26, 53n1 American Dream, 47, 53n10, 110, 116 American West, 2, 17, 21, 38, 41, 55, 62, 87, 123, 133, 137, 141, 147, 188, 200 Americanity, 186 Anderson, Ben, 6, 49, 51–52, 83, 162 Apollonius of Tyana, 64, 67–68 assemblage, 12, 15, 37, 43, 68–69, 72, 77, 81, 99, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 144n7, 178–179, 182, 191, 197, 201, 207, 208,

209n8 Athanasiou, Athena, 140–141 attunement, 8, 12, 15, 30–31, 97–99, 102, 112, 117 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 96n5, 101, 180–181 Barthes, Roland, 7, 45, 96n5, 101, 157 Beaty, Nate, 147 becoming, 2–1, 2–3, 9, 13, 14–22, 25, 33, 36, 40, 59, 66, 69, 80, 87, 97, 108, 123, 143, 158–159, 169, 172, 179, 182, 183, 197–202, 198, 205 Beers, David, 81 Bennett, Jane, 78, 81, 91, 97, 100, 112, 117, 118 Berlant, Lauren, 19, 45, 46, 48, 96n5, 110, 128, 161, 164, 169 A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn , 70–73 bloom space, 83, 115–116, 117, 118, 198 body, 8, 9, 11–12, 15, 30, 33, 35, 49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67, 67–68, 73, 74, 83–84, 88, 100, 106, 111, 123, 126–127, 152, 152–153, 154, 161, 172, 177, 184, 201, 206 bounded fragment, 19, 28, 38, 62, 77 Boym, Svetlana, 155, 156, 165, 166 Bruno, Giuliana, 125, 132, 134–135, 136, 137, 144n5, 144n7, 144n14 Butler, Judith, 3, 13, 22n3, 23n6, 35, 36, 40, 43, 50, 53n4, 140–141, 143, 223

224

Index

145n17, 145n18, 162, 167, 168, 187, 199–200, 201 Canizaro, Vincent, 6, 25 cartography, 1, 2, 35, 71, 85, 89, 113, 114–115, 116, 117, 125, 132–133, 136, 144n11, 152, 155, 175, 177 Casey, Edward, 4–5, 9, 38, 42, 44, 61, 73, 84, 132, 144n6, 156, 157 chronotope, 180–181, 182, 192 circularity, 171, 172 Colebrook, Clare, 17, 158, 159, 164 coloniality, 57, 174, 177, 185, 186–187 compositionality, 15, 42, 81, 89, 99, 101, 113, 114, 115, 118, 121, 172, 174 Connor, Steven, 152–153 Cook, Nancy, 87 critical border thinking, 191. See also Mignolo, Walter critical regionalism, 17, 19, 25, 34–35, 35–44, 55, 62, 72, 82, 83, 118, 121, 182, 187, 203. See also Frampton, Kenneth; Jameson, Frederic; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Crouch, David, 12, 13–14, 19, 111, 148, 158, 169 cruel optimism, 21, 48, 110, 128, 141, 143. See also Berlant, Lauren Davis, Mike, 92, 93, 151, 174, 178, 186 de Certeau, Michel, 90, 94, 109 Debord, Guy, 135, 136, 144n14, 145n16. See also psychogeography; Situationists Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 2, 9, 10, 22n2, 33, 37, 40, 42, 66–67, 68, 74, 74n2, 75n6, 89, 96n5, 98, 103, 109, 122n8, 122n13, 130, 131, 141, 159, 201, 203, 208 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix, 1, 2–3, 9, 14, 14–17, 20, 25, 33, 37, 46, 48, 51, 66, 75n6, 82, 105–106, 108–109, 116, 121, 121n4, 122n14, 123, 124, 130, 131, 144n10, 148, 150, 156, 157, 158, 160, 167, 170n5, 170n6, 171, 172, 174–175, 177, 178–179, 181, 183, 185, 189, 191, 194n1, 198, 201 dirty realism, 53n7, 113, 149 Dorn, Ed, 57, 70, 72 Doty, Mark, 42, 105, 107, 120

