On Geography and Materiality

Abstract

In the context of human geography's encounter with the problematics that surround matter and materiality, this paper offers a principle that works towards a distinctive material imagination. This principle states that our image of matter should be multiplied, so that it can be attended to as taking place with the properties and capacities of any element or state. We elaborate this principle through three substantive discussions of materiality as turbulent, as interrogative, and as excessive. In doing so we draw upon, in turn, forms of relational materialism associated with actor-network theory, the postphenomenologies of Lingis, the animate or enchanted materialism developed by Bennett, and the figurative and affective (im)materialities of Deleuze. The conclusion clarifies why we do not call for geography to be ‘rematerialised’.