Non-Representational Theory 

Space | politics | affect

Nigel Thrift 

Routledge 
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Preface	vii
	Acknowledgements	ix 

1 Life, but not as we know it 

PART I	27 
2	Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist 
	commodification 	29 
3	Still life in nearly present time: the object of nature 	56 
4 	Driving in the city 	75 
5 	Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness	89 

PART II 	107 

6	Afterwords	109 

PART III	151 

7	From born to made: technology, biology, and space 	153 
8	Spatialities of feeling 	171 
9	But malice aforethought	198 
10	Turbulent passions: towards an understanding of the
	affective spaces of political performance	220 

	Notes	255
	Bibliography	279
	Index	314

	This book summarizes and extends a batch of work carried out since the late 1990s concerned with what I call non-representational theory. On one level this is a book about the dynamics of susceptibility and about how we are being made susceptible in new ways. Of course, we are continually being made into new creatures by all kinds of forces, but it is surely the case that as the world is forced to hce up to the damage done, so we can no longer move along the same cul-de-sacs of practical- cum-conceptual possibilities. Other possibilities need to be alighted upon for thinking about the world. That requires boosting inventive attitude so as to produce more contrary motion.
	Then, on another level, this is a book about apathy. Given what has to be faced, it seems important to find a way of expanding the capacity for action in a world in which action is severely circumscribed. But it is not the heroic, individualized and autonomous action of a certain kind of activist -'self-confident and free of worry, capable of vigorous, wilful activity' (Walzer 1988: 313) -that I want to concentrate on in this book. Rather, rediscovering, at least to an extent, seventeenth-century notions of agency and selfhood, it is an action that can be associated with passivity, but a passivity that is demanding, that is called forth by another (Gross 2006).
	In days when the Iraq War, Afghanistan, 9/11, 7/7 and other such events often seem to have claimed total occupation of the Western academic psyche, and many academics have reacted accordingly with mammoth statements about warfare, imperialism, capitalism, global warming, and numerous other waypoints on the road to perdition, it is difficult to remember that other kinds of political impulse might also have something to say, something smaller and larger, something which is in danger of being drowned out. Instead this book keeps faith with the small but growing number of determined experimentalists who think that too often we have been asking the wrong questions in the wrong way: those who want to re-materialize democracy, those who want to think about the exercise of association, those who want to make performances in the interstices of everyday life, those who are intent on producing new and more challenging environments, those who want to redesign everyday things, those who, in other words, want to generate more space to be unprecedented, to love what aids fantasy, and so to gradually break down imaginative resistance. Rather like Darwin's restless earthworms, slowly going about the work of tilling the soil (Graham and Thrift 2007), they are attempting
viii Preface

to make progress in reworking the background by producing new and more productive entanglements. The intent is to produce a political genre in much the same manner that, in the history of painting, the work of the assistants who carried out the painting of the background gradually comes into the light. What was formerly understood as the cheap stuff to be inserted by the apprentices is gradually foregrounded as the genre of landscape painting. The side panels take to centre stage. 
	Of course, all of this is very easy to misread, especially if you want -even need -to do so. Surely we should all be concentrating our attention on the millions without food or water, the terrible wars, the multiple oppressions that characterize so many people's lives. But this kind of linearization of intent, classically associated with those who want to configure a centre that thinks radical practices (Colectivo Situaciones 2005), too often elides the complex, emergent world in which we live, in which it is by no means clear that everyone could or should suddenly reach a point of clarity and unanimity about means and ends, yet alone a state of com- passion. This is a world that is simultaneously monstrous and wonderful, banal and bizarre, ordered and chaotic, a world that is continually adding new hybrid inhabitants, and a world in which the human is consequently up for grabs as 'human nature (the phrase already innocent, nostalgically distant) is melting, running off in unpredictable directions' (Rotman 2000: 591.l 
	Those involved in the kinds of projects that I have mentioned certainly see the imprints of power but they do not believe that everylung enters the machine: for example, there can be moments of relation of which no residue remains upon which therefore we may not easily be able to reflect but which can still have grip. Nor do they believe that everyone enters into a contract as an 'individual' with her own body and can therefore easily manifest intention. Rather there are flows of what is and is not subjectivity (WaU 1999) making their ways across fields of flesh, touching some parts and not others, and it has become clear that these flows of subjectivity need to and do involve more and more actors -various kinds of things, various other biological beings, even the heft of a particular landscape -in a continuous undertow of matterings that cannot be reduced to simple transactions but can become part of new capacities to empower.
	In days when the Iraq War, Afghanistan, 9/11, 7/7 and other such events often seem to have claimed total occupation of the Western academic psyche, and many academics have reacted accordingly with mammoth statements about warfare, imperialism, capitalism, global warming, and numerous other waypoints on the road to perdition, it is difficult to remember that other kinds of political impulse might also have something to say, something smaller and larger, something which is in danger of being drowned out. Instead this book keeps faith with the small but growing number of determined experimentalists who think that too often we have been asking the wrong questions in the wrong way: those who want to re-materialize democracy, those who want to think about the exercise of association, those who want to make performances in the interstices of everyday life, those who are intent on producing new and more challenging environments, those who want to redesign everyday things, those who, in other words, want to generate more space to be unprecedented, to love what aids fantasy, and so to gradually break down imaginative resistance. Rather like Darwin's restless earthworms, slowly going about the work of tilling the soil (Graham and Thrift 2007), they are attempting

Acknowledgements  
One of the banal but still important principles of non-representational theory is that all work is joint: the idea that such a thing as a single author is there to be named is faintly ludicrous. Rather, all books seem to me to be in the nature of treated novels like Tom Phillips's wonderfbl(2005 [1980]) A H~mzment,fdl to the bh with the thoughts of a host of others, alive and dead. I would like to name and thank some of these others who have commented on one or more of the chapters in this book: Jeremy Ahearne, Ash Amin, Jakob Arnoldi, Andrew Barry, Ryan Bishop, Virginia Blum, Dede Boden, Scaren Buhl, Geof Bowker, Chris Castiglia, Tom Conley, Verena Andermatt Conley, Gail Davies, J-D Dewsbury, Stuart Elden, Chris Gosden, Steve Graham, Pad Harrison, Kevin Hetherington, Ben Highmore, Alex Kacelnik, Baz Kershaw, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Steen Nepper Larsen, Bruno Latour, John Law, Beverly Lear, Celia Lury, Derek McCormack, Gregor Maclennan, Bill Maurer, David Midgley, Brian Morris, Meaghan Morris, Dana Nelson, Melissa Orlie, Tom Osborne, David Parkin, Claire Pearson, Victoria Perks, Dag Petersson, John Phiilips, Chris Philo, Paul Rabinow, Alan Read, Nikolas Rose, Richard Sennett, Michael Sheringham, Peter Slojterdijk, Bent Scarenson, David Stark, Helen Thomas, Grahame Thompson, Frederik Tygsmp, John Urry, Deb Verhoeven, Valerie Walkerdine, Sarah Whatmore, Martin White, Steve Woolgar, and Katharine Young. 

Chapter 1: for this book 

PART I 
Chapter 2: first published in 2006 in Economy and Society (reproduced courtesy of Routledge) 
Chapter 3: first published in 2001 in Body and Society (reproduced courtesy of Sage (0 Sage Publications, 2000) by permission of Sage Publications) 
Chapter 4: first published in 2004 in Theory, Culture, and Society (reproduced courtesy of Sage (Sage Publications, 2000) by permission of Sage Publications)
	In days when the Iraq War, Afghanistan, 9/11, 7/7 and other such events often seem to have claimed total occupation of the Western academic psyche, and many academics have reacted accordingly with mammoth statements about warfare, imperialism, capitalism, global warming, and numerous other waypoints on the road to perdition, it is difficult to remember that other kinds of political impulse might also have something to say, something smaller and larger, something which is in danger of being drowned out. Instead this book keeps faith with the small but growing number of determined experimentalists who think that too often we have been asking the wrong questions in the wrong way: those who want to re-materialize democracy, those who want to think about the exercise of association, those who want to make performances in the interstices of everyday life, those who are intent on producing new and more challenging environments, those who want to redesign everyday things, those who, in other words, want to generate more space to be unprecedented, to love what aids fantasy, and so to gradually break down imaginative resistance. Rather like Darwin's restless earthworms, slowly going about the work of tilling the soil (Graham and Thrift 2007), they are attempting

x Acknowledgements

Chapter 5: first published in 2005 in Economy and Society (reproduced courtesy of Routledge) 

PART II

Chapter 6: first published in Environment and Planning. D: Society and Space (reproduced courtesy of Pion)

PART III

Chapter 7: first published in 2004 in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers(reproduced courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society, courtesy of Blackwell Publishing)

Chapter 8: first published in 2004 in GeorajskaAnnaler (reproduced courtesy of Blackwell Publishing)

Chapter 9: first published in 2005 in Transactions of the Institute of British Geopaphers(reproduced courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society, courtesy of Blackwell Publishing)

Chapter 10: for this book.
1 Life, but not as we know it  
When it was enthusiastically pointed out within memory of ow present Academy that race or gender or nation. . . were so many social constructions, inventions, and representations, a window was opened, an invitation to begin the critical process of analysis and culmd reconstruction was offered.. . . The brlliance of the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking what's the next step? What do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable? How come culture appears so natural? 
(Taussig 1993: mi) 
'production7' then7 is used according to the meaning of its etymological root 
(i.e. Latin producere) that refers to the act of 'bringing forth' an object in space. (Gumbrecht 2004: xiii) 
a knowledge of arrangement or disposition is, of all others, the most useful. (Humphrey Repton 1803, cited in Wall 2006: 6) 
But can we really assume that the reading of such texts is a reading exclusively concentrated on meaning? Do we not sing these texts? Shodd the process by which a poem speaks be ody carried by a meaning intention? Is there not, at the same time, a truth that lies in its performance? This, I think, is the task with which the poem confronts us. 
(Gadamer 2000, cited in Gumbrecht 2004: 64) 
we can and we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards a world of which we trust the other parts to meet om jump. (James 1999 [1911]: 230) 

Introduction 

Since the early 1990s I have been engaged in an attempt to develop what I call non-representational theory. The chapters in this book are some of the later results of that project, following on in a direct Line from Spatial Formations (Thrift 1996) and Knowing Capitalism (Thrift 2005a). Indeed, the three books should be considered together: they are all part and parcel of the same economic-cum- cultural-cum-political venture.