existential territory, 180, 200 The Faraway Nearby, 123, 125, 129, 132, 137, 140, 142, 144n5 fictocriticism, 20, 98, 103, 103–105, 110, 118, 120 A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 126, 132, 134, 137, 140 Foster, Sesshu, 175, 194n3 Foucault, Michel, 48, 49, 66, 88, 89, 90, 96n5, 122n7, 132, 191, 202–203, 203, 205 Frampton, Kenneth, 19, 27–32, 34–35, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 55, 62, 77, 83, 97, 99, 121, 203 Frank, Robert, 46 fugitive, 3, 8, 12, 23n4, 52, 148, 149, 150, 167, 169, 199, 205 Garnett, William, 80, 86, 88, 90, 108 genealogy, 31, 87–89 Gibbs, Anna, 104, 110 Gibson, William, 174, 186 Gilroy, Paul, 94, 96n10 globality, 18, 23n9, 40, 121, 172, 174, 177, 178, 179, 194n2, 201 globalization, 16, 29, 40, 45, 172, 174, 176, 177, 179, 191, 192, 194n3, 201, 209n5 Goméz Peña, Guillermo, 134, 144n13, 174, 175 Guattari, Félix,, 174, 177, 181, 198, 201, 203–208 Haraway, Donna, 2, 11–12, 15, 16, 23n8, 96n5, 124, 126, 137, 140, 142, 156, 202, 205–206 Hansen, Ron, 42–44, 53n9 Harold’s Club, 164, 166 Heidegger, Martin, 4–5, 22n1, 30, 38, 42, 74n1, 84, 97, 99, 102, 105, 106, 107, 114, 175 Herr, Cheryl Temple, 37, 38 Highmore, Ben, 52, 82, 83, 97 Holy Land , 23n7, 77–95, 96n4, 96n5, 96n8, 108, 112, 194n4 Hope in the Dark, 20, 53n10, 126, 137 I Hotel, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180–189, 189–193

Index immanence, 46, 51, 78, 111, 113, 121n4, 172, 208 Infinite City , 133–135, 136, 145n15 Ingold, Tim, 9–10, 12, 22, 148, 150, 155, 160, 169, 200 Jameson, Frederic, 31, 32–33, 34, 36, 53n7 Kafka, Franz, 2, 148 Lakewood, 74n4, 77, 79–81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 85–87, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96n6, 97, 110; See also Holy Land Las Vegas, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 160 Latour, Bruno, 8, 15–16, 19, 23n8, 79, 81, 85–86, 89, 96n3, 96n9, 107, 109, 113, 148, 209n4 layering, 17, 19, 29, 34–35, 38, 39, 42, 62, 68, 82, 83, 88, 93, 104, 132, 134, 144n12, 185 Leach, Neil, 35, 36 Lefaivre, Lianne, 26, 29–31, 34, 37, 53n1 Lefebvre, Henri, 53n2, 77–78, 80, 94, 96n4, 116, 148, 160. See also Rhythmanalysis Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , 100–101, 103, 105–106, 117 Levinas, Emmanuel, 140, 145n17, 162 Lippard, Lucy, 14, 81 local, 2–3, 5, 6–8, 11, 12, 14–18, 18–20, 23n9, 26–29, 31–32, 34, 37, 39, 44, 45, 49, 53n5, 55, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 67, 70, 73–74, 74n4, 77, 80, 81, 85, 88, 89, 89–90, 92, 93, 99, 102, 103, 107, 112, 120, 122n8, 124, 126, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148–150, 172, 174, 177, 178, 184, 185, 186–188, 191, 192, 194n2, 198, 199, 200, 203, 207 Lombardi, Will, 147 Los Angeles, 84, 89, 90, 93–94, 114, 174, 175 Lynch, Kevin, 27, 30 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 22 Manifest Destiny, 2, 48, 64, 128, 133, 141, 151, 159, 182, 186, 189, 194n3 Manning, Erin, 66, 68, 184 mapping / remapping, 1, 43–44, 51, 56, 57, 58, 66, 85, 87, 124, 130, 131, 132–135,

