and a kind of dignity, even in the midst of melancholy. That is surely something
remarkable, given most people’s restricted circumstances and prospects – and it
must surely be something worth nurturing. Indeed, some do go further still. And
in that process, they may strike out on to new practical-imaginative territories.
Of course, these continuous rites of spring hardly mean that all is well in the world.
But they do show that life pretty well always exceeds its own terms and conditions:
it is not always captured by the small print of the social contract. There is hope that,
in amongst the poisons of prejudice and general paranoia, some small beginnings
can be made, summonings of what is not that can leap up and hear themselves,
that are able to ‘seek the true, the real where the merely factual disappears’ (Bloch
2000 [1923]: 3).
The chapters
The rest of this book consists of a set of chapters which come from the project
that I have been pursuing in various guises since the early 1980s under the banner
of ‘non-representational theory’. The project was originally an attempt to take
practices seriously against the background of a (thoroughly modernist, I should
add) emphasis on unknowing (Weinstein 2005) but it has moved on from there,
I like to think. For in studying practices in detail, it became clear to me that what
was missing from too many accounts was a sense of mutability; of the moments of
inspired improvisation, conflicting but still fertile mimesis, rivalrous desires, creative
forms of symbiosis, and simple transcription errors which make each moment a
new starting point. Whether studying the history of clocks, which is scattered with
the unknown foot soldiers of innovation – tinkerers making myriad small adjust-
ments which lead on to ‘bigger’ things (Glennie and Thrift 200 7 ) – or the way
in which styles of financial dealing transmute into new financial instruments
(Leyshon and Thrift 199 7 ), or the vagaries of all kinds of artistic performance
(Thrift 2001), or the remorseless work of repair and maintenance (Graham and
Thrift 200 7 ), what I was increasingly concerned to underline was the ceaseless work
of transmutation which drives the ‘social’. The social is in scare quotes here because
I want to emphasize a set of associationist working assumptions that are in
contradistinction to the views of ‘sociologists of the social’, by drawing (selectively)
on the work of Tarde (2000) to produce a means of associating entities. First
assumption: everything can be regarded as a society. Consequently, at a minimum,
‘there are many other ways to retrace the entire social world than the narrow
definition provided by standardized social ties’ or, more generally, ‘social is not a
place, a thing, a domain or a kind of stuff but a provisional movement of new
associations’ (Latour 2005: 238). Thus, as Latour (2005: 239) nicely puts it, space
can be made for ‘landing strips for other entities’ that have never been followed
before, for emergent forms of life (Fischer 2003), or simply forms of life that have
never come to notice before. Second assumption: always be suspicious that the
difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’, ‘macro’ and ‘micro’, ‘general’ and ‘specific’
is necessarily significant. I am particularly sceptical of any explanation that appeals
to scale. Third assumption: keep difference at the core of explanation.
Life, but not as we know it 21