Compulsive geographies and desire

In order to understand ‘human being’, human geographers have engaged with the spatialities and geographies of the human body in how it constitutes the ways humans engage with place. They have done so by situating the corporeal as affected by a multiplicity of extracorporealities producing a conceptualisation of engagements with place as intentional and reflective in nature. Whilst this captures the vast majority of human engagement with place, vital elements that tend to occur beyond our immediate attention seem to escape these conceptualisations, because they happen in-between more charismatic gestures. These bodily engagements with place are to a large extent less or even unintentional, not goal-oriented, involuntary and pre-reflexive. This renders the body agential in the production of geographies in ways this paper engages with through the notion of compulsivity. It does so by examining a particular kind of body that has strong compulsive tendencies; a body affected by Tourette syndrome. This phenomenon urges the body into physical interactions (e.g. compulsive touching, ordering) with affective environments. By reimagining Tourette syndrome through the Deleuzean rhetoric of desire, this papers aims to explore how the human body produces a geography of compulsivity, and what this means for human enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Additionally, it contributes to ways of ‘alternative’ engagements with the world (Hansen & Philo, 2007) through human conditions that potentially through their medicalisation have been marginalised. References: Hansen & Philo (2007) The normalcy of doing things differently: bodies, spaces and disability geography. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 98 (4): 493–506

Towards compulsive geographies

This paper presents a spatial imagining of compulsivity. Deconstructing its medicalised conceptualisation and its rendition through the diagnostic system, the paper offers a performative analysis of compulsive body–world formation. It does so by introducing compulsivity as urging the performance of acts that are unwanted, purposeless, and meaningless, and that nevertheless enlace the corporeal with and through the extracorporeal on unchosen terms. This analysis of compulsions not only develops the dimension of urgency to nonrepresentational theory in cultural geography. It also develops the critical performative understanding of medicalised phenomena in disability and health geography by considering compulsivity as a more-than-human condition. Indeed, reporting on interviews, participant observations, and mobile eye-tracking sessions with 15 people diagnosed with Tourette syndrome, compulsions seem to emerge from particularly volatile compositions of bodies, objects and spaces. The paper then conceives of compulsivity as articulating the material sensibilities emerging with the body’s unfolding situation, and propels it beyond the diagnosable in a broader humanity engaging in material interactions that are felt, rather than known. In addition to a geography of compulsivity, a geographical rendering and ontological centring of compulsions creates a compulsive geography. Ultimately, it situates geographical analysis as crucial to understanding this medicalised performance and as potentially generative of therapeutic outcomes

Compulsive geographies and desire

In order to understand ‘human being’, human geographers have engaged with the spatialities and geographies of the human body in how it constitutes the ways humans engage with place. They have done so by situating the corporeal as affected by a multiplicity of extracorporealities producing a conceptualisation of engagements with place as intentional and reflective in nature. Whilst this captures the vast majority of human engagement with place, vital elements that tend to occur beyond our immediate attention seem to escape these conceptualisations, because they happen in-between more charismatic gestures. These bodily engagements with place are to a large extent less or even unintentional, not goal-oriented, involuntary and pre-reflexive. This renders the body agential in the production of geographies in ways this paper engages with through the notion of compulsivity. It does so by examining a particular kind of body that has strong compulsive tendencies; a body affected by Tourette syndrome. This phenomenon urges the body into physical interactions (e.g. compulsive touching, ordering) with affective environments. By reimagining Tourette syndrome through the Deleuzean rhetoric of desire, this papers aims to explore how the human body produces a geography of compulsivity, and what this means for human enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Additionally, it contributes to ways of ‘alternative’ engagements with the world (Hansen & Philo, 2007) through human conditions that potentially through their medicalisation have been marginalised. References: Hansen & Philo (2007) The normalcy of doing things differently: bodies, spaces and disability geography. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 98 (4): 493–506

Compulsieve interacties: Hoe je omgeving jouw tics stuurt

This is a report of the findings of my PhD research into compulsive interactions between people with Tourette syndrome and thier bodily environment. It is written in Dutch and aimed at people with Tourette syndrome as the periodical that published it is affiliated with the Dutch patient organisation 'Stichting Gilles de la Tourette' (tourette.nl

Geographies of compulsive interactions: bodies, objects, spaces

This doctoral thesis introduces compulsivity as an empirical, conceptual and theoretical phenomenon to human geography. Compulsivity as mobilised here is associated with the Tourette syndrome diagnosis, and can be understood as the performance of unwanted and unprecedented interactions that are experienced to be purposeless and meaningless in their response to unqualified urges. Drawing on and contributing to medical and clinical sciences of Tourette syndrome, geographies of medicalised performances and perception, as well poststructural and postphenomenological theories in cultural geography, it focuses on the performativity of compulsive interactions between affected bodies and their material environments. As urge-driven compulsions have received little to no scholarly attention, the study seeks to identify if and how a spatial approach could help understand these engagements. In turn, it explores how compulsivity as a principle could develop geography’s conceptualisations of person-place relations. The study then examines the ways in which bodily environments affect compulsive interactions, and how they are negotiated. It does so through in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and mobile eye-tracking in close collaboration with 15 participants. The study took place in the homes of the participants, shops, cars, public transport, natural areas, and schools in the Netherlands over an 8-month period. The outcomes reimagine compulsivity as choreographies between human bodies, objects and spaces that configure towards each other and form systems through dimensions they then come to share. Compulsive interactions constitute, affirm, and (re)stabilise these systems by elongating their durations in order for those affected to thrive. In their anticipation and performance of compulsions, they apply a plethora of spatial negotiation techniques. In addition to carving out a space for a compulsive approach to body-world formation beyond the Tourette syndrome diagnosis, this study develops a vitalist ethics for human geography to study medicalised performances. Furthermore, it proposes new ways for capacity building for, and integration in, academic research of those affected