4 ‘Now we have finally found [the Greek mathematician]: thinking aloud, in a few formulae,
made up of a small set of words, staring at a diagram, lettering it’ (Netz 1999: 16 7 ).
5 To use Newton’s well-worn phrase in Principiae.
6 For an elaboration of these points, see Thrift (200 4 a) and Fraser (2002).
7 Perhaps the best example of this is a number of modern fighter planes which are
inherently unstable and are able to fly only because of the numerous calculations and
recalculations made by on-board computers which keep the plane in trim.
8 Interestingly, Anlo seem more concerned with stabilizing the internal state than the
external environment.
9 So, for example, the interoceptive and proprioceptive sensations get comparatively short
shrift as formal categories of the senses in Euro-American societies, even though their
importance can hardly be denied.
10 At the same time, the hand allows humans to think of tools as separate from themselves
in a way which animals would find difficult to do.
11 In the Anlo world, for example, touching something soft and touching something hard
are regarded as two quite distinct phenomena, two separate ways of touching and
experiencing.
12 Activities like geocaching seem to me to be the first of many attempts to make new
kinds of way in a world where co-ordinates are easily established. In a sense, they are
new rounds of exploration of an already explored world.
6 Afterwords
1 Of course, in this chapter, as elsewhere, I am trying to avoid Wittgenstein’s extreme
ethical individualism, and his lack of historical sense.
2 As will become clear, my perspective is what Deleuze (199 7 a) calls cartographic rather
than psychoanalytic, but I think there are some clear and obvious connections between
these two approaches. See, for example, Billig’s recent (1999) work on the ‘dialogical
unconscious’.
3 These affinities date from an attempt (Thrift 1983) to produce a ‘science of the
particular’, a phrase often deployed in actor-network theory (see, for example, Law and
Benschop 199 7 : 1 7 9).
4 A whole paper could be written on this issue. Suffice it to say, for now, that this chapter
is, in a sense, an attempt to write/not-write the human in nonhumanist, distributed
ways which can avoid the myth of self-presence. I am not trying to create a new human-
ism: ‘the hideous anthropromorphic colonialism of a wholesale making conscious’
(McClure 1998: 11). But, on the other hand, I do not want to go as far as Deleuze,
for whom there is only matter-energy and the human is ‘merely the eventual sediment
of the continual process of desiring-production; they are neither its means nor its ends’
(McClure 1998: 181). I want, in other words, to retain the tension of the in-between
that has produced certain human capacities to produce.
Glendinning puts it well when he writes that
What is needed, then, is a conception of human existence which eschews bald
naturalism but which does not simply affirm a new humanism. Achieving this, I am
suggesting, will perforce require a new account of human behaviour in general; an
account which explains how something manifest in that behaviour might be (pace
humanism) ‘immanent to the behaviour as such’ and yet (pace bald naturalism)
‘transcendent in relation to the anatomical apparatus’ (Merleau-Ponty).
(1998: 4 )
5 As Gell puts it,
the point I want to emphasise here is that the means we generally have to form a
notion of the disposition and intentions of ‘social others’ is via a large number of
264 Notes