Life, but not as we know it 2

	How to characterize this particular book's contents, then? Stripped to its bare s, this is a book about the geography of what happens. In large part, it is therefore a work of description of the bare bones of actual occasions but it does not, I hope, adopt a passive stance to its object of enquiry: what is present in experience. And not just because -as I have tried to make clear here and elsewhere -the content of what is present in experience has changed radically. For this is also a book about how these actual occasions, howsoever they may have been altered, might be enlivened -made more responsive and more active -by the application of a series of procedures and techniques of expression. In other words, it is intended as the beginning of an outline of the art of producing a permanent supplement to the ordinary, a sacrament for the everyday, a hymn to the superfluous.
	If that sounds too tentative, a little bit tortuous, or even rather portentous, then I am afraid that that is how it will have to be. This is a tentative book because it is not entirely clear what a politics of what happens might look like -indeed, given that so much of what I want to outline is avowedly experimental, perhaps too much in the way of clarity should not necessarily be counted as a good thing2 (although straightaway I can hear the criticisms from those who believe that theory should slide home like a bolt). It is a little bit tortuous because there is a lot of ground-clearing to do, a lot of hacking back of the theoretical undergrowth in order to get to the nub of the matter. And it is portentous because it involves taking some of the small signs of everyday life for wonders and this involves all manner of risks, and not least pretentiousness. All I can say is that I think that the risk is worth it in order to achieve a diagnosis of the present which is simultaneously a carrier wave for new ways of doing things. 
	Certainly, in order to achieve its goals, this book has to be three things at once. First, it has to be a work of social and cultural theory.  The book builds on a series of cognate traditions in order to construct what I hope is a convincing account of how the worlds4 are, given that encounters are all there is, and their results cannot be pre-given (although they can, of course, be pre-treated). Complex trajectories rather than blurred genres, as Strathern (1999: 25) puts it. But, second, the book also has to be a diagnostic tool. It is intended to be a work that takes some of the specificities of the present moment and weaves them into what might be called a speculative topography. The contours and content of what happens constantly change: for example, there is no stable 'human' experience because the human sensorium is constantly being re-invented as the body continually adds parts in to itself; therefore how and what is experienced as experience is itself variable.  Then, third and finally, the book is intended as a political contribution to the task of reconsidering our hopes for ourselves. This is, after all, a time in which the invention of new 'everyday' forms of democracy has become a part of the political ambition of many people, in which the 'local' and the 'global' have become increasingly awkward political terms but no satisfactory alternative to the connected separation they imply seems to exist, and in which 'what each of us feels capable of (Ginsborg 2005: 7) is perceived as a vital political issue. The small offering that this book attempts to make to these three debates, and especially to the last 

Life, but not as we know it 3 

one, is an opening up of new political domains which it is then possible to make a corresponding political rumpus about. The book is, most especially then, an attempt to produce an art of the invention of political invention by putting hard questions to the given in experience, the overall intent being to call new publics into existence who will pose questions to politics which are not yet of politics (Rajchman 1998) -whilst recognizing that this questioning can never be more than an inexact science6 (Stengers 2002a). Bloch (2000 [1923]) called this 'build- ing into the blue'. That is not a bad description for the kind of resource I am trying to construct. 
	But I need to severely qualify each of these goals. To qualify the first, like many, I think that, in certain senses at least, the social sciences and humanities suffer from a certain kind of over-theoretization at present. There are too many theories, all of them seemingly speaking on behalf of those whose lives have been damaged by the official structures of power.7 A cynic might think that the profusion of 'fast' theories created by academics is simply a mirror of the rise of brainy classes, who are able to live a life of permanent theoretical revolution whilst everyone else does the dirty work. That would be too harsh. But the criticism is not therefore with- out any force at all (Rabinow 2006). It seems to me, to qualify the second goal, that this task is a necessary one in a time in which a globalized capitalism based on the rise of the brainy classes has become ever more pervasive, and democracy is in danger of becoming something of a sham, enacted as part of what Sloterdijk (2005~)calls an authoritarian capitalism.

The mass of the population is periodically doused with the rhetoric of democracy and assured that it lives in a democratic society and that democracy is the condition to which all progressive-minded societies should aspire. Yet that democracy is not meant to realise the demos but to constrain and neutralize it by the arts of electoral engineering and opinion management. It is, necessarily, regressive. Democracy is embalmed in public rhetoric precisely in order to memorialize its loss of substance. Substantive democracy 
-equalizing, participatory, commonalizing -is antithetical to everything that a high reward meritocratic society stands for. At the same moment that advanced societies have identified their progressive character with perpetual technological innovation they have defined themselves through policies that are regressive in many of their effects. Democracy is where these effects are registered. By virtually every important official norm -efficiency, incentives to unequal rewards, hierarchical principles of authority, expertise - it appears anachronistic, dysynchronous. The crux of the problem is that high-technology, globalized capitalism is radically incongruent with democracy. 
(Wolin 2000: 20) 

	What seems to me more valuable, to qualify the third goal, would be to try to construct practices of vocation8 that can begin to address the deficit of felt powerlessness and to chip away at 'our capacity to interiorize power relations, to delimit by ourselves the realm of the possible' (Ginsborg 2005: 20). These practices would
Life, but not as we know it 4

not be permanent solutions. Rather, they would be oriented to escape attempts, some of which would take root: a series of fireworks inserted into everyday life which could confront or sidestep the 'behavioural codes that are not unilateral or totalitarian or especially disciplinarian, and which furthermore appear to offer great freedom of choice, but which none the less convey us effortlessly into a life of normalcy and convention' (Ginsborg 2005: 20). At this point, I am often stuck for words to describe what I mean, so let me take someone else's instead Greil Marcus's homily on Robert Johnson as a force, and not just a mirror: 

At the highest point of his music each note that is played implies another that 
isn't, each emotion expressed hints at what can't be said. For all of its elegance 
and craft the music is unstable at its core -each song is at once an attempt 
to escape from the world as everyone around the singer believes it to be, 
and a dream that the world is not a prison but a homecoming. . . .Johnson 
is momentarily in the air, flying just as one does in a dream, looking down in 
wonder at where you are, then soaring as if it's the most natural thing in the 
world. 
(Marcus 2005: 103) 

	Now I am well aware that the cultivation of this form of knowledge may be interpreted as an irredeemably middle-class pre-occupation, the equivalent in theory of Bromell's (2000) characterization of white middle-class teenagers as insiders who long to be outsiders, the kind of consciousness of the world that too quickly falls into a call for 'a quick revolutionary fix that will please everyone and just reinforce a cosy feeling of powerlessness' (Lotringer 2004: 18)? But I think there is more to it than that, much more. For it suggests that there may be a more general means of opening up an allusive field in which 'the listener's attention is seized and dropped and held and released by possibilities of meaning that amuse and interest but do not quite come into being' (Bromell 2000: 133). This is what I mean by a politics of hope,1å the prospect of constructing a machine for 'sustaining affirmation' (White 2000), of launching an additional source of political nourishment and responsiveness and imagination in a time when so many forces militate against it, of locating and warming up the technology of questioning and non-questioning 'by which attention forms and experience crystallizes' (Connolly 2005: 166). In other words, I want to try and add a distinct co- operative-cum-experimental sensibility in to the mix of the world that will help us 'engage the strangeness of the late modem world more receptively' (White 2000: 
153). In turn, we could perhaps live in a less 'stingy' (as Connolly (2005) puts it) and more playful way, overcoming or at least bypassing some of the cringes that have been sewn into the fibres of our being as we have learnt how to be embodied. The net outcome would be that the texture of the feel and outcome of the everyday could be reworked as traditional forms of expression were slowly but surely readied differently (Abrahams 2005). 
	What is then at issue is what form these practices would take. There is nothing automatically leads them towards such forms of generosity, after all. In a sense, 

Life, but not as we know it 5

this quest/question about questioning is precisely what the rest of this book attempts to do.
	In the remaining pages of this introductory chapter, I will introduce some of main themes that will be taken up in the chapters of this book. I will begin by outlining some of the main characteristics of non-representational theory some of the key contemporary issues that non-representational theory highlight. Next, I will consider some of the theoretical and practical issues that the book throws up. Then, finally, I will parse each of the individual chapters, bringing out some of their common problematics. 

