Notes
Preface
1 But I do not want to be misunderstood. Though rationality has become a difficult value
to adhere to, not least because it is becoming clear from much recent research (e.g.
Hurley and Nudds 2006) that what counts as rationality is up for grabs, this does not
mean that I want to cast that value aside. Quite the reverse.
2 In particular, they believe that we need to work on those transindividual aspects of
human being that operate before understanding in a realm which is not just about
subjectivity. These transindividual aspects are themselves open to manipulation,
the result of ‘mobilizing and modulating the pre-individual, pre-cognitive and pre-
verbal components of subjectivity, causing affects, perceptions, and sensations as yet
unindividuated or unassigned to a subject, etc. to function like cogs in a machine’
(Lazzarato 2006: 4 ). In turn, understanding this transindividual mobilization and
modulation must mean thinking through matter and materiality again and according
it a sensibility of its own. This is a way of thinking which holds the natural and fabricated
world to be structured by a non-propositional intelligence shared with the human mind.1 Life, but not as we know it
1 I had originally considered calling this introductory chapter ‘Sacraments of expression’
after Whitehead but Whitehead means something rather different and there seems no
point in confusing the issue. The reference to the superfluous intentionally echoes
Voltaire’s famous dictum.
2 I agree with Connolly (2005: 166) that ‘running the experiment may be the best way
to test the claims’.
3 I understand social theory as an art of controlled speculation, not as a faithful rendition
of what may be going on, as if that were indeed possible.
4 Throughout the introduction, I use the plural term ‘the worlds’ in preference to the
‘the world’ in order to signify that I am trying to describe a set of different but attuned
worlds rather than just one order of being, a move prompted by traditions as diverse as
von Uexkull’s discussion of umweltenand contemporary discussions of postcolonialism.
5 It follows that I do not believe that experience has in some way been radically
downgraded or made problematic in the contemporary world, in the style of Benjamin
or Agamben (see Docherty 2006). There is, in my opinion, no general crisis of
modernity: there are plenty of crises to be going on with.
6 Most especially, because publics, as peoples to come, are a conjunction of forces which
will always exceed any given human intention.
7 I am uncomfortably aware of the complicated theoretical apparatus that I have myself
used to reach these conclusions.
8 It is worth recalling that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘vocation’