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Abstract: This paper introduces the notion of ‘state affects’ to describe the errancies that often characterize everyday statist relations. Where structured conditions and intelligibilities, such as the government of populations, engender state effects that veil the state's non-existence, state affects, I argue, enroll bodies and differentiate masses through what Secor has called ‘unrecognizable conditions.’ Particularly where such conditions are bungled and baffling, they constitute a field of problems that enable the formulation of an affective ‘politics of confusion.’ Several models of affect and emotion provide a glimpse at the possible biological–methodological and epistemological–ontological stakes of such negotiations of affective uncertainty in state errancies. I anchor these to Spinoza's notion of ‘inadequate ideas,’ a mode of embodied not-knowing that has important political consequences for describing the opacity of affect in everyday encounters. Finally, the New York City Police Department's bungled management of protest during the 2004 Republican National Convention offers multiple lenses for reading the spectrum of ways in which deployments of the state's monopoly on violence and the work of its ostensibly dissociated materialities sustain the political tensions between a state's non-existence and its affectiva-emotive power. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper offers a further exploration of ‘flat ontology’, an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site – via site ontology– as an ‘event-space’ that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and dispersing bodies. This paper’s contribution lies in considering how politics and political potentials are specified by such event-spaces. In geography and other fields, politics has nearly always been thought to proceed from and to exist for subjects, regardless of how they get theorized. Here we explore how the site might initiate politics that neither presuppose nor undergird individual subject positionalities or mass identitarian categories. We argue that subjectivity – widely understood to be the motive force in organizing politics – is often ‘suspended’ where bodies encounter or get enlisted in the unanticipated connections and relations that site ontology describes. Thus, our account understands the site as autonomous with respect to the subject in two crucial ways. The site is: (1) organizationally autonomous: its rules emerge from its specific, localized relations and this material immanence makes the site the legislator of its own assembly; and (2) politically autonomous: that is, not conditioned by the political schemata of subjectivity per se, even though sites diversely and differently enlist and reshuffle bodies that often attend to, direct, participate in, and inhabit subjective politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The macro-micro distinction is one of the most powerful in the human and physical sciences. In this article we challenge the macro by positing an alternative that recognises the intricacies and complexities of material geographies. We employ the Latin proverb – Aquila non captat muscas (Eagles don't catch flies) – to epitomise our position. Instead of looking to general theory – the bird's eye view – we argue for interrogating the ontological and methodological implications of a reciprocal, but antithetical, perspective – that of the flies. We call this alternative the site, an ontology that attempts to account for the different and varying political possibilities – virtually infinite and ‘un-catalogue-able’– constantly at work in the world. The site is a formulation that recognises social life as a realm of infinite singularity and variability, where matter is immanently self-organising and pure difference unfolds. We explore the spatiality of the site through the concepts of topology and difference and then develop four methodological orientations for exploring the terrain of situated practices enmeshed in and unfolding through sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we offer some criticisms regarding the spatial ontologies that have underwritten theories of globalization. We evaluate different approaches to understanding their workings, each of which must grapple with the problem of connecting the local and the global, and contrast these to that of our recent work aimed at elaborating a 'flat ontology'. The central feature of this alternative ontology is the site: a material localization characterized by differential relations through which one site is connected to other sites, out of which emerges a social space that can be understood to extend, however unevenly and temporarily, across distant places. Yet, in light of its focus on practices - on situated sayings and doings - our ontology must refuse the spatial imaginaries that underpin nearly all discussions of globalization. To illustrate our position we examine the practices of popular filmmaking within Lagos, Nigeria (Nollywood). This site is an entry point for comprehending and enlarging upon the political implications of our ontology - one that is meant not only to rethink globalization but to unsettle the abstractions that enable its expanding hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of scale in human geography has been profoundly transformed over the past 20 years. And yet, despite the insights that both empirical and theoretical research on scale have generated, there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized. In this paper we critique the dominant – hierarchical – conception of scale, arguing it presents a number of problems that cannot be overcome simply by adding on to or integrating with network theorizing. We thereby propose to eliminate scale as a concept in human geography. In its place we offer a different ontology, one that so flattens scale as to render the concept unnecessary. We conclude by addressing some of the political implications of a human geography without scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]