always works against cultural gravity, so to speak. This improvisatory virtuality
provides an opportunity for an unsettled politics of advocacy which ‘watch[es] the
world, listening for what escapes explanation by science, law, and other established
discourses. Accounting for what established systems discounted as noise’ (Fortun
2001: 351). Fourth it requires a much better sense of the ways in which practices
need objects against which to react and from which to learn, but these objects may
have many versions (Despret 200 4 ), many ‘offers of appropriateness’, to use a
Latourian phrase. To summarize, what is being sought for is what might be
described as an ethological ethic which is gratuitouslybenign. What I am aiming
for is to produce a supplement to the ordinary labour of everyday life which is
both a valediction and a sacrament, though I am sure that sounds entirely
too grand. If I had to choose an analogy, it might be with Darwin’s furtive earth-
worms which, through continuous ingestion, work a good part of the world into
existence. In Darwin’s later thought they stand for a lowly kind of secular creation
myth; ‘something [is being said] about resilience and beneficial accidents; that it
may be more marvellous when the world happens to work for us, than to believe
it was designed to do so’ (Phillips 1999: 58).
Lest I be misunderstood (and this is a point on which there is a lot of misunder-
standing, most of it wilful, it has to be said), I am notarguing that the back and
forth of what we currently call politics should be shut down. I do not think that
the constant testing of the limits of what counts as the political implied by this
project means that it is either a substitute for other forms of politics of the governed
or even the invention of a determinate new political form (Amin and Thrift 2005;
Chatterjee 200 4 ). Rather, it is a halting means of producing more interest,
identifying swells and overflows, and generating new forms of energy. ‘Modest’
has become an overused word, of late. But non-representational theory is genuinely
intended to be a modest supplement.
Finally, this book is therefore self-consciously interdisciplinary. I have tried to
avoid any particular disciplinary tradition in the arts and humanities and social
sciences and to take inspiration from them all – or at least a good many of them.
There is an important sense in which any politics of ordinary moments is bound
to transgress these disciplinary boundaries since it involves so many different
elements of discipline and indiscipline, imagination and narrative, sense and
nonsense.... But each of these disciplines can be bent towards my overall goal:
to produce a politics of opening the event to more, more; more action, more
imagination, more light, more fun, even. This is not, I should hasten to add, meant
to be a romantic or quixotic quest. It is meant to be in-your-face politics.
Currently, many people are forced to live their lives in cramped worlds which offer
them little or no imaginative relief because of the crushing weight of economic
circumstance, the narrow margins of what they are allowed to think by what
they have been taught and what lies bleeding around them and the consequently
almost routine harrowing of their confidence that the world can ever be for
them (Chakrabarty 2002; Chatterjee 200 4 ). Yet, all that said, very many struggle
to express something more than just resignation and inconsolability, often against
themselves. They may value a certain conviviality, demonstrate hope, resolution,
20 Life, but not as we know it