So far as space is concerned, what I have been most concerned with is banishing
nearness as the measure of all things (Thrift 2006b). It is a staple of the literature
that a drive towards nearness is regarded as having an intrinsic value. For example,
think of all the terms that imply nearness in the philosophical tradition: present-
at-hand, flesh, thrownness. In part, this terminological profusion arises from the
idea that closeness to the body is the main geometer of the world (Ginzburg
2001b). But this is to take the biological body as an interpellated centre (Gil 1998)
with a definable fleshy inside. But even an organ like the gut can as well be thought
of as an outside as an inside (Probyn 2005), as a logistics of the movement of
things which can be mapped on to the world.^46 And this is without going into
the obvious political dangers of identifying the body as a preformed entity. At the
same time I do not want to stray into the ambient pieties of some parts of
the phenomenological tradition or their collapse into an absolute alterity^47 or a
spiritualist immanence^48 (Toscano 200 4 ). Instead I want to substitute distribution
for nearness or ambience. Why? Well, to begin with, because the paradox of space
is that we all know that space is something lived in and through in the most
mundane of ways – from the bordering provided by the womb, through the loca-
tion of the coffee cup on our desk that is just out of reach, through the memories
of buildings and landscapes which intertwine with our bodies and provide a kind
of poetics of space, through the ways in which vast political and commercial
empires – and the resultant wealth and misery – can be fashioned from the mun-
dane comings and goings of ships and trains and now planes, through to the
invisible messages that inhabit the radio spectrum in their billions and etch another
dimension to life. Then, because there is no need to reduce such complexity to
a problematic of ‘scale’, a still too common move. Actors continually change size.
A multiplicity of ‘scales’ is always present in interactions; the putatively large is of
the same kind as the small, but amplified to generate a different order of effects
(Strathern 1999; Tarde 2000). Then, because we now understand that the spaces
and rhythms of the everyday, everydayness and everyday life (Seigworth 2000)
are not just a filigree bolstering an underlying social machine but a series of
pre-individual ethologies that incessantly rehearse a materialism in which matter
turns into a sensed-sensing energy with multiple centres. Then, again, because
increasingly what counts as a ‘we’ is being redefined by a range of transhuman
approaches. These approaches have not just, in what has now become an increas-
ingly hackneyed move, undone the dependence of the point of view on a
preformed subject. They have also increased the number of actors’ spaces that can
be recognized and worked with. Consequently, they have begun to redefine what
counts as an actor, most especially through an understanding of the actor as an
artefact of different territories of ‘thought’, conceived as the operations that
constitute the thinker.^49 This ‘onto-ethological’ move can be made precisely
because actors can now be seen to not just occupy but to be made up of all kinds
of intermediary spaces which cannot be tied down to just one and simultaneously
participate with each other. The world, in other words, is jam-packed with entities.
Finally, because more and more of the sensory registers in which spaces make their
marks as spaces seem to be being recognized,^50 no doubt in part because these
Life, but not as we know it 17