Non-representational theory

This is a book based on the leitmotif of movement in its many forms. Thus, to begin with, it would be possible to argue that human life is based on and in movement. Indeed, it might be argued that it is the human capacity for such complex movements and the accompanying evolution of movement as an enhanced attractor11 that has produced the reason for much of our rhizomatic, acentred brain. Then, movement captures the animic flux of life and especially an ontogenesis12 which undoes a dependence on the preformed subject; 'every creature, as it "issues forth" and trails behind, moves in its characteristic way' (Ingold 2006: 15). Then again, movement captures the joy -I will not say simple -of living as a succession of luminous or mundane instants. Though it is possible, even easy, to get carried away by an emphasis on presence, closeness, and tangibility, and by a corresponding desire to do more than simply squeeze meaning from the world, still we can think of the leitmotif of movement as a desire for a presence which escapes a consciousness-centred core of self-reference;13 'Rather than have to think, always and endlessly, what else there could be, we sometimes seem to connect with a layer in our existence that simply wants the things of the world close to our skin' (Gumbrecht 2004: 106). And, finally and relatedly, movement captures a certain attitude to life as potential; 'to pose the problem is to invent and not only to dis-cover; it is to create, in the same movement, both the problem and its solution' (Alliez 2004b: 113). 
	Non-representational theory takes the leitmotif of movement and works with it as a means of going beyond constructivism. As a way of summarizing its now increasingly diverse character,14 I will point to seven of its main tenets. First, non-representational theory tries to capture the 'inflow', as Ralph Pred (2005) calls it, of everyday life. It therefore follows the anti-substantialist ambition of philosophies of becoming and philosophies of vitalist intuition equally -and their constant war on frozen states.16 That means that it has a lot of forebears, of course. These forebears hardly agreed on everything, to put it but mildly, and not least on the status of intention and intentionality. So I will need to take a little time to more carefully specify what I mean. I think that this can be boiled down to three propositions. One is that the most effective approach will be one that is faithful to a radical empiricism that differs -radically -from a sense-perception or observation-based empiricism. As must be clear, that means that although I respect
Life, but not as we know it 6

Humean models of empiricism, I find them too austere. I prefer the lineage of inter-relation that runs from James through Whitehead which is not willing to completely jettison the phenomenological (the lived immediacy of actual experience, before any reflection on it)17 and the consequent neglect of the transitive. At the same time, I want to temper what seem to me to be the more extreme manifestations of this lineage, which can end up by positing a continuity of and to experience about which I am sceptical, by employing an ethological notion of the pre-individual field in which the event holds sway and which leads to 'buds' or 'pulses' of thought-formation/perception in which 'thought is never an object in its own hands' (James 1960 [1890]: 522). This approach seems to me to be very much in line with Whitehead's monistic way of thinking about the world. As Pred puts it:

Whitehead extends the scope of radical empiricism and, in effect, points to a way to overcome the limitations inherent in the spatiotemporal and sensory (visual, aural, tactile) metaphor of the stream [of consciousness]. Instead of merely taking a 'general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness', Whitehead goes 'into' the moment. He refuses to abstract from the moment, any moment, understood as an act of experience issuing from and into other experiences, as an act occurring within the constraints of inheritance from all that is encompassed within the experient's past and with the onflow of experiences. By bringing philosophical analysis into the bud, Whitehead secures access to a post-Cartesian/Humean basis for ontology, and can charac- terize momentary consciousness as it arises from pre-conscious moments of synthesis within a broader stream . . . of activity. 
Whitehead applies the notion of buds not only to human moments of experience but also, more broadly, to actual entities or occasions -'the final real things ofwhich the world is made up'. He elaborates the notions of actual entities and concrescence with rigor and thoroughness, 'with the purpose of obtaining a one-substance cosmology'. 
(Pred 2005: 11) 
Another proposition, which follows on naturally from these thoughts, is that the most effective approach values the pre-cognitive as something more than an addendum to the cognitive. What is called consciousness is such a narrow window of perception that it could be argued that it could not be otherwise. As Donald (2001) makes clear, defined in a narrow way, consciousness seems to be a very poor thing indeed, a window of time -fifteen seconds at most -in which just a few things (normally no more than six or seven) can be addressed, which is opaque to introspection and which is easily distracted. Indeed, consciousness can be depicted as though it hardly existed, as an emergent derivative of an unconscious. Yet it is clearly dangerous to make too little of cognition, as I perhaps did in some of my early papers. Because it is so weak (though hardly as weak as some commentators have depicted it), it has enrolled powerful allies which can focus and extend conscious awareness -various configurations of bodies and things which, knitted together as routinized environments, enable a range of different 

Life, but not as we know it 7 

technologies for more thinking to be constructed. But, at the same time, the logical corollary of these thoughts is that we should also pay more attention to the pre- cognitive. This roiling mass of nerve volleys prepare the body for action in such a way that intentions or decisions are made before the conscious self is even aware of them. In turn, the many automatisms18 of 'bare life' or 'creaturely life' mark out not only eminent biopolitical domains19 but also,a series of key theoretical conundrums about what constitutes life itself, such as the nature of 'the open' and motility, animality and undeadness, instinct and drive, poverty in world and what it means to be captivated by an environment in a world marked by all kinds of literal and metaphorical dislocations (Agamben 2004; Santner 2006).
	The last proposition follows on again. It is that it is important to specify what unit is being addressed. Nearly all action is reaction to joint action, to being-as-a pair, to the digestion20 of the intricacies of talk, body language, even an ambient sense of the situation to hand, and this unremitting work of active reaction imposes enormous evaluative demands, equally enormous demands on intermediate memory, and similarly large demands on the general management of attention. Indeed, many now conclude that the idea of cognition as simply a minor place- holder is an artefact of tests carried out in a highly restricted environment -the laboratory (Despret 2004) -in which consciousness shows up as short-term because of the artificiality of the situation demanded by the researcher. Rather, cognition should be seen as an emergent outcome of strategic joint action for which it acts as a guidance function, monitoring and interpreting the situation as found, and, in particular, as a key ability to theorize others' states, as a kind of 'mindreading' that is the result of the human ability to theorize others' states without having full-blown beliefs about those states (Levinson 2003; Sterelny 2003).21 And, most of the time, this social awareness -involving high-level cognitive abilities like imitation, learning about learning, and an ability to carry meaning in a whole series of registers (not only language but also gesture) (McNeill 2005) and the manipulation of time and space -predominates over sensory awareness: 'our normal focus is social and social awareness is highly conscious, that is; it heavily engages our conscious activity' (Donald 2001: 68). In other words, cognition has not only a performative aspect but a 'theoretical' aspect too (the two being related) and these aspects are a key to what is often called 'imagination'.22 This is why non-representational theory privileges play: play is understood as a perpetual human activity with immense affective significance, by no means confined to just early childhood, in which many basic ethical dilemmas (such as fairness) are worked through in ways which are both performative and theoretical. 
	Second, as must by now be clear, non-representational theory is resolutely anti-biographical and pre-individual. It trades in modes of perception which are not subject-based. Like Freud, I am deeply suspicious of, even inimical to, auto- biography or biography as modes of proceeding. One seems to me to provide a spurious sense of oneness. The other seems to me to provide a suspect intimacy with the dead. As Phillips (1999: 74)puts it, 'Biography, for Freud, was a monument to the belief that lives were there to be known and understood, rather than
Life, but not as we know it 8

endlessly redescribed. Biography did to the dead what Freud feared that psycho- analysis might do to the living'. Instead I want to substitute a materialschematism in which the world is made up of all kinds of things brought in to relation with one another by many and various spaces through a continuous and largely involuntary process of encounter, and the violent training that such encounter forces. This is an approach that has had some forebears in the social sciences. I think of Gabriel Tarde's micrometaphysics, Pitirim Sorokin's forays into socio- cultural causality, Torsten Haserstrand's time-geography, or Anthony Giddens's expeditions around social theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as my own hesitant attempts to time space and space time dating from the late 1970s (Parkes and Thrift 1980). It has achieved more grip of late because of theoretical developments like actor-network theory, and the consequent rediscovery of authors like Tarde and Whitehead, as well as the influence of the writings of authors like Deleuze and Guattari on assemblages. As, and probably more importantly, a whole series of fields have been constructed out of the resurgence of what Paul Carter (2004) calls 'material thinking', the 'performative' working methods and procedures of writings (and, very importantly, other methods of exposition) that emphasize how the whole business of praxis and poiesis is wrapped up in the stubborn plainness of a field of things. These fields must necessarily emphasize the materiality of thinking, and include the study of material culture, the sociology of science, performance studies, from dance to poetry, installation and site-based art, elements of architecture, some of the excursions in to interaction design (such as trying to formulate living information), various aspects of archaeology and museum studies, and the range of developments taking place in parts of cultural geography.
	Third, non-representational theory concentrates, therefore, on practices, under-stood as material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over time, through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized devices, to reproduce themselves (Vendler 1995). In particular, these bodies' stability is a result of schooling in these practices, of each actor holding the others to them, and of the brute 'natural' fact that the default is to continue on in most situations.23  These material bodies are continually being rewritten as unusual circumstances arise, and new bodies are continually making an entrance but, if we are looking for something that approximates to a stable feature of a world that is continually in meltdown, that is continually bringing forth new hybrids, then I take the practice to be it. Practices are productive concatenations that have been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic intelligibility of the world: they are not therefore the properties of actors but of the practices themselves (Schatzki 2002). Actions presuppose practices and not vice versa.
	However, what I am espousing is no naive practice theory. For example, as  practices lose their place in a historical form of life, they may leave abandoned  wreckage behind them which can then take on new life, generating new hybrids  or simply leavings which still have resonance. Take the example of things. These  may have been vital parts of particular networks of practice, only to fall out of use  as these networks metamorphose. Consequently their meanings may become 
Life, but not as we know it 9

