mean paying attention to the potential of stylistic free variation (Massumi 199 7 a)
and it is to this topic that I therefore turn first.
The push: new styles of thought
Style... is not the dress of thought, but part of its essence.
(Dening 1996: 116)Too much of social and cultural theory assumes the event, too much of social
and cultural theory is fundamentally unprocessual (Massumi 199 7 a). Non-
representational theory aims to compensate for this deficit through the serious
consideration of what I call the push that keeps the world rolling over; the energy
that fuels change; the work of transformation which ensures that ‘the reproduction
of the other as the same is not assured’ (Phelan 1993: 3). How can we approach
the push? I want to start by outlining the ‘non-epistemic ontology-activity’
(Newman and Holzman 199 7 : 11) that underlines non-representational theory.
As I have already explained elsewhere (see Thrift 1996, 199 7 , 1998), non-
representational theory is an approach to understanding the world in terms of
effectivity rather than representation; not the what but the how (Kemp 1996). In
order to begin the task of understanding, non-representational theory draws
on three traditions of work which, though they are very different in certain respects,
share this common concern.
The first is recent developments in feminist theory, and most especially the
more recent work of writers such as Bordo, Butler, Grosz, and Threadgold on a
rhetorical or performative philosophy, as well as the later writings of Irigaray
on space. The second tradition is distributed theories of practices. Taking its cue
from writers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Bourdieu and de Certeau, this
kind of work reaches all the way from ‘discursive’ social psychology to human
geography. A recent development has been the greater emphasis on spatial dis-
tribution imported from actor-network theory. Then, there is a tradition which
has fixed on biology for both inspiration and illustration. Drawing on writers
as diverse as Von Uexküll, Bateson, and Canguilhem, as well as Heidegger’s later
work, this tradition has been given renewed impetus by the current strength
of the sciences of life as represented by, for example, genetics. Thus, there is now
a growing school of ‘biological philosophy’ to which writers such as Deleuze and
Serres might be said to belong (see Ansell Pearson 199 7 ) as well as anthropological
work on biosciences as represented by, for example, Rabinow’s recent excursions
(Rabinow 1995, 1996). Needless to say, each of these three traditions can draw
strength from the others.
How can this style of work be summarized? In embryo, it can be said to depend
upon an argument which relies on dispelling analogical imaginings of a diagnostic
kind, so beloved of certain kinds of intellectuals, in favour of the direct significances
of practices. Most importantly, this means that the world is a making (Threadgold
1997 ): it is processual; it is in action; it is ‘all that is present and moving’
Afterwords 113