The meaning of attachment: Cruel intensions

Abstract

In this commentary, I address some of the assumptions of a geography focused on teleological promises. Ben Anderson presented attachment as a kind of relation with special endurance and significance, differentiating it from relations which may be entangled. As a result, the power of attachments lies in one's aspirations: they may turn abstract objects into proximal objects. I am responding to two emphases of the concept: on meaning and on sensuous attachment. I revisit Anderson and subsequent commentaries by Cockayne and Ruez, Coleman, Rose and Zhang plumbing their shared theoretical roots in Lauren Berlant and Michel Foucault for connective tissue. I refer casually to the rich literature in analytic philosophy on meaning. Caveat lector that there exists a lengthy debate on ‘belief–desire’ in philosophy and psychology about whether these affects alone may cause human action or if they need an external object: how can we know what we want if we do not know about it? For lack of space and geography, I will not cover this topic, and furthermore I am not bridging the chasm between analytic and continental philosophy; but both present methodological difficulties to attachment-as-placemaking.