Non-Representational Theory Non-Representational Theory presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of the 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. This book questions the orientation of the social sciences and humanities and makes essential reading for researchers and postgraduates. It revolves around three key functions: • it introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience, • it provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities, • it begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre. Nigel Thrift brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. Thrift’s noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and provides a groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic making Non-Representational Theory an incredibly useful text for students of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies. Nigel Thrift, Professor at the University of Warwick, is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. He has authored, co-authored and co-edited more than 35 books and over 200 journal articles. His research includes work on international finance, new forms of capitalism, cities, social and cultural theory and the history of time International Library of Sociology Founded by Karl Mannheim Editor: John Urry Lancaster University Recent publications in this series include: Risk and Technological Culture Visual Worlds Towards a sociology of virulence John Hall, Blake Stimson Joost Van Loon and Lisa Tamiris Becker Reconnecting Culture, Technology Time, Innovation and Mobilities and Nature Travel in technological cultures Mike Michael Peter Frank Peters Advertising Myths Complexity and Social Movements The strange half lives of images and Multitudes acting at the edge of chaos commodities Ian Welsh and Graeme Chesters Anne M. Cronin Qualitative Complexity Adorno on Popular Culture Ecology, cognitive processes and the Robert R Witkin re-emergence of structures in post-humanist social theory Consuming the Caribbean Chris Jenks and John Smith From Arwaks to Zombies Mimi Sheller Theories of the Information Society 3rd Edition Crime and Punishment in Frank Webster Contemporary Culture Claire Valier Mediating Nature Nils Lindahl Elliot Between Sex and Power Family in the world, 1900–2000 Haunting the Knowledge Economy Goran Therborn Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey and Simon Robb States of Knowledge The co-production of social science Global Nomads and social order Techno and new age as transnational Shelia Jasanoff countercultures in Ibiza and Goa Anthony D’Andrea After Method Mess in social science research The Cinematic Tourist John Law Explorations in globalization, culture and resistance Brands Rodanthi Tzanelli Logos of the global economy Celia Lury Non-Representational Theory Space | politics | affect The Culture of Exception Nigel Thrift Sociology facing the camp Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten Non-Representational Theory Space | politics | affect Nigel Thrift First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Transferred to Digital Printing 2007 © 2007 Nigel Thrift All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-94656-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–39320–5 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–39321–3 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–94656–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–39320–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–39321–8 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–94656–5 (ebk) Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements ix 1 Life, but not as we know it 1 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 vi Contents Notes 255 Bibliography 279 Index 314 Preface 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 face 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: 59).1 Those involved in the kinds of projects that I have mentioned certainly see the imprints of power but they do not believe that everything 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.