Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises

Abstract

Attachment is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary cultural geography. Cultural geography is full of relations that look like attachments. But attachment as a concept is mostly absent, used interchangeably with association, connection or simply relation per se. In this article, I respond to dissatisfaction with the flattening effects of the relational turn by arguing for a cultural geography orientated to attachments. Engaging with the work of Lauren Berlant and other feminist and queer theory in dialogue with actor-network theory, I conceptualise attachments as enduring trajectories that ‘bring closer’ something which comes to feel necessary to a way of life. This means that ‘objects’ of attachment – whether a person or a place, a song or a nation or anything else – come to be encountered as promises. To understand the (de/re)composition of attachments, this paper offers two concepts. Forms of attachment are arrangements that make available promises to be attached to. They channel the optimism of attachment. The presence of the promissory object intensifies in scenes of attachment – everyday space-times of limited duration which give an affective push to forms of attachment. The result of orientating inquiry to forms and scenes of attachment is a cultural geography of promises.