hollowed out but may still retain a presence as enigmatic signifiers (Santner 2006). Or they may find new uses in other networks. Or they may linger on as denaturalized reminders of past events and practices, purposely memorialized in various ways or simply present as ruins, as melancholy rem(a)inders. In other words, things can have a potent afterlife. 
	The mention of things brings us to the fourth tenet. The constitution of non- representational theory has always given equal weight to the vast spillage of things. In particular, it takes the energy of the sense-catching forms of things seriously (Critchley 2005) -rather than seeing things as mere cladding.24 Things answer back; 'not only does our existence articulate that of an object through the language of our perceptions, the object calls out that language from us, and with it our own sense of embodied experience' (Schwenger 2006: 3). But how to describe what Walter Benjamin called the 'petrified unrest' of things? Three main moves seem particularly apposite. To begin with, things become part of hybrid assemblages: concretions, settings and flows. In this approach, things are given equal weight, and I do mean equal.25 Thus things are not just bound by their brute efficacy to the visible termini of humans in some form of latent subjectivism such as 'concern' or 'care', however comforting their presence may sometimes be as mundane familiars. That would be to smuggle 'from the realm of common sense the notion that humans are very different from knives or paper' (Harman 2002: 30). Rather,
the tool itself is bound up in a specific empire of functions, a system that takes its meaning from some particular projection, some final reference. Admittedly, the meaning of equipment is determined by that for the sake ofwhich it acts. But I flatly contest the view that this Woruimvillenis necessarily human. Tools execute their being 'for the sake of a reference, not because people run across them but because they are utterly determinate in their referential function 
-that is, because they already stand at the mercy of innumerable points of 
meaning. (Harman 2002: 29) 

Then, it is important to understand the way in which things have another genetic disposition that needs to be mentioned at this point. That is what Simondon (1989) calls their 'technicity', their actual collective character as a 'technology' (the word being placed in scare quotes precisely because we cannot be sure exactly what constitutes a technology). The technicity of something like a hand tool which forms a relatively isolated technical element26 can be isolated from its context. Indeed, it may have sufficient material character to be given a proper name: Toledo steel or Murano glass, for example (Mackenzie 2002). But the more effective and ubiquitous a technology becomes, the less likely this is to be the case. Portability comes about because of the ramification of a larger and larger infrastructure which means that the technology becomes increasingly a part of an empire of functions encumbered by a network of supportive elements, each of which relies on the other. 'A mobile phone or wireless appliance could be understood from this 

Life, but not as we know it 10

perspective as a massively encumbered object. Its physical portability comes at the expense of an increased ramification and layering of communication infrastructure' (Mackenzie 2002: 12).
	To summarize the argument so far, things form not so much a technological unconscious as a technological anteconscious; a 'spreading so extensive that it can come to the surface in lives entirely different from the one beneath which it is currently sensed' (Schwenger 2006: 4), a warp and weft of inhuman traffic with its own indifferent geographies. But I want to see things as having one more dis- position. That is, the way in which the human body interacts with other things. I do not want to count the body as separate from the thing world. Indeed, I think it could be argued that the human body is what it is because of its unparalleled ability to co-evolve with things, taking them in and adding them to different parts of the biological body to produce something which, if we could but see it, would resemble a constantly evolving distribution of different hybrids with different reaches. Indeed, the evidence suggests that organs like the hand, the gut, and various other muscle and nerve complexes which have evolved in part in response to the requirements of tools have subsequently produced changes in the brain. The human body is a tool-being. This is, I think,an important point. Of late, there has been a large literature generated on corporeality, most particularly by feminist theorists, which often seems to want to endow the flesh with some form of primordial distinction: goo is good, so to speak.27 But, whilst it would be profoundly unwise to ignore the special characteristics of it would be equally unwise to think that the make-up of the human body stopped there, or that it produced an ineffable perceptual membrane. It does not. There is a sense of touch in all parts of the extended physiognomy of the material body.29 At the same time, it is important to enter a note of caution which has been generated, at least in part, by feminist theorists. Too often, the recent turn to corporeality has also allowed a series of assumptions to be smuggled in about the active, synthetic and purposive role of embodiment which need closer examination. In particular, it is assumed that bodies are bodies-in-action, able to exhibit a kind of continuous intentionality, able to be constantly enrolled into activity.30 Every occasion seems to be willed, cultivated or at least honed. My own work has been periodically guilty of this sin, I am sure. But the experience of embodiment is not like that at all; not everything is focused intensity. Embodiment includes tripping, falling over, and a whole host of other such mistakes. It includes vulnerability, passivity, suffering, even simple hunger. It includes episodes of insomnia, weariness and exhaustion, a sense of insignificance and even sheer indifference to the world. In other words, bodies can and do become overwhelmed. The unchosen and unforeseen exceed the ability of the body to contain or absorb. And this is not an abnormal condition: it is a part of being as flesh. It may be that it is only 'because the self is sensible, open to the pangs of hunger and eros, that it is worthy of ethics' (Critchley 2002: 21).31
	All that said, this emphasis on things questions the solidity of the world, since so much of it is ultimately mutable, working according to a spectrum of different time scales (Grosz 2005). Increasingly, many human activities seem to realize this. Indeed, it is a point that has been brilliantly made by Kwinter (2001). Thus

Life, but not as we know it 11

Kwinter points to the rise of a whole series of sports that depend on an artful shaping of the different time scales of the environment for sustenance, tracking and tracing flows and perturbations in order to produce e/affects. Kwinter mentions paragliding, surfing, snowboarding and rock-climbing as sports of falling32 that extend a streaming ethos to landscapes, understood as 'motorfields of solids' (2001: 29). In their current manifestation, these sports have increasingly under- stood the environment as exemplifying fluidity of movement, intuition and invention. Take the case of rock-climbing:33

[Climbers] must flow up the mountain, flow or tack against the downward gradient of gravity -but also must become hypersensitive tamers and chan- nelers of the gravitational sink, masters at storing it in their muscles or making it flow through certain pans of the pelvis, thighs, palms, and this only at certain times; they must know how to accelerate the flow into a quick transfer that could mean the difference between triumph and disaster, to mix and remix dynamic and static elements in endless variation -for it is not enough to prevail against gravity but rather to be able to make it stream continuously through one, and especially to be able to generalize this knowledge to every part of the body without allowing it to regroup at any time -transcendant and unitary -as a spatialized figure in the head. 
(Kwinter 2001: 29-30) 

But note here how the mountain also plays its part: 
The mineral shelf represents a flow whose timescale is nearly unfathomable from the scale of duration represented by the electrolytic and metabolic processes of muscle and nerves -but even at this tirnescale -nanometric in relation to the millennia that measure geological flows -singularities abound: a three millimeter-wide fissure just wide enough to allow the placement of one finger, and anchored by sufficiently solid earth to permit but eighty pounds of pressure for, say, three seconds but no longer; an infinitesimally graded basin of sedimentary tock whose erratically ribbed surface (weathered unevenly by flows of wind and rain) offers enough friction to a spread palm to allow strategic placement of the other palm on an igneous ledge half a meter above. This very rock face, until recently considered virtually slick and featureless -an uninflected glacis even to classical pick and patio climbers -now swarms with individualized points, inhomogeneities, trajectories, complex relations .. .the climber's task is less to 'master' in the macho, form-imposing sense than to forge a morphogenetic figure in time, it insert himself into a seamless, streaming space and to become soft and fluid himself, which means momentarily to recover real time, and to engage the universe's wild and free unfolding through the morphogenetic capacities of the singularity. 
(Kwinter 2001: 31) 

