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 thing^2
(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 worlds^4 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 increas-
ingly 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
2 Life, but not as we know it