to acknowledge that this is a world which we can only partially understand. Not
only is it the case that many things are inherently unknowable but also, as Latour
(2005) has pointed out, there is every reason to believe that we are surrounded
by innumerable hybrids, only a few of which we have named and even fewer of
which we can claim to understand. For example, who can truly say that they fully
understand the forces we tag as ‘affect’? The fact that we (itself a difficult category)
must live surrounded by an ocean of hybrids whose nature we do not know or at
best imperfectly understand because we bleed into them in so many odd ways
means that all kinds of things just seem to show up because we are unable to trace
their genealogy or all the forces that trigger how they participate in an event. Some
see this as a problem. But I see it as an opportunity, and as a demonstration that
there will always be more to do – which brings me to my next point.
Practically, the book arises from a number of political imperatives. The first is
the growing realization that there are landscapes of space, time and experience
that have been ceded too readily to powerful naturalizing forces which erase the
prospect of political action even before it starts by producing backgrounds, latent
worlds that, by virtue of their routinized, ‘unrememberable but unforgettable’
(Gerhardt 200 4 ) natures, make certain aspects of the events we constantly come
across not so much hard to question as hard to even think of as containing ques-
tions at all. In the past, there have, of course, been various politics of ordinary
moments which have attempted to show that what might seem like supposedly
trivial everyday affairs can have import once the misplaced concreteness of social
categories is factored out; wilful acts of political mis-perception and re-perception,
if you like. I think here of aspects of surrealism, the fall-out from situationism,
some forms of psychoanalytic and psychological therapy, the kinds of political
theory that have recently grouped around the banner of a politics of the ordinary,
the concrete empirical details of interaction to be found in ethnomethodology,
certain kinds of architecture and site-specific installation, and so on. It also draws
on those considerable parts of the arts and humanities, and especially art and poetry
and dance, that call to the practices of everyday life. What I have tried to do here
is to show that these traditions form a living whole with many of the same goals
and projects in mind, a poetics of mundane space and time which can teach us to
ourselves in better ways, that is ways which will allow peoples to survive their own
environing (Wagner 2001) by creating more rather than fewer worlds. Such a
poetics of the ways in which witnessable coherence is continually produced requires
four things. First it requires a better sense of the future (Bloch 1986 [1959]) built
up out of a forward-looking ethics of the moment which is not concerned with
outright adjudication but instead tries to work with the affects/percepts/concepts
of ‘stance’ or ‘style’. Second it requires serious attention to the spaces of the
empirical moment that is built up out of examining the ways in which the spaces
of situations are extruded. That may result in a poetics of the spaces of dreams and
improvisations, of what Vesely (200 4 ) calls ‘rich articulations’, that arise out of a
deep respect for situations and which manifests itself in continually attempting to
go beyond them. Third it requires attempting to let loose a certain kind of wild
conceptuality which is attuned to the moment but always goes beyond it, which
Life, but not as we know it 19