Thus we arrive at a notion of ‘site’, as an active and always incomplete incarnation
of events, an actualization of times and spaces that uses the fluctuating conditions
to assemble itself (Kwon 200 4 ). Site is not so much a result of punctual, external
causes, therefore, as it is an insertion in to one or more flows.^34
Fifth, non-representational theory is experimental. I make no apologies for this.
After all, ‘no battle has ever been won without resorting to new combinations and
surprising events’ (Latour 2005: 252). In particular, I want to pull the energy
of the performing arts into the social sciences in order to make it easier to ‘crawl
out to the edge of the cliff of the conceptual’ (Vendler 1995: 7 9). To see what
will happen. To let the event sing you. To some this will appear a retrograde step:
hasn’t the history of the social sciences been about attaining the kind of rigour
that the performing arts supposedly lack? My answers are fourfold. First, I believe
that the performing arts can have as much rigour as any other experimental set-
up, once it is understood that the laboratory, and all the models that have resulted
from it, provide much too narrow a metaphor to be able to capture the richness
of the worlds (Despret 200 4 ). Consider just the rehearsal: would anyone seriously
say that it is not a rigorous entity? Second, because once it is understood how
many entities there are in the world, of which we are able to name but a few, then
capturing the traces of these entities, even for a brief moment, will clearly involve
unconventional means, a kind of poetics of the release of energy that might be
thought to resemble play. After all, who knows what entities and processes lurk
in the under- (or should it be over-) growth, just getting on with it? Third, because
the performing arts may help us to inject a note of wonder back into a social science
which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything. I am often bemused by
the degree to which scientific and artistic works are allowed to evince wonder
(Fisher 2002). Yet it often seems as if the extraordinary emergences of the ‘social’
world have to be treated in a different register, as stumbling, inertial and ‘mundane’
(Abrahams 2005). But any glance at the kinds of columns that tend to appear in
newspapers and magazines under bylines such as ‘odd world’, ‘strange world’, ‘this
world’, ‘funny old world’, and so on, show the essential ebullience of that world
and the way in which it can never be truly kept within theoretical tramlines. Social
imaginaries are just that: they cannot be contained. Thus ‘retracing the iron ties
of necessity is not sufficient to explore what is possible’ (Latour 2005: 261).
Instead, social science needs to take on the quality of renewal that it can see all
around it as new collectives constantly come into existence: ‘for a social science to
become relevant, it has to have the capacity to renew itself – a quality impossible
if a society is supposed to be “behind” political action’ (Latour 2005: 261). Finally,
because it is imperative to understand the virtual as multiple registers of sensation
operating beyond the reach of the reading techniques on which the social sciences
are founded. Culture is, in this sense, an ‘involuntary adventure’ (Toscano 200 4 )
in which, in a Whiteheadian vein, thought is the operation that constitutes the
thinker (who is constituted in the occasion), rather than vice versa (Alliez 200 4 a).
This brings me directly to the topic of affect.
Thus, sixth, I want to get in touch with the full range of registers of thought
by stressing affect and sensation. These are concept-percepts that are fully as
12 Life, but not as we know it