Authority is not a word with many positive connotations. It suggests power-hungry dictators, trigger-happy police, stifling bureaucracies, and monumental urban landscapes. In Nonauthoritarian Authority Julian Brigstocke argues that in these shattered times, anti-authoritarianism is not enough: a radical, speculative reinvention of authority is needed. He introduces the idea of nonauthoritarian authority: a form of power that pluralises marginalised and hidden voices, recognises diverse agencies, and amplifies heterogeneous demands.
Engaging with key philosophical debates around materiality, experience, feeling, agency, and landscape, Nonauthoritarian Authority stages a series of experiments with thinking, reading, researching, and writing nonauthoritarian authority. Dramatising a speculative search for barely sensed, dispersed authorities, Brigstocke’s experiments in thinking explore the intrinsically spatial nature of authority, through empirical studies of violent urban borders in Rio de Janeiro, colonial material infrastructures in Hong Kong, monumental architecture in Paris, and everyday spaces of encounter in the UK.
Offering an intricate and playful reflection on the relationship between authority, urban forms, and writing, each exercise in thinking links form and genre to a distinctive way of imagining authority. Each chapter simultaneously critiques a form of authoritarian authority and searches for a new, nonauthoritarian authority within the rubble of the old.
By:
Julian Brigstocke
Imprint: LSE Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781911712558
ISBN 10: 1911712551
Series: RGS-IBG Book Series
Pages: 270
Publication Date: 26 March 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Adult education
,
Further / Higher Education
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of figures About the series About the author Acknowledgements 1. Authority and modernity 2. Attuning to emergent, everyday, ordinary authorities 3. Spaces and aesthetics of authority 4. Four speculative figures of authority: attention, care, birth, attunement 5. Lectio divina – reading Arendt’s ‘What is authority? 6. Authority, authorship, form, and genre: a horoscope for the neurotic and paranoid 7. Atmospheric authority and emotional borderwork in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro First cut: women’s lived experiences of authority Second cut: material embodiments of authority Third cut: atmospheric authority 8. Landscapes of thinking, or, where am I when I think? 9. Granular authority, bureaucracy, and the aesthetics of sand in colonial Hong Kong 10. Authority, modernity, and the factory of emotions 11. Speculative provocations for a nonauthoritarian authority Appendix: Methodological note References Index
Julian Brigstocke is a Reader in Human Geography at Cardiff University, UK. His interests focus on the spatialities of authority, power, and violence, through post- and decolonial, feminist, and nonrepresentational lenses. He is interested in experimental, embodied, and creative research methods, including experiments with the forms of academic writing.
