Non-Representational Theory
From Geography
The non-representational theory is a theory that is developed mostly through the work of Nigel Thrift who himself drew on the works of Deleuze and de Certeau and was helped by his colleague J.D. Dewsbury. It is a theory used in Human Geography which focuses on the idea that geographies to life and thought are practiced, it seeks to immerse itself in everyday practice. Thrift came up with the non-representational theory because most of the human geographical thinking was dominated by the mode of representational thinking, especially in cultural geography. He wanted to re-focus cultural geographers concerns onto performativity and bodily practices and engage them ‘more actively with the heterogeneous entanglements of practice’ (Latour, 1990).Non-representational theory takes the recurrent theme of movement and works with it as a means of going beyond Constructivism. Thrift noticed that much of the work of geographers was based on epistemological models which created gaps between theory and practice and thought and action. Instead non-representational geographers are concerned with the practices of everyday life. Non-representational thinking tends towards an academic style which is rather concerned with describing and present, instead of diagnosing and represent. (Cadman 2009, p. 1-6) According to Hayden Lorimer non-representational theory is, ‘an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks to better cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds’ (Lorimer 2005: 83). Thrift recognises this as he say non-representational theory has become increasingly difficult to pin down since its original inception.
References:
Cadman, L. (2009). Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies. Elsevier inc., Glasgow.
Latour, B. (1990) ‘Drawing things together’, Lynch M. and Woolgar S. (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice, 19-68, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Comments on “Conclusion: From Society to Collective—Can the Social Be Reassembled?” pp. 247-262.
Lorimer, H. (2005) ‘Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational,’’ Progress in Human Geography, 29 (1) 83-94
Published by Ivar le Loux & Jorg Schröder
