technologies for more thinking to be constructed. But, at the same time, the logical
corollary of these thoughts is that we should also pay more attention to the pre-
cognitive. This roiling mass of nerve volleys prepare the body for action in such a
way that intentions or decisions are made before the conscious self is even aware
of them. In turn, the many automatisms^18 of ‘bare life’ or ‘creaturely life’ mark
out not only eminent biopolitical domains^19 but also a series of key theoretical
conundrums about what constitutes life itself, such as the nature of ‘the open’ and
motility, animality and undeadness, instinct and drive, poverty in world and what
it means to be captivated by an environment in a world marked by all kinds of
literal and metaphorical dislocations (Agamben 200 4 ; Santner 2006).
The last proposition follows on again. It is that it is important to specify what
unit is being addressed. Nearly all action is reaction to joint action, to being-as-a
pair, to the digestion^20 of the intricacies of talk, body language, even an ambient
sense of the situation to hand, and this unremitting work of active reaction imposes
enormous evaluative demands, equally enormous demands on intermediate
memory, and similarly large demands on the general management of attention.
Indeed, many now conclude that the idea of cognition as simply a minor place-
holder is an artefact of tests carried out in a highly restricted environment – the
laboratory (Despret 200 4 ) – in which consciousness shows up as short-term
because of the artificiality of the situation demanded by the researcher. Rather,
cognition should be seen as an emergent outcome of strategic joint action for
which it acts as a guidance function, monitoring and interpreting the situation
as found, and, in particular, as a key ability to theorize others’ states, as a kind of
‘mindreading’ that is the result of the human ability to theorize others’ states
without having full-blown beliefs about those states (Levinson 2003; Sterelny
2003).^21 And, most of the time, this social awareness – involving high-level
cognitive abilities like imitation, learning about learning, and an ability to carry
meaning in a whole series of registers (not only language but also gesture) (McNeill
2005) and the manipulation of time and space – predominates over sensory
awareness: ‘our normal focus is social and social awareness is highly conscious,
that is; it heavily engages our conscious activity’ (Donald 2001: 68). In other
words, cognition has not only a performative aspect but a ‘theoretical’ aspect too
(the two being related) and these aspects are a key to what is often called ‘imagi-
nation’.^22 This is why non-representational theory privileges play: play is
understood as a perpetual human activity with immense affective significance, by
no means confined to just early childhood, in which many basic ethical dilemmas
(such as fairness) are worked through in ways which are both performative and
theoretical.
Second, as must by now be clear, non-representational theory is resolutely
anti-biographical and pre-individual. It trades in modes of perception which are
not subject-based. Like Freud, I am deeply suspicious of, even inimical to, auto-
biography or biography as modes of proceeding. One seems to me to provide a
spurious sense of oneness. The other seems to me to provide a suspect intimacy
with the dead. As Phillips (1999: 74 ) puts it, ‘Biography, for Freud, was a monu-
ment to the belief that lives were there to be known and understood, rather than
Life, but not as we know it 7