make the possibility of relevant novelty matter, that rely on the irreducibility of
possibility, ‘transforming potentiality into its own actuality, as it decides for itself
how it will fulfil its own process of becoming itself’ (Stengers 2005: 12). Such a
viewpoint has led to a flowering of all manner of approaches (from Deleuzian
pragmatics through actor-network theory to many different kinds of performance)
which might be termed naturalistic, both in their attention to a vivid, irridescent
world in which there is no deciding subject because the decision is producing the
subject and in their emphasis on adaptation which is no longer conceived as
continuity through modification but as adventure, irrational hopes, foolish
enterprises.
The second current of work approaches the biological in a less direct fashion.
It has tried to take up the idea that it is possible to derive a thinking that is not
conditioned or compressed by time but is of what might be called an ethological
nature, recognizing the prime importance of territory since an object like affect is
no longer regarded as in some sense ‘internal’ but is regarded rather as a moving
map of passions making their way hither and thither. In terms of current thought,
such a processual move towards a spatial thinking(cf. Buchanan and Lambert
2005) has most often been associated with the work of Gilles Deleuze.
He asks whether it is possible not only to criticize Kant in order to offer
a theory of thought fractured by time in a non-Kantian way, but also to
think a radically different thought that would be neither temporal, his-
torical, reflexive, nor active, and instead geographical, inorganic, passive and
vegetal.
(Arsic 2003: 126)But I want to turn to three other developments in spatial thinking instead.
Though each one of them has a relation to Deleuze, they can also be used to go
beyond his work and to think about the nature of shared animated space more
deeply. The first is the work of Gabriel Tarde. Tarde was a formative influence on
Deleuze’s thought on difference and repetition but he offers much more than that
of an extended footnote. The second is the work of the Italian operaismoMarxists,
Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato. Both Virno and Lazzarato have become
increasingly influenced by both Deleuze and Tarde but they provide a diagnostic
reading of capitalism that is only faintly present in Deleuze. Finally, there is the
work of Peter Sloterdijk, and especially his ‘Spheres’ trilogy (Sloterdijk 1998, 1999,
2004 ). Sloterdijk shares an interest in Deleuze but in his Sphärentrilogy arguably
he demonstrates a much more acute sense of space.
Why would authors like Virno and Lazzarato and indeed lately Sloterdijk
become interested in Tarde, whose work has been resurrected by the presence
of a French reissue of nearly the whole of his corpus under the editorship of Eric
Alliez, and by publication in German and Danish too?^12 There are five main
reasons, I think. First, his work seems to prefigure a modern landscape in its
commitment to an epidemiological model in which imitation and invention are a
key form of the ‘universal repetition’ that Tarde conceived as at the base of all
Turbulent passions 229