becomes destructive, but at other times it suggests a kind of curious, almost
unconscious communication.
(Albright 199 7 : xix–xx)Conclusions
Writing in 193 4 , Lefebvre commented that
upon the basis of acts repeated billions of times (practical, technical and social
acts, like the acts of buying and selling today), customs, ideological inter-
pretations, cultures and lifestyles erect themselves. The materialist analysis of
these styles has progressed very little.
(Lefebvre 193 4 : 7 2)Until quite recently, this materialist analysis has been stilled, held back by an
undue emphasis on cognition and a lack of technologies which might further our
understanding. But now there is no excuse. Non-representational styles of work
provide a very different means of ‘theorizing’ and ‘witnessing’, which can produce
a sense of engagement with the world by emphasizing the push. I want to argue
that such styles make three main differences.
The first is in the style of work. Non-representationalist work does not pretend
to grand theory (though it is still concerned with ‘overviews’). Rather it is an
attempt to produce strategic and hopefully ‘therapeutic’ interventions which stress
the disclosive power of performance as recognition of the fact that all solutions
are responsive, relational, dialogical. The ‘embodied embeddedness’ (Shotter
1998: 4 9) of this flow of responsive activity is ineradicable: ‘only in the stream of
thought and life do words (and our other activities) have meaning’ (Wittgenstein
1980: No. 1 7 3). To write as though this were not the case is to produce the kind
of distanced account that lets cognitivism in again by the back door, a cardinal
error in a project which is, in effect, an attempt to revive phronesis.
The second and related difference is the emphasis non-representational work
places on classes of experience which have been too rarely addressed, the produc-
tive, the interactive, play; all those responsive activities which are usually involved
in ‘setting up’ situations which, because they are often considered to be always
already there, are still too little considered; they are regarded as ‘trivial’. This means
moving towards a poetics of encounter which both conveys a sense of life in which
meaning shows itself only in the living, and which, belatedly, recognizes that the
unsayable has genuine value and can be felt ‘on our pulses’ (Wittgenstein 1969:
23). We can see performance as a metaphor which best expresses this poetics, and
which, in its workings out, provides imaginative ways of dealing with juxtaposition,
ways which are more than just arrangements and namings (cf. Hetherington
1997 ).
The third influence is methodological. Current work in cultural studies and
cultural geography still draws on a remarkably limited number of methodologies
- ethnography, focus groups, and the like – which are nearly always cognitive in
Afterwords 147