Life, but not as we know it 12

Thus we arrive at a notion of 'site', as an active and always incomplete incarnation of events, an actualization of times and spaces that uses the fluctuating conditions to assemble itself (Kwon 2004). Site is not so much a result of punctual, external causes, therefore, as it is an insertion in to one or more flows.34
	Fifth, non-representational theory is experimental. I make no apologies for this. After all, 'no battle has ever been won without resorting to new combinations and surprising events' (Latour 2005: 252). In particular, I want to pull the energy of the performing arts into the social sciences in order to make it easier to 'crawl out to the edge of the cliff of the conceptual' (Vendler 1995: 79). To see what will happen. To let the event sing you. To some this will appear a retrograde step: hasn't the history of the social sciences been about attaining the kind of rigour that the performing arts supposedly lack? My answers are fourfold. First, I believe that the performing arts can have as much rigour as any other experimental set- up, once it is understood that the laboratory, and all the models that have resulted from it, provide much too narrow a metaphor to be able to capture the richness of the worlds (Despret 2004). Consider just the rehearsal: would anyone seriously say that it is not a rigorous entity? Second, because once it is understood how many entities there are in the world, of which we are able to name but a few, then capturing the traces of these entities, even for a brief moment, will clearly involve unconventional means, a kind of poetics of the release of energy that might be thought to resemble play. After all, who knows what entities and processes lurk in the under- (or should it be over-) growth, just getting on with it? Third, because the performing arts may help us to inject a note of wonder back into a social science which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything. I am often bemused by the degree to which scientific and artistic works are allowed to evince wonder (Fisher 2002). Yet it often seems as if the extraordinary emergences of the 'social' world have to be treated in a different register, as stumbling, inertial and 'mundane' (Abrahams 2005). But any glance at the kinds of columns that tend to appear in newspapers and magazines under bylines such as 'odd world', 'strange world', 'this world', 'funny old world', and so on, show the essential ebullience of that world and the way in which it can never be truly kept within theoretical tramlines. Social imaginaries are just that: they cannot be contained. Thus 'retracing the iron ties of necessity is not sufficient to explore what is possible' (Latour 2005: 261). Instead, social science needs to take on the quality of renewal that it can see all around it as new collectives constantly come into existence: 'for a social science to become relevant, it has to have the capacity to renew itself -a quality impossible if a society is supposed to be "behind" political action' (Latour 2005: 261). Finally, because it is imperative to understand the virtual as multiple registers of sensation operating beyond the reach of the reading techniques on which the social sciences are founded. Culture is, in this sense, an 'involuntary adventure' (Toscano 2004) in which, in a Whiteheadian vein, thought is the operation that constitutes the thinker (who is constituted in the occasion), rather than vice versa (Miez 2004a). This brings me directly to the topic of affect.
	Thus, sixth, I want to get in touch with the full range of registers of thought by stressing affect and sensation. These are concept-percepts that are fully as
Life, but not as we know it 13

important as signs and significations but that only recently have begun to receive their due. Recently, like a number of authors, I have taken an affective turn with this work, drawing on a combination of Spinoza, Freud, Tomkins, Ekman, Massumi, and a host of feminist theorists, as well as biological traditions including evolutionary theory and ethology, in order to understand affect as the way in which each 'thing' in acting, living, and striving to preserve its own being is 'nothing but the actual essence of the thing' (Spinoza et al. 1997).Thus, 
There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force. The plane is concerned only with movements and rests, with dynamic affective charges: the plane will be perceived with whatever it makes us perceive, and then only bit by bit. Our ways of living, thinking or writing change according to the plane upon which we find ourselves. 
(Spinoza, cited in Alliez 2004b: 27) 

	All of this said, I do want to retain a certain minimal humanism. Whilst refusing to grant reflexive consciousness and its pretensions to invariance the privilege of occupying the centre of the stage, dropping the human subject entirely seems to me to be a step too far. I have done much to rid myself of an object that often seems to me to be a user-illusion -in my writings, there is 'no longer such a thing as a relatively fixed and consistent person -a person with a recognizable identity 
-confronting a potentially predictable world but rather two turbulences enmeshed with each other' (Phillips 1999: 20). Still, I am uncomfortably aware that, taken to extremes, a resolutely anti-humanist position parodies the degenerative path taken in the nineteenth century from Rousseau through Balzac to Bergson, from 'an ideal of an immanent community, the subsequent emergence of a strictly codified bourgeois subject capable of constructing and manifesting itself "aesthetically" through gesture and the eventual somatization of that individual body to a condition of mere potentiality' (Hewitt 2005: 103). This degeneration can be seen equally as a movement from intention to automation as the industrial systems of that century took hold. Whatever the case, I want to keep hold of a humanist ledge on the machinic cliff face. I hold to a sense of personal authorship',35 no matter that the trace is very faint and no matter that the brain is a society, different parts of which are dynamically and differentially connected to all manner of environments. And the reason? Because how things seem is often more important than what they are.

The fact is that it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call this an illusion, it is a mistake to think the illusory is trivial. 
(Wegner 2002: 341-342) 

Further, this conscious will is bolstered in at least three ways. To begin with there is the special constitutional significance of joint action and its particular way of
Life, but not as we know it 14

understanding the worlds (Levinson 2003). Then there is the consequent ability of joint action periodically to work across different social fields, refusing to respect boundaries. And finally there is the 'adaptive unconscious' (Wilson 2002) working ceaselessly and nonconsciously to interpolate/interpellate the world. These are not insignificant qualities and they give a significant role to style, a particular way of practising joint action that can be equated to agency in this book.
	My stamping ground for these kinds of thoughts has often been dance, but it could just as well have been building or music, two other baseline human activities which, so far as I am aware, are found in all societies, including those of the greatest antiquity. For my purposes, dance is important: it engages the whole of the senses in bending time and space into new kinaesthetic shapes, taps into the long and variegated history of the unleashing of performance leads us to understand movement as a potential,37 challenges the privileging of meaning (especially by understanding the body as being expressive without being a signifier; see Langer 2005; Dunagan 2005; Gumbrecht 2004), gives weight to intuition as thinking-in-movement, foregrounds the 'underlanguage' of gesture38 and kinetic semantics in general (Sheets-Johnstone 2005), teaches us anew about evolution (for example by demonstrating the crucial role of bipedality), and is able to point to key cognitive processes like imitation and suggestion which are now understood to be pivotal to any understanding of understanding (Hurley and Chater 2005) and, indeed, desire.39
	The aforegoing paragraphs allow me to say something, finally, about ethics.40 I have been painting a very faint view of human agency, to put it mildly. The classical human subject which is transparent, rational and continuous no longer pertains. Classical ethical questions like 'What have I done?' and 'What ought I to do?' become much more difficult when the 'I' in these questions is so faint, when self-transparency and narratibility are such transient features. Similarly, more modern ethical questions like what it means to be genuinely open to another human being or culture take on added layers of complexity. Clearly, becoming ethical now means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act but which we cannot fully choose (Butler 2005) and taking responsibility -in a sense to be specified -for the dilemmas that subsequently arise. But this hardly counts as a revelation.
	What I will want to argue for, in concert with Santner (2001: 6), is a generalized ethic of out-of-jointness within which 'every familiar is ultimately strange and . .. ,indeed, I am even in a crucial sense a stranger to myself. But, rather than see this form of answerability as a problem, it can as well be thought of as an opportunity to build new forms of life in which 'strangeness itself [is] the locus of new forms of neighborliness and community' (Santner 2001: 6). In turn, this ethic of novelty can be connected to the general theme of 'more life', for it suggests a particular form of boosting aliveness, one that opens us to our being in the midst of life through a thoroughly ontological involvement.41 For, what is clear is that all too often in our everyday life we are not open to that pressure and do not inhabit the midst of life, and thus live everyday life as, well, everyday life, clipping our own wings because we inhabit cringes that limit our field of action.
Life, but not as we know it 15

Everyday life includes possibilities for withdrawing from, defending against, its own aliveness to the world, possibilities of, as it were, not really being there, of dying to the other's presence. The energies that constitute our aliveness to the world are, in other words, subject to multiple modifications and transformations. 
(Santner 2001: 9) 

Some commentators would, I think, like to understand boosting this out-of- jointness as part of a more general rediscovery of piety -- or even epiphany -- often heralded as part of a move to a 'post-secular spirituality' (e.g. Goodchild 2002; Gumbrecht 2004; Braidotti 2006). Sometimes following on from Deleuze's thoughts on 'becoming-imperceptible' in which extinguishing the self allows all kinds of unexpected futures to be opened up and drawn strength from. This is 'reversing the subject to face the outside' (Braidotti 2006: 262), thus boosting potentia: in Jamesian terms it is the jump towards another world. Whilst, hardly surprisingly, I am sympathetic to the general direction of travel, this is too grand and seductive a vision for me. I would prefer to see a multiple set of projects concerned with the construction of an orientation to the future, the development of 'an anxiety about the future which is analogous to Orwell's anxiety about the loss of the past and of memory and childhood' (Jameson 2005: 23), which is, at the same time, the development of a method of hope (Miyazaki 2004,2006). In more conventional philosophical terms, this might, I suppose, be thought of as a flourishing of potential in act,42 not in the sense of the realization of some proper form, but rather as a departure from what is -- a potentiality that is brought into being only as it acts or exists in the interstices of interaction. But I would also prefer to see it in another way, as an attempt to re-gather the ethic of craftsmanship, a means of composition and channelling which involves bringing together discipline and concentration, understanding and inspiration, in order to bring out potential: a different model of homo faber, if you like, working both for its own sake and as part of a community of ability.43 At the same time, this ethic, following on from a long line of thinking which has tried to overcome nihilism and determine the conditions for an affirmation of life, can be seen as a means of celebrating the joyous, even transcendent, confusion of life itself (Reginster 2006). 
Isn't this something to have faith in? The stuff of life, the astonishing, resilient, inventiveness of it all? The extravagant iridescence in the wings of butter- flies. The minute convolutions of Henle's loop in the human kidney, 'like the meanders in a creek'. The song of the Albert's lyrebird, which takes it six years to learn and segues the phrasing of every other bird in the Queensland bush. At times, the gratuitousness of creation, its sheer wild playfulness, can only be understood as a kind of unscripted comedy. 
(Mabey 2006: 197) 

