Non-Representational Theory

Space, Politics, Affect

Nigel Thrift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134162710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It:

• introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience
• provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities
• begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre.

A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift's outstanding work brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. This noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and is essential reading for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.

1 Life, but not as we know it

When it was enthusiastically pointed out within memory of our 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 cultural reconstruction was offered. . . . The brilliance 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: xvi)

‘production,’ then, 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? Should the process by which a poem speaks be only 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 our 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. How to characterize this particular book’s contents, then? Stripped to its bare essentials, 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.¹

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.³ 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.⁵ 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 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 ‘building 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 without 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 (2005c) 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 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).⁹ 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,¹⁰ 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 cooperative- cum-experimental sensibility in to the mix of the world that will help us ‘engage the strangeness of the late modern 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 breathed differently (Abrahams 2005).

What is then at issue is what form these practices would take. There is nothing that automatically leads them towards such forms of generosity, after all. In a sense, answering 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 the main themes that will be taken up in the chapters of this book. I will begin by briefly outlining some of the main characteristics of non-representational theory and some of the key contemporary issues that non-representational theory highlights. 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, nonrepresentational theory tries to capture the ‘onflow’,¹⁵ 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 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 characterize 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 of which 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 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 precognitive. 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 placeholder 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 theor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Life, but Not as We Know it
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• Bibliography