And, of course, encounters in which other things are a part of the interruption are
increasing in importance and, as a result, the nature of other things has become
increasingly active, providing a further decentring of the ‘human’ subject and
increasing the difficulty of conceiving of ‘human’ ‘agency’ at all. And, as the
‘ecology of mind’ (Bateson 19 7 3) becomes ever richer as intermediaries and
mediaries multiply, so the ‘human’ ‘subject’ migrates on to many more planes and
is mixed with other ‘subjects’ in increasingly polymorphous combinations. ‘The
body is nourished by technology in the same way that it is nourished by chemical
products’ (Marks 1998: 4 8).
In turn, such thoughts allow us to more easily conceive of a present-oriented
(a ‘cartographic’) notion of a person. Such a notion is quite different from an
archaeological conception of the person, as found in psychoanalysis.
The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory:
it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception that pertains
to persons or objects, the milieus being nothing more than terrains capable
of conserving, identifying or authorising them.... Maps, on the contrary,
are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the
following map, rather than finding its origin in the preceding one: from one
map to the next, is it not a matter of searching for an origin but of evaluating
displacements.
(Deleuze 199 7 a: 63)Thus persons become, in effect, rather ill-defined constellations rattling around
the world which are
not confined to particular spatio-temporal coordinates, but consist of a spread
of biographical events and memories of events, and a dispersed category of
material objects, traces, and leavings, which can be attributed to a person and
which, in aggregate, testify to agency and patienthood during a biographical
career which may, indeed, prolong itself well after biological death. The person
is thus understood as the sum total of the indexes which testify, in life and
subsequently, to the biographical existence of this or that individual. Personal
agency, as inherent in the causal milieu, generates one of these ‘distributed
objects’, that is, all the material differences ‘in the way things are’ from which
some particular agency can be abducted.
(Gell 1998: 222–223)^9We now have the tools to turn to the third element of signification: creativity.
It is remarkable how little effort has been exerted by academic writers upon
precisely the element which they would – presumably – most wish to characterize
their work. Yet, it is not that such work has not been attended to or that it has no
connections to contemporary thought. For example, the expressivism of Herder,
the pragmatism of Peirce^10 and Dewey, and some of Simmel’s^11 later thoughts
all contain pointers to subsequent work by writers such as Deleuze, Castoriadis,
118 Part II