To summarize my summary, non-representational theory asks three main
questions. First it questions the divide between theoretical and practical work by
ceding certain theoretical conundrums to practice. Second, by questioning what
is in the world, it exposes a whole new frontier of inhuman endeavour, what might
be called the construction of new matterings, along with their typical attachments,
their passions, strengths and weaknesses, their differences and indifferences. Third,
by intensifying the intensity of being, it is able to question the load of precognitive
conditionings that make up most of what it is to be human. In other words, or so
I will argue, it is possible to boost the content of bare life, making it more
responsive, more inventive and more open to ethical interventions.
Insofar as it has a political agenda, then, this book is about the construction of
new counterpublics through the assembling of more performative political
ecologies. At its heart, in other words, is a pressing task of political experiment
and invention, a work of ‘ensoulment’^55 (Santner 2006), aimed at making more
room in the world for new political forms, which, at the same time, produces
new excitations of power; ‘those enigmatic bits of address and interpellation that
disturb the social space – and bodies – of... protagonists’ (Santner 2006: 2 4 ).
This is a task that seems vital in an age when politics too often ends up in declarative
cul-de-sacs.^56 Further, this politics of effective togethernesses (Stengers 2006)
is, so I believe, currently breaking out all over. The numbers of experiments cur-
rently taking place with new political forms of effective togetherness are legion,
and I cannot list them all here. But, for example, there are the many attempts to
forge a new urban politics which can comprehend and work with belonging-in-
transience (Amin and Thrift 2005a and b). Then there are all the experiments
aimed at disrupting given spatial and temporal arrangements in an age when ‘the
speed at which new products appear and reconfigurations of technological systems
take place precludes the possibility of ever becoming familiar with a given arrange-
ment’ (Crary 200 4 : 9). How is it possible, in other words, to group around states
that are neither dependent on lasting objects nor on fixed locations? Then, there
are the myriad experiments that set out to invent flexible models of imagination
and narrative outside the enforced routines of consumption. And, finally, there
are all the experiments that want to understand and work with the ‘animality’ of
bare life, both as a means of understanding what elements of being are included
but do not count and as a means of tapping that vital force.
The subsequent chapters in this book are inter-connected. They were often
written with one another in mind. Sometimes they purposely follow on one from
the other. They make their way as follows. The first four chapters of the book,
which form its first section, act as an extended prologue by offering a tentative
description of how the world is now. The first chapter attempts to give a descrip-
tion of some of the main contours of experience that currently exist in the West
by concentrating on the business of commodity production. My intention is to
show how the forces of business are reshaping the world we live in, reworking
what we call experience along the way. I do not want to claim any particular power
of insight here. The tendencies that I will describe have been extant in prototype
form for a number of years now, and in some cases their origins can be traced even
22 Life, but not as we know it