Finally, I want to broach the topic of space again. For substantive rather than narrow disciplinary reasons, space looms large in what follows. That said, I start
Life, but not as we know it 16

from an 'instinctive' understanding of space shared by all the 'field' disciplines -- anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography and large parts of performance studies. This is a sense of the concreteness and materiality of the situation which is hard to put into words, a need to capture being there which is not just a report back -a finding which is also a leaving. Straightaway, I hasten to add that this is not just an excuse for the random empiricism of which such disciplines are sometimes accused. But it has certainly complicated the use of categories which are often assumed to in some way motivate social change (society, class, gender, ethnicity, and so on) because it places variation on an equal footing. And it also complicates what is assumed to be a simple empirical fact, not just because all of these disciplines try to deepen those facts by drawing on all kinds of representational and non-representational registers (digs, ethnographies, various maps and diagrams, buildings, software, performances) but also because they simultaneously explore how particular spaces resonate, obtain their particular 'atmosphere' (Brennan 2004; Sloterdijk 2005a, 2005b), so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
	I hope that this makes it clear that space is not a metaphorics, nor is it a transcendental principle of space in general (the phenomenological idea of consciousness as the fount of all space, produced by a finite being who constitutes 'his' world), nor is it simply a series of local determinations of a repeating theme. In each of these cases, we can see that the very style of thought is 'oriented by spatial relations, the way in which we imagine what to think' (Colebrook 2005a: 190).@ Rather, it is three different qualities in one. First, it is a practical set of configurations that mix in a variety of assemblages thereby producing new senses of space45 and:

By confronting all those events from which thought emerges, by thinking how there can be perceptions of spaces, we no longer presuppose an infinity to be represented; nor a finite being who constitutes 'his' human world (as in phenomenology) but an 'unlimited infinity'. Each located observer is the opening of a fold, a world folded around its contemplations and rhythms. There are as many space and folds as there are styles of perception. If a fold is the way perceptions 'curve around' or are oriented according to an active body, the thought of these curves produces a life that can think not just its own human world -the space of man -but the sense of space as such. 
(Colebrook 2005a: 190) 

	Second, it also forms, therefore, a poetics of the unthought, of what Vesely (2004) calls the latent world, a well-structured pre-reflective world which, just because it lacks explicit articulation, is not therefore without grip. Third, it is indicative of the substance of the new era of the inhabitable map in which space has more active qualities designed into its becoming -a tracery of cognitive and pre-cognitive assists threading their way through each and every moment of the being-at-work of presentation -which make it into a very different ground from the one that Heidegger imagined as presence.
Life, but not as we know It 17 

	So far as space is concerned, what I have been most concerned with is banishing ness as the measure of all things (Thrift 20060). It is a staple of the literature a drive towards nearness is regarded as having an intrinsic value. For example, of all the terms that imply nearness in the philosophical tradition: present-at-hand, flesh, thrownness. In part, this terminological profusion arises from the idea that closeness to the body is the main geometer of the world (Ginzburg 2001b). But this is to take the biological body as an interpellated centre (Gil1998) definable fleshy inside. But even an organ like the gut can as well be thought of as an outside as an inside (Probyn 2005), as a logistics of the movement of things which can be mapped on to the world.46 And this is without going into obvious political dangers of identifying the body as a preformed entity. At the same time I do not want to stray into the ambient pieties of some parts of phenomenological tradition or their collapse into an absolute alterity or a spiritualist immanence48 (Toscano 2004). Instead I want to substitute distribution for nearness or ambience. Why? Well, to begin with, because the paradox of space we all know that space is something lived in and through in the most mundane of ways -from the bordering provided by the womb, through the location of the coffee cup on our desk that is just out of reach, through the memories buildings and landscapes which intertwine with our bodies and provide a kind of poetics of space, through the ways in which vast political and commercial empires -- and the resultant wealth and misery -- can be fashioned from the mundane comings and goings of ships and trains and now planes, through to the visible messages that inhabit the radio spectrum in their billions and etch another dimension to life. Then, because there is no need to reduce such complexity to blematic of 'scale', a still too common move. Actors continually change size. multiplicity of 'scales' is always present in interactions; the putatively large is of the same kind as the small, but amplified to generate a different order of effects (Strathern 1999; Tarde 2000). Then, because we now understand that the spaces d rhythms of the everyday, everydayness and everyday life (Seigworth 2000) are not just a filigree bolstering an underlying social machine but a series of pre-individual ethologies that incessantly rehearse a materialism in which matter turns into a sensed-sensing energy with multiple centres. Then, again, because increasingly what counts as a 'we' is being redefined by a range of transhuman approaches. These approaches have not just, in what has now become an increasingly hackneyed move, undone the dependence of the point of view on a preformed subject. They have also increased the number of actors' spaces that can be recognized and worked with. Consequently, they have begun to redefine what counts as an actor, most especially through an understanding of the actor as an artefact of different territories of 'thought', conceived as the operations that constitute the thinker.49 This 'onto-ethological' move can be made precisely because actors can now be seen to not just occupy but to be made up of all kinds of intermediary spaces which cannot be tied down to just one and simultaneously participate with each other. The world, in other words, is jam-packed with entities. Finally, because more and more of the sensory registers in which spaces make their marks as spaces seem to be being recognized, no doubt in part because these 
Life, but not as we know it 18

registers are continuously expanding but also in part because the sheer cultural diversity of how space appears is increasingly being recognized as more than culture or body (e.g. Levinson 2004; Wilson 2004).

The book 
Having outlined some of the main tenets of non-representational theory, let me now move to the book itself. This book is motivated by a heterogeneous series of inspirations, rather than just one. I will point to a theoretical agenda first. I do not subscribe to the spirit guide approach to social science. Thus, for example, though I take Deleuze's work on topics like the gap between sensation and perception, the difference between possibility and virtuality, the heterogenesis of both material density and subjective action from a pre-individual field, and the different time- images of repetition and recurrence, to be important, I am afraid that this has not produced a total makeover of my work in a way that has now become quite common in some quarters, a makeover that sometimes seems to resemble a religious conversion. There are elements of Deleuze's work that I remain out of sorts with51 and, in any case, I do not think that it is the function of a social scientist to simply apply the work of philosophers (as in a Deleuzian approach, a Foucauldian approach, an Agambenian approach, and so on). It seems to me to be a highly questionable assumption that modern social science stands in this kind of sub- ordinate relationship to a set of themes from Western philosophy52 or should see its task as simply echoing the assumptions those themes may make. So far as I am concerned, social scientists are there to hear the world and to make sure that it can speak back just as much as they are there to produce wild ideas -and then out of this interaction they may be able to produce something that is itself equally new. But they must share with philosophers like Deleuze one ambition at least and that is to render the world problematic by elaborating questions. To simply offer solutions is not enough.53
	At the same time, in recent years, there has been an equal tendency to argue that social science must be more practical, policy-oriented, and so on, a tendency which risks losing touch with wild ideas completely; it is the kind of social science that does not understand the basic point that it is producing a form of intelligibility which 'can only confirm the prevailing views within those institutions that generated the data' (Rawls 2002: 54) and in fetishizing the values of methodological rigour seems to me to miss a large part of the point of social science by purposefully going about deadening itself (Law 2005) when that is both pointless and unnecessary.
	Instead of all that, this book is about new kinds of practice which are compelled by their own demonstrations and therefore leave room for values like messiness, and operators like the mistake, the stumble and the stutter (Law 2004). To some these practices will appear to be just idle chatter but I prefer to see them as vehicles for bringing into view the conditions of meaning, not so much a means of going further as a technology for tackling inconceivability (Fenves 1993). After all, and this point is crucial, it seems to me to be of the greatest methodological importance

