endlessly redescribed. Biography did to the dead what Freud feared that psycho-
analysis might do to the living’. Instead I want to substitute a material schematism
in which the world is made up of all kinds of things brought in to relation with
one another by many and various spaces through a continuous and largely
involuntary process of encounter, and the violent training that such encounter
forces. This is an approach that has had some forebears in the social sciences. I
think of Gabriel Tarde’s micrometaphysics, Pitirim Sorokin’s forays into socio-
cultural causality, Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography, or Anthony Giddens’s
expeditions around social theory in the late 19 7 0s and early 1980s, as well as my
own hesitant attempts to time space and space time dating from the late 19 7 0s
(Parkes and Thrift 1980). It has achieved more grip of late because of theoretical
developments like actor-network theory, and the consequent rediscovery of authors
like Tarde and Whitehead, as well as the influence of the writings of authors like
Deleuze and Guattari on assemblages. As, and probably more importantly,
a whole series of fields have been constructed out of the resurgence of what Paul
Carter (200 4 ) calls ‘material thinking’, the ‘performative’ working methods and
procedures of writings (and, very importantly, other methods of exposition) that
emphasize how the whole business of praxis and poiesis is wrapped up in the
stubborn plainness of a field of things. These fields must necessarily emphasize the
materiality of thinking, and include the study of material culture, the sociology of
science, performance studies, from dance to poetry, installation and site-based art,
elements of architecture, some of the excursions in to interaction design (such as
trying to formulate living information), various aspects of archaeology and museum
studies, and the range of developments taking place in parts of cultural geography.
Third, non-representational theory concentrates, therefore, on practices, under-
stood as material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over
time, through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized
devices, to reproduce themselves (Vendler 1995). In particular, these bodies’
stability is a result of schooling in these practices, of each actor holding the others
to them, and of the brute ‘natural’ fact that the default is to continue on in most
situations.^23 These material bodies are continually being rewritten as unusual
circumstances arise, and new bodies are continually making an entrance but, if
we are looking for something that approximates to a stable feature of a world
that is continually in meltdown, that is continually bringing forth new hybrids,
then I take the practice to be it. Practices are productive concatenations that have
been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic
intelligibility of the world: they are not therefore the properties of actors but of
the practices themselves (Schatzki 2002). Actions presuppose practices and not
vice versa.
However, what I am espousing is no naïve practice theory. For example, as
practices lose their place in a historical form of life, they may leave abandoned
wreckage behind them which can then take on new life, generating new hybrids
or simply leavings which still have resonance. Take the example of things. These
may have been vital parts of particular networks of practice, only to fall out of use
as these networks metamorphose. Consequently their meanings may become
8 Life, but not as we know it