theoretical assumptions, we see them in terms of the connections and relations
they might actually make, the roles they might play in our lives.
(Shotter 1998: 4 6– 47 )And such meditations must lead us on to thinking about thinking itself. In many
accounts, such an impulse leads naturally to the work of Deleuze and his systematic
realignment of concepts and affects, and to Castoriadis and his emphasis on the
radical imaginary (see Thrift 1996). What can be written (and what cannot) about
these practices of imagining depends, I believe, upon ‘the curious collision of the
mystical with the close and commensurate study of active language practices’
(Perloff 1996: 182) as is found in much modern ‘disclosive’ poetry which
recognizes that
the most extraordinary things are also the most everyday; the strangest things
are often the most trivial....Once separated from its context... once
presented in all its triviality i.e. in all that makes it trivial, suffocating,
oppressive – the trivial becomes extraordinary, and the habitual becomes
‘mythical’.
(Lefebvre 1991: 13)In turn, this leads to an activist politics of disclosure which attempts to make
different things significant and worthy of notice, and most particularly through
the practices of historical disclosure which force a change of style. Two kinds of
skills are required for historical disclosure. ‘First, one has to be able to sense and
hold on to disharmonies in one’s current disclosive activity; second, one has to be
able to change one’s disclosive space on the basis of the disharmonious practices’
(Spinosa et al. 199 7 ). According to Spinosa et al. (199 7 ) there are at least three
ways that it is possible to change a disclosive space in response to the realization
that practices are not in harmony: focusing a dispersed practice (articulation);
making what was a marginal practice central (reconfiguration); and adopting and
activating a neighbouring practice (cross appropriation). Such changes in practice
nearly always come about through involved experimentation rather than delib-
erative thinking (even though, when, subsequently written about, they are often
couched in terms of the deliberative model of going on). Thus, for example, such
an approach to politics does not conform to the literal model as it does not see
the course of people’s lives as determined by private judgements:
a judgement made in private reflection is a judgement that one is not yet ready
to follow. Such a judgement grows out of dispassionate ratiocination – the
imagining and sifting of ideas and potential consequences. It may tell one that
one should change one’s heart, but a reflective judgement does not amount
to a change of heart. A separate act of heroic will is then required before one
can act. A resolution that emerges through group action, conversely, is
precisely one that emerged because one’s practices have readied one for it.
Liberal life is ultimately made desperately voluntarist by the necessity of takingAfterwords 123