Life, but not as we know it 19 

to acknowledge that this is a world which we can only partially understand. Not only is it the case that many things are inherently unknowable but also, as Latour ) has pointed out, there is every reason to believe that we are surrounded innumerable hybrids, only a few of which we have named and even fewer of we can claim to understand. For example, who can truly say that they fully understand the forces we tag as 'affect'? The fact that we (itself a difficult category) live surrounded by an ocean of hybrids whose nature we do not know or at st imperfectly understand because we bleed into them in so many odd ways means that all kinds of things just seem to show up because we are unable to trace their genealogy or all the forces that trigger how they participate in an event. Some see this as a problem. But I see it as an opportunity, and as a demonstration that there will always be more to do -which brings me to my next point.
	Practically, the book arises from a number of political imperatives. The first is the growing realization that there are landscapes of space, time and experience that have been ceded too readily to powerful naturalizing forces which erase the prospect of political action even before it starts by producing backgrounds, latent worlds that, by virtue of their routinized, 'unrememberable but unforgettable' (Gerhardt 2004) natures, make certain aspects of the events we constantly come across not so much hard to question as hard to even think of as containing questions at all. In the past, there have, of course, been various politics of ordinary moments which have attempted to show that what might seem like supposedly trivial everyday affairs can have import once the misplaced concreteness of social categories is factored out; willful acts of political mis-perception and re-perception, if you like. I think here of aspects of surrealism, the fall-out from situationism, some forms of psychoanalytic and psychological therapy, the kinds of political theory that have recently grouped around the banner of a politics of the ordinary, the concrete empirical details of interaction to be found in ethnomethodology, certain kinds of architecture and site-specific installation, and so on. It also draws on those considerable parts of the arts and humanities, and especially art and poetry and dance, that call to the practices of everyday life. What I have tried to do here is to show that these traditions form a living whole with many of the same goals and projects in mind, a poetics of mundane space and time which can teach us to ourselves in better ways, that is ways which will allow peoples to survive their own environing (Wagner 2001) by creating more rather than fewer worlds. Such a poetics of the ways in which witnessable coherence is continually produced requires four things. First it requires a better sense of the future (Bloch 1986 [1959]) built up out of a forward-looking ethics of the moment which is not concerned with outright adjudication but instead tries to work with the affects/percepts/concepts of 'stance' or 'style'. Second it requires serious attention to the spaces of the empirical moment that is built up out of examining the ways in which the spaces of situations are extruded. That may result in a poetics of the spaces of dreams and improvisations, of what Vesely (2004) calls 'rich articulations', that arise out of a deep respect for situations and which manifests itself in continually attempting to go beyond them. Third it requires attempting to let loose a certain kind of wild conceptuality which
Life, but not as we know it 20

is attuned to the moment but always goes beyond it, which always works against cultural gravity, so to speak. This improvisatory virtuality provides an opportunity for an unsettled politics of advocacy which 'watch[es] the world, listening for what escapes explanation by science, law, and other established discourses. Accounting for what established systems discounted as noise' (Fortun 2001: 351). Fourth it requires a much better sense of the ways in which practices need objects against which to react and from which to learn, but these objects may have many versions (Despret 2004), many 'offers of appropriateness', to use a Latourian phrase. To summarize, what is being sought for is what might be described as an ethological ethic which is gratuitously benign. What I am aiming for is to produce a supplement to the ordinary labour of everyday life which is both a valediction and a sacrament, though I am sure that sounds entirely too grand. If I had to choose an analogy, it might be with Darwin's furtive earthworms which, through continuous ingestion, work a good part of the world into existence. In Darwin's later thought they stand for a lowly kind of secular creation myth; 'something [is being said] about resilience and beneficial accidents; that it may be more marvellous when the world happens to work for us, than to believe it was designed to do so' (Phillips 1999: 58). 
	Lest I be misunderstood (and this is a point on which there is a lot of misunder- standing, most of it willful, it has to be said), I am not arguing that the back and forth of what we currently call politics should be shut down. I do not think that the constant testing of the limits of what counts as the political implied by this project means that it is either a substitute for other forms of politics of the governed or even the invention of a determinate new political form (Arnin and Thrift 2005; Chatterjee 2004). Rather, it is a halting means of producing more interest, identifying swells and overflows, and generating new forms of energy. 'Modest' has become an overused word, of late. But non-representational theory is genuinely intended to be a modest supplement. 
	Finally, this book is therefore self-consciously interdisciplinary. I have tried to  avoid any particular disciplinary tradition in the arts and humanities and social  sciences and to take inspiration from them all -or at least a good many of them.  There is an important sense in which any politics of ordinary moments is bound  to transgress these disciplinary boundaries since it involves so many different  elements of discipline and indiscipline, imagination and narrative, sense and  nonsense.... But each of these disciplines can be bent towards my overall goal:  to produce a politics of opening the event to more, more; more action, more  imagination, more light, more fun, even. This is not, I should hasten to add, meant to be a romantic or quixotic quest. It is meant to be in-your-face politics.  Currently, many people are forced to live their lives in cramped worlds which offer  them little or no imaginative relief because of the crushing weight of economic  circumstance, the narrow margins of what they are allowed to think by what  they have been taught and what lies bleeding around them and the consequently  almost routine harrowing of their confidence that the world can ever be for  them (Chakrabarty 2002; Chatterjee 2004). Yet, all that said, very many struggle to express something more than just resignation and inconsolability, often against  themselves. They may value a certain conviviality, demonstrate hope, resolution,
Life, but not as we know it 21 

and a kind of dignity, even in the midst of melancholy. That is surely something remarkable, given most people's restricted circumstances and prospects -and it must surely be something worth nurturing. Indeed, some do go further still. And in that process, they may strike out on to new practical-imaginative territories. Of course, these continuous rites of spring hardly mean that all is well in the world. But they do show that life pretty well always exceeds its own terms and conditions: it is not always captured by the small print of the social contract. There is hope that, in amongst the poisons of prejudice and general paranoia, some small beginnings can be made, summonings of what is not that can leap up and hear themselves, that are able to 'seek the true, the real where the merely factual disappears' (Bloch 2000 [1923]: 3).

The chapters 

The rest of this book consists of a set of chapters which come from the project that I have been pursuing in various guises since the early 1980s under the banner of 'non-representational theory'. The project was originally an attempt to take practices seriously against the background of a (thoroughly modernist, I should add) emphasis on unknowing (Weinstein 2005) but it has moved on from there, I like to think. For in studying practices in detail, it became clear to me that what was missing from too many accounts was a sense of mutability; of the moments of inspired improvisation, conflicting but still fertile mimesis, rivalrous desires, creative forms of symbiosis, and simple transcription errors which make each moment a new starting point. Whether studying the history of clocks, which is scattered with the unknown foot soldiers of innovation -tinkerers making myriad small adjust- ments which lead on to 'bigger7 things (Glennie and Thrift 2007) -or the way in which styles of financial dealing transmute into new financial instruments (Leyshon and Thrift 1997), or the vagaries of all kinds of artistic performance (Thrift 2001), or the remorseless work of repair and maintenance (Graham and Thrift 2007), what I was increasingly concerned to underline was the ceaseless work of transmutation which drives the 'social'. The social is in scare quotes here because I want to emphasize a set of associationist working assumptions that are in contradistinction to the views of 'sociologists of the social', by drawing (selectively) on the work of Tarde (2000) to produce a means of associating entities. First assumption: everything can be regarded as a society. Consequently, at a minimum, 'there are many other ways to retrace the entire social world than the narrow definition provided by standardized social ties' or, more generally, 'social is not a place, a thing, a domain or a kind of stuff but a provisional movement of new associations' (Latour 2005: 238). Thus, as Latour (2005: 239) nicely puts it, space can be made for 'landing strips for other entities' that have never been followed before, for emergent forms of life (Fischer 2003), or simply forms of life that have never come to notice before. Second assumption: always be suspicious that the difference between 'large' and 'small', 'macro' and 'micro', 'general' and 'specific' is necessarily significant. I am particularly sceptical of any explanation that appeals to scale. Third assumption: keep difference at the core of explanation.
Life, but not as we know it 22

	To summarize my summary, non-representational theory asks three main questions. First it questions the divide between theoretical and practical work by ceding certain theoretical conundrums to practice. Second, by questioning what is in the world, it exposes a whole new frontier of inhuman endeavour, what might be called the construction of new matterings, along with their typical attachments, their passions, strengths and weaknesses, their differences and indifferences. Third, by intensifying the intensity of being, it is able to question the load of precognitive conditionings that make up most of what it is to be human. In other words, or so I will argue, it is possible to boost the content of bare life, making it more responsive, more inventive and more open to ethical interventions.
	Insofar as it has a political agenda, then, this book is about the construction of new counterpublics through the assembling of more performative political ecologies. At its heart, in other words, is a pressing task of political experiment and invention, a work of 'ensoulment'55 (Santner 2006), aimed at making more room in the world for new political forms, which, at the same time, produces new excitations of power; 'those enigmatic bits of address and interpellation that disturb the social space -- and bodies --of ...protagonists' (Santner 2006: 24). This is a task that seems vital in an age when politics too often ends up in declarative cul-de-sacs.56  Further, this politics of effective togethernesses (Stengers 2006) is, so I believe, currently breaking out all over. The numbers of experiments currently taking place with new political forms of effective togetherness are legion, and I cannot list them all here. But, for example, there are the many attempts to forge a new urban politics which can comprehend and work with belonging-in- transience (Amin and Thrift 2005a and b). Then there are all the experiments aimed at disrupting given spatial and temporal arrangements in an age when 'the speed at which new products appear and reconfigurations of technological systems take place precludes the possibility of ever becoming familiar with a given arrangement' (Crary 2004: 9).How is it possible, in other words, to group around states that are neither dependent on lasting objects nor on fixed locations? Then, there are the myriad experiments that set out to invent flexible models of imagination and narrative outside the enforced routines of consumption. And, finally, there are all the experiments that want to understand and work with the 'animality' of bare life, both as a means of understanding what elements of being are included but do not count and as a means of tapping that vital force.
	The subsequent chapters in this book are inter-connected. They were often  written with one another in mind. Sometimes they purposely follow on one from  the other. They make their way as follows. The first four chapters of the book,  which form its first section, act as an extended prologue by offering a tentative  description of how the world is now. The first chapter attempts to give a description of some of the main contours of experience that currently exist in the West  by concentrating on the business of commodity production. My intention is to  show how the forces of business are reshaping the world we live in, reworking  what we call experience along the way. I do not want to claim any particular power  of insight here. The tendencies that I will describe have been extant in prototype  form for a number of years now, and in some cases their origins can be traced even 

