originated in the Latin noun of action, vocare, meaning to call or summon. This meaning
fits my purposes well.
9 Lotringer is reproaching Hardt and Negri, justifiably so far as I am concerned.
10 This phrase has become associated with the work of Ernst Bloch and I would want to
affirm Bloch’s general direction whilst dissociating it from his theory of history.
11 As in rhythm, play, and kinetic markers such as running, chasing, fleeing, jumping,
falling, and so on (Sheets-Johnstone 2005).
12 That is, following being in its genesis, by accomplishing the genesis of thought in parallel
with the object. So far as I am aware, the term was first used by Simondon.
13 I have not used the word experience because so many philosophical traditions associate
that word with interpretation, that is with acts of the attribution of meaning.
14 In particular, I would point to the important work being done in human geography by
Ben Anderson, J.D. Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Eric Laurier, Derek McCormack, John
Wylie, and others.
15 Pred’s is a useful term because it does not presuppose a specific spatial location (such
as the biological body) or any necessary sensory modalities.
16 For a very clear introduction to this line of thought and its implications, see Middleton
and Brown (2006).
17 This is one of my main objections to actor-network theory: its curiously flat tone arises
from the filters it puts up on what can be included in the world, in a way that, for
example, Whitehead’s philosophy – which includes feelings as ‘concrete elements in the
nature of actual entities’ – does not.
18 This is a word that needs to be used with care, given its history (Wegner 2002). But I
also think that the word’s brutal edge is important in pointing to the way in which
instinct is laid down. I take the unconscious as normally understood to be one part of
bare or creaturely life, a specific mode of expressivity.
19 Though I am extremely sceptical of the current tendency to mark out pretty well
anything with a bio prefix.
20 Donald (2001) suggests that the analogy of computation as a means of describing
cognition is inaccurate. A better analogy would be digestion.
21 In other words, being human involves the evolution of the capacity to have beliefs about
beliefs, the evolution, in other words, from behaviour readers to mind readers (Sterelny
2003).
22 The crucial role of language as affect should be noted here; see Riley (2005).
23 Echoing Wittgenstein’s observation that what underlies a number of features of
language-games, including the following of rules, is the brute ‘natural’ fact that people
just do continue in certain ways in certain situations.
24 Objects are often thought of as interpretable, in that they demand an unreciprocated
affection which is a part of person-making. In other words, ‘there are no interpretable
objects or intentional objects, only what counts as an interpretable object or, better,
groups of people who count as interpretable and who, accordingly, deal with certain
objects in recognizable ways’ (Tamen 2001: 3).
25 This is actor-network theory’s presupposition of symmetry formalized.
26 Which still implies intensive corporeal organization.
27 But there is another feminist tradition, of course; see, for example, Parisi (200 4 ).
28 A point that Donna Haraway makes well in her critique of actor-network theory.
29 In any case, flesh, under the imperatives of bioscience, is itself rapidly becoming the
subject and object of numerous technological ensembles which are rapidly making it
portable, and which, in certain accounts, are extending the imperatives of farming to
the human world (Sloterdijk 2006).
30 This is why I am suspicious of making too easy links between labour and existence, a
point often made by Lévinas.
31 Many of the same points can apply to occasions of humour or embarrassment; see Billig
(2005).
256 Notes