from an ‘instinctive’ understanding of space shared by all the ‘field’ disciplines
- anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography and large parts of perfor-
mance studies. This is a sense of the concreteness and materiality of the situation
which is hard to put into words, a need to capture being there which is not just
a report back – a finding which is also a leaving. Straightaway, I hasten to add that
this is not just an excuse for the random empiricism of which such disciplines
are sometimes accused. But it has certainly complicated the use of categories which
are often assumed to in some way motivate social change (society, class, gender,
ethnicity, and so on) because it places variation on an equal footing. And it also
complicates what is assumed to be a simple empirical fact, not just because all
of these disciplines try to deepen those facts by drawing on all kinds of repre-
sentational and non-representational registers (digs, ethnographies, various maps
and diagrams, buildings, software, performances) but also because they simul-
taneously explore how particular spaces resonate, obtain their particular
‘atmosphere’ (Brennan 200 4 ; Sloterdijk 2005a, 2005b), so that the whole is more
than the sum of the parts.
I hope that this makes it clear that space is not a metaphorics, nor is it a
transcendental principle of space in general (the phenomenological idea of
consciousness as the fount of all space, produced by a finite being who constitutes
‘his’ world), nor is it simply a series of local determinations of a repeating theme.
In each of these cases, we can see that the very style of thought is ‘oriented by
spatial relations, the way in which we imagine what to think’ (Colebrook 2005a:
190).^44 Rather, it is three different qualities in one. First, it is a practical set of
configurations that mix in a variety of assemblages thereby producing new senses
of space^45 and:
By confronting all those events from which thought emerges, by thinking
how there can be perceptions of spaces, we no longer presuppose an infinity
to be represented; nor a finite being who constitutes ‘his’ human world (as
in phenomenology) but an ‘unlimited infinity’. Each located observer is the
opening of a fold, a world folded around its contemplations and rhythms.
There are as many space and folds as there are styles of perception. If a fold
is the way perceptions ‘curve around’ or are oriented according to an active
body, the thought of these curves produces a life that can think not just its
own human world – the space of man – but the sense of space as such.
(Colebrook 2005a: 190)Second, it also forms, therefore, a poetics of the unthought, of what Vesely
(200 4 ) calls the latent world, a well-structured pre-reflective world which, just
because it lacks explicit articulation, is not therefore without grip. Third, it is
indicative of the substance of the new era of the inhabitable map in which space
has more active qualities designed into its becoming – a tracery of cognitive and
pre-cognitive assists threading their way through each and every moment of the
being-at-work of presentation – which make it into a very different ground from
the one that Heidegger imagined as presence.
16 Life, but not as we know it