Life, but not as we know it 23 

earlier. It would also be possible to argue that they have been prefigured in a number ,by authors who want to give up on the kind of remorselessly monopolist of capitalism that act as a kind of intellectual and political bulldozer (Arnin rift 2005).57 I think of Michel Callon's work on an economy of qualities, tanski and Eve Chiapello's work on new forms of economic justification, Lipuma and Benjamin Lee's work on circulating capitalism, Celia Lury's brands, Lev Manovich's work on new media, the work of Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato on intellectual labour and 'immaterial' capitalism, the work of Moulier Boutang and others on cognitive capitalism, or even, to back in time, Alvin Toffler's coining of the term 'prosumerism'. Put baldy I want to point to three formative tendencies that now structure -- and rule -- experience in capitalist economic formations: prospecting across the whole of experience, but most especially in the 'anteconscious', thus reworking what is regarded as labour, class, invention and, indeed, much of what was traditionally regarded as political economy; attempting to produce instant communities, worlds gathered around products and production processes which themselves become a part of what is regarded as product and production process;58 reworking space time so that they fit this new kind of life, most especially by producing new prostheses which are also additions to cognition and precognition.
	Most importantly I want to zero in on this latter process. It is possible to argue the most important reworking of experience that is currently taking place  production of new kinds of not just attentive and responsive but formative which act as a generalized form of writing on to and in to the world, g especially at the level of bare life. This mass 'production of worlds', as Lazzarato (2004) would put it, consists not just of a multiplication of saleable of living, but also the symbolic indexing of these spaces so that they can usually generate what would have been thought of as 'decisive moments' with t that these spaces can be constantly refreshed and so remain absorbing ft 2006b). If one of the most important cognitive leaps of the last few hundred years was the growth of writing-in its many forms, now, or so I argue, a similar change in the structure of cognition is occurring but as a general process e purposeful production of semiosis, in which space is both template and font. is is, in other words, the age of the inhabitable map (Fawcett-Tang 2005; rams and Hall 2006), an age intent on producing various new kinds of captivation through the cultivation of atmosphere or presence or touch (see Sloterdik 2005a, Zumthor 2006).59  So, for example, when Wheeler (2006) points to a world perfused with signs, privileges emergence, and underlines the importance of responsiveness, I take this stance to be not just an outline of the lineaments of kind of political project but also a symptomatic observation concerning a world in which spaces are taking on many of the characteristics of life. The trick, 
so it seems to me, is to work with this emerging spatial grain, in the full understanding that it is both a part of a series of means of opening up new opportunities for the exercise of power and profit and a new palette of possibilities.
	The three subsequent chapters fill out how the background of experience is changing in response to these three insistent imperatives. In essence, they are an
Life, but not as we know it 24

attempt to move on from Deleuze and Guattari's famous aphorism from Anti- Oedipus, 'The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory', by documenting how the unconscious has become both together, as the factory and the theatre have blended into each other. Thus 'Still life in nearly present time' considers the ways in which modern societies are experimenting with 'neutral' material backgrounds for commercial gain, burrowing into bare life in order to come up with the goods. I associate bare life with that small space of time between action and cognition and show the way firms have become ever more expert in operating on this new territory for commercial gain. It was one of my first attempts to show up how the backgrounds through which we live are changing as new disciplines have their say. 'Driving in the city' is intended to demonstrate just how radically bodies are changing as they are augmented and extended by these backgrounds, as they subtly redefine what counts as experience. The chapter argues that de Certeau's understanding of walking as the archetypal transhuman practice of making the city habitable cannot hold in a post-human world. By concentrating on the practices of driving, I argue that other experiences of the city now have an equal validity. In other words, de Certeau's work on everyday life in the city needs to be reworked in order to take into account the rise of automobility. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to exploring how that goal might be achieved, concentrating in particular on how new knowledges like software and ergonomics have become responsible for a large-scale spatial reordering of the city which presages an important change in what counts as making the city habitable. 'Movement-space' takes a slightly different tack by arguing that the background of experience is being changed irrevocably by means of mass calculation which is, perhaps, better described as 'qualculation' with the result that every event turns up digitally pre-disposed, so to speak. The chapter then moves on to consider how this qualculative background is producing new apprehensions of space and time before ending by considering how new kinds of sensorium may now be becoming possible. I illustrate this argument by considering the changing presence of the hand, coordinate systems, and language, thereby attempting to conjure up the lineaments of a new kind of movement-space.
	The second section attempts to articulate some of the political stakes that arise from non-representational theory. Written in the late 1990s the single chapter in this section forms a kind of pivot. 'Afterwords', was an attempt to make a definitive statement about non-representational theory by focusing particularly on the motif of performance as the key to a politics of experiment. It is intended as a message of hope, of a longing for a future of stutter and clutter that can produce new places within which more interesting practices are able to produce more habitable worlds (Miyazaki 2006). 
	Having sketched in a background, I can then move on to some more recent work. Non-representational theory has been interpreted by some as being simply a political message of unbridled optimism. That is not the case. As if to prove it, the book ends on a darker note, emphasizing that the quest for a new kind of political that I want to follow may try to multiply positive prehensions, but that it is not therefore a quixotic quest for the new moral styles we so desperately need 
Life, but not as we know it 25

(Appadurai 2006). Indeed, I hold to a tragic view of human life insofar as I believe history is one long stumble into the unknown, and it cannot be tied down and ordered in the way that too many social theorists imply with their too neat theories. Most particularly, it would be foolish to deny some of the more unsavoury facts of existence. Nature is both astonishingly prolific, able to produce infinite and exquisite adaptation, and abundantly and unremittingly cruel. Nature does not take sides. The cost of what Nietzsche called 'more life' is depredation on a scale we can hardly comprehend: who could sum the number of violent deaths casually occur around the world every second or claim to understand this sublime destructiveness? 
	Human being does not stand outside nature. It is full of all kinds of impulses are outside its comprehension and are the other (I will not say negative) side of this equation, impulses that can be likened to Freud's death instinct in their capacity to undo connections and destroy life. In the last section of the book, I start to address some of these issues, and, most particularly, the issues of anger, rage, and humiliation, by concentrating on the issue of affect, for what it seems important to underline is that a clarion call for 'more life' is disingenuous, even misleading, without some understanding of the surpluses of anger, rage and humiliation that have been unleashed as a result of the 'predatory narcissisms' (Appadurai 2006) that characterize too much of the modern world.
	The last four chapters in the book which form its final section point to the need to think about affect as a key element of a politics that will supplement the ordinary. What is certain is that understanding affect requires some sense of the role of biology, howsoever understood. The first chapter, 'From born to made', is an attempt to come to terms with that legacy of thought and practice by taking up some of the themes from the first part of the book and pulling them into the third.  It is particularly concerned with forging new links between biology and technology by delivering a set of shocks to the meaning of accepted categories like 'nature' 'technology', especially by relying on the Whiteheadian dictum that 'nature is a theatre for the interrelation of activities' (Whitehead 1978: 140). To achieve these dual aims, the chapter double clicks on the icon 'intelligence'. 'Intelligence' prioritizes the active shaping of environments. It thereby allows space for the spaces of the world to themselves become a part of intelligibility and intellect as elements of distributed cognition and distributed pre-cognition. The chapter argues that such a conception of sentience can provide a series of new perspectives, as well as a pressing ethical challenge. I then move to a consideration of the political stakes that the deployment of affect entails against the background of the active engineering of pre-cognition. In the chapter 'Spatialities of feeling' I outline what a politics of affect might look like and especially the more explicit politics of hope that is currently struggling to be born out of an analysis of the affective swirl that characterizes modern societies. However, I take seriously the criticism of this kind of work, that it has tended to neglect the many forms of violence and repression that infest the worlds and knock it around. Thus I try to counterbalance the politics of hope that I espouse with some sober reflections on the affective substrate in which it is embedded and from which it cannot be simply divided. Thus the chapter
Life, but not as we know it 26

'But malice aforethought' considers the affective life that is to be found in modern cities, concentrating on the idea that sociality does not have to mean that citizens automatically like each other. Indeed, modem cities are drenched in dislike and even hatred, and I argue that this misanthropic fact needs to be taken fully into account in any narrative and politics of affect. Finally, 'Turbulent passions' considers how we might better understand the realm of political feeling by concentrating on the affective technologies through which masses of people become primed to act. I argue that this is a pressing political task, given that the systematic manipulation of 'motivational propensity' has become a key political technology. But in order to arrive at a diagnosis of the affective swash of the present, I argue that social science needs to draw on approaches that are willing to countenance a formative role for the biological. I therefore turn to two strands of work, one that directly revalues the biological, the other that calls on ethological models and analogies. Using these different but connected strands of work, I am able to move to such a diagnosis. My argument is that a series of affective technologies that were previously used mainly in the corporate sphere to work on consumer anxiety, obsession and compulsion are now being moved over into the political sphere with mainly deleterious consequences. However, this process of transmission also suggests some interesting counter-politics based on the cultivation of contrary affective motion, not what Appadurai (2006) calls the 'runaway acts of mutual stimulation' which are so prevalent in a media-saturated age but something much more interesting.