the places of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations,
scrolls.’
Second, because as many space-times have become increasingly strung out across
the globe, so the sense of the faraway as near has been able to become increasingly
prevalent. Phantoms are often, therefore, figures of technological transmigration
and metamorphosis (Bayer 1998) which stand for the clandestine spirit of a larger
network of practices. Third, because space-times – to return to a point made earlier
in the chapter – generate many of the unactualized possibles without which they
cannot be sensed and described. The distribution of space-times is complex and
the response to this complexity is not theoretical but practical: different things
need to be tried out, opened up, which can leave their trace even when they
fail. Space-times very often provide the ‘stutter’ in social relations, the jolt which
arises from new encounters, new connections, new ways of proceeding. Then, last,
space-times are nearly always approximate and these approximations, close-to but
not-quites, can linger as all sorts of clues to a story that never quite happened: the
body used for another purpose, the aspect of a bodily stance that looks increasingly
at odds with the world, and so on.
So it is no surprise that ‘that which appears to be not there is often a steely
presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the
ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting
is taking place’ (Gordon 199 7 : 8). Or as Gordon (199 7 : 7 ) puts it in another way,
haunting is ‘a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of
us who study it have usually granted’.^12 Haunting is where it’s at which is where
it’s not. Haunting is the place that never is but always was and will be.
Practical knowing
I hope I have already hinted, by using the term ‘style’, that in non-representational
theory what counts as knowledge must take on a radically different sense. It
becomes something tentative, something which no longer exhibits an epistemo-
logical bias but is a practice and is a part of practice. Most of the writers currently
attempting to grapple with this sense of theory have based their thoughts on the
work of writers such as Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. Roughly speaking, current
non-representationalist writers want to lay epistemology to one side.
At their most extreme, they might ask ‘Can we really give up knowing?’
And, you may reasonably (and philosophically) ask ‘How would we know?’
This may appear to be still another quasi-self-referential paradox. But it isn’t
for there is an answer – a non-paradoxical answer – to the question ‘How
would we know?’ We wouldn’t. Yet the force of modern epistemology is so
great that many find it almost inconceivable to accept such an answer. If
something is, it must be at least possible to know that it is? This, of course is
the voice of epistemological modernism speaking. It is the typical dualistic
reduction of ontology to epistemology – the insistence of science and
modernism that everything (worthy or not worthy of a name or a description)
must be knowable. But if a challenge to that claim is successful, it will still notAfterwords 121