Internal Geopoetics: Toward a Non-Extractive Presence of Place

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

This article proposes a new theory of place beyond physical displacement, tourism, and spatial consumption. Anchored in a form of embodied consciousness and respectful opacity, it offers a mode of being-in-the-world that aligns with ecological, poetic, and ethical imperatives. Drawing from Glissant’s “right to opacity,” Didi-Huberman’s “survivance,” and Laura U. Marks’ “haptic visuality,” it imagines a new diplomacy of place: one that feels, listens, and honors without seizing.

The End of Travel as Epistemology

To travel has become a form of epistemic violence. The body moves, but the subject remains absent—capturing images, collecting names, “doing countries” like products. This logic is colonial at its core. In contrast, the autonomous subject—lucid, anchored, and unbound by spectacle—no longer needs to move to know. The essence of a place is not consumed; it is intuited.

This is not about escapism or cultural tourism through screens. It is a radical reinvention of relationality: the ability to sense a place without touching it, to feel its rhythms without imprinting oneself upon it. The place remains sovereign.

A Cartography of Frequencies

Some places resonate with us not because we’ve walked their streets, but because we’ve already housed them within. Through dreams, sensations, memories not lived but received, we access a form of geopoetic intimacy. Reza Negarestani speaks of xenogeography—geographies that move through us, altering our internal terrain. We could call this cartography of frequencies: not map-reading, but wave-tuning.

This aligns with Laura U. Marks’ haptic visuality, where knowing does not pass through distance or classification, but through skin, breath, smell, grain. The subject becomes a receptor, not a colonizer of meaning.

The Right to Remain Opaque

Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” becomes central here. Places, like people, have the right not to reveal themselves. The new subject no longer seeks to decode or archive, but to encounter without mastery. This is an anti-touristic ethic: letting the place remain unknowable, and oneself remain disarmed.

Opacity is not ignorance—it is reverence. It is the refusal to translate everything into the legible, the profitable, or the narratable.

A Sanctuary-Based Lifeform

Instead of flights and visas, this theory proposes the chamber—a sanctum, a condensed cosmos. The subject, anchored in a minimal life, cultivates a dense and luminous form of awareness. No longer scattered across airports, identities, or curated feeds, they become radically present.

This is also a form of environmental ethics: low energy consumption, no emissions, no waste of bodies or places. It is a form of kinetic asceticism—a refusal to move for the sake of it, and a return to the dignity of stillness.

Memory Without Possession

Georges Didi-Huberman writes about the “survivance” of images—not what they represent, but what they transmit across time. In the same way, places can be “remembered” without being visited. A sound, a knot, a wind in the curtains can hold entire continents. This is a non-possessive memory—a reterritorialization of knowledge without violence.

Tim Ingold speaks of “wayfaring” as a mode of dwelling: not walking over the world but walking with it. The subject of internal geopoetics no longer tours the world—they become a sensitive point in its resonance field.

Toward a Non-Extractive Aesthetics

This mode of being reshapes art, love, and knowledge. It requires no proof of having “been there.” No photos. No footprints. Only attunement. A deep ethics of relation where nothing is taken, and everything is felt. A silent diplomacy. A lucid withdrawal from the imperialism of presence.

This is not a retreat—it is a new presence: ethical, poetic, and opaque.

Internal geopoetics is not just a theory—it is a stance, a life-form, a refusal to conquer. It respects time, space, and the right of places to remain mysterious. It offers an embodied resistance to the violence of overexposure. And it reminds us that the truest intimacy may lie not in going everywhere, but in vibrating deeply, from where we are.