225

136, 137, 141, 144n7, 153, 166, 174–175, 182, 200 Marks, Laura U., 80–81 Massey, Doreen, 39, 122n9, 128 Massumi, Brian, 17–18, 18, 33, 38, 52, 148, 167–168, 172, 200, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208 Matless, David, 3, 21, 22, 205, 208 The Maximus Poems , 7, 55, 58, 61, 62, 65, 69 McCormack, Derek, 4–5, 51, 52, 115, 177, 180, 185, 189, 192, 203–204 meshwork, 1, 10, 12, 22, 123, 126, 148, 160, 186, 200 Mignolo, Walter, 174, 186, 188, 191, 194n2, 195n9 minor, 2–3, 8, 9, 19, 20, 25, 45, 55, 82, 89, 103, 122n8, 123, 128, 130, 148–149, 172, 198–199, 203, 205, 207 The Motel Life, 147–148, 170n4, 195n7 Muecke, Stephen, 16, 20, 21, 97–99, 100–101, 102–104, 109–110, 116, 118, 172, 205, 209n3, 209n4. See also No Road (bitumen all the way) Mumford, Lewis, 26, 31 myth, 2–3, 7, 9, 11, 41, 45, 50, 62, 85, 99, 110, 128, 136, 137, 144n8, 147, 151, 155, 156–157, 159, 160, 164; national myth, 87, 128 Nebraska (film), 44–51, 51–52, 53n11, 53n13, 201 ‘Nebraska’ (story), 42–43 New Regionalism, 36, 84, 96n7 Newman, Paul, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163 nexus, 12, 21, 32, 37, 52, 55, 58, 62, 62–63, 68, 69, 70–71, 73, 117, 172, 200 No Road (bitumen all the way), 118 non-representation / more-thanrepresentation, 4–5, 7, 8, 17, 30, 33, 58, 69, 82–83, 111, 113, 114, 145n18, 192 Northline, 11, 21, 147–169, 172 nostalgia, 6, 34, 44, 49, 61, 93, 116, 165, 197; reflective nostalgia, 165, 166; restorative nostalgia, 155, 165 O’Sullivan, Simon, 185, 186, 203, 208 Olson, Charles, 7, 21, 39, 55–74, 75n8, 75n9, 97, 100, 108, 109, 114, 121n1,

226

Index

132, 170n6, 199, 202. See also Apollonius of Tyana; The Maximus Poems; West (Olson) ordinary / everyday, 18, 73, 77–78, 79, 81–82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 92–93, 95n2, 97, 101, 103, 106, 113, 116, 118, 148, 150, 156, 164, 197–198, 205, 208 Ordinary Affects, 43, 51, 78, 94, 99, 108–113, 113, 120, 122n10, 135, 159, 165, 167, 174, 178, 207 Packer, George, 41, 47 palimpsest, 37, 49, 52, 87, 89, 91, 132, 134, 135, 144n12, 177, 182 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 35, 83, 86 panorama, 16, 19, 188 Paterson, 55, 60, 61, 62 Paterson, Mark, 80–81 Payne, Alexander, 44–45, 46, 48, 51, 53n13 performative, 19, 28–34, 35–36, 57, 105, 109, 114, 200 polis, 7, 61–62, 62–63, 74, 74n4, 93 Polis Is This (film), 55, 73 Pollock, Jackson, 2, 66, 200 postwestern, 147, 159, 172, 174, 179, 191 Pound, Ezra, 60, 62 Powell, Douglas Reichert, 6, 17, 37, 38, 42, 82 precarity, 3, 141, 162, 168, 200 presencing, 38, 42, 106 Process and Reality, 10, 53n8, 57, 61, 62, 71 process philosophy, 7, 57, 59, 107. See also Whitehead, Alfred North projective, 20, 57–58, 61, 67, 68, 69, 74n1, 109, 114, 121n1, 170n6 Proust, Marcel, 17, 46 psychogeography, 135, 144n7, 165. See also Debord, Guy; Situationists Raban, Jonathan, 157 Rajchman, John, 1–2, 66, 109, 110, 113, 122n8, 122n12, 197 Rancière, Jacques, 2, 7, 19, 112–113 refrain, 100, 106, 113, 115–117, 118, 122n13, 171, 172, 177–178, 180–182, 184–186, 186–187, 189, 192, 197, 198–199, 203–204, 205, 208

regional worlding, 14, 113 regionality, 1, 2, 3–4, 6–8, 9, 10–12, 14–18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 31, 36, 37, 38–39, 44, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57–58, 59–60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 81, 82, 84, 88, 89, 93, 99, 99–100, 102, 104–105, 108, 112, 117, 120, 121, 122n8, 123, 130, 134, 137, 140, 144n12, 167, 172, 174, 177–179, 185, 187, 188, 192, 197–199, 200–201, 202, 205–206, 209n3; -as-compositionality, 121, 174–176; fictocritical, 104–105, 111, 113; fugitive, 167. See also affective critical regionality; regioning ‘Regionality’ (essay), 15, 118, 120 regioning, 4–5, 38, 39, 42, 44, 61, 63, 70, 73, 84, 117, 120, 175, 192, 201, 207 relationality, 12, 37, 38, 50, 127, 129, 133, 135, 137, 140–141, 145n18, 198 Reno, 147, 149, 158, 160, 163–164, 165–166, 166, 167, 169, 170n7 rhizomatic, 23n6, 62, 66, 81, 94, 110, 114, 130, 172, 176, 178, 181, 189 rhythm, 2, 12, 42, 45, 53n2, 77, 78, 79, 96n4, 97, 102, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 114, 124, 126, 130, 141, 150, 176, 181, 202 Rhythmanalysis, 53n2, 96n4 Ricoeur, Paul, 29 Royle, Nicholas, 130, 133, 143 Sauer, Carl O., 71–72, 73 Savage Dreams, 126–127, 129, 133, 137 Shaw, Lytle, 57, 59, 66 Shelton, Allen C., 200–201, 209n1 simple location, 9, 10, 12, 19, 38, 60–61, 68, 72, 79, 100, 116, 140, 156, 198, 200, 201, 202 situated knowledge, 11, 12, 124, 137, 140 Situationists, 135, 136, 144n14, 145n16. See also Debord, Guy; psychogeography smooth space, 48–49, 157, 158, 164, 170n6, 194n1. See also striated space Soja, Edward, 36–37, 84–85, 96n7, 194n6 Solnit, Rebecca, vii, 12, 20, 21, 53n10, 74, 113, 117, 122n16, 123–143, 144n2, 144n3, 144n8, 144n11, 145n15, 199, 209n3; See also Hope in the Dark; The

Index Faraway Nearby; The Field Guide to Getting Lost; Infinite City; Savage Dreams Speck, Lawrence, 25 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 40, 42, 43, 49, 96n3, 187 Springsteen, Bruce, 47, 53n13 Steger, Manfred, 178 Steiner, George, 105–106, 114 Steiner, Michael C., 2, 3, 6, 9 Stengers, Isabelle, 22n3, 87, 202 Stewart, Kathleen, vii, 12, 14, 15, 21, 36, 42–43, 51, 53n6, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 89, 92–93, 94, 95n2, 96n3, 96n5, 97–121, 121n3, 121n6, 122n11, 126, 130, 135, 144n9, 150, 159, 165, 167, 169, 172, 174, 180, 192–193, 197–198, 198, 205–206, 207, 208. See also Ordinary Affects; ‘Regionality’ (essay) Storper, Michael, 84, 194n6 Stott, William, 101 striated space, 48, 156, 157, 170n5, 194n1 subjugated knowledge, 48, 49, 89, 132 suburbs, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83–84, 86, 88, 89, 89–91, 92–93, 95n1, 108; See also Holy Land; Waldie, D. J. tactility, 15, 19, 28, 30, 31, 35, 48, 72, 83, 86, 97, 99, 121, 137, 156, 172 Taussig, Michael, 21, 96n5, 101, 103, 104, 121n2, 172 A Thousand Plateaus, 9, 75n6, 121n4. See also Delueze, Giles, and Guattari, Felix Thrift, Nigel, 33, 67, 82, 128, 148 Trigg, Dylan, 49 Tropic of Orange , 114, 144n13, 174–180, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 192, 193 Tsing, Anna, 172 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 64, 154, 155

227

Ty, Eleanor, 172 Tzonis, Alexander, 26, 29–31, 34, 37, 53n1 Vann, David, 47, 48 vibrant materiality, 93, 100, 118. See also Bennett, Jane Vizenor, Gerald, 12 Vlautin, Willy, vii, 11, 21, 53n7, 78, 113, 147–169, 170n7, 195n7, 205; See also The Motel Life; Northline vulnerability, 3, 12, 50, 90, 92, 94, 140, 141, 152, 163, 167, 168 Waldie, D. J., vii, 11, 21, 23n7, 53n12, 74n4, 77–95, 95n2, 96n3, 96n4, 96n5, 96n6, 96n8, 96n9, 96n10, 97, 102, 105, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 132, 136, 144n11, 145n16, 177, 194n4, 207. See also Holy Land West (Olson), 55, 65–66, 68–69, 70–71 westness, 2, 93, 154, 155, 160, 172 Whitehead, Alfred North, 7–9, 10, 12, 15, 22n2, 22n3, 37, 38–39, 40, 53n3, 53n4, 53n8, 57, 58, 58–61, 62, 62–64, 65, 68–69, 70–72, 73, 74, 107, 114, 121, 174, 197, 198, 204; See also Process and Reality Williams, James, 7–8, 60 Williams, Raymond, 95n2, 96n3 Williams, William Carlos, 55, 60, 61, 62, 70; See also Paterson Wister, Owen, 154–155 worlding, 97, 102, 106, 107, 108, 113–116, 117, 120, 172, 174, 180, 192, 200–201, 208. See also regional worlding Yamashita, Karen Tei, 21, 114, 171–193, 194n5, 195n8, 205, 207. See also I Hotel; Tropic of Orange